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Allan (04:23):
Dr. Tan, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Dr. Tan (04:25):
Hi, glad to be on.

Allan (04:28):
Now, you know, for a long time, I'm going to admit, I would read about vitamin E and it's this antioxidant that you're supposed to have. And then I'd be reading on vitamin E and it's like, well, maybe vitamin D is and all that good for you. Maybe you don't need as much as we thought you did. Maybe it isn't as good an antioxidant. Just drink red wine, and you'll be fine. You know, but in your book, The Truth About Vitamin E, you shed a lot of light on why, not only what vitamin E is, but why maybe the science, had a hard time catching on. Why vitamin E is valuable and why we may have missed it because we didn't truly understand the nature of vitamin E at the beginning.

Dr. Tan (05:14):
Yeah. I think that, you know, sometime there things that we are Hotwire in life. Just, you know, and vitamin E is one of those. The Popular vitamin E, or the one that is known for 40 50 years before is something called Tocopherol. You can see it on the cereal box and before say. Take your vitamin E Tocopherols and nothing intrinsically wrong with that. And then in the 1980s, a lot of studies were done on them. This has been, I was a young assistant professor at University of Massachusetts then, and then I was also swept in and wanted to learn more about vitamin E as an antioxidant, all these wonderful thing that it will intervene chronic conditions. So if somebody were to go online and search for vitamin E, you'll find that nothing happened to it. At the very best it didn't work. And then at worst, it may do some harm. That vitamin E could cause cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Dr. Tan (06:15):
You can look. So now the audience don't need to be alarmed. You just to feel well, why is that? So that is referring to the vitamin E Tocopherol because it's known for 50 to 70 years before, somewhere along that time, I got interested in the much, much less than known vitamin E called tocotrienol. Its a mouth full of word. Later, when you get to get a copy of the book, you can see, and then you spell out for you there. This at that time is little known, but meanwhile, that public knows vitamin E as Tocopherol. But I get fixated to study tocotrienol much less is known then. It was already known to the scientists and few scientists. So I decided to stick it on there and then study what plant material make this kind of lesser known vitamin E. And so that started my career in 1982. So it was a long time coming.

Dr. Tan (07:16):
It's no flash in the pants. So for the audience, this is just a love of my life. Wanting to pass the information on. There may be something unusual about this lesson on vitamin E. So that's the backdrop why people read and study and want to know more about Vitamin E.

Allan (07:34):
Okay. And so scientists have identified that vitamin E is an antioxidant. One of many. Tell us just a minute. What, what does an antioxidant do for us and why is it important?

Dr. Tan (07:49):
Okay. The word antioxidant before I say that vitamin E is a little bit overused, but it's a quick take for the public to understand that it protects you, that it does. Now,I'm not trying to get into the science, but just to the cartoony version of it, each of us contain 37, 38 trillion cells. That's a lot of numbers. The world population is about seven and a half billion.

Dr. Tan (08:18):
So approximately 5,000 times of population of diverse are the number of cells continue on human body. And a cell looks like a bean shaped. Its just like a cell wall, round and a bean and inside are all the constituent of the cell, like the nucleus, the mitochondria, all of these things that do good things for the body, but it had to be contained into a cell wall. And the cell wall, are fat, they are lipids, they are fat. And fat is it easiest thing to be oxidized. I'm trying to get to the word antioxidant like that. And people use the word. Antioxidant is overused. So every darn thing is an antioxidant. It is not good for the public to appreciate this. So if you asked me, I care for the things that are easiest to oxidize. If you put a stick of butter in a summer day, it'll go rancid, see.

Dr. Tan (09:14):
Even if you need to stick an uncooked piece of meat into open. When it go off after a couple of hours on a hot day, you're not smelling the protein going off in a week, you're smelling this fat going off. So then after a while, we got the gist that when you say things are oxidized, it's the fat that is oxidized. So now back to the cell wall. They are all fat. So therefore I got very interested to know. I need to know what are the antioxidants that protect the cell? Because that is the motion, not any antioxidant. About 30, 40 years ago an Austrian professor did just that. They harvested all the antioxidant on the cell wall of the fat and all of the lipid protein, the particle that float around in the blood. They also have these cell walls. So they, and then he found out that, let's say you have a hundred pieces of antioxidant in the cell wall that actually protect the lipid in the cell wall.

Dr. Tan (10:24):
More than about 90 to 95 of them. Yeah. Vitamin E molecule, the remaining five to no more than 10 are other antioxidant. There are thousands of them. So that gave me a big clue that most of the important antioxidants are protective fat. They look like vitamin E and vitamin E, now I'm reducing it down to the funnel now. Of the vitamin E we just discussed it, two groups tocopherol and tocotrienol. The difference of tocopherols. They're both antioxidant. They both catch the bad guy. You know, the difference is a tocotrienol, because the tail is a little bit shorter. It cooks, it anchors into the lipid membrane. If it goes around the cell like that. A Tocopherol goes around the cell slower figure out like five miles an hour like that a tocotrienol goes around at 50 to a hundred miles per hour.

Dr. Tan (11:30):
In other words, it brings up oxygen here to under oxidize the fat, because it spins around 50 times faster, it captures the oxygen and then annuls it. So you want oxidize the fat. Those things have published scientifically that's it. So therefore, often 90, 95% of the antioxidant vitamin E, I am now segue to the tocotrienol, because at 50 times more potent. So therefore now to the public inflammation, if somebody need to protect themself of antioxidant, first think of them protecting the fat. And the fat would be your cell wall. And the best way to protect the antioxidant should be a tocotrienol, because at 50 times more potent. Now I have a hard challenge to communicate this to the public. There's a public, mostly about tocopherol not tocotrienol. So that's, I hope that explained somewhat on that.

Allan (12:35):
It does. It does. So I think you know, we know when we start talking about the B vitamins, you know, there's B6, B12, B2 and they've got their own little names just to make it more complicated, but we tend to stick to those numbers, you know, B1, B2, B6, B12 the E vitamins also kind of have their own types as well. And there are eight of them. Do you mind going through the eight and kind of comparing and contrasting those for us.

Dr. Tan (13:04):
Since you brought up the B vitamin, the B vitamins are very complex. Where the complexity of the B vitamin is reduced to simplistic service. All B vitamin have two things. I know I'm digressing, but I hope this is useful information to your listener. The B vitamins are all water soluble. So it's not really something to use in your body, but they're all water soluble and a B vitamin chemically they're totally different. And one last thing on a, B vitamin, they all have to do with growth factor. It had to help a young and chick, a young animal to grow. So we, and then they become a B vitamin because it can help, but chemically, they are very diverse. However, in the E vitamin, sometime people call it E vitamins. They're only, they're very similar molecules. They are just tocopherol where the tail is longer, anchors less deep, and move around the cell wall slower, and tocotrienol shorter tail and it goes around the cell wall faster. Just two.

Dr. Tan (14:08):
Each one of them have four numbers on them. It's not called one, two, three, four. You have the Greek letter, alpha beta, Delta, and gamma tocopherols, alpha beta Delta, and gamma tocotrienol. If one were to do a Google search, you will find more than 90% of the research that shows vitamin E to actually work today are only two of the eight possibilities. And the two of them are Delta tocotrienol and gamma tocotrienol everything else pale, including all the Tocopherols and all the tocotrienol, except these two. Now, to share with you my excitement in the discovery from annato which is growing all over in South America, it does not grow on Argentina and Chile where you see great country growing is too cold.

Dr. Tan (15:10):
So anything from Argentina and Chile coming up North all the way to Mexico, you see this, the Spanish people call this achote, the Americans called it annato, and the British have nicknamed it, the lipstick plant because it's intense red color like that. So now we, I discovered this about 22, 23 years ago when I was in Ecuador and Peru. And I found out that this red color is intensely oxidizable. So I was surmising that there's got to be something that protect the color of going back quickly. I didn't know what it was. I thought it was a polyphenol. And surprising to me is a vitamin E molecule. And even more surprising to me, it only contained tocotrienol with no tocopherol. And most surprising to me, it only contained Delta tocotrienol and gamma tocotrienol the two of the eight that I told you that is most potent.

Dr. Tan (16:12):
So the plant know what they are doing. And I'm just fortunate to be there, spiritually to discover it. They figured it out to the evolution of time, you know, like that. So now when I discovered that this plan contained the two most potent antioxidant to protect lipid, then I said, I think I stumbled into this. And that was 22, 23 years ago. So I spent the last 20 years doing just about nothing else, but figuring out how can I show this that would help first in animal studies and then later in clinical studies that is really useful to people. That's what I've been spending most of my life.

Allan (16:58):
Okay.

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Allan (17:57):
Now, I think people can relate to the word rancid. The thought that our cell walls are getting rancid because of an oxygen molecule. One of the ways I've heard it said before, it's a little easier to understand basically the same thing as rust. Rust is an oxidation of a metal. And I think you can think that's probably good, but there's some real health benefits that we can get from an antioxidant like tocotrienol.

Dr. Tan (18:23):
Yeah. That's it. And tocotrienol now when people show picture that rubbed something on a cut apple, so to the browning will go slower. That would be an example of an oxidation that is not lipid because there's no fat in Apple. So if you put in vitamin C the vitamin C, which is ascorbic acid, you just drop a little bit on it, then it just doesn't turn Brown. Usually mothers or my wife would do this even to keep apple fresh. This is a simple way to do it. You'll put acidic acid, vinegar. That's a different process. The vinegar is a knocking off the enzyme. So the enzyme would not cause browning effect. So it's not working as an antitoxic, but it does the same job. But vitamin C would be, if you put tocotrienol on an apple, it doesn't work because it's not a lipid, a cell wall like that.

Dr. Tan (19:20):
Under rusting it is a direct oxidation on the iron. And iron from iron oxide C and then they took an oxidation. They'll all oxidation. So you go right. Those are ideas of oxidation, how easily our body can get oxidized. Because in air is about 20 to 22% oxygen. So plenty of oxygen in the air. So you can oxidize thing, but lipid. Each human body holds about 20 to 25% of lipid. That needs to be protected. And it's not like we don't need oxygen and excluded without oxygen. We die. You know, you can see this ventilator thing on a COVID thing is very clear. They need to breathe. Otherwise we died. And now with the news, let me breathe, you know, like that, is just that we need oxygen, but as we need oxygen. There are one in a thousand oxygen we reason is going to turn rogue. That rogue oxygen will oxidize your fat.

Dr. Tan (20:27):
The other 99.9% oxygen is for exchanging the carbon dioxide. All good like that. So the tocotrienol is there like a police. To capture the one in 1000 things gone bad. Otherwise there'll be a good, so that is usually fat related right? On the fat on the cell wall. And that's where tocotrienol play the best role in protecting the fat.

Allan (20:52):
Okay. And there's some definite health benefits that we can, I mean, like real health benefits, like cancer, dementia, heart disease, things like that. That this relates to.

