Dr. Rachele Pojednic—How Exercise Improves Healthspan

Aerobic exercise is going to be really important for cardiovascular health. Strength training is going to be really important for muscle integrity and power training. It's going to be really important to make sure that you can do the things that you want to do. Act speed for the longest period of time. Welcome to Lawn Jevidi by Design, a podcast designed to give individuals access to the leading scientific information in the field of Lawn Jevidi. The ability to add years to your life and life to your years needs no opinion. Join us as we ask science to take the wheel. In each episode, Dr. Gil Blander joins a co-host and an industry expert in the field of Lawn Jevidi, shining a light. And getting the answers to the key question, how can we live a longer, healthier life? Hello, I'm Ashley Reaver and I'm joined by Dr. Gil Blander. Welcome to Lawn Jevidi by Design, how to live a longer, healthier life. We're produced by Inside Tracker, your science-based guide to optimizing your body from the inside out. Our guest today is Dr. Rachel Pajednik. Dr. Pajednik is an associate professor and program director of exercise science in the Department of Health and Human Performance at Norwich University. She's also a research associate at the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Pajednik holds a PhD in biochemical and molecular nutrition from Tufts University and completed her postdoctoral training at Jocelyn Diabetes Center at Harvard Medical School. Her current work examines nutrition and physical activity, education for health care and fitness professionals, as well as dietary supplementation and physical activity interventions on muscle physiology, performance, recovery, and chronic disease. Dr. Pajednik has a passion for science, communication, and has been an active member of the fitness community for over 20 years as an indoor cycling instructor and an ambassador for specialized and Lulu Lemon. Thank you for being here with us today. Oh, it's my absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. So Rachel, it's, as Ashley said, it's a great pleasure having you. And we always like to start with a question that our guest about, why have you decided to become a scientist and how have you got involved in nutrition, biochemistry, and the exercise science? That's a great question. And I feel like many of your guests probably have a very circuitous route to where they landed, which is exactly my story as well. I started out in the exercise science space back doing my undergrad, mostly because I really liked exercise. I was an athlete and I really enjoyed that. And then I realized very quickly how important the scientific underpinnings were for this overlap between nutrition, metabolism, and performance. And that sort of started me on the path. And I could just never, never learn enough. I was just so passionate about trying to understand more and more, which is eventually why I landed at Tufts in the biochemical and molecular nutrition program. Because I just kept going deeper and deeper and I was like, I want to learn everything about how this happens at the cellular level. So then I can translate it into sort of usable and actionable, you know, nuggets that we can give to people. But I very genuinely felt like if I didn't understand it at the most basic level, I wouldn't be able to describe it or to give people this information in the most accurate way. So I like to say my superpower now at age 41 in this space is that I'm really good at taking very complicated scientific pathways and theories and making them simple for people to understand. And that track of really going deep into this world is the reason for that. X and I tend just to say that we really like tough university and Ashley is a graduate for me at Tufts and we have maybe 15 to 20 Tufts graduate all of our almost all of our nutrition expert are from Tufts. So we really like it and they appreciate the the breast and the depth of the scientific knowledge there, specifically about nutrition, but also exercise physiology. So from the reading a bit about you, we realized that your specialty is the lifestyle medicine. And we love lifestyle and we understand that there is a lot outside of the core of traditional medicine. But maybe for our audience that don't that are not aware of tradition of a lifestyle medicine, can you explain what you start and the what are the tools that you use in a lifestyle medicine. Yeah, sure. This actually connects all of my worlds this idea of being able to communicate really good science. One of the things when I was working at Tufts, I was actually in Dr Roger Fielding's neps lab over there. I didn't know he's very connected with inside tracker. And I was in that lab and I was working back to back with Dr Eddie Phillips, who is a physician. He was a physician for many of our trials in the next lab and his passion was lifestyle medicine. And this is where I sort of got the bug for this is you know, he was a physician and he recognized that during his training, he basically got no coursework, no classes, no parallel pathways on these strategies that we know. And the strategies that we know to work for health and longevity, so things like nutrition, exercise, stress relief, sleep, sort of behavior change throughout the lifespan. And so he and a group of other people really started this initiative and they've got the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine at Harvard, which is where I did my postdoc. And this really comes to this idea of translating the deep scientific knowledge of what we know about these behaviors and how they affect not only physiology, but also, you know, health span so that when you're taking this information, this physiologic information, you can translate it into your life to I'm going to live to be 80 85 90 95 years old. And I'm going to do that well and I'm going to be healthy at those ages and that's sort of the tenant of lifestyle medicine. So really it's creating these parallel education models and then interventions mostly in the clinical space to show that these behaviors, nutrition, that the activities, dress, that they work in almost exactly the same pathways that the pharmaceuticals that we prescribe. The, you know, the other modalities that we that we give in the clinical space. So one example, one of my favorite pathways is the insulin receptor