DO THESE 4 Things To Help PREVENT Alzheimer's & Dementia! | Matthew Walker & Rangan Chatterjee

and this tells you just how critical sleep is to to a fighting uh for our health that swamps all other factors uh in terms of whether you're gonna be healthy and uh and happy at age eight or age 108. there are genetic risk factors your genes are important but your lifestyle is just as important outsourcing our cooking to corporations is killing us [Music] deprivation you feel may be causative now or or one of the causative factors that causes alzheimer's disease that's right i'm thinking well you know i i often say this when i'm teaching doctors you know why are we not bringing up sleep quality with pretty much every single patient that walks in through our door sleep really is the tide that raises all of the other health boats it's just as you said it's the superordinate node that if you manipulate it you know it's like the archimedes lever you pull that everything else you know can start to come into place you get the sleep but it affects your brain affects your hormones it affects your genetic expression it affects all these sort of things that we might be looking for drugs to to affect those individual pathways but you can improve a lot of them by moving your sleep yeah you know and it's no we think well that sounds almost too good but don't forget you know it took mother nature 3.6 million years to evolve this necessity of eight hours of sleep in place which i should note by the way that if you look at the data back in the 1940s the average adult was sleeping about 7.9 hours of sleep now that number here in the united kingdom is closer to 6 hours and 30 minutes in other words within the space of 100 years which is a blink of an evolutionary eye we've lopped off almost 20 percent of our sleep need you know how could that not come with demonstrable health and disease consequence so i think you know there's that component there but i love what you're saying that you know in medicine we're often or even in research and pharmaceuticals we're often trying to sort of manipulate one pathway in one area of the metabolic system on one aspect of the immune system or one feature of the cardiovascular system and you know sleep affects all of those and we can you know i'll give you an example firstly we know that after if you get a patient and you have them sleeping just six hours for one week this is someone let's say who is healthy at the end of that one week of short sleep their blood sugar levels are disrupted so significantly that they would be pre-diabetic that you would diagnose them as being in a state of pre-diabetes sleep just from sleep deprivation we control all of the factors you can also speak about sleep loss and the cardiovascular system and all it takes is one hour of lost sleep because there is a global experiment that's performed on 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year and it's called daylight savings time and it turns out that when you look at that data in the spring when we lose an hour of sleep we see a subsequent 24 increase in heart attacks as a result it's just incredible but in the autumn you know when we gain an hour of sleep we see a 21 reduction in heart attacks so so the basis there when on a global level is striking you know and you can even think you know you speak a lot about um you know the immune system it's so key for our health so what do tell us what does sleep do for the immune system so firstly we can look on both sides of the coin what happens when we don't get enough sleep firstly we know that people who are sleeping five hours a night are four times more likely to catch a cold than those people who are sleeping eight hours or more striking study very well controlled study um we also know that it doesn't take one week of you know short sleep deprivation one night is enough what we've found is that if you take healthy individuals and then we limit them to just four hours of sleep for one single night what we see is a 70 drop in critical anti-cancer fighting immune cells called natural killer cells which are these wonderful sort of immune assassins that you know help decrease our you know sort of you know cancer risk yeah and help us fight infections and fighting immune system exactly part of that critical innate immune response flip the the the sort of the side of the coin and now what we find is that when you get sleep there is a change in what we call the autonomic nervous system which is sort of this automatic part of our nervous system and that automatic nervous system is split into two branches one that is sort of like the accelerator pedal that gets us revved up triggers the fight or flight response the other is the break that sort of calms us down and when we go into deep sleep we apply that break to the nervous system and everything quiets down heart rate decreases deep sleep is the most wonderful form of natural blood pressure medication that you could ever wish for but one of the other things is that we see as that nervous system quiets down levels of things like cortisol drop down that stress-related chemical and it's during that time that the body goes into an immune stimulation mode and it's where essentially you're going to restock the armament of your immune army so that when you wake up the next day you can battle and fight infection what's also fascinating i love this data and this tells you just how critical sleep is to to a fighting for our health if you look at people who become infected or you actually infect them in the experimental laboratory let's say with sort of a cold vaccine you immediately trigger increased sleepiness and increased amounts of deep sleep and it turns out that the infection indicates to the immune system that you're under attack and the immune system will actually signal to the sleep system within the brain we need more sleep sleep is the best battle force that we have right now to combat this assault and so that's why when you're sick all you tend to want to do is just curl up in bed and go to sleep the reason is because your body is trying to sleep you well it's an appropriate response to what's going on exactly it's bodies are pretty clever right they are remarkably clever you know again mother nature has figured this out and so she brings up this thing called sleep which i would argue is probably like the swiss army knife of health you know whatever ailment you are facing it is more than likely that sleep has a tool in the box to try and help fight it that's so key whatever ailment you're facing guys if you're listening to this whatever you're suffering from whether it's you know lack of energy on a day-to-day basis or whether it's that you're worried about your risk of developing a chronic disease such as type 2 diabetes or heart problems as you get older you know what matthew is saying what professor walker is saying is that sleep improving your quality of sleep is going to help you with all these different facets it's going to help reduce your risk it's going to help increase your energy it's also going to reduce your risk of actually getting disease in the future which is just absolutely incredible i mean we are going to move on to um [Music] tips because i know many of you be thinking okay this is all great you know i i'm sort of hearing about all these things that sleep does but how do i get more so we're gonna we're gonna come to that shortly but you know so many health inequalities are there from people from different socioeconomic groups we know in the uk that you know you can have as much of a 10-year difference in your life expectancy depending on where you live well one thing i like about a focus on sleep and i appreciate that there are many pressures in deprived communities you know financial stresses uh you know maybe a lot of shift work maybe working multiple jobs i absolutely understand and recognize that there are significant issues that we have to overcome but a lot of the recommendations that we're now going to talk about that i cover in my book and you cover in detail in your book most of the recommendations to help people to you know get more quality sleep are free of charge yeah you know i often say that i think sleep is perhaps the most democratically freely available healthcare system for everyone around the world now that's a bit of a glib statement on the basis of exactly what you just said i think about and the data is quite frightening we've been looking at this too at sort of low socioeconomic status communities and there what you'd see is just what you described you know higher general social stress that impers sleep um usually working multiple different jobs split shifts working the night work often people in those communities are working in the service industry that usually means that you're either up very early or you're staying in work very late all of which comprise you know factors that work against sleep so i want to be really appreciative of that but still i think you know the tips that we can do right now to start sleeping better every night should be applicable and for the most part utilized by just about everyone as long as you don't have a sleep disorder well matthew normally i end the podcast off by asking people for four key tips um that people can put into practice immediately but we'd have to limit it to four you know i i want this podcast to inspire people to not only take sleep seriously but to give them some practical help so immediately after listening to this i can put the headphones down and go right i'm gonna do what professor walker's asked me to do i'm gonna try you know these five things today in your experience and you've been interviewed all around the world now to do with your book what what are those common things that people aren't doing that they could do to help improve their sleep yeah so there's probably um maybe five things um that people can do right now to get better sleep the first is regularity um going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time no matter what even if you've had a bad night of sleep still try to wake up at the same time just understand it's going to be a tough next day and then get to bed at the same time that following night and you'll have a good night of sleep you'll sort of sleep a little bit more soundly that night even if it's the weekday or the weekend don't do so what we call social jet lag which is sort of where you sort of sleep too late at the weekend and then on sunday night you've got to drag your body clock all the way back and try and force it to sleep at a time when you haven't been sleeping before that's torture regularity is key the second thing is temperature we've spoken a little bit about that but keep your bedroom cool and probably around about 18 degrees celsius which is colder than most people think but cooling the room down takes your body into that right sort of thermal space for good sleep it cools it down darkness we've spoken about too but we are i think a dark deprived society in this modern era and you need darkness at night to allow the release of a hormone called melatonin which helps time the healthy onset of your sleep so yes it's to do with blue light sort of emitting devices screens phones those are things that you should try and stay away from in the last hour before bed but it's not just that it's also overhead lighting you know we don't need to be bathed in electric light all night in the last hour before bed just try turning half of the lights off in your flat or in your home you'd be surprised at how soporific and sleepy you become when you're shrouded in darkness so that's the third thing the fourth thing is i would say walk it out and what i mean by that is don't stay in bed if you've been awake for 20 or 25 minutes either trying to fall asleep or you've woken up and you're trying to get back to sleep the reason is because your brain is this wonderfully associative device and it will start to very quickly learn that being in bed is about being awake rather than asleep so what you need to do is after about 25 minutes just relax understand that sleep is not quite here yet go to a different room in dim light read a book or listen to a podcast but don't check email don't eat because it trains your brain to expect that in the middle of the night only return to bed