Dhru Purohit Show - The Mind Blowing Science of Walking 8,000 Steps a Day to Support Fat Burning, Cognitive Health and Longevity

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, Ketone-IQ and Lifeforce. We know being active is key to longevity, optimal weight, and overall health. In our modern lifestyles, staying active throughout the day can seem daunting and impractical. Today’s guest reminds us why walking and taking short movement breaks can help us make progress toward our goals and be incorporated into our daily routines as a way of living.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Mike Mutzel to explore why increasing your daily activity level is key for longevity. Mike explains the science behind his 8,000-step benchmark, which can enhance fat burning, protect cognitive health, and prevent disease. He also highlights the value of incorporating "exercise snacks" into your routine and why sweating and heat exposure are essential for overall health. Additionally, Mike shares his views on the latest health trends, including what he's focusing on and what he believes can be deprioritized. If you're looking for actionable tips to boost your activity level, Mike has the advice to get started. Mike Mutzel completed his M.S. in Clinical Nutrition from the University of Bridgeport in 2015. He is a graduate of the Institute for Functional Medicine’s (IFM) Applying Functional Medicine in Clinical Practice (AFMCP). In 2014, Mike published his first book, Belly Fat Effect: The Real Secret About How Your Diet, Intestinal Health, and Gut Bacteria Help You Burn Fat. In this episode, Dhru and Mike dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): Increase Steps and Activity Level for Fat Burning (00:00:24 / 00:00:24) 8,000 Steps as a Benchmark (4:30 / 4:30) Exercise Snacks (11:54 / 8:10) Lack of Physical Activity Correlated to Mortality (16:44 / 13:00) Lifestyle Habits Contributing to Chronic Disease (21:14 / 17:30) Weight Loss, Diet, and Physical Activity (26:24 / 21:00) Emerging Trends in Health (36:08 / 30:44) The Importance of Sweating and Heat Exposure (50:44 / 45:20) Stanford Aging Study Results and What to Prioritize at Each Age (54:24 / 49:00) What Mike Has Doubled Down On and What He Has Deprioritized (1:02:54 / 57:30) Key Supplements Mike Recommends (1:06:24 / 1:01:00) Protecting Brain Health for Later in Life (1:13:24 / 1:08:00) Also mentioned in this episode: High Intensity Health Mike’s Podcast  To learn more about Mike, follow him on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, or his website.  This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, Ketone-IQ and Lifeforce.  Upgrade your digestion with enzymes! Go to bioptimizers.com/dhru now and enter promo code DHRU10 to get 10% off any order and free gifts for a limited time. Right now, my friends at Ketone-IQ are offering 30% off your first subscription order & a free six-pack of Ketone-IQ when you order using the link ketone.com/dhru and promo code DHRU.  Right now, you can save $250 on your first diagnostic and get personalized suggestions. Optimize your longevity and track your progress; go to mylifeforce.com/dhru!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mike Mutzel, welcome to the podcast. You know, I want to kick things off by talking about fat burning, a topic that you're truly an expert on. You recently put the spotlight on multiple new studies that show that if their inactive fat loss becomes nearly impossible, this is something that I learned from you, which is called exercise resistance. So what did these new studies show? And why is it so important that everybody listening today get their step and activity count up if they care about fat burning and longevity? Drew, great question. And first of all, great to be with you.

Good to see your face virtually. So as you know, I mean, the field of exercise science has changed dramatically over the past several years. We're learning more and more that humans are built to move. We're built to move all throughout the day and not just go to the gym and embark on structured recreational exercise. And I'm a huge fan of that. I've been going to the gym five, six days a week since I was like 14 years old. I'm a huge fan of going to the gym.

But what I didn't really realize until many years later is the power of just walking and moving throughout the day. And so there's a great researcher at UT Austin. His name is Edward Coyle. And he's been publishing a lot of fantastic human clinical studies, human control trials here, that really help us better to enumerate just how effective, like moving throughout the day. is even if you go to the gym. So for example, he randomized people to be very sedentary for just three days. And what I mean by very sedentary is they reduce their step count to just 4,000 steps

per day. So that was one arm of the study or a bucket of the study. The other arm did, participated in 6,500 steps, you know, for three days. And then they had a control group who was just doing whatever they did beforehand, which was, I want to say it was like 3,000 steps or something a little bit lower than the 4,000. And what they found is that after three days, they had it, individuals eat a test meal. And it was standardized and, you know, the amount of macros and fats and carbohydrates and protein were standardized based upon their body weight. Then they had them do one hour of steady state cardio, which is a really good way. People have heard of Zone 2, Peter Atia and many others have been talking a lot about how Zone 2 training burns body fat and so forth. So they had

them eat the meal and then several hours later do this one hour steady state zone 2. And they looked at the amounts and they enumerated how much fat was oxidized and looked at postmeal blood fats and all these different aspects. And what they found is that when there was a linear increase in the amount of fat that was oxidized after that test meal and exercise session, there was proportional with the amount of recreational activity or sorry, the steps that people were taking in the three days leading up to that. So that's what's really important. So the people that only walked like 2,000 steps per day didn't burn that much fat during this so-called fat-burning exercise session. In contrast, people that walked between 6,000 and 8,000 steps during that study

burned significantly more amounts of fat in the 60-minute exercise session. So I think that's really important because most people are sedentary throughout the day. They're in their desk jobs and working from home or doing tech work or whatever it may be. And they go to an orange theory class or an F-45 class. And they're thinking, gosh, I'm going to burn all this fat during this exercise session. but you're going to make that exercise session more, you're going to increase the return on your exercise investment if you also do these exercise snacks and breaks throughout the day.

So for example, you know, it's about 12, 15 or so here. I've already walked 4,000 steps. And I didn't just go for a power walk in the morning. I took my dogs out and went for five minutes, came back, did some garden work. And then before this podcast, did a few sprints on my skier that's outside, and then did just a quick five-minute walk. And I think when people understand that this doesn't have to be a major time commitment,

yet it's very effective, particularly as throughout this conversation, we'll talk more about metabolic health. I think it's important because most people, as they become a little bit more sedentary, a little bit more overweight, they start to notice a little bit more belly fat, their blood triglycerides increase. And that's actually an independent carbasca risk factor. And the more that we recreationally walk throughout the day, the more sensitive we are to lowering our triglysts rights and using those as fuel when we go to the gym and do our

structured exercise. One of the numbers that kept on coming up in your video, which we'll link to below, was 8,000. Why is that such an important number as a benchmark to share with the audience? Yeah, I'm not sure what's so magical about 8,000, but this comes from a meta-analysis from a researcher, I believe he's in the UK. The paper was Bannick at all, and he looked at meta-analysis of, there's a lot of different studies where they use podometers and accelerometers, and these are ways like fitbits and garments and different things to track your steps. And what they found is in this meta-analysis involving hundreds of thousands of people, I believe it was using the UK Biobank data set, which is really pretty solid data. And they found all these inverse associations. When individual step counts got above 9,000 steps per day, 8,500 are in that ballpark.

they were inversely correlated with the incidence and severity of a lot of different diseases that unfortunately many people suffer from today like osteoporosis, sleep apnea, gastrointestinal reflux disorder or gurd. There is joint pain, depression, mental health issues, blood pressure. I mean, the list goes on. And so I think a lot of folks now in the wellness space are really splitting hairs over things like how much protein to have or, you know, should I do red light therapy or what about this new an MN supplement or whatever.

But if you're not walking at least, you know, I'm just going to say 10,000 steps per day, you're really missing out on a piece of low-hanging fruit that can have so many different health benefits that goes on here. So basically multiple studies show that around 8,500, 10,000 is sort of the sweet spot. And I'm sure there's diminishing returns if someone were to every day walk 25,000 steps. Most people don't do that. but it seems that based upon these studies, like more is a little bit better to a point.