pathway. I just love this one. I would do you my postdoc was at Jocelyn and just this idea that when you have too much glucose in your bloodstream and the insulin receptor isn't working appropriately because as you know, perhaps a diagnosis of insulin resistance or a type 2 diabetes. You have this amazing parallel calcium derived pathway that can suck glucose out of your bloodstream and it's a redundant pathway because your body knows that too much glucose in your bloodstream is not good for you. And this is where when I was at Harvard, we were really working to show this in the medical classroom to say, look, these two things this, you know, we're talking so much about GLP one, you know, receptor agonist these days with weight loss and, you know, drugs like metforman and insulin. And when we look at that, they act in a really similar way to exercise. And you could see light bulbs go off like, oh, yeah, I never even learned this in medical school. How is that possible? And so that's this idea of lifestyle medicine is that there was a paper that was released. I think it was in 2012 by Ford and it was called something about the greatest revenge or so lifestyle is the greatest revenge. And basically they show that 80% of our diseases have a root cause of these behaviors that we let go not eating a good diet, not exercising, not getting enough sleep. 80% and we're treating these diseases with pharmaceuticals and traditional, you know, medicine and that's great. It's awesome. We want to make sure we're doing all of these things. But we can't ignore how powerful these behaviors are and that's really the time that lifestyle medicine. Yeah, it's a very good point and I think that the issue why, why do they treat them with a drugs and not with food and exercise is a most likely the money. The pharmaceutical company can make a lot of money by selling drugs and I think the farmer will make a bit of money by selling you big. So that's why we do is. And it's also really hard for people to Dr. Bander, I think this is the part that is so frustrating for physicians and I wrote a couple of papers with Dr. Phillips on this is that doctors get really frustrated because they have five minutes with people 15. And it's not enough time to give information about sustainable healthy behavior. And this is kind of where I put on another hat and it, you know, all overlaps is that as a result of this people go looking for information elsewhere, right, because they only have five minutes with their doctor or with an expert or professional. And so they sort of turn to the Wild West influence areas and you know the wellness here in social media and this is where I spend a lot of my time is trying to again communicate these really complicated scientific, you know, theories and outcomes and ideas in a really good way. digestible and easy way for people to understand because the physicians and the clinical space needs help in supporting these ideas. Yeah, and it's it's it's very similar to the mission of in St. Tracker that we are it's exactly the same. We are trying to communicate to the average consumer what he should do related to a food supplement, Texas and lifestyle changes that is a bit based on science and the ecanfollow and they be sure that it's not coming from a guru outside the just a basic value just want to sell him another supplement. So I think that we have a very a similar cause which is a very exciting. Yeah, absolutely. I've always been and this is I have no affiliation with in St. Tracker except that I've just always really appreciated the company and the way that you underpin the work that you do with the evidence. You're really quick to be able to say this is what we know this is what we don't know which I think is also really important. So I really appreciate that ethoset insect tracker. We are trying to become TikTok famous as a you're plug in there. I have not yeah, I have not gotten into TikTok. I that seems like the one obstructive. Kind of when we had Dr. Fielding on the podcast we talked about how if we could put exercise into a pill it would be the most effective pharmaceutical that we could sell because exercise has such a immense impact on health and in his episode we also talked about the development of exercise guidelines and how he was kind of part of that. So on that I was hoping given your expertise in muscle as well as on exercise if you can discuss some of the physiological benefits that exercise really has on our health like what actually bins when we contract our muscles and how does that lead to benefits for a health of longevity. Yeah, so this is again this idea of like a very nuanced sort of complicated semester long conversation on how a muscle works right but the sort of general tenet here is that when you contract your muscle there are two things that are happening. Your muscle is pulling in fuel which is the metabolic process which at the end of the day is really going to be carbohydrates and fat. They're going to draw those in and that's really beneficial for your body because carbohydrates and fats in excess in circulation like to cause trouble right. So sugar is sticky it sticks to things like like oscillate things and it makes them work inappropriately. Fat is sticky to the you know excessive or the outside of your arteries and your veins and it starts to collapse them and make them smaller which can lead to things like cardiovascular disease. So right here if you're not pulling in those nutrients in excess out of your bloodstream you've got risk for two diseases already type two diabetes and insulin resistance cardiovascular disease. So your muscle acts as a really important thing for these fuels that we get from our food. The other thing that's really amazing about muscle and this is something that muscle is my tissue I get really passionate about just how important this tissue is in the body is muscle talks to every other organ in your system and we didn't realize this for a really long time so we knew that we were making T.P. and you were no we were using it to get stronger but what we're now figuring out is that there are these little molecules called myakines that are going to be secreted from your muscle they're going to talk to your brain they're going to talk to your pancreas they're going to talk to your heart which is also a muscle they're going to talk to your gut there's some amazing new research showing