Instant Genius - Health hacks, with Dr Michael Mosley

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

Dr Michael Mosley, host of the podcast Just One Thing, explains the simple lifestyle changes we can all make to improve our health and wellbeing. Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius, dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you’ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts. Produced by the team behind BBC Science Focus Magazine. Visit our website: sciencefocus.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people

with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this shell will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Introducing the new best skin ever ultra slim precision concealer from Sephora Collection. It's full coverage with a matte finish and perfect for any look, whether you're building it up for a full glam moment or targeting correction for a more natural vibe. At only $12, it's great for affordable touch-ups on the go.

Get this new must-have concealer at Sephora or at Sephora.com today. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation

and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio. to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Sarah Rigby, online staff writer at BBC Science Focus magazine.

Joining me on this week's episode is Dr Michael Mosley. He's a former medical doctor, health writer and presenter of the podcast Just One Thing on BBC Sounds. He tells me all about the simple lifestyle changes we can all make to improve our health and well-being. First of all, could you please just tell us a bit about your podcast, just one thing? Sure. So the idea of this podcast came from a bunch of independent producers, and what they said to me is, do you fancy doing a podcast series, which will be bite-sized, it'll just be 15 minutes ago. And the idea is that in each one, we will explore just one thing that you can do, which is kind of simple and easy, and you can fit into your life,

but which could, you know, transform your life or at least improve your life in ways you might not predict. And they came up with a sort of short list which included things like brisk early morning walks or cold showers. And they seem to me very doable. And so the idea is that in each episode I do it. We get a volunteer, a member of the public, to give it a go as well, for a week or so. and I also interview an expert in the area who knows a lot about cold water immersion or whatever it might be. And yeah, so it's partly an immersive experience and partly you're learning from the experts and to some extent from me and from the willing guinea pigs about what the experience is like. And each week it's different.

So the things, the just one thing, things that you include, they tend to be quite easy, quite small things that you can do. If, for example, I have quite an unhealthy lifestyle, can I do just small things like this and get healthier? Or can they really replace larger lifestyle changes? I think what the research shows is that we may, you know, on January the 1st or whatever, come up with all these New Year's resolutions and say we're going to lose two stone or, you know, 20 kilos and take up a marathon. But when you have these sort of goals, they're very rarely followed through. And the more successful goals tend to be the ones where they are bite-sized, where you think, oh, yeah, I could do that.

I could tag that onto my life. And a lot of it is about actually finding things you're really doing and then tagging these onto them. Because if you find it really difficult, if it's really challenging, then frequently people start and then they give up because it's too big a change. So the idea of these is, yes, they are relatively simple, but they accumulate. and that if you do do them, then yeah, you can make some significant changes in a remarkably short period of time. So, for example, going for a brisk early morning walk. It's something that

most of us could probably do. Most of us probably don't do. But the research shows, particularly if you're sedentary, then doing a walk of any form is good. But if you can do it briskly, and in that particular episode, I also explore the power of music to drive you along so that you pick up the pace. And we look at the kind of science of being, you know, why would you want to do it in the morning or the afternoon or the evening? So there's more sort of elements to it.

But the simple premise, you know, go for a 15 minute walk. It's something which is eminently achievable. And there is a lot of science now which suggests that I'm doing something as simple of that, particularly, as I said, if you're starting off from a very low base, that that can make a significant difference. So you're on your second series of the podcast now. So you've got, you've suggested quite a lot of doing,

lifestyle changes that I can make, but I think I might struggle to incorporate all of them into my life in one go. So if I am going to choose one, how would I go about choosing one from all of the topics that you've covered? I think one thing you can do is obviously go to BBC Sounds and look at the list and see which ones you fancy, basically, because you have to be willing to do it. You have to be interested in wanting to do it. And then it has to be something you can fit into your life. So that is really my best advice. You look at it and go, oh, yeah, I could do that or, oh, no, that doesn't really grab me. That doesn't, isn't something I want to do. I'm a ready, for example, going out for early morning runs, so I don't need to throw in a early morning walk

