ZOE Science & Nutrition - Exercise myths busted: Practical steps to sustain your health

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

Admit it, exercise isn't everyone's favorite pastime. Of course, our ancestors weren't hitting the gym by choice — our evolution has wired us to stay active, and this natural activity actually slows down the aging process. The good news is that you can achieve the benefits without feeling like you're "exercising." In today’s episode, Prof. Daniel Lieberman debunks exercise myths. He also teaches us how exercise impacts our health and how learning from our evolution can unlock the secrets of a longer life. Daniel Lieberman is a paleoanthropologist at Harvard University. He’s the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences and a professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. He’s best known for his research on the evolution of the human mind and the human body. If you want to uncover the right foods for your body, head to zoe.com/podcast, and get 10% off your personalized nutrition program. Download our FREE guide — Top 10 Tips to Live Healthier: https://zoe.com/freeguide Timecodes: 00:00  Introduction 01:34  Quickfire questions 03:22  The Rudyard Kipling view of our ancestors 04:54  Is exercise good for us and why do most of us hate it? 06:19  For millions of years, people were physically active for 2 reasons only… 15:38  Our bodies have evolved to save calroies and preserve energy 18:31  It’s normal to think your life is normal 22:27  We need to exercise because we don’t move enough! 34:00 Diet, exercise and sleep can prevent these diseases… 39:54  The active Grandparent hypothesis 43:10  Study of men matriculating as undergraduates at Harvard University 49:44  How can we enjoy keeping physically active? 01:00:00 The importance of weights exercise 01:06:43 Summary Mentioned in today’s episode:  Three generations of HSPH researchers explore health benefits of exercise from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Stanford marshmallow test experiment, a summary from Simply Psychology We also mention Daniel’s book Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health, and you can find it here. Episode transcripts are available here. Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here

Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health. Today, we discover that many of the things we've been told about exercise are a myth. We learn that it's normal not to enjoy exercise, and how to overcome this problem. How? By learning from our ancestors. Harvard professor Daniel Lieberman is a world-renowned expert in evolutionary biology and anthropology. Beyond the walls of his lab, Daniel has traveled from Africa to Greenland to study non-Westernized populations and their physical activities. In his latest New York Times bestseller, Exercise, Daniel brings together a

decade of his research to debunk common myths about fitness and health. You are in for a treat. Daniel, thank you for joining me today. My pleasure. And it's fun to do this in person. Now, we have a tradition that we always do on this show, which we start with a quick fire round of questions, which in general professors don't love because the rules are you can say yes or no, or if you have to, a one sentence answer. Are you willing to give it a go? Let's try. All right. Did our ancestors exercise? No. Is sitting bad for us? No. Is it normal to dislike exercise? Yes. Do we need to do 10,000 steps per day? Not sure. Okay. And lastly, can someone start exercising

late in life and still benefit? Absolutely. That wasn't so bad, was it? No. So I have one that you can have a whole sentence for. What's the biggest myth about exercise that you've discovered through your research? Well, I think it's the one that you just asked, which is this idea that it's sort of normal as you get older to be less active.

And I think of all the myths that I've been interested in, that one is not only, I think that surprises me just how much people think it's just normal to become less active as they get older, but also people don't understand just how important it is to stay active as you get older, you know, for a thousand reasons, not the least of which is your mental health and your physical health. I thought I was brought up with these stories that if we were living, you know living in the African savannah, then the young people ran around and killed the wildebeest and the hunting and the old people sat around at home, but they were wise and old and that was sort of their job.

So I think that is definitely the, you're laughing, but I think that is very much the story that I was brought up with. Yeah, kind of the Rudyard Kipling view of human behavior. I'm worried now that I have the Rudyard Kipling view, that doesn't sound good. But that is, I think, that is sort of the idea that you were old and that the value of surviving was your wisdom. And of course, you wouldn't do anything physical, you'd just sort of, you know, be supported by these young, strong people. Well, wisdom is important. And that's certainly one of the values of getting old. And for sure, wisdom that elders impart to youngers is important, but they also work hard.

I think that's really interesting. And I really enjoyed the book, which I was reading on the plane over, and it made me think about exercise quite a bit. And for me, exercise is definitely a chore. So I work out two to three times a week because I've been convinced by a whole variety of scientists that this is really important for my health, but it's definitely not fun. And the pleasure I take in it is at the point that it's done. I'm like, oh, I feel really good that I've now done it, but I'm definitely not taking a lot of pleasure during the period of lifting these weights. And I know that's one of the things that you talk about in this book, along with a whole series of other myths. So I'm really looking forward to

digging into that. Before we talk about how we learn from our ancestors and how your own research has looked at both what they might've done in the past and modern hunter-gatherers, though. I'd love to start actually with just a really simple question. So is exercise good for us? And if so, why do most of us hate it? Well, to answer that question, let's start with the definition. All right. So exercise is a form of physical activity. So physical activity is just moving, right?

You know, climbing the stairs to get to my office, you know, making breakfast, whatever. That's all forms of physical activity. And exercise is a special form of physical activity, which is discretionary, voluntary physical activity that we do for the sake of health and fitness. Rather than because I need to get to the top of the house in order to pick something up. Yeah. And if you think about exercise that way, and actually exercise comes from the Latin word that has to do with hoeing. There's a reason when you do your maths exercises, right? We call them exercises. You're not using anything other than your brain there, right? But it's a modern behavior, right? Nobody until very recently exercised under discretionary,

voluntary reasons for the sake of health and fitness. Is that right? You say that as if it's obvious, but there weren't lots of people doing exercises in the Roman times or the... Well, that's still recent as far as I'm concerned, right? Oh, okay. Your idea of recent is longer than mine. Yeah. I mean, I'm talking prehistory, right? For millions and millions of years, people were physically active for two reasons and two reasons only. When it was necessary, in other words, in order to get food or to avoid being somebody else's food, right? Or when it was rewarding.

Think about play. I mean, children in all cultures play. Adults play. And play, of course, is very useful for all kinds of reasons. But our ancestors were not doing exercise in order to make sure that when they went hunting, they would be successful. No, never.

Again, you say that, but that's really interesting because we think now you need to do lots of exercise in order to go and be successful at, you know, if you were going to be going to have to run in a race, you think, well, you need to do lots of exercise in order to be successful at the race. But our ancestors didn't need to do that in order to catch the antelope. Yeah, I mean, there's many ways to answer that question. But let me just say that the reason I started this book, actually, they really, sometimes, you know, people make up these epiphanies, right? But I actually really had one when I was doing some research in northern Mexico, studying a Native American population that's famous for its running, the Tarahumara.

And I was collecting data. I was being a good anthropologist, had my clipboard with all my questions that I'd worked out in advance and talked to ethnographer friends to make sure that I was doing it in the right proper way when I was measuring their feet and measuring their running biomechanics and doing all kinds of stuff. Just me and a guy who I'd hired to help me travel around

and we were sleeping on the floors of Pueblos and all that sort of stuff. Ever I asked people about training, that's what you're talking about, I got these really like confused answers, right? People didn't understand the question. And I had a translator. And finally,

there was this one old guy I was interviewing, and he was a shaman, famous for his long-distance running, too. And so I could tell my translator was asking my usual question, how do you train for running? And he looked at me, and I didn't even need a translator. I could say, why would anybody run if they didn't have to? And that's what he said. And, you know, this is a guy who runs like 100-mile races, right? He doesn't train. His life is his training. He's very physically active. He walks long distances. Occasionally, when he was young, he used to run in order to hunt.

