Pod Insights Good Life Project Simple Food & Lifestyle Choices That Protect Your Brain | Austin Perlmutter, MD About this episode Every choice you make today is rewiring your brain, shaping not just how you think and feel, but who you become.
In this fascinating conversation, Dr. Austin Perlmutter, author of Brain Wash: Detox Your Mind for Clearer Thinking, Deeper Relationships, and Lasting Happiness https://amzn.to/4m416I0, reveals how modern life disrupts our brain chemistry and shares simple, science-backed strategies to enhance cognitive function, improve decision-making, and protect against mental decline. Learn why resistance training is crucial for brain health, which foods help make better decisions, and how to set up your environment to make healthy choices automatic rather than exhausting.
You can find Austin at: Website https://www.austinperlmutter.com/ | Instagram https://www.instagram.com/draustinperlmutter | Episode Transcript https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/neuroplasticity-cognitive-health-brain-inflammation-austin-perlmutter-md
If you LOVED this episode, you’ll also love the conversations we had with Adam Grant https://pod.link/goodlifeproject/episode/Z2lkOi8vYXJ0MTktZXBpc29kZS1sb2NhdG9yL1YwL1ZlNWEyUVkwODFoT3ZEdEZCb1pZeWRtZExHTHhOX0pRMVAwXzJ6TG8xQm8 about rethinking what we think we know.
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0:01 Jonathan Fields? So what if every time you reach for a sugary snack or social media to escape stress or anxiety, you're not just making a momentary choice, but you're actually rewiring your brain's circuitry for future decisions? The science behind this is fascinating. The implications for how we live are profound. We are in an era where 300 million-plus people worldwide struggle with depression and anxiety, and cognitive decline is accelerating at unprecedented rates. Yet, what captivates me about today's conversation is how our daily choices create either virtuous or vicious cycles in our brain chemistry, fundamentally altering not just how we think and feel right now, but who we become over time, and even over decades.
0:44 Jonathan Fields? My guest today is Dr. Austin Perlmutter, a board-certified internal medicine physician, New York Times bestselling author, researcher, and entrepreneur whose work has been featured everywhere from BBC to Rolling Stone, Newsweek, NPR, and so many other places. He's the author of Brainwash: Get Your Mind Clear, Clear Thinking, Deeper Relationships, and Lasting Happiness, and serves as chief science officer of Big Bold Health, where he's leading pioneering research on how plant nutrients impact human aging. And what you'll discover in this conversation, it might also change how you think about everything from your morning workout to what you eat for breakfast, not just because of how it affects you today or makes you feel or changes your physiology, but because of how it may affect you decades from now.
1:28 Jonathan Fields? Austin shares fascinating research about how resistance training, for example, affects your brain, why certain foods program us to make better or worse decisions, and simple ways to set up your environment so making healthy choices become automatic rather than exhausting. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.
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3:30 Jonathan Fields? What I would love to do is zoom the lens out a little bit first and talk a bit about the state of brain health today, more broadly.
3:42 Jonathan Fields? Because I think that's sort of like a good launching off point for us to go deeper into maybe why it's that way and then also what are some of the things that we can do about it.
3:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think it is safe to say that the state of brain health in the United States and around the world is nowhere near as good as it could be. And I was thinking about this a lot lately in that here we have 100 years of incredible progress, we're living a lot longer, we've seen incredible technological advancements throughout the medical field. But the most important thing, the only thing I'd argue that really matters is the state of our collective brain health. And it's not just brain health in terms of rates of Alzheimer's, dementia, or dementia in general, it's mental health. These are all function of brain health. And if you look at rates of depression and anxiety around the world, we're talking about roughly 300 million people around the world with depression and around the same amount
4:35 Speaker 04 of people with anxiety disorders. We have epidemic levels of mental health problems despite, in theory, having more and more access to things that should be good for our health. So we're not really becoming happier and we're definitely becoming more stressed. And then when you add that to the rates of dementia around the world, so right now we have 57 million people who have dementia, rates are expected to increase to 153 million by the year 2050, around 16% of people over the age of 50 with mild cognitive impairment. And then just this acceptance of brain function declining as we get older. I think there's so much more that we can do with the tools we have available through modern research to help people to think better, to feel better, and to improve the overall
5:20 Speaker 04 quality of their lives when we leverage this data, when we leverage these tools to improve brain health.
5:26 Jonathan Fields? So if that's sort of like broad strokes state of where we are with brain health today, and you referenced two different large indicators that I think a lot of people think about. One is emotional well-being, mental health, and the other is cognitive function. So anxiety and depression are these two things that so many people are struggling with these days. And then as many of us sort of get older, cognitive function, I wonder also if cognitive function, it really works on two different levels. One is, and this is applicable to everybody of every age, performance. Like, how are we doing? Are we able to show up as our best selves? Are we able to think the way that we want to think and create and innovate and add it and then communicate in a way that actually allows us to show up the way that we want? And potentially...
6:09 Jonathan Fields? For those who are younger in their lives and career minded, like open the doors we want to open and perform at a level that makes us feel really good. And then as we grow further into life, I feel like oftentimes that that shifts to, okay, so yes, that still matters to me. And I'm also moving into a season where I'm starting to notice things that maybe I don't love. Maybe I'm forgetting little things here and there. Maybe it's just natural. Maybe it's just a part of aging, but maybe it's not. And then we may see people, maybe we're moving into that season of our lives where we're seeing parent age people and we're seeing sort of like what's happening a generation beyond us and it's getting really concerning. Am I leaving anything out there?
6:49 Speaker 04 I think you're spot on, Jonathan, because what winds up happening in conversations about brain health is we hyper focus on one aspect of it and then leave out this larger conversation that really impacts everyone. There is no person for whom brain health doesn't matter, where it isn't the most important thing. But the way we tend to approach it, and I will say the way we, meaning doctors like me, approach it is when a person's in the clinic and they're suffering from a significant degree of symptoms from a certain, what we would call diagnostic kind of criteria, we will label their brain health issue with a diagnosis that then leads to a treatment algorithm. So for one person, that might be depression. We say, well, you've been feeling down in the dumps for long enough. It's significant
7:32 Speaker 04 enough. It's impairing other parts of your life enough. We'd say you have major depression. And if you have major depression, the next step is psychotherapy, maybe an antidepressant medication. And that makes sense because we have some data to support that that is the right next step. Now, another person might come in and say, well, I'm forgetting my keys, or I'm having trouble with names. I'm also feeling a little bit low. I'm also maybe struggling with making sense and meaning of this world, but mostly it's the keys that are my biggest concern. Then the doctor will say, well, let's do the triaging to see whether you have mild cognitive impairment or dementia. And if that's the case, we could talk about a different set of drugs and a different set of kind of treatment modalities. But
8:13 Speaker 04 it is not as though depression and dementia exist in a separate domain of biology. They both happen inside the brain. And what I would really advocate for more people to understand is those may be the extreme ends where we say something is so wrong that you need to see a doctor because look, your life is clearly impaired by your inability to remember things, or the fact that you're so low in terms of your mood that you're not getting out of bed in the morning. But every person, every day is experiencing some degree of cognitive and mental variability. You don't feel the way you do today, the same way that you did yesterday, and you won't feel the same way tomorrow, both in terms of how you think and how you emotionally interact with the world. And so what I try to get people to understand is whatever it is that you care about, whether
8:58 Speaker 04 it's being a better father, whether it's doing a better job at your job, whether it's living a long and healthy life where you're able to get outside and, you know, be able to enjoy nature, the only thing that's going to be the single variable that cuts across all of these things is your ability to think clearly and feel good about what you're doing each day. And that is a direct manifestation of that two to three pounds of mostly fat between our ears and up in our skull. What you're talking about as you're describing all these different ways in which brain health can be described is the fundamental substance that all of us need to be caring about. What I find problematic is that we wind up picking things related to it and chasing after
9:40 Speaker 04 variables that can temporarily make our brains feel okay, or at least offset some of the discomfort. And in doing so, we're actually creating more total negative outcomes to our brains. So if you think about what are the principal drivers of human behavior? What gets a person to do anything in the modern day? Yeah, sure, we want to eat some food so we're not hungry. We don't want to feel unsafe, you know, so we're going to lock the door at night. But so much of what we're doing is an attempt to escape from psychological pain. And that is again purely a brain outcome. So what we do to try to get rid of that psychological pain is largely the things that in the long run directly compromise our brain biology and predispose us to worse
10:24 Speaker 04 mental health, worse cognitive health. And even far before we ever get there, just take away from our chances at enjoying life for all we can and any sense of brain optimization. So I think you're spot on in terms of this spectrum of things that we absolutely need to associate with brain health. And what's great about it is most of the interventions that can get our brains to a better space, all target kind of the same systems. So it's not like there's one diet that can help to decrease your risk of dementia, but it's really bad for your mental health. It's the same type of dietary patterns because it acts on the same neurobiology.
