YouSaid · the spoken record

David Raichlen

lines on the record: 98
first: 2024-02-08
most recent: 2024-02-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“People rest a lot. Like the Hadza, they sit or rest and sit for as long as we do, which was actually super surprising to us. We thought that wouldn't be the case. We thought they were going to be active all the time and there would be much less sitting. But when we finally actually measured it with accelerometers, they're resting for the same amount of time that we are. But they're not sitting in chairs. They're resting in postures that require a little muscle activity. So they're squatting or they're kneeling or they're sitting on the ground in ways that, you know, you have to kind of keep shifting your body around. And it's possible that just that kind of low level of muscle activity is how our bodies are well adapted to rest and what's weird is the invention of chairs. And what's weird is the invention of these objects that completely eliminate the need for our lower bodies to use muscle activity.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, when I give talks about sitting, all of a sudden I start seeing people fidgeting, right? Some people get up and stand up in the back. So, you know, you take the load off of your lower legs and your muscles don't have to work. And, you know, not surprisingly, that's super comfortable. We're not working hard. But at the same time, what's happening is our muscles not being active means that what we normally do to fuel muscle activity, which is, you know, we break up triglycerides in our bloodstream and that's those are broken up into fatty acids that fuel muscle activity. That's not happening. And so those fuels now build up in our blood vessels. And that's associated with cardiovascular disease. So sitting for long periods of time is associated with some negative health outcomes. And one of the things that we've learned from working with the Hadza is that, you know”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So sitting is sitting's a beautiful thing, right? I mean, we're doing it right now. It's really comfortable. And the reason it's comfortable is because we've basically taken all of the load off of our lower body. So we're supporting ourselves in these chairs, right? You got to move around.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“may be tweaked by this behavior. And so I've tried to implement some things like trying not to sit too long, trying to break up my sitting, finding ways to not be stuck in a chair all day. And a lot of that's driven by my research.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think a couple of things. Number one, physical activity is sort of the cornerstone of my life. That's sort of been driven by my personal sort of enjoyment of it, but also from a research standpoint, that's been really motivating to maintain an active lifestyle across these years. But more recently, I've been really interested in sitting, which is, you know, in some ways not really the opposite of being physically active, but it's another behavior that we engage in actually for much more time per day than anybody's physically active. And we've done a lot of work on resting behaviors in the Hadza. And that's been an area that I've sort of tried to pull into my life as well is trying to understand how sitting can impact our lives and then how our evolutionary biology may”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very little evidence of diabetes, very little evidence of dementia. I mean, these diseases that we look at as inevitable parts of aging, they're just not, right? They are not inevitable. A lot of them are a product of our lifestyle. And I'm most familiar with dementia. And something like 40% of risk of dementia is preventable. It's due to lifestyle, right? We have the ability to modify our risk in really big ways by altering the way we live.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we don't see a lot of evidence of disease risk. So we have not yet measured cardiovascular outcomes like we haven't measured mortality, for example, from cardiovascular disease. But we have measured biomarkers. So things like cholesterol levels, triglyceride levels, blood pressure. So looked at whether there's hypertension. And we see very little evidence of cardiovascular disease in this group. Other researchers have looked at other groups. So there's a long-term study of a group in South America called the Chimane that have been studied in a lot of detail. And there they found almost no evidence of cardiovascular disease. And they've been able to look in a much more detailed way at outcomes like, you know, death from cardiovascular disease. And they see almost no evidence of high levels of cardiovascular disease.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so on average, right, for older adults. So we just don't see as much physical activity in the US. Like I said before, only 25% of adults in the US meet physical activity guidelines and physical activity guidelines here are 150 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous physical activity. In the US, 25% of adults meet those guidelines. In the HADZA, those that we've measured are meeting weekly physical activity guidelines on average in two days. So they're getting 300 minutes of physical activity in a couple days versus adults in the U.S. who aren't coming close to that.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of times the way that we measure physical activity is in terms of how much time they spend in moderate or vigorous intensity activity. So these are kind of activities that get your heart rate up to about 50, 55% plus of your maximum heart rate. And older adults are still engaging in 60, 70, 80 minutes per day of that kind of activity. Whereas, say, in the US, you might see older adults on average engaging in two to four minutes per day of that level of activity. Two to four.