Exercise myths busted: Practical steps to sustain your health | Harvard Professor Daniel Lieberman

it surprises me just how much people think it's just normal to become less active as they get older but also people don't understand just how important it is to stay active as you get older for me exercise is definitely a chore one of the myths is that our ancestors were built like Arnold Schwarzeneggar and all of that's false all of that is false we live in a world however where we no longer have to be physically active so we have to exercise that's really interesting so when people say they hate to exercise it's because welcome to Zoe science and nutrition where World leading scientists explain how their research can improve your [Music] health I'm your host Jonathan wolf founder and CEO of Zoe today we discover that many of the things we've been told about exercise are a myth we learned that it's normal not to enjoy exercise and how to overcome this problem how by learning from our ancestors Harvard Professor Daniel liberman is a world-renowned expert in evolutionary biology and anth anthropology beyond the walls of his lab Daniel has traveled from Africa to Greenland to study non-westernized populations and their physical activities in his latest New York Times bestseller exercised Daniel brings together a decade of his research to debunk common myths about fitness and health you are in for a treat Daniel thank you for joining me today my pleasure and it's fun to do this in person um now we have a tradition that we always do on this show which we start with a quick fire round of questions which in general professors don't love because the rules are you can say yes or no or if you have to a one- sentence answer are you willing to give it a go let's try all right did our ancestors exercise no see that wasn't so bad is sitting bad for us no is it normal to dislike exercise yes do we need to do 10,000 steps per day H not sure okay should we take it easy as we get older no and lastly can someone start exercising late in life and still benefit absolutely that wasn't so bad was it no so I have one that you can have a whole sentence for what's the biggest myth about exercise that you've discovered through your research well I think it's the one that you just asked which is um this idea that it's sort of normal as you get older to less active and um I think um of all the myths that I've been interested in that one is not only uh I think that surprises me just how much people think it's just normal to become less active as they get older but also people don't understand just how important it is to stay active as you get older uh to keep you know for for a thousand reasons not the least of which is your your your mental health and your physical health hi I hope you're enjoying the show so far and learning a lot about why what you thought about EX might not entirely be true now if you're not already a regular listener I hope you feel like you might come back it would mean a lot to me if you hit the Subscribe button so you know whenever a new episode arrives this podcast is an adree labor of love sustained by people like you choosing to listen to us okay back to the show I thought I was brought up with these stories that you know if we were living you know in the African Savannah then the young people ran around and like killed the wilderbeast and the hunting and the old people sat around at home but they were wise and old and that was sort of their job so I think that is definitely the um you're laughing but I think that's very much the story that I was brought up yeah the kind of the rard Kipling view of of human human beh I'm worried now that I have the Roger Kipling view that doesn't sound good but that is I think that is sort of the the idea that you were old and that the value of surviving was your wisdom and of course you wouldn't do anything physical You' just sort of you know be supported by these young strong people well wisdom is is important and that's certainly one of the values of getting old and and for sure wisdom that Elders impart to youngers is important but um but they also work hard I think that's really interesting and um I really enjoyed the book which I was reading on the plane over and it made me think about exercise quite a bit and for me exercise is definitely a chore so I work out two to three times a week because I've been convinced by whole variety of scientists that you know this is really important for my health but it's definitely not fun and the pleasure I take in it is at the point that it's done I'm like oh I feel really good I've now done it but I'm definitely not taking a lot of pleasure During the period of you know lifting these weights and you know I know that's one of the things you talk about in this this book along with a whole series of other myths so I'm really looking forward to digging into that before we talk about how we sort of learn from our ancestors and how you know your own research has looked at both both like what they might have done in the past and modern hunter gatherers though I'd love to start actually with just a really simple question so is exercise good for us and if so why do most of us hate it well to answer that question let's start with a definition all right so exercise is a form of physical activity so physical activity is just moving right you know climbing the stairs to get to my office you know making breakfast whatever that's all forms of physical activity and exercise is a special form of physical activity where which is discretionary voluntary physical activity that we do for the sake of health and fitness ra because I need to get to the the top of the house in order to pick something up yeah and and if you think about exercise that way and and actually exercise comes from the Latin word that you know has to do with hoing you know there's reason when we you you do your maths exercises right we call them exercises you're not using anything other than your brain there right but it's a modern behavior right nobody uh until very recently exercised under s of discretionary voluntary reasons for the sake of health and fitness is that right you say that as if it's obvious but weren't there weren't lots of people doing exercises in the Roman times or the well that's still recent as far as I'm concerned right so for the your idea recent is is is is we're yeah I mean I'm talking prehistory right for for millions and millions of years people were Physically Active for two reasons and two reasons only when it was necessary in other words in order to to get food or to avoid being somebody else's food right or when it was rewarding think about play I mean children in all cultures play adults Play and play of course is very useful for all kinds of reasons but our ancestors were not doing exercise in order to make sure that when they went hunting they would be successful no never um so again you say that but that's really interesting because we think now you need to do lots of exercise in order to go and be successful at you know if you were going to be going to have to run in a race you think well you need to do lots of exercise in order to be successful at the race but our ancestor didn't need to do that in order to catch the no yeah I mean there's many ways to answer that question but let me just say that the reason I started this book actually they really sometimes you know people make up these epiphanies right but I actually really had one when I was doing some research in northern Mexico studying a Native American population that's famous for its running the tumara and I was collecting data I was being a Good anthropologist had my clipboard with all my questions that I worked out in advance and talked to ethnographer friends to make sure that I was doing it in the right proper way when I was measuring their feet and measuring their biomechanics and doing all kinds of stuff just me and a and a guy who ID hired to help me travel around and we were sleeping on the floors of Pueblo and all that sort of stuff ever I asked people about training that's what you're talking about I got these really like conf confused answers right people didn't understand the question and I had a translator and finally there was this one old guy I was I was interviewing um I'll remember him intensely and he was a a shaman famous for um for his longdistance running too and so I could tell my translator was asking my usual question you know how do you train for running and he looked at me and I didn't even need a translator I could say like why would anybody run if they didn't have to and that's that's what he said and you know this is a guy who runs like 100 mile races right he doesn't train his life is his training he's very Physically Active he walks long distances occasionally when he was young he used to run in order to hunt but the idea of getting up in the morning like this morning I ran about five or six miles right just for the sake of running five or six miles the various places I go to do research and and I when I run in the morning they laugh at me they think it's hilarious and it makes sense because most people in most parts of the world for most of our evolutionary history struggled to get enough food right it was it's hard right and I spent what about 500 calories this morning running my five miles if you're struggling to get enough calories wasting 500 calories in the morning just for no purpose whatsoever is a really you know it's it's not a good idea it's right it's maladaptive playing on the other hand when you're a child you learn skills you develop capacity you you learn social skills there's all kinds of good