Good Life Project - Marta Zaraska | Growing Young

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

Marta Zaraska is a Polish-Canadian science journalist who has written everywhere from the Washington Post, and Scientific American to New Scientist, the Atlantic, Discover, and more. Her articles and books have been turned into TV programs in the US, Spain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russia, Bulgaria, Germany and Poland, and reprinted around the globe from Oman and Dubai to Australia and Singapore. She’s visited over 80 countries around the world and lived in six of them, reported from Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nicaragua, India, Togo, Cameroon, and many other places and currently lives in a tiny French village with her husband and daughter. Marta’s new book, Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100 (https://amzn.to/2WkQdZs) is a research-driven case for why optimism, kindness, and strong social networks will keep us living longer than any fitness tracker or superfood. This is a conversation we need now more than ever.You can find Marta Zaraska at:Website : https://www.zaraska.com/Twitter : https://twitter.com/mzaraska-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My guest today, Marta Zaraska, is a Polish-Canadian science journalist who's written everywhere from the Washington Post, Scientific American, to New Scientist, The Atlantic, Discover, and so many others. Her articles and books have been turned into TV shows in the US, Spain, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Russia, Bulgaria, Germany, and Poland, and reprinted around the globe from Oman to Dubai, Australia, and Singapore. She personally has visited over 80 countries in the world, lived in six of them, reported from Rwanda, DR Congo, Nicaragua, India, Togo, Cameroon, and many other places, and currently lives in a tiny village with her husband and daughter in France. March's new book, Growing Young, How Friendship, Optimism,

and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100, is a research-driven case for why optimism, kindness, and strong social networks will keep us living longer than any fitness tractor or other sort of common popular fad or phenomenon. This is a conversation we need more now than ever. So excited to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. We'll be right back. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. I'm in New York City. You're in a small town in France.

Grew up originally in Poland. I guess outside Warsaw or somewhere else? No, also metal of Norway. Got it. And you also, so you would have been kind of growing up as a teen through the whole solidarity movement, like Walesa coming

in. Was that sort of a conscious part of your upbringing and your experience as a kid there? Oh, yeah. It was extremely important. I mean, my dad was very involved in the whole movement against the, you know, communist party. So we had communist government agents placed outside of our house on a permanent basis.

So it was quite an important part of our life. Yeah. Did you have a sense of, I mean, having those agents placed outside your house, was there a sense of fear around that at all? Or just sort of like you had to act in a certain way and behave in a certain way? my father was fearing he will not be coming back home and said he will be going to prison. So as a political prisoner and my parents were starting to park suitcases in the middle of the night, I just never knew about those things. So for me, it was a pretty awesome childhood, you know, but yeah, I was just not really aware of all these things going on. So yeah, I mean, I would imagine the conversations afterwards or like in hindsight, sitting down with your parents would be pretty eye opening.

Yeah. You end up, I guess, going out into the world and starting a career as a journalist, reporting, traveling a lot. But also in, you end up in law school. So you have degrees in law and photography i mean it's not so that the photography was just kind of a diploma but i'm a lawyer by education which surprises a lot of people because they think you know what has what does a lawyer have to do with science journalism but um but the thing is i really think that my degree in journalism prepared me to be a science journalist, because when you think about law, it's all about fact finding and making sure that the argument has no holes in it.

And also looking from different perspectives and trying to see the different side of things and really looking for proof and making sure it's solid. So this is something that really this kind of training really helped me in my science journalism, although I've been a journalist as well for over 20 years. So I've never worked as a journalist professionally. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I have, so I have a background in law also. I practiced for about four or five years. But similar to you, it was a very long time in my past at this point. But I agree, it gives you a way to look at things, to understand, to question them, to analyze them, to understand arguments on both sides. And I feel like especially as a journalist, it would be

valuable because part of the training of law is you're taught to look at both sides. If you're representing this or this, what would be the arguments where, and I feel like in journalism, really good journalism does that. Yeah, it should, right? Yeah. Well, I'm curious about the photography side also. I know you sort of downplayed that a little bit, but I'm curious what drew you to that and, and, as you're

out in the field, you know, like now a couple of decades into journalism, whether the photographer's lens, eye, in some way affects that. I mean, I did use my photography skill in my work as a journalist as well, because at the very beginning I used to be a foreign affairs journalist. So I was reporting from Africa and other developing countries, but mostly in Africa. So I was doing also photography to accompany my stories. It was always kind of more of a social, environmental, human rights side,

the kind of reporting I was doing. So I did do photography as well for work as a journalist before. Right now, when I'm doing purely science, then there is much less opportunity to use my photography, although it does happen from time to time as well. Yeah. What happens that tips you into science journalism? Because it seems like that is, you know,

from covering a wide range of things, traveling a ton, this, especially over the last four or five years, has become a really strong focus. I mean, I've been doing it for well and Africa stuff, stories, because I was also settling down, you know, in private life and starting a family. And that was not the best lifestyle, both time-wise and safety-wise, since I was going to places like Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, during the conflict. And so definitely being a science journalist that goes much better with um with family and uh and i'm married to a scientist as well that's definitely you know so we both spend our days reading uh academic journals and um and talking to other scientists so so that's kind of a natural path for me yeah it. It seems like, you know, you've written for so many different places. You wrote a piece for Siam Mind,

I think it was in 2015, that I thought was sort of like one of the interesting things early that I saw at least my exposure to your writing. It was about happiness and age, which also to me in a weird way, I wondered if it was the early, like earliest, earliest seeds of your most recent book.