10:58 Jonathan Fields? We do love to sort of like separate things into really discreet buckets, but it's like when it comes to your brain, it's everything, it's all cross-functionality, right? It's like everything relates to everything, everything impacts everything and not just within the brain, but also within the entire physiological system. And one of the sort of the big flashing like questions for me right now is how do we get here? Like, has this always been the state of brain health? Or are there shifts that we've seen over the last generation or two that are really concerning trends that are that are worsening the general state of brain health and that are at risk of becoming even much worse trends?
11:38 Speaker 04 It's such an interesting question. You know, clearly humans have been suffering from many of the same things for a long time. And in many ways, life has gotten so much better than it used to be. Our rates of dying from, for example, infectious diseases have plummeted. Our lifespan has basically doubled in the last couple hundred years, the average lifespan. So there are so many really positive things. But when you think about brain health in general, I mean, depression's been around forever. We wouldn't have called it depression, might have called it melancholia or something else. We might have called it an imbalance in the humors, we might have called it some sort of a nefarious spirit that came into our bodies and that would maybe change the way we thought about the therapeutics for it. Dementia isn't a new thing.
12:23 Speaker 04 People would still lose their cognitive function as they aged and years gone by. I think what's different now is that people are living longer, so we're seeing some of these things compound over time and we have a far better sense as to what we can do to significantly decrease the rates of these conditions and yet we're not taking advantage of them. So it's one thing to say, well, there is this infectious pathogen. We don't know what to do about it. And so some degree of people are going to die. But it's another thing to say, we know, for example, that eating a healthier diet gives you 10 extra years of lifespan, but we're not taking steps personally and as a society to make healthy food available to people so they can live a longer life.
13:05 Speaker 04 So I think it's a compounding effect of multiple variables in the modern world in addition to now this knowledge that we could be doing better that makes it unique. The one caveat to that would be to say, there's some debate, for example, in Alzheimer's with whether rates of Alzheimer's are going up or whether people are just kind of living longer and we have more people at an older age because we know it, the strongest risk factor or the biggest predictor of Alzheimer's is age. So more older people means more Alzheimer's. But when it comes to mental health, I think it is such an interesting subcomponent of the brain health conversation because in theory, we should be doing better at producing gross happiness or just happiness. We think, well, here's the things that humans need to thrive. They need to feel connected. They need to eat some healthy food.
13:50 Speaker 04 They need to get out into nature a little bit. They need to have a meaningful job. We have the tools necessary to optimize towards those things, but we don't. And I think it is not an overstatement to basically say that in the United States, that is not our top priority. It's not as though happiness is the goal of any administration. It might be GDP. It might be other health variables, but it's not happiness. What I find very unique about that is that we have in no ways used the data we have in terms of what promotes better brain health to design a study or to design a country, design a society where those outcomes are more likely, at least in the United States. And I do think there are some subsets where we could say things are getting worse.
14:34 Speaker 04 For example, social media exposure for young women, for young girls, seems to have an especially detrimental effect. And so there are these various subcategories of, in this case, mental health. So for these young women with anxiety symptoms, which seem to be correlated with these new aspects of the modern world, there's also some Strong correlation between the diet that we eat now compared to the diet that our ancestors consumed and higher rates of depression and Alzheimer's disease. So something can be said for that as well, but I think the fundamental piece of this whole equation is we have the data to do better, yet we are consciously choosing to do something different. Whereas in the past, people just didn't know what to do about these problems in the first place.
15:18 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, it is so interesting as you described, like now we have a data set that actually points us to potential solutions, potential shifts, changes that we might be able to make. And we tend to focus on me like, what do you measure a country by very often? It's GDP, right? Growth as a product, which comes down to like productivity and money. Not that those things don't matter. We're all like living in a world where we understand you have to support certain things. And yet, at the same time, if you could imagine, you know, like if we could ratchet up the average happiness fulfillment level of the typical person or the average well-being level of the typical person by 5% across the board. What would the net effect of that be then on those things that we actually like say are really important to measure?
16:02 Jonathan Fields? Like, how would that actually affect things like GDP and stuff like this? I would guess it's sensible that it would make a huge effect on it. And yet we don't bridge that gap.
16:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's just not a priority. I was having a great conversation with my father about this just recently in terms of what is keeping us from a society where happiness is the top priority? Now, in the one extreme version, you have this sense of, I mean, I guess some of the pushback to hippie culture a couple of decades ago, all these unproductive people sitting around using mind altering chemicals, and then the society basically crumbles underneath them because nobody's doing anything to advance the culture. So you fall behind other countries. Maybe you get taken over by another military power. So I get it. However, I think that for most people right now, there is such a disconnect between
16:52 Speaker 04 a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose, a sense that they are content with a given day and what could be the case. And I think that it is very intentional in our modern day world to be perpetually exposed to things that intentionally keep us from feeling satisfied, feeling content. Because when you are in a state. Where you feel like your needs are met. What you're not going to do is buy some garbage that is advertised to you on Meta. And what you're not going to do is fall victim to some sort of a scam for X, Y, or Z. And what you're not going to do is necessarily want to go and eat a whole bunch of excess junk food because your basic needs are satisfied. I think from the kind of capitalist consumerist version of what we have now, our being satisfied
17:37 Speaker 04 and being content is directly out of sync with maximizing the GDP that is predicated on consumerism and consumerism is predicated on buying more things. And so these things are a little bit out of sync if we're talking about the goals to what society could be. And this isn't to say that companies are fully focused on making us unhappy, but they do benefit more when we're not satisfied. Because when you are satisfied, you tend not to make as many consumerist decisions, especially around stuff that targets your sense of stress or dissatisfaction with the modern day.