things that come out of play um and play and adults continue to do that but play is kind of a special form of physical activity I don't think of play as exercise it doesn't at least fit my definition of exercise so does that mean that just the normal lives that our ancestors would have lived was in in essence sort of all the training they required in in order to them be able to do that run or that chase or whatever so they didn't need to do exercise because just their normal life was providing the necessary training yes they were they were very Physically Active right and and physical activity uh promotes a response by your body which um not only you know improves or maintains your performance ability but also has all kinds of health benefits you know the average Hunter gather walks 10 to 15 km every day every single day no there are no weekends there's no holidays there's no retirement there's there's nothing they do it day in day out for their whole lives and they're they're often digging they're they're sometimes they have to run they have to climb trees they have to lift things you know um um uh their their lives involve a reasonable amount not a a huge amount but a reasonable amount of physical activity um and that gets them basically just enough calories to make it to the next day and they they occasionally do things for fun that are physical they dance but dancing of course is very important for helping you find a mate and having fun and for social reasons again it's fun right y but but but no Hunter gather I've ever met or heard of or seen of in the ethnographic literature has ever gone to find some rocks and then just simply lift them LIF them in order to be strong enough for their other tasks yeah or or go for a f mile run in the morning whatever that's just it's inconceivable I love that because it's definitely at odds with I think a lot of what people think maybe that's helps to answer I guess the second part of my question which is if this if exercise because you also said exercise is good for us I then was like so why do most of us hate it does this tie into the fact that actually historically we never needed to do the exercise yeah well I mean again remember physic it's physical activity that's good for us exercise is a kind of physical activity but if you if you're a you know a post Postman and you walk around you know delivering male that's physical activity it's not exercise and it's and it's good for them they're one of the very famous early actually the first major study to show that physical activity is good for your health was done in London on bus conductors and compared the bus conductors you know the people walked up and down the bus collecting tickets definitely a long time ago CU been one of them for a long time I remember when I was a child going on buses in London and there was this man with this little thing that used to do that right and then there was the the driver right and the driver sat in a seat all day long driving the bus and the rate of heart attacks in the drivers was twice that of the conductors twice twice and the only difference was the bus driver was sitting down all day and was walking around was walking around and then there was a follow-up study because they thought well okay maybe drivers are really stressed because they deal with London traffic so they compared postal workers in London with the people who worked in the post office who who who managed them the the administrators right and again exactly the same result right so that was the that was back in the 1950s right and since then of course we've had you know I couldn't even count the number number of studies which show how important physical activity is for health but again that's physical activity not exercise but if you're already a very physically active person and you don't need that much physical activity for your for the benefits just a a moderate amount is more than sufficient really to promote health and you're struggling to get enough food which is what the case was for hunter gatherers and and most subsistence Farmers the people I work with in Africa for example are struggling to get enough food going you know running like I run maybe 30 to 50 miles a week that's that's you know that's a lot of calories and if you're stressed for calories that's a really bad idea I mean that's a you're actually putting your family at risk so when people say that we hate to exercise it's because we're asking people to do something that is intrinsically unnatural uh and the example I love to point out is if you ever go to an airport or a mall or a subway stop or whatever where there's an escalator next to a Stairway um um I was just in in the subway here in Boston going up to South Station and I got off the subway car and everybody filed and waited in line to go up the escalator and I was one of the few people who took the the stairs because I have to otherwise I'm a hypocrite right and did you take the stairs because you know it's good for you but you hate doing it anyway or are you in this exception for some reason no I don't like taking the stairs likeing the stair but if anybody C look I'm Mr like I'm Mr you should be physically active anybody catches me on the escalator I'm in trouble right so you're in the same world as me it's what saying you don't it's not you enjoy it you're just trying to override natural tendency to basically be lazy and not not do this just like you know most people if you put a piece of cake in front of me and an apple right I'm going to want the cake right and I have to override my instincts to eat the cake cake rather than the apple and um if nobody's looking I might have the cake right and I do sometimes meet people who seem to really enjoy exercise and they do like these extreme things like Iron Man or Ultra marathons or all the rest of it so are you saying that they're just a bit weird which I've always suspected well I think it's more complicated than that I mean I enjoy I I usually rarely enjoy starting uh exercise okay but I usually am glad I've done it when it's over and that's what you mentioned at the beginning right so I mean this morning was no exception I there was a beautiful morning here in Boston it was perfect weather could not have been nicer for running and I was like dithering and complaining and finally my wife said come on just go time for you to go and you know I didn't enjoy the first mile very much I never do um but then I settled in and I enjoyed myself and by the time I came home I was I was glad I did it but I've done it enough to know that um I get some benefit and I'm reasonably fit that it's not a horrible chore right but if I'm unfit and struggling to exercise right if I'm overweight or or or haven't been exercised in a long time it's hard and and we shouldn't make people feel bad for not liking it um because it's actually normal and we shouldn't make people feel bad for for feeling like they you know being inhibited or or or or you know you know you have to overcome some inertia and you're saying that is deeply rooted in us it's actually our body is sort of evolved to protect those you know protect our calories not waste energy on doing this exercise so you know whenever you do do this exercise you sort of you deserve a big round of applause is what I'm hearing like you're sort of overcoming something that is actually natural to say well don't waste your energy doing this because after all if you really needed to do this you'd go and do it anyway because you won't get any food or whatever so at which point you wouldn't need this strong desire to do exercise you'd just be like well I have to go and walk that far in order to get this food otherwise I'm going to go hungry and that is definitely worse is that yeah I mean I think you've made it more complicated than necessary I mean again just to to simplify it it's not really complicated right we evolved to be physically active for two reasons and two reasons only full stop when it was necessary or rewarding okay and so if we want to help people exercise we have to either make it necessary or Waring or both so if I'm going to meet a friend for a run I don't necessarily even think about it as exercise hey I'm gonna go meet I'm gonna go meet my friend Elena which I do every Friday morning and we run together and it's fun we chat about the week and this what Etc and I don't think about it so much as exercise it's my you know weekly meeting with my friend and neighbor Elena or maybe I have a coach right and my coach says you know training for Boston Marathon on Tuesday I want you to do this he's kind of made it necessary for me right and I've signed up for this race and I better damn well train otherwise I'm going to be humiliated or have a horrible time so we use carrots we use sticks but um but it's really very simple you know we evolve to be physically active either because it's necessary rewarding now we live in this world where people know that it's good for them to be physically active AK exercise because they don't otherwise you know they sit and chairs all day long and either they somehow have the willpower to overcome that that distaste for what they're doing or they find ways to make it fun that's brilliant so one way is that suddenly instead of this being unpleasant there's this way that switches it to being fun and actually you talk about dancing in the book and I was sort of strupped by that that in my mind I enjoy dancing that's definitely not exercise that's fun and then you point out well actually it's quite a lot of exercise really but because you switched to think you don't think about it like that it's just fun and therefore you you just respond