June 9, 2025 • 39 mins
Protein, weights, sleep, oh my.
Does it feel like you hit a certain birthday with a zero and everyone started yelling at you about chicken breast and dumbbells?
For this last episode of MID for Season 5, we wanted to ask someone smart to tell us exactly why that is. And so we found a woman called Louisa Nicola, an Australian neurophysiologist and human performance coach based in the US - and got her to tell us - what's important in the space of midlife health, and what's just noise.
And what she tells us about the three things to prioritise to live better longer is a surprise. Seriously.Important note: The information discussed in this episode is not intended to replace professional medical advice. Supplement availability, safety, and regulation vary between countries, including Australia. Always seek guidance from your GP or pharmacist, and ensure any therapeutic goods are listed on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods (ARTG).
You can follow Louisa Nicola and learn more about her work, here: https://www.instagram.com/louisanicola_/
CREDITS:
Host: Holly Wainwright
Guest: Louisa Nicola
Executive Producer: Naima Brown
Producer: Tahli Blackman
Audio Producer: Jacob Round
Mamamia acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Land we have recorded this podcast on, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to a Mama Mia podcast. Mamma mea acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on. Eat more protein. How about some salmon
with that egg? How about some cottage cheese with that steak?
How about you sprinkle some creatine all over that thing?
What about protein powder and your protein powder for a
(00:32):
morning smoothie full of fiber? And while we're at it,
how many supplements? There's too many supplements? Should I, in
fact rattle when I walk? Speaking of walking? Is walking enough?
Counting my steps? Is that just propaganda? Now? And if
I manage to get to the gym, what should I
do there? For decades it's been burned, baby burn, and
now it's lift, baby lift. Does it feel suddenly like
(00:55):
there's a set of new rules that no one sent
you that you just get glimpses of them yelled at
you through your phone? One hundred grams of protein, bitch
as you scroll past a twenty eight year old with
fluoro athlesia and a neutrib bullet. Well, you'd be right.
The rules are new because the old rules they were
written for men, sweat, sprint, starve, And they were also
(01:19):
written by the toxic body culture we were so surrounded
by as we came of age. It was invisible to
the naked eye, size zero, low rise genes, thigh gaps,
crash diets, and the endless comparison game. Now we've woken
up in what feels like a second puberty, and we've
only just barely started to understand our bodies. They can
(01:41):
feel like angry strangers. Hormones are fluctuating, sleep is elusive.
Joints ache for no reason, and we're told it's just
the beginning. What wants work doesn't work anymore. What once
felt intuitive now feels like guesswork. The new rules are
kinder but also confusing. Move your body more, but don't
(02:02):
overdo it. Eat red meat, but not too much, because
your heart gets some sun for vitamin D, but also
that face from those raisor rays. Sleep more, meditate, fix
your nervous system, add magnesium, track your cycle. Cut out
sugar but not fruit or is it fruit too? If
we decode it. If we find the new rules and
(02:23):
write them down, learn to live by them, can we
change what's coming? Protect our minds and our bodies from age,
from wrinkles and falls, forgetfulness, aches and pains and the
soft stand up grunt? Can eggs really do all that? Hello,
I'm Holly Wainwright and I am Mid, Midlife, Midfamily, mid
(02:47):
lifting my tiny pink weights. Does it feel like you
hit a certain birthday with a zero and everyone starts
yelling at you about protein and dumbbells. Well, if it
feels like that, you're right, because that's what happens. And
for this last episode of Mid for season five, we
wanted to ask someone smart to tell us exactly why
that is, And so we found called Louisa Nicola and
(03:11):
asked her what she thought of all the things midwomen
are told to do. Why Louisa, Well, because she is
an Australian neurophysiologist and human performance coach who's living in
the US and working there at the moment, right at
the forefront of all the science about longevity and health
and performance and exercise and food. She used to be
(03:32):
a world championship triathlete, representing Australia at all kinds of
major international events before a serious injury stopped her athletic
career in its tracks. But that also set her on
the path to understand what she calls brain training and
become an expert in basically telling us normies what athletes
and high performance people know to be true. One of
(03:55):
the things we're going to talk to Louisa about today
is how to care for our brains as we age.
But we are going to talk to her two about
our bodies because that is one of the things that
everybody's always talking to us about. What are the things
to prioritize to live better longer? To be honest, the
priorities she told me were a serious surprise. So here
we go. This is your Nobs guide to the new
(04:17):
rules of a better life. But before we get started,
I need to make this clear. The information discussed in
this episode is not intended to replace professional medical advice.
Supplement availability, safety, and regulation vary between countries, including Australia.
You always need to seek guidance from your GP or
a pharmacist and ensure that any therapeutic goods are listed
(04:41):
on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods before you go
near them. And if you listen to this conversation and
you wonder, oh, I thought you might mention this supplement
or this supplement, because I see them everywhere, there is
a good reason why not, and that is because here
in Australia we're actually pretty lucky that our regulations are
really tight about what you can and can't talk about
(05:02):
and promote. So if there are a few gaps here,
that's why. But I still think you are going to
find this conversation with Louisa Nicola really really interesting. Protein, sleep, exercise.
Oh my, Louisa, I'm just so happy to be talking
to you today because as a woman of my age,
(05:24):
I'm kind of completely overwhelmed by all the stuff I'm
being told to do and knowing what's real, what's helpful,
what's not. And then if i am, I know a
lot of other women are right, and I'd like to
start with a big gun. So if there's one thing
we can advise a woman who's in her kind of
let's say she's in her forties, that her relationship with
(05:44):
fitness is pretty typical, which is that maybe she goes
and fits and starts. She might stick to a gym
regime for a while and then drop out of it.
She's had times in her life when she's been fitter
and times in a life where she's been less. So
what is the one thing we can advise this woman
to do to change the quality of the next twenty
years or so, what would it be.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Well, first of all, Holly, thank you for how you're
definitely tapping on something that is becoming quite an epidemic.
We all are inevitably going to face the decline of
estrogen and progesterone somewhere throughout our life. I think what's
happening now is menopause is really at the spotlight. It
(06:27):
is gaining a lot of traction. And this is really
due to the fact that we had a lot of
misinformation around menopause and estrogen, etc. And this is now
causing a lot of women in midlife and even at
the age of forty to start rethinking their decisions. So
to cut a long story shot, because I know we're
(06:48):
going to evolve throughout this conversation, and to answer your question,
what can a woman do right now to improve the
next twenty years of her life? Well, look, she can
do many things, Okay, but let's talk about what actually
happens at this stage of life in the fourth decade. Well,
the transition into many menopause comes at around a decade
(07:10):
prior to the menopause onset. So if we're thinking it
around the average age, maybe forty two forty three is
the onset of perimenopause. When we start to see the
decline of estrogen and progesterome, we need to start thinking
about what is actually happening, because in my opinion, menopause
(07:30):
doesn't just happen to your ovaries. It's a neuroendocrine malfunction. Really,
we have a lot of things that happen to our
brain and as a result of that, we then go
through a cascade of issues ranging from bone mineral density.
We see a decline in that, we see a decline
in bone mass, in strength, in muscle mass, in cognitive functions,
(07:52):
and these are the things we need throughout our lifespan,
throughout my work and through what I do for a
living and what I research, which is Alzheimer's disease. What
I can safely say is the one thing you should
do right now in your forties is practice good exercise.
