Latest / The Dr Louise Newson Podcast / 40 - How hormones reduce inflammation and keep you healthier for longer

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40 - How hormones reduce inflammation and keep you healthier for longer · The Dr Louise Newson Podcast

0:00
We need to be thinking more about health span rather than
0:02
lifespan. We need to be trying to prevent
0:04
disease rather than cure disease.
0:06
And in this podcast, I'm talking with Leslie Kenny about
0:09
longevity, about her journey of being diagnosed with an
0:13
autoimmune disease that she actually cured herself rather
0:17
than taking medications that were suggested to her.
0:20
So it's a great conversation that we can all learn from as
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well. So there's similar.
0:27
Let's just talk about I've known you for a little while, but I
0:30
just love the work that you do because you're coming from a
0:33
scientist, a patient advocate, a woman, someone who's inquisitive
0:38
and just wants to learn more. And that's great, isn't it?
0:42
Yeah, Well, I love what I do. And I think the body is such a
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mysterious but beautiful, complex guardian.
0:50
And if we treat it right, we will be rewarded with a long,
0:54
healthy, vibrant life. But if we forget that we are
0:58
guardians of our bodies, we have the flip side, which is if we're
1:04
not supporting it with the things it needs and we're
1:07
overburdening it with toxins or stress, then unfortunately, we
1:13
have to bear the consequences. Luckily the body is wonderfully
1:17
resilient and tapping into that resilience and showing people
1:21
they have more, more power than they think, and they can
1:24
actually bring their bodies back online, back to balance, to
1:29
homeostasis. That's my raise on debt.
1:32
And also the body is very repairing as well.
1:34
And, you know, so many of us, myself included, take our health
1:38
for granted. And it's not until we're I'll
1:41
that we realize how fragile our health is.
1:44
And I know that I've been ill. I've had pancreatitis, I've had
1:47
sepsis, I've had migraines that I still have that I can't
1:51
control. And, you know, sometimes if you
1:54
do something that's you know, isn't right and you have a
1:57
consequence, that's fine. But when you're otherwise
1:59
healthy and something happens, it's, it can be really
2:02
difficult. But the other thing that
2:04
frustrates me every day in my work is that when you're not
2:07
listened to or you're told wrong information.
2:09
And so just tell us a bit about your experience if you don't
2:13
mind. Sure.
2:14
Well, at age 39, that's 21 years ago, I was in the middle of my
2:19
fifth round of IVF and I had been told that I was too old to
2:24
use my own eggs, so I had to use donor eggs, which is not easy.
2:27
Too old to use your own eggs at? 39 and.
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I had my third daughter at 40 so I would have been told the same.
2:34
Well, there is a happy ending because I did bear a biological
2:37
daughter at 43 with no help, but it's 39 in the United States.
2:42
I was told I had to go to donor eggs, and it's not easy for
2:45
someone who's half Asian, half Caucasian like me to find the
2:49
right donor. And there were.
2:52
It was quite high stakes. At the same time, I began to
2:56
notice pain in my hands and I went to my doctor to investigate
3:00
and got that call. No one likes to get saying your
3:03
results are in. Would you mind coming into the
3:07
office so we can discuss them? So it wasn't no problem.
3:11
Everything's fine. Go about your daily business.
3:14
It was obviously something. And when I came in, the doctor
3:17
told me that I had rheumatoid arthritis and not to worry that
3:23
I could be put on these drugs, injectables that would suppress
3:28
my immune system. And when I asked about lifestyle
3:31
changes that I could make, she said, no, there's really nothing
3:35
you can do, but you should avoid large crowds of people.
3:39
So things like the cinema, parties, church and small
3:44
children in particular I should avoid because they carry germs.
3:48
So that was my lifestyle tip and the lifestyle change I was told
3:53
to make. And then she said, but your
3:56
other results indicate that you have lupus, which I'd never
4:00
heard of. And I said, well, what's the
4:03
drug for that? And she said, unfortunately
4:06
there isn't. There isn't a treatment to
4:09
manage it and there's no cure. And this is 2004.
4:13
So since then I think they have come up with something.
