Leading Brain Expert Reveals Most Impactful Things You Can Do For Your Brain Health | Dr Tommy Wood

there's almost no example in medicine or health where the same thing helps everybody subjective quality of life subjective health is one of the best predictors of long-term health right how do i feel just asking yourself that question over time as you make changes being mindful of you know how is my body responding i think it's going to get you a good chunk of the way [Music] often athletes we say that they're they're fit but they're not necessarily healthy they've kind of often crushed themselves in this attritional training and eating model that is often used particularly in endurance sports and then how do you unpick some of that and and make it so that people can perform well long into later life that was something that we're doing so i so alongside my formal academic career which is largely based in neonatal neuroscience so i research ways to uh heal the injured newborn brain well you know as my day job is what i spend most of my time doing there's been this kind of you know working with these other diverse populations and trying to really understand how their environment uh contributes to health or any kind of disease that they might have yeah thanks for sharing that tommy and you mentioned something there that was really interesting these people can be fit but not healthy now to most people listening i would imagine there's a bit of a clash out what do you mean they can be fit and not healthy because i think in society the prevailing narrative is that the fitter you become the healthier you become so i wonder if you could elaborate on that yes i think from a general population standpoint there's there's almost a linear relationship between how fit you are and how healthy you are and that means that anybody regardless of their current fitness levels can probably again in the average population improve that somewhat and and have you know some kind of overall health benefit however when you're at the pointy edge of the spear you have to start making sacrifices for of for your health in order to get some kind of increase in performance and that may be because you're targeting a very specific adaptation um you know if you took a tour de france cyclist i mean they're essentially this incredible cardiovascular system on on little legs but if you ask them to jump onto a high wall they wouldn't be able to do it they don't have like the muscle fibers in the structure to be able to do it and when you think about what you might want to do long term to protect your health as you get older one of the most important things is being able to stop yourself from falling over and that requires a certain type of what we call fast twitch muscle fibers which you can lose with a huge amount of endurance exercise so in the long term while these people are incredibly fit they may not have the best overall muscle structure and strengths to them be able to you know keep themselves from say falling over in 40 years time and of course there's plenty of time in between those two periods for that to change but there are lots of things that we need in order to be fit and healthy and just you know work well in our environment and in terms of strength or cardiovascular fitness it's not that much we do need some absolutely but it's not necessarily as much or we don't have to work as hard as some people tell us or you have made us believe that we have to right you to to be fit you don't have to go and run for an hour a day for instance far from it um and but you do need enough and if you have enough then there's a huge amount of health benefit that comes from that but if you really try and chase a certain adaptation a certain performance in a given sport um more likely than than not you're going to have to sacrifice somewhere else which which may then be detrimental long term yeah really really interesting and um it's it's something i've been thinking about actually because i am currently on paper down to do the london marathon in october of this year um now long story how that started it was it was a dare from chris evans on the on live radio last january uh which i said yes to and at that point there was i think 12 or 13 weeks to go then the pandemic happens things get postponed and you know as things stand it's meant to happen in october now i have a an amazing running coach who frankly saying running coach is really underserving what she does but she's really big on recovery and as you know when i go into sort of intense weeks and i i try and experiment with certain things i'm really looking at my whole loads in my life and going okay if i'm going to do that i can't just keep killing it at everything else as well you know i've got to make sure that i'm balancing things so i'm really i think maybe this comes with age or maybe this is because i'm you know a father now and i've got other responsibilities but i really feel that actually i've got to be very careful about how much i take on here and what i can actually balance because recovery rest recuperation my cognitive capacity for my job all those things are sort of vying for that same amount of energy right yeah i think there's a number of things that that come out of that and it's important to remember that um well one of the most important things that i've that i've really focused on recently is that humans are far stronger and more resilient than sometimes we give ourselves credit for and often we talk about um we talk about things that affect our health or can affect our health with this very negative language which i think has a significant effect on our physiology because of the way that our brains affect our bodies um and and part of that the reason why i bring this up now is because some stress and i mean stress is in anything that sort of like directly causes a change in our physiology is is really important for us it's how we adapt is how we get stronger it's how that we sort of um create fitness to to survive but at some point all of those things start to come together and they can create too much of what what some people might call an allostatic load like how much total stress is being put into the system and it can come from all these different places it can come from the amount that you're sleeping how well you're eating the amount of exercise you're doing um you know psychological stressors because um you know you've got to go to you've got to go to work and you've got to balance your patient load and then you've got to record your two hours for radio 2 um and then you've got to think about getting up early to go to go and do your marathon training and all of this has an effect so so some small pieces of these of these stresses as i would call them um are really important but you know overall you do have to balance them and then give yourself time to recover and again if we take the the example of an athlete you don't get stronger through training you get stronger through recovery um and so continuously beating yourself down in any of those spheres without any uh ability to adapt or consolidate or recover then essentially just results in in sort of a long-term detriment yeah yeah i love that and helen who's sort of i went to because i was you know having having some issues with my right hamstring and she she very holistically looks at the whole body biomechanics but also you know emotional load and how you think about running and she like you i think also very much we are strong we are much more capable than we often give ourselves credit for and she has this uh sort of she does these little three week builds and one week rest weeks but she doesn't call them where she says those one weeks where you're not actually running and you're walking that is training that is your body recovering and building and getting stronger and she's really hammering that home to me i think to be fair i sort of get that concept but she says most of the athletes she works with have real difficulty acknowledging that a week of maybe taking it lighter is also going to have a benefit is that something you've seen as well yeah uh absolutely and it reminds me of when so my my uh first year as a junior doctor i worked in orthopedics in foot and ankle um and one of the consultants i remember uh said that so so so runners it's very common for us to get stress fractures in their metatarsals in the in the bones in their feet and he made the comment that only amateurs get stress fractures because they always want to push themselves they never want to recover they never auto regulate they never listen to their body they just think i need to go out and train really hard because then i'm going to get really fit and then that's going to give me my fast you know 5k time or 10k time whereas most professional athletes when your body is what pays the bills you have to uh you really focus on recovery and making sure that you're getting stronger and you're not overdoing it and i think you know the majority of the athletes that i've worked with are just passionate amateurs um even though i have worked with some some some professionals in in different sports um but but those those people um they tend to always want uh to work really hard um and you know we can go into various reasons why that might be but but it eventually it starts it starts to sort of come apart and it can affect all kinds of things like it can affect relationships and your work because you're constantly trying to fit in 20 hours of training a week or racing an iron man every two or three two or three months and the travel and time involved in that and so that's actually one of the most important things again i remember seeing an intake form for an iron man athlete for for this coaching service that i was i was running and looking at the training load and looking at the racing load like the first thing that i thought was all this is going to result in his divorce because like no uh it's just not sustainable from a relationship standpoint so so so all your body can could obviously suffer but then so can all these other areas if if if you don't you know uh provide time for sort of relaxation and recovery and all these other things that are also very important yeah it's interesting how i'm thinking about this because last january at this right at the start of january in 2020 when when chris asked me i said yes and that was kind of like the old rongan from like uni like he'll always say yes you know whatever challenge you give me i will do it and i was thinking oh man that's in 12 weeks i'm not a runner like that's a long distance to do and you know i would have done it i know i i could have done it and i would have pushed myself to do it but i think it would have come at a cost now because of circumstances that never happens and it really helped me though because now i've really processed what it is about