But the idea of getting up in the morning, like this morning, I ran about five or six miles, right? Just for the sake of running five or six miles. The various places I go to do research and when I run in the morning, they laugh at me. They think it's hilarious. And it makes sense because most people in most parts of the world, for most of our evolutionary history,

struggled to get enough food, right? It's hard, right? And I spent, what, about 500 calories this morning running my five miles. If you're struggling to get enough calories, wasting 500 calories in the morning, just for no purpose whatsoever, it's not a good idea. It's maladaptive. Playing, on the other hand, when you're a child, you learn skills, you develop capacity, you learn social skills. There's

all kinds of good things that come out of play, and adults continue to do that. But play is kind of a special form of physical activity. I don't think of play as exercise. It doesn't at least fit my definition of exercise. And so does that mean that just the normal lives that our ancestors would have lived was in essence sort of all the training they required in order to then be able to do that run or that chase or whatever. So they didn't need to do exercise because just their normal life was providing the necessary training. Yes, they were very physically active, right? And physical activity promotes a response by your body, which not only improves or maintains your performance ability,

but also has all kinds of health benefits. You know, the average hunter-gatherer walks 10 to 15 kilometers every day, every single day. There are no weekends. There's no holidays. There's no retirement. There's nothing. They do it day in, day out for their whole lives. And they're often digging. Sometimes they have to run. They have to climb trees. They have to lift things, you know. Their lives involve a reasonable amount, not a huge amount, but a reasonable amount of physical activity. And that gets them basically just enough calories to make it to the next day. And they occasionally do things for fun that are physical. They dance.

But dancing, of course, is very important for helping you find a mate and having fun and for social reasons. Again, it's fun, right? Yeah. fun and for social reasons. Again, it's fun, right? But no hunter-gatherer I've ever met or heard of or seen of in the ethnographic literature has ever gone to find some rocks and then just simply lift them. Lift them in order to be strong enough for their other tasks. Yeah. Or go for a five-mile run in the morning, whatever. It's inconceivable. I love that because it's definitely at odds with, I think, a lot of what people think. Maybe that helps to answer, I guess, the second part of my question, which is, because you also said exercise is good for us. I then was like, so why do most of us

hate it? Does this tie into the fact that actually, historically, we never needed to do the exercise? Yeah, well, I mean, again, remember, it's physical activity that's good for us. Exercise is a kind of physical activity. But if you're a postman and you walk around delivering mail, that's good for us. Exercise is a kind of physical activity. But if you're a postman and you walk around delivering mail, that's physical activity. It's not exercise. And it's good for them. One of the very famous early studies, actually the first major study to show that physical activity is good for your health was done in London on bus conductors and compared the bus conductors, the people who walked up and down the bus collecting tickets. Which is definitely a long time ago because I remember when I was a child going on buses inors and compared the bus conductors, you know, the people who walked up and down the bus collecting tickets. Which is definitely a long time ago,

because I remember when I was a child going on buses in London, and there was this man with this little thing that used to do that, right? And then there was the driver, right? And the driver sat in a seat all day long driving the bus, and the rate of heart attacks in the drivers was twice that of the conductors. Twice. Twice. And the only difference was the bus driver was sitting down all day

and the conductor was walking around. Was walking around. And then there was a follow-up study because they thought, well, okay, maybe drivers are really stressed because they have to deal with London traffic. So they compared postal workers in London with the people who worked in the post office who managed them, the administrators, right?

And again, exactly the same result, right? So that was back in the 1950s, right? And since then, of course, we've had, you know, I couldn't even count the number of studies which show how important physical activity is for health. But again, that's physical activity, not exercise. But if you're already a very physically active person, and you don't need that much physical activity for the benefits,

just a moderate amount is more than sufficient, really, to promote health. And you're struggling to get enough food, which is what the case was for hunter gatherers and most subsistence farmers, the people I work with in Africa, for example, are struggling to get enough food. I run maybe 30 to 50 miles a week. That's a lot of calories. And if you're stressed for calories, that's a really bad idea. I mean, you're actually putting your family at risk. So when people say that we hate to exercise, it's because we're asking people to do something that is intrinsically unnatural. And the example I love to point out is if you ever go to an airport or a mall or a subway stop or

whatever, where there's an escalator next to a stairway. I was just in the subway here in Boston going up to South Station and I got off the subway car and everybody filed and waited in line to go up the escalator. And I was one of the few people who took the stairs because I have to, otherwise I'm a hypocrite, right? And did you take the stairs because you know it's good for you, but you hate doing it anyway? Or are you in this exception for some reason? No, I don't like taking the stairs. You don't like take the stairs because you know it's good for you, but you hate doing it anyway? Or are you in this exception for some reason? No, I don't like taking the stairs. You don't like taking the stairs.

But if anybody, you know, I'm Mr. You-Should-Be-Physically-Active. If anybody catches me on the escalator, I'm in trouble, right? So you're in the same world as me. It's not that you enjoy it. You're just trying to override your natural tendency to basically be lazy and not do this. Just like, you know, most people, if you put a piece of cake in front of me and an apple, right, I'm going to want the cake, right? And I have to override my instincts to eat the cake

rather than the apple. And if nobody's looking, I might have the cake, right? And I do sometimes meet people who seem to really enjoy exercise and they do like these extreme things like Ironman or ultramarathons or the rest of it. So are you saying that they're just a bit weird, which I've always suspected? Well, I think it's more complicated than that.

I mean, I usually rarely enjoy starting exercise, but I usually am glad I've done it when it's over. And that's what you mentioned at the beginning, right? So, I mean, this morning was no exception, right? There was a beautiful morning here in Boston. It was perfect weather. Could not have been nicer for running. And I was like dithering and complaining.

And finally, my wife said, come on, just go. Time for you to go. And, you know, I didn't enjoy the first mile very much. I never do. Then I settled in and I enjoyed myself. And by the time I came home, I was glad I did it. But I've done it enough to know that I get some benefit and I'm reasonably fit, that it's not a horrible chore, right? But if I'm unfit and struggling to exercise, right, if I'm overweight or haven't exercised in a long time,

it's hard. And we shouldn't make people feel bad for not liking it. You have to overcome some inertia. And you're saying that is deeply rooted in us it's actually our body has sort of evolved to protect those you know protect our calories not waste energy on doing this exercise so whenever you do do this exercise you sort of you deserve a big round of applause is what i'm hearing like you're sort of overcoming something that is actually natural to say well don't waste your energy doing this because after all if you really needed to do this you'd go and do it anyway because you won't get any food or whatever. So at which point you wouldn't need this strong desire to do exercise.