when you are very sleepy and that way your brain will start to relearn the association that your bedroom is the place of sleep rather than the place i think that's a really important tip matthew that's you know i know even from our first conversation on facebook but you know whenever i talk about sleep you know people can often get really wound up about this and say you know i'm doing all those things i i can't sleep and they've you know they've really just you know without without trying to their brain has just got into the position where it's been trained not to sleep it's been trained to not associate the bedroom with sleep or you know so many people i see you know when i hear about on social media are doing work emails right up to the moment they fall asleep and and you know you we mentioned children before and i i often say you know children need a bedtime routine we know that why is adults do we think we're any different we should and you're absolutely right you know we've turned the bed uh in this day and age often you know into a kitchen we've turned it into an office we've turned it into a cinema you know we do all of these things typically on the bed which then it does impact the brain's association it gets quite confused about what this thing called the bed is is all about um so i think that that's a that's a very helpful tip and try not to get too anxious if you're sort of falling asleep i know that probably a lot of what i've been telling people will make you feel anxious if you're not being able to get the sleep that you need but try not to worry about it everyone has a bad night of sleep just get up understand that you're going to be awake for a little bit longer and then go back to bed and you will start to relearn that association and in fact a lot of you know people and patients will say to me well you know i've been falling asleep on the settee watching television and then i get into bed and i'm wide awake and i don't know why and again it's because of this association that you've learned with the bed the final two things one of which we've mentioned is what you'd intake into your body caffeine and alcohol we've spoken about caffeine but i'll speak about alcohol quickly many people use alcohol as a sleep aid and it is anything but an assistant to sleep alcohol is a class of drugs that we call the sedatives um and sedation is not sleep unfortunately it's sedation it's not sleeping it's very different um so what you're doing when you have a night cap or you use alcohol to try and get to sleep and many people do understandably so they mistake one for the other you're just knocking your cortex out you're not in natural sleep the two other problems with alcohol and sleep firstly alcohol will fragment your sleep so if i were to record someone's sleep in the laboratory after they've had a couple of drinks their sleep is littered with all of these awakenings throughout the night now you tend not to remember waking up but the next day you feel again unrefreshed you don't feel sort of bright and alert or restored by your sleep but you don't remember waking up so you don't link it to the alcohol but alcohol is bad at fragmenting your sleep produces poor quality the final thing alcohol is good at doing is blocking your dream sleep or your rem sleep and we know to come back to our conversation rem sleep is critical for emotional first aid rem sleep provides overnight therapy it's a form of emotional convalescence and alcohol will block that rem sleep quite viciously so those would be the five tips i think for better sleep yeah matthew thanks i love that um just to say on alcohol is it dose dependent so for example you know some people say well i'm okay with one glass of wine but two or three glasses is going to fragment my sleep you know it can you comment on on the dosage there or would you advise people who are struggling with sleep to knock it on its head basically no and it's so hard for me to answer this and this is the reason one of the many reasons why i'm such a deeply unpopular person but um i don't think that's fair to say but i but you know i firstly i don't want to sound puritanical you know life is to be lived to a degree and all of these things that we're discussing i was trying to speak about the extremes but i also want to empower people with the knowledge i'm not here to tell you necessarily what you should or you shouldn't do i just want to give you the scientific facts and then you can make the choice i would say unfortunately that even just one glass of alcohol in the evening we can we can see that we can measure that you can measure that in your lab you can see that you're not getting the same deep level of restorative sleep even with one drink even with one drink so i know it's hard but now you know everyone you know should you know have a social life and sort of you know enjoy a drink now and again i think the best advice would be this if you're going to bed feeling tipsy you probably have had too much alcohol in terms of sleep impairment well i i think you know i i so resonate with it with so much of what you've just said which is you know this podcast what i do what you do it's not about telling people what to do you know i've got no interest of telling someone what they should do i have no right to tell someone what they should do with their lives um what i think we're trying to do is to educate people inspire them empower them to understand what lifestyle choices they're making and how that could impact their health and i i always draw the analogy with going out having a few drinks with your mates on a friday nights people know intuitively that if i go out for a drink on friday nights and have three or four pints let's say you know what my saturday morning might be a bit of a write-off i may not be functioning as well as i might want to but you're going into that with that knowledge you're saying you know i know the effects alcohol has on me but i'm going to get so much enjoyment out of my night out tonight that i'm willing to put up with the consequences what i think we're both trying to say is guys we just want to empower you we want to help you understand the impact that caffeine might be having on your sleep the alcohol might be having on your sleep that the fact that you're on your work emails before you go to bed might be having on your sleep do without information what you will you know um that's how i would put it i i so agree because i think you know a lot of you know what you speak about um in your book which is you know far more wide-ranging than mine because i just take one of the things you go after four of the key they're the key pillars which is so much more impressive i think says so much about the difference between me and and you rang in but what are you a research i'm a clinician right there's a big difference right there is but i i still think it's it's a it's a heroic thing but what i would say i think is that yes a lot of people are aware of some of these things you know like it's good to be physically active you know i should try and stay away from drinking too much alcohol but i also think that there's a lot of what we discuss you know i hope in both books that is perhaps knowledge that people aren't aware of and if only that they were aware of it they would actually want to do something different that's the sort of the case that i'm really passionate about is that people as long as you know the information and you choose to do otherwise no problem at all a lot of people just are either misinformed or entirely when it comes to sleep uninformed that's the goal that is the goal and it's and it's really about it's that empowerment piece and and this is one thing i just want to end on is just to say guys look it may not be that you can just change one thing and suddenly have a great night so you might have to change three or four things together you know that's certainly my experience it's like you know matthew you know you're a researcher say a lot you know you'll do research and showing what caffeine does on showing what alcohol does and but i would say as a clinician use that research but maybe you might have to try a few things like you might try for example one week with no caffeine and no alcohol and see how you sleep because then you can be empowered to just to decide what you're going to do after that are you going to go back or maybe then i always try and get people sleeping as well as they've ever slept then they can start reintroducing some of these lifestyle things that they want and they can say oh wow that's interesting i i felt great last week but now when i have a 2 p.m coffee you know what i'm not quite as good okay that's that's going to teach me now that i'm going to i'm going to knock it a bit earlier in the day because i think ultimately nobody's going to follow your advice or my advice simply because we told them to i think it's only when they start to feel the difference themselves yeah they go wow you know i kind of like feeling good yeah and i think you know i love your point about just trying to give it time to you know sleep and starting to change your sleep and seeing the effects of getting better sleep it's a little bit like exercise at the gym you know you're not going to go to the gym one day and wake up looking like arnold schwarzenegger you know it just takes some time but if you commit to it you will see gradual change and it's the same thing with with sleep as well but i also think i love the idea of you you know putting sleep in that bedrock place and then starting to introduce the other factors what's lovely is that many of them will actually fall in place when sleep is stabilized and i'll give you a good example of diet we know that without sufficient sleep two critical appetite hormones go in opposite bad directions one of those hormones is called leptin which is a hormone that sort of signals to your body you're full you're you don't want to eat anymore the other hormone is called ghrelin which does the opposite it says you're not satisfied with your food you want to eat more and despite leptin ghrelin sounding like two hobbits they are actually real hormones um what's interesting is that when you sleep deprive people or even just limit them to maybe just like five or six hours of sleep for a week levels of leptin which say you're full don't eat more they drop down levels of ghrelin that ramp up your hunger and say i've just eaten a big meal but i'm not satisfied i want to eat more that hormone skyrockets when you're underslept so no wonder people who are sleeping just five to six hours a night will actually eat on average somewhere between two to three hundred extra calories every single day yeah so you can solve sleep and you will actually start to not want to eat as much yeah and this is why a part of weight loss is to sleep better i know you're on a really busy schedule that happens when you have such a popular international best-selling book and you know all about that too so well guys i'd highly encourage you to pick up matthew's book why we sleep it's it's absolutely brilliant it's got pretty much everything you've ever wanted to know about sleep i think you'll probably find in that book um i look forward to when you release a later edition when you've got newer research coming out in the future at some points but matthew one question i i like to ask my my guests who are you know leading researchers in the field is you know as you became more and more aware of all this sleep research what was the biggest thing in your own lifestyle that you changed on the back of your research i think it was probably caffeine um i think just seeing the data and then doing those types of studies ourselves and particularly the the finding that we discussed were even if you're asleep the quality of that sleep is just not as deep that really got me concerned and that's when i really started to pay attention to my to my caffeine content are you tea turtle now with caffeine or you so right now yeah i am i drink decaffeinated tea and i drink decaffeinated coffee um i sometimes you know i've ebbed and flowed between sort of having coffee in the morning because i do feel it's it's alerting benefits but you know we didn't necessarily evolve to be medicated with caffeine and i think anyone who's you know drinking caffeine at 