And so I think on some days, you know, over the weekends, you know, for example, my daughter and I and girlfriend, we go out hiking and, you know, some days we'll do 30,000 steps and so forth. And if you think about hunter-gatherers, like, what would people do? I mean, ancestral people would walk. And I know there's a lot of, you know, un-great, there's so many great things about modernity.

And I'm not trying to glorify ancestral eras. But it does turn out that our leg muscle in particular, this is where I want to go with this, depend upon movement. Several studies out of Denmark and Copenhagen, University of Copenhagen, where they looked at skeletal muscle insulin resistance. And so it turns out that even in full-blown type 2 diabetics, and we know that diabetes is actually, people think that it's a disease of the pancreas, like, oh, your pancreas is not secreting enough insulin. It's really a disease of the skeletal muscle. And what happens is the skeletal muscle becomes insulin resistant because of fat spillover and that fat.

fat, we can look at this and look at our blood work to see our blood triglycerides start to elevate, and then our liver gets filled up with fat, our liver enzymes increase. But our skeletal muscle becomes filled up with fat and it becomes resistant to insulin's messaging. And it turns out that the leg muscles are particularly sensitive to becoming more insulin resistant and it happens first. And so this is why walking is so important. And so this several studies, as I mentioned, University of Copenhagen, they found that in diabetics, when they do different studies where they isolate the arm using a tourniquet and so forth and look at how much glucose the muscle in the arm will uptake compared to the legs, the upper body musculature remains relatively insulin sensitive.

In contrast, in these people who have flow-blown diabetes, their leg musculature is really insulin resistant. And so the good news is we can reverse this and prevent insulin resistance by doing something so simple, like just walking, particularly walking after a meal. That's fantastic. You know, you shared this term earlier that a lot of people are talking about these days, but it might be new to some of our audience and it's exercise snacks. And you talk about how you were doing some gardening and then you may have done some sprints or you've got a little walk in the morning and you're sprinkling these snacks throughout the day. What could be a possible routine for somebody who's like, you know what? I'm getting an average of around 4,000 steps a day,

which is pretty normal for a lot of the population, but it's also defined as sedentary, how could they use an exercise snack routine to just get their steps and their total activity up throughout the day? Can you give us some possibilities? Yeah, Drew, this is really important. You know, we have to make this really simple. So I think, you know, let's say you work in corporate America

and you're on the fourth floor of your office building and doing secretary of work or whatever maybe. You know, you can just put a timer on your phone, for example, or an alert, in your calendar. I have a Google calendar and an alert pops up. And it's just a reminder to move every 90 minutes. And so just something really simple. And this can be five minutes. And, you know, it doesn't have to be particularly long. It doesn't have to be a 20 minute exercise snack. We're talking about five minutes. Okay, I've been sitting and doing deep work for 90 minutes. I'm going to go out and go check the mail or I'm going to go out and do a quick sprint. The nice part about these so-called exercise snacks is you're not going to get stinky or sweaty. I mean, maybe if it's, you know, Dallas, Texas, and July, you might get a little sweaty outside or Oklahoma. right but for the most part you know if you're just doing a short duration five minute little quick walk going up and down the stairs you know another simple way to do that you know if you um you know let's say you have three kids you're a stay home mom and you're running around juggling activities and taking

kids to sports and things like that just park your car farther away from where you're going in the parking lot so i often do that if it's been a or if i travel for example and i'm like i got to go to the grocery store we had no food in the fridge you know so i'll just park my car a little bit further and just get up extra 12,000 or sorry, 200 or 1,500 steps in. I think timing really matters here. So let's just say someone eats two to three meals a day. A simple time to do your exercise snacks is within the 30-minute window after you eat. So if you have a little breakfast, try to do a little bit of a brisk walk.

And what's nice about that, Drew, and people can test this if they wear a continuous glucose modder. And that's actually how I sort of discover this in 2018. We can talk about that later if you want. but I went to a vegan restaurant and I was just like, hey, give me your most popular items. They had pizza, bread, sandwiches, things like that. And I was very low carb for years going into that. And my blood glucose spiked to 190. And I was like, I can't go to bed like this.

This is really, for me, quite high. And that's actually in the pre-diabetic range. Now, that's common with people who have been low carb for a while. So I took my dogs and just went for a very brisk walk and found a hill, did two sprints. Short sprints. We're talking like 10 seconds. My glucose almost cut in half. It was like 85 milligrams per deciliter.

So that's when I realized like, wow, exercise or just walking in general is so effective at just taking that blood glucose, putting it right into the muscles. And so because Drew about 93 or 94 percent of U.S. adults have some degree, and this is well-recognized data now. We've known this since 2018, and you've talked about it as well, some degree of insulin resistance or they're on the spectrum of developing metabolic syndrome and prediabetes. You know, most people should be walking a little bit after a meal. And as I mentioned before we started, I was in Europe earlier this year. And one thing I noticed was the lack or dearth of obesity in parts of France and in the UK and even Switzerland. Well, people walk everywhere, right? And so, you know, I think it walk and yet they smoke on an order of magnitude much higher than here in the U.S.

Yet there are rates of heart disease, dementia, cognitive decline are just not even close to our statistics. We trump, you know, the world in terms of rates of heart disease per capita and metabolic disease. So, you know, that was a little bit confusing to me. And I just, it really exemplified and highlights the power of these exercise snacks and walking. So again, to summarize, you can do a thousand steps before you have your first cup of coffee. Really easy to just go outside, get a little sunlight in your eyes, walk around for just a few minutes. Take the stairs in your office. Just do a quick break after lunch.

I think a lot of people struggle with the afternoon fatigue. If you look at the Starbucks line around 3 o'clock, most coffee shops around 3 o'clock are slammed because people are starting to get a little tired from their reactive hypoglycemia from the bread sandwiches that they might have had at lunch. So taking a quick walk is a good way to drop that glucose naturally and not have your pancreas overshoot with insulin.

And then, of course, a little walk after dinner is great. I mean, it helps you sleep, it helps you unwind, it helps you digest. So just several little exercise snacks is phenomenal. You know, being sedentary doesn't just make it hard for you to lose weight. There's actually a bigger point that you want to make here. And I didn't know this fact. I'm going to read a quote from your video here.

You said, lack of physical activity is the fourth leading cause of death in the world. I was astonished to hear that. Can you expand a little bit more on that quote? It's wild. I mean, if you think about all the different conditions, though, they are characterized if they think about cardiovascular disease if we think about diabetes think about obesity think about dementia i mean these diseases are characterized by individuals and they're most commonly expressed or manifested in individuals who are sedentary and so it makes a lot of sense that we just

you know if if we were to if if the power of exercise could be encapsulated into a pill it would be a blockbuster drug, much more powerful than Lipitor or any of the other hot selling drugs out there. So I think it really behooves all of us. I mean, if we look at the data, just something very simple like grip strength, which is just a rough approximation to look at our whole body strength. Low grip strength now is correlated with increased pace of epigenetic or biologic aging. And this data has been well elucidated by Steve Horvath and various Morgan Levine and various other people who study pace of aging.

If we look at just exercise capacity, I mean, there was a great study. It published in New England Journal of Medicine, or sorry, this one was JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, where they tracked individuals' ability to do push-ups. They took a group of firemen in Indiana, 1,000 firefighters and looked at all their different biomarkers with regards to cardiovascular disease, risk factors like C-RATs of protein and LDL cholesterol and all these different things. And then they had them do as many push-ups as they could in one minute. and they followed them over the course of 11 years.