Allan (21:04):
yeah, And on those we've done first, we did probably 10 years or more of animal study. So we're pretty confident in this area is worth studying before we put our resources against clinical study with human. So one of the earliest study we did on the cardiovascular benefit, people would have high lipids are no good meaning, high cholesterol, high triglyceride, you know, people, diabetes have high triglycerides.

Dr. Tan (21:33):
People have heart disease have high cholesterol, so we studied it. When we did. We found that in the lipid, the cholesterol typically drop about 15% and the triglyceride drop about 20%. That's good news, enough for me because I'm not on medication. I also asked that researcher that sometimes people have heart disease also caused by inflammation, distress to their body. So they study something called C reactive protein, a measurement of inflammation. And that also dropped typically about 30 to 40%. So we got that done at University of Missouri, probably about 10 years ago. Then we also study directly on inflammation, not no cardiovascular disease. And we found that C reactive protein continues to drop. So we're good with that. It helped people to lower the inflammation, the stress in your life that become biological. Usually distress is a physical one, but it translate to biological in their body.

Dr. Tan (22:38):
And it does no good to the body. And we noticed that it quenched inflammation in your body. So that part is good. Then we studied bone in postmenopausal. Women say 55 years old. We did this study in Texas. So in bone bone is organic. The growing of the bone cell is called osteoblasts, the growing cell. And the cell, the breakdown is called ostioclass. These two are in perfect balance in life. There's no such thing as just grow. And then you don't have to because the bone turn over once every 24 months like that. But as we get into menopause, the estrogen drop. Either way, Estrogen is an antioxidant. So when an estrogen drop, this is, let's say, this is the growing bone, the growing bone start to drop and to break down bone, start to increase why the breakdown increase and the growing drop. So on average, the bone is beginning to sink.

Dr. Tan (23:40):
So it's a balance on it when we gave them the vitamin E or, you know, the growing of the bone start to increase and ostioclass, that breakdown of the bone, rather than you go up is suppressed. So in other words it make the mineralization and breakdown of the bone from 55 to 65 years old dropping precipitously like that. It dropped like this over time. In other words, it cannot stop it, but it resists the bone loss. So we are very happy that that study was done and that they take about 300 milligram or so. I forgot to say in the earlier cardiovascular study, it was 200 to 500 milligrams. I'll summarize a little later. There was the second study. And the third study, I'll leave the cancer be last, the third study is fatty liver because the American diet is increasingly having more fat.

Dr. Tan (24:44):
So there's a silent disease in make the liver fatty, not a good thing. Who would have guessed 30 years ago. And people have fatty liver are people that consume too much alcohol. So to alcohol not able to be processed in the liver adequately. And the liver becomes very fatty and it causes cirrhosis. Today we see example of cirrhotic liver to a person that is non alcohol drinker. And that condition was first identified by Mayo clinic in the 1980s is called. It actually is an awkwardly long phrase is NAFLD, for non alcohol fatty liver disease. So if you want to go, go to read up, just put non alcoholic fatty liver disease, NAFLD. It was first identified in Mayo clinic in Minneapolis, in the 1980 like that. And that is simply caused by, as the phrase said, non-alcohol related and due to fatty acid, we decided to study that silent group because they had no pain, no exempt, no anything.

Dr. Tan (25:59):
Unless you do a blood test show, blood enzyme of liver, it gets stressed up like that. So we did that. We did a three month study and a six months study. So now we are, so under a three and six months study, we found that surprising to us, not intended for surprising to us that the people lost 10 pounds in three months, not as dramatic as you're exercising that you told on your story, but still it is something exciting. They did not do exercise like that. So it somehow is able to work with the body to quench the inflammation. And in six months they lost 16 pounds. So it is the time dependent like that. We, we now decided so convinced by the study, we're doing a 12 month study. We don't know the weight loss. Remember we did not design this study for weight loss.

Dr. Tan (26:54):
We actually to see, so to bring back the body back in proper shelter and therefore it beginning to work properly, the C reactive protein dropped significantly. I'm thrilled about that. They took 600 milligram like that. So in the six, in the 12 month study, we asked them to increase exercise and improve their food habits, to not, not continue to eat very high, fat food, which costs their liver damage to begin with. So that's it. The last one, probably our most dramatic study of them all with a cancer study. These cancer studies were done in Denmark. It's still ongoing and we're doing five different cancers. And the one that is published is ovarian cancer. And actually five cancer, actually six of them total, but some of them are duplicating more than the same cancer, but the four different kinds of cancer on the six studies of ovarian cancer that's published.

Dr. Tan (27:57):
And the others three, because it's four different cancers. A lung, breast, and colon cancer. And those are big types of cancer. Chronic, for sure. If you go to the state of Florida, a huge number of the elderly population have colon cancer. And of course, if they are a smoker which is not a good thing to begin with, they also exposed himself to lung cancer, much higher risks. But this ovarian cancer thing is probably related to the menopausal time is related to endometrial problems like that. But on ovarian cancer, the results publish. We started this study with stage four cancer patient. Stage four, meaning that they can say have gone everywhere. The options are not good. The doctors can not do anything, that group of people. So they have standard care that take medication that make them really sick. But if they know that it's even worse.

Dr. Tan (28:58):
So most of them after six months they are no longer living. And then the other group is taking the standard of care with the vitamin E tocotrienol. After six to six months, half of them still living. And even after 12 months continue to be after 24 months, 25% still living. I am talking about a nutritional supplement. This is nothing short of a miracle. You know, if it's a drug, it would be all over Wall Street Journal, but it isn't. So we published this, but we have great confidence. So we're down to wait for the clinical trial, for the breast, lung, and colon cancer to come out, hopefully will yield the exciting news. And these patient takes 900 milligrams, higher dose because they are at the end stage. And once we are successful with the stage four, then we will do the stage three, two, and one, you follow?

Dr. Tan (30:03):
So we did that because with stage four, you have nothing to lose. So we begin with that and we'll graduate to the one. So just so for the audience, you know, we don't have all the answers now we are providing. You know, research is like that. Easy to ask question, but results are not easy to come by. But I would take tocotrienol for the prevention of cancer. Because nobody had dodged the bullet, you know. Your DNA could go act out and then you have cancer causing. So not everything is dietary, not so days that genetic component also. So if I can ward it away by taking 300 milligrams, why not? It's a very inexpensive insurance.

Allan (30:48):
It definitely is.

Dr. Tan (30:49):
Those are the studies.

Allan (30:51):
Now in a lot of cases when you're taking a mineral, you're taking a vitamin, they'll talk about how it has a symbiotic relationship with something else. And then other times you take something and it could actually harms you from getting what you need out of something else. So taking it is not in your best interest. And so you talked in the book about when you supplement or your food stuff is pretty high in tocopherols, that that can actually be, bad for getting the tocotrienol to work the way you need. I'm going to say it wrong, right?

Dr. Tan (31:32):
No, I understand your question. You are referring to, is there anything that would be antagonistic or interfer.

Allan (31:41):
Because yeah, more of a good thing is not always a good thing.

Dr. Tan (31:44):
That is correct. I think there, let me take one step back before the show you had asked me about, if you can get something from food, let's get it from food. So I should address that. In a dietary manner in which is eating from food. We typically can get about 10 to 12 milligrams of tocopherol. If you just eat healthy food with vegetable like that, you'll get mostly tocopherol you can get from oil, vegetable oil. If you add them up and USDA have these kind of numbers, we were on a Western diet, probably 10 to 12 milligram of tocopherol. That 10 to 12 milligram of tocopherol is ducky. No problem with that. It's good. If you take supplement for tocopherol, It's a different story. People take 400 IU, 600, 1000 IU, approximate to 400, 600 to 1000 milligrams. That is not, you cannot get that from diet. You have to get it from a supplement and tocotrienol, if you eat a Western diet, typically you have about two milligram of tocotrienol, and from the citation I mentioned on this study, there are approximately about 200 to 600 milligram.

Dr. Tan (33:05):
So if you take it from food, 200 milligrams, you need approximately a hundred times more. So therefore it's not possible to get in now. So tocotrienol from the diet. So just to set the stage for that. So now on the interference and the antagonistic component, if a person takes supplemental vitamin E tocopherol then the supplemental vitamin E tocopherol would interfere with the function of tocotrienol. If you want to see the benefit of tocotrienol. So for me, because tococpherol and tocotrienol protect the cell wall equally. I mean, to protect the cell wall, but not equally, I meant, but tocotrienol protects it 50 times better. I have stopped taking tocopherol more than 20 years. If I get tocopherol from diet, which I mentioned is 10, 12 milligram of data is fine. That will not interfere.

Dr. Tan (34:08):
It's too small to interfere because I take 300 milligrams, 300 milligrams of tocotrienol 10 milligram of tocopherol no interference. But if I take 300 milligrams of tocotrienol, then I take 300 milligrams of supplement tocopherol. I have a problem because basically I, my leg, my right leg is on the gas pedal. And my left leg is on the brake petal. It's like this, but if I dietarily have 10 milligram to cough, my, my gas pedal right leg is on nothing on the left leg. So you would not interfere. So I hope I help to clarify that.

Allan (34:54):
You did, you did. We want our foot on the brake, not pushing it, and our gas peddle pushing it and that's gonna move us forward. Alright. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

Dr. Tan (35:12):
That, you know, I don't get asked that kind of question a lot, but I liked the way you, you raised that question. I thought about it a little bit. So thank you for doing it at different interview, at different slang on things. Some, some are very critically scientific, some which is a larger audience and some is holistic. I see these questions that you have, you asked healthiest, and I translate in my mind as wellness. You mentioned fitness, I translate in my mind as exercise. And then you use the word happiness. Happiness sometime can be elusive, you know, by translate in my mind, happiness as spiritual, you know, I'm in my sixties, you have things that have happiness come but they're fleeting. After a while it flies away, that's not a character of happiness. So I thought of happiness as spiritual something is intrinsic within me like that. So I think I now describe this three thing. It's not a strategy, you know, not so intentional like that.

Dr. Tan (36:20):
I think of this three as something I got into. So maybe learning to ally. So not so intentional. The first one is I just described it in my way. The first one is I moved from deleterious. People know the word, things, bad things, deleterious to nutritional, you know, if it's in life and it would be toxic to nontoxic, I, I, that the phrase is loaded somewhat, but in your, in my study in science is deleterious to a nutritional. Why do I use the word deleterious? When I was a young assistant professor, I got a lot of grant from the EPA, the environmental protection agency. So I just, I studied fish Fish of cancer all over their face, you know, it's terrible, you know, and then I study oil spill and then they have pesticide in the thing. So any good news, I can't bare bad news. I appreciate that.