You'd just be like, well, I have to go and walk that far in order to get this food. Otherwise, I'm going to go hungry. And that is definitely worse. Is that how I understand it? Yeah, I mean, I think you've made it more complicated than necessary. I mean, again, just to simplify it, it's not really complicated, right? We evolved to be physically active for two reasons and two reasons only, full stop, when it was necessary or rewarding. And so if we want to help people exercise,

we have to either make it necessary or rewarding or both. So if I'm going to meet a friend for a run, I don't necessarily even think about it as exercise. Hey, I'm going to go meet, I'm going to go be my friend Elena, which I do every Friday morning and we run together. And it's fun. We chat about the week and this one, et cetera. And I don't think about it so much as exercise. It's my, you know, weekly meeting with my friend and neighbor Elena, or maybe I have a coach, right? And my coach says, you know, training for Boston Marathon on Tuesday, I want you to do this. He's kind of made it necessary for me, right? And I've signed up for this race and I better damn well train, otherwise I'm going to be humiliated or have a horrible time. So we use carrots, we use sticks, but it's really very

simple. We evolved to be physically active either because it's necessary or rewarding. Now we live in this world where people know that it's good for them to be physically active, aka exercise, because they don't otherwise, you know, they sit in chairs all day long. And either they somehow have the willpower to overcome that distaste for what they're doing, or they find ways to make it fun. Hi, I'm Zoe's U.S. Medical Director, Dr. Will Bolsowitz, and I'm excited to tell you about a free resource that's going to kickstart your journey to better gut health. If you're a regular listener, you probably already know how

a healthy gut microbiome is important for digestion, immune support, and mental well-being, and that a high-fiber diet is a great way to improve your gut health. But where to start? And what exactly does a high-fiber shopping list look like? With 95% of US adults deficient in fiber, clearly this is not common knowledge. Zoe's Gut Guide has the answers. To get yours for free, simply go to zoe.com slash gut guide and start feeling the benefits of a healthier gut today. That's brilliant. So one way is that suddenly, instead of this being unpleasant, there's this way that switches it to being fun.

And actually, you talk about dancing in the book, and I was sort of struck by that, that in my mind, I enjoy dancing. That's definitely not exercise. That's fun. And then you point out, well, actually, it's quite a lot of exercise, really, but because you switch to think, you don't think about it like that, it's just fun, and therefore you just respond to it in a different way. Yeah, I mean, the Tarahumara I was mentioning earlier

are famous for their endurance dancing. Everybody talks about their endurance running. They have dances. I've been there. They'll dance for 24 hours. 24 hours? Yes. They just go on and on and on and on. There's a lot of drinking going on. It's a party. They're having a great time, right? And that, of course, is obviously training, right? They don of remote tribes around the world to understand sort of how they live their lives.

And I guess, could you help our listeners to understand, like, why do you do that? And what does it help us to understand? Well, you know, I think it's normal to think that your life is normal, right? Yeah. You know, I think it's normal. As a child, that's absolutely how we all think, isn't it? Sure. I mean, I think it's normal to get in this metal box and travel across the city and get

in a metal tube and fly around from one continent to another and eat breakfast cereal that comes in a box. And we could go on and talk about all the very modern things that we think are normal, but we didn't evolve that way, right? We evolved to be hunter-gatherers for almost our entire evolutionary history, we were hunter-gatherers. And then for thousands of years, we were subsistence farmers before the industrial era. And if you want to understand how bodies work and how physical activity and diet and all these things affect us, you can't just study people in Cambridge, Massachusetts or London or where have

you. You have to go out into the rest of the world, which is how other people use their bodies. There's a colleague of mine, Joe Henrich, who's written this wonderful paper called The Weirdest People in the World. Weird, for him, is Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. It's actually only about 10% of the world fits that category. A colleague of mine actually did a study where we showed that over 90%, or approximately 90% of all the biomedical data, psychological data, medical data, comes from Europe and North America, a little bit of Australia. We're generalizing about human beings from a very tiny, unusual,

frankly, weird sample. So if you want to understand how and why we are the way we are, how our bodies evolved to work, what it's like to be physically active, how physical activity functions in aging, and you can't just study people in the West. You need to travel elsewhere. And so that's why we do it. It's interesting. We've covered on the podcast some scientists looking specifically at the gut microbiome. And that's obviously something that Zoe is very interested in. And one of the things they talk about is sort of a bit similar to this, which is when you look at the gut microbiome of the people you're talking as weird people, so sort of westernized post-industrial. It's bizarre.

This microbiome is incredibly shrunken compared to the microbiome that they see elsewhere. And it sounds like you're saying more broadly, in a sense, our whole lives and how we understand things, you're saying we need to step away from how we might be living in the West because actually these sort of pre-industrialized environments are a much better way to understand really what is the way our bodies are built and what would really be healthy for us. Yeah. I'm going to give you a simple example. Like, what did you carry today?

A small rucksack. Exactly. So that's weird, right? Is it weird? Yes. I mean, in most populations, in most of the world, people spend much of their day carrying heavy things. They carry babies, they carry food. If they hunt an animal, they have to carry it back to camp. They carry water. I mean, if you and I want water, we just go and turn a little tap, right? Out it comes, right? That's incredibly recent, right? If you lived in London just 150 years ago, you'd have to go to the local well and pump it and then carry it back to your, you know, cholera-filled water as well, right? So we don't carry anything anymore, right? And so we think that how backs function, almost all the data we have about back biomechanics is on people who sit

in chairs all day long and never carry anything. And if you really want to understand how the back functions and how physical activity affects the back, you need to go to places like where I go. Like, for example, we're working in Rwanda this summer where people have to carry absolutely everything. It's really interesting. So what you're saying is what we think of as normal, which we just pick up from looking everybody around us, like

it's normal not really to carry very much, is actually weirdly abnormal and not the way that our bodies are built or evolved, because actually it's never been like that until just very recently in a small part of the world. To go to a supermarket, get a shopping cart, put boxes of food in it, carry the shopping cart, then you might carry the bag to your car. And that's about it, right? Everything about that, from going to the supermarket to the way you carry foods around the supermarket, all of that is completely abnormal. So, I've never been to any of these places and many of our listeners haven't. So, what is it that is surprising that is different?

Because there's some things that we understand, obviously, that that environment is quite different from ours. But the example you just gave is like, oh, I'd never thought about it. What is it that is sort of surprising that you've taken away about how we lived versus? I don't know how to answer that question because there's so many things that are different about our world. I think actually what surprises me the most is how human beings are just human beings, right? People are lazy everywhere.

People have jealousies and whatever. We often tend to romanticize the past and think about the good old times when we were farmers or hunter-gatherers. And they have tough lives too. I mean, I think the more I travel around the world and work and live with other cultures, the more I realize how, you know, scratch underneath the surface, there are many things about humans that are the same. But also, of course, there are plenty of things that are very different. Our diet,

of course, is very different. I mean, think about like after this interview, you're going to think, hmm, I'm hungry. What shall I have for dinner? Should we have Italian or shall I get pizza or shall I go for Chinese food or vegetarian restaurant? We just think it's normal to choose what you're going to eat. If you're a farmer or a hunter-gatherer, you don't choose what you eat. You eat what you have, right? You eat what you grow. We think it's normal to exercise and to sit in chairs all day long and to not carry things. I mean, I could go on.

