Dr. Rhonda Patrick On Why Exercise Fuels The Brain, How Microplastics Poison The Body, & The Science Of Fitness

There have been studies that have come out recently showing that you can do 10 bodyweight squats, 10 bodyweight squats, every 45 minutes throughout about an 8-hours hour workday, and that will improve your blood glucose regulation better than a 30-minute walk.

I did a lot of research in nutrition, and so it's always something that I've always thought as the most important thing. And I'm not saying I don't think nutrition is important, but I think exercise is the most. I think it's the most important thing.

There have been studies showing that people consuming canned soup out of a can—cans are lined with BPA because they have a plastic lining to protect the food... Those individuals are, they have like a thousand-fold higher BPA after consuming canned soup versus the people that consume the very same soup out of a glass jar...

I would say the black plastics are the ones to really avoid ... The problem with the black plastic—so think sushi container or like a rotisserie chicken container or takeout container or those black forks that you have at parties or whatever—those are often, not always, but often made of recycled plastic from recycled electronics ... Those plastics contain a variety of chemical that are known carcinogens...

The longer you have glucose sitting around in your vascular system, it reacts with proteins, with DNA, lipids, but specifically it reacts with proteins, including collagen ... It forms something called Advanced Glycation End Products, or AGEs for short. And these things, they basically, cause your proteins to become stiff ... One of the reasons that exercise plays an important role in de-stiffening the heart or preventing the stiffness is because of the just enormous improvement in glucose regulation that you're getting from exercise.

There was probably one of the largest studies done looking at the effect of exercise versus metformin on the progression of prediabetes into diabetes ... Exercise out-performed metformin by almost like 30 to 40%, closer to 40%. So, you know, it out-performed it. In other words, it stoped the progression of prediabetes to type 2 diabetes much, much better than metformin did.

I would say, in terms of the VO2 max improvements, what's been shown to be the most beneficial is the Norwegian 4x4 protocol that I mentioned ... The idea is you want to do 4 minutes at the highest intensity that you can maintain for that 4 minutes, which is not all-out; you do recovery for 3 minutes at a very low intensity; and then you do that, and you repeat it four times...

You can take a 50-year-old person who is sedentary... and put them under a pretty intense exercise protocol for 2 years, and basically you can reverse the aging of their heart by almost 20 years.

There's been a quite a few studies... showing that, it was like 30 minutes a day or something, don't quote me on this, maybe about 30 minutes three times a week, I think. And it was moderate- to vigorous-intensity exercise. Again, I think, ot was about three times a week over the course of a month or so. These people had improvements in their blood pressure that were comparable to antihypertensive treatments and antihypertensive drugs...

It's hard. Like, it's really hard to do, like, front squats and [cleans] ...I work out in the morning, and I find that it's almost mentally harder for me than physically ... And I find that everything else in the day that I do is so much easier, and I love that. I love starting my day like that...

There was a study published in 2024 ... That study had looked at microplastics in a variety of different organs and found that it was accumulating in the brain, human brains, about 10 times the rate of other organs, which, to me, was very alarming because [the] blood-brain barrier is supposed to protect our brain...

Heat... accelerates the oxidation process, and so it really rapidly causes more microplastics to be shed into the beverages or into foods, but also the chemicals associated with them also. So there was a study showing that boiling water can cause BPA, which is a plastic-associated chemical and endocrine disruptor, to leach into the liquid by like 55 times higher...

I do think that there's a case to be made for the compound found highly in broccoli sprouts, but also in mature broccoli, sulforaphane, because sulforaphane increases an enzyme that causes BPA to be converted into a... water-soluble product. And so, it increases that enzyme. There's no direct evidence that sulforaphane does increases the excretion of BPA. I'm doing my own tests to find out. I think highly, highly likely...

So the brain-derived neurotrophic factor is growing new neurons, can increase the size of the hippocampus, but also, it's really important for something called neuroplasticity ... So really neuroplasticity allows our brains to adapt to a changing environment—and this is important for aging, but it's also important for mental health...

I think almost everyone by now knows that exercise is one of the best things you can do for mental health ... You can't deny it ... Even just even doing like a 10-minute high intensity workout, you feel better.

If you are doing more of a vigorous type of exercise, going again to lactate being a signaling molecule, lactate signals to your muscle to get more glucose in it ... It opens up the floodgates for glucose to come in...

There are, of course, a lot of other studies that have shown that people that have type 2 diabetes can reverse their type 2 diabetes with exercise ... There are lifestyle modifications, including exercise, probably being the most important. I don't think anything is more important than exercise in terms of health but also in reversing type 2 diabetes. I think that's one of the biggest the biggest factors.

There's also studies showing that people that are getting fewer than 7 hours of sleep at night, they have a higher all-cause mortality than people that are getting greater than 7 to 9 hours a night. But if they're physically active and getting fewer than 7 hours, guess what? They have the same all-cause mortality. Again, so exercise, I think, really does forgive some of the sins and that's where, you know, if you're going to cheat, make sure you're physically active.

