Harvard Professor: The Science Behind Losing Belly Fat, Avoiding Cancer & Living Longer

typical Hunter gather would walk from Los Angeles to New York City every every year we're a mismatch to being inactive just a moderate amount of physical activity just 150 minutes a week which boils down to 21 minutes a day lowers your your all cause risk of death by approximately 30% in almost all of the studies the exercise has more of an effect than taking a pharmaceutical for millions and millions of years our ancestors had to be physically active in order to survive and now we have to choose be physically active and humans are unusually fat

creatures whenever there's any extra energy it goes into fat hey just a really quick note to say thank you so much to all of our new subscribers and if you haven't yet subscribed why not it means you're the first to know about brand new episodes of high performance and it also means we can attract incredible new guests to the show so please hit subscribe right now enjoy the show well Dan thank you very much for joining us my pleasure what is your definition of high performance well I study how and why humans evolve to be

physically active so I think um I instead of like focusing on Elite athletes and people who like you know win stuff I'm actually just interested in how and why average everyday people can do really quite remarkable decent physical activity you know so it doesn't have to be running a marathon although pretty much anybody can if they train um so for me high performance is really just about you know achieving your goals and just staying staying fit staying active and why is it important for us to have this kind of conversation because we're in a world

where machines have replaced human labor and for millions and millions of years our ancestors had to be physically active in order to survive and that's woven into our biology and now we have to choose to be physically active we have to we have to do the weird thing called exercise which is to be engag in discretionary voluntary physical activity for the sake of health and fitness which nobody nobody did until very recently and but it's important for health so we we now have to find ways to encourage each other and make and help each other

uh stay active so that we can stay healthy and I'm well aware that people that are tuning into this have got a myriad of podcasts to listen to hundreds of social media accounts based on fitness and health and trying to find your own Optimum performance um there my hate I bet you do I thought you might there's a lot of misinformation out there there's a lot of challenges for people so where is the best place for us to start I guess it's not regarding Optimum performance uh but where's the the best place for us to

begin this conversation that would carry most value you think to to our audience well maybe let's start with the the the basic epidemiological evidence right so large scale studies of millions of people right in America England elsewhere which show that just a moderate amount of physical activity just 150 minutes a week which boils down to 21 minutes a day lowers your your all cause risk of Death at a given age by approximately 30% which is massive right nothing there is no thing you can do that has as much benefit and of course if you do

more you get get yet more benefit of course it tails off at a certain point uh so just even a moderate amount of phys phal activity doesn't have to be you know running the London Marathon or whatever just just a moderate amount of physical activity has enormous benefits for physical and also mental health I think that's the probably the most important thing that everybody needs to know and and and you know just a little bit is better than none another fact breast cancer right yeah a concern that um that we all have colon cancer you

can lower an average person who exercises something like you know 150 minutes a week right just going for breast walk can lower their lifetime risk of breast or colon cancer by somewhere between 30 and 60% depending upon which stud you're looking at I mean that's that's massive right you can lower your risk of Alzheimer's by by 40 to 50% um heart disease diabetes um all these chronic diseases that that cost you know that cost lives and money and misery uh just moderate levels of physical activity have enormous benefits and I so I think that's the

place to start yeah we need we we we never evolved not to be active and we pay a huge price for being persistently sedentary so why are we persistently sedentary because it feels to me like you hear that said once by you and that should be the that should be on the front page of every newspaper it should be the first story on every News Bulletin in the evening it's like we're all looking to live longer and be healthier here's an answer yet it seems a real challenge for people to do it well so the

reason why I called my book exercised is that we make people exercised about exercise we make them anxious and and whatever because we we tell people if they don't exercise there's there's something wrong with them right they're lazy they're they're they're they're deficient in some way but the important thing to realize again is that remember exercise is this discretionary voluntary physical activity for the sake of health and fitness that we never evolved to do because for millions of years I mean literally millions of years until just you know a few Generations ago in places like

like like like you know the UK or the US um and for many people around the world people have to be very Physically Active but they're also struggling to get enough food they're struggling to get enough energy and when when when you're struggling to get enough calories because you're you're working very hard to get get enough to feed yourself and your family going like I went for a five mile run this morning around Regent Park I spent about 500 calories doing that run that would have been a completely stupid thing to do if I were

struggling to get enough food right that's energy and that I couldn't spend on helping my family so we evolved to avoid physical activity when it wasn't necessary or wasn't rewarding that's a fundamental adaptation so you know I always talk about when you go to a you know a an airport or a tube stop or whatever and there's an escalator in a stairway right it's even though there are no escalators in the Paleolithic right it's an instinct to take the escalator because it saves energy well I know I came here today I knew I was talking

to you so I took the stairs I was the only person on the stairs and hundreds of people flooding past me going up the escalator but but we know this now though we know that it's better to take the stairs so why am I the only one on the stairs but we have two parts of our brain right you I don't know if you've read Daniel conman's famous book Thinking Fast thinking slow but but you know I mean he's not the only person to argue this but you know we have we have an instincts to