on top of that. But you may be someone who's got a kind of sweet tooth. You've been wanting to give up some of the more obviously sugary stuff. You're eating a lot of buns and you think, I could try the dark chocolate challenge. And you'd kind of dig into that, and you'd look at the science around that, and I certainly find that if I have dark chocolate in the house, and we do explore the sort of science around dark chocolate, because it's less sugary,

and because it's richer in cocoa, and because it's richer in flavonoids, then I am less inclined to eat lots of it. So if it's a bar of milky chocolate, I'll eat the whole thing. But in dark chocolate, I'm quite happy to take a square or two and that's that, you know, I can put it aside and forget about it, whereas I really, really can't do that with the milky stuff. So it's a way of changing a particular habit.

And hopefully over time, your longing for the other stuff will fade, but I have to say with me it's taken a long time. I still feel longing, but I just have replaced it with a different thing. So as you mentioned earlier on each episode, you get a member of the public in to test out this thing. Whose life has changed the most over the course of the experiments that you've done with them? Interesting. I'm not entirely sure. They had different sort of goals. In the case of the chocolate, we had a nurse who was very keen to lose a bit of weight, get a bit healthier.

She spends a lot of her time, as is often the case when you are working in a hospital. the patients leave you sort of big piles of chocolate and gifts and things like that on the station and you wander by and you munch them down. And she found that simply substituting it for dark chocolate did make quite a big difference. And she was very enthusiastic about that.

She lost some weight, but she also found that her sweet tooth diminished. On the other hand, we had a guy who was very keen on... He's a goli. He wants to be a... He's an amateur. He's a goalie, but he wants to... to be a striker. So I got him to spend a while doing a sort of visualization technique, which is in one of the episodes. And he has became a sort of a goal scoring phenomenon

since that episode. So I think he's very grateful for it. But each person has sort of derived benefits in different forms. Oh, I'm glad to hear that he did end up getting his dream of being a striker. I can sometimes be a bit lazy And so if I want to do one of these things That will improve my health Can you recommend to me one that is really, really easy? What is the easiest one of your suggestions? Okay, probably the easiest one of the suggestions

Is to buy more houseplants in the sense that, you know, it doesn't require it. Well, you have to water them. I hope you're able to do that. So, and that was kind of a really fascinating episode. I have some houseplants, but I went out and bought a load more afterwards. And the reason for the house plants is there's a lot of evidence showing that having

house plants, particularly around in a, you call them house plants, it could be office plants, but basically having more brightly coloured plants and things like that around your office, around your home, they make you feel better, just seeing vegetation in the house, but also they help to absorb and scrub out some of the volatile chemical. which our houses, and particularly as we go into winter, and we lock all our windows and doors and, you know, huddle up indoors. This is quite a big thing. Furniture exudes some of these things.

And the other thing is that it gets drier during the winter months, particularly we've got central heating on, and we know that we'll also dry out the sort of mucus in your airways and in your nose, which will make you more vulnerable to infection. There are a lot of nasty bugs going around at the moment, not just COVID-19, but the flu, some pretty vicious cold viruses hanging around as well. So having a few houseplants around helps to humidify the air. So that could keep your mucus in good slimy form. And on top of that, I just, you know, as I said, there's just a psychological thing about it.

And it's just nice as well having them there to chat to and nurture it. a bit. So go for the houseplants. That's certainly probably one of the easiest things you can do. Yeah, I do like having houseplants. And I find it kind of stressful sometimes. You know, if one starts to die, then I get a bit too worked up about it. And I'm like, what am I doing wrong? But it's also, it's easy to feel really proud of yourself when it starts to grow or when it gets a new leaf or starts to flower. Absolutely. And you can share it with other people. Years ago, I was making a series called Trust Me, I'm a Doctor. And one of the things that really surprised me there was we were looking at air pollution.

