Longevity is easiest to misunderstand when it is treated as a race against time. This conversation with Dr Rangan Chatterjee points toward a steadier frame: healthspan is built by the signals we repeat, the stress we recover from, and the evidence we are willing to respect.
Full transcript with timestamped links back to the original YouTube conversation.
so you do this kind of 3E program where they unprocess their diet then you put them on this kind of 18 hour fast so they're having two meals a day over 6 hours and then for 18 hours they not consuming anything uh we must talk about any Contra indications like insulin or blood sugar medications at some point just to make sure that you know people who are listening who want to try stuff that we've we've covered that but also I want to go a bit further because I know you have used 24-hour f fasting with patients I know you have used three day fasts and you have also shared in previous conversations some very powerful statistics one in particular I remember on a 7-Day fast you shared a statistic a bit of research from Boston in terms of what that does to your lifetime cancer risk so maybe you could talk about some of these longer fasts and then practically how do people start going about that yes yes so absolutely so at all times they are supposed to take the blood pressures twice a day make sure that the blood pressure not going down to because I do not stop the blood pressure medications right off the bat so on the blood pressure medication reduction will be done depending on your blood pressure readings as far as blood sugar is concerned if they are on oral agents I'll continue those oral agents while they're doing the 18-hour fast periods even the 24-hour fast I'll keep them on it and I will ask them to monitor the blood sugars now continuous glucose monitoring the little uh devices I only advise those on on patients who are on insulin when I'm fasting them because I want to make sure that the insulins don't drop off but when a patient is taking insulin and he does the 24-hour fast I drop the insulin levels by half first I mean insulin dosage by half and I monitor the blood sugars and then when they go beyond 24-hour fast I stop insulin completely I stop it
completely completely I stop it completely because I don't want them to become hypoglycemic so oral agents I will continue insulin I will discontinue if I'm doing more than 24 hours but I monitor the blood sugars very closely and then that brings me to a little longer fast before I go to longer fast I make them do a 36-hour fast so I'll make them do that once a week means that evening rolls around skip that meal also and then have yourself a breakfast treat yourself for the breakfast the next day and that brings it to 36 hours so I make them do at least 1 36 hour fast for maybe you know two consecutive weeks and then I'll take them to higher levels can I just clar can I just clarify that so the 36-hour fast the way you have found it most beneficial for most of your patients is what you skip one evening meal to the next evening meal how when when does that fasting time I know you can do it any way you want but what you found to work could we just clarify that yeah so the patients already are used to having only one meal a day okay so then I'll say skip that one meal and then have the next meal when you're supposed to have then that'll bring you to 36 hours so for most patients these days they're having the evening meals because it's more social having it with so they'll skip breakfast they'll skip lunch evening comes down they're supposed to eat and I tell them skip it and go and have breakfast the next day that brings them to 36 hours I guess if they're already used having one meal a day then actually skipping that evening meal is kind of I don't know just go go to bed early as well you know sort of you know it's yeah I like that so what stage do you take them from this two meal a day which is this uh you know this 6-hour eating window you know you you do that initially for the 18h hour fast then you take them to 24 hours de with just one meal a day is that how you do it that's exactly how I do it and then they're doing one meal a day 5 days a week weekends they're going to have
a week weekends they're going to have two meals they do that for two weeks and then I say okay you've been doing this for two weeks now you've been having only one meal a day next few weeks one day a week you're going to go to 36 and the way you're going to do it is you're going to skip that one meal also and then have a breakfast the next day so that'll bring you to the and I want to see how you feel and most of them come back saying I just missed the meal in the evening I watched a movie and went to bed so why am I going from 24 to 36 because I want to get them ready for longer fast especially if they tremendously overweight and they're metabolically deranged what's the biochemical Advantage between 24 and 36 at by 36 hours almost all of them will be in some degree of ketogenesis so it's hard to know who's going to start spilling ketones at 18 hours 24 hours 30 or 32 hours it's hard to know that so when I prime them then I'm finding that there's longer and longer periods of ketogenesis that means they go into Ketone production at 16 hours so long as they made their dietary changes gradually got into this the ketogenesis phase starts a little bit sooner at about 16 hours and the most motivated patients say that oh I want to know I said okay if you want to know then go to the pharmacy and pick up some keto sticks and just just your urine and tell me when you started spilling the ketones so after 24-hour fast almost all of them are spilling ketones and when they spilling ketones I know what's going on with their physiology at that point I know that they're getting the benefits of some degree of autophagy growth hormone um bdnf production and mitophagy I know that's happening because they they're spilling ketones so
spilling ketones so that's another motivating thing in the patient who's showing me the interest and the ones I really want them to yes give them the tool take this home check your ketones that's what I find so fascinating so by 36 hours they're making the ketones so they'll do that for a couple of weeks where they now went to 36-hour fasts once a week for 2 weeks now at that point depending on how motivated they feel and how well they are doing now I'll go to more prolonged fasts and my favorite fast is the water fast and most of the I'm telling you greater than 95% of them when they've graduated to this point where they've gradually gone and done all this they're able to do the 3-day water fast with no difficulty whatsoever and if they get cramps then I tell them okay take a glass of water and put a pinch of salt in it and just just down it and you'll feel better but most of them don't because they've adapted themselves if you go into a 3-day water fast too quickly you're going to get more cramps but more importantly you're going to go through what is known as keto flu and you just feel terrible and achy and you just feel really bad so I do it gradually but I must make them go to a 3-day water Fest I use it in that case I also use it in patients who are able to lose weight but then they reach a plateau so now they're weighing 230 lb and I want them to have more weight loss so they've been doing this now for a month and they said look doc I just can't shed any more weight now I've done everything you're saying and I'll put them on a 3-day water water fast and lo and behold they'll start losing weight again so I use that in patients who've reached the plateau going to the 3-day water Fest thank you for sharing that I think something I did want to bring up today um because I know a lot of people and again we're all influenced by the online world or the patients that we've seen or the online world that we inhabit and you know I spoke to David Sinclair uh this Harvard Professor who talks about Aging in a very very profound and
about Aging in a very very profound and novel way and you know when I put out that episode with David A lot of people are saying look asking people to skip meals uh is very triggering for people with eating disorders and I know Eating Disorders are on the rise uh massively all over the world certainly here in the UK and and in America so I think we need to be careful about that uh I think it's worth me just flagging that here that potentially this advice is not for people with eating disorders that's a sort of separate issue well I'd welcome your perspective on that um but also you know is it possible that we take these things to extremes I guess there would be some people we mentioned Anna ly's book before dopamine nation and um that we all we're living in a world of addicts now and that you know she mentions that the smartphone is the modern day hypodermic needle which I thought was a very provocative way but but I I actually completely agreee with her of talking about it there's Health there's physical biochemical Health but there's also this kind of emotional health and our mental well-being do you think as much as you love fasting do you think some people they can sort of overdo it and get so addicted to kind of that feeling of fasting and actually go to an extreme which potentially could become problematic I think you're right it can happen fortunately I haven't seen it here with somebody I tell them stop now stop stop this is enough now you should be eating two meals a day and you know I think that the pattern you need to settle down in is for you I think that two meals a day in a 6 or 8 Hour window period may be a nice thing for you to do chronically to maintain what you've gained the benefits that you've already gained um then I haven't seen any patients who ignored that and contined to the 3day water fast on a weekly
to the 3day water fast on a weekly basis or whatever or two weekly basis I haven't seen that but but you are absolutely right that there are some patients who clearly have an eating disorder and they clearly have a type of addiction and and they're going up at night and they they creep downstairs and they're eating away five bars of chocolates and all this kinds of stuff and those patients clearly do need help and I will not deal with those on my own I will supervise it but I'll send them to a psychologist that actually specializes in addictions because they have to really spend time with that patient about addiction behavior and it's not just Behavior about the food there may be other issues that are actually triggering um cuz you see you slide from one addiction to the other so so you can't take of this alone on its own until you also take care of the sugar and maybe the the cell phone and and other digital gadgets that gives you the instant gratifications and and there may even be other issues it may be a gambler oil you know or have other type of deviant Behavior addictions so no you're absolutely so recognizing those with the biggest problems and addiction is a huge problem and it's becoming more more known now that uh the addiction is to not only sugar but it's also addicted uh to process food content processed foods and the content of processed foods um are very addictive yeah I think that's why you want to change the the type of food that you so you're getting rid of all the addictive substances in the food the addtive sugar in the food and then addictive behaviors in other aspects of your life as well so so it's really looking at the whole thing it's a huge problem and yes we are an addicted nation and that's why it's making it so easier for us to become addicted to food later on in life because it starts at a very young age already getting addicted to gadgets um and instant gratification I want to move on to the mental benefits shortly of fasting because I think there's a real important piece there
there's a real important piece there that we touched on a couple of times in the conversation already before I do I sort of feel that that there's so much um divisiveness and um you know frankly fighting about different diets that I think sometimes get so unhelpful for the general public um they see doctors who they admire saying this diet has got this evidence this is really good and they see another doctor who they admire say this diet is really good it has all this evidence and I think and I know this from talking to patients and talking to the public that many people find this incredibly confusing I I really like fasting for the right person in the right state of health I kind of see it as the great unifier in many ways because as long as you are metabolically able to do that fast you know where whether you choose to eat meat and fish or whether you choose to be vegan if you are whole food primarily and not having uh much processed food at all in your diet then you're still going to get benefits from fasting right whether you're low carb or whether you're vegan and you know it's interesting that video that you did on fasting fasting for Survival on YouTube which has you know had millions of views I was reading through the comments just before this conversation Dr jadas and the top comment was really I think encompasses everything that you stand for he I think said he was mostly plant-based and he started off following your advice with a whole food mostly plant-based diet I think he started off with 18 hour fast he moved up to 24-Hour ones I can't quite remember then he moved to maybe one three-day one every six months and he's documented his health Journey over two years and it is utterly remarkable that you put out a
utterly remarkable that you put out a video on YouTube and you have completely empowered that guy to transform his life so first of all just I want to acknowledge you for that that's just one of millions of people who've seen that video and changed their lives and that's just incredible work that you're doing but what do you think about this concept that fasting could be the great unifier no matter what tribe you belong to you can still get involved with fasting and yield and reap many of those benefits yeah you absolutely right um the various dietary programs that have come out have confused the public it's confused the Physicians as well I mean my patients come and say that I'm following this diet that diet and nothing happened and this one's too hard for me and this one's too restrictive for me and it doesn't fit with my lifestyle I understand that fasting forgives you fasting in a sense forgives you for certain foods that that you may then consume and actually think about it this way also you eat that slice of bread after a fast your insulin response is totally different in the fasting State than in a Fed State you're going to make less insulin for the same slice of bread in a fasting state so it's and the type of food that they consume so when I first started out I was years and years ago I was I said oh you got to be a vegetarian you got to drop all meats and being here in United States how many patients are going to become St right so and then as the data came out and I started studying more and more I changed yeah I decided that hey there's something wrong with this you know people should be able to eat ancestral foods and what they grew up with and but the problem was processed foods then we take the foods and we process them we change them and all the additives that we put into and the way we grow our food or way we get our Meats has changed so I said
we get our Meats has changed so I said no this is not right when I studied nonvegetarian diets um around the world how come there this low instance of heart disease there are populations that eat only meat and only drink milk and blood or the population that only eat starches and a lot of it and they also live long what's the commonality what was the commonality in all of them the commonality was no processed foods no additives right no no sugar so they all had simple diets so then I came up with my own plan and I said listen you what do you like to eat so you want to eat red meat okay then eat grass finish meat because that will have more nutrients in it the fats will be the right kind of fats you will not have all those Omega sixes in there you you'll have more natural fats in there and if you want eggs chicken so I let them do that and I said but you got to also introduce plants in your diet because you need the plants not for you yeah and you're going to get some some water soluble vitamins etc etc into your system and you eat plants and but it's really for your gut bacteria so again I had to read a lot about the microbiome to understand that the fiber is hugely important very important and and so I tell them eat your vegetables as well so this is my diet plan it's not so restrictive just stay away from anything that your great great grandfather wouldn't eat and no process foods anything in a packet box barcode stay away from anything made into a flower and that's been a hard one the flower one um also inwhere it's a huge problem I love this um you know I'm so enjoying speaking to you there's a real kind of there's just a beautiful energy there's also this kind of real life practicalness that you know what it's like when these patients come in and you've got on your head the ideal thing but you got to work with people and their tastes and their preferences and
their tastes and their preferences and their culture and what they want and I really do strongly feel that too many people these days on social media commentate they look at the science and go oh this is what everyone needs to do it's like it's just not how it works in real life in my experience you know people are different they've got different desires they've got different cultures different preferences so I really like that you've mentioned all the kind of physical benefits the biochemical benefits when we have a period of not taking in food a period fasting but there's also something really powerful isn't there like you have touched on several times about what it does for you when you know oh I can go 12 hours without food I can go 18 hours W actually I can go 24 hours and I don't actually need to put something in my mouth I think we shouldn't undervalue just what that does for someone you know I think it's Freedom from a dependency on food addict to Foods processed food sugar it means that you can go about you're out on the train station or the airport and there's no good food to have cool just don't eat take the flight don't eat it there's a real Freedom which many people feel that they are CH they're in Chains I guess to the food industry and to their their hunger and their stomach so you know can you speak a little bit about that and why you feel that's so important yeah I love the the fact that you use that word freedom because you know I said okay it empowers a patient but it is a real Freedom it's a freedom that that they know that what their behavior resulted in no adverse effect and that they were able to overcome this which they never thought they could overcome so these little hurdles that they're overcoming in their diet actually has huge repercussions in other aspects of their life and really honestly it it percolates into their
it it percolates into their workplace into their family life um in in their social interactions uh with their friends um and I've seen that these people they just become more more uh self-confident um and and I think it's because we introduce terms to them like that's who you are the real you so it opens up a new aspect of their existence that there is a part of me that's separate and apart from my body and from my mind and my cravings and my stomach and my feelings and and all these things and that's the real me and of course you know this gets into some of that part that I have a huge interest in which is who are you yeah yeah what you know who are you really um where is the you uh and why can't you that that you change uh your behavior of course you can because you need to change your identification so this is an identification change that I see the patients doing they realize that they are in charge that them inside them not the body not the mind there's actually an awareness an amness and I am and that is huge huge and I found that people who have done this program over the last few years they actually get work promotions they actually become better better supervisors they become uh just better family uh members and and caregivers um and it's miraculous how one thing because it's it's showing them that yes you are in charge look you can do it and they just self-empower themselves they feel so good self-confidence just goes off the roof and I think that there's a you know I'm learning more about this um but but I think it does boil down to to because that also brings me to Stress Management because one of the things we do tell our
because one of the things we do tell our patients is that you you if you start getting stressed out during all this these periods where you're getting into the fasting period you need to go out and do some some meditation we tell them and we show them how to meditate and I have a very simple meditation technique where I just basically ask the patients to okay just uh close your eyes and just concentrate on your breathing only and when a thought comes let the thought go don't don't follow up on it because then another thought will come in a few minutes don't follow up on it wait just come back to your breathing concentrate on your breathing as the breath goes in and out and you will find that there'll be gaps in between your thoughts that get longer and my patients have all said yes you're absolutely right there's blankness I said well that blankness when you don't have a thought or when you're not thinking of something that's you that's the real you and when you come out of this for 15 20 minutes you will realize that there is that you in you and you can make up your mind about anything you can do anything it'll Empower you and you'll feel less stressed out you'll feel less compelled you less automatic you will be you you will become as you said that word that you use you'll have freedom and and I find that fascinating so you see this whole thing I said this in the beginning that you know fasting seems to open up those that onion into all different parts of your life you know it's just amazing stuff I mean I love it I I just love it and um if and when we have our second conversation I I could see us going deep into who we are spirituality and I really do feel that's a missing pieace in medicine like it's not just about telling someone what they should do for their health I mean people don't really do what other people say in the long term in my experience they they what might do initially to get them going but at some point it has to change from being the doctor's plan to
change from being the doctor's plan to being my plan at some point it needs to be like they go on your 3we unprocess your diet uh sort of regime they start fasting at some point maybe after a month two months 3 months you want that self-empowerment piece where it's like yeah okay the dots guided me but I know what I'm doing now right I want to eat this way I want to fast like this because I feel good when I do it so I'm now doing it not because he told me to but because I want to and I think that you know I like you I teach doctors uh I I always T about this this is a really important piece of the puzzle another thought I had is fasting is you know initially at least a difficult thing for many people to do and we kind of know that when humans do difficult things whether it's fasting for 24 hours when you find it hard or whether it's completing a half marage when you know 6 months ago you couldn't walk around the block what it does for us in terms of who we are and our self-esteem and our confidence it's very very powerful isn't it so I really love that you are bringing that up also in the context of fasting we we have to you know that there's a huge in health there's a huge component of your your mental being and and your understanding of who you are and your role in your life in and the people around you um so I one of my interests and maybe we can talk about this in other occasions is is you know what are your relationships like especially with your mother because that's going to tell you how long you can already live it's amazing or you know when my patients are in the hospital how many people come visit them after open heart surgery determines how quickly they're going to recover from open heart surgery same surgery what's going on here so we can you know there's huge repercussions on how patient health is depending on the social and then how do they view
