Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Francesca Budkin and I'm Louise Aria and this
Speaker 1: is season four of our New Zealand Ye Old podcast
Speaker 1: The Little Things.
Speaker 2: Good to have you with us. In this podcast, we
Speaker 2: talk to experts and find out all the little things
Speaker 2: you need to know to improve all areas of your life.
Speaker 1: And today we're talking about something that's hitting the headlines.
Speaker 1: Well it has been for a while now, and that's
Speaker 1: the Quest for longevity. It's it tight, it's not boring,
Speaker 1: it's not as hard as you think.
Speaker 2: I mean, we've all read the stories, haven't we know
Speaker 2: about the wealthy tech bros and the extreme links they're
Speaker 2: going to an order to live longer people. Have you
Speaker 2: know a lot of people talked about the TV show
Speaker 2: Secrets of the Blue Zones. We're always reading articles telling us,
Speaker 2: you know, to eat this and not that, and to
Speaker 2: exercise for this long or that long.
Speaker 1: It just goes on and all it does a bit,
Speaker 1: and I mean sometimes I just wish I was born
Speaker 1: in a blue zone so I could just come out naturally.
Speaker 1: But unlike tech Billinia Brian Johnson's very complex and expensive quest,
Speaker 1: here on the Little Things, we love, research based advice
Speaker 1: that's simple to follow and is not going to up
Speaker 1: end your life or empty your wallet.
Speaker 2: So I was very excited when I discovered a University
Speaker 2: of Sydney research paper published in BMC Medicine stating that
Speaker 2: small changes can have a big impact on health and
Speaker 2: reduce the risk of premature death. But better still, these
Speaker 2: researchers understand that any changes we make must be sustainable,
Speaker 2: they must be easy to maintain. So they have looked
Speaker 2: at the minimal we need to do and I promise
Speaker 2: you this is all durable for all of us.
Speaker 1: So to check longevity, we have a two part podcast
Speaker 1: for you today. Later on we catch up with journalists
Speaker 1: Joanna Wayne to talk us through her year long attempt
Speaker 1: to reduce your biological age. But right now, one of
Speaker 1: the co authors of that groundbreaking study of Francesca mentioned
Speaker 1: is doctor Nicholas Comeal. Nick is a trained dietician postdoctoral
Speaker 1: research fellow in the Physical Activity, Lifestyle and Population Health
Speaker 1: Department at the University of Sydney and he.
Speaker 3: Is with us now. Welcome, Nick, thanks so much for
Speaker 3: joining us.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, it's a pleasure. Thanks for the invitation, Nicholas.
Speaker 2: Longevity has been hurting the headlines and social media algorithms
Speaker 2: increasingly over the last few years. Why do you think
Speaker 2: people are talking about it so much? Aside from the
Speaker 2: fact that we all want to live over it's.
Speaker 5: Really become an increasingly important thing to look at, especially
Speaker 5: as life expectancy has extended so long, I mean globally.
Speaker 5: But it also raises other questions, you know, how do
Speaker 5: we live not just a longer life, but a healthier
Speaker 5: life and embedded with inside that lifespan. And this also
Speaker 5: comes with I think an increasing wave of just the
Speaker 5: information that we can get from both wearable technology but
Speaker 5: also the advancements in science. We're starting to be able
Speaker 5: to really translate some of that biological information into bite
Speaker 5: size information that the lay person could understand, and so
Speaker 5: that's really sort of proliferated a wave of interest I
Speaker 5: think in this field.
Speaker 1: So the health and wellness space can feel quite overwhelming,
Speaker 1: and I have heard people report of, you know, fatigue
Speaker 1: from just all the health and wellness information there is
Speaker 1: out there. Is it getting harder for you know, even
Speaker 1: space researchers to combat the noise saved to us by
Speaker 1: social media and so forth.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I mean you see this as a
Speaker 5: dietitians probably the biggest area where I see this. You know,
Speaker 5: physical activity for example, you would oftentimes get that moving
Speaker 5: more is healthy, But for a diet in particular.
Speaker 4: Every day, every week there's a.
Speaker 5: New fad diet and new thing that comes up, and
Speaker 5: that makes a lot of noise, makes my job as
Speaker 5: a dietitian incredibly challenging. So moving back to the basics,
Speaker 5: I think that and perhaps we'll discuss it here in
Speaker 5: a moment. This study was quite important because it really
Speaker 5: distilled it down to a little bit simpler terms and
Speaker 5: the sense of fruits vegetables for diet for example, and
Speaker 5: minutes per day of activity. So I think the noise
Speaker 5: is challenging, and that's part of our job as researchers
Speaker 5: is to try to consolidate it, to hop on the
Speaker 5: air with amazing people such as yourself, to try to
Speaker 5: disseminate these research findings into usable information and clear the air,
Speaker 5: so to speak.
Speaker 2: So let's start with the aims of the study. There
Speaker 2: were two aims. Took us through them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, So this study was interesting.
Speaker 5: So what we did was we were hoping to find
Speaker 5: the minimum change that you would need for longevity based
Speaker 5: off of three different lifestyle behaviors. So this is sleep,
Speaker 5: physical activity, and diet. So we call this span and
Speaker 5: it sort of embeds itself into the health span and lifespan.
Speaker 4: If we were to use that acronym.
Speaker 5: The other aim of this study was to find the
Speaker 5: optimal change, So what would be an invest case scenario
Speaker 5: that would look like And we found some pretty interesting stuff.
Speaker 5: So the aim was to find the minimum and the optimal,
Speaker 5: and we were able to find that the minimum for
Speaker 5: clinically meaningful reductions and risk of moretality. So this is
Speaker 5: about ten percent lower risk of mortality just required fifteen
Speaker 5: extra minutes of sleep, two minutes extra per day of
Speaker 5: moderate to vigorous physical activity, and just something like an
Speaker 5: extra half serving of vegetables per day. So this is
Speaker 5: quite unique in the sense of other literature out there.
