FoundMyFitness - #048 Sauna Use as an Exercise Mimetic for Heart and Healthspan

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

This podcast is the audio from a presentation Dr. Rhonda Patrick gave on how the sauna may be an exercise mimetic for heat health and healthspan. Sauna use has emerged as a means to increase lifespan and improve overall health, based on compelling data from observational, interventional, and mechanistic studies. Listen in to find out more. In this episode, you'll discover: (00:00) Introduction (03:01)  Clinical research shows that sauna improves cardiovascular health (09:19) Finnish sauna vs Waon infrared therapy (12:35) The mechanisms of sauna use mimic exercise (15:58) Heat shock proteins mediate the benefits of sauna use (23:42) Sauna use reduces inflammation (25:54) Sauna use is enjoyable and safe (28:55) Crowd questions and answers  If you're interested in learning more, you can read the full show notes here. Join over 300,000 people and get the latest distilled information straight to your inbox weekly: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/newsletter Become a FoundMyFitness premium member to get access to exclusive episodes, emails, live Q+A's with Rhonda and more: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/crowdsponsor

Hello, my fellow sauna lovers. As many of you know, I love the sauna, and I love to talk about the sauna. This episode features me doing one of the things I love to do, talking sauna science. In this case, I focus a lot on the heart effects of the sauna, but I also talk quite a bit more about other things as well. The reason for the focus on heart health is because the audio I'm about to share with you is from a recent talk I gave at the Healthy Heart Conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, about how sauna use may be an exercise memetic for heart health and health span. I feel passionate about this topic. That's why I really don't mince words to this room full of cardiologists that were listening to this presentation when I said to them that I think in the next 10 years, sauna bathing

may very well become part of the standard of care for the prevention and treatment of heart disease and a variety of heart conditions and for overall longevity. I feel that way in a large part due to the utterly crucial research coming out of a lab based in Copio Finland, led by Dr. Yari Laucanin. I have a previous podcast with Dr. Laucanin, which you can find on the episode list on my website or write on iTunes. It is not Yari's work alone, however, that convinces me of this fact. It is also the molecular research that has established aspects of the heat stress response as a regulator of aging in genetic studies in humans, but also studies in worms and flies, so-called lower organisms, where the real fundamentals of aging biology can be teased apart

and help us get a better sense of the big story surrounding what I believe to be the healthful and adaptive practice of sauna bathing. All of that said, it's still early, even now when it comes to clinical research on the subject, especially in the context of heart disease. It is important we exercise due caution. Please don't take my word for any of this. If you are suffering from a heart-related condition, please consult your physician to ask them if it's appropriate to use the sauna. It's always good to exercise good common sense. Big thanks to Arkansas Heart Hospital for having me out and recording the presentation. And away to the podcast.

Our next speaker is a very well-known, if not famous, individual who has been devoted her Ph.D. life mainly to that of working on the aging process, on areas and which disease prevention could occur and in looking for different and new modalities that may affect the aging process. And today, Dr. Rhonda Patrick is going to talk to us about a new modality that may have applications for a lot of us and for which, who knows, you may be wanting to write a prescription for at some point. So if without that, Rhonda, if you would come forward, we were looking forward to your talk.

Thank you so much, Dr. Bruce Murphy, for the invitation for that very flattering introduction. As Bruce mentioned, my name is Rhonda Patrick, and I have a PhD. So I'm not a medical doctor, so all your very technical questions about aortic or left ventricular function and all that stuff, I may not be able to answer. So you may notice that the title of my talk, actually, that's not the title. I skipped it. It doesn't actually match what's on your syllabus. And that's because when I was told that I was going to give a talk at the Healthy Heart Conference,

I got really, really excited because I saw this amazing opportunity to talk about something that I am very passionate about and convinced will be part of standard of care next 10 years for the prevention and treatment for a variety of different cardiovascular related conditions. And so I decided, instead of talking about 20 different things that may help you stave off the aging process and live healthier, I thought I would kind of do a deep dive into one thing that I think will save off the aging process and help you live longer, but also particularly has a very robust effect on cardiovascular. vascular health. So over the next 30 minutes or so, I'm going to try to convince everyone here today that you should be sitting in a hot box for about 20 minutes a day, at least a couple times a week.