You mentioned people. You know some women go through stages
(08:14):
of they're really motivated, they go to the gym for
a week, and maybe they go off the gym. And
what we know is that consistency is key, right because
if we're going to build a good foundation for our
body when we're eighty and when we're ninety, even in
in your sixties and seventies. Really it's got to be
consistent effort, consistently going to the gym, consistently putting in work,
(08:38):
and if you have to follow a structured program from
a personal trainer, I think that's actually becoming more of
a need these days just to really get the foundation set.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
So what we keep being told right now is to
forget the hardcore cardio that we might have been doing
to chase a dress size in our twenties and focus
on weights. Is it that simple and is that the
shift we should definitely make.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
It's not that simple, But let me tell you there
is a need for everything, every part of exercise. When
we are looking into the scientific literature, we're usually separating
exercises into three buckets. Right, We've got strength training, We've
got cardiovascular training, which is your zone too easy, long
long runs, long swim sessions, et cetera, cardio if you will,
(09:28):
and then we've got this high intensity training. Right, So
if we look at across the board, what is going
to give you the biggest bang for your buck it
would be strength and that's because we lose strength and
muscle mass at a very rapid rate. It comes on
in the fourth decade, right, and we females need more
(09:50):
strength if we had to, we still need to work
on our cardiovascular fitness. Right. When we're looking at cardiovascular fitness,
we're also taking into account that we're training the powerhouses
of ourselves, which is called the mitochondria. We've got more
mitochondria than men. So a lot of this marketing what
you're seeing when you're talking about zone two training, which
(10:10):
is dubbed out you should be doing cardio at least
three hours a week. That's really looking at males. Women
should actually be prioritizing strength. And when I say strength,
I'm talking about weights, so resistance training and then high
intensity training. That's like when you're going hard out, not
(10:32):
hit training, but high intensity, hard out efforts, and then cardio.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
I've heard you rail against the little pink weights we all.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Have, Yes, it's you want I try and say women
should move away from the pink weights because listen, it's
not doing you anything. You're actually wasting your time if
you're at the gym lifting small lightweights. If we want
to prevent sycopenia, which is age related muscle loss. If
we want to enhance our metabolic rate and glucose metabolism,
(11:05):
we need to without being too scientific, but we need
to trigger mechano receptors in muscle fibers, right, and that
is triggered when we lift heavy. To improve our muscle
mouse increase our muscle musk, we have to lift heavy.
You're not going to get anything from lifting these two
(11:27):
kilo dumbbells, which are often painted pink.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Okay, let's get a bit more serious. I think we'll
come back to exercise in a while. So women in
my age, apparently we cannot eat enough protein. It's just protein,
protein protein. You can't buy cottage cheese anywhere in the
shops at the moment because the older women have eaten
it all. Eat eggs, fish, meat, eggs and fish more
and more. I wonder if what we're being told is right.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Look, I actually thought it was and I still do.
I think that bare minimum, every single individual, but mainly women,
should be having at minimum one hundred grams of protein
a day. In it it varies right, because we should
be eating around one point six to one point eight
grams perk of body weight. So you know, if you're
(12:12):
seventy kilos, then literally just seventy kilos, you literally multiply
seventy by one point six and that's how much protein
you should be having a day, and that varies.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
What does that much protein actually look like?
Speaker 2 (12:25):
To be honest, it's quite difficult for a lot of women.
It's quite difficult for me to hit my protein goals
every day. But it looks like having one hundred and
fifty grams of chicken breast for lunch, another one hundred
and fifty grams of chicken breast or similar for dinner,
having two to three eggs in the morning.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
So the protein is key.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Protein is key. However, I just interviewed one of the
biggest scientists in protein, so he was actually responsible for
the twin study that was actually documented on Netflix, and
he said something really interesting to me. He noted that
muscle mass is actually muscle mass, and strength is actually
(13:08):
ninety percent resistance training and ten percent protein. So I
was even fed this lie. I was even fed this
lie that we needed we needed so much protein to
gain muscle mass. But it turns out that if you're
not actually stimulating the mechana receptors. As I mentioned earlier,
if you're not even lifting heavy, but you're meeting your
protein requirement needs, it doesn't even matter. But I just
(13:32):
want to add on top of that as well. Protein
also has other wonders where you can increase your metabolic
rate by eating it. So it takes a lot to
digest protein. So once you eat protein, you're also burning
calories and it keeps you full of for longer if
you can try and prioritize at least one hundred grams
(13:54):
a day.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Okay, that's good, sensible advice, good for me to know.
I want to ask you about something else, vitamin D sunshine.
I'm also being told lots of vitamin D.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Vitamin D is really interesting, right we call it vitamin D,
but it's a hormone synthesized by the sun. Right now,
I live in the US, I live in New York,
so a lot of people in the US are actually
vitamin D deficient. So we measure it over here with
(14:26):
nanograms per deesoleader. And what we are trying to and
you can do the conversions in Australian metrics, and so
what we're trying to get everyone too is around sixty
nanograms per deesoleader, but the average is around twenty nanograms
per desoleader. This doesn't mean that you are sun deficient, right,
(14:47):
I mean it can, but it could mean that you
are magnesium deficient. So I've had private clients and patients
who we've worked on their vitamin D levels and we've
brought their vitamin D levels up just by supplementing them
with magnesium alone, because we need magnesium to make vitamin D.
(15:08):
So vitamin D is extremely, extremely important. It's involved in
many and zomatic processes in the body. So if you
want vitamin D deficient, and it's so easy to get tested,
just go to the GP, get a blood test and
you will see if you're vitamin D deficient or not.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
How would you feel if you were vitamin D deficient? Like,
how would you know if you were?
Speaker 2 (15:33):
That's a thing you wouldn't know. It could present as
dry skin, it could present as fatigue. It could present
as going to the gym and not getting that not
being able to lift heavy fast enough. But it's not
like a you can't get a headache and think, oh
I'm vitamin D deficient.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Yeah right, okay, And a few of those things you
just said are often symptoms that menopausal or perimenopause or
women living with anyway.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
I know right.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
After this break, Louise and Nicola and I discussed what
might feel like the most elusive part of this whole thing.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Sleep.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
All right, I want to ask you about sleep, because
that's another thing we're being told is so important. And
we all know that that's true, of course, but sleep
hygiene is such a buzz term right now. Lots of
products we can buy to optimize our sleep and measure
our sleep and see how it's going. Sleep often becomes
a really big problem for women around this phase of life. Anyway,
(16:34):
We've got the anxious two am wake up that would
be very familiar to lots of our listeners. How important
is sleep?
Speaker 2 (16:42):
So sleep is incredibly important. We go through many things
during sleep. Sleep is not just this thing that happens
right during sleep. We go through two different phases. We
go through non REM sleep, and then we go through
REM sleep. During the non rapid eye movement sleep, we
go through a period which is stage three deep sleep.
(17:05):
And I can't tell you how important this stage is
to get into and to stay into.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Right.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
We don't want to just get into deep sleep for
ten minutes out of the night. We really want to
be spending maybe at least three hours of deep sleep
at night. I track my sleep, you know, rigorously, using
three different types of monitors, and I can tell you
even sometimes I am experiencing fluctuations in my sleep. So
during deep sleep, what happens is we activate this system,
(17:35):
which is called the glymphatic system, and this is like
a washing machine in your brain. What happens is all
of the cerebral spinal fluid goes through your brain and
cleans out all of the debris throughout the day. I'm
talking amyloid beta that builds up during the day. We've
got toxins, we've got oh the burdens. Apparently now we've
got microplastics in our brain, which was actually stated first
(17:57):
in an Australian study. So sleep is so important and
there's so many things that we can do to improve
both the quality of our sleep and the quantity of
our sleep. However, we now know that consistency and regularity
of sleep is more important than quantity and quality. So
going to sleep at the same time every day and
(18:18):
waking up at the same time every day, which is
so hard, right, I travel like every three weeks for work,
so that's incredibly hard for me. But maintaining a regular
sleep and wake up time and actually doesn't matter whether
you're sleeping twelve pm till eight am, all right or
ten pm till six am is based on your chronotype.
(18:38):
And you can take a chronotype quiz online. Just type
it in. Take a quiz figure out whether you're an
early bird or a night owl, and you can go
to sleep at whatever time that you like.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
There used to be saying that, like the hours before
midnight are worth more than the sleep you get after.