this connection between contracting muscle and the gut and really it's this organ in your body that if it is not strong if it is not robust we see that these pathways start to break down in the early days and in the later days we see these diseases start to progress like type two diabetes cardiovascular disease all timers dementia exercise and movement likely in that interaction between the muscle and the brain have this protective effect against this disease of the brain gut issues as I mentioned and so the muscle is just really this massive communicator that is critically important for stopping the progression of these diseases and the one that I'm sure you talked to Dr. Fielding about at excess was probably sarcopenia which is the disease of muscle wasting with age and what we see with sarcopenia I mean if we stay on that disease for even just a second that the you know the outcomes of sarcopenia are so problematic so a you know a 40% increased risk of death sometimes in some in some papers up to 16% 60% increased risk of all cosmortality just simply because your muscles are not robust so exercise is going to create this integrity in your tissues that's so important for communicating with all these other organs that are going to keep these diseases back. Dr. it is a very good background about exercise and I assume that the next question that our audience will ask is okay so how often how much should I exercise and what is the minimum amount of exercise if I'm a bit lazy and I want to get the highest amount of value for my investment? Yeah so I'm I'm just going to throw a stake in the ground here and say the best exercise that you can do is the exercise that you love and that you will stick to. That is that's the right answer right like you if if you hate it you might do it for a short period of time and then you're going to stop doing it and I know that that's not the answer that people want and I'm going to get to the nitty gritty but the most important answer is find the thing that you love to do and keep doing if that's biking do it if it's dancing do it if it's gardening do it whatever it is it's going to keep your body moving that's the most important thing and in fact when we look at the most long lived populations they don't really exercise right like they're not on a spin by e-core in the gym lifting weight they're moving continuously throughout the day and this goes back to all those pathways that I was just talking about is if you continuously using your muscle it's communicating to all those organs it's sucking the sugar and the fat out of your bloodstream you're going to have better health metrics for the long haul so the first answer is do the thing find the thing that you love and keep doing now there is a little bit more nuance to this as there always is in science is that there are outcomes that are related to different types of exercise so for example if you go and start running this is an aerobic exercise you're going to see changes in your cardiovascular system so we'll see that your heart muscle will get stronger we'll see that your blood volume increases we'll see that your capitalization the blood vessels that go into your organ starts to increase and that is really unique to aerobic exercise as a result you're going to have an increase in oxygen utilization it always comes back to metabolism right Dr. Blender you know this um so you're going to see you know an increase in use of oxygen so as a result you're going to become a better runner a better hiker a better biker a better you know a better able to do things at sort of for long periods of time contrast that with doing something like resistance training and now you're going to see that this is going to specifically affect the size of your muscle we call that hypertrophy it's going to affect the type of muscle fiber that you're increasing so type two fibers which are these fast switch fibers versus type one fibers it's going to increase mitochondria in those types of fibers so that it's producing the right amount of energy for the right area you're going to be able to lift things heavier things than you were able to do before and maybe you even end up increasing some of your power metrics which I'll come to next and this is important because you're going to be able to do activities of daily living better right you're going to be able to pick up your kids or your groceries or you know lift heavier weights at the gym which is always fun right so these two types of activity are going to have really different effects on your body the third type which I actually did a pretty good amount of work in when I was at Rogers in Rogers lab which he does a significant amount of work in which his power is this idea of lifting something heavy quickly right so before just a second ago you were just lifting heavy things and now you're lifting something heavy quick and there might be might be the best way to improve and increase longevity because you're going to be able to do the things that you want to do with bead why is this important one of the most um one of the most prevalent ways that people are going to sort of kick it in the end is that they end up falling right and so if they fall you're going to end up in the hospital you might break a bone and this is where when I started working in Rogers lab I had a huge aha moment I was like well we know it's really important that we take vitamin D and calcium and exercise and whatever make sure our bone is really strong but what if catch ourselves before we hit the ground isn't that sort of one of the most important things and that's where I really started to go down this path of muscle and longevity. is shoot, if we can just stop ourselves from hitting the cement in the middle of December or March or whatever, we could end up not in the hospital and we could end up living our lives in a better way. So back to your question, what is the best type of exercise? They're all really important for different reasons. Aerobic exercise is going to be really important for cardiovascular health, strength training is going to be really important for muscle integrity and power training. It's going to be really important to make sure that you can do the things that you want to do at speed for the longest period of time. Told you it's nuanced. No, it's a very good explanation and it makes a lot of sense. But I would try to push even further and try