that that i liked i like the thought of doing a marathon but now i've got really clear in my goals tommy for me it's about having fun right it's about enjoying the process of training it's about it not breaking me so i have no desire for a particular time i really don't have a time in mind my goal is to be able to function in my life as a doctor as a as a father as a husband as a health communicator to enjoy the process and not to break myself doing it and i believe it's possible but i believe it's possible if you have clarity into what your goal is rather than trying to excel and get better at every single component of your life because that may work in your 20s but maybe now that i'm in my early 40s maybe that's not going to work so well yeah i mean i i certainly appreciate the uh the the need for a challenge um and i think again i think that's it it's important it's um it's a new skill it's uh a new like process of of bringing bringing things in it's a new exposure um for the body which you know has a huge amount of benefit um and i have done my fair share of ridiculous sporting events essentially for for the same reason um and although when i was younger and probably mixed with a small amount of of self-loathing in there um and but what's interesting to me now sort of looking back on all of that is how sort of the marathon has become the pinnacle of challenges for for for humans and ma like the tr like the triathlon was kind of in there a little bit but it's really the marathon um and now you know if i think about what is it that i want to be good at um physically as i get older i would have much more right some cardiovascular fitness is incredibly important like we talked about um but i but but i think physical strength is is really undervalued and probably because you know we think about you know these incredible feats of endurance performance like the marathon but as soon as you think about being strong you you see you you imagine seeing people who are incredibly big and bulky and maybe you think about you know taking steroids to achieve that and and again it doesn't require much but there's a huge amount of benefit and you know not just preventing you from falling and breaking your hip um you know being able to do all your your daily activities well into your 80s 90s 100 plus is going to require some kind of physical strength so so that's where i focus my attention later in life but i did you know i i spent 15 20 years incredibly focused on endurance performance first um and then kind of just sort of switched into something that i think is is going to be more um i guess sort of all-round beneficial longer term and and i'm not built like a marathon runner and um let's be honest you're not really either and so so i i certainly appreciate the challenge but but i think um yeah yeah longer term i focus more on on gender aerobic stuff and then and and then strength because i think that that's what's going to take me further into the future yeah i think you've raised a great point there no i'm doing it because it's trying something new i would like to have completed that i'm very lucky to have a place in the london marathon so i think you know i'd love to do that it would just be a nice personal challenge but yeah i'm under no illusion that that's necessarily going to be helping me with my longevity now there's there's quite a few things going on there tommy and and it's sort of it's a nice way to move into the the main topic i really want to talk to you today about which is our brain health you got a lot of experience you're doing a lot of research in neonatal brain health um and there's a couple of things we've already touched on in terms of you know strength um we you've touched on a challenge and trying something new and these are all things that can actually feed into how healthy our brain is so i thought we could start off with this line that i've heard you say on a talk on youtube which is long-term brain health can be inexpensive and simple to achieve and i wonder if you could expand what you mean by that yeah i think that i think that's absolutely true and this forms essentially the the foundation of my current and and hopefully future career and when i think about uh building a healthy brain that's essentially what happens when when you're you're a baby both uh in the womb and and then afterwards for you know two or three decades potentially then i think well how you know so what is it what do you need to make a healthy brain in the first place and then what do you need in order to keep it healthy and those things are often very similar they are essentially the the same thing and there's always going to be a huge amount of interest in in terms of how do we maintain cognitive function late into life because age-related dementia and age-related cognitive decline are now the leading cause of death some people call it alzheimer's disease but there's uh alzheimer's disease as it was originally described as probably a genetic early onset alzheimer's disease in my familial alzheimer's disease whereas what most people have is this late onset alzheimer's disease which may actually not be the same thing and in my mind it's a continuous um onslaught um of the of the brain from the environment um and then a lack of protective factors and a lack of protective inputs so if you think about things that are protective and beneficial for for the brain so so we've we've talked about exercise um i think the first time so first in in rodents and then the humans the first time we saw that we can actually increase the size of an important area of the brain later in life uh was the hippocampus so the hippocampus is an area of the brain that's very important in memory it's definitely uh affect significantly affected in people with dementia uh or cognitive decline alzheimer's disease and in an uh an older population then they were in their 60s they had them just brisk do brisk walking three times a week for a year i think it was 45 minutes and there was a control group who did some stretching for the same period of time and in the brisk walking group and again when i talk about cardiovascular exercise aerobic exercise that's what i mean i mean going for a brisk walk like it doesn't need to be more intense than that but that group saw an increase in the size of the hippocampus which would normally decrease in size with age it was the first time that we ever saw in humans in adult humans older adult humans that an area of the brain can increase in size and so exercise is incredibly important um again resistance training has similar effects but seems to affect more um the white the white matter which is the part of the brain that's really um there for fast connection sort of connecting all the different parts of the brain and sending signals and and so so both aspects as we might separate them out aerobic and strength um are important for the brain and then the the the challenge aspects which we talked about i think this is one of the probably the uh most um i guess forgotten important part of what it takes to make and keep a healthy brain um and again let's let's use uh an athlete analogy which is that if you stop training or for some reason you become immobilized um your muscles and you have a good amount of muscle you're an athlete right or you say break your leg and it goes in a cast when you take that cast off you'll see the leg on that size is smaller you've lost muscle mass on that side so anytime you stop um sort of giving an input a stimulus to the muscles they will reduce in size because it's energetically expensive if you don't need them your body isn't going to keep it isn't going to keep it around and everything all the evidence that exists today suggests that your the brain is the same right use it or lose it and when we think about using the brain um again i like to compare back to what it takes to create and build a brain in the first place so as an infant you are doing things like learning to talk learning social interaction social cues um learning to control this fabulously complicated meat suit with incredible dexterity and those things take a huge amount of neurological uh stimulus input and effort then throughout life um you made you start to do things that you may think are hard but compared to that really not that hard like biochemistry as an undergrad or learning to drive a car um or you know the the ins and outs of your job right they feel hard but in terms of the stimulus and the the the effort required from your nervous system it's actually quite small compared to say learning how to control your whole body and as we get older we just do the same things again and again they get easier for us they just become habits they become patterns which don't require again any significant cognitive input and because of that you're essentially telling your brain hey i don't need you to be as complex as you once were because we're not doing anything difficult um and you see multiple different strands that that kind of um come into this so uh people have probably heard about the knowledge right london cab drivers you know less so now if if if uber's continues to be allowed to exist but uh to be a a black cab driver in london you had to learn the knowledge originally which is um all of the streets in a six mile radius of charing cross and they once looked at brain scans of people taking the knowledge or learning it before and after and those who passed and again we don't know why they passed whether it's because they were the ones who actually studied or you know they have some other some other skills that allowed them to be able to gain the knowledge those who passed again saw an increase in size in certain aspects of the brain on a brain scan and those who didn't pass the knowledge didn't become cabarrus didn't so you've created this incredibly difficult stimulus which has then you know helped uh improve the brain and you see something similar in terms of people who retire earlier tend to die earlier as well and that's after you're adjusting for all the things that might cause you to retire earlier such as medical conditions so again like telling the body telling the brain that it's required um it is incredibly powerful for brain health and you know we could go on so if you look at the brain if you look at the brain health or the brain age of musicians amateur musicians have a better brain age than professional musicians because amateur musicians it's harder for them right they have to work harder to get a nice result so so all of this is basically telling me that in order to keep your brain healthy you need to tell tell your brain that it's needed and that requires you to do difficult things which is going to also require you to be bad at stuff as you learn new skills um and then once you once you've acquired a new skill you then have to move on to something else i