It’s SPECtacular (Ep. 4) | How Physical Activity, Sleep, and Nutrition Impact Brain Development

[00:00] So physical health, that's the P in spectacular. And we already know something about physical health, but again, one of the things I love about the nervous system is we're always finding new things that we did not know, totally didn't know. So again, physical behaviors, physical health is going to be a big part of the world.

[00:20] going to provide us the resources so that we can essentially adapt to changes in the world, we can cope with all of the stressful events that occur. And it includes physical activity, exercise, sleep, and nutrition. So again, we've heard about these things. We know that these things are important.

[00:40] But I'm going to show you why they're important to a healthy brain. And the thing is is that those things change over time. When you're young, you can be doing one thing. My little foot is a good example. When you get older, you have to modify what you do with your behaviors. I just thought I could bump around.

[01:00] around the world just like I did when I was young. Not so much. So you've got to understand this. So let's first start with physical activity. Now, we know the brain controls all of the muscles in our body. And we have, 40% of our body is made up of skeletal muscles, which are attached to bone, which basically helps you to move your body.

[01:20] So any kind of movement is going to be good for your physical activity. So for kids, taking, well for everybody, taking walks, you know, hanging out with other people, playing in the playgrounds, lifting weights, playing sports, and then just doing your normal chores.

[01:40] moving around the house. Anything that moves your body, that's physical activity. So one of the things that I like about this is that physical activity, you don't have to sweat. I'm not a big proponent of sweating. That's why I took up swimming because you sweat, but you don't know you're sweating because you're in the water.

[02:00] So you don't necessarily have to sweat. And as I said, as we age, we have to change the physical activity that we do. One of the things that they don't tell you is that as you get older, what's really important is your sense of balance because what's bad for older adults when they have falls.

[02:20] your strength and your mobility, especially in your joints. So physical activity changes over time. Now, what does physical activity do? Well, it does a lot of things. It'll activate your immune system, which that's your system that helps to protect you from any intrusions from the outside world.

[02:40] It affects lots of different parts of your brain. It affects how you feel about yourself. So it basically is going to improve stressful situations, so your ability to deal with changes. Anxiety, depression, does all of that. And it does it because the areas that are controlling your physical activity,

[03:00] They're constantly changing, so increases neuroplasticity, decreases your inflammatory and oxidative stress levels in your brain. Those are things that are detrimental to the ability of your brain to change. And that it increases social behavior. So we already saw how social behaviors do a lot of things to make our brain healthy.

[03:20] So that's going to help us to have a healthy brain. Takes us to sleep. Now again, sleep, why do we need to sleep? Well, we know there's an adaptive survival reason for us to sleep. It conserves energy in the wild. It helps us to avoid predators. Luckily we don't have predators that are looking for it.

[03:40] memory consolidation. When you sleep, and again we're going to look at there's different stages of your sleep cycle, slow wave and REM. We know that when you sleep you're consolidating your memories. If you have something you want to remember, think about it before you fall asleep and that will

[04:00] essentially consolidate the memory for you. Now again, it can change the memory. That's why sometimes our memories can, you know, not be totally accurate, but and sometimes that's a good thing to do, especially with post-traumatic stress disorders. It restores your body. During the day, you basically are doing lots of activity.

[04:20] activities, lots of chemical reactions are going on. So basically it helps you to restore, helps you to grow, helps you to maintain, helps you to repair those parts of your body and your brain. And then my favorite, which is something we literally in the last 10, 15 years just...

[04:40] learned about, it removes waste. When you sleep, you're literally washing your brain, you're being brainwashed. This is because there's a system there called the glymphatic system. We didn't know about this when I was an undergrad or even when I was a graduate student. We just learned about it recently and this

[05:00] In the case of this lymphatic system, what it does is it actually causes your nervous system, the cells in your nervous system, to contract so that the cerebral spinal fluid that your brain is floating around in can literally wash away all of the metabolites, all of the things that can hurt your brain, can stop it from being able to.