And then at the end of 11 years, they put people into different buckets based upon how many push-ups they could do in a minute. And the people who could do 40 or more push-ups in a minute in one-minute duration without stopping had incidents and prevalence of heart disease and heart disease-related complications like having a stroke or a major cardiovascular event

in orders of magnitude lower compared to people who could only do 11 push-ups. Now, that's not to say that push-ups prevent heart disease per se. Push-ups in this study were just an approximation of one's overall physical fitness. But it does go to show that if you're sedentary and just not moving, how could you expect the most important muscle in your body, your heart, to be healthy, right? Because when you move your muscles, you're invariably moving your heart as well. So I think that's really important for people to recognize that exercise is incredibly powerful. Now, what I also like to point out about

this great, well-controlled study that was published in JAMA, is the LDL cholesterol levels of the participants were not significantly different, right? So if you go to most mainstream medical doctors, they're really concerned oftentimes when your LDL cholesterol gets above 125 milligrams per deciliter and recommend statins and all these lipid lowering medications and so forth. But if we just do something even more crude, like look at your push-up capacity, that's going to give us a more sensitive and specific assessment about your future risk of developing a really common condition, like having a heart attack, sudden cardiac death. So I think that's really important for people to recognize that just

fitness is not about just looking good. This is about living longer and preventing all these conditions. You know, if you work with people in health care or know people in health care, Drew, which I know you do, many people who have dementia are, they have what's called deconditioned, right? They are just sedentary. They have no ability to even, you know, to care for themselves, to get up and go to the bathroom, to get groceries. And so many of these chronic conditions, and this is why healthcare is so expensive is because people just simply can't can't move. And if you can't move, how can you expect to be healthy and free of disease? So I think it's really important. And here's the great news. All these things that we're talking

about can be ameliorated with just home exercises, air squats, pull-ups, presses. You don't need any fancy gym equipment to maintain a health-promoting level of baseline fitness. For a lot of folks who are listening today, they listen to a lot of podcasts. And hopefully they'll start listening to your podcast that they aren't listening. And every week, they get different suggestions from different people's of both things to do and also things not to do. Here, we're giving a big suggestion that's free that has a lot of evidence around it. Don't be sedentary. And it's not just supportive for fat burning, but it's also important for all-cause mortality, as you've outlined. If you had to expand on that list of the most

dangerous lifestyle habits that are causing chronic disease and that predict decreased lifespan, what else would you add to that list? Drew, this is a great question. You know, I'm a huge fan of the circadian clock system in our body, and I think the exposure to artificial light at night and the lack of sunlight or daylight during the day is a huge problem. I know that sounds a little, but these things are not sexy. It's not sexy to talk about get up and get sunlight in the day.

But yeah, I wrote about this in my book, Belly Fat Effect that we published in 2014's. And all this data now has been elucidated. There was a great study by Stanford, scientists. And I think if people want to invest in their sleep quality, and this is really important for women that are going through menopause or postmenopausal, as you know, sleep can be really challenged because of hormonal changes, particularly progesterone changes. So I think it's really important to optimize light hygiene during the day and making sure that we're getting at least

1,200 luck throughout the day. And the way that you can do this is there's actually free apps on the iPhone. I bought a photometer on Amazon for $27. And it's really a cool tool, Drew. I don't know if you've used these before, but even on a cloudy day, we think like I live in Washington State where it's often cloudy and stuff. People think there's no benefit of going outside because you're not getting vitamin D. But you're getting all that natural light exposure that helps to entrain all of these different systems in your body and particularly create sleep pressure. And so I think that's really important and minimizing light exposure in the hour before bedtime and sleeping in a dark room. And so this expert consensus paper helped to enumerate this in the hour before bed,

you want less than 50 lux, which is quite low. Your iPhone will put out 60 lux if the screen brightness is at maximum capacity. So just that alone, if you're using your phone in bed, your sleep's going to be compromised for sure. And then in your bedroom, you want as close to zero lux as possible. So I think that's something that is really important, and it's particularly important to you for kids. It turns out that kids, the way that their eye is shaped and growing, they are much more sensitive to the artificial light inductions effect, suppressive effect on their hormone melatonin. So kids should not be on screens before bed and using phones in the bedroom because we know that sleep is so important for their growth and their brain health and all that.

So I think daylight and then minimizing artificial light exposure, and I have several female clients who, We're taking all the oral progesterone. They're doing all these different supplements, magnesium and things, and they're wondering why they can't go to sleep. And yet they're scrolling on news channels in bed at night. And we've discovered that through my coaching calls and so forth. And since changing that, they're noticing huge improvements. Just doing that one thing.

Sorry, two things. Being more intentional about daylight and being more intentional about minimizing screen time and light exposure at night. So it sounds a little boring, Drew, but that is quite perfect. found. Oh, that's great. You know, I want to come back to the topic of fat burning and a question that I personally have. I had heard for years, experts in this field, which could be a large spectrum, say things like exercise is not the best way to lose weight for people. It can be a good

way to maintain your weight and sort of maintain the progress, but really diet is the way that people are going to be dialing in weight loss, which is really people are looking for body composition, a healthier body composition. less body fat percentage or getting into an optimal body composition. From your sense of knowing both the dietary side and the exercise side, how do you put those two things together when you're giving advice to your clients and people on your YouTube channel? Yeah, Drew, this is a brilliant question.

You know, I think there's a lot of variability here between individuals. You know, some people can eat terribly and not gain weight because they exercise intensely. Other people, you know, they need to be very sensitive. to both their diet and their exercise or they will gain a lot of weight. So I think there's some variability here. But I have found through coaching and being in this space and just chinkering with my own body, as I mentioned, I started working out when I was 14 years old and I've been up as heavy as 235 pounds and overweight right now for reference.

I'm like 185, right? So I've been lean, I've been fat. I have seen both ends of it. It's really hard to lose weight if you're eating like crap. So I think your diet needs to be dialed into a point. And I think if we look at this like not, like imagine your dashboard, like a metabolic dashboard, like a pilot looks at the instruments in an airplane.

You know, if your exercise dial is cranked up because you're walking a lot, because you're going to the gym, you're doing CrossFit, you're exercising a lot, you can have a little bit more leeway with the foods that you eat. And so we see this oftentimes. Now, we don't want to get carried away with this and have ice cream for breakfast, dinner and lunch. But I think, you know, people can have a little bit more leeway in their diet if their exercise and recreational activity is, is on point. So I think that's important for people to recognize. Now, the same is true. If they do not exercise, people need to be very strict with their

diet to improve their body composition. I think it's really hard, in fact. I will say it's not going to say impossible. People have lost significant amounts of weight by just dieting alone, but it's much more challenging. Now here's why, Drew, because what happens is oftentimes when we are dieting, we're in a calorie deficit. When we're in a calorie deficit, it's almost impossible to not lose skeletal muscle, to not lose muscle. And muscle is so important, as you know, your listeners, know you've had Gabriel Lion on the show. Muscle contributes a lot to our resting energy expenditure. And so what often happens is we have this kind of yo-yoing effect where we diet down, suppress our calories to get into a deficit, to burn some body fat. We start to lose muscle.

mass, then our metabolic rate goes down and then we stop our dieting period and we tend to regain some of the weight lost and then some, but our metabolism is actually at a lower set point than what it was before. And so that makes this ability to maintain body weight homeostasis or our weight balance over time really, really challenging. And this is why exercise is so good because it's muscle sparing. So when you're exercising, you're helping to stimulate muscle protein synthesis and muscle growth and preventing muscle loss. So I think that's really important, number one, to always exercise anytime you do a calorie deficit,

to prevent unnecessary loss of skeletal muscle. That's so important. And number two, to even eat more protein when one is dieting or in a calorie deficit to prevent, again, the loss of muscle tissue. So it really depends upon the study or the individual, but on the higher end of estimates, about four in 10, yeah, four and say 10,

pounds loss could be from skeletal muscle. I mean, it really varies based upon how much protein people are consuming and how much exercise they're doing. Now, we can reduce that to say, 1.5 pounds out of every 10 pound lost is muscle. So we can tweak that, but various studies do show that if people go into a deficit, don't exercise, cut back their calories, and maybe go on something like Ozmpic or whatever the various drugs are to really suppress appetite, you know, a significant amount of that weight loss could be muscle. And then the challenge therein is, again, when you stop the dieting period, you're like, okay, I've lost, I'm 130 pounds. Every woman wants to be around 130 pounds for some reason, right? I'm good. I don't need a diet anymore,