to to save energy right it's a it's a it's like just like you have instincts to you put chocolate cake in front of me I'm going to it's my instinct to take go for the chocolate cake instead of the carrot right uh if there's also a carrot so we have to use our slow brain to override our fast brain we have to we have to consciously make that decision which is what you just told me right you you thought about oh you're meeting this exercise freak so I better I better take stairs and I'm the

same way and my my office is on the fifth floor of a beautiful Victorian building at Harvard it's a I'm on it's a it's a it's quite a climb to get up to my to my floor and if I take the elevator I guess you call it the lift here right I I'd be called a hypocrite so I have no choice I have to take the stairs because because of what I study but every day I have this little debate with myself and I have to override my instinct to take the lift because um because

it's better for me to take the stairs for not just for my health but also for my um my reputation so so it's just natural right and so we live in a world now where we no longer have to be physically active and also a lot of the physical activity that people do isn't much fun I mean it's not fun to trudge up the stairs and the chany lane you know tube stop or whatever so um you know or it's not you know getting on a treadmill right which is what a lot of people do

right I mean who enjoys running on a treadmill nobody I mean you can make the time pass if you're maybe listening to this podcast or something like that but uh so we you know we we we make it often very unfun and we certainly make it unnecessary and the result is that people are just normal so we shouldn't blame and shame people for for struggling to exercise they're just normal absolutely completely normal human beings being doing doing what we have all to do you know hu has been a staple of my diet for some time

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you got yourself to that place because I'm sure there are people going great I now know what I need to do but my brain is still going to tell me why well I struggle just like everybody else there's nothing special about me so I I find ways to um to make it either necessary or fun so I sign up for races like I I have a race coming up on April 15th and I if I don't train I'll humiliate myself so I better I better so that's why I like you know here I am traveling

and I'm still running around you know various places to try to stay fit um I also uh Run With Friends uh when I can so um I arrange to meet friends and um and then and then it's a social thing right so I you know we meet at a certain place and if I'm late they're going to be irritated at me and vice versa so we we kind of coerce each other socially to to do and then of course you know it's often early in the morning we're kind of grumpy and whatever but but by

the end of the run we're usually you know chatting and gossiping and having a good time and usually I'm glad I did it yeah so make it fun rather than a necessity I also love reading about the way that you talk about nudges and shoves right can we talk about those sure I mean um you know there's look we can coers people right yeah and that's what we do in school right I mean children are required to do to do a sports or some other kind of you know exercise um and you know we we

think that's okay right because children can't make decisions for themselves but for adults you know we're not um you know you can't tell me what to do I'm I'm I'm an adult right so so what we need are our our our help help that would help that we would agree to right right so so help us help ourselves right and so uh we call those nudges right so um um you know putting the putting the the lift or the escalator kind of out of the way so that it's easier to take the stairs rather than

the than than the than the than the escalator that's a nudge for example or or um um you know incentives or whatever all there there are many forms of Dungeons and we don't really use them very often um but we can and should use them more and I think that gives People Choice without coercion um and helps them do what they would actually like to do themselves what about a shove shoves are just like hard nudges right you know okay um let me think I mean a shove might be uh let's say your boss signs

the entire um team up for uh you know the you know the the counting team or whatever it is you you do uh for some kind of you know race right to raise money for a charity right and then it's like you're you're not the only one who's not going to go participate right so you're kind of you're kind of forced to do it right in a kind of a socially you know and maybe people do object to that sometimes but um but that that can be useful so in the in the book one of

the things I did is I went to the bjorg company in in in Stockholm um because it's as far as I know still the only company in the world that requires all of its employees to exercise the the CEO is this exercise fanatic and as far as he's concerned if you want to work at his company on Fridays it's it's it's you know a fitness hour or Sports hour what that they call it and and the entire company it doesn't matter who you are you could be a board member you could be somebody who sorts

the mail you could be the CEO everybody goes and and exercises together and um and if you're visiting you go too and it's um that's quite a shove um and and you agree with it well you know I was kind of curious about it so I I I I I I emailed the company and said can I come and see this because I was curious about it and um they they invited me to go and I and he said and I was given free reign to the company I could talk to anybody I wanted there

was like nobody minding me or watching me listening to me Etc and the vast majority of folks said there were a few of course who were like you exercise Fanatics already and they they loved the fact that they were you know that that everybody did this together but there were some who also um you know did it um a little bit begrudgingly but we're kind of glad that they did it and there's some who who they told me people who quit you know when the company started doing this there were people who had left the

company because they was like I'm not doing this so so um but I think for the most part uh so the people who are still there appreciated it um they they they realized it was a good thing you know because it you know when you exercise together you not only get the benefits of exercise you also it's like a it's a communal thing you're you're having fun it's like look there are forms of physical activity which we which is you know we don't always call all exercise physical activity but that are communal that every culture

has done for millions of years like dancing um and we've kind of stopped doing that in our culture right we just don't do that anymore can you explain what actually physiologically happens to our bodies because I love these numbers you know if you do exercise you lower your risk of all caused death by a huge amount but I still don't really understand why like what's actually happening to us so there are two ways in which exercise or let call it physical activity because it can be working in the garden right which is most people don't