social and then how do they view themselves in society and their role and the hierarchy in society and that seems to also dictate uh outcomes in health irrespective of how much health care provide uh facilities are available to them so there's all these other social determinants of Health that are extremely important and I think that we don't talk about that enough and I think that that's something that we need to talk about because in cardiology besides fasting my other aspect is I do want to get into all that with my patients to see that you know um health is defined by you basically metabolize your psychosocial being you metabolize it into your body so be careful about your thoughts about who you are and how you're interacting with the world and everything that's going around here because in an instantaneous moment you're actually metabolizing it into physiology in your body something I've been thinking a lot about matx and I I will put this to you in just a moment is whether it's more important for people to focus on what to eliminate versus what to bring in and of course you know that's quite black or white of course they're both important but certainly in the UK there's been a tendency for people now to say don't worry about exclusion it's all about what we including in our diet and I understand it I think people want to hear that message I think it's a more palatable message message and I I understand the rationale that if you are filling your plate and your diet with the things that you should be consuming more of there's going to be less room for the things that we're trying to avoid or limit I understand that my bias is that I have been a clinician for over two decades I've seen tens of thousands of patients and I'll be completely honest Matts I have found more benefits in helping people cut out of their diets the problematic Foods in the
diets the problematic Foods in the modern food environments the the modern food supply then by actively focusing on what to bring in it's not a popular opinion that you can put out there these days but I underlined this section in the introduction of Genius foods which I thought was really powerful and again this is these are your words Matt you'll see that actually slowing the aging process including cognitive aging is just as much about the foods you emit from your diet as those you choose to consume so I've said quite a bit there I love your perspective on that Max yeah it's I mean I think it's definitely um we have to lift the veil for people this idea that all foods fit right that all foods are good foods that there's no such thing as good or bad foods I understand like you where that comes from and certainly people listening to this watching this are coming with a lifetime of uh you know of cultural attitudes about food preferences and and the like and I think that you know we have to be able to remove the morality from food and be able to talk about food in terms of its empirical value right especially in a time where people are sick right so context is everything and we have to understand that we're talking to a population that is unwell a study came out just a couple years ago that found that about only 10% of people uh are free of metabolic illness meaning 90% of people in the US have some degree of metabolic illness so this is a sick population and I think that it's the responsibility of you know the healthcare provider to um to consider context right and so this idea that all foods fit indeed that is the Mantra of
foods fit indeed that is the Mantra of the junk food industry because what that says is it's not our fault it's not you know this sugar sweetened beverage that crams 30 teaspoons of sugar into a 16 ounce serving that's the problem it's your problem because you are an able to moderate your consumption of these Foods well it's not innate to our biology to moderate our consumption of those kinds of foods right there is something wrong with drinking 50 gram of sugar you know in a beverage in one sitting there's absolutely something wrong with that there's not something wrong with you if you decide to indulge every now and then that's a very human characteristic it's a human Universal in fact and I think that's where we have to be able to separate morality from this conversation about you know what makes a food good or bad to make sure you're taking action after watching this video I have created a free breathing guide that's going to help you reduce stress calm your mind and boost your energy in this guide I share with you six really simple breathing practices that work immediately even just one minute a day will start to make a big difference to receive your free guides all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below I think that in an an environment where 66% of people are either overweight or obese and where we are trending toward a population where by the year 2030 one and two people are going to be not just overweight but obese right we're talk talking about clinical obesity here that obesogenic foods like sugar sweetened beverages like these hyperpalatable Ultra processed foods that drive you to overeat which we've already established right which we have good data now to say that these Foods drive you to over consume that it's hard to argue that those foods are good right yeah you would argue that I think a strong case could be made that those foods are actually not that good right that they are counterproductive to Good Health yeah and I would also argue that if you can't say that certain foods are
if you can't say that certain foods are bad then we can't have double standards you also shouldn't be able to say that certain foods are good and so does that mean that we shouldn't say that like broccoli is good yeah does that mean that we should be censored when trying to say that like whole eggs are good whole eggs are great right we should be encouraging people to eat these Foods so I think we need to get back to a certain degree of of logic and Common Sense and reason when it comes to talking about food and again I understand that everybody's different and some people have fractured relationships with food right which is super important and we have to talk about that but not every message is for every person yeah I think I I completely agree with that Max and as you say everyone's different everyone's got a different relationship with Foods I think practically if people have never ever done two or three weeks where they are literally only eating Whole Foods right the sort of foods that we're talking about I think people will genuinely be surprised with how good they could feel and that's why my Approach as a clinician has always been let's have a two threee period where we cut everything out of course you have to eat something in that so it's not as if I'm starving people they're eating real Whole Foods in that time but the focus really is on what not to eat and then what I find like I mentioned with those migraine patients is that people experience their life in a way that they haven't done before they have more energy they're sleeping better their skin feels clearer often joint aches start to go like you see this so often and then people can go okay right this is getting a bit Bland what can I introduce you know and you bit by bit they start expanding their diet again very intentionally to kind of figure out ah you know I'm not so great when I have that type of food but you know that sort of education piece when we're tuned in to how a certain food
we're tuned in to how a certain food makes us feel for me that's the Gold Max because then it doesn't matter what I say or what you say right then they've become their own expert like they've used maybe me and you as their guides to help them get going but ultimately it's like yeah I know Max says to eat that food or wrong says to eat that one but when I eat that food I get siny I can't breathe properly I get itchy and I think that individualized component is so important I kind of feel that many people have really Outsource their expertise to other people and and I think there's value and obviously we're trying to help there we're trying to help guide people with our podcast and our books and our work but I really feel that at some point the reader The Listener has to go no okay I've taken that on board but now I'm going to be my own expert I know what works for me yeah absolutely I think we need to yeah the the this notion of self-empowerment of of agency in podcasts like yours all the work that I'm putting out uh you know my intent is that people use the advice that I give as a template to do their own research and to iterate and to Tinker and to see what works for them I mean we could talk all day long about for example the benefits of kale I happen to be a fan of kale right but not everybody is going to be a fan of kale and kale is not going to digest well for example for some people right and so I'm not saying that you have to eat this food right but generally when I'm talking about a food an a specific food it's to represent really a food category and for example kale represents dark leafy greens for me which I think is one of these foods that you would think would not be controversial but of course today um is right I posted about the value on my Instagram of dark leafy greens and how researchers out of Rush University found that people who WR who
University found that people who WR who ingest on a daily basis about a cup and a half of dark leafy greens have brains that perform up to 11 years younger right so this this really interesting Insight which is correlational to be clear it wasn't uh that wasn't a determined via randomized control multicenter trial right but you know carnivores come out of the woodwork now people who only eat meat and they're you know and they have a problem now a bone to pick with dark leafy greens but dark leafy greens are I think a wonderful food and for most people going to be very well tolerated and provide a number of different important nutrients some of which essential some of which non-essential but which we see is associated with with Better Health and to me should not be controversial a very empowering I think um idea that I have uh put forth in genius Foods is that people should ingest a fatty salad every day just as a general rule of thumb a box that people can easily check off every day to consume uh a fatty salad every day so that you know were if this Rush University finding holds true that you could prevent brain aging and in fact reverse brain aging by up to 11 years to me should be non-controversial what do you mean when you say a faty salad so many of the um the phytonutrient the phytochemicals in dark leafy greens are fat soluble but greens don't contain a lot of fat and so there was a very interesting study that looked at the absorption of uh actually these catenoids that we've talked about lutein and zanthin and what the study found was that coing esting them these two compounds which are abundant in dark leafy greens particularly kale and swiss chard and spinach they're these these uh these greens are rich in in those two compounds that if they are not co-ingested with a fat source they essentially flow through you whereas
essentially flow through you whereas consuming them with fat dramatically increases their bioavailability because they're fat soluble so the fat generally that I recommend um people using liberally in their salads is extra virgin olive oil which increases the bioavailability basically the way in which your body can um the capacity for your body to access these very valuable um phytochemicals and so um yeah so that's a I think a great tip but then there all there are other um aspects to dark lefy greens that make them valuable as well for example arugula is the top source of nitrates dietary nitrates which we know helps support our body's nitric oxide pathway which is important for maintaining healthy blood pressure yeah which again we've established super important for good brain in fact one high nitrate meal of for example arugula or beets which are another um very uh food group rich in nitrates can potentially boost cognitive function because it it has the capacity to boost blood flow to the brain and so you get that in dark leafy greens you get um compounds called flavonoids there is a very interesting study and carnivores which is funny I don't know how many gravitate to your work rungan but I seem to be a magnet for um people on all sorts of extreme diets not least of which carnivore diets do do you have I do and I have some views on that I wanted to talk about the carnival diet with you at some point Point later on in this conversation so I do have experience um with it on on a variety of different levels but but please continue we'll definitely get there yeah so there was a randomized control actually actual actually multiple randomized control trials where they used compounds called flavonoids which are abundant in dark leafy greens another aspect of dark leafy greens that make them so valuable and and add scientific plausibility to this this finding right that regularly consuming dark leafy greens is associated with reduced brain aging this randomized control trial which is the kind of trial
control trial which is the kind of trial required to prove cause and effect right so that 11-year reduced brain aging was a correlational finding but this randomized control trial used compounds called flavonoids which are abundant in dark leafy greens and flavonoids are quite literally plant defense compounds which carnivores love to say are toxic for us right that they that these kinds of compounds should be avoided but in fact with this randomized control trial found was that it's these very compounds that have the capacity to boost bdnf which is brain derived neurotropic Factor sort of thought to be like a Miracle Grow protein for the brain supports neuroplasticity supports the suppleness of your brain as you age right so they looked at levels of bdnf and serum and also cognitive function with cognitive cognitive tests right and what they found was that when compared to low flavonoid uh foods high flavonoid Foods actually boost bdnf and support and enhance in fact cognitive function and so you find these food these compounds flavonoids in coffee in tea in berries and citrus and in dark leafy greens right so again these are a food category that I refer to as genius Foods dark leafy greens they also were um surfaced in a study by be at Al 2021 I believe as being one of the most nutrient dens foods that we have um access to because of the concentration of folate that you get in dark leafy greens so not a food group to be uh to be avoided you you mentioned faty salads and and I was flicking through genius kitchen today this is your cookbook Matt and I'm going to find it now there was a salad towards the end which I thought right I'm making that this weekend you may remember it had blackberries in um I think it had avocado in it the the imagery was just absolutely beautiful I thought I'm definitely making that do
thought I'm definitely making that do you remember the one I think that would definitely qualify as on your fatty salads I think it had in some of the genius feeds we mentioned so far extra Vision olive oil avocado dark leafy greens I think it had was it walnuts or almond cans I believe yeah I know again those are another one of your Genius Foods right the category of nuts that specifically I think you mentioned almond in the book but would you broaden that out Beyond almonds yeah definitely nuts I think are great they are here's the thing because nuts are um rich in fat but not just any fat polyunsaturated fatty acids they also contain their an abundant source of vitamin E wherever you find polyunsaturated fats in nature you also find vitamin E so this is actually another Nuance that we didn't um touch on in our discussion of these grain and Seed oils which I think is very important uh to bring up wherever in nature you find polyunsaturated fats you find a proportional um amount of vitamin E because vitamin E in nature exists to protect polyunsaturated fatty acids and in fact the more polyunsaturated fatty acids you consume your requirement for vitamin E actually increases because it's vitamin E that protects these fats in our bodies Unfortunately today we're consuming more polyunsaturated fats than ever before in human history thanks to the preponderance of these grain and Seed oils but we tend to underc consume vitamin E about 10% of people consume the uh RDA for vitamin E at least in in the United States but when you consume whole food sources of polyunsaturated fats they're actually incredibly healthy right like nuts are incredibly healthy they're a rich source of poly unsaturated fats but they're protected by uh a a commensurate proportion of vitamin E so almonds great source of vitamin E um also magnesium which is a macro
um also magnesium which is a macro mineral that about half the population doesn't consume adequate amounts of which contributes to everything from ATP synthesis to DNA repair DNA damage is at the root of one of the root causes of aging and possibly even um tumorogenesis and so magnesium is is an incredibly important um mineral and you get about 25% in just a handful of almonds every nut has its own sort of um array of of benefits so if you don't like almonds no big deal I'm also a huge fan of pistachios in fact what gives pist pistachios their characteristic uh color are catenoids ltin and zanthin pistachios contain um these catenoids which you won't find in any other nut so if pistachios are your jam go for it macadamia nuts are great uh good source of monounsaturated fat and we see time and time again that nut consump consumption is associated with reduced risk for neurod degenerative disease for cardiovascular disease for respiratory diseases for kidney disease so they're a great food group yeah they way they are of course nuts are something that is easy for some of us to overc consume I know I've been guilty of that before you know nuts are great for my brain they're great for my health and before you know it like where where do that pack of nuts go so I totally agree they're are fantastic food to focus on again like mentioned right at the start even some Whole Foods some of us certainly can overeat and certainly I particularly find I have to be quite careful with my intake of nuts I can easily go uh a bit crazy if there's a bag of nuts in the house certainly for me yeah so here's a good hack for that because I I completely agree that that nuts are very they're among the most calorie dense um Whole Foods that that exist and I think it they become particularly easy to overeat now again sort of byproduct of modern industrial food is that you can
modern industrial food is that you can now buy them without shells right and they come salted often times they have added sugar so just contributing to the hyper palatability of these nuts and making them ever so easy to to overc consume so actually my hack for nuts is I very seldom snack on them I don't use them as a snack I use them in uh recipes where they're portion controlled so a lot of my recipes will integrate nuts but they integrate them in a very deliberate and Portion Control way and so to me that's a great way to um to moderate my consumption of them also you know when you get them with flavored as I mentioned it just you know they become all the more easy to just like eat by the fistful there's other kind of plant-based genius Foods in your book of course we you know mentioned a few of them there's I think do chocolate and broccoli sprouts and blueberries and all kinds of things but I want to move on to animal Foods because I think it's really important you've you've touched on the carnivore phenomena which is growing at the moment where people well many people are going to meet only or certainly meet heavy diets and are reporting huge Health improvements from doing so certainly in the short term at least but but some to be fair in the you know certainly over 3 four years and as an open-minded physician I observed that and because I think like you mats I'm not wearing my dietary affiliation as my identity I feel I'm able to observe and stand back a little bit and go well God this is really interesting because I kind of feel and maybe this speaks to why you can post about dark leafy greens and maybe someone from the carnival Community can be quite vocal I don't know cuz I don't know who that person was but but my theory at the moment is if you have struggled for years with
is if you have struggled for years with your health joint pain skin problems allergies and you've been to doctors and you've tried to empower yourself you've listened to podcasts you've read books and you've tried everything and your life has been really really negatively affected and then you have stumbled across for whatever reason the carnivore diet and you've gone on to it and suddenly a lot those complaints have vanished or certainly got a lot better I get it that it's like oh man this is it this is the Elixir that I've been waiting for and I get it it's it's like if someone goes suddenly vegan and they've never done it before and suddenly you know if they're going from a standardized Western diet to a whole food vegan diet or plant-based diet and feeling better we often you know we've all got biases as humans and we often feel oh man that's it that's the magic diet it worked for me and you know certainly my clinical experience has taught me that there is no one diet that works for everyone I've seen people following paleo diets Thrive I've seen people following vegan diets Thrive and you know I've come to the conclusion that the right diet for you kind of depends a little bit on your previous Health what your goals are where you are at your life at the moment like all all these things factor in so like you I have these Frameworks and guidelines but within that I think people need to play around a bit and personalize them so my view on the Carnival diet is I know we don't have any long-term data yet on it you know but I never want to um I never want to make someone feel you know someone who's transformed their lives by changing their diets I get it like I really understand and and again my bias Max is I've seen sick
again my bias Max is I've seen sick patients for over two decades so when that person finds something that works them I get it I get why they're potentially even resistant to hear anything else it's like if I had pain my whole life and suddenly I went carnivore and it healed my pain you know what I don't think I'd listen to anyone I'd be like you guys say what you want to say but I know that this di works for me so that's just a little bit of my perspective I don't know if any of resonated with you we'll be back to the conversation in just a moment now many of us struggle to find time to eat all of these incredible Whole Foods that's why I'm a big fan of good quality Whole Food supplements like this one that's been in my own life for over three years now it contains over 75 Whole Food Source ingredients vitamins minerals pre and probiotics and can help us support our energy Focus digestion and our immune system ag1 are giving my audience a fantastic offer oneyear supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first order you can see all details at drink a1. com more or just click on the link below and now back to the conversation oh 100% I feel the the exact same way a lot of people tend to be down on what they're not up on right so people that have that that bring to the field of nutrition their biases you know maybe they are um they're on a vegan diet but more so than their dietary uh choices they are there's a side of them that that is actually an activist for various aspects of you know maybe it's animal rights or environment you know planetary health and the like and so people tend to get very um heated when confronted with facts that challenge their own biases right and I think that's a big problem because people as you mentioned are just out here trying to see what's going to work best for them and to cure to heal them sometimes or at least you