4:16
But she said, unfortunately, you should expect it to just get
4:20
worse over time. And at that point, the angry,
4:25
entitled medical consumer in me appeared and said, wait a
4:29
second, I'm the client here. I'm paying you money because we
4:33
have a private system in the United States.
4:36
You're the expert. You're the one with the frame
4:38
diplomas behind you on the wall. Fix this.
4:41
Make this right. And I think so many people,
4:43
especially Americans, love this idea that we can outsource our
4:47
health and then we don't have to take responsibility.
4:50
Somebody else does it. Whether it's liposuction or
4:55
cosmetic surgery, it's somebody else.
4:57
They can fix it, right? And it doesn't work like that
5:01
with your health. And she simply looked at me,
5:04
shook her head and said, because I told her I had the 5th IVF and
5:09
she said I wouldn't do the IVF. Even if you're successful,
5:13
you've only got a good five years left.
5:16
Exactly. That was my response as well.
5:18
She. Said that to you.
5:19
Yeah. And I have since heard from
5:22
other patients who got the same. You've got you've got a good
5:25
five years left. And how?
5:27
Old are you 39? 3939 So that was it.
5:31
That was. Game over at 44.
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That was it exactly. And I, I was gobsmacked.
5:38
I walked out of there. It's a bit of a showstopper when
5:41
somebody says that I had no response.
5:45
And the more I thought about it, the more I felt it only stood to
5:50
reason that a patient who didn't smoke, didn't drink, slept
5:54
better, move better ought to have a better outcome than a
5:58
patient that did those things, right?
6:01
And I thought, surely I must be able to do something, even
6:05
though she says there's nothing I can do.
6:07
I'm going to try and optimize myself to be the best patient
6:10
possible. And if I meet her halfway, maybe
6:14
then she'll meet me halfway and will cure me because I'm still
6:18
looking for cure. And that that's really all that
6:21
patients want. We don't want to be managed.
6:24
We don't want to have these chronic conditions.
6:26
We want cure. And I, I also went to the
6:31
patient bulletin boards, which are a wonderful resource, right?
6:35
If the doctors tell you one thing, but patients will tell
6:38
you their lived experience. And on the lupus boards,
6:42
patients were saying, there's been a study that was conducted
6:46
4 years ago in Germany with lupus patients.
6:48
They did something called intravenous immunoglobulin
6:51
therapy. This is a transfusion made-up of
6:55
antibodies donated by anywhere from three to 10,000 donors.
7:00
And what they were noticing, although it was initially made
7:04
to help people who didn't make antibodies, they noticed that it
7:07
was helping people like me. It was modulating our immune
7:12
systems and bringing them back to homeostasis to balance.
7:16
And every one of the 13 patients improved.
7:21
This was contrary to what my doctor told me.
7:24
And it was a bit of a light bulb moment and gave me hope.
7:26
So I went back to my doctor and said, will you prescribe this
7:29
for me? And she said, absolutely not.
7:32
That's only one study. There are only 13 people.
7:34
It's not statistically significant.
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I said, but there's nothing else.
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She said no. I even looked all over the USI
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found a doctor in San Francisco who was willing to prescribe me
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two rounds of IVIC, which I think in the UK is only
7:51
available to severe Ms. patients.
7:55
And at the same time, I thought if I'm resetting my immune
7:59
system back to baseline, I need to remove the lifestyle triggers
8:04
that might be causing inflammation, causing my immune
8:07
system to overreact. So that was dairy, gluten, eggs,
8:12
poor sleep, poor movement, toxic thoughts, work, stress.
8:17
I got rid of everything. I also did trauma therapy.
8:21
Honestly, I looked under every single rock and when I went back
8:25
to my doctor within six months, this was for a routine checkup
8:30
and had all my bloods done as you would routinely do.
8:35
She opened my file and looked down and simply said, well, look
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at that, You don't have lupus or RA anymore.
8:46
What? You don't have lupus or RA?
8:50
All your blood levels have returned to normal.
8:55
Do you want to know what I did? No, that's OK.
9:00
And she didn't even look up because they're busy.
9:03
There must be thousands of patients like me.
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Patients, you know, everyday I learn from my patients because
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medicine is not just a science, it's an art.
