Dr. Paul Anderson on Muscle as Medicine: Building Strength for Better Health

In this episode, Dr. Paul Anderson delves into the concept of "Muscle as Medicine," highlighting the critical role that building and maintaining muscle mass plays in overall health. He covers:

• Health Benefits of Muscle: Understanding how strong muscles contribute to improved metabolism, better balance and coordination, enhanced joint health, and reduced risk of chronic diseases such as diabetes and osteoporosis.
• Types of Muscle-Building Exercises: Overview of effective exercises for building muscle, including resistance training, weight lifting, bodyweight exercises, and functional movements.
• Exercise Guidelines: Recommendations for frequency, intensity, and duration of strength-training sessions tailored to different fitness levels and health goals.
• Nutrition for Muscle Health: Importance of a balanced diet rich in protein, essential amino acids, and other nutrients that support muscle growth and recovery. Tips on meal planning and supplementation.
• Recovery and Rest: The role of adequate rest and recovery in muscle development, including sleep, hydration, and active recovery techniques.
• Muscle and Aging: How maintaining muscle mass can combat the natural loss of muscle that occurs with aging, helping to preserve mobility and independence.
• Holistic Health: Integrating muscle-building activities with other healthy lifestyle practices such as cardiovascular exercise, stress management, and proper nutrition for comprehensive health benefits.
• Personalized Approaches: How to create a customized muscle-building program that aligns with individual health status, fitness level, and personal goals.

Dr. Anderson provides valuable insights and practical advice on how to harness the power of muscle-building activities to improve overall health, emphasizing the idea that strong muscles are foundational to a healthy, active life.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back to Medicine Help with doctor Paul Anderson. That's me.
I'm doctor Paul and this section in Muscle as Medicine
is a series that we're doing on helpful therapies Muscle
is Medicine. Part two today that we're going to do
is actually how is muscle Medicine? So we talked about
you know, cardio versus resistive, et cetera. But why does

(00:23):
more and more modern science point to the fact that
the activity of muscle in the body so skeletal muscle
that moves your body around. And as we've said, the
most important ones, they're all important, but the most important
ones for muscle effect are going to be your legs,
your arms, shoulders, and chest and then your core in

(00:46):
maybe in those order may be a little different, but
there's something about muscle that has more of an effect
than just doing resistive exercise and you know, burning some
calories or building muscle mass, et cetera. If you recall
back from the resistance versus Cardio little video that we did,

(01:09):
there's also a metabolism shift that goes on your entire bodies.
Metabolism changes and with resistive exercise where you're building muscle.
That metabolism change can be for one to two days
after a workout event. And so what does that mean
Your metabolism is it's the sum total of the activity

(01:32):
of your cells. Now, if your metabolism is slow, you
will be more fatigued, you may sleep more, you may
have more of other problems. You will gain weight easily
because you're not burning energy at the same rate as
you used to. When your metabolism is faster, your brain
will work more slowly. All sorts of things go on

(01:53):
when your metabolism slows down. And your metabolism, i said,
is the net effect of all of the cells in
your body, but your mitochondria that are in all of
your cells, which are what create the energy for your cells.
So that's very important for having energy, having living cells,
having healthy cells. But as a mitochondria creating energy, if

(02:16):
the metabolism slows down, they slow down, and if they
slow down, the metabolism slows down. So one of the
things about doing some resistive work is you can start
to get the mitochondria back online and they will work
better and better the more resistive exercise that you do. Now,
the idea of muscle as medicine kind of has this

(02:39):
other side beyond the metabolism shift. If muscle is so
good for you physically makes you more resistant to many diseases,
it is associated more muscles, associated with longer life, with cancer, survivorship,
and many other things. So if muscle is doing all

(03:02):
this good stuff, is there sort of a counterpoint? You know?
And in most good stories, you've got the hero and
the villain, right those roles. Sometimes you have an anti hero,
you know, or something like that. So in this story
you kind of have a hero and maybe a villain,

(03:23):
or maybe an anti hero, because really the anti hero
here the villain is a part of you that has
to work. Also, it's just that in modern life it
tends to work more, and so the balance is off.
So it's not that we're going to vilify one or
the other group, but we're going to talk about it
in terms of this is modern life, this is how

(03:45):
things work now, and this is why your body may
not be reacting the way you want it. So if
we're going to call muscle mass muscle activity as the
hero and the story, then fat metabolism is going to
be the anti hero or the villain. Now everybody has
to have fat we have to have fat to make hormones.

(04:06):
We do all this other stuff with fat. It's just
that in modern times we tend to build more fat
than our body really needs. And here's a problem. It's
not just that you look bigger if you have more
fat cells. It's that your metabolism shifts. And many people
don't realize that pushing your muscles to work pushes your

(04:28):
metabolism in one direction. Not having your muscles work and
preferentially stimulating your fat metabolism pushes you in another metabolic direction,
which is why we're calling this the antihero and it
makes you less resistant to disease, more inflamed, less likely

(04:49):
to survive traumas, less likely to survive cancer, etc. Etc.
So what is it about this fat metabolism. Well, fat
metabolism goes hand in hand with insulin balance and metabolism
in the body, and so one of the things that's

(05:10):
been known for a long long time, even before the
biochemistry has really worked out, for example, was that people
with insulin sensitivity problems, diabetics, et cetera would do better
if they worked out their body, if they did something resistant,
et cetera. Well, part of that is because the muscle

(05:32):
action is going to shift the metabolism back to more
of a healthy metabolism, and it's going to downregulate some
of the fat and insulin inflammatory reaction that goes on.
So what is it about the insulin release and fat
storage connection that goes off the rails in modern times?