Dr. Tan (37:21):
But then I said, wow, this is such a downer. But of course, if people tell me, Barrie, you better not eat that, that have a lot of lead, but man, thank you very much for telling me, you know, because I don't want you to stop. Right. So, but then I said, I don't want to spend my time bearing bad news all the time. So I don't want to say deleterious thing. I greatly appreciate people who do that and inform me about that, but I started my career and then I move on to nutritional thing. I wanted to know what makes me healthy. So then moved from that. So I went from that position then I began to be very concentrated in my scientific affairs, in wellness and healthy thing. So now my, all my scientific thinking is like that. And I think that it contributes much to my personal health.

Dr. Tan (38:11):
I have genetic hypercholesterolemia like that. So I have to watch what I eat. You know, you know, I can love, I can do many things, but a non beating heart cannot work. A non-beaing heart cannot love. So I got to take care of a few things, so I won't get into problem, you know? So that part talks about your wellness healthier. The second part is I move from moral to spiritual. It's touching on your happy component part. In early on in my life because of my parents, which I'm very grateful. They teach me that Barrie, you want to live life doing the right thing. People say like that that's important. So that galvanized me to have rules right, and wrong. Still there like that, but I move away from that. I didn't want it to be just black and white. And then I moved from moral to spiritual.

Dr. Tan (39:10):
Here I am more aware. My wife teaches me more on this than I am naturally like this, you know, hi, I egocentric doesn't help, you know, like that, but you know, I'm a homosapien, you know, I can't think away from that kind of thing, but it helped the spiritual part help me to be aware and helped me off my being. So in helping me to be aware of my being, I actually am able to focus on things that are non-matter. The first one is matter. You would take this, you don't take this. And this one is non-matter. It helps me. So spiritual being helps me and this kind of component helped me to be happy. Hard to have things that are material, making me happy. It did a little bit and then it just is fleeting, you know? Great.

Dr. Tan (40:04):
And they don't last, you know, so, and so I touched a happy component. The third one, I did not put these contextualized, but they actually fit your three things. The third one has to do with the exercise component. Today, with the advent of Google and computer, I'm tempted to sit. But of course, I started my scientific career before the advent of computers and before Google, but I also sit. Because I'll go to the library to get journal article. And then I said, all day long to read, then I said, wow, this is not good. So then now I walking. So in the last two years in particular, I should have done earlier, not a weekend warrior run like mad. I don't have that in me, but I need to be cardiovascular. If you just walk enough for 20 minutes, you'll heart will increase pulse rate.

Dr. Tan (41:05):
And my reading would increase. I want at least that I want my blood to be circulating. Of course, if I can run like the jock fantastic. But I can't, you know, my doctor said, Barrie you're in your 60s. You cannot get your heartbeat of 140. That's dangerous. Your heart will collapse. You know, you're not in your twenties. You can do that. So I watched that he, my doctor make me run on a treadmill. So when I get my heartbeat of 140, is that very, I can see not rhythm mixing happening to your heart. So you gotta make sure that you can overdo this because you're not in your twenties, you know, like that. So I always want my height to be cardiovascular and cardiovascular is not difficult to do. I just walk 20 minutes. My height will be cardiovascular like that. So I ended up right now, I'm trying to meet the challenge of resistance exercise.

Dr. Tan (41:57):
I would like to do that because they'll help me a strong, good bones built a little bit better muscle. I know that when you lost weight, you said that a portion of your weight gain is your muscle mass. I would like to do that. So I'm working on that.

Allan (42:11):
So Dr. Tan, when we get off this call, let's talk.

Dr. Tan (42:16):
Okay. So those are my three things, you know, so sorry it took a little long winded to answer that, but I'm with you on that how you address this to your audience.

Allan (42:29):
Okay. Great. Thank you. So Dr. Tan, thank you for being on 40 plus fitness. If someone wanted to learn more about, you learn more about your book, The Truth About Vitamin E and your product Delta gold, where would you like for me to send them?

Dr. Tan (42:44):
Okay. First under book, it was a labor of love. So you can get a download free copy of the book. You go on the website, my name Barrie, is B A R R I E. It is a British style of saying Barry. Barrietan.com. They would go on it. And then, because you come to this, to this show, so you can say 40 fitness and you'd be able to download a free copy. If the audience like to get the autograph hand copy you send me an email through the website, and then we'll be happy to send you a copy. Otherwise you can download it fast. So you can read it yourself as to buying the supplement. If you type online, just make sure that the tocotrienol have to work annatto. A N N A T T O two ends and two T are not tocotrienol then that's tocotrienol you're want. Not from any other sources, then you will get it. If you want specific names of company to do, to buy it from, you can buy it from Amazon, the two or three companies that I recommend you all come from our factory, like that would be Designs For Health. Designs, Plural designs for health. Nutricology, synthesizing the word, nutrition and pharmacology Nutricology they have it too. And then AC Grace capital a capital C grace as in grace to our life AC grace. So these three companies have them. And if you still have difficulty sending us an email, we will direct you. How to get, I hope to answer your questions.

Allan (44:41):
You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/440 and I'll have all the links there. Dr. Tan, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Dr. Tan (44:51):
And thank you and thanks for the audience for so patiently. Hopefully you find something useful to your application, to your health. Thank you. Have a wonderful day.

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Allan (03:44):
Kim, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Kim (03:47):
Hello. How are you?

Allan (03:48):
I'm really good. And today we're going to talk about one of my favorite things, sleep. You wrote the book, Trick Yourself to Sleep, 222 Ways to Fall and Stay Asleep from the Science of Slumber. And going through all of those 222 of them, I would say I probably knew maybe half of them. So there's a lot in this book for someone to try if they're struggling with their sleep.

Kim (04:16):
Good. I'm glad to hear that you've not heard of all of them because I think that was the whole reason I wrote the book. There's just so much out there you can do to help yourself sleep. It's not necessarily doing something just before bed. It can be doing things all through the day that can help set the scene for a perfect night's sleep. So, you know, there are a lot of things you can do. So my book, I hope people will be able to dip into, try test out a few things and find some new ways to get that perfect night's sleep

Allan (04:46):
Excellent. Now, one that I hadn't really thought of, obviously as an adult, but it's something we do with our children is rocking. Can you talk about why rocking helps us sleep, and then a couple of ways that we can incorporate rocking into our lives. You know, cause like I'm not going to get my wife to do it. I weigh a little bit too much.

Kim (05:08):
Exactly. That's the problem. I mean, it's obviously something we all do to our babies and our children when they're small enough to do it naturally, it's innate to naturally rock them to sleep, it's soothing. And you know, researchers have wanted to find out if the same sort of feelings can, the same drowsy things can be experienced by adults who rock. So a University of Geneva study. For example, they monitored people, adults who check in that rocking bed, which was like a hammock. And they found that they did in fact fall asleep faster. But what was really, really interesting was that they monitored their brain wave activity and they found that in those people who were rocking in this hammock, there was an increase in the type of brainwave activity that's associated with deep sleep. So it actually should suggest that rocking motions can synchronize your brainwave activity to that, to associate you with sleep. So how do we do it? Like you say, you're too big to be rocks by anybody. But of course there's the good old rocking chair. They are coming back into Vogue at the moment, especially with nursing mothers. There are lots of these chairs that have been sold might be able to find one an antique shop.

Allan (06:28):
Well, no, no, they actually have them. If you live in the Southeast, I think mostly they're in Southeast, it's a store called Cracker Barrel, and they have these rockers outside when they have their long waits. If someone wants to sit out in the rocker and they actually do sell those rocking chairs. So if you're anywhere near the Southeast, you're going to be able to find a rocking chair at the Cracker Barrel.

Kim (06:50):
Perfect. Well, there you go. There you go. So if you can't get hold of rocking chair, apparently now that aren't rocking beds, commercially being developed as we speak, I think in the US actually. And they are sort of as they fit onto your existing beds and they do actually have that beautiful, slow rocking motion. Again, they're quite expensive. So they might not be something we can get your hands on quite easily, but just simply rocking on your feet before bedtime can be relaxing. So it's very simple. You just, before bed, just stand with your feet about shoulder with the parts and just shift your body weight onto your heels. So that's backwards. So your toes lift off the floor and then shift your weight on to your toes so that your heels rockets the floor. And if you just continue rocking back and forth really slowly, breathing deeply as you do so you are setting that rocking motion in your body and you are hopefully then synchronizing your brainwave activity into that associated with deep sleep. And you've got the added advantage of stimulating acupressure points on your feet, which can come and relax you as well. So that's an easy way to do a rock some sort of rocking motion before bed, and then very calmly when you are finished rocking on the heels for a while and to do a stretch, then get into bed and it'll have calmed you down.

Allan (08:25):
Yeah. And that's one thing, you know, at the end of a workout, you know, a lot of times if we're doing group training or you've done any group training, they'll finish up with some stretching and it's always kind of that just that relaxing you're laying on the floor, you're stretching out. So stretching and yoga actually are protocols that could help us sleep better. Could you tell us about that?

Kim (08:46):
Yeah, absolutely. So yoga, myself I've not sort of ever been a huge yoga convert because I think before I tried it, I always thought it was difficult. You had to be really flexible, but of course that's totally not true. You can do so many yoga moves in the comfort of your own home, which are really easy and they don't require much flexibility. And when yoga moves is constantly mentioned when it comes to helping you sleep, nearly every yoga teacher I've talked to is totally, this one is the one to try. It's called legs up the wall. And it's thought to trigger your parasympathetic nervous system. That's the part of your nervous system that helps slow your heartbeat is helps you to relax and, you know, drop your blood pressures, everything down. It's really simple and you don't have to be flexible at all to do it.

Kim (09:44):
So you simply, I don't know if you know this one, but you just sit on the floor with either your left or your right hip the wall, turn your body, keeping your bottom close to the wall. Then you bring your legs up on to the wall. And don't worry too much about how much your knees are bent. If it's more comfortable, you can keep your knees bent. Cause some people don't, can't actually straighten their legs completely against the wall. You can use pillows next to the wall or under your hips to support your back. It's gotta be comfortable for you to be in this position. Basically you are laying there with your legs up against the wall for a few minutes, breathing deeply. And it's really, really thought to somehow calm the nervous system and you can do it in bed against the headboard if that's at all feasible as well.

Kim (10:33):
But that's definitely one pose, which I think you've got to try before anything, if you are going to do some yoga. And then do you want me to talk about any other poses? Like child's? Great stuff. So child's pose. If you are a yoga fan, you'll know the smell quite well, but again, it's one that is supposed to relax your body and mind very, very quickly, but you don't have to be too flexible again. And you can use lots of cushions and that kind of thing to help you. So you just get into a kneeling position. So you're sitting on your heels, their knees either together or it distance apart, whatever you feel more comfortable in and then roll the top half of your body forward. And if you can go a little forward until your forehead rests on the bed or the floor, wherever you're doing this particular exercise with your arms out stretched in front of you, that's fine.

Kim (11:32):
But if you can't get your head to rest on the floor, I know I can't, I'm not that flexible, just rest your head on a pillow. So hold the pose for as long as it's comfortable and probably for a better maximum of three minutes. And just breathe slowly as you do, you're feeling your body, feel all your muscles sort of just getting out of that position. You've been in all day and it's a nice, relaxing, but easy blend, but there are even, there's an even easier one, which I like, which is just simply dangle there like a rag doll. So again, this is one that apparently in yoga, any head below heart pose, it's called an inversion in yoga is supposed to calm and relax the nervous system. So anywhere where you're putting your head below where your heart usually is, then that thought to really, really come down.

Kim (12:32):
So again, with this one, you simply, you don't need much flexibility at all. You don't need really much strength or balance to hold the pose, but it can help release the tension and help people wind down. So if you want me to just quickly explain how it's done, you simply stand, start with your arms raised or the head, and then fold forward from your hips, reaching down towards your toes and then just hang there like a rag doll. Just as far as you can, no further, don't try to push it. Just allow all your muscles and your hair to hang heavily down and you'll feel the tension released from your shoulders. So just shake your arms loosely, back and forth, just like a ragdoll, soften your knees, if you need to. And just dangle there as long as you feel comfortable closing your eyes and breathing slowly and just letting your thoughts drift away.

Kim (13:26):
And one important thing to do as well is to let out a big sigh because research shows that the actual act of sighing while you're doing this particular exercise can relieve stress and muscle tension. So there's a real reason why we say it is actually to release all that tension. So that's a nice one to do. And if you don't want to do while you're standing up, if you feel like you just want to do it when you're sitting down, you can do that at the edge of the bed as well. Simply fall forward like a rag doll at the at the edge of the bed and just get into bed afterwards. And hopefully that will have sort of loosens you up a bit more calm and relaxed.

Allan (14:06):
Yeah. Stretching seems to always do that for me. It's just anytime I've ever done a class or whether it was yoga or just any other kind of fitness class, you get to the stretching part. And it's actually sometimes hard to not fall asleep on the floor.

Kim (14:22):
Studies really have shown that stretching does help give you better sleep. So it doesn't matter what stretches you do as long as they're not really, you're not forcing anything to hurting yourself, but yeah, you're right. They will just calm you down. And like, you know, the science shows that study showed that women actually, who did a regular stretching routine for a few months, they reported better sleep afterwards. And things like stretching your legs can help. I don't know if you suffer like cramps at all in bed or restless leg syndrome, not something that really haunts a lot of people. They can't get to sleep with it, but if you do lots of leg stretches that can help with those such problems as well. And just generally sort of opening your chest as well. You know, we've all been in that position. If you're anything like me, you spend hours on the computer every day.

Kim (15:13):
If you just open your chest before bed just means standing up straight and bringing your arms slightly behind you so that, you know, you're sort of correcting the rounded shoulders position that you might have been in all day. That's a nice one to do as well. That sort of loosens everything up because you don't want to get into bed with muscles that are tight and full of all the stress and tension that you've been living with through the day. Yes. So definitely like you say, like you do at the end of a workout, a nice stretch before bed really sort of loosens up.

Allan (15:50):
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Allan (16:44):
I'm a big fan, anything you want to change a journal is just your best friend. And you have several, you know, acts or tactics in the book that we can use a journal for. So do you mind going through a few of those and why they're valuable?

Kim (17:01):
Yeah, of course. So really important to sort of get sort of worries out of your head before you get into bed. So a really good idea is to sort of schedule a time before bed. Quite a way before bed actually, cause you don't want these things particularly on your mind. So about six o'clock schedule, 15 minutes, which is called your worry time. And that's where you sit down with a pen and paper and you write out anything that's bothering you. And then you also write out some solutions, possible solutions to the problem. So, you know, this, it could be anything from, Oh, I know there's going to be a big bill coming in and you might want to write on the possible solutions. Okay, we going to have to cut back on this or that, but it sort of frees your mind from any niggles that might be there when you go to bed and it sort of stops you from worrying in bed.

Kim (18:06):
So for example, if worry does come into mind at bedtime, you can actually say to yourself, I'm not going to worry about that now, because that'll be in my worry time tomorrow, it's scheduled for that 15 minute slot tomorrow. That's when I'll sorted out. That's when I'll worry about it. So it's sort of a way of putting your worries to bed if you like. And again, writing it to do list is really good. I mean, there's even been studies on this, where scientists have looked at a group of people who wrote out a detailed to do list. And then they looked at another group who wrote out a list of things they'd completed tasks they'd completed in the last few days. And it was actually the group who had written out their to do list before bed fell asleep quicker. And the more detailed the list they'd written, the quicker they fell asleep.

Kim (18:57):
And again, it's the whole process of offloading on paper, things that have to be done. It helps free your mind from that responsibility and stops that list from going round and round in your head when you are in bed. So that's a good thing to do. Write all your worries and write your to do list before bed. And then another nice thing to do is think of good things, break down five good things every night that happened to you in the day. So it can be simple things such as getting a text from a friend or eating a great meal, just writing down things that are good in your life or something that you're grateful for. Again, studies, scientific studies have shown that writing these sort of a gratitude journal, or even just thinking about what's good and not bad in your life can help you fall asleep faster and longer.

Kim (19:51):
So another nice reason to do that. And then keeping a sleep diary. I think you might've heard of that where you, I think you mentioned that, you know, it's a good way to find out what you're maybe doing wrong in the day that's a making you sleep badly. So in the book, I've got the details of how you can do that. You know, just buy a nice notebook. Then online, you can find really good sleep diary templates, where you can copy that section of the book and you fill in every day sort of what happened, what time you went to bed, what time you woke up, how many times in the night you might've woken. And then there's another section to put in what you ate and drank and when, and what exercise you had, whether you napped, and what you did in that hour before bed. So at the end of every week you can examine your diary for any patterns and you can see what's maybe helping or hindering your that way. So that's a nice way to sort of keep track of what you're doing and what you can make better. Yeah. So yeah, lots of ways, just sort of just writing things out on paper. I think actually I'd prefer to do it with a pen and paper myself. I think it sort of goes in better than doing anything on the computer.

Allan (21:07):
Well, one of the advantages of doing it, I mean, my to do list is on my computer. As far as the rest of it, you know, journaling on paper, you're doing this, you can do this by candlelight because we know blue light computers, screens, are not necessarily things we need to be doing that the last hour before we go to bed. So if you're sitting there and particularly one of the things you had in there was just to write down a reminder. So if you were turning out the light and get ready to go to bed, and all of a sudden it was, Oh, boom, I've got to meet someone at seven o'clock, you know, or I've got to go do this thing. I need to write myself a reminder, or I need to, you know, or you're going to stay awake all night thinking about it? So it's just, you know, your alarm is set when it needs to be set, you know, you're going to be up, but just the reminder so that, okay, I know I have to do this thing, or, you know, so just getting that off your chest. And if you, again, if you get on your computer or your phone to do that, then you're dismantling some of the things we've done with the other work we've been doing.

Kim (22:04):
Yeah, absolutely. That's right. So keep that pen and paper by the bed. Don't, whatever you do, like you say, don't pick up your phone to put it on your list because that's going to hold that light, that blue light coming from your phone is going to stop you from producing melatonin, which is your sleepy hormone. So just literally scroll on that piece of paper in the dark. I mean, it might look like a complete mess in the morning, but I'm sure you'll know what it says, but that's what you should do. Keep the lights up and just scroll. So you're giving your mind permission to forget about it. So it's not going to stop you from falling asleep.

Allan (22:39):
Yeah. Now I have this client and you know, I go through a lot of the protocols with her but she's blind. So it's obviously, you know, the red light/blue light thing is not something that she can really do. You know, we've talked about her meds, everything she's taking shouldn't be a problem. She's got her hormones pretty much in check for a woman her age and what she's gone through in life, but she still really, really struggles with sleep. And from a health and wellness perspective, it's really bringing her down. What's some advice that you would give to someone who pretty much feels like they've just about tried everything, but still struggling to fall asleep.

Kim (23:19):
Yeah. It's not nice, is it? And it happens to a lot of us. I think that the problem is sometimes we get into a vicious circle where, you know, we've had trouble with sleeping and then we walk into our bedroom. And as soon as we walk in, we associate that room with worry and sleeplessness, and it's just an awful sort of, is almost waiting to happen. You know, just know I'm not going to be able to sleep in it. It's sort of a self fulfilling really. But you know, sometimes anxiety can keep us awake. The whole thing of feeling that there's something wrong with us. Why can't we sleep? And cognitive behavioral therapy is really good helping tackle that the sort of mindset you have to sleep. And there is a particular branch of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia CVTI, which is really helpful for helping reduce that anxiety we feel.

Kim (24:15):
And it's recognizing all of that negative and exaggerated thoughts we have about sleep and then challenging them and then replacing them with more realistic, really telling us that it's normal. Everybody wakes up at certain points in the night, but we do all have the capacity to sleep. So you can actually try, you can get told of therapists who can help you with that obviously. Or you can train yourself by making sort of a thought record and that involves again, getting a nice book you feel happy writing in. And sort of writing out your thoughts and sort of what's maybe you could say the thoughts I'm having about sleep at the moment might be, you know, I'm laying in bed. I really can't sleep. Or gosh, I need 8 hours tonight, why can't I sleep? There's something wrong with me. And then you write how this all makes you feel.

Kim (25:09):
And then obviously that thought will make you feel anxious or panicky or hopeless. And then you write a more realistic, balanced version of your thoughts and where you might say something like, okay, well, it would be nice to get that solid 8 hours, but not everybody really needs 8 hours to function. Well, there's plenty of evidence that support the beliefs that, you know, people can get by on six or seven hours. So there's lots of ways to do this particular exercise, but my book does explain quite easily how to do it. And eventually if you start challenging or negative thoughts in this way, not only at night, but even through the day, if you start to recognize when you're getting into a negative thought pattern and then you try and look at it in a more sort of calm and balanced way, and then it just becomes more of a habit that you start to challenge your thoughts, and then you actually sort of stop panicking in your mind so that, you know you're actually calming down your whole nervous system by thinking in this way. You're being kind to yourself, you know, sort of all the good fit, the feel good hormones are coming out rather than the anxiety inducing hormones is switching off the adrenaline in your mind, and that all can help with falling asleep.

Kim (26:28):
In the end, it takes a little bit of practice, I've got to say, because you know, your initial thoughts when you're laying there for two hours, and you're not always likely to feel that way, but you can train your mind to be less catastrophic. If you like you can train your thoughts to veer away from that side of a feeling to a more calm and realistic side. So, you know, maybe that's something that your client could look at.

Allan (26:56):
Well, cause the, the mind/body thing is, is so, so huge in anything that you're telling yourself you know, sweats was it Ford who said, if you think you can, you can, if you think you can't you're right. You know, either way, something like something like that. Anyway, I butchered that, but you know, what we tell ourselves is typically going to be true, unless we take the time to remap the way we think about things, the way we structure it, then we're setting ourselves up. So I see that, you know, and when you're getting hormone responses and the fight or flight, just out of being in the bedroom, that's not how to start a good night's sleep.

Kim (27:41):
It's really not. And there's another section called acceptance therapy where you actually accept worrying thoughts in a way that's almost you know, you welcome them. There's a particular proponent in the UK, Dr. Guy Magis, who I interviewed him once. And he said to me, what you should do, if a worrying thought enters your mind at night, you should welcome it as if it's a friend. So you should say something like, Oh, hello, worry. Here you are again, how are you? And by welcoming this in that way, you are switching off the stress, you're, like you just said, you know, you are changing your whole mindset, your body reactions then become different. You're not under threat. So your fight or flight system is not coming on. So that's another sort of way to try and change your thoughts, sort of welcome those thoughts as you would a friend.

Allan (28:41):
Yeah. Now, as I mentioned, when we first started the show, I'm a huge fan of sleep and also a huge fan of napping when you need to nap and I'm a regular napper. But in the book you go through and I've seen this advice several times, but it doesn't really fit the way I like to nap. So, you know, as you share in the book, and many people may know a standard sleep cycle typically lasts about 90 minutes. And so there's about four or five, depending on what school of thought you want to term things, as you go through there's lite, sleep REM sleep, and then deep, deeper. But anyway, as you go through those sleep cycles, it's, you want to go through all of them. And if you're getting good sleep, that's what's happening. So for me taking a nap, I want that 90 minute nap because I go through a full sleep cycle and I wake up feeling really good.

Allan (29:32):
And if I do that early enough in the afternoon, waking up no later than say 3:30/4:00, I'm, I'm good to go. But other people may need to nap less. Can you kinda just talk about napping and you know, the shorter version, cause I've done that too, you know, like at work and you can't, they're not gonna let you lay at your desk for an hour and a half. So going out to the car and taking a quick little 20 minute snooze was what, all the time I had so I've done both, but I can tell you, they both have value.

Kim (30:05):
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, that just sort of illustrates the fact that everybody's different. Everybody needs different amounts of sleep. Everybody, you know, some people can do things during the day, like have a long nap and it doesn't interfere with nighttime sleep. Other people, you know, even if they do 5/10 minutes, that's going to interfere with heir night time. So there's no one size fits all. But the general advice is that your nap should be 10 to 20 minutes, no longer than 30 minutes. Because after that, you get into that deep stage of sleep. It's very typical to wake up from you get brain fog, you're sluggish and you know, if you can carry on and go through the whole sleep cycle, like you've done then brilliant. But like you're saying not many of us have that time during the day to do that.

Kim (30:50):
But one thing I would say is the timing of your nap is really important because between 1 and 3:00 PM in the afternoon, we experienced a small drop in our core body temperature. Now that's something that happens every night and it acts as a signal to our brain to release melatonin, our sleeping hormone. And so that drop in body temperature happens every night about 9:00 PM or when dusk falls or whenever, just sort of starts to make you feel sleepy. It also happens at this time between 1 and 3:00 PM. If you want to work with that natural depth in your body temperature and work with your body's natural circadian rhythm, then maybe 2:00 PM would be the ideal time to have that sleep. And as I say, if you just don't want to get into, if you don't want to be woken from the deep stage of your asleep, then stick to 10 to 20 minutes and definitely no longer. But yeah, it would be nice to have the 90 minute nap every day, but I don't think we've all got that luxury unfortunately.

Allan (32:02):
I just thought I hate being woken up during my deep sleep time. It just, I get angry, which is why I stopped using an alarm clock four years ago. Unless I have to get up for a flight. I'm like, I'm going to use my natural rhythms and I'm going to wake up when it's light sleep and I'll look at it. But if I wake up, you know, I'm supposed to be up at six o'clock and I wake up at 5:30, I'm up, you know, there's no sense in me trying to get another round of sleep because it's not going to happen for me. So yeah, I'm one of those that I hate alarms and I hate being woken up and you can ask my wife, that's just, don't wake him up when he's in deep sleep.

Kim (32:39):
Yeah. Same with my other half yeah, let sleeping dogs lie, as they say, just leave them alone. But there's another bonus to not napping during the day because I know a lot of specialists actually say, don't nap it'll interfere with your natural drive to sleep later in the night. But I think a really good bonus side to napping is that it helps retrain your brain to realize that falling asleep can be easy because usually if you're having a nap during the day, you're tired, it's not difficult to fall asleep. So you're actually telling, your brain is saying, Oh, okay, well that was easy, I fell asleep. So in a way, it you know, it could help retrain you to sleep better at night as well.

Allan (33:30):
Now, again, the book has 222 ways, and there's no way we could cover all of them in a podcast. And some of them are really, really good. We, like I said, I love sleep. We could talk, I could talk about it for hours. So this is, this is just really cool to be able to try these things out, get a journal together, start recording the things that are working for you and those that aren't and find the right thing for you. Kim, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

Kim (34:05):
Okay. So I'm obviously gonna say get enough exercise more because we're all, so many of us are just sitting at a desk for 7 to 10 hours a day and that's just not natural. So I definitely advise everybody to move about more and to get your exercise. It doesn't matter what sort of exercise, you know, as long as you enjoy it, it's gotta be enjoyable for you to stick at it. So whether, you know, you like walking or tennis or whatever, just make it a regular habit. And again, you're going to help your sleep by doing that. All the research points to, if you are a regular exercise, it doesn't matter if you do aerobic or a mix of aerobic and resistance training, all this science points to the fact that you can sleep better because sometimes if you go to bed and you haven't done any exercise during the day, you're not going to be tired enough to fall asleep usually.

Kim (35:00):
So I'd say definitely get enough exercise and move more. Personally. I also, what makes me happy is getting my daily dose of being outdoors. I think if we stay cooped up indoors all day, we're exposed to so much artificial light from our electric lights, our TVs, iPads, blah, blah, blah. It's sort of what we're exposed to unnatural light patterns that confuses our body clocks. So keep your body clued up, but getting outside, I love being outside exposed to all the natural patterns of daylight and dusk helps my body clock. I just love being surrounded by nature. I'm lucky enough to live near woods, you know, plenty of outdoor spaces, but no matter where you live, I think just being outside and connecting somehow, no matter how small with nature is just so good for you, good for your body, good for your mind, it helps you slow down.

Kim (35:57):
You know, listen to that bird song, listen to the ocean waves, walk and enjoy what's around you. And you're getting all that natural benefits of the, you know, what time of day it is, you're keeping your body aware of what time it is. And you're likely to get better sleep that way as well because your body knows when to start producing melatonin because it's getting dark or it knows when to stop producing melatonin because it's daylight. And the other thing I'd say is, and this is something that I've only really started doing in the last few years is meditating, but it's not meditating in a really big way. It's not something that has to take up hours of your time. My meditation will be just literally, if I am, if I've gone to bed and I'm not falling asleep quickly, I just do a very quick meditation, which is something like the hundred steps.

Kim (36:51):
Like just pretend I'm at the top of this beautiful mountain and counting down from a hundred and each step I take down takes me sort of, lowers everything and my heart rate, my breathing slows and meditation is fantastic for sleeping because actually loads of research has been done into how it actually changes the structure of your brain. And it sort of diminishes the concentration of gray matter the amygdala, which is the area of the brain associated with anxiety and stress. And it's even find that people who meditate before bed can increase their output of melatonin, the sleepy hormone. So it's got to be good for you just slowing down your breathing, slowing down your heart rate and taking yourself somewhere in your mind that's really pretty and calming. So yeah, those are my three things that I think can help you live a healthy life.

Allan (37:54):
Thank you, Kim. If someone wanted to learn more about you and learn more about the book, Trick Yourself to Sleep, where would you like for me to send them?

Kim (38:04):
Okay, so it's published by a fantastic and the experiment. So you can find them at theexperimentpublishing.com they're based in New York. My website is KimJoneswrites.co.uk. The book is available from all good stockists and online places like Amazon and Barnes and noble and Books-A-Million that kind of thing. And it's all information's on the website.

Allan (38:28):
Okay. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/439, and I'll be sure to have the links. So Kim, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Kim (38:42)
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

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Allan (02:30):
Tom, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Tom (02:33):
Oh, great to be with you.

Allan (02:35):
You know, as trainers, we know the number one reason that most people give us that, you know, I can't work out. I don't have time to work out. That's the reasons. I just don't have enough time in the day. I think with a lot of people idled during the pandemic stuff, they had a lot more time. But then they didn't have a gym.

Tom (02:54):
Right.

Allan (02:54):
And so, you know, there's a second reason and I actually struggle with that too. Cause I'm one of those guys that become a gym rat, I love going in the gym and pushing bigger weights can and still do this at home. But your book, but The Micro Workout Plan: Get the Body You Want Without the Gym in 15 Minutes or Less a Day, is really, really cool. I think this solves both problems pretty quickly. And you've got like 30 workouts in there. They give a lot of variety and a lot of opportunity and they're all things that we can do basically with nothing more than bodyweight and dumbbells.

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Tom (03:31):
Yeah. And you know, I'm like you, Allan, I still go to the gym. I love going to the gym. I've been, you know, spent the better part of my life in a gym, but you know, it's an adjunct, right? So as you know, it's what we do outside the gym that really matters as well. It's both that are important. So yeah, this new book really excited just came out a couple of weeks ago, and it's to help those people that, you know, as well will say, Hey, you know, I don't always want to go to the gym or I don't want to go to the gym and I just want to feel better. I want to look a little better on a, lose a couple pounds. I don't want to be in pain. I want to be able to go golf or do whatever I do without pain. So, you know, I know a lot of people will hear micro workouts in 15 minutes, but if you think about it you know, we're generally, even if you go to the gym, you're doing like five minutes of abs, and five minutes of arms and five minutes of chest, which kind of just breaks it down into manageable chunks and you can do five, you can do 25. It's just making it accessible and easier for the average person.

Allan (04:28):
Yeah. You know, I train online as well as in the gym. And you know, most of my clients that are online are online because they don't want to go to the gym so you don't have to go to the gym. And that's what's I think is really good about all this is, these are all things that you can do in your garage, in your living room. Really, really simple but effective exercises. I really liked the workouts that you have in here. Now in the book you, you go through and identify the five components of fitness. Would you mind going through those?

Tom (04:59):
Yeah. So, you know, back when I was studying for all this, the certifications and then went on to get a master's degree and they talk about constantly these five components of fitness. And, you know, most people, I would argue, Allan are doing one, right. And it's what they generally love to do and what they're genetically predisposed to do. But for those people who don't know, it's you know, muscular strength, you know, lifting heavy things, muscular endurance, being able to do it for a longer period of time, cardiovascular endurance, so basic heart health. And then you have flexibility and there's a lot of debate about that. I'm sure you've done numerous shows and you know, constantly we're talking about importance or, you know, when and where about flexibility and then the steps would be body composition so that, you know, the amount of body fat you have and just your body composition as far as body mass and body fat. So all five of those things are important Allan. And most people again do one, maybe two consistently, and we need to do all five.

Allan (06:01):
Yes, I agree. And I would throw a sixth in there if you don't mind. I put balance, you know, as we get older and you've mentioned this in the book, you know, if we're building strength we're more resilient for the fall, but you can also train some balance in there too. So I always throw in balance because.

Tom (06:18):
We are totally aligned Allan. I just did a show myself about that very thing. There should be a sixth component. So I'm a hundred percent with you and I'm surprised that they didn't include it. And I think they should going forward. Absolutely.

Allan (06:32):
Yeah. Well, you know I guess what, you know, 20 years ago, no one over the age of 40 would have even thought about working out. And so now it's, you know, as we have the baby boomers coming through, you know, there's a larger and larger contingent of people that are over 50, over 60, over 70 and even though we're 80, that are still training and active. So, yeah, that's all going to come about. And all of these are really important for us to train. And you have workouts across the board that do those, which is really cool. Now I liked one thing that you put in the book because this is the way we use our words, you know, when I was an auditor I always knew the way I wrote an audit report was really, really important. The words I used in that audit report, how they would affect the audit committee, how they would affect management. And so you spend a lot of time working on the words that you use in report. And then when I started training people, I realized, wait, it's, this is kind of the same thing. If, if I'm using the wrong words, then that doesn't work. If they're using the wrong words, I kind of have to pick up on that. But you list two words in the book that are really, really important for people to avoid.

Tom (07:45):
Yeah. It's ONLY, and JUST. And, you know, I even find myself slipping occasionally and using them obviously in a different way but in the wrong way. So when people say Allan, you know, I only walked two miles today, or I just did, you know, three minutes of stretching. My response is you have to take those words out of your vocabulary because science just contradicts it. So, you know, I always use the example of three, 10 minutes, bouts of exercise, use cardio, as an example, has the exact same benefit as one continuous 30 minute bout. And I would say, and I'm sure you'd agree to it. Actually, if you do three 10 minute bouts, you can actually push yourself a little harder, depending on what you're doing. So there is no workout that is too short and, you know, minutes literally matter when it comes to overall health and wellness and you don't have to do an hour, you don't have to do a half an hour. And it's what you do throughout the day. Again, that truly, that all adds up.

Allan (08:48):
Yeah. As you put in the book, the government guidelines, you know, they're going to say we should do 150 minutes at, or 75 minutes at, you know, extreme or intense. But there's no magic to that. There's no, it doesn't all have to be done in one workout. You know, it's not like you, you need to put that two and a half hours in, in one hour increments or even half hour increments at that point. Your book in the exercise you have in there, there are five minute blocks. And they allow you to pick and choose so that you're getting across all those different components of fitness we talked about. And then with that, this now kind of defines your fitness perspective, philosophy that you call excessive moderation. Could you describe that for us?

Tom (09:37):
Yeah. I love talking about this. It's just over the years, what I've found is, you know, the secret to talking to TV soundbites is not doing most people do a lot of exercise a little, right? New Years rolls around, you get all motivated. You go to the gym, we all know we're all guilty of that at some point in our lives. And you do a lot for a short amount of time and either get burnt out, injured, or generally both. And then you don't do anything. And the true secret, if there is one, and I don't even like using that term, but it's doing a little bit, a lot. So that's where the whole philosophy of excessive moderation and shorter workouts done throughout the day it's being consistent. And you and I talked about that, you know, before the show even started, it's about consistency. That is my most important metric. And was back when I was a trainer, is just show up. That's the most important thing is how many times you exercise, then we can talk about, you know, what you're doing, but showing up, not just in fitness in life is one of the major keys to success.

Allan (10:40):
Oh yeah. Showing up is 90%. If you're there, you know, that's what I tell some clients, you know, they'll tell me they're just not quite motivated. And I'm like, okay, go to go get on the elliptical. If that's what you got in your basement, get on that elliptical, get on the rower and go for five minutes.

Tom (10:57):
Sure.

Allan (10:57):
And after five minutes, if you're not feeling it any more, cool, just wrap it up, go take a shower and go to work. But most people find is they get in there for that five minutes. Like I said, if they did a five minute block of one of your workouts, then immediately, they're probably gonna, you know if they have the time they're gonna want to go ahead and say, well, I did that. I did that cardio work, I'll go ahead and do a stretching block.

Tom (11:19):
Yes. Yeah. It leads to more, it's a snowball effect. And that's why you just have to get out the door right back when I was doing iron man, I still do them, but you know, truly racing and you know, we're not motivated all the time. You and I, and you go, I just have to get out the door. I know that in three, four, 15 minutes, it's going to start feeling really good.

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Allan (13:58):
Yeah. When I was training for a marathon, and I was in Washington, DC and the gym I went to, they had a limit of 20 minutes on any 1 machine. So I'm like, I need to train for time. And so I just say, okay, well, I'm going to do this 20 minute block. And so I put my name on the list and then I do my 20 minute block. And then as soon as I finished the 20 minutes, I just looked for another machine that was open. And then I go do a 20 minute block there and another 20 minute block there and another. And so as a cross training that was happening because there's just different types of machines, you know, climber, rower, all kinds of stuff. And what I found was that, you know, I do a 20 minute block and I'd say, okay, well, I could just quit right now. But it just kinda got into my blood. It's like, no, I can, I've got 20 minutes. I can go do another block until they kicked me out of the gym, which happened.

Tom (14:46):
Well, let me give you a funny story about that is back, you know, I started as a trainer for many years and then working for different fitness equipment companies that consultant, and I learned that all of those machines have codes. Cheat codes, where you can hack into the machine. And you know, if it's set for 20 minutes, you could hack into it and make it go continuous. So back when I was training and you know, occasionally you do like a 20 minute or 20 mile run at the gym. Now, obviously, you know, someone could come up and kick you off, but I would hack into the machine so that it would go, cause I wanted full credit. Allan, I didn't want to do like a 10 mile, 15 mile run and not see 15. It's a mental thing, right?

Allan (15:23):
Yeah, it is. It is. Well, what they did was they had a sign up sheet and yeah, the machine only went to 20 minutes. So they had all 20 minute blocks. And so they told you that you go on you write your name and then you do the 20 minute block and you set your time. And people would be walking over, looking over your shoulder, employees and other people that wanted to use the machine because they were on the list and it was a very busy gym. There was a reason that they only gave us 20 minutes, but I was just like, okay, I'll go off of this machine, go there. And for me again, I was looking at, it was time. I was not training for distance because I said, you know, for me to be able to do something, it's really building that endurance to just be able to keep going.

Tom (16:06):
Yeah, that goes both ways Allan. And now I have to chunk it. So if you think, if you are doing a longer day, you go, Oh, I gotta be on this for an extended period of time. He say, well, no, I'm going to break it down into three 20 minute chunks or whatever that makes it. So there's so much of the mental game that is involved in what we're talking about. And you have to figure out those tips and tricks that work for you.

Allan (16:26):
Yeah. So we talked about consistency, but there are two other, I guess, what I would call attributes of excessive moderation and that's quality and intensity. Could you talk about why those are so important?

Tom (16:39):
Yeah. You know, I just did, I was talking, I talk frequently about like, you know, there's new thing as many reps as possible and things like that. I don't care how many pushups I do. I don't care how much weight I lift. Oftentimes when I am in the gym, people will come up to me and say, are you hurt the last, because I'm doing dumbbell curls with 20 or 25 pounds, but I'm about quality. You know, if the goal is to activate muscle fibers, you actually want to make it challenging. Right? So if I can do a hundred really bad pushups or I can do 30 really good ones. And if my goal is to change my body and to be healthy, I don't care about the number. So that goes to the quality of the exercise. You know, form is everything to me. And then intensity, we need to vary those things as well. Whether you have your easy day or your hard day. And that's why if you're doing a 5, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, with a cardio blast, if you're doing true tabata, that's four minutes of brutal anaerobic work. So the shorter we go, if your goal is to maximize your time, then the intensity goes up, but we need variation in that as well.

Allan (17:47):
Yeah. For a lot of people, they would think that quality and intensity kind of contradict each other. But if you watched the CrossFit workout where AMRAP, people just flopping around and you know, I'm like, okay, that's great until you break, so you got to have the quality of the movement. And then yeah, we've got to go to an intensity where we're pushing ourselves. But we're not going to change, you know, we need that stimulus to change. So that's enough if you don't do it right, you're risking hurting yourself and you know, over 40 you hurt yourself. That's a setback, that's a setback you don't want to have.

Tom (18:23):
Absolutely. And that is the secret to, you know, there's the top three things that I'm all about. It's the access of moderation, but it's also not getting injured. You know, our job in the fitness industry are threefold it's to get people the greatest results in the shortest amount of time with the least likelihood of injury. And that third component is oftentimes left out. A, because you know, the fitness professional doesn't know or B, they're just, you know, they're falling prey to their ego and what the client wants, but, you know, I've done an insane number of races in my life, but I'm injury free because it's about quality over quantity. There are exercises I just won't do because the cost benefit doesn't make any sense to me. I go, why would I do that? You know, when the risk of hurting myself is so high and the benefit is really not there either. So, you know, there's too many exercises to choose from Allan.

Allan (19:14):
Yeah. And that's why that's one of the areas I've, I guess I'd say I've always struggled. I'm not going to say I'll ever get over this, but it's that ego over capacity. And so, you know, I tore a rotator cuff training for a Spartan because I just wanted to get really, really strong. And as I got really, really strong working with my trainer and you start moving heavier weights and heavier dumbbells, and I was like, I'm just going to do overhead press with heavy, heavy dumbbells and pop there goes that arm.

Tom (19:46):
Yeah. And we all have those moments and hopefully we learn from them sooner rather than later. And it just happens. We're going to have those obstacles and it's human nature, right. To compete.

Allan (19:57):
Yeah. Which is why when you were talking about your timing, your tempo of your lifts. You know, the concentric is fast and the eccentric is slow. So you're doing a two to four count. And I'll tell you, when you take half of the weight that you would normally use on any kind of work and you go two seconds up and four seconds back, that's intense.

Tom (20:26):
Yes. And you know, it's so crazy. Allan is my first true fitness job back when I was about 18, 19 years old was a summer job at a Nautilus facility. And it was the old school, you know, I'm 51 going way back, but it was the old school machines that Arthur Jones came up with. And we were taught, I was taught for the two, four second counts. And to this day, I still do this. And the crazy thing you talk about coming full circle is now I'm the fitness advisor for Nautilus, but from, you know, age 18, it was just it made sense to me to have that slower repetition. Isn't that to be perfectly six seconds, but just contracting and controlling that movement throughout the entire range of motion.