mean still do the thing if you enjoy it but then if as soon as something becomes habit becomes patterned becomes easy it's no longer the same stimulus so this could be anything it could be dancing it could be some kind of movement or sport it could be singing um teaching others seems to be a protective as well uh knitting um i recently started to learn how to code on on my computer because you know that was something that was beneficial for my job but also incredibly difficult i've never done anything like it before so there are all these things that you can do but you need some kind of ongoing stimulus to tell your brain that it that's still needed it's still worth keeping around um and and that's something that you'll you'll essentially need for is that for as long as you want your brain to still be working i mean it's so fascinating what you mentioned about the the leg that goes in a cast and six weeks later muscle masses has declined this whole idea that our brain is constantly responding to the inputs that we get and if you know if we think it's not required it's i'm not gonna waste energy shoving it out i'm gonna i'm gonna focus on something else but it made me think about something professor laurie santos said to me recently on the podcast she's from yale she's a psychology professor and has i got this globally successful course called the science of well-being and she talks a lot about how our brains kid us often in terms of the things that are going to make us happy are not the sort of things that our brain think is going to make us happy so we actually behave in a way that actually isn't moving us towards happiness and as you were talking there it made me think that it's interesting that society um you know the way we live now you know where you know everything's front loaded as kids and then we sort of just gradually decline once we start working we don't have time anymore to try new things it's just pay the mortgage get to work take the kids to their classes and you just you know people are waiting for retirement to just chillax and it and it sort of it reminds me a little bit of that where you know we older also we get we get quite shy we don't we don't want to suck at something we don't want to fail at something so we don't do it but what you're saying tommy is that actually that's exactly what we need to be doing we need to be doing things that remind us that hey you are needed my brain is needed you need to grow you need to respond so yeah i mean do you feel we we're sort of fighting human nature or certainly the way society is set up in an effort to improve our brain health yeah absolutely the way um society is is set up is is to sort of funnel you continuously in one direction and then you know be very good at whatever it is that you do but it doesn't require again it sort of becomes you know just part of the same thing again again doesn't require the same the same inputs and i think there's a huge amount of benefit from um you know being a bit of a jack of all trades you know having lots of having lots of interests like diversifying your interests and your expertise and your skills and that creates some buffer in terms of you know hey you may not always have that job or you may not always be able to do that job you know you know having some kind of broader you know base of of skills or things that you enjoy again create some some kind of buffers in there um but equally as as we get older we're expected to get more serious uh another thing that i didn't mention which is incredibly important and uh very well um emphasized and advertised by our mutual friend daryl edwards is play adults aren't supposed to play we're supposed to be serious we're not supposed to have fun um and and again it is sort of it become you know our exercise our movement is supposed to be very prescribed it's going to be on a treadmill are you going to do x reps in the gym or whatever and again that's just not how we're des how we you know quote unquote designed to move like we're supposed to be interacting with our environment entering other people animals nature you know that's why our bodies are built and structured the way that they are um but yeah everything that is required of us in in modern day society is sort of pulling us away uh from those those stimuli those inputs that that our body i think expects um and then is what creates a foundation for long-term health yeah and that um there's a brilliant talk that you did on brain health that's on youtube and i'll definitely link to that in the uh the show notes for this podcast you put up a graph towards the end and i think you it's something about the amount of cognitive capacity it requires to do certain things and you know one end was learning to walk i think and the other end was you know retirement and doing sudoku and it was the contrast was really quite stark yeah and you know i i uh so i borrowed that graph i remade it as made by a friend of mine uh dr josh turk news and neurologist uh over here in the u.s and you know a lot of those ideas about sort of this the requirement of of a long-term uh stimulus to keep our brains healthy is certainly something that i've discussed a lot with him and and gotten from him and yeah i mean it's very difficult to quantify these things right like how could you possibly quantify the amount of effort that it takes to learn how to control the human body except for if you you know think about people you know adults who have to relearn how to walk or if you're trying to build a robot that's that knows how to walk right these are incredibly complex tasks that we haven't even necessarily been able to figure out yet right because it's that difficult but most of the other things that we require of our brains can probably you know as adults can probably be automated uh to some degree because it's actually not that difficult so so yeah if if you think about what's what you what you ask of your body and your brain it it just it's just a steady decline throughout life um and that requires now some kind of um significant effort on our part to to to prevent that so in practical terms for people that could be anything right that could be what learning a language learning an instrument um i don't know doing some balance work you know anything i guess where you're being challenged is going to have a positive impact on your current brain health but also i guess make you more resilient for that sort of brain decline that we might see as we get older yeah absolutely and that's the thing is it can be you know almost anything that you and i say you enjoy but it's probably if it's difficult you're probably not going to enjoy it to begin with right this is what we talked about we don't like being bad at things and we talk you know and we're sort of taught to feel like it's not good to be good at something whereas actually if you think about kids they would just try stuff and they'll be bad at it and they'll fall over and they'll try it again and again and they'll get better over time and that's again something that we need to um reacquaint ourselves with but then you know you know it can and should be something that you enjoy doing um and that you can use so you'd learn a language and then one day we'll be able to travel again and you can go and put it into practice but it doesn't need to be a language it could be anything any of the things you mentioned um and it you know could be you know knitting or or whatever literally anything that requires you to learn a new skill and that you enjoy but again as soon as you get good at it you have to start thinking you know what what can i do next that sort of keeps the challenge going yeah there's this kind of conflict between mastery and and super specialism with that kind of just general broad all-around knowledge as you say jack of all trades and uh you know you train as a medical doctor um i i really do feel that of course specialism is important in medicine but i think we really have undervalued the role of the generalist for many years and although not directly related to brain health i can't help but see some similarities in terms of what you're talking about and how we kind of need that overview you know i i feel in medicine told me that now we need generalism more than ever we've got all these complex problems that are are coming across multiple systems in the body and we can't just be focused on one organ we have to be able to put everything together yeah i agree and when you think about people's health i think the more that we learn the more we realize how complex it is how many different uh inputs environmental factors are contributing to this disease or these symptoms in an individual patient and if you're very hyper focused on one system or one disease process you're going to miss out on all the the factors that are you sort of coming together um in this individual so i think having a really you know broad base and open mind is really important when you're when you're then trying to um because when you're then trying to improve the health of a patient because like the people can come in with the same the same disease um the same concern the same symptoms and there could be vastly different uh underlying uh reasons environmental environmental sociological socioeconomic factors that could be contributing and you really need to be able to appreciate all of those to get the best outcome well i think that sort of approach applies to us looking after our own health as well doesn't it instead of a laser-like focus in just one area and you know we've both been in the nutrition space for quite a number of years and there can be a real focus on nutrition and of course that's important but there was i think for a period of time a neglect of uh the importance of stress management the importance of sleep when those things are starting to change and if we if we sort of think about brain health and how you think about it with your expertise you mentioned some of the components of movement that can be really important and i mean before we move on from movements just to just to be really clear for people you were saying in that trial i think that it was 40 minutes of walking a brisk walking three times a week change the size of your hippocampus you know one of the memory centers in the brain but that's not that much is it no no absolutely not and again i think um it comes it comes from the the way i believe society has sort of created this image of exercise where again the pinnacle is the marathon um and then to be fit requires this huge volume of running so that you could even survive a marathon um but when we look at you know this is the you know in terms of the brain but also in terms of just uh overall mortality risk you know how long you live a healthy life health span you get to a point where you you reach diminishing returns you might call it so if you do a