to understand the amount of time that you should dedicate for that. Especially most of us are obesity people. We are having a lot of responsibility. It can be work, it can be family. And we don't have all the time in the world to exercise. And also as you said, sometimes some people don't like to exercise. I'm gifted like you, sounds like you like to exercise. So I also like to exercise. But some people don't like to exercise. So what is the, if you can give them like a high level, what is the minimum amount? What is the maximum amount? And is it linear? Meaning if I will exercise for my son, the rise to sunset every day, is it better than exercising less? So I will get to a point that maybe too much exercise is better. So I'll start with what the guidelines say. So the physical activity guidelines for Americans, their last revision was done in 2018, says that they want you to have 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity. Or 75 minutes of vigorous activity per week. So that is getting those minutes in wherever you can throughout seven days. The secondary recommendation is please also get two days of resistance train per week, which takes about 30 minutes to do a full body resistance training exercise routine. So the party line is 150 minutes of moderate 75 minutes of vigorous. So the question if we stick to that of how do we get this in during a day. So it's roughly two hours of moderate, roughly an hour and 15 minutes or roughly an hour and 15 minutes of vigorous. So if you break that down by day, if you wanted to do vigorous exercise, it's like 10, 15 minutes a day. If you wanted to do moderate, it's a little bit more. Let's call it 25 30 minutes per day by days a week. The way that I like to think about this is not so much in the minutes, but the things that I like to do kind of to your point. So I, you said in the, in the beginning in my bio that I'm a indoor cycling instructor, right? It's one of the things that I love. I love the energy. I love the community. I love the music. I go into that studio and it makes me feel amazing. So step number one is I found something that I really love. The second thing is it's 45 minutes. If I do it twice a week, that's vigorous activity. I'm done. I've had fun. I've done something amazing for myself. I live, leave smiling, feeling energized, high-fiving my friends on the way out. And I've sort of killed two birds with one stone here. I've gotten my minutes in and I've also sort of created this community, this social interaction that's super positive throughout my day too. So two days a week for something vigorous, something like that. If you're a person that just likes to take a quiet walk and you're like, I just need some time away. A good lunchtime walk is always a really good idea, right? So just remove yourself from the office, put on a coat, put on a hat if you're in Boston, put on a t-shirt, if you're in Northern California, and just go enjoy the outside and take a few deep breaths. So it doesn't need to be the super intensive, you know, crazy activity. It can just be what works in your day to day. And again, it's like 20, 25 minutes a day and you can pretty much break that down any way that works for you throughout the day. So even though that number 150 sounds really daunting, if you break it up into your day that works for you, you can do it in 10, 15, 20 minute sessions. Excellent. So just to follow up on the last part of my question, is there a point that is too much if someone exoscicies five hours a day? Is it too much or more the merrier? Yeah, that's a great question. So I'm going to start at the beginning and then I'll finish at this sort of extreme end. So when we look at that 150 minutes, one of the first important things to know is that the most benefit that you actually see if we plot this out on a curve is that the most health benefit that you're going to actually see the steepest part of that curve is going to be in the first 60 minutes. So even if you can't get 150 minutes in that first 60 minutes, so this is 10 minutes a day per day for six, not even seven days a week, six days a week. That's where we see the most health benefit. That's different than a training benefit. You're not going to be able to run a marathon at 10 minutes a day, but you'll see some health benefit. If you look at the other side of that curve, what we see is that the benefits seem to increase, although not white as much, the sort of maximum health benefit that we see is about 300 minutes per week for health. So from there, what we actually start to see is, are so slightly ever so slightly, this is really important that we highlight this ever so slightly. We see increases in health risks after 300 minutes. Now it's important to qualify this is that the curve has already gotten so low with health benefits, meaning good things are happening that even though we see this ever so slight up tick after 300 minutes. It's not nearly as high of a risk by hundreds of full to being sent in. So while we see an ever so slight up tick at 300 minutes, it's so negligible that I wouldn't really stress about it. Now, here's where we do start to see problems after 300 minutes injury. So we might see some risk if you are not training well or you are over training, we could see that. There's also some risk for mental health starting to not be positively affected by exercise anymore. So if we think about, I don't like to use the word addiction, but just this idea that, you know, compulsion exercise for longer than that could be detrimental. I think those are the two major risks. There's some risk to show that that up tick might have to do with a little bit of heart, particularly the right atria, scarring. But it's in such a small percentage of the population that really are exercising hard that it kind of drags up the curve for everybody else. So just to recap, first 60 minutes are the most important. We see ever so slight increases in risk at 300 minutes. But when we look at that, it's for health outcomes, which brings me to the second point is that if you're training for something, a marathon, an older marathon, a triathlon, something like that, you're going to have to get a little bit more granular with your training. So you have to get a little bit more specific. And it's likely that you're going to be exercising for, you know, several hours per week in order to get the training effect that you're looking