Pod Insights Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee BITESIZE | The Most Powerful Daily Habit for Better Brain Health | Louisa Nicola #585 About this episode Do you think that it’s inevitable that the function of your brain will decline as you get older? Or, do you believe that there are simple things you can do each day to preserve, protect and enhance it?
Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests.
Today’s clip is from episode 522 of the podcast with neurophysiologist and brain health researcher, Louisa Nicola.
Louisa believes that exercise is one of the most powerful tools we have to protect and enhance our brain health and, in this clip, she shares simple, practical strategies that we can all adopt – whatever our age or fitness level.
Louisa believes that while modern lifestyles may contribute to cognitive decline, we have far more control over our brain health than we might think. Small daily choices add up, and it’s never too early—or too late—to start.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:20 Rangan Chatterjee? See all details at drinkag1.com/livemore. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 522 of the podcast with neurophysiologist and brain-held researcher Louisa Nicola. Louisa believes that exercise is one of the most powerful tools we have to protect and enhance our brain health. And in this clip, she shares simple, practical strategies that we can all adopt, whatever our age or fitness level.
2:08 Rangan Chatterjee? You mentioned that aerobic exercise can increase the grey matter of the brain.
2:13 Speaker 01 Yes.
2:14 Rangan Chatterjee? That sounds really great, I'm sure, to many people. In terms of what that actually means for them, if they have more grey matter, what is that? Is that the way they process information, the way they think?
2:27 Speaker 01 Absolutely everything. Your brain is responsible for everything that you do. It is responsible for who you are, how you see, how you interpret information, how you sleep, how you eat, even down to the spouse that you choose. If you have a better functioning brain, more grey matter, more functional neural networks, you will perform better, think faster and live longer. It'll make you a better human.
2:52 Rangan Chatterjee? And aerobic exercise, which isn't actually that difficult, is going to help you do that?
2:58 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
2:59 Rangan Chatterjee? And what are the mechanisms there? You mentioned BDNF.
3:02 Speaker 01 BDNF is one, yeah. Through exercise, through a specific pathway, it's the myokine pathway. When we are engaging in aerobic activity, we get this expression, this release of a growth factor. It's called BDNF.
3:17 Rangan Chatterjee? Okay, so what is BDNF? And is it aerobic exercise that specifically increases it? Or do other forms of exercise like resistance training and high intensity training also do it?
3:29 Speaker 01 Yeah. So BDNF stands for brain-derived neurotrophic factor. It is a growth factor for the brain, meaning that when it is expressed, and you have to be, let's just say we're at that zone two, right, we're running, it gets expressed into the bloodstream. So it's a little hormone, if you will. And when it does, it goes through the bloodstream up into the brain. It does cross the blood-brain barrier. But this is a really great thing. It gets in there and it goes into the hippocampus. The hippocampus is this seahorse-shaped structure, deep in the temporal lobes. And when it goes in there, it basically helps you grow new brain cells in that area.
4:08 Speaker 01 Now, here's the phenomenal thing. That is the first structure of the brain to go during Alzheimer's disease. That is the part that holds your memories. Short term memories, it's where a memory formation occurs. And we've seen now through human studies that the hippocampal subregions, the areas around the brain can also change in structure. But the, the volume of the hippocampus grows. It increases, becomes more dense.
4:37 Rangan Chatterjee? I think I read some research a few years ago from Art Kramer.
4:39 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
4:40 Rangan Chatterjee? And from recollection, it was people in their sixties, maybe in their seventies.
4:46 Speaker 01 Yes.
4:47 Rangan Chatterjee? And just from walking, not that much every week. I, you may know the study to hand, I think a year later, the hippocampus looked bigger.
4:57 Speaker 01 Yes, and that's because the, the starting point, they were very inactive.
5:02 Rangan Chatterjee? Okay.
5:02 Speaker 01 Yes.
5:03 Rangan Chatterjee? So that's really interesting. So if you're really inactive, anything you do is going to make a difference.
5:10 Speaker 01 That's the great point, yes.
5:11 Rangan Chatterjee? That's really empowering for people because, because you don't want, you know, when we start talking about zone twos and zone fives and high intensity and VO2 maxes. And I want to talk about all those things. I think some people who don't move that much are like, yeah, I mean, that all sounds great, but I don't know where to start. Like, I don't really move much at the moment. So I think we want to leave that message at least that, hey, it doesn't matter where you are, just start moving a bit more.