18:13 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, that makes so much sense. I think so many of us turn to some form of consumerism as a form of therapy and it's a momentary hit.
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19:39 Jonathan Fields? Good Life Project is sponsored by Bombas. So there's this moment every fall here in Boulder. The morning air is crisp, the light goes golden against the mountains, and something in you just wants to slow down, like soft layers and long walks and a warm mug and a good book. You know, the cozy feeling has just arrived. And cozy really does start at your feet. Bombas just launched new suede moccasins, cushy soles, a shearling lining and water-resistant suede. So a little frost on the grass isn't a problem. Our whole family's sock drawers are basically shrines to Bombas, have been for years. Marina wool for chilly mornings, sports socks for when we get out and move, and compression socks for long travel days, which I'm actually about to have. Opening that drawer, they're just a right pair for whatever the day holds.
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20:52 Speaker 02 With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com/Bank. Capital One, N.A., Member FDIC.
21:27 Jonathan Fields? You referenced earlier in our conversation that sometimes when we are noticing, whether it's we're struggling with our cognitive function or our mental health, that We often turn to shorter term things to make us feel better, not realizing that the net effect long term may be actually to worsen the problem. Take me deeper into that.
21:48 Speaker 04 So we'll go deep and you can just pull us out when you think we go too far. If you're thinking about what it is that makes a person think, act, and feel the way they do, it is fundamentally a question of neurobiology. It is a question of the setup of your neurons, your glial cells, the neurotransmitters, but also your brain's metabolism, your brain's immune system, neuroplasticity, all of these convergent forces that occur in real time and lightning speed within our brains. If we think about how our brains are optimized, independent of whatever psychological or religious belief system you have, your brain is optimized towards survival, and survival means living through the next moment. And
22:30 Speaker 04 it will always choose that over a potential risk to not living in a year from now. So when your brain, when all of these various chemicals detect a danger signal that something is wrong in the outside world, they will respond by getting you to do whatever is necessary to ensure survival for that next instant. And this all makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, because historically, there were real threats to our survival that occurred many times. So it would be a neighboring tribe is attacking. It would be there's a weather event. It would be there's a wild animal that we would have to deal with. And so all of our cognitive resources, all of our brain systems would activate. You'd flood
23:14 Speaker 04 your brain with cortisol and your body with cortisol. You'd increase your heart rate. You'd increase glucose in your system so that you had more energy available to respond to the threat. And then you would either die, or you would get over the threat and go back to a state of, to some degree, calm. But today, for most people, and I don't want to overgeneralize because there are many people in the world for whom those acute stressors are still a significant part of their day to day. But for many people now, it is more a question of these chronic stressors that become the issue. So it's, oh, well, I have this relationship thing. It's not quite optimized. Or I don't really know what's happening in my job. I'm worried I might get fired, but I don't know when that will happen. I'm not super satisfied there. I'm worried about the stock market. My mortgage and my financial pressures are concerning.
23:57 Speaker 04 It's a lot of these chronic, long-term things, not to mention just, I'm not doing as well as my neighbors, the Joneses. So all of these things are in our brains and our brains are interpreting that as an existential threat. They're not parsing out the fact that actually, this isn't something you have to deal with right now, and it may not be an issue at all. They're still seeing this as an existential threat. So our brains do what is necessary to respond to that thing. They rev up stress. They try to create some sort of a survival scenario. And so what that means is often they're trying to decrease that stress catecholamine pathway, and that could be eating some food that momentarily takes away the stress, but actually,
24:39 Speaker 04 in the long run, programs the brain towards dysfunction, towards inflammation, towards higher risk for dementia, depression. It may mean you're feeling stressed, so you need to do something to offset it. So you go on social media, because at least it's a distraction, but winds up to be in the process. Not only are you consuming a bunch of stressful content on social media, or for example, on the news, but you're also not doing the stuff that is healthy, that is going to build your brain's resilience. So the core of this whole thing is to say that your brain is optimized towards short-term survival and dealing with short-term stressors. And the way that we have been programmed to respond to these things in the modern day is to pick up whatever is easiest to distract ourselves from those existential
25:22 Speaker 04 threats. And it allows our brains to just for a moment, not be worried about survival. But the solutions that we take in are the exact things that program our brains towards disability, towards worse cognition. So what I'm talking about here is worse mental health, higher risk for dementia, also worse decision-making. And the last thing I just said there is kind of the key. We don't think about this very often, but most of the things that determine our life outcomes are a function of the decisions that we make. Now, some of the time, those decisions are made for us. But for most people, there is a good degree of agency over the decisions that we make, and those decisions have the most significant role to play in how long we live and the quality of our lives.
26:05 Speaker 04 Because the biggest contributors for most people in the United States to how long they're going to live and the quality of those years are going to be things like, do they eat good food? Do they exercise regularly? Do they get good sleep? Do they engage in stress mitigation processes? Do they have the bandwidth, and I should say, the economic ability to get preventive care? Do they breathe clean air? And these are things that are functions of our decision making. The problem with a lot of these short-term fixes is that they fundamentally degrade the apparatus of decision making, such that in the future, it becomes harder for us to make healthy decisions. And that compounds, that perpetuates, that puts us into this cycle of having our brains
26:48 Speaker 04 more and more wired for unhealthy thinking and unhealthy decision making, so that when years go on, it becomes harder and harder for us to extricate ourselves from this cycle of making unhealthy choices. And that's really the kind of cornerstone to this argument I made with my dad in this book, Brainwash, which is that our brains are being rewired towards worse health. And unless we recognize that, and unless we take steps to get off this merry-go-round, we wind up getting stuck in a cycle where our brains are increasingly wired for worse and worse health. And the last thing I'll say, which I've alluded to before, and I don't mean this as some sort of a deep conspiracy theory, is that many of the largest forces in the modern world
27:31 Speaker 04 would prefer for us to be making decisions at the cost of our long-term brain health, because those are the types of decisions that will keep us purchasing their products and services, as opposed to allowing us to be content and allowing us to feel like, oh, well, it's a nice day, I'm just gonna go walk around outside, as opposed to scrolling on this online shopping platform for something that I definitely don't need, but I'm using as a way to offset my stress.
27:58 Jonathan Fields? The way you lay it out, what it sounds like is a lot of the behaviors are tied to these primal instincts that maybe thousands or like many, many years before that ago were key. They were important. They got us to survive as a species up until now. But the options that we have available now, combined with the shifts in environment, which lead to just kind of perpetual stressors and the need to make these decisions, and the things that we might reach for, whether it's behavioral things or nutritional things, they now carry costs that are very different. And also because we're living longer, whereas even if these things did carry longer term costs, thousands or tens
28:41 Jonathan Fields? of thousands of years ago, most people didn't live long enough to ever experience what those might have been. We do now.
28:46 Speaker 04 That's right.
28:47 Jonathan Fields? So now it's like, it's just a whole different analysis when we think about it. But here's my curiosity. You know, if these things are, it's a really primal instinct in us that has been wiring us for thousands and thousands of years, how do we reverse out of that? Because even if we change, you know, what's available to us to choose, if the primal instinct is still there, how do we deal with that?