And not only should you be sitting in a hot box, but people you care about and perhaps your patients as well. So that's kind of the agenda today. So over the past few decades, there's been emerging research, very compelling research, observational studies, prospective studies, interventional trials, as well as mechanistic studies, that suggest that sauna bathing improves overall health. And we're going to talk about, at least sample a few of all those types of studies today. So probably some of the largest prospective studies have come out of eastern Finland, and they're using a cohort of people that is part of a study called the Coupio ischemic heart disease risk factor study. And that study is a very long, ongoing perspective study

that started back in the 80s. It includes a few thousand individuals, men and women. And people are followed for, you know, 20 years or so and looked at a variety of different diseases are looked at. So a study was published a few years ago in the Journal of American Medicine, Drama, Internal Medicine, And what that study looked at was, in this specific case, it was men, about 2,300 men that had at least one risk factor for cardiovascular disease. And it looked at sauna bathing and its overall effect on longevity as well as a variety of different cardiovascular-related diseases. And what it found is that sudden cardiac death, so looking at sudden cardiac death, men that used the sauna two to three times a week had 22% lower sudden cardiac death compared to men. men that use the sauna one time or week. Men that used the sauna four to seven times a week

had a 63% lower sudden cardiac death compared to men that used the sauna one time or week. So there was a dose-dependent effect in terms of frequency. And also there was a dose-dependent effect on duration, time spent in the sauna. So spending at least 11 minutes in the sauna, there was about a 7% lower risk of sudden cardiac death, and spending at least greater than 19 minutes,

so 20 minutes in the sauna, there was about a 50% reduction in sudden cardiac death. So the duration was also very important. And of course, the data was adjusted for a variety of potential confounding factors, cholesterol, triglycerides, hypertension, socioeconomic status, physical activity, things like that. In addition to sudden cardiac death, coronary heart-related death, and also cardiovascular, so fatal cardiovascular mortality was also looked at. And again, dose-dependent effect.

So men that used the sauna two to three times a week had like a 23% lower coronary heart disease-related death. And if they used the sauna 47 times a week, jumped up to like 43% lower mortality risk compared to men that use the sauna one time a week. And we see a very similar trend for cardiovascular-related mortality. 27% lower for men that use the sauna two to three times a week and 50% lower for men that use the sauna 47 times a week.

So again, nice dose-dependent effect. Sona bathing also affects stroke risk. This also is using the Coupio. I'll refer to it as the Coupio study for short. The study was published in the journal of neurology, and it also found that the sauna positively affected stroke risk, and this was a variety of different types of stroke. So using the sauna two to three times a week,

there was about a 14% lower stroke risk. Using the sauna 47 times a week, there was about a 60% lower stroke risk in both men and women, compared to men and women that only use the sauna one time a week. Hypertension is also affected. So hypertension is probably one of those things that has really repeatedly and consistently been shown to be affected by sawning use. And again, there was a dose-dependent effect where using the sauna four to seven times a week

had the most robust effect. We're talking about a 50% reduction in risk of hypertension. And in fact, just a single exposure to a 30-minute finish sauna is able to lower blood pressure in about, there was about 100 people or so in this study that had at least one cardiovascular risk factor. And after doing the 30-minute sauna session, blood pressure was lowered and also arterial compliance was improved.

So the ability of the blood vessels to expand and contract in response to changing pressure. So that's also been shown. In fact, more than one study has shown this. So most of the studies that I've mentioned up until this point have been using what's called a Finnish sauna, which is basically a dry sauna but not dry. It uses hot water that's thrown on rocks and increases humidity.

So these sonnas are typically around 174 degrees Fahrenheit. You throw some hot water or water on rocks, which becomes hot, and it creates steam, and so you have up to about a 20% humidity in the sauna, which makes it feel even hotter. Most of the, as I mentioned earlier, the time spent, the duration spent in the sauna was greater than 19 minutes. So spending at least 20 minutes in that hot sauna was key for the robust effects that I just discussed. In terms of frequency, again, the more frequent, the more robust the effect.