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Higher and higher levels. So what we see in the past or see in living hunter-gatherers may be quite different than what's necessarily optimal for our health in terms of where are we going to get the most benefit and where do we start to trail off.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, so we can look at what living hunter-gatherers do, and that provides us with kind of a clue as to what that lifestyle might entail. And I do like to think about things in terms of steps per day often because that's an easy metric for people to kind of understand and track for themselves. There are more complicated ways to measure physical activity, but steps is a good one. Step counts. And so the Hadza, as we've measured their step counts, are getting a lot. So it's like, you know, 15,000 to 20,000 steps per day in that range, which is quite a bit of movement. And that's not to say that that is the optimal amount, but that's what we see in hunting and gathering lifestyles. The benefits that we get from a public health standpoint start to occur at much smaller levels, right? So, you know, four, five, six, thousand steps per day, you start to see some real benefits. And as I said, you start to maybe see diminishing returns as you get.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the Hadza provide a window into what a hunting and gathering lifestyle looks like. And so if you work with individuals who are still pretty much full-time hunting and gathering, they give you a view of how much physical activity does it take to be a hunter-gatherer, for example. And how does that relate to biomarkers of cardiovascular health? Or how does that relate to their cognition? How does this lifestyle impact the way that they age? And the Hadza give us this really important view of what that lifestyle is like in terms of behavior and activity and aging.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I started working with the Hadza in 2009. That was my first time out there. And we've been working with them and interested in what kinds of health impacts you see in the context of a hunting and gathering lifestyle.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For me, if you are not an exerciser, getting four or five thousand steps per day is going to give you a big cardiovascular benefit and a big benefit for your brain.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not to be intimidated by the advice out there about how much you have to exercise because it's actually surprising how little you need to exercise to gain benefits. So if you're starting from zero, the biggest bang for your buck from a public health standpoint are people who are starting from almost zero and just starting to exercise a little bit, right? Just getting out the door and taking a thousand steps, right? Something like that. Those sorts of small amounts going from zero to two, three, four thousand steps per day of exercise, that's the biggest public health benefit. Then you start to see diminishing returns, right? So if you're already exercising a lot and you want to bump it up a little higher, the amount of benefit you get is smaller than going from very little to more. But I think that's the, I mean, that's the surprising thing.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I exercise first thing in the morning Because I will feel better all day, right? And so, I mean, there's two reasons. I think one, if I save exercise for later in the day, there's a greater chance that things will come up and I'll, you know, I'll find excuses not to. But mainly it's because first thing in the morning, if I exercise, my whole day is better, right? And so that's the motivation to get out of bed for me and get out the door is I literally think about how I will feel if I don't do it. Because sometimes it's cold. Sometimes you don't, it's dark, you know, this time of year. You don't want to do it. But if I think about how I'll feel the rest of the day, that's a big motivator.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things that I think is happening is that you've activated reward centers in your brain that have increased your arousal, right? You've activated these centers in your brain that are making you feel good. And when we feel good, we feel more confident. We're not as sort of stuck in our heads. We're not as we're more present. But I think that is rooted in the rewarding sensations of exercise, right? It makes us feel better. And when you feel better, you function better across all aspects of your body, of your life. And those rewards are molecular rewards that are popping up. There's similarities with how people feel when they use certain drugs. They're activating similar receptors in your brain is when you're using certain drugs. Although to a much lower extent, and it's really, it's making you, you know, sharper and making you more confident and making you feel better.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that's why I got into this, right? Because I started noticing the same thing. And I started noticing how much better I felt after I exercised. And, you know, and to this day, right, I mean, my wife knows when I didn't go for a run in the morning, right? I'm not that pleasant of a person to be around the rest of the day.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Absolutely. I mean, to me, that's the really surprising outcome of a lot of this research is that moving outside and especially moving in green spaces. So moving in parks or near parks or moving on trails, things like that seems to have bigger benefits, especially for mood. We don't know yet about the cognitive benefits. That's our hypothesis. But certainly some of the research out there suggests that for mood and feelings of well-being, moving your body in a green space provides a little bit extra benefit than moving in, like I said, in city streets or indoors.