29:14 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's such a good question because we're not going to be able to override the most primitive processing. So you could do a ton of psychotherapy and maybe, I don't know, some other molecules that allow you to have a decreased fear response. But there's a reason why the fear response exists. Because if you're walking down a dark alley and something jumps out at you, it's probably reasonable to at least have some degree of fear reactivity to that. I think what winds up becoming more and more important is how you're building your environment so that you're able to make better unconscious decisions and so that the choices you make are able to compound in the background in your favor as opposed to away from your benefit. This is the research, of course, around habit neuroscience. And
29:58 Speaker 04 there's some wonderful researchers out there. I had an opportunity to interview Wendy Wood, who is one of those on my podcast. And the basic idea is that most of the choices we make in a given day are not things that we're consciously choosing. They're kind of a function of our environment. They're a function of what is easiest. And if we can build into our lives, systems that make healthy choices more likely, we are far more likely to make those. There's kind of this myth that Everything comes down to willpower that as long as you can steel yourself against making bad choices, you will be successful. That myth is destroyed every year when it comes to New Year's resolutions, which never stick. But it is the perfect myth for a society that wants to place the burden of healthy
30:42 Speaker 04 behavior on the consumer. So if you are a cereal company producing arguably one of the most popular forms of junk food, which is, you know, these sugary breakfast cereals, you'll say, hey, it's not the cereal. You just need to eat it as part of a complete breakfast. If you produce alcohol, you'll say, well, people need to have the opportunity to choose what they want. It's not the alcohol. It's the fact that some people don't have the willpower to say no. Same with cigarettes. And it kind of removes this concept of the companies being in part responsible for the harm they're causing as part of the conversation. So the idea here is to build a society and to build even our internal lives such that
31:22 Speaker 04 we are more likely to make healthy choices without having to think about each one. Because so much of why we choose one thing or another thing is not a function of this willpower. It's a function of what is most readily available. That gets to another kind of key part of the brain, which is involved in habit formation, which can be programmed through neuroplasticity, the rewiring of the brain for either better or for the worse. So that basic understanding, which is that many of your decisions, arguably 40 plus percent of your decisions each day are habitual, they're not conscious choices, and there are things you can do to make them healthier, is a big part of this. Because if you can wire your brain for better unconscious choices, it will actually allow you to have more bandwidth to focus on the conscious choices.
32:07 Speaker 04 How do you do this? Some of this is as straightforward as saying, what are you bringing into your home? Or where are you spending your time? If you find that you're having a lot of trouble spending time on social media late at night, put a, uh, an on off switch on your wireless router and just have it shut down at a certain hour, right? That is an automatic choice that is already made by you so that you won't be scrolling social media after 10:00 PM. A more practical one for most people would be to say, what food are you bringing into your home? I do think that many of these food companies are at least in part to blame. But you can make the choice, which is to say, I'm not bringing junk food into the home. And that will absolutely make it less likely that you consume junk food. It's a very straightforward piece of it. Another one and an example that I think helps a lot of people is to know
32:50 Speaker 04 that instead of trying to index towards going from zero to a hundred or zero to sixty. So for example, you want to be somebody who exercises, but you find yourself struggling every day to get to the gym. Don't try to make your first step be running a five K each day. But rather build a habit and do this repeatedly of just putting your shoes on, tying your shoelaces, putting your shoes on and walking out the door. You will be so much more likely to at least go on some sort of a walk and then you'll build that habit. It takes on average, a little over two months to build a new habit. And then you're able to build on that habit with subsequent either further walks, more exercise, or build something else healthy into the day. But the point would be to say, if you were to look at the choices that you make in a given day
33:35 Speaker 04 and say, what are the things that lead to either the healthy or the unhealthy things? So if it's every day, you like one third of Americans wind up eating fast food, going to a fast food restaurant. You might take a step backwards and say, well, why is it that I do that each day? Now, one line of reasoning would be to say you make a conscious choice, which is that you want to eat the junk food each day. But the reality is, that's probably not the case. You make that choice because you drive home in a certain way from work. You're feeling stressed and it's also part of your routine. So the habit choice would simply be to drive a different way home from work. And I think when we can start to apply some of these focused changes to the unconscious patterns. So in this case, you know, you take a moment of conscious choice to drive a different way. But then you're unconscious and you're not even thinking about that junk food or fast food restaurant.
34:20 Speaker 04 You can actually wire your brain for better decision making. The other component of this, which we can talk about, I think in detail, if you're interested is, how do you actually take control of some of your brain wiring to create the space to where you can make healthier choices? Because when your brain is locked into a state of chronic stress, when it's locked into a state of inflammation, metabolic dysfunction, it's harder for you to be able to make healthy choices. And actually, your brain is biased against the making of healthy choices. So if the brain is stressed, you are more likely to make an impulsive choice around food, around other aspects of your life. You get tunnel vision and you're no longer able to see the future. You get focused on the present. If we can target that pathway, and that could be something like saying, well, your chronic stress is coming from what you're experiencing at work.
35:05 Speaker 04 A great way to vent that is either exercise or mindful meditation or something. And actually bring your brain wiring more on side. You create the opportunity for healthier choices. And you get outside of this primitive state where you're constantly just responding in real time to perceived threats to your existence, these stressors. So I think it is, it's a component of both of these systems. One is wiring your brain towards healthier habits. And the other part of it is taking a more active agency over your neurobiology to make your conscious choices better.
35:37 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, I'm raising my hand. Like, I think nobody gets to opt out of this just because you could be a really, really smart person, but you don't get to opt out of the primal impulses that exist within you.
35:47 Speaker 04 That's right.
35:47 Jonathan Fields? I'm a writer, I write books, and when I'm on deadline, like, there's a lot that I have to do. And if I sit on my computer and I'm home and I have access to all the things, all the social media and stuff like this, I am not going to write. I know I want to write, I know I'm on deadlines, I know I'm being paid to write, I now want to write. And I'm sitting in front of my screen, saying to myself, I'm scrolling social media right now, not writing, knowing this is exactly what I don't want to do, and yet I'm doing it. So I will change the environment and structurally put in place like apps that basically make it so I can't do that, because I know I don't, I can't rely on willpower to just make that choice. So I rely on technology to make the choice for me.
36:28 Speaker 04 I love that you said that. This isn't a function of intelligence. I think it is a trap to think that you can outthink the unhealthy aspects of the modern world by just using brute willpower. Doesn't work that way. And it doesn't matter how smart you are. I've had very similar experiences, you know, when there are times that I need to really buckle down and get work done, you think, well, I have to do this and therefore I will. It doesn't work that way. Social media in particular has been engineered with so much research, so much intelligence, that it is designed to keep you hooked on the screen. And this, it doesn't matter if you're a smart person or anyone, it's designed to do that, and it's, the algorithm will serve you what it needs to keep your eyes on the screen.
37:12 Speaker 04 And so I think, you know, to the point that you're describing here, unless we take agency over some of these, you know, core tools that will allow us to have the space to, whether it's accomplish good work or engage in some mindfulness or make a healthy meal, we are going to wind up in a really bad spot. And one part of this that I think can be helpful, I derive some of my energy around this is to say that I'm upset with and I'm unwilling to accept a reality in which these negative health outcomes are the inevitable. There's got to be some impetus, some desire for a person to make the changes. And I think by virtue of their listening in on this conversation, there's at least curiosity. It starts with curiosity. Is it possible that things could be better?