Is that true? No?
Speaker 2 (18:58):
I thought that was true as well. But I sit
on the board with one of the most well known
sleep doctors and we had dinner probably i would say,
two months ago, and I brought this up with here
and he slammed the table. He's like, stop saying this,
And he explained it to me that it's built on chronotypes.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
Tell me what your sleep hygen looks like to get
the kind of sleep that you do, Oh, tell me.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
So it's really important for me to be able to
bring my nervous system down prior to sleep. So a
lot of people, if you work in a sleep lab right,
for example, and you get a patient, you're often asked
two things. Do you have problem falling asleep or trouble
staying asleep? And it varies across the board. So for me,
(19:42):
I sleep first of all, i sleep in a pitch
black room, so I've got blackout curtains. I wear religiously
an eyemask every night. Even though I've got blackout curtains,
i still wear an eye mask. I sleep on a
temperature controlled mattress, and i know not everyone can do that,
but it's a bit fancy, but it basically I have
an app on my phone and I can control the
(20:03):
temperature of the bed, so it goes cold and then
hot and all throughout the night. I have said it
at around fifty nine degrees fahrenheit, but it's actually separated
into cycles, so it matches. It knows Louisa's in deep sleep,
so I'm going to bring the temperature of the bed down.
(20:23):
Louisa is in light sleep, so I'm going to bring
it down. I'm going to bring it up a bit more,
and I've got an alarm on it. I'm like, well, bed,
wake me up at seven am, so it starts to
heat up at six point thirty in the morning because
heat is actually what wakes us up. Well, heat and light.
But it's like when the sun comes up, it warms
(20:44):
your body, which then releases quartersole, and quartersole is what
wakes you up. Right, So I've got the bed to
heat up half an hour prior to waking.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Look that sounds awesome. Do you use mouth tape? I
see mouth tape everywhere.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
I sometimes do. I don't think it plays as big
of a role as what we think. I think that's
more in line with the beauty hacks. If you will, so,
I don't mouth theare but I also don't mouthbreak.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
So if I don't have a temperature controlled mattress and
perfect blackout, the best thing I can do to get
myself in a good place for sleep is to wind down. Yes,
we've all heard no phones, no blue light, how long
before bed? And also I hear the longevity guys saying
you should stop eating a long time before you go
to sleep. Does that make a big difference?
Speaker 2 (21:30):
So when we eat, it raises our core body temperature. Now,
in order to fall asleep and stay asleep, our core
body temperature needs to drop at least two degrees. This
is why I sleep on a temperature controlled mattress. You
don't want to be eating too close to bedtime. I
usually say, make sure you've had your last meal an
hour and a half to two hours prior to going
to bed, and that's to allow for digestion, right, anything
(21:53):
above that, right, I mean, Brian Johnson is having his
last meal at eleven am, and I think that's just
really really poor education and marketing for the world. That is,
in my opinion, stupid. So I think that's in line
with females.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
So it's also that realistic to most people's lives.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Let's be honest, and I really want the women listening
to understand that we are not men, all right, So
if you hear a male say something, it might be
great for us, right, but we have to do we
have to dig a little bit deeper, and women just
need more fuel in different ranges of you know, different
stages of our lives. So I don't think that's correct.
(22:37):
But I also don't think eating at ten pm and
then going to bed at ten thirty is correct.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
So, just while we're on what you were just saying
about the men, do you think that one of the reasons.
It can feel that the health advice coming at women,
particularly women going through hormonal changes, feels like a lot
is because we're sort of waking up to the fact
that a lot of the medical conventions we've been sold
about what's good for us, we're all about men. And
now as we're learning more about women, there's all this
(23:04):
new information to share.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Yes, so first of all, women very hard to study
in the lab, So a lot of the studies that
have been done have been done on men because they're easier.
Why are they easier because you have to conduct the
gold standard in academic medicine, which is called a randomized
control trial. You need women over a long period of time.
(23:29):
Now what happens with women, Well, we go through menopause,
so hormones change. That's going to skew the data. Some
women want to have a child with enter tain year framework,
so that skews the data. So women just became somewhat
difficult to work with, right, So therefore not a lot
of funding was placed upon them. So a lot of
the funding was placed on men because they were just
(23:52):
easier subjects. And then we put out all of this information.
Scientists were like, well, this fasting does this, or zone
to training does this, and it improves this, but we've
forgot to include women in that, and we just thought, Okay, well,
this study says this, but we don't really understand sex differences.
(24:13):
We're now becoming more attuned with sex differences between men
and women. We know that women have more estrogen receptors
in their brain than men. We know that men go
through their own type of metopause, but the average age
of metopause for a woman is fifty two. Men it's
in their seventies, so that's called andropause. So that was
(24:33):
why all of the marketing was really geared at men. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Right, and now we're understanding that better. There's a lot
to learn all this.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
So look, I'm I'm in neurosurgery three days a week.
I study the brain rigorously. It's all I do. It's
all I've done for the past fifteen years. And every
day I'm like, oh my gosh, I don't know that.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
Much before we get to dementia and Alzheimer's. You mentioned
fasting just now, and I wanted to ask you about
eating in general. A lot of women around my age
have lived in diet culture forever, right, we've sort of
withheld food food from ourselves. We've tried a million different diets.
We've tried Atkins and keto, We've gone donat before two pm,
(25:17):
only at this time, not at that time. Do you
think that women, maybe a lot of women are actually
restricting themselves too much with food at this time in
their life rather than not enough.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Yeah. I think women just don't understand food, right. We
just you know, there's so much to learn. Fasting is
both beneficial and can be detrimental. It depends and even
with women just because we're all it depends on stages
of menstrual cycle. What if you are planning for a pregnancy,
you're starving yourself and then you claim that you're infertile,
(25:51):
but maybe you're just not eating enough to produce the
necessary amount of estrogen to go into ovulation, etc. So
fasting is great. It can turn on autophagy, which is
whatever they can actually stimulate stem cells. But I think
that women should maybe move away from that and maybe
(26:13):
move towards understanding macro nutrients like how much protein do
I need in a day, and how can I maybe
get off sugar and saturated fats and ultra processed foods
and eat a really good lean diet and exercise. It's
not rocket science, right, It's like, you know, then we
(26:34):
can look at calories in, calories out, but it's not
rocket science. If you are lifting and you are working
out every day and moving your body, getting your ten
thousand steps and eating a whole food diet without going overboard,
I mean, that's the secret, sauce.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
It's really interesting to shift to that. Nourish yourself rather
than punish yourself. You know, I think a lot of
women have lived a lot of years of life. I
shouldn't eat that. I can't have that. I'm bad if
my lunch is too big. It's like we've got a
lot of emotion attached to it and we need to shift.
Oh yeah, to a nourish active right yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Nourishing your body and eating well to lift heavy is
I think the new sexy. That's what we have to
start to think. You know, skinny frail is just not
going to cut it anymore. If you want to lift heavy,
if you want to have the energy, and if you
don't want to fall and break your hip, well, you
have to get used to eating. You have to get
(27:31):
used to eating. The rainbow I just did a podcast
with doctor Tim Spector, who's a professor and he is
an epidemiologist who looks into the gut microbiome, and he
was telling me how eating the rainbow is really important
and that our gut microbiome is very much correlated to
(27:54):
diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease. So feeding
your microbiome, getting the necessary amount of nutrients is going
to help you throughout midlife.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Also, the rainbow is a nice pet. Did to remember,
eat the rain in bone. Make it as simple as
you can. Yeah, okay, you talked before about if you
want to not fall and break a hip. This is
a large part of why we're telling women to eat
so well and lift heavy. Right, it's trying to avoid osteoporosis.
Is that right? Is that what we're all trying to avoid?