And many people are just surprised when I mention the water that they must know at some level, but they just haven't really thought about how our lives have been transformed by plumbing. I think that's right. I think if you don't experience this, it's really interesting what you said. I'm still thinking about the carrying, which is the bit I think that I'm really struck by because I think I'm so used to this idea that you don't really need to carry things around very much and that therefore you have to do exercise where you carry heavy iron weights around,

because I've been told that's really important for my health. And you're just saying, well, you're only doing that because until very recently, of course, you'd be carrying lots of heavy things around just to function. So it's sort of like we're having to substitute these things that would have just happened as part of our lives. You know what's even funnier? You probably actually spent money buying heavy iron things to carry them. I mean, that's hilarious, right? I mean, imagine explaining that to a hunter-gatherer or to your great-great-great-great-great grandparents who are farmers somewhere in England or wherever. They would think you're the silliest

person on the planet. I mean, I think just explain it to my father, to be honest. I think he has the same attitude as the hunter-gatherers you were describing about exercise. He's like, well, why would you do that if you don't have to? So I'm not sure I have to go that far back. I'd love to talk about some of the sort of, therefore, the myths of exercise that come out of this. I think there's many different things that you've learned out of this experience, but it seems like one of the things that you've taken from a lot of these different people that you've been to, and I think a lot of other scientific literature, if I understand, is there are quite a few things that we say today about exercise that not only aren't well backed

up by science, but might actually be complete myths. Where would you start? What's the thing that you would... God, there's so many, it's hard to know. Well, I started the book off actually with the first section of the book is on inactivity. Because if you want to understand activity, you also need to understand inactivity. There's two sides of the same coin. One of the myths is that our ancestors were incredibly physically active. They were built like Arnold Schwarzenegger and incredibly strong and incredibly fast and worked really hard and never sat in a chair ever and slept always eight hours and all that. All of that's false. All of that is false. All of that is false. So first of all, our ancestors, our hunter-gatherers, even farmers,

are strong by many people's standards, but they're not super strong because, after all, muscle's expensive, right? If you build weights and lift weights to bulk up, you're going to add a lot of muscle mass. But muscle is a really expensive tissue. There's a reason we have this use it or lose it physiology is that if you don't need it, you don't want to pay for the extra calories, right? You're saying that as you increase the muscles, you need extra calories just to support those existing muscles? Yeah.

You spend a good 30%, 40% of your metabolism just paying for your muscles, just sitting there, not even using them. Just to sustain them in existence. Yeah. They're expensive tissues. So you want to be economical. You want enough, but not too much, right? Because if you have too much muscle and then you don't get any food, then you might end

up dying. Is that what you're saying? I mean, so the basic fundamental principle behind life is you eat food and then you have babies, right? That's the equation of life. Food in, babies out. That's all evolution actually cares about, which is kind of depressing. But nonetheless, that's a little depressing. Okay, keep going. That's what we're about. All organisms ultimately are about bringing in energy, using that energy to reproduce and create other versions of themselves. And we are, sadly, actually no different, right? But energy is a constrained, limited resource for most organisms and was until recently, and it's still for many people today, still the case. So anytime

you spend a calorie on running in the morning or paying for your unnecessary muscle, that's energy you're not spending on reproduction. We call this energy allocation theory, right? So spending energy that's on, say, extra muscle that is then taking energy away from reproduction. And so we long ago evolved a system to add muscle when we need it. And when you say take away from reproduction, I think a lot of people are a bit confused. You don't literally mean having sex. You mean something much broader. Yeah, hormones, your testosterone levels or your estrogen levels, your progesterone levels

and energy that's allocated towards reproduction, exactly. Or nursing. I mean, nursing is very expensive. 600 calories a day to produce breast milk. So we have all kinds of adaptations to add muscle when we need it. So that's, you know, working out and then for atrophy to occur, to lose that muscle when we're not using it. That's useful. Just again, just to make sure that we're all following, if we don't do this physical exercise,

we see our muscle shrink. This is our evolution sort of protecting us and saying, well, you clearly don't need that. so I can reduce it. That's going to reduce the number of calories that you need for your muscles. So actually you can use this for something else because getting calories is hard as far as our body is concerned. Even though it's no longer true, we can get them really easily at the convenience store. Correct. And so the hunter-gatherers that I've met,

but I haven't met that many because there aren't that many on the planet. But also if you look at the literature, they're reasonably fit and strong, but none of them are bulked up. They're not super strong, right? And also they mostly engage in endurance, not that much strength physical activity. So that's one myth.

Another myth is that they never sit. And a former student of mine, Dave Reikland, who's at the University of Southern California, did a wonderful paper a few years ago in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science showing that actually, if you look at sitting time, they're not, of course, in chairs like the ones we're sitting in right now. They actually sit as much as Westerners. Is that right? Yes. Because if you're not being physically active, well, it makes sense to save energy, right? And my dog sits, cows sit, birds sit, every animal sits. Why shouldn't humans sit?

So this idea that sitting is the new smoking has, I think, been exaggerated. The average Hadza, for example, these are hunter-gatherers in Tanzania that have been well-studied. I mean, they're putting sensors on them. They sit 9.9 hours a day. Wow, because I feel like that's what everybody's being told now, post-pandemic, on their Zoom, that they mustn't sit eight hours a day. But you're saying that they had to do more

sitting. Yes. Now, of course, the thing is that when they're not sitting, they're being physically active. So the problem is, if you look at the epidemiological data on sitting, it turns out that it's not work time sitting that's so associated with bad health. It's actually leisure time sitting. So if you spend all your day sitting at work, and then you go home and you sit all evening watching television, and you sit in your car getting to work, and you sit in your car getting... If you never are physically active, then of course you're going to pay a price for that. But it's not the sitting itself which is bad. It's the fact that you're not doing any of this activity on top.

Because our normal experience, you're saying as human beings, is quite a lot of sitting, but then quite a lot of physical activity to live. And our issue is we've kept the sitting, but we've also got rid of the rest of this physical activity and turned that into more sitting. That's part of it. And the other is how long you sit, what's called the sitting bout. So it turns out that if you spend time in a hunter-gatherer camp or in a village of farmers or whatever, people are sitting, but then they're getting up constantly. They're getting up because of the kids.

They're getting up to cook. They're getting up to do this. They're getting up. So the average amount of time they spend sitting at any one moment, at any one bout is about 15 minutes. Okay. So they're not like sitting for three hours at a stretch absorbed in there. Watching the telly. Right, exactly. And it turns out that intermittent sitting or interrupted sitting turns out to be much healthier than uninterrupted sitting. Because when you get up, you're actually turning on your muscles,

you're turning on all kinds of machinery in your body that it's almost like turning the engine in your car on, right? It's interesting. So even when we go back to the sitting, then there is a takeaway here, is it? Which is that- Get up every once in a while. You might be all right if you're constantly getting up,

but sitting for a prolonged period of time- Not good for you. Not good for us. It's not how we're naturally evolved to be. Right. So some people have phones that tell them, you know, their wristwatch buzzes every 15 minutes and tells them to get up and go pee or make a cup of tea or whatever.

That's all good. Hi, I hope you've enjoyed our journey back in time today, getting exercise advice informed by the way our ancestors lived. Talking about going back in time, we've actually had 18 months of conversations like this with world-leading scientists, all focused on getting you to a longer, healthier life. Now, if you're short on time and want the key takeaways without all those hours of listening, we've got you covered. Our team has just created a free guide summarizing the top 10 discoveries from our podcast that

can make a real difference in your life. To get it, simply go to zoe.com slash free guide, or click the link in the show notes. And please let me know what you think of it. Okay, back to the show. One of the things I like about this is I get teased a lot by my wife, because I like to drink tea quite a lot. So that means that sort of after every meeting, basically, I'm like, oh, well, I need to go make a cup of tea. And obviously, that means I can't sit at my desk, I have to go make the cup of tea and come back. And of course, if you drink lots more fluid, then you need to go to the toilet more often as well. So now I can say, well,

it's really important for my health because a world leading professors explained this makes me more like the way I was supposed to be. Is that right? Yes. Not only because it makes you more like you're supposed to be, it's just even without knowing that hunter-gatherers did it, it turns out to be healthy. Do we need to make fundamental changes to the way that somehow our lives are ordered in order to start to move? Because our lives are very different, right? And so clearly we're not going to end up living a life in the way that our ancestors did. You're not suggesting that we get rid of the water in our house and things like this, presumably. So do you need to make lots of very intentional decisions in order to try and get closer to sort of the way that we need to live in order to be healthy? I think the answer is kind of obviously yes. You know, we live in a world

