Show Notes
Once you pass 50, five everyday movements can tell a doctor a surprising amount about how your body is ageing and how long you are likely to stay independent. No equipment needed, you can try each one at home today. The first is climbing two flights of stairs without stopping. It asks your heart, lungs and leg muscles to work together, and some doctors even use it as a rough guide before big operations like lung surgery. The second is putting your shoes and socks on without sitting down or leaning on anything. This one is all about balance, standing on one leg while your ankles, core and brain coordinate to keep you upright. The third is carrying heavy shopping from the car to the kitchen without putting the bags down. This is really testing your grip strength, which reflects how your muscles are functioning right across your whole body. The fourth, and the one that catches people out the most, is getting down to the floor and standing back up again without using your hands or knees. It needs leg strength, hip flexibility and balance all at once, which is exactly why it is so hard. The fifth is managing 10 press ups, testing the strength and stamina in your chest, shoulders, arms and core. None of these are formal medical tests you would find in a hospital or a textbook, but they lean on the same things doctors do measure, strength, balance and coordination. If something specific like arthritis or a joint replacement stops you doing one of them, that is a completely different situation to simply being out of practice. If you struggled with any of these, you are in very good company and it says far more about how modern life is set up than about you as a person. The encouraging part is that every one of these can be improved at any age, even starting later in life makes a real difference. 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 #longevity #healthyageing
More from The Long Game | Dr Alex
Two 70 year olds, same town, same height, same starting point. One has trained for most of their adult life. One hasn't. Look inside their muscle cells and the difference is not small. In this video I take you inside a muscle to show what actually happens as we age, why your energy producing machinery slows down, how fat sitting inside muscle messes with your blood sugar, and why your nerves start dropping fast muscle fibres from your 50s onwards. I also look at what the research says about NAD boosting supplements, and whether it is ever too late to start training. Spoiler, it isn't. There is a study in this video involving people in their late 80s and even their 90s who improved their strength and walking speed with regular training. 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 #muscleaging #strengthtraining
I eat somewhere around 60 grams of fibre on a normal day. I never planned that number and I never tracked it, Steph and I just sat down one day and worked out what a typical day actually contained. For context, the average person in Britain eats around 18 to 20 grams a day, and in the US it is closer to 15 or 16. The official guidance sits at 30 grams in the UK and between 25 and 38 grams in the US depending on sex. A lot of doctors working in this space, myself included, think those targets are set low on purpose, as a realistic starting point for a population eating far less, rather than as an actual goal for health. In this video I go through why those numbers look the way they do, what a large review in the Lancet found when looking at fibre intake well above the official guidelines, and what groups like the Hadza in Tanzania and communities in the Bolivian Amazon eat on a daily basis without a second thought. Then I walk through an entire ordinary day of eating in our house, meal by meal, showing exactly where that fibre comes from. Spoiler, tinned beans do a huge amount of the work. 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 #fibre #guthealth
Most health advice I give is about small, slow changes. But some of you have told me you prefer to go all in, so here is a full day built entirely around your health, from the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep. It starts with getting outside into natural daylight as soon as you can after waking, which helps set your body clock for the whole day. Then comes a breakfast with proper protein and some colour on the plate, which keeps your blood sugar steady and your energy levels up for hours. After that, a short walk, even just a few minutes, helps your muscles pull sugar out of your bloodstream before it causes any damage. Somewhere in the day you want to lift something properly heavy, because muscle is one of the biggest places your body stores sugar safely and it protects your bones as you age. Add something fermented, aim for a wide variety of plants across the week, get outside again for a proper laugh with someone you care about, and protect the final hour before bed by dimming the lights and keeping your bedroom cool and dark. You do not need to keep all of it going forever. Try the whole day once, then keep the two or three parts that felt easiest and build from there. 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 #preventativehealth #healthyhabits
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
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