[05:20] to do those neuroplastic mechanisms. So we know that this is a system that is active. Now, if we look at the different parts of our sleep cycle, and I won't talk a lot about this, even though I could, you can see that, so at the Y axis, we're looking at hours of sleep, the X axis, we're looking at hours of sleep.

[05:40] age of the individual starting from birth, going all the way to old age, and you can see, I don't like old age, elderly, when you get elderly, but you can see that the amount of slow wave sleep it decreases, the amount of REM sleep decreases, the actual time that you need to sleep decreases.

[06:00] And one of the things that we know is that in the elderly, you don't spend a lot of time in slow wave sleep. That's when you're doing that washing of your brain, that's when you're storing memories. And one of the things that we know that improves your slow wave sleep as you get older is exercise activity. So again,

[06:20] The sleep cycle is changing over time. We know that the sleep cycle does a lot of good things to our brain, which essentially increases neuroplasticity, gives us a healthy brain. Brings us to nutrition. Now again, we know a lot about what we should be eating. We don't know a lot about what we should be eating.

[06:40] Everybody is different. So this is a difficult one. So why do we eat? Two reasons. We need energy. We are, I mean, just when we're sitting there doing nothing, not listening, not reading, not thinking, just sitting there sort of zoning out. 48% of our metabolic activity

[07:00] activity is being observed by our brain, which is just helping us to stay alive, making us breathe, making our heart pump, all those kinds of things. We need energy. We need nutrients. We don't know exactly which nutrients we need, and people need different ones. We know that there are 20 amino acids, 9 of which are essential, which means we don't make

[07:20] We have to eat them. We know that there are vitamins and minerals, but like I say, we're learning more and more about our gastrointestinal system and what the needs of our body are. Right now, the sort of main thought is that they're following the my plate, which you want to have half of

[07:40] your daily food intake be fruits and vegetables, then you want grains and proteins, you have a little bit of dairy, which I'm a cheese lover so I tend to make that a little bit bigger. So there's lots of food that they say we need. But again, everybody's needs are different. And we know that these needs change

[08:00] over time. Now one of the things that we've known about for a long time is that there's an interaction between our brain and our gastrointestinal system, the gut-brain connection. And we know that not only is our brain talking to different parts of our gastrointestinal system, which include our mouth, but it's also about our brain.

[08:20] that it's essentially regulating the hypothalamic pituitary access. That's the part of your brain that spits out hormones, makes you do behaviors, makes you eat when you're hungry, drink when you're thirsty. It's also playing a role in your immune system. So, and again,

[08:40] We're learning so much about the gastrointestinal system and all the different micro-environments in your gastrointestinal system, so those prebiotics and probiotics that they're out there touting. Everybody's needs for those are different. Different parts of your gastrointestinal system have different needs for

[09:00] probiotics or prebiotics. So basically we know that the gut-brain connection is important. The brain's talking to the gastrointestinal system, the gastrointestinal system is talking to the brain, and we know it's regulating appetite. If we listened to our bodies, we would eat only the things that we need to eat to survive.

[09:20] if that's what the brain has us do. But we've got all this marketing out there that says this is a good food and you need to do that, you need to do that. And so we just shove things in there and it changes everything. And again, everybody is different. We know that the gut-brain connection impacts our mood. It reduces symptoms.

[09:40] symptoms of anxiety, depression, we know it impacts our cognition. You can't think when you're not, you don't have the energy to do so. And we know that there are different environments, microbiomes, that are going to influence our immune system. So that's the system that helps protect our bodies. So when we

[10:00] look at nutrition, yes it gives us energy, yes it gives us nutrients, we know that the gut-brain connection is important, we don't know exactly why, but we know that these things help to make our brains healthy. So again, when we look at trying to get a healthy brain, physical health in terms of

[10:20] of the physical activity, the sleep behaviors that we do, and our nutrition are going to help us to adapt to changes in the environment, keep those parts of our brain that need to be changing change so that our behaviors can change. We also need social health, emotional health, and cognitive health.

[10:40] which takes us to the next phase of our story.