11am which on the basis of your circadian rhythm if you listen to the wonderful podcast with uh sachin panda that you did you know your peak of your circadian rhythm is right around sort of the 11 o'clock period that's when it should be almost impossible for you to fall asleep but yet you know i sometimes look around on an airplane when i'm leaving and people half the plane is asleep at 11 o'clock yeah um and if you're self-medicating um your sleep deprivation at 11am with caffeine it usually means that you're perhaps just not getting enough sleep and that's probably been one of the greatest i think influential factors that and the impact on my productivity i think that was the the most underrated and it actually forced me to start doing a lot of research on sleep loss and productivity that maybe on a second podcast because yeah but you know my ability to maintain focus and produce high quality output work is dramatically dependent on the sleep that i've been having at night that absolutely echoes what professor panda said a few weeks ago on this podcast when he goes off caffeine his products as he goes up so guys look no one's asking you guys to to cut out caffeine you know i know how much you guys love it i have certainly had my own love hate relation well more love of a relationship with coffee in the past but i have dramatically reduced it and i'm feeling better than i've ever felt [Music] are some people just lucky they're born with good genes so they're gonna age well or do all of us have the opportunity to do things that are going to increase the likelihood that we can also age well well all is a strong word uh if you've got a genetic uh disease that's that's is fatal uh and it comes up early i mean there's often nothing you can do about that but for the vast majority of us uh genetics is not a prescription it's not deterministic it's probabilistic it's like quantum physics it's a statistical tendency that you might be prone to cancer or alcoholism or heart disease or living a long healthy life and the choices that we make in three areas can really there's a whole lot that's still under our control genes make up depending on the trait or quality you're looking at they make up between seven and fifty percent of the variability and outcomes that leaves a whopping amount that's under our control and it's basically things like mindset healthy practices and then luck you know if you if you get hit by a bus and you get a concussion no matter how careful you were that could happen and and that will change things i'm curious to know what conversations you have with your patients as you know i'm not a medical doctor i'm just a simple country neuroscientist so do you talk about quality of life and are there trade-offs in your patients where you have to say well look you can do this you'll if you do this it'll make you live happier but maybe not as long yeah look it i i talk with my patients about a whole variety of different things so you know 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 over medicate in medicine we suppress symptoms a lot and that often if we are quite 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 massive 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 how they feel absolutely think's really important i think certainly in almost 20 years of practice i'd have to say that when a patient feels as though they can't do anything like they've just got this condition and there's nothing they can do about it i 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 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 short term with their symptoms but also i'll say yeah but this can also like you know sleep for example uh i spoke to matthew walker on on the podcast maybe a year ago terrific yeah absolutely fantastic and you know me and matthew were talking about some of the research that is suggesting that sleep deprivation chronic sleep deprivation can be causative oh absolutely in the developments of alzheimer's absolutely and and 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 alzheimer's 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's doesn't just start you know the six 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 yeah not only will you feel good in the short term but you're gonna 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 i'm really interested in that and it sounds it sounds i i agree with you completely if i were a medical doctor it would be i'd be having the same conversations yeah because for me and one of you subscribed to this dan that it's often the things that we can do day to day that are going to help us feel good day to day are also the sort of things that are going to help us age well right yes well although there are some funny exceptions yes what are those exceptions well my favorite example of an exception is jogging okay there's dozens of studies now that show that for every hour that you jog you get an extra hour of life so if you're jogging five hours a week you're going to get five hours added on to the end of your life 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 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 it was a to one ratio that'd be different but it's not so i guess your approach is about giving people information and letting them decide what they want to do with that information absolutely in fact that's that's my whole 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 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 posts the field guide to lies and statistics and here these are the these are the trade-offs these are the choices you have to decide it's a very personal thing yeah and dan is 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 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 paternalistic 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 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 if 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 the sort of granular 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 fare at any age is a personality trait a mindset you might call it of conscientiousness that swamps all other factors 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 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 then well conscientious adults have a doctor and they at least in the u.s their insurance payments are current and when the doctor tells them to do something they do it conscientiousness which is a cluster of traits relating to stick-to-itiveness reliability dependability 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 you know compulsive hand washing or things like that 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's super interesting because when you talk about personality because 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 i'm not that conscientious a person so that number one factor that dan said and dan that neuroscience has 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 you know there's a bunch of studies coming out 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 mother 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 antidepressants and interestingly perhaps counter-intuitively cbt alone is 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 gonna 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 at any age which it which is very encouraging now when you were describing conjunction as i was thinking okay so someone is conscientious uh they're not gonna they're gonna 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 i've read your previous book and i know you talk a lot about creativity 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 do you see what i'm getting at i do yeah i i cause although rule following is a part of it it's not all of it yeah and there are cases where you really have to not follow a rule um if 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 there are all these kinds of thought experiments about ethics i think that if you had the opportunity to murder hitler murder is supposed to be against the rules but you know there's a an argument to be made that that would have been a good thing to do so and these aren't i'm not talking about creative acts here i'm talking about more practical ones but i think of the people i know joni mitchell is a good example one of the most creative people i know and she's very conscientious although she breaks all kinds of rules with her songwriting and her painting she's a wonderful painter the way the conscientiousness shows up as 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-to-itiveness and 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 full i can tell you this because 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 django 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 think if you heard of a bank or crowded house for sure neil finn yeah yeah they were they were one of my favorites yeah i've seen them a few times playing a dream it's over yeah there is reason within yeah exactly there's reason with that it's such a great track yeah um my friend mitchell froome plays the organ on it the b3 oh really yeah i know well it's amazing this conversation could fast go down a track in 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 i think that mitchell managed to get it as close to the timbre and the sound of um um booker t yeah uh booker t jones uh i think he he managed to get that sound the booker t 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 i mean he nailed it it's yeah i mean i mean by the and on the own crowded house um what was rather in my head based upon what we said about jenny 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 bands so our limitations become our strength so he was all from from certainly my interpretation of what i heard was that we're gonna only record stuff or play live stuff that we can do the four of us so we're gonna have to create around that rather than bringing in extra people to be able to play this part or that part of that part it's the opposite of a latter day beatles or steely dan approach yeah you're a live band like you too yeah exactly and it's it's fascinating that joni 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 as creative 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 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 five percent of the population are sorry for a buzzword but an hedonic 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 many domains some people don't like chocolate some people don't like sex or being touched some people don't like music but for the rest of us who do 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 a cool fact it's an essential part of adults living with 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 you don't recognize the caregivers who come in every single day and often we see in these patients as you well know a great deal of agitation and 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 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 a less extreme case it'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 you can't grow new neurons 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 though right you're just learning anything whether it's music or sport or absolutely you know but it's 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 traversky and scott grafton both have new books out about this the scots is called physical intelligence 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 a 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 it's because as you're walking on an uneven surface your foot and your ankle and your legs are me and your vestibular system are making dozens of micro adjustments every minute 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 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 just 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 and a little bit of spinal cord but sarcopenia is to muscle what osteoporosis 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'm 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 and told me she started doing the same thing um do you enjoy it i do i do i can't i couldn't tell you why but i do and i also do the elliptical 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 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 yeah nathan