Life doesn’t end at 40! How to live well for longer, with Dr Jenna Macciochi

0:01Hello, a massive welcome to Happy Place with me, Fern Cotton. This is the show that takes care of your body and your mind. Today I'm chatting to Dr. Jenna Machocki. At that time in my life I was like in a job I hated, in a life I hated, I was like really floundering along and then it suddenly was this wake-up call of like how do I do the next part better and you can't undo all the stuff you did before, all those years of like drinking too much, late nights, all the wrong decisions but I can make changes now that take me forward and I just kind of felt like I'm not done like because I've crossed over into the second half of my life at 40.

0:39Like I've got so much more I want to achieve. Right. I think you're going to really enjoy this chat. Even if you don't know much about Jenna, please stick with me because I think this is one for all of us that we need to hear big time. Don't you feel that you sometimes just sort of ignore things that are going on in your body or you just sort of don't really pay much attention to your health? I do it all the time. I have got what probably would be known as like menopause denial somewhat. I'm like fingers and ears, don't want to talk about it. And obviously we've chatted about it on Happy Place before.

1:12I sort of don't want to think about it. But more recently, look, we're very honest in this space, aren't we? It's a safe place, guys. It's a safe space. My periods are all over the gaff at the moment. My cycle is going from like 33 days to 24 days. And then it goes long again. It is all over the place. And again, I'm still head in sand, not looking at it. And I think whenever I have a chat like this, it makes me take all of this stuff more seriously, not in a scary way, but in a way where I really need to like actually, first of all, write down when I've had my period because I'm still not even doing that like an absolute idiot.

1:48And just taking it all again, not more seriously. I'm just looking at it more carefully and paying attention to what my body is doing. we're not talking exclusively about periods or menopause in this chat it's more just about the body in general and health but I think most of us just sort of go oh yeah I'm doing all right even if something's niggling ass or something feels a bit off and when it comes to the immune system which is something that we really look at here there is stuff we can do to really help ourselves and that's what I found so fascinating do you know what we talk about in this chat as well, like a quick little tip off, is dental hygiene.

2:26Again, I hadn't been to the hygienist in two years. How bad is that? That's my little admission. After this chat, I booked and I went last week. Fuck me. How great is it going to the hygienist? It feels amazing. My teeth were like glass when I came out. I was like running my tongue over my teeth constantly. It felt sensational. Anyway, let me talk in more detail about Jenna and also tell you what other things we talk about other than just dental hygiene. So Dr. Jenna, she's an immunologist. She specializes in understanding how nutrition, movement and lifestyle interact with the immune system. Her new book is called Immune to Age, the game changing science of immune health.

3:04I was so interested when I came across this because I think especially for women, many of you listening to this are women, not exclusively, but many of you are. I think ageing is aimed at us in the form of what we look like. What's our skin saying? Are we getting wrinkles? What do we notice is sagging? And actually ageing means so much more than what is topical and on the surface. It's every bit of our body and how it's functioning and our energy levels and our hormones. It's all of it. So this to me feels like a much deeper dive into looking at the subject of ageing. Hi, this is Knox from the Popcast with Knox and Jamie.

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6:10Hello, Jenna. Hi, Farron. We've both worn yellow. I know, bringing the sunshine. It's so nice to see you again because we've obviously worked together on a couple of projects before. Yes, yeah. But this is, for me, a real treat to get stuck into what you are an expert at. Oh, thank you. And really just get all the knowledge and wisdom from you. so I guess where I want to start with this conversation today is whenever I personally but I think most people hear health being talked about yeah we can get quite freaked out like oh my god I'm doing it all wrong or if I do this one thing I'm going to cut my life short and we can sort of just put our fingers in our ears and go la la la la yeah how do we have this chat today without freaking people out yeah that's probably what was going through my mind as I wrote this whole book because I guess I'm kind of in that health and wellness sphere and have definitely been making content around that like these are things you should do and these are things you should take and I got really kind of I don't know disenchanted with it all a couple of years ago probably in the midst of COVID and that kind of sparked this new book idea because it's kind of like we live in this information age like we're really overloaded with information but people don't need more information they need to understand how to embody it more and to me that just starts with building awareness and figuring out how to drown out the noise that you have this sort of constant static and being sort of true to yourself and so it changed for me maybe it was about 2020 and this was when I don't know what year the queen died this was definitely like a seminal moment that is so bad i remember exactly where i was and what i was doing but i can't remember what year and it was it was like at the end of that covid yeah yeah and i was just mindlessly online as we are and there was this like oh figure out how long you're going to live for questionnaire thing you know like put in some stats did you do it you live yeah it was like really silly and fun it was i think i'd still shame myself doing that yeah and it sort of spouted out a number and it was pretty good innings it was like in my 80s so I was like oh you know that's pretty good but then I was like shit that means half of my life's already over this is why I'm getting freaked out already because I was in my head I think come on get to 100 but actually yeah what does that even mean I could have 10 years at the end of my life completely immobile exactly I wish I died at 90 so that's why I kind of went on this journey going well if I have really good innings like you know there's obviously accidents and these things that we can't account for and I you know there's a place for fate you know there's just these unexpected things um that's more than half my life being over what am I going to do with the second half and at that time in my life I was like in a job I hated in a life I hated I was like really just like floundering along and then suddenly was this wake-up call of like how do I do the next part better and you can't undo all the stuff you did before you know all those years of like drinking too much late nights all the you know wrong decisions but I can make changes now that take me forward and I just kind of felt like I'm the anti-Brian Johnson like I'm not spending millions of dollars on this optimized life but I want to make sure that I'm feeling and living and embodying every day and enjoying the really small shitty moments yeah the garbage time with the kids where you're not really doing anything and really kind of trying to make good decisions like stopping the mindless scrolling and stopping the mindless like doing things that I know don't really make me feel good and sort of taking a step back and going why do I even do those and then putting that out in the world is like I'm here to help you I have all this kind of stupid amounts of knowledge on the human body because I'm a geek and I've spent many years researching it but I'm also a human being and have a job and I have kids and I'm not there with the perfect morning routine but you know if you want to come along on the ride I'll try and keep myself accountable maybe that keeps you accountable and that kind of then spurred into this book where I wanted to see life in seasons I wanted to think I'm not done like because I've crossed over into the second half of my life at 40 like I've got so much more I want to achieve and things will change about my body and my appearance I think as a woman that's a huge part of how you know we feel about ourselves because of how the world sees us but I was like no no we need to it's more than kind of a rebranding just seeing that we have already had a longevity revolution and this is to me kind of at odds with what we have now where we have this longevity space it's very male dominated it's very very biohacky it's very much commercial you have to buy the stuff you have to do the stuff you have to take the things you know I don't know how they have a real job because they're doing all the life yes I mean I've not watched the Brian Johnson doc yet it keeps coming up yeah my streaming services but I did I mean I'm not ashamed to admit this see him on the Kardashians that was that's how I get my news and um and I and I watched that episode like what the crap is going on here like he was you know getting up doing an hour of this very precise yeah exercise every day he has his last meal at 11 in the morning i mean none of it's realistic and yes you might be biohacking and you want to see how long you can live but like you say you can't negate accidents happening or fate taking control which would be devastating considering you've not enjoyed any of your actual life because you're only eating at 11 o 'clock and that's a point that you make in the book early on is let's not think about longevity purely let's think about are we actually living fully and you mentioned deferred happiness syndrome which I think relates to quite a lot of what you've just said especially in your own personal life just as a human outside of your skill set of going am I actually happy in my life now because many of us with this deferred happiness syndrome think oh life will start when you know in five years time when I've I've got the job or or I've got the partner, or I've sorted out that thing that still keeps happening in my life.