But it was eye-opening because I think a lot of people think, well, as you get older, you decline and all sorts of things, and it must be the least happy part of your life. And in fact, as you shared, it's not. Yeah, it was quite an interesting piece for me as well, because exactly. And very optimistic as well because exactly it's and very optimistic as well right that's people often assume that when we age we just become this miserable unhappy creatures and everything just goes downhill at some point from i don't know starting at 50 or something like that but the truth is that it's the opposite that people actually tend to be the most miserable in their midlife and then things start improving and only in extreme

old age just the few last months maybe are not that happy but generally you know in their 60s and 70s even early 80s people tend to be happier than people in their 30s and 40s and this is for one one reason for that is just lifestyle um and just basically environmental reasons so that you have less responsibility you don't have kids living at home you have less pressure at work or no work anymore so it's generally just the the environment in which you live but also there are actual biological changes right to the brain and some and and the way we are wired makes us more likely to become happy later in life. Yeah, I love that. Like you said, it's hopeful.

I guess right around that time also you were working on, would it have been your first book, Meat Hooked? Yes. So I started working on Meat Hooked in 2014, I think, and it was published in 2016. So I have to ask the horrible pun, like what got your hooks into this particular thing as a topic? I mean, it's all related, right? Because Meat Hook was about nutrition, nutrition is about health as well. So it's all very much connected. And Meat Hook, it was on nutrition, but also on psychology, because it was history and science, our obsession, why do we love meat so much. So it was very much based in psychology and nutrition, which are the topics I've been writing about for over a decade now. So it was also kind of a natural thing. And also because I myself, I'm kind of a struggling vegetarian. So that's why I was interested in this particular topic as well.

Yeah, which evolves us to your current book, Growing Young. And I want to dive into a whole bunch of ideas around this because I'm fascinated by it. You know, I have lived in this world of, you know, talking to so many different people and doing a whole bunch of different reading, exploration around however you frame it as lifespan, life extension, growing old, all these different things. And what makes a difference? What doesn't make a difference? What are we actually talking about when we're talking about all of these things?

And you kind of take everything and roll it into one big giant exploration and come up with some surprising ideas. First, I have to tell you, a book about living well and living long that has a two-layer, what seems to be buttercream, pink cake on the cover of it, automatically I have to love. Because there's a sense of freedom in that. But, you know, I guess I think the first question I actually really want to ask you is, when we talk about aging, what are we actually talking about? So, of course, it depends who you are asking.

So some people, when they hear aging, they think about some kind of outside beauty. So your wrinkles, whether, you know, your hair is graying or falling out, or they're thinking about Botox and plastic surgery. and this is not absolutely not what i'm writing about so i'm never saying that we should try to keep our you know appearance or anything like that because this is not what it's about it's about also embracing aging and just enjoying it basically but the truth is that um that if we take care of our health then they both go together so and looks often follow as well but although this is not you know the most important part but sometimes it also happens so that you know we stay healthy we age well we live long it's all

connected you know sometimes people tell me that they actually don't want to live to 100 because they fear they will be very sick for a very long time and this is not an appealing perspective but the truth is that this usually doesn't happen that way so people who are in good health tend to live long in good health it's people who struggle health-wise. They stay sick for longer periods, and they also die younger. And actually, the most bizarre statistic, one of the bizarre statistics I've read, is that people who live to be 110 or more, 10% of them, so one in ten escapes disease until the very last three months of life so they are healthy for 109 years and nine months let's say and then only three last months they are kind of sickish and then they pass away which is amazing you know when you think about it that you can stay healthy

for let's say 109 years and it's the people who live the statistical 82, 81 years who are more likely actually to spend more time being infirm. Yeah, I remember reading you shared something like 18% of people who live an average lifespan or people who live an average lifespan spend something like 18% of that entire life ill. Whereas people who are the centenarians who live past 100, I think the average was only 5%. So like you were describing, it's health, health, health, health, health, and then just very quickly towards just the absolute end, which is kind of counterintuitive. And I guess part of the question also is, you know, like what, it speaks to the idea of healthspan versus lifespan also, you know, like instead of optimizing for years, optimizing for years spent in good health, which I think

has become a real big focus for so many of these days. But it also seems that those two are connected, right? So it's not like lifespan versus healthspan. It seems that if you go for healthspan, you are very likely to end up with lifespan as well. So it's kind of unlikely for you to get very long lifespan and be sick a lot of the time. I mean, it does happen, but it's not a common thing. Yeah. And when we think about longevity, I know that the first metric that most people point to is your chronological age. Like, how are you? When were you born? This is your age. And so in theory, you know, that is about how old you would be. And I think for a long time, we just kind of assumed that if that's your age,

well, the average person is going to have these particular things associated with that age. But these days, I think we're not just measuring age chronologically now, but also people are pointing to these internal things, to all sorts of other things to try and use them as metrics for, but how old are you actually really on a physiological level? Can you talk a little bit about some of the things that we're looking at? Yeah. So there are, of course, chronological age doesn't tell you a lot about a person's age and not only later in life, but even when you are talking about three-year-old children, actually, there are already differences. And the reason for that is that we have those telomeres.