you've got a long history in music haven't you you're a music producer as well yes yeah and i heard you on an interview recently talk about you had the opportunity to meet sting once and you scanned his brain yeah so i'm interested you know sting well i don't know how old's thing is but he's a few years older than me i'm 62 i think he's 67 ish yeah so look i haven't seen a pictures thing for a while but the last time i saw him certainly there's no way i would have guessed that he was in his late 60s it's clearly someone who seems to be aging very well so sting has a lot of practices certainly that come across in the media that we read about how many of those are true that i don't know but when the tantric sex is not true that's exactly it's not true no okay um do you know what he does i do i do um sting had read this is your brain on music and he reached out to me at some point in 2007 or eight and said he wanted to visit the lab and meet me and talk about the findings and so he came to montreal and i said you know while you're here if you want we can scan your brain and we can you know see what it looks like um it wouldn't be an actual study i guess it's a case study but not a proper experiment uh and he was into it and uh you know we we found that his corpus callosum is thicker than most people's that's the fiber track that connects the left and the right hemisphere and we often see thicker corpus callosi in people who are very creative who are shuttling information from the left to the right hemisphere we learned some things about how he organizes music in his memory that we're quite novel we published a paper about it scott grafton and i the embodied cognition guy in a journal called neurocase it's available for free on my website as all my peer-reviewed papers are okay great and we'll link to all of them sure as well in the show not section so people can easily find that uh i mean it is a article written for other scientists but i think that the average person could glean the punchline from it uh and then uh we we kind of got a lot we got we got along well and he invited me to come and tour with him and the police reunion tour for a few shows you've got to be kidding me it was terrific um oh wow and so i did get to see what his life is like uh he does yoga every afternoon he has you know for at least a couple of hours sometimes four he uh earmarks alone time apart from the yoga to either practice something musically or learn a new song or uh or write something just to experiment around he gives himself play time to play every day when he's on tour and then the other extraordinary thing was we're talking about conscientiousness i've never met anybody with the work ethic that he has and you know i i i i i'm i'm a professor i know a number of nobel prize winners most of the professors i know are workaholics we work 75-80 hours a week that's nothing compared to what sting does he is working all the time he enjoys himself but he his work ethic just to give you an example i asked him how is it that you play bass and sing at the same time i'm a bass player that's very difficult to do because it's not like strumming guitar finger picking where everything's in sort of lock step time bass parts tend to be syncopated you know you're not always singing when the bass hits a note you're sometimes singing in between notes and in odd inter integer ratios and so just as as a demonstration of work ethic i said how do you do it he says well he says when i know that i'm going to go out on tour and i'm gonna have to play these songs in the studio yeah you can track it differently yeah he played the bass first he sang second or vice versa if he's gonna have to do it live so he writes out on a piece of paper the lyrics and the the chords or the notes and he writes a kind of visual map for where the vocal note is versus the bass notes sometimes they're synchronized sometimes they're anti-phase and then he'll sit down and he'll practice one measure at about one-fifth the normal tempo and he might do that for half an hour that one measure and then he'll put it away and go to another song and the next day he'll come back and he'll add another measure and he says it could take him six months to work up a tune at the proper tempo and i thought wow oh my god is it a bit like you know some again i'm not trying to compare the two but just to sort of make it really relevant for people at home who maybe are not musical or don't play the bass and they never try to play the bass and sing at the same time you know like i'm sure it's the same in america we have the same way you have to try and um patch your stomach and sorry you know put your hand around your stomach and pat your head at the same time which some people find quite hard to do unless you but i think most people when they focus on it and practice well it requires what we call limb independence yeah so is there something similar to that that's going on with sting when he's trying to just teach him maybe not limb independence but you know voice and hand independence yeah and we find this in a lot of activities flying an airplane requires limb independence you're using both feet using both hands one of the things i did in order to adopt the advice that i gave others in the book is that i realized i had to push myself out of my comfort zone and so i took flying lessons and studied for my private pilot's license because it is very complicated it's not like playing drums you're doing this to help you age better i did yeah yeah and um because it's a new skill and it's it's sort of taxing your brain you and your brains have to fire up different neurons is that in a nutshell what it is it's exactly that it was taxing my brain in ways i hadn't texted before not only that but i'm i'm terribly afraid of heights and so it was a way for me to get some agency over my own uh feelings in life i mean i find if we just go back to sting for a second what i find really interesting is you started off talking about staying and saying that he makes sure he does some yoga every afternoon sometimes for two hours sometimes for three or four hours he ensures that he's got some time alone and then you follow that up by saying he's one of the most if not the most productive and conscientious people you've ever had the had the opportunity to meet yeah and so a lot of people that won't make sense it will be like hold on a minute how can he be conscientious and hard-working when he's got time to do yoga in the afternoon and he's got time to spend an hour by himself each day unless of course those are things that help him be productive and conscientious well it's exactly that uh it's if i don't go to the gym in the morning um it's there's always this tension that i i like you probably i'm i'm way behind in my work i'll never catch up no matter what i do and i always feel that if i take 15 minutes off i'll fall 30 minutes behind and so when i wake up in the morning do i go to the gym and and basically lose 45 minutes well for me anyway if i do i gain that back later in the day in terms of productivity i get more done in an hour of work if i've had that and sting must have worked out that these things um help keep him on an even emotional keel and help inspire him to to do his best you know the whole sting story reminds me of something else that maybe your listeners will be interested in i saw this fantastic magic trick it was the um it was the signature trick of a guy named glenn falkenstein who's passed away and i saw it several times and what he does is he goes into a a room you know it's usually a concert hall or a venue and he's on the stage and his assistant uh put some uh silver dollars over his eyes and then wraps them with uh plastic and then puts on some sort of uh um thing to block his vision even more uh and um then she goes out in the audience and she asks somebody um to without saying what they're doing pull something out of their pocket or their purse or off their table and hold it up uh and so i was a uh i was a participant in this a couple of times i love this trick one time i pulled out a credit card and she says to him uh okay uh you know this person is ready do you do you know what he has and the glenn says well it's a credit card and she says okay what else can you tell us about and he says well it's a visa it's not a mastercard or a diners club or an amex she says what else can you tell us anything else he says well it's the chase bank and she says okay and she says and uh now i'm wondering if you can read off the numbers the 16 digits and he does in groups of four after each one she says keep going or you know that's right uh what's next you know these kinds of things um now i imagined that this was a super high tech trick that she's got a hidden camera in her hand and the reason for all of this stuff around his eyes that he's got some kind of a screen or maybe he's got an earpiece and somebody is you know talking in his ear he can read off the serial number of a dollar bill people pull out a lipstick he can tell you it's an estee lauder and it's this color and it's it's amazing and so right before he retired i asked him how he did the trick and of course magicians aren't supposed to tell you but he had retired um he worked on that trick with this assistant for five years everything she says is code when she says this person's ready that means it's a credit card she says are you ready to start that means it's a bill of some sort if she says okay let's go that means it's a piece of silverware it's the most elaborate code you can imagine and they memorized it it took them five years of working on this two hours a day but in the end i mean to me that it's a marvel of conscientiousness and and and work ethic but in the end they had this amazing trick that nobody can figure out i mean it's incredible to hear that and it's incredible to hear the capacity of the human brain um it's incredible to hit that story sting story and just think how hard and how dedicated some people are to mastering their craft and then i'm always thinking about how can i bring that back to someone who's out on a run at the moment who's listening to this who maybe like the title of the podcast thought oh how i'm going to age well and then what can they take from that into their own life and i guess it's as you said right at the start you know the number one trait that's going to help you age while there's conscientiousness so i guess can you finish a task you started can you and can not only that but can you do the best possible job you can can you do not just good enough can you try to push yourself to do more to do better can you can you grow in whatever it is that you're doing if it's keeping a garden if it's cooking for yourself and your family if it's choosing vegetables learning which ones to choose at the markets you get the most flavorful and healthy ones with the most nutrients any area of a human endeavor where you can learn and keep learning is what's neuro-protective and um i mean it's fun it is fun yeah it's it's curiosity really which is a separate trait it's number two on the list after conscientiousness is it really people who are curious do better in life so conscientiousness and curiosity the two c's of aging well right and you know with this book like all my other books the version of it that got published was uh roughly uh version 52. that is i wrote the manuscript i went back over it and rewrote entirely 52 times i've never published anything that i had fewer than 12 revisions on those tend to be short articles or scientific papers where it's uh you know there's a formula but for you know for the books or for the new yorker articles or things like that it's always 40 or 50 drafts and i have this friend named mike lankford who is i think the best writer i know he published a wonderful book that i think you'd like called life in double time okay about his uh early years as a drummer in a touring band that nobody's ever heard of but it's hilarious and insightful and then he wrote another book which is both of the two of my favorite books of all time the other one is becoming leonardo it's a biography of da vinci it's so much better than walter isaacson's bio which came out at the same time and i said to mike your books are so amazing how many drafts for becoming leonardo he said 75 he worked