12:25But actually, we've just got to do it now. Yeah, exactly. I didn't even realise I was existing in that. I was so unaware that I was in this kind of deferred life. I was sort of in limbo thinking, oh, when this finishes, I'll do this. When this busy period's done, I'll start getting back to the activities I enjoy. I'll start just sitting in the garden and, you know, looking at the trees, enjoying a moment with my cat instead of going right I need to do this I need to you know all the lists and things and it was a really weird moment to be like oh I'm existing like that and that time is just moving anyway and life is now life is now and and the whole kind of zen buddhism about being in the moment I think it was that point where I like understood it on a different level I'd always sort of done meditation I'd sort of read a lot but I hadn't kind of like permeated the deeper layers until then and I was like oh it really is now this isn't the prelude to the main act like I this is the one chance I'm in it and it's not about it always being fun but I can be really present I can be really grateful I can you know like sit in the garden and just listen to the hum of the traffic or the birds and think about how beautiful that is and kind of like those little moments of awe and it really started to become different like there was a shift from knowing it and sort of being aware of it to it actually being like right let's this is the moment to make some change yeah I mean you start the book by asking a terrifying question and the question is are you scared of dying and I I'm probably a typical person that just goes not thinking about that not thinking about that yeah can go there it's too terrifying I understand that again in many sort of esoteric frameworks like Buddhism it's a real daily practice that you think about death so that you are then pulled into the present you're more grateful yeah what you're doing now but i think when i really hone into that question i am scared i am scared and i don't know what to do with that i think that's yeah i think that's very human and i always kind of look at things through the lens of evolution and i'm like well you know for most of our existence as humans on this planet we were always under some sort of threat whether that was not having enough food getting an injury that you would die from getting eaten you know something happening an infection so we had to be scared of dying so everything was kind of optimized for living and optimized for a very short life so you know living beyond 40 was kind of like unheard of that's something that really happened sort of beyond 1900s that we started extending our lifespans and I think that's kind of interesting because your whole biology is kind of optimized for this one time point where you've passed on your genes and I always think it's quite weird to think about it through that lens because not everyone wants to have children but unfortunately your biology is optimized to pass your genes on and then at a certain age you know evolution didn't quite catch up because we haven't been living these long lives for long enough so some of the genes that help you get to 40 and reproduce actually can be detrimental in the second half of your life so it's kind of like we need to adapt to this now longer lifespan that we have and really figure out what do we do with the second part to make it better because on average in the UK we will live until we're 80 like that is the average lifespan but the average health span is actually your early 60s so there's this kind of 20 year delta where we have so much medical advancements now that we can keep people medicalized well you know in some sort of state of living but it might actually be like a slow death and I think this question about are you scared of dying I think it's very human to be scared of dying but if we think about death as just this one end point what all comes before it is just aging and how can we have some kind of you know influence on that aging process which literally starts from the moment of conception so it's not just when you get the gray hairs and the wrinkles we're always aging but death is just this one point I mean I want to get on to all the ways we can do that in in just a moment but you know the the title of your book is immune to age we're going to dive into talking about the immune system.

16:49Why is that important in the context of aging? Because it might not be immediately obvious. Yeah, I know. I think that part of my work has been like, you know, trying to champion this idea that the immune system isn't just this thing that kicks up in winter when you get that cough or cold, or, you know, spring when you get your seasonal hay fever that's annoying. It's actually this wellness system that's with us throughout our life course. It's a real sensing system. It's there to, yes, keep you protected from infections, but it's also important for healing, repair, for growth. It's part of what nurtures the baby through pregnancy and keeps that safe.

17:29And it's got this really kind of unique role in aging because as much as that first half of life, it's got this inflammatory system, which is really important to prevent you getting infections to you know get rid of viruses and bacteria but that becomes kind of the system that gets swung the other direction as you get older so we get this thing called inflammation aging so inflammation that's usually only reserved for when we have an infection it's the stuff that makes us feel a bit poorly you know the fever you know the symptoms that you might get with a cough or a sore throat, that can be easily triggered as we get older.