37:57 Speaker 04 For me, specific to brain health, I've had two of my grandparents, two of my grand, my paternal and maternal grandfathers with Alzheimer's disease. I've seen so many patients with mental health issues, with cognitive health issues. I see this in friends and family, and I'm unwilling to accept that those rates of those conditions are going to apply to me when I know there's something I can do about it. In the United States, most people have at least one chronic disease. Forty percent of people have two or more. And some of those aren't preventable, but many of them are. They are a function of our environment. And instead of being fully focused on, well, this sucks for me, I think pushing it a little bit out and saying, I'm unwilling to accept that this is the best we can do. It doesn't mean we can reverse every disease. It doesn't mean we can prevent
38:42 Speaker 04 every disease. But it does mean that if you only do what other people are doing in a world where chronic preventable diseases are the default, that you have to accept that those defaults will apply to you. And so I think if you can become a little bit angry about this and say, no, I have higher expectations. I want to live in a functional body until my seventies, until my eighties. I want to have a clear mind. I want to be able to be able to use my brain for all it's worth. And I'm unwilling to allow these corporations to use up all of my beautiful, valuable mental real estate. The average American spends 11 plus hours of their day engaging with media, four hours watching TV, two plus on their phones. So those are not
39:24 Speaker 04 Necessary. You can argue all you want that, oh, well, I have to be informed. You don't need to watch four hours of TV a day to be informed. And I think the best argument isn't that it's, you know, rotting our brains and creating terrible mental health. It is simply the opportunity cost that if we were spending every waking moment glued to our screens and listening to these people who are trying to keep our attention, we are not doing the most important things that we can in our lives that are linked to long-term overall and brain health, which as much as the modern science is amazing, it's basically just proven the things that have been known all along. It's eating real food. It's getting good sleep. It's spending time with people that we care about. There's no substitute for it. There's no supplement. There's no injection.
40:09 Speaker 04 I think it's much easier to be sold this myth that just do whatever everyone else is doing and then we'll give you something and then that's going to fix the problem. That is the problem is that we're being told that we're going to solve for your happiness or your cognition with a medicine or a supplement or an expensive biohack that just doesn't exist. So I'm trying to find ways, and maybe you have ways as well, to punch through the noise and get people to understand this one fundamental truth, which is that if you care about your cognitive and mental health, the most important things that you need to do are to do the basics well and certainly seek additional care if necessary. But this myth that we can wait for either the medical establishment or a social media
40:54 Speaker 04 influencer to fix our problems with some sort of breakthrough therapy is the problem because it allows us to offset or wait until things get so bad that not much can be done when the best opportunity we have for good brain health is right now doing the basics well.
41:11 Jonathan Fields? And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall, that cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scars. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2% daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right
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43:51 Jonathan Fields? Let's dip into that a bit more than the doing the basics well part. One thing you've referenced a number of times is exercise, moving your body. What do you actually mean by this?
44:01 Speaker 04 Yeah.
44:01 Jonathan Fields? Are there things that are better for you or worse for you, more effective or less effective? And what's the mechanism? How does this actually affect our brains?
44:10 Speaker 04 For sure. Going through medical training, not super long ago, we learned about exercise, primarily cardiovascular exercise, as a key step to preventing heart disease. That matters because heart disease was and remains the top killer around the world and in the United States. So when we know that simply walking, moving your body each day can dramatically decrease our chances of developing heart disease, it makes sense as an evidence-based intervention to make sure people are moving their body regularly. What we didn't talk about in training, but what the research has made abundantly clear, is that exercise, and not just any movement, any movement is great, but specific types of exercise appear to have an absolutely insane protective effect on the brain.
44:54 Speaker 04 Not only does regular exercise appear to provide a protective effect against depression, dementia, but people who have existing cognitive impairment and start exercising see benefit in terms of growth of various parts of the brain, like the hippocampus, in terms of improved cognition. So there is no person who doesn't benefit from regular activity. Then we could just say, well, is the statement, everybody should be exercising? The answer is kind of yes. It's not to say you have to do it a certain way. You have to hit exactly the right amount of minutes, which is arguably 150 minutes of aerobic exercise each week. But it is to say that movement actually provides signals to your brain to tell it that it is better suited to be highly functional than it is to be less functional.
45:37 Speaker 04 So we talked a little bit before about these signals to the brain around chronic stress and survival, and how chronic stress tells the brain, focus only on the present, and how that can become incredibly destructive for our long-term brain health. Exercise provides the brain with signals that tell it it needs to be focused, tells it there's something that we're chasing, there's something we're doing, so we need to stay online. And we're now starting to understand what those signals actually are. So I kind of learned, exercise is important because when you exercise your muscles, they're going to be healthier, and it might do something to your oxygen levels and improve your vascular system in your brain, as well as within your heart. So better blood flow to the brain is a good thing, provides your brain tissue with more oxygen. So that's why exercise may be good for the brain.
46:20 Speaker 04 What we're now understanding is that exercise dramatically impacts the brain's immune system. It influences the way our brains are wired. It influences brain metabolism, and it influences even neurotransmission. And so how does it do that? It's because when we exercise, we impact all of these systems throughout our body, and those translate into the brain. So metabolically, exercise is going to suck glucose out of the bloodstream and into muscle, which is a good thing, because for most people, they're at least, to some degree, metabolically impaired. And one of the kind of core markers of that is too high of blood sugar, meaning your blood sugar overall is elevated. So maybe not even type 2 diabetes, but it's higher than what is healthy. So exercise regulates blood sugar.
47:04 Speaker 04 It also does that by regulating insulin levels or insulin sensitivity, which is a good thing. Exercise also, in addition to just pulling things out of the blood, exercising muscles produce molecules that influence the brain. So this is just pretty recent data showing that muscles produce molecules called myokines, these tiny chemical signals that influence our overall physiology, reach the brain, and impact brain immunity, brain metabolism, and neuroplasticity. And one myokine people may be familiar with is BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor. That's an interesting molecule because it is a potent activator of what's called neuroplasticity, the rewiring of the brain. But it is also interesting, if our goal is to increase BDNF,
47:48 Speaker 04 because BDNF levels kind of are inversely correlated to cognition, to mental health, meaning higher BDNF levels are seen in people with better mental health, better cognition, that the best exercises to increase BDNF are not aerobic conditioning or so-called cardio, but rather resistance training, because it's in part a function of how much we're able to stress our muscles. And beyond that, when we exercise our muscles using resistance training, we're elevating levels of molecules like Iresin, Cathepsin B, these myokines that regulate brain immunity, regulate brain metabolism. So in essence, what I'm saying here is, when you exercise, you are not just creating health by improving muscle health, but rather you're actually creating this cascade of signals
48:31 Speaker 04 that are telling your brain how to function at a higher level. And so you can see in research, when people even engage in an acute bout of exercise, their cognition improves right afterwards. So that's good. If you're thinking about how do I stay focused? Moderate intensity exercise can actually improve cognition after the exercise. So that's interesting. But long-term, there's very few or are very few things that are equally as advantageous to brain health as getting regular exercise. And just to tie this together, yes, I think cardio is important. So if you can, three to five days of cardio, sure. But get that resistance training. And in particular, your goal is to activate your large skeletal muscles, which are predominantly located in your lower extremities.
49:15 Speaker 04 So there's a very long-winded way of saying, don't skip leg day, because it may be the most important day of the week when it comes to brain health.