You may have heard about them. And these are the protective caps at the ends of our chromosomes that take an important part in the way we age. And the most simplistic view is that when they get shorter, it also means that we kind of are older. But the truth is that they already start shortening when we are still in our mother's wombs. And actually, they shorten the fastest during the first four years of life. And then if you compare the lengths of different people's telomeres, in general, this is one of the ways of looking how their age compares biologically.

There is also something called the DNA methylation clock. That's another type of clock that scientists use based on epigenetics to measure how differently aged biologically people's bodies are. All those clocks are still very much imperfect. So when you very often, for example, on the internet, you can see some labs offering to measure your telomeres to tell you how old you are or your methylation clock. But the truth is that it doesn't work that way yet.

You know, we can use those tools for research, for comparing populations, for example, but definitely you cannot just simply get it measured and tell you, okay, your birth certificate says you're 30, but really you're 25 or 45. It just doesn't work that way. It's far too early in science for us to be able to measure it's uh on an individual level yeah i mean the the um i have seen all of these sort of like commercial ways to measure your telomeres i know it's been a hot topic of conversation in the biohacking community for a number of years now and it was interesting to hear the the research that you shared which says that that so much of

the variation actually is set up either at birth or shortly after and And, you know, so, and it's interesting because I have had friends that have measured their telomeres or, you know, like send it to whatever the service was and then eaten and changed their lifestyle and moved their body in particular way and a year later sent in, you know, like had themselves retested and had very different numbers and said,

well, you know, like I had a much healthier lifestyle and now it shows that I have reversed age 10 years. But I guess what you're saying is that that's not really the way it works, or at least the science isn't there yet. Absolutely not. Those services, just don't use them. Basically, that's the lesson here. Because the truth is that the measurements are also so imprecise that if you measure your telomeres and send them to the swap or whatever they are requesting from you and

send it to several different labs they will give you a completely different result even if you give two swaps to the same lab one after another you know from the same day they will most likely come up with a very different result so it's extremely imprecise and tells you basically nothing. So not on an individual level, it's just basically a waste of money. Interesting. As part of your research, were you curious, did you actually do any of that yourself? No, I didn't do that. I did a lot of other stuff on myself, but some of them quite unpleasant and involving

blood draws, but not that particular, no. Yeah. The other thing that you mentioned was DNA methylation. I know that's been a bigger part of the conversation, I think, in functional medicine, integrated medicine these days, which is really looking at sort of the epigenetic state of your genes,

like what's turned on, what's turned off, how does environment, how do genetics affect this? It feels like that has been a more robust field of investigation. I mean, once again, they measure very different things. Telomeres and DNA methylation clocks, they measure very different things and they are both research only right now. And the DNA methylation is also not for the individual measurement of how old you are at all actually one of the top scientists who researches dna methylation clocks he told me that one of his big fears is that it will become the same hype as surrounding telomeres because it's basically completely incorrect it's just waste of people's money

and it's just skews the perception whereas it's it's not what it's for it's not for you know me or you just to send to get to learn whether we are really 40 or 50 it just doesn't work that way mayday mayday we've been compromised the pilot's a hitman i knew you were gonna be fun on january 24th tell me how to fly this thing mark walberg you know what the difference between me and you you're gonna die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk Tell me how to fly this thing. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot.

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Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. One of the other things that I guess you tracked and has been on my radar for a while is mitochondria, mitochondrial function in your body. So I think we all learned when we were kids, you know, the mitochondria are the power plants of the cell. They're implicated in generating energy. And I guess as we old, they start to malfunction and become, there are a lot fewer of them. That, I guess, was one of the things that you took a look at as well. I mean, it's one of the ways to, one of the mechanisms behind aging, right? Because the thing is that we still don't really understand aging very well.

And definitely mitochondrial dysfunction is one of the mechanisms that is likely behind aging, just like telomere shortening is also among them. But there is, you know, very often in popular culture, people are looking for very simple answers. But the problem is with science, and especially science of aging, there are just no simple answers. It's very complicated. We still don't understand a lot of those processes.

You know, scientists don't even know if we have a limit to our lifespans or not. You know, there was one paper a few years back that argued that there is a limit of 115. And there was such an amazing back and forth between scientists, so much fighting in scientific journals after that paper, because they are basically split in half, disagreeing whether there is a limit or there is no limit. And we just don't know, you know, if there is something that happens that makes us only live to 115 more or less, because of course, Jean Calment who lived to 122, but, or maybe there isn't, maybe it just happened so far that we didn't live, but we could,

but we could, we don't know. Yeah. I mean, I remember reading a number of years back a paper by somebody who said, regardless of our biological ability to extend life, 300 years would be effectively the 100% cap for any person because by 300 years, your chances of dying accidentally would be at 100%. So it's sort of like there is some kind of cap, at least in theory, but we're nowhere near being able to test that in a practical way.

You also talk about something which I guess senescence, senescent cells or what, you know, quote, zombie cells. Yeah. I mean, so this is something I saw in a lab at Oxford, which I visited. And I was looking basically at how cells are aging and talking to scientists there who showed me this kind of senescent cells and, you know, how differently they look from young cells and how they get bloated. And basically, when cells age, they start accumulating all this junk inside.