where our life is mismatched to our biology in many ways, right? Think about the diseases that are more common today. Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancers, arthritis, osteoporosis, depression, anxiety. All of these are much more common today than they were in the past. And we have good data to show that, right? And by the past, I don't mean actually even that long ago. And most of those diseases, you know, most of the time when somebody walks into a doctor's office for a health visit, the vast majority of those visits

are for preventable diseases, the vast majority, at least 70% by most estimates. And how do you prevent those diseases? Well, I mean, over and over and over and over, it comes down to a few just simple basic things. Apart from not smoking, right? It's diet and exercise. Sleep is also important, of course. Avoiding psychosocial stress is important. But diet and exercise are obviously fundamental. And we live in a world, however, where we no longer have to be physically active, so we have to exercise. And tell me a bit more about, because I think it is really interesting,

you've seen the point that you're making is that we didn't exercise before. We just had a life where you got sort of this activity. Is there such a thing as a typical hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Is it very clear the sort of activities they did that therefore we need to build? Or is that actually... People want a prescription, right? And that's part of the problem, which is that there is no simple prescription. But people were physically active. They sat, but they didn't sit for long periods of time all the time. They didn't have access to, you know, industrially processed foods that had all kinds of, you know, crap added and the fiber removed, et cetera. And, you know, time after time, if you look at the literature, you know, even if you didn't know anything about our hunter-gatherer or farmer ancestors, you'd already know that, right? I mean, who doesn't know that exercise is good for them

and not eating McDonald's every day is good for them? Everybody knows that. The problem is that we live in a world where, again, now physical activity has become optional and it's less expensive and more easy to buy industrially processed foods that are unhealthy. I mean, I pay more money for food that has less sugar added, right? And I pay more money for foods in which they haven't removed the fiber for it, right? The world has become essentially kind of topsy-turvy. So it does require us to be intentional about how we organize our lives in terms of both physical activity and diet. That's just a sad truth to our lives. And there are all these people out there who are trying to make money off our desire to be comfortable, off our desire to have energy-rich

food, and we need to figure out how to overcome that. Everybody I know understands that exercise is good for them. It's just that many of us struggle in order to exercise. And so I think that part of the problem is that we kind of shame and blame them, right? We make them feel bad. Somehow they're lazy. There's something wrong with them. I think that is absolutely sort of the story that we're used to. It's like, we should do this.

And if you're not doing it, it's somehow, there's something wrong with you. Like whether it's a moral failing or a physical failing. And I feel that actually that's got even more so in the culture over the last, even like 10 years. Absolutely. The physical activity culture is such that, you know, just go do it, right? You know, just do it and all those other, you know, we need to understand that if you look, if you put couches and escalators and, you know, nice comfy chairs and whatever in the Kalahari Desert, the hunter-gatherers there would avail themselves of them just as much as you and I do, right?

So we need to find ways to help people help themselves without being dictatorial, without being sort of fascistic about it. And that means finding ways to help people either make physical activity necessary or make it rewarding or both. And that's, I think, our societal challenge. And I'd love to talk about that.

Just before we do, there were a couple of these myths that I would love just to cover first. So one, I think you mentioned at the beginning, the quickfire questions about this idea that when you get old, you should retire and slow down. Is that true? Very much no. So we actually published a paper recently called the Active Grandparent Hypothesis. So you may have heard of the grandparent hypothesis, the idea that humans evolved to be grandparents. Most species, very rarely do individuals live after they've stopped reproducing.

Whereas the average human lives about two decades after the end of reproduction, which makes us very unusual by the species. And one of the reasons, of course, is that old people impart wisdom. We talked about that earlier. But also, if you go to any non-pre-industrial society, the grandparents are out there in the fields digging and farming. The grandparents are out in the hunter-gatherers out there, you know, digging for food and hunting and providing food for their children and grandchildren. We evolved to stay active all throughout our lives. And what's important about that is that being active slows the aging process. We can talk about why that is the case. And promotes health, both mental and physical, which thereby enables people to actually live longer. So it's a feedback system. Because remember, until recently, we make a distinction between health span and life span. And until recently, there was no medical system, right? Doctors didn't exist. Your life span was your health span, right? As soon as you got really sick, you died, right?

What physical activity does, really, it's not so much important for lengthening lifespan, although it does, it's what's really important is it extends your health span by slowing aging and turning on repair and maintenance mechanisms that keep your body functioning really well. The fact that people evolved to be physically active as they aged actually helped them age so that they could be actor grandparents. And I feel a lot of people listening to this are like, you've slightly blown their mind because I think we are absolutely used to this idea that there's this big distinction between a grandparent and a parent and grandparents definitely are not like going out, you know,

in the equivalent of the hunting and digging in the field. It's like, well, you know, in the equivalent of the hunting and digging in the field. It's like, well, you know, no, obviously they'll be too frail. They won't be strong enough. That's a different thing. And now if I was thinking back to this hunter-gatherer, it'd be like, well, I assume that they sort of sit in the middle of the village and look after the little children so that, you know, the people in their 20s and 30s can go out and do these really physical things. Nothing could be further from the truth. So, there's a wonderful study by an anthropologist named Kristen Hawks, who showed that among the Hadza, again, we always go back to the Hadza, because they're pretty much the best study hunter-gatherer group, the grandmothers actually

spend more time digging up tubers, you know, food, than the mothers. Grandmothers do more digging than the mothers. Yes, because mothers are dealing with their children, right? You know, there's a handful, right? Grandma can go off and spend more time. Of course, they also do a lot of childcare and other things like that. They can actually spend more time. They end up digging more tubers. I've seen this myself. Some of these grandmas, like, my God, they're like machines. They're like, it's hard to keep up with them. They're like digging machines, right? So they're actually working harder than the mothers. And of course, they're not doing it as a form of exercise.

They're doing it to help their children and their children and their grandchildren. But here's the thing. It actually helps them. The most famous study on exercise and aging was actually done here in Boston at Harvard Medical School by a guy named Ralph Paffenbarger. He figured out that if you wanted to study aging and exercise, Harvard was actually like the best place on the planet. And the reason for that is that the Harvard Alumni Association, the development office, never lets go of its alums because they're constantly asking them for money. You never, never get left alone. Until the day you die, Harvard will ask you for money. And because of that, he thought, this is perfect. We can get the Harvard alum, you know, the development office

to let us follow a bunch of Harvard alums as they age, find out how they're doing, give them some questionnaire, you know, find out how active they are, whether they smoke and what, et cetera, and then find out effects on aging. And what he showed was, and of course it's been replicated many times, but this is a classic paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that as people get older, the effect of exercise increases their lifespan more. So, for example, Harvard alums who are 20 or 30 or 40 years old who exercised more than the sedentary alums from the same class,

they had about a 20% lower death rate. By the time in their 60s or 70s or 80s, after correcting for other factors, they had a 50% lower death rate. So once you're in your 60s, 70s, 80s, the people exercising were having a 50% lower death rate than the others. That's correct. In other words, the other way of saying is that the older you get, the bigger the benefit of exercise is on your longevity. And of course, since then, we understand the mechanisms behind that because every time you exercise or climb the stairs or go dig up some tubers or carry water instead of turning on the fire,