consider exercise or going for a dance right but there are two ways in which physical activity are beneficial so and they all have to do with energy right so the first is that um when I'm spending energy on physical activity my body is is allocating energy to that activity as opposed to other ways my body can spend energy which are unhealthy right so one of them is adding too much fat right yeah so fat is normal right we all need fat fat is is fat is sometimes unfairly demonized um and humans are unusually fat creatures

so most animals have about 4% 5% body fat we evolve to have three to five times that skinny people have three to five times more body fat than than our closest relatives who are primates or most mammals um but if you're and the reason fat is important for humans is that it's important for reproduction we need fat to help make sure our brains always have energy it's like money in the bank we need to have fat to pay for our reproductive strategies we need to have fat for all kinds of important reasons that that it's

been selected for in human evolution so our bodies unlike that of many other animals or or more so than other animals whenever there's any extra energy goes into fat so that's one of the reasons why exercise or physical activity is so incredibly useful for preven weight gain or weight regain it's not great for losing weight but it's phenomenal for preventing you from gaining weight so exercise should always be a part of any dieting strategy the other thing that exercise does is it or physical activity does is it um affects hormone level so remember what does

natural selection care about reproduction exactly how how many babies you have right so if for when our bodies um when we stop being Physically Active our body say oh there's extra energy and and and hormone levels go up especially in women and in in in the second half of the menstrual cycle What's called the ludal phase of the menstrual cycle estrogen Rises and especially progesterone Rises and those hormones um and they rise to unusually high levels levels that aren't necessary to get fertile right to to get to get pregnant those those higher hormone levels are

what cause the higher levels of breast cancer in in women right because because again if you have all this extra energy plow it into reproduction I think that's fascinating cuz I think that we all associate eating food with more fat and then the more fat makes you iller but actually what you're saying is the eating of the food gives you this kind of the opposite of a calor deficit whatever that word is you'll probably know that rather than me but you've got all this extra calories all this extra energy and your body's your body's then

increasing hormones in women which is then well it's not just eating food it's also not being Physically Active right so so both of them affect what we call energy balance you can be either positive energy balance which is you're gaining weight or negative energy balance you're losing weight most of us manage to you know we're cycling back and forth and B and forth we stay pretty pretty pretty stable when you're not spending energy on physical activity again I spent 500 calories this morning you know running around Regent's Park for no reason whatsoever right that's energy

if I had if I ate the same amount of food I would just Plow That Into Fat I'm not a female so I wouldn't increase my progesterone levels right but but anyway but the point is that both most of those are are are are unhealthy right too much fat causes inflammation yeah and inflammation is what causes pretty much every disease that most of us are concerned about it causes heart disease it causes diabetes type 2 diabetes it causes it affects cancer rates it affects Alzheimers it affects arthritis I mean the list is long and very

very very scary right so too much fat U we can talk about way why that's the case but fat is it becomes inflammatory and inflammation is just mucks up our body and also too levels of hormones that are too high increase rates of cancer so that's one that's one pathway by which exercise is good but the other one and is that when when I go for a run or you play you know a game of football or whatever it is that you do right you're stressing your body right you're causing physiological stress pretty much in

every system of your body you're you're causing you know your mitochondria which are the little organel in every cell that provide the energy right they're like the battery packs of every cell right those mitochondria as they produce energy they're just spewing out what we call reactive oxygen species those are those are molecules that are um have unpaired electrons and they're highly reactive they cause basically you know when you're Apple Browns if you just let it sit there that's that's the same thing it's oxidation of of tissue right so those little reactive oxygen species cause damage

everywhere right so so exercise actually creates this this sort of storm of of really unhealthy molecules that are just flooding your body right you produce it causes DNA damage it it causes proteins to become what we call glycated they get they get damaged by heat and by you know sugar start attaching to them and gum them up you create tears in your muscles you create cracks in your bone I could go on right I mean every single system of your body pretty much is affected by is stressed by exercise but our bodies also evolved to

cope with that right so we when we when we produce these reactive oxygen species our cells produce antioxidants that mop that up our cells produce enzymes that repair our DNA right and and and keep them keep the chromosomes from getting shortened and and repair our muscles and repair our bones and keep our brains healthy there are a gazillion of these of these proteins that we produce and because well two important things one is that because um we um we never evolved not to be physically active we never evolved to turn these mechanisms on in the

absence of physical activity as much and then secondly they always overshoot right because you don't want to I mean if if if you if you created all this stuff and you didn't mop up all the damage You' you'd die younger if you were Physically Active right we know that's not the case right so I often say it's like spilling coffee right you know if I were to spill coffee on this table and then I cleaned it up right the table back should be cleaner than before I spilled the coffee not that the table looks all

that dirty right and it's the same thing in your body right you overshoot the damage repair and the result is that you have maintenance and repair and also remodeling that that that that that that you know repair your DNA and keep your chromosomes from getting too short and you know keep your muscles from atrophying and and the list goes on forever your brain from the neurons in your brain from getting clogged we have a we produce a factor called bdnf brain derived neurotropic factor it's actually produced by your muscles in vast quantities when you're exercising

when you're physically active what does that do it's like a colleague of mine calls it Miracle Grow for the brain it's what it's actually causes new neurons to grow in the brain and it actually repairs and keeps the synapses in your brain from uh from from getting damaged um it's probably one of the major reasons why exercise is by far an order of magnitude more potent for preventing Alzheimer's and Dementia than any other known thing you can possibly do on your on in your life right because you're producing these these molecules that that help you