for. So there's a difference here between health outcomes and training. It's a great explanation. And I like the point that you raised that maybe you haven't said it, but I got it that the exercise can be an addiction. And I would say that if I have to choose between exercise addiction to alcohol addiction to maybe drug addiction, I hope you'll keep the exercise. It is addiction. I think that I'm addicted, but it's the best addiction that I can have. Yeah, it's such a good point. I feel like there's this really fine line between habit, identifying as an exerciseer and lifestyle and this like tip over into unhealthy years, right? So I think, you know, I had this student that emailed me the other day and she's taking my physical activity course at the Harvard Extension School. And she said to me, I'm so excited about exercising more. I do it every day. She's like, and I feel guilty on days that I don't do it. And I'm like, there are two things happening here. First is I want you to feel like you want to have this in your life and that you feel like you're kind of missing something when you don't do it, right? Right. Like I feel I personally and it sounds like you maybe you both do as well. I feel like on a day that I am planning to exercise not a rest day, but a day that I'm planning to exercise. If it doesn't pan out, I'm like, I'm annoyed. My body doesn't feel good. I recognize that it is a good behavior for me. The part where I feel like we need to be really careful is tipping into the I need to continuously do more if I don't do it. I'm a bad person. Those kinds of thoughts are really where the you know we tip into the sort of negative mental health side of it. But I totally agree is that this idea of, you know, if there's something that I'm going to be sort of compelled to do every day. day. It's much better that I'm going for a run and drinking a bottle of wine for Yeah, I think that there are some people and we see that in St. Tracker that are getting to an addiction that make them to wake up at 4 a.m. or to go to exercise at 11 p.m. and then start to influence the other thing that are as important, like sleep and the right nutrition and the right amount of calories. So I think that they're awfully most of us in the level of a good addiction, but sometimes it can go to a greater addiction and I see those people. So I agree with you on that person. Totally, and I think that's really a great reason to use companies and trackers and using inside tracker to show your body that it's hard to intuit where that line is sometimes, where it's like I feel like I want to be doing this. So if you're checking your biomarkers, if you're using your device to check your resting heart rate, and you know, these recovery scores, making sure that you're sleeping enough, all of those behaviors work together. And this, I am not, I'm going to just throw this out there. I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I do not have that training. But one of the areas of addiction diagnosis is that other behaviors, other things that are supposed to be good for you in your life, relationships, sleep, you know, whatever, are being sacked by this thing that you are addicted to. And so I think that's exactly to your point, Dr. Blender, is that that's where you start to recognize you. If there are other things in my life that are going poorly because I am exercising so much, you're over the line. Yep, that's a great point. And we definitely have seen some athletes that get tested pretty regularly. And it is really eye-opening. I think for some of them to have that kind of objective data point of, I'm doing too much when they can see their biomarkers are not looking good. Definitely where they are in their training, it has an impact on those markers too. But it's been nice to be part of that conversation for that light bulb. For some people that you're right, I'm pushing too hard, I'm not recovering enough, my nutrition is not supporting this amount of activity either. Yeah, totally. And I think you're bringing up a really important population that's sort of outside the general population is that the athletes often have to train really, really hard to get the outcome that they are trying to reach to be on the podium, to be, you know, in the final to advance in their, you know, athletic field. And that does require some real physical stress. And so watching yourself, that's very different than exercise addiction, right? That is very purposeful training and making sure that you're optimizing the other areas that are going to support that treat by watching your biomarkers, by watching your biometrics. So two really different populations. And that's why I like to really distinguish between health outcomes and performance outcomes because I think that while there is some overlap there, they're very distinct. Yeah, great point. One question. Well, I think that you've outlaid or laid out pretty nicely, you know, at your cardiovascular exercise plus strength training or resistance training twice a week. Something I get asked about all the time is where does my yoga fit into this? Certainly, some types of yoga can be cardiovascular workouts or strength training workouts, but, you know, is where would yoga fit? Is there now a fourth kind of category that comes into exercise if you think about more of these relaxation or stress relief things too? Yeah, it's such a good question. I feel like fitness is kind of a category in and of itself. And I think that yoga people might roll their eyes if I categorize them as fitness, but you could put functional training, you know, crossfit, orange theory, like these things that are. You know, like, their strength training at some level, they are potentially have some aerobic component to it if they're on the row or something like yoga, if you take a vinyasa class and you're moving your body really continuously, your heart rate gets up. That there is this sort of overlap in the middle there of these modalities. And we do see that they have certainly beneficial effects for health for yoga. They used to say it would help your flexibility. I'm not sure that the data really supports that nor do I think the data necessarily supports that flexibility is super important. It's a little bit more thinking about range of motion and mobility at this point. But I think that's really where those types of exercise fit in is twofold comes back to my