And there was some research which suggested that silver birch trees are very good way of trapping the sort of micro particles that come out of lorries and buses and things like that. And so the producer suggested that we get these houses on quite a busy road and we plant birch trees outside in pots. And I thought this is ludicrous. birch trees are not going to make any difference whatsoever. But he persuaded me otherwise, and the academic said that she believed it might work. And indeed, we did that and we sort of swabbed the house beforehand and swabbed the house three or four weeks later after the birch trees had been outside. And we did see it had led to a significant drop in the sort of particulate matter that had sort of come in through the windows and settled on the equipment and stuff like that. So just having a few more

trees around seem to make a big difference. And so, yeah, has plants obviously not as big as birch trees, but if you get enough of them, then as long as you don't get too stressed by them, it's supposed to be a sort of, you know, pleasurable activity. So how do plants actually absorb air pollutants? Well, it seems to be to do with the sort of the surface area, the stoma, that, as I understand it, and I'm no expert on this, which is why we always get an expert in, that what's, they do is they trap, and particularly on the fine sort of hair sometimes on the plants, they

trap some of these particles, and when you sort of water them, they get sort of washed away. That's certainly what seems to happen with birch trees. The other thing that I'm having a few more houseplants can do is also have a sort of small but perhaps significant effect on the carbon dioxide levels in your room. But again, if it gets a bit foggy and things like that, then plants will be out there pumping out a bit of oxygen. So you need to keep them in a sort of a nice space. where they are getting in decent light.

I think on that particular episode, they give you the names. I can't remember the names of the plants that our expert was recommending. But she said you need kind of vigorous ones that grow quite readily and which love a bit, they generally love a bit of light. But the Royal Horticultural Society is a good place to go if you're wondering what sort of houseplants I should be having. So do you think you would notice the difference in air quality? I don't know.

certainly the studies that our expert were talking about were largely carried out in office buildings and what they did is they were looking at a more psychological aspect. So they were looking at productivity, they were measuring well-being, they were measuring things like that. And in one of the experiments, what they did is they took, they put the plants there, left them there for sort of four months and then they took them away. And people got really quite upset about it when they went away. They didn't realize they were going to miss them. So, NASA did an experiment years and years ago, in which they put houseplants in a capsule.

This was on the ground to see the impact of that. And it didn't seem to make a difference to the air quality, but weather up in the space station. They currently have houseplants. I haven't noticed any, but I suspect it's probably a bit tricky, and they have other means of keeping the air properly filtered. As I said, I suspect with houseplants,

most of the benefit comes from the joy of having them around, with some impact on things that come dark side levels and also some effect on hydration and some effect on air pollution levels. So do you think that's related to studies that sort of suggest that we tend to feel happier and more relaxed when we get to look at nature and green spaces? Absolutely. And that was another episode we did, which was spending time in green spaces. that was in the first episode, and the Japanese have an expression for it, they call it forest bathing. And the idea is that you go and, again, you spend time in green spaces. It could be a wood, it could be a park.

They haven't yet explored blue spaces, i.e. spending time down by the sea or by a lake, but I suspect it's the same sort of thing. The added benefit of trees is that they produce a range of volatile chemicals, which we seem to enjoy, which would kind of make sense since we have a sort of, you know, our ancestors would have been spending quite a lot of time in the trees, our very remote ancestors.

And we know, for example, again, another study showed that spending time in green spaces, particularly in forests, was associated with increased production of natural killer cells. So it could well be that, you know, doing that would help benefit. your immune system. And again, there's a strong psychological component to it. And I like it. I mean, I love woods and things like in open spaces. And I'm very fortunate because we're kind of near a wood. And so I can combine several things in one go. I can get up early. I go off. I go for a run or a walk with a dog.

through the wood. I'm walking briskly. I'm getting my 100 to 120 paces a minute. And I'm also spending time sort of sniffing the trees as a go. So you can knock up quite a few just one things in one go. And that's a good thing. Combine them with other stuff. It all adds up. And so another one you could actually add in there was one of your episodes is about getting more sunlight. It sounds a bit counterintuitive to me because I thought we were supposed to try and sort of reduce the amount of sunlight we get, especially in the summer months so that we don't, you know, get sunburn and things like that. Yeah, so there are two different elements to it.