on it 10 years that's a masterpiece it couldn't be any better i have much to learn and i guess all of these stories whether it's your friends their or yourself just the act of you writing this book forget about your other ones for a minute just this book and doing 52 or so revisions that is conscientiousness that is dedication that is actually i guess helping you to age well well and it's curiosity i'm curious to know what i can do to make it better i'm curious to know if there's a you after our conversation i'm gonna go right take notes because i get a chance between now and the paperback to do another few revisions yeah and in stimulating conversations like this i always think well there's probably something i can take and change it for the better and it's interesting i mean as we record this stan i mentioned just before we went on there and my 100th episode of this podcast has probably gone live whilst we've been chatting congratulations yeah thank you it's uh it's again something that started off as an idea um just over two years ago 100. yeah episode 100 okay a week one yeah pretty much one a week uh i have taken august off the last two years because you know for me i've got two young kids they're off in august i want to just switch off and be able to spend proper quality time with them when they're off school so um you know i i've done that the last couple years but what's interesting for me is the feedback we get the way it's grown so rapidly and the fact that people say look each week it's it's such a varied guess i'm learning new things it's making me think about my life in a different way i can't wait for the next one i'm really curious for what's coming next so i guess i'm thinking or i'm certainly hoping that actually people who listen to this podcast each week with that curiosity maybe in some way this is helping them to age well oh i hope so i believe so if if you can remain curious and learn new things that's neuroprotective sorry to interrupt if you're enjoying this conversation there's loads more like it on my channel please do press subscribe and hit that bell now back to the conversation [Music] you said that dementia is not a disease of old age it's so important for people to get that because you know i've spent a lot of time with professor dale bredesen um in in california i'm sure you've seen some of dale's work and some of his research and you know he's said on many occasions that you know alzheimer's or other forms of dementia may be starting even 30 years before it shows up now i'm not you may or may not agree with that but he is he's sort of said that the idea being that when you get symptoms is not when this starts this starts a long way before and therefore there's an opportunity if we're aware of that to start taking preemptive and preventive action you know in our 30s and our 40s and our 50s not when we're suddenly getting the diagnosis at the age of 72 let's say so i want to just hammer home that the the things in your book that uh are based absolutely in science in terms of what people can do they're kind of relevant to everyone particularly women i would say no matter what your age writes i agree with you i i completely agree on everything you say alzheimer's disease is not like you you just all of a sudden catch a cold right it's not like tomorrow you go to the doctor and boom you have alzheimer's disease there's something that's been happening in your brain for a really really long time that eventually leads to the symptoms which again speaks to how resilient the brain is how strong these brains we have are because they can literally fend off a whole amount of pathology and insults and problems for years and years and years and your ability and your brain's cognitive reserve of reserve right against these insults is really largely based on the way you live your life there is a genetic component our dna is part of whoever we are everything we are it's involved in every body in neurological function however your medical report heart report card in your lifestyle matter just as much for the vast majority of people like even in patients with genetically determined alzheimer's even for those very rare patients who carry genetic mutations that cause alzheimer's at a young age there's evidence that things like exercise can really delay the onset of dementia and for the vast majority of the population over 98 percent of people do not carry this genetic mutation so risk is really more about the interplay of factors like sure there are genetic risk factors your genes are important but your lifestyle is just as important your environment is just as important your medical health is just as important and those are the things that we need to take care of pretty much as soon as we're aware that they're important it's not like you're 50 and today you have to take care of your brain no this brain health should really be part of overall health we should really start thinking about their brains as our best friends and the part of us then it's nurturing and supporting that is doing so much for us right so i think it's really important that we make choices that really support the brain and i i usually like to say that i encourage everyone to think of their brains more like a muscle right there are things that you can do to make your brain stronger you can exercise it properly you can feed it properly you can take care of it properly and your brain will perform so much better for you yeah at any age either at any age yeah i mean i want to sort of get into this lifestyle piece because there's so much that people can do particularly the bit on movement as well where less might be more for for women which i found really interesting and something i i've been thinking about for some time as well um before we do that i wonder if we could deal with hormones and in particular hrt which is obviously a very hot topic it's a very divisive topic from you as a neuroscientist looking through the lens of the brain and with all the work you've done what are your views on hormones and how they can be used to help brain health my views are that hormones are important and that the field has not developed a way that one would hope especially as far as our brains are concerned and i i could talk about this for days to just give you the full detailed picture but i think the bottom line is that preventing alzheimer's or minimizing the depression and anxiety is not the same as treating hot flashes right so we know that hormonal replacement therapy is very effective at reducing minimizing and in some cases completely eliminating hot flashes for women who can tolerate the medications that women are not eligible for pulmonary therapy for menopause but most women are and that is something that has been shown to be successful for like hrt can really help with hot flashes it also produces vaginal dryness especially for women who undergo a hysterectomy or oophorectomy which is the surgical removal of the uterus and or the ovaries now when it comes to brain health things become really complicated because the research is just not there there have been clinical trials that looked at whether or not hormonal therapy could prevent dementia right and they showed that it cannot in women older than 65. so they were looking at women who were like 15 years post menopause and they were given hormones at that point which is too late it's just too late to start now more recently two very large clinical trials um tested the efficacy of hormonal therapy in women who were a little bit younger so within five years of menopause and they showed no adverse effects but also no benefit for cognition and i would argue that that is again too late we were talking about the locking the key the key in the lock analogy and the timeline is very important because what happens in physiology is that this system where the hormone locks to the receptor is really age dependent happens to the receptors is that if you don't have hormones blocking for a really long time the receptor shuts down it just closes the lock is not longer to lock it just turns into a piece of door so if you try to get the hormones then nothing is ever going to happen right yeah you need to have plasticity you need to have the hormones and the receptors if the receptors said okay sorry guys too late there's no point giving hormones so what we're trying to do right now is to better clarify this window of opportunity for brain health and the way that we need to do it is not just by theoretically putting women in a clinical trial but we need to look at their brains we need to probe the system are these receptors working or not are they active or not does it make sense to give you hormones at this stage in your life as a woman so i think this is missing and it's hard for me to answer the question without the right information right now the question is we don't know maybe for some women especially women again who who do receive hysterectomies and oophorectomies prior to menopause the current recommendation is to take hormones because that's been associated with a lower risk of alzheimer's disease a lower risk of osteoporosis or high flush a lot of symptoms for other women the answer is that we don't quite know yet so so a couple of things there so again i don't want to quote professor bredesen because he's not here and so i want to make sure i'm accurately describing uh some of his work but dale very much takes a multi-pronged approach when he's trying to help a patient so he's saying you know he he you know he he would try and change seven eight nine different factors together rather than typically it's we'll try this one thing does it work no that's shown it doesn't work we'll try something else and and again there's pros and cons of things but i quite like that method in terms of it's not about trying to put everything onto one thing it's doing multiple things and i think he was the first person who really tuned me into thinking maybe this maybe six six years ago or so that oh maybe women should be well not women should be maybe some women would benefit from taking estrogen in some form through and after the menopause to not to withdraw that sort of trophic support to the brain and i find that really interesting because you know as a husband i was thinking oh well when my wife gets to that stage i've never even worried about no oh genuinely what it was more oh once you know that you can't unknow it right so it's it's then it's like well should women be routinely taking that or should we be considering that with respect to brain health and then you know where i get conflicted in my head is that you know we've looked through the evolutionary lens before about what men and women used to do when our brains were evolving so i don't know if you're familiar with any work on this i'm not you know if you go to something like the hadza tribe in tanzania for example uh hunter-gatherer tribe who are still living at their traditional lifestyles right in terms of their hunting they're gathering they're very much living these low stress uh lives that are out in harmony with nature i i wonder you know do they have a word for the menopause do they suffer menopausal symptoms in the same way you know i don't know i wonder if you've come across that at all because i think that would be really interesting it is really interesting and and we do know that the experience of menopause really changes a lot depending on different cultures like in asia women do not report nearly as much discomfort as women in the united states of america so i think yes there's a genetic component but i think the lifestyle i can say this is you know this is not a scientific trial but in my clinical experience a lot of my female patients who come in with significant menopausal symptoms also have high degrees of stress in their life now of course makes sense to me it could be the symptoms are getting bad and are not getting treated which causes a stress i i absolutely recognize that but when i've really tried to unpick lifestyles for a number of years before it stress seems to play a really big role and i think as you've explained in the book with the pregnenolone steel you know there is a way that stress literally impacts and changes this kind of symphony of hormones in your body so i wonder if you could expand a bit on