to heal them sometimes or at least you know mitigate symptoms with regard to some very pressing I think health health challenges today many people are suffering from and so I think that it's um it's definitely something that we need to study more I know that they are trying to do that research um I think it's David lwig at Harvard or I know sea Baker is always on his like Instagram trying who's a prominent you know carnivore personality trying to recruit people for his studies um and the like so I think think that the research is you know probably going to be coming out because of the number of anecdotes that you're seeing on social media but I think a lot of the people who are seeing the greatest Improvement of symptoms they're coming from uh they're coming from sick places you know they're they're coming from places of you know having crippling uh you know gastrointestinal disorders autoimmune conditions and the like and I I think there there is some plausibility to the fact that when you cut out you know certain plant materials that can instigate what's called molecular mimicry in the body body um to somebody who has a a dysfunctional immune system or an impaired gut microbiome for example gut disbiosis yeah uh that you're going to see a reprieve from from these symptoms and you know meat at the end of the day is a very nutrient dense food so I'm I've always considered myself um to some degree carnivore adjacent uh I definitely like to promote the value of plant Foods I think I I think it should be a a almost like a 50-50 mix I think you know my message is one of balance I think that we have to embrace plants but we also have to embrace animal products and I think that you know that can sometimes be the hardest message the hardest line to toe is that that message of balance right yeah because you offend both parties yeah I agree I think we're touching on something that's really important max if we're going to truly cut through this and and help people I have real sympathy and and respect for that individual who
and and respect for that individual who has found something that works him and if that's a carnivore diet I get it I understand that but at the same time that working for that person doesn't necessarily mean that the research you are sharing about leafy greens is invalid that's the kind of unlogical leap from that it's like okay cool for you maybe at this moment in time maybe you've got a damage G maybe you've got molecular mimicry maybe you've got leaky guts maybe at this moment in time you cannot tolerate a lot of the plant foods that Max is recommending but I mean look you live in America it's probably worse there than here in the UK but it's reflective of everything right whether it's food or politics like this kind of nuanced position in the middle it almost doesn't exist anymore you offend everyone when you take it you almost have to nail your colors you either are hardcore vegan or hardcore carnivore because your approach I really like it Matt it's very balanced you know I'm not going to out of the gate recommend a carnival diet to one of my patients right it's not going to be my starting point but just as with let's say a patient with iroso bowel syndrome IBS a lot of the dietary recommendations people make often don't work for them if they've got severe IBS they have to be very careful initially maybe reduce their fod maps with the help of a nutrition expert whilst they are healing their their guts dealing with their stress levels and maybe in a few months down the line they can start to introduce foods that they couldn't tolerate you know my own health Journey mats you know I can now bring in foods that seven eight years ago I couldn't tolerate because I've you know I've repaired everything I've gone back to basics I've healed I've addressed all the areas of my lifestyle that you talk about you know in your second book The Genius life so yeah I kind of I how do you find it as someone who is putting out nutrition information regularly with with the aim to help people you know do you sometimes
to help people you know do you sometimes just sort of bang your head against your computer and want to throw your phone against the W I mean how do you handle it oh man lots of coffee and it's uh no it is it it can be um it's grading and it can be tiring but uh you know my North Star is I've I've never thankfully knock on wood had any major health problems of of note um other than the the occasional migraine which has been an annoyance to say the least but the reason why I got involved in this um is because my mom was very sick for many years she at the age of 58 um started to display the earliest symptoms of what would ultimately be diagnosed as a rare um and Progressive incurable form of dementia called Louis body dementia which is akin to having both Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease at the same time and so she had that for eight years um and it was a real struggle and when she was initially diagnosed actually even prior to Her diagnosis when she was initially prescribed drugs for both Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease I had a panic attack for the first time um and only time in my life Googling the drugs right which is what any Millennial with a data plan would do they would just you know go to Dr Google and when I saw that that her condition would get worse and that the drugs had no disease modifying effect they were mere biochemical Band-Aids to me that was like a turning point in my life really where I became obsessed I was going to say I dedicated myself but it wasn't even conscious I just became obsessed with trying to learn everything I could about diet and lifestyle and how all of these different variables play a role in terms of our predisposition to developing conditions like dementia like Alzheimer's disease like Parkinson's disease which we know even less about but um but you know I
even less about but um but you know I like you have seen I I'm not a medical doctor so I haven't seen it from the standpoint of a clinician but I've seen real sickness like real sickness that very few people um have you know have the ability to to see and in many ways it was kind of a privilege because you know I wish I could give it all back and and have my mom back in in good Health but it really got me to see the world in a new way and and it really cracked open my perspective on all of the different ways that we could be living Better Living more healthily and and you know I think it's an Insight it also helped me have empathy for people and and people's struggles right like not everybody has access to the same kind of food that I have access to not everybody has the same kind of you know whether it's you know nutritional wherewithal or uh food access or financial um privilege right like so it has made me very conscious of the fact that everybody is coming to this topic from a different place and to do my best um to to spread a message that's going to do the most good for the most people later in my mom's health trajectory she actually developed um pancreatic cancer and she passed away about three years ago and so yeah I mean what I've seen is just like I I don't even know sometimes when I think about what I experienced with my mom I don't even know how I able to walk on two legs like after that experience it was so incredibly traumatic but um but it's motivated me in a way that I've I've never experienced with anything else in my life to uh do what I can to help separate fact from fiction for for people to help dispel nutritional misinformation and getting back to your question to keep my eye on the prize right I have a what psychologist Jordan Peterson has called a noble aim and that's to help people so when people come at me whether it's carnivores or vegans attacking me in my work it
vegans attacking me in my work it literally it's like you know it's like rain on my windshield like it falls off because because I know that I'm motivated by helping people and that that you know my truth is something that um is really motivated and will always be motivated by um understanding what it was that happened to my mom and the desire that I have to prevent it from happening to myself others that I care about and ultimately the public at large running you know even within the medical profession people will say that running is bad for your knees I'd love you to expand poy okay um I don't know if I'm allowed to say that but um U look running injuries are are common right I mean when people do any exercise they'll injure themselves and running is a can be very repetitive right you know you thousands and thousands of steps with high forces and yes people do injure themselves and yes the knee is the most common sight of injury but we already talked about this that I think running is a skill and if actually learn to run properly uh the forces and that we actually know from a biomechanical level as well as even epidemiologically that proper running form can decrease the rate of knee injury but the chestnut of all those injuries of the myths is the idea that running causes arthritis in the knee we've actually done a lot of research on arthritis in my lab and the evolution of arthritis turns out by the way that your chances of getting arthritis for a given year in your age have doubled since World War II doubled right that's clearly because not because genes for arthritis have swept through the population it's because our our lifestyle has changed and we're trying to figure out what that's about and it's not being not about being more physically active because people have become less Physically Active today and it turns out that running is actually heal actually healthy for your kns actually it's good for cartilage uh growth it actually keeps the cartilage healthy as you get as you age physical activity does so and there maybe 15 randomized control studies showing that Runners do not have higher incidents of knee arthritis and
higher incidents of knee arthritis and yet I can't tell you how many Physicians I've told I spoke to who just assume that with no evidence zil they just say it because it's a cultural bias and then they have the authority of being a physician but they're wrong it's just flat out wrong and it can be disproved um and the problem is can I say one of the problems is there's a wider problem here I think which is we're so far removed from our evolutionary Heritage or you know evolutionary Norms compared to these modern societal cultural norms that I think we become very we're so risk averse when it comes to physical activy you know anytime we talk about it we have to give disclaimers we have to say yes be careful when you do that like every time I submit a book manuscript the Eds come out you know just make sure that people aren't going to get injured and do this and and I understand it because of course no one wants to get injured but we made something that is fundamentally part of our our human nature to move our bodies we've turned it into something that's quite removed from us we have to be careful we need to you know we need to keep our back like this we need and again please I'm not trying to say that those things don't have Merit for some people I just really feel very much like you said we've commoditized it we' made it feel like it's this thing that separate from the rest of our lives and I think that's really problematic another example is sleep I mean one of the things I so when I wrote this book I thought if I'm going to do a natural history of physical activity I better start with physical inactivity because after all two sides of the same coin and I've been very interested in sitting for a while and I've studied sitting for a while but I didn't really know I not really delved into the Sleep literature and I was astonished as I started looking at the Sleep literature that this idea that you need eight hours is is also just made up as far as I can tell there's there's actually no empirical evidence for it um I mean some people do need eight hours but it's it's been oversimplified and over commodified and imbued
over commodified and imbued with kind of cultural significance so when it turns out when we look at people in parts of the world who don't have electricity they don't have internet they don't have iPhones they don't have you know telephones they don't have anything that has electricity right they don't sleep eight hours they actually sleep between 5. 9 and 7. 1 hours I think that's the I can't remember the exact numbers right um and um uh and furthermore when you look at epidemiological studies of very large samples of people the op you know in terms of relative risk of heart disease and various other you know illnesses the optimum always comes out to seven not eight I mean of course there are some people out there because there's variation around the meme who do benefit from eight there's some people who get by at six but somehow we've we've turned eight into this kind of this this ideal and then what happens is that people feel like oh my gosh I'm not getting eight hours of sleep there's something wrong with me then they get anxious of course when you get anxious you produce cortisol which makes you stressed and cortisol is the enemy of sleep and we create this kind of feedback loop which then gets people to go buy drugs to make them sleep or spend ridiculous amounts of money on some you know clip on their nose that helps them sleep or you know whatever it is you know curtains or new mattress or whatever and you know none of that you know we've created the Sleep industrial complex based on a cultural norm that's kind of Western and modern but not necessarily rooted in our body yeah and and I guess it's one of the problems really one of your central arguments is that it's there's no one siiz fits all right we're all different we all have to find what works for us what's going to get us moving I guess what's going to get us sleeping and some of us I guess you know I would just add from a clinician perspective that I I found that you can't really make these hard and fast rules for people because the individual in front of me there are so many other inputs going on into their lives so what are their stress levels like what has been their
stress levels like what has been their state of health for 5 years what what else is going on and therefore their sleep requirement is going to depend on all those things whereas some of these communities let's say without electricity without iPhones um maybe I'm just hypothesizing here maybe their stress levels are really really low maybe they're actually maybe they can get by with less sleep than someone who has huge amounts of stress you know I obviously I can't say the answer to that I'm just hypothesizing that it is quite individual right and um of course yeah and we sort of Miss that so sleep there's a myth there running is uh good for the knees of course if someone so I'm just just trying to play Devil's Advocate someone listening to that goes okay I I hear what you're saying Professor leberman but every time I run I get knee pain so what should I do then well I mean um well there's two posties one is you should back off because pain is a adaptation it tells you something's wrong right and you shouldn't ignore pain and if you have pain you have to either you can either treat the cause or you can treat the symptoms so the question is what's causing that pain and one possibility is you do already have damage in your knee in which case running will exacerbate it right if you already have arthritis in your knee running is not a good idea because it's gonna it's GNA exacerbate it but the other possibility is that the way in which you're running is causing you to get the knee pain in the first place and maybe you should instead of and you know so many people go to a sports medicine doctor right who will look at their knee but never look at how they run yeah right they're treating the symptom rather than the cause now you know these are things there's no one answer to it and it's I'm not saying that you know barefoot running is going to solve everybody's running problems um but uh but you might want to look at how you run and it might be that there's a better way for you to run that might actually alleviate um the repetitive stresses that you're putting on the tissues around your knee that might be causing the running P but you know it's there's no one siiz fit fits-all answer yeah it's it is a skill and I think
yeah it's it is a skill and I think maybe I'd be interested to see what happens with kids like my kids have never really worn cushion shoes like from a young age particularly my daughter they've gone straight to Minimalist Shoes so I don't know if you would make a of course they're not necessarily learning the skill of running but they're also not wearing cushion shoes to start them changing their gate accordingly so I don't know have you got any research as to what might happen to those kids who've never worn cushion shoes in the first place well we've been studying that in Africa for ages right so we we've got lots of data we published many many papers on on kids who grown up never wearing shoes and comparing them to kids from the same tribe who do wear shoes and what we've not done and what's really hard to do is a randomize control study where you randomize people into wearing shoes and not wearing shoes as you can imagine that's challenging study to do especially in a place like Boston where it gets very cold Winters um but yeah we've you in my lab we published lots of papers we have a paper coming out I think today in nature scientific reviews on on um on toes Springs that upward curvature in almost every shoe that exists on the planet including many minimal shoes and how that changes the biomechanics of the foot so we're we're very interested in how shoes affect foot function and then how that affects how we walk and how we run we had a paper last year in nature which showed um that about how calluses work um how calluses protect the foot but but how they transmit all the sensory information from the ground to the body so unlike a shoe which is a trade-off between protection and and sensory information calluses don't have that trade-off which is really interesting but so yeah this is a a subject of intense research in my that so so removing calluses uh as is a Modern Trend to do for cosmetic reasons could be problematic you're saying that calluses actually give us that sensory information that we need yeah well callus come from just you know calluses come from being Barefoot right when the friction and the pressure of being Barefoot you grow calluses right
being Barefoot you grow calluses right and so most of us who wear shoes have very thin calluses but people who are Barefoot have thick calluses and it turns out that thick calluses I I learned this when when being Barefoot which is that you know I would step on something and I'd still feel it just as well you know as as after my calluses had grown then when I you know because every winter of course I'm wearing shoes and then I often take my shoes off in the spring after after the Boston Marathon and I sort of slowly regrow my calluses and I notice that as this as the spring and the summer went on I would step on the same Pebble or a similar Pebble and I would feel the pebble just as much but didn't hurt so it wasn't I was losing sensor information I was just getting more protection and so we we that started a project to kind of to study how calluses work because after all you know until recently everybody that was there we didn't have shoes we just had calluses and and my dog you know she goes Barefoot all the time um one of my favorite moments was uh I was running Barefoot a few few blocks through my house there's a woman I see all every morning you know or many mornings walking her two just two beautiful dogs and I remember one morning I was running by her on my way to the river here and she said you're you're Barefoot and and I said to her as I whizzed by your dogs are Barefoot and the look of shock on her face like oh my gosh my dogs are Barefoot but you know the dogs don't mind right and our ancestors didn't mind people in all over the world don't mind I'm not saying that shoes are bad or whatever we shouldn't wear shoes but you know shoes change how how our bodies work and there's nothing you know judgmental about it nothing wrong with wearing shoes there's nothing virtuous about being Barefoot um but we you know we learned something about how biology works by by studying people unlike us yeah super super interesting a couple more myths I'd just like to go through before we wrap up Daniel um you mentioned earlier on in our conversation that hunter gatherers sit down for long
that hunter gatherers sit down for long periods of time so there's there's this idea that sitting is really bad for us um what would you say to that well I mean you know we again oversimplify things right so you and I are sitting um while we're having this conversation and sitting is the new smoking so we might as well just be smoking a pack of cigarettes right and it is true that people who are physically inactive do do run trouble but um but it turns out that sitting is a completely natural thing and again we pathologize something that's natural um so recent Studies have shown there's a guy named Dave Rin and who who did a study of the hods 100 gathers in Tanzania and they sit almost 10 hours a day which is basically the same amount as as Brits and you know Americans sit uh so sitting isn't something weird and abnormal it but that said um how we sit is a little bit different so I was going to ask about how so there's two important differences the first is that many of us sit in chairs with backs so like I have this nice back of my chair when I sit with that that rest seat back that's a very modern thing I no longer have to use any muscles to to kind of keep my my back up right and that leads to a weak back which we think has has related to lower back pain the other thing is that people in nonwestern societies uh and and some people in Western societies have a lot of interrupted sitting they just don't sit in ntly for hours and hours so and it turns out that getting up every once in a while every few minutes every 12 minutes or 15 minutes or 10 minutes whatever depends on the study has all kinds of metabolic benefits it's like turning on the car engine right it it turns on all kinds of cellular Machinery it lowers blood sugar levels it lowers you know triglyceride levels in your blood it decreases inflammation so you might sit the same number of hours as the next guy but if you get get up every once in a while just move a little bit that has all kinds of metabolic benefits and then finally maybe most importantly it's what you do when you're not at work right if I sit all day at work because I have a