It's basically broken parts. Sometimes we think of nature that it's all efficient and great and simple. But the truth is, sometimes it's just really messy. And junk and leftover parts can stay in different places. So it's just like with those old cells. They just accumulate broken parts, you could say. And that's why they get bigger and bigger and sometimes the senescent cells so this age cell starts secreting different mixes of chemicals that's tearing other cells also

senescence this is why they call them zombie cells because they turn other cells zombie you know this is part of aging as well this is some of the processes the scientists are studying to understand you know how are we aging or why are we aging and can we prevent it? Can we, you know, slow it down or not? Yeah. And I, and I guess, you know, like things like that are, you know, become involved in quote infecting other cells or turning them into zombie cells and also sources of inflammation through the body. I mean, these things are interesting to me because we're sort of trying to, there's been so much of a focus, I feel like, on trying to identify what are the sort of discrete things that we can measure that will in some way give us some sense of how we can quantify this thing we call aging. But they're also like, they are by definition, they're all reductionist.

They're all sort of like looking at these very narrow things rather than the bigger picture, which you're saying is really, it's good that we're doing this research, but none of these discrete things are at a point scientifically where we can really use them as tools to affect or change behavior. They're sort of like fascinations right now, but not accurate enough on an individual level to make decisions. I mean, in general, I feel that in our culture, we are very reductionist, as you said. We really want to just pop one pill, do one test, and everything is beautiful and done. And so that's a problem also for scientists working in the field of aging

and that they often have to struggle with this problem that whatever they publish, there will be people turning into it some kind of product or commercial thing and start popping some pills which is a very generally a very bad idea and but it just always happens because we're just looking for things like that and that's also why i believe that we are so focused on nutrition as a way to prevent aging even though though, of course, nutrition is important, but we are really obsessing about it sometimes too much because we are thinking in terms of how many grams of ancient grains you should be eating

or what kind of supplements or all these fat diets. We are really looking for this miracle, basically, somewhere. Something very simple, easily measurable, that you can just do one thing and you're done. But the problem is that, as I've mentioned before, in the whole field of aging, it's not that simple. It's a much bigger picture when things are interacting together, and it's never solvable by one pill. Yeah, and it's interesting also, I mean, you bring up nutrition, you know, which really also brings up the question of, what do we as a society sort of like,

what have we been trained to do to try and stay healthy and if we can slow the aging process, but really, you know, reduce the risk of disease, things like that. What are the big things that pop onto our radar? Well, it's nutrition, like you said, you know, there's been, whether you're paleo, vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, you know, it's all, you know, ifo, vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, it's all, if the idea comes into our domains, it says,

well, inflammation is a part of what's going on. Well, how do we eat in a way that reduces inflammation? How do we move our bodies? So exercise is always one of the other modalities that people point to, and how exercise changes your physiology, your brain. And I guess the argument you're making is not that these things don't matter, but in terms of what you might look at more broadly in the way that you live your life, are they the things that really move the

needle the most? And are they the things that we really should be focusing on as the primary devotions? Exactly. Now, we are just trying, I think we're trying to go too deep into those topics. Because when you think about nutrition and exercise and how they impact our health and aging, in fact, these things are very simple.

You know, to eat healthy, what do you need? It's just like Michael Poll michael plan said right uh eat food mostly plants not too much that's it it's very simple right it's just you know you don't have to eat ancient grains and kale and uh and juice and you know whatever fancy goji berries and chia seeds it's just carrots and apples and it's perfectly fine. Just eat enough of the veggies. They don't have to be organic. Just, you know, just eat them, right? Don't eat too much fast food, not too much sugar. And this is all in all the governments that are, that's what they are telling us, right? That many portions, servings, whatever, you'll be fine. The

same with exercise, you know, you just have to move, but you can just go on a family biking trip. You don't have to go for some fancy exercise classes with some special gadgets that measure everything in your body. This is really not required, right? But we really try to go extremely deep into finding, as you said, like which food will prevent this amount of inflammation in my body, right? And at the same time, you know, if we had unlimited time on our hands, then okay, do whatever you want. But the problem is that we don't and we are very busy people in general.

And while we are so concentrating at all this fat diets and supplements and miracle foods and exercise gadgets, we are completely forgetting about something that may be more important to our health and longevity, which is exactly the soft drivers, friendship, romantic relationship, volunteering, kindness, community involvement, which actually may be more important, but we just don't have any time left over or any, you know, will to take it on because we've been spending our time reading on

fat diets. Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting to me also, because a lot of the focus on how to be healthier, how to reduce disease, how to reduce inflammation, how to extend your life these days has been on either things to do that a lot of people don't find enjoyable. So they have to find ways to force themselves to do it or things to stop doing, you know, restrictions in their lives that people really struggle with and most fail at and then shame themselves on top of it. And so what's interesting to me, and again, we're not saying, you know, like just go out and eat fast food, everything and never ever move your body. These things do matter, but bigger picture, you know, I guess it's like, and you speak to this in your writing and, and, and I've, I've seen this conversation also and always been curious about it.