(05:55):
Because I keep talking about modern times, things are different. Well,
the thing that happens is that number one, when you
eat a carbohydrate, you are going to trigger a response
by your pancreas to release insulin, which is fine, That's
what we want. Is what does the insulin do. It

(06:17):
goes out, It binds to the cell, and then the
sugar can go the carb can go into the cell
and be used as energy. But in about forty five
to fifty five percent of people in North America, they
have a spectrum because of genetics and other things of
insulin resistance that develops, meaning insulin goes out, it binds

(06:42):
to the receptor, it doesn't work so well, So we
make more insulin. It binds the receptor, receptor works, and
we keep doing this and the receptors get slower and
slower and duller and duller. Now, the problem with this
is not the sugar going in the cell part, that's
sort of you know, at this point that's doing its thing.
But all this extra insulin that is made is sort

(07:07):
of like you know, an unattended child who has who
has a weapon or something. It's going to run around
and do things that are unintended. And so what happens
with insulin when we start to have too much of
it floating around is a number of inflammatory things go downstream.
Number one, these are just the order I'm saying them in.

(07:30):
They're not more or less important. But number one would
be it shifts your inflammatory fat biology and your cell membrane.
So the icosinoids that we think of like the omega
oils like omega three you've heard about, or six or
nine or others, and then a rackadonic acid, which is
a relative. You start to preferentially take one group of

(07:55):
those and metabolize them more towards the inflammatory side, So
your cells actually get more inflame when there's too much
insulin around. The Next thing that happens is your fat
cells become hypersensitized to convert excess amounts of other food

(08:15):
product and nutrients that you've taken in into fat to
store for later. Now, in non modern times that was
really useful when you'd have famine and shortages and pestilence
and stresses and stuff like that. But in modern times,
at least in the Western world, we don't have a
lot of famine. We don't have those sort of things,

(08:36):
and so our body just goes into this evolutionary system
that it does and it stores fat. So beyond fat
storage and your cell membranes getting inflamed and all that,
there's a lot of other chemistry that the excess insulin triggers,
and that chemistry can be very deranging to your immune system,

(09:00):
your immune function, and so part of the reason it's
believed that this balance between muscle and insulin and fat
activity is so critical is that in modern times we're
sort of overdoing the inflammatory side and we're not attending
enough to the muscle action in our body and building muscle,
et cetera. So the idea that muscle is the counterpoint

(09:24):
to insulin and fat activity is very important because the
more we work the muscles, the more we have them
to do resistance activity, the better our metabolism shifts towards
the healthier and a lot of the inflammatory chemistry goes
down and down. Now, there's obviously a dietary component here.

(09:45):
You can't simply just work out all the time and
you know, drink sugary beverages and eat carbs and all
that stuff and expect that the muscle is going to out,
you know, out compete your diet. But you've got to
kind of put them both together. So, for instance, when
we're talking to chronically ill patients or cancer patients, there's

(10:07):
a lot of different types of therapeutic diets people do.
We've talked about many of them here, but the thing
that we try to focus on is the core of
the therapeutic diet for chronic illness and cancer is going
to be to keep insulin release in your body to
a normal minimum, meaning I want enough, I don't want

(10:30):
too much, okay, And for most people that is manipulated
by their diet. So the best way to help and
the best way for muscle to actually be medicine is
to actually work the muscle so that its metabolism increases.
Part of the biology of that is when you work
the muscle, it knows it's going to have to change

(10:52):
in size, so it can do this work easier it's
going to trigger the mitochondria getting more active and them
shifting and so working it is very helpful. Now in
a couple of the other sections, we're going to talk
about what if I was injured and now I got
to get back to working out, or what if I'm
really untrained, I got to get back to working out.

(11:15):
Obviously there's a lot of technical things about getting back online,
but building the muscle creates this long term metabolism shift.
And then if your diet is even at all insulin modulating,
so it's not triggering excess amounts of insulin release, and

(11:35):
that is usually by modulating the type of carbohydrate that
you intake, et cetera, then you have the perfect combo.
So the diet shift in a low glycemic type diet,
and you can just look at that's a very common
topic on the internet, lots of charts and stuff, a
lot of cool pictures, et cetera. But basically, if you

(11:57):
look up low glycemic diet, they'll tell you the idea
behind it, etc. But the idea behind it really is
to have enough carbohydrates to go into your body to
feed your body, but no excess amount, so the insulin
release from your pancreas is appropriate, it's not excessive. Now,
if you have insulin resistance, like I said, forty five

(12:20):
to fifty five percent of North American's minimum have that
more in some areas, your body's just going to be
more responsive to either the good or the bad that
we've talked about. So the metabolism shift and someone say
with a insulin insensitivity or type two diabetes, is going
to be profoundly helpful to their body, just like it

(12:42):
would be to anybody else. But because they have an
excessive amount of the anti hero the fat and the
insulin stuff going on, then that is a person who
is going to benefit quite a bit more because they're
going to attend to the muscle by making it work
more over time, and then they're going to attend to

(13:03):
the fat and insulin side by shifting their diet. We're
just about a time here, and this section is about
muscle is medicine. We're going to move on talk about
some other things. Please like share, subscribe, and do the notifications,
because sometimes the algorithm puts us off in the corner
and you won't know that that's going on. And I

(13:23):
will see you in the next session.