18:09So not just by a cold or a flu, but by things in our lifestyle, pollution in our environment that we're breathing in, we're exposed to, things that we take. So we kind of have to think about this anti-inflammatory lifestyle component more and more because it's the biggest weapon we have against this health span lifespan delta yeah so because i think when we have a chat about let's use the term broadly aging yeah especially when it's for women and a lot of my listeners are female and a lot of them are probably the similar age to us yeah yeah it's usually like let's just look at the aesthetics here like you know what's what's your skin doing have you got jowls and you know it's your hair a bit more brittle but actually we are diving deeply into to biology and how our bodies are working.

19:00So are we really to be focusing more on protecting or benefiting the immune system? Is that what we're doing to prolong our lifespan and to live more healthily? That's what we need to focus on. It's kind of thinking of the life and seasons. So spring being childhood, summer being young adulthood, autumn being the sort of age that we're entering now, and then the winter years being that end of life. the last part and realizing that everything's cyclical like what you do in spring is going to affect what you reap in winter yeah that's the bit I'm scared about so it feels like my spring was was quite an adventurous time yeah and that's something I think many people worry about is if in their spring years yeah they were out having a jolly good time yeah which many of us were can we reverse that or can or is it too late is it too late to do good work now in the autumn years to ensure that we are healthy going forward I think that is a real key question and that's something that I've addressed throughout the book because I wanted anyone in any season of life to be able to pick it up and see how it could help them and I think that you know the body is so adaptable the immune system is highly adaptable any change that we make is helpful at any age you know the studies that i write about where there's you know people in their 90s that are they're doing resistance exercise building muscle they're seeing reverses in their immune age it's like there is there's no better time to start than today and then i think by being really aware and zooming out on your life and just going i i'm an i'm sort of sleepwalking through doing these things I don't want to do living a life I don't want to live it's not just about diet and supplements but it's about you know nurturing good relationships like that's a huge component your immune system is a social network and some of the biggest pieces of evidence that I cite in the book is really about social connection and how that is having this what we call epigenetic effect so genes that are being expressed and how that is controlling this inflammatory response And it's particularly important for those autumn and winter seasons.

21:14Yeah, I think we could very easily overlook elements to our lifestyle, like socialising and go, how can that have an effect on our immune system? How can that impact me physically? But like you've just said, when we dive into epigenetics and we look at how our bodies respond, we are social creatures. And we know that there is a loneliness epidemic. I don't know if it still exists, but there was a loneliness minister in the UK at some point during COVID. I don't know if they still have a job, but I'm pretty sure it's still a massive problem where people feel increasingly lonely. We had Professor Bob Waldinger on the podcast a while ago.

21:50Oh, he's wonderful. Who is amazing. And you talk about him in the book. He specialises in that subject, looking at how social connection is so key for not only our mental and emotional well-being, but our physical well-being. So how is that? What is that? How is that system working? how if we're meeting up with friends once a week because you know he's he said that he would send people off to go and you know go and socialize with someone once a week and come back and talk to me then and there were profound effects you know people coming back with completely like their ailments had gone they'd be feeling mentally better yeah how can socializing have such a big impact on our immune system this is where we have to really think about the the mind body connection and in my field we call it psychoneuroimmunology so it's the psychology the neurology and the immunology are all intermeshed together so your immune system is not in one place in the body it's everywhere unlike other systems you can you can you know point to where your digestive system is or your respiratory system your immune system is everywhere and it's interacting with every other system in the body this is why it's so important as this kind of wellness system but particularly with the brain you know if you see danger with your eyes that's information that your brain is then taking it's making this imprint of neurotransmitters and hormones that then it puts out into the body your immune cells have little receptors on the surface who are picking up that signal and then going okay there's a threat we need to be on standby you know to be able to respond to that and what is that cortisol being released cortisol is one of them but even the different neurotransmitters so things like dopamine oxytocin the love hormone this is a really important one so it's really important for bonding so between a mother and a child or a romantic couple or friends or even you and your pet you have this release of oxytocin sometimes we can feel it you know like when i pick up frank the cat yeah and i hug him all the oxytocin is released oh my god so much yeah it's the best if i go back to my moment in like 2020 where i was oh my god I'm sleepwalking in my life I also ended up getting three cats at that point.

23:59Best decision ever. Best decision you could have ever made. That's going to add years to your life. Completely but we can almost feel it that that sort of like love feeling that you get and our immune cells have receptors on their surface for oxytocin and that is basically what you're thinking and feeling directing your physiology going I'm safe I'm loved I'm felt I'm seen I'm wanted and i think those are really really human things that we you know we just don't have anymore we just overlook that the mind body connection as you mentioned at the start of that yeah we i think we can often just poo poo it and go as if that's a thing but the one i think you reference this in the book but the one depiction of that i always go oh i completely understand that is if you are to imagine a lemon and then your mouth starts watering that is quite literally mind-body connection you've thought of a lemon you don't have to eat one or see one in real life and you have a physical reaction to it it's no different if you're lonely versus hanging out with people that make you feel amazing yeah yeah and we have you know great ways to connect with people like uh you know during covid everybody started doing zoom calls with their families and things um you know i can go on social media and i can see like a million different reels of people where I'm like oh my god I feel seen but there's something about the physical contact as well so your heart is this um electromagnetic thing you can actually like detect the electromagnetic field of your heart from outside your body from several feet which is amazing um and if you imagine uh on the wall there was pendulum clocks and they're all swinging slightly differently because you've just hung them on the wall eventually they will start to synchronize well if you're with another person your heartbeats and so if you're if you're with another person your heartbeats are kind of eventually kind of synchronizing and it's all different bits of our body language you know and things that we're putting out is helping with that synchronization that's the cutest bit of science i've ever heard it's so cute isn't it when i learned this it put parenting in a whole other realm for me because you know if your child is crying as they fell over and they run to you and you you hold them you're very calm because you know everything's fine so your heart rate is calm your breathing is calm their heart is like going a million beats you know i mean they're they're hysterical and their little heart is going to be able to phase lock onto your bigger stronger heart and that sort of connection is going to help them regulate so this kind of co-regulation that we have it's very physical and it's really like blew my mind and it's you know why you want to hug a friend it's why you you want to meet with people in real life and have that physical connection so it's great that we have all the technology but i think there is a fundamental thing that we can replace yeah we need to be together yeah