You know, the idea of the Mediterranean diet, right? Well, it's the diet that creates all of these amazing health outcomes that we've measured, you know, in Mediterranean populations. And in fact, well, maybe the diet is a part of it, but you reference the Rosetta effect, which is a really interesting experiment. This is, well, maybe it's actually something bigger than that. Yeah, so what I'm saying in Grand Yang, you know, that maybe Mediterranean diet is not necessarily just about the amount of olive oil or red wine or vegetables that are in the diet. So not about the pure nutritional aspect of it but that is also about the way the mediterranean cultures are eating so i live in france and i can observe it you know firsthand and here the eating is not just about the food is actually about with whom you eat

so people here really really cherish the time they spend eating they take a long time to eat they celebrate it and they eat with others right at the table so for example in people who are in their 30s and 40s in france among them 61 percent claim that they eat dinner at a table with their family every single day whereas in us that number is only 24%. And in the statistic, it was not even specified whether they're eating at a table or maybe in front of television, which is definitely not exactly eating a meal together. So it's a very big difference, right? And you also mentioned the Rosetto effect, right? So Rosetto was, I mean, it still is, a little town in Pennsylvania, which was settled by Italians from a town called Rosetto in Italy. And it's attracted attention of doctors in the 50s and 60s because there was no heart disease in Rosetto.

Whereas in surrounding communities, which shared the same water supply, the same health care, and generally were very similar, was lots of heart disease, there were heart attacks, and so on. People lived shorter. And so the doctors started investigating what's so special about Rosetto. And they checked the genes, of course, but it was not about the genes. It was not about the diet either, because the people in Rosetto actually forgot their Italian diet very, very fast and just started eating very greasy sausages, drank a lot of alcohol. So it was not a diet. So what the scientists discovered was that it was actually about the community spirit. So what they did bring from Italy was their involvement in the social sphere of life. So they were extremely neighborly.

They were visiting each other all the time. They were having events where everybody participated. They had civic organizations. They volunteered. They really, really cared about that. And this was most likely the reason why they escaped cardiovascular disease for a very long time. Yeah. So it's almost like the socialization had a deep focus on community and people almost had a protective effect against whatever shifts away they made from the Mediterranean diet to whatever,

like the typical diet was and like in the town that there was this almost protective effect that really keeping the cultural traditions and exalting the relationships had along the way. I mean, it was interesting. I was in, we were in Italy a couple of years back and I was struck by so many little things, but one of them was,

there's no such thing as a to-go cup in Italy. Like you don't get espresso or cappuccino in a paper cup. It doesn't exist. In France either. Yeah, it's just like the very concept of that is bizarre. You get a tiny little porcelain cup. And even if you're not sitting, you're just standing like at the bar

and strangers just talking to each other. The idea of just grabbing something and going and not in some way using it as a reset, as a pause, or maybe a way to connect to somebody who's standing or sitting next to you. Just, it doesn't exist in the way that it does here. Yeah, you know, when I moved to France, I moved here from Canada.

And so I was used to the typical Canadian way of eating. So, you know, I would often eat in my car on my own or while walking down the street in a rush, you know, just munching on my sandwich. And when I moved here, I very quickly learned you just don't do that in France. You don't eat in your car. You don't eat while walking down the street.

It's a very big faux pas. And so right now, if I had to do it, it would just, it just would feel so wrong. I just cannot eat on the street anymore, you know, unless you, I have to sit down properly and then it's fine. But you just cannot just rush it somewhere, you know, while you're doing something else. It just doesn't work that way. Yeah.

I mean, and it's interesting that, you know, when you do these things, when you build them into your life, not only does it make life more pleasant just on a lived day-to-day basis, but it actually affects, it can change your physiology and your psychology by making these sort of like subtle changes in the way that you relate. I'm curious what you've seen in terms of, you know, how does it actually change you? What are the internal changes that happen in the context of when you spend more time with friends and family or just community people that are your chosen family, people who nourish you and who you maybe nourish back? So that was one of the fascinating things I found out when I was writing Growing Young, that there is just so much, you know, in terms of biology, physiology that connects our emotions, our social lives to our health and lifespan, because, you know, people often assume that there's some kind of new agey thing that, you know, just very fluffy, no research really, no just, you know, stories maybe. But the truth

is that while researching growing young, I read over 600 papers and experiments, very, very academic. And that really showed that there is just such an amazing biological connection exactly between whether exactly we are connected to our friends and neighbors and community and how our body functions. And when you think about it, it makes perfect sense because we are social apes. So we evolved to be with a tribe, just like, for example, chimpanzees. They are social apes as well. we evolved to be with a tribe just like for example chimpanzees they are social apes as well they need to be with others and this is how we evolved this is how we've been for the most of our evolutionary time and some and there are certain biological mechanisms that encourage being together with others and discourage being alone. So for example, when apes, just like chimps, or humans, groom each

other, or touch in our case, we get a boost of endorphins, which are so-called social hormones, which on one hand, make us feel more connected to others, more kind of included and give us all this kind of warm and fluffy feelings. On the other hand, they also affect our physiology in a very straightforward way. So for example, endorphins are natural painkillers. So on one hand, you may be hugging someone and you're feeling connected. On the other hand, you're getting painkilling side effects. And we have other hormones like this as well. We have oxytocin, the famous laugh hormone. This also gets secreted when we are with others. And it also has physiological effects.