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so there's a research movement called the Green Exercise Movement that is focused on the impact of exercising in green spaces versus more urban environments or indoors on exercise equipment. And I don't want to scare anybody. No, no, no. Like I said, exercise is great. If you, if running on a treadmill works for someone's lifestyle.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's possible. So I think there's a couple things running on a treadmill may end up being a little more like running on a running wheel for a mouse without the extra enrichment. And yeah, running outside may provide some of those better benefits. We also know that running outside actually has a lot more benefits than just maybe cognition, but also seems to boost mood a little bit more than running or exercising in more impoverished environments.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do that than when you just exercise or you just play a game. And so we can, you know, take that and perhaps translate that into the real world and think about ways that you can Make your exercise more cognitively challenging. So can you go out and challenge yourself spatially, take new roots, right? Oftentimes, especially runners or walkers, they just do the same route every time or the same. They have two or three routes that they do every time, depending on how long they want to go. But maybe we should be challenging ourselves a little more, right? Maybe we should take new routes where you get a little lost and then have to find your way back, right?”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think number one is just getting active, right? So I think, you know, to me, the number one recommendation is to be physically active. And especially for people who aren't that active right now, the best thing they can do is get out and start walking. But if we want to enhance the effects of physical activity on the brain and build on this animal work, we're starting to see some good evidence that if you do something similar, if you combine physical activity with cognitive challenges, you can boost the effects of physical activity on the brain, on especially cognitive performance. And so, you know, most of the work has been in controlled environments. So we've done a study where we built a game that you can play while you're on an exercise machine. So you combine exercise with challenging activities, right? And we've shown that you can actually get a bigger benefit for cognition when you...”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you got this really cool additive effect where you really enhance the effects of either one of those behaviors by combining them.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yeah, there have been a great impetus for our work was some of the work done in rodent studies by a professor named Gerd Kemperman. And he and his group did some work in mouse models where they combined access to running wheels with very enriched cage environment. So they looked at, they did a very careful study where they looked at some mice who were just living in their cage, you know, normally a control group. They looked at mice that were given access to a running wheel. They looked at mice that were given access to this enriched environment, this cognitively challenging and things to play on. And then they looked at a combined group where they combined the running wheel with the enriched environment. And they found this effect where the combined environment doubled the growth and survival of new neurons compared to either wheel running alone or Cajun.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think it fits into an evolutionary model, at least in my mind, where the purpose of being physically active is to move around a habitat to find things, find food, find water, find firewood. And so physical activity in this sort of ecologically relevant world is a combination of cognitive challenges and physical challenges. So I think that when you combine them in the way that perhaps orienteering does or maybe some other sports, you might actually get a bigger boost for your buck, a bigger bang for your buck in terms of the brain benefits. And that, I think, is rooted in our evolutionary history. Like I said, I think that being active in an evolutionary sense always comes with sort of a cognitive challenge. Nobody's ever just going out for a workout. There's no reason to. If you don't need to find something, you're going to relax and rest.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this would be like a trail run or something like that. And there was a great study that just came out looking at it was a randomized control trial. So they actually randomized people into either an orienteering group or a hiking group or a control group. And over a couple months, they found that the orienteering group actually had better performance on cognitive tests like memory tests and executive function tests than even the hiking group. Both of those groups did better than the control group, but there was actually this extra boost for the people who were in the orienteering group. So we're starting to see that maybe some different activities could potentially enhance the effects of exercise on the brain.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. Always done outside. Typically done on natural, like on trails and things, but people do do it in cities as well. Oh.