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29:06And also, of course, you know, any of that, whether it's physical touch, being with people that make you feel great is going to reduce stress. Now, we all know, and this is again where people might go, I can't listen to this because I am really, really stressed. We've all got stress in our lives. Like it's almost impossible in the modern age to deal with all the things we're meant to be dealing with, especially for people that are trying to juggle lots of multiple areas of life to not feel utterly stressed out of your mind all of the time. Now, of course, we need to reduce that because we know it has an impact.

29:38And when we put it into the context of everything we've just talked about with the mind-body connection, stress and imagining is up there as one of the number one things that is very negatively impacting our immune system and just our entire body. Yes. Yeah, completely. And this is not, you know, to scare anyone. I am like a self-confessed stress head. This is probably my number one kind of lever that I struggle to pull. but if we think about something like heart disease which is the biggest killer globally and I feel like we're a bit numb to heart disease because even as a kid I remember you know all those campaigns about heart disease it's just been up there as the biggest killer for a really long time and we've got tools and medications and ways to treat people but the problem hasn't really changed in fact it's probably got worse and we know and there's a whole part in the book where I write about this as a sort of midlife crisis is really heart disease because it the roots of it start much younger so it is that inflammation is that keeping our immune system happy keeping it controlled keeping it you know in its lane doing its job and not spilling over this unwanted inflammation but if you take all the risk factors for heart disease which is you know the classic things like you know high cholesterol high blood pressure per diet and then you look at things like stress then you have like this huge jump in risk so it's not just the the usual suspects and if we think about you know we have a lot of access to better information about what we should be eating we've got you know diet the whole diet protocols for people with heart disease risk but the stress element is something that is this nebulous thing that nobody knows how to address and that seems to be the kind of missing link there the stress is going up we're not managing to get on top of this heart disease issue and what do we do you know it's it's something that the the way we have medicine at the moment it doesn't it's not got the capacity to bring that in and go how do we define this nebulous stress thing and make it better because it's a big ship to to turn it is and it's tricky because everyone's got different reasons for their stress and some of those reasons you know there's solutions and there's ways of mitigating it and yeah other times it feels less doable so it's it's really tricky and I think also one of the big problems I guess is feeling super stressed a lot of the time it's been normalized like everyone is rushing around it's become almost illegal to say oh I'm not doing anything today or you know are you busy right now no not really it's like what you know people are sort of terrified to admit they're not doing much or that they've taken a day to do yeah nothing you know we don't know how to rest anymore yeah I I I was got quite vulnerable in the book because I was kind of like oh I don't care anymore it's not just about science it's about real real life stuff and I was thinking you know in that midlife chapter because that's what resonates with me in my current experience it's not always the big things that are stressful there are big things but sometimes it's just like from opening my eyes and realizing the million things I have to do before I have to leave for work in terms of like the kids and then I'm out to take the bin out of my pajamas because I forgot to do that and then I burn every week and every week I do that yeah I know it's a Monday just put them out micro hits of stress and yeah just it's just um it's not always the big things but it sort of chips away at our resilience yeah so that then when one big thing does come along you you haven't got that buffer and I didn't really know how to address that for many years in terms of when people ask me because I do think it's a very personalized thing and I almost feel like you have to get your own toolbox in front of you and there's this sort of in the moment tools so I trained a few years ago as a breathwork practitioner because I wanted to understand how I could use that as a tool because I was really recognizing I am a stress head and this is the thing that is running away from me that I can't it's it's then having this impact on everything else and so now I know that the breath is this component that links the brain and body you know I can take control of my breathing rate or my breathing rate can take control of itself like there's an automatic way that we breathe or I can do it and I know that there's these different components of my rib cage that are going to be transmitting the breathing rate to my brain so if I'm slowing my breathing down it's going to tell my brain you know there's a lot of neuronal information from the body that goes to the brain going, ah, everything's chill, you know, it's fine.