One is early morning exposure to light, which is about resetting your internal clock, because we know that sunlight is particularly early morning light, is very good for resetting the circadian clock. And that also should help things like sleep. But pretty well, everything is driven by the clock, or at least the series of clocks that exist within you. And they are triggered by a number of things, but light seems to be one of the most important things. But then there's sort of exposure to ultraviolet light, which is kind of more sunlight, which is more you're talking about. And we were talking about it in the context of two things.

Really, one is vitamin D and the other is the impact of sunlight on mood and also on blood pressure. And they seem to be independent effects. So what I was recommending in that particular episode was in the sort of summer months or the spring and summer, and that's really between March and about September. The British Sun is a good source of free vitamin D, and you go out there for about 10 minutes with your sleeves rolled up and your socks rolled up, probably more like half an hour if you are Asian or Afro-Caribbean ethnicity

because darker skin takes longer to generate vitamin D. And that seems to be enough. 10 minutes is kind of enough to generate vitamin D without burning. And there is a sort of a view which says that we have got a little bit too concerned about the impact of ultraviolet light on our skin that clearly going out there, burning, going red, peeling is not a great idea. But on the other hand, there are a lot of people who are chronically vitamin D deprived, and that's because they spend a lot of time indoors. Because you can get vitamin D from things like oily fish, but frankly, you're unlikely to get enough.

And so the majority of it comes from the reaction of the sound on your skin. And by the depths of winter, it's some, you know, particularly if you are, you know, Asian ethnicity, then something like a quarter of Asians or people with an Asian background are either chronically or seriously depleted of vitamin D. And we know vitamin D is important for a whole, whole range of things. So that's kind of why we were doing the episode. and giving you an opportunity to store up a bit more. Unfortunately, by now, by October and November time, it's too late.

The British wind, well, in effect, I said, look, in theory you could. If it's a bright sunny day, you strip down naked and stand outside in the garden. For a couple of hours, you might be able to generate from vitamin D. But to be honest, you know, I think many of us are going to be doing that. So it's, you know, it's a bit too weak. So it's either the sunshine holiday abroad. or it's eating more oily fish, but probably it's supplementing. And the NHS now advises pretty well all adults to supplement between October and March.

And if you have a darker skin, they actually recommend you supplement all the way around the year. And we know the vitamin D is so unbelievably important because it is probably one of the best explanations for why our ancestors had darker skins. from Africa, when they came to Europe, when it spread throughout Europe, they became paler. And that was almost certainly because, you know, as you head north, then you get less vitamin D or less opportunity to generate vitamin D. And with the sole exception of the Inuit up in the north, the further north you go, paler people get. And the reason, or at least the theory as to why the Inuit are not pale is because they get their vitamin D from fish and from blubber and, you know, very other rich sources of vitamin D,

which most of us don't have access to. So something which could actually, you know, change skin color or drive the changes in skin color is obviously really rather important for our health. It's particularly true of women who need a lot of vitamin D, particularly doing pregnancy and periods of that. But again, we know vitamin D important for bones, important for immune system, important for a whole load of things.

So, yeah, I'm afraid you've missed the opportunity to get a free supply of vitamin D now, but come next month, march, get out there in the garden, roll up those trousers legs and those shorts and go and get some free stuff. As you mentioned, the NHS does recommend that we supplement vitamin D. But what about other supplements? Should I be taking, say, vitamin C or, you know, when you go into a pharmacy, there's the whole shelves and shelves of different supplements you can take? Yeah, no, I mean, I'm generally very cynical about supplements and I don't take anything. I take some vitamin D. It obviously depends. I tried to get to the bottom of how.

