Dr. Paul Anderson outlines six pillars for optimal health: sleep, movement, nutrition, stress management, prevention, and supplements. Tobacco, poor diet, and inactivity cause most deaths over 65. He emphasizes starting where you are and consulting your doctor.
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Good day and welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul. And if you're seeing this live on a Facebook feed or a CTR or listening live, uh, great, welcome. It's 3 PM Pacific time on February 17th, 2022, and a lot of you see this on either, uh, listen on a PodBurner or on YouTube. So if you're on one of those, make sure you subscribe and like and share and all that good stuff. It really does help us. The YouTube channel is growing and growing, so that's really good. We repurpose all of these medicine health over there, and then I do short-form videos also, which are growing. So today, um, Not because there's not things to talk about with, with COVID and all of that, but I was thinking about, you know, there was a bunch of things I, I could have talked about in regard to the current health situation, but also where we have COVID, although we're still dealing with a lot in North America, we have COVID heading towards an endemic, um, uh, infection, meaning it's going from worldwide pandemic status to something that will just be with us periodically. forever, as long as we have people on the earth, and just like all of the other coronavirus that we have already. So what I thought would be really good is get healthy and stay healthy. If you have managed to miss getting COVID and you haven't had the flu, you haven't been sick, great. I hope everybody would be just super healthy, but a lot of us have had COVID. A lot of us have had the cold, had colds, flu, or maybe needed surgery or some other problem. I think getting healthy and staying healthy is a really wonderful way to think about moving forward in the future. Because one of the things that is worth thinking about is our internal resistance, our immune system, etc., is really all we've got going for us. Yes, we can add in medications and natural treatments and all sorts of other things, but Your immune system is what keeps you from getting sick every day, right? It's also largely what keeps those, uh, those of us who don't develop cancer from developing cancer. Now, the immune system has limits, and there's only so much that it can do. So it's not, you know, all-powerful, and, uh, and it doesn't exceed all disease. But I was just thinking, well, as we move forward and, you know, we're, we're going to have this endemic You know, SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, uh, we'll probably have it, you know, revisit us once a year or so. Um, we're gonna have other viruses come up. We're gonna have other, you know, immune challenges that go on. Let's take today and, uh, talk about what can we do to live at a maximal healthy level. And so that was really the goal for today, and I want to, I want to kind of break it up into 6 different parts. And again, if you're listening live or you're live streaming this or you're on CTR Radio, I will have these links that I'm telling you about, and we'll put them up in the description area on, on YouTube when we put it up on YouTube later today or tomorrow. Now, On YouTube, because I've had— excuse me— people ask this, um, where do you find these links? Well, if you're on your phone, your device, on the lower right corner, right below the video, there's a little chevron that points down. It's like the tip of an arrow. Click on that, it'll open the description box. If you're on your laptop, your computer, or some larger device, It'll be over on the left-hand side and it'll say show more. And you click on the show more, which doesn't look like a link. If you click on show more, it'll open up the notes and the links that we talk about will be there. So wanted to get— and these don't go in any particular order, but they're all important areas of keeping and staying healthy. And so I wanted to just start out, no particular order, with sleep. Because a lot of times, you know, we'll have information about, you know, diet or maybe exercise or, you know, supplementation or other things that we can do or preventive medicine strategies, et cetera. All of those are really, really good. But sometimes we overlook the overwhelming benefits that sleep and our sleep-wake cycle give us. So the first thing I wanted to just mention is that we have to be— well, we don't have to be, but I want to be, as I talk to you here on the program, realistic about what can be done. There are times when we have more opportunity and availability to sleep. There are times where you're caring for young children, or maybe you've got an ill family member, or some other thing happens in your world, and, um, you know, sleep is what you can get. So the first rule of all of these things is start where you're at, do the best that you can do. But if you have a window where you can get 6 to 8 hours of, uh, the best sleep you can get, and again, if you If you have young children— so with our family, we've had 5 children, 7 grandchildren, so we're accustomed to the not sleeping because of the smaller people, um, or when they become teenagers, not sleeping for other reasons— you do the best that you can. But if you look at the way that the body is set up and the circadian rhythm that you hear about, There are a couple of interrelationships between the outer world and the brain and the circadian rhythm. And the circadian rhythm essentially is just, you know, when does my brain wake up, ergo, when do I wake up, and when do I start to get sleepy at night and go to sleep? So in the morning, what happens somewhere between 4 AM and 8 AM, the brain, through parts of the lower central brain, start to send out signals, and the adrenal glands start to put out corticoids. So like cortisol, you think of the primary steroid. Now cortisol is part of what wakes your brain up in the morning. So if you look at cortisol, it's truly circadian. It's high in the morning and it's low at night. So you're running off your morning cortisol for quite a while. Now, cortisol rising in the morning will wake the brain up. And if your doctor ever gave you steroids, you know, like prednisone or something, for, you know, you swell up a joint or maybe after surgery or something, you might have noticed that they warned you that it might disturb your sleep. Well, that's because if you're on a therapeutic dose of a steroid, your brain thinks it's maybe morning all the time. So that's why that happens. Well, your internal corticoids coming out and swimming around in the morning wake up your brain and wake you up. Now, there's other things then that take over that feed into your wakefulness and energy and all of that. But that's the beginning of it. So you can run that system down and your cortisol can be too low in the morning, which you can get tested. And that can be a reason, part reason why you don't get into a good sleep-wake pattern. So if you're truly having trouble and you feel like you're doing all the sleep hygiene and other stuff that we're going to talk about, and Either you just never feel any different between morning and evening, or you're tired all day, or you get flipped around where you're tired in the morning but your brain wakes up at night. There are particular tests that can be done to check the cortisol rhythm. Now, if it's just a morning test, you can check your cortisol in a blood test when you get your other blood tests done. That's very helpful. But if you're flipped around where the nighttime is higher and you, you're concerned that maybe your cortisol is is pumping out at night. What we usually do is an adrenal stress index type of a test, and that's where they send you home with little tubes and you put saliva in it. Saliva has been used to test corticoids for decades and decades, and you get 4 samples. So morning, noon, mid-afternoon, and evening. And it should look like a slide where it's high in the morning and goes down. But in some people, it gets flipped around. That can happen with working at night. It can happen with stress. It happens a lot with, again, parents, children, where they're stressed at night and getting up and all that. So that's possible. But normally, the cortisol wakes you up in the morning. And then at night, what happens is your eyes— remember I said there's external stimuli that kind of tell us when this stuff's going on. Your eyes have a non-visual neurological pathway And it's called the retinohypothalamic pathway. So retino for the retina in your eye, hypothalamic for the place in your diencephalon, kind of in the middle of your brain, that controls a lot of hormonal output, etc. I actually had the great honor of working with one of the discoverers of that pathway. So that pathway has not been known for that long, you know, under 50 years, and this particular doctor that I worked with was one of the discoverers of the pathway. And so he was quite a lot of fun to talk to. What does it do? Well, it's non-visual. It means it doesn't give you any visual perception like what your eyeballs are normally doing. It's sensing how much light is coming into your eyes. And instead of going to the occipital area of your brain like vision does, this goes to the center of your brain. And as the light starts to drop at night, another hormone to oppose cortisol is pumped out, and that's melatonin. So cortisol is the morning hormone and melatonin is the go-to-sleep hormone. Now, a lot of people confuse melatonin with a, you know, keep-you-asleep hormone. It basically initiates sleep. So there's a drug called Remelaton which is basically high-tech melatonin. It's patented, but it's used for what? Circadian rhythm dysfunction, travel to other time zones, etc. So they have you take it in the evening when your brain should be going to sleep. Now, you can also take melatonin that way, but ideally, you should get your brain making its own melatonin if it can. So one of the reasons in sleep hygiene where they tell you, you know, we got all these lights here and all that, so they tell you to disengage from your screens and your phone and everything is beaming light into your eyes and go into a dark room to try and sleep, et cetera. There's a neurohormonal reason for that. And that is to downregulate the activity from the retinohypothalamic pathway so that the melatonin actually gets produced. And melatonin makes you feel sleepy. And then other neurochemistry takes over to help you sleep. So that is the regular circadian rhythm. Now, that obviously can be thrown off by stress. If you're under physical or pathological stress, you just had surgery, or you're sick with an infection or whatever, you can actually pump out too much cortisol. And so you won't— You can have too much light around you in the evening, that can throw off the melatonin and the other, you know, sleepy chemicals. So just things to consider. Now, in the links, and again, these will be on YouTube in the description box, I have some links to some guidelines on sleep hygiene. You can also just look it up if you want to. But we have some really, you know, positive things that can be done. Now, can you, you know, do a lot of people take sleeping pills? Certainly. Ideally, if you can live your life and need as few of those as possible, it's better because a lot of drugs that put you to sleep make you unconscious, but they don't make you have a really good quality of sleep. So yes, if you have stopped sleeping and you need to pharmacologically or herbally or whatever make yourself go to sleep, fine. But the goal long-term would be sleep normally. Now, how does this relate to my overall health? Well, Most of us know that if we get run down and we don't sleep, we're more likely to get sick. It has a direct effect on our immune system. It has a direct effect on our mental and emotional status. And sleep-wake has a direct effect on a number of other things. So I think you kind of get the point there. The next area I wanted to talk about that I talk a lot about, like when I do the little short TikTok videos. I will often do this because usually, you know, I'll do a lot of those while I'm out on my exercise hiking and stuff like that. But we'll talk about muscle and movement in your body. So, I mean, obviously, if you're not moving and your muscles aren't doing anything, your metabolism is going to shift in not a very good direction. Now, again, movement and then extension of movement called exercise, if you will, is relative to what you can do. So just like sleep, you want to start with what's possible for you in the world of movement. So what we working with chronically ill people, people with cancer, etc., remember that we talk about recovery after maybe surgery or a lot of medications, chemotherapy, etc., or a long illness or recovery when you go into remission with cancer. A lot of times those people are not in really great shape because of all the medical intervention that's they've had. And so they feel really, you know, down. They, they don't really feel like doing much, etc. Uh, or you could take the example of if you get the flu or if you've recently had COVID, you know, you, you're not real zippy. You don't feel like just going out and, you know, running foot races and starting to do resistance exercise. Some people do, but most people don't. So you have to start with what your physical capacity is. So like I always say, you know, don't take medical advice from people on, uh, video platforms like YouTube or TikTok. You can get ideas and then, you know, run this by your doctor. Because as I talk about, I am a doctor, but I'm not your doctor. So just, you know, you take these as good ideas, filter them, you know, look up the links I give you and then filter that through your healthcare providers. But the first thing is, you know, if you have, say, a cardiac problem, you know, or some other, you know, orthopedic problem, you may have limitations that you have to work within, uh, you know, such as being, you know, considerate of how much you're pushing your joints or your heart, etc. So you do want to, you know, have some guidance there. But the bottom line is that movement and the ability for your, you know, core muscles in your body to move and do their work is associated with not only better health but actually longer life, even in some chronic illnesses. And I have some really nice, um, uh, links to some articles around this, you know. And, and certainly when I put the links in, these are example articles I'm giving you. I've had people, you know, comment and, you know, say— I mean, people on, uh, you know, people on social media, YouTube, etc. are prone to commenting really wonderful things, but also really, you know, stupid or trolly kind of things. You know, some people say, well, that's not the best paper to look at for that, or that doesn't say this, or what, you know. Yeah, okay, give me a break. I'm just giving you— So when you're thinking about it though, movement and then exercises is part of what we do. And so what I would tell people, because we would literally have patients who hadn't been out of a hospital bed, and, you know, they get home and they're in recovery from, say, you know, a lot of chemo or surgery and radiation or chemo or whatever, or some other, you know, medical issue. And they would say, well, I'm at home and, you know, I'm— I don't feel like doing anything, but I know I need to kind of get my strength back. So we would look at, okay, what can you do? Now, I've had people who are bedbound and what they can do, and usually the physical therapist will work on this with you in the hospital, is you could do resistive things in your hospital bed if you needed to, like resistance bands or something. You also, if you are able to get up, I've had people literally say, all I do is, you know, I'm in my bed recovering. I take my meals in my bed, but I do get up to use the bathroom. So I'll say, well, okay, about how many trips to the bathroom do you do? And they're doing, you know, 3, 4, 5 trips to the bathroom during the day. I'll say, you know, just, okay, we'll start with, you know, your 4 normal trips and we'll add one more trip on where you don't need to go to the bathroom, but you just sort of make a loop. Okay, that could be with their walker, or if they're fully ambulatory on their own, whatever it is. And they'll say, well, does that really make any difference? And the answer is yes. Anything you do to incrementally add on movement is critically important. And so then you think, well, why is it so critically important? Well, it's critically important because Muscle and muscle metabolism actually is very pro-healing. It is also very pro-recovery. And as you will see in some of the, you know, muscle as medicine sort of papers that I list there, it's actually associated with— so the, you know, more muscle mass and muscle activity associated with longer survival, even in cancer. One of the things to consider is if you truly can live longer with an advanced cancer simply by improving your muscle metabolism and your muscle mass, what could it do if you don't have cancer? The answer is it's also associated with longer life, better quality of life, etc. Now, I've talked about this on other programs before, but one of the other concepts is when the muscles are working and metabolizing, they are doing different things biochemically than when fat is working and metabolizing. And so then you start to think, oh, okay, well, why would, you know, one be good and one be bad? Well, you know, we have naturally fat in our bodies as a storage vehicle for energy and, you know, other various things. So it's not like fat is, you know, evil. But if we're very sedentary, the fat in our body obviously will either expand or get a little more metabolically active. And when we're sedentary, our muscles get less active, meaning there's less muscle metabolism. So if you put a scale there and you have fat and fat metabolism on one side, muscle and muscle metabolism on the other side, you always want to be tipping the scales in the direction of muscle metabolism because fat metabolism and all the chemistry and the hormonal stuff that goes on with fat metabolism, the fat side of the metabolic scale is associated with more inflammation, More disease, shorter life, worse quality of life, etc. So you always want to be getting the muscles working. That's why we say, you know, even if you, you know, what you can do today is one more trip around your living room, uh, great. You know, it's better than not doing it. I've had people where they're like, well, you know, um, I can go up and down the stairs one more time. I can walk around my house. The idea is that you're just going to do progressively more as you go along. Now, I've also had people, you know, had chronic illness or cancer or something, and they were a pretty, you know, active athletic type person, and their goal was to kind of get back to where they were before. That's a little easier to do if, you know, before your illness you're very active and athletic, but they still had to kind of crawl out of the hole. You have to kind of do What we call graded exercise tolerance, where you wear yourself out. You don't want to hurt yourself, et cetera, which is why you should work with somebody on this. But you do want to do a little bit more every day. Now, the other thing, as I say about everything, is, you know, you have to meet yourself where you are, or you and your healthcare person need to meet where you are. So you wouldn't take someone who's not been very active And now they're starting to recover from something or they're trying to get over something and have them start running, you know, or have them start doing big heavy resistance weights. All it takes is getting your core muscles working. Nice thing is the bigger the muscle, the better. So the muscles that operate your legs and your hips, biggest ones you have, get those, get those working standing up and sitting down, starting to walk. Et cetera. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't take anything really elaborate to do that. So sleep, we talked about movement, we talked about, and it's, you know, start where you're at, et cetera. The next thing, which I think is a core tenet in getting healthy, staying healthy, is what you're eating. And you Probably knew this one was coming because, you know, they say you are what you eat. Well, you know, in a sense, all of your molecules for the most part come from what you eat. So you truly are. Now, there's a number of things around eating that I think are important to consider. So one is what you're putting in your mouth and what you're eating and drinking. That's more our diet. The other is the amount of time that you're eating during the day. There's a couple of moving parts here. Now, one I've talked about before in regard to less likelihood of cancer recurrence, good promising looking data as far as quality of life and all that is intermittent fasting. And this essentially, you know, people say fasting, you think you have to, you know, go on a mountain and stare at the sun and, you know, not eat for a long time. But it turns out to start to get benefits from this somewhere around 13 hours, so 12 to 14 hours. But about 13 hours in studies with women who had survived breast cancer, Where they didn't change anything about their diet. They ate the same diet that they always did. They just took a 13-hour window when they didn't eat. They drank water but no food. And a third of those women who did that— they are— no, the women who did this 13-hour break in eating were a third more likely to survive longer, so longer survival. Now, if you think about it and you're asleep for, say, 8 hours, that only leaves you 5 hours where you have to worry about, you know, just drinking water and not eating. And then if you take and you cut your eating off at dinner time, you know, and then you again drink all the water you want, if you cut your eating off at dinner time, you know, that's going to give you another 2, 3, maybe 4 hours. And then You can delay your morning feeding or eating by a little bit, and that'll, that'll catch up to the total 13 hours. Even 12 is probably beneficial, but there's a lot of things that go on when we have time-restricted eating. And if again, you just stop eating at dinner, drink water between then and bedtime, when you wake up in the morning, drink lots of water until you hit to the 12 or 13-hour mark, your body is going to have a turn on a process. called autophagy, where it's a self-cleaning sort of process, a cell regeneration. It's going to do all sorts of good stuff. So that's one thing. So timing of eating is one thing. Then there's what you eat. Now, there are literally as many diets and ideas about what you eat as there are probably people with ideas about diets. And I don't often promote, you know, one particular dietary approach specifically unless it's a therapeutic diet. So in our, you know, for example, in our cancer or chronically ill patient population, we may talk to them about the benefits of something that gets what I call get the metabolism's attention. And so in cancer, a lot of times, because we're trying to manipulate the energy load on the, you know, normal cells versus cancer cells at the mitochondria and other things, we may prescribe a, you know, ketogenic diet for a cancer patient when they're doing a metabolic therapy. Or we might prescribe, you know, we've had patients say, well, you know, I intellectually get— I can get my head around the ketogenic diet, but there's no way I'm going to do it. I will not eat that way. And it's not the way it works for me. Even though there are non-animal ways that you can do ketogenic diets. But again, you have to do what you will do and what you can do. So we've had people where we have done intermittent fasting, but also then had them— they were more They wanted to be more towards, say, you know, a high plant diet, etc. So what we did is we had them start out with, you know, a high plant, kind of a raw food diet for a week to 2 weeks to kind of get the body's attention with some time-restricted eating, and then move them over to what we call a modified Mediterranean diet. Now you'll see in the links when you get there, and again, the links are going to be in the description box on YouTube. If you're on your phone, the little arrow to find the description box is right below the video on the right. If you're on your computer, it's the Show More tab on the left, right below the video. But what I did is I put in there things about the Mediterranean diet because it is the most studied diet for health. Now remember what we've talked about before, just because something has the most data doesn't mean it's the best, it just means it's the most studied. But an important thing about the Mediterranean diet is it's a range of eating and it's also associated with some of the better health outcomes when we do look at diet and health outcome. In a cancer patient, we would do a modification of the Mediterranean diet that would lower some of the simple carbohydrates or remove them. We would look at the types of fat they were getting, etc. So, but if you look at Mediterranean diet, you know, there's some of the links in there that will say, well, maybe it's, you know, not so much the diet itself, but it's the way of eating. And there's other things. Then there's, you know, maybe, you know, it's splitting hairs a little bit, but is the glycemic index and Mediterranean diet, are they connected? And really what you come up with is whatever way you're eating, the glycemic index of the foods is essentially an index for how much insulin— you know, obviously it's sugar, but it's how much insulin is that going to trigger. If we go back to that balance thing between fat metabolism being associated with disease and muscle metabolism being associated with health, longevity, etc., the more insulinogenic or the higher glycemic index that your diet is, the more trouble you're going to have long-term because that's feeding into the fat insulin side of the metabolic equation. So one of the things, if you do it, you know, well, is the Mediterranean diet focuses on a lot of, you know, reasonably high-density protein and fats, a lot of plants, and, you know, lower amount of high-glycemic sort of foods. So you're getting less insulin, you know, triggering. If we have people who are really ill and/or, you know, with cancer, etc., What we will do to modify it is take out the simple carbohydrates so they're even less insulinogenic. But again, you can, you know, take a look at that and see on those links, and you can modify it to the way that you like to eat, etc. You know, there are some people who don't want to eat any meat. Yeah. There's some people who prefer to just do fish and then, you know, vegetables and things. There's some people that are a little more omnivorous. A lot of it is what choices you make within there. Okay. Now, the next sort of area I want to talk about in getting or staying healthy is mind-body connection. And, you know, a lot of people will look and say, oh well, if it can— this woo-woo and all this stuff. And actually, there's a very large body of science showing that, you know, not only physically is our, our mind and our body connected, uh, but our, our mind and our neurological system that makes up our mind and our consciousness is intimately related to our health and our ability to stay healthy. So the core concept around mind-body action is empowerment. Now, empowerment can be described in a number of ways, but empowerment is essentially your ability, regardless of the circumstances that you are in— because we all have circumstances we do and don't like— your ability, regardless of that, to feel in control of yourself, your situation, your body, and your choices. Now, you may not have much outside of that, but your control over your perception is very important, and that's where empowerment starts. Now, if you are in a position where you make all of your own decisions and nobody is enforcing any rules on you that, you know, you don't agree to, then you can be not only empowered in your response, but you can be empowered in your actions and outcome too. Some people have a little more control around their life, or they're in living situations where there's you know, compromises and things that need to be made, or they don't have complete control around, you know, how, uh, you know, what goes on at work or all of that. But you still have control over your perception and your response to those things that are happening around you that affect you. And that's really where empowerment starts. And why is this important? It goes back to a lot of the research that shows that, you know, we will, you know, say, you know, or you'll read, well, stress kills and all of this. Well, there's different kinds of stress, and your perception of how the stressor is affecting you is the most critical factor in how that stress gets into you and either poisons you or doesn't. And so while there are certain extreme physical stressors, you know, if you starve somebody, or if, you know, you're extremely physically abusive, or there's other, you know, physical stressors, those are things that while you're in your mind, you might be able to say, I can control the way I think about this physically. They will take a toll on you. But then there's other stressors which your brain and your nervous system actually don't know the difference between, you know, someone imprisoning you or torturing you and all the other stressors. There are stressors that we can either magnify or objectify. And if we allow all the stressors to come in and we feel we have no control over those stressors, That is often what is associated with bad outcomes physically and illness. Whereas if we know, you know, or don't know, but we're dealing with stressors and we can objectify them to the point that I can control these things over here and I'm going to stop participating in those stressors, and these things over here, maybe you got a jerk for a boss or whatever else going on. These things I can do a little bit about, but I'm going to objectify how much I allow that to impact me. Okay, and there's going to be a minority of things left over that are truly out of your control 100%. Now, you know, the things like a jerk of a boss or whatever may be only in your control a certain amount, but your response to it is still in your control. So the response and the level of empowerment that you have leads to how much or little the stressors in your life are actually going to create trouble for you. There's a lot of ways to kind of deal with these, you know, things like stress and empowerment and all of that stuff. And I put in a link— there's a couple of links there, I think 2 main links. One is actually self-referential. It's to my book that's over my shoulder here, Cancer: The Journey from Diagnosis to Empowerment, which is all about this in real-life examples and steps and people who are diagnosed with cancer, which is one of the worst, you know, physical events, physical, mental, emotional events that can happen because you can't get away from the diagnosis. So that book goes through, you know, why is this empowerment helpful to me physically and mentally and emotionally, and what do I do to, you know, move over to empowerment. So something I always tell people is, if you start— it's just like with diet. If you're starting out with your diet and your diet is a mess, then Do what you can to get it not a mess. Okay, you're starting out and your diet is 90% online, work on the 10%. Okay, it's the same with stress and empowerment. If you're starting out and you are always feeling victimized and you're always feeling under the thumb of the world and everything else, You can't go from that to being a fully empowered person usually overnight. You have to start to work on your levels of empowerment, which is very, very difficult. And just like changing your diet or starting to, you know, do movement and exercise is very difficult. Okay. So the way that, you know, one way to work on this is to use external triggers and stimuli to help retrain your brain. Because just like if you've been very sedentary and then you're going to go out, you're going to do a little bit more exercise every week, your body's going to fight you back and say, why are you doing this? This is a dumb idea. Because your body doesn't like that change. Well, same thing if you go and you say, yeah, I agree. I have no control over these few things. I have somewhere between 10% and 50% control over this group of things. And then I have complete control over these things as far as my perception of stress, etc. But I don't know what to do about it. Your brain is going to have to be retrained to think of these things as, I am an empowered being, I am in control of what I can be in control of, and I am not going to allow the, the negativity and the stress to penetrate me, uh, in my brain and in my mind and my, you know, spirit, or whatever way you like to look at that. Now, there's a zillion ways to do this, but what is most important is, just like with exercise, you don't change the pattern immediately. It takes a long time, sometimes shorter, sometimes longer. So I personally have found, you know, if you, if you have a centering practice— a lot of people, you know, do mindfulness or learn how to do mindfulness. can be really helpful. If you, uh, have a particular, uh, spiritual practice that you do, um, you know, whether it's yoga and meditation or certain types of other meditation or a spiritual practice that's unique to you, that can be very helpful. Sometimes you need some help with that, but also the getting positive input. So, you know, one of the things that I've had people do, because I found it to be quite helpful, is, you know, during the time that they're trying to get more movement in, or during some quiet time, listening to people who help you with empowerment around, uh, you know, your mental-emotional self and the way to look at things and all that. And with, you know, with podcasts and YouTube and all this other stuff that we have. Yeah, there's a lot of junk out there, but there's also a lot of people with really good messages. And you find it's just like diet, just like exercise. You find what works for you. What do you resonate with? And it's usually different people, you know, but there'll be groups of people you resonate with. And then you listen to them, and every day, just like Making a decision to go exercise a little bit or something is a choice that you force yourself into in the beginning. You know, every day you get some of this sort of positive mind-changing stuff going, and it really is quite useful. Um, I know that there's a number of things that I would have never been able to flip the switches in the mind-body area of my life without some external positive input. Now, some people, if you really like to read, you might say, I don't like podcasts, but, uh, well, there's a lot of books that help out with this too, or videos or whatever else. Okay, so on the mind-body side, you know, really important things. Uh, I did put in a, um, a really nice summary. I know a lot of times I post things that are more Like the scientific articles, but this was a review by, I believe, a psychiatrist who wrote it, and they had some bullet points. So they said, you know, physical and mental health have an undeniable relationship, but it's up to you to make it a positive one instead of a negative one. And they had a couple of main tips: exercise regularly to reduce depression, anxiety. The more you move your body, the lower your depression, anxiety will go. Make sure to get enough sleep every night. We already covered that. Uh, get outside when you can to combat depression. Now, one of the things, uh, so I'm in Seattle, Washington. You may, if you don't live here, you may have heard it's, it's sort of a moist place. It's wet. Um, it's not always the most fun to go outside in Seattle, but what I have sort of trained myself to do is to bundle up to the degree necessary and Go out for at least a little bit of time, and that actually does help quite a bit. Um, eat as nutritious and balanced a diet as possible. And again, if you're doing, you know, modified med or one of the therapeutic diets or whatever, or just a low glycemic diet, that's going to fill that bill. And then they ended with, you know, don't hesitate to talk to a therapist. So if you're really stuck, you know, especially if you've been, you know, chronically ill, it's You know, people who are chronically ill, people with cancer, or just people who have never really felt empowered in their life, the presence of an outside voice that's trained and can help you is invaluable. So yes, you know, the online resources and books and videos and stuff like that are wonderful. But, you know, if you're feeling really shoved up against the wall and you need some coping skills, sometimes a one-to-one person, you know, in modern times it might be on Zoom or it might be live, is very, very important. The next area that I want to talk about was prevention. So what does that mean? Prevention, the cornerstones of prevention are what we've talked about: appropriate sleep, appropriate circadian rhythm, eating appropriately, moving your body, more muscle, less fat activity, working on the mind-body connection and empowerment, etc. And then you've got things, you know, like screening exams and stuff like that. Now, I, I put it in here from American Academy of Family Practice because it's kind of interesting. And you might look this up and say, well, I'm not over 65. So this doesn't apply to me. But the reason I picked this, you know, causes of death over 65 is not to be a downer, but it's to look at, okay, well, if we're really trying to prevent things in the future, let's say you're 35 or 45 or 55, why not look at what gets most of us when we get past 65? And there's an interesting thing. And the reason I chose this paper is it has leading causes of death and then actual causes of death. And some of that is semantic, but it goes to how do we divide these things up. Now, the big 3, as you know, causes of death are heart disease, cancer, and then cerebrovascular disease, strokes for the most part. So brain problems. Okay. Those are the big 3. But if you look at people 65+ who died, the largest majority, 18%, is tobacco use. The next largest at 15% is poor diet and physical inactivity, 2 of the things we talked about. Then you go all the way down to 3% for alcohol consumption. So the majority of death is caused by either things— tobacco use or physical inactivity and poor diet. Okay, then you're going to have single digits. So alcohol consumption, 3%, flu, pneumonia, etc., 3%. Toxic agents, uh, 2%. So let's be like air pollution, radon, stuff like that. Uh, motor vehicle crashes, 2%. Guns, 1%. And then everything else is pretty tiny. Now I say that to look at actual causes of death, uh, statistically, to say there's a lot that you have things you can do because I've done the thing where people say, okay, heart disease, I, I get it. I can, you know, that's a lot about diet and exercise, a little bit about genetics, etc. Um, you know, cancer, some, you know, preventable, some not. There's a lot of disagreement in the research, but, you know, they, they say up to 50% at least could be prevented by diet and lifestyle. Strokes, maybe same thing. But, you know, there's a lot that I can't control there. But then if you look and you take the majority of reasons people die after 65 are 100% in your control, which would be tobacco and then diet and physical activity, all those things that we talked about earlier. So sleep, movement and exercise, how you eat, the mind-body connection. All very important. And then I wanted to end with the thing that most people, because we're humans and we have human nature, think of first when it comes to prevention and living healthier and getting healthy. And that is the very important world of, you know, vitamins, minerals, nutritional supplements, stuff like that. I put them last because they should be the cherry on top and not the thing driving you forward in your, uh, your bid to, you know, get healthy, stay healthy. We use them therapeutically in people when they're really sick to help the process to move them forward. But there's an old saying that I know I've said for 30 years in classes and other people picked up on, and it's, you can't out-supplement a shitty diet. Okay? And that is very true. Now, you might do it for a while just because, you know, you're doing what you can, but the supplements should be on top of all this other stuff you're doing. So sleep, diet, and exercise, all the stuff we talked about. So we've done whole programs on these. If you go on my website, dranow.com, D-R-A-N-O-W, So D-R-A-N-O-W, dranow.com. There's links, there's some newsletters up there. I'm really shifting more towards video form newsletters, but there's newsletters up there about supplements and health and all this other business. But some of the things to keep in mind are you've got fat and water-soluble vitamins. My advice to most people is actually that they, you know, if you're going to take a lot of vitamins or herbs or whatever, work with somebody who does that. Not just, you know, you can ask your general practitioner, your primary care doctor, but unless they're trained in that or they do it, you know, you're not going to get a lot of really great advice. And that's not a slam on your GP. Yeah. It's just not part of their training. So one thing that's fairly safe to do, and I'm sure the people who make these things would love, is the, you know, the multivitamins for men, women, and children. Now we have different types. Pretty safe bet. Okay. Some people who are really feeling tired will, you know, take a multivitamin and a B complex to add some B vitamins in there. If you're going to start taking the fat-soluble vitamins in any high amount, those are A, D, E, and K. You really want to work with somebody, you know, who's going to measure your vitamin D levels periodically, stuff like that, because the fat-soluble ones stay in our body. Water-soluble ones go right through. The other fat-soluble things though that some people will look into, and again, this is not medical advice, this is just ideas. take them to your healthcare folks. But phospholipids like phosphatidylcholine— in the olden days, we give people lecithin, which has phospholipids in it, phosphatidylserine, phosphatidylcholine— very good for the nervous system and the cell membranes, etc. You've heard of fish oil or omega-3s, other omega oils. And then some people do well with, you know, amino acid supplements, etc. The bottom line with supplements is you want the supplements to augment everything else you're doing or fill in a hole that you just can't get in your diet. You don't want the supplements to drive the health bus. So while they're extremely important, I prescribe a lot of them, etc., they should be, again, the end of the story. Now, if you're really feeling crappy, they can be great to help you out of the hole. But remember, the big areas of getting a sleep cycle, getting moving, doing a little exercise, how you eat, mind-body, uh, and then preventive things all go together, and the supplements then just sort of push you over the edge. But we are about to get the electronic hook. We got to get off the air. Uh, in just a little bit here. And so this is Dr. Paul Anderson for Medicine and Health with Dr. Anderson. Today we've been talking about getting healthy and staying healthy. Uh, if you are watching us on YouTube, please like, share, and subscribe. If you're on a PodBurner, please subscribe there. If you're on CTR Radio Network, uh, that's my home. That's where it's all being recorded. Uh, tell your friends and you can log on there and get all sorts of other good programs. Okay, that's enough for one day. I will see you all on the radio next week.