stress and what that does to the brain sure so stress can literally steal your hormones and that's because cortisol which is the main stress hormone is in balance with your estrogens because they the body uses the same molecule pigmenolone which you mentioned before to make cortisol and the sex hormones so if you're super stressed out like chronically stressed your body will necessarily have to shift production of cortisol by taking the pregnenolone away from your sex hormones and then you're going through menopause so with perimenopause you're stressed out because you're a middle-aged woman with most likely a job a family elderly parent you have no time for yourself you're having hot flashes or you're not feeling well because of hormonal changes and then you also have the stress in your life and your hormones are going down further so it really kind of turns into a vicious circle right where the more stressed you are the more symptoms you get and who knows how we can stop it but i think sometimes hormonal therapy might be a great way to break the cycle sometimes more about lifestyle you know there are things that we all can and should do to keep stress at bay and that is so important not just for hormones but also really for brain health because something we don't talk about enough i think as a society is that too much stress is not only bad for your heart it's also literally bad news for your brain and there's this incredible study came out last year with hundreds probably thousands of people who got brain scans and they were middle aged like 40 to 65 and what they showed is that if you have high cortisol levels that really correlates with brain shrinkage already in mid life and with a worsening in memory performance so high stress can really negatively impact your ability to recall information already when you're 50 years old and what i thought was particularly scary is that the brain shrinkage when they actually looked at gender they found out that the brain shrinkage was only found in women who would pause menopause which is again you know the gender bias they didn't look at gender as a predictor they were trying to remove the effects of gender but then they realized that there was something really hard to get rid of and it turns out that it was the fact that only women and not men only highly stressed women show brain shrinkage i mean this is you're basically saying that stress affects the brains of women differently differently than the brains of men that's right it looks like men's brains are more resilient to stress at least in mid-life and again these titles are all the average right we're comparing the average man to the average woman it tells you nothing about outliers and women who can tolerate stress beautifully and men who really suffer but on average women's brains tend to shrink in mid lives when your levels when stress levels are really high and when you say middle life are you specifically talking about what was that sorry 40 to 65 40 to 65 so yeah coming into that age off the perimenopause i guess yeah and beyond that i guess that really that really begs the question for me and i have you know men and women of all ages listening and watching this show but if that really is the case then in some ways that turning point to 40 is quite a significant one in the sense of look you know of course it's going to be different in different people and of course these are just generalities and it's you know we can't say that's the same for everyone but it's almost like saying hey look between your 20s and 40s you know while you're building up life you know figuring out who you are what you want to be you know tolerating all these kind of stressors maybe there needs to be again like a step change in the way we view stress particularly let's say for women at the age of 40 and go hey look maybe i could get away with it 20 to 40 but over the next 10 20 years i've got to be careful that i take some time for myself i take some time to switch off that i don't take on too much so that i know it's hard because culture is pushing us away from this and i think that's another big piece of the puzzle here which we sort of touched on at the start which is you know i think i think i think a lot of people have it tough in society but i think women have got it super tough you know even in this pandemic lisa yes we don't in my network right and the patients i've spoken to and in my network and if i'm honest in my house women have taken on the bulk of the caregiving gc's they're sort of child care duties of course it's not in every case no for sure but i think that would be that that i know has been incredibly stressful for me for many women for sure for sure you know we we got six months of lockdown i thought it was going to lose my mind um but it's hard regardless of pandemics i think and it's really it's really about you being able to deal with stress because there's always going to be something that is stressful in your life right now everything is really much more difficult but there's always going to be stresses for everyone and i think it's really important to start looking at strategies to reduce stress and really make it part of a culture which is it's not part of our culture now in some schools kids are being taught yoga and meditation which i think is phenomenal i wish i had it yeah i learned to meditate by myself actually dr rudy tanzi yeah taught me into that as soon as i moved to new york and that really changed my life i thought he was like kind of excuse me i didn't do a scientist so were you skeptical this is interesting that as a scientist you were scared oh my god that's great yeah for sure yoga i love both and they have an incredible incredible beneficial impact on the health of my brain for sure but also now we have actual clinical studies showing that they really change the functionality of your brain if you do it consistently enough and according to specific traditions or specific practices and one practice that i describe in the book is the kirtan kriya which is a form of kundalini yoga but is actually a meditation that's been scientifically proven in clinical trials to improve blood flow to the brain reduce cortisol levels and improve memory function specifically in women during midlife and after and it's an 11 minutes meditation that is very you probably i thought yeah yeah i had some kundalini yoga classes last year with my wife actually we had this instructor to come uh every friday evening we'd do that for a while and you know i was i do that meditation as well it's so fascinating for me to hear the skeptical scientist i was you know it's brilliant [Laughter] yeah i'm not into running a motorbike runner but then yes and i think it's fantastic and i think there are tools that may not work for everyone but i i think there are so many different options in so many different forms it's like exercise yeah there's something that will work for you it's just a matter of finding out what you enjoy what you can do consistently over time because if you do it for three days it's not the same as really having a regular practice and i think a lot of people have a hard time putting in the effort with regularity yeah but the beauty about this meditation is that it's literally only 11 minutes 12 10 minutes so there's loads on youtube if people want to follow it you can just look it up on youtube and follow one along and people want to try it i mean lisa look we've not even got into your eight pillars yet and i have about 10 minutes left so i i know my audience is going to love this lisa we'll see when we get through and i might be able to persuade you for a part two at some point because i really think people will enjoy this but the things i thought we'll get through more if we can but i found the the stuff on phytoestrogens and soy yes really interesting i don't think people on my show have heard much about that before so i don't know if you could expand a little bit on those yes so um we were talking about hormonal replacement therapy and which makes total sense right so as a woman you're losing some of your estrogens and the idea is to replace them with estrogens that come from the outside now the source of the estrogen is something that a lot of scientists are looking into because where are these hormones coming from right in the very early formulations of estrogen replacement therapy and still in some formulations today the hormones were coming from the urine of pregnant horses which is not attractive perhaps in some ways but it's a very reasonable source they have to come from something right so they can come from animals or they can come from plants and something that i find very beautiful is that estrogen or estradiol is arguably the most ancient of hormones which means that is shared across all living beings plants animals humans as we also animals that we tend to forget about so what that means is that plants make estrogens they're called phytoestrogens from greek estrogens from plants and they are so bioactive and so easy to share across species that the estrogens made by a flower or a plant really works the same way as the estrogens made in our own body they're just milder the effects are minded they're more gentle so sometimes people wonder and some people are looking into this right now myself included if a diet that includes a lot of phytoestrogens from safe sources could be a gentle replacement to hormonal therapy and the answers from culture probably seems to be probably yes so where are these phytoestrogens coming from the most abundant source is soy and soy is very controversial but like we were talking about before women in asia do not suffer the kind of hot flashes and nice sweats and neurological symptoms of menopause the same way that women do here in industrialized countries it is possible that there's a genetic component it is possible that the high quantity of isoflavones from the soy in their diet could also make it different isoflavones are a very strong source of phytoestrogens yeah now soy here is different it's polluted it's gmo genetically modified is more it's more of an allergenic for us than for asian populations so that may not be the best way to think about phytoestrogens but there are a ton of other foods that contain a different kind of phytoestrogens they're called lignans and those foods are perfectly safe and they're found very often in the mediterranean regions and we know the women on a mediterranean diet have a much lower risk of heart disease heart attacks strokes depression anxiety breast cancer and dementia in women on like a western type diet so there's something about this diet that seems to be quite protective and quite supportive of women's health and the key nutrients are sesame seeds great source of phytoestrogens flaxseeds also great source dried apricots believe it or not for some reason all sorts of legumes especially chickpeas and beans some fruits especially strawberries melon cantaloupe all the sweets and vegetables are really rich in phytoestrogens and they have a whole list because i'm a scientist so i have a whole table in the book with all different sources by group and their bio activity so i think for me personally that's the way i eat and i've done so much research using brain scans where we show quite clearly that if you're like a 50 year old woman your brain looks at least five years younger if you are on a mediterranean diet i'm going to say this again if you're a 50 year old woman on a mediterranean diet your brain looks at least five years younger as compared to a woman who's also 50 years old but who's been on a western diet for most of his life i mean you can see them you can see the brain scans you can see the way the brain doesn't change when you follow a mediterranean style diet and the way your brain literally shrinks at age 50 when you are on a western style diet and do we know obviously you mentioned one component some of those foods that are obviously very prevalent in mediterranean style diets the term mediterranean style diet gets miscentricated quite a lot and lots of people use it to make the yeah to make different kinds of foods and so i wonder and i appreciate you've written a whole book brain food on different foods for your brain which which is well worth reading and said lots of practical advice in that and lots