5:36 Speaker 01 Even if that involves you walking for 10 minutes a day. You know what's really great? If you live around hills, just walk for 10 minutes a day, maybe get on one hill. Just get out and just do it easy because when you do, you will feel the benefits. By the way, B D N F, when it, when it is expressed, it doesn't just help with hippocampal volume. We get other things as well. It, it helps with the expression of different neurochemicals that are involved in mood. We know that there is a direct correlation between depression and, and exercise.
6:09 Speaker 01 Why is that? Maybe it's because you're changing the structure of your brain through physical activity.
6:14 Rangan Chatterjee? And this is one of the things I love the most about your message. It's very empowering. The message you're putting out there to the world is very much about saying to people, "Look, there is so much that you can be doing right now, no matter how old you are, that's absolutely going to make a difference in the future."
6:30 Speaker 01 100%. We think about Alzheimer's disease as this one point in our life, in our 70s, that we're diagnosed with. When you actually are diagnosed in your 70s or in your 80s, that disease has been accumulating since your 20s, your 30s and your 40s. Right now, Alzheimer's disease, 55 million people worldwide have this disease. That number is going to triple by the year 2050. In the UK, Alzheimer's disease is the second leading cause of death and the first leading cause of death among women. Now, two out of three Alzheimer's disease cases globally are female. So that's something to consider.
7:10 Rangan Chatterjee? I think there's a common belief in society that our brains are going to decline as we get older. I think many people believe that Alzheimer's is an inevitable consequence of the aging brain, but it's simply not the case, is it?
7:28 Speaker 01 Absolutely not. And I always tell people that dementia is not part of the natural brain aging process.
7:36 Rangan Chatterjee? The lifestyle factors we've sort of touched on, exercise, sleep, stress and food, they're all important.
7:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:44 Rangan Chatterjee? But if you had to pick one for people to focus on, is there one that comes to the surface for you?
7:52 Speaker 01 I don't think any other intervention can compare to exercise. I believe that exercise is the panacea for health. Exercise is medicine and our muscles are like pharmacies.
8:07 Rangan Chatterjee? So your recommendation for aerobic exercise is what, like for optimum brain health?
8:13 Speaker 01 At minimum, three hours per week of 65% of your maximum heart rate. That's zone two zone.
8:20 Rangan Chatterjee? Okay, so conversational pace, little bit out of breath,
8:23 Speaker 01 Yep.
8:24 Rangan Chatterjee? but not too out of breath, three hours. Yeah, okay, fine, so.
8:28 Speaker 01 That's minimum.
8:29 Rangan Chatterjee? Minimum, so at least half an hour a day.
8:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:32 Rangan Chatterjee? Which I think is pretty reasonable and I do. You wanna make things accessible to people at the same time you wanna be honest with them and sort of get a listen, you have to move your body.
8:41 Speaker 01 And for the people who are like, but I don't have enough energy, this actually helps you create more energy. When you're training in this zone, you're trading the mitochondria, which is the powerhouse of our cell, where we produce our energy to work better, to function better, to create more of itself.
8:58 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
8:58 Speaker 01 So you can have more energy.
9:00 Rangan Chatterjee? What do you wish everyone knew about exercise in the brain?
9:06 Speaker 01 I wish everybody would exercise for their brain health and for health outcomes and longevity, rather than aesthetics. In my world, people are, but that's a mere probably 10% of the population. The physical activity guidelines globally state that we should be exercising around 150 minutes to 300 minutes per week, and that's moderate to vigorous physical activity.
9:32 Rangan Chatterjee? Which means what?
9:34 Speaker 01 Exercising at around 65% to 75% of our maximum heart rate.
9:39 Rangan Chatterjee? Are you able to give some examples of activities that might fall into that category?
9:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, so imagine you are running up a flight of stairs and you are going full force. And the last step is when your heart rate, you feel like it's going to come out of your chest. You've reached most likely your maximum heart rate. Let's just say that's 200.
10:02 Rangan Chatterjee? Okay.
10:02 Speaker 01 Okay. You want to be working. I mean, that would be very high. That's a young, young person. Let's just say 100 then, just for argument's sake. That means that we want you working out at 65% of that 100 beat. That is your maximum heart rate. So we want you to be working out for 150 minutes at 65% of your 100. So 65 beats per minute.