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Yep. Yep Osteoporosis is something that occurs during the late stages,
like postmenopausal women, just because of the depletion of estrogen.
We have estrogen receptors on our bones, so if they
are not stimulated through estrogen, and this is even if
(28:47):
you're you're taking hit for example, if you're you're getting
on hormones even if it's not. We need to stimulate
our bone mass because bone mass obviously reduces the risk
of osteoporosis and fractures. But what happens is we need
to stimulate something called osteoblasts. Okay, and that's the creation
(29:09):
of these new bone cells. But what happens is we
get during menopause a huge turnover of osteoclass, so the
breaking down of the bones at a much faster rate
than the osteoblasts. So we're not regenerating our bone cells
as much. Now, how do we overcome that? Well, Vitamin
D actually is incredibly important for that because our bones
(29:32):
are made of many things, so vitamin D can help
you offset that. But nothing, and I mean nothing, compares
to working out at the gym and lifting heavy like
I mentioned earlier, weight training, mechanical loading.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
After this break, I asked Louisa about what most of
us fear the most when we think about getting older, dementia,
Alzheimer's disease, and cognitive decline. I've heard you say that
your mission to eradicate Alzheimer's disease? Now, am I incorrect?
(30:13):
When I'm sometimes saying dementia and sometimes saying Alzheimer's Are
they different things? Just so I've got my language right.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Yes, So dementia is the umbrella term that is used
just to speak about a deficit in our cognitive abilities.
Now underneath dementia sits Alzheimer's disease, dementia with Lewis body
Parkinson's dementia front to temporal dementia. The reason why we
(30:42):
know Alzheimer's disease is because it is the most prevalent
out of all of the dementia's Alzheimer's dementia fifty five
million people that I actually around sixty million people worldwide
have this disease. That number is going to triple by
the year twenty fifty. So Alzheimer's disease is different. They've
all got different pathologies.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Why is it going to triple?
Speaker 2 (31:02):
We have substantial evidence to show that lifestyle and environment
affects the rates of our Ceimer's disease. So I mentioned
around sixty million people worldwide. If you have a look
across the board, around ninety five percent of these people
got Alzheimer's disease through lifestyle, not because of a genetic makeup.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
So that's why when you say your mission is to
eradicate it, you believe this is preventable with lifestyle changes.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
I believe it is a one hundred percent preventable disease.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
So a lot of the people listening to this will
have loved ones who've been through this, and again maybe
the umbrella term dementia, maybe not specifically Alzheimer's, and a
lot of midlife women are terrified that's what's going to
happen to them, because sometimes they've seen really distressing things
happen to their loved ones in this space. So, of
all the things we've been talking about today, is that
(31:54):
part of what will help this prevention or is this
the whole separate thing.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
So, first of all, it's interesting to note that, yeah,
one in three people, you'll you know, you look around you.
If you're in a room with two other people, one
of you is going to get the disease. Two out
of three cases of Alzheimer's disease is female, which is
even more scarier for females. Good and bad news. Right,
(32:20):
when we talk about genetics, there is a difference between
genetic risk factors and genetic mutations. Genetic mutations are mistakes
in the genetic code. For example, if you've got a
genetic mutation on chromosome four, you will get Huntington's disease. Okay,
we have When it comes to Alzheimer's disease, there's only
(32:43):
three genetic mutations involved in the disease. That's Presnell and one,
Presnell and two, and the APP gene. That only accounts
for about I would say point five percent of the
Alzheimer's disease cases. The other part of it is genetic
risk factors. You've probably heard of the APE four gene.
(33:06):
This is a risk factor gene. Now we've all got
the apoe gene, the APO lipoprotein epsilon gene, and we
get two allyls. We get one from mum, one from Dad,
and where it consists of a po E two, three
and four. If we get two copies of the Apo
(33:26):
E two gene, for example, which is extremely rare, but
Apo E two is a protective, protective gene. So if
you've got at least one ALLYL, then you're in a
really good place. Then you can be an E three
E three which doesn't raise your risk at all of
getting the disease, and it doesn't lower your risk. It's
the average. I'm an E three E three carrier. I've
(33:48):
had a patient who was E three E two, which
was phenomenal. That's what I wish I had. But you
don't determine that your parents do. Then we've got the
APO e four gene. Now, the APO e four you
can either have one copy or you can have two copies.
Now Chris Hamsworth has two copies of the gene, which
means that he raises his risk over ten times of
(34:11):
getting the disease. And this gene is involved in what
we call lipid metabolism. So basically in our brain, we
have different transporters that help transport fats, and so we
can utilize fat in our brain, different types of fats. Right,
and if we have the APO e four gene as
(34:32):
opposed to the APOE two, the APO e four basically
becomes a dumb transport. It doesn't help us. It doesn't
allow us to transport fat as well as we do.
So what ends up happening, Well, our brain is the
most vascular rich organ in the entire body, so then
we end up getting the accumulation of fat in the
(34:54):
vessels of our brain. So just like we do with
cardiovascular disease, which is an occlusion in a blood vessel
because of the build up of PLAK can happen in
our brain. Now, this could lead to a stroke, or
it could lead to an occlusion in one of the
vessels in the brain, which stops our brain from functioning correctly.
(35:14):
So the APO E four gene raises your risk of
getting the disease, but it's not a foe gun conclusion
if you are an E four E four carrier. By
the way, I think everybody should get tested. Everyone can
get tested, and if you're scared, it's just like figuring
out whether the bus is coming if you're on the road.
You want to know what you're up against. You don't
(35:36):
have to do it, but it's.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Nice to know.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
So let's just say you do have either one copy
or two copies. It just means you have to be
a bit more vigilant with your lifestyle interventions. It may
mean really honing down with your cholesterol panel right, looking
at your LDL cholesterol, looking at your APO B cholesterol.
We know that especially in women, and this was a
(35:59):
really well known study that was released, especially in women
who are E four carriers. You want to maintain a
LDL cholesterol level below seven that's American units. So we
know that we need to really really consider cardiovascular disease
risk as well.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
So assuming that testing is available, but even if not,
we should be considering all these lifestyle choices we're talking
about today to be helpful in safeguarding against Alzheimer's as
well as cardio issues and all the other things we
might worry about in terms of our aging bodies.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Yeah, there's a real nice saying, which is what's good
for the heart is good for the brain. So just
remember that even if you don't have an E four copy,
you are still at risk of getting Alzheimer's disease if
you do not sleep well, if you do not exercise
every day, if you do not lower your stress, if
you do not look at your micro nutrient profiles.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
So to recap, if you are going to tell midlife
women who are totally lost when it comes to how
to care for themselves, what should they start doing today?
Speaker 2 (37:07):
I have this pyramid and the pyramid at the bottom
of the pyramid for you to age well sits exercise.
It is the ultimate, in my opinion, the ultimate elixa
for longevity and brain health. So we really want to
hone in the exercise. On top of that is sleep,
(37:27):
and then it's nutrition. I would definitely recommend everybody getting
a blood test, figure out what you might be deficient in,
figure out are you perimenopausal? Is do you need to
discuss hormone replacement therapy with your obgyn. These are the
things that we need to be doing. But the biggest
bang for your buck. Oh and also lower the bad
stress that comes into your life and manage anxiety. If
(37:51):
you can.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
There, you are friends. If there's one takeaway from that
that I've internalized, it's exercise that the pyramid for well
being goes. Exercise, then sleep, then nutrition of course protein, creatine, magnesium, sleep.
If you like me, you probably need to listen to
this again and write some things down. And the other
(38:16):
most important thing that Luisa said to us is to
remember that we are not men as we start to
understand our bodies again and learn to care for them now,
respecting the complexities of the female body and specifically your
female body is key. Okay, friends, go and eat an
egg and lift something heavy and enjoy feeling kick ass.