So two to three times a week had a, you know, significant. significant effect on a variety of different cardiovascular-related diseases and conditions. And four to seven times a week was an even stronger effect. But Finnish sauna is not the only type of sauna that is shown to improve heart health. And it's also not the only type that's been shown to be used to manage heart disease. So another type of sauna called Wayon Therapy uses far infrared rays. And those saunas are typically not quite as hot, so they're around 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

Because they're not quite as hot, in most studies, what you'll see is that the duration is longer, so the duration is about 45 minutes as opposed to 20 minutes. And the frequency is higher. It's daily every day, and most studies do between two to three weeks of this treatment daily. The major difference between a dry sauna, a wet sauna, which is a finished sauna,

and far infrared ray saunas is that the dry saunas and the wet saunas, they heat the ambient air, and the heat is transferred from the ambient air to your body, whereas the far infrared rays use thermal radiation to heat the body directly, and that's the major difference. So I'm just briefly going to mention two studies that have been, that are randomized trials that have been published for the management of, One was for people with chronic heart failure, and the other one is for people that had,

I think it was coronary artery-related ischemia. And they were both treated with way-on therapy. And so using the far-infrared wraith sauna for about two to three weeks, patients that had chronic heart failure had improved endurance, they had improved heart size and improved disease status compared to the control group, which received standard of care treatment, and there was no improvement in disease status. For the ischemic heart disease study, Wayon Therapy was also used for three weeks,

and those patients, it was also a randomized controlled trial, and those patients had improved vascular endothelial function, whereas the patients that received standard of care did not. And there are actually many other published studies using this way-on therapy, what's called Way-on Therapy, again, far-infrared rays, that's used for the management of heart disease. So what you may be asking yourself, and if you're not, you should be asking yourself is why does sauna or why does heat stress have all these beneficial effects on the cardiovascular system?

And what should be kind of intuitive is that basically anyone that's under, you know, that has been physically active, you know that you elevate your core body temperature. You're getting hot. And so there's a lot of overlap between the physiological responses that occur when you sit in a sauna and when you're physically. active. So typically what happens is, first of all, your skin temperature increases, and your body then shifts blood flow. So blood flow goes from the organs to the skin, about 50 to 70% of blood gets redistributed to your skin, and that's to help facilitate sweating. And so you sweat, and your heart rate increases. Your heart rate increases up to 150 beats per minute, which is equivalent to moderate physical activity.

Stroke volume remains the same, but cardiac output increases between 60 and 70%. So a lot of these things, in fact, all of these things happen when you're physically active. And that's exactly what's been shown. A study published in the complementary therapies of medicine last June compared a 25-minute sauna session

to a 25-minute session on a stationary bike doing about 100 watts. And what the study showed is that in terms of the effects on heart rate and blood pressure, they were identical. So during the physical activity, during the sauna session, heart rate increased, blood pressure increased. Immediately after the sauna or the physical activity, heart rate was lower, in fact, lower than baseline, and blood pressure was lower than baseline levels.

So there was, the complete, same effect happened from 25 minutes of the sauna versus 25 minutes of moderate physical activity. The sauna also has very similar effects on the autonomic nervous system as physical activity has. So the sauna has been shown to improve heart rate variability. So a 30-minute finish sauna session,

just one 30-minute sauna session, it lowered heart rate after the sauna, it increased heart rate variability, it increased parasympathetic activity. So increased heart rate variability, it's basically indicative of a better capacity of the heart to respond favorably under stressful conditions. So it's a good thing to have an increased heart rate variability.

And other studies using way-on therapy have shown something similar. And I should mention that the people that were involved in this study had at least one cardiovascular risk factor. And same with the studies using way-on therapy. So it's been repeated using different types of heat. stress, but heat stress nonetheless. It's no surprise, it should be no surprise, that long-term sauna use has actually been shown to improve blood pressure, it's been shown to improve left ventricular function, it's been shown to improve vascular compliance and also endothelial

function. All these things have been shown to be improved by physical activity as well. So cardiovascular disease is the number one killer in the United States, and in fact in many other countries. But there's also other diseases that people are dying of, and there's particularly diseases that people become more susceptible to as they age, the so-called age-related diseases, like Alzheimer's disease, for example, even cancer for the most part. So back to the Coupio study that I first sort of talked about,