I sit all day at work because I have a nine-to - five job and then I go home and then I sit in front of the TV I'm in trouble right but if I sit all day at work but I go to the gym in the morning and you know go for a walk and you know do some exercise Etc it's not the same thing and it turns out that when people do epidemiological studies of sitting time against illness it turns out that Leisure Time physical inactivity is far more predict of Health than work time and so we don't often make these distinctions so so sitting isn't in in itself abnormal or dangerous or bad it's how sitting fits into our overall life and how we sit um that is important I I think that that's such a great distinction and how we sit is fascinating to me because um you know sitting in these chairs or I guess what we're saying is the more comfortable our chair is in some ways the more problematic because we can have hours without actually activating muscles we can just sort of morph into the chair and not do anything whereas I'm guessing the hunter gatherers don't have an alarm or a smartphone telling them to get up every 12 to 15 minutes so I'm guessing they're sitting in a way that I wouldn't say is uncomfortable well how do they sit why you why don't you explain how is so half the time they sit on the ground with their legs out maybe 15% of the time they squat you know another 15% of the time they KNE you know but but they're always you know there's children running around there's food on the fire there's you know they get up every once in a while but they're not sitting they're glued to their Zoom screen because they're locked down in a pandemic or they're not watching a you know two-hour movie or whatever they're they're kind of getting up all the time and we know both epidemiologically but we also know in terms of the mechanistic biology that you know interrupted sitting is just way more healthy than than un interupted sitting and while there's nothing wrong with sitting per se if that's all you do then yes you're
se if that's all you do then yes you're going to you're you're going to increase your chances of of a wide range of diseases yeah and I'll just admit one of my own personal bug Bears is again a societal Norm which is to tell children to keep their bums on their seat and not move around it's something that oh that's so wrong of course for you yeah it's like you know it's like you're being a good obedient child if you sit there and don't move which is just completely you know it's so far removed from our innate uh needs and wants you know I watched my kids they want to move around my my son actually in his old school he used to get told off because halfway into the lesson or 10 minutes in he'd like he'd want to squat on his chair he just felt very natural and comfortable in that position and he's like bum on chair stay still and I'm like and I was really conflicted because I'm like I really thought but that is I don't want my son having to have his bum on his seat and and stuck there for 40 minutes um but it's I think this is where your book I think is going to be incredibly helpful for Society at large and just really busting a lot of these myths having a bit more Nuance in the conversation around physical activity and movements which I think is very much needed uh I I think it's such a fabulous Deep dive into a topic that frankly affects all of us I love the bit about grandparents in the book and I my favorite section it was such a wonderful bit to read about and I wonder if you could just sort of expand on it and why it's so important for us to remember because many people I think as they get older think that they should actually become less active and you're s saying that may not be the case yeah this is something we're working on further right now but I to me I think it's maybe the most important part of the book in a way which is that we have this idea that as you get older you know it's time to kick up your heels and you know move to Florida or whatever it is right and just kind of be less active and take it easy and you know enjoy the enjoy your retirement but you know humans are unusual species we evolved
humans are unusual species we evolved we're one of the few species that evolved to live after we reproduce we evolved to be grandparents but we didn't evolve just to be grandparents you know to enjoy our grandchildren we evolved to be grandparents to help our grandchildren so if you look in the hunter gather societies and in farming societies grandparents are out there foraging and hunting and Gathering and digging and doing all kinds of stuff and and helping out their children and their grandchildren providing food plus you know helping you know being active and in fact we have data showing that people tend to be often are more active when they're grandparents than when they're parents because they don't have kids in toe right and and what's important about that it's kind of like a chicken and egg question you know which came first living long in order to be active or being active in order to live long and you know they're they're both there right and and it turns out that that physical activity is really important in in slowing processes of aging and and decreasing disease because when you're physically active you turn on all kinds of repair and maintenance mechanisms right so when you're active you you know you stress your body you produce reactive oxygen species you you know you you get you generate heat you do all you turn up your your sympathetic nervous system your fight andf flight system but then you spend energy after you're exercising to deal with all that right we produce antioxidants we produce molecules to fix all the proteins that we damaged because they got you know affected by heat we lower our blood PR temperature we turn on our parasympathetic you know rest and digest system to lower sympathetic activity we turn on all these mechanisms that keep our bodies repaired and and maintained and the trick is that we NE because we never evolve not to be physically active we never evolve to turn on these mechanisms in the absence of physical activity we need that stress to mount the anti-stress response and so physical activity this is really at the heart of the book this is why physical activity is so good for us it it turns on all kinds of good processes in our body that that keep us from aging and keep us from getting sick
from aging and keep us from getting sick and so as we get older that becomes even more important right you want to keep your muscles healthy you want to keep your chromosomes healthy you want to keep your your cells from detering when to keep the mitochondrial numbers up in your muscles the list goes on and that's why physical activity is so important so as we get older it it becomes even more important to stay Physically Active because that and of course the data are there we know the epidemiological data we know the mechanistic data but we don't have this sort of cultural idea that as we age that's the time to keep up the activity not turn it down yeah it really fascinating how we've evolved to be grandparents I really like that as an idea um you've you've also mentioned in the book that we've not evolved to be too strong and I found that really interesting um and it it made me think of something that I guess I've been pondering for a while is with this with the sort of narrative around exercise and you know as a guy you know seeing since I was 13 or 14 seeing Men's Health on the magazine wherever I went with a ripped guy on the cover showing off his six-pack and his pecs and being quite influenced by that I think as a you know as an insecure teenage of growing up um you now see there's there's some you go into gyms and you see some you know really really musly people um who who love bodybuilding and I I've actually had a few patients including one when I made a BBC documentary um this chap who actually had body dysmorphia and he had a real negative self-esteem issues how he viewed himself and you know working out putting on muscle was was absolutely linked to that and I just want to before you answer this I just want to draw a contrast a couple of summers ago I was in a place called Shaman in France which is at the foot of Mont BL beautiful place uh I was there in the summer with my family I've got a lot
the summer with my family I've got a lot of friends there and one day we went to the swimming pool the outdoor swimming pool and what was really interesting to me is that if you looked around in the pool it it was so noticeable to me that the physique of people in the pool whether they were you know above the age of 60 70 you know in the middle age young the physique of people was just a little bit different there were you never saw every not everyone but a lot of people look really fit but not in a like a really I've worked on my fitness way so these typically would be people who live in the mountains so they're getting around they they hike at the weekends they might go cycling uh they make lug stuff up and down the mountains it was almost like a functional fitness they weren't working on being fit yet they were actually really fit and and I think in some ways that actually supports everything you're making the case for in the book so just a few thoughts there I wonder if you could unpack them for me well I mean to me for me the big surprise is you know going to a gym and realizing or I have a tiny little gym in my basement and I've actually gone I've bought weights whose sole function is to be lifted if you think about it's kind of really weird thing right try to explain that to your great grandparents that you go out and spend hard-earned money on something whose sole job is to be lifted like why not just do some sit-ups or pull-ups or you know go out and do something in the garden right it's a very modern thing right and and again there's nothing wrong with it I've done it myself but but um but we had this idea that you know of being ripped and buffed and a lot of this happened uh I in the book I went into the history of this kind of modern you know physical culture a lot of it started in the industrial revolution as the machines were placing humans and and um and and people were insecure and I think that led to Charles Atlas and this kind of Rise of physical culture movement this idea of being really ripped and buffed and you know Mr Universe kind of stuff
know you know Mr Universe kind of stuff and and we have this idea that you know to be and there's nothing wrong with being really strong I mean you know there just for for many folks it's fun and some people really enjoy it but it's it's a modern thing right and our ancestors not only didn't do that but they couldn't afford to do that because muscle is a really expensive tissue if you had a lot of muscle mass you have to eat a lot more too and in a world in which where food is scarce you can't afford to to um um to have that kind of extra muscle mass furthermore you don't have nautiluses and other machines that apply you know constant loads no matter what the angle of your biceps are Etc there is no way to kind of get that fit in in a normal world uh so so again it's important to stay strong as you get old particularly to avoid muscle wasting sarcopenia which is a really serious disease of Aging people have a hard time getting out of chairs and stuff like that because they lose strength but we don't need to be super strong to be healthy um and our ancestors weren't super strong so if you want to go to the gym and get ripped fine that's perfectly okay and um um or if you enjoy you know looking at people whose physiques are ripped that's fine too but let's not pretend that this is a kind of a a necessary natural thing and I and the other thing I think is that I I worry about sometimes is people people get really into what they do right they're aerobic people who do cardio who hate doing weights and people who do weights who hate doing cardio and then they kind of self justify what they do right yeah and the answer of course is that we we have all to do a mixture of of those things cardio still is the Bedrock of most fitness programs you know as a physician I'm sure you know this better than most but if you really were to do one thing to kind of work on your physical your health cardio is probably it but you should also add some some weights in there too I mean that's also important and some kind of mixture is you know is what we evolved to do and it's probably right and if you want to do more one more of the other that's fine but let's not
the other that's fine but let's not pretend that's what we evolve to do we didn't evolve to be like super jacked you know caveman you know Charles atlases any more than we evolve to be you know Elliot kogi where rolv to be something in the middle yeah and I love your approach um D it's very respectful of people's autonomy their right to choose it's like look you do it well I'm going to present you the science I'm going to present you The evolutionary story here yeah if you want to do something different go for it but let's not pretend it's anything other than that's your desire that's your passion I think that's that's a lovely way to approach it as we sort of close this conversation off I do think we should briefly touch on the immune system oh yeah because especially in view of what's been going on in the world a lot of people are thinking about their immune system how does physical activity play a role in the immune system yeah well um uh as I was actually doing the the edits on the book you know the lockdown had started and I made sure that there was a a section on respiratory tract infections but but the immune system is like every system in the body is affected by physical activity and for the most part just like everything else it's it's improved by physical activity and and we don't know exactly why but I think it's because if you're in Camp and doing nothing you don't and you don't leave you don't encounter new pathogens right so I think there's a link between physical activity and immune function because as you being physical Physically Active was was the way in which we you know we left camp and got exposed to pathogens that might be a hypothesis and it's also part of this S Repair and maintenance mechanism but but there's plenty of data which shows that physical activity moderate levels of physical activity upregulate key components of the immune system so for for respiratory tract infections for example when your Physically Active you not only produce more immune cells like there's natural killer cells which I love the name right you know they're
love the name right you know they're naturally killing things in your body they're they're your they kill for example cells that become infected with viruses right cytotoxic tea cells again an important part of your immune system upregulated by physical activity and not only there you produce more of them but there's compelling evidence that you redeploy them to vulnerable parts of your body so when you go for a run not only do you produce more of these cells but you send them to the the Linings of your respiratory tract which is guess what where we get we're vulnerable to co right to this SARS Corona virus in addition physical activity upregulates the humoral immune system the antibody production as people get older their antibody production uh declines but people are more physically active have much healthier responses to vaccines and produce more antibodies and again for the same reason and so uh so by being physically inactive we increase our vulnerability to directly increase our vulnerability to respiratory tract infections but physical activity also has in indirect Effects by making us more likely to be obese to have metabolic syndrome to have all the hypertensive which are all the covariates that increase your risk to disease so if we're going to fight this this pandemic one of the key ways to keep ourselves healthy is to stay Physically Active um that said there's interesting evidence and there's a big debate about whether too much activity yeah makes opens a window and makes you vulnerable and there's to be honest there's not a lot of data because there's so few people who do too much that we just don't have a lot of data at that end of the curve um and it's still very debated So within humans there's not a lot of really good data but in animal models there certainly is so there's I I cite in the book A study that is really quite extraordinary study they they gave mice a really virent form of influenza and then for the few days where while the mice were coping with that influenza you know before that Sy symptoms emerged while their immune system was initially dealing with it some of the mice were sedentary some of the mice they had them exercise like 20
the mice they had them exercise like 20 minutes a day and some of those poor little mice they had them exercise like two hours a day and the ones who exercised moderately had less than half the the mortality rate of the sedentary mice but the ones who exercised ridiculous amounts had much higher mortality rates than the sedentary mice to me I think that that highlights I think what every physician knows which is that you know some is good but be careful don't overdo it because you're going to deplete your body of energy and that then if there's less energy then your which your immune system takes a lot of energy you could potentially harm yourself so really as we deal with the physical problems the me physical health the mental health of this pandemic but also just our immune Health you know staying Physically Active is just absolutely crucial right now yeah thank you that was a really nice summary of of the research there and sort of how it helps Daniel look thank you so much for your time today thanks for writing such a wonderful book um I always like to finish off conversations with some practical tips for people so the the podcast is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we're going to get more out of life and I'm sure you know when we move more when we move in a way that makes us feel good that that allows us to move regularly we're going to probably live longer and we're going to feel better in ourselves so do you have a few sort of practical tips of people so they can think about and start applying them into their lives immediately to start improving their health and well-being well I think um I think the tip would vary depending upon the kind of person so if you're somebody who's struggling to get enough exercise right if you don't get enough and you'd like to exercise more um I think that you know there's lots of things you can do but I think the most important thing is to find somebody who you want exercise with get an exercise buddy um and use each other to help each other um there's nothing like you
each other um there's nothing like you know having a you know somebody who you meet for a walk or a run or whatever and don't feel like you have to you know you have to go crazy you know some is better than none and once you get better you enjoy some then you might decide that you want to do a little bit more but don't feel like there's an optimal kind of exercise or you you know whatever just you know that you have to do it don't make it you know make it unfun make it fun and and if you make it fun and make it part of your life and recognize also that your body has to adapt it takes time one of the problems for example of being obese is that um is that you have less dopamine response to exercise and dopamine is the molecule that makes you want to do more it's the reward molecule and obesity actually downregulates that and so we have these expectations that all of a sudden you exercise and a week later you're going to feel great well it's going to take more than a week and and you have to be in it for the long term not the short term and so don't do it just for the health benefits do it for the social benefits do it for all the other things and if you make it fun and part of your life um um and find ways to make it necessary um I think that's the most important thing that we you know that's the most important tip and there are so many ways to do that I I for example leave my exercise clothes out in the morning when I go to bed so that when I wake up that's what I put on and that like helps it's like it removes one less barrier to to starting my run because I never want to go for a run in the morning when I start never ever on no occasion whatsoever um do I ever and how many marathons have you done now I just did my 25th well first of all congratulations but that I think is is so valuable there at the end what you said Daniel that you've had to find ways to remove barriers to that because you don't want to yeah yeah you've just completed your 25th Marathon you don't want to get up and go for a run yet you are a runner and that's really really key isn't it I know
really really key isn't it I know there's never been a time when I left the door of my house thinking I really want to run I always like I'm gonna force myself to run and then I always enjoy it when I come back um another example is the in my my building right um I live in my office when I get to go to it again after the lockdown my office is on the fifth floor of this beautiful old Victorian building and every day and I walk into the building I wanted take the elevator bar I always look at the elevator longingly but the reason I don't take the elevator is that if anybody sees on me taking the elevator they'll call me a hypocrite and so it's not because I'm doing it for my health I'm doing it because because I have a social I have I've socially coerced myself into into taking the stairs and I never regret having taken the stairs by the time I get to the fifth floor but I always regret taking the stairs as I head up the stairs looking longingly at the elevator and don't beat yourself up for those instincts even though elevators never existed in the Stone Age it is a completely normal natural instinct to want to avoid exertion and don't ever feel bad about it typically people will be in to see me with a specific problem so I wouldn't say that many people are coming in well saying hey Doc what can I do to enhance and optimize my longevity you do get it a couple of times but it's not that common so typically the attention goes to what is that person suffering from now my bias is that we overmedicate in medicine we suppress symptoms a lot and that often if we are qu often if we're careful with lifestyle interventions you can make big changes not just in terms of prevention in terms of preventing getting sick but often when people are sick it can make a bass Improvement in their symptoms and you know sometimes you know you can reverse things but I'm talking about giving patients a sense of agency over
giving patients a sense of agency over how they feel absolutely which think it's really important I think certainly in almost 20 years of practice I'd have to say that when a patient feels as so they can't do anything like they've just got this condition and there's nothing they can do about it I just see you know you don't see that good outcomes there people feel very disengaged in the process I always want to give people a feeling that they can do something about it even if it's five minutes of meditation a day it's going to help change their perception of it um but often what I do is when I talk to them about those lifestyle changes I'll also explain what that's going to do for them long term so yes it's about helping them in the shortterm with their symptoms but also I'll say yeah but this can also like you know sleep for example I S to Matthew Walker on on the podcast maybe a year ago yeah absolutely fantastic and you know me and Matthew were talking some of the research that is suggesting that sleep deprivation chronic sleep deprivation can be causative in absolutely in the developments of Alzheimer's absolutely and interestingly there are many misdiagnosed cases of Alzheimer's or somebody's got memory impairment and it's they're simply sleep deprived yeah exactly so if I had a patient who was struggling with their sleep and who also had a family member with Alzheimers for example the conversation could very easily be about the things that they can do in the short term to help but I might also bring up some of that research and say hey look you know Alzheimer doesn't just start you know the 6 months before you get it it's probably been going on for 20 or 30 years in your brain beforehand and chronic sleep deprivation is one of those factors so not only will you feel good in the short term but you're going to help insulate yourself from potentially going down the path that your family member did so I guess that's the context of which I might bring it up is that what you were getting at yeah that's terrific yeah I'm really interested in that and it sounds I I agree with you completely if I were a medical doctor it
