Most replayed moment: The five fundamental pillars of longevity | Kayla Barnes-Lentz & Dr Federica Amati

Kayla Barnes-Lentz follows an intensive, highly structured daily protocol designed by a team of scientists to optimise every aspect of her health. She believes this carefully curated lifestyle could help her live to 150 years or more. While her routine may not be realistic for everyone, the insights behind it could benefit us all. Today, Kayla joins Dr Federica Amati to break longevity down into five fundamental pillars. Together, they explore the science behind each one, how Kayla puts them into practice, and how you can start strengthening your own pillars today. 🌱 Try our science-backed and tasty wholefood supplement Daily30 🌿Let your gut microbes snack on the ZOE Gut Health Bar Get our brand-new app and Gut Health Test designed by world-leading gut health and nutrition scientists to build healthy eating habits 👉 Join ZOE Follow ZOE on Instagram. 📚Books by our ZOE Scientists The Food For Life Cookbook Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati The Appetite Reset by Dr Federica Amati Food For Life by Prof. Tim Spector Ferment by Prof. Tim Spector Good Mood Food (preorder) by Prof. Tim Spector Free resources from ZOE The Smart Snacking Guide: How to feed your gut, fuel your day, and snack without guilt The Hormone Harmony Guide: Tuning Your Body’s Internal Orchestra Eating for Better Brain Health: Your brain-gut blueprint How to eat in 2026 - Discover ZOE’s 8 nutrition principles for long-term health Live Healthier: Top 10 Tips From ZOE Science & Nutrition Gut Guide - For a Healthier Microbiome in Weeks Better Breakfast Guide Have feedback or a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know here. Episode transcripts are available here.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Kayla Barnes-Lentz follows an intensive, highly structured daily protocol designed by a team of scientists to optimize every aspect of her health. She believes this carefully curated lifestyle could help her live to 150 years or more. While her routine may not be realistic for most of us, the insights behind it could be beneficial. Today, Kayla joins Dr Federica Marti to break longevity down into five fundamental pillars. Together, they explore the science behind each one, how Kayla puts them into practice, and how you can start strengthening your own pillars today. The first one might surprise you, it's oral health.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  We have known for a long time the link between brain health and oral health, right? And cardiovascular health and oral health. So I think it's really important that we don't just gloss over the oral microbiome. So I mean, I do a test, it's an oral microbiome test, just like a gut microbiome test, but just the basics, right? Ensuring you're seeing your dentist as often as you can, getting the proper cleanings, the checkups, flossing, I mean, it's so boring, but it's so important.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  So important.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  The obviously adequate brushing. A few more advanced things from like an oral protocol that I do is I do a little bit of coconut oil pulling. You take coconut oil, organic coconut oil, and you swish it around the mouth. It can help with any bad bacteria. Also, it can potentially whiten the teeth, so.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  And do you do that after you brush your teeth?

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Yes, after. And then I kind of like do a quick re-brush at the end because it will leave a bit of a film. But yes, and I do that like once a week and not on a daily basis. I also use, you know, a nanny hydroxyapatite toothpaste with prebiotics in it. So it's feed your good guys. So looking at the quality of the toothpaste for oral health. The other thing I'm excited about though is red light therapy for the gums or the mouth. It looks like a mouth guard and you just slip it in. And so gum inflammation is a very common thing, right? So that helps to, we know red light therapy, good for inflammation. So that's another part of my oral protocol. And the last thing I will say, I'm not sure if you have these in the UK, but here in the US, we have something called a biological dentist. So it's like the functional medicine of dentistry, right?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  It's like root cause, whole body, they do really interesting scans, they do something called a comb beam scan. So I was having a chat with one of the biological dentists here, his name is Dr Dome, and he was explaining this massive link between even some cancers and cavitations in the mouth. So the cavitation is like an ongoing infection in your mouth. And, you know, I'm not saying it's necessarily causation, but it seems that, you know, sometimes when they scan the mouth, they find these. So very important to just take a deeper look and standard dentistry doesn't always look for those things.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  It's fascinating because actually sort of oral health and specifically gingivitis, so gum disease, has been linked to increased risk of heart attacks for decades. It's not new science, but I think it is becoming more popular. And it's interesting because whenever you speak to people who've really suffered with their gum health and they lose teeth later in life, they often say, I wish someone had told me just how important it is to just brush your teeth and floss.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  What's next on the list?