load more you're not going to get that much more benefit and that point is something like 30 to 45 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity every day um and when i say moderate to vigorous i mean a brisk walk 30 minutes of brisk walking a day is going to get you the vast majority of the way um in terms of exercise that's required to see long-term health benefit and if you do a load more you you're not going to see that much more so it's really not that much it's not that much and i i really think this is a this is a point that's worth hammering home and yeah if we move on to nutrition tommy in terms of what kind of things we should be eating to build a healthy brain i'd be interested in your view there and also i wonder if you could touch upon why a healthy brain is important because it's yeah we want to build a healthy brain and then often we think about the other extreme which is when our brain doesn't work when we're 70 or it doesn't work as well but we forget that there's this long latent period where our brain function can start to decline before we even get symptoms so just a couple of things there which i wonder if you could just sort of expand upon yeah sure so so actually before we um get into that you mentioned earlier about this hyper focus on on nutrition in terms of what's essential for for long-term health and when i think about the things that a healthy body a healthy brain requires long-term right so nutrition is important um but so is sleep or circadian rhythm right like when it's light dark when it's dark movement um some kind of stress mitigation and then social connection probably those are the things i think you're going to underpin most of the stuff you know those are the biggest rocks that you know that you can move to to improve long-term health i i think that the more you neglect any one of those areas the more you have to become hyper focused in another so when people are talking about restricting restricting restricting from a dietary sense and that could be total calories it could be fat it could be carbohydrates it could be protein all of them have been vitified by different groups for for essentially the same reasons um i think that the reason why we had to become so hyper focused and so restrictive to a large degree and actually any one of those approaches can have can have benefit depending on the person in front of you um it's because we are neglecting the other things we're neglecting movement we're kept neglecting sleep and and circadian rhythm and neglecting social interaction social connection um and so so that's that's that's one reason it's also something that's very easy to sort of like quantify whereas it's hard for me to say you know it's easy for me to say oh you should stop eating carbohydrates it's much harder for me to say um oh you should go and make new friends right that's much harder um and so i think that's one reason why we're hyper focused so the more you neglect the others that you have to sort of like really sort of focus in on another one because those other systems are being uh are not getting the attention um that they should um in terms of building a healthy brain um i mean the easiest way to think of it in my mind is well what is a brain made up of um and it's mainly made up of fat and cholesterol um and the you know that that in our modern nutrition environment sounds very scary i'm not telling you that you should you need to eat a whole load of fat and cholesterol actually your brain makes its own cholesterol uh the and it makes it from from precursors that could be glucose or could be ketone bodies when you're a baby ketone bodies are essentially the preferred precursor for making new fats making new cholesterol um and but one of the one of the things that's very important is dha the long chain omega-3 fatty acid that you get in seafood and there's going to be some variation in terms of what amount people need and it's probably going to be based on their ancestral background so there's some evidence to suggest that people who are of a more northern ancestry um so people like me we got most of our most of our long chain of polyunsaturated fatty acids from food from seafood so i'm probably going to do better uh with more you know direct from the source whereas people who live close to the equator may have gotten more sort of precursors like alpha-linolenic acid which is the omega-3 that you might get in nuts and seeds and then we make our own dha and there's a whole whole host of other things that can influence that but there is going to be some sort of individual variation it's just the point that i'm trying to try to make but dha is incredibly important and it's um accumulated very actively in the brain in the last trimester of um of pregnancy so the last three months or so and it's basically being actively depending on the amount in the mother is being actively regulated how much is passed on to the baby and then basically all of it is ending up in the brain and then some is put in the fat stores and humans are the only primate that has significant fat stores when it's born and that's largely because it's a repository of these important things to then support the brain and again because babies are born with an incredibly demanding brain human babies um and it's you know we need these fat stools to support to support it's one of the reasons that we have the brains that we do so dha is incredibly important um lots of other things you know will come up so uh things like choline can be very important again you might get that from eggs liver organ meats potentially and then when i think long term something that is probably having a negative effect on the brain is really large swings in blood sugar and there's there's a lot of data to support that you know if you're eating foods that cause very very big spikes in blood sugar that's probably over time going to have a negative effect on your cognition and there are some studies that suggest that people with diabetes if you improve their blood sugar control you improve their cognitive function and this can happen over years you know and you and again we're normally told that it's like this inexorable decline over time whereas actually we have plenty of evidence to suggest that we can reverse that as long as we improve uh some of these factors so so it's just um i think it's very positive and empowering to say you know wherever you are today there is potential for improvement if you're you know sort of capable and able and and and and you know interested in doing that there's a few different threads there so you mentioned dha you mentioned that potentially your ancestry may influence what you thrive best on so you were talking about yourself and how your ancestors probably got a lot of seafoods um and then you mentioned people who might like my own ancestry would have been you know from india sort of near the equator and potentially we can actually make that dha that typically you would get from seafoods we might be able to make that from non-animal sources yeah it's interesting that my ancestors potentially did that but they're not they you know my parents emigrated to the uk i've been born and brought up here so my microbiome i'm sure has changed significantly to adapt to my new environment so we could there's a whole world of complexity here to try and unpick as to what someone like me should potentially do then is it more to suit the local environment where i live is it more to do with how my ancestors lived but then i think the wider point for me is there is this big sort of debate isn't there you know dha imports it for the brain so typically you get that from seafood and animal products and then people who prefer plant-based diets are saying well you can take alar we can supplement to make that and i think the truth is that different people probably do well on different approaches depending on all kinds of different factors but how would you unpick your way through that i think where we are currently it's very difficult for me to say because of your ancestry because of um what generation of immigrant you are to your new to your current place um to then say this is how you should shouldn't eat um i believe we'll get to a point where we can do that um i believe very strongly that you can't use genetic testing to tell you what you should eat most of that is complete nonsense um and so this is kind of in that box so so when i'm talking about so particularly polyunsaturated fatty acids there have been studies where they look where they look at whether uh populations based on their ancestry do better with plants or animal based sources of of poofers polyunsaturated fatty acids omega-3s and omega-6s and so in broad strokes i can tell you that people of your ancestry will probably do better or are are more likely to thrive using plant-based sources than than mine but that doesn't mean that you will do better on plant-based sources than i will or vice versa so i think a lot of the confusion um and this can come from you know pretty much any area in health the the confusion comes from conflating what can we say on a population level versus what can i recommend the individual and they are very very regularly not uh you know they are essentially mutually exclusive i can't take anything from a population level and and say this will definitely help this individual now both are important because you may want to identify groups at risk for certain conditions and then you know all of medicine is is applying statistics and hoping that you're going to improve an outcome right so when you do a clinical trial you see you know you give half the group an active drug you give half group placebo you generate something called the number needed to treat how many people do you need to treat so that one will benefit and often that number is quite high right so you're treating a lot of people so that one will get benefit on average right so there's almost no example in medicine or health where the same thing helps everybody so so all we're doing is playing the statistics and this is just this is just unfortunately how we have to work currently and things will improve over time so for for fats is i think it's very difficult um we'll get to a point where you know we can measure some of these things but if i measure the omega-3s and makes omega-6s in your blood it's a very very poor indicator of what's in your brain because there are transporters other mechanisms that are regulating that um so i so some people would say well you just measure the omega-3s in the blood that will tell you something about the brain unfortunately that's not the case but again these things will improve uh however one one area where we have made some improvement is in blood sugar control and there have been some really interesting studies first from the weissman institute in israel then um tim