we another thing that we study in my lab is a is a molecule called il6 interlan 6 we all heard about this during the covid right remember the cyto storm so cyto are molecules that turn on your immune system right so it turns out that we always knew that these molecules were produced by our blood cells our white blood cells you know but they're also actually produced by your muscle and when you're when you're active and I have a lot more muscle in my body than I have white blood cells so when I go for

that run in the morning I produce this prodigious quantity of of il6 which at low levels is inflammatory but at high levels turns off inflammation so that's one of the reason why people who exercise have lower levels of inflammation because their muscles are are shutting down that system keeping us from getting damaged so there's a gazillion rep care and maintenance and remodeling mechanisms that are are incredibly beneficial um and because we evolved to be physically active but we don't turn them on in the absence of physical activity because we never evolved not to be physically

active there's no time in human history until very recently when you could just sit around all day in a chair and just do nothing you had to go out and be active average hunter gatherer walks 9 to 15 kilm every single day every single day there's no holidays there's no weekends there's no retirement in to put into practical terms they walk a typical Hunter gather would walk from Los Angeles to New York City every every year so we've got a body designed for a very different world that's right so we call this a mismatch we're

mismatched to being inactive our bodies never evolved to be inactive and so as a result we don't turn on all these mechanisms that keep us healthy and and and so what we do is we get sick if we're inactive and we go to the doctor and we get pills and various other sorts of treatments to keep us going but what health what exercise does is it increases what we call your health span right your your the the amount of the years that you live without any disease or disability so people today are living longer than

before that's for sure um although not that much longer actually than Hunter gathers but um but they're also living more and more years with disabilities the average American now lives to be 78 but the last 16 years of their lives are spent on average this is average so many people have more with some serious kind of chronic disability and most of those disabilities would be prevented to some extent um if not to a large extent by having been more physically active earlier in their lives I guess one of the toughest challenges right is that I'm

45 so if I listen to this conversation I probably think well my knees are a bit sore I can't bounce out of bed like I used to I can't play on the play area with the kids like I could when they were first born seven or eight years ago but apart from that I'm okay I mean what we're really asking people to do which I guess is a challenge is to do the work now with with the rewards in the future to some extent yes uh so you're you're you're doing what we call um hyperbolic

discounting right you're you're choosing to do something now because you get benefit in the future but it's also true that um the it's not like it you like if you exercise now you're going to live to be 100 later you have to keep doing it um so uh we call this the active grandparent hypothesis so humans are unusual in that we evolve to live after we stop reproducing so most animals right this as soon as they stop having babies natural selection doesn't care about them at all right they're just gone right but humans are different

we a typical hunter gatherer will live about two decades at least after after they stop reproducing and um but they're not just like reti in and going to you know Florida or whatever you know you know where the south of Spain or whatever it is you're doing when you retire or you know sitting sitting back and just watching the television they're they're they're still active right they're still hunting they're still Gathering and then that physical activity turns on all those repair and maintenance mechanisms which keeps people healthy so so the trick is not to just

you know think well I exercise when I'm young and that'll keep me healthy when I'm older is to continue to stay pH physically active as you Agee and there's plenty of epidemiological data that supports this there are studies which show that as people age the benefits of exercise are actually become bigger not smaller in terms of their long-term health because my dad says to me when I he's I've never seen my I go to the gym and he now says to me he's 76 he either says it's too late for me to be doing this

or exercises for young people not true absolutely not true quite the reverse so what would it do to his body then if he started to ex exercise well I mean I'm not a I'm not a gerontologist so I'm not a you know an expert on and furthermore everybody's a bit different in terms of what their what their you know health health issues are and their Fitness levels are but you know this the benefits are the same for everybody when you're physically active you start pumping blood around your body you turn on all these proteins why

is it more for him then why would it be more beneficial for well because as we as we age sence starts to catch up with us you know aging is is is as the years tick by right syence is the is the deterioration that comes is correlated with age and what exercise does is it slows sence so like one of the big problems that people run into as they age in our society is is a is a is the muscle wasting uh the technical term is sarcopenia Saro means flesh in Greek and Pia means loss

so flesh loss it's kind of sounds awful right but sarcopenia is what happens when people get old and they get frail and they can't do stuff right so it gets hard to you know get off the toilet or get out of a chair it gets hard to lift your bags and you know everything becomes a little bit more difficult and when that happens a visal cycle sets in because then you do less of those things and you become even more frail and then and we all seen this you know people elderly individuals who really struggle

to do basic things and their bodies deteriorate at a rapid rage you can you can it's not causal it's correlative but you know the the speed at which people walk is very predictive of how long they're going to live as they age right and it's not because walking fast is like NE all that great for you it's just a good signpost of it's a you know an indicator of of how much your body is deteriorating so as people age staying Physically Active slows the rate at which all the systems in their bod sesse and helps