10:28 Rangan Chatterjee? Okay, so that's going to depend on who we are or what our maximum heart rate is. But essentially, we're talking about things like a pretty fast walk.
10:37 Speaker 01 Fast walk, yeah, fast paced walk, a jog, an easy jog where you can. Where you can hold a conversation, but you are, you feel like you're working out at the same time.
10:49 Rangan Chatterjee? Do you agree with those physical activity guidelines, first of all? Or do you think they are conservative?
10:53 Speaker 01 They're conservative and it's around eighty percent people who are not meeting the physical activity guidelines.
10:58 Rangan Chatterjee? In what countries like America and the UK?
11:00 Speaker 01 Yes, correct.
11:01 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah, okay. And we know that physical inactivity is one of the leading causes of premature death globally, right? So that's pretty well established. So.
11:11 Rangan Chatterjee? I know, because I've spoken to people in public health over the years, that sometimes public health guidance is given, not necessarily because it's optimum, but because it's like, well, if we push it much beyond this, no one's gonna do it.
11:27 Speaker 01 Yes.
11:28 Rangan Chatterjee? Right? And so what is enough in your view, based upon the research that you've seen?
11:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, that also, people don't know, how many times am I meant to be doing weight training? How many times am I meant to be doing aerobic training? So they're just compiling it all together. So let's break it apart. Your aerobic training should be made up of at minimum three hours a week. So aerobic training are things like your long distance running, cycling, anything where you're, where you're able to move at around that sixty five percent of maximum heart rate.
12:02 Rangan Chatterjee? So you don't feel as though you're crushing it or you're pushing hard? It's quite, you know.
12:08 Speaker 01 Aerobic, it's easy, it's your long, slow distance running, I call it.
12:12 Rangan Chatterjee? So what about someone who doesn't run?
12:14 Speaker 01 Your brain doesn't know the difference between you running, cycling or swimming. It just knows heart rate. So get on a bike, an elliptical trainer at the gym, anything that is that cut, it's in the cardio zone of the gym, anything that's just going to get you into that steady state of sixty five percent to seventy five percent.
12:34 Rangan Chatterjee? And you don't have to push yourself hard here. I think that's important, right? So you should be able to have a conversation whilst doing this?
12:39 Speaker 01 Yes, and at the end of every sentence, you should be like, you know, you have to take a breath.
12:44 Rangan Chatterjee? Okay, so you're lightly exerting yourself, but your heart rate is certainly elevated compared to when you're just sitting down.
12:51 Speaker 01 Yes, right. When we talk about zones, we talk training zones. Zone one, we are sedentary. That zone two is that next level up, sixty five percent of maximum heart rate. Everyone needs to understand it's very individualized. Your zone two is different from my zone two. If I am not very metabolically fit, my zone two might be fast paced walking. We've got zone three and then when you're in that zone four, I call that the death zone. That's when you are working so hard, running up those stairs to your maximum.
13:25 Rangan Chatterjee? The death zone.
13:26 Speaker 01 Yes, the death zone. When we are training in that zone four or zone five.
13:30 Rangan Chatterjee? So this is more intense.
13:31 Speaker 01 This is intense, yeah.
13:33 Rangan Chatterjee? High intensity.
13:34 Speaker 01 High intensity, right? So that's the sprints. That's when you're doing, running up those stairs where you're really like struggling to get air. Many things are happening in this zone. You're doing a lot for cancer outcomes and for brain health outcomes. So remember, when you're training at those zone, you're getting a massive shunt of blood to your brain and to the rest of your body. During that process, during the sheer force and the shunting of the blood, you are able to have an effect on 13 types of cancer. You are able to inhibit 13 types of cancer through this type of training.
14:14 Rangan Chatterjee? Wow.
14:14 Speaker 01 Yeah. And the way that it does that is there's three, there's three ways. The first one is when you exercise in this zone, you are increasing your production of natural killer cells. And these natural killer cells, they're a lymphocyte, but without getting too much into it, these natural killer cells are able to locate a circulating tumor, circulating tumor cells and kill them. These circulating tumor cells are abundant through our body if we have a tumor. Let's just say you are diagnosed with stage one cancer, which is the best type to get diagnosed with it. There is a tumor that has formed somewhere in your body. What happens is that tumor, some of the cells tend to break off and we call these circulating tumor cells.