completely if I were a medical doctor it would be I'd be having the same conversations yeah because for me and I wonder if you subscribe to this Dan that it's often the things that we can do dayto day that are going to help us feel good dayto day are also the sort of things that are going to help us age well right yes although there are some funny exceptions yeah so what are those exceptions well my favorite example of an exception is jogging okay there there's dozens of studies now that show that for every hour that you jog you get an extra hour uh of life so if you're jogging five hours a week you're going to get five hours uh added on to the end of your life uh it's a pretty robust finding but if you unpack it a bit if you step back and you say I love jogging well that's a good trade-off you're enjoying it in the moment if you hate jogging like I do I like power walking I can't stand jogging um why would I want to spend an hour a day now to get an hour a day later at the end of my life when I'm you know possibly catatonic and drooling all over myself it doesn't seem like the right trade-off I'd rather have the hour now if if it was a two to1 ratio that'd be different but it's not so I guess your approach is about giving people information and let them decide what they want to do with that information absolutely in fact that's that's my whole uh thing for the through the last three books is that I I wouldn't presume to tell anybody what to do about anything I feel that my job as a scientist uh is to just lay out what I know about the science of various issues whether it's productivity and creativity as in the organized mind or the science of trying to sort out what's true and what's not in the newspaper and in Facebook post the field guide to lies and statistics and here these are the tradeoffs these are the
these are the tradeoffs these are the choices you have to decide it's a very personal thing yeah and Dan it's it's interesting you're saying that as a neuroscientist but I would Echo that as a medical doctor I actually don't believe it's my job to tell anyone what to do um in well I appreciate that because a lot of doctors are paternalistic they are and I I fundamentally believe that you don't really connect and make long-term changes with someone when you are paternal lising and you tell them what to do I guess going back to the book because I do think it's it's really interesting and there's quite a few things in there that I think people listening to this podcast can start thinking about applying into their own life which is ultimately I think the goal of of you sharing that information with people it's yes to educate them but it's also to hopefully Empower them to think hey I could start doing that right so let's actually go into that sort of granula the nitty-gritty of what it is what is the number one thing people can do to help ensure that they age well the number one factor that influences how you're going to Faire at any age is a personality trait a mindset uh you might call it of conscientiousness that swamps all other factors uh in terms of whether you're going to be healthy and uh and happy at age eight or age 108 now think about it conscientious kids don't cross against the light so they're less likely to get hit by a lorry uh conscientious teenagers and adults are less likely to end up in prison because they follow some marginal rules conscientious adults go see a doctor when something's wrong they say it hurts here you know and and then well conscientious adults have a doctor and they um at least in the US their insurance payments are are current and the doctor tells them to do something they do it conscientiousness which is a cluster of traits relating to stick tutiven reliability
stick tutiven reliability dependability uh doing what you'll say you'll do that's the biggest single factor and although it's unevenly distributed throughout the population some people have a lot of it some people have none and on the one extreme if you've got too much of it it becomes obsessive compulsive disorder uh you know compulsive handwashing or things like that um you can change that as well as any personality trait or mindset quality at any age it's never too early to start and it's never too late to start yeah and that that's super interesting because when you talk about personality CU you're basically saying the number one factor that predicts if you're going to age well is how conscientious you are yeah and some people will hear that and think oh my God uh I'm not that conscientious a person so that number one factor that Dan said Dan that neurosciences said I don't have it but what you're then saying is that you can change your personality well you can and the whole field of psychotherapy is based on this idea and although not all psychotherapeutic techniques work for all people um you know there's a bunch of studies coming out uh about behavioral change uh just to take one example cognitive behavioral therapy uh has been shown to be better at improving symptoms of depression and lack of conscientiousness and it this CBT is is not used lying on a couch and talking about your childhood and you know your the relationship with your mother it's practical tools that the therapist gives you to help you reach the goals you said that you wanted to reach sort of like your patients coming to you CBT doesn't tell you what to do they tell you how to do it and it's been shown to be more effective than drugs even anti-depressant and interestingly perhaps counterintuitively CBT alone is more effective than the combination of
more effective than the combination of drugs and CBT but it's not just therapies uh meditation yoga finding inspiration from literature or art or or somebody that you've read about in the news who has made a change uh maybe somebody in your family and saying you know I'm inspired by that I'm going to do that super interesting isn't it that Consciousness is that number one trait uh and that it's something that you can train or work on certainly at any age which which is very encouraging now when you were describing conscientious I was thinking okay so someone's conscientious uh they're not going to they're going to wait for the green man to cross the road they're going to go and see the doctor when they're sick are you talking about someone then who just follows rules because I guess and I I've read your previous book uh and I know you talk a lot about creativity and and you know there's so many benefits to being creative and uh I guess challenging a lot of the assumptions that are already there in society and actually you know sort of navigating your way around that is there a clash there somewhere can you be someone who is highly conscientious but is also very creative and willing to challenge things well I believe so uh you see what I'm getting out I do yeah I I because conscientiousness although rule following is a part of it it's not all of it and there are cases where you really have to not follow a rule um if you're starving and uh you see a role I mean really starving you're about to die and you see a role left out on a table in a restaurant that hasn't been picked up yet I would say you're morally and ethically Justified to pick up that role even though you didn't pay for it uh there are all these kinds of thought experiments about ethics um I think that if you had the opportunity to murder Hitler murder is supposed to be against the rules but you know there's an argument to be made that that would have been a good thing to do so and these AR
been a good thing to do so and these AR I'm not talking about creative act here I'm talking about more practical ones but I think of the people I know Joanie Mitchell is a good example one of the most creative people I know and she's very conscientious uh although she breaks all kinds of rules with her songwriting and her painting she's a wonderful painter um the way the conscientiousness shows up is she finishes what she starts she'll spend months working on a single line of a song to get it just right that's a kind of stick tutiven and um she's happy to break rules in songs for one thing she doesn't use standard guitar tunings like everybody else does she invents her own interestingly she this is not well known but the reason she did it is because she had Polio as a child she doesn't have I can tell you this cuz you're a guitarist she doesn't have the full strength of her left fingers to be able to make conventional chords for the most part she can only play two strings at once kind of like Jango Reinhardt so she invents these tunings that allow her to basically take two fingers and move them up and down the neck I would say that's an interesting case of rule breaking and conscientiousness yeah I mean that it's super interesting that that reminds me of um I don't if you heard of a bank or Crowded House for sure Neil Finn yeah they were one of my favorite bands in the90s I've seen them a few times play Dream It's Over yeah there is reason within yeah exactly there reason without it's such a great track um my friend Mitchell FR plays the organ on it the B3 organ oh really yeah yeah I know well it's amazing this conversation could fast go down a track of Music which I'm going to go down for a little bit because I'm super interested the B3 is one of my favorite sounds I think out of all musical sounds I absolutely love it and when it's just sitting there in the background it's it's just beautiful and
background it's it's just beautiful and I think that Mitchel managed to get it as close to the tamber and the sound of um um Booker te yeah uh Booker T Jones I think he he managed to get that sound the the booker tea sound green onions and all that and it's hard to do it's it's all in the draw bars and it's in the the micro adjustments you make with touch yeah he nailed it it's yeah I me I mean but and on on Crowded House um what was rather in my head basic we said about Journey Mitchell is that I remember seeing an interview with Neil Finn once and he's you know not verbatim but he says something like you know we're a four-piece band so our limitations become our strength so he was all from from certainly my interpretation of what I heard was that we're going to only record stuff or play Live stuff that we can do the four of us so we're going to have to create around that rather than bringing in extra people to be able to play this part or that part the opposite of a Latter Day Beatles or Steely Dan approach yeah they're live band like you too yeah exactly and it's it's fascinating that Joanie also because she's she's got a limitation that lends that that gives her some new creativity because if she didn't have that maybe she would play in standard tuning and therefore she might not be his creator who knows but it's it's super interesting but I guess Dan we are talking about aging well in the brain and you've written a book on music and the Brain um so I'm interested does music play a role for us in terms of how we're aging well um yes and no um we now believe that 5% of the population are sorry for a buzzword but anhedonic for music meaning they they don't get pleasure from music and you know this just due to genetic variation or environmental factors uh we see anhedonia failure to receive pleasure in
anhedonia failure to receive pleasure in many domains some people don't like chocolate some people don't like sex uh or being touched some people don't like music but for the rest of us who do um there are some interesting connections between music and aging uh some of which are well known uh if you've got Alzheimer's or extreme dementia and you no longer recognize where you are or who your friends are you don't recognize yourself in a mirror in many many cases you still recognize songs from your youth they're preserved and this is not just kind of a um a cool fact it's an essential part of adults living with uh cognitive impairment in um in relaxing them or causing them to be less agitated imagine what it's like if you look in the mirror you don't recognize who it is you were put in some home or facility after your memory impairment started so you don't know where you are uh you don't recognize the caregivers who come in every single day um and often we see in these patients as you well know a great deal of agitation and uh anger and of course they're angry they don't know where they are but you put on the headphones the earbuds whatever you play them a song from when they were 14 years old they suddenly reconnect with themselves there's home there's something in their memory that they recognize and that's who I am this is something I can get a hold of and we find that in these cases the the patients as well as their families are tremendously relieved now that's sort of an extreme case of Music um a less extreme case that's not as well known is that older adults Who start to learn an instrument or if they already play a new instrument that learning is neuroprotective one of the many myths that I try to bust in the changing mind is that uh you can't grow new neurons after a certain age or you can't make
after a certain age or you can't make new neural connections neuroplasticity the buzzword for making new neural connections new synapses that goes on your entire life and the more you can learn especially new things the more neuroprotective it is because you're building up neural and cognitive reserves so that could be anything there right you just learning anything whether it's music or sport or absolutely you know but is a new language so this sounds like one of the key things we need to be thinking about as we get older is what keep trying new things yeah and in particular there's this new appreciation for what we call embodied cognition uh Barbara traversi and Scott Grafton both have new books out about this Scotts is called physical intelligence uh fantastic books the idea is that your body actually helps your mind grow through the experiences you have manipulating your body so learning a new language is neuroprotective but learning something that involves eye hand coordination um musical instruments being one not so much singing But playing an instrument or or taking up tennis or or ping pong or you know anything that involves this kind of body intelligence very powerful is simply going for a walk on an uneven Trail as you probably know some Scottish doctors are now writing prescriptions for their patients go for a walk outside you know uh it's because as you're walking on an uneven surface your foot and your ankle and your legs or and your vestibular system are making dozens of micro adjustments every minute uh you have to change the pressure and the angle and you have to get feedback about what's happening so you don't fall over and it's hugely important so would you say that you know would you therefore not be recommending as people age that they work out in a gym on a treadmill or on
work out in a gym on a treadmill or on an exercise bike or can you do a bit of both well you can certainly do a bit of both uh I've I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation I've St changed a few things in my own life one was I didn't know about sarcopenia how would I as I say I I basically know about stuff from the chin up uh and a little bit of spinal cord but sarcopenia is to muscle what oste porosis is to Bone and um so I've started doing resistance training I go to the gym I'm not trying to bulk up like Arnold Schwarzenegger but I do a round of 20 I sorry 12 different weight machines just to keep my muscles going I spend about 40 minutes there four or five times a week Jane Fonda has started told me she started doing the same thing um enjoy it I do I can't I couldn't tell you why but I do and I also do the elliptic because I'm trying to get my heart rate up and I do what's called high-intensity interval training but better than both of those really is the difference between sedentarism and moving Outdoors if you only do one thing you should move Outdoors but yeah adding the others is great yeah I mean that's that's great because there's a lot of information we're giving people and sometimes getting too many things to do too many things that are great to do can sometimes of seem a bit overwhelming you have to prioritize now if you're in a wheelchair get somebody to take you out the visual stimulation of being in nature is neuroprotective not as much as if you're walking and if you can push your own wheelchair even better or Walker as a doctor I know that around 90% of what we see in any given days in some way related to stress and I just don't think people really get stress still and understand how stressed and how upregulated they are much of the time in your experience people who come to your Retreats people who seek you out for help people you've coached when they come and see you What
coached when they come and see you What proportion of their daily life do you think they're spending up regulated compared to down regulated compared to let's say an indigenous tribe who are living in nature with nature can you sort of paint a picture for us of what that difference might look like um I can paint it from Bruce the Bruce Parry um has been with so many tribes now documentary tribes also Ty um and I had a good chat with Bruce around the book as well discussing um penan tribe and another tribe called the Benelli tribes they're mentioned in the book they are I love that bit with the penon tribe I I just underlined it I thought it was wonderful amazing story and he you know and he just expressed his he just said look you'll get it Tony because of this right and left hemispheres and being damn regulated and this state of meditation they're operating in like 24 / 7 it's like even if they're in alert States it's it's like an alert state that we would talk through the Wim Hoff method let's say where you're you're using an upregulating breath technique but not to bring that kind of upregulation stress to become an alert state so there's a positive to that it might be oh I'm um having a slump in the afternoon say you're having a slump in the afternoon it's 3: 30 I've got to jump on a podcast I use another type of breath practice to just pick me up again it just brecks me up into an alert State doesn't mean I'm stress out but it's an alert um tuned in practice so it's like a stressed and focus as opposed to a stress and anxious yes it's it's a different mindset so that's what Bruce was explaining that these indigenous tribes that again they're moving through a landscape but they're not separate to it they're totally tuned into the frequency of it right that's where they're at um and if we again if we look at people that maybe turn up on Retreat they've nor normalized they've normalized stress it's like that's what they operate at the whole time so it's like these indigenous communities that Bruce is
indigenous communities that Bruce is talking about are normalizing down regulation parasympathetic and some of the attendees I see have normalized sympathetic and what we then do is things like um ice baths or breathing techniques enables us with the ice buff enables us to go up we get a peak and then they can drop back under again so suddenly it's like ah there there's a stressor because I've just been operating at stress I almost need a even more of a peak of stress to be able to drop back under again to recognize where my parasynthetic my more Crystal Clear state of mind would be mhm um and I see it just from taking people again like with the blindfolds on into the forest you can just see a complete shift in that person's State you can feel it it's not just seeing it you just feel it from like the whole Aura there something changes within their energy um I guess people know that don't they most people will probably recognize the feeling I I guess on a Sunday maybe when they haven't got to go to work and they haven't got anything like to do or even on holiday how how just they feel and maybe a few aches and pains aren't there you know just there there's a relaxedness and your experience of the world is very different when you're in that state and I guess many people think though I can only be in that state when I'm on holid or on a Sunday right many people will listen and go yeah that's all right for you maybe but I've got a busy life I've got a busy job it doesn't apply to me what would you say so them um I have a coaching business I hold Retreats um I've just produced a book in lockdown which is a i hats off to anyone that produced anything in lockdown I believe um and did two major endurance events built a documentary around that um we unschooled our kids as as well so we've been doing that for many years and still managed to operate in a downregulated state so there is this oh it's okay for you mate but there I I
it's okay for you mate but there I I totally I'm totally there with you you know I I live it as well I I live that environment um it just you can put practices within your day you just need little reminders and sometimes that's all it takes it's a reminder to breathe you know it's a reminder maybe on the hour to say everyone has a minute you know out of your hour take one of the minutes away and just say okay here's six cycles of breath just to reconnect to the breath again and to find myself within it so let's just talk people through that because a lot of people have heard of breath work they've heard of practices they've heard it on this show before but you mentioned one the 4 six yeah right so maybe just be super practical of people on the hour you're recommending that they take a pause and do four six six cycles and sometimes you know what don't even get obsessed by the count counting of it you know there's a breathing app I've recommended in the past and it has a sound that picks up for 4 seconds another sound that drops off for 6 seconds that's called breathing app it's so simple right that's one or it can just be um if you put your finger on your pulse for a moment and you just inhale up through your nose you'll notice there's a slight pick up of the pulse as you exhale and you exhale for longer you'll notice there's a dropping off of the pulse so it's as long as you can inhale for and as long as you can exhale for but try and extend the exhale a little longer and practice six Cycles you'll be at around a minute right um prior to that just try this wherever you're sitting it could be on the floor office chair wherever you are just try and relax the pelvic Basin in your lower abdomen because we're also very tense down there right so walking around very tense so try and relax that area to begin with allow your jaw to settle and your heart to settle just tune into that very simple language relax the pelvic floor the pelvic Basin the lower abdomen the jaw let the shoulders go and let the heart go even that if you just even think of that you're already a step there like immediately moment I think of that I'm oh okay I feel calm again yeah
that I'm oh okay I feel calm again yeah you know it just comes in drops in and then you breathe into that space breathe into the relaxed jaw breathe into the relaxed shoulders breathe into the lower abdomen the pelvic floor and just allow all that being of you just to expand on the inhale and then don't push your exhale so you just allow your exhale to go as if yeah otherwise it turns into and then we're tense again in the lower abdomen the jaw on the shoulders so it's just allowing your whole being to be inflated with an inhale and allow the breath just to leave you and that's six Cycles that's I mean it's such a simple practice it's so simple isn't it so like an alarm on the hour maybe on people's phones to remind them like even if that's post it note boom up on your screen whatever it is just remember to breathe today you know it could be it's just little reminders and we do need the reminders because again once that stuff starts kicking in the next email the next phone call we find ourselves up regulated we're already operating from a different system so sometimes we just need that little reminder like a little tap on the shoulder from your favorite uncle or Aunt saying just remember to breathe now yeah I mean what I love about that practice is that there's literally nobody who is listening to this podcast right now who couldn't do that it it doesn't cost any money right they don't have to uh buy anything they don't need to get an app really you know you don't even really need to time it do you it's just a rough um approximation you know roughly in for four out for six and just do that for a minute and what benefits is someone going to get if they do that why should they I honestly believe that just that those simple like the inner work I call it but every relationship improves from you doing the inner work including the one with yourself right so that would mean that every relationship within your work environment a home environment will improve via that it could be like with the lady I'm do knew enters her father's home her relationship with her father improves from that right just in that moment because again she's seeing him differently she's not seeing him from