Speaker 5: Most studies will focus on broad sweeps of behaviors, but
Speaker 5: this focused on what is the most the minimum, what
Speaker 5: is the most the bare minimum that we could do
Speaker 5: for some chunk of reduction.
Speaker 4: But yeah, hopefully that answers your question.
Speaker 2: Did you focus on the minimum because you have no
Speaker 2: faith in us to be apeful.
Speaker 3: To kind of kite with any coupe with anything more.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, it's it's a good point. So I wouldn't
Speaker 5: necessarily lean towards that. I think the main point in
Speaker 5: this is all previous literature has focused on meeting the
Speaker 5: guidelines or a perfect diet. You know, if I'm to
Speaker 5: do this fad diet, or if I'm to do this,
Speaker 5: and you know, in the most general sense, we as
Speaker 5: as consumers, we as the public, we generally get the
Speaker 5: idea moving more is healthy, that eating fruits and vegetables
Speaker 5: is healthy. The next step really for public health guidance
Speaker 5: is breaking it down into what I need to do today,
Speaker 5: what is the first step in the cascade of making
Speaker 5: behavior change. That's what's really interesting about this. Now it
Speaker 5: might seem like common sense, but being able to statistically
Speaker 5: and from an epidemiological perspective break that down into a
Speaker 5: chunk of where I put my right foot before the
Speaker 5: left foot, that takes a little bit of design.
Speaker 4: So that was kind of the interest there.
Speaker 5: I wouldn't lean towards the faith in the end user,
Speaker 5: but yeah, it's it goes hand in hand with behavior change.
Speaker 4: So that was really a novel aspect of this study.
Speaker 3: It was it was a large cohort that you studied.
Speaker 1: I involved, and participant based research and recruitment can be
Speaker 1: really tricky at times.
Speaker 3: How did you get that many people to be involved?
Speaker 5: Well, luckily I was a little bit of background on
Speaker 5: this for the listeners here. This was a sample of
Speaker 5: sixty thousand adults approximately, and these were UK based participants,
Speaker 5: so these were not Sydney based or Australia based or
Speaker 5: New Zealand based. And this is a part of what's
Speaker 5: known as the UK Biobank. So this is a very
Speaker 5: large scale, one of the largest biomedical studies globally that
Speaker 5: has trapped.
Speaker 4: People over time.
Speaker 5: So in this study, those sixty thousand participants were tracked
Speaker 5: over eight years. Now, luckily I was not involved in
Speaker 5: collecting that data. That would take an enormous amount of effort,
Speaker 5: and this is a part of that data resource. It
Speaker 5: enables any researcher globally through application to access that data
Speaker 5: to explore some of these more more granular associations. So yeah,
Speaker 5: it wasn't me involved in that, but I think that
Speaker 5: this is really the next.
Speaker 4: Step of research.
Speaker 2: That was the first comment loom made. They hit sixty.
Speaker 1: Those sort of data banks, you know, are amazing for research,
Speaker 1: aren't they. You know, you do have to go through
Speaker 1: your ethical loopholes to get to that to them, but
Speaker 1: such a great resource.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, and this, you know, it's on longevity.
Speaker 5: The UK Biobank has other aspects collected, you know, I
Speaker 5: think genetics as well as embedded in this and other
Speaker 5: metabolic parameters.
Speaker 4: So it's such a rich resource.
Speaker 5: This was really the tippity iceberg on what we're hoping
Speaker 5: to achieve with the span studies.
Speaker 4: The sleep is coal, activity and day.
Speaker 2: In the past, we've done plenty of studies on sleep
Speaker 2: and nutrition and physical exercise, but we haven't necessarily looked
Speaker 2: at them all together, which is kind of weird because
Speaker 2: they are intertwined, aren't they.
Speaker 4: Absolutely?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So this is probably the most important feature of
Speaker 5: this study. You know, on one element I mentioned that
Speaker 5: it's the next step, right that we can take breaking
Speaker 5: it into a chunk, a digestible chunk of where we
Speaker 5: can what we can do today to make for a
Speaker 5: longer and healthier future tomorrow. But going back to the
Speaker 5: biological and physiological underpinnings of this study is an important
Speaker 5: thing to discuss. So sleep, physical activity, and nutrition are
Speaker 5: incredibly intertwined and We chose those behaviors because across the
Speaker 5: twenty four hour period, they basically bump into each other
Speaker 5: at every point. And I like to give the example
Speaker 5: of sleep. You know, we've all had that Friday night,
Speaker 5: or that Saturday, or maybe a long working week where
Speaker 5: we can't get enough sleep, and the next day we're
Speaker 5: obviously a little bit fatigued. We're not going to be
Speaker 5: taken the flight of stairs. We're going to systematically reduce
Speaker 5: the amount of movement we do. And we're also, at
Speaker 5: least I know on my end, reaching for that extra
Speaker 5: bag of Chippy's or that extra bag of biscuits. Because
Speaker 5: we are fatigued, we are reducing our overall energy and
Speaker 5: so that drives the sort of the appetite hormones and
Speaker 5: our bodies to reach out for more energy consumption. So
Speaker 5: there is a bidirectional relationship between many of the behaviors
Speaker 5: involved here, and so that's what's unique about this. We
Speaker 5: chose these behaviors because they're intertwined. They're not silos really,
Speaker 5: they're more all interconnected as a web and ecological web
Speaker 5: that we have to consider.
Speaker 1: You're really speaking to me today because I caught a
Speaker 1: flight this morning. I had to get up at four
Speaker 1: forty five for and all I have been wanting to
Speaker 1: do is eat fetty food, you know, like I don't
Speaker 1: know because I'm fatigued.
Speaker 3: I had a few drinks celebrating a graduation.