of specific foods but you know is there some general broad principles of what you're talking about when you say the mediterranean diet yes and i think again it's important to say mediterranean style diet because otherwise it becomes really impractical even for me i can't find the same foods here that i used to eat easily growing up but the point is plant-centric so vegetables some fruit and grains and legumes are really the focus of the diet when we use condiments they're more like unrefined vegetable oils like extra virgin olive oil flax oil flax oil is incredible for vegans i know there are so many vegans in england and a lot of your followers are vegan as well i am on and off vegan forever flax oil is the oil with the highest concentration of polyunsaturated fatty acids even more than extra virgin olive oil and one concern about veganism is that unless you take supplements your omega-3s could be quite low because especially the kind of omega-3s that are so important for brain health to the dha because plants contain aha that the brain is to convert into dha and up to 70 percent is lost yeah in the conversion so just one tablespoon of flax oil is pretty much more than half of all the omega-3s that you need for the day wow so just the tape because i was very excited when i found out i did a lot of research on that but that's a great practical tip for people yeah do you pick great practice because that's something people can do right now if they you know after this podcast they can actually order something and actually start bringing it into their diet every day right yes it's very yellow it tastes really nice it's great with salads so why not that's a good tip yeah also fish is a big part of the mediterranean diet whereas meat and dairy products are considered more like a treat like an occasional treat it's a very flexible diet it's a very reasonable diet it's not you know it is not in any way suggesting deprivation or food restriction which i find very sensible as a scientist we always talk about diversity in the diet has been real key to health [Music] the whole invention of cereal was one of the biggest scams propagated on humanity i mean when you think about it was kellogg and others we wanted to take you know grains and turn them into cereals but the you know the cereals we're eating now are mostly sugar uh you know like 75 sugar some of them in terms when you look at the carbohydrate they might have six forms of sugar in them and they are what we think of quote is a healthy breakfast when we feed our kids you know cereal and milk is a good breakfast but it's really toxic and it leaves them nutritionally depleted it makes them gain weight it causes them to probably not be able to focus and you know often be hungry before lunch so i i often joke i say i'm a serial killer i don't think we should eat we need protein and fat for breakfast not not sugar for a family or a parent listing mark who thinks okay i get this i need to i want to change how i feed my children and feed myself but they feel it's too hard right they feel i don't know where to start because this is how we've been doing things for the last four or five years yeah dr hyman tell me where to start what would you say to them well it's like anything else you know if you don't know how to do it it's hard right but last night i had some friends over and um you know i was busy up until they showed up and um you know i threw some sweet potatoes in the oven an hour and a half before they came let them cook and then we made really simple salad i made some stir-fried mushrooms and some grass-fed steak and literally the whole thing took 15 minutes and it was super easy so i think it's really about skill and it's about knowledge it's about understanding how to navigate the grocery store and navigate your kitchen to have the right tools in place to have things ready and easy for you so i think i think it's often you know we don't we don't know the skills of how to cut vegetables or how to shop or how to prepare food or how to cook and so we really have lost these arts and it's important people to start to learn them back but once you do it's really pretty simple and i you know i have no problem feeding myself really well and have for years even in a very very busy life so i think uh in the book i do talk about how do you how do you make it easy how do you make the habit stick how do you make it affordable and i think the messaging that we've gotten is that it's it's complicated it's difficult it's time consuming it's expensive to eat well and that's just not true i mean you look at the data on affordability and whole foods you know maybe maybe it costs 50 cents more day other studies show it may not cost any more at all so i think we have to sort of understand that the propaganda of you deserve a break today you know you know leave the cooking to us you know outsourcing our cooking to corporations is killing us and we need to we need to take back our kitchens they've been hijacked by the food industry and we need to start enjoying enjoying at home and i think you know covet has had that silver lining a lot of people are starting to cook at home and you know people are getting a little trouble because they're they're not necessarily thinking they want to eat healthy stuff they want to bake but you don't want to have that covered 19 or the quarantine 15 pounds you want to you want to make sure you stay metabolically healthy because if you don't you're more risk for getting sick from covet and more risk for dying so i think you know we we have to sort of get over this myth that it's difficult time consuming hard and and just understand that there are some basic skills you need to learn and it's not hard i mean i had a family of five who lived in a trailer disability food stamps never cooked a meal in their life all seriously overweight father was 42 on dialysis from kidney failure because of diabetes i mean type 2 diabetes at 42. uh and the sun was you know 100 pounds overweight it was pretty pretty bad scene desperate to do the right thing desperate to lose weight he couldn't get a new kidney if he didn't lose the weight so they were all struggling and um they never cooked a meal so i said let's let me not give you a lecture but let's let's go to your house and let's go to um shopping let's get some simple food and i give them a guide called good food on a tight budget we made you know food from from inexpensive ingredients that are whole foods right you have to have a 70 grass-fed ribeye steak but you can have you know ground turkey that's organic so we had ground turkey chili we had stir-fried asparagus we made a salad roasted some sweet potatoes they didn't have knives or cutting boards and within within a few minutes i realized this is fun and two when they ate it they were like this is delicious and someone's like do you cook like this with your family every night and i'm like yeah and then and then i was like i don't know what's gonna happen so i gave them a guide on how to eat well for less and then i gave them my cookbook with some recipes and i said you guys can do this and on the way home i bought them with cutting boards and knives and i sent them to their house online and they first week she texted me back we lost 18 pounds the mother lost 100 pounds in the first year the sun lost 50 gained it back and went to work at the bojangles which is a bad fast food store but then ultimately end up lost 138 pounds going to college in medical school i wrote him a lot of recommendation because of a simple meal that we cooked together that changed their lives right just think about that it's not like you need you know 10 years of culinary education just here's how you chop things here's here's the principles of stir-frying baking roasting like it's just really simple and and it was just uh it was just so so powerful for me to have that insight that people don't really know it's not a lack of desire it's a lack of knowledge and skill and again it's not that hard to to get those skills so i i think uh you know we're really only one meal away from a real food revolution jamie oliver really has talked a lot about this you know if we can just get a couple people to cook everything is going to change and i agree yeah it really is something isn't it this skill of cooking that you know until i don't know when it was when we probably couldn't have lived without the skill of cooking until i don't know 30 40 years ago if you couldn't cook you probably you didn't have access to takeaways and um all these these cafes to give you that food you you had to figure it out and i i do want to i touched on this in in my last bookmark i touched on this that the rise of the influencer and the instagram influence there and again nothing wrong with that at all but sometimes i feel that people who don't know how to cook and they're a bit scared and bit intimidated and then they follow food influences and they see this gorgeous meal that that is picture perfect so we think they just whip that up in their kitchen we don't realize that you know a lot of uh food photography you know is set up over two three hours to actually get all the lights right so it actually you know looks the right way and then they think that their standard um leg of lamb broccoli and potatoes is like somehow a failure compared to what they see around them so there's there's that myth to sort of bust as well i think absolutely you know it's so funny that it is it is uh you know listen if you want to be a five-star chef fine a michelin chef i'm not looking for that i'm looking to make simple ingredients into delicious food and it just doesn't have to be hard it just doesn't have to be hard it's if you get real food and good ingredients the food itself just tastes good you know i just made a beet salad i just took the and beets aren't that expensive i just cut the beets boiled them i chopped them up and then put in like olive oil lemon dill parsley cilantro salt and pepper it was just delicious beet salad super simple and the beet greens i chopped them up stir fry them with little onions and ginger and have this beautiful you know beet green side dish of cooked greens um and it's easy like it's just you don't need fancy recipes i mean i've written five cookbooks but like honestly it's like i don't really use a recipe book it's just once you learn the it's like learning the scales you know once you're a musician you've gotten really good at the scales you can play anything right so i think that's sort of how it how it works with cooking as well man we're having this conversation at my dinner time mark and you talking about those foods i can i can feel my stomach juices just uh uh-huh yeah i know you're just woken up it's morning time but i'm i'm getting super hungry as you say that so me too i'm like i'm like it's breakfast time it is breakfast time but um you mentioned kovitz and um you know looking after your diets and the way you live was important 18 months ago was very very important already it's almost been heightened in the last 12 months in terms of what we're seeing around the world and it in in some ways this could be the biggest wake-up call to say hey look you know what it is time to really start putting our well-being our health our lifestyles first i mean what's your experience being of that and you know can you talk about some of those real risks with covid and how your food choices how um you know how it can impact that potentially yeah i mean i i i would hope that we're gonna have a wake-up call around this random but i'm not hopeful i don't know what it's like in the uk but in america it's like crickets here except for bill maher who screams on television about how we need to face the fact that the reason in america were overwhelmed by copa is because we're metabolically so unhealthy 88 of americans have poor metabolic health which means that they're like in the spectrum of pre-diabetes which means they have belly fat which means they have inflammation and so when the covet lands on them it's almost nine out of 10 americans they're like a sitting duck and so it's like putting gasoline on a fire and all of a sudden you get this cytokine storm that ends up killing people and and wherever you are in that spectrum we know that the poor metabolic health is a driver uh for for for really