spector's group uh in london have done some some similar work and basically looking at uh based on an individual food a person you know when they're eating it what what the uh um sort of the context of that food is have they exercised recently is it breakfast is it lunch is it dinner their genetics their microbiota um all these you know their their metabolic health in general you know what their fasting blood sugar is then there's a huge amount of variability in how and how different people respond to the same food so if i eat a banana i'll have a very different blood sugar response to when you eat a banana and all of those factors are going to play a role there so i think we can to a certain extent um that we get we're starting to get to a point where we'd hope to be able to predict it right so maybe i can measure some things in you and then i'll say well this is how you're going to respond to bananas so you're going to respond to pasta this is how you'll respond to a cookie um but um we can also do it ourselves to a certain extent so we can you know there's this increasing interest in continuous blood sugar monitoring or just testing your blood sugar after meals see how you respond um and again this is this is kind of this is not something that i'm not saying everybody needs to do it i'm just saying this is probably the area where we're the closest to being able to understand her like into individual variability and even then it's quite uh an intensive process and that's just with blood sugar so then when you think about all the different fats all the different micronutrients protein carbohydrates um you know we're really miles away from being able to understand how one person should should eat for their for their uh individual health so then it really comes down to um personal preference to a large extent and then some kind of iterative process whereby you know maybe you measure maybe you do use a blood test or maybe you just like how do i feel right subjective quality of life subjective health is one of the best predictors of long-term health um and and so we at the moment we just have to be guided by some of that because the rest you know people are working on it but it's incredibly complex and we're not there yet yeah i mean that question how do i feel so so powerful but just hardly ever spoken about it's about you know like a safe on this podcast this is about helping people become the architects of their own health which is the place i want to put them into where they feel yeah i can i can absorb this information from the experts or from you know people who've got experience in a certain area but then i can start to put it through my own filter and go well does this work for me does it work in the way i live my life with my family with my work patterns um you know what and i think i think we've forgotten a bit about i don't know that autonomy that sort of sovereignty that actually sometimes we know what's best for our bodies not somebody else yeah uh absolutely and i think there has to be more humility in in people who talk about any given approach to improve health because if you actually go out in the real world and apply it you're going to see it fail a lot and again that's not i don't think that's a depressing message i think it's just a reminder that humans are incredibly complex um and we we essentially are the species that we are because we can thrive in almost any environment right there is no other um you know multicellular organism that can thrive in the variety of environments and with the variety of exposures that we can and so all of those things are going to change what is going to be best for an individual so when you when you see any given approach fail you then have to step back and say well hey well this is a useful tool it's going to work for some people um or you know this is this is a useful tool for some people but it didn't work for me and that's fine right there's no arguments to be made there um and like like you said the question like how do i feel how does my you know how do i view my health even you know 30 years ago a question of somebody's subjective health how do you rate your health was one of the best predictors of longevity and mortality right on a scale of one to four you know very good good um not very good or poor something like that and you know and and so just asking yourself that question over time as you make changes being mindful of you know how is my body responding am i moodier you know do i feel less good when i go for my walk do i feel less able to concentrate um you know these can can be really good indicators um but again becoming really hyper focused on something does have its detriments but looking inwards and just you know you're checking in yourself how do i feel after i've made this change is it you know positive or negative um i think it's going to get you a good chunk of the way yeah that's a brain health we were searching on dha we were talking about ancestry and just to sort of complete that then um you're saying that dha the fat is an important component for brain health in the womb when you're growing but also throughout life and if so what are those sources and how can we think about taking practical steps on that yes so particularly important in the womb or potentially if you're born prematurely which is a group that i frequently work with then you know making sure they're getting that um during that during that lot during that period when they would have otherwise been in the womb and then throughout life as well and so the your fat issue um is incredibly important and one of the reasons why it's incredibly important is because it acts as a store for dha so some people estimate that the average person has maybe 10 years worth of dha for their brain stored in their adipose tissue so that means in their fat tissue so that means that you don't need to have it every day you don't need to be overly worried about how much you're taking in uh because you have a buffer uh that's one of the best ways to describe your fat tissue is an incredibly important buffer and but you know if you were to take in no dha and you're somebody who isn't very good at converting it from plant-based sources so you're not getting plant-based sources because you eat a highly refined uh modern diet then you know there is you know you're going to run out of that store eventually and so you know i'm a big fan of seafood small fish um you know if we think about there is a risk of mercury contamination some other things in in larger you know tuna and swordfish and other things so sardines um particularly good uh shellfish oysters um you can take you know there are there are algal sources uh krill sources you can take um a a as a you know as a supplement like if um if you're taking it as a supplement you know one or two grams a day is probably going to be enough for most people um you know if you're eating it from from seafood you know a portion once or twice a week is probably is probably gonna be enough so it's not a huge amount um but but longer term i think it's definitely gonna have an effect the other side of that is vegetable oils and there's there's a if you exist in the nutrition space there is a huge amount of controversy around around vegetable oils because some people will say if you replace saturated fat or vegetable oils your cholesterol will be lower and that's going to lower your risk of heart disease other people will say the vegetable oils are incredibly inflammatory they're easily oxidized and then that can then cause issues including heart disease um and so i think there's a varied amount of evidence in both directions for those and that's why it's complicated uh but for the brain particularly when we look at um both the the data that we have from humans and it mainly comes from uh autopsies in children and from animal models including pigs which are very similar metabolically in terms of their gut and their brain to humans you see that if you have a large amount of linoleic acid which is an omega-6 largely found in vegetable oils in our diet if you have a large amount of that in the diet it seems to out-compete dha getting into the brain so in you know if we're just thinking about simple heuristics not eating a lot of fried foods is probably going to be number one for a number of reasons but that's going to be one because those that makes up a significant portion of the the caloric intake of or caloric content of fried foods and a lot of processed foods um and then just um you know making sure that you're eating some kind of whole food sources of some some omega-3s at the same time so reducing reducing your intakes um you know just just if you're eating whole foods and cooking them at home as much as you can and again there's a lot of privilege that's involved in being able to do that but it's not something we've talked we've talked about yet but but you know that's that we have to remember that as well but if you're reducing the intake of those vegetable oils um again just from sort of processed and fried foods then i think most of the problem goes away so you don't need to be like overly um overly worried or um you know really hyper focused on that you know just just removing that component there and then you know making sure you're getting some um from from whole either seafood or plant-based sources that's probably going to be good enough right it doesn't doesn't require anything harder than that so you're saying that the the we've got these omega-3s as dhas and we've got these amiga sixes which we were talking about a lot of them come in the vegetable oils and then hardly processed foods and fried foods and they're sort of competing so one option is to increase omega-3s but you're saying actually a really good option that will have multiple benefits is how much processed food you're having how many vegetable oils are in your diet and actually automatically that's going to mean ratio wise there's more omega-3 there and you're going to get all the knock-on benefits as well uh beyond just vegetable oils uh and sort of oxidized vegetable oils that you that you get from whole food diets is that effectively what you what you're saying that tommy yeah exactly and and you know depending on the nutrition camp that you're in uh people get very hyper focused on a specific a specific intake a specific ratio you know they start looking at the omega-6 and omega-3 contents of all their foods and trying to increase you know decrease one and increase another to improve the ratio i don't think that anybody really needs to do that i think if we just focus on reducing the most significant contributors which have a number of potential negative health effects which are processed and fried foods um and then we are just getting some whole food based sources you know if it's fish once a week or you know chia seeds in your in your