 Welcome to the Dr. Dundee Podcast. So, you know, everybody knows that walking is good for you, right? But could walking actually be better for you than lifting weights or even running? Well, the answer may surprise you. You see, science shows that living a healthier, happier life takes more than just talking the talk. It actually takes walking the walk, literally. And in just a minute, you're going to learn why. On this episode of the Dr. Dundee Podcast, I'll be speaking with the author, neuroscientist and bona fide walking expert. Yeah, there is such a thing, Shane Omara. Shane is a professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. A few months ago, he released his latest book, In Praise of Walking, a new scientific exploration. And today we're going to be talking about the history of walking. Believe it or not, apparently there is a history of walking. And why we actually both agree walking is one of the best forms of exercise there is. We'll also talk about how walking can benefit your posture, protect your organs. Oh, this I got to hear. Promote reverse aging, boy, something I love, and so much more. Shane, welcome to the program. Thank you. I'm delighted to be with you. All right, so Shane, tell me and my listeners a bit more about yourself. Of all the crazy fields of research that you could dive into, why walking? Come on. So it's actually very straightforward. In my everyday research life, I work on the kind of the brain systems that are affected by stress and depression and that are supported by learning and memory. And one of the great convergences in brain science is the discovery that lots of bits of the brain are involved in lots of different functions. And these parts of the brain that are involved in learning and memory that are badly affected by stress and depression are also preferentially affected by walking. In fact, I are involved in goal setting and knowing where you are when you're moving about in the world. And it just seemed utterly straightforward. Nobody had put the literature together before. And I thought, well, if I don't do it, I wonder who else will. So I thought I'd do it. So now the first obvious question is, are you a walker or were you always a walker? I've always been a walker and I've always preferred walking to running. I was always one of those guys when we were doing school sports. We'd do the 5,000 kilometers and I would be in the back two or three. But I was always really good at walking and I could walk very long distances and still can for very long periods of time without too much trouble. So I guess I have a certain bias in terms of my own willingness to walk. All right. So I guess there was some motivation here to look into this deeper. Yeah. And I'm, of course, where walking is concerned. My big thing is that we need to weave walking into our everyday lives. We've designed towns and cities where we've engineered walking out of our lives. And we've also got this strange cultural idea that walking is something you do with boots at the weekend. You get into your car, you drive however many miles out into the woods. And actually we shouldn't be doing that. You know, what we're doing is living a very unnatural life at the moment where we sit as we both are while we're talking here for maybe seven, eight hours a day. But our bodies are built for movement and our bodies are built to profit from movement. And there's a peculiar thing, actually, which is worth mentioning. Our nearest primate relatives, the great apes, the chimpanzees and others, they live very indolent lifestyles and it's without cardiovascular effect. For us, though, it is sitting around all day long is bad for us in just about every way you can think of, from cardiovascular effects to subtle changes in your personality to simple things like the gluing up of your joints and all of the other things that you should be capable of doing. And we know that walking is intensely health-promoting, it reduces inflammation. For example, there's lots of inflammatory factors produced in your blood when you sit around all day. Interleukin-6 is a famous one, but also low-density cholesterol, LDL, the bad form of cholesterol. And these are all reversed quickly and easily by walking and walking lots. All right. So I guess one of the big questions that everybody says is define walking lots. Do I? Yes. So we can do that and we can do that actually quite easily because we can look at, because we've got pedometers now and we've got smartphones, we can look at the amount of walking that people do and look at their liability to metabolic diseases and other non-communicable diseases. And what you see is that people walk less than about 5,000 to 7.5 thousand steps a day. There's a surge of metabolic disorder, the cardiovascular disease, diabetes, all of those kinds of things in that population. And it falls away dramatically once you start to slide that walking threshold up. So we can be fairly certain that activity is the thing and the kind of activity that we're designed for and we can most easily engage in is to go for lots of regular walks during the course of the day. And my advice always is, because we don't walk enough, 5,000 steps more than you're currently doing is probably a good guide. So if you're doing 5,000 a day, that will take you to 10. If you're doing 3,000, which is not very much at all, that'll take you to eight. And the health benefits of that would become very, very apparent very, very quickly. Yeah, I'll give you I'll give you an example that I actually have put in my upcoming book, The Energy Paradox. Back in the mid 1980s, my family moved to London, England, where I did a fellowship in pediatric cardiac surgery at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children and we didn't have a car and we had to walk up flat and we we had the smallest tiny flat and we had the tiniest little refrigerator. So we had two young kids, five and seven. And so we had to go everywhere walking. The grocery was about 10 blocks away. Our favorite pizza, pizza express was a mile away. And even the tube of the underground was a significant walk to get to. And then, as you know, wherever you got off, it was usually still a significant walk. And even though I was as busy as I had ever been during that year, I actually lost almost 