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if you sit for 10 hours a day compared to 9 hours a day it's about a 10% increased risk of dementia if you sit for 12 hours a day it's about a 60% increased risk of dementia 60% yes so it's a problem that we have to deal with David reand professor of human evolutionary biology exercise physiology and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California we are dealing with brain health problems that are only going to increase as our population ages and healthy aging is linked to three behaviors diet physical activity and social connections for example people who have stronger social connections tend to have better brain outcomes than people who don't does excessive alcohol use to shrink the brain yes over one drink per day is associated with negative Health outcomes sleep is the other one that's a big factor in cognitive decline right it is less sleep and lots of sleep are both associated with higher risk is there a optimal amount of exercise physical activity guidelines are 150 minutes per week but only 25 % of adults in the US meet those guidelines with older adults doing 2 to four minutes per day two to four but there are these small activities that provide big benefits that generate new neurons and those neurons get integrated into key parts of the brain number one is remote work is dangerous it's natural for the human body I'm concerned about physical health what's the Practical advice to people that work at home that is realistic for us if you combine with it will literally change your life I think this is fascinating I looked at the back end of our YouTube channel and it says that since this channel started 69.9% of you that watch it frequently haven't yet hit the Subscribe button so I have a favor to ask you if you've ever watched this Channel and enjoyed the content if you're enjoying this episode right now please could I ask a small favor please hit the Subscribe button helps this channel more than I can explain and I promise if you do that to return the favor we will make the show better and better and better and better and better that's the promise I'm willing to make you if you hit the Subscribe button do we have a [Music] deal David if you had to summarize the essence of what your work shines Al
light on and what it intends to help us understand as human beings how would you summarize that what my work has been focused on is uh understanding how and why physical activity especially and lifestyle behaviors in general can impact health and most specifically impact the health of our brains um and I think that you know we are dealing with um brain health problems that are only going to increase as our population ages uh so we have uh we have six million people in the US today that are diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or other related dementias that's projected to grow to around 13 million people over the next 25 years or so um it's we're projected to have 150 million people diagnosed with dementia worldwide over the next 30 years or so um so it's a problem that we have to deal with and I my work has been focused on ways that we can prevent these diseases that are associated with aging why does the brain matter and I say this in part because I think for most of my life I just assumed you know I understand muscles I can go to the gym and work on my muscles but the brain I just thought is this like piece of tofu in between my skull that I have very little control over yeah I mean I think that is that was the prevailing view for a long time that you know we grow our brains uh as children and during adolescence and by the time you're in your 20s your brain has done all the growing it's going to do and now it's just this Progressive shrinking over the rest of your life and you know over the last few decades we've realized that's not true actually that you can uh generate new neurons especially in uh key areas of the brain like the hippocampus that's associated with memory and that that growth of new neurons may be the key to preventing or staving off these neurodegenerative diseases that have this big impact on the Aging brain um and so you know if we can find ways to do that and and what I study is uh kind of doing that through physical activity and exercise um then we might be able to prevent some of the cognitive decline people experience with age maybe even saave off or prevent the development of Alzheimer's disease or other dementias what evidence have scientists got that we can actually grow our brain well that's a great question
the evidence in humans is uh a little trickier so I can talk more about the evidence from animal models because with animal models you can actually look inside the brain and see what's happening after say an exercise intervention so there have now been many many studies especially in mice and rats where um researchers have shown that if you give them access to running wheels or if you have them run on a treadmill that you actually generate new neurons and those neurons survive and get integrated into key parts of the brain and we focus a lot on the hippocampus um because it's so important to memory um which is a which is a major aspect of being human is being able to remember things and uh researchers have shown very clearly that exercise and physical activity in these rodent models leads to the birth and survival of new neurons what is a neuron what's a neuron is the main brain cell um so a neuron is sort of the main cell in your brain that's responsible for um communication and transmission of information across brain regions and where you said this hippocampus thing which is where I know you referenced that it's a sort of Center Point for memory yeah where is that located in the head so the hippocampus is sort is in the temporal deep in the temporal lobe of the brain it looks like a seahorse if you know if it's kind of this curved um curved object in the brain that plays a big role in different aspects of memory so it plays a big role especially in working memory which is um keeping things in your memory over the short term that you may need to recall quickly um and it also plays a big role in the formation of memories of events um that happen in your life and also in spatial navigation which is a an important part of moving around in the world so it's a really key part of the brain and it's also one of the parts of the brain that is most effective by neurod degenerate diseases like Alzheimer's disease so it is a part of the brain that deteriorates in these diseases leading to memory deficits that have a big effect on your daily life is that the only part of the brain that we're able to sort of regenerate or is it can the rest of you know I'm thinking about these rats and these mice if we put them under a brain scan would we see the the mass of the
brain increasing question and is it just that little seahorse hippocampus part or is it the whole brain growing so in in rodent models where uh where researchers have done sort of this detailed work the hippocampus is where uh mainly where new neurons have been found associated with exercise in human studies brain effects have been more widespread so you do see volumetric changes in the hippocampus but you also see volumetric changes or Pres obervation of brain volume in uh frontal loes which are associated with executive cognitive function so things like planning and decision making um where do we need to begin to understand this relationship that humans have between exercise and their brains there's got to be a point in history where exercise became I guess Pro survival in a way where it became sort of imperative for us as a human species to do in order to preserve and extend our cognitive capacity I guess yeah I mean all animals generally have to move to survive right they have to move to find food in some way but at some point during human history um our our pattern of movement shifted pretty dramatically and we think that was around 2 million years ago and at that point we shifted from a more aplike lifestyle to uh hunting and Gathering lifestyle where our our travel distances increased drastically so we were moving over you know 20 kilometers sometimes per day um sometimes longer um and our intensity of movement probably shifted a bit to higher intensities and so the need to uh be physically active changed and if we think about the way that our physiology evolved our physiology evolved in this context of large levels of physical activity on a consistent basis and so I like to think of that as sort of the normal um condition for humans and anything else so as we kind of progress into modern times and and many people have dropped their activity that's actually uh the condition that is quite different from the way that our physiology functions best and and from the way that our physiology evolved does this mean that if I don't do physical activity my brain will shrink that's a good question I mean on a on a broad Public Health scale uh yes you know levels of physical activity or inactivity is associated