in your morning porridge or something which is a good plant source of ala which is a precursor to dha you know just just by doing that is probably going to going to get you most of the benefit when we do talk about vegetable oils is it the vegetable oils per se or is that how they're cooked and if they're fried and if they're heated yeah i i think both is actually important so the little layeric acid the this main omega-6 in in vegetable oils in its native state seems to some i don't think we necessarily understand exactly how or why but it seems to compete with dha getting into the brain um and so you know and if you have a huge amount of of that as forming part of this the fat content of the diet then you seem you seem to see less dha in the brain um and that's regardless of how that oil comes um but equally there's also some some increasing literature on the breakdown products um where it's become oxidized you know which which happens with high heat repeated heating cycles so if you think about the the the fryer at mcdonald's it's you know goes through multiple cycles on and off being heated and cooled heated and cooled and that's something that definitely increases the oxidation of the oil um and that seems to have a negative effect on brain health as well and there's some data in humans and also in animal models so i think um i think it's a bit i think it's a bit of both uh really um however i i don't think we should be demonizing these things and just saying they're definitely bad they shouldn't be in the diet so you know when we talk about vegetable oils what are we talking about um so i'm talking you know sunflower oil um refined rapeseed oil uh which again is uh soybean oil these are very you know these are the ones used in commercial fryers in um you know fast food restaurants um sunflower oil not as bad actually because has a lower little layer of acid content it's more monounsaturated fats more like olive oil so again olive oil uh a very good option um coconut oil avocado oil butter um tallow if you're a carnivore you can use the rendered fat from your cow um so when you're cooking with these in normal amounts at home i don't really think it's worth it's worth worrying about obviously if you're deep deep fat frying at home the same applies but if it's just in a pan to saute some vegetables or you know cook a bit of chicken or something i'm much less worried about that you know what you know i think again if we think about the the big rocks that you want to move if you can if you're using a bit of sunflower oil at home to cook yourself a stir fry um rather than getting a big portion of chips um that was sort of you know the the the the the total exposure and the nature of it is very very different um so so again if you can bring it back to cooking whole foods at home you're able to do that you have the facilities and the resources to do that then i then i i think a lot of the problem goes away there's talk that these oxidized fats can stick around in our body for a long period of time um and is that something you know that we should be thinking about so you know a lot of people like some fries for example which of course is likely to have been cooked in reheated vegetable oils which presumably will be super oxidized and drive inflammation in the body i would imagine um crisps are a very common snack here in the uk i think even people who uh like to follow whole food diets find it really hard to resist you know fries and crisps uh and those things have of course are highly processed and just in terms of you know one thing i love about your approach and why i think i resonate with it so much is because it's there's real balance there there's there's real sort of it's not about extremes necessarily it's about saying look here are the big levers to turn don't worry about these small things if you're turning those big ones and i just wonder when it comes to things like fries and crisps you know that oxidized fat can stick around i think in the body for quite some time so it's not about demonizing it necessarily but just helping people understand why they may not be the best choices certainly in high amounts i don't want to be too prescriptive but i think we need to talk about these things yeah it's it's a very important question and i think the the natural tendency is for people to basically say they're terrible for your health you should never eat them um and there's really no evidence to support that idea although like mechanistically like you say biochemically yes these things can hang around for a long time um but the one of the most important aspects of all of this to me is to control the things that you can control and then the ones that you can't control or you're not willing to control for whatever reason are things that you shouldn't worry about right and because i think that the process of worrying about it is worse than the process of doing the thing itself right so if you have a bag of chips once a month because it's your treat on a friday night um i would much rather you do that and enjoy it and it's you know part of your overall you know health and well-being then worry about what the fat that's on those chips is gonna do in your body like i would really hope that you never that you don't do that because the effect of worrying is probably going to be more significant than the effect of the fat on the chips so it's very much about just thinking about you know what am i trying to achieve what can i meaningfully control that doesn't have a negative effect right because if you feel like you're being restricted because you can't have your monthly friday night chips that's going to have a negative effect on your physiology and and people who you know who feel more um restricted dietary then have some knock-on effects like they have higher uh stress hormone levels and and things like that like it has an effect on your physiology so to the extent that you can and are willing to change something do that that's great um it's going to have you know it's definitely going to have an effect on your health but when you get to a point where it feels restrictive long term a it's not going to be sustainable and b is going to have a negative effect on you so so yes i think that people should minimize their intake of vegetable oils and fried and processed foods i still eat those things and it's a big part of you know occasionally and it's a a big part where it's important to me to if i'm going to do it i'm going to enjoy it and then not feel guilty about it because the guilt is going to be worse than the food itself you know that guilt and feeling bad about something is is actually a lot more toxic than people really think and there's actually really good reason kristen neff um has done a lot of research on self-compassion for 20 years which i've only been coming across in the last few months and it's really really fascinating and it really echoes my own clinical experience which is deprivation and restriction works for a period of time but if you still feel as though you're being deprived and restricted you can get all kinds of toxic knock-on behaviors on the back of it you feel bad you know as you say if you can have those chips with your friends if you're gonna do it enjoy it and understand that hey you know what i'm doing this because i'm with my buddies and i'm hanging out and it reminds us of university or whatever it is be in that because otherwise the next morning you wake up you're like man i shouldn't have done that i'm a failure i can't stick to anything you drink more wine that evening to compensate for that for that for that feeling and it's a knock-on effect and again this doesn't get spoken about enough i don't think in the health and wellness space it's all very well giving a prescription for healthy living but how we deliver that prescription how that prescription is communicated is so so important but i just don't think it's given enough credit yeah this is uh and i particularly got interested in this when thinking about we talked about genetics briefly the way we talk about our genetics and our health and we always talk about it from like using this negative language right either you're normal or you have some kind of genetic risk factor or deficit or this genism working properly you know if you if you listen to people who talk about genetics and health that's the language that they use and so automatically you're creating this negative association with something that's inherent to you and it has a negative effect on your physiology so they've done experiments where they had people do a treadmill test right how far can you run in 30 minutes then they did a genetic test and they they told them based on your genetics we would expect you to be you know either you have a good aerobic performance gene or you have a bad aerobic performance gene then they re-did the test those who were told that they had a good performance gene did exactly the same those who were told they had a bad performance gene did worse on average right they've been told they have a bad gene for aerobic performance and they actually got worse on a treadmill test now the thing is they randomized people to whether that was that what they told them was true or not so the effect was not in the genes the effect was in being told whether you had the gene or not which actually was not true so being told something negative about your physiology about something that's inherent to you has a negative effect on your health or your performance and this is how we talk about things this is how we talk about vegetable oils this is how we talk about genetics this is how we talk about carbohydrates or protein or meat and what it creates is like everything becomes this well what's the negative effect this is going to have on me it's never what's the beneficial what like what's the benefit like what are the great things that are happening to me right now because of this um and we know you know ellen langer has done some incredible work on the effects of the mind on physiology uh blood sugar control weight like body weight um and you know we just don't give that enough credit so the way that health experts talk about these things you're automatically creating this this sort of feeling of negativity around pretty much anything um in the people who are listening and that's having a bigger effect i believe on on the physiology than actually whatever the advice is yeah it's it's such a good point tommy there's so many aspects of that to think about that's how we communicate health messaging so we always feel that we're slightly inadequate in some way that oh i need to optimize i need to oh i wasn't born with that gene oh but my best mate oh man i've got to do something to compensate for my inadequacy but that sort of mindset it sort of goes beyond that as well doesn't it that that not feeling good enough