which was the one that looked at sudden cardiac death and other cardiovascular-related mortalities. Well, that study also looked at all-cause mortality. So people that were dying of cancer, they were dying of respiratory tract infections and other things. And that study also found that men that used the sauna two to three times a week had a 27% lower risk of all cause mortality and a 40% lower risk of all cause mortality if they use the sauna 47 times a week compared to men that use the sauna just once a week. And we know also Alzheimer's disease has been shown to be associated with a lower risk of of Alzheimer's disease associated with sauna use, which obviously,

vascular health is very important for your heart, and that's important for your brain as well. There's also potentially other mechanisms, which I'll talk about in a minute. But men that use the sauna two or three times a week had a 20% lower risk of Alzheimer's disease and something similar for dementia, and a 60% lower risk of Alzheimer's disease if they use the sauna 4 to 7 times a week compared to men that use this on once a week. Alzheimer's disease is an age-related disease, and I do want to circle back to that in a minute because it involves protein aggregation.

And one of the mechanisms, I think, that the sauna, you know, that heat stress in general increases may be involved in preventing aggregation of proteins. But I just also want to mention, since we're talking about longevity, that in lower organisms, actually, in sea elegans, which are a type of nematode worm, and in Drosophila, which are a fruit fly, Just a single brief heat exposure in these organisms increases their lifespan by up to 15%.

Just one sort of heat exposure, like a little sort of warm in fly sauna where they're putting a little chamber and the temperatures increased. And the mechanisms have all been worked out in terms of what's responsible for the lifespan extension, and it happens to be dependent on a family of proteins that are actually chaperone proteins called heat shock proteins. And heat shock proteins are evolutionarily conserved. found in worms, in flies, in mice, in monkeys, and in humans. So heat chock proteins, they respond to stressful conditions. And heat is one of the probably most robust ways to

increase their expression and their activity. Heat chock proteins do a lot of things, but one of the things that they're, what they're most important for is for maintaining the proper three-dimensional structure of proteins inside of your cells. And that's really important. important for the function of proteins, whether that is to make a red blood cell or a synapse or to have your white blood cells functioning properly. Function of proteins is very important. Well, the other thing that it does is that the three-dimensional structure is important for the life cycle, the protein, the half-life.

So new proteins are made, they perform their function, and then they get degraded and they're replaced by a new protein. Well, sometimes just the normal aging process, so byproducts of our normal metabolism, what we had for lunch, reactive oxygen species are created, and this can damage three-dimensional structure of proteins, and it happens all the time, normal immune function. And of course, this gets worse as we age, and so those problems get even worse. But the chaperone proteins basically, they help prevent. that from happening. When the three-dimensional structure gets messed up, proteins then aren't degraded

when they're supposed to. They sit around a lot longer than they are supposed to. And what ends up happening is they can then start to aggregate with other proteins and form protein aggregates. Sometimes they're soluble, sometimes they're insoluble. They can form plaques. For example, protein aggregates have been shown to play a causal role in many different neurodegenerative diseases. For example, amyloid beta protein in Alzheimer's disease or alpha nucleine protein in Parkinson's disease, Huntington protein protein protein protein aggregates have also been implicated in some cardiovascular related diseases, atherosclerosis, cardiomyopathy, as well as heart failure. So protein aggregation is definitely not a good thing and it does happen as as the aging process

occurs, it happens more and more. And heat shock proteins play a pivot. role in preventing that from happening, and also they've been shown to actually even help negate some of the process that if it's already occurred. In addition, heat chock proteins have been shown to slow muscular atrophy. So a very recent study published earlier this year showed that people that had one of their legs immobilized for a couple of weeks that were exposed to heat and had increased levels of heatchug proteins in their muscle biopsies, they were 30,000. 7% less likely to have muscle atrophy compared to the sham-controlled group.

So it has been shown to prevent muscle atrophy in tons and tons of animal studies. This has been worked out in mechanisms that's been shown to be dependent on heat chug proteins. Well, heat chug proteins have also been shown to play a role in longevity, human longevity. And again, heat chug proteins, they don't just increase in response to heat. Exercise increases them, fasting, polyphenols, things that are part of the good stress, the good types of stress on your body, but also even bad stress, inflammation, you know, chronic inflammation or, you know, acute inflammation can also increase heat shock proteins.

So speaking to the human longevity part, it's known that humans that have a single nucleotide polymorphism in the heat shock protein 70 gene that has functional significance. So this makes the chaperone protein better at maintaining the proteins, other proteins in the cells, three-dimensional structure. humans that have two copies of that, so their homozygous, have basically on average live two years longer than people that don't have that SNIP, and people that have one copy, so they're heterozygous for that SNIP, live about one year longer. So there's a gene dosage dependent effect with the Hitchuk protein 70 SNIP.

So if you're one of those unlucky individuals that does not have those one or two alleles of the SNIP I just mentioned, what do you do to increase your heat shock proteins? You get in the sauna. You can also be physically active. But it's been shown that healthy individuals that sit in a dry sauna that's around 163 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes, increase their heat shock proteins by 50%. And once those levels are increased, they stay elevated for about 48 hours. It's also been shown in separate studies that people that are already acclimated to heat,

as in they're frequently using the sauna, or they are physically... frequently physically active, which also raises your core body temperature, they can increase their heat chock proteins sooner upon heat stress exposure and more robustly. So people that are heat acclimated actually get a better heat shock protein response. So with that said, I will mention one more thing that, one more possible mechanism by which the sauna can improve overall longevity, and that is by lowering inflation. inflammation. Multiple studies have implicated that inflammation plays a major role in the aging process and also in age-related diseases like Alzheimer's disease, cancer, heart disease. So,

you know, having something that can lower your inflammatory biomarkers is something that is good for increasing health span. And the sauna has been consistently shown to lower, for example, see reactive of protein in a dose-dependent manner. So the more frequent the sauna bathing, the more longer the duration, the more robust in terms of lowering C-rected protein. It's also been shown to increase anti-inflammatory biomarkers like IL-10. So that's also a very good thing that, you know, something that's also very consistent with physical activity as well.

Physical activity has also been shown to do the same thing. That's pretty much all I'm going to talk about today. There's lots of other things. the sauna improves. It's also been shown to have a major effect on brain function and it increases endorphins, much like physical activity. So there's a mood enhancing effect. In fact, there was a friend of mine published a randomized controlled trial where he elevated people that had major depression, elevated their core body temperature about one or two degrees. And just one exposure to that had an antidepressant effect that lasted weeks compared to people that got the sham

control, which by the way, the people that got the sham control thought they were actually getting the treatment. So it was a nice placebo control. It's also been shown to, there's positive things on just sweating in general. There's certain heavy metals that are excreted better through sweat than through urine, for example, cadmium and arsenic. Sorry, not arsenic, mercury. Cadmium and mercury are better excreted through sweat than through urine. So there's lots of other things in terms of the sauna that I'm not going to talk about. But overall, it's very safe for healthy people as well as people with stable cardiac disease. And I would say that one of the biggest things that I've seen in terms of talking about the

sauna in the general population basically is that people are much more likely to be compliant in terms of if you have a person that has a lifetime of being sedentary and they have risk factors for cardiovascular disease or they may even have it. It's really hard to get them to go out and be physically active. It's very, very difficult. But when you tell them about the amazing, you know, things that the studies that have shown that the sauna has, you know, positive effects on a variety of different cardiovascular rated, you know, diseases and isn't good for prevention, people think the sauna is like a spa treatment. So they want to go sit in the sauna.

And little do they know that it's really sitting in the saunas, mimicking in many ways moderate aerobic activity. So that's one of the reasons I really think I was very excited to come here and speak to all you guys, physicians, physician assistant nurses, health practitioners in general, because I really think that this is something that's important to get in, you know, to have physicians, talking about to other physicians and to their patients.

Read the medical literature yourself, look it up, see for yourself the evidence. It's important that you rehydrate after the sauna. Typically a person loses about 0.5 kilograms of sweat. So you have to rehydrate. I use the sauna about four times a week, and I drink a ton of water before I get in there and also when I get out. There are some contraindications, so probably one of the biggest ones is alcohol. Never, ever, ever use alcohol before you're getting in the sauna.

During the sauna, there's been several case reports where it can cause death. So alcohol is a big, big no-no for sauna use. Also, elderly people that are prone to low blood pressure, because it does have a significant effect on lowering blood pressure, that's something that could potentially be a contraindication. Also, people with recent myocardial infarction, all this other stuff that I don't know too much about, like angina pectoris and severe aortic stenosis.

Those are also considered to be contraindications. Whoops. So with that said, I will say there's my red sweaty sauna face, one of many. And you guys, I hope you'll go out and hit the sauna at your gym after this talk, get your heat chug proteins on. And with that, I will answer any questions you have about this or anything else like time-restricted eating or the gut microbiome. I'm just kidding.

So thank you very much. So thank you for that information. I have thoroughly enjoyed your podcast, by the way, and I've already implemented sauna a lot in my patients and of myself. My question is, is there an additive effect to exercise, fasting, and sauna, and do you worry about the refeating as far as protein loss with what? weight left doing that kind of thing. So I guess everyone did hear the question

because he had a microphone. So it's an interesting question if there's an additive effect in terms of doing the sauna, being physically active, eating a healthy diet, potentially doing time-restricted eating and intermittent fasting. I will say, first of all, there is an additive

effect in terms of physical activity and sauna. Like that's been published. That's been shown, for example, people that are physically active that use the sauna, there's improvements in mitochondrial function in the muscle tissue and the improvements happen better in people that are physically active versus people that are sedentary. They still occur in people that are sedentary, but they occur better in physically active people. I don't know, I mean,

it's my belief. I think that, you know, I think all these things are affecting, there's cross-talk on the pathways that they're affecting. So fasting, you know, fasting and time-restricted eating, for example, you know, fasting itself activates heat shock proteins. But, but, you know, but, you know, But there's this whole component to eating all your food in a certain time window when your metabolism is most optimal. That has nothing to do with heat jog proteins. It has nothing to do with anything that the sauna would be affecting. That is also very relevant for healthy aging.

So I think that there's different molecular mechanisms that play for these different things like time-restricted eating and fasting and sauna and exercise. So I don't know that there's an additive effect. because there's been no data on that, actually specifically proving that. But I think that it's quite possible that there is. But, you know, again, I don't know for sure. So thank you very much. It's a wonderful, wonderful presentation.

Are there limits on how long you can be in the sauna? And is it an everyday thing for some people? Great question. So I would say that, you know, obviously heat stress, can be dangerous. And so you shouldn't stay in the sauna, like you don't want to give yourself a heat stroke, right? Most people in Finland, I've gone to Finland,

I've used the public saunas with people there doing them. Most of the time people are going in there for 20 minutes or so. They get out, they actually jump in the cold Baltic, and then they get back in the sauna again. So they're sort of breaking it up. And there's been published studies looking at, you know, cold shower in between or even just rest at room temperature and then going back in the sauna. So 20 minutes seems to be key if you're at about 174 degrees Fahrenheit in terms of

the studies that I mentioned with the effects on cardiovascular health. Personally, I stay in about 30 minutes and the sauna that I'm using is about 170, 175 degrees Fahrenheit. So, you know, you become acclimated to it. So like, you know, I was in there the other day and there were some elderly women and I was talking all about the heart health and, you know, of course they had no idea and they're so excited, but they're like, I can't even stay in here for seven minutes. And I said, well, look, you stay in five minutes the first time and the next time you come, you stay in seven. And that's what happens. You acclimate and it gets easier and easier and eventually you're in there for 20 minutes. So that would be, you had a question, sir? So the question is, if I was going to build a sauna in my home, would I build a finished sauna or the infrared? Hands down without even having to think about it, I would build a finished sauna for sure. Personally, I'm not, like, I've used infrared saunas before, and I have to stay in there, like, an hour to get my heart rate what it gets, you know, in about 30 minutes of a really hot sauna. In fact, finished sanas are even hot because they're hotter because the steam, makes it feel hotter. The humidity, right? As people that are in Little Rock in the summer know,

humidity feels, and it makes it feel a lot, you know, hotter. So, but infrared saunas are convenient, they're cheaper, and they're less of a fire hazard risk. So, I mean, I certainly see the, you know, the, why people like infrared sonnas. But it's my, my personal, I think that the dry saunas or in a finished sauna would be ideal. So is there any, first two questions. Number one, do you know why there's no blue zones in Finland? So I have no idea why there's no blue zones in Finland. I know that, I mean, they have a completely different diet.