Again, painkilling, anti-inflammatory. You said that we're looking at anti-inflammatory ways of eating, whereas exactly this hormone oxytocin has such anti-inflammatory properties as well. And there is also serotonin. And on the other side of the spectrum, we have all this kind of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline and many, many others as well that don't get secreted when we are with others because it calms us down to be surrounded by our tribe, basically. processes that's evolved. I could go much deeper into it, but just to keep it very basic, we have a whole soup of hormones that works together when we are surrounded by other people. Yeah. I love that because the idea of, well, I could try and move my body in a particular way and eat a whole bunch of things and not eat a whole bunch of things to create a similar internal physiological effect in my body that would be beneficial.

Or I could hang out with people I love. Yeah, exactly. You know, not that it's an either or thing, but just the fact that you, you get a truly strong internal shift in, in physiology by doing something that is nourishing just interpersonally is really powerful. And I guess, you know, there's been so much focus on the microbiome, on the gut microbiota these days and its relationship to wellbeing and inflammation, and even our relationships can affect that. Yeah. That's another fascinating part. As you've said, you know, we are thinking about microbiome a lot these days and we are always talking about it in terms of probiotics,

what you should be ingesting or what you should not be ingesting to keep it healthy. But the truth is that our microbiome is also in a very large part about our social lives. So I took those one of the fun parts when I was writing the book. I actually went to Oxford again and I was helping in an experiment on wild mice in the woods around Oxford University where scientists were basically catching the wild mice and checking their their social networks and also checking the microbiome and how it's affected by whom they were hanging out with how many friends the certain mouse had and so on and so on and what they showed is that the more diverse friendships the rodents had,

the more diverse and healthier microbiomes they also had. And it works the same way with humans. So we know that we share our gut microbes with other people. So, for example, when we do contact sports, the teams will actually exchange their microbes together. And the same thing happens when you hug other people. You exchange microbes with them. And this is generally a good thing for your gut microbiome because the more diverse it is, it tends to be healthier. So it's also about hanging with others as well, not just about what you swallow or don't swallow.

Yeah, I love that. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. you also reference um i think it was a Japanese study that I thought was really interesting about the contrast of people who rarely meet and the health effect of that versus basically not eating any plants. Yeah. So, you know, so that's studies show that not meeting with your friends, you know,

is at least as bad for you as eating absolutely no vegetables or fruits at all. And for whatever reason, in that particular study, it was even more pronounced for men. There are sometimes differences like that, but in general, it's bad for everybody. If you don't see your friends, it's almost the same or the same as if you were not eating at all any fruits and veggies and just, you know, junk food, cheese and white bread. Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, I love hearing all this research. On the other hand,

in the moment that we're having this conversation, it becomes even more concerning because if we know that having regular contact with people that we enjoy being around is so critical to our wellbeing and potentially our longevity and our disease risk. And we are in different parts of the world right now that are in various states of isolation, lockdown, complete social and physical distancing. I'm sure you've thought about this, you know, like what the long-term effects of this may be on what we're talking about. I mean, definitely, you know, we know that social isolation is extremely bad for human physiology.

We know that people who are socially isolated, they have, for example, shorter telomeres. So once again, you know, we've talked about telomeres. So we have shorter telomeres when we're social, the people who are socially isolated. Then we know that people who are socially isolated have worse antiviral response, meaning they are more actually prone to getting sick with viruses, which is kind of ironic when you think about that. And they also live shorter. So in one California study, people who are socially isolated were actually three times more likely to die prematurely than people who are not isolated. So definitely there are very serious reasons

to be worried about us separating ourselves from other people but on the other hand i always try to be optimistic and i hope that when we are doing this social isolation right now which is often very much required that maybe we realized how much we actually need connection you know because when we're living our lives as we did before always rushing never really stopping to think maybe we didn't really appreciate how important it is to us but now that we are often forbidden from seeing our close ones our loved ones then maybe we'll appreciate how important those relationships are you know very often in the so-called old normal before the coronavirus,

we've seen people in restaurants, let's say, theoretically being together, but everybody would be looking at their phones and really not paying attention. This is not a proper social relationship. This is not something that helps you grow young. You know, you need to really connect, to look at each other, to really be there.

And I'm hoping, you know, it's hard to imagine right now that people who have been isolating for a long time and they will meet their friends and everybody just looking at their phones, you know, we've been so starved of each other that I'm certain we'll be appreciating those relationships more. And I hope it stays this way. In this way, we could live longer in a way because of coronavirus if it switches us to appreciating these things more. And also about community, you know, in many places around the world, people were for the first time discovering their neighbors, you know,

because they were locked down together. And you heard so many uplifting stories about this community spirit and kindness and helping others. And I really hope that we learn something from that. Yeah, it's such an interesting point. You know, in New York City, where everyone lives, for the most part, in brownstones or buildings, that can be, you know, as few as a dozen people or as many as hundreds and hundreds of people. People, as a general rule, don't know their neighbors and don't really associate. You know, you may kind of get stuck in an elevator and you use the word stuck with other people. But nobody really, you know, when you're in elevator, you certainly don't look at anybody and you don't talk to

anybody. It's sort of against the social norms. And you are seeing a lot of people, and I'm hearing a lot of stories among friends and family where people are just doing things for the other people in their building. Or maybe if they notice that they have neighbors, you know, across the hall who are older and it's not safe for them to get out, just, you know, knocking on their door and yelling inside, hey, I'm going to, you know, like the shop, can I get something for you? In a way that, I mean, I've spent my entire adult life in the city, I've never really seen before like this. Yeah, that's certainly very hopeful. And, you know, if we shift our attention this way, long term, that could