to it in a different way yeah I mean that the tarar I was mentioning earlier are famous for their like endurance dancing people everybody talks about their endurance running they have dances I've been there I I can't keep up with them and they'll dance for 24 hours 24 hours yes they just go on and on and on and on there's a lot of drinking going on it's it's a party they they're having a great time right and that of course is obviously training right um of course it's not they don't think of it as training and of course it helps them because dancing is jumping and running is actually just jumping from one leg to another that's interesting now you've already touched on a few of these but I really wanted to ask um you know you've visited a lot of these sort of remote tribes around um the world to to understand sort of how they live their lives and I guess could you help our listeners to understand like why do you do that and what does it um what does it help us to to understand well you know I think it's normal to think that your life is normal right yeah you know I think it's normal a child that's absolutely how we all think is it sure I mean I think it's normal to get in a this metal box and travel across the city and get in a metal tube and fly around from One content to another and eat breakfast cereal that comes in a box and we could go on and talk about all the the very modern things that we think are normal but we didn't evolve that way right we evolved U to be Hunter gathers for almost our entire evolutionary history we're Hunter gathers and then for thousands of years we were subsistence Farmers before the industrial era if you want to understand how bodies work and and and um how physical activity and diet and all these things you know affect us you can't just study people in Cambridge Massachusetts or London or or you know Toronto or where have you you have to go out into the the rest of the world which is how people you know other people use their bodies right there's a a colleague of mine Joe Henrik who's written this wonderful paper called the weirdest people in the world weird for him is Western educated industrialized rich and Democratic it's actually only about 10% of the world fits that category um a colleague of mine actually did a study where we showed that over 90% or approximately 90% of all the biomedical data psychological data Medical Data comes from Europe and North America little bit of Australia we're generalizing about human beings from a very tiny unusual frankly weird sample so if you want to understand how and why we are the way we are how our bodies evolved to work what it's like to be physically active how physical activity functions and aging and you have to you can't just study um people in the in the west you need to travel elsewhere and so that's why we do it it's interesting we we've covered on the podcast um some scientists looking specifically at the gut microbiome and um that's obviously something Zoe is very interested in and one the things they talk about is sort of a bit similar to this which is when you look at the gut microbiome of the people you're talking as weird people so sort of westernized um industrial that this microbiome is incredibly shrunken compared to the microbiome that they see elsewhere and it sounds like you're saying more broadly in a sense our whole lives and how we understand things like we need you're saying we need to step away from how we might be living in the west because actually these sort of pre-industrialized um environments are a much better way to understand really what is the our bodies are built and how what would really be healthy for us yeah I'm G give you a simple example like what did you carry today a small rock sack exactly so that's weird right um and is it weird yes I mean in most populations in most of the world people spend much of their day carrying heavy things they carry babies they carry food they if they hunt an animal they have to carry it back to Camp they carry water I mean if you and I want water we just go and turn a little tap right out it comes right that's in that's incredibly recent right if you lived in London just 150 years ago you'd have to go to the local well and pump it and then carry it back to your you know Cola filled water as well right so you know we don't carry anything anymore right and so we we think that uh how backs function almost all the data we have about back biomechanics is on on people who sit in chairs all day long and never carry anything and if you want really want to understand how the back functions and how physical activity affects the bank back you need to go to places like where I go like for example we're working in Randa this summer where people have to carry absolutely everything it's really interesting so what you're saying is what we think of as normal which we just pick up from looking everybody around us like it's normal not really to carry very much is actually weirdly abnormal and not the way that our bodies are built or evolv because actually it's never been like that until just very recently in a small part of the world yeah to go to a supermarket get a shopping cart put boxes of food in it carry the you know shopping cart then you might carry the bag to your car um and that's about it right that's everything about that from from going to the supermarket to the way you carry Foods around the supermarket all of that is completely abnormal so I've never been to any of these places and many of our listeners haven't so what is it that is surprising that is different because there's some things that you know we we understand obviously that that environment is quite different from ours but the example you just gave is like oh I'd never thought about what is it that is sort of surprising that is that you're taking away um about how we lived versus I don't know how to answer that question because Ian there's so many things that are different about our world I think actually what surprises me the most is how human beings are just human beings right people are lazy everywhere people are have you know jealousies and whatever we often tend to romanticize the past and and and and you know think about ah the good old times when we were farmers or hunter gatherers and they have tough lives too I mean I think um I think the more I travel around around the world and and work and live with other cultures the more I realize how you know scratch underneath the surface there are many things about humans that are the same but but but also of course there are plenty of things that are very different our diet of course is very different I mean think about like after this interview you're going to think um I I'm hungry what should I have for dinner should we have Italian or should I get pizza or should I go for Chinese food or vegetarian restaurant or we just think it's normal to choose what you're going to eat if you're a a farmer or a hunter gather you don't choose what you eat you eat what you have right you eat what you grow we think it's normal to you know wear shoes and and to exercise and and to sit in chairs all day long and to not carry things I mean I could go on and we've many people are just surprised when I you know mentioned the water that like like they they don't they must know at some level but they just haven't really thought about how just how our lives have been transformed by by Plumbing I think that's right I think if you don't experience this it's really interesting what you said I'm still thinking about the carrying which is the bit I think that I'm really struck by because I think I'm so used to this idea that you don't really need to carry things around very much and that therefore you have to do exercise where you carry heavy iron weights around because I've been told that's really important for my health and you saying well you're only doing that because until very recently of course you'd be carrying lots of heavy things around just to function so it's sort of like we're having to substitute these things that would have just happened as part of our Lives you know even funnier you probably actually spent money buying heavy iron things to carry them I mean that's hilarious right I mean imagine explaining that to Hunter gather right or to to your great great great great great grandparents who are farmers somewhere in England or wherever they would think you're the silliest person on the planet I mean I think just explain it to my father to be honest things I think he has the same attitude as the hunter gathers who were describing about exercise he's like well why would you do that if you don't have to so I'm not sure I have to go that far back I'd love to talk about some of the sort of therefore the myths of exercise that that come out of this I think there's many different things that you you've learned out of this experience but it seems like one of things that you've you've taken from a lot of these different people that you've been to and I think a lot of other scientific literature if I understand is there are quite a few things that we say today about exercise that not only aren't well backed up by science but might actually be completely myths where would you start what's the thing that you would um there are so many hard to know well I started the book off actually with uh the first section of the book is on inactivity because if you want to understand activity you also need to understand inactivity there s of two sides of the same coin and I think one of the um you know one of the myths is that our ancestors were incredibly Physically Active you know they were built like Arnold Schwarzenegger and incredibly