9:12
And individualization of care is so important.
9:15
But you know, you want to know what else people can do, how
9:18
they can help themselves as well.
9:21
But you're inquisitive as well, and I think that it's so much
9:26
more work to be curious. Of course it is right, but it's
9:30
more satisfying as a doctor. And that's what we all, we
9:33
patients all look for in a doctor.
9:35
And I do say to other patients, if you are not getting this
9:39
level of curiosity and interest from your doctor, fire them
9:43
right? So you didn't go back and see
9:44
him again? No, no.
9:46
No, never. And in fact, it was shortly
9:49
after that that I moved to the United Kingdom.
9:52
And ever since then, I have gone to a functional medicine doctor
9:57
on Harley Street. And I have my bloods done
10:00
privately just to make sure that I get everything done.
10:04
And I'm looking at far more than just HSCRP, which is the marker
10:09
of inflammation that most of us get tested for.
10:11
I'm looking for cytokines, TNF alpha.
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These are the markers that were sky high for me and mine are
10:19
quite low. And every year over the last.
10:23
Well, I moved here in 2006. Every year since then my CRP
10:28
gets a little bit better so that now it's 0.3, which is great.
10:33
Ideally you'd want it under 0.5. And when I did my glycan age
10:39
biological age test last year, it remarkably came back at age
10:44
21. Now how is that possible?
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I was told I should be dead by 44.
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How can I have the biological age of a 21 year old?
10:52
And that's where I say to patients, I'm living proof that
10:56
you can do so much more than you have been led to believe.
11:01
My colleague at the Oxford Longevity Project, Sir Muir
11:05
Gray, who's one of the leaders in preventive medicine in the
11:08
NHS for the last 50 years, he has always said that the patient
11:13
is the biggest missing piece in modern medicine.
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We've got to empower patients so that they collaborate with their
11:21
practitioners. And if we have more curious
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practitioners like you, then we have the opportunity to not just
11:29
manage chronic conditions, but actually cure them.
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It's so important because often in medicine, it's guideline
11:35
driven, it's treatment driven, you're waiting for the disease
11:38
and then you treat the disease. And that's just the way we're
11:41
taught even at medical school. Yet often we're not taught,
11:45
taught enough about why a disease occurs.
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And I'm very fortunate, as you know, I've got a pathology
11:51
degree and I spent the whole year studying the macrophage,
11:55
which is. Yeah.
11:57
And it, which is a cell that's really key for inflammation.
12:00
And you know, I didn't realise until then that, you know, we
12:04
need to have these inflammatory cells to protect us.
12:09
But if they're in the wrong microenvironment, they can
12:11
become pro inflammatory. They can switch on inflammation
12:14
and make it worse for us. So those cytokines like
12:17
interleukin 6 and tumor necrosis factor will get produced at the
12:20
wrong amounts, the wrong levels and damage our tissue and
12:24
increase diseases. And it's quite simplistic.
12:27
At the time I thought, oh, I'm not really that interested in
12:30
that. And then once you start to learn
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and you see people, I remember going back and reading my notes
12:36
and thinking, actually the root cause of so many diseases is
12:41
inflammation. And also, you know, we've got
12:44
inflammatory lives. We have inflammatory diets, we
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have inflammatory lifestyles, and some of the drugs that we
12:50
prescribe now increase inflammation as well.
12:53
And then if we're in the wrong microenvironment, IE obviously
12:57
when I think about often in hormones, we've got low
13:00
estradiol, progesterone, testosterone, we've got more
13:02
inflammation, but we have to be looking at all of those things.
13:06
We can't just look at exercise or just look at sleep.
13:09
And I know you being such an inquisitive patient as well,
13:13
you're taking responsibility for as much as you can by yourself
13:17
as well, but by asking the right questions, and that's so
13:21
important, isn't? It, it's 100% and a lot of it is
13:25
down to us because if we simply accept the practitioner that we
13:29
are paired with on the NHS, it's the luck of the draw.
13:34
It's a lottery, right? And you might have an inspired
13:38
practitioner, but you might not. And for instance, with BHRT,
13:43
something I'm passionate about, it's so hard for women to get
13:48
access to this, but absolutely crucial.