with poor brain health smaller volumes of key brain structures so smaller hippoc cample volumes for example and worse cognition overall and greater risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease on a personal level it's hard to say specifically right because there's so many factors that go into your risk of um of dealing with these conditions but I can say that the best way for any individual to reduce their risk of cognitive decline is to be physically active what exactly is going on in my brain then when I'm physically active that's causing my brain to be protected insulated from things like Alzheimer's and Dementia and in some areas of the brain to actually grow what is what is actually happening inside a lot a lot of fun things um so I mean one of the things that happens when we exercise is we increase blood flow to the brain and that helps bring nutrients and and keep our neurons functioning properly but another thing that happens is that your muscles actually generate proteins called myokines and those travel to the brain and they uh interact with neurons in ways that upregulate neurotropins so there's this great neurotropin called brain derived neurotropic factor bdnf and bdnf acts kind of like a fertilizer for brain cells or for new neurons so bdnf when it's upregulated with exercise um helps both the birth of new neurons and it helps them to survive and integrate into the processes that they're that they're meant to work for this suit probably a stupid question but I'm just wondering why the brain just doesn't do that anyway I know it wouldn't it be nice wouldn't it be nice if I didn't have to exercise for the brain to restore itself in such a way to expand it it would be nice in some ways but that's just that's not really the way that our physiology works right so you know as I was kind as I was saying if you think of the sort of natural condition of humans as being Physically Active because that's what we had to to find food and survive then our physiology is adapted to that condition and over the course of two million years we never had to adapt to low levels of physical activity because it just wasn't a part of being human and so it's only been in the last you know few hundred years that we've seen this rapid decline in activity and that's just not enough
time to see that sort of adaptation occur what happened a couple hundred years ago that caused this decline in physical activity was there like a certain invention or something was there a change in cultural understanding I mean I think think start with the Industrial Revolution okay as we as we mechanize and we find ways to um to reduce um our the the need to uh be physically active to gain access to food to survive um and then as as we move on you know in the last 50 60 70 years we start to see a a lot more office jobs right we start to see changes in our work life that reduce activity patterns throughout the day cars I guess cars so in terms of commuting Leisure Time what do we what do most people do during their Leisure Time the couch is really comfortable our screens are really enticing TV screens but now phone and computer and all these things and so we end we end up sitting a lot do you have the stats on the increase in sedentary behavior that is basically people being still it's hard in terms of increase because we we haven't measured time spent sitting for very long that's really been a pretty recent part of research uh but we do know that today people are sitting for on average N9 to 10 hours per day and that level of sitting um is also linked with really low levels of then being physically active so um we can think about you know how many of us are actually active enough to meet the kinds of guidelines that that are prescribed for health um and we're talking about 25% of us adults actually Meeting those guidelines and that number hasn't changed in in 20 years or so even with all the messaging physical activity is good for you you need to be more active you need to exercise you know people just don't do it I guess this the very heart of this is this idea when we're talking about the brain not just taking care of itself without physical activity is this notion that all parts of our body and all parts of our being are created in response pretty much or at least develop in response to an external stimuli of some sort so let me go into the gym the example I gave earlier if I pick up the weight then the muscle grows and whenever I try and Implement a very sudden behavioral change like when I suddenly started training football four
times a week my my muscles basically exploded in my feet because they just weren't strong enough to deal with that demand and I guess the same applies to the brain that if we don't use it we we lose it basically yeah I mean our our bodies are uh fantastic at tuning what we put energy into to maintain to the kinds of activities that we're that we're engaged in right and so you know I like to think of our bodies as great energy minimizers in some ways that you know if you're not using muscles those muscles will get smaller because it takes energy to maintain that tissue if you're not you know creating the need for your heart to pump blood across your body by exercising you'll atrophy some of that tissue you'll you'll reduce blood vessels your heart will become less efficient because you've signaled to your body that you don't need that energy to put be put into that tissue maintenance the same it seems holds true for the brain that if you're not active um in some way then you're kind of signaling that you don't need some of that uh energy to be put into that tissue is all activity the same so if I'm doing strength training is that as beneficial for my brain as potentially going for a run Outdoors that's a great question and um you know we there is not a ton of very clear work that's compared directly different types of activity in ways where I could tell you for sure this is the best one right there are data that suggest that resistance training is beneficial to the brain there's more work on endurance activity and I actually think that's probably because it's easier to do rodent work on endurance activity than resistance and so trying to translate across those models is a little bit easier both forms of exercise have benefits they may be through different Pathways um there may be different biological mechanisms that are underlying those benefits I've kind of seen some cool work coming out lately that has tried to look at uh for example different types of endurance exercise so there's a great study that came out are you familiar with orienteering it's a sport where you're given like a map and a compass and you have to uh find your way across a route as fast as possible so it kind of mixes endurance activity with spatial navigation and and uh
moving around your environment and figuring out where you are typically done outside right yeah always done outside typically done on natural like on trails and things but people do do it in cities as well oh okay so like and this is over miles in cles yeah this would be like a like a trail run kind of or something like that and there was a great study that just came out looking at um it was a randomized control trial so they actually randomized people into either an orientering group or a hiking group or a control group and over a couple months they found that the orienteering group actually had uh better performance on uh cognitive tests like memory tests and executive function tests than even the hiking group both of those groups did better than the control group but there was actually this extra boost if they if for the people who were in the orienteering group so we're starting to see that maybe some different activ ities could potentially enhance the effects of exercise on the brain what's the conclusion there what does that study hint at in terms of because hiking you're out in nature you're navigating your way up a hill or something orientering that it's it's almost like solving a puzzle right because you've got a map and a compass yeah I mean I think it it fits into an evolutionary model at least in my mind um where the purpose of being Physically Active is to move around a habit to find things find food find water find firewood um and so physical activity in in this sort of ecologically relevant world is a combination of cognitive challenges and physical challenges so I think that when you combine them in the way that perhaps orienteering does or maybe some other sports you might actually get a bigger boost for your buck a bigger bang for your buck um in terms of the brain benefits and that I think is rooted in our evolutionary history like I said I think that being active in an evolutionary sense always comes with sort of a cognitive challenge nobody's ever just going out for a workout there's no reason to if you're not if you don't need to find something you're going to relax and rest because you're an energy minimizer right don't spend that energy if you don't have to is there any animal studies that show how
um have doing challenging exercise so cognitively challenging exercise so exercise that involves problem solving improves our neuroplasticity or increases our the amount of brain cells we have across our brain yes yeah there there have been and a great um impetus for our work was some of the work done in rodent studies um by a a professor named ger Kerman um and he and his group did some work in in Mouse models where they combined uh access to running Wheels with a very enriched cage environment um so they looked at they they did a very careful study where they looked at some mice who were just living in their cage you know normally a control group they looked at mice that were given access to a running wheel they looked at mice that were given access to this enriched environment that's cognitively challenging and things to play on and then they looked at a combined group where they combined the running wheel with the enriched environment and they found this effect where the combined environment doubled the growth and survival of new neurons compared to either wheel running alone or cage enrichment alone so you got this really cool ative effect um where you where you really enhance the effects of either one of those behaviors by combining them if we can pull that conclusion over to human life if we can if one assumes that the same effect will be seen in humans what does that then tell us we should be doing if we if our objective is to live long happy healthy lives with fantastic brains what should we then be doing exercise wise well I think number one is just getting active right so I think you know to me the number one recommendation is you know to be physically active and especially for people who aren't that active right now um the best thing they can do is get out and and start walking um but if we want to enhance the effects of physical activity on the brain and build on this animal work we're starting to see some good evidence that if you do something similar if you combine physical activity with cognitive challenges you can boost the effects of physical activity on um on the brain on on especially cognitive uh performance and so you know most of the work has been in controlled environments so we've done a study where um we built a uh a game that you can