• 3:13Speaker 02

  So next on the list, we have sleep. I mean, we could do a whole podcast on sleep, I think. So tell us your sleep protocol.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I really build my life around sleep, you know? So I go to bed at eight o'clock every night. We get up naturally around like four, 4:30, somewhere around there. But I have a bit of an intense sleep protocol. So I'll actually start in the morning. So I get morning sun to really like optimize my circadian rhythm. So it tells my brain and body what time it is because obviously light and food are two major influences on knowing what time it is. So get morning light, watch evening sunset if I can to really just anchor that circadian rhythm. I stop eating at 4:00 PM, but I would definitely say at least stopping eating two to three hours prior to sleep because we know that if you're eating food, it's not telling your body it's time to go to bed, it's obviously time to eat. So it can suppress your melatonin production. Also, if you are eating these meals late at night, it can potentially keep you out

• 4:04Speaker 01

  of the deeper stages of sleep, like deep and REM, because you're digesting your food. So eating early, super important. I keep my room completely dark, so dark room, cool room. And then getting your resting heart rate as low as possible, you know, relaxing before bed. I think this is a huge part that people miss. We have to relax because if we go to bed stressed, we're not going to be getting the highs while we sleep.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  And how do you achieve that?

• 4:27Speaker 01

  So I love to do some breath work, also like to take a long walk with my husband in nature, really like wind down. So after dinner, we're off our phones, we are doing very non-stimulating activities, not watching something scary or anxiety inducing. So we just try to make it very calm at night. Sometimes a warm bath, sometimes I'll do a sauna about two hours prior to bed. I switch with my sauna sometimes either right after exercise to continue those benefits or about two hours prior to bed. You don't want to do it too close to bed though, because it does increase your heart rate.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  So having a hot bath before bed, or if you don't have access to sauna, that change in temperature from being very hot to cool gives your brain that sign, oh, it's time to go to sleep.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  And so what's number three on the list?

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Exercise. So I would actually love to understand your exercise protocol and how you treat exercise in this context.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  So we know exercises, you know, if there was like one pill for longevity, it would be exercise. But we think about my protocol in hitting every area of longevity. So we want to think of course cardiovascular health and a couple of metrics to measure on that is like VO2 max, right? We know that VO2 max, the higher your VO2 max, it is actually pretty well correlated with how healthy you are, but also potentially how long you live. So we have cardiovascular training, then we have zone two training, but it's a little bit difficult. So about 158 minutes of that per week, one to two higher intensity zone two trainings. Also, I love to track this on my Oura Ring. So I have like cardiovascular age in my Oura Ring and I took my cardiovascular health from negative six and a half to negative 11 and a half.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  Could you help me try and understand what that means to go from minus six and a half to minus 11 of something?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's not a perfect metric, but Oura Ring will give you an estimate of cardiovascular health. Maybe you know exactly how they do it. I know it's the pulse wave, I believe.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they actually use the data from the Oura Ring to try and work out what your VO2 max would be if you did the VO2 max test. And it's a good way to understand cardiovascular age. So Kayla was already at six and a half years younger and got it to 11 years younger. And you'd want your heart to be as young as possible, right? It will keep your life longer.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's cardiovascular training. And then of course we have strength training. So I strength train about four to five times per week, really focusing on progressive overload, meaning adding more weight to get stronger. I measure my muscle mass, I look at my bone density, but I'm doing, you know, compound lifting, of course, if you're just starting out, work with a trainer or watch videos. I'm very glad that we're past the days of like these tiny little weights. You know, I was in the gym, you know, doing some presses this morning with like 35, 40 pound weights. I mean, I'm trying to go, and you know, I see it in my grip strength. I mean, my grip strength right now is 100 pounds, so.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  And interestingly, grip strength is a really good marker of health. So we use it usually in older populations. If you measure grip strength, you get a sense of how much frailty that person has. So using it earlier in life to really see whether you should pay more attention is a good idea.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  What's next on the list?

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Diet and nutrition.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  I'm not surprised. There would be many Zoe podcasts that aren't going to touch on diet at all. What does your overall diet look like?