strong and Incredibly fast and worked really hard and never sat in a chair ever and you know slept always eight hours and all that all of that's false um all of that is false all of that is false so uh first of all our our ancestors or Hunter gathers even farmers are strong by many people stands but they're not super strong because after all muscle is expensive right if you if you build weights and you lift weights to bulk up you're going to add a lot of muscle mass but muscle is really expensive tissue there's a reason we have this use it or lose it physiology is that if you don't need it you don't want to pay for the extra calories right you're saying that as you increase the muscles you need extra calories just to support those existing muscles yeah you you spend a good you know 30 40% of your metabolism just paying for your muscles just sitting there not even using them they're very to sustain them in existence yeah they're expensive tissues so you you you want enough you want to be economical you want enough but not too much right so because if you have too much muscle and then you don't get any food then you might end up dying is that what was saying I mean so the basic fundamental principle behind life is you eat food and then you have babies right that's the equation of Life Food in babies out that's all Evolution actually cares about which is kind of depressing but nonetheless that's a little depressing okay keep that's that's what we're about all all organisms ultimately are about bringing in energy using that energy to reproduce and create other versions of themselves and we are sadly actually no different right but energy is a constrained limited resource for most organisms and was until recently and still for many people today still the case so anytime you spend a on on running you know in the morning or or or or paying for your unnecessary muscle that's energy you're not spending on reproduction we call this energy allocation Theory right so so spending energy that's on on on on say extra muscle that is then taking energy away from reproduction and so we long ago evolved a system to add muscle and when you say take away from reproduction I think a lot of people are a bit confused you don't literally mean having sex you mean something much hor hormones you know your your your your testosterone levels or your or your your your estrogen levels your progesterone levels and you know energy that's allocated towards reproduction exactly or you know nursing you know I mean nursing you know is is very expensive 600 calories a day to produce breast milk so so we have all kinds of adaptations to add muscle when we need it so that's you know working out and then and then for atrophy to occur to lose that muscle when we're not using it and that's that's that's useful and that is why just again just to make make sure that we're all following if we don't do this physical exercise we see our muscle shrink this is our Evolution sort of protecting us and saying well you clearly don't need that so I can reduce it that's going to reduce the number of calories that you need for um your muscle so actually you can use this for something else because you know getting calories is hard as far as our body is concerned even though it's no longer true we can get them really easily at the correct conven correct and so the hunter gatherers that I've met and I haven't met that many because there aren't that many on the planet but you know also if you look at the literature you know they're reasonably fit and strong but they're not none of them are bulked up they're not super strong right because and also they mostly engage in endurance not that much strength physical activity so that's one myth another myth is that um they never sit and a a former student of mine Dave rean who's at the University of Southern California did a wonderful paper a few years ago in um the proceedings of the National Academy of Science showing that actually if you look at sitting time they're not of course in chairs like the ones we're sitting in right now they actually sit as much as westers right is that right yes because because um you know if you're not being Physically Active like well it makes sense to save energy right and you know cows my dog sits cows sit you know birds sit I mean moose sit every animal sits why shouldn't humans sit uh so this idea that sitting is the new smoking is um uh I think been exaggerated um the average hodza for example these are hun gathers in Tanzania that've been well well well studied I you know putting sensors on them they sit 9.9 hours a day wow because I feel like that's what everybody's being told now post pandemic you know on their Zoom that they mustn't do is sort of sit eight hours a day but you're saying that they had to do it quite they had to do more sitting yes now of course the thing is that when they're not sitting they're being physically active so the problem is if you look at the epidemiological data on sitting turns out that it's not worktime sitting that's so associated with bad Health it's actually Leisure Time sitting so if you spend all your day sitting at work and then you go home and you sit all evening watching television and you sit in your C getting to work and you sit in your car getting you know if you never are Physically Active then of course you're going to pay a price for that but it's not the sitting itself which is bad it's the fact that you're not doing any of this activity on top which because our normal experience you're saying as human beings is quite a lot of sitting but then quite a lot of physical activity to live and and our issue is we've kept the sitting but we've also got rid of the rest of this physical activity and turned that into sitting that's part of it the other is how long you sit What's called the sitting bout so turns out that if if you if you spend time in a hunter gather camp or in a you know Village of farmers or whatever and you know people are sitting but then they're getting up constantly they're getting up because of the kids they're getting up to cook they're getting up to do this they're getting up so the the average amount of time they spend sitting at any one moment at any one bout is about 15 minutes okay so then I like sitting for 3 hours at a stretch absorbed in there watching the Telly right exactly so and it turns out that intermittent sitting or interrupted sitting turns out to be much healthier than uninterrupted sitting because when you get up you're actually turning on your muscles you're turning on all kinds of Machinery in your body that it's almost like turning the engine and your car on right so even when we go back to the sitting then there is a takeaway here is it which is that get up every once in a while you might be all right if you're constantly getting up but sitting for a prolonged period of time not good it's not good for us and it's not how we're naturally um evolved to be right so some people have phones that tell them you know or their wristwatch buzzes every 15 minutes and tell them to get up and go pee or make a cup of tea or whatever that's all good hi I hope you've enjoyed our journey back in time today getting exercise advice informed by the way our ancestors lived talking about going back in time we've actually had 18 months of conversations like this with World leading scientists all focused on getting you to a longer healthier life now if you're short on time and want the key takeaways without all those hours of listening we've got you covered our team has just created a free guide summarizing the top 10 discoveries from our podcast that can make a real difference in your life to get it simply go to zoe.com free guide or click the link in the show notes and please let me know what you think of it okay by back to the show one of the things I like about this is I get teased a lot by my wife cuz I like to drink tea quite a lot and uh so that means that um and I I get I get tea a bit at work as well it means sort of after every meeting basically like oh well I need to go make a cup of tea and obviously that means I can't sit at my desk I have to go and make the cup of tea and and come back and of course if you drink lots more fluid then you need to go to the toilet more often as well so now I can say well it's really important for my health because a uh you know World leading professor explain this makes me more like the way I was supposed to be is that is that right yes not only because it makes you more like you're supposed to be it's just there's even without knowing that Hunter gathers did it it turns out to be healthy do we need to make fundamental changes to the way that somehow our lives are ordered in order to start to move because our lives are very different right and so clearly we're not going to end up living a life in the way that our ancestors did you're not suggesting that we get rid of of the water in our house and things like this presumably so do you need to make lots of very intentional decisions in order to try and get closer to sort of the way that we need to live in order to be healthy I think the answer is kind of obviously yes you know we live in a world where that is our our our life is mismatched to our biology in many ways right think about the diseases that are more common today type 2 diabetes heart disease uh cancer um arthritis um osteoporosis um depression anxiety all of these are much more common today than they were in the past and we have and we have good data to show that right and by the past I don't mean actually even that long ago and most of those diseases you know most of the time when somebody walks into a doctor's office for for a health visit the vast majority of those visits are for preventable diseases the vast majority at least 70% by by most estimates and how do you prevent those diseases well well I mean over and over and over and over it comes down to a few just simple basic things apart from not smoking right it's diet and exercise sleep is also important of course um you know avoiding psychosocial stress is important but but diet and exercise are obviously fundamental and we live in a world however where we no longer have to be physically active so we have to exercise and tell me a bit more about because I think isra you've seen you the point that you're you're making is that we didn't exercise before we just had a life where you got um sort of this activity so what are you know is there such a thing as a typical hunter gatherer lifestyle is it very clear the sort of activities they did that therefore we need to build or is that actually help us to understand because you mentioned already that you know this thing about like we used to we carry more how can you draw me a bit more of a picture of what what what do this life people want people want a prescription right and that's part of the problem which is that there is no simple prescription but people were physically active they sat but they didn't sit for long periods of time all the time they um they didn't have access to you know industrially processed foods that had all kinds of you know crap added and the fiber removed Etc um and um and you know time after time if you look at the literature you know it with even if you didn't know anything about our hunter gather or farmer ancestors you'd already know that right I mean who doesn't know that exercise is good for them and not eating you know McDonald's every day is good for them everybody knows the problem is that we live in a world where again now physical activities become optional and it's less expensive and more easy to buy of um industrially processed foods that are that are unhealthy and so people have to now go out of I mean I pay more money for food that has less sugar added right Y and I pay more money for Foods in which they haven't removed the fiber for it right the world has become essentially kind of Topsy Turvy so it does require us to be intentional about how we organize our lives in terms of both physical activity and diet that's that's just a sad truth um to our lives and there are all these people out there who are trying to make money off our desire to be comfortable off our desire to have energy-rich food you know and um and we need to figure out how to how to uh overcome that you know everybody I know likes you know a understands that exercise is good for them it's just that many of us struggle in order to exercise and so I I think that part of the problem is that we kind of Shame and blame them right we make them feel bad they're somehow they're lazy there's something wrong with them yeah I think that is absolutely sort of the story that we're used to it's like this we should do this and if you're not doing it it's somehow there's something wrong with you like whether it's a moral failing or a physical failing and I feel that actually that's got even more so in the culture over the last um even like 10 years absolutely the physical activity culture is such that you know just go do it right you know just do it and all those other you know and and and you know we need to understand that if look if you put couches and and escalators and and uh you know nice comfy chairs and whatever in the in the Kalahari Desert the the hunter gathers there would Avail themselves of them just as much as you and I do right so we need to find ways to help people help themselves without being dictatorial you know without being sort of um you know fascistic about it um and that means finding ways to help people either make it physical activity necessary or make it rewarding or or both and and and that's I think our our societal Challenge and I'd love to talk about that just before we do there were a couple of these myths that I I would love just to just to cover first so one I think you mentioned um the beginning the quickfire questions about this idea that when you get old you should retire and slow down is that true very much no so we actually published a paper recently called the active grandparent hypothesis so you may have heard of the grandparent hypothesis the idea that humans evolve to be grandparents most species very rarely do individuals live after they've stopped reproducing whereas the average human lives about two decades after the end of reproduction which makes us very unusual by other species and and one of the reasons of course is that old people impart wisdom we talked about that earlier but also if you go to any um non you know pre-industrial Society the grandparents are out there in the fields digging and farming the grand parents are out in the hunter gathers are out there you know digging for food and hunting and providing food for their children and grandchildren we evolve to stay active all throughout our lives and and and what's important about that is that being active U slows the aging process we can talk about why that is the case and um and promotes Health uh both mental and physical which thereby enables people to actually live longer so it's a feedback system because remember until recently we make a distinction between Health span and lifespan and until recently there was no medical system right the doctors didn't exist your lifespan was your health span right as soon as you got really sick you died right what physical activity does really it's not so much important for lengthening lifespan although it does it's what's really important is it extends your health span by slowing aging and and turning on repair and maintenance mechanisms that keep your body functioning really well and so the fact that people evolved to be physically active as they aged actually helped them age so that they could be actor grandparents and I feel a lot of people listening to this like feel you slightly blown their mind because I think we are absolutely used to this idea that there's this big distinction between a grandparent and a parent and grandparents definitely are not like going out you know in the equivalent of the hunting and digging in the field it's like well you know no obviously they'll be too frail they won't be strong enough that's that's a different thing and now if I was thinking back to this Hunter gather be like well I assume that they sort of sit in the middle of the Village and look after the little children so that you know the people in their 20s and 30s can go go out and do these really phys nothing could be further from the truth so there's a a wonderful study by Anthropologist named Kristen Hawks who showed that among the hodza again we're always go back to the hza because they're the pretty much the best steady Hunter together group The grandmothers actually spend more time digging up ERS you know food than the mothers grandmothers do more digging than the mothers yes because because mothers are dealing with their children right you know there's a handful right Grandma can go off and and and spend more time of course they also do a lot of child care and other things like that they can actually spend more time they end up digging more tubers I've seen this myself some of these grandmas like my God they're like machines they're like it's hard to keep up with them they're like digging machines right um um so they're actually working hard harder than the mothers and of course um they're not doing it as a form of exercise they're doing it to help their children and their children and their grandchildren but here's the thing it actually helps them there there is a the most famous study on exercise and aging was actually done here in Boston at Harvard Medical School by a guy named Ralph paffenbarger uh he figured out that if you wanted to study aging and exercise Harvard was actually like the best place on the planet and the reason for that is that the Harvard Alumni Association the development office never lets go of its alums because they're constantly asking them for money okay you never never get left alone until the day you die Harvard will ask you for money and because of that he thought this is perfect we can we can get the Harvard Alum you know the development office to let us follow a bunch of Harvard alums as they age find out how they're doing give them some questionnaire you know find out how active they are and whether they smoke and what Etc and then find out effects on aging and what he showed was and of course it's been replicated many times but this is a this is a classic paper in the England Journal of Medicine showed that as people get older the effect of exercise increases their lifespan more so for example Harvard alums who were in The you 20 or 30 or 40 years old who exercised more than the than the sedentary alums from their same class they had about a 20% lower death rate okay by the time in their 60s or 70s or 80s the after correcting for other factors they had a 50% lower death rate so once in your 60s 70s 80s the people are exercising we having a 50% lower death rate the other correct other words the other way of saying is the older you get the bigger the benefit of exercises on your longevity and of course since then we understand the me mechanisms behind that because every time you exercise or for that matter are Physically Active climb the stairs or you know go dig up some tubers or carry water instead of turning on the F whatever it is you do right what what you're doing is you're stressing your body okay right you're your your your the muscles are you getting little tears your your the mitochondria and your muscles those are little organel that produce energy they're actually producing reactive oxygen species they're actually causing oxidation like you know when you brown an apple right they're producing these little chem chemicals that are that are reactive right you're you're heating up and so you're you're actually de you're actually you know changing you're damaging your proteins there's a thousand bad things that happen when you sounds bad you're describing all the bad things that happen is stressful it's a phological stress in in every single system of your body is stress however we evolve to be physically active right so for every single one of these stresses our bodies turn on repair and maintenance mechanisms so we turn on WE produce antioxidants that mop up all those free radicals those those reactive oxygen species we produce U proteins and enzymes that get rid of the proteins that have been damaged we produce enzymes that repair the mutations that are caused in our DNA by the exercise I mean I could go on right every single thing you can think about right has been natural selection over billions of generations of not just humans but our ancestors has produced responses so that it that physical activity isn't damaging for us it's actually the reverse need to do the physical activity in order to trigger all of these beneficial exactly because we never evolved not to be physically active so we never involved to turn on these mechanisms in the absence of physical activity and we're evolved and our body's like well obviously I'll only turn on the the repair after the damage and it never imagined that you might be able to go through a whole day without having to do lots of activity and and set it off that's part that's partly and the other is that of course you wouldn't want to it's very hard to program the body just to repair exactly that damage right you tend to overshoot right so the analogy often uses like imagine you've spilled your tea on the floor right now and you then cleaned it up the floor would actually be a little bit cleaner after you cleaned it up right because then than it is right now because it's actually not all that clean right so and that's exactly the same with these repair and maintenance mechanisms we actually tend to overshoot them and so the end result is that physical activity isn't bad for us otherwise people who exercise would die younger right instead we turn on these repair and maintenance mechanisms that actually prevent that actually we that actually improve every aspect of weo which is why exercise slows aging because you actually slow through these repair and maintenance mechanisms the aging process and we don't we haven't invented a way to pop a pill that just switches on these repair and we never will because you have to take an entire Pharmacy every day and F furthermore every single one those pills would have side effects there's one other important benefit of exercise when you're younger which is that exercise remember we talked earlier about energy right and there's only so much energy you have well it turns out that if you're physically inactive right if I don't exercise um my my body will think oh hey extra energy let's turn up the hormones and this is especially true in women so women who are inactive have higher levels of estrogen and progesterone and of course that's the body's natural way to try to increase fertility but there's actually they're already plenty fertile right so what happens is that you're actually unnaturally turning up reproductive hormones which increases the risk of cancer so people who are Physically Active actually have lower risks of cancer breast cancer rates are between 30 and 50% lower I'll say that again between 30 and 50% lower in people who just get 150 minutes a week of exercise that's 20 minutes a day that's amazing and and the reason for that is partly because of this energy turn on I'll give you another example um um um remember we talked about repair and maintenance mechanism when you go out there and do stuff right you're encountering the outside world you turn on your immune system one of the things that gets one of the cell types that gets turned on by exercise are cells called natural killer cells which sound awful but they sound bit scary and they're also they also called them cytotoxic te cells again sound a little scary but these to say but these are the cells that protect us against cancer they also protect us against viral infections and various other things we heard about them a lot during covid so people who exercise actually are turning on the cell types and then moving them about their body through the circulatory system thereby protecting them from the damage that they might get but also from damage that comes from cancer natural killer cells are our first line of defense against cancerous cells so if you look at the data almost every single form of cancer with almost no exceptions people have significantly lower rates of cancer if they're regularly physically active and that's again because of we turn on these systems that um that we don't otherwise turn on in the absence of physical activity it's amazing so that's an incredibly strong argument you're putting forward about physical activity and exercise and I'd Love Therefore to start to talk about practical advice because you also started at the beginning by saying we're all naturally um set up to try and avoid doing any uh unnecessary activity so there's this huge tension between all this amazing impact on on our health and actually how we're we're naturally evolved to avoid doing any of this and so I would love some really smart Insight you know most people listening to this are therefore going to be saying I sort of hate exercise I'm hearing you say that um that it's important but you know people tell me about import things I should do all the time but you know I it's still hard to do is there any insight from everything that you've learned that can help us to understand how we can try and find a way to do this activity well again I you know I'm not a psychologist so um you should take my advice with a grain of salt but again I go back to this first principle which is that we have all to be physically active for two reasons and two reasons only when it's necessary or rewarding and the fact of the matter is we're not going to make it necessary for most people right um most people don't have to be physically active in order to survive so I think we should focus more on the rewarding bit and and for me the most rewarding kinds of physical activity and I think it's true for most people is making it social I mean just think about the the way I a lot of people like when they complain to me about exercise they you I go to the gym and I go on the treadmill and I hate it you know maybe they're maybe they'll make it rewarding by listening to this podcast or something like that you know sometimes when I you know am forced inside on a treadmill I mean believe me I'm not you know I listen to something or watch something or whatever but really the best social activities are when you're with a friend right when you're with other people and you it ceases to be exercise it becomes fun right and is that why sport is sort of sport rather than exercise because actually it's social and it's got this sort of competitive element yeah if you're re tired your friends say hey come on keep going or whatever and you you have like a little peer pressure to keep going and and you know the miles pass by if you're running or whatever it is you're doing or going for a walk or whatever you go for a walk with a friend that you don't think of it as exercise you're going for a walk with a friend right and so I think we you know dancing you mentioned it earlier dancing is exercise right um but but we don't think of it as that we think of it as a social activity and why not have why don't we why don't we have more public dancing why don't we have more you know towns and cities you know have you know bands on street corners for people to go dancing in the evening I mean we can think of all kinds of ways of doing this right and but we don't because I think our our imaginations have been limited by by the way we've industrialized um and and corporatized um physical activity and it doesn't have to be any of those things there's nothing wrong with with you know with it but it doesn't it doesn't really work what is the sorts of exercises you think that we need to do because again I think this is also an area where there's a lot of myths right um about you know you must do 10,000 steps or or you need to do you know these particular sorts of exercises what is um well that's part of the medicalization of exercise right we prescribe It Like a Pill right and you know it doesn't work that way right it depends on who you are how old you are what your ISS your world issues are are you worried about Alzheimer's are you worried about cancer are you worried about heart disease Etc are you are you injured are you unfit are you overweight there's never going to be one solution but I would say this and I think there's some very some simple principles which is that no matter who you are some is better than none right just a a few thousand steps a day has been shown and that's not a lot that much a few thousand steps a day has been shown to provide benefits over over none and and furthermore the more you do the the you get increasing benefits but those benefits tend to tail off right so you don't need to run marathons or ultramarathons it's not going to help you at all and we didn't evolve to do any one thing right we didn't evolve just to walk although walking is the most fundamental form of physical activity we also evolved to you know carry things and pick things up and whatever and so mixing it up is always a good good idea so would just walking be sufficient activity for people or are you saying actually it's better than nothing but there's clearly other things you need to do to sort of which is a bit what I I've taken away I don't really know what sufficient means right I again whatever you do is better than none so if all that you can do is get some walking in that's fine but if you have the ability or the inclination to do more than walking and do a b vigorous physical activity because walking is what we call moderate physical activity right you get your heart rate up to about 50% of your maximum about is for walking which is good right walking is the most fundamental basic form of physical activity bar none so if you're going to do anything walk and this is back to your saying that it's amazing how far people walk in these hun gather environments yeah and yeah and I think you mention also that they're not necessarily sort of running as much as maybe we had this well they run sometimes but you know they don't like running R every day they're not running five miles every morning right um maybe once a week they might do some running you know so you're saying it's not like every day they are running in order to do something they have to do no definitely not I I love the way you say some of these things and so they're so obvious from your experience it's really fun and I'm like I've absolutely no idea in fact what would be normal in this environment but again it's just because it's normal doesn't mean that's what we should do that's that's the myth of the paleo diet right if you if you eat like Hunter GA ancestors you're going to be you it doesn't work that way right our ancestors didn't evolve to be physically active in order to be healthy they evolve to be physically active in order to survive and reproduce so it it's not a blueprint for exactly how we should be today it just gives us information about what we evolve to do and it helps us understand the mismatches that we have in the world today but it's not a prescription okay doesn't mean we have to live exactly like because I think a lot of people are listening to say so we should be trying to live as close as possible that's fasile that's wrong that's a very bad way of using evolutionary data and that's the myth of the paleo diet you're saying it's fasile but I think it's not meaning like it's obviously not true also they didn't have medicine they didn't have refrigerators they didn't have you know there's all kinds of good things we've invented today and um that it should we abandon those because our hunter gatherers didn't have so sort of trying to understand which of those things by not having or hurting us and adjusting for that rather than just assuming that everything they did like just assuming their diet is better always or that their particular that's not always the right answer we call that the naturalistic fallacy that that that what was you know done in the past or what's natural must necessarily be better sometimes is it's a it's a reasonable you know way to start thinking about things but we use science to sort of test these ideas so this is like saying we now know that if you boil the water it gets rid of the germs that's a good thing we don't and the fact that we didn't do that in the past doesn't mean that yes yes Hunter gathers only had unboiled water therefore I'm never going to have boiled water okay so that's an example where you're saying actually we could have made made you know there's just progress that we didn't understand yes we don't have to abandon abandon all kinds of modern things the reason why you're talking about the activity is that it's it our body is sort of acquiring this um activity in order to trigger all of this maintenance and repair and we haven't come up with an alternative today in our lifestyle to solve for that so we need to create this activity to to trigger it it's it our bodies um evolved to to require some degree of physical activity to turn on all these repair and maintenance mechanisms to modulate our hormone levels all these sorts of things and if you remove them from our environment we run into trouble so the bottom line is get get some physical activity more is better than none and mix it up and and if you're want to try to do it if you're struggling to do it a don't feel bad about yourself there's nothing wrong with you and B try to make it fun you know because if it's fun and it's social so example I I have a uh I like to run and I often run with friends um and so I on Tuesdays I run with so and so and on Fridays I run with so and so and on Sundays we have this big running group and we often email each other the night before it's like hey let's meet on on Tuesday at 7:15 and I guarantee you at Tuesday at 7:00 it's like oh my God I'm like what am I doing I don't I don't it's raining or it's cold or I've got like I've got to work on this paper I gotta get ready for class or whatever you know whatever and I don't want to do it but I've already promised you know my friend Aaron that I'm going to be there and if I'm not there he's going to be pissed off and so I go and you know we're often like grumbling in the morning and neither of us want to see each other and then you know after 10 15 minutes you know it's good so we made it necessary for each other um made this commitment is forcing you to do it and then in the end then it and it's also social because you know he's a good friend and we have we chat about this that and the other and uh so we've made it both necessary and social and um and there's all kinds of ways to do that you can you know um join a club or have a gym or you know there's have a trainer I mean if you have money what whatever there's a thousand ways of doing that and we all have to find our own ways of doing it but that I know Works um and people who tell me that you know they're struggling works the other thing is that we often engage in hyperbolic discounting which is a fancy word of saying H I'll do it next time you know it's the famous marshmallow test right you know you can have one marshmallow now but if you wait 20 minutes you can have two marshmallows right and we're very bad about that right um and so how often do we like do I walk into the my my the building I I work in right I'm my office is on the fifth floor it's old Victorian building and I can guarantee you every single time I walk into the building I would like to take the elevator right every single time but I don't um and I think okay you know what I'll take it today next tomorrow I'll take the elevator the only reason I don't take the elevator is that if anybody sees me on the elevator they'll call me a hypocrite right because I talk about you sort of forced yourself to take the stairs by declaiming how terrible it would be if every time I get there I my brain does this little hyperbolic discounting trick saying you know what the elevator today tomorrow tomorrow I'll take the stairs right I'm no different from anybody else so we need ways to trick ourselves out of that kind of hyperbolic discounting because it's a natural basic fundamental Instinct we all do it I don't care who you are now you've talked quite a bit about um walking and how that's important in doing War activity I was interested in about the sort of weights and carrying because you sort of Ted on that a bit and I think for a lot of people they tend to think about exercises like it means you're going for a run but but weights are important too yeah yeah so could you tell me about those two and so weight's actually really important for aging because um one of the big issues for Aging in the western world is is something called sarop penia which is a long fancy word which means just basically you're getting frail so Sarco means muscle and pinea means loss so muscle loss and as people get older um they they tend to lose muscle mass and they get frail and you know getting out of a chair is difficult and you know doing basic tasks is difficult and when that happens you become less physically active and then that further exacerbates the muscle loss right so it's a vicious circle and then of course it becomes very serious because then you have loss of quality of life and then you you're less able to walk you're walking slows down all of these things happen the way to prevent sarcopenia is to do some strength training again because I don't I live in a I don't have to carry water I don't have to carry anything in my life so I do like you I go to the gym and I I have weights and I lift them and I hate doing them but as we get older you feel that that is an essential thing that you need to do it's absolutely important so um pretty much every major Health Organization recommends that as people get older it's critical that they do weight training at least twice a week and you don't have to do crazy amounts of weight just enough to kind of you know it sounds like you're saying that you know in these tribes that you visit all these grandparents are just carrying lots of heavy weights all the time no but they're carrying food they're I mean they're not car I mean but but not weights but I mean like things that are heavy they are just carrying things yes there there are no there's no shopping carts there are no cars but their children aren't doing this for them they have to carry their children right yeah at a certain point the children can help carry St but there's always babies to