bad outcomes with that said people don't understand that within a very short time a couple of weeks maybe you can really radically reverse your poor metabolic health and i'll just give you a quick example you know we had a type type by 2 diabetic on insulin for 10 years heart failure angina liver kidneys failing i mean just she was a mess she was had a body mass index of 43 which you know normal is under 25 over 30 is obese she was in the severely obese category uh 65 years old and um taking insulin every day and tons of medications uh within three days of changing her diet like three days she was off her insulin completely within three months she was off all her medications and her metabolic parameters were all normal in blood sugar cholesterol blood pressure everything kidneys liver and so it doesn't it might take 30 years to get there it can be very quick to get back and even if you don't lose all the weight i mean if you're for example a gastric bypass patient and you have diabetes you get your gastric bypass within a week or so your diabetes is gone you're you're still very overweight because it takes a little longer to lose weight but your diabetes is gone so your metabolic health level of inflammation all can change very quickly in response to your diet so i wouldn't feel discouraged if you have issues i would double down on eating what we've talked about today on the show the pekin diet or just a similar whole foods philosophy approach and and it will have a profound effect on your immune system i just wanted to touch on you one of the principles is around habit change one of the chapters which is super interesting and there's a few things in there i really likes but one of the things that you wrote was friend power is more important than willpower and you shared how at the cleveland clinic how you guys use groups and how powerful that can be and so you know for people listening who have tried to change before struggle to do it by themselves i think this could be quite a helpful tip for them right absolutely i mean i think you know um for years i studied the minutiae of functional medicine i was sort of a nerd about the biochemistry the genomics the physiology the microbiome i just wanted to know every little aspect of our cellular functioning and bio all this sort of nerdy stuff and i was really good at getting people healthy if they did what i tell them to do but often you know we know in medicine and half of people don't feel the prescriptions they get and half that dude don't take them so the doctor writes a prescription for statin 25 of people take it and 75 don't so that's not a good odds and i think in in medicine and nutrition and what we're doing is maybe even harder so uh you know i had this epiphany a number of years ago well over 10 years ago when i went to haiti and met paul farmer who um was able to deal with tb and aids in one of the worst places in terms of health care and poverty in the world haiti not by better drugs or surgery or technology but just by the power of community he called it accompaniment and he trained thousands of community health workers to help each other accompany each other their health and make sure they took their medications because we know how to cure tbn aids or essentially treat them using the right cocktails and medications but these people didn't have a watch they didn't have running water they didn't have they often a place to be i mean so it was dealing with a lot of these these fundamental we call structural violence issues the social economic and political conditions that drive disease we see that in this country you know with food swamps and food deserts i'm sure it's like that in the uk too and i think we we have a tremendous um sort of deficit of understanding how how we really can environment that supports people to health and so the big epiphany for me was okay i know how to change biology but i'm going to fail until i understand how to change behavior and so so i realized at the same time when paul was treating infectious disease using this this model i was like wait a minute um i said wait a minute you know chronic disease is also contagious right obesity is also contagious you're far more likely to be overweight if your friend friend's overweight then if your family is overweight we know that that you're social for you or maybe more important your genetic threads in determining your health outcomes we just know this from the science so if that's true you know if you're bad behavior uh it goes along with with uh you know bad habits in other words if all your friends are you know eating at mcdonald's and smoking and drinking beer and having coca-cola you're probably going to be doing the same thing but if all your friends are you know drinking green juices and going to yoga well you might be doing that so so there's a tremendous amount of peer pressure that that we all are subjected to because we're social animals uh it's how we as how we live we have to be social or else we would die as humans we just we're not we're not like a a wild you know lion that can roam around by himself or whatever and just eat whatever responsibility we're we're dependent on each other and so what we know is that it's much more effective to use friend power than than to use willpower when you want to change behavior and particularly for chronic disease so so i kind of had this experiment that we did with this church in southern california where we got 15 000 people to sign up for a six-week healthy living program sort of faith-based wellness program and it was striking what happened people just did so well they lost over the course of a year they lost a quarter of a million pounds probably like i don't know how many stone that is but it's a lot of weight and i think we we we saw that the power of these community-based solutions was so massive and it wasn't even an expert they had these groups that they had in the church that were met every week to support each other so they would mean six to eight people and it would have these little learning sessions and we just sort of substituted in the curriculum for the healthy living and they support each other they encourage each other they held each other accountable they had jogging for jesus you know and like all kinds of stuff that they did uh to actually do stuff together um and that was really was an insight for me that was like wait a minute this is how we have to change medicine and so at cleveland clinic we're doing the same thing we're about to publish our data in the british medical journal actually uh soon where we show that that the the group visits the community support was more effective than one-on-one visits with a functional message doctor which were more effective than with a traditional doctor so we've got some interesting data about the power of this model to really accelerate change it was the speed of recovery and getting better but also the adherence and the the level of change so i i'm excited about using this model and we're trying to scale this up around the country and and use this power of community i call it love is medicine so food is medicine love is also medicine yeah i love it mark mark you you've just you know you're someone who has been dedicated to the cause of empowering and inspiring people both patients and physicians all over the world for so many years i i can't imagine what it's been like for you you know i'm sure you've faced all kinds of opposition at various times but you know you're driven in that mission and you know it's it's fantastic to see it's very inspiring i know for many um you know for many of my colleagues or myself we see what you have been doing and how you have paved the way for many of us to start spreading our messages i want to publicly acknowledge you for that and say thank you um and just to finish off mark you know it's as i say it's the pinky night is a brilliant book i think it really helps to simplify nutrition for people uh some really some core principles there um i always love to leave my listeners with some actionable tips so we we covered a lot of ground today um phytonutrients we covered the climate regenerative farming kids all kinds of things but just to bring it all down for people at the ends this is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of life what are some of your top tips for people listening to the show right now well i try to synthesize this at the end of the book and you know sort of getting started and it's just some simple things that are easy to remember first when you're going to eat something ask yourself a simple question did god make this or did man make it if you don't believe in god is it a nature mate so did god make an avocado yeah did he make a twinkie no if if if god made it you can eat it if nature made it you could eat it but if man made it you probably don't want to eat it right the second is a similar idea is you know try not to eat food with labels or if it has a label make sure you read very carefully what the ingredients are if it's broccoli it just says broccoli if it's a piece of chicken it's chicken if it's an egg it's an egg if it's an almond it's an almond it doesn't have a label or nutrition facts and so most of the food i like to use without labels now sometimes you know if you want to buy a package of nuts it might say a label on it and it has your little nutrition facts on it might say salt or something or if you buy a can of sardines i might say olive oil and sardines and salt that's okay but just try to avoid foods with labels the next the next kind of principle is if you don't have it in your kitchen cupboard or you can't pronounce it you probably won't want to eat it right so if you have a jar of butylated hydroxytoluene in your cupboard that you sprinkle on your stir fries probably not but it's otherwise known as bht banned in most of europe but available here in the united states and it's a it's a carcinogenic preservative so you don't want to eat that stuff also when you go shopping don't go down the middle of the aisles stick around the outside where there's just real food vegetables and the produce and the dairy in the meat section uh if you're eating just focus on plants like i i always focus on two or three servings of plant dishes at each meal whether it's just serb asparagus or mushrooms or salad so last night i had beets we had mushrooms that had salad and we have sweet potato so we like four four vegetable dishes and you know a small piece of of meat on the side so that's where meat is a condiment or a condom meat um and fat is so important to remember to eat good fats olive oil avocados are my favorite but there's other good fats too make sure you eat a lot of phytonutrients you want to pick your medicines and your foods so like learn about some of the colors and what they have and try to eat like the rainbow as a way of getting phytochemicals it's an easy thing to do and you know enjoy nuts and seeds and and and certain beans are fine so i just enjoy your food i mean it's just got to be fun and delicious and pleasurable so i wouldn't really um get crazy about finding a particular thing i don't i don't count calories i don't count carb grams fat grams protein grams i don't i don't think any of that i just think about what i eat if you focus on what you eat and quality you don't have to worry about how much you eat literally i mean i could eat you know a giant bowl of salad so i couldn't move and nothing would happen right so i think i think you can you can find out what your natural rhythm is in your biology by just getting unreal food and then and then actually just focusing on quality and if you focus on quality all the rest takes care of itself diseases weight metabolism all that yeah love it mark if you enjoyed that conversation i think you are going to love the one that i had with professor tim spector all about foods it's right there so give it a click and let me know what you think if you snack a couple of hours before a meal your metabolic response to that meal is poorer than if you didn't snack okay just say that again so i think that's really important

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 51,876

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: VT7oGNSFjOc

Length: 114min 5sec (6845 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021