Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | The Secret to Long Term Brain Health | Dr Tommy Wood #301

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

The brain is our most vital and complex organ, and there are simple things we can all do to keep it healthy and improve its performance. 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 167 of the podcast with Dr Tommy Wood. In this clip, Tommy explains why cognitive decline in later life is not inevitable and the steps we can take now to keep our brain healthy at any age.   Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/167 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.   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. 

Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel

packs to 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 167 of the podcast with the brilliant Dr. Tommy Woods. In this clip, Tommy explains why cognitive decline in later life is not inevitable and the simple steps we can all take right now to keep our brains healthy in later life. long-term brain health can be inexpensive and simple to achieve i wonder if you could expand on what you mean by that i think you know what you need to make a healthy brain in the first place and then what you need in order to keep it healthy those things are often very similar they

are essentially the the same thing and there's always going to be a huge amount of interest in terms of how do we maintain cognitive function late into life, because age-related dementia and age-related cognitive decline are now the leading cause of death. Let's use an athlete analogy, which is that if you stop training or you break your leg and it goes in a cast when you take that cast off you'll see the leg on that size is smaller you've lost muscle mass on that side so anytime you stop sort of giving an input a stimulus to the muscles they will reduce in size because it's energetically expensive if you don't need them your body isn't going to keep it around and everything all the evidence that exists today suggests that the brain is the same,

right? Use it or lose it. And when we think about using the brain, I like to compare back to what it takes to create and build a brain in the first place. So as an infant, you are doing things like learning to talk, learning social interaction, social cues, learning to control this fabulously complicated meat suit with incredible dexterity. And those things take a huge amount of neurological stimulus, input and effort. Then throughout life, you start to do things that you may think are hard, but compared to that, really not that hard, like biochemistry as an undergrad, or learning to drive a car, or the ins and outs of your job. They feel hard, but in terms of the stimulus and the effort required

from your nervous system, it's actually quite small compared to, say, learning how to control your whole body. As we get older, we just do the same things again and again. They get easier for us. They just become habits. They become patterns, which don't require, again, any significant cognitive input. And because of that, you're essentially telling your brain, hey, I don't need you to be as complex as you once were, because we're not doing anything difficult. And you see multiple different strands that kind of come into this. So to be a black cab driver in London, you had to learn the knowledge originally, which is all of the streets in a six mile radius of Charing Cross. And they once looked at brain scans of people taking the knowledge or learning it before and after. And those who passed,

and again, we don't know why they passed, whether it was because they were the ones who actually studied or they have some other skills that allowed them to be able to gain the knowledge. Those who passed, again, saw an increase in size in certain aspects of the brain on a brain scan. And those who didn't pass, the knowledge didn't become capital drivers, didn't. So you've created this incredibly difficult stimulus, which has then helped improve the brain. And you see something similar in terms of people who retire earlier tend to die earlier as well. And that's after you're adjusting for all the things that might cause you to retire earlier, such as medical conditions. So again, telling the body, telling the brain that it's required is incredibly powerful for brain health. And so all of this is basically telling me

that in order to keep your brain healthy you need to tell tell your brain that it's needed that requires you to do difficult things which is going to also require you to be bad at stuff as you learn new skills and then once you acquired a new skill you then have to move on to something else i mean still do the thing if you enjoy it. But then as soon as something becomes habit, becomes patterned, becomes easy, it's no longer the same stimulus. So this could be anything. It could be dancing. It could be some kind of movement or sport. It could be singing. Teaching others seems to be protective as well. Knitting. There are all these things that you can do, but you need some kind of ongoing stimulus to tell your brain that it's still needed, it's still worth keeping around.

We're normally told that it's like this inexorable decline over time. I think it's very positive and empowering to say, you know, wherever you are today, there is potential for improvement if you're, you know, sort of capable and able and interested in doing that and when i think about the things that a healthy body a healthy brain requires long term right so nutrition is important um but so is sleep or circadian rhythm right light when it's light dark when it's dark movement um some kind of stress mitigation, and then social connection. Just how important is connecting with others for our brain health? When you really boil it down, social connection is essentially the sort of foundational aspect of us as a species, right? We are a collectivist species. We benefit from being part of a social group, from having a place in that social group, from having a purpose within that group, which gives us meaning. And having

meaning is something that tells our body that it's worth being alive. Having meaning or not seems to have an effect on the immune system, has an effect on our physiology. And so without social connection, you're essentially not giving that input which is that you have purpose you have meaning you belong and that is one of the critical inputs for the the brain to to keep working and one of the downstream or threads that comes out of this demand-driven theory of cognitive decline is the grandmother hypothesis the grandmother hypothesis states that rather than when you've procreated you are essentially just a useless sack of meat which is what some people will tell you about the evolutionary forces

on our bodies right that you're just there to procreate once you've done that there are no more evolutionary forces that are creating fitness, right? And so like most people will say that your genes are just there to make you live to 20 or 30 years old, procreate, and then what happens after that doesn't really matter. However, the grandmother hypothesis would state that if you are useful and healthy longer into life, then you are available to help support your progeny, their progeny, and to keep your tribe alive. So you are actually increasing the likelihood that your genes will be passed further into the future by being alive to be able to help the new parents or be able to look after the grandchildren. So actually, there are evolutionary forces that exist to keep us healthy for as long as possible however you get to a point where you are no longer of use to the group and then that's probably going to be a trigger for

some kind of decline because as soon as you're no longer of benefit you know if we think about this from an evolutionary perspective we think about um you about hunter-gatherers, early humans, as soon as you're no longer of benefit, you are a detriment to your tribe, to your group. You're going to take up resources, people are going to have to care for you, which they can't really afford to do. So that could trigger this period of decline. You think about wolves or dogs leaving the pack when they're old so they can go and die peacefully in the wilderness. And humans used to do that in some groups as well. So we are only giving ourselves the input that says, you know, you're worth being here, you're worth having some kind of function because you're part of a group and

because you have purpose. And without social connection, it's almost impossible to have any kind of significant purpose because you don't know that you have purpose because you're not contributing to some kind of goal or group that's greater than yourself. So I think that we've kind of bounced back from the philosophical to the physiological but at some level for us to survive and be healthy and functional requires some kind of social input that says you have meaning you belong you have purpose and so that's going to be critical to physical health mental health cognitive function And that requires social connection. It requires other people to help you see and learn that.

Yeah, thanks for sharing that, Tommy. Super powerful. And the message keeps coming through to me that you've got to give your brain a reason to think that you need to be alive. You have value. And I think we can all think about that for ourselves and for the people around us hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip i hope you have a wonderful weekend and i'll be back next week with my long-form conversational wednesday

and the latest episode of bite Science next Friday.