34:12But then if I'm not consciously doing that, and my breathing rate is elevated, and I'm not even aware, my brain's going to be like, oh, there's something going on, like we need to be on red alert. And so suddenly, all these little switches are getting switched on to make stress a reality. And it never closes the loop. Because these days, as we know, stress isn't just, you know, running out of the way of a bus that's about to hit you and then you know 20 minutes later you're back to baseline stress is like you know walking through life with like a million different little hits overwhelm yeah exactly the breath thing is so interesting because I noticed I don't know how long ago it was now it's probably when I was still doing radio that when I felt um I guess unsafe is the word I'll use and and that you know it's not like I'm being chased by a tiger but you know very much be attacked by lots of people online if I said something wrong yeah didn't nail the interview or whatever I would hold my breath I don't know if it was the top or the bottom of a breath but I would catch myself and go bloody hell I don't think I've taken a sip of air in about 20 seconds because I'd almost frozen paralyzed waiting for the moment to pass and actually I could in real time notice that as soon as I just inhaled even once I would just everything would slightly relax you know and I sort of fall on and off the bandwagon of breath work but I know it works and I love it and I think you're so right we do have to find our own toolbox you know for some people it will be walking for some it will be painting or for some it will just be not looking at your phone for an hour but we do need to if we know we're super duper stressed we do need to do something yeah exactly just sitting in it in stagnation is not gonna yeah if I had a really stressful meeting at work I could use breath work in the toilet like no one would know or I could sit in a meeting and just be like taking that moment other things like there's so many tools for stress but that I'm not going to be able to use that in the moment those are kind of like the future proofing tools like you know I there's loads of community saunas in Brighton I go with friends like we have a little whatsapp group that's like my new pub you know and and so that's kind of my future proofing of stress because we go we connect it's like the ritual it's it's the the chats but it's also like the heat stress on the body that is helping build your resilience you're deliberately putting yourself in a stressful situation deliberately jumping in the ice bath you know screaming with your friends you're in control of that stress and you can get out whenever you want and that kind of helps the system reinforce so that when you're in the other stressful situations you're like oh I've got a little bit more resilience there so it's kind of future-proofing and then in the moment and then really kind of just thought you know I've played with this meditation thing for so long and being like no I'm actually going to really explore this and that was kind of like no I don't think I've ever really been two feet in you know yeah it's a big commitment yeah and um I'm making space for that and being like what I'm telling myself I don't have 10 minutes I know where I can sit down and do this I think many of us don't believe we deserve it we think no no there must be there's a cupboard I need to clear out or we are genuinely just like back to back and we can't see the wood for the trees but we've mindlessly scrolled on our phones for 15 minutes where we could have been sitting doing that exactly we all know which one's gonna benefit us you know completely so look you've mentioned the word inflammation many times and i think it's a key thing that we need to really look at here when it comes to prolonging our life expectancy aging yes and all the things that come with that and the immune system and keeping it really really healthy inflammation is our biggest problem what is causing inflammation yeah so inflammation is the thing that keeps you it's the thing that was made us survive as a species because that's what's triggered when you get sick and it helps you recover so it's really important but there's a little bit of collateral damage every time it's released so we have to take care to control it and contain it and it's this big like explosion of different molecules and cells that happen in your body when there's a threat so that threat could be a virus and your immune cells will be like oh I recognize that bit of a virus it's got a specific molecular pattern and we're going to trigger inflammation because we want to get it out the body so we're going to make it very hostile for that virus and that will you know get it out so say if you have a cold you get all the stuffy nose and everything that's your immune system eliciting inflammation to make it really uncomfortable for that infection, get rid of it so that you can then, you know, recover, feel better.

38:44Five days tops, you know, you're back to normal. The problem is that our immune cells have been optimized, as I said earlier, to live till we're 40, where it's really important to recover, you know, from infections to say, well, so you can pass your genes on. And so those immune cells have these little receptors looking for anything untoward. So it could be a virus or a bacteria or a parasite but it could be something wrong in the tissue like in parts of your body that's unhappy and it will say oh there's something wrong there we're just going to chuck some inflammation in because that'll kind of clear the problem but if the problem never goes away you just end up with this recurring inflammatory issue and now we realize that this is one of the key hallmarks of aging so it's kind of like you know keeping your car running when you're not driving it it's just like in the background it's sucking up resources it's like you know keep putting fuel on the smoldering fire and never really extinguishing it and over time you know you just get a bigger and bigger kind of pile of ash so not to make it sound really scary but we do have so much at our disposal and we've talked about stress it's a huge component and that was you know this um professor robert waldinger and his harvard study of human development looking at at you know the longest running study of adults showing that human connection was so important for this anti-inflammatory effect.

40:10And then, of course, diets. We have now so much research on anti-inflammatory diet patterns. And this, I think, is really important because we don't need to focus on superfoods. We don't need to have a really restricted diet. The word pattern is really important. So take yourself off to your favorite Mediterranean coastal city and think about what the you know the the 90 year old residents that you know have lived and breathed that what are they eating how are they eating when you mentioned olive oil you're like just drowning olive oil yes what's olive oil doing for us i'm so i mean thank god because i put it on everything i was over the moon to read that yeah i'm doing one of the things without even meaning to this is great yeah i think with inflammation we can think oh why don't we just take an anti-inflammatory you know we have anti-inflammatory drugs couldn't they help with aging and the problem is that they they cut the inflammatory pathways off kind of too soon and they don't properly resolve so ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory drug that you can buy you know over the easily you know not even over the counter but it it kind of will make you feel better if you have like a really bad inflammatory issue and your doctor might advise it but it's not allowing that resolution phase of inflammation.

41:23Whereas olive oil contains these compounds inside that look a bit like what's an ibuprofen. So at the molecular level, they look very similar, but they're just different enough that they actually help resolve inflammation. Wow. It's so incredible. I mean, you look at the blue zones and you know, you're going to find a lot of them in Italy or like, exactly. I watched that Netflix show. Is it Greece and Japan? I mean, they're probably less on the olive oil but a lot of those european countries they're using olive oil in everything and everything yeah and it's it's got there's such a high level of these these polyphenols things like olicanthol that mean that you can heat it and cook with it and there's many studies showing that it doesn't affect the oil because there's a lot of concern about oh you shouldn't cook with that and i'm like well the test of time alone look at sort of along the mediterranean where It's the only oil they use for all sorts of cooking for, you know, centuries.

42:18And I think that kind of overrides the science. But I would say to people, be really confident and using a high quality olive oil for home cooking, not something industrial where you're reheating it, but that it's totally fine. And it's thought that that's part of why these Mediterranean diets get held up. There has been amongst the healthiest because you're having this tiny, you know, daily dose of this anti-inflammatory. so it's just keeping that you know rising inflammation we get with aging you're just keeping it at a nice level so of course there's a natural decline it's going to happen anyway but you're sort of managing it in a way that's very natural with something that tastes delicious oh my god it's the best yeah i mean i put it on everything but like salads i'm just dowsing a salad it's not my favorite thing ever yes let's talk about exercise because i think again for many people out there and again especially women of our age we know that maybe a bit of strength training coming into play is a good idea but we're not quite sure why but also there has still been for women of our age who have sort of grown up through the 90s and the early noughties with all these you know awful diets and toxic messaging going on about what we should look like nothing to do with our health whatsoever and people trying wacky new diets and cleanses and eliminating things and doing all sorts of weird exercise that wasn't necessarily benefiting us.