Speaker 1: But you know it's so true. We just kind of
Speaker 1: just put bed on top of bed. Yeah, how did
Speaker 1: you measure each of these aspects of the study.
Speaker 4: That's a great point.
Speaker 5: So I'm an integrated behavioral scientist at the Mackenzie Wearable
Speaker 5: sub and we specialize in wearable technology, so you can
Speaker 5: imagine this as both research grade wearables as well as
Speaker 5: as well as consumer grade wearables. So you know, you
Speaker 5: can imagine this as an example like a fitbit or
Speaker 5: requirement things like this. Now, the UK Biobank had a
Speaker 5: subsample of individuals and they collected wearable data on them,
Speaker 5: and so that's what we use. That's really the gold
Speaker 5: standard for capturing physical activity and sleep measures. And in
Speaker 5: this case, we collected diet through a food frequency questionnaire,
Speaker 5: so that's reflective of their long term dietary behavior measurements.
Speaker 5: So we employed, you know, our ground truth and validated
Speaker 5: machine learning approaches to break apart that wearable data into
Speaker 5: these very high resolution changes, and that's how we were
Speaker 5: able to get the bare minimum. You know, we were
Speaker 5: able to break it down into those chunks.
Speaker 2: The results are really interesting because as you see, to
Speaker 2: us before fifteen minutes more sleep a day just out
Speaker 2: of two minutes I think of exercise, moderate to vigorous
Speaker 2: exercise and you know, sort of half a cup of
Speaker 2: you know, an extra half a cup of green vegie
Speaker 2: or Vegi's or something. That is not a lot to
Speaker 2: ask for, is it. I mean, you hear that and
Speaker 2: you go, I can do that. I can do that.
Speaker 2: It's pretty awesome. So what I want to know is, though,
Speaker 2: what does that actually mean? Does that just give us
Speaker 2: a better chance of living longer than the average age
Speaker 2: or and I think in New Zealand for women it's
Speaker 2: eighty four minutes just over eighty or does it give
Speaker 2: us a bit of chance of just getting to the
Speaker 2: average age.
Speaker 5: So in this study specifically, we did not calculate the
Speaker 5: life expectancy, So that's sort of a separate a separate
Speaker 5: area of epidemiology and public health. In this study, we
Speaker 5: were looking at the risk of premature and death. So
Speaker 5: it's a slight nuance to your question to answer, the
Speaker 5: first part would be what does it mean right? Breaking
Speaker 5: that question that arm of the question down, and that
Speaker 5: bare minimum was related to a ten percent lower risk
Speaker 5: of premature death. So while it doesn't mean that we
Speaker 5: can give you a precise age that you would live
Speaker 5: to per se, you can imagine that as you make
Speaker 5: the subsequent changes you'll have up to In this case,
Speaker 5: we had sixty four percent lower risk of mortality. If
Speaker 5: you were to make more substantial changes in your lifestyle,
Speaker 5: that would be the most optimal lifestyle change. So that's
Speaker 5: quite a large amount and really really exciting work that
Speaker 5: I'm working on once we finish the call here and
Speaker 5: hope to preprint and put online soon, is a translation
Speaker 5: of those risks into life expectancy, so how many raw
Speaker 5: years you would gain and as well healthy years that
Speaker 5: you would gain. So there's some exciting new work that
Speaker 5: will come out that hopefully will take that to the
Speaker 5: next step, not just a percentage of risk that we
Speaker 5: can get, but how many years. And that's I think
Speaker 5: really the pinnacle of translation of research.
Speaker 2: Do you think that will really hit people? That'll make
Speaker 2: it sink in a lot more with people When you go,
Speaker 2: you know you'll get this many more years.
Speaker 5: That's always the balancing act, you know, we in research
Speaker 5: is taking the findings and trying to make them, you know,
Speaker 5: disseminatable to where we can we can give it to
Speaker 5: the public, but also trying to put it in realistic terms,
Speaker 5: you know. So I think it will be helpful because
Speaker 5: ten percent lower risk is one thing, but years is
Speaker 5: really I mean, everybody understands that, right, So I think
Speaker 5: that it will help.
Speaker 4: I think that will be really really interesting.
Speaker 5: The other nice part about this this study, and I
Speaker 5: won't go into it in too much detail because it's
Speaker 5: it's not published yet, but is looking at the healthy
Speaker 5: year's game. So in this study, we're looking at lower
Speaker 5: risk of mortality, but we're not really breaking down the
Speaker 5: quality years of your life, you know, and that's I
Speaker 5: think probably one of the more important features to look
Speaker 5: at how many years we have of healthy living as
Speaker 5: opposed to just.
Speaker 3: Pre death exactly.
Speaker 1: And that's right, And so it's taking down those risks
Speaker 1: of a certain disease, carriivascular disease, cancers and that kind
Speaker 1: of thing, right, absolutely.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So generally speaking, you'll see this as a a
Speaker 5: few different diseases you hit, you hit it right on
Speaker 5: the head there, cardiovascular disease cancer tayetoo, diabetes off that time.
Speaker 4: Another big one you.
Speaker 5: Would see would be, for example, cognitive disorders demnsha Alzheimer's,
Speaker 5: because you may be void of of cardiovascular or type
Speaker 5: two diabetic complications, but you can't see cognitive decline.
Speaker 4: And that's definitely on the rise right now.
Speaker 2: In Australia, Nick, you mentioned we've been talking about how
Speaker 2: intertwined these three things out physical movement and sleep and nutrition.
Speaker 2: So I'm presuming if you just did one of these things,
Speaker 2: if you just sleeped for fifteen more minutes a day,
Speaker 2: because it sounded quite nice, that's not going to have impact.
Speaker 3: You've got to do all three.
Speaker 5: Not necessarily. It's a really really good point to make.
Speaker 5: So in this study we actually looked at them juxtapose.