49:22 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting, right? Move your legs to help your brain. But the way you describe it, the mechanism, it makes a lot of sense. You know, I had always heard BDNF referenced, and this was years ago. It's sort of like this is one of the early things that people keyed in on as being something that could actually drive neurogenesis, the creation of new brain cells. Is that still considered to be accurate or no?
49:45 Speaker 04 It's still true. I think it depends on who you ask. It is true that we create new brain cells across the lifespan, that regardless of age, you're creating new brain cells. And I think that's an important fact for people to understand because it has a strong association with opportunity and with the potential for change. So I don't want to discount from that. But as a relative contribution to the benefits from anything, neurogenesis is such a small amount of cell turnover compared to other aspects of neuroplasticity. Usually, people will call neurogenesis one version of neuroplasticity, where neuroplasticity is the rewiring or the kind of changing of the connections
50:30 Speaker 04 and the number of the links between our brains over our lifespan. Neurogenesis, creation of new neurons, does occur. But what's more important for most people is how our brain cells are wired. The number of connections, the strengths of the connection, what types of connections we have between our neurons. What happens over the lifespan is there's this massive influx of new connections that happens in the early years of our lives. And then we prune a whole bunch of synapses. And just for context here, we have roughly 80 billion neurons, but we have roughly 100 trillion synapses or connections between our neurons. So these are massive, massive numbers. And having too many connections is not the goal. That's actually associated with certain brain issues. And having too few connections is not the goal.
51:14 Speaker 04 It's the right amount of connections. Those connections change as a function of what we do and what we experience. So if you are experiencing a lot of stress, let's say you experience PTSD, neuroplasticity has wired your brain for, in this case, something that is not optimal, right? So increased fear, increased stress response. Neuroplasticity is not a good or a bad thing. It is just the rewiring of the brain. But what we're learning is to open up healthy neuroplasticity and to help wire our brains for health, for happiness, for optimism, for meaning. Certain things seem to promote that. And so BDNF is a molecule that promotes global neuroplasticity and has been correlated with an increase in new brain cells.
51:59 Speaker 04 But I do think, just going back to the original point, the more important mechanism is going to be how we rewire the connections between our neurons rather than how many new neurons we create.
52:09 Jonathan Fields? And I guess the big news here also, because people I think probably often ask, you know, like what type of what and what you're saying is that cardio and resistance, these things both matter.
52:17 Speaker 04 They do.
52:18 Jonathan Fields? And so try and find ways to work them into your life.
52:22 Speaker 04 And the other thing I feel like I'm just obligated to say, one of the reasons why resistance training and kind of balance training is so important is that falls become such a significant source of brain damage as we age. And so building core strength and building balance is by itself a brain health intervention. But I will say in addition to that, there is something called the age-related loss of muscle strength and function. It has a term or a name called sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is a huge deal because we start to lose muscle around age 35 at a significant rate to where we can be losing 10, 20, 30, 40% of our total skeletal muscle mass in our later years. And that correlates directly with worse cognition,
53:02 Speaker 04 with worse mental health. And so having a healthy mass of muscle is really key. And the best way to preserve, protect, build muscle mass is not going to just be aerobic conditioning, but rather it's resistance training. So you can build that skeletal muscle health and that will help you with your balance, but also because of these molecules like myokines promotes better brain health.
53:24 Jonathan Fields? Let's shift into nutrition here. This is one of the other things that you referenced, basically what goes into us. And, you know, most of us live within a food system where we have certain things that are being offered to us nonstop that are referencing earlier in our conversation, the things that make us feel good in an instant, like in the, in the right now, but oftentimes long-term are not great. So what, when we want to focus on like, what are the things that we would love to make central in the way that we're fueling our body? What should we be focusing on?
53:55 Speaker 04 So just to take this one step back, if you think about what is in food, because food is obligatory, certain things in life are not, but we have to be consuming food in order to not die. So you're always going to be having this conversation around, well, we have to do it. How do we do it best? So I think that's key. If we think about what is in food that is essential, calories, yes. And I think that that's where the conversation begins. You need calories or you die. You need a certain amount of calories or you lose weight. And if you are already at a low weight, then an under consumption of calories leads to starvation and death. That's the beginning part. And then you start to layer in the next phase, which is to say, well, is there more to food than just calories? And we say, well, yes, there's macronutrients. So we got fats, carbs and proteins.
54:39 Speaker 04 And we understand that certain fats, for example, are essential, essential fatty acids. We can't manufacture them in high enough levels. We have to consume them from our diet. Then we would say, well, are there certain carbohydrates that are essential? And the answer is kind of no, but there are things in the carbohydrate family like fiber, where we're starting to recognize, oh, well, we probably do need a certain amount of that. Proteins, very clearly, they're essential amino acids that we can't synthesize. So we need to be consuming those for our diet. And so for some people, that's where the conversation ends. They say, well, I got enough fats, carbs and proteins. I'm covering my bases. So my food is fine. Then you take that one step further and we're really only talking the last hundred years or so
55:20 Speaker 04 of nutrition science to say, well, even if you optimize fats, carbs and proteins and got enough calories, people are still dying unnecessarily because they seem to have a deficiency of something. And so then we say, well, you don't have enough vitamin C. You get scurvy. So you need enough vitamin C. And you can identify vitamins and minerals and say, well, we know we need enough of these from our food. So either you get it from a real food or you fortify a food. But basically you try to make sure you cover those bases. And where we're getting now, and maybe where we'll come back to in a moment, is the understanding that, like anything, it was an incomplete story. So yes, it was the macronutrients. Yes, it was the micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals. But there's a whole lot more in food. The so-called phytochemicals, the things that are present in plants, the thousands and thousands of molecules
56:06 Speaker 04 that we've historically written off as just fluff, unnecessary, that we're now starting to see do actually program our bodies and our brains in a positive way. So it's this kind of trans-species communication where those nutrients come from the soil, into the plant, into the animal, or directly from the plant into the human. It's a question of what data we're feeding our systems. Now, you're totally right in that in the modern day, we are consuming a lot of these foods that despite the fact that they're packed with calories, they're actually not nourishing us. And so this is the first time that at scale in human history, many people have had an overabundance of food calories, but an underabundance of actual nourishment
56:51 Speaker 04 of the key nutrients that they need to promote health. And it's in part because we just, at one point, indexed towards having enough calories, enough food available for the general public. So that made sense. That's a practical tool. But now we're indexing towards selling as much food as possible. So food has been converted from something that actually nourishes us to something that sells a lot of product. And so you can basically take these levers of fattiness or sweetness and just crank them up to the perfect level to keep people eating those foods, even as they know those foods are bad for them. When you couple that with a system in the United States where we subsidize unhealthy food and make
57:31 Speaker 04 it harder for people to purchase and eat healthy food, it makes total sense that we'd have so many people eating unhealthy food. The 60, 70% of our calories now come from ultra-processed foods. 70% plus of our foods and beverages have added sweeteners. It has become the standard to produce foods that have been engineered for palatability at the expense of value to our health. And we've normalized this because of this challenge we have as humans in connecting the short-term effects with the long-term consequences. You know, if you drink a couple liters of soda today, you might feel a little bit elevated
58:13 Speaker 04 because of the caffeine, but you're not going to get diabetes this afternoon because of that consumption. And so it's hard to say, well, you know, we really need to regulate this system because over time, making soda so cheap is actually leading to all of these chronic health complications that are bankrupting our system because we're really not able to reverse these conditions once they get them. So the modern day environment, everything it feels like is optimized towards what is going to incentivize a consumer to buy it, consume it, and continue to consume it as opposed to what is actually best for a person, whether it's our food or our social media content that nourishes health. We could say some of the things on the inverse in terms
58:56 Speaker 04 of what are better solutions to this, but I think part of this is basically addressing this question of what is lost in the process of taking something that is found in nature, that is a food that we evolved next to for thousands and thousands of years and are used to consuming and transmuting it into some sort of an ultra-processed homologue of that food so that we get the sense of it. It's a watermelon flavored candy, right? But what is lost in that process? And I think in many ways that is emblematic. It's a microcosm of what we see now, which is it's kind of like the real thing, but not quite there enough to where it is satisfying what we need to feel nourished and to promote
59:39 Speaker 04 health. So I think food is, it's become quite problematic for a number of reasons, but we're consuming more of the nutrients we don't need and less of the nutrients we actually need to support satiety, support good brain health and support good mental health. And again, not from the perspective of conspiracy, but rather incentives. If you're a food manufacturer, you would like for people to continue to consume your food and to be so pressed to want it all the time that they're willing to consume it regardless of the health implications. So I think that by and large, ultra-processed foods are far more palatable than eating, you know, let's say a piece of kale or an apple or an almond or whatever. And then
1:00:23 Speaker 04 you layer in on top of this, the current health influencer realm in which everyone is countering everyone else in terms of what is healthy. Some people saying, if you eat fruit, that's the worst thing. If you eat meat, that's the worst thing. And so a lot of people are just going to default to eating what is most readily available, what is in front of them, which in this case turns out to be the worst thing for their health.
1:00:45 Jonathan Fields? So. When we're thinking about brain health, does it really come down to something as simple as eat mostly whole foods, a lot of plants and clean proteins?
1:00:56 Speaker 04 I think this is one of those things that is true and insufficient.
1:01:00 Jonathan Fields? Okay.
1:01:00 Speaker 04 Right? So I think these messages are true. And then the implementation turns out to be equally as important as the backing. So I do think it is true that if most people ate more of what you just described, then health would be dramatically better across the board. And I think as much as there is a debate over the specifics, you know, does some subset of people benefit from a ketogenic diet? Maybe that the majority of the benefit, 80, 90% of the benefit from dietary change would come from simply doing what you just described. But then the question is, how do you implement it? And I think the best data is always on dietary change, not swapping out an individual food.
1:01:37 Jonathan Fields? Right.
1:01:37 Speaker 04 But I think that creating those first steps to where you can say, this food swap matters is actually important because it gives people the agency over saying, well, I'm not willing to swap everything out, but I am willing to do this one thing. And then you can build off of that. So one of the things that I think people really should consider starting with is the food for which there is the best data for worse brain health, and that's sugar sweetened beverages. There is no redeeming value to sugary beverages. There is a very small subset of people who need to be drinking these things. And they're usually people kind of at the extremes. Right? So maybe if you're an ultra marathoner, or maybe if you're in the hospital and, you know, you're trying to regulate your glucose, you need to be consuming, in this case, in an IV form, basically sugar water.
1:02:21 Speaker 04 However, for most people, and most of the time, sugar sweetened beverages are the exact opposite of what our bodies and our brains need. Because even though they provide glucose, glucose and fructose in a readily available format, long-term, they dysregulate that system. What winds up happening in the brain is as we age, the brain has more trouble getting access to and using glucose as fuel. And it's correlated with the overconsumption of these types of beverages that basically flood our system with glucose, dysregulate our insulin sensitivity, create metabolic and immune chaos, and long-term lead to worse brain health. So I think, starting with the sugar sweetened beverages, if you're somebody out there who drinks soda,
1:03:02 Speaker 04 if you're somebody out there who drinks fruit juices that aren't really containing fruit, this is the low hanging fruit. Exactly. Because switching it to a sparkling beverage, we could talk about some of the sugar alternatives if that's necessary. This is a great place to begin the journey and it's kind of an 80/20, right? So it's a small percentage, but it's going to have a huge benefit in terms of your overall long-term health. The other things are really tactical and it has a lot to do with what I said before around making the decisions that are the default decisions. So much of the reasons we choose to eat or drink something are a function of our environment. Just a simple tip here would be having available healthy calories with you and something that some people may remember from times where they were consuming alcohol
1:03:47 Speaker 04 or maybe if they're still consuming alcohol is this pre-gaming concept. And so for me in college, people talked about pre-gaming as a way to drink cheap alcohol. So you didn't have to spend as much on the expense of alcohol at the bar. Nowadays, what I'm saying is if you're going to be putting yourself into a situation where there's tons of junk food, eat a healthy meal beforehand. If you find yourself in the office and it's Martha's 60th birthday and so you know cupcakes are going to be present, eat breakfast before you go. If you're going on a plane flight and you know you're going to be tempted to eat those pretzels or whatever other food they serve to you, bring some almonds and have those available. I think so much of our poor decision-making isn't because we really want to eat the unhealthy food. It's simply because it's available and we don't have a better option.
1:04:29 Speaker 04 So there's lots of tactical steps like that, but I do think it comes back to that core thing that I said before, which is saying you're not comfortable being another person who embraces the status quo in an age where most people are unhealthy. And I tell people, and I feel like a lot of people have come up to me and told me they do this as well, embrace being a little bit of a weirdo at certain points. You don't have to be the difficult person. You know, it doesn't mean that you have to be the person calling other people out when they're eating junk food, but be willing to deviate a little bit and do things that other people would think are weird. When the average person is doing things that are unhealthy, you want to be a little bit of a weirdo.
1:05:05 Jonathan Fields? Yeah. So I mean, it comes down to think ahead, create the structural changes that allow you to honor what you truly value. So that when you're in the situation, rather than just having to react to whatever is available then, you've already kind of thought about it and prepared yourself so that you're more likely to make the better choice and you have the resources available to you in that moment to actually make the better choice, rather than just defaulting to whatever is available in the moment.
1:05:31 Speaker 04 I think that's completely true. The other part of this conversation, which, you know, I could definitely nerd out on for a while, but I'll just touch on is this question of what signals we're actually feeding our body with the food that we eat and how we can use those to reprogram our kind of core decision-making systems to promote healthier choices. And that's a lot of words. What I mean by that is if you think about food, every bite of food that you consume as data, some of that data may actually wire us for better health and some of that data may wire us for worse health. But as I said before, we're getting to the point in our understanding of food where we're going beyond the macro and the micronutrients to understanding it's actually, oh, there are microbes on our food. So there are bacteria that live on our food and those are not completely inert.