13:51
And also for thyroid health, which is another one of my pet
13:56
peeves is thyroid support in the UK, but also in the United
14:02
States, a lot of women don't get the support they need and
14:04
they're just told it's the menopause, the brain fog, the
14:07
extra weight, the hair loss. This is this is how it is,
14:12
honey, right? But it's not.
14:14
And I feel like this chapter from 60 onwards or from 50
14:21
onwards, when we enter menopause, it's a magical time
14:25
and I want all other women to tap into their inner magic.
14:29
But sometimes the way to do it is by having BHRT, getting the
14:34
right thyroid support, making sure there's not inflammation
14:36
there. And once you have a holistic
14:40
program in place for the patient and they do their part, then a
14:47
whole new life unfolds for them, right?
14:49
It's after children, after the career.
14:52
Then they can contribute back to society.
14:54
Really it's. I just want to remind you that
14:58
I'm the founder of the free Balance app, which you should
15:01
all be downloading so you can learn so much more about your
15:05
hormones from and also monitor symptoms if you're having them.
15:08
So just head to the App Store or Google Play and download Balance
15:13
app. I was sitting on the train
15:17
yesterday coming down to London and I was quietly working on my
15:20
laptop and there were two women talking who worked for the train
15:23
service and they'd recognized each other.
15:25
And they were probably my age. They they looked menopausal.
15:29
They didn't look like they were taking hormones.
15:32
And they were both talking about how tired they were.
15:34
And they said, well, and they were talking and I have my head
15:37
down because I don't think they recognise me.
15:39
And they said, well, it's just that time of life, isn't it?
15:40
She goes, oh, yeah, well, you will get tired now, won't you?
15:43
And she said, yeah, I have my tea at 6:00.
15:45
And then I went to sleep on the sofa.
15:47
And then I woke up at 1:00 in the morning.
15:49
And then I just got to bed. And then I woke up and she said,
15:52
but I often really sleep so early.
15:53
She goes normally my bedtime's 8:00.
15:56
And the other one says, yeah, mine's about half 8.
15:58
And I was like. What?
16:00
Yeah, I I have so much I need to do in the evening.
16:02
I didn't want to go to bed then. And it's, I just made me
16:05
realize, you know, we know women become invisible when they're
16:08
menopausal, but actually they're becoming invisible in their own
16:11
home. Yeah.
16:12
And they're sort of just accepting that, you know,
16:15
they're both a bit overweight. They're both struggling when
16:18
they, because they got off at Leamington.
16:19
So they were hobbling a little bit and it was just like, that's
16:22
their lot. Do you know what I mean?
16:23
They're sort of because people talk about this menopause sort
16:27
of transition, This is how you're going to feel and you're
16:30
sort of expected to be a second class citizen because you don't
16:34
have hormones. And there's no other area of
16:37
medicine where we have an evidence based treatment that we
16:40
know has important biological effects in the body, yet we're
16:43
saying, Oh no, you can just see how you are without it.
16:47
It's terrible because this whole group of society actually
16:51
withdraw into themselves, into their homes because they don't
16:55
have the energy. Now, if I talk to these women,
16:58
they always say, oh, I don't have time to take part.
17:01
I don't, I don't have the energy.
17:02
And I think do you could, if I gave you the opportunity to have
17:06
the time and energy back, would you take it?
17:09
And I want everybody listening to know that they can get the
17:14
energy and the time back because not only can you get the energy
17:18
through, say, BHRT, but BHRT will help you become
17:24
biologically younger, hence giving you more time to live
17:30
your life. You will have a longer health
17:32
span and more time to spend with your family, more time to give
17:37
back to your community, more time to do all the things you
17:39
wanted to do. And that's what I'm doing with
17:42
my life at 60. Which is so important.
17:44
And, you know, it talks me a little bit about the Oxford
17:46
Longevity Project because it was just so wonderful to be part of
17:49
it. And I'm still so grateful that
17:51
you invited me to be a speaker because longevity means
17:55
different things to different people, right?
17:57
But you also mentioned health span.