Speaker 5: We looked at the individual behaviors one at a time,
Speaker 5: and then we held them comparatively to what you would
Speaker 5: need to do the amount you would need to do
Speaker 5: of the combined behaviors. So with sleep, for example, you
Speaker 5: absolutely could make some changes and obtain a benefit, could
Speaker 5: obtain lower risk, but it was nowhere near the maximum
Speaker 5: benefit that you could have changed. The sum of the
Speaker 5: individual parts was equal to more than the whole, so
Speaker 5: there was a cynergistic relationship there. And the other thing
Speaker 5: is is that for sleep, for example, we have fifteen minutes,
Speaker 5: but on its own, you start to see that it
Speaker 5: would require substantially more sleep than you would And that
Speaker 5: goes back to what is behaviorally sustainable for these individuals
Speaker 5: who might be trying to make change. If I ask
Speaker 5: you to sleep an extra hour every day, you'd tell me,
Speaker 5: you know, I can't, I have to work, you know,
Speaker 5: I just might not be feasible, but just an extra
Speaker 5: little bit there, and then changing maybe you know what
Speaker 5: you prepare for breakfast or lunch or dinner to have
Speaker 5: just that extra little bit. Now we're starting to make
Speaker 5: long term sustainable changes. And that's the icing on the
Speaker 5: cake here, is really trying to make things not just feasible,
Speaker 5: but to where they're practical to maintain in the long term.
Speaker 1: Just on that sleep, is that as part of your evening,
Speaker 1: your overnight sleep, or it can it be a nap
Speaker 1: at some other point of the day.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a good point. So we didn't we didn't
Speaker 5: look at naps or other breaks inside of that. But
Speaker 5: I think that the literature now supports that the nap
Speaker 5: still can be a healthy part of rest, right. I mean,
Speaker 5: that's not the focus of this study, but it's an
Speaker 5: important that's an interesting point to make, you know, as
Speaker 5: you know, if you can get the total hours as
Speaker 5: opposed to one continuous bout of sleep. And I think
Speaker 5: that that's going to be answered soon because sleep is
Speaker 5: is kind of an under explored area in longevity, in
Speaker 5: terms of wearable technology, it hasn't yet really been fully
Speaker 5: explored to the extent of physical activity. And I think
Speaker 5: we're seeing a new way. Our team has been publishing
Speaker 5: some stuff on this as well as sleep regularity, how
Speaker 5: consistent you are with sleep, and as well, you know,
Speaker 5: we sleep catch up. So for example, a year to
Speaker 5: go sleep on the weekend, you catch up all of
Speaker 5: the sleep you're missing for the week with that had
Speaker 5: the same benefit. And this is a new wave of
Speaker 5: sleep studies that are coming out really pointing towards comparison
Speaker 5: with physical activity, where you might do some weekend warrior
Speaker 5: type behaviors. And yeah, I think I can't answer that
Speaker 5: specifically which would be better at apples to oranges, because
Speaker 5: we didn't address that in the study, But I think
Speaker 5: it will be answered soon. I think that's the next
Speaker 5: next week.
Speaker 1: If we are already getting a recommended amount of sleep,
Speaker 1: we're exercising regularly, and we've got pretty good nutrition, well,
Speaker 1: how do we make an impact on our house in
Speaker 1: that case?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So in this study we did explore if you
Speaker 5: were to shift the reference points. So for example, in
Speaker 5: this study, we were looking at those who were occupying
Speaker 5: sort of the bottom end of these behaviors and saying,
Speaker 5: what's the minimum from that? Which you miss some public
Speaker 5: health relevance there because not everybody in the distribution of
Speaker 5: society is going to be at the bottom end, sleeping
Speaker 5: a small amount or occupying the worst possible dietary behaviors.
Speaker 5: And you still could achieve benefits if you were to
Speaker 5: make change, but it wasn't to the same degree. And
Speaker 5: that's because, as you said, you're already occupying a more
Speaker 5: optimal profile. And I think that's when you start to
Speaker 5: get into really trying to refine what those behaviors look like.
Speaker 5: So for example, with physical activity, I mean it starts
Speaker 5: to become blurry because you can embed this in other things,
Speaker 5: for example, sedentary behavior. If you're breaking up your day
Speaker 5: of sitting down and injecting the same duration of physical
Speaker 5: activity across the day to try to interrupt those long
Speaker 5: bouts of sitting. That can have some benefit as well
Speaker 5: as the regularity aspect that I was mentioning, going to
Speaker 5: sleep at a consistent time that we have shown previously,
Speaker 5: again not the purpose of today discussion, but that's shown
Speaker 5: to have an enormous impact on our risk of dementia
Speaker 5: as well as our risk of cardiovascular disease. And that's
Speaker 5: really exciting because that's starting to show that the biological
Speaker 5: notion of this circadian rhythm, you know, as we start
Speaker 5: to feed into it, we're consistently going to sleep at
Speaker 5: the same time, we're consistently training or eating at the
Speaker 5: same time. Now we're starting to allow for the body
Speaker 5: system to operate on a more regular rhythm, literally a
Speaker 5: regular rhythm, and that can add to our or amplify
Speaker 5: the lifestyle benefits that we're already getting same amount.
Speaker 2: It's interesting you use that we're consistent because as two
Speaker 2: women who are around the age of perimenopause minipause, consistency
Speaker 2: has suddenly become hugely important and actually a lot of
Speaker 2: large parts of our lives can I just ask a question.
Speaker 2: Thing we were talking about, of course, the minimum amount
Speaker 2: that you had to do, but what was the optimum
Speaker 2: amount that you discovered.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's a great point.
Speaker 5: So optimum in this case was quite quite substantial in
Speaker 5: the sense of sleep. Sleep was somewhere around seven to
Speaker 5: eight hours per day. I'll give these as approximations here.
Speaker 5: And for physical activity, we were looking at more of
Speaker 5: the forty to one hundred minutes per day. So this
Speaker 5: is quite a substantial amount of moderate to vigorous physical activity.