but you could have less muscle mass than when you started and your metabolic rate could be even lower and it becomes increasingly hard to maintain that weight loss over time. So again, to answer your question, I think it's important that we clean up our diets and we prioritize exercise. And if we're really dieting down and cutting back the calories, we need to crank up their protein to prevent that loss of muscle. You just shared a few of the key things that you prioritize and recommend that people prioritize. Protein, for example, especially if somebody's in a calorie deficit. What are some other guiding principles that you bring to the space of food? So many people are confused. They see all the different debates that are out there and they're all wondering,

what's the best way that I can eat just to feel healthy and happy? Historically, what did humans used to eat? Because we didn't used to see the prevalence of obesity in these so-called non-communicable diseases like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, and beyond. And so it turns out that humans have been omnivores for a very, very long time. Radioisotope imaging studies of dental and animal from parts of Africa and Europe show that humans are omnivores. We eat whole foods, both vegetable in matter, a small amount of grains in season, as well as animal-based foods. And so I think that's what we should strive for eating healthy whole foods. And if we look at what has changed over the past since the 1800s. Our diets have dramatically changed and we see that

change commensurate with the rise in obesity and diabetes. And so what are we eating less of, what are we eating more of now? It seems that we are eating much more corn-derived sweeteners. So if there's one thing that you definitely want to avoid is corn sugar, like high-fruit-dose corn syrup, fructose, dextrose, maltodextrin. These things are in mostly sugar-sweetened beverages, also sports drinks and products like that. So you want to, yeah, definitely if you're having soda of any kind, you want to cut that out. We're also eating a lot more, Drew, as you know, vegetable oils. And so this is a very controversial topic right now because there's a lot of data to show that if you do swap out saturated fat or vegetable oils, your LDL cholesterol will go down.

And there's this whole diet heart hypothesis that's been promoted since the late 1950s, that LDL cholesterol is the driving factor behind heart disease. And so we should lower cholesterol. So all these meta-analysis suggests that we should reduce butter and red meat intake because they do raise L.A.l cholesterol and they posit that LDAO cholesterol causes heart disease. But it turns out that's actually not the case. And if we look at the rise in vegetable oil consumption, it has far surpassed in the last 200 years, butter, large, tallow, and red meat consumption and saturated fat from red meat. So we are eating much more vegetable oils, corn-derived sweeteners,

as well as, you know, manufacture grain-type products and sugar-sweetened beverages and baked goods. So I think those are the things that we should probably be avoiding. And in terms of protein sources, actually data really shows that especially young people, we're not eating as much red meat as we have in the past. Yet we see, I mean, you hear the statistics all the time,

early onset cancer in people under 50, depression, anxiety, mental health issues in millennials and Gen Z individuals that are at rates that were never really seen in older generations. to strashtra levels are at you know testosterone levels in individuals in their 30s are now as low as they were in individuals in their 50s just a generation ago so we're seeing all these different changes we're not eating red meat we're eating like i think poultry consumption is up 150 some odd percent so most people are swapping out red meat for chicken we're having much more vegetable oils in our

diet from canola cottonseed um sunflower oil soy oil those are the top sources and most of these oils by the way are in processed foods and or salad dressings or we're frying with them. And I think the problem with these oils is they get stuck in our fat cells. There are various studies now show that linoleic acid gets concentrated. That's the predominant 18 carbon long fatty acid found in most of these vegetable or cedo oils. And particularly corn and soy oil as well as canola oil, and this stuff gets concentrated in your fat tissue and it may contribute to oxidation and this vicious cycle of free radical pathology,

as well as the oxidation of LDL cholesterol that we can get into later. So when you look at just how diets have shifted and what to eat and what don't to eat, my belief is that we should be eating more red meat or meat from ruminant animals, more full fat dairy, probably a little bit more butter than we are, and not be consuming as much margarine or vegetable oils and corn-derived sweeteners, and probably not consume as much chicken because chicken's not the best. protein source if we look at the indispensable digestibility amino acid score. This is a way to look at how many essential amino acids are in different food sources and so forth. And red meat and milk

is up there at the top. And then actually below that is whole soy. And then there's eggs and then chicken is a little bit lower and then almonds are like at the bottom. So I think we should be looking at protein in terms of the amino acid constituents and also the non-amino acid conditionally essential micronutrients like torrentine like carotene like creatine carnesine i mean there's all these carotin nutrients zinc and different bioactive peptides that are found in an omnivorous diet that has animal-based foods that are particularly healthy and they're very satiating i think you know if we think about chicken it's not yeah it has protein but it's not particularly satiating and then the growing environment that chickens are subjected to to get to your plate not exactly the most humane so yeah that's what i think

people should be consuming just a whole food omniburist style diet that's that's devoid of these industrial created oils and a little bit more animal fat you know you talked about ldl you talked about cholesterol and that conversation naturally leads into things like apo b and one thing that i noticed myself is that the more saturated fat intake that i had in my diet primarily from any sources of saturated fat, but especially if I'm having more red meat in my diet and there's different cuts of red meat, the ones that are more saturated fat based, let's say I'm having those, I noticed a significant uptick on my APOB. Now, from your angle, obviously this isn't medical advice or anything else like that, you know, I'm just thinking, do I really want elevated APOB levels

over the course of my rest of my life? I'm 40, you know, the goal is to live into by, you know, late 90s at least, am I rolling the dice and risking it by being in that category of high APOB? Or do you feel like there's more to the story? The short answer is I really don't know. And I don't think anyone really knows. And so there's this, there's several competing hypothesis that sort of conflict with each other in the literature. And I myself, I found the same thing. My APOB will increase when I have a more paleo or carnivore style diet. But you know what also increases true is my APOA1. And so this is the sort of counterpart. So every single LDL particle and also your VLDLDL particles will have one and only one APO lipoprotein B. And we can measure this in the blood,

as you mentioned. But also your protective HGL cholesterol will have varying amounts of APOA1 associated with it, one to four. So it's a different relationship. But you should see if you're eating in such a way and exercising in such a way, if your APOB increases, the APOA1 should also increase so long as you're not eating a processed food heavy diet. So I think that's important. So it's really the ratio of APOB to A1 that in my opinion is more important. But as you mentioned, I think there's individual aspects of this, genetics that we should look at, our heritage, other aspects of metabolic health that we should consider.

So APOB and APO Aeroa run one are one proxy. We should also be looking at our triglystriac rides. And our triglysts rise should be decreasing if we're eating a healthy omniburist-style diet that is congruent with our heritage and our genetics. And if that's not increasing, then perhaps that APOLB is more problematic. So that's my perspective. Now, let's look at the literature. What the literature actually shows is there's one hypothesis known as the continuous exposure

hypothesis. And that sort of coincides with exactly what you said, Drew. And if your APO B is a little bit higher, why would I want to risk that if I want to live a double my lifespan or more? I want to live another 45, 50 years because that means that your vascular endothelial cells will be more, they'll be exposed to this atherogenic lipoprotein, the APOB particle for a longer period of time

and the continuous exposure hypothesis posits that the more that you expose your blood vessels to these so-called atherogenic lipoproteins that contain this APOB lipoprotein particle, then the greater the probability, right, the greater the odds are that they will become atherosclerotic where they will develop plaque. And that placking will progressively narrow the arteries and it will restrict blood flow and create a problem, maybe a heart attack, right? So that's one hypothesis. The other hypothesis posits that we

need some sort of initiation event to cause the apiliproprotein particles to become modified or oxidized to develop or initiate the plaque. Because it turns out, various studies show that about 80% of APOB containing lipoproteins go in and out of the vessel wall and do not cause black. Remember, your liver is making these lipoprotein particles. Your liver's not an autoimmune sort of directed attack. Your liver is making these lipoprotein particles because your blood is water-based and your blood needs nutrients like vitamin K, like coenzyme Q10, like vitamin D, like essential fatty acids. And these nutrients have to be transported on these buses that we know to be called lipoprotein particles