original point. People love yoga, right? It feels good to them. They love some people love going into that obscenely hot room and just sweating for 60 to 90 minutes. It's like the most rejuvenating thing to them. They love the community of yoga, which is one of the reasons why I love the fitness and wellness world so much is that you see other people, which I think, you know, as fitness was sort of decimated during the pandemic. We're seeing finally coming back and value of moving your body with other people. You get stronger for sure, right? So you're moving your own body. That's essentially a type of resistance training. And you could say the same for things like orange theory or you know, some of these boot camp classes or things like CrossFit is, you know, are there a risk of, you know, doing something crazy in those spaces and getting injured, yes, sure, but people really love them and they're moving their body and that's really at the end of the day. What counts? I think the one thing that I would say about the fitness wellness world and this kind of ties back to the athletic space that we were just talking about is the thing that's lacking in my opinion in the fitness world. And this goes for yoga and other, you know, modalities that we've talked about is there's no real progression, right? So when we look at the athlete world, the way that people get better is by very strategically, periodizing and progressing their training so that they get quicker, stronger, faster, whatever they're trying to do over time. And one of these fitness modalities is they're kind of the same thing all the time forever, right? So if you go in and do yoga, it's the same flow, perhaps, or, you know, maybe you're getting a little bit better at poses here and there. I think that the real value then after you sort of reach this plateau with these classes is again coming back to the continuous movement, contracting your muscle, using, you know, the fuels from your system. And it becomes kind of a health metric, not so much of a performance metric. Yeah, that's that a good point and another kind of activity that is in fashion right now, it's a HIV or intensity interval training. So how do you see that and what is the difference between that and I don't know doing running or cycling? I love this question. So every fitness studio, every fitness instructor in the world that calls their activity, hit, high intensity interval training is kind of not using that term appropriately, right? And we look at hit in the scientific space when we look at it in the research space, but we really are talking about using high intensity interval training. What we're talking about is pushing something, pushing a body to about their VO2 max or maybe even higher for very short periods of time. Very, very, very intense anaerobic activity. So think about running is absolutely hard as you possibly can on a treadmill for 25 30 seconds a minute, right? And then what you do is you either very gently active recover or stop until your body is completely recovered and then you do it again, right? And that's not what is happening in the fitness space, what's happening in the fitness space is essentially interval training, right? Or, you know, circuit training or something like that where it's like people's heart rate go up a little, they come down a little, go up a little, come down a little, go up a little, that's not hit. Right. So I think we need to be really careful and I'm saying this as somebody in the fitness and wellness space that we are using this terminology correctly. So when we look at the hit training, we look at true high intensity interval training, we actually see some really awesome health benefits. So even in there's some really serious clinical populations that can't exercise for long periods of time. So you think about people with cardiovascular disease, there's even some data to show that congestive heart failure patients can benefit from high intensity interval training, supervised with a doctor and an exercise physiologist. But there's some good data to show that those very, very tiny as hard as you can go pushes can have these physiologic benefits that something like going for a long half hour run is also going to have the mechanisms are a little bit under a little bit not well understood right now as to why this super high intensity activity is having the same benefit is something like a long slow distance cardiovascular outcome. You know if you get into the sort of details of what's actually happening at the physiologic and aerobic mitochondrial level, but those exercises work and that's not to say that those circuit training or the not quite high intensity interval training aren't good either they are it's just not high intensity interval training that's a very, very specific type of training. So if I'm trying to summarize it for our users, you can have a cheat day that you don't have enough time and maybe a completion 10 minutes what you will accomplish in an hour of running by doing the proper HIV is it a fair statement. Yeah, although if you've ever done high intensity interval training for real, you would definitely not call it a cheat day. It's really hard. You can condense a one hour and 10 minutes. Yes, 100%. Yeah, so I mean, I think that's sort of the beauty of this and the data is emerging right now. Like I said, it's not really, really well understood, but what we do see is that these health outcomes and maybe even some performance outcomes when we look at elite level athletes, that there certainly is a place for this type of training both in the general population as well as performer, elite athlete performers. And it takes a lot less time, which is really nice. Often I feel like when people think about starting a new exercise routine, it is coupled with a weight loss attempt. And that's one of the reasons that people really dislike exercise because one, maybe they're forcing themselves to do something they don't like, but they're also doing it at the same time that they are underfueling in general, just for light. So of course, it feels really bad. Can you maybe discuss some of the ways that you try and communicate exercise as being completely coupled from weight loss to try and encourage people to do it for general health and not just for this always big, shiny object in the distance that will then describe it for. - Yeah, totally. This, the answer to this is really multifaceted. So I'll start at the very beginning, is I wrote this paper probably 10 years ago that said, stop exercising to lose weight, right? And you can sort of interpret that a couple of different ways, but the idea here is that the data is pretty compelling to show that using exercise as a weight loss tool is not a great way to go. Now, the end of the day, and this is a separate podcast for a separate day, at the end of the day, if you wanna lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you're taking. I know that it's much more nuanced than that, and it's really complicated, but that's sort of the formula at the end of the day. Now, does exercise help you to burn more calories? 