Speaker 5: So I mean moderate to vigorous. You could imagine this
Speaker 5: as a brisk walking for an hour along those lines
Speaker 5: would get you up to that. And then for diet,
Speaker 5: it was quite a few changes. So for example, entirely
Speaker 5: cutting out sugar sweetened beverages, We're reducing the processed or
Speaker 5: refined meats from the diet, several servings per day of
Speaker 5: fruits and vegetables, and this is kind of sort of
Speaker 5: like meeting the food the food my plate. You know,
Speaker 5: you're fitting all of the food groups that you would
Speaker 5: need to match the dietary guidelines depending on which country
Speaker 5: you're in, obviously, but as a generalization that would be
Speaker 5: the main objective, and for that again, we're getting up
Speaker 5: to a sixty four percent lower risk of mortality. So
Speaker 5: it does require some shifts, but yeah, it's it's still doable,
Speaker 5: you know. I think these are all things that we
Speaker 5: could make in our day to day lives. They just
Speaker 5: take a little bit more planning when looking at the maximum.
Speaker 1: They do take planning because I used to do my
Speaker 1: exercise first thing in the morning when I woke up,
Speaker 1: but I've recently joined a JIM and I go with
Speaker 1: a friend from work and we leave our desks, we
Speaker 1: walk down there, we do our workout, we walk back
Speaker 1: and I can't believe for a difference it's made to
Speaker 1: my day, you know, because I'm breaking up there sitting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it also means I have to plan my breakfast, down,
Speaker 1: my lunch, you know, I have to do all of that.
Speaker 1: So it does take a bit of planning. But then
Speaker 1: you get into the pattern of it again, you become consistent.
Speaker 5: That's the important part is creating the habit. Once the
Speaker 5: habit's created, it sort of falls like a domino, and that's.
Speaker 4: What we're hoping to achieve here. Create the first domino.
Speaker 2: You know, which is really interesting when it comes to
Speaker 2: us thinking about longevity or just looking after ourselves to
Speaker 2: live a healthier life, we tend to hear all these
Speaker 2: stories at the moment we go kind of straight to biohacking,
Speaker 2: don't we. I mean, do biological tests or genome sequencing,
Speaker 2: all these full body scans that you're hearing people you know,
Speaker 2: getting done these days, do they have a role to
Speaker 2: play in longevity or I mean they're really out of
Speaker 2: reach for the average person, aren't they.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean there's sort of a hierarchy here of what's
Speaker 5: important in public health and what is achievable. And I
Speaker 5: think at the bottom of that hierarchy, I mean wearables aside,
Speaker 5: everything aside, I mean, is basically just trying to make
Speaker 5: the things that we do in our every day to
Speaker 5: day life optimized. We have to eat food, we have
Speaker 5: to sleep, I mean, movement is essential. We need to
Speaker 5: move our bodies. So you sort of need to achieve
Speaker 5: that first level of the hierarchy before you can even
Speaker 5: start to thay about doing a human genome sequence. I mean,
Speaker 5: I guess you don't have to, but the main thing
Speaker 5: is that that would be the first logical step, so
Speaker 5: that way you can incrementally sort of refine what you're doing.
Speaker 5: And the other thing is these things cost money, right,
Speaker 5: I mean we can not just in high income countries,
Speaker 5: but we look at this from a global standpoint. There's
Speaker 5: a lot of countries where we don't have those tools
Speaker 5: or resources to be able to do so. While biohacking
Speaker 5: is important and I think it does have another silver
Speaker 5: lining in terms of advancing the field of longevity. This
Speaker 5: wave of consumers doing this can add some nice data
Speaker 5: and richness to what's available there and help point towards
Speaker 5: the next generation when things become more affordable. But I mean,
Speaker 5: I'm more of a generalist. I like to think of
Speaker 5: how I can impact the highest number of people, how
Speaker 5: we can help change the highest number of lifestyles and
Speaker 5: behavior change, And with that it's better oftentimes to start
Speaker 5: with what's changeable in the general public and how we
Speaker 5: can start to make those shifts. So, yeah, it's sort
Speaker 5: of yin and yang. There's a place for it, but
Speaker 5: enough for everybody.
Speaker 1: We were going to raise Brian Johnson type things that
Speaker 1: he's doing to try and live for I don't know
Speaker 1: what is it one hundred and forty, one hundred and
Speaker 1: six or whatever it is twenty I think, and he's
Speaker 1: a bit of a piney I get that, and he
Speaker 1: acts as if he's doing it for the benefit of
Speaker 1: all mankind. But you've really answered that it's yes, there
Speaker 1: may be some things that come out of his personal
Speaker 1: experiment that will benefit humankind later.
Speaker 3: I don't know how many out of all the.
Speaker 1: Many many things he's doing, because there's no control, so
Speaker 1: at least you're just counting the rest of the population.
Speaker 1: But what you're saying is more that these things can
Speaker 1: sort of have a trickle down effect for population health
Speaker 1: that if you start, as you say, at the top
Speaker 1: of the pyramid.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, yeah, so there's definitely pros and cons to these
Speaker 5: sorts of things, and yeah, it's incredible to sort of
Speaker 5: commit that much time. I'm in that much resource to
Speaker 5: advancing the field. But again going also to other things
Speaker 5: such as the sustainability of these behaviors. You know, if
Speaker 5: I was to go to the general public and tell
Speaker 5: them they need to follow this, you know, twelve hour
Speaker 5: regime every day, it's not feasible, you know, and you
Speaker 5: almost end up with better behavior change and you end
Speaker 5: up with more successful protocols whenever they are a little
Speaker 5: bit more realistic. Now, maybe that's the minimum change, maybe
Speaker 5: it's a little bit more generalized. But offering these really
Speaker 5: really structured regimes, you end up moving people away from
Speaker 5: in some cases not all cases, you end up moving
Speaker 5: them away from organic living into this sort of structured
Speaker 5: confine of you need to do this at every minute
Speaker 5: of the day, and it moves away from free living
Speaker 5: and into almost a synthetic environment.
Speaker 4: And that's not.
Speaker 5: Always healthy for everybody. It can cause some mental concerns.
Speaker 5: It can cause some eruptions in your quality of life.
Speaker 5: So longevity and quality of life, that can be a
Speaker 5: balance to strike there. Yeah, and mental health and psychology.
Speaker 5: It's not my expertise, but you can imagine how this
Speaker 5: could be. I mean, how this could disrupt your normal
Speaker 5: day to day living or normal life events that you
Speaker 5: would have going on, going to a graduation, going you know,
Speaker 5: things like this. As you mentioned, it can get in
Speaker 5: the way of those and that's not what we want
Speaker 5: to preach.
Speaker 4: We want to try to.
Speaker 5: Embed and to weave these into a healthy lifestyle where
Speaker 5: you can still do everything you'd like to do, just
Speaker 5: in a healthier way.
Speaker 2: Nicholas, thank you so much for your time. For talking
Speaker 2: us through this, and I think we're going to have
Speaker 2: to be back in touch with you again in the future.
Speaker 2: It sounds like this is just there's just a lot
Speaker 2: of ongoing information to still to come our way.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, so thank you again for the time. We've got
Speaker 5: that next study coming up on health span versus lifespan.
Speaker 5: Would be super keen to discuss with you guys that
Speaker 5: on the podcast. Otherwise, if there's any questions from the
Speaker 5: listeners or for you guys, feel free to reach out
Speaker 5: to me. At the University of Sydney, Nicholas come out.
Speaker 2: You're listening to the Little Things And that was doctor
Speaker 2: Nicholas Comel talking about his groundbreaking study on how small
Speaker 2: changes those little things can have a big impact on
Speaker 2: our health. When we come back, the Kewi journo and
Speaker 2: her year long Queace to reduce her biological age back soon. So,
Speaker 2: as you know, here on The Little Things, Lou and
Speaker 2: I like to test out a lot of the advice
Speaker 2: we're given, but for this EP we didn't have to
Speaker 2: because our colleague here at The New Zealand Herald, senior
Speaker 2: feature writer Joanna Wayne, has already done this. So Joe
Speaker 2: spent a year on a mission to lower her biological
Speaker 2: age in pursuit of longevity, and joins us now to
Speaker 2: talk through the process and the results. Welcome, Arenda, thank
Speaker 2: you so much for sharing your story with us. I
Speaker 2: presume that you got tested before you started everything.
Speaker 6: Yeah, i'd been I'd written a couple of storyries on
Speaker 6: the international race to cure aging. So I was really
Speaker 6: interested in the science of whether you could increase your
Speaker 6: health span. You know, that's when you're alive, but you
Speaker 6: don't have any chronic diseases, Like it's something like life
Speaker 6: expectancy average around the world is eighty but health span
Speaker 6: where you're healthy and active is like sixty three, you know,
Speaker 6: not even gold cut. So I was interested in what
Speaker 6: you could do to keep yourself healthy for longer. And
Speaker 6: I heard about this DNA test where you could send
Speaker 6: off this little pin prick blood sample and have your
Speaker 6: cellular age analyzed, so how your body is deteriorating versus
Speaker 6: you know, the number of candles on your birthday cake.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I did.
Speaker 6: I had discussed what I would do with one of
Speaker 6: the people I'd interviewed from my articles, who's own New
Speaker 6: Zealand's or biotech guy who's developed their supplements, so that
Speaker 6: were that was part of it. And I was, you know,
Speaker 6: late fifties turning fifty nine. I thought, okay, can I
Speaker 6: make myself younger before I hit the big six to
Speaker 6: So that was the idea. It was a kind of
Speaker 6: a challenge. So how did you go about this challenge?
Speaker 6: What did you do? So I'm not an extreme kind
Speaker 6: of person, and I wanted it to be pretty relatable
Speaker 6: to the average person. So it wasn't about spending money
Speaker 6: or you know, come fasting for weeks, So a little
Speaker 6: less alcohol, a little more exercise, trying to reduce stress.
Speaker 6: I did go on these anti aging supplements which were
Speaker 6: supplied by SRW, so that was who also organized the test.
Speaker 6: And I went to a hypnotherapist to try and reduce
Speaker 6: stress and also help stop me grinding my teeth, which
Speaker 6: I do so ferociously.
Speaker 3: I smashed my fillings.
Speaker 6: That's definitely a sign of stress, right, breathing exercises, and
Speaker 6: I've got this great osteopath who going to him as
Speaker 6: good for the body is as well as the soul.
Speaker 6: So just little little things.
Speaker 2: It's interesting you say that they were little things. Did
Speaker 2: you do that purely because you knew that they would
Speaker 2: be sustainable and easy to stick to.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I knew for both myself that I just wasn't
Speaker 6: that kind of intense person who was going to go
Speaker 6: to the gym seven days a week. But also, you know,
Speaker 6: for the for the point of doing the story and
Speaker 6: the challenge, I did want it to be something that
Speaker 6: just the average person could look at and say, yeah,
Speaker 6: yeah I could. I could give that a go, And
Speaker 6: I figured doing anything was worthwhile. I mean, I was
Speaker 6: reasonably healthy, reasonably good diet, reasonably good weight. You know,
Speaker 6: it was mainly for me, it wasn't It was about
Speaker 6: hitting that age where you think, Okay, how many good
Speaker 6: years have I got left to be active and out
Speaker 6: and adventures and doing things, and you want to make
Speaker 6: you want to make that last for as long as possible.
Speaker 6: So that was a motivation for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that health span thing is really key, isn't it.
Speaker 1: Sixty three is a little bit of a surprise to me.