Also, it's dark there, like a lot of the year. And I really, actually, I think the sauna is helps them adapt to that because of the effects on mood. because it's like, you know, I don't think I could handle living in a region where it's, it's like, I went and visited there and I think it was October, November, it was like fall. And, I mean, the sun was like, it was just like when the sun came out, it was like, oh, it's here, we got to go outside. And, you know, so no, I don't know. The other question I have is, is there, do you know of any supporting evidence out of the Japanese on sin? I don't. That's something that I probably should read up on. Because they're, I mean, they don't get quite that hot, but there's a lot of long time in a very hot water environment.

Right. And so I think this is a good opportunity to mention that there's other modalities for increasing your core body temperature, not just a finished sauna or a dry sauna or infrared sauna. There's steam showers, there's hot baths. And there's been studies comparing hot bath to a dry sauna. in terms of some of the endrican effects. The sauna has profound effects on the endrican system, and those effects are very similar in terms of a hot bath versus the sauna. So, I mean, for me, like, I'll take hot baths at home, but it's so easy for me to, like, stick my legs out or my arms out, you know, and so I'm not getting,

it's better if you can stay submerged under the water. Like, you want the benefit of that heat stress. When you start to, like, cool yourself, cool certain parts of your body off, it's not working quite as well. So I find for me, like, getting myself in the box where I can't, like, you know, escape anything works best. But I absolutely think that the bat pop-boughs have similar effects. Any other questions?

Oh, yes, Corey. So is there an age limit on the sonas, like, for children? One question, and then the other question is, do you have, like, a quick rundown of some of the other tools for the increasing your health span that you were possibly going to speak about earlier? So the question about age limit and the sauna, of course in Finland, the sauna is ubiquitous and many age groups are using it, children, adults. For the children, there seems to be a limit in terms of time, so it's like much shorter duration. I mean, like, you know, maybe like five minutes versus, you know, an adult that will sit in there for 20 minutes. I do have some scientific resources on my website, foundmyfitness.com. There's a topic page on the sauna, and it talks all about special populations, elderly children.

It talks about people with various heart-related conditions as well as pregnancy. Because there is, it's somebody to consider when you're talking about using something like the sauna is elderly people and children. So that was a great question. And so your second question is some of the other topics that, some of the other tools that I think can help improve health span. So typically, I would say that there's a few things that I think have the biggest bang for your buck kind of thing. And I think that one of those is time restricted eating. I think that time restricted eating refers to eating all your food within.

in a certain time window and not eating outside of that time window. And that time window typically is anywhere between six to, I would say, 11 hours. You want to eat all your food within that time window and fast for the remaining time. And the reason I say that is because, one, it's a lot easier for people to do that. Like, it's very, very difficult, as I'm sure everyone here knows, to get people to change their diet. It's very, very difficult, particularly when people have a bad diet and don't really want to change their diet, even though they need to change their diet, to improve their health. So when you tell them, okay, you know, you don't have to, like, eat what you're eating,

but eat all your food in, you know, try to eat all your food within nine hours. people go okay well yeah I think I can do that you know they don't have this adverse like effect where I have to cut out my you know my treats my candy whatever it is they're you know addicted to and so so people the compliance for that is I think much better than trying to get them to like cut out all the refined sugars and all this other stuff and I think that you're going to get benefits you're going to get the intermittent fasting benefits so you know There are lots of things throughout human history. There are periods of time we didn't have access to food.

And so, you know, we have all these amazing genetic pathways that are meant to be switched on, and they're not going to be switched on unless you stop eating for a certain period of time. And so you miss out. And these genetic pathways are pathways that are often stress response pathways. So there are pathways that are turned on,

turned on that help you deal with the stresses of aging better. So these are pathways that are clearing out, you know, things that are accumulating within the cell on a daily basis, dead cellular debris, they're cleaning out organelles inside of your cells that are dysfunctional like mitochondria, replacing them with new mitochondria. It's kind of like this rejuvenation period. So I think that's also a really important benefit you're getting

with time-restricted eating. Also, you're getting the benefit of eating your food when you're the most insulin sensitive. So there's been studies comparing, for example, men that ate the same identical meal in terms of their macronutrient composition, their caloric composition. They ate them for breakfast or for lunch or for dinner. And insulin sensitivity, blood glucose levels, all those things were measured. And they were the most insulin sensitive in the morning and the least insulin sensitive, of the evening, even though there's identical meals.