whatever it is you do, right? What you're doing is you're stressing your body, right? The muscles are getting little tears. The mitochondria in your muscles, those are little organelles that produce energy. They're actually producing reactive oxygen species. They're actually causing oxidation, like when you brown an apple, right? They're producing these little chemicals that are reactive, right? You're heating up, and so you're actually damaging your proteins. There's

a thousand bad things that happen when you exercise. Okay, so if all this sounds bad, you're describing all the bad things that happen when you exercise. Exercise is stressful. It's a physiological stress. In every single system of your body is stress. However, we evolved to be physically active, right? So for every single one of these stresses, our bodies turn on repair and maintenance mechanisms. We produce antioxidants that mop up all those free radicals, those reactive oxygen species. We produce proteins and enzymes that get rid of the proteins that have been damaged. We produce enzymes that repair the mutations that are caused in our DNA by the exercise. I mean, I could go on, right? Every single thing you can

think about has been natural selection over billions of generations of not just humans, but our ancestors, has produced responses so that physical activity isn't damaging for us. It's actually the reverse. You need to do the physical activity in order to trigger all of these beneficial effects. Exactly. Because we never evolved not to be physically active. So we never involved turn on these mechanisms in the absence of physical activity. You're saying we're evolved and our bodies work.

Well, obviously, I'll only turn on the repair after the damage. And it never imagined that you might be able to go through a whole day without having to do lots of activity and set it off. Is that what you're saying? That's partly. And the other is that it's very hard to program the body just to repair exactly that damage, right? You tend to overshoot, right? So, the analogy I often use is like, imagine you spilled your tea on the floor right now and you then cleaned it up. The floor would actually be a little bit cleaner after you cleaned it up, right? Because then it is right now because it's actually not all that clean, right?

So, and that's exactly the same with these repair and maintenance mechanisms. We actually tend to overshoot them. And so the end result is that physical activity isn't bad for us. Otherwise, people who exercise would die younger, right? Instead, we turn on these repair and maintenance mechanisms that actually prevent, that actually improve every aspect of ourselves. Which is why exercise slows aging, because you actually slow, through these repair and maintenance mechanisms, the aging process.

And we haven't invented a way to pop a pill that just switches on these repair mechanisms. And we never will, because you have to take an entire pharmacy every day. And furthermore, every single one of those pills would have side effects. There's one other important benefit of exercise when you're younger, which is that exercise, remember, we talked earlier about energy, right? And there's only so much energy you have. Well, it turns out that if you're physically inactive, right? If I don't exercise, my body will think, oh, hey, extra energy, let's turn up the hormones. And this is especially true in women. So women who are inactive have higher levels of estrogen and progesterone. And of course, that's the body's natural way to try

to increase fertility, but there's actually, there are already plenty fertile, right? So what happens is that you're actually unnaturally turning up reproductive hormones, which increases the risk of cancer. So people who are physically active actually have lower risks of cancer. Breast cancer rates are between 30 and 50% lower. I'll say that again, between 30 and 50% lower in people who just get 150 minutes a week of exercise. That's 20 minutes a day. That's amazing. And the reason for that is partly because of this energy turn on. I'll give you another example. Remember, we talked about repair and maintenance mechanisms. When you go out there and do stuff, right, you're encountering the outside world,

you turn on your immune system. One of the cell types that gets turned on by exercise are cells called natural killer cells, which sound awful. Sound a bit scary. And they're also called cytotoxic T cells. Again, sound a little scary. But these are the cells that protect us against cancer.

They also protect us against viral infections and various other things. We heard about them a lot during COVID. So people who exercise actually are turning on the cell types and then moving them about their body through the circulatory system, thereby protecting them from the damage that they might get, but also from damage that comes from cancer. Natural killer cells are our first line of defense against cancerous cells. So if you look at the data, almost every single form of cancer, with almost no exceptions,

people have significantly lower rates of cancer if they're regularly physically active. And that's, again, because we turn on these systems that we don't otherwise turn on in the absence of physical activity. Hi. I have a small favor to ask. We want this podcast to reach as many people as possible as we continue our mission to improve the health of millions. And watching this show grow is what motivates the whole team at Zoe to keep up the really hard work of creating new episodes each week. So right now, if you could share a link to the show with one friend who would benefit from today's information, it would mean a great deal to me. Thank you. It's amazing. So that's an incredibly strong argument you're putting forward about physical

activity and exercise. And I'd love, therefore argument you're putting forward about physical activity and exercise. And I'd love, therefore, to start to talk about practical advice, because you also started at the beginning by saying we're all naturally set up to try and avoid doing any unnecessary activity. So there's this huge tension between all this amazing impact on our health and actually how we're naturally evolved to avoid doing any of this. And so I would love some really smart insight. Most people listening to this are therefore going to be saying, I sort of hate exercise. I'm hearing you say that it's important, but people tell me about important things I should do all the time, but it's still

hard to do. Is there any insight from everything that you've learned that can help us to understand how we can try and find a way to do this activity? Well, again, I'm not a psychologist, so you should take my advice with a grain of salt. But again, I go back to this first principle, which is that we evolve to be physically active for two reasons, and two reasons only, when it's necessary or rewarding. And the fact of the matter is, we're not going to make it necessary for most people. Most people don't have to be physically active in order to survive. So I think we should focus more on the rewarding bit. And for me, the most rewarding kinds of physical activity, and I think it's true for most people, is making it social. A lot of people, when they complain to me about exercise,

they go to the gym and I go on the treadmill and I hate it. Maybe they'll make it rewarding by listening to this podcast or something like that. Sometimes when I am forced inside on a treadmill, I mean, believe me, I listen to something or watch something or whatever. But really, the best social activities are when you're with a friend, right? When you're with other people and it ceases to be exercise, it becomes fun, right? Is that why sport is sort of short rather than exercise? Because actually, it's social and it's got this sort of competitive element. Yeah. If you're tired, your friends say, come on, keep going or whatever. And you have have like a little peer pressure to keep going, and you know, the miles pass by if you're running, or whatever it is you're doing, or going for a walk, or whatever. You go for a walk with a friend,

you don't think of it as exercise, you're going for a walk with a friend, right? You know, dancing, you mentioned it earlier, dancing is exercise, right? But we don't think of it as that, we think of it as a social activity, and why not have, why don't we have more public dancing? Why don't we have more, you know, towns and cities have, and cities have bands on street corners for people to go dancing in the evening? I mean, we can think of all kinds of ways of doing this, right? But we don't, because I think our imaginations have been limited by the way we've industrialized and corporatized physical activity. And it doesn't have to be any of those things. There's nothing wrong with it, but it doesn't really work. What is the sorts of exercises you think that we need to do? Because

again, I think this is also an area where there's a lot of myths, right? About, you know, you must do 10,000 steps or you need to do, you know, these particular sorts of exercises. What is... Well, that's part of the medicalization of exercise, right? We prescribe it like a pill, right? And, you know, it doesn't work that way, right? It depends on who you are, how old you are, what your issues are. Are you worried about Alzheimer's? Are you worried about cancer? Are you worried about heart disease, etc.? Are you injured? Are you unfit? Are you overweight? There's never going to be one solution. But I would say this is some simple principles, which is that no matter who you are, some is better than none, right? Just a few thousand steps a day has been shown, and that's not a lot that much, a few thousand steps a day has been