like VLDL remnant lipopr protein or LVL cholesterol. So they transfer on these buses and they deliver their payload by going inside the single layer of the vessel wall known as the endothelial tissue. They'll drop off this payload and leave and maybe carry some other nutrients to another part of the body, for example. I'm really oversimplifying here. But here's the problem,

and I think it goes back to our other conversation with regards to what are humans eating now. We're eating much more vegetable-derived oils. And various studies show that If your lipoproteins, these so-called APOB containing lipoproteins that you mentioned, Drew, if you're eating a lot of soybean, corn oil, canola oil, or sunflower oil, these lipoproteins are the probability of them becoming modified when they're dropping off their payload of vitamin K, vitamin D, of essential fat and nutrients, and so forth in your vessel wall,

they're more likely to become problematic in what's known as this oxidation. They become oxidized, and that initiates and triggers this vicious cycle that ultimately leads to placking. So in my opinion, I think that's a better question to be asking is what individuals are more susceptible to developing plaque? And so we should be looking at the quantities in historical diet logs of, you know, hey, how long, Sally, have you been eating processed food contained with large amounts of canola, cottonseed, you know, soybean oil and corn oil? Like if it's your whole life, then maybe we should just do more of a low-carb, sorry, high-protein style. diet, not so much heavy on the red meat, saturated fat, and so forth for a little while,

while we correct your fatty acid profiles in your body, and then maybe over time you can try a more carnivore-style diet. I think that's one way to consider that. But people that are low-carb and have high-LD cholesterol, they are the ones that are most sensitive, they should be avoiding processed oils in their diet the most because they are at increased likelihood of having that LDL become oxidized and modified because their LDL levels are higher. So I think that's the subset of the population that should really look at their omega-3 index and look at the proportion of omega-3s to omega-3 fats in their blood. This is a $49 test from Omega-Quant.

Really great, simple way to sort of ascertain your risk there. But I think that's the most important question because, Drew, if we look at the long-term data here, you mentioned you wanted to live to 90, it turns out, and this was one study, looking at the what's called the amorous cohort out of, I believe it was Sweden. The amorous cohort stands for the apolyproprotein mortality risk cohort. And they tracked these individuals from the age of 65 and they wanted to see what blood biomarkers would most strongly be associated with the odds of one living to become a centenarian to reach 100 years of age.

And guess what? LDL cholesterol was linearly associated with increased odds of becoming a centenarian. people who had low LDL cholesterol at 65 had lowered odds of becoming a centenarian. So that flies in the face of the message that we're hearing about now that lower is better in the so-called continuous exposure hypothesis. So again, I don't really know the answers. But this is one of the, in my opinion, the most recent good studies that we have to really help, especially our parents who are in their 60s already ascertained whether or not they should

proactively lower their cholesterol. And as I mentioned, there were tens of thousands of people in this study, to the best of my knowledge. And they also found, guess what? Lower blood glucose was linked with increased odds of reaching your 100th birthday. Lower liver enzymes. The liver enzymes, as I mentioned when we were talking about muscle tissue becoming insulin resistant, the more fat that gets infiltrated in our liver that increases the release of these enzymes. And so we want to have lower liver enzymes.

People that are on the spectrum of pre-diabetes often have liver enzymes in their 40s or 50s, you really want them. This is units per liter around 20, 25 in that ballpark. Lower liver enzymes increase odds of becoming a centenarian. Higher albumin, increased odds of becoming a centenarian. Yeah, lower glucose, triglycerides. There was another one, I want to say creatinine, higher wasn't associated with increased odds of becoming a centenarian. People can look up the study, but interesting things. So again, I think when it comes to cholesterol, to put a bow on this, really long part about cholesterol. We have more questions and answers. true at this point. And I think what's even more interesting, I have a paper right here on my desk,

I'm really diving into this for a new book, is that you can't, I'm sorry, investigators can't get LDL to become modified or oxidized in vitro, in tissue culture. So you would seem that it would be very simple, straightforward. You take this LDL particle from someone's blood, you put it in a petri dish, and you can add reagents or some free radicals or something, but it doesn't become oxidized. this only happens in vivo in our body. And so I think that means that the milieu is really important. One's whole milieu. And that is the oils, the fats, the proportion of processed foods,

unprocessed foods. I think people that have high LDL cholesterol and high amounts of processed foods, really a bad idea, in my opinion, based upon the increasing susceptibility to LDL oxidizing and cause in this plaque. That's a great breakdown of the landscape. And it really highlights the fact that this is

complicated and we're all learning along the way but there are themes that are there and I think it's worth revisiting just like you talked about exercise in the beginning being straightforward what's good enough what's associated with the long healthy life I want to make sure that I pluck out the right themes because it can sound more complicated than it is but really you're just advocating for some basic things number one first and foremost you feel that generally people are going to do fine on an omnivore diet that's primarily based on whole foods and that truly ultra-processed foods and heavily processed foods, if we greatly diminish them, doesn't mean that we can't eat them forever, it just means that they're not a huge percentage of our diet,

we're generally going to be doing good. You are a fan of people eating from all different food macros, fats, carbs, protein, and that the diet can match the level of activity. And when you have a higher activity level, you can get away with having a little bit more flexibility. in your diet for our listeners, you know, there was a whole trend where everybody was winding down and kind of minimizing the amount of, you know, carbohydrates in their diet. And a lot of people are still doing that. And then a lot of people went on, you know, glucose monitors and started exercising more regularly and getting their fasting insulin. And many people, including myself, and I've talked about this on the podcast, I got away with eating more carbs. And my fasting insulin

lowered simply because I was prioritizing lean muscle mass and protein inside of the diet. Anything else you'd add to that? You know, these simple rules that are there. You know, there's the nuances of APOB and cholesterol and this, but the rules that you're talking about are pretty simple. Any additional ones you want to add? Another emerging trend here is the presence of microplastic in various bodily tissues. And I'm sure you've seen these different statistics.

And one study just came out finding that individuals when they went to the hospital with chest pain and symptoms of a heart attack, their blood levels of. microplastics were significantly higher compared to people who were just in the control group who didn't have chest pain. So that's another big aspect of just eating whole real food is you're not exposing yourself. I mean, forget all the diet wars of low carb, high carb, low fat, all this stuff. I mean, the processed foods are really the problem that I think we can all agree upon. And so if you can minimize your exposure to things wrapped in plastic and that includes plastic coffee cups, plastic water, various things like that,

cooking in plastic, storing food in plastic, all that. We should all be really proactive about this. I mean, numerous studies have shown it's in the placenta. Two studies this year I've shown. One was in the crowded artery plaque, and we reviewed that in March of this year. Then this other one in the heart tissue, there was another recent one found in the penile tissue, in the testicles. I mean, this stuff is getting everywhere, and it's linked with all these different diseases.

So including cognitive decline. So I think that, you know, irrespective of where you land on the low carb, high carb, plant-based versus, you know, omnivorous diet, try to minimize your exposure of all kinds to plastic. And I think a big part of that is disposable, you know, plastic water bottles and hot coffee cups, disposable coffee cups. That's great. You know, you were talking about these triggering events that are the initiator event that would cause these particles, these athergenic particles to stick in the first place. And we've had on my cardiologist on the podcast before, Dr. Michael Twyman. And one of the things that he's talking about when it comes to

things like microplastics and also poor indoor air pollution. Most people will realize it, but they're home if they're not using a filter or regularly keeping the windows open, their home air, even in a place like L.A. where I live, where the air is not known to be amazing. It's actually improved a lot more since, you know, 10 years ago. The indoor air quality can be up to 100 to 300 times worse than the outdoor air quality. And these little particulates, they call them PM2.5. You've done many videos on it. I've written some newsletters on it.

These can get in our bloodstream. They can cross the brain blood barrier. They can end up in our arteries. And they can be these initiating events. So microplastics, poor air quality, these things, they add up with our exposure. And the best that we can do is just make sure we cut them off at the source for the big ones. We're not going to be able to avoid it completely. but at least the big ones.