play while you're on an exercise machine um so you combine exercise with challenging activities right um and we've shown that you can actually get a bigger benefit for cognition when you do that than when you just exercise or you just play a game and so we can you know take that and perhaps translate that into the real world and think about way that you can make your exercise more cognitively challenging so can you go out and and um challenge yourself spatially take new Roots right oftentimes especially runners or or Walkers they just do the same route every time or same they have two or three rootes that they do every time depending on how long they want to go but maybe we should be challenging ourselves a little more right maybe we should take new routes where you get a little lost and then have to find your way back right I'm someone that runs on the treadmill but Jack over there he runs Outdoors so you're telling me sort of Topline that Jack is serving his brain more than I am when I'm just on that same treadmill every day in my hotel room while I'm out here in New York whereas he's running around Central Park it's possible so I think there's there's a couple things um you know running on a treadmill may end up being a little more like running on a running wheel for a mouse without the extra enrichment and yeah running outside May provide some of those better benefits we also know that running outside actually has a lot more more uh benefits than just maybe cognition but also seems to boost mood a little bit more than running or exercising in more impoverished environments you know Cog really yes so there's like there's a research movement called the green exercise movement that is uh focused on uh the impact of exercising in green spaces versus um more urban environments or or indoors on exercise equipment and I don't want to scare anybody said exercise is great if if you if running on a treadmill works for someone's lifestyle it is fantastic exercise right but you know what I mean I could go outside so the only reason I'm not is because I don't know the difference and so you know it's for someone like me of course I could have gone outside this morning instead of just um being on the treadmill but I've I I thought they were
the same so you're telling me that there is potentially some upside according to research and me getting outside and running in both mood and neuroplasticity makes me go okay tomorrow a different decision absolutely I think that I mean to me that's the really surprising outcome of a lot of This research is that uh moving outside and especially moving in green spaces so moving in um Parks or near Parks or uh moving on Trails things like that seems to uh have bigger benefits especially for mood we don't know yet about the cognitive benefits that's our hypothesis but certainly uh some of the research out there suggests that for mood and feelings of well-being moving your body in a green space provides a little bit extra benefit than moving in um in like I said in city streets or in in indoors one of the things I notice all the time is if I exercise before I do this podcast my brain just seems to work yeah whereas if I get out of bed and I don't exercise and then I come and do this podcast it's like the words just don't go from my brain to my mouth properly yeah I mean that's why I got into this right because I started noticing the same thing and I started noticing how much better I felt after I exercised and you know and and to this day right I mean my wife knows when I didn't go for a run in the morning right I'm not that Pleasant of a person to be around the rest of the day what is going on there do you do you know the sort of physiological reason why it feels like if I exercise in the morning before I have a two-hour conversation my brain and mouth seem to be connected one of the things that I I think is happening is that um you've activated uh reward centers in your brain that have increased your arousal right they you've activated these centers in your brain um that are making you feel good and when we feel good we feel more confident um we're not as sort of stuck in our heads we're not as we're more present um but I think that is rooted in the rewarding sensations of exercise right it it makes us feel better and when you feel better you function better across all aspects of your body of of your life um and those rewards are molecular rewards that are that are popping up it's there's there's similarities with um with how people feel when they use certain drugs
they're activating similar receptors in your brain as when you're using certain drugs although to a much lower extent um and it's really it's making you you know sharper and and making you more confident and making you feel better is there a optimal time of day to exercise I know to your point um about any exercise is better than no exercise but is there an optimal time to exercise I mean when do you exercise and why well I exercise first thing in the morning why um because I will feel better all day right and so I mean there's two reasons I think one if I save exercise for later in the day there's a greater chance that things will come up and I'll you know I'll I'll find excuses not to but mainly it's because first thing in the morning if I exercise my whole day is better right and so that's the motivation to get out of bed for me and and get out the door is I literally think about how I will feel if I don't do it um because sometimes it's cold sometimes you don't it's dark you know this time of year you don't want to do it but if I think about how feel the rest of the day um that's a big motivator and people might hear this and they they might be starting from zero right they might not be excising at all what would you say to those people not to be intimidated by the advice out there about how much you have to exercise because it's actually surprising how little you need to exercise to gain benefits um so if you're starting from zero the biggest bang for your buck from a public health standpoint are people who are starting from almost zero and just starting to exercise a little bit right just getting out the door and taking a thousand steps right something like that you know those those sorts of uh small amounts going from zero to two three 4,000 steps per day of exercise that's that's the biggest public health benefit then you start to see diminishing returns right so if you're if you're already exercising a lot and you and you want to bump it up a little higher you know the amount of benefit you get is is smaller than going from very little to to more but I think that's the I mean that's the surprising thing for me is that you know if you if you are not an exerciser getting four or 5,000 steps per day is going to give you a big cardiovascular benefit and a big benefit for your brain
you've studied some of the tribes around the world so the hatza tribe right is correct yes what what work have you done with them and when did that research begin so I started working with uh the hza and 2009 that was my first time out there and we've been working with them and interested in um what kinds of um Health impacts you see in a hun in the context of a hunting and Gathering lifestyle and they live in what part of the world so they live in northern Tanzania why did you want to spend time with them so the hodza uh provide a window into what a hunting and Gathering lifestyle looks like and so if you work with individuals who are still um pretty much full-time hunting and Gathering um they give you a view of how much physical activity does it take to be a hunter gatherer for example and how does that relate to biomarkers of cardiovascular health or how does that relate to their cognition um how does this lifestyle impact the way that they age and the hodza give us this really important view of what that lifestyle is like in terms of behavior and activity and and um and aging is there a op timal amount of exercise that's in line with our sort of evolutionary past we said you know that we've evolved to be active was is there like an average amount I mean do we see this in the hatza tribes do we have any clues from history yeah I mean it so we can look at what living hunter gatherers do and that provides us with kind of a clue as to what that lifestyle um might entail and I like I do like to think about things in terms of steps per day often because that's an easy metric for people to kind of understand and Trav for themselves there are more complicated ways to to measure physical activity but steps is a good one step counts and so um the hodza that as we've measured their step counts are getting a lot so it's like you know 15 to 20,000 steps per day in that range which is quite a bit of of movement and that's not to say that that is the optimal amount um but that's what we see in hunting and Gathering Lifestyles the benefits that we get from a public health standpoint start to occur at much smaller levels right so you know four five 6,000 steps per day you start to see some real benefits and as I said you start to maybe see diminishing returns