18:00
So just elaborate a bit because that's so crucial people
18:03
understand. So your longevity is really how
18:07
long you will actually live. But we know many people who live
18:11
in very poor health. So health span is really how
18:14
long you will live in healthy in a healthy state.
18:19
And that is much more important than how long you live.
18:23
I don't think any of us want to be in pain like those women were
18:27
hobbling off the train at Leamington or a feeling
18:31
exhausted, like they they can't cook for themselves, they can't
18:35
cook for their families. They can't shift the way they're
18:38
brain fogged, right? We want to live in full
18:42
vitality, we want to feel vibrant.
18:45
And once you do things like replace your lost hormones, your
18:51
bioidentical with bioidentical hormones, that helps.
18:55
So that's really the difference between health span and
18:58
longevity. And if we look at countries like
19:01
Japan, they're doing a good job at lengthening the years of
19:08
healthy life and the more years of healthy life you have, the
19:13
more years you can work, the more years you can pay taxes.
19:17
So I hope the Strimer government is paying attention.
19:20
I know Layla Moran and parliament is going to be having
19:23
you were grace speak in a few weeks time about this.
19:27
But this whole cohort of people in their 60s, seventies, 80s and
19:33
90s, like Sir Christopher Ball, they can give back and they want
19:38
to give back, and they have so much experience.
19:40
So in the East, older people are seen as elders.
19:43
They're wise and they're there to help share.
19:46
And you've heard of ikigai, this Japanese idea that each one of
19:51
us has a unique purpose, a reason why we've been put on
19:54
this planet. And when you step into your
19:57
wisdom when you were older, you embrace that ikigai and you
20:02
share it with everyone else in your community.
20:05
And I think it's a wonderful. Way to give back.
20:07
But it gives this sense of purpose to older individuals.
20:12
And so that's why I'm so passionate and my my Co founders
20:16
of the Oxford longevity project are so passionate about helping
20:19
empower people to really get actively involved in authoring
20:25
their own health span. And the longevity project is
20:29
really there to bring the latest scientific breakthroughs around
20:33
healthy aging. But also science, whether it's
20:37
Nobel prizes like the 2016 Nobel Prize around autophagy or cell
20:41
renewal or like the T regs Nobel that was just announced
20:46
yesterday around the immune system.
20:49
We want to explain these things to people so they understand
20:53
them and think, oh, autophagy, cell renewal.
20:56
I can do that if I fast or if I eat certain compounds that will
21:00
activate this for me. I didn't know I could do that.
21:04
No doctor is going to explain that to them because they don't
21:07
have the time and and they've got their prescription pad.
21:10
It's so much faster to use the prescription pad, right?
21:13
No, no, I don't want to throw shade on doctors because we need
21:17
them and I have benefited from them.
21:19
And you're a wonderful doctor. Case in point, right?
21:22
But a prescription pad is is a quick way to get your patient
21:27
through your office. And what doctors get 6 minutes
21:30
on the NHS now? We do need to think differently
21:33
because you know the last few years when I was AGP, it was a
21:37
revolving door. People were just coming back and
21:40
back and getting sicker and sicker.
21:42
And it's a two way thing. You know, some women and men are
21:45
not taking responsibility for their health, but more so
21:49
doctors and not just in the UK but globally are not able, but
21:53
they're not trained to take responsibility for preventing
21:56
disease. And even my husband, he just,
21:59
he's works in the NHS and he said, but we can't, we, we're
22:03
swamped, we're drowning. But then I said to him, do you
22:06
ever give vitamin D to your patients, Paul?
22:08
And he said, well, no, because why would I?
22:10
I said, would you ever test? And he said no, because they'll
22:12
all be low. It's like, well, you know, but
22:15
when I was AGP, they'd stopped us.
22:18
They wouldn't allow us to prescribe vitamin D because they
22:20
said it's so cheap, people can just buy it.
22:22
But I worked in a very deprived area and people don't privatise
22:25
their health over their cigarettes and their alcohol and
22:28
whatever else. And, and that's just fact, you
22:30
know, Whereas if it's a free prescription, they're entitled
22:33
to free prescription, they would take it and more importantly,
22:35
they would give it to their children.