them stay active and healthy and and and you know helps them stay mentally alert um it it slows dementia it slows you know heart disease it slows metabolic disease I mean I I don't even know where to stop the list yeah hey guys do you want 350 of the latest Generation 8 sleep pod 4 ultra it's a pod added to your existing mattress proven to give you up to one hour more quality sleep every night it's used by Sports people it's used by Titans of industry it's even used by me and there's nothing else like

it on the market it Heats it cools it adjusts and it uses sensors to track your sleep with 99% tracking accuracy sleeping on the Pod for just one week could improve your cardiovascular health as much as 12 weeks of strength training so to get £350 off the latest generation eight sleep pod for Ultra just go to 8sleep.com HPP that's 8sleep.com HPP can we talk about the mental impacts as well as the physical ones sure I'm a big advocate for mental health particularly in young men um but I now see among my parents as they get

older and their friends the prevalence of you know people having mental health challenges much later in life having never had a real issue with it when life was busy when they had children and they had purpose and they had a job and all these things so I'd love to talk about the impact of exercise yeah it's actually I think one of the most compelling reasons to help people to help motivate people because you know especially when you're young but also as you age um you know you know when you're 20 you think okay it doesn't

matter but exercise when you're 20 can have huge effects for example on on depression so when when you're physically active you you produce all kinds of neurotransmitters right I produce dopamine which is the molecule that basically says do it again right I produce serotonin which is important for for regulating mood and anxiety and frustration and anger I produce um um I guess we call it epinephrine I think you call it adrenaline here in England right which you know again makes you kind of more active I produce brain derived neurotropic growth factor which produces more neurons

in my brain it keeps my brain growing I produce opioids right which which you know would be oh absolutely you're producing all kinds of endogenous opioids which it's one of the reasons why you know you can run like if you ever I don't if you ever run a marathon or like that but I've sometimes you know run long races like marathons and I feel you know at the end of the race all suddenly my feet like like I realize I have a blister the size of you know New York City but you've never felt it

when you I didn't feel it because the opioids were just making my brain happy right um you produce endoc canabo which is the same stuff when you when you smoke cannabis right um it um it gives you Runners high right in fact the first time I ran the I ran the London Marathon once and I remember um uh uh you know I was just running it for fun I wasn't you know racing and I had just a grand time I had a wonderful time I remember as I ran by Big Ben right towards the finish

I remember thinking wow Big Ben is so big and I realized I'm high right because Big Ben actually isn't that big is it but it Big Ben looks really because when you're high right everything is like exaggerated right white is whiter and blue is Bluer and the birds are Tweeter and big Ben is bigger and whatever and but the point is that your brain produces this cocktail of of molecules that are that make you feel good they also we have data right there are I don't know how many there at least we just did a

big study in our lab but um of metaanalysis but there are dozens maybe many dozens of studies prospective gold standard studies where they take two groups of you know a group of individuals who are all clinically diagnosed with major depress Ive disorder right so these are people who are struggling right and they half of them are assigned to exercise um and then half of them are assigned some kind of pharmaceutical right and in almost all of the studies the exercise has more of an effect than taking a pharmaceutical and we actually understand them so we

have data that tells us the prevalence of you know the effectiveness we also have data which tells us the the mechanisms we understand some of the the molecular mechanisms you know the the the you know self-medication that occurs right um so we so we we know that this is very potent effects um and and yet very how often when somebody goes in to see um a counselor or a psychiatrist I mean often nobody even asks whether they they're being physically active they don't ask whether they're exercising and and it's just it's just a failure of

our of our medical system um our Medical Systems to recognize just how important physical activity is for so many aspects of our body but again let's be let's be careful right let's not sell this as a as a I think I'm overdoing this in a way it's not a Magic Bullet right it doesn't mean that any everybody who gets depression will instantly have their depression gone it increases your your your you know exercise decreases your vulnerability it can help but it's not like a Magic Bullet but it helps just there there are no Magic Bullets

people who exercise also still die you know but it is it is one of the most potent ways to reduce your vulnerability to a wide range of diseases and in many cases helps you um can also help treat a number of diseases I think one of the other challenges is just how busy we all are I was thinking about this conversation because I went to a party on Saturday night and the conversation I kept having repeated itself how are you got so much going on at the moment what are you what are you doing at

the moment oh I haven't I can I've hardly got time to go to the bathroom at the moment I'm so busy there is this real disconnect isn't there between feeling that we have to pushing ourselves all of the time and finding the opportunity to do the things that we that we know are good for us yeah I mean you know it is an issue I mean it's it's also a question of priority yeah and and how we evaluate our priorities and and and again you know I'm often too busy to um and I would I