(38:38):
I will see you back here for mid season six
in a few short weeks until then. Thank you so
much for being with us through this season of mid
The executive producer of this episode is name A. Brown,
The producer is Charlie Blackman, and we've had audio production
by Jacob Brown. I'll see you next time. The information
(39:00):
discussed in this episode is not intended to replace professional
medical advice. Please remember that supplement availability, safety, and regulation
vary between countries, including Australia. Always seek guidance from your
GP or pharmacist and ensure any therapeutic goods are listed
on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods the AARTG
You're listening to a Mama Mia podcast. Mamma mea acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on. Eat more protein. How about some salmon
with that egg? How about some cottage cheese with that steak?
How about you sprinkle some creatine all over that thing?
What about protein powder and your protein powder for a
(00:32):
morning smoothie full of fiber? And while we're at it,
how many supplements? There's too many supplements? Should I, in
fact rattle when I walk? Speaking of walking? Is walking enough?
Counting my steps? Is that just propaganda? Now? And if
I manage to get to the gym, what should I
do there? For decades it's been burned, baby burn, and
now it's lift, baby lift. Does it feel suddenly like
(00:55):
there's a set of new rules that no one sent
you that you just get glimpses of them yelled at
you through your phone? One hundred grams of protein, bitch
as you scroll past a twenty eight year old with
fluoro athlesia and a neutrib bullet. Well, you'd be right.
The rules are new because the old rules they were
written for men, sweat, sprint, starve, And they were also
(01:19):
written by the toxic body culture we were so surrounded
by as we came of age. It was invisible to
the naked eye, size zero, low rise genes, thigh gaps,
crash diets, and the endless comparison game. Now we've woken
up in what feels like a second puberty, and we've
only just barely started to understand our bodies. They can
(01:41):
feel like angry strangers. Hormones are fluctuating, sleep is elusive.
Joints ache for no reason, and we're told it's just
the beginning. What wants work doesn't work anymore. What once
felt intuitive now feels like guesswork. The new rules are
kinder but also confusing. Move your body more, but don't
(02:02):
overdo it. Eat red meat, but not too much, because
your heart gets some sun for vitamin D, but also
that face from those raisor rays. Sleep more, meditate, fix
your nervous system, add magnesium, track your cycle. Cut out
sugar but not fruit or is it fruit too? If
we decode it. If we find the new rules and
(02:23):
write them down, learn to live by them, can we
change what's coming? Protect our minds and our bodies from age,
from wrinkles and falls, forgetfulness, aches and pains and the
soft stand up grunt? Can eggs really do all that? Hello,
I'm Holly Wainwright and I am Mid, Midlife, Midfamily, mid
(02:47):
lifting my tiny pink weights. Does it feel like you
hit a certain birthday with a zero and everyone starts
yelling at you about protein and dumbbells. Well, if it
feels like that, you're right, because that's what happens. And
for this last episode of Mid for season five, we
wanted to ask someone smart to tell us exactly why
that is, And so we found called Louisa Nicola and
(03:11):
asked her what she thought of all the things midwomen
are told to do. Why Louisa, Well, because she is
an Australian neurophysiologist and human performance coach who's living in
the US and working there at the moment, right at
the forefront of all the science about longevity and health
and performance and exercise and food. She used to be
(03:32):
a world championship triathlete, representing Australia at all kinds of
major international events before a serious injury stopped her athletic
career in its tracks. But that also set her on
the path to understand what she calls brain training and
become an expert in basically telling us normies what athletes
and high performance people know to be true. One of
(03:55):
the things we're going to talk to Louisa about today
is how to care for our brains as we age.
But we are going to talk to her two about
our bodies because that is one of the things that
everybody's always talking to us about. What are the things
to prioritize to live better longer? To be honest, the
priorities she told me were a serious surprise. So here
we go. This is your Nobs guide to the new
(04:17):
rules of a better life. But before we get started,
I need to make this clear. The information discussed in
this episode is not intended to replace professional medical advice.
Supplement availability, safety, and regulation vary between countries, including Australia.
You always need to seek guidance from your GP or
a pharmacist and ensure that any therapeutic goods are listed
(04:41):
on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods before you go
near them. And if you listen to this conversation and
you wonder, oh, I thought you might mention this supplement
or this supplement, because I see them everywhere, there is
a good reason why not, and that is because here
in Australia we're actually pretty lucky that our regulations are
really tight about what you can and can't talk about
(05:02):
and promote. So if there are a few gaps here,
that's why. But I still think you are going to
find this conversation with Louisa Nicola really really interesting. Protein, sleep, exercise.
Oh my, Louisa, I'm just so happy to be talking
to you today because as a woman of my age,
(05:24):
I'm kind of completely overwhelmed by all the stuff I'm
being told to do and knowing what's real, what's helpful,
what's not. And then if i am, I know a
lot of other women are right, and I'd like to
start with a big gun. So if there's one thing
we can advise a woman who's in her kind of
let's say she's in her forties, that her relationship with
(05:44):
fitness is pretty typical, which is that maybe she goes
and fits and starts. She might stick to a gym
regime for a while and then drop out of it.
She's had times in her life when she's been fitter
and times in a life where she's been less. So
what is the one thing we can advise this woman
to do to change the quality of the next twenty
years or so, what would it be.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Well, first of all, Holly, thank you for how you're
definitely tapping on something that is becoming quite an epidemic.
We all are inevitably going to face the decline of
estrogen and progesterone somewhere throughout our life. I think what's
happening now is menopause is really at the spotlight. It
(06:27):
is gaining a lot of traction. And this is really
due to the fact that we had a lot of
misinformation around menopause and estrogen, etc. And this is now
causing a lot of women in midlife and even at
the age of forty to start rethinking their decisions. So
to cut a long story shot, because I know we're
(06:48):
going to evolve throughout this conversation, and to answer your question,
what can a woman do right now to improve the
next twenty years of her life? Well, look, she can
do many things, Okay, but let's talk about what actually
happens at this stage of life in the fourth decade. Well,
the transition into many menopause comes at around a decade
(07:10):
prior to the menopause onset. So if we're thinking it
around the average age, maybe forty two forty three is
the onset of perimenopause. When we start to see the
decline of estrogen and progesterome, we need to start thinking
about what is actually happening, because in my opinion, menopause
(07:30):
doesn't just happen to your ovaries. It's a neuroendocrine malfunction. Really,
we have a lot of things that happen to our
brain and as a result of that, we then go
through a cascade of issues ranging from bone mineral density.
We see a decline in that, we see a decline
in bone mass, in strength, in muscle mass, in cognitive functions,
(07:52):
and these are the things we need throughout our lifespan,
throughout my work and through what I do for a
living and what I research, which is Alzheimer's disease. What
I can safely say is the one thing you should
do right now in your forties is practice good exercise.
You mentioned people. You know some women go through stages
(08:14):
of they're really motivated, they go to the gym for
a week, and maybe they go off the gym. And
what we know is that consistency is key, right because
if we're going to build a good foundation for our
body when we're eighty and when we're ninety, even in
in your sixties and seventies. Really it's got to be
consistent effort, consistently going to the gym, consistently putting in work,
(08:38):
and if you have to follow a structured program from
a personal trainer, I think that's actually becoming more of
a need these days just to really get the foundation set.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
So what we keep being told right now is to
forget the hardcore cardio that we might have been doing
to chase a dress size in our twenties and focus
on weights. Is it that simple and is that the
shift we should definitely make.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
It's not that simple, But let me tell you there
is a need for everything, every part of exercise. When
we are looking into the scientific literature, we're usually separating
exercises into three buckets. Right, We've got strength training, We've
got cardiovascular training, which is your zone too easy, long
long runs, long swim sessions, et cetera, cardio if you will,
(09:28):
and then we've got this high intensity training. Right, So
if we look at across the board, what is going
to give you the biggest bang for your buck it
would be strength and that's because we lose strength and
muscle mass at a very rapid rate. It comes on
in the fourth decade, right, and we females need more
(09:50):
strength if we had to, we still need to work
on our cardiovascular fitness. Right. When we're looking at cardiovascular fitness,
we're also taking into account that we're training the powerhouses
of ourselves, which is called the mitochondria. We've got more
mitochondria than men. So a lot of this marketing what
you're seeing when you're talking about zone two training, which
(10:10):
is dubbed out you should be doing cardio at least
three hours a week. That's really looking at males. Women
should actually be prioritizing strength. And when I say strength,
I'm talking about weights, so resistance training and then high
intensity training. That's like when you're going hard out, not
(10:32):
hit training, but high intensity, hard out efforts, and then cardio.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
I've heard you rail against the little pink weights we all.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Have, Yes, it's you want I try and say women
should move away from the pink weights because listen, it's
not doing you anything. You're actually wasting your time if
you're at the gym lifting small lightweights. If we want
to prevent sycopenia, which is age related muscle loss. If
we want to enhance our metabolic rate and glucose metabolism,
(11:05):
we need to without being too scientific, but we need
to trigger mechano receptors in muscle fibers, right, and that
is triggered when we lift heavy. To improve our muscle
mouse increase our muscle musk, we have to lift heavy.
You're not going to get anything from lifting these two
(11:27):
kilo dumbbells, which are often painted pink.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
Okay, let's get a bit more serious. I think we'll
come back to exercise in a while. So women in
my age, apparently we cannot eat enough protein. It's just protein,
protein protein. You can't buy cottage cheese anywhere in the
shops at the moment because the older women have eaten
it all. Eat eggs, fish, meat, eggs and fish more
and more. I wonder if what we're being told is right.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Look, I actually thought it was and I still do.
I think that bare minimum, every single individual, but mainly women,
should be having at minimum one hundred grams of protein
a day. In it it varies right, because we should
be eating around one point six to one point eight
grams perk of body weight. So you know, if you're
(12:12):
seventy kilos, then literally just seventy kilos, you literally multiply
seventy by one point six and that's how much protein
you should be having a day, and that varies.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
What does that much protein actually look like?
Speaker 2 (12:25):
To be honest, it's quite difficult for a lot of women.
It's quite difficult for me to hit my protein goals
every day. But it looks like having one hundred and
fifty grams of chicken breast for lunch, another one hundred
and fifty grams of chicken breast or similar for dinner,
having two to three eggs in the morning.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
So the protein is key.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Protein is key. However, I just interviewed one of the
biggest scientists in protein, so he was actually responsible for
the twin study that was actually documented on Netflix, and
he said something really interesting to me. He noted that
muscle mass is actually muscle mass, and strength is actually
(13:08):
ninety percent resistance training and ten percent protein. So I
was even fed this lie. I was even fed this
lie that we needed we needed so much protein to
gain muscle mass. But it turns out that if you're
not actually stimulating the mechana receptors. As I mentioned earlier,
if you're not even lifting heavy, but you're meeting your
protein requirement needs, it doesn't even matter. But I just
(13:32):
want to add on top of that as well. Protein
also has other wonders where you can increase your metabolic
rate by eating it. So it takes a lot to
digest protein. So once you eat protein, you're also burning
calories and it keeps you full of for longer if
you can try and prioritize at least one hundred grams
(13:54):
a day.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Okay, that's good, sensible advice, good for me to know.
I want to ask you about something else, vitamin D sunshine.
I'm also being told lots of vitamin D.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Vitamin D is really interesting, right we call it vitamin D,
but it's a hormone synthesized by the sun. Right now,
I live in the US, I live in New York,
so a lot of people in the US are actually
vitamin D deficient. So we measure it over here with
(14:26):
nanograms per deesoleader. And what we are trying to and
you can do the conversions in Australian metrics, and so
what we're trying to get everyone too is around sixty
nanograms per deesoleader, but the average is around twenty nanograms
per desoleader. This doesn't mean that you are sun deficient, right,
(14:47):
I mean it can, but it could mean that you
are magnesium deficient. So I've had private clients and patients
who we've worked on their vitamin D levels and we've
brought their vitamin D levels up just by supplementing them
with magnesium alone, because we need magnesium to make vitamin D.
(15:08):
So vitamin D is extremely, extremely important. It's involved in
many and zomatic processes in the body. So if you
want vitamin D deficient, and it's so easy to get tested,
just go to the GP, get a blood test and
you will see if you're vitamin D deficient or not.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
How would you feel if you were vitamin D deficient? Like,
how would you know if you were?
Speaker 2 (15:33):
That's a thing you wouldn't know. It could present as
dry skin, it could present as fatigue. It could present
as going to the gym and not getting that not
being able to lift heavy fast enough. But it's not
like a you can't get a headache and think, oh
I'm vitamin D deficient.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Yeah right, okay, And a few of those things you
just said are often symptoms that menopausal or perimenopause or
women living with anyway.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
I know right.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
After this break, Louise and Nicola and I discussed what
might feel like the most elusive part of this whole thing.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Sleep.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
All right, I want to ask you about sleep, because
that's another thing we're being told is so important. And
we all know that that's true, of course, but sleep
hygiene is such a buzz term right now. Lots of
products we can buy to optimize our sleep and measure
our sleep and see how it's going. Sleep often becomes
a really big problem for women around this phase of life. Anyway,
(16:34):
We've got the anxious two am wake up that would
be very familiar to lots of our listeners. How important
is sleep?
Speaker 2 (16:42):
So sleep is incredibly important. We go through many things
during sleep. Sleep is not just this thing that happens
right during sleep. We go through two different phases. We
go through non REM sleep, and then we go through
REM sleep. During the non rapid eye movement sleep, we
go through a period which is stage three deep sleep.
(17:05):
And I can't tell you how important this stage is
to get into and to stay into.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
Right.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
We don't want to just get into deep sleep for
ten minutes out of the night. We really want to
be spending maybe at least three hours of deep sleep
at night. I track my sleep, you know, rigorously, using
three different types of monitors, and I can tell you
even sometimes I am experiencing fluctuations in my sleep. So
during deep sleep, what happens is we activate this system,
(17:35):
which is called the glymphatic system, and this is like
a washing machine in your brain. What happens is all
of the cerebral spinal fluid goes through your brain and
cleans out all of the debris throughout the day. I'm
talking amyloid beta that builds up during the day. We've
got toxins, we've got oh the burdens. Apparently now we've
got microplastics in our brain, which was actually stated first
(17:57):
in an Australian study. So sleep is so important and
there's so many things that we can do to improve
both the quality of our sleep and the quantity of
our sleep. However, we now know that consistency and regularity
of sleep is more important than quantity and quality. So
going to sleep at the same time every day and
(18:18):
waking up at the same time every day, which is
so hard, right, I travel like every three weeks for work,
so that's incredibly hard for me. But maintaining a regular
sleep and wake up time and actually doesn't matter whether
you're sleeping twelve pm till eight am, all right or
ten pm till six am is based on your chronotype.
(18:38):
And you can take a chronotype quiz online. Just type
it in. Take a quiz figure out whether you're an
early bird or a night owl, and you can go
to sleep at whatever time that you like.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
There used to be saying that, like the hours before
midnight are worth more than the sleep you get after.
Is that true? No?