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Find your way across a route as fast as possible. So it kind of mixes endurance activity with spatial navigation and moving around your environment and figuring out where you are”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question. And there is not a ton of very clear work that's compared directly different types of activity in ways where I could tell you for sure this is the best one, right? There are data that suggest that resistance training is beneficial to the brain. There's more work on endurance activity. And I actually think that's probably because it's easier to do rodent work on endurance activity than resistance. And so trying to translate across those models is a little bit easier. Both forms of exercise have benefits. They may be through different pathways. There may be different biological mechanisms that are underlying those benefits. I've kind of seen some cool work coming out lately that has tried to look at, for example, different types of endurance exercise. So there's a great study that came out. Are you familiar with orienteering? It's a sport where you're given like a map and a compass and you have to.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, our bodies are fantastic at tuning what we put energy into to maintain to the kinds of activities that we're engaged in, right? And so, you know, I like to think of our bodies as great energy minimizers in some ways that if you're not using muscles, those muscles will get smaller because it takes energy to maintain that tissue. If you're not. You know, creating the need for your heart to pump blood across your body by exercising, you'll atrophy some of that tissue. You'll reduce blood vessels. Your heart will become less efficient because you've signaled to your body that you don't need that energy to be put into that tissue maintenance. The same, it seems, holds true for the brain that if you're not active in some way, then you're kind of signaling that you don't need some of that energy to be put into that tissue.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's hard in terms of increase because we haven't measured time spent sitting for very long. That's really been a pretty recent part of research. But we do know that today people are sitting for on average nine to ten hours per day and that level of sitting is also linked with really low levels of then being physically active. So we can think about how many of us are actually active enough to meet the kinds of guidelines that are prescribed for health. And we're talking about 25% of U.S. adults actually meeting those guidelines. And that number hasn't changed in 20 years or so, even with all the messaging. Physical activity is good for you. You need to be more active. You need to exercise. You know, people just don't do it.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in terms of commuting leisure time, what do most people do during their leisure time? The couch is really comfortable. Our screens are really enticing TV screens, but now phone and computer and all these things. And so we end up sitting a lot.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think things start with the Industrial Revolution. As we mechanize and we find ways to reduce the need to be physically active to gain access to food, to survive. And then as we move on, in the last 50, 60, 70 years, we start to see a lot more office jobs, right? We start to see changes in our work life that reduce activity patterns throughout the day.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would be nice in some ways, but that's just not really the way that our physiology works, right? So, you know, as I was saying, if you think of the sort of natural condition of humans as being physically active, because that's what we had to do to find food and survive, then our physiology is adapted to that condition. And over the course of two million years, we never had to adapt to low levels of physical activity because it just wasn't a part of being human. And so it's only been in the last few hundred years that we've seen this rapid decline in activity. And that's just not enough time to see that sort of adaptation occur.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot, a lot of fun things. So, I mean, one of the things that happens when we exercise is we increase blood flow to the brain. And that helps bring nutrients and keep our neurons functioning properly. But another thing that happens is that your muscles actually generate proteins called myokines. And those travel to the brain and they interact with neurons in ways that upregulate neurotrophins. So there's this great neurotrophin called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF, and BDNF acts kind of like a fertilizer for brain cells or for new neurons. So BDNF, when it's upregulated with exercise, helps both the birth of new neurons and it helps them to survive and integrate into the processes that they're meant to work for.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a good question. I mean, on a broad public health scale, yes, you know, low levels of physical activity or inactivity is associated with poorer brain health, smaller volumes of key brain structures, so smaller hippocampal volumes, for example, and worse cognition overall, and greater risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease. On a personal level, it's hard to say specifically, right, because there's so many factors that go into your risk of dealing with these conditions. But I can say that the best way for any individual to reduce their risk of cognitive decline is to be physically active.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is sort of the normal condition for humans. And anything else, so as we kind of progress into modern times and many people have dropped their activity, that's actually the condition that is quite different from the way that our physiology functions best and from the way that our physiology evolved.