43:42I think what we need to do is understand, right, we're exercising to live longer and to live a more mobile and happy, comfortable life in this autumn slash winter period that's to come. So why is exercise important when it comes to the immune system? Yeah, one of the key things about exercise is to do with our muscles. they're not just a structural component of our body that helps us move and be mobile they're actually an immunological organ so they have immune cells within them they are producing these myokines they're called so these are immune system molecules so um i think in the book i use the analogy you know if you if you spill something on a table and then you go to wipe it you often leave the table cleaner than it was before so when you use your muscles you're spilling out all these myokines which are actually pro-inflammatory so after everything i've been saying you're thinking oh well i don't want to do exercise it's going to increase my inflammation levels but it drives this huge anti-inflammatory sort of recovery response that you know cleans up everything even better than it was before so we really need these muscles to keep doing this for as long as possible and so muscle is now really recognized as a longevity organ so it is something that we need to look after but it does decline from our 30s so it's energetically costly to our body to hold on to it so your body's going to not you know you're not going to end up looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger if you're not living a lifestyle that commands that amount of muscle so you will naturally get rid of it and I guess the challenge is that we do have sedentary jobs my job is in front of a computer I know that I need to move my body but sometimes from like the school run to being in front of my computer to the school run to the kids running around whatever they need and then getting to the evening maybe I can't get out to the gym maybe I don't feel like going to the gym and it's this really challenging problem that I think particularly working mums I don't know hard relate it's so hard but then if we put it through that lens of like this is something I you know I'm investing in my pension or I'm saving for a trip that I want to do this is an investment in our future and it's just making that connection in your mind that my muscle will naturally you know decline with age that is a fundamental biological thing that happens to the human body but if I give it the stimulus to tell it that I need that muscle to stick around i.e doing resistance exercise that is the best investment I can do and it can be like lifting your shopping bags gardening you know anything where you're putting resistance on your muscles and finding the things that work for you.

46:20Like I have my things that I love to do in the gym and I do jujitsu, but I don't tell other people to copy me because I'm like, this is maybe not for you. Like I like to do these weird things with sandbags and whatever, but you don't have to do what I do, but we have to be like an end of one experiment with ourselves. Like I'm gonna make this year, this next half of this year, go on a mission of experimenting to find your thing that you can pepper through your week that helps you give those muscles a signal that I need you to hang around. Like that's basically what you're doing. You're telling them, I need you to stay around as much as possible.

46:56Here's the stimulus. And you find your thing. I guess even if like tiny snatches of time, like you're cleaning your teeth and you're just doing squats. That might sound mental to say that. But do you know what I mean? I think on those days where I'm going, oh my God, like you just said, the school run and then I have to race back. And then it's just nonstop all day. I will try and find like a couple of minutes especially for my lower body I think the amount of reports I've read about getting into your winter years and falling being the ultimate decline and the percentage you don't know what it is but it's disproportionately high and actually if we can keep the muscle in our lower body that is going to serve us so well down the line exactly yeah my paternal grandfather so I grew up on a farm in rural Scotland he was 95 he was still living on that farm like still like growing his own vegetables like my grandmother had passed away a couple of years before and very very able and you know very self-sufficient very self-reliant probably to his own detriment yeah but he went on top of his roof to clean his chimney because he still had a coal fire like no central heating um and he was cleaning his chimney as he's done his whole life and he lost his footing he fell onto the flat roof of a garage somehow didn't break any bones at all And the doctors were astounded.

48:13And they said, because he'd been so physically active, like his lifestyle demanded him be active. It wasn't like something he had to put into a time box into a gym session, that that really was, you know, something that that meant he didn't die from that fall, which was incredible. But the sad part is what happened next that then because it was seen that maybe he couldn't live on his own because this, you know, he could be a danger to himself. So he was just sitting in hospital, like recovering from some scrapes and bruises. And because of his age being 95, the decline in muscle mass is so rapid and being sitting all day.

48:51He then became unable to walk within weeks. I mean, it was like dramatic and very and it happens to, you know, so many older people just from that one incident. One fall, you're immobilized and your body just struggles to hold on to the muscle the older you get. So the more that we can sort of build that bank account now. And I think even when we go into like the spring years and we look at kids and we're looking at things like the muscle and the bone density that they need to build, you know, in the first two decades of their life. We're actually seeing that is starting to decline because kids are sitting more, you know, the changes to their lifestyles.

49:26So we need to, I always think about, you know, going back to our point on death, it's always a series of renewal, you know, we one day we won't be here, but our, you know, children's children will be carrying the mantle. And so as we get older, we almost have a responsibility to pass on this wisdom and be like, okay, you know, this is the challenge I'm going to be facing with in the next two seasons of my life, making sure I keep a hold of my muscle, knowing that it's anti-inflammatory, knowing that that can help me avoid a fall, which could really you know limit my life imagine if you can't if you suddenly are immobile and you can't have that social connection you can't go to your little like club with your little friends and you lose that oxytocin you know there's this whole kind of trickle down effect but what can I do for the younger generations to make sure they listen to this message and we've got almost like a responsibility now that we have these really long lives to be like okay let's you know help that generation with our wisdom, as well as, you know, trying to do the best for our own future.