Anything that you've seen in your experience, besides avoiding processed food, that's number one, maybe getting a high-quality water filter for microplastics, anything else to significantly reduce your exposure to microplastics. You mentioned the coffee, stay away from hot beverages in, you know, a cup of coffee that's not a home thermos. Anything else? Yeah, I mean, just if you go out for coffee with friends,

I mean, we don't want to encourage people to be, you know, hermits or weirdos and not ever be social. Just ask for the for-heum mug. if you go and get coffee. Like you and I, Drew, have had food before together at a restaurant. Just, you know, instead of getting a disposable, you get your macha, just ask for in a for-here mug.

And most restaurants will do that. So I think the minimizing the exposure is great, but also improving the excretion of these things is equally as important. I'm a huge fan of going in the sauna. And so sauna therapy has been a big part of my sort of wellness routine since 2015. So sweating. And so if you don't have access to a sauna, hot yoga does the same thing. And so there was a study by step.

and genus called the blood urine sweat study. And he's enumerated or quantified how much stuff we excrete in our sweat, arsenic, lead, cadmium mercury, heavy metals, persistent organic pollutants, microplastics. I mean, all these things can be excreted in sweat. And so just going out, and we've been talking about exercise this whole time. When you exercise, you get hot, you sweat. And so there's various ways to sweat. Make sure you're trying to sweat at some level, pretty much every single day. In my opinion, sauna is one of the best ways to do that. It's all or relaxing. We talked about the prevalence of diabetes. There's been numerous studies that find that heat therapy going back to 1992 improves insulin sensitivity, improves cardiovascular

function. Sona therapy is an exercise memetic. It does to our heart what exercise does without having to move. So if you hate exercise on the bare minimum, you should be going in the sauna or a hot tub. And the plus, the upside there is not only are you affecting your cardiovascular system in a favorable way, you're excreting these things that are really problematic and are linked with all sorts of health issues. So sweating of all kinds is recommended. For anybody who's worried about the plaque buildup that they already have, are there any evidence-based things that you know that are out there, whether they are biohacking things like sauna, whether there's particular types of diets, supplements, you know, other aspects that I may not be aware of, advanced

sort of peptides, therapeutics, anything that you're aware of on the landscape that is helpful or has evidence around helping us get rid of the plaque that might already be there. So there was one study looking at berberin about last year. We reviewed that. It found that it was able to berber. And this is an herb that's been using Ayavetic medicine and traditional Chinese medicine for 3,000 years. I think it was a 12-week clinical trial that showed that berberine could help produce arterial plaque build up. I've heard, and I've been working with doctors in the healthcare space for a number of years, serapeptidase and natalchinase might be helpful.

So those are different tools, but honestly, Drew, I think just living a healthy life, you know, the body is constantly, we can have these old injuries and then recover from them and move on. You know, our body is malleable, changing constantly. I think there are several reports in the literature of people reversing or slowing down the accumulation of plaque with dietary change and lifestyle change. So I think just regular exercise being consistent with that is going to be the best thing that we can do.

And so I think in that, you know, not having the ebbs and flows in blood glucose, there was recently published study found that one of the biggest contributors to arterial constriction is postmill glucose fluctuations and hyperinsulinemia. So our coronary arteries are prone to becoming constricted, especially in the postmill window and presumably they get more plaque and calcification and so forth. So one of the biggest variables there was having low post-male glucose and insulin. So I think that's important. But yeah, I don't know that there's a magic tool.

I really don't. And I'm sure there's people out there that are doing things. Philovedia may be a good one to have on your show to talk more about that with. You know, as more of the population is focused on the topic of longevity. And you've been covering this field for such a long time on your YouTube channel. Now with over 700,000 plus subscribers, please everybody subscribe to Mike Mutzel. Thank you. A big part of what people are trying to do is they're trying to separate what deserves attention

versus what doesn't deserve attention. And what can we learn from the latest research that's out there? One of the things that we put on our docket today discuss is this Stanford aging study. Any takeaways for the audience from that study and the findings that would help them prioritize what's important versus deprioritize things that are not as important? Drew, this was a really interesting study and they looked at metabolomics and transcriptomics and epigenetic changes. There's hundreds of people in the study,

and they tracked them on average for, I think, a year and a half or something like that over the course of all sorts of different time points in people's lives. And what they found is there was two marked clusters around chronologic age, around 44 and again at 60, that kept showing up, you know, and the trends trended this way. And these different clusters particularly revolved around alcohol metabolism, carbohydrate metabolism,

around 44, as well as caffeine metabolism. So I think that one thing to really focus on, I know there's been a big trend, you know, on minimizing alcohol consumption. I quit alcohol back in February of 2023. And that was one of the, among the many best decisions. I think that's something that people should focus on.

It's really hard to be optimally healthy if you're drinking significant amounts of alcohol. It affects your sleep. It affects your liver. I mean, it makes you so much easier to gain belly fat. So in terms of like really prioritizing one thing, I think alcohol consumption is really deleterious for people. But what this study found is that people just,

there were significant changes in alcohol, glucose, and caffeine metabolism starting at 44. So I think, you know, the takeaway from that was for me. And then at 60, there was changes in muscle that we can get into. But that after your mid-40s, you know, carbohydrate intake should really be tailored to the amount of exercise that you're doing. And so I think it's really easy as we're younger to get away with, eating all sorts of stuff. I mean, when I was in college, I mean, I would eat just terrible foods

and not really suffer much in the way of consequences that I could readily, was apparent at the time. But now it's a lot harder. You know, you go out and you have a bunch of bread or overconsume chips at a party or whatever. And like you start to know it's in your face or whatever, gaining water retention and things like that. So I think for me, minimizing alcohol consumption in your 40s is really important because your body naturally changes and doesn't metabolize it as well, not having caffeine over noon. So there was significant changes in the metabolomics and transcriptomics of various enzymes that are responsible for metabolizing caffeine. And we know caffeine can affect sleep quality, sleep duration. So that's important as well as carbohydrate metabolism at 44.

Now, at 60, there was demonstable changes in genes involved in sarcopenia and muscular development and muscle wasting and things like that that increased. And so I've heard from a lot of people that the gap between 60 and 70 is quite profound in terms of apparently obvious signs of aging become more noticeable. And this article highlighted that perhaps resistant training and protein should be prioritized in 160s to help offset the natural shift in our protein expression and gene expression that might make us more susceptible to losing muscle tissue. So that was something that I think is really interesting.

and we've known this. The literature has shown that people over 65 should actually have more protein than say people on a percentage of their body weight, ideal body weight, compared to people in their 30s or 40s. And that sounds really counterintuitive because most people in our 60s are not lifting as heavy compared to when they were in their 40s. But we need a little bit more. The signal to noise ratio kind of gets a little bit muted in terms of stimulating muscle protein synthesis above 60. And so we need a little bit more protein to help offset the natural increase in muscle loss in our 60s. So that was my interpretation. And honestly, the other thing is the study didn't look at lifestyle. And I think that's really important. And they admit that in their limitations in the study

design, as they said, we didn't control for lifestyle variables and factors. But I think it's important to bring up a 40-year follow-up study called the Dunedin study out of New Zealand. I'm sure you've covered this on the show where individuals have been tracked since they were, since the 1970s. There was a thousand and people that were born in New Zealand, they were tracked and followed for a number of years. And what they found is there were some things that were linked with poor pace of biologic aging. And oftentimes when one's biologic age is at a mismatch with their chronologic age, there were significant associations between the people who had an accelerated pace of biologic aging. And the number one thing they found over and over again in this ongoing study that has received a lot of media attention,

the Dunedin study, is negative perception of aging. so our mindset. And you talk a lot about this, Drew, on Instagram and other places, you know, if we think we're aging poorly, if we think we look old, if we say things to ourselves like, oh, I can't do that anymore. I'm 40, right? I used to be able to, when I was a young man or a young woman, I used to do this, those, that sort of self-talk and self-dialogue is actually linked with