Speaker 2 (18:58):
I thought that was true as well. But I sit
on the board with one of the most well known
sleep doctors and we had dinner probably i would say,
two months ago, and I brought this up with here
and he slammed the table. He's like, stop saying this,
And he explained it to me that it's built on chronotypes.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
Tell me what your sleep hygen looks like to get
the kind of sleep that you do, Oh, tell me.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
So it's really important for me to be able to
bring my nervous system down prior to sleep. So a
lot of people, if you work in a sleep lab right,
for example, and you get a patient, you're often asked
two things. Do you have problem falling asleep or trouble
staying asleep? And it varies across the board. So for me,
(19:42):
I sleep first of all, i sleep in a pitch
black room, so I've got blackout curtains. I wear religiously
an eyemask every night. Even though I've got blackout curtains,
i still wear an eye mask. I sleep on a
temperature controlled mattress, and i know not everyone can do that,
but it's a bit fancy, but it basically I have
an app on my phone and I can control the
(20:03):
temperature of the bed, so it goes cold and then
hot and all throughout the night. I have said it
at around fifty nine degrees fahrenheit, but it's actually separated
into cycles, so it matches. It knows Louisa's in deep sleep,
so I'm going to bring the temperature of the bed down.
(20:23):
Louisa is in light sleep, so I'm going to bring
it down. I'm going to bring it up a bit more,
and I've got an alarm on it. I'm like, well, bed,
wake me up at seven am, so it starts to
heat up at six point thirty in the morning because
heat is actually what wakes us up. Well, heat and light.
But it's like when the sun comes up, it warms
(20:44):
your body, which then releases quartersole, and quartersole is what
wakes you up. Right, So I've got the bed to
heat up half an hour prior to waking.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
Look that sounds awesome. Do you use mouth tape? I
see mouth tape everywhere.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
I sometimes do. I don't think it plays as big
of a role as what we think. I think that's
more in line with the beauty hacks. If you will, so,
I don't mouth theare but I also don't mouthbreak.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
So if I don't have a temperature controlled mattress and
perfect blackout, the best thing I can do to get
myself in a good place for sleep is to wind down. Yes,
we've all heard no phones, no blue light, how long
before bed? And also I hear the longevity guys saying
you should stop eating a long time before you go
to sleep. Does that make a big difference?
Speaker 2 (21:30):
So when we eat, it raises our core body temperature. Now,
in order to fall asleep and stay asleep, our core
body temperature needs to drop at least two degrees. This
is why I sleep on a temperature controlled mattress. You
don't want to be eating too close to bedtime. I
usually say, make sure you've had your last meal an
hour and a half to two hours prior to going
to bed, and that's to allow for digestion, right, anything
(21:53):
above that, right, I mean, Brian Johnson is having his
last meal at eleven am, and I think that's just
really really poor education and marketing for the world. That is,
in my opinion, stupid. So I think that's in line
with females.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
So it's also that realistic to most people's lives.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Let's be honest, and I really want the women listening
to understand that we are not men, all right, So
if you hear a male say something, it might be
great for us, right, but we have to do we
have to dig a little bit deeper, and women just
need more fuel in different ranges of you know, different
stages of our lives. So I don't think that's correct.
(22:37):
But I also don't think eating at ten pm and
then going to bed at ten thirty is correct.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
So, just while we're on what you were just saying
about the men, do you think that one of the reasons.
It can feel that the health advice coming at women,
particularly women going through hormonal changes, feels like a lot
is because we're sort of waking up to the fact
that a lot of the medical conventions we've been sold
about what's good for us, we're all about men. And
now as we're learning more about women, there's all this
(23:04):
new information to share.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Yes, so first of all, women very hard to study
in the lab, So a lot of the studies that
have been done have been done on men because they're easier.
Why are they easier because you have to conduct the
gold standard in academic medicine, which is called a randomized
control trial. You need women over a long period of time.
(23:29):
Now what happens with women, Well, we go through menopause,
so hormones change. That's going to skew the data. Some
women want to have a child with enter tain year framework,
so that skews the data. So women just became somewhat
difficult to work with, right, So therefore not a lot
of funding was placed upon them. So a lot of
the funding was placed on men because they were just
(23:52):
easier subjects. And then we put out all of this information.
Scientists were like, well, this fasting does this, or zone
to training does this, and it improves this, but we've
forgot to include women in that, and we just thought, Okay, well,
this study says this, but we don't really understand sex differences.
(24:13):
We're now becoming more attuned with sex differences between men
and women. We know that women have more estrogen receptors
in their brain than men. We know that men go
through their own type of metopause, but the average age
of metopause for a woman is fifty two. Men it's
in their seventies, so that's called andropause. So that was
(24:33):
why all of the marketing was really geared at men. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Right, and now we're understanding that better. There's a lot
to learn all this.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
So look, I'm I'm in neurosurgery three days a week.
I study the brain rigorously. It's all I do. It's
all I've done for the past fifteen years. And every
day I'm like, oh my gosh, I don't know that.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
Much before we get to dementia and Alzheimer's. You mentioned
fasting just now, and I wanted to ask you about
eating in general. A lot of women around my age
have lived in diet culture forever, right, we've sort of
withheld food food from ourselves. We've tried a million different diets.
We've tried Atkins and keto, We've gone donat before two pm,
(25:17):
only at this time, not at that time. Do you
think that women, maybe a lot of women are actually
restricting themselves too much with food at this time in
their life rather than not enough.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Yeah. I think women just don't understand food, right. We
just you know, there's so much to learn. Fasting is
both beneficial and can be detrimental. It depends and even
with women just because we're all it depends on stages
of menstrual cycle. What if you are planning for a pregnancy,
you're starving yourself and then you claim that you're infertile,
(25:51):
but maybe you're just not eating enough to produce the
necessary amount of estrogen to go into ovulation, etc. So
fasting is great. It can turn on autophagy, which is
whatever they can actually stimulate stem cells. But I think
that women should maybe move away from that and maybe
(26:13):
move towards understanding macro nutrients like how much protein do
I need in a day, and how can I maybe
get off sugar and saturated fats and ultra processed foods
and eat a really good lean diet and exercise. It's
not rocket science, right, It's like, you know, then we
(26:34):
can look at calories in, calories out, but it's not
rocket science. If you are lifting and you are working
out every day and moving your body, getting your ten
thousand steps and eating a whole food diet without going overboard,
I mean, that's the secret, sauce.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
It's really interesting to shift to that. Nourish yourself rather
than punish yourself. You know, I think a lot of
women have lived a lot of years of life. I
shouldn't eat that. I can't have that. I'm bad if
my lunch is too big. It's like we've got a
lot of emotion attached to it and we need to shift.
Oh yeah, to a nourish active right yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Nourishing your body and eating well to lift heavy is
I think the new sexy. That's what we have to
start to think. You know, skinny frail is just not
going to cut it anymore. If you want to lift heavy,
if you want to have the energy, and if you
don't want to fall and break your hip, well, you
have to get used to eating. You have to get
(27:31):
used to eating. The rainbow I just did a podcast
with doctor Tim Spector, who's a professor and he is
an epidemiologist who looks into the gut microbiome, and he
was telling me how eating the rainbow is really important
and that our gut microbiome is very much correlated to
(27:54):
diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease. So feeding
your microbiome, getting the necessary amount of nutrients is going
to help you throughout midlife.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Also, the rainbow is a nice pet. Did to remember,
eat the rain in bone. Make it as simple as
you can. Yeah, okay, you talked before about if you
want to not fall and break a hip. This is
a large part of why we're telling women to eat
so well and lift heavy. Right, it's trying to avoid osteoporosis.
Is that right? Is that what we're all trying to avoid?
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Yep. Yep Osteoporosis is something that occurs during the late stages,
like postmenopausal women, just because of the depletion of estrogen.