as you get higher and higher levels so what's what what we see in the past or see in living Hunter gathers may be quite different than what's necessarily you know optimal for our health in terms of you know where are we going to get the most benefit and and where do we start to Trail off with the hazer is that across all age groups or is that yeah I mean there is a decline in IAL activity with age that's clear but um but even older adults we we've measured physical activity in adults in their 70s and even their early 80s and they're still far exceeding what we do in in in uh in the US or the UK or by factor of a lot of times the way that we measure physical activity is in terms of um how much time they spend in moderate or vigorous intensity activity um so these are kind of activities that are that get your heart rate up up to about 50 55% plus of your of your maximum heart rate and older adults are still engaging in 60 70 80 minutes per day of that kind of activity whereas say in the US you might see older adults on average engaging in two to four minutes per day of that level of activity to four yeah so on average right for for older adults so we just don't see as much physical activity in in the US like I said before only 25% of adults in the US meet physical activity guidelines and physical activity guidelines here are 150 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous physical activity so in the US 25% of adults meet those guidelines in the hodza uh those that we've measured are meeting weekly physical activity guidelines on average in two days so they're getting 300 minutes of physical activity in a couple days versus you know adults the US who aren't coming close to that one of the biggest Killers I think maybe the biggest killer of people in the US and I believe in the UK as well is cardiovascular diseases yeah that is am I right in thinking that is the single biggest that's the disease you're most likely to die from yes I believe so when we look at the hadza how are they doing in terms of cardiovascular illness so we don't see a lot of evidence of uh disease risk so we we have not yet measured cardiovascular outcomes like we haven't measured mortality for example from cardiovascular disease but we have measured uh biomarkers so things like
cholesterol levels triglyceride levels um blood pressure so looked at whether there's hypertension and we see very little evidence of cardiovascular disease um in this group others other researchers have looked at other groups so um there's a long-term study of a group in South America called the chimane um that have been studied in a lot of detail and there they found almost no evidence of cardiovascular disease and they've been able to look in a much more detailed way at at outcomes like you know death from cardiovascular disease and they see almost no evidence of of high levels of cardiovascular disease diabetes very little evidence of diabetes very little evidence of dementia I mean these diseases that we look at as inevitable parts of Aging they're just not right they are not inevitable a lot of them are a product of our lifestyle and you know I'm I'm most familiar with dementia and something like 40% of risk of dementia is preventable it's due to Lifestyle right we have the ability to modify our risk in really big Ways by altering the way we live what else has inspired you or caused you to implement behavioral changes into your life new habits based on your work researching the hadza tribe is there anything at all that has either changed your mind or modified how you live your life yeah I mean I think a couple of things um number one um physical activity is is sort of the Cornerstone of my life that's sort of that is that is um that's been driven by my personal sort of uh enjoyment of it but also from a research standpoint that's been really motivating to maintain an active lifestyle um across these years but more recently I've been really interested in sitting um which is you know in some ways um it's it's not really the opposite of being Physically Active um but it's another behavior that we engage in actually for much more time per day than than anybody's physically active and um we've done a lot of work on resting behaviors in the hza and that's been an area that I that I've sort of tried to pull into my life as well is um trying to understand you know how sitting can impact our lives and then how our evolutionary biology May uh may be tweaked by by this behavior and so I've tried to implement some things like
trying not to sit too long trying to break up my sitting um finding ways to to um to not be stuck on in a chair all day um and a lot of that's driven by by my research what's uh what's the issue with sitting so sitting is um sitting is a beautiful thing right I mean we're doing it right now it's really comfortable and the reason it's comfortable is because we've basically taken all of the load off of our lower body so we're we're supporting ourselves in these chairs right you got to move around you mention you know when I give talks about sitting all of a sudden I start seeing people fidgeting right some people get up and and stand up in the back um so you know you take the load off of your lower legs and your muscles don't have to work and you know not surprisingly that super comfortable we're not working hard um but the same time what's happening is the our muscles not being active means that what we normally do to fuel muscle activity which is you know we break up triglycerides in our bloodstream and that's you know that's those are broken up into fatty acids that fuel muscle activity that's not happening and so those those fuels now build up in our in our blood vessels and that's associated with cardiovascular disease so sitting for long periods of time is associated with some negative Health outcomes and one of the things that we've learned from working with the hodza is that you know people rest a lot like the hodza they sit for as rest and sit for as long as we do which was actually super surprising to us we thought that wouldn't be the case we thought they were going to be active you know all the time and there would be much less sitting but when we finally actually measured it with accelerometers um they're resting for the same amount of time that we are but they're not sitting in chairs they're resting in postures that require a little muscle activity so they're squatting or they're they're kneeling or they're sitting on the ground in ways that you know you have to kind of keep shifting your body around and it's possible that just that kind of low level of muscle activity um is is how our bodies are well adapted to rest and what's weird is the invention of chairs and what's weird is the invention of these objects that completely
eliminate the need for our lower bodies to use muscle activity chairs a fairly new invention when when did chairs come into the picture the first chairs that we know about from the archeological record are about 5,000 years old um but you know the ubiquitous use of chairs is is probably even more recent than that right chairs are chairs are these weird objects that they're not only you know ergonomic and and and made for you know our comfort but they also over history have had implications for economic status and power and you know taking a seat at the table and a throne in in you know in in terms of political power um where you sit has always been important from a political and and economic and social standpoint so um chairs have have sort of Taken on a big part of our lives and if you you know if you walk into someone's house you know generally the first thing that you're seeing is there seating environment right chairs and couches and um and and places to sit are part of the way we design our world um we don't think about them that often but we use them more than almost any other object in our lives it's kind of like we assume they've just always been a thing it's most of these things in our life we assume that this is just the way it's always been and this is therefore normal and acceptable but it must be pretty Illuminating to go and see these tribes who they must think we're crazy they must think we're so strange by the things that we do I mean they do but at the same time you know when we work in in Hodel land we bring chairs because they're comfortable and you know the the first thing that happens when we're out there is you know this crazy game of musical chairs that if one of us gets up you know someone comes over and sits in our chair and why is that because they're super comfortable um and so I I don't think they they necessarily think we're crazy I think they they they you know they enjoy sitting in the chairs um they just don't have them be careful not to leave any of them that well that's what you know that's what happens is you know we'll go out for the day and and go you know go um you know foraging with people and and come back and you know you can't find you want to sit down and you can't find a chair because everyone's sitting in your chair but that's totally fine they they deserve to