Pregnant women that have higher urinary BPA levels are six times more likely to have a child diagnosed with autism by the age 11 ... Multiple studies have shown this. And it's not just autism. There's a spectrum of neurodevelopmental disorders, including ADHD, anxiety. Urinary BPA is associated with all of these neurodevelopmental disorders...

For the most part, trying to not drink water out of a plastic bottle is really advisable because that is a big source of microplastics ... Any type of activated carbon filter will filter out a lot of the plastic-associated chemicals, but if you really want to filter out all these microplastics in all their sizes... a reverse osmosis filter at home, whether it's a tabletop one that you just drink your water out of or it's a whole-home filtration system, is the way to go because it does filter out even the nanoplastics.

There's all sorts of studies that have come out of cities with really bad air pollution, like Mexico City. There's been a few studies that have come out looking at, you know, post-mortem infants and also children. Their brains have accumulated amyloid-beta plaques like like an 80-year-old would have. These are things that are involved in the pathology of Alzheimer's disease...

There have been studies that have shown that even people that are meeting the two and a half hours of moderate intensity exercise per week, if they're only doing this sort of zone 2 training... up to 40% of people have a hard time improving their VO2 max, and they're called non-responders.

Not getting enough sleep also changes a lot of the glucose regulatory system, including insulin sensitivity, including glucose disposal ... Doing high-intensity interval training can really ameliorate most of those negative effects from not getting enough sleep in terms of glucose and how your glucose isn't being regulated.

There have been studies that have compared running to people taking SSRIs and it was as good, if not better, at improving a variety of depressive symptoms in people with depression. Running was, compared to SSRIs.

Well, the people that had Alzheimer's disease in this study were 10-20 times more likely to have microplastic particles in their brain than people that did not have Alzheimer's disease...

I have so many friends that are like, 'Oh, I'm fine. I get BPA-free plastic.' And like, you realize that the stuff that they replace BPA with is just the same or worse. It's also an endocrine disruptor doing the same things, and it's just a brilliant marketing strategy...

So cardiorespiratory fitness is... usually measured in terms of VO2 max, as you know, and it's the maximum amount of oxygen that you can take in during maximal exercise... Emerging data over the last five years or so has proven that it's probably the strongest marker we have of longevity today.

There have been a variety of studies that have shown even older adults that are engaging in moderate-intensity activity for about a year can increase the size of their hippocampus by like 2%, which is amazing because typically older adults... their hippocampus atrophies with time. So not only were they fighting and staving off the atrophying, but they were also increasing it.

If your neurons don't need to use glucose, if they're using lactate instead, this allows glucose to be spared. And why is that important? It's important because glucose is used to make something called NADPH, which is a precursor to form glutathione, which is the brains major, major antioxidant system.

Let's say you're comparing someone that is doing a 30-minute zone 2 run versus a 30-minute more vigorous run, then you're going to increase the number of mitochondrial density more by doing the vigorous intensity...

There's been a variety of studies that have been done now looking at people that have colorectal cancer or breast cancer and they engage in exercise. These people are 40% less likely to have cancer recurrence and 63% less likely to die from their cancer. So they're improving their overall cancer outcome, right, just from from exercising...

Exercise is a type of what is called hormetic stress. So this is a type of beneficial stress. It does create oxidation; it does create reactive oxygen species; it does create IL-6 and pro-inflammatory cytokines. It causes inflammation acutely. But there's an adaptive response to ... It has a net anti-inflammatory and a net antioxidant effect.

I would say, the other study that was also published this year, it was in the New England Journal of Medicine... That study looked at patients that were undergoing cardiac surgery and found that close to 50% or so of these patients had microplastic particles lodged in their arterial walls...

The other main offenders would be to-go coffee mugs. Most to-go coffee mugs are lined with plastic, and that plastic breaks down with heat ... Aluminum cans are lined with plastic lining to protect the aluminum from corrosion from the beverage or food. So, you think you think you're avoiding the plastic by drinking out of a can; turns out you're actually drinking out of a plastic-lined can.

Heat is accelerating that whole degradation process. You are shedding microplastics and chemicals into the food. So you want to get wooden cooking utensils ... If you're putting heat in any way shape or form on any type of plastic, how robust it seems, it doesn't matter, because the heat is really what's breaking that down. It's breaking it down, and it's leaching into the food or the beverage.

But what's even more interesting is that lactate is also increasing the expression of other genes, and this is happening in the brain ... In the brain, it increases a very important one called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and this is basically one of the best things that you could do for your brain...

Exercise is one of the best things you can do for cancer prevention and also for cancer treatment. In other words, if you've been diagnosed with cancer, which is probably where most people... they wouldn't exercise.

There is some, I would say, preliminary evidence that dietary fiber may help prevent the absorption of those microplastics.