Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #231 BITESIZE | The Benefits of Movement (and How to Get More) | Dr Daniel Lieberman

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

One of the key ways to keep ourselves healthy is to stay physically active.   Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart.  Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests.   Today’s clip is from episode 128 of the podcast with paleoanthropologist and Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, Dr Daniel Lieberman   In this clip he explains why movement is so important for our immune system and our health, and how we can work with our biology to incorporate more movement into our life. Thanks to our sponsor http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Order Dr Chatterjee's new book Happy Mind, Happy Life: UK version: https://amzn.to/304opgJ, US & Canada version: https://amzn.to/3DRxjgp Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3oAKmxi. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com.   Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/128 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. 

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10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 128 of the podcast with Dr. Daniel Lieberman. One of the key ways to keep ourselves healthy is to stay physically active. And in this clip, Daniel explains why movement is so important for our immune system and our health, and how we can work with our biology to incorporate more movement into our lives.

Exercise really does improve your health. Exercise really decreases your chances of getting sick. You know, the data are unquestionable. 150 minutes a week of physical activity, just, you know, a brisk walk can lower your relative risk of dying at a given age by 50%. That's not a number I just pulled out of a hat. That's a really, really, really solid number based on many, many, many studies. How does physical activity play a role in the immune system? The immune system is like every system of the body is affected by physical activity. And for the most part, just like everything else, it's improved by physical activity. There's plenty of data which shows that moderate levels of physical activity upregulate key components of the immune system. So for respiratory tract infections, for example, when you're physically active, you not only produce more immune cells, like there's natural killer cells, which I love the

name, right? They're naturally killing things in your body. They kill, for example, cells that come infected with viruses, right? Cytotoxic T cells, again, an important part of your immune system, upregulated by physical activity. And not only do you produce more of them, but there's compelling evidence that you redeploy them to vulnerable parts of your body. In addition, physical activity upregulates the humoral in your system, the antibody production. As people get older, their antibody production

declines, but people who are more physically active have much healthier responses to vaccines and produce more antibodies. One of the key ways to keep ourselves healthy is to stay physically active. Staying physically active is just absolutely crucial right now. I love the bit about grandparents in the book. Thank you. That's my favorite section. It was such a wonderful bit to read about. And I wonder if you could just sort of expand on it and why it's so important for us to remember. Because many people, I think, as they get older, think that they should actually become less active. And you're sort of saying that may not be the case yeah this is

something we're working on further right now you know we have this idea that as you get older you know it's time to kick up your heels and you know move to Florida or whatever it is right and just kind of be less active and take it easy and enjoy your retirement but you know humans are unusual species we're one of the few species that evolved to live after we reproduce. We evolved to be grandparents, but we didn't evolve just to be grandparents to enjoy our grandchildren. We evolved to be grandparents to help our grandchildren. So if you look in the hunter-gatherer societies and in farming societies, grandparents are out there foraging and hunting and gathering and digging and doing all kinds of stuff and helping out their children and their grandchildren, providing food surplus, you know, being active. We have data showing that people

tend to be often are more active when their grandparents than when their parents because they don't have kids in tow, right? And what's important about that, it's kind of like a chicken and egg question, you know, which came first, living long in order to be active or being active in order to live long. And, you know, they're both there, right? And it turns out that physical activity is really important in slowing processes of aging and decreasing disease. Because when you're physically active, you turn on all kinds of repair

and maintenance mechanisms, right? So when you're active, you stress your body, you produce reactive oxygen species, you turn up your sympathetic nervous system, your fight and flight nervous system. But then you spend energy after you're exercising to deal with all that, right? We produce antioxidants. We produce molecules to fix all the proteins that we damaged because they got affected by heat. We lower our blood temperature. We turn on our parasympathetic rest and digest system to lower sympathetic activity. We turn on our parasympathetic, you know, rest and digest system to lower sympathetic activity.

We turn on all these mechanisms that keep our bodies repaired and maintained. And the trick is that because we never evolved not to be physically active, we never evolved to turn on these mechanisms in the absence of physical activity. We need that stress to mount the anti-stress response. This is why physical activity is so good for us. It turns on all kinds of good processes in our body that keep us from aging and keep us from getting sick. And so as we get older, that becomes even more important, right? You want to keep your muscles healthy. You want to keep your chromosomes healthy. You want to keep your cells from deteriorating. You want to keep the mitochondrial numbers up in your muscles. The list goes on and on and on. And that's why physical activity is so important so as we get older it becomes even more important to stay physically active

because that and of course the data are there we know the epidemiological data we know the mechanistic data but we don't have this sort of cultural idea that as we age that's the time to keep up the activity not not turn it down. Yeah. It's really fascinating how we've evolved to be grandparents. I really like that as an idea. So why is it when the data and the science is really clear that, as you say, 150 minutes of physical activity each week may have multiple benefits on your well-being and your longevity, why do so many of us struggle to do that? may have multiple benefits on your well-being and your longevity. Why do so many of us struggle to do that? Because it's abnormal.