differently she's not seeing him from the what might have been way back there in childhood even because she's not operating at that subconscious layer it's now she's entered as a conscious adult into that experience not operating as maybe the six-year - old or the 5-year - old back there right I guess your um ability to think clearly precisely you know so within a work environment what do we want to be on our game don't we you know we want to be able to articulate we want to be um focused we want to be able to deliver on time or targets and you can do all of that you're could have work better you just work more efficiently right it's that's that's it in it simple form but again I think it's really down to for me it's the relationships every relationship improves and with with parenting for instance it might even be working from home I have a studio outside the house I have this really long commute these days across the lawn right but sometimes easy to forget that that's still a work environment and I'd suddenly enter the home and I'm still in the email or the phone call so what can we do okay we we put everything down in that moment breath work just for a moment a minute then leave that experience and leave whatever it is in that space before entering the new space because again the kids are waiting for you they're waiting to see you and who do they want to see kind of again the upregulated pera or the down regulated Pera you know who have they been waiting for and then that believe me an hour or two hours is like a lifetime to kids if if you've been in that environment it could be I just can do one minute of down regulation breathing where my out breath is longer than my INB breath in my car and then when you walk through the door your interaction with your partner with your kids it's going to be completely different it can stop a lot of you know unnecessary disputes or arguments I the other thing for me Tony is I hear that why why I think that's such a very such a powerful practice also is because we get to work and we just start to accumulate a lot of the time stress and what I call Micro stress Doses and if you don't do anything to down regulate
you don't do anything to down regulate you just keep going and then by the end of the day when you finished you may not have done anything to pause to bring everything back down again so by the time you then Rock up at home after work whether you're working from home or from an office you know your state is completely different and arguably not the best state to then interact with loved ones I had this moment I was staying at my friend space in Somerset we were there for 6 months so we got to live in like a proper Community experience and there was one morning um I had a lot on and I just I'm just I know what I'm going to do I'm going to go to the lake I'm just going to sit at the lake so I walk to the lake did some breath and in that moment it was this simple language of um it's a choice right so you can choose to do the bread and appreciate the privilege or you can choose not to and feel overwhelmed and then I realized it was just a fine line between overwhelm and privilege and what can help me navigate that path is just a simple breathing practice but equally being out in nature you know just as we're discussing breath just to walk within a green space or taking your shoes off and going for a walk on the lawn you know the study suggests that 20 minutes in a in in a natural environment will lower heart rate blood pressure and drop us into parasympathetic as well what equally has to highlight though a bit like the morning practice is you know that why are we uppr regulated you know what is it within this everyday environment that's that's doing this you know and what are the other things I could be addressing right you know that could be again getting out to Green Space might be one being spending more time Outdoors we're known as this indoor species right this urbanite species that spends 90 95% of our time indoors um so we can look at stretching perhaps try and find more time outside or from that natural experience of being outside and recognizing that just a small
and recognizing that just a small percentage of time Outdoors will lower heart rate and blood pressure what can I learn from that can I perhaps journal what that experience is and what it is I'm feeling what are those things that that I feel drawn to that are doing lowering the heart rate and blood pressure and what can I bring into my everyday environment from that what can I learn from this out here to bring into the everyday environment because for some again it's right for you Tony you might get to spend more time outside which I get um others it's not so simple maybe can't get out today or can't get out tomorrow what if you know it's dark immediately afterwards you know and Outdoors doesn't mean um the tube the car or the shopping center it means actually Outdoors right and so where the sky above your head yeah so you know what can I be doing maybe try and stretch it you know make the next tube stop to walk to or you know just try and work with that but ultimately try and bring more of that organic experience inside the home in those everyday environments that might be what you see and what you taste and what you smell and what you feel within those environments but it could also how we move in those environments how can we move more organically within an environment right including the home yeah it's you know getting off the tube One Stop earlier often The Narrative I think in society around health is okay well you can get more movement in then you know let's say you can get a 20-minute Walkin now great and then people naturally often go to oh I'm ticking off my physical activity Bots uh what how many calories is that going to burn or whatever it might be but again it's very reductionist isn't it because that 20 minute walk could be many things it could be you're getting natural light exposure you might be getting a bit of sun you might be hearing the birds depending on where you're walking you could be doing some breathing at the same time it's not just one thing is it that 20 minute walk actually can hit multiple parameters yeah you can get many knees met right rather than just the the want or the
rather than just the the want or the desire to get to work on time you could flip it and just think well okay what can I receive from that experience how many of those boxes those natural needs can I tick off um it can be then oh I feel so amazing for just doing a 20-minute walk I I'm going to get up a bit earlier now and maybe walk for a bit longer you know and that's that's what can happen through these experiences and become more of an opportunist even along the way right once you really open things up what does it feel like oh maybe I'm going to balance on the curbstone today and get some balancing in or I'm going to balance on the wall or you know use the stairs down to the tube instead of escal just add more things on like yoodi I describe in the book yood is like he's 82 now um I think I discussed him on the last podcast but his commute right was that he'd wake up in the morning anyway he'd have his whole practice at home and so he'd have um an office experience at home where he'd set it up there were mats there so he had no chair he'd ground sit um he'd answer his emails either on the ground or standing he'd have a pullup bar so he could hang from before entering the office it was in one of those positions where it's always there so he knew he would do it um kitchens are great for that right you could pull up bar in the kitchen so you know whenever you enter oh I can hang while the kettle's boiling and then he'd walk in his Vivo barefoot shoes right so he's getting his feedback from his feet and his feet can behave how they meant to behave get to the tube people normally say um would you like a seat and he no no I'm okay and as soon as the trade starts moving he's either hanging off the rail above right so he's hanging while the Train's moving or he's surfing right so surfing would mean not holding on to anything and just working like so the tube becomes like a huge power plate right where you have to stabilize great for the hips and that would be his experience and then he'd walk up the stairs and this you know it's just that's that's where you can take it and that's that started happening for him when he was was 78 and he's now 82 and he's thriving in terms of his cap capacity to move now right I mean that is it's such a powerful story
mean that is it's such a powerful story it's empowering for um anyone who thinks you know is it too late have I lost a lot of my natural movement you know what can I do you know when did he start seeing you was it did you say now he actually started seeing me this big big Journey he first started seeing me when he was 72 and he wanted to learn how to walk so he was and why did he want to learn how to walk did he feel icon walk properly anymore well this is a massive story to unpack but he um he had a stooped posture you know really head chasing collapsed in the chest from sitting I didn't realize this at the time but anyway he wanted to learn to walk so I okay let's pop you up on the treadmill and I'll record You Because unless someone shows you a video of you walking you really have no idea you're kind of subconsciously incompetent at that stage and what the video will do is just make you consciously incompetent and then we can do some practices and then readdress it and then you know and then record it again a bit later and then suddenly that becomes your new template your new subconscious competence let's say through that model um introduced to ground sitting um Vivo as I mentioned so those studies are profound aren't they that we know that um 60% of foot strength um notice his Professor D I think his name is from University of Liverpool right within six months of wearing Vivo barefoot shoes their foot people's foot strength had developed by 60% right but also balance had increased by 40% and and I just want to because I love that study and you know I'm a huge fan of Evo Barefoot she is ear ones I wear my wife my kids I'm either Barefoot or in Vios um probably very much like you and that study what I love about it is it wasn't about running no a lot of people hear barefoot shoes and I've got to be runed it's like hold on no this is just living in barefoot shoes you know going to the shops walking around yeah you know what I mean within a six-month period so if you think about that from a parenting perspective Ive what that means as a parent okay we want the best for our kids and we want to create these solid foundations for our kids and foundations for life right um it's
foundations for life right um it's saying that if you wear compromising Footwear you're going to remove 60% your foot strength and 40% your balance essentially that's what it's saying right it's also saying that after billions of pounds that's been spent in the Sports Science World for developing Footwear which is mainly for athletics not athleticism let's say if we understand this model is where has that got us but but equ I think for this parental thing it's like understanding well you know think about the potential that's perhaps lost right and if we look at um things like physical education we already know that if you're the youngest in the class you there's a you're at a disadvantage for the older kids when it comes to physical education and PE right so there's already this feeling of inadequacy when it comes to sports perhaps and PE in later life but then we're saying we're removing also 60% of foot strength 40% of balance you know but with yudi's case he um he yeah so introduce him to Vivo so again again foot strength would improve balance would improve of course naturally without working on it just just by actually not compromising your Footwear and being in touch with the grounds so that's removing so that's operating at the cause level right you know and really understanding that because you can do all the foot practices you like strengthening your feet balancing work but if you keep putting them in the the same environment that compromising in the first place it's merely symptom relief and quick fixes are further distractions from the truth you need to get into the real cause and often it's it's simply the shape of the foot you know it's the environment really that we need to work at and the environment for the foot in modern society is the shoe is it not right so with yehudi that foot strength that improved balance improve his overall understanding his posture had improved because it removed the chair and gotten back to mobilizing areas that are designed to be mobile and creating stability in areas that essentially designed for stability and also bringing the squat back so squatting instead of sitting so that his mind could understand where his weight should be
understand where his weight should be when he stands up even let alone when he walks right um but later on as times passed yehoodi then said well the reason I wanted to learn to walk is because I wanted to go to Everest Base Camp for my 50th anniversary with my wife so that's why he'd taken on that challenge did Everest Base Camp did Mount Kenya bhan um Atlas in his late 70s in his late he's closer to 80 and then at 79 um he came on a workshop of mine which was originally um it's now called The 100 Human Experience but originally it was called move breath chill which was movement and play and breath work and then ice baths and yoodi was terrified right properly terrified of the cold so it took me about an hour the night before the workshop mean you'd agreed to it days before but an hour the night before to convince you who the next morning yudi also lived the closest to the workshop it was in Camden he lived in hamston people were traveling from all over and he was still managed to be late right but once we got him through the breath work and the play is great for that because it enters this playful state of mind and it breaks down all the armor in a way and um we become much more open and we become much more open to the breath so the breath goes right in very quickly and he was first in the ice bath right first one in and he let out this huge Primal room in like screaming from the belly was coming out of this man then stepped out and he thought he was done I said no we're going to go back in again I think we need to go back in and got him in again and then since then um yudi has been going to um either Hamstead ponds or the river Lee five mornings a week um for two years now right to make sure you're taking action after watching this video I've created a free guide to help you build healthy habits we can all make short-term change but can those changes become a fundamental part of our life often they don't and that's why in this free guide I share with you the six crucial steps
I share with you the six crucial steps you need to take they're really really effective if you want to get hold of that free guide right now all you have to do is click the link in the description box below so he's 82 so like like the practices like you know we think oh it's too late for me or it's too late for that I can't start this now I'm already we're talking about someone in the late' 70s he's not alone I mean I there's a number of my clients that are past their 70s mid 70s pluses that have been told you know not to take their knees past their toes and they're now in deep range squats lowgate walking balancing on Rails and for me again it's incredibly inspiring yeah because it changes my template even of what the 70s and' 80s are right because my personal understanding 780s looking at my grandparents or even 50 pluses at one point you know it's like it was just like normal to groan as you sit back in the chair or something or Gran to get out the and here we are witnessing empowered 70 to 80 year olds doing quite profound things but are they that profound or are they Again Naturally normal just we've we've become um distanc From the Path perhaps yeah I completely agree I mean I'm so on board I I can't sh this idea of an 82y old chap on the tube and Lon in between stops hanging from the rail or squatting yeah I I think it's wonderful and I think that for me brings up some interesting points Monday night I was at anra last night of my book tour and um I was coming back on the train yesterday and the train got cancelled and there was all kinds of had to take three trains instead of one train it was all unplanned and yeah I was pretty chilled about it actually which is uh you know when you practice these sort of things I feel you natur you know I I feel I'm a lot more down regulated these days naturally and therefore I just be a lot more Train's cell okay cool well it's going to be
cell okay cool well it's going to be what it's going to be and then in the final leg I thought actually T's coming tomorrow let me get back into his book a little bit more I'd been reading over the weekends and I was reading about yoodi and this was a busy kind of local train it was coming at office time a lot of people there was no chairs and stuff and I thought yeah Tony's coming tomorrow I'm going to squat and so for the last hour um I in between the uh you know sitting carriages you know I was squatting against the wall and just reading your book and then listening to some music or whatever I was rested against the wall and you know after about 10 minutes I was a bit stiff so I'd stand up for two or three minutes and I then I po back down again yeah the thing is a lot of people will think oh my God what would people think people are going to stare at me I don't recall anyone looking at me like genuinely like people are so tied up in their own worlds and their own podcasts and their own music and their own books I think that's empowering that actually no one gave two Hoots you know I always go it's none of my business what other people think of me right and also you'll be surprised that if people are looking at you how do you know that they're just not being inspired by you why do we immediately go to the negative of oh no going to think I'm this crazy man on the tube They Might Be Inspired you know and again I I'm inspired by someone like yehoodi who be hanging off the tube rails and squatting how could you not be inspired by that you're not going to look at someone in their 80s go that crazy 80-year - old hanging off the rails and squatting you're going to think Legend yeah exactly and there there's that and I I think also it's a cultural thing like our kids are now going to this uh Forest school it's a group of parents that live where we live and we kind of done something together and created something for them to attend on a Thursday and um one of the dads was there and he'd listen to our podcast way back and said oh no way your Katarina antonian was talking about ground sitting fantastic and again was discussing this the oh how do people
discussing this the oh how do people react to it and K said well it depends where you are in the world because some cultures that's what they do it's just our our where we are in the west perhaps is our own lens of how we see it you know yeah has anyone ever said anything to you negative not negative I've never had anything negative even walking around you know and being better I mean sometimes I I mean I have had kids kind of be like Papa why is that man running around with no shoes on and and but nothing really not really negative Sometimes some strange I guess strange kind of looks of what's he doing over there but then again it's how it's received right again what if we're receiving the upregulated versus receiving it down regulated how about try and do the practices but work on your breath while you're there and it might change the lens of which you you're receiving that look it might be suddenly that's a positivity look rather than a negativity look a judgmental look and when it comes to judgment more often or not we're judging others for judging us not them judging us yeah you know it's you know when you are concerned or overly concerned with what other people think think usually if not always it comes from a place of an insecurity doesn't it when you don't think enough of yourself um you know for me as a fellow Barefoot uh shoe wearer and someone who literally has a shoes off as much as I possibly can it's really interesting a lot of people who listen to this podcast now where Vios because Vivo have been supporting the show for for a few years and I I talk very passionately about them and and what's really interesting for me at the event in Edinburgh on Monday night a lot of the time in the books Sig and Kei Afters people show me their V hey look you know I'm wear it's really nice
I'm wear it's really nice and they're like oh man I don't have my back pain anymore I don't have my knee pain thank you so much all this stuff Brant right there was two really lovely women at one point he said you know they've just got to make better looking female shoes you know than I'll wear them and first of all I you know this is a this something I had with my own wife a few years ago she you know but she's been wearing them probably four or five years now and wouldn't go back you know once you experience them and I think they do look really good now actually I think compared to maybe 10 or 15 years ago it's oh yeah but I think this is a really interesting point like if you look at the research on minimal issues you've mentioned you know one of those studies from University of Liverpool I know I think it's Professor Irene Davis in yeah um in America talks about as soon as you put a human in a cushion shoe their gate changes away right you you denormalize or you it's you you're changing how you walk it's come through animal studies as well they show it yeah yeah and then you think well I think well once you know that and and I want to talk to about feet in just a second and they are so important to every aspect of who we are it for me through the lens with which I look at the world which is well why on Earth would I wear cushions every day if I know what that's doing to me but I understand and many people yeah they're persuaded they give it a go and they're like oh man you know I'm actually enjoying walking more now CU I can feel the ground a lot more and then they're not quite as disconnected but some people are still very much off the view yeah man but they don't look normal they don't have that kind of pointed end that I'm used to or and I guess what I'm trying to get to to be as inclusive as possible you know I I think everyone should try at some point minimal is shoes V or whatever brand you want right try and just see it for yourself how you feel have you had resistance to that have you had clients who come and go look I'll do the other stuff ah man that's not my thing or does it almost self - select when people want to work