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Overall, the diet is Mediterranean. So I've found that to be the most science-backed for longevity. And I also mentioned the 50 plant species. So really trying to focus on getting diverse diet with organic plants, one possible biodynamic, you know, the cleanest that I can. I do consume meat in small quantities, like grass-fed, grass-finished. I actually do sometimes more also load that in the early phase of my cycle when I am, you know, menstruating because the iron. But lots of wild-caught fatty fish like salmon. I love to rotate the proteins too, like maybe some day of branzino, then a wild salmon, lots of avocados, olive oil, sprouted nuts and seeds, lots of blueberries, love blueberries, blackberries, definitely no ultra-processed foods, and I focus on the highest quality I can get.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  And then I also use things like the micronutrient test. And there's also an app called Cronometer. So you can plug in exactly what you're eating. So it'll not only give you your macronutrients like protein, fat and carbs, et cetera, but it'll also give you an estimate of micronutrients. So I do try to optimize for both, of course, micro and macro nutrients in my diet.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  And that sounds pretty yummy.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I also make all of the meals for my husband and I at home. I have in different phases of my life had very similar meals on a day-to-day basis. But from what I understand, that's not optimal for gut diversity and, you know, overall gut health. So I also try to do local as much as possible and small farms near me. So I try to be really thoughtful, but I also want to enjoy the process of making the food and enjoying it. I mean, there's even something to it when you're smelling your own food, cooking, your digestive enzymes increasing because you're making it yourself, which is better for the nutrient uptake, also relaxing while I'm doing that so I can have better nutrient absorption.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  So there's really elegant science that's been done, looking at how time spent sharing meals at tables correlates with health outcomes across the world.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Love that.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  So countries like the US and the UK that spend very little time tend to have worse like dietary patterns, whereas those countries where they, you know, take an hour and a half for lunch tend to have better diets. It's a correlation, of course, but it just goes to show that when we treat food in the way that we should, which is an essential part of our, how we live and how healthy we are, but also a source of connection with the people we love, it helps us to actually... Slow down and focus on one thing at a time. So something we're very passionate about at Zoe is mindful eating. And it's like this idea that we need to give this food the proper attention that it deserves. What are we putting into our bodies? How is it nourishing us? How is it helping our gut microbiome to thrive? And so what you just described is so good. And the seasonality, trying to get some local

• 9:59Speaker 02

  produce that helps to switch things up, helps to get more diversity in. You haven't mentioned fibre, but that's okay.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Actually, in my brain, I was like as soon as, I forgot to mention that. So yeah, I'm aimed for actually quite high level of fibre, about forty to fifty grams per day.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  And that's excellent because we have good data from RCTs that shows that there doesn't seem to be an upper limit to fibre. So one RCT from that wonderful podcast we did with the scientists who looked at the African heritage diet, they had ninety grams a day and saw even better health outcomes. So you know, I always say thirty grams a day is a minimum recommendation. So going above that is is perfect. And the omega three rich fatty fish, we always want to encourage people to include whole grains and legumes. So these are the beans, the peas and the lentils, they're really nutritious foods. So nutrient dense, diverse diet.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Another thing I didn't mention was fermented foods. So I do have, that's kind of like the the base of my plate for each meal is like a protein, a fermented food, some sort of usually like legume or lentil, and then a huge like, you know, slot of plants, you know, some sort of vegetables. But also, yeah, I've really enjoyed the process of making the food. And it's also kind of a love language, you know?

• 11:11Speaker 02

  It is. And it's a skill. It's like a life skill to be able to cook delicious food, right?

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just started making, I got excited about making seed crackers. I also love, there's a product actually, it's called Zen Basil. Have you ever heard of this?

• 11:20Speaker 02

  I've I've seen it here in Palm Beach.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like double the amount of fibre. So it's a basil seed instead of a chia seed, which people love for fibre. So I've been doing the basil seed pudding, tastes amazing. And great way to get in a lot of fibre.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  I don't want to wrap up without asking Kayla about the one piece of advice you'd give to a listener who is hearing this and saying, oh, I'd like to sort of start on my longevity journey. And like, what is, what's the one thing that you would say they should do first? And maybe they could set out to do, you know, even today?

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Can I have a small preface before that? You know, we've talked a lot about these advanced therapies, right? And kind of like interesting devices and tools. But without a doubt, if you master the basics, you're going to be healthier than, you know, ninety nine percent of people, right? So start slow, start easy, master those basics, social connection, we didn't talk too much about, but a little bit about social connection, stress management, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and you will be absolutely thriving. So if you want to start with sleep tonight, I think that's a really great place. And then maybe add on exercise in the morning.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  As you can imagine, hosting this podcast, running Zoe, juggling family life, it all keeps me pretty busy. So I try as best I can to stay energized and show up well in all those parts of my life by fueling my body with the right food, by exercising, and by adding a scoop of Daily Thirty to my meals every day. If you haven't heard of Daily Thirty yet, it's the gut supplement designed by our gut health scientists here at Zoe. It's made of over thirty high quality handpicked plants, including seaweed, fungi, and different types of fibre. Better yet, it contains ingredients to support gut health, digestion, and energy, which is ideal for packed calendars and busy lives. Simply add one scoop a day

• 13:10Speaker 00

  to any meal for an extra boost of fibre and plant diversity. And because it tastes delicious on just about anything, and adds a satisfying crunch, it quite quickly slots into your life, becoming a daily healthy habit you'll always have time for. By the way, whenever we talk about Daily Thirty as a good source of fibre, we're required to say that it contains four grams of total fat per serving. Obviously, that's all amazing healthy fats from plants. So order yours today at Zoe.com/daily30. Thanks for listening and see you next time.