Biochemist Reveals The Proven Habits To REVERSE Sleep Deprivation & Reduce Cancer Risk | Dr. Rhonda Patrick

People that are in the elite level, so these are the elite athletes, they're in the top 2.3% of VO2 max, have an 80% reduction in all-cause mortality compared to people at the low end ... The elite, if you compare them to people that are like me, I have a high VO2 max my age... they still had a 20% lower all-cause mortality ... But the people with a low VO2 max, those people had a mortality that was comparable or worse to people that were smokers, had hypertension, diabetes ... It's because being sedentary, like not being physically active is a disease. It is a disease.

All of our repair processes are happening when we're sleeping, whether that's repairing damage to our DNA to prevent us from getting cancer-causing mutations... Whether we're repairing our brain, so we're cleaning out a lot of gunk that builds up in our brain throughout the day ... When we sleep, it's like we clean that all out ... It's very important for preventing the build-up of protein aggregates, like amyloid-beta, which is involved in Alzheimer's disease...

Or there's the Norwegian 4x4. This is one of the best ways to improve your VO2 max. And that is where you go 4 minutes at an intensity that's pretty high, that you can maintain and sustain for that entire 4 minutes—usually it's about 85% max heart rate—so you're going pretty hard for the entire 4 minutes, as hard as you can maintain for the entire 4 minutes, and then you rest for 3 minutes ... So you do it four times. And that is one of the best ways to improve your cardiorespiratory fitness.

What happens is after three nights of getting 1-3 hours less sleep per night is that their body isn't disposing of glucose properly. So their blood glucose levels stay elevated. On top of that, insulin, they're not making enough insulin to lower the blood glucose levels and so you get this double whammy almost looking like insulin resistant, or pre-diabetic, if you were to just look at the hard numbers ... This is just from not getting enough sleep for three nights in a row...

You can be sedentary and still be physically active. So like, I do a lot of sitting when I'm at my computer when I'm researching something, reading studies ... I sit for multiple hours, right? That is sedentary time. And that has been shown to be an independent risk factor for certain cancers.

People that do anywhere between 2 to 6 minutes of this sort of unstructured type of vigorous exercise, they have a 40% lower cancer-related mortality, 40% lower all-cause mortality, so dying from all causes, 50% lower cardiovascular related-mortality mortality. This is incredible ... Who doesn't have 6 minutes a day?

As we age, our hearts get smaller and stiffer ... So after those two years of, you know, five to six hours of pretty good, physical exercise every single week, their hearts looked 20 years younger ... So, they were 50, and if you look just at the structure of the heart, their hearts look like 30-year-olds...

There are studies that have now shown that having a low omega-3 index is like smoking ... [Bill Harris] looked at people's omega-3 levels. High would be 8%; low would be 4% ... People that were non-smokers but had a low omega-3 index had the same life expectancy as smokers with a high omega-3 index.

Studies have found that, so people with 4% omega-3 index, that's low—that's actually, people in the US, the average or omega-3 index is, like, 5%. If you take 2 grams of omega-3, so supplemental omega-3, per day for, was it like, three months or so... then you can go from a 4% omega-3 index to an 8% (high) omega-3 index. And people that have an 8% omega-3 index have a 5-year increased life expectancy compared to the people with low.

Sulforaphane activates a pathway in your body called Nrf2. That's a major, major activator of a lot of different genes in our body that get rid of toxic compounds like carcinogens...

The first question is, how much sleep do people need? ... Most people need 7-9 hours of sleep a night. However, caveat that with that, you know, those outlier people that have certain genes that make them not require quite as much—and they can actually function quite well with less than 7 hours. That's the exception not the rule.

In order to make lactate, you have to work hard; you have to be going 85% of your max heart rate, and doing that 10, 20, 30 minutes, right? The more you do it, it's a dose-dependent effect. That lactate goes into the brain.... and it increases something in the brain called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF ... It's something that increases the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus. It increases the connections between neurons .. And it also improves something called neuroplasticity. So that is the ability of your brain to adapt to a changing environment.

There's a study that came out... that showed doing ten bodyweight squats every 45 minutes throughout an 8-hourish work day was better for glucose regulation than a 30-minute walk.

And then the other thing that I think is even more important than the food is heat stress, like doing a hot tub or a sauna. If you do that pretty close to bedtime, like not necessarily right before bed but maybe a couple of hours before bed, it really seems to improve sleep...

10 minutes of high-intensity interval training can improve blood flow to the brain, it improves memory, it improves cognition. And it only took 10 minutes to do it.

I think that 10,000 steps should be replaced with 10 minutes vigorous exercise...

Lifting is hard ... It's hard, mentally ... I feel like the mental toughness I've gotten from weight training has carried over to other areas like when I'm running... or doing work like, work things, that I'm procrastinating. It becomes a little easier. It really does carry over. It really does carry over.

In fact there's been studies showing that doing those exercise snacks we were talking about, if you time them around meals... it really dramatically improves their glucose really disposal. So they're not getting that big spike ... You can do the exercise before or after, either or...

I used to think that, you know, limiting protein was probably, like, oh, you're better off being more plant-based. Now, I don't; I think exercise is the king. I think exercise is the longevity drug that, if you could pill it up, we'd all be taking it...

But then I also have some kale and blueberries in a shake together. And that also really kind of gives me a brain boost. I don't know what it is. I think it's the polyphenols in the blueberries, but I'm not alone in that ... Instead of having the caffeine mid-afternoon, I get the blueberries. And there are studies showing that improves cognition and memory across the lifespan.

The net effect is, you know, this high-intense interval training, is getting that glucose out of your bloodstream and bringing it to your muscle where you want it ... People that even do high-intensity interval training before they're sleep-deprived, they do it after they're sleep-deprived, doesn't matter, if you're doing it within a 48-hour window or so of getting less sleep, what's happening is your glucose regulation resets, right? Because you're causing that stress on your muscle to make more glucose transporters, and so glucose gets taken in better.