common vitamin deficiencies are. Because obviously, on the whole, taking vitamins, if you've already got sufficient vitamins, is a complete not a waste of time. Your body will, you know, pass them out. There is some evidence for zinc, for the cold. There have been a number of randomized controlled trials showing that if you take zinc tablets, it will cut the duration of the cold by about two days from seven to five. Vitamin C, not really worth it. unless there are a subgroup of people who seem to benefit from vitamin C supplements, and they are marathon runners and extreme sports people. They're the people who, for whatever reasons, if they get a cold,

then they do benefit from taking vitamin C. The rest of us, no. But what's very difficult to get the bottom of is just how common insufficiencies and deficiencies are, because they're not really measured. We were always told at medical school. It doesn't happen, you know, the diet. fine. But reality is when you start looking into it, it's generally not fine. So, for example, we know that women between the ages of 20 and 55, typically high risk of iron deficiency

because of menstruation and things like that. We know that if you're vegan or indeed in vegetarian and a lot of people are going in that direction, high risk of iron deficiency, and particularly a vitamin B12, folate deficiency. Very high risk of that indeed because you don't get it from your diet by much unless you're eating, you know, there are not many. Yeast is one of the few sources of vitamin B12. Most of it comes from meat. And otherwise, there are things like, things like zinc, as I was saying, which you can be a bit deficient in. The other thing is, surprisingly, enough that if you are overweight or obese and obviously significant section of population are increasingly so.

There have been a number of small studies I saw one recently in Australia showing that they tended to be deficient in a range, quite a large range of vitamins and minerals. Not vitamin C, that's what everyone seemed to have a lot of, but vitamin D, magnesium, iron, selenium, and a whole range of stuff. And so they were suggesting, the researchers were suggesting, but this could also be kind of driving appetite. Your body is aware it's deficient, and so it's particularly true for calcium. There seems to be a specific appetite of calcium,

and then again in this population they seem to be deficient. And again, one of the things about moving to a vegetarian or vegan diet is the sources of calcium are not as obvious as they are if you're drinking cow's milk or something like that. So a lot of deficiency in calcium. And again, you know, it's a really complicated, utterly fascinating area. And I could rabbit on about vitamins and minerals for hours.

But the danger is that just isn't the data there at the moment. And it's kind of really weird because another thing is, for example, a lot of vitamins people get now come from supplements. Well, basically from fortified cereals. So cereals, they bung in lots of extra stuff. And I was talking to a nutritionist. And I was saying, look, these sugary cereals are not terribly good. Why are you advising kids eat them?

And she said, basically, if they didn't get the vitamins from the cereals, they wouldn't be getting them from anywhere in their diet. So I hold my nose and they can sort of knock back the sugary, chocolatey things. But at least amongst that they're going to get something. And that's a kind of rather sad type of our food system, that people are getting a significant amount of their vitamins from bread, from flour, from fortified stuff, rather than from fruit, vegetables, or whatever it might be.

And, yeah, that's kind of sad. But I was pleased to see they're going to start fortifying with folic acid. They've just announced that the latest thing we're going to do because, again, we know that's linked, particularly in pregnant women, to a very high risk or an increased risk of neural tube defects. And I've been banging about that for 25 years. I did a film about it 25 years ago saying it's about time we did it because lots of other countries did it and low and behold 25 years later.

They've actually eventually done it. We've talked about quite a few different lifestyle changes here. And you test them out, don't you, as well as the member of the public? Absolutely. Some of them I've kind of already been doing. Some of them I give a go in a way I haven't done before. So I'd sort of half-heartedly thought about having cold showers, but it wasn't until we decided to do the item on cold showers. that I thought I'd better give it a go.

And one of my sons has been doing it very enthusiastically for about a year now, and he impressed us all by going for a swim in the Thames on Christmas Day. So, yeah, quite. So it's never struck me as terribly appealing, but, you know, I thought it's easy in the sense that it's short and brutal, and you get over and done with. And I like swimming to sea.

I've done some cold water swimming. I had a really sort of odd incident that I can tell you about cold water swimming, which falls into some of the downsides of cold water immersion. But yeah, I absolutely started to embrace the cold shower. And here I am six months later and I'm still doing them. So were there any of these changes that really surprised you by how much they worked? I think the one that, well, a couple of things. I mean, yeah, you know, with the cold showers, I was surprised by how quickly I adapted to them.