in ourselves that insecurity that many of us have you know i remember i didn't um sort of go down that route at the time i remember you saying that in your earlier days you used to go on these quite brutal endurance um you know you'd really really push yourself and you sort of laughed it off at the end of a sentence there was a bit of self-loathing there and i i i really noted that at the time because i know myself one of the reasons i feel i can approach the marathon this year with are we all calm it's because i'm not trying to prove myself to anyone i'm comfortable with who i am i've done a ton of therapy over the last seven eight years and i feel i like the person that looks back at me in the mirror now whether i run a marathon or not whether i finish it or i fall after seven miles and i'm injured that doesn't change how i feel about myself my kids still love me my wife still loves me i still love me and i know my own behaviors in the past were driven from a place of not feeling good enough so i would define myself my identity was made up around oh if you do that you know yeah you're a success you're you you are someone and letting go of that has just given me more freedom in my personal life but also with my health i feel and i don't know you know how would you think about that self-loathing you spoke about before and how do you think that's impacted your journey throughout health yeah i think most of my health journey actually started with that i was bullied a lot as a kid um i was a bit overweight didn't really like sport um didn't really have very many friends i was absolutely the nerd who wanted the extra tests was trying to do very well at school which doesn't often go well down well with your peers and when i was 18 that essentially manifested itself in a hyper focus on my uh how i looked physically because i was dumped just before my a levels and i channeled all of that into the into the gym um which is the first time i'd ever really done any significant exercise um and you know like when you're 18 years old you're like well if i get a six-pack maybe she'll love me again and she'll take me back right and this is i think this is where you know where a lot of teenage males may end up going and obviously not at all helped by um you know men's health and men's fitness magazines which i read obsessively um and i remember and i was also very hyper focused on like everything that went into my mouth um like the it had to be very high quality had to be completely unprocessed i had to have cooked it myself i had to know all the ingredients this sort of i guess like 18 19 mainly my my gap year before university was when it was probably at its worst and i remember when i when i then got to university somebody as a joke posted underneath my uh my dorm room door uh a thing about orthorexia which i mean this is in 2000 2003 right i don't think anybody had heard of orthorexia then right and like that was really when i was at my lowest like i was training 20 plus hours a week i wasn't really eating very much i look at pictures back at me like me back then i'm just i'm gaunt actually i went to see my grandmother one summer and she she she used that word it was icelandic but she basically told me that i was gaunt um and i didn't see it um but like slowly over time as as i became accepted by my peers as i started to feel like i had worth in other areas um as i like started to be like loved more by others and i started to love myself and understand myself a lot of this stuff disappeared but it's in the background all the time like i still think too much about what i eat and i still think too much about the exercise that i do but it's sort of just like a little grumble that's in the back of my mind it's not negatively affecting my health in the way that it used to um but it like that journey took 15 years maybe but because of that it allows me to see it in others empathize with it in others you know really understand why these things exist how common it is um and then also you know inform some of my approach uh to how we might think about health and nutrition and stuff but it's so basically that that journey which is sort of underlied all of my education and and uh professional experiences is kind of kind of been on ongoing and has has really sort of laid laid the foundation of it yeah thanks for sharing that tommy uh super poignant to hear that and certainly helps us understand some of your passion for health messaging and the way we can and should deliver that messaging um [Music] yeah i think emotional health is so so important isn't it i mean is there much research on emotional health and brain health i certainly know there is with regards to overall health and well-being and our satisfaction but but with respect to our brains is there anything there that you're aware of well they're essentially they're very intimately connected and if you think about anxiety and depression they those who have diagnosed anxiety depression have an increased risk of dementia those who have um certain types of stress you know emotional stress so particularly um they've looked at this in the workplace if you have a job that has a high amount of stress but you have very little control over that um that's then also so you know that obviously has a negative effect on your mental health at that time at the time but also increases your your risk of cognitive decline so and and these things are intertwined why is it is it simply the the psychological effect or is it you know the the mind and the body are intimately connected and we know that a lot of injury processes in the brain have a a peripheral component which could you know be some kind of inflammation due to some other kind of disease process which then negatively affects the brain um and you know these things are in constant communication so so yeah the things that affect our emotional well-being um and our subjective um stress levels absolutely um then then have can can have an impact in terms of our long-term brain health yeah i mean we're all on a journey aren't we you know in our health whether it's as health communicators or just to improve our own well-being and you know i certainly think of the way i've evolved my thinking is you know yes food movement sleep stress super important of course but i really feel these days that how we feel about ourselves self-worth that emotional health i i'm starting to think that that's actually more of a root cause because when that's sorted you often don't need to chase around with food movement sleep and stress because actually you you don't actually compensate for that lack of self-worth by engaging in those other behaviors so i mean that's completely where my head is at at the moment um how do you think about that i i think i mean because of all the the sort of the reasons we've gone over i'd you know i'd i'd completely agree with you and the the modern environment you know social media how we interact with others now i think feeds into this you know general negative self-worth and and again you know even those of us who are trying to help other people improve their health we can absolutely make it worse um and i'm sure i'm sure we we actively do that despite our best interest and i actually and you know i think most people are trying to help they just don't realize the potential you know negative effects of that but again i think these things are tightly connected so if you put yourself in an environment that is supportive of your self-worth and your mental health yes that's going to hopefully reduce these sort of negative behaviors that can have a negative effect but i think the nature of that environment can also support better habits or better processes in those areas so you know if you're in a place that you're actively supporting yourself worth you're probably gonna sleep better um and you're probably you know getting but you know either making or you know sort of being exposed to better food choices and better better social connection and you're less subjectively stressed and i think if if the environment changes then many of these things are going to change and these things compound over time so we know that you know people who start to exercise more are more likely to change their diet they're more likely to stop smoking they're more likely to sleep better and these things sort of they're intimately connected um so so yeah i mean the the environment that we're creating currently is probably having a this huge effect on us on our self-worth that is then negatively impacting all these other areas and then it might be from person to person a different area is the root in you know maybe it's a focus on sleep which then improves mental health and self-worth which improves you know your diet or your movement or whatever yeah i i think i think there definitely is a different route in for different people you can enter that circle at any point and it can start to feed all the all the other components to sort of close this off tommy the two other areas i wanted to talk to you about in relation to brain health was sleep and connection now i'm super cautious uh given what we've just said that we don't stress anyone out as we talk about a lack of sleep and brain health and a lack of connection in brain health so let's keep that at the top of our minds if we can which is always difficult but how did those two things potentially impact our our overall brain health so i think i mean sleep has become thankfully sleep has become sexy again which i think is fabulous uh because it really did used to be sort of like society said sleep when you're dead you know get the work done you know it's something that you can you can uh you know reduce and you know you'll just don't worry about it pay for it later um and you really do pay for it pretty much right from the start um so so i'm i'm really glad that people are starting to decide to focus on sleep again and i also think and this is something that i've learned from my friend dr greg potter who's my own personal expert in circadian biology and we've published together and worked together on some projects um and he'll tell you that actually we don't sleep as badly as we're told we do and the majority of people probably sleep enough but you know if you're not spending seven hours in bed you know all things being equal you're probably gonna be better off from a mental health standpoint a long term brain health and physical health standpoint if you do get to spend seven to eight hours in bed and then you get to spend most of that uh asleep and when we look at both sleep quantity and sleep quality both of those are important for long-term risk of cognitive decline and though it's difficult to really unpick it we probably can't pharmaceuticalize our way into that so if you're taking sedatives in order to achieve that sleep you're probably not going to be getting all