Speaker 1: It probably shouldn't be, bit it is. So you did
Speaker 1: this for twelve months.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So I had the initial test and I've got to
Speaker 6: say my results were pretty good. I was quite shaffed.
Speaker 6: The results are across a whole range of different tests
Speaker 6: or analysis of your bloods, and one of them had
Speaker 6: me down at forty three, so rocking it, baby. And
Speaker 6: then there's also one that's the pace of aging, which
Speaker 6: is actually based off the Dunedin study, which you know,
Speaker 6: has followed nearly a thousand people since the early seventies,
Speaker 6: I think, and that one looks it's a snapshot in
Speaker 6: time of how fast you're aging. So according to my
Speaker 6: results in a year, I'm only aging eight and a
Speaker 6: half months, So that was my best result by far,
Speaker 6: and at the time, although the technology changes so quickly,
Speaker 6: at the time, that was considered the core result. So
Speaker 6: then I did it again at six months to see
Speaker 6: how I was going along the way. And it is
Speaker 6: quite nerve wracking waiting for your results, you know, and
Speaker 6: they were pretty good. They were much the same. I
Speaker 6: think my pace of aging was the same. I had
Speaker 6: one element that had really improved, but then the twelve
Speaker 6: month one came along and got I took the ten
Speaker 6: just after I'd done the Apstau Ocean cycle ride for
Speaker 6: my sixtieth birthday, so maybe my reserves were depleted, or
Speaker 6: maybe it was an off day beneaway, my results were
Speaker 6: not great after twelve months, like they were not great.
Speaker 6: My pace of aging was still quite good, but it
Speaker 6: had gone up. My other ages were all late fifties.
Speaker 6: They'd brought in a new test that looks at the
Speaker 6: health of your organs the risk factor for issues, and
Speaker 6: it suggested I'd needed to be careful of my kidneys
Speaker 6: and there was some inflammatory signals that were up which
Speaker 6: may be related to stress.
Speaker 2: So it was a bit of a downer that last result.
Speaker 2: So was it worth it? Was the year worth it?
Speaker 6: I mean that last result may be thinking, oh my god,
Speaker 6: have I got some underlying condition I don't know about.
Speaker 6: I think in the future, where the cost of it
Speaker 6: and accessibility comes down, maybe all of us would do
Speaker 6: this every six months at the doctrum and then you'd
Speaker 6: see a pattern rather than a bump up and down.
Speaker 6: One of my big risk factors was drinking, like I'd
Speaker 6: put down three to five drinks a week, and that
Speaker 6: put me in a really quite high risk category for
Speaker 6: lots of things. I think that's probably I'm still a
Speaker 6: sporadic exerciser. I try with stress, like I think it's
Speaker 6: a really stressful dark time in the world, and I
Speaker 6: try and realize when I feel it quartersol rising. I
Speaker 6: can almost feel my blood pressure rising. So I try
Speaker 6: and stay on top of that. But I drink definitely
Speaker 6: drink less. I think that's the one big thing that
Speaker 6: I've taken out of it is just knocking having a
Speaker 6: few days off.
Speaker 2: Just my doctor said to me at one point, she said, actually,
Speaker 2: you know, no alcohol is best franchisca. And if you
Speaker 2: look around the world, you know, Canada and other places,
Speaker 2: they're saying two standard drinks a week, and they're being
Speaker 2: really strict about it. And I just remember sort of thinking,
Speaker 2: I don't think I'd ever get to that point. And
Speaker 2: I think I've had two drinks a week now only
Speaker 2: for about a month and a half. And I regret
Speaker 2: to say it probably is a reason for that. You know,
Speaker 2: it's really interesting, isn't it. I suppose what I'm wondering is,
Speaker 2: even though in your stats came back and were a
Speaker 2: little bit depressing, the data was a bit depressing. After
Speaker 2: that year of doing all those little changes of just
Speaker 2: exercising a bit more and eating while and cutting back
Speaker 2: on the alcohol and things, did you in general feel better,
Speaker 2: like where there are the benefits aside from the data,
Speaker 2: did you feel better.
Speaker 6: So I have to be really honest. So I didn't
Speaker 6: feel any different at all through the whole year. I
Speaker 6: really didn't feel any different. I think a mind shift though,
Speaker 6: because one of the big things that surprised me in
Speaker 6: writing about it was that the current thinking is that
Speaker 6: your genetics are twenty percent, which isn't that high, and
Speaker 6: lifestyle is eighty percent. So that's the environment you live in.
Speaker 6: Some of that you might not be able to control,
Speaker 6: like pollution in the air or whether you can walk
Speaker 6: or bike to work, but also how you behave in
Speaker 6: that you know where they had, whether your drink, smoke, exercise.
Speaker 6: So I think it I felt, I don't know, a
Speaker 6: terrible we'd empowered to be a little bit more in
Speaker 6: control and that you can influence it, just to do
Speaker 6: the best you can. So I think that was what
Speaker 6: I took out of it most was I want to,
Speaker 6: you know, keep engaging in life and having adventures and
Speaker 6: just to keep doing it and know that I can
Speaker 6: influence at least some of it. Rather, you know, I
Speaker 6: can lower the odds of things going wrong for me
Speaker 6: health wise.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1: Give yourself the best chance with those chronic conditions that
Speaker 1: can sneak up on us as we age. I'm relieved
Speaker 1: in a way to hear that you didn't notice it
Speaker 1: in a huge way, because if you then told me
Speaker 1: and Francisca today everything change and I just felt amazing,
Speaker 1: we'd be like, oh no, that's another job we better
Speaker 1: get on with. So you know, those little changes are
Speaker 1: probably good for your day to day. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: it's like, and you have good days and bad days,
Speaker 1: and the world hasn't got any easier to live in over.
Speaker 6: The past few years. So probably being a little bit
Speaker 6: more aware of my response to the world I live in.
