Show Notes
What actually happens to your blood sugar if you did 30 squats every day for 30 days? In this episode I go through exactly that, from the first afternoon all the way through to a full year of doing this. The short version is that using your muscles after a meal gives your blood sugar somewhere to go instead of sitting around in your bloodstream causing damage. Your muscles are the biggest user of the glucose you eat, and squeezing them opens up a way for sugar to get in that does not rely on insulin working properly, which matters a lot if your insulin signalling has already started to struggle. Research looking at short bouts of movement every twenty minutes or so found noticeably less sugar in the blood afterwards and a real drop in the amount of insulin the body needed to deal with it. More recent work using small sets of squats scattered through the day found similar benefits, sometimes doing better than one longer walk. I take you through what to expect at each stage. The effect on a single meal is immediate. Thirty days builds the habit and starts shifting insulin sensitivity under the surface, even if your bloods do not show much yet. Three months is where a blood test can actually reflect the change. A year of this puts you on a genuinely different trajectory for your long term health. I also cover how to actually fit this into a normal busy day, how to do a squat safely, and why this only works as part of a wider picture that includes what you are eating, not as a replacement for it. The full list of research references is in the description of the YouTube version. Disclaimer: This is not personal medical advice and does not override what your doctor says. #dralex #bloodsugar #insulinresistance
More from The Long Game | Dr Alex
Cooling your rice, pasta or potatoes after cooking turns some of that starch into something your body treats more like fibre than carbohydrate. The surprising part is that reheating it properly the next day does not undo that benefit. The type of starch responsible for most of the effect is incredibly heat stable, so warming your food back up barely touches it. The food poisoning worry that comes up every time this topic is discussed is really about how quickly food is cooled, not about reheating it. Bacteria like Bacillus cereus can survive cooking by forming spores, and those spores wake up if food sits too long at room temperature. Getting food into the fridge promptly, rather than leaving it out for hours, is the part that actually matters for safety. Freezing bread works on the same principle. A fresh slice gives the biggest blood sugar spike, but freezing and then toasting it brings that spike down noticeably, roughly half as much in the small study mentioned in the video. It also stops good quality loaves going to waste, which makes it one of those habits with no real downside. None of this replaces eating more fibre in the first place or cutting back on refined carbohydrates generally. The numbers involved are fairly small on their own, an extra gram or two of resistant starch per portion, but repeated several times a week over many years, small shifts like this genuinely add up. The full list of research references for this video is in the description of the YouTube version. Disclaimer: This is not personal medical advice and does not override what your doctor says. #dralex #guthealth #healthyeating
Five diet mistakes that are quietly undoing your health, and none of them require buying anything new or giving up the food you love. The first is not getting enough antioxidants. These come from colourful plants and they protect the lining of your arteries from everyday wear and tear. Supplements will not do the job here, the food itself is what matters. The second is eating the same few plants over and over. Variety matters just as much as quantity, since different coloured plants feed different parts of your body. Aiming for around 30 different plants a week is a good target, and herbs, spices, nuts and beans all count towards that. The third is simply not eating enough fibre. The UK recommendation is 30 grams a day and the average person falls well short of that. Fibre lowers cholesterol, flattens blood sugar spikes and calms inflammation, all from one thing on your plate. The fourth is reaching for sugar and refined carbs first thing in the morning. Many breakfast foods are dressed up desserts, and they send your blood sugar up and then crashing down, leaving you foggy and hungry again within hours. The fifth is fearing fat itself rather than choosing the right type. Good fats from oily fish, nuts, seeds and olive oil actually help your liver clear cholesterol, while the low fat trend of past decades often just replaced fat with sugar and starch. The full list of research references is in the description of the YouTube version of this video. Disclaimer: This is not personal medical advice and does not override what your doctor says. #dralex #nutrition #healthyeating
Aspirin sits in millions of kitchen cupboards, but whether it helps or harms you comes down to one question most people have never been asked properly. In this episode I explain what aspirin is actually doing inside your body once you swallow it, why the dose matters so much, and why a tablet that works brilliantly for some people can quietly cause harm in others. I walk through the difference between secondary prevention, for people who have already had a heart attack or stroke, and primary prevention, for people trying to stop a first event ever happening. These are two very different situations with very different evidence behind them. I also cover the big studies that changed official guidance in the UK, the US, Canada and Australia, and why the advice for older adults without existing heart or artery disease has shifted so clearly away from routine daily aspirin. Finally, I compare aspirin against simple lifestyle changes such as diet, walking and blood pressure control, and what the evidence actually shows when you put them side by side. The full list of research references is in the description of the YouTube version. Disclaimer: This is not personal medical advice and does not override what your doctor says. #dralex #aspirin #heartdisease
Your eyes can lose around a third of their function before you ever notice anything is wrong, because your brain quietly fills in the gaps and hides the problem from you. In this episode I go through exactly how your eye works, why presbyopia from your mid forties onwards is normal ageing rather than a disease, and the difference between your eyes ageing at the pace they should and ageing faster than they should because of years of accumulated damage. I also cover a simple fifteen second test you can do at home to pick up on early changes in your vision, the symptoms that mean you need to be seen the same day rather than waiting for a routine appointment, floaters and when they actually matter, glaucoma, cataracts, sunglasses and the best time of day to wear them, and why your yearly eye test checks for far more than just whether you need new glasses. The full list of research references for this episode is in the description of the YouTube version. Disclaimer: This is not personal medical advice and does not override what your doctor says. #dralex #eyehealth #preventativehealth
You can throw out your salt shaker completely and your blood pressure can still barely move three months later. That is not you doing something wrong. It usually means something underneath your diet has been pushing that number up for years. In this episode I go through five things that keep blood pressure high even when someone's diet already looks fairly sensible: where most of your salt actually comes from and the mineral that is missing alongside it, the hormone problem that runs quietly for years before anyone mentions diabetes, what ultraprocessed food does to your vessels beyond the salt it contains, the type of exercise that moves the number more than people expect, and the stress and sleep side of things, which I personally find hardest. The full list of research references for this episode is in the description of the YouTube version. Disclaimer: This is not personal medical advice and does not override what your doctor says. #dralex #bloodpressure #preventativehealth