the benefits because the nature of that sleep isn't the same so i don't think our sleep is necessarily as bad as we're told it is but for the people who you know aren't sleeping well or long you know and it doesn't you know again like seven to nine hours is probably the the average that you might want um you know then i i think there's definitely gonna be some benefit to improving that if you know you're able to spend that extra time in bed there was one paper i think i saw you present once tommy where um decreased sleep you know yes increases um reactivity in the amygdala the emotional part of the brain but also i think you shared something where it decreases empathy which i found really interesting yeah so so this was those those things were actually from the the same paper looking at how we react to visual cues in other people's faces when we're sleep deprived or not and when um when we're sleep deprived and acutely it's gonna happen in one night of sleep um and again the the important thing that other studies have shown that is that one night of bad sleep does not have any meaningful negative effect on your health right so you know overall we're talking about these things compounding over time so if you if you sleep badly one night it's not something to worry about again you know it's just it's fine and you'll you'll survive just just fine you'll have no long-term negative effects but when people are sleep-deprived you're less likely to be able to recognize a positive uh emotion or change in somebody else's face you're less likely to be able to empathize with them and you're more likely to see something as negative and again so when you think about people sleep deprived in meetings on zoom calls interacting with others meeting new people when you're sleep deprived it's more likely to be a negative experience and again um i think this stuff compounds over time so this is one of you know if you want to be a well um well-rounded socially connected sociable human being sleep is incredibly important um and you know that's you know in that study that was one of the reasons why that was found to be the case yeah i think we all know that intuitively i mean going back to how do we feel um you know we can we can talk about sleep and and ask yourself the question you know each morning you know how do i feel does that was that enough do i feel refreshed do i need a little bit more tonight was that a little bit later than is best for me um just finishing off there then told me on connection and you know i guess some of the softer stuff or what we used to think was the softer stuff i don't think i learned anything about the power of connection at medical school now thinking about thinking back maybe i did maybe i've forgotten about it um but just how important is connecting with others for our brain health when you really boil it down social connection again is is essentially the sort of foundational aspect of us as a species right we are a collectivist species um we benefit from being part of a social group from having a place in that social group from having a purpose within that group which gives us meaning and having meaning is something that tells our body that it's worth being alive having meaning or not seems to have an effect on the immune system has an effect on our physiology and so without social connection you're essentially not giving that input which is that you have purpose you have meaning you belong and that is one of the critical inputs for the the brain to to keep working and one of the um one of sort of the the the downstream or threads that comes out of this uh demands driven theory of cognitive decline which we talked about earlier is the grandmother hypothesis um and so the grand hypothesis states that you know rather than when you've procreated you are essentially just a useless sack of meat which is what some people will tell you about the evolutionary forces on our bodies right that you're just there to procreate once you've done once you've done that there are no more evolutionary forces that are creating fitness right and so like most people will say that your genes are just there to make you live to 20 or 30 years old procreate and then what happens after that doesn't really matter however the grandmother hypothesis would state that if you are useful and healthy longer into life then you are available to help support your progeny their progeny and to keep your your tribe alive right so you are actually increasing the likelihood that your genes will be passed further into the future by being alive to be able to help the new parents or being able to look after the grandchildren so actually there are evolutionary forces that exist to keep us long and healthy for as long as possible however you get to a point where you are no longer of use to the group and then that's probably going to be a trigger for some kind of decline because as soon as you're no longer of benefit you know if we think about this from an evolutionary perspective we think about um you know hunter-gatherers you know early humans as soon as you're no longer a benefit you are that you are a detriment to your tribe to your group you're going to take up resources uh people have to care for you um which is which they can't really afford to do so that could trigger this period of decline you know you think about uh wolves or dogs leaving the pack when they're old so they can go and die peacefully in the wilderness and humans used to do that in some groups as well so we are only giving ourselves the input that says you know you're worth being here you're worth having some kind of function because you're part of a group and because you have purpose and without social connection it's almost impossible to have any kind of significant purpose because you don't know that you have purpose because you're not contributing to a to a some kind of goal or group that's greater than yourself so i think that you know we've kind of bounced back from the philosophical to the physiological but says you know at some level for us to survive and be healthy and functional requires some kind of social input that says you have meaning you belong you have purpose and so that's going to be critical to physical health mental health cognitive function and that requires social connection it requires other people to help you see and learn that um and so without that social connection i think that is probably a significant trigger for decline in health and decline in cognitive function yeah thanks for sharing that tommy's super powerful and you know i was thinking about my elderly mother as you were saying that and the the message keeps was coming through to me that you've got to give your brain a reason to think that you need to be alive you have value and uh i think we can all think about that for ourselves and for the people around us tommy i've so enjoyed our conversations today we've gone into all kinds of different areas there's a there's so much we didn't touch upon as well which no doubt will do at some point in the future tommy i always love to leave the listeners and the viewers on youtube with some practical tips so the podcast is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of life you have worked with uh neonates you've worked with people trying to lose weight you work with formula one drivers with athletes with all that experience what are some of your top practical tips for people to improve the way that they feel i think when you go across all of those different groups what i've seen again and again is that the things that are required for optimal performance um are the same as the things that are required for optimal physical health the same are the things that are required for optimal cognitive health and cognitive function and those are the things that we've talked about um so they are you know sleep diet nutrition social connection and what i think it you know there are two things that are really important um to remember from from like my perspective one is that to improve any of those things requires much less physical effort than we are often told right or that we tell ourselves um in terms of the amount of the amount that we need to change our diet or restrict our diet or the amount that we need to exercise um and even just small you know small changes a brisk walk three times a week can have huge knock-on effects on our brain on our bodies and so that's one thing it doesn't take much to have a really big big effect and the other thing is is to remember that we are incredibly strong and resilient as individuals but that does require a group it does require a collective um because that's where we where we derive our meaning and purpose which where a lot of this comes from so you know remember that it doesn't take much uh to improve any of those areas which will then have knock-on effects in other areas and then also remember that you are an incredibly strong resilient human being you know with you know significant purpose and meaning in you know you are loved and you you have a place and because of that you have incredible strength um and you know if you remember that then you know all these ne all this negative messaging that could come from you know a lot of it's internal but a lot of it comes from you know external social media all that kind of stuff then you know you can sort of leave some of that by the wayside and just remember like how little it takes to improve and and how strong and resilient you really are yeah brilliant way to finish great advice there tommy at the end i just want to publicly acknowledge you tommy i think what you're doing is great i love the information you put out i love the way you do it here's someone who i regard as inspirational very influential and um thanks for joining me today thank you uh so much for having me it's a real pleasure and um yeah you're one of very few people in in this arena that i really respect and look up to as well and and uh you know i i really appreciate that cheers tommy really hope you enjoyed that conversation please do think about one thing that you can take and apply into your life inspiration is not enough you need to take action if you did enjoy that please do press subscribe hit that notification bell and why not check out this conversation that i picked out that acts as the perfect follow-up

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 27,833

Rating: 4.9163589 out of 5

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, biochemistry, physiology, neuroscience, resilience, injury, brain health, human health, performance, longevity, multiple sclerosis, insulin resistance, endurance sport, fitness, self-esteem, orthorexia, failure, sleep, stress, movement, nutrition, emotional health, human connection, wellbeing

Id: QB7Lz63_p4I

Length: 93min 31sec (5611 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021