shown to provide benefits over none. And furthermore, the more you do, you get increasing benefits, but those benefits tend to tail off, right? So you don't need to run marathons or ultra marathons. In fact, it's not going to help you at all. And we didn't evolve to do any one thing, right? We didn't evolve just to walk, although walking is the most fundamental form of physical activity. We also evolved to, you know, carry things and pick things up and whatever. And so, mixing it up is always a good idea. So, would just walking be sufficient activity for people? Or are you saying, actually, it's better than nothing, but there's clearly other things you need to do to sort of,

which is a bit what I've taken away. I don't really know what sufficient means, right? And again, whatever you do is better than none. So if all that you can do is get some walking in, that's fine. But if you have the ability or the inclination to do more than walking and do a little vigorous physical activity, because walking is what we call moderate physical activity right you get your heart rate up to about 50 of your maximum about is for walking which is good right walking is the most fundamental basic form of physical activity bar none so if you're going to do anything walk and this is back

to your saying that it's amazing how far people walk in these hunter-gatherer environments yeah and i think you mentioned also that they're not necessarily sort of running as much as maybe we had this... Well, they run sometimes, but you know, they don't like running every day. They're not running five miles every morning, right? Maybe once a week they might do some running, you know? So you're saying it's not like every day they are running in order to do something they have to do? No, definitely not. I love the way you say some of these things and so they're so obvious from your experience.

It's really fun. And I'm like, I have absolutely no idea, in fact, what would be normal in this environment. But again, just because it's normal doesn't mean that's what we should do. That's the myth of the paleo diet, right? If you eat like hunter-gatherer ancestors, you're going to be, it doesn't work that way, right?

Our ancestors didn't evolve to be physically active in order to be healthy. They evolved to be physically active in order to survive and reproduce. So it's not a blueprint for exactly how we should be today. It just gives us information about what we evolved to do, and then helps us understand the mismatches that we have in the world today. But it's not a prescription. Okay, it doesn't mean we have to live exactly like, because I think a lot of people are listening to this and say, so we should be trying to live as close as possible to that.

That's facile. That's wrong. That's a very bad way of using evolutionary data. And that's the myth of the paleo diet. You're saying it's facile, but I think it's not meaning like, it's obviously not true. They didn't have medicine. They didn't have refrigerators. They didn't have, you know,

there's all kinds of good things we've invented today. And should we abandon those because our hunter gatherers didn't have them? So it's sort of trying to understand which of those things by not having a hurting us and adjusting for that rather than just assuming that everything they did like just assuming their diet is better always or that they're particular so that's not always the right answer. Yeah, we call that the naturalistic

fallacy that what was you know done in the past or what's natural must necessarily be better. Sometimes it is. It's a reasonable you know way to start thinking about things but we use science to test these ideas. So this is like saying, we now know that if you boil the water, it gets rid of the germs. That's a good thing. And the fact that we didn't do that in the past

doesn't mean that... Yes, yes. Hunter-gatherers only had unboiled water. Therefore, I'm never going to have boiled water. Okay. So that's an example where you're saying, actually, we could have made, you know, there's just progress

that we didn't understand. Yes, we don't have to abandon all kinds of modern things. And so the reason why you talk about the activity is that it's it our body is sort of requiring this activity in order to trigger all of this maintenance and repair and we haven't come up with an alternative today in our lifestyle to solve for that so we need to create this activity to trigger it's our bodies evolved to acquire some degree of physical activity to turn on all these repair and maintenance mechanisms, to modulate our hormone levels, all these sorts of things.

And if you remove them from our environment, we run into trouble. So the bottom line is, get some physical activity. More is better than none. And mix it up. And if you're going to try to do it, if you're struggling to do it, A, don't feel bad about yourself. There's nothing wrong with you. And B, try to make it fun. So example, I like to run and I often run with friends. And so on Tuesdays, I run with so-and-so and on Fridays, I run with so-and-so. And on Sundays, we have this big running group

and we often email each other the night before. It's like, hey, let's meet on Tuesday at 7.15. And I guarantee you, at Tuesday at 7 o'clock, it's like, oh my God, I'm like, hey, let's meet on Tuesday at 7.15. And I guarantee you, at Tuesday at 7 o'clock, it's like, oh my God, I'm like, what am I doing? I don't, I don't, it's raining or it's cold or I've got like, I've got to work on this paper. I got to get ready for class or whatever, you know, whatever. And I don't want to do it, but I've already promised, you know, my friend Aaron that I'm going to be there. And if I'm not there, he's going to be pissed off. And so I go and, you know, we're often like grumbling in the morning and neither of us want to see each other. And then, you know, after 10, 15 minutes, you know, it's good.

So we've made it necessary for each other. It's even made this commitment is forcing you to do it. And then in the end, then it And it's also social because, you know, he's a good friend and we have a chat about this, that and the other. And so we've made it both necessary and social. And there's all kinds of ways to do that. You can join a club or have a gym or have a trainer. I mean, if you have money, whatever, there's a thousand ways of doing that and we all have to find our own ways of doing it. But that I know works. The other thing is that we often engage in hyperbolic discounting, which is a fancy word of

saying, I'll do it next time. It's the famous marshmallow test. You can have one marshmallow now, but if you wait 20 minutes, you can have two marshmallows. And we're very bad about that. And so how often do I walk into the building I work in? My office is on the fifth floor. It's an old Victorian building. And I can guarantee you every single time I walk into the building I work in, my office is on the fifth floor. It's an old Victorian building. And I can guarantee you every single time I walk into the building, I would like to take the elevator. Every single time. But I don't. And I think, okay, you know what?

I'll take it today. Tomorrow I'll take the elevator. The only reason I don't take the elevator is that if anybody sees me on the elevator, they'll call me a hypocrite, right? Because I talk about- You sort of force yourself to take the stairs by declaiming how terrible it would be if you took the elevator. But every time I get there, my brain does this little hyperbolic discounting trick saying, you know what? Take the elevator today. Tomorrow, I'll take the stairs, right? I'm no different from anybody else. So we need ways to trick ourselves out of that kind of hyperbolic discounting because

it's a natural, basic, fundamental instinct. We all do it. I don't care who you are. Now, you've talked quite a bit about walking and how that's important and doing more activity. I was interested in about the sort of weights and carrying because you sort of touched on that a bit. And I think for a lot of people, they tend to think about exercises like it means you're going for a run. But weights are important too. Yeah. So could you tell me about those two? Sure. So weight's actually really important for aging because one of the big

issues for aging in the Western world is something called sarcopenia, which is a long fancy word, which means just basically you're getting frail. So sarco means muscle, and penia means loss, so muscle loss. And as people get older, they tend to lose muscle mass, and they get frail, and getting out of a chair is difficult, and doing basic tasks is difficult. And when that happens, you become less physically active, and then that further exacerbates the muscle loss, right? So it's a vicious circle. And then, of course, it becomes very serious because then you have loss of quality of life. And then you're less able to walk.

Your walking slows down. All of these things happen. The way to prevent sarcopenia is to do some strength training, right? Again, because I don't have to carry water. I don't have to carry anything in my life. So I do, like you. I go to the gym and I have weights and I lift them and I hate doing them. But as we get older-

But you feel that that is an essential thing that you need to do. It's absolutely important. So pretty much every major health organization recommends that as people get older, it's critical that they do weight training at least twice a week. And you don't have to do crazy amounts of weight, just enough to kind of- And it sounds like you're saying that, you know, in these tribes that you visit, all these grandparents are just carrying lots of heavy weights all the time? No, but they're carrying food. I mean, they're not carrying weights.