And that's because insulin sensitivity, blood glucose, all these things, all these genes that are regulating a variety of processes, they're on a circadian rhythm, meaning they're active during certain times in the day. And the thing that starts that clock is the intake of food. So the first calorie you take in is going to start that clock from ticking. And so at that early point is going to be when you can be the most insulin sensitive. And as the day goes on, that sort of the sensitivity goes down. So you're getting all those benefits, and I think that is one of the easiest and most robust things that I think is important for improving health span.

The other would be sort of an extension of that, and it happens to be a little bit, I would say a little bit more challenging and even a little bit scarier, and that is a little bit more of a prolonged fast. There's a lot of work by Dr. Walter Longo, who is a friend of mine, and as this gentleman over here mentioned, I do have a podcast. where I interview a variety of scientists, physicians, and we talk about a lot of topics that are related to aging. And so I've spoke with him multiple times, and he is a variety of clinical studies where he has looked at the effects of basically not eating food for a prolonged period of time,

which is around 48, at least 48 hours. And he's looked at the effects of that on, for example, autoimmune-related diseases. So people that had multiple sclerosis, they were doing, in that case, it wasn't actually a fast. They were doing a fasting-mimicking diet. So it was a diet that was sort of had a very specific caloric content and macronutrient

composition that activated a lot of the same molecular pathways that fasting does. And it improved a variety, it improved disease status in the multiple sclerosis patients. He's also been co-author on studies where he's shown that there may be a benefit. to fasting along with standard of care treatment when you're undergoing cancer treatment, like chemotherapy or radiation. So he's published a couple of pilot studies showing that a 48-hour water fast is safe. And not only is it safe, there seems to be a beneficial effect on sensitizing cancer cells to death and protecting normal cells from the toxicity of chemotherapy and or radiation.

And that largely has to do with the fact that fasting activates those stress response pathways I just mentioned that are meant to be switched on, that humans, because of our 24-hour access to food these days, never switch on. Well, normal cells switch them on. And so when you switch on those stress response pathways, they actually become more resilient to stress, like chemotherapy radiation. Those are very toxic types of stress. Normal cells become more resilient to them because they have increased activation of genes

that are involved in dealing with oxidative stress, in dealing with inflammatory stress, and dealing with the kind of stuff that's causing them to die from this chemotherapy radiation. Cancer cells are unable to do that. They're completely screwed up mutations, all sorts of mutations. When they experience stressful, when something is stressing them out,

they don't respond by increasing stress response pathways. They just die. So that's another area that I think is really interesting in terms of healthy people doing it to prolong their lifespan, it's an open question. Volter thinks that in people that are lean and don't have any cardiovascular risk factors or any other type 2 diabetes risk factors,

that they can maybe do this once or twice a year and they may help improve longevity. That's speculation at this point. It hasn't been shown in humans, but there have been animal studies showing that it does increase lifespan it increases health span. Volter's shown that doing a prolonged fast

can basically cause organs to shrink inside of animals during the fasting phase, and that is due to a variety of factors. One, cell size is shrinking, two, cells are dying. And what Volter is shown is that preferentially damaged old cells die. And this then can basically during the refeating phase, which I think now that was a question I missed.

When you're breaking your fast, the refeating phase causes stem cells to proliferate and to replace all those cells that were lost. And so the organs that shrunk regrow, and they're regrowing with healthy new young cells. So it's really this amazing rejuvenation process that seems to be hard encoded in our genes and activated just by not eating.

So a lot of work to still be done there. Huge implications for autoimmune disease. I mean, what Walter has shown in a lot of animal studies is that immune cells that are dysfunctional, those are preferentially killed off and replaced by healthy new non-automimmune cells, which is amazing. So I think there's a lot of promise for prolonged fasting and not only the treatment for maybe cancer

and autoimmune diseases and other diseases, but also even possibly to improve health span in healthy people. And so I really look forward to that research progressing. I think it's a really hot new area that I'm very excited about. And I think my red dot is totally like going berserk here. So I'm supposed to stop. I wanted to mention one other thing, and that is broccoli sprouts and sulfur fane. Just listen to a podcast I did with Dr. Jed Fahey,

if you want to know more about it, but I really think that's another important way to improve health span. So thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Again, I was really, really excited. So thank you so much. Once again, a huge thank you to Arkansas Heart Hospital for putting on the event and inviting me out. And thank all of you for listening.

I'll catch you next time.