14:58 Speaker 01 And they roam around through the body, looking for a different site to lodge and create another tumor. And we then move into metastases. During that process, these circulating tumor cells through the body can actually be ameliorated through the sheer force of this blood flow via that maximal aerobic exercise.
15:21 Rangan Chatterjee? Wow.
15:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:23 Rangan Chatterjee? So it's helpful for your brain function as you age, but it's also helpful for reducing your risk of getting cancer.
15:29 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
15:32 Rangan Chatterjee? Okay, there's gonna be some people listening who go, well, I'm no longer physically capable enough to run up a flight of stairs. You are at your age and your fitness level. I am. But some older listeners may go, well, hold on a minute, I can't do that, or I feel that would injure me.
15:49 Speaker 01 Yes.
15:50 Rangan Chatterjee? These heart rates and these zones are all relative to your own baseline, right? So what someone in their 30s might do might be different from someone who's 70.
16:01 Speaker 01 Yes.
16:01 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah.
16:02 Speaker 01 And so what I do with my parents is I get them to walk up a hill. We've got this steep hill back at my, my home that I grew up in. And once a week, they have to walk up and down that for 20 minutes. And let me tell you, they are getting to their maximum. I even get to my maximum if I'm jogging up it. It is really steep. They have to take some, some breaks as they're going up. They're not running, they are just walking up a hill.
16:28 Rangan Chatterjee? I think walking up hills is one of the very best forms of movement. It really is.
16:34 Speaker 01 And look, it only needs to be done 20 minutes a week.
16:38 Rangan Chatterjee? So this kind of training, in terms of your brain prescription.
16:42 Speaker 01 Yep.
16:43 Rangan Chatterjee? You're saying three hours aerobic.
16:45 Speaker 01 Yep.
16:45 Rangan Chatterjee? 20 minutes of this form of exercise.
16:49 Speaker 01 Yep.
16:49 Rangan Chatterjee? Okay. I mean, one of, one of my favorite recommendations to patients over the years regarding intensity, depending on their age, would be, okay, where you live, okay, walk around the block as a warm up. And then if you're back at your house, see in one minute, walk as fast as you can and see what number door you get to. Okay, when you get there, walk back.
17:18 Speaker 01 Yep.
17:19 Rangan Chatterjee? Relaxed. And you come back, hopefully by the time you're back to your house. You're feeling really relaxed and you've recovered. And then go again as fast as you can and see what number house you can get to. And maybe do that four or five times. And then what I really liked about it was a very simple and accessible way for people to start playing around with intensity and using their inner competitiveness to go, oh, you know, I got to number 24 yesterday. After two weeks of doing it, I could get to number 28.
17:52 Speaker 01 So you're gamifying it.
17:53 Rangan Chatterjee? Exactly. And I found for people who maybe get put up by going to the gym or maybe hill walking seems like something that they can't do. I found that quite useful. So you're saying that exercise is probably the number one thing that people can do and focus on to protect their brains long term.
18:13 Speaker 01 Yes.
18:15 Rangan Chatterjee? One of the mechanisms by which exercise does all this magic in our bodies and frankly, our brains is through B D N F, brain derived neurotrophic factor. And you're saying that we need to do a minimum really of three hours aerobic exercise a week. Okay. And where have these numbers come from? This three hours of aerobic, the 20 minutes of intense training. Like this is all coming from the research that you've studied, right?
18:48 Speaker 01 Absolutely. Everything I'm talking about, I've, I've, I've researched thoroughly. I think my last paper, there was about 1,500 to 2,000 references. And that's what I do daily. So they're, they're very gold standard when we come to academic research.
19:03 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah. One of the biggest things I've changed in my life over the past two years is my love of physical activity.
19:11 Speaker 01 You have to love it.
19:13 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah, you've got to find something that you love. And something that's going to allow you to do this regularly without it being a real pain. And everyone's got something they can do if you find it. I guess for me, I've realised that when you really dive into the research on exercise and longevity and brain health and cancer and all these things, it's very hard not to come away with a conclusion that despite the common narrative that society today often puts out, which is, you know, take it easy as you get older. I kind of feel that's problematic. I feel the older you get, the more you have to be thinking about moving your body and not allowing yourself to get
19:55 Rangan Chatterjee? sedentary. So what does that mean for me? I now, I would say 95% of the time, I'm walking for at least an hour a day.