But not weights, but I mean, like things that are heavy, they are just carrying things. Yes, there's no shopping carts. There are no cars. But their children aren't doing this for them. They have to carry their children, right? Yeah, at a certain point, the children can help carry them, but there's always babies to carry. You know, when you go out and dig a bunch of tubers, you got to bring them home, right? There's not going to, you can't call an Uber

and have the Uber deliver it. I think what's really interesting is I've still got, you know, I've still got this thing in my mind about, well, okay, but if they're, you know, in their forties or fifties, they have grown up children, aren't their grown up children doing all of this for them so they don't need to carry these things? Not in the slightest. No, everybody works. Everybody carries. You go out and hunt a kudu, you can't just let it sit there, right? You have

to bring the kudu home, right? And so everybody's just still strong. Because they have to use their bodies, you know, and they're not doing crazy stuff, right? The studies show that, you know, just a moderate level of, you know, 10 to 12 repetitions, several of those, and various basic muscle groups, doesn't have to be really super heavy weights, is enough to basically prevent that kind of muscle loss. So one of the things- That's like twice a week, not crazy, there's already this transformation. I mean, one of the ways I do it is that every morning I make coffee for my wife and myself.

We have a French press and I leave the coffee in the French press for four minutes. And while that's doing, I go to the living room and I do push-ups. I hate the push-ups. I promise you, I do not enjoy doing it, but I've made that my little habit. And now I know that when the coffee's there, I have to do my little push-ups and it works. And it's one of the ways I sort of trick myself into doing. Because at least you get coffee at the end. Is that what you're saying?

I get coffee at the end and it's just like my habit. I'm still impressed. You're quite disciplined there because I think unless I had a trainer or somebody leaning over me, which is my hack on this is like, I need someone to make me do it. But I've made it a habit. Habits are useful. Trust me. I don't ever really want to do it, but I grumble and whatever.

And also, I also know that if I'm going to talk to somebody like you, I don't want to be a liar. Could you tell me, is there any difference in this advice between men and women? No, absolutely not. I mean, both men and women evolved to be physically active and it's important for both. It's important for everyone. And I would say these are universal. So I'd love to almost wrap that up just by you're helping me to sort of summarize your weekly exercise routines. I think we got bits of that through the podcast. I think really interesting to see how that is. I'm a little weird. Well, tell us, I think lots of people are gonna be interested.

It's like, okay, you say all of this, you're like, what do you really do, Daniel? Well, I love to run. Okay. So I run probably- So you genuinely take pleasure from this, despite everything you say all of this. You're like, what do you really do, Daniel? Well, I love to run. Okay. So I run probably. So you genuinely take pleasure from this, despite everything you've said up till now, actually, you enjoy it. Well, I genuinely take pleasure from running, but I never really enjoy the first few miles of any run or very rarely.

Right. But I like to run. So I usually run, you know, five times a week. Sometimes I do spin cycling, cycle in the basement. And I try to do weights, you know, just a few, not a huge amount, about twice a week. You know, I do squats and things like that. And I do my pushups when I make my coffee. I try to get up every once in a while. And it's like you, I'm a tea drinker. And so I'm getting up to make my tea and then micro

have my tea because it gets cold and you know, all that sort of stuff. And that's about it. It's quite impressive. Like that's a high level of activity. If somebody told you tomorrow, we have got this magic pill, so we can sort out the health bit, what would you still be doing? I wouldn't believe you because there is, first of all, exercise itself is no magic pill. I mean, sometimes it's oversold as being, I hope I haven't oversold it. It reduces your risk of cancer, but it's not going to prevent you necessarily from getting cancer.

But again, I do exercise not only because it makes me feel good and makes me feel vital and vigorous and healthy, but also it's the way I've made a lot of friends. I mean, some of my best friends are my running partners, right? It's a part of my life. So this is like back to talking about the dancing. Once it becomes just fun and pleasurable, then it's not just being done for health and therefore it's easier to stick with than something that you might run. So I don't think of running as just exercise. Running is part of my social life. And yeah, I run sometimes in the morning by myself, but I often run with friends. So, you know, I would say a large percentage of my friends I met and made friends through running.

Amazing. I have so many more questions, but unfortunately, we're at time. So I think we started talking about exercise and this idea that our ancestors used to exercise is just wrong. What they used to do is a lot of physical activity, largely because they had no choice. If you wanted to get water or food or any of the rest of it, you have to do this. And that because until very recently, we were always in this desperate need to try and find enough calories just to sustain us and have children or the rest of it, we sort of evolved to minimize the waste. So why would you do a whole bunch of exercise if you don't need to? And similarly, our muscles are designed to shrink if they're not actively used because they have this

cost of calories to support them. So there were no massive Tarzan's walking around everywhere unless they really, really needed it. And so unfortunately, we're in this world where our muscles naturally want to shrink and we're not anymore doing any of this activity. So that's very different. And I think you also talked about the way in which we now understand that although this activity in the short term can create damage to our body in lots of ways, it switches on these amazing repair mechanisms. And the total impact of that is actually it's repairing all of us. So

if we are being active, we're actually repairing our bodies. And if we stop being active, suddenly these systems that should be working all the time just aren't. And therefore, you describe these amazing statistics, I think, about how in your 60s, 70s, 80s, if you're being active, then your chance of dying each year, I think, was like 50% lower. So this is a huge change. You also said that it's a complete illusion that as we get older, we should stop doing exercise. And so this thing that I think we are all used to in the West is not at all the patterns that you've seen visiting all of these different hunter-gatherer tribes, where you might be a grandmother or grandfather, you keep digging the tubers and carrying the water and everything else.

And as a result, you're much, much stronger than we would be here today. And that loss of strength is a huge risk factor for all of us. And unfortunately, that means you need to carry some weight. So I think in terms of then talking about actionable advice, we do need to do activity. We need to do walking, but we also need to do weights and we need to fight sort of this natural desire not to do it. And I think you gave us some really great tips of which I think the thing you were most interested in is like make it social. So that suddenly this thing is, if this can be fun, it's no longer just this really

tiresome thing of, you know, going off to the gym on your own, but actually you're going to meet friends or you're going dancing or whatever those things are, then it makes it much easier because it's natural not to want to do exercise. And this idea that if anyone's listening to this, that there's something wrong with them, they don't want to do it. You're actually saying it's the reverse. Of course, you don't want to do it. You need to create ways to want to do this activity. And the good news though, is if you do it, then it to create ways to want to do this activity. And the good news, though, is if you do it, then it really affects your health. And I think the other thing you sort of talked a bit about is sometimes the start of it is what's worse. So you're saying, actually, you hate starting running, but then actually you quite enjoy it later. So there is

a sort of positivity at the end of this if you can get over this initial hump. I would say that's an A. Thank you very much. I thought this was so interesting. I would say that's an A. Thank you very much. I thought this was so interesting. I hope I can tempt you back in the future because I know there's a lot of things we didn't talk about, like sleep and various other areas. It was a pleasure.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Daniel, for joining me on Zoe's Science and Nutrition today. We've shattered some myths, made me feel a lot better that I don't enjoy exercise, and also heard some practical tips on how we can reap its benefits. But to really optimize our health, we must also ensure our bodies receive the right nutrition. And if you want to understand how to support your body with the best foods for you,

then you may want to try Zoe's personalized nutrition program. You can learn more and get 10% off by going to zoe.com slash podcast. As always, I'm your host, Jonathan Wolfe. Zoe Science and Nutrition is produced by Yella Hewins-Martin, Richard Willen, and Tilly Fulford. See you next time.