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52:14I think everything you've mentioned so far in the chat is attainable. It's not like you're saying you need to go to this specific type of gym and you need to have this exact diet. You've mentioned olive oil, which any of us can go out and add into our daily diet. Exercising, and like you said, like your granddad, who's living on a rural farm in Scotland, it's not got to be a workout class. It's moving your body and finding that resistance. yes yeah and I wonder what other very simple additions or maybe it's taking things out of our lifestyle would you say are essential when it comes to keeping our immune systems afloat and looking at longevity well I think diet is a big part of it and you know 70 % of all the immune cells in your body are located along your digestive tract so from your mouth all the way to your other end so that's a huge amount of immune cell activity going on in there and inside your gut is around two kilos of microbes so you've got this living ecosystem and then it's surrounded by all these immune cells and they're constantly talking to each other and so we almost need to make sure that conversation is going well because if it's not the gut barrier becomes a bit you know compromised you get some flourishing of less favorable bacteria in the gut that can drive inflammation things in the gut can sort of leak through into the body drive inflammation so the gut and the integrity and how the gut is working is a really big part of the conversation about this inflammatory aging picture and um one thing that i've certainly found is that people say to me all the time i eat so well now you know they've got into their 40s they've learned their lessons they might have the means to you know be preparing the lovely organic food and they've experimented with all diets and they found one that works for them but they're like but my gut just doesn't it just isn't happy and I'm kind of like it's because the diet you're eating now might be great but your gut's been affected by like all those years that came before you know medications antibiotics in particular but also things like ppis and even some antidepressants have been shown to affect the gut microbes you know the the pollution you know if we're here in London you're you're swallowing whatever is in the air you're a lot of shit yeah exactly microplastics are becoming an emerging thing we're kind of like we've got this assault on our guts right from the start right from you know the minute we enter the world and that I think is probably the biggest challenge that we have in terms of humanity I think it's a birthright for a child to be born with a healthy microbiome but we've got this kind of impoverished microbiome situation where every generation has you know like the rainforest being being cut down like we're losing some of those good microbes and they're extinct and we don't know if we can get them back well even the soil that our organic vegetables are grown in is fucked so it's like you know you're right we're on it's what do we do what do we do just do our best and so people will go on this really like fiber is so important that is the food for your gut microbes you know you need to feed them well to look after them and people will start eating all this fat i've heard fiber is really good for me i'm eating you know 20 different plants this week but but jesus my gut is giving me like some feedback and it's because your gut's not really ready for that change yeah it didn't get the feedback is brutal yes you have to go slow and steady so i think people will find themselves on this like i'm doing all the stuff i've been told i am i've got you know got the lentils the beans the pulses the chickpeas like um all the different fruits and veggies you know i'm doing all the right things my gut still isn't happy and I think there it's about the dose you know you have this lovely ecosystem inside you if you just dump on a whole load of fertilizer you're probably just going to kill like the the vibe you know you have to go low and slow you have to nurture it like a garden and there was this lovely study um in the US by the Sonnenbergs or a couple who do a lot of gut health research and they got people to just take fermented foods any fermented food of their choice So it could be your kombucha, your kimchi.

56:20I'm obsessed with kimchi. Yeah, love kimchi. I cannot get enough of kimchi. My whole fridge just smells like kimchi. I love it. Yeah, yeah, it's so good. Heaven. Yeah, so choose your favorite, take it for a set amount of time. And then they did a whole bunch of analysis, including looking at the immune system and particularly levels of unwanted inflammation. And what they found was it didn't really matter which fermented food you went for. you had an improvement in this unwanted inflammation so it was having a beneficial effect on your gut microbiome which was then having a beneficial effect on your immune system in the gut because they're constantly talking to each other but then of course the immune system is passing that out to the whole body so what happens in the gut doesn't just stay in the gut and the interesting thing was that they also looked at giving people a fiber intervention so what happens if we just give them more fiber and it they found the results and this was something they spoke about outside of the published data because they were a little bit like this needs exploring and it was kind of like we know fiber is really important for those gut microbes that's what they eat that is their food but if your gut microbes are kind of out of whack they can't cope with that fiber and it's almost like having the the reverse effect you're getting the symptoms you're feeling uncomfortable you it might even make things worse and so you have to go with this low and slow approach so I would say make sure you're getting fiber into your diet um it's something in the UK that we know roughly we get half of what we're meant to get and I feel like fiber has this kind of image problem like it it's what we think of like bran flakes and stuff yeah we're not from the 80s yeah people don't really know what is fiber and it's all plants it's even things like dried herbs and spices you know fruit and veg and nuts and seeds like all of the different legumes beans pulses and just trying to get that into your diet and do it low and slow and have your fermented foods alongside it and i think that is kind of the best we can do for a healthy resilient gut microbiome amidst what is a very challenging environment without doubt you talk about oral hygiene as well what's the importance there because i wasn't necessarily expecting to read about yeah so that would be like my other key tip for anyone listening to take away from this make friends with your dental hygienist it's really important yeah so why talk about this again it's it's we have this ecosystem of microbes in our mouth and um that's healthy it's normal but whatever your mouth is doing you're swallowing that and it's seeding what's going on the gut so it's almost kind of upstream of gut health we have to think about the mouth the mouth is going to be affected by the environment you're in so we know that cities and and different actual physical environments have their own microbiomes we're breathing in microbiomes from whichever environment we're in and this is going to affect the oral microbiome but there's a particular microbe called p gingivalis which can cause um inflamed gums and different um periodontal you know issues um which is why we should go and see our dental hygienist really regularly i'm literally going to book later like i'm doing that kimchi thing but My genus I've let slide.

59:31Yeah. And I'm going to book today. Get that in the diary. Get the reminders in. Yeah. Make friends with them. Because you were saying like the entry point for all sorts of, you know, common colds, whatever, are eyes, mouth. And was there another one? I can't remember. Nose. Nose. Yeah. Yeah. So we really need to reinforce these areas. But if we have, you know, inflamed gums or unhealthy oral microbiome that then those microbes seem to make the little journey away from the gums and find themselves in different parts of the body where they're there just going, oh, I'm just going to trigger some inflammation because the immune system is going to see it and go, oh, you shouldn't be there.

