Genetics vs Exercise: What wins?
Good morning everyone, it's Thursday and today I wanna talk about three studies. Three very interesting studies actually that gives us a lot of insight. So the first study looks at genetics versus exercise. Can exercise help you overcome your DNA? So in a recent study, researchers from the University of California San Diego decided to find out.
Speaker 1:They measured the habitual activity levels of 5,400 women in their late seventies and also analyzed their DNA for three genetic markers associated with longevity longevity. They kept track of the women for an average of 6.5. Okay. Very long time. The finding for older exercise can overcome genetics when it comes to living longer.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's have a look into this deeply. Where men with the most genetic markers for longevity were sixty eight percent more likely to survive to the age of 90 than women with the worst genes. That's nuts and a sixty eight percent more likely to survive to the age of 90 than under the worst genes. But that difference disappeared once physical activity levels were factored in.
Speaker 1:So regardless of their genetic markers, women who completed the most light daily physical activities each day had a reduced risk of dying compared to the least active group. Okay? So activity is essential and bridges the gap. So someone can have better genes than you, you move, you move, you bridge the gap, goes that benefit or that, you know, them living longer, you know, in this research is gone. So the activity they did in this research, the light activity was very light, like housework, gardening, playing an instrument, blow drying their hair, doing their hair, doing that throughout the day was very very effective.
Speaker 1:And for people in the study they did it for five hours a day, just being able to move, know, you're kind of writing, you're putting books away, you're moving chairs, you're gonna cook, you're gonna do some gardening, you're gonna go walk to the shop, you know, we can easily get about five hours of iron per day but we typically don't because we're sitting down. So moving without sweating is very good for us, clear as day, as you in the study women who are older, just doing that was enough to bridge the gap between the genetics. But the research looked as well if they even if they picked up the intensity more, there was even more benefit. Right? So they looked at the group with the highest accumulated moderate activity which was seventy minutes a day, so seven zero.
Speaker 1:And this was on the metabolic equivalent of task scale, they wanted it level three or higher. So just give you context on that scale, for you to be in a 1.5 to three which is lower would be stretching, standing and walking the dogs really slow. So to be three and above, so seventy minutes of three and above. So three and above is walking at three miles per hour, strength training, scrubbing the floors, raking the lawn, walking four miles per hour, obviously strength training a bit harder, running at four miles per hour or jogging. So that's kind of the moderate.
Speaker 1:So can you do seventy minutes of a brisk walk combined with like a workout, combined with someone else, you'd probably hit those numbers, right? And that's kind of at the top scale of the benefits. So yeah, I think it's important to look at as in today's world we think that physical activity has to be high intensity interval training, we must be sweating our, you know, whatever off to get the benefits but we don't. Even if you're not sweating but you're moving, it's so good for you, it's what humans were meant to do which leads me to the next study. But just be content with movement, guys.
Speaker 1:Whatever movement you got, just sitting on a chair all day is no good. Getting up, going for a walk, standing, taking phone calls, standing as a new habit instead of sitting down, just some something where you're moving a bit is gonna be massively beneficial over the long over the long run. And this research just proves it. And even if you don't have the best genetics you can still do something about it which is brilliant news. Imagine our study said, yeah, even if that group with the bad genetics did an hour of training in a day, still go nowhere near people with good genetics.
Speaker 1:You'd be like, fuck. Thanks for that genetics. So the next one is about does it matter if we walk or run? So we know humans are born to move and move a lot in that case. And this study looked at people who'd walk, you know, back in sixty thousand years ago Africa, we would be walking a lot, hunting a lot.
Speaker 1:And it shows that people who take the most daily steps have the lowest rate of dementia, heart disease and cancer, and the lowest risk of premature death from any cause. So steps is up there with one of the most important things you should focus on. And so I'm saying, gaze steps in, gaze steps in five six thousand a day. In these charts, it looks like the benefits hit well or like the most benefit you'd from like 1,000 a day to 6,000 days, you a big drop in these the causes. And then it starts flatlining between six to 12,000, you still get an improvement.
Speaker 1:Beyond 12,000, the improvement is less in terms of the health. So you wanna be hit in six to 12 range. And, you know, I'm hitting the five to six range recently, and, you know, and I I wanna be doing more. I was doing eight to nine, and I like being on that zone. I felt better.
Speaker 1:And, you know, sometimes you look at it, you can say busy day in work and all this stuff, but really there is no there is no excuse for us not to get five to 6,000 steps a day in. And, for me, it's definitely, you know, I've got a few days left of the week now to bring the average up, which I'm gonna do and focus on and happy days really. So let's make sure we do that. But into this study, there's always a debate between are humans meant to run, are humans meant to walk? The way the walk run debate.
Speaker 1:And they looked at this research, they did like simulation, and they were trying to figure out how did we hunt. And we know this. There's a book called the old way I read a while back as well. It talks about how did we, hunt when we only had, a spear and we were hunting these massive buffalo or whatever. But we we did it through persistent hunting.
Speaker 1:So we basically chased an animal until it couldn't run anymore. So was so exhausted, it just collapsed basically. And a lot of the, animals on the savannah at that time had very, there was a certain one, I can't remember the name, had very thick fur. So it couldn't sweat out the heat, it overheat quite fast. So if it if you got it to run for a bit, it would eventually collapse from exhaustion, and then you would, you know, be an easy kill basically.
Speaker 1:So it took a lot of guts, took a lot of scale, took sort of strategy and teamwork and hours for humans back end to get a kill and get the steak and get the meat that they needed to survive. Took endurance, endurance, endurance, endurance. Right? But what was it better to do the endurance through walking or is it better to do the endurance through running is what they wanted to find out. So the study looked at this, you know, water loss and body cold temperature.
Speaker 1:They did simulated 50,000 hunts using the technology. It's quite cool. Right? And they wanted to see if they could, you know, to check different speeds, walking speeds, drilling speeds, combination of both, to see which one was best environmental conditions. So what the study found was, they thought that walking would be the most successful strategy for long distance hunting, because it would keep your body temperature down, it was boiling and all this stuff.
Speaker 1:But what they what they thought what they saw was walking was the worst hunting strategy for most prey and most conditions, so just walking was the worst. So the highest success rate came when the hunter moved just a little faster than the animal's preferred walking or running pace. Right? So they required the hunter to run at a very fast pace sometimes. It required a pace that was quite easy for them.
Speaker 1:Walking could work, but really there was more towards a walk into a run. And the study was basically saying, hunters, humans, the most because obviously if you think of Charles Darwin and, you know, the genes are passed on and, you know, what we learned that got passed on and how we evolved, It's not that we would just walkers or just runners, we were a multi speed, species, if that makes sense. So we evolved to do a range of speeds and a range of challenges so we were able to adapt wherever prey and that's how we are sitting here today. And that's how you're listening to me now on this podcast that we've back in that those days, we got through those thousands of years doing that. So what does it do when it comes back to what we're gonna say now?
Speaker 1:This ties in with the first study. So we know the walking has got an insanely beneficial link to our health, right? Just walking. Forget about physical weight training now. But we know that we've evolved to be multi speed.
Speaker 1:So to walk, to brisk walk, to sprint, to jog. So really we wanna be moving in all different types of speeds as a variety as a whole. If we were to pick the perfect type of plan for us as a human being, it would be that I walk a lot each day, that I do some runs, that I do something that's a bit more high intensity like the weights because that would have that would have been the thing back then. It would be jogging and it'd be running different directions, it'd be kneeling down on the floor picking stuff up, it'd moving my body in different ways just being active and moving and that's really what a human being has evolved to do. That's what we are meant to be to be doing.
Speaker 1:Right? So when you go on these runs and you've never run before, don't think like, oh my god, I can't run consistently for 10 k. Think of it like I'm gonna run and then I'm gonna stop and walk. And this is exactly what the type of training we should be doing. We should be working at different speeds because if you go into a running, plan and you can't run five k like running one k and you're not good, it's really hard, it's flying, that's really high intensity for you.
Speaker 1:It doesn't matter that it's not high intensity for someone else, for you that one k is high intensity then you walk. So you've gone into this high intensity like kind of all out run because your heart has gone up and you can bring it back down just because it's not as it was because it's hard or someone else can do five k without stopping. For them to replicate what you've just done is they'd have to run 10 k and then they'd have to walk because 10 k is their endpoint or their barrier. Does that make sense? So we've all got similar we've all got different levels of conditioning of the body.
Speaker 1:Some of us are fitter than others, but this is the same type of thing to happen. The heart rate goes up, puts us in a high intensity zone. If you're unfit, your high intensity zone's easier to reach. That's all. There's some people who are really fit.
Speaker 1:It's harder to get in a high intensity zone. Okay? That's only difference. So don't worry. So I think that ties in nicely with this challenge, to be honest.
Speaker 1:This challenge we're doing, we've got some boxing type of movement, using the full body, we're using we're powering through the legs, we're down on the floor. We've got the sweat and shred bringing in the high intensity Tabata style training. We've got the form of Ryan where you're doing deep squats, we're working on mobility. Then we're going into core with Joe, again our core strength and then we're going into mobility with Alex. So kind of like Ryan session, but more focused on full body movements and moving in all directions, right?
Speaker 1:And then going for walks, perfect. I can't think of anything, we're moving just as we should be and you should be proud of that and you will reap the rewards for doing this long term. There's no doubt about it. And I just want to finish with one other study and it's a really short one. University of Surrey in England.
Speaker 1:The psychologist wanted look at if humor has any impact on body image and eating behaviors. So there was four types of humor they explained. The affiliate affiliate affiliate oh, I can't I hate saying it was live. I don't practice any voice that's why. Affiliative.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, I'm trying to say it too fast. Affiliative. Affiliative humor includes saying something funny to break the ice or joking about a situation to establish that we're all in this together. Then you've got aggressive humor which targets someone or something for teasing or ridicule.
Speaker 1:Boys banter that is. Then you've got self enhancing humor is positive and self accepting and is the only humor style associated with emotional well-being and stability. And then you got self defeat in humor involves making fun of yourself to get approval from others and is linked to depression, anxiety, narcissism, and low self esteem. So they just basically looked at 216 white women, so they're white women specifically, 18 to 77 years old. So ask them to do questionnaires and stuff basically, how they cope with stress, how they feel about their body, how they like to compare their body swellers, blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 1:So these are what studies found. Shot one, self enhancing humor as the authors expected was associated with higher levels of body appreciation and kindness, and self defeat in humor was expected, as expected was linked to less body appreciation, more body criticism, a higher drive for thinness, and more emotional eating. Okay? Really what to take away from this is, is our humor style, telling us a bit about ourselves? Are you a self defeating humor type of person?
Speaker 1:And does that say that you have got lesser body appreciation of? Maybe it does. Maybe it's something to look into. And self enhancing humor, you know, is linked with positive stuff. I'm not saying to change your humor levels, but just just a study to maybe have a look and see clues because we wanna be reading the book of ourselves, don't we?
Speaker 1:We really wanna be looking at ourselves, reading ourselves, being a light to ourselves. That is how we're gonna find things out. So that might give you some clues, it might not, who knows? But to finish this podcast off, well done. We're nearly near the end of well, not the end.
Speaker 1:We're four days in. Well done for everyone. We just kept going this week, taking it one day at a time. Make sure movement movement is magic. Walking, running, brisk walks, brisk run, fast run, slow runs, one some which you're doing what you can.
Speaker 1:Doing what you can is the main thing to do, and you should be proud of that. And you keep going. And it's again another day, another time to only focus on what is possible to focus on, which is now. Can you take action now? You can put the best plan.
Speaker 1:Was replying to someone on Facebook yesterday. You know, it's like, yeah. Yeah. No. This turtle is the best plan.
Speaker 1:I just need to do I just need to I need to do it. And it's like, exactly. You can have the best plan in the entire world given to you on a gold scroll, the plan of success, and it's nothing. It's meaningless without action. So please take action today.
Speaker 1:Someone as well was saying they bought a silver or they're getting back you know, they told themselves sorry. They've took they're on the Christmas channel and told themselves, they may be listening. They're for three years, they're gonna do something and really put us shared a screenshot of really good macros for the day. Like, you know, is this enough? Exactly where you need to be.
Speaker 1:That is enough. You just start one step, one day. That's it. That's all. It's the accumulation of that is the change.
Speaker 1:That's the magic of it. There is there's nothing else to it. And it might sound a bit like, oh, is that really it? Well, it is. You turn up, I guess, every day and focus on day tight compartments, and your life will change over time.
Speaker 1:You gotta be a ripe fruit. Gotta give it time to ripen. Farmers not planting wheat now, and then tomorrow, go in, where's my meat, mate? Wheat, mate? Meat.
Speaker 1:Where's he doesn't know what his meat is. Where's my wheat? It's not grown yet, mate. Then take it and it doesn't happen in a day, is it? No.
Speaker 1:You're right. You're quite right, Adam. You're quite right. And you go, okay, well we keep the conditions going one day at a time and you will write one over time. That's how it works.
Speaker 1:That's how nature works. That's how nature intends it to work. So we are nature. So don't fight that. Embrace it.
Speaker 1:And I will see you on the nutrition roundtable with Doctor. P. Really we're going go around as many people as possible taking your biggest struggle or biggest thing you don't understand about nutrition or macros or whatever. Try and get some commonalities in the themes and then maybe hot seat which just means, you know, okay, let's go and deep dive into someone for ten, fifteen minutes, and we do it for someone else. Ideally, someone new to turtles, so we can have some new people talking, but we will go through all members, not just gonna be new new members focused, but it's good to bring in new perspectives, which you'll real realize will be similar to other people.
Speaker 1:And doctor p will break it down and give you some really good insights that everybody bet everybody benefit from. So other than that, see you later.