100%. So you're burning calories in the moment that you're exercising, perhaps you're making your muscles stronger, and you're burning more calories throughout the day as your basal metabolic rate increases because you've got more lean tissue. Now, here's where things get really sticky, is that because of all that, you've exercise, you've got more lean tissue, you're really hungry, right? And this data is pretty compelling, there was the data, I was in grad school at the time, church put it out, it was on the front of time magazine, that basically showed that people that were marathon runners were gaining weight as opposed to people that were sort of middle distance runners. And the reason for it is they were out running around for two, three, four hours a day, they were just starving, right? And so in order to support that type of training, you need to increase your fuel intake, and your body's gonna tell you that you're hungry. And so this is where you sort of get this vicious cycle of training more, having an increased drive to eat, and then obviously, you know, perhaps, not obviously, but perhaps gaining weight. Now, here's where things get even more nuanced, is that, okay, so you're gaining weight. What kind of weight? That's really important. So we've been talking this whole time about how robust muscle is critically important for health and longevity, long term. If you're increasing your weight because you just put on six pounds of muscle, and maybe also lost three pounds of that, you've just made your body a healthier, stronger, more efficient machine, even if the pounds on the scale went up. And this is where I get, like, I kind of roll my eyes a little bit about weight loss and exercises. And I'm like, I don't really understand why that needs to be the goal of exercise. What if the goal of exercise was to make my muscles really strong and I didn't step on the scale because muscles really heavy, and I might go up a pound or two. Okay, cool. If I do, now I'm a healthier human for it. And if I've gotten into my head because wellness industry, diaculture, blah, blah, blah, and I watch that scale go up and I'm like, "Ah, I've gone up two pounds. How is that even possible?" I'm burning so many calories. I'm not exercising anymore. This is ridiculous. Now you've gotten to a point where your mental health is not great and you're not exercising, and now your physical health is gonna start to deteriorate. So this uncoupling of exercise and weight loss is I think radically important as we start to talk and sort of market how awesome exercise is. It's always been marketed as a weight loss tool and I think that it's just really doing a disservice to how powerful and potent exercise truly is. Absolutely. I think on that marketing piece, communicating scientific info to the general population that doesn't necessarily have a scientific background I would love to dig into some of your thoughts about how we can do that. And why is it so important to talk about scientific information? How someone without a science background can feel more confident consuming content. I run an Instagram account on about cholesterol and most of what I do there is telling people it's not true what you heard from X, Y, and Z, the carnivore diet in particular. Why vegetables are not the cause of all your illnesses. But I know that you also do something similar. So how can we, I don't know, fight against the headlines and misinformation that out there or make people feel a lot more confident about where they get their information on these scientific topics. Yeah, so important. One of the things that I say about science communication all the time is that scientists suck at Instagram and we need to get better at meeting people where they are because you know what people are not coming to find us in our office. None of my students come to office hours, right? And like they're easy targets, right? So people aren't gonna come and seek you out just because you're an expert in this space, right? We need to start telling people what this data actually says and say it in a way that is actionable and usable by real human beings. We talk a lot to each other in these sort of, you know, if I said something to you, actually, if I said methylcylbalamin, you're like, okay, B12, I know what you're talking about. But if I say that to the general population, they're like the terrible chemical that I shouldn't put in my body, right? So we communicate in a way that people just don't understand. So there's that, but I do think that there's a really important responsibility on the consumer to also make sure that they are sort of screening the information that they take in because everybody can have a microphone right now, right? And so there's a couple of rules that I like to live by when I think about screening people out of your feed or experts that are not necessarily people that are helping you out. So there's a couple of red flags, specifically three red flags that I think are really important for people to pay attention to. Number one is if people are making outrageous or new claims, red flag number one, right? Science is this process of consensus learning, right? And we, it takes a long time for this data to come up. There's been headlines lately about sugar alcohols that are in the news right now and everybody's losing their mind about, oh, should I stop drinking my diet coke? What is this? And if you ask the scientists, they're like, that study had a lot of flaws. It's generalizable only to a very small population. And the second we start talking like that, people are like, maa, they just hear like the key nuts, you know, teacher in the background, maa, maa, maa, maa, maa, maa, like