self - select when people want to work with you that they're already in tune with that way of thinking yeah I have much more compassion these days like in my coaching when I first started out on this journey I used to be quite strict it used to be well you know if if you're not prepared to change shoes then I can't really coach you because the whole point is that you know if we understand the behavior of the foot 33 articulations 26 bones 100 muscles tendons ligaments and all the receptors within the feet 200, 000 extra receptors and how that feeds and nourishes the whole posture and all the joint actions above it and the muscular actions above it in tumor that then you'll be super efficient and minimize the risk of injury if you're not prepared to do it then it's and we're really just offering symptom relief I'm happy to give you symptom relief but really this is where it's at um and I think over time it's just here's the conversation this is it you know and allow it to just settle a bit plant the seeds at least you know and the beauty of this work now is we do have those studies there you know not many people have heard of that study and for me that's it's quite profound to understand that 60% of your foot strength will improve over a six-month period that can be okay if you're not prepared to change it and I get it even my Lola and million to Lula started putting Lego blocks in the back of their socks to be like high heels right and they're unschooled it's not they're even in a school environment Karina doesn't wear heels just it's it's within it's just within it they're observing it somewhere um and am I going to say no take those blocks out of your heels and of course I'm not you know it's just an experience they're playing with something um but it's also understanding that probably a large proportion of the day they are Barefoot or they're in Vivo Barefoot so what can you do okay um could be an unavoidable sitting scenario like now right we're sitting right um do we alienate sitting or this the devil's work sitting smoke sittings are new
work sitting smoke sittings are new smoking it's well there are unavoidable sitting scenarios drive a car get a flight you know in an office environment it's not appropriate to sit on the floor and for some environments they won't even allow a standing desk so what do we do is what we do outside of that the the places where we can possibly take responsibility or control of what we can take control of so when you arrive home and you're behind the door then get the shoes off and then there's certain toe practices or what we call toger or yoga for your feet that you can then do which will then help unravel or deconstruct some of that um yeah that environment you've created which unfortunately does compromise the foot and the behaviors above it you know but it's amazing how much you the environment influences our Behavior doesn't it not only the environment we see around us and what we think is normal um or or typical I should say rather than because you obviously talk a lot about this concept of biologically normal yeah um but culturally you know we may have touched on this when you came on the show a few years ago but in most Indian families you take your shoes off before you come in that's obviously my cultural upbringing which a lot of people certainly in in the UK and and America don't have it it's it can be very different right and so have you found there a difference do you get clients from different cultures different parts of the world and have you found that actually their willingness to respond engage is different depending on their belief system yeah it's an interesting one with Footwear in the home isn't it you know and some some haven't actually taken their Footwear off it could be a whole day experience so even that as I say it's it's suddenly changing that template that within the home let's just at least try and get that Barefoot environment yeah change flip the perception of that one environment um and yes some people are much more responsive to others it's what's normalized it's whatever those templates are and how long you've had the experience or what you've observed
the experience or what you've observed in your earliest years even play out within that yeah I mean there's even you know we say you said office environment where you can't do that much you know we thought long and hard you know in this new studio it's like okay well I'm going to sit here maybe for two hours with someone having a deep conversation I don't want them to feel uncom able I don't want to feel uncomfortable myself um yet there's also a certain expectation of what should a chair be in a studio where someone's coming right and uh so I have this movan here I don't know if you know movan but it's awesome because it's an unstable seat yeah so I have to by default for this hour two hours my postural muscles yeah I think it's say youve yeah move exactly I have to move man I have to move and this is I think a lot about movement I'd love your perspective on this but the fact that I can't slump and stop engaging my muscles yes it means that whenever I finish I've never had an ache like never I just simply walk up it's like yeah I feel great because my muscles have been engaging the entire time um but I also think that this helps me think more clearly throughout the conversation so I'm not you know if if I'm stagnating into a chair my my lymph my blood everything's sort of stagnating right and then that chair that you're sitting in you know we got what we consider the best ergonomic chair for people to at least because I thought like in my guest to move man I thought wrong what the problem is is if they're not used to that it could be really uncomfortable so instead of engaging with the conversation they can just be thinking about how they're sitting and they know there's cameras is here do you know what I mean how how would you think about that I've with someone at the moment um I had someone come and see about your height Stuart his name is and um he had a Furniture business like Auditorium kind of lecture chairs and um I'd seen his sister originally she was like this Yogi living off grid in Portugal came with a back
off grid in Portugal came with a back condition very quickly one session out the door done I need to send you my brother brother come Stuart and he just said um do you think there's a chair in this stuff Tony CU I took him through simple ground resting positions that are in the book just a simple series of ground sitting from kneeling to sitting cross-legged to Shin boxing to um and each one of those you know prerequisite almost of how we stand let's call it they're almost like the motor skill Milestones of what it is we do as children before we stand up so we then I we parked that conversation and it must have been two years went by I said I have the idea he's like what I said I know the chair so we're going to I have it so we went through this whole design so at the point we're ready to launch that very soon um and that then is a platform that's at normal seat height and you can perform six different rest positions that you could normally perform on the ground and you're 100% right it's about move man it's like this understanding that well there should be certain signals to move anyway you know if we've been in a position for too long yes we're stagnating what does that mean for think of flow States what what does stagnation have to do with a flow State you know stagnant versus flow and then they're completely different ends of the spectrum right so it's enabling I guess that movement to be really fluid um which then ticks the box of earlier conversation about within an environment of work what do we want to be on our game don't we want to be super sharp um and I think with this sitting conversation it's it's yeah it's individual specific again isn't it there's a template there of what we've normalized so what we've tried to do with this particular chair is you can sit on it like an everyday chair but equally you can be in certain positions which if you don't have the mobility it can be adjusted and then over time you can start to gain the range one of them being the squat that has a central sitting pillar that and the base goes up
sitting pillar that and the base goes up and down so you'll start to gain more more range in the ankle and the hips over time um but yet you can always be at desk level so it then brings that ground sitting conversation into every office environment you know yeah and and then where do we go from there then we have standing discs I think you know it can be just just as detrimental to stand with poor posture as it is to sit with poor posture so the standing desk isn't always the answer if you look at my dad's an engineer um Precision Tool maker and the most shocking posture from standing all day working over screens and working over and and working with materials that he has to for his trade um if you're still working over a desk and you're still stooped and where does that lead us so it's just understanding there's certain postures or shapes that we should be adopting which help as prerequisites to standing um and the other conversation is around muscles need to learn how to switch on and off so it's it's not great to be in one rest position for too long whatever that is so it's choosing a different shape and normally as I say in ground rest position you get a signal it will be a signal oh this is a little bit uncomfortable now let's move and you shape shift in this in a normal chair or on a sofa we don't necessarily get that yeah and we start to stagnate as you say so that means that there is no muscles or muscles off we've just it's either on incredibly on to try and stabilize something or it's just off and both States over time can lead to atrophy if a muscle's on for too long on it will atrophy over time um Swiss balls were like an example of that where people are just sitting on Swiss PO for a period of time You' be so on to try and stabilize that you're not giving yourself the rest opportunity within that there are two two major predictors of our happiness our health maybe even our longevity and that's the frequency and the quality of our contact
frequency and the quality of our contact with other people why are those two things so important well frequency has to do with this observation that when we don't keep current with each other with the really important people in our lives that perfectly good relationships can simply wither away from neglect and the quality has a lot to do with what actually is restorative and energizing about relationships which is um the sense of um relationships being stress reducers the sense of relationships being energizers um a AFF firmers of our identity so many different things that we get in a positive way uh from good quality relationships so it is it's frequency and quality yeah it's it's fascinating because I think if I take a step back and think about your book think about your research it's incredible how front and center relationships are I think if you walk out on the street and you were to talk to people about their let's say their longevity right their their health both now and into the future what's important I think many people would immediately go to things like nutrition physical activity sleep for example yet you guys are making the case that sitting above them all potentially the quality of our relationships yeah it's remarkable I mean I think we were surprised when we started to find how important relationships were for our physical health and then when we started to look at other studies and it's the loneliness research that's maybe the most compelling now that you see these
most compelling now that you see these incredible links with the amount of time that people spend on the earth the amount of time that they live it's just extraordinary and that relationship is of a similar magnitude to the things that we commonly think about as serious health risks like smoking and obesity so there's so many indications of how powerful relationships are I think we take them for granted and it's clear science is telling us that they're important so you mentioned there relationships and physical health and I think that's where some people have to make a leap into the dark right I get it good relationships feel good okay we enjoy ourselves when we're in the company of people that we like who mean something to us but how does that then impact our physical health well that's the interesting research question so we're always asking if we see a connection between one thing and another how does it work what's the mechanism and probably the best hypothesis that we have for which we have the most evidence is a hypothesis about stress that good relationships help us regulate emotion particularly negative emotion so stress is there all day long I mean something upsetting happens to me and I can literally feel my body change go into fight or flight mode and what we know is that when we have someone we can talk to when I can go home and complain to my wife about my day I can literally feel my body calmed down um and what we know is that loneliness and social isolation are stressors um that we evolv to be social animals so if we are too alone what we think happens is that we stay in a lowlevel fight or flight mode the body doesn't return to equilibrium and that means higher levels of circulating stress hormones like cortisol higher levels of chronic inflammation and those things can gradually break down multiple
things can gradually break down multiple body systems which is how you could get a connection between relationships and arthritis or between relationships and cardiovascular disease because the stress hypothesis posits that these connections are with multiple B systems yeah there's some powerful research in the book that you share I mean there's multiple bits of research that you share in the book but one I particularly was drawn to perhaps because I've been a caregiver for much of my adult life was the research on wound healing and caregivers I wonder know if one of you could elaborate on that and and sort of tell us what does that show us yeah so this is remarkable research done by uh a husband and wife team actually it's Janice Kiko Glazer and Ron Glazer and what they did is they studied wounds they did a kind of standardized wound that they put on people's forearms it was like a punch biopsy but a shallow one and they photographed that wound across days to see how quickly people would heal and what they found this is now in a number of studies so one example is caregivers of folks with dementia their wounds healed more slowly than folks that didn't have that stress burden so we see a connection between our stress levels and the nature of our relationships and how quickly our body heals it self which is quite extraordinary in other research they've also found that people who are in more positive marital relationships ones that have less conflict or more satisfying their wounds will actually heal quicker the punch biopsy was it 9 days it was something pretty significant yeah a big difference yeah it was nine days and you mentioned marriage there I think there was a statistic in the book about this is it I wrote this down marital happiness at age 50 was a better predictor of good physical health than I think the level of cholesterol exactly in our study yep so that was the first that was an early sign in our study that there might be this connection between relationships and how people aged and that was related both to their physical
that was related both to their physical health and their mental health and their 80s um so extraordinary finding we were kind of surprised about it you know is this something unusual about our sample is this something that other studies are are showing as well and sure enough when you look at other studies there's more and more research from a variety of perspectives and types of research that suggests this intimate connection between relationships and physical health yeah it goes both ways doesn't it relationships and stress because good quality relationships help buffer us from stress but at the same time you know poor relationships can be a major source of stress right yes and so let's talk about the study that you guys are guardians of and directors of off what can we say about poor quality relationships because it would be wonderful wouldn't it if all our relationships were great we can say oh relationships are important so I'm going to prioritize them spend more time on them but not all relationships are nourishing absolutely absolutely right so I mean one thing's important like we we think about for us Bob and I very exciting This research that suggests these physical Pathways between relationships and our physical health so things like inflam fatory responses and immune responses you know it's sexy exciting it's the frontier but there are other mundane things that good relationships do for us as well so you know my wife reminds me did you go to your medical appointment did you make your medical appointment did you you know go to the gym this week so there are behavioral changes that also flow from close connections people reminding us to be responsible and healthy and the opposite is definitely true that if you're in a relationship that's filled with tension it's a source of stress and it's also uh the kind of support that we get and it's a incredible range of support that we can get from relationships we can talk more about the types um but if we don't get that for our relationships we suffer it can't moderate those stressors that we find
moderate those stressors that we find yeah there's some research that suggests that being in a really toxic acrimonious marriage is more hazardous to your health than being divorced and so there it doesn't come from our study we haven't done those specific studies about negative relationships and their impact on health although we certainly have a great deal of anecdotal evidence and a lot of life stories that that bear this out but there is some study that suggests that the degree of acrimony has a lot to do with health breakdown over time yeah let's just take a step back for a moment I mentioned this study a couple of times in our conversation but I wonder if one of you can explain to me me my audience what is this study and why is it so important as far as we know this is the longest study of human life that's ever been done the longest study of the same people it began in 1938 began as two studies that were unaware of each other one was a study of Harvard College undergraduate students 19-year - old young men who were chosen by their Deans as fine upstanding specimens and the other was a study of boys often average age 12 uh from uh the not just the poorest families in the Boston of 1938 but the most troubled families each family was known on average to five social service agencies for problems like domestic violence parental mental illness physical illness extreme poverty so very privileged group been a very underprivileged Group total of 724 men and then we brought in their spouses and we have brought in all their children more than half of whom are
children more than half of whom are women so now we have some gender balance as well and so this has now been going on for 85 85 years that's phenomenal I was actually talking to my kids over the weekends because I was chatting about who's coming to the studio what's the topic and they' love intering with this kind of stuff and I said you guys know what a scientific study is and you know they came up with their their ideas and what it was and I said well you know most of them are probably two weeks or four weeks and some really long ones tend to be 12 weeks how long do you think this study is that Bob and Mark are going to talk about and you know my daughter was I know Daddy one year 2 years I said a bit more 10 years and you know then I told it it's 85 years it it's pretty remarkable isn't it that you were able to do this and it's still going on so clearly uh looking at you both I don't think you were both alive we were not uh 85 years ago so could you maybe explain how that works where there's still a study going on but now you guys are leading it yeah so it it you know it's a combination of luck and and perseverance so this a study both of these separate studies began as studies that were going to go a few years and would answer the question that they began to address quickly or relatively quickly and through sort of luck and kind of incredible leadership over the year study continued you need funding to continue a study like this so the funding would go dry at different points and the study would figure out ways to keep going it's kept going now for over eight decades which is just incredible what's amazing about it is it allows us to track people's lives in real time as they go forward so the lives of these teenagers in Boston and the students at Harvard we had guesses the researchers back in the 30s had guesses about how their lives would turn out but we've been able to follow them through their entire lives through their you know adulthood middle adulthood old age uh to the end of life and and now they're
the end of life and and now they're children um so a lot of it is luck U Bob took over the study about 20 years ago at this point um can I just ask but before you respond there what what is that process like of taking over because the previous director would presumably have had that methods their ideas like how can we keep consistency going when a director changes well George Valiant was the third director and he was my professor in medical school oh wow he lectured to my first year medical school class about these men who were then in their 50s 40s or 50s and I thought this is the coolest thing in the world but never dreamed you'd be the director one and one day he took me out to lunch and said how would you like to inherit the Harvard study of adult development and I nearly dropped my fork and said I don't know anything about old people because by then they were old and I studyed couples and he didn't miss a beat he said let's study older couples and that was our first grant that was our first project but you know part of what was so good about George's Vision was that he delighted in our bringing in new methods I mean when we started they had never even been audio taped let alone videotaped and certainly they had not had blood drawn for DNA they had not been put into MRI scanners so George applauded our doing all of that as a way of bringing new methods to study the the same essential domains of life and and the other thing that's important I think George had this capacity to to really he was so motivated to understand the experience of partici ANS to really sort of get in their heads to understand sort of what motivated them how they thought about things what their daily experience was like and that's really been a Hallmark of the study since the 1930s that when we look back in the files they're
we look back in the files they're copious notes from interviews they weren't audio taped as Bob suggest but they're copious notes so this was a study that was always interesed in people's lived experience and Bob and I certainly share that interest and motivation it's one of the great things about this data set as it's accumulated over 85 years you get to know people inside out from these interviews yeah it's fascinating I I was reflecting on your work uh this morning before you came to the studio and I was thinking about medicine you know my job as a doctor and I I've been thinking that one of the greatest privileges about being a doctor is that you are allowed into people's lives you hear things you you know they share with you things that they probably wouldn't share with many people they didn't know personally and intimately yet for some reason you get that Insight which is an incredible privilege which of course allows you to help them and understand what's going on and then I thought well back in 2015 and 2017 I had the very fortunate opportunity to to make a series of BBC documentaries called doctor in the house and what happened in in those documentaries is there were people within families who were sick and were underd and specialists yet they were still struggling and I went into their house to live alongside them for four to six weeks wow and through the process was able to help all of these families get significantly better from a variety different conditions they were struggling from mostly through changes to their lifestyle but where the connection is to your work is and I was really thinking about this this morning I say why do I have a slightly different perspective on health and many of my conventional colleagues and I think I've always had that but I also think that the experience of going into people's