rest just as much or more than than anybody else what's the Practical advice do you think there for for employers for people that work at home for people that sit in chairs often because we people can't just know we can't just do this podcast squatting right when we could but you know what I'm saying very challenging it' be very very challenging is there some kind of Middle Ground that is um accessible and realistic for us yeah I think the I think the best thing people can do is just try not to sit for prolonged periods of time I mean there's no way to eliminate sitting and I don't think that standing all day is is necessarily the answer I don't think that that's necessarily A a benefit full-time I think breaking up sitting into smaller periods is probably the best thing we can do um so you know one of the pieces of advice is is actually that I always tell people is you know just drink more water so you got to get up and pee more um that is that's an easy way to to kind of force yourself not to sit for two hours at a time but you know having those kinds of reminders that you should get up move around um there's been this popular notion of take an exercise snack break so you know every 30 minutes every 45 minutes get up and walk up a staircase or do some push-ups or something just to get your body moving get your muscles working do some squats um and so that can be you know really beneficial some people will hear that and go yeah but if just doing just getting up and doing a two-minute walk how's that going to help in the grand scheme of things there's really good evidence so okay couple things um from an epidemiological standpoint there's been this really great work coming out on um something that's called vigorous intermittent physical activity um so this is um activity that's not purposeful it's short in duration but it's vigorous so going up the stairs or walking really briskly for like a minute or two that in the long run people that do that often have a lower risk of mortality and a lower risk of cardiovascular disease regardless of purposeful physical activity right so you can actually get big benefits by just doing these short bursts of activity walking to get your lunch or at a vigorous Pace at a vigorous Pace yeah I mean walking to get your lunch is
great but you get a little bit more benefit from doing it at a vigorous pace so you know if you're walking and you can't sing at the same time or you can't talk at the same time that's that's now you're getting into kind of a vigorous intensity um and there's also been randomized control trials where people have actually in the lab had people sit for you know eight hours not do anything and then they've taken those same people on another day and had them sit but break it up into you know 20 minutes break it up and walk on a treadmill for two minutes something like that and those Studies have shown changes in cardi metabolic markers so they've shown shown changes in um insulin levels and changes in um in triglyceride levels and and cardiovascular disease biomarkers just from breaking up your sitting in into into shorter periods so you really can have a a profound effect I think on your health um by implementing some of these small changes is there you know a type of EX we touched on this a little bit earlier on but I'm really trying to make a case to myself that I should be doing more ER iic exercise then I typically do a little bit of aerobic exercise um unless I'm training for something in particular and a lot of sort of resistance training is there any case that I should be doing more aerobic exercise or resistance training if my goal is to improve my brain my memory my cognition I think I mean I think both are important um from from my perspective aerobic activity you know we're we're thinking about this from an evolutionary standpoint right we've been talking about this idea of can we boost the effects of exercise by adding cognitive challenges right and so from my perspective aerobic activity is probably the place where you can do that um in the easiest way um so by moving yourself outside in new environments um by adding in some some spatial navigation challenges to a workout you might be able to do that a little easier than than when you're lifting weights you know this whole brain training industry that emerged I think it emerged like 10 years ago and there became all of these apps that were kind of like puzzles and stuff and they claimed that if you use these apps and do this brain training stuff then it will um make your memory better your IQ higher all of
these things is there any Merit to these brain training games there does appear to be some um so there do appear to be some training games that that do improve aspects of um of cognition you know it's been a it's been a tough industry because not all of the studies are super high quality um and and some of the claims can be a little bit further ahead of maybe where the science is so are the effects that big like if you do it you know every day and you invest all this time are you going to get the biggest effect um but there does appear to be some benefit you know if I were in a perfect world would I be doing everything I could um to save off the potential for developing dementia yes and so if there's a little bit of evidence that that could be helpful I would I would definitely jump in and do it just learning generally yeah learning so learning education um keeping yourself cognitively challenged throughout your lifespan is clearly um a way to keep staving off cognitive decline is there research to support the idea that learning or reading or some kind education for sure for sure and and you know education is a difficult one because education is wrapped up in a lot of other things right so education is wrapped up in um your parents and socioeconomic class and so when we study education from an epidemiological standpoint it's really hard to deal with um the kinds of other variables that could confound those relationships but certainly lifelong learning seems to be associated with better reserve so one of the things that we think about in terms of cognitive aging is how much Reserve do you build up over the course of your lifespan so that as we undergo some atrophy and decline which isn't which is kind of inevitable um have you built up enough Reserve so that that decline doesn't impact your daily life right you you have enough of this builtup tissue and built up reserve and built up connections um that even if you undergo some decline or in in tissue it doesn't impact you reserve being kind of like Pathways is that Reserve could be Pathways right it could be volume volume so it could be a bigger hippocampus or it could be the connections between your hippocampus and and other parts of the
brain and both of those are are important and you can build those up across your lifespan with physical activity with um cognitive engagement um things like that and with avoiding some of the sort of negative health behavior like smoking or excessive alcohol use does excessive alcohol use and smoking shrink the brain they do they are they are risk factors in cognitive decline and the development of dementia and Alzheimer's disease how much alcohol we know that excessive like you know excessive consumption over the sort of one drink per day or two drinks per day for a man one drink per day for a woman um that level of alcohol consumption is associated with negative Health outcomes including risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease is so sleep is the other one that's a big a big factor in cognitive decline right it is and sleep I mean a lot of things happen during sleep um that are really important one of the things that happens during sleep we think is that um it's a time where your brain is clearing these plaques that can build up that are associated with um neurodegenerative disease and so if that's the case and there's been some evidence that suggests that that sleep is when some of that clearance is happening then poor Sleep Quality just doesn't allow that function to occur allows those uh plaques to build up sleep is weird in some ways because it's not always more is better so uh it follows a U-shaped curve in terms of risk of developing dementia for example where less sleep and lots of sleep are both associated with higher risk and there's like a sweet spot right there's a sweet spot of you know call it seven to nine hours a night something like that um that that's that is where your lowest risk is going to be so you can over sleep you can Here's the the the the caveat to that is what's going on with overs sleepers that you're not able to sus out in your analysis so a lot of times people oversleep because they're depressed and we know depression is linked with these neurodegenerative diseases and so it's it's possible that it's those it's not the actual sleep itself but it's what's linked with too much sleep like inactivity they might not be exercising as much as other yeah what are you displacing so another yeah that's a
great Point another thing that we can look at is you know you have 24 hours in a day right and so if you sit for an extra hour that's going to come at the expense of something else if you sleep for an extra hour yeah or exercise or light physical activity just housework or something um so you can't the day is not infinite so anything that you choose to do is displacing something else what about having friends yeah having a partner you know does that is that going to increase my chances of having a great cognitive function in a big brain well it depends on how good your relationship is so I mean just having a partner sometimes you know if it's if it's there are ways that that can be associated with negative outcome comes if if your relationship is is challenging right um but you know so I I think of healthy aging as linked to really three main behaviors diet physical activity and social connections okay social connections are key and so you know we're hearing now there's a kind of a buzzword the epidemic of loneliness especially coming out of the pandemic years that is really um it's kind of frightening because people have gotten more used to sort of living alone and being alone um and those social connections are a key aspect of maintaining a healthy brain when we age we know that um and how do we know well mainly from epidemiology there's two ways to two ways to analyze these these these questions there are are randomized control trials and sort of observational trials it's really hard to do randomized control trials on loneliness and and look at long-term outcome so we look at observational data and people who have stronger social connections who have um it's not necessarily more but it's it's higher quality social connections who you know if you ask them if they have people they can confide in they'll say Yes um those people tend to have better brain outcomes than people who who don't have those connections and if you think about it again I I don't want to make a a sort of an easy evolutionary argument where we just say this is how we evolved so this is how we live should live now but I mean if you think about our evolutionary history for for the most part we lived in a in a time where social connections were imperative to survival right I mean if you are living
in a in a hunting and Gathering lifestyle you know you need those social connections you can't guarantee that you will find food every day so you need to have connections with other people who you trust and they trust who you're willing to share with right and so those social connections become um become inextricably linked to your health does pollution have an impact on our cognitive performance yeah that's been so that's been a surprising and really kind of sad result of a lot of research lately is that air pollution um has real negative impacts on brain aging um and we've seen that in acute studies where people have looked at um the effects of you know what's going on in your in your peripheral blood when you commute in traffic right when you ride your bike in traffic um but also from an epidemiological standpoint people who are living in areas with higher air pollution have a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's disease and other dementias um one of the things that we've done some work on we were really interested in whether physical activity either could you know diminish those impacts of air pollution on the brain but also we were thinking well when you're active you're breathing more right you're your your your respiration increases so you're breathing in more uh pollution more particles so could that actually you know have an impact on the benefits of activity on your brain and we found we we've looked at a look at this in a couple ways and both for some brain structural outcomes and for risk of dementia exercising in or being physically active in in an area with even moderate levels of air pollution diminishes the benefits of physical activity on the brain which is a real bummer especially for me I live in Los Angeles which is a very uh it's an area with a lot of air pollution and um and so being physically active in that environment when there's a lot of pollution in the air um it doesn't it doesn't make your health outcome worse but it diminishes the benefits of physical activity so if you go for a a run in the middle of London for example or in the middle of New York City the cognitive benefits are diminished that's what we're seeing in the data we're seeing and in fact the study that we did was was uh from data uh based in the UK
where you know we're not seeing the kinds of levels of pollution that we see in some other cities around the world where it's really drastic or even in Los Angeles where it's much higher levels of pollution than we'd see in say London but even in those levels with more moderate levels of air pollution um people who are active in in higher levels of air pollution don't show the same brain benefits as people who are active in areas with lower pollution I had my brain scanned uh what two months ago now and it was okay okay it wasn't amazing it what do you mean by okay I mean he just told me there was room for improvement in terms of like some things he saw in my brain he also diagnosed me with ADHD following that and a few other questionnaires and and things one of the things in my sort of prescription that he asked me to do more of was racket Sports interesting okay he said if you do this list of things that he's asked me to do things like hyperbaric chambers and blah blah blah blah blah blah and Racket Sports um we'll see an increase in certain parts of your brain now that somewhat ties into what you're saying with doing this physical activity but pairing it with some kind of cognitive challenge racket Sports seems like a prime example it's actually it's funny it it is the number one question I get after I give a talk is about tennis and I think I probably you know I give talks a lot in in you know to communities with you know more a sometimes more affluent older adults who probably play a lot of tennis and but it is you know it's an activity that people play can play later in life you know um and um and it does involve a lot of strategic thinking it involves a lot of fast reactions and it involves aerobic activity um and so it is it's a great Contender and you're doing and you're doing with someone it's social um oftentimes especially U when you get a little older you play doubles um so you don't have to run the court as much what are the other questions people after hearing you speak what are the other questions that people often are most curious about how much activity that's the big one right how much do I have to do do I have to do right that's way people think about it yeah and you know I think have to do yeah and it it it's it sort of does bum me out to frame it
that way because um because I think of physical activity as as something that as as we were just talking about it improves your whole day um it's something that many of us want to do because of that right and so I think you know first the first thing I always tell people is find the activity you want to do because that's the one you'll keep doing and so don't look for the perfect right if running a treadmill makes you crazy and you don't want to do it then you won't keep it up um if playing tennis does it for you maybe it's not the best if we fig you know if we can even figure out what that means but you're going to do it for the rest of your life then by all means that's the one to do and so I think that is the first thing that everyone should be thinking about is you know what do you what do you what makes you excited to get out the door and do um and don't worry about what's best what is the research that you've done that you're most proud of or that surpris surprised you the most because you know I've I've been looking through your work and found different things that I found interesting but um I must have missed something that you find really fascinating well one of the things that I found really surprising was actually it was it's now been a while it's been like over over a decade ago I did some work on um the endoc canabo system um and the endoc canabo system is our body's uh sort of natural form of marijuana you know we produce these uh chemicals that activate brain receptors the same way that the active ingredient in marijuana um activates and so um it turns out that exercise upregulates the same system um these endoc canabo and that may be why at least partially why exercise makes people feel good um and one of the studies that we did like I said about 10 11 years ago now uh was we found that the same thing that we get from exercise in terms of endoc canabo signaling dogs also get that and I'm I'm a dog dog lover and I know my dog loves to exercise and she's you know bummed out if she can't get her her her walk and run in for the day and I think there's something similar going on it's these similar rewarding mechanisms that make them feel good that that makes us feel good so that was one um one really fun and and interesting kind of finding
that I think has some implications right it's it's if if if we can find those activities that generate those rewards we're going to want to do that more often and it also provides a sort of physiological explanation as to why some people who don't exercise or aren't able to exercise can often have depressive symptoms agree I totally agree yeah and I think these biological mechanisms that can that can make you feel better when you exercise they don't always kick in right away right and so I also think they can be a that can be a little bit of a barrier to someone who's not active that you know if you just get up and start exercising you know maybe it takes a little bit of time for these things to kick in you have to be able to stay within a certain intensity level and maybe if you're not very fit you kind of overshoot that and you you end up going too too intense and you don't get those same sort of mild benefits that just make you feel good all day right I think one of the things that people need to kind of keep in mind is is maybe try to stick with it long enough to get a little bit of Fitness so you can reap those rewards they'll come you just need to just give it some time right have you got any hypothesis that you're working on at the moment that you have haven't been able to prove out yet but you know as someone that's a researcher and that's insanely curious there must be things in your mind that you're thinking I'd love to do a study on that to figure out if that's true yeah I mean so a couple things I mean one we are not done with the combining cognitive challenges with physical activity I think that is a really um a really exciting area and it's it's early on so I think the the work that we've done and others have done is in its infancy and how we can boost the the the brain benefits of exercise and that's sort of that's going to be a big part of our work going forward is what can we do to really um make exercise a little more cognitively challenging and get those benefits um the area that I'm that I'm really interested in now um is the effects of sitting on the brain and um what are the mechanisms that link too much time spent sitting with brain health and how can we kind of manage that a little bit better you know when we think about exercise participation and I've been
saying you know 25% of adults engage in in uh the guidelines for physical activity levels in the US that number hasn't changed over the last you know couple decades all the messaging I mean you know would you could you ever meet someone who doesn't know that physical activity is important to do but still 75% of people don't exercise and so I don't know what it'll take to to change that number but I think maybe we can look at other behaviors that we can change and sitting is something that everyone does and so that I think is a really nice place to focus to move the needle a little bit so can we get people to sit less what are the kinds of interventions we can Implement that can get people to to reduce their time spent sitting and will that pay off in terms of brain health and I think that's it's a big question we know that time spent sitting is associated with risk of dementia we just we just did a big study looking at you know if you if you sit for 10 hours a day compared to nine hours a day it's about a 10% increased risk of dementia if you sit for 12 hours a day it's about a 60% increase risk of dementia compared to sitting for N9 n and a half% 60% versus 9 hours a day right so just a couple more hours right it's it's a nonlinear relationship so once you get past about nine nine and a half hours a day your risks start going up in in a nonlinear exponential way and so can we alter that can can we I mean it doesn't it doesn't take a lot necessarily to go from 12 to 8 hours a day so maybe that's easier than getting people out the door maybe we can find some find some intervention so that's what I'm really excited about is you know some of some lowcost ideas some low investment ideas for people um that could maybe have a big impact on the way they age I'm thinking about all kinds of chairs that vibrate and give you an electric shock I'm thinking of how we can Implement that into which is aany involved in totally yeah I mean reminders are one way right I mean I think tracking um your behavior I mean there it's not going to work for everybody but certainly tracking your time spent sitting for a couple weeks might actually give you a little bit of motivation once you realize just how much time you spend on these chairs what is brain foods is is there
such thing as a brain food I think I much the reason I take aega is because people tell me it's good for your brain yeah I don't you know I don't think there's a magic pill um I you know I think the best evidence that we have right now is um is more plant-based less meat-based especially less processed meat more plant-based more plant-based foods and and Less meat Less meat yeah here's where the difficulty lies in all of this research to study brain health you need to observe people over long periods of time and so you can't Implement a a 10-year diet intervention just nobody will follow it so all of the research that's really um strong in this area is asking people to report what they eat and then tracking what happens to them over time so it's it's difficult work but the best evidence is that aspects of the Mediterranean diet seem to be linked with better brain outcomes so more plant-based more um more legumes more whole grains less processed food Less meat less sugar these are you know these are the obvious dietary interventions right and I think they're they're obvious for a reason because they seem to be so good for so much of our bodies and you know so much of our cardiovascular metabolic health and our brain health if there was one fundamental misunderstanding that most people have that your work and your experience has um rebutted I guess what is that fundamental human misunderstanding about the nature of our bodies and how we're supposed to be living to be optimal I think I think the most dangerous misunderstanding is how much exercise it takes to get benefits right and I think that's because that acts as a barrier to people and what we've seen from the epidemiological work is that you know the the there are minimal amounts of activity that provide big benefits more is generally better but you can get huge benefits just by moving your body a little bit every day and so I think that's you know as I said it's a dangerous misconception because it's a barrier when someone thinks when someone doesn't exercise at all and thinks I need to get 12,000 steps per day and I'm tracking it and I'm getting 3,000 that's a pretty big gap and that's one that maybe you don't think you can fill but if you're getting 3,000 and you think if I get to 5,000 I'm gonna get a
big benefit that's motivating right it's so true that sometimes going from zero to one feels so hm inconsequential and somewhat embarrassing that we just don't do it because we I think many people think of 0 to one as like zero to a five day a week gym attendance record right which is just like climbing Mount Everest in your mind it's just so far away that there's going to be so much psychological discomfort it's going to result in procrastination you're going to do something else and you're going to avoid it but if we reframe that to zero to one being walking for your lunch yeah and that as the starting point and then one to two being as you said going from 1,000 steps to maybe 2,000 steps feels like something everyone can do but we just don't think it's important we think it's totally inconsequential to go for a walk as opposed to um you know just sitting down and ordering our food on an app yeah something that I I think about a lot because even as someone like me that I I go to the gym you know um as frequently as I possibly can however there are some days like today where I'm extremely busy where I might have said I was going to go to the gym lateer at night and I either think to my myself that there's no middle ground I think that's either going to the gym and working really hard or [ __ ] it yeah yeah there's great middle ground though yeah you can run up the stairs on your way to bed right you know I mean you really or you you know you can do these exercise snacks but I like to think of the the things that you're talking about you know walk to lunch instead of ordering in you think that's not important maybe it's life-changing for some people it will literally change your life if if you are doing very little and you take that first step you know it can change everything about your you know your future in some ways um because it builds the foundation for oh that feels good maybe I'll try a little bit more right maybe I'll try a little bit more you know we were talking earlier you were saying you know you implement a new exercise regimen and you jump in with everything and then you end up you know getting a achilles tendon injury or something like that you know that's especially true of people who don't exercise at all and so you know the best
thing to do is to start slowly and really start reaping those rewards because that's the motivator and so yeah I mean I think if you are exercising a lot you know day that gets away from you and you can't make it to the gym I mean getting a little bit of vigorous activity going for a really brisk walk going up the stairs doing some pushup I mean anything is going to give you a little bit of benefit um you know these are really easy things that we can Implement into our lives quick one from one of our sponsors a lot of you have asked me the question about Hu over the years about where heel fits into your life is it the most healthy choice one can make when they're thinking about what their nutrition and here's what I would say to all of those people I think in an Ideal World I would be able to sit down and cook and prepare all of my meals I think that would be my ideal option but it because of the nature of my life because I'm moving around often what used to happen before hu was I'd end up making bad choices I'd end up snacking I'd have junk food options on the because I was busy and my nutrition would come second to whatever my professional priority was what hu allows you to do is to have a healthier option on the go that is convenient that contains a lot of the nutrients that you need to have a complete diet and that's exactly where it fits in my life they've now expanded the range if you haven't yet checked out the hu RTD I highly recommend you do go to your local Tesco boots or SS spres or online and you can grab and try one there does Alzheimer's exist on a spectrum per se and is is what one end of that Spectrum sort of just general cognitive decline and memory reduction because I sometimes wonder obviously my job here is to I interview very intelligent people and those people come in all shapes sizes and ages and I obviously as an observer notice how some of the older people that I meet are incredibly sharp you know arguably significantly sharper than I am and I'm you know in some cas is 30% 40% of their age 40% of their age um and they're just unbelievably sharp and then we've also all had experiences maybe with an elder relative or you know someone slightly older where you can see that that their
