Moment 198: Do This To Stop Premature Ageing!: Daniel E. Lieberman

0:03The more I study the importance of resistance training and the more I study the importance of doing weights especially as you age, the more I start kicking myself for being lazy about that. So now I try to do good to strength workouts out of every week, at least, and take it more seriously. Because especially as you age, loss of muscle mass can be really debilitating. There's a technical term for that is sarcopenia. Sarco is the Greek word for muscle and pinia is loss of muscle loss. So as people get older, they tend to lose muscle and when you do that, you become frail and you lose functional capacity.

0:42And then that starts off a vicious cycle. Right? Once that happens, then you're less likely to be physically active. And then of course, when you're less physically active, your muscles begin to waste away more and it's very debilitating. And so I think as we get older and I'm getting older, it's more and more important to incorporate that. So I think that's the one thing that I've taken to heart. From what you said there, it sounds like not doing resistance training, not lifting weights as you age almost accelerates aging in any sort of superficial sense. But it also, in a physiological sense, you're increasing the speed of aging.

1:19Yeah, I'm not sure if I'd think about it that way. But I think I kind of reverse it slightly, which is that aging is just the clock ticking on. There's nothing we can do about age. But senescence is the way our bodies degrade as we get older. And what physical activity does, in fact, maybe the most important thing about physical activity is that it slows senescence, especially for certain organs and systems. And there are different kinds of physical activities. So there's endurance physical activities, like running, walking, etc. such as swimming, and then strength or resistance physical activities.

1:52And they have different kinds of ways in which they slow various properties of senescence, which we, you know, colloquially call aging. And all of them are important. And I think one of the things that's really interesting about humans, in fact, I think it may be the most important thing about this book, and you asked about myths earlier, the most important myth, I think, by far, is this idea that as you get older, it's normal to be less active. And that is just not true. We evolved to be grandparents. We evolved to live. One of the things that's most interesting about humans, maybe, is that we evolved to live about 20 years or so after we stopped reproducing.

2:26No other animal does that except orcas, maybe killer whales. But with the exception of killer whales, humans have this really weird life history. We evolved to be grandparents. But grandparents in the old days weren't retiring to Florida, or I don't know where they do in England or whatever, go to New York or whatever, and kick up their heels and play golf or whatever with carts. Grandparents in the olden days, right, and many cultures still today, are working, right? They're working in the fields, they're hunting, they're gathering, they're getting food for their children and their grandchildren, they're helping with child care.

2:58And that physical activity is, you know, that's what their job is to be physically active. But in turn, that physical activity turns on an amazing suite of physiological processes that counter aging. Turns on repair and maintenance processes that not only keep our muscles strong, but also keep our DNA from accruing mutations, keep our mitochondria numbers high, keep the cells in our brain from accumulating gunk so that prevents Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. I mean, for every system of the body, physical activity has benefits that slow the aging process. And so when you stop doing it, you accelerate, and that's the way in which you perceive it is accelerating aging.

3:42But really, it's the absence of physical activity, which lets aging run amuck. In your first book in 2013, the story of the human body, in chapter 12, you said, use this phrase, use it or lose it, basically. We evolved to use or lose our bodies. And I was sat with them, someone recently, and I was trying to figure out why it appears that when people retire, or the other instance I've seen is, when their elderly partner passes away, it appears as if they don't live much longer. It's kind of like a folklore or something that, once you retire, your days are kind of numbered. Yeah, yeah. And I was trying to figure out the evolutionary reason for that, but it sounds like it's kind of what you've explained there.

4:23Well, I mean, I think part of that is depression, right? When you lose a partner, I mean, grief and depression, your cortisol levels go up, your immune system goes down. I mean, it's really tough on your body. I mean, psychosocial stress plays a serious physiological toll. But also, as you just pointed out, when people retire, they become less active, and that loss of activity has enormous effects on every aspect of our body. And our minds, physical activity is important not just for physical health, but also vital for mental health. And I think a lot of the problems that mental health issues we have today, depression, anxiety, some of them, to some extent, we can attribute that to less physical activity.

5:12And as people age, becoming less physically active, again, makes them much more vulnerable to widespread diseases. So would you say we shouldn't retire? Well, or if you do retire, I mean, retireing is again another modern, weird thing, right? Nobody retired in the past. I mean, if you're a farmer, it's like a subsistence farmer in any place, right? It's not like suddenly you hit 65, and I'm a sudden, you don't want to work in the fields. You work in the fields until you're dead, right? And hunter -gatherers don't retire. They continue to be physically active until they die, right? Or until they get too sick.

5:45So it's a very modern, western concept. And yes, we do pay price for it. But you, of course, can replace work that you do with challenging, rewarding, fun things. To do, the important thing is just not to stop being physically active. One of my favorite studies ever published, without a doubt, is a study done by a guy named Ralph Paffenberger. He realized that places like Harvard are fantastic for studying aging, because Harvard, like other private universities, never let's go there alumni. So until you die, they're asking you for money on a regular basis. And so he got the Alumni Association, the Harvard Development Office, to let him follow a series of Harvard alumni from several years, and keep asking them in questions about their physical activity levels, and also their diet, and whether they smoked and stuff like that, and then detract them for 25, 30 years.