20:05 Speaker 01 Yes.
20:05 Rangan Chatterjee? Like, it's just something I've decided. I made a decision in my brain, a conscious decision a couple of years ago, saying, no, Rangan, listen, if you want good brain health, good heart health, if you want to be functioning as well as you can as you get older, if you want to be the best dad, the best husband, the best son, you have to move your body. You cannot let other things get in the way of that. Am I fortunate to have some autonomy in my life to do this? Yes, I am. But nonetheless, with that autonomy, I've made that choice. And that's kind of like a minimum for me. I do other things as well, but one hour's walk is kind of a minimum for me.
20:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:46 Rangan Chatterjee? So how important is strength training?
20:48 Speaker 01 Oh, my gosh. Strength training, I believe, is probably fundamentally the most important part of exercise.
20:54 Rangan Chatterjee? Really?
20:55 Speaker 01 Many reasons. One, you're increasing your muscle mass. We know that at the age of 40, we get a decline exponentially in strength and mass. Think about muscle as your, your reserves. Okay, muscle is an endocrine organ. It stores a lot of our mitochondria, where we produce all of our energy. It helps us and stabilizes us as we get older. But it's the journey of building the muscle that is the most important. Because when we are strength training, we are releasing and expressing a whole host of myokines. Now, we mentioned B D N F, that's a myokine. But oh my gosh, strength training releases another 100 of them.
21:40 Speaker 01 Myokines are muscle based proteins that when they go into different organs in the body, the brain, the liver, the pancreas, they have positive effects. So for the brain, they help preserve the synapses. They help the other neurons survive. They help with the growth and proliferation of other neurons in the hippocampus. So they're doing the same thing as B D N F, but they're doing even more than that. B D N F just goes into the brain, but these myokines can actually go elsewhere.
22:13 Rangan Chatterjee? Do you have a specific recommendation for resistance training?
22:17 Speaker 01 So in the paper that I authored alongside our friend, Dr. Tommy Wood.
22:23 Rangan Chatterjee? I think Gabrielle Lyman was on that as well.
22:24 Speaker 01 Gab was on it too, yeah. So this was at minimum two days a week, and this is compound movements.
22:31 Rangan Chatterjee? What does that mean for people who've never heard that term?
22:33 Speaker 01 So that's just squats. Instead of doing the designer aesthetics, okay? You want to be doing things that move as many muscle groups as possible per exercise.
22:41 Rangan Chatterjee? So not the bicep curl while looking in the mirror?
22:44 Speaker 01 No, no. So you want to be doing squats, bench press, walking lunges are great. Anytime you can really work the lower part of your body as well. Just due to vector size of your quads, for example, you're just increasing your gray matter. Now, let's talk about somebody who doesn't even, and they've never been into a gym before. You can still get the same benefits. We have a close family friend and she was kind of like a grandmother to me. She's 98 years old. Cognitively, she is firing. She's unbelievable. She's maintained exercise and dancing her entire life and social interactions, right?
23:26 Speaker 01 If I was to tell her to increase her muscle mass, we just have to get her to wall sit. She can increase her muscle size in her legs and get massive gains if she was just to wall sit. For me, that wouldn't work because I have stronger legs and I'm much younger than her. What I mean by that is if you are completely set entering, you want to start lifting weights, you don't have to go into the gym and pound these weights, as I'm saying. You can start with calisthenics, which is just body weight movements. Start with doing some pushups. You can go onto YouTube and just type in beginner workouts for 50 year old females. I set them up for my mum all the time when she tells me she doesn't know what to do. And that's how you can start.
24:10 Rangan Chatterjee? Yeah, so don't allow where you currently are to put you off getting started, basically. If you take nothing else from this, just this idea that you can do something at home that literally is changing the structure and function of your brain.
24:31 Speaker 01 Yes.
24:32 Rangan Chatterjee? That's pretty empowering.
24:33 Speaker 01 That is the most beautiful thing about exercise.
24:38 Rangan Chatterjee? Hope you enjoyed that bite sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.
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