I mean, our instincts are constantly pulling us not to exercise. I mean, our instincts are deep and they're powerful. I mean, for millions of years, our ancestors struggled to get enough energy to eat, right? Every day they had to work. They didn't go crazy hard. You know, they didn't like work eight hours a day on their feet, struggling to get enough food. Average hunter-gatherers seem to work moderately hard for about two and a half hours a day, two and a quarter hours a day, and then light tasks for the rest of the day. They sit as much as we do, around nine to 10 hours a

day. But that gave them just enough food to survive. There are no obese hunter-gatherers, right? And if they were to go for, like what I did this morning, go for a long run just for the hell of it, they would then waste all that energy which they could use towards reproduction and the things that natural selection cares about. So nobody in the Stone Age ever went for a morning run for the fun of it. And it's a bad idea. And whenever you have a chance to save energy, you should, until recently. And now we live in this really strange, interesting, modern world, wonderful and all kinds of one in regards where we can spend our entire day without ever getting our heart rate up, you know, press buttons to get food and shopping carts. And, you know,

I don't even have to move my hand when I brush my teeth, if I didn't want to, you know, I get electric toothbrush, right? I mean, everything is mechanical toothbrush. Everything is mechanical. The result is that we no longer have to be physically active and we now have to do something really weird, which is to choose to be physically active. Although we know up here in our brains that it's good for us, all kinds of instincts just kick in to tell us not to. I think the best evidence for that are when you have a stairway next to an escalator, right? You must see them, you know, there are tube stops all over the place and then airports everywhere. We all know this phenomenon, right? And it doesn't matter where you are in the world. People have studied this in Japan and in Denmark and in America and in Israel and, you know, various places, wherever there is a stairway next to an escalator, less than 5% of

people take the stairway. And if you put a sign up up that just goes up just a wee bit right if you put us escalators in the Kalahari desert you know they would take the escalator there too it's an instant yeah and I think what you just said there about the Kalahari desert really I think it brings it to life for people because a lot of people feel bad. They feel guilt. They feel shame that they're not moving as much as either their doctor has told them, the news has asked them to do, or even people they're following on social media who post a photo, hey, just did my 10K run before breakfast. How are you all doing today?

just in my 10K run before breakfast, how are you all doing today? You know, that kind of meme, which I think if you find it inspiring and you're like, oh man, I didn't do anything. I want to do that. Great. But for many people, they watch that and day in, day out, they're feeding their brains without thinking, I'm some kind of failure. Like look at all these people who can move their body every day and are vibrant and full of energy. Yet just getting through the day is a real struggle. And I think that's one of the beautiful things in your book is that you help people not to feel bad about it. You're sort of arguing that we've not evolved to exercise. Absolutely.

And I think we need to understand that our bodies aren't, we don't just get to decide what we do with our bodies. Our bodies are evolved over millions and millions of generations. And we need to be compassionate and understand that and work with our biology to find better solutions. Are there any sort of universal principles when it comes to movement that actually do work for all of us? comes to movement that actually do work for all of us? In terms of getting us to move, two basic impetuses that have, you know, over millennia have been the basis for how and why people move. And one is because it's necessary. And the other is because it's fun. And for most people, fun involves social. So if you're somebody who's struggling to get enough exercise, or if you don't get enough and you'd like to exercise more, I think that there's lots of things you can do.

But I think the most important thing is to find somebody you want to exercise with. Get an exercise buddy and use each other to help each other. There's nothing like having somebody who you meet for a walk or a run or whatever. And don't feel like you have to go crazy. Some is better than none. And once you get better, you enjoy some, then you might to, you have to go crazy. You know, some is better than none. And once you get better, you enjoy some, then you might decide that you want to do a little bit more, but don't feel like there's an optimal kind of exercise or, you know, don't make it unfun, make it fun. If you make it fun and part of your life and find ways to make it necessary,

you know, that's the most important tip. And there are so many ways to do that. I, for example, leave my exercise clothes out in the morning when I go to bed so that when i wake up that's what i put on and that like helps it's like it removes one less barrier to starting my run because i never want to go for a run in the morning when i start never ever on no occasion whatsoever do i ever really and how many marathons have you done now i just did my 25th. Well, first of all, congratulations. But that I think is, is so valuable there at the end, what you said, Daniel, that you've had to find ways to remove barriers to that because you don't want to. Yeah. Yeah. You've just completed your 25th marathon. You don't want to get up and go for a run yet. you are a runner. And that's really, really key, isn't it?

There's never been a time when I left the door of my house thinking, I really want to run. I always like, I'm going to force myself to run. And then I always enjoy it when I come back. Another example is in my building, right? My office is on the fifth floor of this beautiful old Victorian building. And every day when I walk into the building, I want to take the elevator. Bar none. I always look at the elevator longingly. But the reason I don't take the elevator is that if anybody sees me taking the elevator, they'll call me a hypocrite. And so it's not because I'm doing it for my health. I'm doing it because I've socially coerced myself into taking the stairs. And I never regret having taken the stairs by the time I get to the fifth floor.

But I always regret taking the stairs as I head up the stairs looking longingly at the elevator. And don't beat yourself up for those instincts. Even though elevators never existed in the Stone Age, it is a completely normal natural instinct to want to avoid exertion and don't ever feel bad about it. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.