the experience of going into people's houses was very unique to do that for six weeks with cameras running and you know you're recording everything yeah amazing it's a very unique experience and and I don't think I realized at the time how much I learned because on reflection I now remember seeing how relationships how like let's say I had 10 minutes with a patient let's say I was lucky and I got 20 minutes or 30 minutes in my consultation room yeah I might get a bit more information but I wouldn't see how the family interacted how the husband spoke to the wife how the wife SP to the husband and I remember starting to draw all kinds of connections thinking oh wow this relationship is having a negative impact on your health this relationship is why you are then needing to comfort eat and why you were you know in terms of these Downstream behaviors a lot of them are Downstream from the quality of our relationships and I thought your study for 85 years that's actually turning it up you know 2 11 on on another scale you're actually seeing and you you're you're getting to know the quality of these people's lives that the total quality the 360 degree quality in a way that no doctor could ever do in a consultation room well I think what you did is extraordinary too right to go into their homes for that length of time but the study began with home visits from the the study itself sent folks to the homes of all the participants the teenagers and the college students and interviewed their parents watched what they were like when they interacted with their parents and I think part of what's so powerful about it is that we know Bob and I met actually working in a community mental health setting which brought Psychotherapy out into the community got outside of the office that we know that people aren't always the same as they are when they come to Medical Offices right so that's the amazing recognition and to be interested in that and to see people as you describe just an incredible privilege we certainly feel it working with the study yeah you know one of the things we we mostly do is live our professional lives
mostly do is live our professional lives in silos and um you know so to be able to do a deep dive into someone's life into their home or in our cases in into 85 years of a family's life is such a privilege and then in addition I mean so for example I sit every day and I speak to at least two people in depth in Psychotherapy taking deep dives into their lives and every day I sit on a meditation cushion and I watch everything that comes up in my own mind and body and these are different ways of knowing the same thing which is essentially The Human Condition and I think once we start to break down those silos and once we start to let each one inform the other um we realize that there's much more richness than we can get if we just stay within our lanes right yeah and so our the questions we ask in the research are informed by clinical work they're for me informed by Zen um the you know and so many ways in which things fortunately bleed into each other more and more yeah but that combination right so important I mean I think this idea about sitting on a cushion observing yourself being reflective so important to learn about ourselves and to use that information to understand others as well but the combination Bob is talking about of of doing that with Psychotherapy understanding others it's it's uh really important and very for us it's been very enriching and and certainly promoting of incredible growth I mean Bob you've been the director now for is it 20 years a bit more than 20 years and if you had one minute with someone what's the what you know the elev Ator pitch if you were going to tell someone in one minute what are the key things that you have learned from this study about The Human Experience what would you
say I would say take care of your body like you're going to need it for a hundred years and invest in relationships it's the best payoff you'll get throughout your life love it was under 15 seconds that was brilliant and Mark how would you answer that same question I certainly would say similar things to Bob but I also would say there's a a kind of basic Humanity that we all have when we look hard enough at the at folks lives and really try to understand what their experience is there's a commonality we're human we're all human and that comes through when we look at these lives across time the these these men boys grew up very different circumstances right Boston in city kids they weren't that far away from Harvard University but their lives were so extraordinarily different but when we trade face The Arc of their lives when we look carefully there there are a lot of commonalities in their experience that are just extraordinary yeah and and one of the things I love about your book I me it's a wonderful book I honestly can't imagine anyone who wouldn't get something from reading it it's because you're talking about The Human Experience we all have relationships we only exist in relation to other people don't we but the stories you share I was thinking as I was reading it you can make a film about all these different families you know the the hero's journey which is what all films will have within it it kind of plays out in every one of those experiences it's a story of life you know the UPS the Downs how we get over things it's it's really quite incredible isn't it and then if I think about relationships so that's your pitch relationships are front and center of what it means to live a happy healthy and long life and of course we started off this conversation talking about those two m predictors that you write about in your book The Frequency and the quality of our contact with other people so if we think about relationships well the way my brain sees
relationships well the way my brain sees it is well okay there's relationships how can we break that down there's a relationship with myself you just mentioned the meditation cushion where you sit and you work on your relationship with yourself and then we start to expand it out there's a relationship maybe with a romantic partner if we have one if we don't of course we don't have that relationship with our family relationship with our friends relationship with our work colleagues the list goes on and relationship with the Baristas and the coffee shops right so there's all these kind of circles that are getting bigger and bigger so if we're to take you guys at face value and say okay relationships are important which are the most important there there's there's no wi about it there's no most important about it they're all important what we do believe is that everybody needs one or two what we call securely attached relationships um that at one point in our study um we asked our participants who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared and most people could list several people but some people couldn't list anyone and a few of those people were married and they couldn't list anyone what we believe is that everybody whether you're shy or extroverted everybody needs at least one or two of what we call securely attached relationships where you feel like someone will be there for me if I'm really in trouble I mean that's a great question isn't it are you up to speed with the latest research and I mean I don't know maybe not in the UK but in the US where are we up to with loneliness at the moment yeah so loneliness significant problem in all Western countries and also non-western countries as well so you know the rates are in the US somewhere between 20 and 40% of adults talk about being lonely and what that means it's the opposite of
and what that means it's the opposite of what Bob is describing it's not having a sense that someone has your back or knows who you are um that people just don't care whether you exist or not so those are incredible rates if you think about 20 to 40% of the adult population says that there's no one that really knows who they are and can they could depend on so this is a serious problem the health risk as we talked about before is similar to the risk that we associate with smoking and obesity so this is why there's a Ministry of loneliness in the UK this is why our Surgeon General our top health person talks a lot about loneliness it's a recognition of the importance of relationships to our health as we get more and more tech savvy we can be overly reductionist it's almost as if if we can measure it great if we can't measure it it doesn't exist and of course you know what's that phrase you know not everything that we measure matters and not everything that matters can be measured right there's no relationship blood test right right where the doctor pulls your blood and goes yeah yeah your relationships are great you know we can do that with blood sugar we can do that with hemoglobin to tell you if you're anemic but we can't do that with relationships and you mentioned the west and and where I'm getting to here is if you went to an Eastern country or I reckon even in the west if you went and spoke to people and asked them them how important relationships I think everyone say yeah they're really important yet when we think about it through the lens of Health I don't think many F think about it right right mean why' you think that is well one of the problems is that relationships can't be measured in the same way I mean we can say okay I'm I'm eating right I'm eating this many calories a day I'm exercising this many minutes I'm doing these Health behaviors right but what is a relationship and and how do you nurture relationships it's much more amorphous it's Messier it's more complicated and so to say invest in this is so much less specific and and
this is so much less specific and and easily grasped than you know do 10, 000 steps a day yeah right and that's part of the problem it's very difficult to to get our heads around this even though all of us know in our guts hey this is really important yeah it's such a great Point let's talk about friendship because I think friendship really speaks to this and there's a whole section in the book on friendship it's pretty common certainly in this country that men seem to prioritize their friendships less than women now look this is a gross generalization I appreciate that's not the same in every case but the loneliest group in this country at the moment according to latest research I've read are men between the age of 35 and 50 there's a very high suicide rate in men and what's pretty common and and I guess I can probably hold my hand up and say I've been a little bit guilty of this in my own life as adulthood kicks in and you have responsibilities and mortgages and jobs or whatever often we we may have really good friends I'm lucky to have really good friends but sometimes you don't end up seeing them for quite a long time and there's nothing like those nourishing experiences with your friends so first of all let's talk about friendship it's quite a unique I mean it is very unique isn't it because we choose our friends we don't choose our family but we choose our friends so can you talk a little bit about friendship and why it's so important well I think partly because of this idea that we choose our friends that friendships are particularly prone to to distancing that we sort of let our friendships wither we we figure that they're going to work and we don't have to sort of lean in and and put energy into them so we talk in the book about this idea about social Fitness and Social Fitness applies to all of your relationships but we need to kind of exercise those relationship muscles to really connect with people to to spend time to a lot time that we can you know be together with the people that are important to us
with the people that are important to us and friends are particularly vulnerable I think because of this idea that they're they're folks that we choose and oftentimes we make friends through the activities that we're doing in life so they might be schoolmates from University that uh we're no longer doing the same activities so we have to figure out ways to keep those relationships going whereas relatives I think we often feel that connection around holiday times or family events that there's there ways in which they keep going but I think the the kind of bigger issue here is that there's so many distractions today for our time that all of us spend a lot of time on screens these days sometimes doing work sometimes being distracted could be by social media or traditional media but we we have to really kind of harvest our time for the things that are most important for us and it's harder and harder to do that with these devices that pull us away from those things that are critical for us um doing this research I've realized that I have to start taking my own medicine and so um you know I realized that particularly once my kids were grown and out of the house and they weren't like pulling me away and saying dad do this or drive me here that I could just work all the time um and so what I've had to do is be much more intentional about scheduling walks with people uh scheduling dinners out uh Mark and I have a call every Friday noon and we talk yes we talk about our writing and our research but we also just talk about our lives and I find that if I'm not active really active every week in doing things with people who I want to keep current with it'll it'll wither away and so I'm doing more of that now than I ever did when I was younger and and there definitely points during the life one time as middleaged when you know we get pulled away from those connections more that we have responsibilities like family responsibilities our kids are also calling for our attention and they need us um late life is another moment when folks are in retirement and changing you
folks are in retirement and changing you know their lives in important ways so any transition is a point where friendships that have been important are threatened in some ways we really need to lean in and take care of them yeah there's a wonderful story in the book I can't remember his name now of someone who actually didn't have that many friends through their adult life but in retirement incred suddenly became like a a friendship Pro who was it sorry Andrew Dearing I think it was right yeah it was just wonderful to read that and and I think it gives people hope I think that story because if one is feeling man I'm I'm really busy with my work for example and I don't have time yeah this can change yeah the other thing is that he was an example of somebody who said H I'm just not very good at relationships I'm never going to have good friends and he didn't have much of a marriage and one of the chapters in the book is titled it's never too late because there are these real life stories of people who were sure it was never going to happen for them good relationships and then when they didn't expect it they found good relationships and so we want to kind of bring this message that that from these real life histories we have good evidence that there there are surprises in store for people I want to go about that practical exercise in just a moment in the Friendship chapter which I think it's in chapter 4 and there in the section on Social Fitness it's a really beautiful exercise before we get to that though just to comment you know you said um Bob that you could just work if left your own devices and I know how much culture influences what we perceive to be normal or what we end up doing with our time you know the our environment has a huge influence on us and one of the things I'm writing about at the moment for for my next book is this idea of Heroes and you know we kind of worship the wrong Heroes I think in modern
the wrong Heroes I think in modern culture and you know we may look at someone successful online let's say and go wow look at their life but we're just seeing one narrow aspect of their life they may be doing that at the cost of all their relationships but we don't see that we go wow they're successful but are they successful or have they traded in the most important things in their life for a bit of work success I think this is a massive massive problem and that's why I think your book and your research is really really important so what you're saying reminds me of of something one of my teachers said which is we're always comparing our insides to other people's outsides these curated lives right these these supposed Heroes influencers whoever they might be right who who show us these lives that look like they've got it all figured out and maybe they're working all the time maybe they've won the Nobel Prize but but what we don't know is what it's like to live that experience and what we do know is that our own lives are messy and complicated and have challenges and ups and downs and so I think part of the difficulty is trying to understand the real it that we know from following thousands of people that there is no perfect life and that it's always a set of tradeoffs I think it goes back to this idea about how hard it is to quantify our connections to others the quality of them right so it's easy to count the number of likes that I have on a post it's very hard to to quantify the quality of my connection with people that are important to me and I think we all get distracted by that so you know I remember days of my life where you know I didn't feel it was a particularly a productive day but I'd okay I spent 8 hours or 10 hours today working right there's a way that we quantify our lives that helps us kind of justify or make sense meaning of Our Lives that I think um we we can run down
Lives that I think um we we can run down the wrong path sometimes in that way money is the same thing easy to quantify right yeah I've always been incredibly fascinated by cultures which have this kind of prioritization of relationships and frankly switch off buil in mhm you know the Jewish sabbath for example I I just love that as a concept and I for many months years I keep chat to my wife about look we're not Jewish but I think the Sabbath is awesome a great thing yeah and I think we should build our own version of that because if we don't it's too easy to let the modern world infiltrate your weekends yeah and I just love that no it's basically a mechanism for me and again please correct me if I I've misinterpreted this it's a mechanism whereby we say no switching off focusing on those around us is important so we're going to put it in the diary nothing gets in the way of that I think that's right and I think you know it's incredible you you hear these stories about young people today doing this teenagers doing this they they get together with friends they turn off their phones that they're intentionally leaning into their connections and trying to move those distractions away right so they're they're becoming anti-technology in a certain way the trick of course is to figure out ways to use the technology in ways that are going to help us but I think there are lots of movements out there and the Sabbath is a wonderful example but there are lots of other examples yeah I do Retreats every every couple months I do a Zen Retreat where for two or three days I'm with a group of people and we sit silently and we walk and we eat very mindfully it's really spending time just doing a deep dive into the simplest aspects of being alive and of course no phones no real connections with the outside world and we come away refreshed
outside world and we come away refreshed and sort of amazed at what it's like when you slow down and simplify everything he's different I mean I've seen it I Bob is different after a retreat um this is really interesting so are these people you know some of them I don't know okay so this is really interesting so we've been talking about friendship and clearly those are people we know and we've chosen but what you're kind of sharing here is how the act of pausing stepping outside of your life and doing something together in community even if you don't know them is incredibly powerful yes yes it's one of the things we say is it's very much alone and together mhm and that's what you're doing you are sitting alone walking alone and you're very much with other people um what's what's some more examples of equivalent things that people can think about in their own life like what's what's the principle there that people can take away I mean that's what I think is is important because sometimes people say oh I should meditate but it's not for me well meditation isn't for everybody that really I think what we hope everyone can find is some something where they're in what we might think of as a state of flow where they're in a situation where they are completely absorbed and where time just passes by effortlessly right that could be playing music that could be walking in the woods that could be gardening could be so many things but I think for each of us there there may be a an activity that allows us to be fully absorbed and it's very nourishing and energizing to be in that kind of state even if you're doing it by yourself so how does that then fit with the importance of relationships well in Zen practice what happens is I watch my incredibly messy mind and complicated
incredibly messy mind and complicated body and realize oh my God everybody has this mind and body this kind of mind and body right and then what happens is a kind of natural arising of compassion for other people it's not something I have to cultivate it just happen s and then what I realize is that my connections with other people are different as a result of what I come to see and accept in myself as I sit on a cushion and and part of it I'm guessing you would say I think part of it is this ability to be present as well that you cultivate an ability to focus on something in meditation that might be on your breath or on your experience in some way and we can bring that to relationship so I can really focus in on what I think you might be experiencing really be interested in hearing what you're saying and it's so rare in this modern world that we give people that kind of attention I I think that's something you cultivate as well through oh yeah yeah if that conversation resonated with you here is another incredibly powerful one that I really think you're going to enjoy as we sit down every day to make a decision about what we eat or we go to the store to buy some food we need to realize whatever we put into our body is either going to take our health down or build our Health back up
Transcript auto-generated by YouTube. Verbatim — duplicates intentionally preserved.
Dr. Pradip Jamnadas speaks about fasting and heart health through a broader idea: the body cannot repair well when it is constantly processing, reacting, and compensating. Restorative windows matter.
That can include fasting for some people, but it also includes sleep, nervous system calm, and time away from constant stimulation.
Time without food can change insulin signaling, metabolic flexibility, and appetite patterns. It can also be inappropriate for some people, especially those with a history of eating disorders, pregnancy, certain medical conditions, or medication needs.
The useful protocol is the one that supports health without creating strain or obsession.
Chronic stress touches blood pressure, glucose, sleep, cravings, inflammation, and mood. Breath, movement, relationships, and stillness are not soft practices. They are ways of changing the body’s operating state.
Calm becomes measurable when it changes recovery.
Fasting cannot compensate for a consistently poor diet. Whole foods, fiber, protein, and reduced ultra-processed intake give the body better material to work with.
Longevity is built in both the eating window and the recovery window.
Restoration is not passive. It is one of the body’s most important signals.
If exploring fasting, start conservatively and seek medical guidance when health conditions or medications are involved.
Pair metabolic practices with stress reduction, breath, sleep, and movement.
Use food quality as the foundation; fasting is not a substitute for nourishment.