We have estrogen receptors on our bones, so if they
are not stimulated through estrogen, and this is even if
(28:47):
you're you're taking hit for example, if you're you're getting
on hormones even if it's not. We need to stimulate
our bone mass because bone mass obviously reduces the risk
of osteoporosis and fractures. But what happens is we need
to stimulate something called osteoblasts. Okay, and that's the creation
(29:09):
of these new bone cells. But what happens is we
get during menopause a huge turnover of osteoclass, so the
breaking down of the bones at a much faster rate
than the osteoblasts. So we're not regenerating our bone cells
as much. Now, how do we overcome that? Well, Vitamin
D actually is incredibly important for that because our bones
(29:32):
are made of many things, so vitamin D can help
you offset that. But nothing, and I mean nothing, compares
to working out at the gym and lifting heavy like
I mentioned earlier, weight training, mechanical loading.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
After this break, I asked Louisa about what most of
us fear the most when we think about getting older, dementia,
Alzheimer's disease, and cognitive decline. I've heard you say that
your mission to eradicate Alzheimer's disease? Now, am I incorrect?
(30:13):
When I'm sometimes saying dementia and sometimes saying Alzheimer's Are
they different things? Just so I've got my language right.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Yes, So dementia is the umbrella term that is used
just to speak about a deficit in our cognitive abilities.
Now underneath dementia sits Alzheimer's disease, dementia with Lewis body
Parkinson's dementia front to temporal dementia. The reason why we
(30:42):
know Alzheimer's disease is because it is the most prevalent
out of all of the dementia's Alzheimer's dementia fifty five
million people that I actually around sixty million people worldwide
have this disease. That number is going to triple by
the year twenty fifty. So Alzheimer's disease is different. They've
all got different pathologies.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
Why is it going to triple?
Speaker 2 (31:02):
We have substantial evidence to show that lifestyle and environment
affects the rates of our Ceimer's disease. So I mentioned
around sixty million people worldwide. If you have a look
across the board, around ninety five percent of these people
got Alzheimer's disease through lifestyle, not because of a genetic makeup.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
So that's why when you say your mission is to
eradicate it, you believe this is preventable with lifestyle changes.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
I believe it is a one hundred percent preventable disease.
Speaker 1 (31:32):
So a lot of the people listening to this will
have loved ones who've been through this, and again maybe
the umbrella term dementia, maybe not specifically Alzheimer's, and a
lot of midlife women are terrified that's what's going to
happen to them, because sometimes they've seen really distressing things
happen to their loved ones in this space. So, of
all the things we've been talking about today, is that
(31:54):
part of what will help this prevention or is this
the whole separate thing.
Speaker 2 (31:59):
So, first of all, it's interesting to note that, yeah,
one in three people, you'll you know, you look around you.
If you're in a room with two other people, one
of you is going to get the disease. Two out
of three cases of Alzheimer's disease is female, which is
even more scarier for females. Good and bad news. Right,
(32:20):
when we talk about genetics, there is a difference between
genetic risk factors and genetic mutations. Genetic mutations are mistakes
in the genetic code. For example, if you've got a
genetic mutation on chromosome four, you will get Huntington's disease. Okay,
we have When it comes to Alzheimer's disease, there's only
(32:43):
three genetic mutations involved in the disease. That's Presnell and one,
Presnell and two, and the APP gene. That only accounts
for about I would say point five percent of the
Alzheimer's disease cases. The other part of it is genetic
risk factors. You've probably heard of the APE four gene.
(33:06):
This is a risk factor gene. Now we've all got
the apoe gene, the APO lipoprotein epsilon gene, and we
get two allyls. We get one from mum, one from Dad,
and where it consists of a po E two, three
and four. If we get two copies of the Apo
(33:26):
E two gene, for example, which is extremely rare, but
Apo E two is a protective, protective gene. So if
you've got at least one ALLYL, then you're in a
really good place. Then you can be an E three
E three which doesn't raise your risk at all of
getting the disease, and it doesn't lower your risk. It's
the average. I'm an E three E three carrier. I've
(33:48):
had a patient who was E three E two, which
was phenomenal. That's what I wish I had. But you
don't determine that your parents do. Then we've got the
APO e four gene. Now, the APO e four you
can either have one copy or you can have two copies.
Now Chris Hamsworth has two copies of the gene, which
means that he raises his risk over ten times of
(34:11):
getting the disease. And this gene is involved in what
we call lipid metabolism. So basically in our brain, we
have different transporters that help transport fats, and so we
can utilize fat in our brain, different types of fats. Right,
and if we have the APO e four gene as
(34:32):
opposed to the APOE two, the APO e four basically
becomes a dumb transport. It doesn't help us. It doesn't
allow us to transport fat as well as we do.
So what ends up happening, Well, our brain is the
most vascular rich organ in the entire body, so then
we end up getting the accumulation of fat in the
(34:54):
vessels of our brain. So just like we do with
cardiovascular disease, which is an occlusion in a blood vessel
because of the build up of PLAK can happen in
our brain. Now, this could lead to a stroke, or
it could lead to an occlusion in one of the
vessels in the brain, which stops our brain from functioning correctly.
(35:14):
So the APO E four gene raises your risk of
getting the disease, but it's not a foe gun conclusion
if you are an E four E four carrier. By
the way, I think everybody should get tested. Everyone can
get tested, and if you're scared, it's just like figuring
out whether the bus is coming if you're on the road.
You want to know what you're up against. You don't
(35:36):
have to do it, but it's.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Nice to know.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
So let's just say you do have either one copy
or two copies. It just means you have to be
a bit more vigilant with your lifestyle interventions. It may
mean really honing down with your cholesterol panel right, looking
at your LDL cholesterol, looking at your APO B cholesterol.
We know that especially in women, and this was a
(35:59):
really well known study that was released, especially in women
who are E four carriers. You want to maintain a
LDL cholesterol level below seven that's American units. So we
know that we need to really really consider cardiovascular disease
risk as well.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
So assuming that testing is available, but even if not,
we should be considering all these lifestyle choices we're talking
about today to be helpful in safeguarding against Alzheimer's as
well as cardio issues and all the other things we
might worry about in terms of our aging bodies.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Yeah, there's a real nice saying, which is what's good
for the heart is good for the brain. So just
remember that even if you don't have an E four copy,
you are still at risk of getting Alzheimer's disease if
you do not sleep well, if you do not exercise
every day, if you do not lower your stress, if
you do not look at your micro nutrient profiles.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
So to recap, if you are going to tell midlife
women who are totally lost when it comes to how
to care for themselves, what should they start doing today?
Speaker 2 (37:07):
I have this pyramid and the pyramid at the bottom
of the pyramid for you to age well sits exercise.
It is the ultimate, in my opinion, the ultimate elixa
for longevity and brain health. So we really want to
hone in the exercise. On top of that is sleep,
(37:27):
and then it's nutrition. I would definitely recommend everybody getting
a blood test, figure out what you might be deficient in,
figure out are you perimenopausal? Is do you need to
discuss hormone replacement therapy with your obgyn. These are the
things that we need to be doing. But the biggest
bang for your buck. Oh and also lower the bad
stress that comes into your life and manage anxiety. If
(37:51):
you can.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
There, you are friends. If there's one takeaway from that
that I've internalized, it's exercise that the pyramid for well
being goes. Exercise, then sleep, then nutrition of course protein, creatine, magnesium, sleep.
If you like me, you probably need to listen to
this again and write some things down. And the other
(38:16):
most important thing that Luisa said to us is to
remember that we are not men as we start to
understand our bodies again and learn to care for them now,
respecting the complexities of the female body and specifically your
female body is key. Okay, friends, go and eat an
egg and lift something heavy and enjoy feeling kick ass.
(38:38):
I will see you back here for mid season six
in a few short weeks until then. Thank you so
much for being with us through this season of mid
The executive producer of this episode is name A. Brown,
The producer is Charlie Blackman, and we've had audio production
by Jacob Brown. I'll see you next time. The information
(39:00):
discussed in this episode is not intended to replace professional
medical advice. Please remember that supplement availability, safety, and regulation
vary between countries, including Australia. Always seek guidance from your
GP or pharmacist and ensure any therapeutic goods are listed
on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods the AARTG
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