acceleration of our pace of biologic aging, meaning that our cells can age faster than our chronologic age might suggest. And so I think a lot of people think that, well, if you're 40, biologically you're 40. You can be chronologically 40 and biologically 34, right? I mean, this is possible. You can also be chronologically 40 and biologically 50. And so we want to slow down that pace of biologic aging. I have no financial affiliation with this, but there's companies now. One of them is true diagnostics. And they use this dunedin pace of methylation aging. It's called the Dunindin-Poham score. And so you can look at this. So mine was like 0.72. So that means for every

calendar year, my biology is aging 0.7 of 1. So it's aging about 25% or, sorry, 38, sorry, 28% slower than it normally would be if I was just, you know, eating a crappier, having, living a more unhealthy lifestyle. So I don't know. I think that's important for people to recognize that the food choices they make now impact how they will age in the future. Yeah, I have that test sitting on my dining table. I have to do it. And maybe I'll have on the founders to talk a little bit about it. I've heard some good feedback. I've heard some criticism that it can be easily influenced by certain supplementation. I'm not sure where things lie, but I think the way that you're looking at it is that, hey, this is helpful feedback, but if you're not doing all the basics,

you know, nothing really else matters. Exercise, dialing in your diet, et cetera. And it's not the end-all test, but it's interesting information to pay attention to. Is that what you're generally feeling? Yeah, in my opinion, I agree. And I think probably to make it even more accurate, you would have to do serial tests to see, or like every 90 days do it for about a year. And there's the whole aging Olympics. Have you seen that website? Brian Johnson said, you know, and so the only way that you can get on that, if you wanted to be on the website, is you have to do serial testing. So I think just a one-off biologic age test or epigenetic age test is not really great. I mean, it's good to know to see, okay, because I didn't change anything.

And this was actually after I got back from Europe and I was kind of, I ate a little bit more carbs and pastries in France and stuff like that than I normally would. I was just kind of curious. Like, am I trending in the right direction? I think that's all we can expect from blood work anyway. I mean, if you just go get your random cholesterol test or blood glucose, like you can't make life determining, you know, changes off one test anyhow. It's just like a good snapshot in time to see where things are at in your basic trends.

So that's what I gather from that. I mean, it is kind of expensive. It's 300 bucks. I think if someone is going to do a test, I would rather them do a comprehensive metabolic panel, look at their liver enzymes, their lipids like we talked about, Cibratin protein. But these epigenetic age tests, I think there is some sensitivity and reliability in terms of overall trends in terms of how our lifestyle is affecting our biology. You know, on this topic of aging, I'm curious, on a personal level,

are there things that you've doubled down on now in your, I believe, mid-40s that you're in right now? Early 40s? Actually, this weekend. Oh, happy early birthday. Thank you. I just turned 42 myself in August 1st. So you're in your early 40s. You look fantastic. You know, you're super fit. What have you doubled down on? And also, because you've been in this world of health, wellness, functional medicine for quite some long time, what are things that you've significantly deprioritized that maybe you were just kind of overly excited about before?

but the data either didn't support it or there was other things just that mattered so much more. So on a personal level, what have you doubled down on and anything you have de-prioritized? Yeah, true, great question. I love it. I've doubled down on exercise.

You know, I think there was times in my life in my early 30s where I would kind of, you know, I had my daughter and as she was younger, I wanted to be home more. And I would kind of say, well, I don't have time to go to gym and things like that. And I look at pictures back then. I just looked terrible, you know,

and felt terrible. too and didn't operate at the same level in terms of productivity and verbal acuity, all that. So I think exercise is one thing that I've definitely doubled down on. And most people that I meet, you know, my parents and their friends and so forth that are recreational athletes, whether they do cross-country skiing or they run or they hike, they just look and function so much better compared to their age-match controls who don't exercise. So I think that's something I've doubled down on. And the other thing is just being really mindful about screen time and phone usage and light exposure in the evening time.

The same, when I see people in their 50s and 60s who are great at sleep and they're like not watching a bunch of Netflix and things like that in their bedroom, I have found they generally just look so much better. Their skin, their complexion, all that. So I think there's a really big factor here. And, you know, on the flip side, when I see people now in their 20s or even teenagers or my daughter's friends who were given iPhones, she still has a flip phone, she's 12, when they have unfettered access to phones,

even at that age you can start to see. I mean, they're starting to develop like, you know, pockets around their eyes and dark circles and things like that. So I really think that these screens as effective and amazing as they can be. You have a supercomputer in your pocket. I mean, it's amazing. But you don't want that on your nightstand. You don't want to be consuming a lot of that screen time before bed.

So Ariana Huffington talked about this in her book about sleep, I think 2018 or whatever it was. So I just put my phone to bed at 9 o'clock. It's like it doesn't matter what I'm doing. It's like it's on airplane mode. It's in a drawer. It's done. I don't use that for an alarm, not in bed, looking at stuff.

And I found that to be really effective because as I mentioned, when my health was really not the best in my early 30s, I would always, if I had to wake up to go to the bathroom, I'm looking at my phone. I'm checking an email. I'm looking at reports, doing whatever. And then it's really hard to fall back asleep if you do get woken up that way. So I think prioritizing sleep and exercise is some of the things that I found to be really effective.

and I used to be, one thing that I've changed my mind on is I used to be a low-carb zealot, more on the keto space, and I think it can be amazing for so many different things. But now, I mean, going to Europe and just seeing how many carbs people eat and like there's no obesity, right? I mean, it's incredible. I found that like having more carbs in the diet, I think there's a place for that. As long as we're eating food that's sort of close to, we're close to the process and like sourdough breads or sourdough pancakes, I've gotten into breadmaking myself and let it rise and ferment for 16 hours before making and things like that. And it's been really fun.

And it's a cool, like we had friends over for sourdough pizza on Friday night, really great social thing to do. So I think being less of a zealot about carbs and more I've changed my prioritizing sleep and exercise are the things that in my opinion really have moved the needle. Always comes back to the basics. And on that category of basics, we couldn't have you on without touching. on the topic of supplements. What is your approach to recommendation of the supplements that have the biggest efficacy, biggest evidence that there are no-brainer to be including into our routine for certain type of goals that people might have?

Yeah, Drew, great question. You know, there's so many supplements out there. I'm a huge fan of just, like you said, cover the basics, vitamin D and vitamin K. I think most people are not getting that from their diet. Unless you're eating like cod liver, you're not getting vitamin D or vitamin A or vitamin K. So I think the fatty nutrients are really important. Even if people are getting sun exposure, most people are still wearing sunscreen or covering up for fear of skin and cancer and stuff, which I totally understand. So covering the basics, vitamin D, vitamin D, vitamin K.

And they all work synergistically, actually. There was a study in stroke patients finding that when they added vitamin A to vitamin D, it only increased the vitamin D level compared to the people just taking vitamin D. It also increased the vitamin A level and reduced cytokine. So it seems that these things work together. So that's really important. Another nutrient that I'm a huge fan of, and it's not for everyone, but it's berbering. I mentioned it before.

And again, my bias here, some of the things that I'm talking about, I personally sell, but that's not why I'm talking about them. I'm just really impressed at the long-term safety record of some of these different nutrients, like berberin. It's been used for 3,000 years. I've been a huge fan of it since 2009. And there's just tons of research. I mean, Western scientists are publishing hundreds of articles every year.

There's now 22 human clinical studies on berberine. So in my opinion, that's a lot better for blood sugar than things like gymnema. There's like vanadium. People use or chromium. I mean, these are minerals that in the late 90s and early 2000s, a lot of supplement companies put out there, they just don't move the needle in terms of affecting metabolic health. And I think that's important because, as I mentioned, like most people, it doesn't matter what their priority is, whether it's sleep issues, hormone issues, memory. I mean, metabolic health is inseparable from all of these chronic conditions.