Speaker 6: I suppose you talking about alcohol. It's coming up to
Speaker 6: winter and we have an open fire, and open fire
Speaker 6: and a glass of wine, red wine. It's just goes together.
Speaker 6: But it is just kind of treating myself a bit
Speaker 6: more gently. I'm the youngest in my family, so I've
Speaker 6: seen my older siblings deal with various issues as they
Speaker 6: get older, and yeah, just increasing your chances nobody. There's
Speaker 6: a looney guy, Brian Johnson, who's really worth reading about
Speaker 6: if you have a chance, who's gone into this.
Speaker 3: He's very wealthy.
Speaker 6: He's spent millions making his body a personal science. Experiment
Speaker 6: to try and increase his health span, and he has
Speaker 6: lowered his cellular age by a few years. But oh
Speaker 6: my god, the cost of it.
Speaker 3: There's just no joy.
Speaker 6: In life, you know, in the food he eats, he's
Speaker 6: monitored twenty for seven even his erections during the night
Speaker 6: measure his manliness or something. I don't know. You've just
Speaker 6: got to enjoy living, if I think, if you get
Speaker 6: to extreme on this kind of thing, then you miss
Speaker 6: out on the whole point of having health speed in
Speaker 6: any way, you know, if you're not out enjoying it.
Speaker 1: I've done a bit of research on Brian and my
Speaker 1: issue with him is it is in making out as
Speaker 1: if he's doing it for the betterment of all mankind.
Speaker 1: But it'll never be affordable for all mankind to do
Speaker 1: what he's doing. And if he comes across some golden nugget,
Speaker 1: that'd be great.
Speaker 3: It's more about his ego. Yeah, it's not living right,
Speaker 3: and he's not for the most of us. He wants
Speaker 3: to do it. You will power that.
Speaker 6: You see the ones who are spending so much on
Speaker 6: anti aging, it's all the really super rich people. It's
Speaker 6: the Jeff be Sauces and multimillion Dollar Labs working on it.
Speaker 6: It's ego, it's not about the betterment of humanity.
Speaker 3: That's what the little thing's for. It's free. Listen to
Speaker 3: it on wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll give
Speaker 3: you little bits of advice every week.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us and taking us
Speaker 1: through your year of health pleasure.
Speaker 2: Thank you to both doctor Komel and Joanna Wayne all
Speaker 2: their time today. That was pretty interesting, wasn't it, Because
Speaker 2: you know, as we said at the top of the hour,
Speaker 2: we're all talking about longevity. We're watching the TV show
Speaker 2: as we're reading the articles about these kind of fruit
Speaker 2: loopy billionaires who are trying to live to one hundred
Speaker 2: and twenty in things, and really.
Speaker 3: It's kind of simple.
Speaker 2: It is get a little bit more sleep, do a
Speaker 2: little bit more exercise, and eat a little bit better.
Speaker 2: Just throw just half a cup I think it's even
Speaker 2: a quarter of a cup? Is on you need of
Speaker 2: green leafy veggies? Yeah, unto your day and that's not hard.
Speaker 2: Reduce the risk any one of us death. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: again it's about the house in years, isn't it. It's
Speaker 2: it's about the peep in your step, and I think
Speaker 2: that'll be really interesting to hear more about what Nick discovers,
Speaker 2: because of course we were talking about reducing the risk
Speaker 2: of premature death. But actually, at the moment, I think
Speaker 2: the health span in New Zealand is sixty three. So
Speaker 2: that is the age that we get to before we
Speaker 2: start being That's defined as the year spent generally active
Speaker 2: and free from disease, So that's six three years old.
Speaker 2: I like that to be a little older.
Speaker 1: That was an interesting discovery. I didn't know that, and
Speaker 1: that shocked me a little bit. But then I suppose,
Speaker 1: I guess I don't know what the perimeters are. Does
Speaker 1: that mean start to need medication, statins and blood pressure
Speaker 1: men's and stuff like that. I don't quite know what
Speaker 1: they mean by sixty three, you know, but anything you can.
Speaker 2: Do, I mean most of us do by that stage.
Speaker 1: Saving all of that off for as long as possible.
Speaker 1: I certainly want to be fit and fit as a
Speaker 1: fiddle at sixty three.
Speaker 3: Gosh.
Speaker 2: So I found Nick really interesting, and I found those
Speaker 2: minimal levels of change just so exciting because we have
Speaker 2: the third highest adult obesity rate in the OECD. And
Speaker 2: if we can take this information and you can use it,
Speaker 2: and you can educate people and things look fingers crossed.
Speaker 2: It could be a really simple way of having a
Speaker 2: huge impact. But then I found it really interesting listening
Speaker 2: to Joanna and everything she went through to kind of
Speaker 2: come out with quite mixed results at the end of
Speaker 2: the year.
Speaker 1: Well, we interviewed her in person, and she looks fantastic.
Speaker 1: She looks young. I as I said, I think sometimes
Speaker 1: these things, just knowing you're being measured can affect your outcome.
Speaker 1: So I wonder how much that played into it as well.
Speaker 1: But I kind of feel relieved about that.
Speaker 3: I'm not gonna I'm not going to do that for
Speaker 3: a year.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to launch out there on and and
Speaker 2: spend all that money on all the different fads and
Speaker 2: things go. It's just getting back to what we're always
Speaker 2: talking about.
Speaker 6: Louise.
Speaker 3: What's that?
Speaker 2: How's the food?
Speaker 3: Move consistently and sleep consistently?
Speaker 2: Ever that's working for us? Okay, thanks for joining us
Speaker 2: on our new Zealand Heal podcast series, Little Things. We
Speaker 2: hope you share the podcast with the women in your
Speaker 2: life so we can all live a little longer.
Speaker 1: You can follow this podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts, and for more on this and other topics,
Speaker 1: He to zied Herald dot co dot zed
Speaker 2: And we'll catch you next time on the little things.