50 pounds just because I walked everywhere. You walked. I walked everywhere. And London is one of the world's great walking cities. And of course, if you look at indices of walkability in the US, New York always comes out top. Boston comes up out there as well. And so does San Francisco. And these are cities that really a car is a bit of a liability in. And I think what we're seeing, especially coming out of this very, very strange period we've been in, that cities are starting to think about how this should be redesigned to make it easy for people to get around under their own steam. And London is a great example of that. The public transport is fantastic. And really, you can do most things on foot. And of course, this is something you inadvertently profit from. You don't engineer walking into your day. It's just part of your day. And it's something that you do naturally and you get all the health benefits from it as a result. And all of the other benefits, we shouldn't just focus about and focus on health. There are myriad other ones. Yeah, I'm going to add one other thing. We either kind of jog or walk our dogs about two and a half, three miles every every day. That's a wonderful thing about a dog. They, you know, require walking. They force you out. Yes, they do. And we have a neighbor in and I won't tell you which town. We have a neighbor and we have that's a fairly long drive, way not significant, who there are age, but they actually take their car out of their garage. They drive down the driveway to pick up their newspaper, turn around and drive up the driveway. And they do this every day. And I, you know, I get I knew I was going to talk to you. I said, so, Sean, what do you think about that practice? I think that's really sad. You know, one of the kind of arguments I make is that we need lots of regular activity built in right throughout the course of our days every day. And here I don't know how long your neighbor's drive is. Let's say it's a kilometer long just for the fun of it. OK, it's not OK. Well, let's say it's 500 meters long. It doesn't matter. The point is that you could be getting an extra five, six hundred steps out and back without thinking about it. And the same when you take a phone call. Don't sit when you're taking the call, walk up and down. There are lots and lots of ways that you can build extra walking into the course of your day if you have to drive to work. Park as far as is reasonably possible from where you work and walk the remaining part of the journey. If you have to go to the mall, do the same. If you take a train to work, get out a couple of stops early. I take the train into the centre of Dublin every day. Well, I haven't for the last couple of months. But what I would normally do is get out two stations early. And that gives me an extra three thousand steps and also clears my head before the workday starts. Ah, OK. So you're you know, here you are a neuroscientist and you talk about clearing the head. I happen to believe you. Tell me the research. Is is there such a thing that walking clears your head? Yeah, there is. And you can treat this at all sorts of different all sorts of different ways. So a very simple thing is you've got a problem to solve. And poets, of course, have known about the connection between walking and creativity since time immemorial. Teachers have the peripatetic school of philosophers used to walk and talk. And of course, a good way to have an argument with somebody is not face to face, but while you're out for a walk. So there are all sorts of kind of anecdotal reasons why walking might be good. But if you have a difficult problem to solve coming up with ideas is the is the problem. And sitting there, you feel like the problem you've got is intractable. It's big. You can't get can't get it solved. And a way of dealing with that is to go for a walk. And we can push this beyond just saying anecdotally, this is a good thing. So a good test of creativity in the laboratory is what's known as an alternative uses test. So you're brought into the lab and people will hand you common objects like a phone or a book or whatever. And you have to come up with uses for those objects. And people vary in the number of uses they can come up with. Some people will come up with very few two or three alternative uses. Others will come up with 10 or 20. Now, here's the thing. If you get people to go for a walk for maybe eight or 10 minutes before they do this task, they come up with about twice as many ideas as they would have done had they just been sitting there. And I think the argument, the reason for this is straightforward. Walking makes demands on the brain and body that sitting simply doesn't. You're sitting, you've got very nice posture there. You're breathing, you're paying attention to me and paying attention to you with to maintain a conversational thread. But that's really as much as our brain really needs to worry about. When you stand, immediately things change because that's a call to action to the body from the brain. It's saying, get ready, we have to do something. And you're not built for movement from your feet up. You're built actually from the head down. As far as your brain is concerned, your body is hung out of your head and makes contact with the ground. It's like you're kind of a castle in the air. And that means there's a continuous signal coming out from the brain to the body. And there's feedback coming back from the body and on a stable surface. I can move in this direction. All of those kinds of things are happening continuously. So you're getting activity spreading out across the brain in ways that wouldn't have occurred merely as the result of being seated. And then just to push that thought a little bit further, a wonderful discovery just in the past 10 or so years is the fact that the muscles when they're activated, in particular, the muscles of the legs produce molecules known as myokines. So these are only produced when muscle is contracting. So the muscle must be working. And when they're produced, they diffuse through the vasculature right throughout the body and into the brain, among other places. And they help keep the fabric of the brain and body in good working order. To the point that if you take people in their early 70s, this is work which has