1:00:12But it's kind of persistent because it's always coming from the mouth. So you have this constant supply. So you're never able to get rid of the inflammation that's been triggered by this. And also the mouth, you know, can be, oh, it's really important for production of what we call nitric oxide. So this is when we are producing a gas that actually helps relax our blood vessels. So that's really important for things like blood pressure, which again, going back to heart disease, this is an issue there. So really the mouth is such a kind of overlooked aspect of our health. And, you know, I was previously at the University of Sussex and I had this girl doing a project with me and she happened to have been a dentist in her previous life before she'd come to do this biomedical research.

1:00:59and we started this whole thing looking at the the research in dentistry about people with rheumatoid arthritis which is an inflammatory condition affecting the joints who improved their oral health by going to see their dental hygienist regularly and getting the correct advice about what to do with this p gingivalis infection if they if they had it but there was nothing in the rheumatology evidence base about the dentistry it was like the two fields needed to talk to each other wow so this was like a piece of work we were doing where we're like we need to sort of cross-pollinate here because imagine your rheumatologist is taking your medical history and saying like how often do you see your um your dental hygienist and do you have bleeding gums and have you you know any issues in your mouth and you know working together and then as part of your treatment plan you've got that that improvement i mean it's all it all makes total sense it's so bizarre almost that we see the body as all these little bits like it's one thing yeah it's all connected it's one thing we kind of had to do that and medicine like silo things even within immunology there's not really a kind of medical immunology discipline it's it's rheumatology or allergy or like it's siloed into different aspects and sometimes i think we need to bring in maybe inflammation as as a subject of its own where because it touches everything now not just infectious disease but autoimmune disease allergies aging the sort of non-infectious killers like heart disease certain cancers um and so we almost have that common thread pulled together somehow rather than all the silos yeah my god it's it's so utterly mind-blowing and fascinating i kind of want to round off by going back to the initial theme of sort of are you scared of dying because you mentioned that towards the end of the book again and talk about living fully because yes we can all try and be like brian johnson and have this regimented life and live for as long as possible but actually are we living fully are we in each day experiencing it what does that mean to you living fully yeah i think that is just you know i open my eyes in the morning I feel grateful I try not to leap onto the things leap onto the treadmill of life I know that there's emails waiting for me that I need to see I know that there's things that I need to do potentially quite stressful things but I the first thing I do if it's summer if it's warm I sit in my garden I do my 10 minutes of meditation with my cats around my feet before my kids wake up and I try to catch myself when I go down the path of like oh you know just rushing through and like getting annoyed at the kids because I've asked them five times to put the shoes on and we're supposed to leave the house and just really trying to be like I get to do this I get and it's not easy it sounds really trite and it sounds really like weird but when you sort of map out your and you can buy these like where you you cross off the the years of your life out of your potential lifespan you're just like this is the main event and and also that whole piece of just kind of being okay with any outcome because there's so many things I can't control I can want things I can work towards things I can desire things I can be ambitious but I have to be okay with any outcome I have to be okay with that thing not happening you know that career move going wrong And I think that gave me a lot of confidence.

1:04:26I was I was scared for a long time. And that kept me paralyzed in a situation where I was really sleepwalking in my life. And so since that kind of moment of realization, I quit my job, I quit my marriage of like, completely changed my life. And, and I've never felt happier. And I have those moments of fear, like I have those moments where I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. Like, this is all like, feels like a terrible plan. But I think that's really normal. And I think that's really human. but if you can center yourself and like listen to that voice deep inside you which I think we all we all have of course we all have it but I didn't know how to listen to it yeah it took me till I was 40 to even like I don't know give it the time of day and um when you live really in alignment with that that part of you like crazy things happen yeah and I guess it doesn't necessarily make things easier no it makes them better it makes it's easy to stay in a life where you know you're kind of coasting yeah you're not particularly feeling great but it's familiar and actually i think often we think better means everything's so easy and everything's just fluidly working but actually i think better can be there can be more challenges yeah you feel better you feel better I definitely have a much deeper sense of peace and I think about the people who are in my life more you know I moved to Brighton eight years ago didn't know a single soul and I built like a mini village and that that happened over a long time it wasn't something that kind of happened overnight and I need those guys like you know the walks on the seafront the trips to the sauna you know the late night whatsapp group panics about whatever and and and so making sure that and putting that sort of good vibe for want of a better word like putting that out there and then it comes back and I know that sounds really woo for scientists but that's why I love what you're doing because I think you know with this book but the work that you're doing and how you're talking about this subject you're perfectly marrying science and all the nitty-gritty that I certainly need educating on with that sense of gratitude for simply being alive and looking at being in the present moment and of course yeah they're all related but these conversations are often happening by different people in different spheres and we're just bringing it all together because we need to have a well-rounded yeah education on all of it so we can help ourselves we can all help ourselves yeah i'd love to know i've got an inkling but i might be making assumptions here where jenna is your happy place oh i would probably say it's a cross between sitting watching the sea in brighton beach or sitting in my garden uh just watching the wind in the trees with my cats gorgeous i mean for me tick tick both of those cats and the sea yeah i love it very happy well this has been a total education and i'm sure like myself everyone listening to this will be taking parts of it away and working out how it can be you know gently applied this is not like you have to do a whole life overhaul not at all but i think everything you've said has been just so entirely helpful so thank you so much for your time thanks for having me oh jenna thanks i love that god i learned so much it was almost sort of an overwhelming amount of knowledge in that conversation but i think if you can just take away one thing from that like i did like booking a hygienist appointment then that's a bloody good thing or lessening stress in some way or trying to see your friends a little bit more than you do there were so many good takeaways in that chat thank you so much jenna jenna's book immune to age is out right now i would love to know what you made of this chat by the way if you might make any little tweaks to your lifestyle please let us know head to our instagram account we're at happy place official massive thanks again to jenna to the producer anushka tate at happy place studios and to you look after yourselves lovelies

1:08:44so

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