really have very beneficial effects on our health and, you know, our diabetes risk, our cardiovascular risk, all these kind of diseases that are really a big plug in our society as well. Yeah, I am hopeful also, like you, I think we're going through a window which is really painful right now. But assuming it is short-lived in the context of our lives and society, if it has the effect of maybe having us really re-examine the way that we want to live and the way we want to relate to people and the longer-term effect is a sustained behavior change, that would be pretty good in a way that's healthy, of course, at the appropriate timing when it's safe to go and do those things. A particular type of relationship also, we've talked a lot about just general friends and

family. You also speak to romantic relationships and how they're sort of like very defined ideas about how that affects this. Yeah. So actually, if you were to just do only one thing for your health or longevity, just one single thing, then having a happy romantic relationship is just the best thing. Because this can lower your mortality risk by almost 50%. And to compare diet and exercise usually hover around 20-30 percent so having a happy committed romantic

relationship is just amazing in terms of health and longevity much better than any diets you could ever think of but of course the key word here is committed this is what i often say that you know just living together is not as good and the reason for that is just exactly this commitment so this kind of feeling that you are in it for good, no matter what happens until death do us part. And I think this is because it gives people this sense of security and some trust and just that the other person is there for them and always will be.

And this calms all the stress systems that we have in our bodies that evolved when we're still in the savannah. And we feel we belong that way uh we just respond in a much healthier way yeah so it's interesting so then would it would it be accurate to say it's not so much about the romantic part of that of that but it's really much more about having a truly open vulnerable and committed relationship that you like trust and expect to extend over like a very long time. Oh, yeah, certainly. You know, it's not about the butterflies and the kind of, you know, flowers and the early stages of romance. It's not about that. It's,

it's about the commitment and about the long term love that you have for another person and staying together and trusting and opening and so on and so on, which usually starts with the butterflies, but it's not just about, it's not about that phase in particular, it's about the long term. Okay, which brings up another question, which is, does it have to be a person?

I mean, yes and no. So definitely it has to be a person to get that real, really strong effect. But it's true that your dog can also give you some small boost as well, much, much smaller than a human can. But still, research shows that looking deeply into your dog's eyes gives you some oxytocin boost, so the laugh hormone boost as well. And again, I've mentioned before, it also has very straightforward effects on our physiology, positive ones, and actually for the dog as well. So the dog also gets some health boosts from looking into his own eyes. So that also is a nice thing.

But obviously, it's not a replacement for a human connection. Yeah. So if you're the person who has a dog who is immediately greeted when you get home, and if you try and look at your phone while the dog is there and the dog basically swats it away with the paw, the dog knows something you don't know. It's actually important to look into each other's eyes and to have that contact. The sort of building on the idea of relationships, you also look at kindness and how that affects our well-being. And there's some interesting research around there as well. Yeah. So, you know, for example, people who volunteer a lot, research shows that they have lower blood pressure, for example.

They spend less nights in hospitals. They have lower blood glucose for example they spend less nights in hospitals they they have lower blood glucose levels as well so there are very very direct physiological effects you can measure they can even see it on the level of their gene expression actually that's uh the when scientists look into their white blood cells they can see differences there you know it's really amazing how how it really affects the physiology uh and and and this is probably because we've evolved something called the caregiving system so basically to carry for others we need to be calm so when you think about nature about parents taking care of their children and i'm talking more you the savannah version, you really need to be calm and not anxious

to be able to provide for somebody who depends on you. If you are running amok, you know, panicking, crazy and scared and stressed, you really are not doing a good job. So this is why most likely when we care for others, and it actually is the same for other animals. So there is research, for example, on rats that show exactly the same effects when when they care for for others their stress systems in their bodies really calm down so this cortisol response and everything really you know calms down and because of course chronic stress is bad for our health i don't think i have to remind that

to anybody then this kind of caregiving helps us calm down and of course it evolves mostly for us to help to take care of our offspring but it works as well if you take care of your neighbors or your community or or some kind of charity organizations you are working for. So as long as you're caring and helping and giving, it really affects our physiology in a very positive way. Yeah, I mean, I wonder if part of that is, if you start combining these things to a certain extent, we talked earlier about the notion that research shows that actually as you get later on in your years,

you tend to be the average person, tends to actually become increasingly happier, more satisfied with life. And if you are somebody who is on in years and you're in a committed relationship, and we tend to think that if that person in your relationship with needs being taken care of, that maybe that's a burden,

but maybe what this is saying that in fact, the act of you being a caretaker to a certain extent, that there's benefit to them, but also maybe benefit to you as well beyond just expressing your love. I mean, so several years ago, there was some research showing that caregiving is not good for caregivers. The research that they were more more sickish and just generally suffering because of that but um over the years there was more and more studies done on this topic which went a little bit deeper and checked it from different angles and i even talked to the scientists who did the original study and they admitted that the population was quite limited there so the newer research generally shows that actually there are benefits

to caregiving exactly even when you are taking care for an elderly parent for example and it may seem draining and difficult as long as it's not too overwhelming as to a way that it affects you physically like you're you know you because of the purely physical strain of lack of sleep and so on, as long as it's not too extreme, because you are not sick yourself, for example, then this has positive effects on us. So that's the newest take on this caregiving. Yeah, and I love that you had that qualifier, that we're talking about a level of caregiving that you're capable of giving rather than it actually really draining you physically or emotionally to a point where it then becomes

unhealthy or destructive on some level for you. But I wonder also part of what's going on there is that it gives you, you may get a sense of purpose from all sorts of other things in your life, but maybe that also adds to, it gives you another source of this sense of meaning or purpose. Yeah, definitely sense of meaning or sense of purpose in life is also extremely important for health and longevity. And when researchers check populations who either have or don't have purpose in life, you can also see very visible differences in their health and longevity. And when I was traveling in Japan for research,

I also talked to many people there and scientists, as well as very elderly people, octagonarians and centenarians there. And they often talk about something called ikigai, which generally translates into this reason for living, which for us is kind of purpose of life or something like that. And they consider it an extremely important health measure to the point that the health minister of japan actually in official documents considers ikigai a part of health strategy just like nutrition or exercise

and they really often talk about the ikigai when they really think about it and some and it's part of very part of the culture and usually also when i talk with westerners about ikigai or maybe purpose in life sometimes they say okay you know i don't know playing golf is my purpose in life but in general it's more about giving something back usually so as if you are doing something only purely for yourself it often doesn't work so as you said about caregiving this would be something exactly that could give somebody ikigai and the japanese often talk when they talk about ikigai they say for example that it's taking care of their grandchildren or their children or their work or their involvement in

their community or things like that, but not necessarily exactly playing golf. Yeah. I remember reading research that looked at people who were doing work that they would normally have considered to be work that they didn't like doing, that was emptying, that paid their rent, but little more, and they considered drudgery. And when they found people who were part of that group who could say that they were doing work in support of something else that was deeply meaningful to them, it completely transformed the experience of the work. So if it was, well, I've got a family back home or I've got a mother and I'm supporting their health needs or whatever it may be, But for the fact that I'm doing this thing, somebody I love couldn't be able to be okay in some way, shape or form.

It completely transformed the experience of it. It gave this thing a sense of purpose that but for that fact, it would have been so much harder to find. And that changed the quality of the person's life more broadly. Yeah, interesting thing about the Japanese people as well, who are, by the way, the longest living nation on the planet,

is that they often don't retire the way we do in the West. So when the Japanese people reach retirement age, a lot of them actually look for a different job. They call it a silver hair job. We even have silver hair job employment agencies especially for people after retirement age and they start on jobs that are very simple often part-time usually badly paid but they do it just for this sense of purpose so for example you will have and i talk to people like that you know like you will have a ceo or some kind of high-powered manager in some company who retires and they then takes on a silver hair job as a parking attendant or a public space gardener and it may seem weird to us

but for them it gives them this purpose that they're doing something for the community because they're helping people find parking spots or they're helping their little town square look pretty. And this really gives them some kind of meaning and still involvement, being part of community, having work friends. And they really believe that, and studies confirm this, it's not just their anecdotal, that actually does help them live longer. Yeah, I love that. I have heard Ikigai translated. I know, I think that the Western overlay tends to want to equate it with life purpose. And I've also seen, well,

it's not actually legit Ikigai unless you can earn a living doing it too, which completely bastardizes the original concept of what it is. But I've heard it translated as a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Yeah. So it's not like the capital L life purpose necessarily, but it's really just, it's a sense of purpose that makes you want to wake up because you know you have something to do.

Yeah, exactly. It can be this parking attendant thing, right? You're just helping people find their parking spot. It doesn't have to be, you know, I'm changing the whole, I don't know, governmental system in my country or something like that. It can be something really small, but you feel that people are benefiting. Yeah, I love that. I mean, it's interesting to really just kind of talk about the granular elements with you, but also zooming the lens out, really understanding that, yes, there are these things we talk about on a daily basis,

exercise, nutrition, the biohacking community gets much more granular about specific interventions and tries to really titrate it. But when you share information, like about showing that a simple type of relationship will have equivalent effect on your wellbeing and longevity as a bunch of different specific things that very often we don't wanna do. And that it's all about bringing

things that are more pleasant into our lives. That is a prescription that I would like to have written for me that I would doggedly comply with, given the opportunity. And I think for a lot of people, I wonder if knowing that there's actual science that shows that this stuff really does matter, almost would give them the freedom to say, okay, so let me elevate this to a place of centrality in the way that I choose what to do and not to do. And, you know, it's just so much more pleasant, you know, just doing something for others, spending time with your friends,

being involved in your neighborhood, volunteering for some local events. It's just so much more pleasant than popping some pills or looking on the internet for some new test to measure your telomeres and taking the swabs. This is just, it's just one side is like so lonely and miserable and you're, you know, like in this kind of internet world. On the other hand, you can be just with your friends, with people you like doing pleasant things, right? And hanging out with your friends, with people you like, doing pleasant things, right? And hanging out with your neighbors for a long meal together. That's just so much happy.

Yeah. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of the Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To live life with others and for others and that way you also end up living long and healthy but with basically thinking more in terms of we than I. Hmm thank you. Thank you so much for listening and thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible.

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share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th... Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot?