April 18, 2025 • 41 mins
Stories about millionaires doing wacky things to decrease their biological age - like plasma transfusions with their teenage sons - have been doing the rounds over the last few years. But extending your lifespan can be done cheaply and easily.
This week, Francesca and Louise talk to Dr Nicholas Koemer about the study he was a co-author on that looked at the easiest ways to change your lifestyle. And they talk with NZ Herald writer Joanna Wane to share what she learned from a year spent trying to extend her lifespan.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Hi, I'm Francesca Budkin and I'm Louise Aria and this
is season four of our New Zealand Ye Old podcast
The Little Things.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Good to have you with us. In this podcast, we
talk to experts and find out all the little things
you need to know to improve all areas of your life.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
And today we're talking about something that's hitting the headlines.
Well it has been for a while now, and that's
the Quest for longevity. It's it tight, it's not boring,
it's not as hard as you think.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I mean, we've all read the stories, haven't we know
about the wealthy tech bros and the extreme links they're
going to an order to live longer people. Have you
know a lot of people talked about the TV show
Secrets of the Blue Zones. We're always reading articles telling us,
you know, to eat this and not that, and to
exercise for this long or that long.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
It just goes on and all it does a bit,
and I mean sometimes I just wish I was born
in a blue zone so I could just come out naturally.
But unlike tech Billinia Brian Johnson's very complex and expensive quest,
here on the Little Things, we love, research based advice
that's simple to follow and is not going to up
end your life or empty your wallet.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
So I was very excited when I discovered a University
of Sydney research paper published in BMC Medicine stating that
small changes can have a big impact on health and
reduce the risk of premature death. But better still, these
researchers understand that any changes we make must be sustainable,
they must be easy to maintain. So they have looked
(01:32):
at the minimal we need to do and I promise
you this is all durable for all of us.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
So to check longevity, we have a two part podcast
for you today. Later on we catch up with journalists
Joanna Wayne to talk us through her year long attempt
to reduce your biological age. But right now, one of
the co authors of that groundbreaking study of Francesca mentioned
is doctor Nicholas Comeal. Nick is a trained dietician postdoctoral
research fellow in the Physical Activity, Lifestyle and Population Health
(01:58):
Department at the University of Sydney and he.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Is with us now. Welcome, Nick, thanks so much for
joining us.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
Absolutely, it's a pleasure. Thanks for the invitation, Nicholas.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Longevity has been hurting the headlines and social media algorithms
increasingly over the last few years. Why do you think
people are talking about it so much? Aside from the
fact that we all want to live over it's.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
Really become an increasingly important thing to look at, especially
as life expectancy has extended so long, I mean globally.
But it also raises other questions, you know, how do
we live not just a longer life, but a healthier
life and embedded with inside that lifespan. And this also
comes with I think an increasing wave of just the
(02:41):
information that we can get from both wearable technology but
also the advancements in science. We're starting to be able
to really translate some of that biological information into bite
size information that the lay person could understand, and so
that's really sort of proliferated a wave of interest I
think in this field.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
So the health and wellness space can feel quite overwhelming,
and I have heard people report of, you know, fatigue
from just all the health and wellness information there is
out there. Is it getting harder for you know, even
space researchers to combat the noise saved to us by
social media and so forth.
Speaker 5 (03:19):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I mean you see this as a
dietitians probably the biggest area where I see this. You know,
physical activity for example, you would oftentimes get that moving
more is healthy, But for a diet in particular.
Speaker 4 (03:31):
Every day, every week there's a.
Speaker 5 (03:33):
New fad diet and new thing that comes up, and
that makes a lot of noise, makes my job as
a dietitian incredibly challenging. So moving back to the basics,
I think that and perhaps we'll discuss it here in
a moment. This study was quite important because it really
distilled it down to a little bit simpler terms and
(03:53):
the sense of fruits vegetables for diet for example, and
minutes per day of activity. So I think the noise
is challenging, and that's part of our job as researchers
is to try to consolidate it, to hop on the
air with amazing people such as yourself, to try to
disseminate these research findings into usable information and clear the air,
(04:13):
so to speak.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
So let's start with the aims of the study. There
were two aims. Took us through them.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
Yeah, yeah, So this study was interesting.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
So what we did was we were hoping to find
the minimum change that you would need for longevity based
off of three different lifestyle behaviors. So this is sleep,
physical activity, and diet. So we call this span and
it sort of embeds itself into the health span and lifespan.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
If we were to use that acronym.
Speaker 5 (04:41):
The other aim of this study was to find the
optimal change, So what would be an invest case scenario
that would look like And we found some pretty interesting stuff.
So the aim was to find the minimum and the optimal,
and we were able to find that the minimum for
clinically meaningful reductions and risk of moretality. So this is
about ten percent lower risk of mortality just required fifteen
(05:05):
extra minutes of sleep, two minutes extra per day of
moderate to vigorous physical activity, and just something like an
extra half serving of vegetables per day. So this is
quite unique in the sense of other literature out there.
Most studies will focus on broad sweeps of behaviors, but
this focused on what is the most the minimum, what
(05:25):
is the most the bare minimum that we could do
for some chunk of reduction.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
But yeah, hopefully that answers your question.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Did you focus on the minimum because you have no
faith in us to be apeful.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
To kind of kite with any coupe with anything more.
Speaker 5 (05:41):
Yeah, no, it's it's a good point. So I wouldn't
necessarily lean towards that. I think the main point in
this is all previous literature has focused on meeting the
guidelines or a perfect diet. You know, if I'm to
do this fad diet, or if I'm to do this,
and you know, in the most general sense, we as
as consumers, we as the public, we generally get the
(06:05):
idea moving more is healthy, that eating fruits and vegetables
is healthy. The next step really for public health guidance
is breaking it down into what I need to do today,
what is the first step in the cascade of making
behavior change. That's what's really interesting about this. Now it
(06:26):
might seem like common sense, but being able to statistically
and from an epidemiological perspective break that down into a
chunk of where I put my right foot before the
left foot, that takes a little bit of design.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
So that was kind of the interest there.
Speaker 5 (06:42):
I wouldn't lean towards the faith in the end user,
but yeah, it's it goes hand in hand with behavior change.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
So that was really a novel aspect of this study.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
It was it was a large cohort that you studied.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
I involved, and participant based research and recruitment can be
really tricky at times.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
How did you get that many people to be involved?
Speaker 5 (07:04):
Well, luckily I was a little bit of background on
this for the listeners here. This was a sample of
sixty thousand adults approximately, and these were UK based participants,
so these were not Sydney based or Australia based or
New Zealand based. And this is a part of what's
known as the UK Biobank. So this is a very
large scale, one of the largest biomedical studies globally that
(07:27):
has trapped.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
People over time.
Speaker 5 (07:29):
So in this study, those sixty thousand participants were tracked
over eight years. Now, luckily I was not involved in
collecting that data. That would take an enormous amount of effort,
and this is a part of that data resource. It
enables any researcher globally through application to access that data
to explore some of these more more granular associations. So yeah,
(07:51):
it wasn't me involved in that, but I think that
this is really the next.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
Step of research.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
That was the first comment loom made. They hit sixty.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Those sort of data banks, you know, are amazing for research,
aren't they. You know, you do have to go through
your ethical loopholes to get to that to them, but
such a great resource.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
Yeah, yeah, and this, you know, it's on longevity.
Speaker 5 (08:16):
The UK Biobank has other aspects collected, you know, I
think genetics as well as embedded in this and other
metabolic parameters.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
So it's such a rich resource.
Speaker 5 (08:27):
This was really the tippity iceberg on what we're hoping
to achieve with the span studies.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
The sleep is coal, activity and day.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
In the past, we've done plenty of studies on sleep
and nutrition and physical exercise, but we haven't necessarily looked
at them all together, which is kind of weird because
they are intertwined, aren't they.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
Absolutely?
Speaker 5 (08:47):
Yeah, So this is probably the most important feature of
this study. You know, on one element I mentioned that
it's the next step, right that we can take breaking
it into a chunk, a digestible chunk of where we
can what we can do today to make for a
longer and healthier future tomorrow. But going back to the
biological and physiological underpinnings of this study is an important
(09:11):
thing to discuss. So sleep, physical activity, and nutrition are
incredibly intertwined and We chose those behaviors because across the
twenty four hour period, they basically bump into each other
at every point. And I like to give the example
of sleep. You know, we've all had that Friday night,
or that Saturday, or maybe a long working week where
(09:31):
we can't get enough sleep, and the next day we're
obviously a little bit fatigued. We're not going to be
taken the flight of stairs. We're going to systematically reduce
the amount of movement we do. And we're also, at
least I know on my end, reaching for that extra
bag of Chippy's or that extra bag of biscuits. Because
we are fatigued, we are reducing our overall energy and
(09:55):
so that drives the sort of the appetite hormones and
our bodies to reach out for more energy consumption. So
there is a bidirectional relationship between many of the behaviors
involved here, and so that's what's unique about this. We
chose these behaviors because they're intertwined. They're not silos really,
they're more all interconnected as a web and ecological web
(10:17):
that we have to consider.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
You're really speaking to me today because I caught a
flight this morning. I had to get up at four
forty five for and all I have been wanting to
do is eat fetty food, you know, like I don't
know because I'm fatigued.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
I had a few drinks celebrating a graduation.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
But you know it's so true. We just kind of
just put bed on top of bed. Yeah, how did
you measure each of these aspects of the study.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
That's a great point.
Speaker 5 (10:45):
So I'm an integrated behavioral scientist at the Mackenzie Wearable
sub and we specialize in wearable technology, so you can
imagine this as both research grade wearables as well as
as well as consumer grade wearables. So you know, you
can imagine this as an example like a fitbit or
requirement things like this. Now, the UK Biobank had a
(11:06):
subsample of individuals and they collected wearable data on them,
and so that's what we use. That's really the gold
standard for capturing physical activity and sleep measures. And in
this case, we collected diet through a food frequency questionnaire,
so that's reflective of their long term dietary behavior measurements.
So we employed, you know, our ground truth and validated
(11:31):
machine learning approaches to break apart that wearable data into
these very high resolution changes, and that's how we were
able to get the bare minimum. You know, we were
able to break it down into those chunks.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
The results are really interesting because as you see, to
us before fifteen minutes more sleep a day just out
of two minutes I think of exercise, moderate to vigorous
exercise and you know, sort of half a cup of
you know, an extra half a cup of green vegie
or Vegi's or something. That is not a lot to
ask for, is it. I mean, you hear that and
(12:05):
you go, I can do that. I can do that.
It's pretty awesome. So what I want to know is, though,
what does that actually mean? Does that just give us
a better chance of living longer than the average age
or and I think in New Zealand for women it's
eighty four minutes just over eighty or does it give
us a bit of chance of just getting to the
(12:26):
average age.
Speaker 5 (12:27):
So in this study specifically, we did not calculate the
life expectancy, So that's sort of a separate a separate
area of epidemiology and public health. In this study, we
were looking at the risk of premature and death. So
it's a slight nuance to your question to answer, the
first part would be what does it mean right? Breaking
(12:48):
that question that arm of the question down, and that
bare minimum was related to a ten percent lower risk
of premature death. So while it doesn't mean that we
can give you a precise age that you would live
to per se, you can imagine that as you make
the subsequent changes you'll have up to In this case,
(13:09):
we had sixty four percent lower risk of mortality. If
you were to make more substantial changes in your lifestyle,
that would be the most optimal lifestyle change. So that's
quite a large amount and really really exciting work that
I'm working on once we finish the call here and
hope to preprint and put online soon, is a translation
(13:30):
of those risks into life expectancy, so how many raw
years you would gain and as well healthy years that
you would gain. So there's some exciting new work that
will come out that hopefully will take that to the
next step, not just a percentage of risk that we
can get, but how many years. And that's I think
really the pinnacle of translation of research.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Do you think that will really hit people? That'll make
it sink in a lot more with people When you go,
you know you'll get this many more years.
Speaker 5 (13:59):
That's always the balancing act, you know, we in research
is taking the findings and trying to make them, you know,
disseminatable to where we can we can give it to
the public, but also trying to put it in realistic terms,
you know. So I think it will be helpful because
ten percent lower risk is one thing, but years is
really I mean, everybody understands that, right, So I think
(14:21):
that it will help.
Speaker 4 (14:22):
I think that will be really really interesting.
Speaker 5 (14:24):
The other nice part about this this study, and I
won't go into it in too much detail because it's
it's not published yet, but is looking at the healthy
year's game. So in this study, we're looking at lower
risk of mortality, but we're not really breaking down the
quality years of your life, you know, and that's I
think probably one of the more important features to look
at how many years we have of healthy living as
(14:46):
opposed to just.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Pre death exactly.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
And that's right, And so it's taking down those risks
of a certain disease, carriivascular disease, cancers and that kind
of thing, right, absolutely.
Speaker 5 (14:57):
Yeah, So generally speaking, you'll see this as a a
few different diseases you hit, you hit it right on
the head there, cardiovascular disease cancer tayetoo, diabetes off that time.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
Another big one you.
Speaker 5 (15:09):
Would see would be, for example, cognitive disorders demnsha Alzheimer's,
because you may be void of of cardiovascular or type
two diabetic complications, but you can't see cognitive decline.
Speaker 4 (15:21):
And that's definitely on the rise right now.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
In Australia, Nick, you mentioned we've been talking about how
intertwined these three things out physical movement and sleep and nutrition.
So I'm presuming if you just did one of these things,
if you just sleeped for fifteen more minutes a day,
because it sounded quite nice, that's not going to have impact.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
You've got to do all three.
Speaker 5 (15:38):
Not necessarily. It's a really really good point to make.
So in this study we actually looked at them juxtapose.
We looked at the individual behaviors one at a time,
and then we held them comparatively to what you would
need to do the amount you would need to do
of the combined behaviors. So with sleep, for example, you
absolutely could make some changes and obtain a benefit, could
(16:00):
obtain lower risk, but it was nowhere near the maximum
benefit that you could have changed. The sum of the
individual parts was equal to more than the whole, so
there was a cynergistic relationship there. And the other thing
is is that for sleep, for example, we have fifteen minutes,
but on its own, you start to see that it
would require substantially more sleep than you would And that
(16:24):
goes back to what is behaviorally sustainable for these individuals
who might be trying to make change. If I ask
you to sleep an extra hour every day, you'd tell me,
you know, I can't, I have to work, you know,
I just might not be feasible, but just an extra
little bit there, and then changing maybe you know what
you prepare for breakfast or lunch or dinner to have
just that extra little bit. Now we're starting to make
(16:47):
long term sustainable changes. And that's the icing on the
cake here, is really trying to make things not just feasible,
but to where they're practical to maintain in the long term.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Just on that sleep, is that as part of your evening,
your overnight sleep, or it can it be a nap
at some other point of the day.
Speaker 5 (17:10):
Yeah, it's a good point. So we didn't we didn't
look at naps or other breaks inside of that. But
I think that the literature now supports that the nap
still can be a healthy part of rest, right. I mean,
that's not the focus of this study, but it's an
important that's an interesting point to make, you know, as
you know, if you can get the total hours as
(17:31):
opposed to one continuous bout of sleep. And I think
that that's going to be answered soon because sleep is
is kind of an under explored area in longevity, in
terms of wearable technology, it hasn't yet really been fully
explored to the extent of physical activity. And I think
we're seeing a new way. Our team has been publishing
(17:52):
some stuff on this as well as sleep regularity, how
consistent you are with sleep, and as well, you know,
we sleep catch up. So for example, a year to
go sleep on the weekend, you catch up all of
the sleep you're missing for the week with that had
the same benefit. And this is a new wave of
sleep studies that are coming out really pointing towards comparison
(18:15):
with physical activity, where you might do some weekend warrior
type behaviors. And yeah, I think I can't answer that
specifically which would be better at apples to oranges, because
we didn't address that in the study, But I think
it will be answered soon. I think that's the next
next week.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
If we are already getting a recommended amount of sleep,
we're exercising regularly, and we've got pretty good nutrition, well,
how do we make an impact on our house in
that case?
Speaker 4 (18:45):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (18:45):
Yeah, So in this study we did explore if you
were to shift the reference points. So for example, in
this study, we were looking at those who were occupying
sort of the bottom end of these behaviors and saying,
what's the minimum from that? Which you miss some public
health relevance there because not everybody in the distribution of
society is going to be at the bottom end, sleeping
(19:06):
a small amount or occupying the worst possible dietary behaviors.
And you still could achieve benefits if you were to
make change, but it wasn't to the same degree. And
that's because, as you said, you're already occupying a more
optimal profile. And I think that's when you start to
get into really trying to refine what those behaviors look like.
(19:27):
So for example, with physical activity, I mean it starts
to become blurry because you can embed this in other things,
for example, sedentary behavior. If you're breaking up your day
of sitting down and injecting the same duration of physical
activity across the day to try to interrupt those long
bouts of sitting. That can have some benefit as well
(19:50):
as the regularity aspect that I was mentioning, going to
sleep at a consistent time that we have shown previously,
again not the purpose of today discussion, but that's shown
to have an enormous impact on our risk of dementia
as well as our risk of cardiovascular disease. And that's
really exciting because that's starting to show that the biological
(20:13):
notion of this circadian rhythm, you know, as we start
to feed into it, we're consistently going to sleep at
the same time, we're consistently training or eating at the
same time. Now we're starting to allow for the body
system to operate on a more regular rhythm, literally a
regular rhythm, and that can add to our or amplify
(20:35):
the lifestyle benefits that we're already getting same amount.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
It's interesting you use that we're consistent because as two
women who are around the age of perimenopause minipause, consistency
has suddenly become hugely important and actually a lot of
large parts of our lives can I just ask a question.
Thing we were talking about, of course, the minimum amount
that you had to do, but what was the optimum
amount that you discovered.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
Yeah, yeah, it's a great point.
Speaker 5 (21:02):
So optimum in this case was quite quite substantial in
the sense of sleep. Sleep was somewhere around seven to
eight hours per day. I'll give these as approximations here.
And for physical activity, we were looking at more of
the forty to one hundred minutes per day. So this
is quite a substantial amount of moderate to vigorous physical activity.
(21:23):
So I mean moderate to vigorous. You could imagine this
as a brisk walking for an hour along those lines
would get you up to that. And then for diet,
it was quite a few changes. So for example, entirely
cutting out sugar sweetened beverages, We're reducing the processed or
refined meats from the diet, several servings per day of
(21:45):
fruits and vegetables, and this is kind of sort of
like meeting the food the food my plate. You know,
you're fitting all of the food groups that you would
need to match the dietary guidelines depending on which country
you're in, obviously, but as a generalization that would be
the main objective, and for that again, we're getting up
to a sixty four percent lower risk of mortality. So
(22:08):
it does require some shifts, but yeah, it's it's still doable,
you know. I think these are all things that we
could make in our day to day lives. They just
take a little bit more planning when looking at the maximum.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
They do take planning because I used to do my
exercise first thing in the morning when I woke up,
but I've recently joined a JIM and I go with
a friend from work and we leave our desks, we
walk down there, we do our workout, we walk back
and I can't believe for a difference it's made to
my day, you know, because I'm breaking up there sitting. Yeah,
(22:41):
and it also means I have to plan my breakfast, down,
my lunch, you know, I have to do all of that.
So it does take a bit of planning. But then
you get into the pattern of it again, you become consistent.
Speaker 5 (22:51):
That's the important part is creating the habit. Once the
habit's created, it sort of falls like a domino, and that's.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
What we're hoping to achieve here. Create the first domino.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
You know, which is really interesting when it comes to
us thinking about longevity or just looking after ourselves to
live a healthier life, we tend to hear all these
stories at the moment we go kind of straight to biohacking,
don't we. I mean, do biological tests or genome sequencing,
all these full body scans that you're hearing people you know,
getting done these days, do they have a role to
(23:21):
play in longevity or I mean they're really out of
reach for the average person, aren't they.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (23:28):
I mean there's sort of a hierarchy here of what's
important in public health and what is achievable. And I
think at the bottom of that hierarchy, I mean wearables aside,
everything aside, I mean, is basically just trying to make
the things that we do in our every day to
day life optimized. We have to eat food, we have
(23:50):
to sleep, I mean, movement is essential. We need to
move our bodies. So you sort of need to achieve
that first level of the hierarchy before you can even
start to thay about doing a human genome sequence. I mean,
I guess you don't have to, but the main thing
is that that would be the first logical step, so
that way you can incrementally sort of refine what you're doing.
(24:12):
And the other thing is these things cost money, right,
I mean we can not just in high income countries,
but we look at this from a global standpoint. There's
a lot of countries where we don't have those tools
or resources to be able to do so. While biohacking
is important and I think it does have another silver
lining in terms of advancing the field of longevity. This
(24:33):
wave of consumers doing this can add some nice data
and richness to what's available there and help point towards
the next generation when things become more affordable. But I mean,
I'm more of a generalist. I like to think of
how I can impact the highest number of people, how
we can help change the highest number of lifestyles and
behavior change, And with that it's better oftentimes to start
(24:57):
with what's changeable in the general public and how we
can start to make those shifts. So, yeah, it's sort
of yin and yang. There's a place for it, but
enough for everybody.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
We were going to raise Brian Johnson type things that
he's doing to try and live for I don't know
what is it one hundred and forty, one hundred and
six or whatever it is twenty I think, and he's
a bit of a piney I get that, and he
acts as if he's doing it for the benefit of
all mankind. But you've really answered that it's yes, there
may be some things that come out of his personal
(25:29):
experiment that will benefit humankind later.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
I don't know how many out of all the.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Many many things he's doing, because there's no control, so
at least you're just counting the rest of the population.
But what you're saying is more that these things can
sort of have a trickle down effect for population health
that if you start, as you say, at the top
of the pyramid.
Speaker 5 (25:51):
Absolutely, yeah, so there's definitely pros and cons to these
sorts of things, and yeah, it's incredible to sort of
commit that much time. I'm in that much resource to
advancing the field. But again going also to other things
such as the sustainability of these behaviors. You know, if
I was to go to the general public and tell
them they need to follow this, you know, twelve hour
(26:14):
regime every day, it's not feasible, you know, and you
almost end up with better behavior change and you end
up with more successful protocols whenever they are a little
bit more realistic. Now, maybe that's the minimum change, maybe
it's a little bit more generalized. But offering these really
really structured regimes, you end up moving people away from
(26:36):
in some cases not all cases, you end up moving
them away from organic living into this sort of structured
confine of you need to do this at every minute
of the day, and it moves away from free living
and into almost a synthetic environment.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
And that's not.
Speaker 5 (26:54):
Always healthy for everybody. It can cause some mental concerns.
It can cause some eruptions in your quality of life.
So longevity and quality of life, that can be a
balance to strike there. Yeah, and mental health and psychology.
It's not my expertise, but you can imagine how this
could be. I mean, how this could disrupt your normal
(27:14):
day to day living or normal life events that you
would have going on, going to a graduation, going you know,
things like this. As you mentioned, it can get in
the way of those and that's not what we want
to preach.
Speaker 4 (27:26):
We want to try to.
Speaker 5 (27:27):
Embed and to weave these into a healthy lifestyle where
you can still do everything you'd like to do, just
in a healthier way.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Nicholas, thank you so much for your time. For talking
us through this, and I think we're going to have
to be back in touch with you again in the future.
It sounds like this is just there's just a lot
of ongoing information to still to come our way.
Speaker 5 (27:46):
Absolutely, so thank you again for the time. We've got
that next study coming up on health span versus lifespan.
Would be super keen to discuss with you guys that
on the podcast. Otherwise, if there's any questions from the
listeners or for you guys, feel free to reach out
to me. At the University of Sydney, Nicholas come out.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
You're listening to the Little Things And that was doctor
Nicholas Comel talking about his groundbreaking study on how small
changes those little things can have a big impact on
our health. When we come back, the Kewi journo and
her year long Queace to reduce her biological age back soon. So,
(28:27):
as you know, here on The Little Things, Lou and
I like to test out a lot of the advice
we're given, but for this EP we didn't have to
because our colleague here at The New Zealand Herald, senior
feature writer Joanna Wayne, has already done this. So Joe
spent a year on a mission to lower her biological
age in pursuit of longevity, and joins us now to
talk through the process and the results. Welcome, Arenda, thank
(28:49):
you so much for sharing your story with us. I
presume that you got tested before you started everything.
Speaker 6 (28:57):
Yeah, i'd been I'd written a couple of storyries on
the international race to cure aging. So I was really
interested in the science of whether you could increase your
health span. You know, that's when you're alive, but you
don't have any chronic diseases, Like it's something like life
expectancy average around the world is eighty but health span
(29:19):
where you're healthy and active is like sixty three, you know,
not even gold cut. So I was interested in what
you could do to keep yourself healthy for longer. And
I heard about this DNA test where you could send
off this little pin prick blood sample and have your
cellular age analyzed, so how your body is deteriorating versus
(29:39):
you know, the number of candles on your birthday cake.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
So yeah, I did.
Speaker 6 (29:43):
I had discussed what I would do with one of
the people I'd interviewed from my articles, who's own New
Zealand's or biotech guy who's developed their supplements, so that
were that was part of it. And I was, you know,
late fifties turning fifty nine. I thought, okay, can I
make myself younger before I hit the big six to
So that was the idea. It was a kind of
(30:03):
a challenge. So how did you go about this challenge?
What did you do? So I'm not an extreme kind
of person, and I wanted it to be pretty relatable
to the average person. So it wasn't about spending money
or you know, come fasting for weeks, So a little
less alcohol, a little more exercise, trying to reduce stress.
(30:27):
I did go on these anti aging supplements which were
supplied by SRW, so that was who also organized the test.
And I went to a hypnotherapist to try and reduce
stress and also help stop me grinding my teeth, which
I do so ferociously.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
I smashed my fillings.
Speaker 6 (30:47):
That's definitely a sign of stress, right, breathing exercises, and
I've got this great osteopath who going to him as
good for the body is as well as the soul.
So just little little things.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
It's interesting you say that they were little things. Did
you do that purely because you knew that they would
be sustainable and easy to stick to.
Speaker 6 (31:09):
Yeah, I knew for both myself that I just wasn't
that kind of intense person who was going to go
to the gym seven days a week. But also, you know,
for the for the point of doing the story and
the challenge, I did want it to be something that
just the average person could look at and say, yeah,
yeah I could. I could give that a go, And
I figured doing anything was worthwhile. I mean, I was
reasonably healthy, reasonably good diet, reasonably good weight. You know,
(31:30):
it was mainly for me, it wasn't It was about
hitting that age where you think, Okay, how many good
years have I got left to be active and out
and adventures and doing things, and you want to make
you want to make that last for as long as possible.
So that was a motivation for me.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Yeah, that health span thing is really key, isn't it.
Sixty three is a little bit of a surprise to me.
It probably shouldn't be, bit it is. So you did
this for twelve months.
Speaker 5 (31:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (31:57):
So I had the initial test and I've got to
say my results were pretty good. I was quite shaffed.
The results are across a whole range of different tests
or analysis of your bloods, and one of them had
me down at forty three, so rocking it, baby. And
then there's also one that's the pace of aging, which
is actually based off the Dunedin study, which you know,
(32:19):
has followed nearly a thousand people since the early seventies,
I think, and that one looks it's a snapshot in
time of how fast you're aging. So according to my
results in a year, I'm only aging eight and a
half months, So that was my best result by far,
and at the time, although the technology changes so quickly,
at the time, that was considered the core result. So
(32:39):
then I did it again at six months to see
how I was going along the way. And it is
quite nerve wracking waiting for your results, you know, and
they were pretty good. They were much the same. I
think my pace of aging was the same. I had
one element that had really improved, but then the twelve
month one came along and got I took the ten
(33:00):
just after I'd done the Apstau Ocean cycle ride for
my sixtieth birthday, so maybe my reserves were depleted, or
maybe it was an off day beneaway, my results were
not great after twelve months, like they were not great.
My pace of aging was still quite good, but it
had gone up. My other ages were all late fifties.
(33:21):
They'd brought in a new test that looks at the
health of your organs the risk factor for issues, and
it suggested I'd needed to be careful of my kidneys
and there was some inflammatory signals that were up which
may be related to stress.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
So it was a bit of a downer that last result.
So was it worth it? Was the year worth it?
Speaker 6 (33:43):
I mean that last result may be thinking, oh my god,
have I got some underlying condition I don't know about.
I think in the future, where the cost of it
and accessibility comes down, maybe all of us would do
this every six months at the doctrum and then you'd
see a pattern rather than a bump up and down.
One of my big risk factors was drinking, like I'd
put down three to five drinks a week, and that
(34:05):
put me in a really quite high risk category for
lots of things. I think that's probably I'm still a
sporadic exerciser. I try with stress, like I think it's
a really stressful dark time in the world, and I
try and realize when I feel it quartersol rising. I
can almost feel my blood pressure rising. So I try
and stay on top of that. But I drink definitely
(34:26):
drink less. I think that's the one big thing that
I've taken out of it is just knocking having a
few days off.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Just my doctor said to me at one point, she said, actually,
you know, no alcohol is best franchisca. And if you
look around the world, you know, Canada and other places,
they're saying two standard drinks a week, and they're being
really strict about it. And I just remember sort of thinking,
I don't think I'd ever get to that point. And
I think I've had two drinks a week now only
for about a month and a half. And I regret
(34:55):
to say it probably is a reason for that. You know,
it's really interesting, isn't it. I suppose what I'm wondering is,
even though in your stats came back and were a
little bit depressing, the data was a bit depressing. After
that year of doing all those little changes of just
exercising a bit more and eating while and cutting back
(35:15):
on the alcohol and things, did you in general feel better,
like where there are the benefits aside from the data,
did you feel better.
Speaker 6 (35:25):
So I have to be really honest. So I didn't
feel any different at all through the whole year. I
really didn't feel any different. I think a mind shift though,
because one of the big things that surprised me in
writing about it was that the current thinking is that
your genetics are twenty percent, which isn't that high, and
lifestyle is eighty percent. So that's the environment you live in.
(35:47):
Some of that you might not be able to control,
like pollution in the air or whether you can walk
or bike to work, but also how you behave in
that you know where they had, whether your drink, smoke, exercise.
So I think it I felt, I don't know, a
terrible we'd empowered to be a little bit more in
control and that you can influence it, just to do
the best you can. So I think that was what
(36:08):
I took out of it most was I want to,
you know, keep engaging in life and having adventures and
just to keep doing it and know that I can
influence at least some of it. Rather, you know, I
can lower the odds of things going wrong for me
health wise.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Give yourself the best chance with those chronic conditions that
can sneak up on us as we age. I'm relieved
in a way to hear that you didn't notice it
in a huge way, because if you then told me
and Francisca today everything change and I just felt amazing,
we'd be like, oh no, that's another job we better
get on with. So you know, those little changes are
(36:46):
probably good for your day to day. Yeah, I think
it's like, and you have good days and bad days,
and the world hasn't got any easier to live in over.
Speaker 6 (36:53):
The past few years. So probably being a little bit
more aware of my response to the world I live in.
I suppose you talking about alcohol. It's coming up to
winter and we have an open fire, and open fire
and a glass of wine, red wine. It's just goes together.
But it is just kind of treating myself a bit
more gently. I'm the youngest in my family, so I've
seen my older siblings deal with various issues as they
(37:15):
get older, and yeah, just increasing your chances nobody. There's
a looney guy, Brian Johnson, who's really worth reading about
if you have a chance, who's gone into this.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
He's very wealthy.
Speaker 6 (37:26):
He's spent millions making his body a personal science. Experiment
to try and increase his health span, and he has
lowered his cellular age by a few years. But oh
my god, the cost of it.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
There's just no joy.
Speaker 6 (37:43):
In life, you know, in the food he eats, he's
monitored twenty for seven even his erections during the night
measure his manliness or something. I don't know. You've just
got to enjoy living, if I think, if you get
to extreme on this kind of thing, then you miss
out on the whole point of having health speed in
any way, you know, if you're not out enjoying it.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
I've done a bit of research on Brian and my
issue with him is it is in making out as
if he's doing it for the betterment of all mankind.
But it'll never be affordable for all mankind to do
what he's doing. And if he comes across some golden nugget,
that'd be great.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
It's more about his ego. Yeah, it's not living right,
and he's not for the most of us. He wants
to do it. You will power that.
Speaker 6 (38:24):
You see the ones who are spending so much on
anti aging, it's all the really super rich people. It's
the Jeff be Sauces and multimillion Dollar Labs working on it.
It's ego, it's not about the betterment of humanity.
Speaker 3 (38:37):
That's what the little thing's for. It's free. Listen to
it on wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll give
you little bits of advice every week.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Thank you so much for joining us and taking us
through your year of health pleasure.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Thank you to both doctor Komel and Joanna Wayne all
their time today. That was pretty interesting, wasn't it, Because
you know, as we said at the top of the hour,
we're all talking about longevity. We're watching the TV show
as we're reading the articles about these kind of fruit
loopy billionaires who are trying to live to one hundred
and twenty in things, and really.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
It's kind of simple.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
It is get a little bit more sleep, do a
little bit more exercise, and eat a little bit better.
Just throw just half a cup I think it's even
a quarter of a cup? Is on you need of
green leafy veggies? Yeah, unto your day and that's not hard.
Reduce the risk any one of us death. Yeah, And
again it's about the house in years, isn't it. It's
it's about the peep in your step, and I think
(39:37):
that'll be really interesting to hear more about what Nick discovers,
because of course we were talking about reducing the risk
of premature death. But actually, at the moment, I think
the health span in New Zealand is sixty three. So
that is the age that we get to before we
start being That's defined as the year spent generally active
(39:58):
and free from disease, So that's six three years old.
I like that to be a little older.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
That was an interesting discovery. I didn't know that, and
that shocked me a little bit. But then I suppose,
I guess I don't know what the perimeters are. Does
that mean start to need medication, statins and blood pressure
men's and stuff like that. I don't quite know what
they mean by sixty three, you know, but anything you can.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
Do, I mean most of us do by that stage.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
Saving all of that off for as long as possible.
I certainly want to be fit and fit as a
fiddle at sixty three.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
Gosh.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
So I found Nick really interesting, and I found those
minimal levels of change just so exciting because we have
the third highest adult obesity rate in the OECD. And
if we can take this information and you can use it,
and you can educate people and things look fingers crossed.
It could be a really simple way of having a
huge impact. But then I found it really interesting listening
(40:50):
to Joanna and everything she went through to kind of
come out with quite mixed results at the end of
the year.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
Well, we interviewed her in person, and she looks fantastic.
She looks young. I as I said, I think sometimes
these things, just knowing you're being measured can affect your outcome.
So I wonder how much that played into it as well.
But I kind of feel relieved about that.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
I'm not gonna I'm not going to do that for
a year.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
I'm not going to launch out there on and and
spend all that money on all the different fads and
things go. It's just getting back to what we're always
talking about.
Speaker 6 (41:25):
Louise.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
What's that?
Speaker 2 (41:26):
How's the food?
Speaker 3 (41:27):
Move consistently and sleep consistently?
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Ever that's working for us? Okay, thanks for joining us
on our new Zealand Heal podcast series, Little Things. We
hope you share the podcast with the women in your
life so we can all live a little longer.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
You can follow this podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you
get your podcasts, and for more on this and other topics,
He to zied Herald dot co dot zed
Speaker 2 (41:52):
And we'll catch you next time on the little things.
Hi, I'm Francesca Budkin and I'm Louise Aria and this
is season four of our New Zealand Ye Old podcast
The Little Things.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Good to have you with us. In this podcast, we
talk to experts and find out all the little things
you need to know to improve all areas of your life.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
And today we're talking about something that's hitting the headlines.
Well it has been for a while now, and that's
the Quest for longevity. It's it tight, it's not boring,
it's not as hard as you think.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I mean, we've all read the stories, haven't we know
about the wealthy tech bros and the extreme links they're
going to an order to live longer people. Have you
know a lot of people talked about the TV show
Secrets of the Blue Zones. We're always reading articles telling us,
you know, to eat this and not that, and to
exercise for this long or that long.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
It just goes on and all it does a bit,
and I mean sometimes I just wish I was born
in a blue zone so I could just come out naturally.
But unlike tech Billinia Brian Johnson's very complex and expensive quest,
here on the Little Things, we love, research based advice
that's simple to follow and is not going to up
end your life or empty your wallet.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
So I was very excited when I discovered a University
of Sydney research paper published in BMC Medicine stating that
small changes can have a big impact on health and
reduce the risk of premature death. But better still, these
researchers understand that any changes we make must be sustainable,
they must be easy to maintain. So they have looked
(01:32):
at the minimal we need to do and I promise
you this is all durable for all of us.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
So to check longevity, we have a two part podcast
for you today. Later on we catch up with journalists
Joanna Wayne to talk us through her year long attempt
to reduce your biological age. But right now, one of
the co authors of that groundbreaking study of Francesca mentioned
is doctor Nicholas Comeal. Nick is a trained dietician postdoctoral
research fellow in the Physical Activity, Lifestyle and Population Health
(01:58):
Department at the University of Sydney and he.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Is with us now. Welcome, Nick, thanks so much for
joining us.
Speaker 4 (02:05):
Absolutely, it's a pleasure. Thanks for the invitation, Nicholas.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Longevity has been hurting the headlines and social media algorithms
increasingly over the last few years. Why do you think
people are talking about it so much? Aside from the
fact that we all want to live over it's.
Speaker 5 (02:20):
Really become an increasingly important thing to look at, especially
as life expectancy has extended so long, I mean globally.
But it also raises other questions, you know, how do
we live not just a longer life, but a healthier
life and embedded with inside that lifespan. And this also
comes with I think an increasing wave of just the
(02:41):
information that we can get from both wearable technology but
also the advancements in science. We're starting to be able
to really translate some of that biological information into bite
size information that the lay person could understand, and so
that's really sort of proliferated a wave of interest I
think in this field.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
So the health and wellness space can feel quite overwhelming,
and I have heard people report of, you know, fatigue
from just all the health and wellness information there is
out there. Is it getting harder for you know, even
space researchers to combat the noise saved to us by
social media and so forth.
Speaker 5 (03:19):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I mean you see this as a
dietitians probably the biggest area where I see this. You know,
physical activity for example, you would oftentimes get that moving
more is healthy, But for a diet in particular.
Speaker 4 (03:31):
Every day, every week there's a.
Speaker 5 (03:33):
New fad diet and new thing that comes up, and
that makes a lot of noise, makes my job as
a dietitian incredibly challenging. So moving back to the basics,
I think that and perhaps we'll discuss it here in
a moment. This study was quite important because it really
distilled it down to a little bit simpler terms and
(03:53):
the sense of fruits vegetables for diet for example, and
minutes per day of activity. So I think the noise
is challenging, and that's part of our job as researchers
is to try to consolidate it, to hop on the
air with amazing people such as yourself, to try to
disseminate these research findings into usable information and clear the air,
(04:13):
so to speak.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
So let's start with the aims of the study. There
were two aims. Took us through them.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
Yeah, yeah, So this study was interesting.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
So what we did was we were hoping to find
the minimum change that you would need for longevity based
off of three different lifestyle behaviors. So this is sleep,
physical activity, and diet. So we call this span and
it sort of embeds itself into the health span and lifespan.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
If we were to use that acronym.
Speaker 5 (04:41):
The other aim of this study was to find the
optimal change, So what would be an invest case scenario
that would look like And we found some pretty interesting stuff.
So the aim was to find the minimum and the optimal,
and we were able to find that the minimum for
clinically meaningful reductions and risk of moretality. So this is
about ten percent lower risk of mortality just required fifteen
(05:05):
extra minutes of sleep, two minutes extra per day of
moderate to vigorous physical activity, and just something like an
extra half serving of vegetables per day. So this is
quite unique in the sense of other literature out there.
Most studies will focus on broad sweeps of behaviors, but
this focused on what is the most the minimum, what
(05:25):
is the most the bare minimum that we could do
for some chunk of reduction.
Speaker 4 (05:30):
But yeah, hopefully that answers your question.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Did you focus on the minimum because you have no
faith in us to be apeful.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
To kind of kite with any coupe with anything more.
Speaker 5 (05:41):
Yeah, no, it's it's a good point. So I wouldn't
necessarily lean towards that. I think the main point in
this is all previous literature has focused on meeting the
guidelines or a perfect diet. You know, if I'm to
do this fad diet, or if I'm to do this,
and you know, in the most general sense, we as
as consumers, we as the public, we generally get the
(06:05):
idea moving more is healthy, that eating fruits and vegetables
is healthy. The next step really for public health guidance
is breaking it down into what I need to do today,
what is the first step in the cascade of making
behavior change. That's what's really interesting about this. Now it
(06:26):
might seem like common sense, but being able to statistically
and from an epidemiological perspective break that down into a
chunk of where I put my right foot before the
left foot, that takes a little bit of design.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
So that was kind of the interest there.
Speaker 5 (06:42):
I wouldn't lean towards the faith in the end user,
but yeah, it's it goes hand in hand with behavior change.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
So that was really a novel aspect of this study.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
It was it was a large cohort that you studied.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
I involved, and participant based research and recruitment can be
really tricky at times.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
How did you get that many people to be involved?
Speaker 5 (07:04):
Well, luckily I was a little bit of background on
this for the listeners here. This was a sample of
sixty thousand adults approximately, and these were UK based participants,
so these were not Sydney based or Australia based or
New Zealand based. And this is a part of what's
known as the UK Biobank. So this is a very
large scale, one of the largest biomedical studies globally that
(07:27):
has trapped.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
People over time.
Speaker 5 (07:29):
So in this study, those sixty thousand participants were tracked
over eight years. Now, luckily I was not involved in
collecting that data. That would take an enormous amount of effort,
and this is a part of that data resource. It
enables any researcher globally through application to access that data
to explore some of these more more granular associations. So yeah,
(07:51):
it wasn't me involved in that, but I think that
this is really the next.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
Step of research.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
That was the first comment loom made. They hit sixty.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Those sort of data banks, you know, are amazing for research,
aren't they. You know, you do have to go through
your ethical loopholes to get to that to them, but
such a great resource.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
Yeah, yeah, and this, you know, it's on longevity.
Speaker 5 (08:16):
The UK Biobank has other aspects collected, you know, I
think genetics as well as embedded in this and other
metabolic parameters.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
So it's such a rich resource.
Speaker 5 (08:27):
This was really the tippity iceberg on what we're hoping
to achieve with the span studies.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
The sleep is coal, activity and day.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
In the past, we've done plenty of studies on sleep
and nutrition and physical exercise, but we haven't necessarily looked
at them all together, which is kind of weird because
they are intertwined, aren't they.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
Absolutely?
Speaker 5 (08:47):
Yeah, So this is probably the most important feature of
this study. You know, on one element I mentioned that
it's the next step, right that we can take breaking
it into a chunk, a digestible chunk of where we
can what we can do today to make for a
longer and healthier future tomorrow. But going back to the
biological and physiological underpinnings of this study is an important
(09:11):
thing to discuss. So sleep, physical activity, and nutrition are
incredibly intertwined and We chose those behaviors because across the
twenty four hour period, they basically bump into each other
at every point. And I like to give the example
of sleep. You know, we've all had that Friday night,
or that Saturday, or maybe a long working week where
(09:31):
we can't get enough sleep, and the next day we're
obviously a little bit fatigued. We're not going to be
taken the flight of stairs. We're going to systematically reduce
the amount of movement we do. And we're also, at
least I know on my end, reaching for that extra
bag of Chippy's or that extra bag of biscuits. Because
we are fatigued, we are reducing our overall energy and
(09:55):
so that drives the sort of the appetite hormones and
our bodies to reach out for more energy consumption. So
there is a bidirectional relationship between many of the behaviors
involved here, and so that's what's unique about this. We
chose these behaviors because they're intertwined. They're not silos really,
they're more all interconnected as a web and ecological web
(10:17):
that we have to consider.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
You're really speaking to me today because I caught a
flight this morning. I had to get up at four
forty five for and all I have been wanting to
do is eat fetty food, you know, like I don't
know because I'm fatigued.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
I had a few drinks celebrating a graduation.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
But you know it's so true. We just kind of
just put bed on top of bed. Yeah, how did
you measure each of these aspects of the study.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
That's a great point.
Speaker 5 (10:45):
So I'm an integrated behavioral scientist at the Mackenzie Wearable
sub and we specialize in wearable technology, so you can
imagine this as both research grade wearables as well as
as well as consumer grade wearables. So you know, you
can imagine this as an example like a fitbit or
requirement things like this. Now, the UK Biobank had a
(11:06):
subsample of individuals and they collected wearable data on them,
and so that's what we use. That's really the gold
standard for capturing physical activity and sleep measures. And in
this case, we collected diet through a food frequency questionnaire,
so that's reflective of their long term dietary behavior measurements.
So we employed, you know, our ground truth and validated
(11:31):
machine learning approaches to break apart that wearable data into
these very high resolution changes, and that's how we were
able to get the bare minimum. You know, we were
able to break it down into those chunks.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
The results are really interesting because as you see, to
us before fifteen minutes more sleep a day just out
of two minutes I think of exercise, moderate to vigorous
exercise and you know, sort of half a cup of
you know, an extra half a cup of green vegie
or Vegi's or something. That is not a lot to
ask for, is it. I mean, you hear that and
(12:05):
you go, I can do that. I can do that.
It's pretty awesome. So what I want to know is, though,
what does that actually mean? Does that just give us
a better chance of living longer than the average age
or and I think in New Zealand for women it's
eighty four minutes just over eighty or does it give
us a bit of chance of just getting to the
(12:26):
average age.
Speaker 5 (12:27):
So in this study specifically, we did not calculate the
life expectancy, So that's sort of a separate a separate
area of epidemiology and public health. In this study, we
were looking at the risk of premature and death. So
it's a slight nuance to your question to answer, the
first part would be what does it mean right? Breaking
(12:48):
that question that arm of the question down, and that
bare minimum was related to a ten percent lower risk
of premature death. So while it doesn't mean that we
can give you a precise age that you would live
to per se, you can imagine that as you make
the subsequent changes you'll have up to In this case,
(13:09):
we had sixty four percent lower risk of mortality. If
you were to make more substantial changes in your lifestyle,
that would be the most optimal lifestyle change. So that's
quite a large amount and really really exciting work that
I'm working on once we finish the call here and
hope to preprint and put online soon, is a translation
(13:30):
of those risks into life expectancy, so how many raw
years you would gain and as well healthy years that
you would gain. So there's some exciting new work that
will come out that hopefully will take that to the
next step, not just a percentage of risk that we
can get, but how many years. And that's I think
really the pinnacle of translation of research.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Do you think that will really hit people? That'll make
it sink in a lot more with people When you go,
you know you'll get this many more years.
Speaker 5 (13:59):
That's always the balancing act, you know, we in research
is taking the findings and trying to make them, you know,
disseminatable to where we can we can give it to
the public, but also trying to put it in realistic terms,
you know. So I think it will be helpful because
ten percent lower risk is one thing, but years is
really I mean, everybody understands that, right, So I think
(14:21):
that it will help.
Speaker 4 (14:22):
I think that will be really really interesting.
Speaker 5 (14:24):
The other nice part about this this study, and I
won't go into it in too much detail because it's
it's not published yet, but is looking at the healthy
year's game. So in this study, we're looking at lower
risk of mortality, but we're not really breaking down the
quality years of your life, you know, and that's I
think probably one of the more important features to look
at how many years we have of healthy living as
(14:46):
opposed to just.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
Pre death exactly.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
And that's right, And so it's taking down those risks
of a certain disease, carriivascular disease, cancers and that kind
of thing, right, absolutely.
Speaker 5 (14:57):
Yeah, So generally speaking, you'll see this as a a
few different diseases you hit, you hit it right on
the head there, cardiovascular disease cancer tayetoo, diabetes off that time.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
Another big one you.
Speaker 5 (15:09):
Would see would be, for example, cognitive disorders demnsha Alzheimer's,
because you may be void of of cardiovascular or type
two diabetic complications, but you can't see cognitive decline.
Speaker 4 (15:21):
And that's definitely on the rise right now.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
In Australia, Nick, you mentioned we've been talking about how
intertwined these three things out physical movement and sleep and nutrition.
So I'm presuming if you just did one of these things,
if you just sleeped for fifteen more minutes a day,
because it sounded quite nice, that's not going to have impact.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
You've got to do all three.
Speaker 5 (15:38):
Not necessarily. It's a really really good point to make.
So in this study we actually looked at them juxtapose.
We looked at the individual behaviors one at a time,
and then we held them comparatively to what you would
need to do the amount you would need to do
of the combined behaviors. So with sleep, for example, you
absolutely could make some changes and obtain a benefit, could
(16:00):
obtain lower risk, but it was nowhere near the maximum
benefit that you could have changed. The sum of the
individual parts was equal to more than the whole, so
there was a cynergistic relationship there. And the other thing
is is that for sleep, for example, we have fifteen minutes,
but on its own, you start to see that it
would require substantially more sleep than you would And that
(16:24):
goes back to what is behaviorally sustainable for these individuals
who might be trying to make change. If I ask
you to sleep an extra hour every day, you'd tell me,
you know, I can't, I have to work, you know,
I just might not be feasible, but just an extra
little bit there, and then changing maybe you know what
you prepare for breakfast or lunch or dinner to have
just that extra little bit. Now we're starting to make
(16:47):
long term sustainable changes. And that's the icing on the
cake here, is really trying to make things not just feasible,
but to where they're practical to maintain in the long term.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Just on that sleep, is that as part of your evening,
your overnight sleep, or it can it be a nap
at some other point of the day.
Speaker 5 (17:10):
Yeah, it's a good point. So we didn't we didn't
look at naps or other breaks inside of that. But
I think that the literature now supports that the nap
still can be a healthy part of rest, right. I mean,
that's not the focus of this study, but it's an
important that's an interesting point to make, you know, as
you know, if you can get the total hours as
(17:31):
opposed to one continuous bout of sleep. And I think
that that's going to be answered soon because sleep is
is kind of an under explored area in longevity, in
terms of wearable technology, it hasn't yet really been fully
explored to the extent of physical activity. And I think
we're seeing a new way. Our team has been publishing
(17:52):
some stuff on this as well as sleep regularity, how
consistent you are with sleep, and as well, you know,
we sleep catch up. So for example, a year to
go sleep on the weekend, you catch up all of
the sleep you're missing for the week with that had
the same benefit. And this is a new wave of
sleep studies that are coming out really pointing towards comparison
(18:15):
with physical activity, where you might do some weekend warrior
type behaviors. And yeah, I think I can't answer that
specifically which would be better at apples to oranges, because
we didn't address that in the study, But I think
it will be answered soon. I think that's the next
next week.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
If we are already getting a recommended amount of sleep,
we're exercising regularly, and we've got pretty good nutrition, well,
how do we make an impact on our house in
that case?
Speaker 4 (18:45):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (18:45):
Yeah, So in this study we did explore if you
were to shift the reference points. So for example, in
this study, we were looking at those who were occupying
sort of the bottom end of these behaviors and saying,
what's the minimum from that? Which you miss some public
health relevance there because not everybody in the distribution of
society is going to be at the bottom end, sleeping
(19:06):
a small amount or occupying the worst possible dietary behaviors.
And you still could achieve benefits if you were to
make change, but it wasn't to the same degree. And
that's because, as you said, you're already occupying a more
optimal profile. And I think that's when you start to
get into really trying to refine what those behaviors look like.
(19:27):
So for example, with physical activity, I mean it starts
to become blurry because you can embed this in other things,
for example, sedentary behavior. If you're breaking up your day
of sitting down and injecting the same duration of physical
activity across the day to try to interrupt those long
bouts of sitting. That can have some benefit as well
(19:50):
as the regularity aspect that I was mentioning, going to
sleep at a consistent time that we have shown previously,
again not the purpose of today discussion, but that's shown
to have an enormous impact on our risk of dementia
as well as our risk of cardiovascular disease. And that's
really exciting because that's starting to show that the biological
(20:13):
notion of this circadian rhythm, you know, as we start
to feed into it, we're consistently going to sleep at
the same time, we're consistently training or eating at the
same time. Now we're starting to allow for the body
system to operate on a more regular rhythm, literally a
regular rhythm, and that can add to our or amplify
(20:35):
the lifestyle benefits that we're already getting same amount.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
It's interesting you use that we're consistent because as two
women who are around the age of perimenopause minipause, consistency
has suddenly become hugely important and actually a lot of
large parts of our lives can I just ask a question.
Thing we were talking about, of course, the minimum amount
that you had to do, but what was the optimum
amount that you discovered.
Speaker 4 (21:01):
Yeah, yeah, it's a great point.
Speaker 5 (21:02):
So optimum in this case was quite quite substantial in
the sense of sleep. Sleep was somewhere around seven to
eight hours per day. I'll give these as approximations here.
And for physical activity, we were looking at more of
the forty to one hundred minutes per day. So this
is quite a substantial amount of moderate to vigorous physical activity.
(21:23):
So I mean moderate to vigorous. You could imagine this
as a brisk walking for an hour along those lines
would get you up to that. And then for diet,
it was quite a few changes. So for example, entirely
cutting out sugar sweetened beverages, We're reducing the processed or
refined meats from the diet, several servings per day of
(21:45):
fruits and vegetables, and this is kind of sort of
like meeting the food the food my plate. You know,
you're fitting all of the food groups that you would
need to match the dietary guidelines depending on which country
you're in, obviously, but as a generalization that would be
the main objective, and for that again, we're getting up
to a sixty four percent lower risk of mortality. So
(22:08):
it does require some shifts, but yeah, it's it's still doable,
you know. I think these are all things that we
could make in our day to day lives. They just
take a little bit more planning when looking at the maximum.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
They do take planning because I used to do my
exercise first thing in the morning when I woke up,
but I've recently joined a JIM and I go with
a friend from work and we leave our desks, we
walk down there, we do our workout, we walk back
and I can't believe for a difference it's made to
my day, you know, because I'm breaking up there sitting. Yeah,
(22:41):
and it also means I have to plan my breakfast, down,
my lunch, you know, I have to do all of that.
So it does take a bit of planning. But then
you get into the pattern of it again, you become consistent.
Speaker 5 (22:51):
That's the important part is creating the habit. Once the
habit's created, it sort of falls like a domino, and that's.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
What we're hoping to achieve here. Create the first domino.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
You know, which is really interesting when it comes to
us thinking about longevity or just looking after ourselves to
live a healthier life, we tend to hear all these
stories at the moment we go kind of straight to biohacking,
don't we. I mean, do biological tests or genome sequencing,
all these full body scans that you're hearing people you know,
getting done these days, do they have a role to
(23:21):
play in longevity or I mean they're really out of
reach for the average person, aren't they.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (23:28):
I mean there's sort of a hierarchy here of what's
important in public health and what is achievable. And I
think at the bottom of that hierarchy, I mean wearables aside,
everything aside, I mean, is basically just trying to make
the things that we do in our every day to
day life optimized. We have to eat food, we have
(23:50):
to sleep, I mean, movement is essential. We need to
move our bodies. So you sort of need to achieve
that first level of the hierarchy before you can even
start to thay about doing a human genome sequence. I mean,
I guess you don't have to, but the main thing
is that that would be the first logical step, so
that way you can incrementally sort of refine what you're doing.
(24:12):
And the other thing is these things cost money, right,
I mean we can not just in high income countries,
but we look at this from a global standpoint. There's
a lot of countries where we don't have those tools
or resources to be able to do so. While biohacking
is important and I think it does have another silver
lining in terms of advancing the field of longevity. This
(24:33):
wave of consumers doing this can add some nice data
and richness to what's available there and help point towards
the next generation when things become more affordable. But I mean,
I'm more of a generalist. I like to think of
how I can impact the highest number of people, how
we can help change the highest number of lifestyles and
behavior change, And with that it's better oftentimes to start
(24:57):
with what's changeable in the general public and how we
can start to make those shifts. So, yeah, it's sort
of yin and yang. There's a place for it, but
enough for everybody.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
We were going to raise Brian Johnson type things that
he's doing to try and live for I don't know
what is it one hundred and forty, one hundred and
six or whatever it is twenty I think, and he's
a bit of a piney I get that, and he
acts as if he's doing it for the benefit of
all mankind. But you've really answered that it's yes, there
may be some things that come out of his personal
(25:29):
experiment that will benefit humankind later.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
I don't know how many out of all the.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Many many things he's doing, because there's no control, so
at least you're just counting the rest of the population.
But what you're saying is more that these things can
sort of have a trickle down effect for population health
that if you start, as you say, at the top
of the pyramid.
Speaker 5 (25:51):
Absolutely, yeah, so there's definitely pros and cons to these
sorts of things, and yeah, it's incredible to sort of
commit that much time. I'm in that much resource to
advancing the field. But again going also to other things
such as the sustainability of these behaviors. You know, if
I was to go to the general public and tell
them they need to follow this, you know, twelve hour
(26:14):
regime every day, it's not feasible, you know, and you
almost end up with better behavior change and you end
up with more successful protocols whenever they are a little
bit more realistic. Now, maybe that's the minimum change, maybe
it's a little bit more generalized. But offering these really
really structured regimes, you end up moving people away from
(26:36):
in some cases not all cases, you end up moving
them away from organic living into this sort of structured
confine of you need to do this at every minute
of the day, and it moves away from free living
and into almost a synthetic environment.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
And that's not.
Speaker 5 (26:54):
Always healthy for everybody. It can cause some mental concerns.
It can cause some eruptions in your quality of life.
So longevity and quality of life, that can be a
balance to strike there. Yeah, and mental health and psychology.
It's not my expertise, but you can imagine how this
could be. I mean, how this could disrupt your normal
(27:14):
day to day living or normal life events that you
would have going on, going to a graduation, going you know,
things like this. As you mentioned, it can get in
the way of those and that's not what we want
to preach.
Speaker 4 (27:26):
We want to try to.
Speaker 5 (27:27):
Embed and to weave these into a healthy lifestyle where
you can still do everything you'd like to do, just
in a healthier way.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Nicholas, thank you so much for your time. For talking
us through this, and I think we're going to have
to be back in touch with you again in the future.
It sounds like this is just there's just a lot
of ongoing information to still to come our way.
Speaker 5 (27:46):
Absolutely, so thank you again for the time. We've got
that next study coming up on health span versus lifespan.
Would be super keen to discuss with you guys that
on the podcast. Otherwise, if there's any questions from the
listeners or for you guys, feel free to reach out
to me. At the University of Sydney, Nicholas come out.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
You're listening to the Little Things And that was doctor
Nicholas Comel talking about his groundbreaking study on how small
changes those little things can have a big impact on
our health. When we come back, the Kewi journo and
her year long Queace to reduce her biological age back soon. So,
(28:27):
as you know, here on The Little Things, Lou and
I like to test out a lot of the advice
we're given, but for this EP we didn't have to
because our colleague here at The New Zealand Herald, senior
feature writer Joanna Wayne, has already done this. So Joe
spent a year on a mission to lower her biological
age in pursuit of longevity, and joins us now to
talk through the process and the results. Welcome, Arenda, thank
(28:49):
you so much for sharing your story with us. I
presume that you got tested before you started everything.
Speaker 6 (28:57):
Yeah, i'd been I'd written a couple of storyries on
the international race to cure aging. So I was really
interested in the science of whether you could increase your
health span. You know, that's when you're alive, but you
don't have any chronic diseases, Like it's something like life
expectancy average around the world is eighty but health span
(29:19):
where you're healthy and active is like sixty three, you know,
not even gold cut. So I was interested in what
you could do to keep yourself healthy for longer. And
I heard about this DNA test where you could send
off this little pin prick blood sample and have your
cellular age analyzed, so how your body is deteriorating versus
(29:39):
you know, the number of candles on your birthday cake.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
So yeah, I did.
Speaker 6 (29:43):
I had discussed what I would do with one of
the people I'd interviewed from my articles, who's own New
Zealand's or biotech guy who's developed their supplements, so that
were that was part of it. And I was, you know,
late fifties turning fifty nine. I thought, okay, can I
make myself younger before I hit the big six to
So that was the idea. It was a kind of
(30:03):
a challenge. So how did you go about this challenge?
What did you do? So I'm not an extreme kind
of person, and I wanted it to be pretty relatable
to the average person. So it wasn't about spending money
or you know, come fasting for weeks, So a little
less alcohol, a little more exercise, trying to reduce stress.
(30:27):
I did go on these anti aging supplements which were
supplied by SRW, so that was who also organized the test.
And I went to a hypnotherapist to try and reduce
stress and also help stop me grinding my teeth, which
I do so ferociously.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
I smashed my fillings.
Speaker 6 (30:47):
That's definitely a sign of stress, right, breathing exercises, and
I've got this great osteopath who going to him as
good for the body is as well as the soul.
So just little little things.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
It's interesting you say that they were little things. Did
you do that purely because you knew that they would
be sustainable and easy to stick to.
Speaker 6 (31:09):
Yeah, I knew for both myself that I just wasn't
that kind of intense person who was going to go
to the gym seven days a week. But also, you know,
for the for the point of doing the story and
the challenge, I did want it to be something that
just the average person could look at and say, yeah,
yeah I could. I could give that a go, And
I figured doing anything was worthwhile. I mean, I was
reasonably healthy, reasonably good diet, reasonably good weight. You know,
(31:30):
it was mainly for me, it wasn't It was about
hitting that age where you think, Okay, how many good
years have I got left to be active and out
and adventures and doing things, and you want to make
you want to make that last for as long as possible.
So that was a motivation for me.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Yeah, that health span thing is really key, isn't it.
Sixty three is a little bit of a surprise to me.
It probably shouldn't be, bit it is. So you did
this for twelve months.
Speaker 5 (31:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (31:57):
So I had the initial test and I've got to
say my results were pretty good. I was quite shaffed.
The results are across a whole range of different tests
or analysis of your bloods, and one of them had
me down at forty three, so rocking it, baby. And
then there's also one that's the pace of aging, which
is actually based off the Dunedin study, which you know,
(32:19):
has followed nearly a thousand people since the early seventies,
I think, and that one looks it's a snapshot in
time of how fast you're aging. So according to my
results in a year, I'm only aging eight and a
half months, So that was my best result by far,
and at the time, although the technology changes so quickly,
at the time, that was considered the core result. So
(32:39):
then I did it again at six months to see
how I was going along the way. And it is
quite nerve wracking waiting for your results, you know, and
they were pretty good. They were much the same. I
think my pace of aging was the same. I had
one element that had really improved, but then the twelve
month one came along and got I took the ten
(33:00):
just after I'd done the Apstau Ocean cycle ride for
my sixtieth birthday, so maybe my reserves were depleted, or
maybe it was an off day beneaway, my results were
not great after twelve months, like they were not great.
My pace of aging was still quite good, but it
had gone up. My other ages were all late fifties.
(33:21):
They'd brought in a new test that looks at the
health of your organs the risk factor for issues, and
it suggested I'd needed to be careful of my kidneys
and there was some inflammatory signals that were up which
may be related to stress.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
So it was a bit of a downer that last result.
So was it worth it? Was the year worth it?
Speaker 6 (33:43):
I mean that last result may be thinking, oh my god,
have I got some underlying condition I don't know about.
I think in the future, where the cost of it
and accessibility comes down, maybe all of us would do
this every six months at the doctrum and then you'd
see a pattern rather than a bump up and down.
One of my big risk factors was drinking, like I'd
put down three to five drinks a week, and that
(34:05):
put me in a really quite high risk category for
lots of things. I think that's probably I'm still a
sporadic exerciser. I try with stress, like I think it's
a really stressful dark time in the world, and I
try and realize when I feel it quartersol rising. I
can almost feel my blood pressure rising. So I try
and stay on top of that. But I drink definitely
(34:26):
drink less. I think that's the one big thing that
I've taken out of it is just knocking having a
few days off.
Speaker 2 (34:32):
Just my doctor said to me at one point, she said, actually,
you know, no alcohol is best franchisca. And if you
look around the world, you know, Canada and other places,
they're saying two standard drinks a week, and they're being
really strict about it. And I just remember sort of thinking,
I don't think I'd ever get to that point. And
I think I've had two drinks a week now only
for about a month and a half. And I regret
(34:55):
to say it probably is a reason for that. You know,
it's really interesting, isn't it. I suppose what I'm wondering is,
even though in your stats came back and were a
little bit depressing, the data was a bit depressing. After
that year of doing all those little changes of just
exercising a bit more and eating while and cutting back
(35:15):
on the alcohol and things, did you in general feel better,
like where there are the benefits aside from the data,
did you feel better.
Speaker 6 (35:25):
So I have to be really honest. So I didn't
feel any different at all through the whole year. I
really didn't feel any different. I think a mind shift though,
because one of the big things that surprised me in
writing about it was that the current thinking is that
your genetics are twenty percent, which isn't that high, and
lifestyle is eighty percent. So that's the environment you live in.
(35:47):
Some of that you might not be able to control,
like pollution in the air or whether you can walk
or bike to work, but also how you behave in
that you know where they had, whether your drink, smoke, exercise.
So I think it I felt, I don't know, a
terrible we'd empowered to be a little bit more in
control and that you can influence it, just to do
the best you can. So I think that was what
(36:08):
I took out of it most was I want to,
you know, keep engaging in life and having adventures and
just to keep doing it and know that I can
influence at least some of it. Rather, you know, I
can lower the odds of things going wrong for me
health wise.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
Yes, that's right.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Give yourself the best chance with those chronic conditions that
can sneak up on us as we age. I'm relieved
in a way to hear that you didn't notice it
in a huge way, because if you then told me
and Francisca today everything change and I just felt amazing,
we'd be like, oh no, that's another job we better
get on with. So you know, those little changes are
(36:46):
probably good for your day to day. Yeah, I think
it's like, and you have good days and bad days,
and the world hasn't got any easier to live in over.
Speaker 6 (36:53):
The past few years. So probably being a little bit
more aware of my response to the world I live in.
I suppose you talking about alcohol. It's coming up to
winter and we have an open fire, and open fire
and a glass of wine, red wine. It's just goes together.
But it is just kind of treating myself a bit
more gently. I'm the youngest in my family, so I've
seen my older siblings deal with various issues as they
(37:15):
get older, and yeah, just increasing your chances nobody. There's
a looney guy, Brian Johnson, who's really worth reading about
if you have a chance, who's gone into this.
Speaker 3 (37:25):
He's very wealthy.
Speaker 6 (37:26):
He's spent millions making his body a personal science. Experiment
to try and increase his health span, and he has
lowered his cellular age by a few years. But oh
my god, the cost of it.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
There's just no joy.
Speaker 6 (37:43):
In life, you know, in the food he eats, he's
monitored twenty for seven even his erections during the night
measure his manliness or something. I don't know. You've just
got to enjoy living, if I think, if you get
to extreme on this kind of thing, then you miss
out on the whole point of having health speed in
any way, you know, if you're not out enjoying it.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
I've done a bit of research on Brian and my
issue with him is it is in making out as
if he's doing it for the betterment of all mankind.
But it'll never be affordable for all mankind to do
what he's doing. And if he comes across some golden nugget,
that'd be great.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
It's more about his ego. Yeah, it's not living right,
and he's not for the most of us. He wants
to do it. You will power that.
Speaker 6 (38:24):
You see the ones who are spending so much on
anti aging, it's all the really super rich people. It's
the Jeff be Sauces and multimillion Dollar Labs working on it.
It's ego, it's not about the betterment of humanity.
Speaker 3 (38:37):
That's what the little thing's for. It's free. Listen to
it on wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll give
you little bits of advice every week.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Thank you so much for joining us and taking us
through your year of health pleasure.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Thank you to both doctor Komel and Joanna Wayne all
their time today. That was pretty interesting, wasn't it, Because
you know, as we said at the top of the hour,
we're all talking about longevity. We're watching the TV show
as we're reading the articles about these kind of fruit
loopy billionaires who are trying to live to one hundred
and twenty in things, and really.
Speaker 3 (39:13):
It's kind of simple.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
It is get a little bit more sleep, do a
little bit more exercise, and eat a little bit better.
Just throw just half a cup I think it's even
a quarter of a cup? Is on you need of
green leafy veggies? Yeah, unto your day and that's not hard.
Reduce the risk any one of us death. Yeah, And
again it's about the house in years, isn't it. It's
it's about the peep in your step, and I think
(39:37):
that'll be really interesting to hear more about what Nick discovers,
because of course we were talking about reducing the risk
of premature death. But actually, at the moment, I think
the health span in New Zealand is sixty three. So
that is the age that we get to before we
start being That's defined as the year spent generally active
(39:58):
and free from disease, So that's six three years old.
I like that to be a little older.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
That was an interesting discovery. I didn't know that, and
that shocked me a little bit. But then I suppose,
I guess I don't know what the perimeters are. Does
that mean start to need medication, statins and blood pressure
men's and stuff like that. I don't quite know what
they mean by sixty three, you know, but anything you can.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
Do, I mean most of us do by that stage.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
Saving all of that off for as long as possible.
I certainly want to be fit and fit as a
fiddle at sixty three.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
Gosh.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
So I found Nick really interesting, and I found those
minimal levels of change just so exciting because we have
the third highest adult obesity rate in the OECD. And
if we can take this information and you can use it,
and you can educate people and things look fingers crossed.
It could be a really simple way of having a
huge impact. But then I found it really interesting listening
(40:50):
to Joanna and everything she went through to kind of
come out with quite mixed results at the end of
the year.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
Well, we interviewed her in person, and she looks fantastic.
She looks young. I as I said, I think sometimes
these things, just knowing you're being measured can affect your outcome.
So I wonder how much that played into it as well.
But I kind of feel relieved about that.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
I'm not gonna I'm not going to do that for
a year.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
I'm not going to launch out there on and and
spend all that money on all the different fads and
things go. It's just getting back to what we're always
talking about.
Speaker 6 (41:25):
Louise.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
What's that?
Speaker 2 (41:26):
How's the food?
Speaker 3 (41:27):
Move consistently and sleep consistently?
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Ever that's working for us? Okay, thanks for joining us
on our new Zealand Heal podcast series, Little Things. We
hope you share the podcast with the women in your
life so we can all live a little longer.
Speaker 1 (41:42):
You can follow this podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you
get your podcasts, and for more on this and other topics,
He to zied Herald dot co dot zed
Speaker 2 (41:52):
And we'll catch you next time on the little things.
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