22:37
So just a simple cheap thing. I know on a big scale it gets
22:40
expensive, but you know, just look at how vitamin D works.
22:44
You know, it's very important. It's very basic, it's not very
22:47
sexy, it's not big pharma, but actually it's still really
22:50
important. And that's just one example.
22:52
You know, there's lots of things and it's you can't really eat
22:55
enough vitamin D in living in the UK, you can't get enough
22:58
sunshine to. That's right.
23:00
That's right. But think about it.
23:02
It's anti-inflammatory. It's good for the immune system.
23:04
It helps prevent Ms. At least some studies indicate that.
23:08
And I think that if we look at how much we could save, you
23:13
know, there was a study that people have talked about for a
23:15
long time, Andrew Scott at London Business School, Martin
23:19
Ellison at Oxford and David Sinclair at Harvard co-authored
23:24
this paper in Nature. And they said if they could just
23:27
slow down the aging process in all Americans by just one year,
23:33
that it would save the American government something like 38
23:38
billion a year. It was huge amount and over, you
23:41
know, 10 years it was something like 3.8 trillion.
23:44
So there is a they call it the longevity dividend.
23:47
This is Andrew Scott's work and I think we really need to pay
23:50
attention to this. If we can prevent, we have a
23:54
financial gain as a society. But governments also stand to
24:00
gain from people who stay in the workforce for longer.
24:03
Communities gain because people are contributing for longer and
24:08
all that suffering and pain that I'm sure every single person
24:12
listening to this has known or know somebody who's been touched
24:17
by this. We could shorten that period of
24:21
pain. And the goal is really to
24:23
compress the number of years that we have ill health, make
24:27
them small, as small as possible.
24:29
And I think that's, that's my goal.
24:31
I certainly hope that the wheels fall off simultaneously and I'm
24:35
gone like that, right? Because I hope I'm working right
24:39
up to the last minute, but we can't do that if we don't focus
24:44
on preventive medicine. Absolutely.
24:46
And it's it just is a no brainer.
24:49
I mean, even taking the conversation back to hormones,
24:52
if I may, Philip Sorrell, who's a professor of psychiatry and
24:55
gynecology in Yale University, he did a study and while ago now
25:00
looking at the cost of women who've had a hysterectomy, not
25:03
giving back their hormones. And you know, it's it's billions
25:07
of dollars because hysterectomy is a very common operation.
25:10
Lots of young women are still not given hormones.
25:13
We know over here, a study we did show that only 5% of women
25:17
are prescribed hormones after having their ovaries removed
25:20
when they're young with a benign cause, 0% testosterone.
25:24
It's just like madness. And it's it's draining on health
25:28
cares systems, but also economic systems because these women are
25:31
less likely to work, they're less likely to be promoted at
25:34
work. If they do work, they're more
25:35
likely to have a divorce. You know, so much is stacked
25:38
against them. And it's very simple and very
25:41
straightforward actually, to think about the most obvious
25:45
things first. Yeah, I think, I think it really
25:48
is going to take advocacy work like the work that you do and
25:51
some of the work that we do where say Muir Cray does in
25:54
order to really show government that this is worth investing in.
26:00
Prevention is well, they they say it right.
26:03
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
26:06
So it seems so obvious. Yeah, and I think it is becoming
26:11
more obvious people are more prepared to take responsibility.
26:14
I look at my, my older children as 23 and 22 already.
26:18
Their lifestyles are completely better.
26:20
It's so much better than I was when I was 2122.
26:23
But they're, they're looking, they're more aware of nutrition,
26:25
they're more aware of things. You know, they, they want to
26:28
exercise. You know, they, I got to them
26:29
yesterday. My 21 year old was going to a
26:31
gym class. You know, it's really good that
26:33
they are looking at that, that for the future as well because I
26:37
think also, you know, they know the impact on their physical
26:40
health, also their mental health.
26:42
And the two are so closely intertwined, as you know.