I want to make those excuses but then I find ways to force myself because a it's my it's my job and I don't want to be hypocrite yeah and but B um you know I've decided as I get older that that there are two things I just don't like to compromise on and one is sleep and the other is exercise I just you know it's they're important to me and I'm just not a and it and also when I'm not exercising I'm you know I'm not doing the right thing by my family as well so

but you know I mean I think everybody who does that probably could think about how they could adjust uh other things they do in their lives but if you're commuting and you have kids and whatever yeah it is tough there's no question about it because we again we live in a world where um not only is physical activity unnecessary sometimes you have to go out of your way to do it that's one of the challenges it's hard to know what to say to people who already feel like they're operating at 100% And I wonder whether

for them it's it's reducing stress I mean stress obviously is a huge Factor right when it comes to longevity and health yeah and uh and of course physical activity does reduce stress there's no question about it I think everybody knows that going for a walk everybody knows going for a walk outside even on a gray rainy day is better than than not going for a walk right so um yeah it's I I don't have a simple answer that one obviously but um but we Al I think as a society we need to find find ways

and as friends and neighbors and whatever to help help help help each other again we evolve to be physically active for two reasons and two reasons only right when it's necessary or when it's rewarding so we have to help either make it NE make it necessary and rewarding and and there are many ways to do that but um there's no one size fits-all solution can we talk then about the power of being sedentary you've just said that sleep is really important for you can you tell us first of all what you've done to make sure

that you prioritize sleep and get the right sleep that that works for you well actually interesting you know we're all told that we you know eight hours of sleep a night yeah that's just not true actually and um but if you look at epidemiological data again large samples right where you graph how much sleep you get a night and how long you live it's a U-shaped curve so people who don't get much sleep they do run into trouble there's no question about that people who sleep too much also run into trouble that's usually because there's

something wrong that's making them sleep too much but the bottom of the curve for almost everybody for most populations and then there's variation everybody's different so you might be different from me is about seven hours so turns out that seven hours is if you want to say an Optimum you know base bottom of that curve 7 hours turns out to be the optimum furthermore if you look in pop and we think oh well you know modern world you know we have iPhones and television and electric lights and all that and that's ruined sleep right Edison

you know ruin sleep right um populations where which have none of these things right there's no electricity no iPhones or whatever they sleep less than seven hours on average like the hunter gathers like sleep 6 and a half hours right they don't nap either um for the most part um and you know some of them are early risers and some of them are you know night owls and whatever and you there's always somebody awake making noise in Camp Etc but it turns out that you know the idea that you know we Evol to sleep eight

hours is a bit of an exaggeration and that what happens though is that what I call the Sleep industrial complex but there are people who out there to make money off this right oh you're not getting enough sleep so buy this product buy this you know this St you can put on your nose um you know pills of course which are terrible for you I mean hypnotic the pills that sleep sleep pills sleeping pills are really bad for you um and um and then we or you know this mattress or you have to get a

special curtains to block out every every Photon of light or whatever because we're making people stressed about sleep but guess what stress does stress prevents you from sleeping so the more we make people stressed about their sleep the less well they're going to sleep it just drives a vicious circle and the more they're going to go and run and buy your product so we just you know yes too little sleep is a problem people who don't get enough sleep um need to need to we need to find ways to help them but making people anxious

about sleep is I think exactly the wrong way to help them sleep I find if I wake up in the night the one thing that stops me getting back to sleep is the fear of not getting back to sleep that's right that's right yeah and and they like oh my God something's wrong I woke up in the middle of night but you know everybody wakes up in the middle of the night sometimes it's completely normal um you know if you but if you're less worried about it your cortisol levels won't rise and prevent you from

sleeping because cortisol is the is an arousal hormone right when you're stressed so cortisol doesn't cause you to be stressed cortisol comes up when you are stressed when I'm teaching I actually showed this wonderful experiment where they had a bunch of people jump out of airplanes and they measured you can measure cortisol and saliva so spit little tubes as they were getting in the airplane and about to jump out and of course the first time they jumped out their cortisol levels were literally Skyhigh right they're like oh my God I'm going to jump out of

an airplane they're really high cortisol levels and then they what they did is then like every week they repeated the jump right and by seven weeks there was like eh there was like no cortisol right they're still jumping from the same height but they were no longer stressed because they're like now oh yeah I'm going to jump out of a plane again so but cortisol you know turns on your fight andf flight mechanisms right it makes you you know help you run away from the lion or whatever and and and all of that prevents you

from sleeping so you know the trick to helping people sleep is to help them avoid stress and I on a similar note you know talking about sleep and getting them the right rest and Recovery I have a few friends when I talked to them about exercise um they say well I'm I'm just too tired and I often say to them if you start exercising I bet you'll be less tired this is true is it true yes because exercise you know you know like there well for fat there's different kinds of fatigue right so one kind

of fatigue is the fatigue from I mean you know I I did a really long run this weekend right I was I was tired afterwards it's because I that's because I ran a ridiculous number of miles right but but that's kind of but there's the other fatigue which is sort of more U kind of a malaise you know that kind of you know just feeling lack of energy and all that kind of stuff but exercise of course liberates all that energy it turns on you know your endorphins and it turns on on growth hormone G

which gives you this energy surge again this is part of the the issue right which is that we didn't evolve to say I feel awful I think I'm going to go for a run yeah nobody in the Paleolithic ever did that right they didn't think oh God I feel awful I'm going to go I'm going to go for a pointless five mile run you know nobody did that right the reason they went out and were Physically Active was they they were hungry right or their children were hungry or their their friends were hungry and they

had to go get food and they had to you know do something right so they they never you know it was never prescription for for feeling bad it was just a necessity right so are you optimistic or pessimistic about our future when it comes to exercise and fitness and health and wellness because social media has exploded in the last few years so we can spend hours not leaving the sofa we can click one button now and have our lovely food that's highly calorific delivered to our front door I was only when we were younger that

you'd have to actually at least walk to the takeaway right to get yourself a kebab now you don't even have to walk anywhere I kind of feel like you know we've got businesses spending billions of pounds to try and convince us to eat their refined food it feels like Society has stacked so heavily against us so many billions of pounds are being spent for these businesses to to be successful it's bloody hard for us as individuals to kind of almost find our way through and remind ourselves what we really should be doing this is true

so I you know I do most of my field work in Africa where you know we're talking about the industrialized Western world which actually a small percentage of the world's population right now this transition is occurring rapidly everywhere around the world right in in in the area in Kenya where I've been working for many years right diabetes is the fastest growing disease right obesity is rising people are moving to the cities they've got mopeds and bicycles and cars and and you know there's more of course as you say you know Ultra processed foods and and

um and you know if we can't afford it how do you think countries in yeah poor countries in in the global South are going to afford this they can't right it's it's an it's a growing crisis so I'm deeply concerned about uh about this because it's not just in in uh in in in you know America in UK and Europe Etc this is this is happening really fast all over the planet and um we need to we need to act and and the way to do that is through some combination of Public Health messaging but

also I think possib we're going to have to maybe s start thinking about regulation I mean you know we don't like to regulate things and force people to do things but it is true that there are a lot of companies out there that are making a lot of money by making us sick because they're giving us what we want and on the one hand we say well you know they're not forcing us to buy these products but people don't understand the products and so I think we need as a as Society to to ask ourselves

you know how how we want to help regulate the world right to to help people help themselves should tax them should we force them to you know put labels on their Foods just the way we have them for tobacco we also need to push more for physical education for kids for for exercise in schools because the habits people develop when they're young um are important as they get older we need to do more public education so it used to be that that people who are wealthy were overweight and unfit and people who were who were

you know the you know the Working Poor they're the ones who were very physically active and they were you know they were thin now it's the reverse right now people who have means can afford to go to gyms and they can afford to buy really healthy food and people who are struggling have to commute long distances and they have multiple jobs and they don't have time to exercise and they you know if you go to a marathon you know you're going to see a lot of rich people or if you go to an iron man

I've been to Iron Man a few times in Kona I didn't run them by the way I was there in medical T um I mean they're millionaires mostly I mean these are really really rich people who've like made a gazillion dollars or Pounds or whatever and then probably saw their Doctor Who said you know you're about to die because you're just all you've been doing is making money sitting in the chair and so they took the same intensity that they used for you know for making becoming super wealthy and to to becoming like super fit

right and so you know to to get to Kona you have to spend thousands of dollars to get there you buy a 30 you know 20,000 pound bike and you know I mean these are these are wealthy people there's nothing wrong with it right I'm not I'm not opposed to to it but these are mostly very wealthy people who have the time to train for a full Iron Man is a ridiculous amount of time most people can't do that right there's big challenges ahead before we move on to our quick far questions just a few

things I just want to cover off with you um just a reminder to people who've heard this fascinating conversation how much of illness is preventable by us just making a small change so according to the Center for Disease Control in in uh United States um which has had taken a few hits recently they're dealing with Co but nonetheless according to the CDC uh 75% of the time when somebody walks into a doctor's office it's for a disease that's technically classified as preventable 75% of the time and furthermore we also know from many studies that our

uh Medical Care pretty much affects about 10% of people's Healthcare outcomes it's actually pretty so we're spending in the United States we're spending 20% of our GDP on diseases 75% of which are preventable to affect 10% of people's healthare outcomes it's completely stupid right it makes absolutely no sense if we got people to exercise more and also eat healthier and um we could El eliminate a large I mean they're not people are still going to die of course we're all going to die of something but we could we could reduce people's disability and chronic diseases

and increase their quality of life enormously and to that end from people who've been impacted by this conversation what what what's the first thing the most valuable thing that they can do after listening to this that will make a difference just recognize that you don't have to run a marathon or Swim Lish Channel or whatever just anything is better than nothing and just build up slowly and gradually but also make it fun you know if you don't like to exercise arrange to go for a walk with a friend that's not exercise it's just nice go

dancing with somebody you find worth dancing with do something that's fun right and then you know before you know it you'll enjoy it more and then it becomes it becomes more positive and the IT becoming a negative thing it becomes more of a positive thing and then you can increase it and and you know just a few minutes a day is better than no minutes a day and doesn't have to be all or nothing we've spoken a lot about exercise what what have you learned about diet oh my gosh you can give us a few

minutes on it not everything but if you were to sit down with your wife and she would say come on Daniel what have you learned that we can bring into the family today what would you say well I would say that you know again there are a lot of people out there many of them quacks some of them intentionally quacks some of them self- deceived quacks who trying to tell us what the optimal diet is and just like there's no optimal exercise let me tell you there is no optimal diet um despite what people claim

what humans evolve to eat anything you can you can eat you can be an Inuit and live on meat and you can be a vegan and live you know not even eating any dairy not neither necessarily op you know they can to make make you you know super healthy but you can our our bodies evolve to eat pretty much anything and we also never evolve to diet we never evolve to lose weight and so um so you know again just like with exercise there's a lot of useful information we can get from taking an evolutionary