I do actually feel sort of braced. I do feel kind of cheerful. I do feel invigorated after the cold char. I only stay in for about a minute. And the way I, my wife who does them, she just kind of endures. So the idea is you stay in there for long enough so that your breathing slows down. You will start to hyperventilate. I go in, I start off with a warm shower and then I kind of wash myself in the warm water.

I turn it on to coal. And then I sing heartily for about 45 seconds to a minute, and then I emerge. Whereas Claire just kind of stands there and just sort of embraces the cold. And yeah, now the benefits are, they're not very, very clear, let's put it that way. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence about the benefits of cold water in terms of things like depression and anxiety and there are people who swear by it and there is as I said quite a lot of anecdotal evidence around there. There is one randomized control trial looking at the impact of it on your risk of getting a cold that flu and that was done in Holland and it was an online

experiment which I think had about two or three thousand people take part and they were randomly allocated to either continuing having a sort of warm show every morning or a one-minute culture or a, in fact, I think it was a 30-second culture, or it was one-and-a-half-minute to two-minute culture. And then they looked to see how many, you know, come down with a flu over the subsequent winter and also whether they took time off work. And what they found is people having the cold shower,

and it didn't matter if it was 30 seconds or two minutes. There was a lower incident. So that was kind of a, you know, one of the few proper studies that's been done in this area. So I haven't had a cold so far, but whether that's anything to do with the showers, who knows. But yeah, I continue to do it, although it doesn't necessarily get easier.

But I was swimming in the sea last weekend. So clearly my tolerance to the cold. And that was sort of mid-October. My torrents to cold is obviously reasonably high. Okay, thank you. And we'll talk about the science of that a bit in the next episode. But just to wrap up on this episode, I'd just like to ask, if you had to recommend three of these lifestyle changes to the whole population,

which three would you choose? Okay, I think I would go for the brisk early morning walk. I think the benefits of that, particularly if you can do it in green spaces. I would also recommend that you drink more water. So we went into that one, and the recommendation was essentially to drink a glass water when you wake up at glass water with each of your meals.

And I found that it fills you up a bit, but I thought I was drinking enough and I probably wasn't. And the recommendation is, how do you know if you're drinking up well? Basically, you should be weeing six or seven times a day. So that's my new rule. Along with five a day, you should be going for seven a day, seven whee's a day. And that will do you. And the third one is probably the press-ups.

So we explore the science and press-ups and particularly resistance to training. But I won't say I like doing press-ups, but I'm quite good at them. So I stick to them. And again, there was an interesting study done in farm. or fire officers rather, where they showed that those who could do about, I think it was more than 40 press-ups in their 30s, the risk of dying heart attack 20 years later was significantly lower than those who could manage less than 10. So the press-up or the push-up, but what you want to call it,

it's kind of one of the best all-round exercises you can do. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Dr. Michael Mosley. If you want to know more about the health hacks we've discussed in this episode, check out just one thing on BBC Sounds. Or to learn even more about the easy ways to improve your health and the scary experience Michael had whilst cold water swimming, head over to the Instant Genius Extra podcast. The November issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out this week. Pick up a copy in store or visit sciencefocus.com.

Our friends over at Radio Times have interviewed Professor Brian Cox about his upcoming show, Universe. If you're interested in hearing that interview, make sure to subscribe to the brand new Radio Times podcast. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship,

so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at nameaudio.com. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Wireless can feel like a world of track.

But not with Visible. It's one-line wireless with unlimited data and hotspot. Powered by Verizon for $25 a month. Taxes and fees included. Plus, for a limited time, new members pay just $20 a month for one year on the Visible plan. Using the code Fresh Start. Refresh your wireless with Visible. Tap the banner to switch today.

Terms apply. Limited time offer subject to change. See Visible.com for plan features and network management details.