memory recall or their sort of it's almost sometimes you experience it as their self-awareness has started to wne they might tell you a short story in one hour if you know what I'm saying they might they just it's almost like the self-awareness of what they're saying and how they're saying it and their ability articulate themselves has some somewhat slipped away and I wonder if that exists on this scale of Dementia or whether that's just general atrophy as you call it of the brain right and I don't I really really want to be someone as I'm sure we all do that has my brain works until the day that I die yeah you know yeah we all want that yeah we all want that and of course and I that's why I wonder if it's the Spectrum or is it is a spectrum yeah I mean so there's sort of a a a a normal amount of of cognitive change that happens with aging in most people um that in general should not impact your daily life greatly right you should still be able to do all the things you want to do navigate your world in the way that you want to you may have some you know it's inevitable that there will be some memory changes um some changes in your in your executive functions planning but not the kinds of profound changes that we see in people with dementia and so dementia is is is cognitive decline that impacts your daily life in in a way that makes it hard hard to keep doing the things you want to do um when you start to get down into sort of the nitty-gritty of different types of dementia you know Alzheimer's disease which is by far the most common has a lot of pathological features that make it a progressive disease right that that mean you know you will continue to decline um over over the course of the disease and there's no way to stop it really that we know of but there is going to be there's always going to be some change in your brain with age that you can't fully stop for most people I've also always wondered about this is totally random but I said this a few times to a few people this idea that when a spouse or a partner passes away people seem to go into pretty quick cognitive decline and their sort of mortality risk seems to multiply and that could be a very complex thing to do with cortisol and other things going on in the body and hormones and but I wondered if there was
accelerated atrophy if my if I'm 85 and my wife passes away yeah so I mean a couple things are going on Grief in itself is associated with brain changes um there's been interesting work on that brain changes yeah I mean that there are cognitive changes and and structural changes that happen when you're grieving I think some of this is depression as well that's clear and one of the things you know untreated depression can start to look a lot like dementia it's a risk factor for dementia but it can also look like dementia because when you are undergoing um depression a lot of things happen you stop paying attention when you're talking to people you're you're you're you're not as present and so you know what can sometimes seem like a memory deficit might be because you weren't pay able to pay attention to what was going on in the first place and so I think one of the things that I worry about with older adults a lot is making sure that depression is treated because especially when there are cognitive challenges that they're that they're experiencing they're they're feeling like they're have declines in their thinking and memory skills making sure they're not depressed is the first step because you can treat that and actually you can treat that really well with exercise so you might be able to get a couple of bangs for your buck by both treating your you know helping to manage your depressive symptoms and getting the brain other brain benefits but you can also treat it pharmaceutically or with therapy and that can have a profound impact on the way that you think and the way that you manage um those symptoms so yeah I think losing a partner you're also losing a social connection and we know that social connections are so important and so that loneliness and that loss of a social connection is important so um I think that's that's all wrapped up in these brain changes and these are all modifiable things we can watch out for our parents or people in our community when these are H things are happening and try to help them maintain better social connections we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest unaware of who they'll be leaving it for and the question left for you
interesting maybe a little bit obvious but how can your work help the world it's a simple answer I guess but I think it's profound that if you if you sit less and you move more you will not only help yourself but you will also help the general population right I mean we when when we talk about um uh aging it doesn't just affect you right it affects everybody around you it affects your family caregivers it affects our economy I mean the US is is is is we're thinking the US might end up spending a trillion dollars a year on Alzheimer's Disease by 2050 right and so prevention will have a big impact on our economy and I'm not saying people should Implement sitting less and moving more for our economy but by doing that you might actually on a broad scale have a big impact on on our world and so you know I hope that that message gets out there that's why I'm so I was excited to you know to do this podcast with you because you know I think it is a message that we need to keep repeating and and and find ways to help people do that because I think it can have a profound effect on themselves their family and Society are you hopeful well that's a hard question to answer I mean I I am on some level because I think you know especially with the focus on you know start moving away from having people do big steps and trying to get people to do small steps first I am hopeful that we can motivate people to to implement these these changes I I hope it possible um it's been hard to do is the the data going in the wrong direction at the moment generally you know what we just haven't seen big improvements in in adherence and I think one of the things I'm worried about is that worldwide uh more countries are becoming more like the US and UK and instead of less right and our societies are aging and so you know we have a larger number of older people and so just by the sheer numbers we're going to have more people with these these diseases and so you know implementing these these um increases in activity reductions and sedentary Behavior hopefully will have these kind of profound effects on our aging Society but I think it needs to be our Focus like right now you know when we think about Alzheimer's disease we don't have drugs that that are going to have a big impact I mean there's some
new drugs that that are promising maybe um but the biggest thing we can do is prevention and that's where this work comes in is you know if we can prevent or delay we can save people happiness I mean improve their happiness and we can save money and we can improve Society David thank you thank you absolutely incredibly enlightening and inspiring and maybe most importantly of all motivating conversation motivating because knowledge is power um and you've given me so much knowledge which has added fuel to a bunch of different behaviors that are critical for my cognitive outcomes but also just My overall all day-to-day health so thank you so much for that thank you so much for doing the work that you do because I know you're probably doing it in part because you're incredibly curious and you love it um but the other part of that is it's an incredible service to all of us that you go out there and you take this time to do all this research that you then pass out to society in a way that's going to serve us and get us close to the goals that matter most keep us healthy and happy into our later years and keep families together ultimately so thank you for the work you do and thank you for being here today you're welcome thanks so much for having me on it's pleasure quick one as you might know a company that I've invested in is now also a sponsor of this podcast and they're called Zoe and I'm coming to you today with a warning it is January and it's all of those diet companies favorite month of the year and that means that you're about to hear a lot of jargon and words across all types of media when it comes to diet culture please don't get caught up in the fads when it comes to your own health you must listen to experts and that's exactly what Zoe has Zoe isn't about restriction or removing foods from your diet it's about building sustainable daily habits that will make your life better forever they'll help you to discover how eating in the right way for your body with what they call personalized nutrition will have you feeling the benefits almost instantly and far into the future if you're looking to pick up new habits this year then use my code ce10 to get 10% off of your Zoe kit and
do it right now do you need a podcast to listen to next we've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done so I've linked that episode in the description below I know you'll enjoy [Music] it