How to live longer (w/ Keith Diaz)

How to Be a Better Human

Host Chris Duffy sits down with exercise scientist Keith Diaz to discuss the physiological dangers of sedentary lifestyles and how to combat

Key takeaways

• Keith Diaz's research indicates that a 1-5 minute walking break every 30 to 60 minutes can offset many harms of sitting.
• Walking at a slow pace of two miles per hour was shown to reduce blood sugar levels by 60%.

Main topics

• Risks of sedentary lifestyles
• Physiology of muscle activation

Notable quotes

Your muscles are sponges for blood sugar.

Conclusion

Small, consistent movements integrated into daily routines are a power

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Hi there, Better Human listeners. Really quick before we get to our episode, you would be doing me a huge favor and really helping out our show if you could take a moment to fill out our listener survey at bit.ly slash bhsurvey6. That's bit.ly slash bhsurvey6. You can also find a link that you can just click directly on, which is in our show description. Wherever you're listening to this, look at the episode description and at the bottom, there's a link that you can click directly. Please tell us what is resonating with you, what you want more of, what you'd like to see changed, topics you would like to see covered. Your honest feedback means the world to us. It just takes a few seconds of your time, and it would really help us to improve the show and have future seasons be even better. Thank you. It means a lot to me and to the team that makes this show. Thanks for listening, and thanks for taking a few seconds to do the listener survey. Now, on to the episode. Speaker 3 (0:53) This is how to be a better human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. And if we want to be a better human, if I want to be a better human, I need to, at the bare minimum, continue to live. I also would like to do more than live. I would like to have some ability to do things physically. I would like to be in as little pain as possible. I'd like to have some strength and flexibility and independence. And unfortunately, none of those things just happen with me sitting around doing nothing all day. Especially as I'm starting to get older, I realized that I have to make a change. But what is it that you actually need to do? Well, today's guest, Keith Diaz, is a scientist who studies exercise, and he's going to talk to all of us and to me specifically about how we can make some small but very impactful changes that will have a dramatic improvement in our health. I picked way too heavy a weight for this introduction. I'm not even joking. I should have picked a lighter weight. That was too heavy. So I'm going to take a quick breather while you watch a clip from Keith's TED Talk. Speaker 2 (1:54) I saw this play out with my daughter recently when I had to drive her to our local library. But when we got there, the parking lot was full. So I Speaker 7 (2:02) had to park a little further away on the street, and she immediately started complaining that I had parked so far away. Now, mind you, the place I had parked may have added an additional 20 seconds of walking to her life. Not a mile. 20 seconds. But that moment hit me. movement had become an inconvenience for my daughter too. So I gave her a classic dad lecture, and this was met with a preteen eye roll. But a few days later, we were leaving a stadium, and I was taking the escalator down. As I'm going down, I see something pass by, and I look, and it's my daughter taking the regular set of stairs, happily taking the regular set of stairs, smiling at me as she goes by. It was a small victory. And if my eye-rolling preteen can make this shift on occasion, then I have hope for the rest of us. Speaker 3 (2:56) Okay, get up, shake your body, move around, but don't go anywhere because we are going to have so much more from Keith after these quick ads. Speaker 5 (3:13) Support comes from WISE, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. Your life is global. Your money should be too. Some providers promise no fees on overseas transfers. Don't be fooled. Extra costs often hide in bloated exchange rates. Choose WISE. You can send, spend and receive money in over 40 currencies. Count on the exchange rates that you'd usually see on Google. That's how millions save billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get WISE. Visit WISE.com. Speaker 6 (3:44) I'm Phelan Johnson, the host of See You in Court, and we are back with an all-new season. Our first episode is about a woman named Gwen Jacob, who, on a sweltering day in 1991, did what she had to do to cool down. She took her shirt off. She was catcalled, fined, and arrested. But she refused to back down, sparking a national debate about baring breasts. Listen to the story of Gwen's topless walk on See You in Court, on CBC Listen, and everywhere you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (4:18) And we are back. We're talking about how to take care of ourselves and stay healthy with exercise scientist Keith Diaz. Speaker 2 (4:25) My name is Keith Diaz, and I'm an exercise scientist at Columbia University, and I study how to fight back against our sedentary lifestyles. Speaker 8 (4:31) Okay, so Keith, let's talk about your fighting back against sedentary lifestyles. Let's start with why is a sedentary lifestyle a bad thing? Speaker 2 (4:40) Yeah, the science tells us that it pretty much increases our risk for every chronic disease that there is. Dementia, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, heart disease, on and on and on and on. Okay, and one Speaker 8 (4:54) of the problems with this very bad thing, sedentary lifestyles, is that it's kind of the default lifestyle nowadays for many people in North America at least, right? Speaker 2 (5:03) Yeah. I mean, we've been heading this way for decades. And look at every aspect of our lives, from how much time we spend watching TV to how many of us have sedentary jobs to how much time we spend commuting to and from places. Everywhere we go, we sit. Speaker 8 (5:16) Okay. This is obviously going to reveal a lot about me in this question, but is it better if I'm lying down? Like if I was working on my laptop, but I was fully horizontal rather than in a chair, would that be better or worse? Speaker 2 (5:29) Yes and no. Okay. So no, because you're still not moving your muscles, right? And so part of the reason why it's thought that being sedentary, not moving is so harmful is that our muscles just need regular activation and contraction. like throughout the day, not just one time for exercise. But where it could be potentially helpful is one of the reasons the sitting posture Speaker 7 (5:52) in particular is so bad is that when we sit, it's almost like taking a hose and putting a kink in that hose, Speaker 2 (5:58) right? Speaker 7 (5:58) Your blood vessels, you're putting a kink in your arteries of your blood vessels. And so what that does is it creates pooling in your legs and it creates a lot of pressure in those legs. And that's actually damaging to them. So the Speaker 2 (6:10) thought is that, yeah, if you were actually have your legs prone, That could potentially offset some of the harms of sitting, but you're still not moving. Speaker 7 (6:20) So if you're looking for an easy out. Yeah, I'm always looking for an easy out. That's why I asked this question. I suppose it's a little better than. So yeah, if you're going to be sitting on a couch, maybe prop up the leg. Okay, Speaker 8 (6:29) yeah. Like really relaxed into it. Okay, so if I don't want the easy out, I don't want to have all these clearly bad outcomes. And you've done really extensive research on how bad the outcomes of a sedentary lifestyle are. Let's talk about my specific job, right? It mostly requires I'm answering emails, I'm sitting at a computer and writing. I guess I don't have to be sitting, but I'm working on a computer and writing. I'm answering emails or I'm recording conversations with someone where I'm sitting down so that I can be at the microphone. So how can I not die? I guess I will die eventually no matter what, but how can I die later and not in a terrible way? Speaker 7 (7:06) So, I mean, the short answer is you got to move, but the good news is you don't have to. be perpetually always Speaker 2 (7:12) constantly moving. And so what we found in our studies is that probably anywhere from a one minute to a five minute walking break, every half hour to every hour can offset most of the harms of being sedentary. So I think that's the short answer is just sprinkle in periodic movement throughout your day. And that can offset a lot of it. One Speaker 8 (7:33) of the things that I found really interesting and powerful in your TED talk was you talking about how if you do take these very short even, walking breaks during your day, the benefit is not exclusively physical. Like people in your studies reported that they felt a lot better, that they felt like they enjoyed their work more, that they were less fatigued, that they had more energy when they came home. I mean, those are like not what I would expect as the benefit of taking a short walk every few minutes. Speaker 2 (8:01) No, we never set out to really study that effect. We were more interested in the physical. glucose, blood sugar, blood pressure. Those are the things we measure. We're trying to understand the physiology. That was Speaker 7 (8:12) just something kind of we measured as a secondary just to see. And as we've studied this more and more, we've realized that actually that's the most powerful effect. It's powerful in that like it's so we see it so consistently and so strongly and you can see how much of an impact that could have on somebody. But then you think about, well, if somebody's mood plummets and their fatigue builds over the course of sitting all day at their job. What are the chances when they get out of their job that they're going to go home and go to the gym or get a workout in? When you're already so spent, you're so drained, that's kind of the last thing that a lot of people want to do. So we're creating this vicious cycle. And that's what really stood out to me was like, how could we ever help change health behavior when you have this thing fighting us every day because we're just sitting in our chairs all the time? It's just creating this situation or opportunity for us to become even more. of a couch potato. What Speaker 8 (9:05) do you actually do to do this kind of study? Like, how are you measuring? You said you're looking at glucose levels, you're looking at blood sugar, you're looking at all sorts of other, I'm assuming you're taking blood and spit, or how are you actually doing the study? Speaker 2 (9:18) Yeah, the studies are really intense and huge shout out to all our participants who are willing to do this. So they come into our lab and they sit in our lab for nine hours straight. And they come in multiple times. So our first study, they came in five different times for nine hours each time. Right. So they're giving us a ton of time and they just have to sit there while we poke and prod them. And so what we, we measure their glucose levels in two ways. We give them a CGM. So one of those like wearable glucose monitors we put in their tricep, but we also put an IV in and we were taking their blood periodically throughout the visit as well. Nobody likes to have IV in for nine hours, five separate times. We're taking blood pressure constantly. We're asking them questions repeatedly. We have them do cognitive tests throughout the test. Like there's a lot that goes into, they're just not sitting there doing nothing. They're answering a ton of questions at the same time. You know, sometimes they try to squeeze in a little work here and there, but when you keep, we keep bothering them every half hour to get up and go get on the treadmill, it's hard to get some stuff done. Speaker 8 (10:14) And okay. So that get up and get on the treadmill. This is the second thing that I wanted to ask you about. This is what actually is a movement break. Like I get that it's, you're not sitting anymore and you're moving, but. In your studies and then in what you recommend, what is a movement break? In our studies, it was walking Speaker 2 (10:29) at two miles an hour on a treadmill, which, I mean, that's a stroll. That's slower than most people's typical walking pace. I think a lot of people would find Speaker 7 (10:37) it like painfully slow. But that was, we chose walking because it's just, we wanted something that people could do like in the office. Like I didn't want people sprinting up and down stairs or up and down a hallway, like something that you would do when your office closed and something that people wouldn't feel like. uncomfortable about? Like, sure, could I get you to do squats? But do you want Speaker 6 (10:56) to Speaker 7 (10:56) do squats in front of your coworkers every half hour? Walking just seems so easy. But the concept is it's about movement. So it could be squats. It could be any type of like body weight exercises that you can think of. It could be planks. It could be pushups. It could be jumping jacks. It could be just dancing, right? It's just, it's movement. We chose walking because we thought it was an easy, accessible, convenient thing for people. Everybody knows how to walk, right? But It Speaker 2 (11:22) really doesn't have to be whatever is comfortable for you. The whole idea here is to get some muscle contraction and get some movement in your life. Speaker 8 (11:29) And it seems like the answer was even just a pretty slow walk. That alone was enough to make a pretty significant impact. Speaker 2 (11:37) Yeah. Speaker 7 (11:37) Two miles an hour reduced blood sugar levels by 60%. Improved blood pressure by four to five points. And I mean, those numbers, that reduction in blood sugar is similar to what you'd see if you put someone