perspective to diet but it's a long and complicated story we have another conversation one time about diet but I think it's it's a good message for people who are struggling with diet and struggling to lose weight that they're not their body's not designed to do that hey I just wanted to dive in and say we're so proud to be working with Manuel on today's episode and I'm so pleased to be joined by Manuel's testosterone replacement therapy doctor Dr Manny so what's going on when it comes to men and testosterone about one in four men have

low testosterone or experiencing symptoms of low testosterone low sex drive erectile dysfunction low energy levels low mood or anxiety and how important is it you think if someone thinks they might have a problem for them to get in touch the simple thing to do is one of the fingerprick blood tests that you do at home you send it back to us we can then find out if you have actual low testosterone on blood tests what does treatment look like treatment can either be with injections or with creams or gels that you put onto the skin

so those are the ways that we can replace testosterone if you would like to know more or maybe you're thinking that maybe you might have low testosterone then all you need to do is hit the link in in the description to this show and use the code hp45 for 45% off your first atome testosterone blood test absolutely your your body has just has to counter vast numbers of adaptations that it has to hold on to weight so if you if you think it's hard to diet it's because it really is hard to diet and I

love your I love your kind of clear but all-encompassing message that there is no Perfection there is no golden bullet there is no one thing you need to do are you frustrated that we live in a world where that feels to be really prevalent now oh yeah I mean that's how you make money right if I I mean I could make it way more money if I had a book with seven steps to to be super healthy you know I could just make them up right people do that all the time right and um uh

because we want simple answers to complex problems and the problem is that many problems are complex and and they defy simple answers but that's not what people want here and why is it important to you then not to go down that clickbait route because I believe in telling the truth brilliant right are you ready for some quick fire questions sure so the first one is what are the three most important non-negotiable behaviors to you things that you or people around you must bring to the table I really dislike it when people are dishonest uhhuh um

I really dislike it when people are mean [Music] um and also close-minded right very good what's your biggest strength what's your greatest weakness uh I have no idea what my biggest strength is I think it's because I I don't know I am I uh I'm very I'm very fortunate I get to do what I love to do and um um uh I think maybe my biggest strength is also my biggest weakness is I get really obsessed by what I'm interested in so that can be a good thing and it can also be a bad thing

what are you obsessed about at the moment oh right now actually I'm working a book I'm trying to do a kind of a a sequel to exercise I'm writing a book about diet and I become um it's partly to help educate myself but also because I teach you know anatomy in physiology and nutrition and suggestion and and I become really obsessed with um with the research I'm doing on this book here and driving my wife crazy what would you say to a teenage Daniel just starting out on this [Laughter] journey oh wow you know it's

funny I mean life has taken all kinds of interesting courses but it's funny I was just asked this question the other night I was having dinner with a colleague in Oxford and he brought along some students and I said prepare for your midlife crisis right because as you get older right you're going to ask yourself why am I doing what I'm doing right um you know is it really worth all the effort and energy I've poured into it right because it's going to happen at some point in your life and if you start thinking now

about doing something that really will provide lifelong value and make the world a better place uh now's the time to think about it so that you don't run into this problem later on that is brilliant if you go back to One Moment in your life where would you go and why I wouldn't I don't believe in regret doesn't a very unhelpful emotion I mean I've had a very lucky life so far I mean there've been tough times just like with everybody else but I mean I've had a fantastic Journey so far I mean I've got

a wonderful wife and a great kid and got a great job and I've been able to travel to all kinds of wonderful places and and you know being a scientist and professor at a great university has been incredible privilege uh you know there have been struggles and difficulties but uh but I don't believe in it's not a very healthy way of thinking about things final question um and thank you very much for the time you've given us what would you leave us thinking about as your one Golden Rule to living a high performance life remember

that the world that we live in today with all its wonderful things and also challenging things is not the world in which we evolved right and um and we are um and we and we have to and and that the the Western you know industrialized world that that many of us live in is not the world that most people live in and and the world that you think of your life that you may think is normal right you may think it's normal to get in a in a in a metal tube and fly through the

air and you may think it's normal to eat breakfast cereal from a box and you may think it's normal to to you know wear shoes and all that none of that's normal from an evolutionary perspective it doesn't mean it's bad or good but it means that we are often mismatched to the world that we live in and we have to think thought we have to be conscious and careful and thoughtful about the choices that we make and the and the world that we live in because it has all kinds of effects it's brilliant thank you

so much and I think it's a really good reminder for all of us that of course it is normal to us because it's our lived experience right but actually for you to come on here and and share with us that you know we we're not in this moment we didn't we weren't created the moment we were born right there is so many years of evolutionary history behind us that impacts how challenging life can be yeah there's yeah there's an old expression um um it's a it's actually a title of a of an essay but nothing

in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution right because we weren't engineered we weren't designed we evolved and and that's if you understand why we are the way we are you have to understand that evolution of history in fact you could say that nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution doesn't have to even biology right yeah and so that evolutionary history that story of how we got to be the way we are helps explain why we are the way we are and that why helps us answer a lot of important questions

well it's been really helpful so thank you so much my pleasure [Music]