they don't hear it, right? So for the consumer flag number one, science is really nuanced. It takes a long time to really get to a consensus. So if somebody says this brand new study is new information and you shouldn't, don't it? Be really careful. The second red flag is they have this new thing that they're saying and they say also, the experts don't know about this or the experts have been wrong about this forever, right? And they place themselves in this position where they're like, I know this new information and you should not listen to your doctor, you should not listen to the scientists, they have no idea what they're talking, right? That kind of sort of ad hominem is like, that is red flag number two, is that you cannot become an expert in this kind of information, you know, just by doing your own research and I'm using heavy air quotes right there, right? The third that's really a red flag is if those two first things happen and then they try to sell you something at the end, right? So it's a product, it's a course, it's supplement, it's a discount code for something, right? You put all those three things together and you should delete, unfollow, swipe past it, right? Like those three things right away, essentially that's sales 101. I'm gonna create myself as an expert, I'm gonna tell you you have a problem, I'm gonna tell you that nobody else knows how to fix it and here's my product for your, you know, to solve your problem. That's not information, that's not science communication, that's sales, right? So be really careful about that. Now the other side of this is okay, I've cleaned out my feed, I've taken out all the people that are giving me the red flags, where do I go for good information? And this is where I talk to our community And I say, get better at telling people. about your work in a way that's really useful. I, if you, if you follow me on social media, my favorite medium is Twitter and not because of Twitter itself. Twitter is a cesspool. But what Twitter is really good at is forcing you to say something really important in what is 250 letters or whatever. Now, right? Is, can I say something really complicated in a short way to get good information across the people that are just kind of scrolling, right? So this is where I say to our community, the scientists, the experts, the clinicians, how can you get really good at understanding this information and giving nuggets to people so they can go and do it? Now, a couple of resources that I think are awesome. I love examine.com. Obviously, I love insect tracker. You guys have great information too, but examine.com is a really good one. So talk about back to our toughs people is that Kamal Patel started this company when he was at Tufts and sort of took a hey to build it out. But it's this beautiful website. It's so easy to use. It scores every study on every nutrition topic that you can think about. It tells you the impact. So for example, if you're taking a supplement, it says, you know, there's this one really good study that showed if you take it, you get like a tiny boost of energy, depression, whatever. So they're really good at saying like, here's a quick pictorial of how good was the study and how strong was the effect. So people can really use that information. That's a really good one. Another really amazing resource is actually this website called Thinking Is Power. So if you've never seen this one, check it out. It's by, she's a professor at a community college in Massachusetts. Her name is Melanie Trassick King. And she has this awesome tutorial on how to become a really good consumer of science as a lay person. So how do you sort of increase your, your sort of science literacy? And it helps you to understand that again, science is a process. It's not a series of things, right? It's not like vitamin D is this, muscle is this, whatever. When I'm talking about all of these studies and we're bringing them together and giving people information, it's because I've gleaned information from many, many people looking at an issue in many, many different ways and come up with a consensus of what we think works. So this is the thing that I really love about her work. She basically says, science doesn't necessarily prove anything. It kind of sort of just reduces uncertainty, right? I think that's where again, we need to get really good at this, is saying, yeah, the data kind of is showing this, and this is why we use words like may and should drive the consumer the nannies, because they're like, just tell me what to do, right? And I think that we need to be really good at saying this is what my data showed. And this is sort of like usefulness of it and be really honest truth tellers about what the data is actually showing. And in that way, the sort of BS meter of the consumer will start to be a little bit more fine tuned. And they can say, all right, I can trust this person because I understand how they got to this outcome. And this person's just giving me one crazy fact that sounds really extreme and they're trying to sell me something. I probably shouldn't listen to that person. And only in that way are we going to be able to get really good information out there in this space that's really cluttered with disinformation for sure. But I think also really well-intentioned misinformation from people that are just trying to share what they found and have learned works for them. So, Rachel, unfortunately, we got out of time. But we usually, and we want to ask you the same question that we ask all of our guests, is what is your top tip of improving the health skin? My own? You own all the documentation for a way to audience. Well, I think I've been pretty clear that the most important thing that you can do for increasing health span is increasing muscle integrity. I really believe that. So, I think the best thing that you can do, I'll bring it back to rule number one, is find a way to move your body that makes you happy that you're going to continuously do for the rest of your life. That's a very good tip. And I think that we are coming out of time, and I thank you so much again for an amazing and informative session. And we look forward to explore the research in the field of longevity each month with you and the meeting scientists for more information. Please go to www.instarchvacher.com/podcast. Again, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for watching.