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, all animals generally have to move to survive, right? They have to move to find food in some way. But at some point during human history, our pattern of movement shifted pretty dramatically. And we think that was around 2 million years ago. And at that point, we shifted from a more ape-like lifestyle to a hunting and gathering lifestyle where our travel distances increased drastically. So we were moving over 20 kilometers sometimes per day sometimes longer. And our intensity of movement probably shifted a bit to higher intensities. And so the need to be physically active changed. And if we think about the way that our physiology evolved, our physiology evolved in this context of large levels of physical activity on a consistent basis. And so I like to think of”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in rodent models where researchers have done sort of this detailed work, the hippocampus is where mainly where new neurons have been found associated with exercise. In human studies, brain effects have been more widespread. So you do see volumetric changes in the hippocampus, but you also see volumetric changes or preservation of brain volume in frontal hobes, which are associated with executive cognitive function. So things like planning and decision making.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the hippocampus is in the deep in the temporal lobe of the brain. It looks like a seahorse. It's kind of this curved object in the brain that plays a big role in different aspects of memory. So it plays a big role, especially in working memory, which is keeping things in your memory over the short term that you may need to recall quickly. And it also plays a big role in the formation of memories of events that happen in your life. And also in spatial navigation, which is an important part of moving around in the world. So it's a really key part of the brain. And it's also one of the parts of the brain that is most effective by neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease. So it is a part of the brain that deteriorates in these diseases leading to memory deficits that have a big effect on your daily life”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A neuron is the main brain cell. So a neuron is sort of the main cell in your brain that's responsible for communication and transmission of information across brain regions.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question. The evidence in humans is a little trickier, so I can talk more about the evidence from animal models because with animal models, you can actually look inside the brain and see what's happening after, say, an exercise intervention. So there have now been many, many studies, especially in mice and rats, where researchers have shown that if you give them access to running wheels or if you have them run on a treadmill, that you actually generate new neurons and those neurons survive and get integrated into key parts of the brain. And we focus a lot on the hippocampus because it's so important to memory, which is a major aspect of being human is being able to remember things. And researchers have shown very clearly that exercise and physical activity in these rodent models leads to the birth and survival of new neurons.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think that was the prevailing view for a long time that, you know, we grow our brains as children and during adolescence. And by the time you're in your 20s, your brain has done all the growing it's going to do. And now it's just this progressive shrinking over the rest of your life. And, you know, over the last few decades, we've realized that's not true, actually, that you can generate new neurons, especially in key areas of the brain like the hippocampus that's associated with memory. that that growth of new neurons may be the key to preventing or staving off these neurodegenerative diseases that have this big impact on the aging brain. And so if we can find ways to do that, and what I study is kind of doing that through physical activity and exercise, then we might be able to prevent some of the cognitive decline people experience with.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What my work has been focused on is understanding how and why physical activity, especially and lifestyle behaviors in general can impact health and most specifically impact the health of our brains. And I think that we are dealing with Brain health problems that are only going to increase as our population ages. So we have six million people in the US today that are diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or other related dementias. That's projected to grow to around 13 million people over the next 25 years or so. We're projected to have 150 million people diagnosed with dementia worldwide over the next 30 years or so. So it's a problem that we have to deal with. And my work has been focused on ways that we can prevent these diseases that are associated with aging.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Physical activity guidelines here are 150 minutes per week, but only 25% of adults in the US meet those guidelines with older adults doing it two to four minutes per day. But there are these small activities that provide big benefits, that generate new neurons, and those neurons get integrated into key parts of the brain. Number one is”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are dealing with brain health problems that are only going to increase as our population ages. And healthy aging is linked to three behaviors. Diet, physical activity, and social connections. For example, people who have stronger social connections tend to have better brain outcomes than people who don't.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you sit for 10 hours a day compared to nine hours a day, it's about a 10% increase risk of dementia. If you sit for 12 hours a day, it's about a 60% increase risk of dementia.”
2024-02-08 · The Diary of a CEO · The Brain Professor: "Popular Treat Now Considered Deadlier Than Smoking!", "Alcohol Is Shrinking Your Brain" - David Raichlen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT