How Much do Genes Play a Role in Your Health? #10

Genes or Lifestyle?  This show explores how your health may be impacted by your genes, and how much lifestyle plays a role.  Control the controllables.   Heart disease, Alzheimer's Dementia, Cancer, Diabetes are discussed.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to a Fuller Life podcast where we discuss longevity strategies, disease prevention, and improving quality of life. We explore the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social aspects of having the life you want. How do genes affect our health and wellness and disease risk? I want to do a basic exploration on that on this show. I had the question posed to me before uh just recently and many times in the past. So we want to talk about how much of my heart disease, how much of my diabetes, how much of my Alzheimer's, how much of my cancer is due to what mom and dad gave me or grandma and grandpa gave me, and how much of it is due to what I'm doing. So we have a concept that, as I just mentioned, that what mom and dad had plays a big role in what our future is going to be like. And the quick summary is our future, our health and wellness, and particularly those chronic diseases I just mentioned, most of it is in your control. That's the good news. Take that message home with you. Your lifestyle choices has the most influence on if you're going to have those chronic diseases or not. Okay. Well, how do the genes play a role? Okay. So one of the uh issues that I see is when somebody goes to a healthcare practitioner or a doctor, whoever it might be, some of the first questions are, what did your mom and dad have? What were their uh lifestyle, what were their diseases, if they're not alive, what did they die from? And in your grandparents and what are your siblings uh all about and so forth. That is important information, but I don't think that's the first thing we should be asking people. Because lifestyle choices, and lifestyle is your nutrition, we're gonna get into this in detail, your nutrition, your exercise, and so forth, because that is such a plays a bigger role by far in how much uh of these chronic diseases you're going to have, those should be the first things that we're investigating when somebody comes in. If somebody comes in and says, I have an X problem, the healthcare practitioner and doctor should say, okay, let's go over your lifestyle, what's your nutrition like, what's your exercise like, what's your sleep habits like? Are you a water drinker? What's your stress level like? Do you have an enriching job, uh, good relationships or not? You know, and so forth. Those are the things that play the biggest role in what your chronic disease risk is going to be. Now that does interplay with your genes, and your genes are the cellular blueprints that all of your cells have that allow your cellular machinery to operate, which basically allows your body to operate. So it's important to pay a role to them, but it's not as important as the other things that I'm talking about. Now, there's an exception to that because there are genetic disorders and diseases that some people unfortunately have. So sickle cell disease, TASACs disease would be some examples of genetic diseases. You can have um you can have chromosomal disorders like a Down syndrome or fragile X and those kinds of things. Okay, birth defects as people know them. So there are genetic diseases and disorders that people have, but they're much smaller in number than these other chronic diseases that are very much more lifestyle related. Okay. So besides those genetic ones that I had just mentioned, a lot of people will hear these comments of, well, it's a combination of your genes and the environment. And yes, that's true. But again, the heavy emphasis that I hear on a lot of that is it's the genes and your environment. And environment means lifestyle, okay? Your lifestyle choices, your health and wellness choices, your day-to-day choices and what you do and what you don't do.

unknown 4:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

I think that should be set aside in what are your lifestyle choices. That's the thing to talk about. Because for the most part, although we're going to talk about this in a minute, your genes are your genes. You're, you, you were given this, you were dealt this hand by cards, if you just think about it as we're playing a game of cards right now. Your cards were handed to you, okay? Those are your genes. How you play the cards is your lifestyle. Your lifestyle choices determines how you're going to play that hand. Play those cards. The cards are the genes. How are you going to play them? There you go. So let's get into the example. Before I get into the example, I want to mention this particular study because this one is just so poignant in what we're talking about right now. The title of the article is Cancer is a Preventable Disease That Requires Major Lifestyle Changes. This is a public published scientific article out of the journal called Pharmaceutical Research, and it was back in 2008. And there's multiple authors. In the abstract, it summarizes what we're going after right now on this show. This year, more than one million Americans and more than 10 million people worldwide are expected to be diagnosed with cancer, a disease commonly believed to be preventable. Here's the key point now. Only 5 to 10% of all cancer cases can be attributed to genetic defects, whereas the remaining 90 to 95% have their roots in the environment and lifestyle. Lifestyle are the things that we choose to do. That's our nutrition and exercise and sleep and taking care of our spine and nervous system and water and supplements and so forth. Stress, stress reduction. Environment can literally be the environment. Were we exposed to toxins? Did we smoke? Were we exposed to secondhand smoke? Is there too much alcohol in our life? You know. So those are the environment factors. Do we live in a polluted area? Is the water bad? Are we exposed to radiation? You know, whatever it is, right? Okay, so those are the environmental things. The lifestyle factors says this article. Lifestyle factors include cigarettes smoking, diet, alcohol, sun exposure, environmental pollutants, infections, stress, obesity, and physical inactivity. Doesn't that explain everything that we've been talking about forever? The evidence indicates that of all cancer-related deaths, almost 25 to 30% are due to tobacco. So simply don't smoke. Okay? So that's a quarter to one third, almost a third of all cancers. These are all cancers, you know, colorectal and breast and prostate and so forth. Of course, lung cancer. As many as 30 to 35% are linked to diet. So a third of cancers, just one factor alone, what are you eating and what are you not eating? About 15 to 20% are due to infections, and the remaining percentage are due to other factors like radiation, stress, physical activity, environmental pollutants, etc. I'm going to change that a little bit, and I'm going to say that I think the stress is more important and not talked about enough. Therefore, cancer prevention requires smoking cessation, increased ingestion, ingestion of fruits and vegetables, no surprise there, moderate use of alcohol, and I would say little to none is the goal. Little to no alcohol is the best scenario. Caloric restriction, don't overeat. Increased um avoidance of direct exposure to sunlight. Some will argue that slightly, which is get a little bit of sun exposure, but not too much, and don't always hide all the time from the sun. Anyway, that's a debatable thing. But there we go. Don't get too much sun unprotected, is what that's saying, so you get melanoma and so forth. Minimal meat consumption, there's another one saying re-decrease your meat, use of whole grains, use of vaccinations, and regular checkups. Okay. In this review, later on in this study, we present as evidence that inflammation is the link between the agents and factors that cause cancer and the agents that prevent it. In addition, we provide evidence that cancer is a preventable disease that requires major lifestyle changes. And that's what we're talking about here. So the point is back to the original hypothesis that I presented to you today, is most of the chronic diseases that we are facing today as a population in the world are preventable by lifestyle changes. Those major diseases are heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and so forth, okay? All right. So we do have, which is amazing in itself. If you think about our human body, we're just going to break it down now for in into just some basics. All we are is a pile of cells. That's what I'd like to explain that the body. If you look at the body, we're made of a bunch of cells, just a pile of cells. The cells differentiate, so then there's skin cells and bone cells and muscle cells and neurons and digestive system cells and so forth. But we're just a pile of cells. In every cell, except for red blood cells, in every cell, you have DNA, you have a nucleus, you have basically it's a it's an operational city on its own. And if you remember back from our basic biology, if you look at one cell, it is a functioning city with all of these parts that have all kinds of incredible functions. One cell. You need the foundation with concrete, and you need the framing and the foundation, and then you need siding and so forth, right? So the blueprint's gonna show you how to build this and make that, and you've got different materials and different sizes and so forth.

unknown 11:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 11:20

So the the genes that you have are blueprints on how to create proteins and the other substances and so forth that a cell needs to do whatever the cellular machinery is going to do. Of course, now if you imagine right now, if you're watching me on video, you can't see me if you're on the podcast. But if you're on video right now, I'm stretching my arms uh wide out to my sides. And I would say if you walked into a library and you had an encyclopedia with 20,000 pages, that's a long, big, long book. And we we put it down on a table, and it's almost like this long, long um uh card catalog, right? This one massive long drawer of all these cards, 20,000 of them, okay. So get this big, big book, all these pages. Now, if you tried to read that entire encyclopedia 20,000 pages right at that moment, you can't do it. It's just too big. There's too much going on, right? Well, that's your DNA. Those are your genes, okay? And the genes are blueprints, and each page has a little bit of a piece of the blueprint of building stuff, of making a protein, for example, for example, okay? But there's so much you can't read them. As a matter of fact, most of them you don't read. Most of the DNA is just, it's there, it's information, it's needed, but it's not being read, if you will, quote, read. Okay. For sometimes some people call the DNA that's um that is um not coding at that time junk DNA. Well, I don't think it's really junk DNA. I don't think there's any waste going on there whatsoever, but it's DNA that's just not active, it's not coding, it's not being read, and so forth. So the blueprints are there, it's just kind of put off to the side, right? Okay. So if we're in front of this book and we want to learn stuff, we would flip to a page and read some stuff and flip to another page and read some stuff. If we were looking up something specific, let's say we needed a specific protein because we're a skin cell and we needed elastin and we wanted to have some strength, but we wanted to have some stretchiness as well, so the cell needs to produce a little bit of protein, and there we go.

unknown 13:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 13:27

So we're gonna flip to a certain page, maybe three, four pages. I'm making this up as I go. And then the cellular machinery kips into gear because it's been signaled to make some manufacturing processes run. Fine. Okay? Well, let's say in this book of 20,000 pages, you have some faulty pages, some pages with defects, some blueprints that didn't come out perfectly. Okay, we'll call them defects, we'll call them bad signaling, we'll call it a black page or a dark page, you know, something you don't want to open. Do you follow? You don't want to open those pages. If you open them and read them, well, the cell might follow through on those instructions, but it might not go well. Okay? Then faulty things might happen in the cell, and then the cell changes, and it might you might um have faulty cartilage, so then you've got arthritis, and you might have faulty inflammation, and then you get this problem over here, and who knows what it what happens from that um those those genes that are being read that you don't want to read. Okay, maybe it's a heart disease gene, maybe it's a cancer gene. I'll call it a cancer gene. Uh maybe it's a type 2 diabetes gene. I'm making it simplistic, that's not exactly accurate what I'm talking about. But let's say if you read those pages that have faulty information, faulty blueprint on it, the cellular production mechanisms are going to be faulty.

unknown 14:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 14:50

Well, is there a way to affect your DNA in a way that you read the stuff that you want to read and keep the pages closed that you don't want to read? And the answer is yes. So really smart scientists and researchers and doctors and so forth have been looking at this, and this has been a hot topic for many, many years, and still is. It's called epigenetics. So it's genetics, but epigenetics. Epigenetics means above genetics, which means it's the influencers that you can have over your genetics. Okay? There's a process, if you do activities in your life, you signal your cells to create this reaction called methylation. Methylation is where a methyl group, you can look this up if you if you want to go a little deeper, is attached or added to your DNA to affect the reading of your DNA pages. Imagine I've got that big encyclopedia in front of me, and I take paper clips and I paperclip some pay pages together so they don't get red. Or I come over here and I pull off a paperclip because I want those red, those ones over there that make me strong and healthy and resist infection and make strong muscles and strong neurological communications in the brain and make our heart vessels stay stretchy and the heart the heart works well and the sympathetic nervous system stays a little more quiet. Whatever, whatever it might be, right? So we can move around these paper clips and close down the ones that we don't want to be read and open up the ones that we want red. That's methylation that affects the reading of the DNA pages of the blueprints. And well, what is that methylation? What do you do? Do I take a supplement? Do I drink some meth methylation or methyl groups or something like that? Well, not exactly. But what you do is the lifestyle choices that we talked about earlier create those epigenetic effects. It's cellular signaling. It's Bruce Lipton's work, it's Joe Dispens's work. It's when you look at how cells talk to one another, how they communicate. An easy way to, a common way to understand this is how neurons or nerve cells communicate in our body. There's a nerve cell that sends an electrical impulse down its wire, axon wire, and then it goes through a space through a chemical reaction and the space in between the nerves, and then it provokes the next nerve in line to create another electrical impulse. So one nerve cell talks to another nerve cell, and it does so with this communication system. Okay. And if this is a nerve pathway that you want to strengthen, let's say you're trying to remember numbers, so you want to create that memory. Um, if you want to enhance your life uh from a stress reduction process and you remember the things that you're grateful, so you get into a gratitude practice and you enhance that with neuroplasticity, and you build the gratitude pathways by being grateful for little things and big things that you already have in your life right now. You're going to strengthen the neurological communication and connection systems in your brain, and that is an epigenetic effect that's strengthening a pathway that you want to strengthen. That's creating proteins and chemicals and neurons and memories and connection systems and dendritic trees that are going to expand that allow us to talk to more neurons and so forth, right? So you're basically creating more strength in a neurological pathway that you're looking to preserve and enhance, okay? So that would be how stress, or stress reduction in this case, or uh uh being the antithesis of stress pathways by having a gratitude pathway, okay? So that's how going into journaling practices and yoga practices and meditation and mindfulness and gratitude and whatever it might be, deep breathing and so forth, any of these practices that you do are creating an epigenetic effect on your cells. You can make the argument in that case, all the cells in the body, because it's just going to be such a profound effect if you do this over and over and over again. Epigenetics affecting your g your genetic expression by your health habits, by your chosen health habits. And I just gave you one, and there are many, many others.

unknown 19:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 19:47

So when we look at something like Alzheimer's, there is some genetic testing that you can have for Alzheimer's. Now we've talked about this in the past, and there's um these uh substances that you can test for, it's called ApoE. And you might have heard about this, and 23andMe does this. Obviously, there's many, many other labs and tests that you can do with this. But there are these ApoE genes that you can look for, and you have um ApoE2, ApoE3, and ApoE4 that you can test for. Okay. ApoE2 is considered mildly protective for Alzheimer's, Alzheimer's dementia. And you get one copy from one copy from mom, one copy from dad, so two copies of this, of this particular gene. Okay. ApoE3, if you have those, they're considered, if you will, more neutral. And if you have ApoE4, you might have a slight increase in chance of having Alzheimer's dementia down the road. Fine, okay. Let's say you don't want to get tested because you don't want to know, I can appreciate that. Some people just don't want to know, but they still should make good lifestyle choices, right? Let's say somebody does want to get tested because they might see it as a motivational tool, or they want to get tested because family members had Alzheimer's dementia, parents, grandparents, siblings, whatever it is, extended family, whatever it might be. And they said, you know, I do want to know that information, so I can take some action. Fine. Now, a lot of this is out of Dale Bredison's work. You can read his book, The End of Alzheimer's. I've talked about that. There are many other great authors out there, uh, David Pearl Mutter and so forth, talking about these, these, these things. Okay. So let's say somebody tests and you've got two copies of the not so good one that you don't want, Apo E4. Let's say you have two copies of ApoE4. What do you do with that information? I say this. This is my reply, this is how I how I operate. You just got to work a little harder. You just gotta work a little harder. You're gonna work a little harder than the next person. Now, the next person should be working hard to take care of their body and take care of the things that they have. Under their control, which is lifestyle, which is nutrition and exercise and stress reduction and good sleep habits, taking care of your spine and nervous system, taking um immune system boosting and brain boosting supplements, drinking enough water and so forth. Maybe low-level laser. I talked about these. These are the eight buckets, the eight wellness buckets that I talk about. Okay. If somebody says, Oh, I'm ApoE3, I can just kind of cruise control. Well, you know, those are kind of neutral. And somebody says, Well, I'm ApoE2, I am I'm Superman, I'm superwoman. I anything I do, I'm my brain's gonna be fine. I can play contact sports and I can eat whatever I want. No, it means you have a little bit of better protection than the next person, maybe, but you still have to do all the great things. So you really don't change much with that information, is my point. Now, uh looking this up, half of people diagnosed with Alzheimer's dementia do not have the ApoE4 genes. They don't have either a a copy, no copies at all. Half of people, okay. So you can see that it's it's really not super conclusive. Okay. And half of people with two copies of ApoE4 don't get Alzheimer's either. Okay. So even though, oh, I've got two copies. Oh my gosh. Well, very likely again, if you work a little harder, my my perspective on it, if you work a little harder, chances are very good you won't. You won't. Okay. Now we can go down the line with that and say, okay, heart disease runs in my family. Cancer runs in my family. Uh just for a moment and park on this. Let's say you get genetic testing for breast cancer and you get the BRCA1, BRCA, BRCA2 tests, and so forth. Okay. What if you come up and you have some of those anomalies and you test positive for them? What do you do with that information? My reply is you work a little harder. You work a little harder than the next person. And I think everybody should work hard. And then if you get genetic testing, or let's say you really have rampant heart disease in your family, okay? Uh you don't get genetically tested per se, but let's say that you know your parents passed away in their 60s from massive coronaries, and your grandparents didn't live very long, and they all had heart disease on both sides and so forth. And okay, the the point is you have to work a little bit harder, let's say likely, you have to work a little bit harder, okay? So um, let's say you have a lot of type 2 diabetes in your family. What are you gonna do with that? Well, mom and dad are gonna go and and grandma and grandpa on both sides are gonna give me type 2 diabetes, and that's not the point of genetics, is they're not giving you these diseases. But maybe it's this. Number one is maybe we see trends in families because we learn health habits from our parents and grandparents. We learn health habits. So if our parents are good eaters, we might be good eaters. If our parents are eating lots of processed foods, maybe we eat a lot of processed foods. If our parents smoke, maybe we smoke. If our parents never really exercised and never coached potatoes, maybe we never exercised and coached potatoes. Maybe we actually learn the lifestyle things, and then we go down a similar pathway of not getting or getting the diseases that mom and dad and grandma and grandpa had because of the health habits that we had, not because of the genes that gave us illness, you see? And then remember earlier that, and a lot of doctors feel this way, it's like only like five or ten percent of the whole deal, not just cancer, but they were talking about other chronic diseases too, is actually due to genetic defects. Most of it is under your control. Okay. Here's the other spin that I like to give on it. Well, why does why does heart disease run more rampant in this family over here? And cancer is more of a problem over this family over here, and strokes are more of a problem over here, and Alzheimer's dementia is a problem over here. What's the deal there? So, what about that? Okay. My reply to that is if we decide to do an experiment and not take care of ourselves, so we're not gonna take care of ourselves, we're gonna eat whatever tastes good, we're not gonna exercise, we're gonna spend plenty of time on the couch, we're gonna definitely run the rat race, live in America, run the rat race, make sure we're stressed to the hilt, right? Definitely get a job that you don't like with a really bad boss. Make sure you were hanging around with toxic people in the work environment all the time. Internalize other people's stuff as much as you possibly can so you can really lift up your stress mechanisms. Okay, keep that cortisol and those other inflammatory exudates just cranking all the time. Let that affect your sleep. Make sure you don't get sure you alter your sleep patterns, you know, stay up late one night, go to bed early another night, make sure your quality sleep is poor, right? Don't take any anti-inflammatory and probine supplements for sure. Don't take care of your spine and nervous system. Make sure you are king and queen of slouch. Sit in front of a computer and be all slouch over and bent over and really stress that spine and all the mechanoreceptors and mess up the communication to the brain for sure. Okay. Um don't drink any water. Definitely smoke, drink lots of alcohol, uh, heavy, heavy caffeine all day, not just in the morning, all day caffeine all the time. Definitely um eat processed foods. So, like diet soda, get that kicked up. Snack foods that taste really good with super questionable ingredients, pound those down like crazy. Okay. Did I miss anything else? Yeah, definitely like, you know, don't take uh meaningful vacations, make sure your relationships are toxic. Um, all those bad habitals, you know, you're not exercising good. And it certainly, you know, make sure you live in uh toxic environments, like use heavy cleaning products with terrible odors, and make sure you use them every day, and and so on and so forth. Okay, so you've really cranked it up, right? Follow the picture? Okay, so we've gone in the other direction. We've really swung the pendulum into not doing good things, making, let's say, less than ideal lifestyle choices. Follow? Okay. Well, you might not get sick when you're 10, you might not get sick when you're 20 or 30, maybe even 40, who knows? Probably most of us might think, unless you were a genetic mutant, and just as a sidebar, oftentimes people will say, I had a fourth uncle five times removed, that smoke every day and drank and never exercised and just ate hot dogs, and he lived till he's 87, and he he lived it up. He was fun and happy, okay? Great. I call that a genetic mutant. Okay. Sure, there's all everybody's got a little story like that. But let's assume that for the rest of us, mere human humanoids, we're not genetic mutants, and we actually have to pay attention. We have to work hard at it, okay? So, anyways, that's just a little sidebar because people do bring up those stories. Anyway, so here we are, we swung the pendulum way over to the side, and we're not taking care of ourselves. Something is going to break, right? Let's say you're not going to live until 92 and just pass away in your sleep one one night, okay? Let's say likely some organ system is going to break down, okay? What breaks down first might be due to your genes, okay? So if you have one family that did all these bad lifestyle choices that I'm talking about right now, they might have more heart disease because that's their genetic predisposition. The next family over here who did the same thing, they swung the pendulum in a really bad direction, not take care of themselves, maybe cancer pops up first, right? This third family group uh over here, they get more of the type 2 diabetes, and that gets them first, that breaks first. Maybe the families over here they get the Alzheimer's dementia, but it hits them earlier, okay? Now that could be genetic determinants. You've you have the weaker links buried in there somewhere. Make sense? I I think it kind of makes sense that way. And let's say this first family, they survive the heart disease and the heart attack or whatever, but then maybe they do get some cancer because they survive the heart stuff, but the next up for them because they're not taking care of themselves is cancer. Maybe the type 2 diabetic over here mainf their diabetes, but they're not doing well, but then they end up getting type 3 diabetes, the Alzheimer's dementia. You you follow? So that's where I think it really plays a role. Most of it, most of the genetic issues is not going to give you that primary thing because mom and dad and grandma and grandpa gave that to me, and it's their fault. Maybe we learned, unfortunately, when we're young, when we're young and impressionable, we learned those health habits and they stuck with us, and we got into that grind of swinging the pendulum too far into the not good lifestyle habits along the way, and then we ended up having similar disease pictures like our parents had and our siblings had and our grandparents had and so forth. You follow? So I think that that's how we should consider the genetic picture. Now, as technology gets better and so forth, I understand there's a lot of genetic research going on and manipulations and so forth, and we'll see how that all pans out. So, what do we do right now? We go right into those health habit categories and we start paying attention. And I I think number one and number two, and I'm gonna say number three, uh they're just so so important. Nobody can ignore them anymore. So, number one is what are you gonna eat? What are your choices? And you you know, 80 to 90 percent of the time you try to make it as clean as it could possibly be. You try to make it real food. You just try to eat real food. And I had this discussion with another clinician just today, and she had asked me, so you are you um paleo primal, you know, that kind of thing, leaning more toward towards a heavy meat. And I said, No, not really. I'm actually more heavy veg and and so forth. Um, but I'm not gonna get into uh a diet war discussion here. We know that a a mildly ketogenic diet is really the hot topic in Alzheimer's dementia prevention and treatment after diagnosis. Okay, so you're really restricting carbohydrates and going more towards above-ground vegetables and some good healthy meats and healthy fats and so forth. And you're in a mild ketosis moving forward. I get that. If people can stick to that and work it and they see symptomatic improvements and so forth, improvements in their lifestyle improvements. Let's say you're not ill and you don't have a diagnosis, but you're going to your medical physician, you're getting blood tests and replete blood tests, and you just simply look at your weight and your function and your energy and so forth, and everything's trending in the right direction. If that's working for you, stick with it. There can be vegans over here that can do extremely well on a vegan diet with no animal products what what together, and their energy is great, their brain is great, their blood tests look excellent, their energy levels are sharp, their cognitive function is there, and they can do well. The vegetarian over here that has a little bit of animal product uh in there, if they can stick with that and they they're satisfied and they're happy with their dietary choices, the the um paleo or primal people over here, they might do well, stick with the diet. They they source really well their foods and meats and so forth. Maybe they shop at a local farm that raises everything locally and they do it organic and so forth. And you can stick with that, and your family can and your children can stick with that, and everybody seems to be healthy, and all the markers are, and the doctors are pleased with what's going on, stick with it. I think we're from a dietary perspective, if you have one that you can stick with and you're happy with and you're satisfied with and you're making good gains, stick with that. That's that's where I think it can really go. The Mediterranean diet, it works, it's good. It's good for many, many good reasons. Look at that. You know, it's it's it's it's pretty solid stuff. And then you can also look at blue zones, as we talked about. If you don't know, don't know what that is, look it up. Blue zones. Centenarians around the world, concentration of centenarians that have uh lifestyle, lifestyle, uh, good lifestyle and good health, and they live a long time. And then right next to it is exercise. Right next to that is exercise. Just keep in mind we talked about this in the past, is um it's not just walking. Walking is a good start, but walking is not enough. We need to be doing resistance-based exercises. It doesn't have to be weights, it can be body weight stuff, it could be band stuff. Again, I have people in my office who come in and walkers and we get them doing stuff sitting that is resistance-based, arms and legs, and we just work with them. And there are so many talented therapists, trainers, athletic trainers, and so forth, uh, doctors and and and so on that can help with modifications galore to get people doing resistance exercise. I'm gonna put stress and stress reduction, stress management right up there at number three. I already nailed it early on, talking about the different things that we can start to implement uh in our lives. Number four, sleep. We we own this good quality, ongoing sleep. I've done podcasts on this and done videos on this. There's incredible amounts of great information on improving your sleep hygiene, as they call it. Uh, supplements, there are targeted supplements that people can take. Some of the basics are um, and I like what Robert Lustig said. Robert Lustig said, I don't think people should take these piles of supplements. I think people should take stuff that they're deficient in. What do you take, uh, Dr. Lustig? And he says, I take omega-3 essential fatty acids from fish oil. I take vitamin C and vitamin D. So he's already taking three supplements. Well, there we are. I mean, everybody's almost deficient in vitamin D. I can test you if you want on omega-3s. Everybody's deficient there unless you're already taking stuff. Um, vitamin C makes sense. We can take antioxidants, magnesium has worked so well. If you delve into Dale Bredison's work and so forth on Alzheimer's prevention, you'll see uh uh things like that. Taking care of your spine and nervous system makes sense. Um also as a chiropractor myself, uh, taking care of spine and nervous system, if we are more, if our relationship to gravity is better, our mechanoreceptive specialized nerve-ending input into the brain is going to be better. Imagine something all as someone all bent and slouched over. It's that gonna be good for health, well, uh health and longevity. No, I think most people know that. Plus, if you get chronic pain, that's gonna swing the pendulum in a bad direction to inflammation, right? So dealing with those things, you you deal with um water intake is is the next one. Keep caffeine in the morning only as best you can. Maybe people have to go with no caffeine. Don't drink any calories, keep the water intake up. Don't make any of these changes without talking to your doctor first, right? And then lastly, for the brain in particular, I've done shows in low-level laser. I've just seen really incredible things. I have a new concussion case right now, already turning around after one low-level laser therapy treatment on the brain. Only certain lasers can be used on the brain. And this is not red light therapy, by the way, this is laser. So you can look into that as well. That's how you go after these things, keeping in mind it's it is work. For some of us, it's hard work. My hand is raised. I'm a human being like the rest of us. We need to work together, get people to work with, get workout buddies, get nutrition friends, share recipes, get working out. Um, Why We Sleep by uh Matthew Walker. A great example of set an alarm to go to bed to get yourself to bed earlier, and so on, and so on. These lifestyle things can make a big difference in your life and reduce your chance of chronic disease. I'm Dr. Scott Fuller. Thank you. Thank you for listening to a Fuller Life podcast. For a video of this podcast, go to my YouTube channel, Dr. Scott Fuller, which has a lot of additional content.