1:06:16 Speaker 04 They actually can program our gut microbiome for the better and for the worse. That these phytochemicals, and in particular a family called polyphenols, which give plant foods their color. So it's also what makes herbs and spices taste the way they do. They're concentrated in coffee and in tea. That these nutrients, or I guess these phytonutrients, can actually influence our immune system, our metabolism and our brain health. Optimizing our dietary consumption for foods that are giving our physiology the right types of health signals is a step beyond this. So it's not just saying, I don't want to eat these things because they're junk and I want to make sure I get enough vitamins and minerals. It's saying, I want to be eating foods that from the soil to the plant to the animal to
1:06:59 Speaker 04 me are actually creating the right set of signals to promote health. A group that I work with at Big Bold Health and I published a study just last November looking at polyphenols from a plant called Himalayan tartary buckwheat. And the reason this is exciting is we're able to use this large scale analysis to look at how these nutrients in foods like this tartary buckwheat can influence epigenetic signaling. Now, that's, it's a whole other can of worms, but suffice it to say that instead of just looking at how our genes, our 20,000 or so genes influence health, we're now able to look at the hundreds of thousands, over a million different sites on the gene that depending
1:07:41 Speaker 04 on if they're switched on or off, can determine how those genes are being used. So not just the DNA we have, but how our DNA is being used. And what we're able to show in this study is that the polyphenol set that is found in this Himalayan tartary buckwheat has differential effects on over 900 different gene sites, but some very potent and significant effects on genes related to metabolism, immunity, and longevity. So that's a whole lot of science there, but the exciting part is to say, I think what's coming next is the understanding of how certain foods and the nutrients within those foods can program us from a much deeper level to promote health, in part by regulating what is happening in the brain. So if you think about a top-down format, which is, I'm going to set up my life such
1:08:25 Speaker 04 that healthy decisions are more likely, this is the opposite. This is a bottom-up where you're actually letting your microbiome, letting epigenetics, letting your immune system program your brain through the food choices that you pick in order for healthy choices and health in general to be more likely. So I think that's, it's changing the game a little bit because it's no longer just saying, well, you need to make sure you get the key nutrients for brain health, but rather saying you can actually change the way that your genes are used such that you are programming your brain and your body for more wellness.
1:08:56 Jonathan Fields? It's like, you know, big picture, you're setting up the structure of your life to support health-making behavior. And when that health-making behavior then potentially leads you to make choices that bring things into your system, that then from the inside out, kind of for the bottom-up as you described, reinforce those decisions and help you sustain those decisions and also have all sorts of follow-on benefits. And it becomes this virtuous cycle at the end of the day.
1:09:25 Speaker 04 Can I touch on just one more thing here? Because what you're describing, yes, it is you get into a positive feed forward cycle where you're making more and more healthy choices. They're compounding. You're generating a healthier version of yourself. But something that I think has been historically a major barrier to people understanding the gravity of what we're discussing right now is this perceived separation between the sense of who you are, my identity, and what is happening within your brain, where we say, well, the choices I make are a function of me and whether or not I have willpower or whether or not I'm a good or bad person. You know, there's this whole morality piece where we would say, well, this person did this bad thing, they're a bad person.
1:10:06 Speaker 04 And that's because they, as a human identity, are a bad person. Rather than saying the function of their brain is what drove them to make those choices. I think we have this misguided concept of a static me, right? That has the same belief system, acts the same way each day, and that is somehow separate from what is happening within our brains. And so when we start to dismantle this and say, actually, no, the things that we believe, whether it's our political opinions or even personality traits, are a function of the wiring and the structure of our brains. And that changes depending on our environment, depending on the food that we eat. I published an article on a website recently talking about how various
1:10:49 Speaker 04 molecules in our food, including molecules found in psychedelics, can actually alter personality. So if you start to dismantle that and understand we are a work in flux that all of our cells are turning over, right? That we're changing over billions of cells each day. The actual makeup of our body is not a static concept, nor is it the case in our brains. Then you see how all of these kind of puzzle pieces interrelate. And so then you would think, well, If I'm going to be changing my brain wiring, if I'm going to be changing the makeup of my cells in my body each day, how do I change it so that it is a better version of me? And we take away a little bit of this ego sense of, well, I am the static and I can, yes, I can maybe eat so that my gut is in better shape or so that I lose some weight
1:11:34 Speaker 04 or my skin clears up, but rather the food that we eat, the choices we make each day are fundamentally altering the entire sense of who I am. Then all of a sudden it becomes a little bit more of an exciting journey where you're not just saying, I'm trying to drop five pounds, so maybe I should eat less carbs. And you're saying, actually, I'm building a better body and a brain with the food I eat, with the exercise I get. And that I think is a much more powerful motivator for behavior change than simply tethering it to, I want to look good in a swimsuit this spring and after that I'm happy to go back to the way I was.
1:12:05 Jonathan Fields? Yeah, I love that. And it brings a sense of agency to the whole conversation and also hopefulness. You know, because I think when a lot of people think about these ideas, there's a sense of fatalism that comes with their futility. And what you're, what you're introducing here is this sense that like, no, actually, like whoever you are in this moment, as you're watching or listening to this conversation, yes, there are decisions that you made, there are circumstances that you have experienced that have brought you to this moment in time. But simply the way that you are showing up at this exact moment does not have to be who you are, the way you show up, the behaviors you make, the sense of identity that you hold tomorrow, or the next day, or the next year, or the next decade, that we are constantly evolving and changing.
1:12:50 Jonathan Fields? And when we understand the levers that we can pull, which very often are very straightforward, that will create the shifts that we want over time, it does bring back this sense of, oh, like, I'm not just stuck. My life isn't just stuck. There are some things, I have this sense of agency, like, I know that I'm at this moment in an evolutionary process and I have a say in how that process unfolds from this day forward. I think that's really powerful in a lot of different ways. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase, "to live a good life," what comes up?
1:13:30 Speaker 04 I think there's the external versions of it. I'm really trying to focus on what creates meaning, consistent sense of meaning and purpose in my life. I think that I've been overly concerned about happiness. And then I moved to, well, how do I optimize for satisfaction? And now I'm far more concerned about, it's not about happiness. It's not about things being always good. It's about meaning and purpose and feeling like the actions each day are moving towards something that matters. So for me, a good life is not one that is purely happy. It's not one that I'm fully satisfied, but I think it is one in which I can look back and say that there was a meaning to my actions, even if that's something that comes at the end where I could say it all
1:14:14 Speaker 04 feeds into this larger reflection. But I feel like that is largely what is lacking right now. And it's something that I'm trying to take conscious steps to step more into. And I think going back to what we just described in terms of the agency piece, I think we are kind of conditioned to be, to internalize this message that most of what we do doesn't matter and we can't actually change. And that is an ideal scenario for us to buy and do things that benefit corporations who profit from our feelings that nothing can be different. And I think there is never a better moment for a person to change, take agency and create meaning than this very moment right now.
1:14:56 Speaker 04 But it takes multiple people embracing this concept and not just writing it off as some sort of a silly thing. This, this is the only thing is to feel that there is more to this than just waking up each day because we have to, that there's purpose to our lives. And I think it can be as simple as understanding some of these tenants we described around brain health and understanding how much we have the opportunity to change for ourselves. And in doing so, benefit our families, our friends locally and at scale. So that's what I'm spending time thinking about right now, but it's a great question.
1:15:33 Jonathan Fields? Thank you.
1:15:36 Jonathan Fields? Hey there. If you loved this episode, say that you'll also love the conversation we had with Adam Grant about rethinking what we think we know. You can find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez and Troy Young. Christopher Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube, too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did, because you're still listening here. Do me a personal favor, a seven-second favor, share it with just one person. And if you want to share it with more, that's
1:16:18 Jonathan Fields? awesome, too. But just one person even, then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered, to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.
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