26:45
Very true. And I think that programs where
26:48
GPS automatically prescribe things like exercise to patients
26:54
if for instance, they're being prescribed Metformin or Prozac,
26:59
these are great things. And in fact that's starting with
27:03
NHS Hartfordshire. So that's another initiative if
27:06
some you were grey. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
27:08
But also you've got to do as you, you know, practice as you
27:11
preach. There's absolutely no point me
27:13
sitting and saying to my patients you need to exercise
27:15
regularly if I don't exercise regularly or to say you mustn't
27:19
have or you should reduce your processed foods.
27:22
And I'm going to McDonald's twice a day, you know, if I'm So
27:25
we've got, but, but it's, it takes a while and it does take
27:28
generations. But I do think things are moving
27:32
in some ways. But then, you know, I, I've been
27:35
in Norway recently and I was in, in Amsterdam a couple of
27:39
weekends ago. And people are definitely a lot
27:41
leaner, a lot healthier in those countries than over here.
27:45
And I just look at the inflammatory diets that we're
27:48
poisoning people with, and I feel really sad.
27:50
I agree with you I-1. Interesting thing is people here
27:54
always say I can't go outside to exercise, it's too cold.
27:57
And I'm thinking, have you seen the Norwegians?
27:59
Yeah, I know. There's no, there's really no
28:01
excuse, but that's where I'm hoping that government will do
28:06
things like, why did they get rid of the sugar tax?
28:10
That should have been a that's a no brainer really.
28:14
And at the same time, we get these social prescriptions in
28:18
again, like Mira Gray was saying, and if we have community
28:23
initiatives that are fun, like what Angela Rippon is doing with
28:27
Let's Dance. And I know you've had her on
28:29
this program. Then it makes it much more
28:33
compelling because the doctors are saying you should get
28:36
active. Your friends are saying we're
28:38
going to do the Let's Dance program.
28:40
We're doing salsa down at the dance studio.
28:42
Want to come? And it's a fun night out that
28:46
doesn't necessarily involve alcohol or, you know, going down
28:50
to the chip shop. And they get a benefit.
28:55
They get that social oxytocin boost, the dopamine hits away
28:59
from their phone. They're not eating the bad
29:02
things, They're not drinking or smoking the bad things.
29:05
And they're actively investing in their health.
29:08
That's another thing I always say is everybody's so good and
29:12
takes it so far, so for granted that we should all invest in a
29:16
pension, right? But we don't think of investing
29:21
in our health and going to that salsa class or making the choice
29:26
not to have the fried food, but to have the, you know, the salad
29:31
or the vegetables or the Stew is better than the chippy.
29:35
Every time you do that, you were making an investment in your
29:38
health pension and you should think about it like that.
29:41
Absolutely. It's so important we have to
29:42
take responsibility. So I'm really grateful for you
29:45
coming. You can't go without me asking
29:47
for three take home tips though. Yeah, sure.
29:49
So three things that anybody who's listening could do to
29:54
improve their health span. Number one is walk, and there's
30:01
a new Japanese walking phenomenon that you can do,
30:04
which is you walk briskly for three minutes and then you sort
30:08
of go at a leisurely pace. Then you speed up again for
30:11
three minutes and you do this until you hit 30 minutes and not
30:15
only will you get your steps in, but you'll find it's, it's kind
30:18
of like it's the easy equivalent of Sprint training, only you're
30:23
not sprinting. So that's one.
30:26
Another one is make sure you get strong legs and muscle tissue
30:31
releases, something called myokines, they're
30:34
anti-inflammatory components. So we have to start thinking of
30:36
our muscle as actually an organ. The easiest way.
30:40
I know everybody is sedentary and working in front of a desk,
30:43
but try every hour to get up and do 10 squats.
30:48
And at least in my company, we do it in meetings and just to
30:53
normalize it, right? So that's one thing.
30:57
Do 10 squats if you can, then move from every hour to every 20
31:01
minutes, then that's better. Strengthen those legs.
31:04
Finally, I would say make sure you do some kind of physical
31:09
activity that is social and you're getting your steps in and
31:14
you're doing in a social way which boosts oxytocin, which is
31:19
not just for bonding but is itself an anti-inflammatory and
31:22
you're getting your dopamine hits.
31:25
Brilliant so but really good, easy and not expensive advice as
31:29
well. So, Alfrey, thank you ever so
31:31
much for coming. You're very welcome.
31:33
Thank you.