Speaker 1 (00:00:00):
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast, where Dr. Steven Gundry shares his groundbreaking research from over 25 years of treating patients with diet and lifestyle changes alone. Dr. Gundry and other wellness experts offer inspiring stories, the latest scientific advancements, and practical tips to empower you to take control of your health and live a long, happy life.
Speaker 2 (00:00:24):
Today, I’m talking about fitness trackers from the Aura Ring to the Apple Watch to the Whoop Band. These little gadgets are packed with data that can give you deep insights into your sleep, your stress levels, your heart, and even your recovery after exercise. But here’s the problem. Most people have no idea what all these numbers actually mean. I mean, like, what is HRV? What’s a good resting heart rate? And what the heck is sleep latency? Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to cover today. I’ll break down the most common fitness tracker metrics and tell you what’s actually worth paying attention to and what you can probably ignore. So, let’s talk about the Oura Ring. Now, I must admit that I was an early adapter of both the Oura Ring and the Whoop Band, the first generation of both. And let me start by saying this.
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I love data. When it comes to understanding your health, numbers don’t lie. And wearable fitness trackers can give us valuable insights that we could only get in a medical clinic just a few years ago. Now, are they perfect? No. But if you know what to look for, they can act like a daily check-in with your body. They can help you spot trends, catch problems early, and make smart choices about your sleep, your workouts, and even your stress. So, let’s start with the OR ring. Now, this is one of the most popular trackers among biohackers and health nerds, and for pretty good reason. I talk about how much I love mine right here on this channel all the time. But let’s take a look at what it actually tracks. So, let’s start with heart rate variability or HRV. Now, HRV measures the time, difference, variability between your heartbeats.
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And believe it or not, more variability is actually a good thing. Now, unbeknownst to most people, we’ve always thought that a normal sinus rhythm is regular, that the time from one QRS to the next QRS is always the same. But thanks to computer tracking, we now know that that’s not true. And what looks visually as nearly identical is that there is small variations between the distance between these heart rate. So, a higher heart rate variability usually means that your nervous system is relaxed and adaptive, and that you’re well recovered from the day before. Now, what’s a good HRV? Now, that depends on your age, gender, and fitness level. But in general, 60 milliseconds and above is a pretty doggone good target. I can give you some hilarious examples. When I was talking with a representative from Aura a number of years ago at a meeting and discussing my heart rate variability, which quite frankly, can be in the 50s and as high as the 90s, he was 27 years old and was showing me his heart rate variability, and it was like 210.
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And I go, “What the heck? You know, how’d you do that? ” Well, I was, I think, 65 at the time, and he just laughed and said, “Grandpa, yours will never be like that. Thanks a lot, kid.” But it’s true that in general, the younger you are, the higher your heart rate variability is. I was part of a clinical trial where we looked at the ability of heart rate variability to predict who was going to have sudden death from a cardiac arrhythmia or heart attack. And in fact, there was very good correlation between a low heart rate variability and more worrisome signs of sudden death or heart attacks. Now, it’s not universal. I take care of a number of older athletes who have heart rate variabilities in the 20s consistently, and they’re really healthy, and they have incredibly low beating heart rates, resting heart rates, usually in the 40s.
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So, all is not lost if your heart rate variability is low. On the other hand, what you like to do is follow your heart rate variability. For instance, when my wife and I are hiking in France or Italy and putting in, oh, eight, 10 miles a day in the hills, my heart rate variability can go up to 100, 110. But if I’m sitting around like a slug, my heart rate variability can come down to the 30s. So, a lot of times it is exercise related. On the other hand, that’s not a perfect system. What else can lower heart rate variability? Number one, anything that changes the balance between your sympathetic nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous system can change heart rate variability. So, it could be a sign of stress, could be a sign of inflammation, poor sleep, even overtraining can do it. Also, alcohol before bedtime often suppresses heart rate variability.
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Recently, I tried an experiment where I took a very popular memory supplement called Hooperzyna, which is a acetylcholine esterase blocker. If that word sounds familiar, a lot of the Alzheimer’s drugs are acetylcholine esterase blockers. And one of the things that happened as I anticipated is my heart rate variability went into the toilet. It went to, like, 10 or 12. As soon as I stopped taking Hooperzin A, my heart rate variability within a couple days was back up to normal. That’s because it totally changed my sympathetic nervous system. Now, that’s not to say don’t take Hooperzin A. That just means that if you’re following heart rate variability, it’s not gonna be useful. Next up, resting heart rate. Now, this is the number of times your heart beats per minute when you’re totally at rest. Now, usually it’s while you’re sleeping, and a lower number is generally better.
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Now, for most people, somewhere between 50 and 65 is ideal. Elite athletes usually have resting heart rates in the 40s. My wife, who is a great athlete, almost always has resting heart rates in the mid 40s. I usually have resting heart rates around 47 to 49. I really can’t beat her. But here’s the trick. Do not obsess over one night of data. It’s all about the trend. If your resting heart rate suddenly jumps 10 points overnight, you actually may be coming down with something. Or maybe you just had too much wine or a big dinner or a late night snack. So, what you wanna do is you wanna demo your own data. So, what else can we get from these devices? Let’s talk about sleep latency and REM. Now, sleep latency is how long it takes you to fall asleep. If you fall asleep in under five minutes, well, you might be overtired, but you might be my wife Penny.
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She can fall asleep in less than 30 seconds. Me, not so much. And I can assure you that she’s not overtired. She’s just very talented. If it takes you more than 30 minutes, it could be stress, it could be caffeine, or it could be blue light exposure. Most people, 15 to 20 minutes is about the right spot.
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Okay, what about the REM sleep? Now, that’s the dream stage. REM is important for brain health and emotional regulation. Now, you want about 20 to 25% of your total sleep to be an REM. Now, the Aura Ring and the Whoop Band breaks all this down. And the readiness score puts it into one simple number. If it’s low, take it easy that day. Now, the hilarious thing about this data is depending on the device you choose, you may get completely different answers for these cycles. Let me give you an example. A couple of years ago, Aura decided to change their deep sleep measuring system based on working with a renowned sleep center’s results. And up until that point, Aura had quite a bit of deep sleep that would register on their ring. After they recalibrated it, almost everybody’s deep sleep went into the toilet, and I spent months assuring my patients that they’re not doing something wrong.
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It’s the aura ring changes and to not obsess on this. Now, how did I know that? Well, I also wear a whoop band. Now, we’ll talk about the whoop band in a second, but the whoop band didn’t change their deep sleep program. And so, every morning, I have great fun comparing the data on the aura ring to the whoop band. And guess what? They’re really different on a lot of things. First of all, the HRV, the heart rate variability is spot on with both of these devices. They almost always agree. The ura ring consistently says my resting heart rate is, like I say, in the high 40s. The whoop band says my resting heart rate is in the low 50s. Is that a big deal? No. But if I’m obsessed with having my resting heart rate under 50, then I’m, should be doing something more to get my whoop band to pay attention, but let’s not obsess.
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The best part is the WOOP band, when my aura ring, like today, said I got 15 minutes of deep sleep, my whoop band says, “Hey, good news. You got an hour and 34 minutes of deep sleep.” Huh? I was sleeping in the same place. The point is they’re using different algorithms. Now, one of the things I like about the WHOOP band is that in the deep sleep algorithm, most deep sleep occurs early in the sleep cycle, and that’s when it should happen when we do brainwashing, where our brain literally goes through a wash cycle. And the whoop band, that’s when it’s picking up deep sleep. The aurring doesn’t track that way. The other thing I’m impressed with, with the WOOP band is I pretty much remember my dreams. I pretty much remember when I’m dreaming. And interesting, the WHOOP band, at least for me, is extremely accurate about my dream states.
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The Oura Ring, not so much. Before we leave the Oura Ring, one thing I love about the Oura Ring is that it has a GPS tracker built in, so that it knows literally my GPS route. Now, sometimes it goofs, but, and if you’re going uphills, it won’t give you the credit. Let me assure you that steps that any of these bands measure have nothing to do with how far you’ve actually gone. Please do not go out and use these things for steps. They’re totally inaccurate. Okay. The Whoop Band was actually, is actually very popular among athletes and performance junkies. Now, it tracks many of the same metrics as the aura ring, but it puts a bigger focus on strain, how hard your body is working out throughout the day. Now, the strain score goes from zero to 21. Now, don’t assume you need to max it out every day.
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That’s a fast track to burnout. The strain actually comes from the fact that they actually measure some electrolytes, let’s use the word sweat, in your skin. And that part of the strain is not only how your heart rate is changing, but also whether you’re sweating a little bit. And so, a person who sweats a lot will get higher strain scores than a person who doesn’t sweat a lot. My wife, Penny, recently started to use the upgraded WOOP band, which also does an EKG for you when you want, and has been very frustrated that her personal trainer, who also got the same Whoop band a few weeks earlier, they would do the same workout. And her personal trainer, who’s about her age, got better strain scores than she did. And she’s mad. The personal trainer is well known for her ability to sweat at the slightest provocation.
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In fact, she was known for her sweating as a high school basketball player. My wife doesn’t sweat. So, it’s no wonder that they can do the same exercise with the same weights, with the same intensity, and my wife will get a much lower strain score. And I have to explain this to her every night when she’s obsessing about it. So, use it as trends. Don’t use it for, “Oh my gosh, I’m not working hard enough on this exercise,” or, “I’m not pushing myself hard enough at the gym.” But the fun thing about this device is that it’s pretty accurate, and it’s so accurate that early on, a lot of professional football players and basketball players use the whoop band to tell them whether they should go harder or they’ve had a bad day and they should go easy. They’ve started believing the data so much that NFL and NBA asked Woo to not allow the athletes to see their data on the morning of a game.
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They became so obsessed with it. And that’s the point. You can’t obsess yourself with this data. Now, here’s the other thing I’ve learned with the WHOOP in the aura. They both look at heart rate, and they both use a very similar sensing mechanism. It’s a green light that you can see underneath the band. The aura ring, because there’s, it’s connected, literally, it’s kind of looking at little arteries that line the side of your finger. The Whoop Band doesn’t do that. And so, the Oura Ring for me is much more accurate on heart rate, particularly when you’re vigorous to the exercising. I get a chuckle when, when I’m out hiking with the dogs that the aura ring says, “Hey, your maximum heart rate was 125.” And the whoop band is saying, “Well, your maximum heart rate was 205.” I can assure you, if my heart rate was 205, number one, I would know it, and number two, I might be dead.
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So I get a chuckle because this is not as accurate as heart rate. So on the other hand, the WOOP band has a really cool feature, and I’ll show you. I can put my two fingers right here and hold it for 30 seconds after pushing a button on my cell phone, and it’ll give me a really high quality EKG to look at. I can see whether I’m having extra beats, I can see whether I’m in atrial fibrillation, never have been, but you never know. And I can see what my EKG looks like. Our ring can’t do that. And I get a kick out of when the WHOOP says my heart rate is 205, it’s actually 120 by EKG. So WHOOP also measures recovery and sleep staging. It mean, it shows you how much time you spend in deep sleep versus REM, but serve different functions.
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So for me, the WHOOP band is better at sleep scores. On the other hand, the Oura Ring tracks GPS and is certainly better with heart rate. They’re identical so far for heart rate variability. So that’s the two difference between those two. Finally, let’s talk about the Apple Watch. Now, it may not be as specialized as the other, but it’s come a long way, especially with the newer models. They give you a cardio fitness score, also called VO2Max. Now, so does the WHOOP band. Now, this tells you how efficiently your body uses oxygen during exercise. In general, higher numbers mean better cardiovascular health and a better chance of living a long active life. Now, ideally, you want your VO2 max to be in the 40-ish or higher, but a lot of this depends on your age and activity level. Now, Apple also tracks HRV and resting heart rate.
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Now, while it’s not quite as sensitive as Aura or Whoop, the trends over time can still be helpful. If you’re noticing a drop in HRV and a rise in resting heart rate, that’s a sign your body’s under stress. The Apple Watch can also monitor blood oxygen levels just like the WHOOP and the aura. And it can even take an EKG which is useful for people with heart conditions. And how about those movement alerts that you get from them? You know, they might seem silly, but standing up once an hour can actually boost your mitochondrial health and support better blood flow. So yes, I do recommend paying attention to those. So are these fitness trackers worth it? Well, I’d say yes, as long as you use them to guide your habits, not control them. Look for trends. Listen to what your body is telling you and let the data help you make better choices every day.
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Now, buyer beware. These are interesting, but not hard science. Let me give you one final example. Both my Aura ring and my Whoop Band give me basically … The Oar Ring gives me my cardiovascular age. My Whoop band tells me my health span age. So this morning, my Oura Ring was p- pleased to tell me that my cardiovascular age is 10.5 years younger than my actual age. Meantime, my whoop was telling me that my age was 3.2 years younger than my actual age. So who did I believe today? The ora ring won big over the whoop. Tomorrow, it might be a different story. The point is, look for trends, have a good time with them.
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The best exercises for supporting overall health and longevity, they’re actually simple. A lot of people are under the impression that in order to stay healthy, they need to lift really heavy weights at the gym or run miles a day. The truth is, this is a bunch of baloney, and there are much simpler exercises out there that can provide more benefits for your health. Take it from me. I used to run every single day, at least three miles, 30 miles a week, and I was still overweight, grossly obese. As so many of my patients can tell you, running can be bad for your knees. Now, what about jumping rope? We used to jump rope as a kid and did it, you know, hours at a time. Interestingly, 10 minutes of jump roping burns the same amount of calories as running 30 minutes on a treadmill, and jumping rope is a whole lot more fun than running on a treadmill.
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But here’s the thing. If you look at super old people around the world, if you look at blue zones, if you look at other areas with super old people, one of the things that jumps out at you is they’re not gym rats. They’re not spending time in the gym. They’re actually doing chores of daily living. They’re walking, they’re gardening, they’re doing housework. There are multiple studies that show that vacuuming a floor, scrubbing a floor, doing the dishes is good exercise. There’s great studies that doing gardening, actually without the use of power tools, is one of the better exercises you can do. Just think about picking flowers, bending and picking vegetables. There’s a lot of deep knee bending that goes on, and that’s what these societies have done. Interesting, so many of these societies are farm-based. They’re herders. They herd goats and sheep, and they spend a significant part of their days walking, walking uphills, walking downhills, walking for groceries.
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The other benefit that these people get is that they are actually forest bathing, and that’s a cute term to describe immersing ourselves in nature. And however we do that is going to benefit us. Walking in nature is a whole … or running in nature is a whole lot better for you than getting on a treadmill. It has a completely different effect. The other great thing that these people do is they’re not using just one set of muscle groups, and that’s the important thing to remember. There are great exercises like yoga and Tai Chi, but just doing that doesn’t activate all of your muscle groups. That’s why, um, I do Pilates and I also do yoga, but we get a big kick at Pilates classes when we’ll see a muscle-bound gym rat come in with just, you know, incredible physique of muscles, and they are challenged to do some of the basic routines and Pilates, and they’re sweating, and we’re sitting there going, “Wow, you know, what’s wrong with that guy?” Because they haven’t been using all of their muscle groups in a different way.
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So branch out. Don’t do the same thing every day, and take time with friends. You know, it’s football season. During the commercial breaks, during halftime, don’t watch the band on the field. Go out and throw the football around in the yard. If you don’t have a football, grab a Frisbee, throw that in the yard. If you don’t have that, chase the dog around the yard, throw the ball we do every afternoon. It’s great exercise, because a lot of times they don’t bring the ball back and you gotta chase them. Okay. So if you’re gonna do one thing, if you’re gonna start today and change just one thing, add walking to your regimen. A study has shown that there’s a link between people who walk less than five to 7,000 steps per day. They have a surge in metabolic diseases like diabetes, like pre-diabetes and other illnesses compared to people who walk five to 7,000 steps a day.
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Another cool study show that people who live in walkable cities are 31% less likely to be overweight or obese than people living in car dependent cities or suburbs. And that’s true. City dwellers, as a general rule, are much thinner than suburban dwellers who rely on cars. I’ll give you a personal example. When I spent a year, uh, during my training in pediatric heart surgery as a, uh, senior fellow at Great Ormond Street Hospital in, uh, London, England. London England is one of the great walkable cities. Our family did not have a car for a year. Uh, during that year, we walked everywhere. We walked to the grocery store. We walked to the theater. We walked to the clothing store. We walked the kids to school. We walked everywhere. In that year, I actually lost 40 pounds without doing anything else except walking everywhere. And put it into your regimen.
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You’ll be amazed just adding walking will, will be one of the best things you can, you can do. Now, interestingly, if you look particularly at long-lived cultures, one of the things that’s striking, and I see this all the time, particularly in the Mediterranean and also in Japan and China, people walk after their meal. And in one of my first books, I showed a study that people walked either 10 minutes before dinner or 10 minutes after dinner and compared their health and weight loss. The people who walked 10 minutes before dinner had no benefits in their health or weight loss, whereas the people who walked 10 minutes after dinner consistently lost weight and had better metabolic parameters. So that explains why the idea of strolling after dinner is so common in these countries. And it’s also a great way, you see all the time, of meeting people, chatting with people, uh, exchanging more information about what you did during the day than you really did at the dinner table, because quite frankly, some people are busy eating.
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The other thing that fosters this is get a dog. Uh, I can’t say this often enough. Dogs force you to walk whether you want to or not. Dogs also, for the most part, force you to socialize. There’s nothing your dog wants to do more than meet another dog, and that dog usually is escorted by another human being. And you will be amazed the number of friendships, acquaintances, friendly exchanges you will have when you have a dog and interact with other dog owners. Still, some of my favorite prescriptions to write is get a dog. I just wrote one for one of my male patients, uh, this past week, and he said, “Boy, are my kids gonna be pleased because I’ve been resisting this and now it’s doctor’s orders.” So get a dog. For episode 143, I talk with neuroscientists and bonafide walking expert Shane O’Mara all about this topic.
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Now, there’s also a topic, uh, that I’ve come up with that I call exercise snacking. You don’t need any special equipment. Put on a song and dance for two to three minutes. Uh, I like to do deep knee bends while I’m brushing my teeth. You brush your teeth twice a day. Do deep knee bends while you’re brushing your teeth. You can do bicep curls while you’re doing the dishes. Take a heavy pan and just lift it. I love to do couch planks during a commercial. Get off the couch, put your feet on the couch and do a plank leaning forward. You can still watch the TV and just hold it for a minute. If you can’t do that, get on the floor and do a plank. If you can’t do that, do a knee plank. Uh, anything is better than just sitting there and watching the commercial.
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Okay. Last but not least, please, please, please, do not eat before exercise. You will do much better. You will have much better gains with whatever exercise you’re doing if you do it in a fasted state, because eating requires huge amounts of blood flow to your intestines, and it’s blood flow that won’t be available to your muscles. And studies show that fasted animals have actually better athletic performance than in the Fed state. So, don’t have that energy bar before you go to the gym or out for a walk. Don’t have that smoothie while you’re walking. Do it fasted, come back, and then have your bar. Okay. Exercise gadgets. Anything I can do to get you more interested in exercising is a good thing in my opinion. But just remember, most exercise gadgets lie to you about the number of calories you’re burning. They want you to think that you’re getting a tremendous calorie workout boost.
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And in fact, most of this has been rigged to make you think you’re doing more than you actually are. If it makes you wanna do something, I’m fine with that. But don’t believe some of the things you’re getting on these readings. Most people think living longer comes down to luck or good genes. But what I’ve learned for over 30 years of studying longgevity is this. It’s really about keeping your cells young. And one of the most powerful science-backed tools to do that is as simple as stepping into the right kind of sauna, like the ones made by Sunlighten, who are pioneers in infrared technology for over 25 years. So if you’re new here, make sure to subscribe. I share simple, science-backed ways to feel and look your best every week. Now, when you expose your body to infrared light, you’re not just heating your skin.
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You’re literally charging yourselves. Now, many of us are well aware that for some unknown reason, we really like to seek out sunlight, and particularly the warmth that sunlight feels. Why is that? Well, it turns out part of sunlight, part of the spectrum of light from the sun is infrared and near infrared. And what’s exciting is the reason we like that feeling is that infrared and near infrared light actually stimulates our mitochondria, those little energy-producing organelles in all of our tissues, to actually clean up their act, to keep themselves in tip-top shape and really improve their overall performance. And we feel that from sunlight. So, infrared saunas, like sunlight and’s impulse smart sauna, actually send these specific wavelengths of light deep into your tissues. Now, these are wavelengths that you and I can’t see with our eyes, but this invisible light literally interacts directly with your mitochondria.
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And these, again, are the tiny energy factories in all of our cells. So the more mitochondrial energy production, that means your cells are stronger, your cells are better able to repair, and you have a longer life and health span. Just remember, mitochondria are literally the engines that keep your body running. But as we age, they literally start to sputter. And mitochondrial dysfunction, we’re realizing now, underlies really most of the bad things that happen to us, how we feel, how we age, even how cancer cells are able to develop. So the cool thing about infrared and near infrared light is that literally it helps tune them up and even stimulates mitochondria to build new ones. Now, that’s called mitogenesis and mitophagy. When mitochondria kind of near the end of their lifespan, one of two things can happen. If the mitochondria dies, the cell dies. And when the cell dies, it undergoes a death called apoptosis.
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And it literally means it explodes, seriously. And when it explodes, it sends out dead mitochondria, among other things. And here’s the bad news. Mitochondria are actually ancient engulfed bacteria, and they carry the DNA of bacteria. And when these mitochondrial DNA explode out of your cell, your immune system assumes that there are bacteria in you, and that causes inflammation. So when a mitochondria dies and we have apoptosis, that makes inflammation even worse. And you’ve probably heard now of info aging, inflammating, which is the inflammation causing aging. Here’s the good news. This does not have to happen. Apoptosis does not have to happen. If you recycle the mitochondria and recycle the cell, you undergo a different process called autophagy. Autophagy means self-eat, and you recycle those parts rather than exploding and distributing through your body, activating your immune system. What’s fascinating is infrared and near infrared light tells your mitochondria not to die, not to explode, but to undergo autophagy, mitophagy, and make a new better mitochondria.
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And that’s how that works. Once you do that, you get more mitochondria, mitochondria that are actually working better, and you get more energy. Now, more energy means every system, from your heart, to your brain, to your immune cells, literally works better. Now, that’s one reason infrared light use is linked to greater health span and resilience. So let’s break this down. Now, here are five key ways infrared sauna supports longevity, starting with number one, mitochondrial function. I’ll say it over again. Everything begins with your mitochondria, your body’s power plants. You keep those intact. You keep making more mitochondria. You stimulate more mitochondrial growth. That means you get more energy. You get more of these tiny engines to produce more ATP, the molecule that powers every cell function. It also helps your body create more mitochondria when you need them. And I’ll say it again. As we age, our mitochondrial decline because of damage.
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That means you get less energy, you get slower repair and faster aging. So conversely, when you keep your mitochondrial strong and growing more mitochondria, you’re literally slowing down the cellular aging process. Now, number two, infrared actually helps your body get rid of what I call zombie cells. Now, these are technically called senescent cells. And these are cells that are so damaged that they stop working properly, but they refuse to die, literally. And they just sit there, and they literally release toxic signals that harm nearby healthy cells. And this is one of the interesting cell damaged theories of aging, that it’s these zombie cells that are actually the cause of much of the inflammation in cells next to them. Good news is that infrared exposure helps your body identify and clear these senescent cells, making room for new, healthy cells to grow. So it’s kind of like spring cleaning for your body.
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You’re clearing out the junk to make way for renewal. Now, you may have seen on biohackers that there are a number of compounds that have shown some interesting results in clearing zombie cells, and that’s true. But one of the easiest ways that doesn’t involve swallowing any compounds is simply exposing these cells to infrared and near infrared light. Okay, number three. Now, infrared exposure helps balance your body’s natural defense response. Now, as I mentioned, there’s a acute name for chronic low grade stress that accelerates aging, and it’s called inflammation. And it’s now linked to everything from fatigue to stiffness to brain fog as we get older. Now, one of the things as a, as a transplant surgeon I learned through the years is that over time, our immune system, our white blood cell’s ability to recognize trouble, to recognize foreign invaders becomes less and less effective.
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Uh, in a way, our immune system ages. Now, how do I know this? As a baby heart transplant surgeon and a children’s heart transplant surgeon, we knew that we had to use large amounts of immunosuppressant drugs to keep our kids’ immune system from attacking that foreign heart that we put into them. On the other hand, if we had a 70-year-old or a 75-year-old person who needed a heart transplant or a kidney transplant, we just were licking our chops because we didn’t need anything of the high dose immunosuppressant to make this immune system accept that heart. Why? Because quite honestly, it wasn’t very good, and we really only needed little bits of immunosuppressants to tone down its attack. Now, that’s the problem. Over time, our immune system gets hammered, and it affects our ability to fight invaders that happen to us all the time. And conversely, our immune system is always kind of attacking what seems to be wrong inside of our body rather than looking for external triggers.
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That’s why so many people seem to get sicker the older they get, seem to be more exposed to things that you just bounced off of you as a, as a young person. You see so many advertisements on TV telling you that, “Ooh, now that you’re getting older, you need X vaccine because your body is losing the ability, or you need another shot to help your body fight what you normally did as a kid.” And that’s what they’re referring to. What’s great is that infrared light actually helps your body calm the overactive response to things within our body while actually helping the body’s built-in defense regulator improve. And infrared exposure actually triggers a protective gene called HO1, which actually tells your body to calm down the overreaction and make your immune system actually work better. Now, one NIH BAC study found that near infrared and far infrared therapy activates the NERF2 pass- pathway, the same master switch that turns on your antioxidant defenses.
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So that’s what helps calm the endothelium, the lining of your blood vessels, and it helps keep them more flexible and resilient. Now, we can measure flexibility in blood vessels with a blood test and several devices that we can look at how your blood vessels respond to stress. And what’s fascinating is there’s an expression in longgevity that you’re only as young as your blood vessels are flexible. And it’s true. We can see and document that as we begin to have inflammation, inflammating, that our blood vessels get really stiff. And the exciting thing in my clinics and in other clinics, we found that we can make those blood vessels more flexible by influencing the NERF2 system. I mentioned before that cancer is obviously one of the things that happens more and more as we age. Now, why is that? Well, it’s estimated that roughly 15% of cancers worldwide are linked to chronic infection and inflammation.
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And one of the driving factors in this is that our mitochondria are no longer efficient. And simplistically, our cells don’t trust the mitochondria to make energy, so they turn to other systems, and that’s one of the theories of why cancer happened. Now, this is a powerful reminder of how important it is to keep this system of mitochondria working properly in balance. So this deep penetrating heat that we seek from the sun doesn’t just feel good, but it helps your body reset itself from the inside out. Number four, believe it or not, infrared sauna time can even help your gut. Infrared light improves circulation and actually helps support a balanced microbiome. Now, as I tell my patients, your microbiome is like a tropical rainforest where there are thousands of different species in this tropical rainforest, good guys and bad guys that all are dependent on each other for the ecology of that tropical rainforest.
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And we can now measure the ecology of the gut. And sadly, when I first see most of my patients, their tropical rainforest has been reduced to a desert wasteland. And rebuilding that tropical rainforest is what I do in my practice. So how do you help rebuild that tropical rainforest? Well, the great news is infrared near infrared sauna has been shown to improve the diversity of gut bacteria. And once again, as I talked about in the gut-brain paradox, my most recent book, the more diverse your microbiome, the more diverse this tropical rainforest is, the better and more stable your body, your health span. So these trillions of bacteria not only affect your digestion, but they affect your energy and like I talked about in the book, your mood. So when your gut environment is balanced, nutrients get better absorb, your immune system is told to calm down, and your whole body just runs smoother.
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A strong gut means a strong you. Like Hippocrates said 2,500 years ago, the father of medicine, all disease begins in the gut. And here’s another example of how infrared and near infrared light can help. And number five, now this one may be the most exciting stem cells. So most of us now have heard of stem cells. Stem cells are your body’s built-in repair crew. They help replace older damaged tissue. Now, sadly, as we age, the stem cell rejuvenation system slows down. What’s exciting is that infrared therapy actually helps wake up stem cells. It literally mobilizes stem cells from your bone marrow where most of them live, so that they can go out in circulation and rebuild, repair, and renew. I mean, it’s literally like flipping on your body’s own internal repair switch. Now, believe it or not, fasting does this as well. So that’s why, among other things, fasting works.
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We know that the fasting mimicking diet also does the same thing. It activates stem cells. And what easier way to do it is step into a near infrared and infrared sauna. So whether you use it for energy, recovery, or relaxation, infrared saunatherapy does far more than just make you sweat. Oh, and by the way, sweating helps you get rid of toxins. Sweating is one of the easiest ways to liberate toxins from your body. It doesn’t require your liver to be strong. It doesn’t require your liver to filter them. You just kick them out through your body. So yeah, sweating is another huge benefit, but there’s so much more than that. Infrared sauna helps your body strengthen five of the core foundations of longevity. Your mitochondria strengthen, your cellular cleanup improves, your internal balance improves, your gut health improves, and your stem cells get woken up.
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So if you wanna experience these benefits yourself, I really highly recommend checking out Sunlighten’s infrared saunas. They’ve been perfecting this technology for over two decades, and it shows. That’s a pretty good reason to make sauna time a regular part of your longevity routine. In fact, recently, I was on a podcast with a physician who’s an impressive biohacker, and he told me, frankly, he said, “You watch some day soon, all homes will come equipped with a sunlight and sauna. They’re that important for our overall health.” I thought that was really a remarkable statement, and let’s all look forward to that. How many steps should I walk per day to stay healthy? Oh, I gotta get in my steps. I’m sure you’ve either heard this before or said it to yourself. And while it’s great to be active and track your movement, is 10,000 steps really the amount of steps you need to make a difference in your weight and health?
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So I’m sure you’ve heard it all before that 10,000 steps a day is the magic number of steps that you should reach every day in order to be healthy and lose weight. Well, the truth is that this number came from a Japanese pedometer company to sell pedometers. It was completely fabricated with absolutely no experimental basis. All they wanted to do was sell pedometers. So while it is good to get your steps in, you do not need to take that many steps specifically, particularly once during the day. Now, Google it, and every blog I see out there says we need 10,000 steps a day to lose weight. That’s exactly not true. I’ll give you my own example. As you know, I used to be a big, fat, obese guy, even though I was running a minimum of 3K, 3,000 meters per day and 30 miles per week going to the gym one hour every day, and I was gaining weight.
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So the idea that we should be walking to lose weight is, <laugh> in my experience, patently not true. So how many steps should you take? Well, studies show that you really only need about 2,700 to 3,900 steps per day to get the benefit of walking. That’s certainly nowhere near 10,000 steps per day. Now, the other thing that people should realize is this does not have to be on a continuous basis. In other words, you don’t have to walk 3,000 steps at a single time. That’s also not only not true, but may actually be better ways to get that amount of steps in place. So as you know, from my book, The Energy Paradox, there are multiple ways to break up getting your steps in, and I call them exercise snacking. One of the things that a lot of us recommend for very good reason is an early morning walk.
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Getting sunlight in the early morning, particularly as sun is changing into that from orange to yellow, really activates this crazy receptor behind your retina called the suprachatic nucleus, and that actually sets the rhythm of your circadian rhythm. And really, all you need is like 10 to 15 minutes of this sun exposure to set your circadian rhythm properly. And what better way to get that than to take a 10 to 15 minute walk. I’ll say it again. I say it all the time. One of the easiest ways to accomplish that is to get a dog. The dog will be more than happy to accompany you on your morning stroll to set your circadian rhythm. And it always works. The dog will demand it. Uh, my dog’s demanded it this morning, so that’s a great way to do it. The other thing that I think that’s really useful to get in those extra steps is take a walk after dinner.
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One of the studies that I cited in my first book, Dr. Gunder’s Diet Evolution, which was very impactful for me, is they looked at people, human beings, and they had half the group walk 10 minutes before dinner, and the other group walked 10 minutes after dinner, and they actually looked at their weight, and lo and behold, the people who walked 10 minutes before dinner didn’t lose any weight. The people who walked 10 minutes after dinner actually lost weight, even though they actually ate the same amount of calories. Now, I conjectured that what happens is, if you had been out hunting all day, and you then ate dinner, and sat around, your body says, “Oh, uh, he’s not going anywhere the rest of the night, and we might as well store these calories as fat.” On the other hand, if you’ve been hunting all day, and then eat dinner, and then get up and start walking again, your body says, “Wait a minute, uh, we don’t know whether he’s walking for 10 minutes or he’s walking for 30 miles.
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We better not store this food as fat. We should make it available.” And I think that’s actually one of the important reasons why, particularly when I’m in Europe and actually over in, uh, Japan, that I see so many people walking after dinner. And the other thing that’s interesting is nobody’s out power walking after dinner. They’re strolling and they’re communicating with their family, with their loved ones, with friends. So walk in the morning, walk after dinner, it’s gonna be amazing for you to get your steps in, and quite frankly, you don’t need very many steps. There’s more evidence of this. Studies have been done comparing people who live in cities versus living in suburbs, and quite frankly, city dwellers are much thinner, on average, than suburban dwellers. And one of the reasons for that is that people who live in cities walk a great deal compared to people who live in suburbs.
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As many of us know, suburbs were designed to make walking very difficult to do, and it was designed to make car travel extremely easy in general. Cities, on the other hand, even if you, number one, most people don’t have a car. Number two, if you use public transportation, you are often let off quite a ways from where you really wanna be, and you have to walk the rest of the way. Let me give you an example. As many of you know, I did some of my training in children’s art surgery in London, England, and lived in downtown London without a car for a year. And shockingly, I actually lost 40 pounds that year. In one year, what did I do? Well, quite frankly, I walked all over the place. We walked to the grocery store, we walked to the green groceries, we walked to the theater, we walked wherever we had to go.
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Even if we took the tube, the subway, it would let us off quite a ways from our final destination, and we walked. And it was a real wake up going from suburban Ann Arbor, Michigan, to downtown London, England, how effective walking is for weight loss. Now, many people go on vacation to Europe, and they eat all the phenomenal food, and they gorge on carbohydrates, and yet they come back and they’ve actually either maintained their weight, or surprisingly, they’ve actually lost weight. And one of the reasons is, particularly if you’re in the towns of Europe, whether it’s London or Paris or wherever, you’re walking significantly farther distances than you ever would have before. And I think that explains a lot of the miracle of eating all that food and still losing weight. Now, let’s suppose you live in the suburbs where most people do. It’s actually pretty easy to get those steps in.
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One of the easiest things to do, and most of us don’t think about doing it, is walk around your office every time you take a phone call, rather than sitting at your desk. Most of us take our calls now on our cell phone, just get up and walk, and please put it on speakerphone so that you don’t have your cell phone near your head. Second thing is, like I mentioned before, get a dog in the suburbs. The dog will make you go out. This sounds stupid, but it works whererever you’re going at the grocery store, at the mall, at the strip mall, at the post office, park your car as far away from possible from where you’re going. The other benefit is usually those spaces are pretty empty for obvious reasons, and you won’t get the dings in your car if you’re trying to park close.
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Lastly, consider taking public transportation to work and get off a few stops early and walk the rest of the way. If you work in an office building, this is what I’ve talked about in the energy paradox, don’t beat yourself up, don’t think you have to walk up the four or five flights of stairs to the office, or how many ever, take the elevator up and then walk down the stairs. And do that several times a day. Take an exercise snack break. Every hour, just set your watch for five minutes. Go out, walk down the hall, walk down the stairs, take the elevator back. You’ll get those steps in that you need, and you’ll actually get a fantastic workout. All right. Those little steps that you can do throughout the day are really good, but there’s other things you can do. For instance, you don’t just need to walk to get exercise.
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One of the things that’s amazing when you look at super old people who are thriving in their late 90s and early 100s, they also actually do housework. And housework, back in the good old day, was actually hard work. We have so many conveniences now that we forget that housework was actually really good for you. I’m old enough to remember when we actually had to get up to change the channel on a TV. Now we only had three channels, but why not play with this game? Take your remote when you want to change the channel, get up, walk over to the TV, then click the remote and walk back. While you’re still up, why not do some squats on the couch? Why not just lift your legs up while you’re watching TV and hold your legs up for a minute while you’re watching TV. It’s free exercise.
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Think of it as your seated yoga class and just hold your legs up. You’ll notice that your thighs are getting a fantastic workout without you seemingly doing anything. Every time I brush my teeth for two minutes in the morning and two minutes at night, I’m doing squats. You don’t do anything else. If you’ve got a bathtub, grab the edge of the bathtub and do planks or pushups on the bathtub. It’ll be a lot easier than doing pushups on the floor, and you’ll find that you can actually do pushups reaching over a bathtub instead of on the floor. And you’ll actually get a lot of confidence, and you’ll find that you’re gonna do more and more, and they’re a lot easier than torturing yourself. So, all sorts of ways to get in little exercise snacks. You don’t have to walk a single step to lose weight.
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Just look at bears during hibernation. Bears do not move for four to five months, and bears lose a tremendous amount of weight. How do they do it? They don’t eat. Always remember that when all else fails, you don’t have to walk to lose weight. You just don’t have to eat. Finally, remember that the famous Italian cyclist study that I talked about in Unlocking the Keto Code. These cyclists were put on a training table. They had to eat the exact same amount of food. They had to exercise the exact same amount. One group had a 12-hour eating window where they got to eat food. The other group had only a seven-hour eating window where they ate food. Only the group that had the seven-hour eating window lost weight. The other cyclists didn’t lose any weight. Why? Because they compressed their eating window and they uncoupled their mitochondria and burned through fuel.
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The point is, the exercise was no different. It was how they manipulated eating their food. So, all sorts of great tricks, but you do not have to walk 10,000 steps a day to accomplish your health goals.
Speaker 1 (01:04:12):
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast. If you did, please share this with family and friends. You never know how one of these health tips can completely transform someone’s life when you take the time to share it with them. There’s also the Dr. Gundry Podcast YouTube channel, where we have tens of thousands of free health insights that can help you and your loved ones live a long, vital life. Let’s do this together.