6:44And what he found was that the alumni, we have to correct it for every factor you could think of, that as the alumni got older, the effect of physical activity on their health outcomes was bigger and bigger. So alumni who were in their 20s, 30s and 40s, for example, who were exercising you four or five times a week, they had about 20 % lower death rates. By the time they got to their 60s and 70s, the alumni who were exercising more had 50 % lower death rates. So as you get older, and this has been replicated again many times, but what he showed was that as you get older, exercise becomes more, not less important for maintaining your health.

7:21I've been thinking a lot about this because I was saying to Jack, my dad is 60 -ish, but he's very, very out of shape, very, very out of shape. And I was in Indonesia, and I was with my girlfriend, and we were going water -rofting, so we had to go down this really big hill, with all these stairs, it was like 300 meters of stairs. And I remember just thinking, my dad wouldn't be able to do this at his age at 60, and I want to be able to go down those stairs when I'm his age, because at the bottom there was a fun activity with someone I loved, and to think that I'll get to a point in my life where not so far away in the grand scheme of things, where I won't be able to go up or down some stairs because I'm 60, because of my sort of genetic predisposition, as I saw it, was quite sad, but having heard you say that, it really feels much more like a choice than it is genetics.

8:13Yeah, well, we have this expression in my field, which is that genes load the gun, environment pulls the trigger, right? Some of us have genetic predispositions towards being more likely to get diabetes, or heart disease, or this or that or the other, but our great, great, great grandparents in different environments weren't getting these diseases, or they were getting them at much, much, much lower frequencies, and it's not because they were dying earlier, it's because these diseases were less common. So, I think we too often blame our genes for many of these diseases, or many of these health problems, and I'm not, in any way, denying the role of genetics is, but that environment is way more important, and we have control over our environment, to some extent.

8:54And so, if you want to reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease, reduce your risk of diabetes, reduce your risk of Alzheimer's, dementia, exercise isn't a magic bullet, it's not going to prevent you from getting those diseases completely, but it lowers your risk quite substantially. And we know why, too. I mean, we have an immense amount of data on why that's the case. For every single one of these diseases, we understand the mechanisms by which physical activity has important mechanistic effects on these diseases. So, there's epidemiological data, there's mechanistic data, there's personal data, the problem is that it's hard to do, right?

9:34It takes willpower to overcome the inertia of doing what's completely normal, which is wanting to take it easy, right? I was just flew yesterday from Denver to Boston. And in the airport, these escalators right next to the stairway, right? And the escalator and the stair, it wasn't a huge stairway, everybody's lining up to take the escalator, and like the stairs are totally free. So, being me, of course, I'm not allowed to take the escalator unless, you know, I have to, right? So, I run up the stairs, but you know, it's, but those people taking the escalators, nothing wrong with them, they're not lazy, it's just an instinct, right?

10:16It's an instinct to take, to take it easy when you can, right? Because and we now live in a world where everybody can do that, right? Because we have escalators and lifts and cars and shopping carts and all these wonderful devices to make our lives easier. And now you have to overcome this fundamental basic instinct to take it easy in order to be physically active. And that's basically what exercise is. And so, and furthermore, if you're out of, if you're unfit and you're not really, you know, exercising isn't any fun, right? It's, it's unpleasant to you, you know, you sweat, you get hot and you get cranky and, you know, and it's not that rewarding until you get fit.

10:54And so, people hate it, right? And then we blame them for being lazy, but they're actually just being, they're just being normal. And I think we need to have more compassion towards, towards people who struggle to exercise. Quick one, before we get back to this episode, just give me 30 seconds of your time. Two things I wanted to say. The first thing is a huge thank you for listening and tuning into the show week after week. Means the world to all of us. And this really is a dream that we absolutely never had and couldn't have imagined getting to this place. But secondly, it's a dream where we feel like we're only just getting started.

11:26And if you enjoy what we do here, please join the 24 % of people who watch this channel regularly and have hit that subscribe button. It means more than I can say. And if you hit that subscribe button, here's a promise I'm going to make to you. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this show as good as I can now and into the future. We're going to deliver the guests that you want me to speak to and we're going to continue to keep doing all of the things you love about this show. Thank you. Thank you so much. Back to the episode. This basic instinct to take it easy. Are we evolved to be lazy, take escalator riders?

12:01Well, I wouldn't use the word lazy, but we are evolved to take it easy to rest whenever possible. So we've now got ourselves into a bit of a comfort crisis here because everything in our lives is optimizing us for convenience and ease. Right. And it's also it's it's it's sells. I mean comfort. I mean, who prefers to sit in economy as opposed to business class? Nobody. Comfort is nice. Who prefers shoes that are uncomfortable? We we we you know comforts comforts. You know, we love comfort, right? But since when is comfort necessarily better for you? I mean, our comfortable shoes actually better for you than going barefoot or the comfortable chairs better for you than we're taking the the left better for you than taking the short time or at least it appears to be today.

12:44Right. Yes, because we often value the short term benefit over the long term cost, right? That's hyperbolic discounting is the technical term for that. But but so we you know, we live in a world where we we we we you know, we pay extra for comfort or we and we'll we'll prefer it. But but now we also live in a world where we have to now go out of our way to be physically active because it's no longer necessary. And so again, I go back to my original statement, which is that people have all to be physically active for two reasons and two reasons only when it's necessary rewarding. When we don't make it necessary, we need to figure out ways to make it rewarding.

13:17And that's hard. It's very hard.

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