And we need to address that. So berberine is just really effective. And it's on par. And I know the FDA doesn't like you people talking about this, but it's on par with metformin in terms of what it does for improving metabolic health. So that's important. Outside of that, you know, I think it really depends on where people are. are at. You know, if sleep is a priority, I think L-thene, magnesium can be really helpful. El-glycine. These are amino acids. And what I like about, you know, some of these, if we think about magnesium,

it affects 350 enzymes in the body. That's a co-factor for all these different things. And magnesium also helps with having a healthy bowel movement in the morning. It helps draw water into the colon so you can defecate. We mentioned sauna and sweating as a way to detox or help to eliminate these toxins. Having a good bowel movement, a good BM is a great way to get rid of the crap that's in your food, right? So that's important. Myelanacetal has been shown to help sleep al-thenein, so that's really important. Another thing with the cold and flu going around again this summer is anacetylcystine. This is a precursor amino acid to help with glutathal production. This has been long used for Tylenol or acetaminophen toxicity in the liver. It can be really

problematic. So NAC, it's really affordable. You can get a bottle of this for like 29 bucks. So a Folks are exposed, like right now there is forest fires in parts of California here in Washington and Idaho. If you're around a lot of smoke during fire season, NAC is great. It helps increase glutathlone in the lung tissue and in the liver. So that's something can be utilized conditionally, you know, based upon symptoms or exposure. If you work in a hair salon or you work in an aluminum smelter plant and you're exposed with these things, you definitely want higher glutathione levels.

And actually Baylor University published a study where they had people randomized to a placebo or taking high-dose NAC along with glycine. So the glutathione tripeptide has glutamine, glycine, and cysteine. And so when you take glycine and cysteine or NAC together, yeah, it's been shown to increase glutathione. So that's, I think, important. And this Baylor study looked at proxies of aging. We've been talking about aging hitherto.

They looked at epigenetic age. They looked at weight, VO2 max. All of these markers on higher dose NAC glycline improved compared to placebo over 12 weeks. I think that's important. Creatine's been getting a lot of airtime recently. I think that's something that I've been a huge fan of for a while. Creatine helps support cellular hydration.

It's really involved on a fundamental level in facilitating energy production when you're moving your muscles extensively. Like we've been talking about exercise this whole time, if you go and do CrossFit with creatine versus without, you will have more, you know, higher strength performance proxies and better endurance if you take creatine. various studies show that women even kids benefit from creatine elderly people it's involved in energy production and so it also helps with neuronal energy production in the brain so if you have memory

issues cognition there was actually an interesting study drew i'm sure you saw it in sleep deprivation they one investigators randomized people to either have poor sleep without creatine or poor sleep and they woke them up every three hours or something and then they dose these subjects with 20 grams of creatine and they found then they had they had the control group was getting woken up all the time and no creatine versus the intervention group who was getting woken up all the time and had creatine. They had them both do standardized memory and cognition scores. And the people that took creatine had better verbal recall, cognitive performance, better verbal acuity, executive function. All these aspects of memory and cognition were improved,

even though their sleep was all screwed up if they took creatine compared to what they didn't. So, I don't know. Cretine's found in red meat. And so, people are not eating enough red meat and they're eating a lot of poultry, chicken, eggs, things like that. They're just not getting enough creatine or especially if they've been vegan. And in my opinion, that's one of these conditionally essential nutrients that should be in an omniviristyle diet. So creatine, I think is important. Outside of that, I mentioned magnesium, you know, there's a lot of boutique, what I call kind of boutique or designer supplements, NMN, NR, erythrin A, there's all sorts of mushroom blends. I don't know. The data on that, on those to me is

not as compelling compared to these very affordable. And plus, some of these supplements are like $100 a month. I mean, they're crazy expensive. Everything I've mentioned is less than $30 a month for most people. So I like to, again, like we've been talking about this whole time, focus on the basics when it comes to supplements, just focus on the basics and cover the basics and do that well. It need a good diet. And I think you should be fine. I want to end on this topic, again, this theme of the basics, but I want to touch on brain health. We've talked about so many different things and maybe there's even some things that we haven't talked about. But if you had to rank in order, especially as people start to age, and they're getting into their 50s, 60s, 70s, and beyond,

the number one topic that so many people are focused on, even more than cancer and sometimes even more than heart disease, is making sure that their brain stays healthy and functioning. In your highest ranking order of the things that you do in your lifestyle, even if you're stuff that we've covered before. What are the things that you're doing now in midlife to make sure you protect your brain later in life? You know, it comes back to the basics, but also other things we haven't talked about. I think exercise is really important and especially incorporating tactile movements where you're moving around. So doing novel exercises. You know, if you've never done yoga to yoga before, incorporate some balance, the high intensity exercise, you know, whether it's

intervals on a concept two ski machine or row wear all these things really affect cognition it i think a lot of people don't recognize that when you start to learn a new exercise you're not building muscle first you're improving the brain to muscle connection and but that is improving neuroplasticity at a at a very high level so i think that's important but also for me it's reading a lot you know um and i do that's part of like my job making videos and working with customers and clients and things like that staying a breast, staying cognitively sharp, having purpose, I think is really important. Social connections, I mean, you can do all the neuroplasticity training, but if you don't have a good peer group, a good friend group, good relationships, I think that's going to be really detrimental.

I mean, research shows that's really detrimental to the health of your brain. So I think that's something that I'm really intentional about. And we talked about earlier, SANA. The research on sauna therapy coming from Yari Larkham in Finland is just beyond impressive. And it seems that sauna is by way of just improving blood flow and microcirculation. As we mentioned, when we're sitting a lot, our blood's not moving around. And so when you're in the sauna, you're moving your blood, you're getting hot. I think that's really beneficial for cognition. And so those are some of the things that I do.

And lastly, we touched on it, but reducing alcohol consumption. When I was drinking a lot more wine than I do now, I remember just some days would be really off. You know, you'd struggle to capture some words. or you forget someone's name or whatever. I found that cognitively speaking, not consuming alcohol, it just clears a layer of cobwebs that I knew were there, but I didn't know why they were there. I didn't want to admit at the time that it was probably the red wine

because of the polyphenols or whatever else. So I think for a lot of people, and I've worked, you know, some of my employees, they drink several glasses, sometimes a bottle of wine at night, and they just make these weird mistakes. But, you know, doing things that like, well, why don't you think about that, right? And so they, I think most people who are drinking know that it's causing issues with their cognition, but they're not ready to yet accept that or deal with that. And so alcohol is a huge, and various studies show this, alcohol really affects the brain. So I think

that's what I'm doing now, is just not drinking, reading more, going in the sauna, exercising, and prioritizing relationships. And I think, we'll see, I don't know, in 40 years, we'll have to touch base and see what it's doing for my brain health. But yeah, that's what I do. Yeah, well, we'll definitely have you on multiple times before we get to that end state. Mike, this has been fantastic. You've really helped our audience and me separate out what deserves priority and attention versus what maybe is nice but doesn't require as much priority and attention. And when we double down on the basics, we all make more progress in our health,

which gives us the love and attention to focus on everything else that we care about in our life, starting a new business, giving love to our grandkids. and having enough energy to run around and play with them, whatever it is, your church, your nonprofit. That's the true reason that we have health. But getting there is a little bit confusing in this day and age, and you've just made it a lot simpler by presenting your information on today.

You have a fantastic YouTube channel that will be linking to below, and everybody can go subscribe for your regular videos that you put out there. Anywhere else you want to highlight or send our audience to. True. Very much appreciate and very grateful that you have me on. I also share things on Instagram, Metabolic underscore Mike, but yeah,

as you mentioned, YouTube is going to be the best place that we post three to five days a week. And yeah, we try and do a good job of being really, you know, science-based and focus on research and put the images of the studies and things like that there. So hopefully folks get value from that. Yeah, fantastic. Well, please subscribe. Mike. Thank you for all your work in this field over the years. And thank you for your friendship. It was a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thanks, Drew. Likewise. Really appreciate you. Hi, everyone. Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app.

And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. Share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole body health and optimization,

Click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-O-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.