carry and there's you know when you go out and dig a bunch of tubers you got to bring them home right there's not going to you can't call an Uber and have the Uber deliver it or I think what's really interesting is I'm I've still got you know I've still got this thing in my mind about well okay but if if they're um you know you know in their 40s or 50s they have grown-up children aren't their grown-up children doing all of this for them so they don't need to carry these things not in the slightest no everybody works everybody carries you go out and hunt a a you know Kudo you know you can't just let it sit there right you have to bring the Kudo home right and so everybody's just still strong because they have to use their bodies you know and they're not doing crazy stuff right um there you know so you don't need to and so the the the studies show that you know just a moderate level of you know you know 10 to 12 repetitions several of those you know and various basic muscle groups doesn't have to be really super heavy weights is enough to basically prevent that kind of muscle loss so one of twice a week not crazy there's already this transformation I mean and also you can build in like I have this one of the ways I do it is that I I every morning I make coffee for my wife and my and myself we have a French press and I let leave the coffee in the French press for 4 minutes and while that's doing I go to the living room and I do push-ups I hate the push-ups I'm promise you I do not enjoy doing that but I've made that my little habit and now I know that when the coffee is there I have to do my little push-ups and it works um and it's one of the ways I sort of trick myself into doing uh at least you get coffee at the end is that what you're saying I get coffee at the end and it's just like my habit made I'm still impressed you're quite disciplined there because I think unless I had a trainer or somebody leaning over me which is my hack on this is like I need someone to make me do it but I've made it a habits are useful um so it's now a habit and trust me I don't ever really want to do it but I can Grumble and whatever and also I also know that if I'm G to you know talk to somebody like you I I don't want to you know be a liar could you tell me is there any difference in this advice between men and women no absolutely not I mean both men and women involve to be physically active um and um and it's important for both um it's important for everyone um and um I would say um these are these are Universal so I'd love to almost wrap that up just by you're helping me to sort of summarize your weekly exercise routine because I think we got bits of that through the podcast I think really interesting to see how that is I'm a little weird how that is well well tell us I think a lots of people are going to be interested it's like okay you say all of this like what do you really do Daniel well I love to run okay uh so I run probably so you genuinely take pleasure from this despite everything you've said up till now actually well I I genuinely take pleasure from running but I never really enjoy the first few miles of any run or very rarely right but I I um but I like to run and um so I usually run you know five times a week sometimes I do spin cycling cycle in the basement um and I try to do weights you know just just a few not a huge amount about twice a week you know I do squats and things like that and I do my push-ups when I make my coffee I try to get up every once in a while and it's like you I'm tea drinker and so I'm getting up to make my tea and then microwave my tea because it gets cold and you know all that sort of stuff and um and that's about it it's quite impressive like that's a high level of activity and what fraction of that like if somebody told you tomorrow we have got this magic pill so you know we can sort out the health bit what would you still be doing I wouldn't believe you because there is first of all exercise itself is no magic pill I mean sometimes it's oversold it's being you know I hope I haven't oversold it I mean it reduces your risk of cancer but it's not going to prevent you necessarily from getting cancer um but again I participate in I do exercise not only because it makes me feel good and makes me feel vital and vigorous and and healthy but also it's the way I've made a lot of friends I mean some of my best friends are my running Partners right um it's a part of my life um so this is like back to talk about the dancing once it becomes just fun and pleasurable then it's not just being done for health and therefore it's easier to stick with than something so I don't think of running as just exercise running as part of my social life and um yeah I run it sometimes in the morning by myself but I often run with friends so it's um you know I would say a large percentage of my friends are I met and made friends through through running amazing I have so many more questions but unfortunately um we're at time so um I think we started talking about like exercise and this idea that our ancestors used to exercise is just wrong what they used to do is a lot of physical activity largely because they had no choice if you wanted to get water or food or any the rest of it you have to um do this and that because until very recently we were always in this desperate need to try and find enough calories just to sustain us and have children all the rest of it we sort of evolved to minimize the waste so why would you do a whole bunch of exercise if you don't need to and similarly you know our muscles are designed to shrink if they're not actively used because they have this cost of calories to support them so they were no like massive Tarzan Cent you know walking around everywhere unless they really really needed it and and so unfortunately we're in this world where our muscles naturally want to shrink and we're not anymore doing any of this activities that's very different and I think you also talked about the way in which we Now understand that although though this activity in the short term can create damage to our body in lots of ways it switches on these amazing repair mechanisms and the total impact of that is actually it's repairing all of us so if we are being active we're actually repairing our bodies and if we stop being active suddenly these these systems that should be working all the time just aren't and therefore you describe these amazing statistics I think about how you know in your 60s 7s 80s if you're being active then you know your chance of dying each year I think was like 50% lower so this is a huge change you also said that it's a complete illusion that as we get older we should stop doing exercise and so this thing that I think we are all used to in the west is not at all the patterns that you've seen visiting all of these different hunter gatherer tribes where you know you might be a grandmother or grandfather you keep digging the tubers and carrying the water and everything else and as a result you're much much stronger than we would be here today and that that loss of strength is a huge risk factor for for all of us and unfortunately that means you need to carry some weight so I think in terms of then talking about actionable advice we do need to do activity um we need to do walking but we also need to do weights and we need to fight sort of this natural desire not to do it and I think you gave us some really great tips of which I think the thing you were most interested in is like make it social so that suddenly this thing is if this can be fun it's no longer just this really tiresome thing of you know going off to the gym on your own but actually you're going to meet friends or you're going dancing or you know whatever those things are then um it makes it much easier because it's natural not to want to do exercise and this idea that if anyone's listening to this that you know there's something wrong with them they don't want to do it you're actually saying it's the reverse of course you don't want to do it you need to create ways to want to do this activity and the good news though is if you if you do it then it really affects your health and I think the other thing you sort of talked a bit about is sometimes the start of it is what's worse so you're saying like actually you hate starting running but then actually you quite enjoy it later so there is a sort of positivity at the end of this if you can get over this this initial hump I would say that's an a thank you very much I um I thought this was so interesting I hope I can tempt you back in the future because I know there's a lot of things we didn't talk about like sleep and various other areas it be a pleasure thank you thank you thank you Daniel for joining me on Zoe science and nutrition today we've shattered some myths made me feel a lot better that I don't enjoy exercise and also heard some practical tips on how we can reap its benefits but to really optimize our health we must also ensure our bodies receive the right nutrition and if you want to understand how to support your body with the best foods for you then you may want to try Zoe's personalized nutrition program you can learn more and get 10% off by going to zoe.com slmp podcast as always I'm your host Jonathan wolf Zoe science and nutrition is produced by yell huin Martin Richard Willen and Tilly fford see you next [Music] time

Channel: ZOE

Views: 220,849

Keywords: zoe, zoe podcast, gut health, ultra processed foods, tim spector, jessie inchauspe, gut health diet, ultra processed foods documentary, ultra processed food

Id: 54XlifPAnO8

Length: 71min 20sec (4280 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 23 2023