Allan (21:08):
Yeah. Now another way that we can get excessive moderation is just looking at ways that we wouldn't necessarily call a workout. And that might mean, you know, parking the car a little bit further away from the building, using a flight of stairs or two flights of stairs rather than the elevator. And I think with the social distancing, that's probably gonna be happening a lot more. But the term is called NEAT. It's an acronym. Could you kind of go into NEAT what it is and why it's important?

Tom (21:39):
Yeah. And I think it's, so it needs to be talked about so much more so as we are doing the show, I am walking around, I have a standing desk and I am always moving and that adds up. So it does come down to simple math. Let's assume a person goes to the gym three times a week for an hour, and is on the cardio machine for 30 minutes out of that, you know, they're going to burn 10 thousand calories or what the number is so it matters. And that helps, but it's what happens outside the gym, as we were talking about earlier, that adds up enormously as well. So, you know, non-exercise activity, thermogenesis is what that acronym stands for. And it's basically the calories we burn while fidgeting, while you know, just the movement we do throughout the day. That seems so insignificant, but it goes down to Allan, we all have those friends who you go, how is that person? So skinny, you know, I see what they eat and they might not be going to the gym as much, or if at all, but they are moving and burning hundreds, if not a thousand calories or more per day than someone who is not doing those things. So just that movement that we may consider to be insignificant really matters. And, you know, the modern day environment has taken almost all of that out, which is a huge problem, as we know.

Allan (22:55):
Yeah, there's a term called eating like a bird. And its that you're not eating at all, but birds eat a lot, but they're moving so much. It's kind of, they used it backwards if you're eating like a bird, which we are, you need to move around a lot to burn off that food. And unfortunately we're eating like, we're actually eating like birds, but not eating like birds.

Tom (23:16):
That's a perfect analogy. That's so, yeah, exactly. Right.

Allan (23:20):
Tom, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

Tom (23:32):
Three tactics to stay well. So I would say, and start with what I start my new book with, is that you have to believe you have control. You know, we have to start from that. You know, so many people due to bad information and bad articles and bad science is the belief that their genetics and their situation has predetermined them. And they'll never be the healthy weight. They'll never be able to achieve what they want. And my lifetime has shown, you know, clients who have so far exceeded expectations. So it's that first belief that, Hey, you know, you have control, there are three things we control. How much we move, what we put into our mouth and our state of mind. And that's amazing. So you have to start with that, and then you just have to experiment, you know, when people say to us Allan that they don't like exercise you.

Tom (24:18):
And I both know that that means they haven't found what they enjoy yet. And it just takes, you know, trial and error to get there. And then finally, and that goes for food too, by the way, healthy food, healthy exercise, you just have to experiment. There's so many options for everybody. There's no one way. And then finally we don't, unfortunately, you know, success in exercise has been two-fold. It's the number on the scale. And it's what you see in the mirror. And if today's pandemic, doesn't teach us completely how important being healthy is eating healthy, you know, our immune system, exercise. So you don't judge the success of your fitness program based on a number on a scale. And it's about, as you said, feeling good, being happy and living a long, healthy life. And we're going to be 60, 70, 80, 90 years old. I want those years to be quality years and enjoying everything that I want to. So that's what it comes down to.

Allan (25:14):
Cool. Thank you for sharing that, Tom, if someone wanted to learn more about you, more about the book, The Micro Workout Plan, where would you like for me to send them?

Tom (25:23):
TeamHolland.com is the website. and then TomHfit is basically my Instagram, TomHfit is my Twitter. And they can learn all about that too at teamholland.com.

Allan (25:38):
Great. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/438, and I'll be sure to have the links there. So Tom, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Tom (25:47):
So great to speak with you. And I'm very jealous that you're in Panama to say you figured it out fitness and Panama. So, congrats. That's awesome.

Allan (25:56):
Thank you.

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Allan (02:56):
James, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

James (02:59):
Thanks a lot for having me.

Allan (03:01):
So today we're going to talk about your book, Breath: the New Science of a Lost Art. And I have to say that in the law, particularly intellect, like the last four or five years, there's been like kind of a reawakening on how important breath and breathwork is.

James (03:18):
Oh, I would say . And I was lucky enough to sort of jump into that scene right as things were really just stating in the scientific communities.

Allan (03:27):
And so, yeah. So we're hearing, you know about monks and you talk about it in the book monks that can basically change the, their heart rate. They can change the temperature, they can do that just with breath. There's of course there's Wim Hof, which is, he's just a fascinating individual and again, you get into him in the book, but I think really where I want to go with this conversation is to talk a little bit more about how we can use breath in an everyday sense to just manage our overall health and wellbeing.

James (03:58):
Sure. And I think that so many people view breath as something that's binary. It's either about doing it, which is good, which means you're alive, or not doing it, which is very bad word. It means you're dead. But it's the subtleties and the nuances of breathing that are so fascinating to me because there's such a clear reflection of how efficiently our bodies are working, how our minds are functioning, nervous system, organ function, heart rate, mental state, on and on and on. And from what I've found from years of being in this world and researching with these scientists is how we breathe is as important as what we eat, how much we exercise and all that other stuff. It's really a missing pillar of health.

Allan (04:44):
Yeah, it is. It is. You know, as I was, as I was getting into the book and I was thinking, you know, when do I ever actually think about breathing other than one when I can't because I've got, you know, I'm stuffed up or congested or have a cold or flu. I think about breathing a lot. And then when I'm doing meditation and more focused on breath is pretty much the two times that I find myself most focusing on breath. And I guess maybe the third would be when I'm lifting weights or running or doing something like that where how I breathe matters with regards to performance in the South. I don't know if this is everywhere, I guess it is everywhere, but there's this kind of moniker of calling someone a mouth breather. And it's not a nice thing to say to someone, or say about someone calling them a mouth breather. But beyond just the fact that that it's, you know, you're calling them out on something. There is something really, really wrong with breathing out of your mouth. Can you talk about that a little bit?

James (05:40):
Sure. And you know that is a derogatory term that people have bandied around and for good reason. Breathing out of your mouth is extremely unhealthy and it will even after a while start affecting how you look, the skeleton ture of your face and it will start affecting how often you snore, whether or not you get sleep apnea. And there's just this laundry list of problems associated with mouth breathing because what happens when we breathe through our mouth is we're taking an unfiltered, unheated and raw air. The SAPs us of moisture irritates the lungs and loosens the soft tissues at the back of the mouth. So the more we mouth breathe, the more we're going to mouth breathe in the future. And mouth breathing has been even associated with neurological disorders, periodontal disease, increased risk of respiratory infection and on and on and on.

James (06:37):
There's been several studies looking at the difference of mouth breathing and nasal breathing in animals. And one Japanese study showed that mice who had their noses plugged took twice the amount of time to make their way through a maze. And they've also found in human studies that when we breathe through our mouth, there's a disturbance of oxygen in our prefrontal cortex. So this is the area of the brain that's associated with ADHD. So very clear correlations between how we're breathing in this air, the pathway in which we're breathing it, and how we're functioning. So there's a bunch of other physiological effects to that as well. But it's bad news across the board. And what's even worse news is that about 50% of the population, according to one estimate, says that we are chronic mouth breathers and humans are the only species to really suffer from this affliction.

James (07:33):
So if you look at 5,400 different mammals on the planet, they are breathing through their noses. Yeah, dogs are going to be breathing through the mouth, but that's for Thermo regulation. They're not doing it for any other reason. Beyond that, some people have told me, they're like, well, you know, my bulldog breathes through the mouth. My pug breathes through the mouth, but these highly inbred dogs have essentially became, become similar to the way humans have become where we've lost this ability to breathe through our nose. So we have just adapted to breathing through our mouth and it's caused all kinds of problems.

Allan (08:05):
Yeah, and you personally experienced some of these problems by going through this kind of a crazy experiment of of 10 days as a mouth breather. Can you talk about that experiment? Cause that was, that was really interesting and a little bit scary.

James (08:21):
Yeah. So we know all of these problems that are associated with mouth breathing. We just don't know how quickly they turn on. So no one's really studied this. So I was able to convince, I don't know how, but I was able to do it, the chief of rhinology research at Stanford. I had done a few interviews with him over the past several months and finally hatched this idea. I said, well, why don't we test this when we plug my nose with silicone balls and put some tape over it and we can do data panels, we can do pulmonary function tests, we can look at my cortisol levels on and on and on, 60 different markers and we can compare them to nasal breathing afterwards. So for 10 days, me and another subject, a breathing therapist of all people, a Swedish breathing therapist, one of the best breathers in the world, we made him one of the worst.

James (09:18):
And so for, for 10 days, we just breathed through our mouths and tried to live our regular lives. You know, this wasn't so much of a, like a supersize me stunt because what we were doing was placing our bodies into a state that most people have experienced and up to half of us experience regularly. So it's a feeling and you know, a certain level of functioning that we already really know. So you know, it was the data came out and proved everything that the ancients have been saying for thousands and thousands of years. That mouth breathing is just really, really bad news. Both of us started snoring the first night. Snoring increased about 1300%. It got worse and worse until I was snoring four hours throughout the night. We got sleep apnea. We were stressed, we were fatigued. I mean, all of the above. And what was so interesting to me about all this was not the damage afflicted during mouth breathing. It was what happened when we took out these plugs and just breathe through our noses for the next 10 days. All those problems went away. This wasn't just subjective, you know, we were recording everything the whole time, and it was a complete transformation by just changing the channel through which we breathe.

Allan (10:38):
And it was, it was really, really quick. Just, just a matter of a couple of days.

James (10:44):
A couple of days, Yeah.

Allan (10:45):
You're suddenly, it's like, I'm feeling horrible. I'm about to die. And then you change over to him to nose breathing actually. And within a day or two, you're well not fully recovered, but you're you feel drastically different. Your life is drastically different. You're sleeping drastic thing, so much better. No snoring or less snoring it down to no snoring. Sleep apnea goes away. So it was reversible.

James (11:10):
For sure, you know, we went from snoring up to four hours during our worst state of mouth breathing to snoring within that first night, snoring, seven minutes, and then I wasn't snoring at all a couple of days after. So you realize how malleable and how flexible the body is depending on what, what you, what inputs you give to it. So to us this was just a clarification and context on what the ancients have been saying for literally thousands of years. There's this one quote from the Chinese Tao that's 1200 years old. It says, “the breath inhaled through the mouth is called Nietzsche adverse breath, which is extremely harmful. Be careful to not have the breath inhaled through the mouth.” So people were saying this, you know, over a thousand years ago, and it seems to be mostly lost on modern populations. If you look around, a lot of people are habitually mouth breathing and it's bad news.

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Allan (13:29):
So beyond why mouth breathing is bad, let's talk about why nose breathing is actually good and some things about the nose that make it that way.

James (13:40):
Sure. And this is the fun part, right? So once you injure yourself, you can try to rebuild yourself through various means and we simply change the pathway through which we were breathing. So we were no longer breathing through our mouths. We instead put tape on little piece of tape on our mouths to remind us to keep our mouth shut. Obviously we'd open them to eat and to talk on occasion. But for the large part, we were breathing only through our noses. And breathing through the nose, will save you about 40% moisture. So that's one reason, especially while jogging to always breathe through the nose unless you want to be carrying around those silly water bottles, which which nobody wants to do. Also breathing through the nose will increase nitric oxide by six fold. Nitric oxide, and I'm sure a lot of your listeners know what this is, but a quick little recap. It's a molecule that plays an essential role in circulation and delivering oxygen into cells by just breathing through your nose. You can have a massive increase of nitric oxide. They're using nitric oxide now to treat patients with Covid. It's that effective at opening capillaries and increasing oxygenation. And we have a natural supply of this in our nasal passages. All we need to do is breathe through our nose.

Allan (15:01):
And just for the record, Viagra increases nitric oxide. That's why it does what it does. So breathing through the nose.

James (15:11):
That's true. That's true. And if you want to hum, if you want to hum, you can increase that nitric oxide at least 15 fold by humming. So that might be something you know you're out on a date. Things are heating up, something you might want to consider doing on the way home.

Allan (15:30):
Okay. I was actually just kind of blown away when you got into the structure, the nose and all of that and how it's, you know, people just think, okay, it's just a like a vent and then taking in the air. But it's not actually just taking in air, it's causing it to do some things like circulate through the air a little bit differently. It's warming it up, it's filtering it, it's doing all those really good things before it gets to our lungs.

James (15:54):
For sure. I mean this is a natural filter. It's our first line of defense against pathogens and bacteria. So nitric oxide will attack a lot of that stuff. But so will the natural filter of our noses. And if you would open a human nose up, it's pretty amazing to look at. You can find this on the internet or in an anatomy book, but it looks just like a conch shell because, and that's where it gets its name, nasal conchae. So, and it's designed that way. The same way that seashells are designed to keep invaders out. So we also have that function in our nose. What I found, what was so ironic is you look at the national institutes of health and there are 17 different departments investigating everything from skin to lungs to the heart, the brain on and on. But none of them are looking at the functions of the nose, the importance of the nose in health and in longevity.

James (16:54):
So beyond that filtering, the nose also adjust our levels of stress. It can calm us down, it can get us amped up and that is determined by which nostril you're breathing through. So the nose is covered with this erectile tissue, which is the same erectile tissue in our genitals and it responds to the same inputs. So whenever we get excited in one area, the nose will respond as well. And what happens throughout the day, every 30 minutes to about every four hours, the pathway through which air comes in through your nose, either your right nostril or your left nostril is going to switch. So one nostril is going to gently close and the other is going to gently open up. And one of the reasons it does this, some of this is theoretical, but a lot of it has been checked out and verified by scientists. Is that when we breathe through the right nostril, we heat the body up so the heart rate increases. We get a little drip of cortisol, blood pressure increases as well. And if we switch that pathway to the left nostril, the body cools down, heart rate decreases, blood pressure decreases, the heart lowers, heart rate lowers. So you can use this throughout the day depending on what you're doing. There's a whole school in yoga that studies this and that practices these alternate nostril breathing. But you don't need to do that because your body naturally does this. And it adjusts throughout the day and throughout the night.

Allan (18:38):
So we know that our body brings in oxygen and then basically expels carbon dioxide. That's kind of the cycle of what's happening here. One of the interesting things that I got from your book was that, it's not about the amount of oxygen that we take in that matters. It's about the amount of carbon dioxide we have in our blood. It needs to get out that actually keeps that thing working well. And if we don't have the carbon dioxide we're not gonna use the oxygen we're breathing in. So breathing slow and breathing less can actually work to our benefit. Can you get into that?

James (19:13):
For sure. And this is something that's been misinterpreted and still is today is for a healthy body. And that is for somebody who has about 95% or higher of oxygen in your bloodstream in any one time. You don't need more oxygen, so you have plenty of oxygen in your body. What you need is a way of offloading that oxygen efficiently into your cells and tissues and muscles. And that's what carbon dioxide helps us do. So carbon dioxide is, you know, in a lot of circles, considered a very bad thing. It's the stuff that plumes out of coal plants and it's heating up the planet. And all that's true, but for your body, it's essential to have the right balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen so it can work at peak efficiency. And often when we breathe too much, we are off gassing too much carbon dioxide.

James (20:07):
So our bodies enter into an alkaline state, which makes it harder for oxygen to enter into these tissues and muscles and do what our body naturally wants us to do. So when you see people at the gym or jogging or wherever, when they're breathing through the mouth and they're thinking they're getting, getting a good workout, they're actually doing the opposite so they're not burning any more fat. They're making their body work harder to do less. So for the vast majority of people, breathing less is going to give you more oxygen and it's going to do that by your carbon dioxide levels balanced. Now there's extremes to this, right? Somebody with covid or pneumonia or emphysema doesn't get enough oxygen in their bloodstream. They need oxygen. If they're below 90 especially if they're in the eighties but again, for healthy people having extra oxygen isn't going to do anything, which is why I find it so ironic with these oxygen bars.

James (21:12):
They have these people, Oh we're going to help you out. You're healthy, we're going to make you feel even better. It's not doing anything. What you need to do is allow your body to do what it naturally wants to do. You can breathe slowly and get much more benefit from doing that. You can also save a lot more money.

Allan (21:28):
So in, in some of the breathing that you talked about, you actually talked about the breathing rate of 5.5 per minute being kind of a sweet spot.

James (21:38):
Yeah. So these researchers about 20 years ago were looking at different prayers. They were looking at Catholic prayers, the rosary, the Ave Maria, they were looking at the Buddhist chant, Om mani padme hum, The Kundalini Chant on Sa ta na ma. And they found that to vocalize each of these, it takes about five to six seconds and then there's about five to six seconds to inhale.

James (22:09):
So you're inhaling for about five to six seconds, you're exhaling for about five to six seconds. So they got a bunch of subjects and they hook them up to all these sensors and they looked at what was happening to their brains and bodies when they breathe this way. And they found that blood flow increased in the brain. Circulation increased and the body entered a state of coherence. Where the heart, nervous system and everything else were coordinated at peak efficiency. So this really lessened the burden on the heart and allowed us to do more again with less. Just by breathing in this way. And they hypothesized that the healing effects of prayer were probably real, but it had more to do with how we were breathing than what we were saying. And since this discovery, I guess you could call it, various scientists and researchers and psychiatrists have used this breathing pattern in their patients with depression, anxiety, and even for to purge toxins from the lungs and with 9 to 11 survivors.

James (23:20):
So it's free, it's easy. Anyone can do it and the effects or they feel great, you know? And it's backed up by science. So I try to breathe in this way as often as possible. Sometimes I have timers around and even when I'm working out, if I'm at a gym on a stationary bike and I'm really huffing and puffing, I try to slow my breathing to about six or seven breaths per minute, which sounds like how are we possibly getting enough oxygen to support yourself? But I've worn a pulse oximeter and found that my oxygen level did not waver when I was breathing this slowly. So that's a way of really, if you're nervous, you're not getting enough oxygen that you're breathing too slowly. Try to get a pulse ox. You can get these things for for 20 bucks and try it out if you're geeky like me.

James (24:10):
But I was really blown away by this because I had always learned that the more you breathe, the more oxygen you're going to gain. You need that oxygen to go further and to work out harder and that's complete BS. You don't, you need to breathe inline with your metabolic needs, which for the vast majority of us is to breathe more slowly.

Allan (24:31):
Yeah. Because we're going to bring in enough oxygen into our lungs with that breath to be able to go for another minute or two. Actually, if we wanted to hold our breath, there's a guy he married the volleyball player, Gabrielle, and his name's Laird. He was a surfer. Yeah, he's got this protocol where they actually work out underwater, you know, they're lifting weights and running under water so they're not breathing, you know once, maybe a minute and you know, well, from what I've heard, it's pretty amazing stuff, performance in movements you can get when you start training your body to work that way. So a little different thing out there, but we don't have to breathe every two seconds just to make sure we have oxygen. We can, we can go with less.

James (25:19):
Yeah. And that protocol has been around for 70 years that Laird is using. So you know, scientists have known this for a long time. We have known about carbon dioxide benefits in the body for a hundred years. Some prominent scientists, Christian Boar discovered this and then Yen Del Henderson at Yale was a big promoter of the use of carbon dioxide, both in tanks and in our own bodies to allow us to function efficiently. He said this is something that's completely ignored by the medical community. What's ironic is they were doing these tests in the 1910s, 1920s and arguing that more people need to get hip to what's going on with these gases and to know the real benefits. And then today you still have a lot of misinformation and a lot of ignorance as far as how oxygen and carbon dioxide are used in human metabolism. And so it was fascinating to go through all of these medical stories and articles and studies and to see these things played out over again and again and again. People keep discovering the stuff and then disappears. They discover it and it disappears. So what Laire is doing and as part of a long tradition of conditioning the body to use more efficiently. And we do that by breathing less.

Allan (26:46):
I define wellness as being the healthiest fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

James (26:55):
I would argue that breathing is at the core of this. Along with eating well and exercising. So I've thrown in sleeping. You know, this isn't the most original list you've ever heard I'm sure.

Allan (27:11):
Well you started with breathing, that's a little bit more original than most, but yeah.

James (27:14):
I guess, but if you look at the Holy triumvirate of wellness, a longevity of feeling good every day, it's those three things. But breathing has to be considered in there. Because I've met so many people who are triathletes who go to the gym every day who eat, you know, only a keto diet or vegan diet, whatever. But they are not paying attention to their breathing. They have sleep apnea, they snore at night. They say, Oh, this is just this natural. Everyone I know snores. Everyone I know is sleep apnea, but it's not. You have to get control of that before, in my opinion, before you really double down on your food and your exercise. You have to be looking at how you're breathing because we breathe 25,000 times a day. And if you're doing that wrong, you're going to be injuring your body just a little bit, with each breath, so you need to get that right and then you can build upon that foundation and really sharing in good health after that.

Allan (28:16):
Well thank you James. The book is awesome. You know, you're not just giving us information, you're actually walking us through the story of you finding a lot of this stuff. So it was a really cool read. I really enjoyed it. If someone wanted to learn more about you or learn more about the book, Breathe, where would you like for me to send them?

James (28:33):
My website and all the links to the book are there as well. There are 550 scientific references with some videos and photos and a bunch of other stuff to support what sounds like a bunch of pseudoscience. It's all real stuff, people. And all the data's up there on my website at mrjamesnester.com.

Allan (28:50):
And you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/437 and I'll be sure to have the links there. So James, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

James (29:04):
Thanks a lot for having me. Really enjoyed it.

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