been done in Illinois. You actually can reverse the kind of functional aging of the brain. So somebody who's 72, they look much more like somebody who's 70 or 69 in terms of their performance on psychological tests and also parts of the brain that are involved in attention and learning. All of those kinds of things show greater levels of activity than they would otherwise have done. So you have these feed forward things coming out of the brain to the body and then these feedback things coming from the body to the brain. So it's a wonderful integrated system. OK, so the question everybody wants to know, and one of the reasons I wanted you on the program, is if walking so good for you, then surely running is far better for you. Come on. What say you? What say I? OK, so here's an interesting one. If you ask somebody to prepare for a marathon to run a marathon, which is a three hour, four hour run, that takes between 12 and 20 weeks of intense practice to get somebody to walk 1200 kilometres across a mountain range. Takes about four days of adaptation. We're built to adapt very quickly to the rigors of walking. The adapting to the rigors of running. And I'm not down and running where this is. And I don't want to be to be heard as saying you shouldn't run. But we profit very, very quickly from walking lots in a way that we don't where running is concerned, because the adaptation for that kind of extreme performance takes much, much longer. And we've lots of evidence that this is true from studies of people who have been taken over, for example, the Via Alpina, which is in northern Italy on the Appalachian Trail in the US and lots of other places. Humans are built to walk 15 kilometres a day on average from about the age of two until 80 or 90 without any trouble. And it's something we can do every day of our lives, absent injury or illness. Now, there is one thing about walking compared with running. The amount of injuries that you suffer per million steps walked is approximately flat, whereas the numbers of injuries that you suffer per million steps run is not it rises quite considerably. And runners do spend a lot of time with twisted ankles, soreness, splitting and other things. So if you're going to run, be very careful about the surface you run on, the shoes you wear, all of those kinds of things. I think for walking a good pair of shoes, and maybe because I'm talking from Ireland, a decent round coat. You're probably that's probably enough. All right. So do you you know, that's a great point. I in my first book years ago, I actually mentioned the the Kalahari Bushman, the icon now back in the original running craze. People actually went and asked the Kalahari Bushman, what do you think about running a marathon? And they basically said, well, wait a minute, why would anybody run twenty six point two miles? Because because if you were chasing an animal, it wouldn't be worth it, number one. And if the animal was chasing you, he would have caught you long before them. And yet and yet these guys, of course, are great long distance walkers. Yeah, they are very good, amazing, persistent hunters. But they run in bursts. They don't run at the same speed as the antelope that they might be chasing. What they're doing is working in a coordinated group together to hunt that animal down. And again, this is something that humans are remarkably good at. But, you know, take a different group that are living a kind of a similar quote unquote ancestral lifestyle. The Samani in the Amazonian jungle, they walk everywhere. They can't run because you can't run in the jungle. It's it's it's really difficult. And here's the shocking thing about their heart health. The average Samani male who is 80 years old has equivalent heart health to the average 55 year old American. It's it's really they have a lot more parasites and they have other other things going on. But their their heart health is absolutely astonishing. And the the same has been found repeatedly in other populations where people do not rely on mechanized transport. Lots of walking throughout the day benefits you in all sorts of ways. All right. So now wait a minute. The fitness gurus are listening and they're going about. Wait a minute. Walking doesn't get your heart rate up high enough and anybody who knows anything, you've got to get your heart rate up to have good cardiovascular health. How about? Yeah, and they're correct. They're correct. I don't think one should deny what's obvious about the science. But I think the problem we've got is we're damned by the words that we've got. We've got a single verb walking. And actually, what I try to argue is that there are many types of walking that we can can engage in. And if you want to walk for cardiovascular health, you have to impose cardiovascular strain. There's no two ways about that. And you need to walk at a rate of let's say 5.8 6.2 kilometers an hour. You need to do that on a surface that has an incline. So you're imposing a bit more strain and you need to be walking at a pace where it's difficult to concentrate on your podcast that you're listening to. And you can't carry on a conversation with the person beside you very easily. That's the kind of pace that you want to put in if you want to get the cardiovascular benefits. But if you want to walk for problem solving, you probably want to walk a bit more slowly than that. And if you want to talk out a problem with your partner, you probably want to walk a little bit more slowly as well. So I think it all depends on the kind of walking you want to do. And again, my general argument comes back to this point. We've engineered walking out of our everyday lives and we would all profit enormously if we could get an extra eight or 10,000 steps a day in every day. How about I like to call them energy snacks. What about just taking 10 minutes before lunch or before dinner or after lunch or after dinner, breaking this up into little bitty bites? Yeah, lots and lots of bits during the course of the day is ideal. And you you'll know very well, of course, that taking a walk before you eat is a good way of actually suppressing your appetite a little and stabilizing your blood sugar levels. It's a good way if you have a craving to get rid of that craving for whatever it happens to be. Yeah, so that's perfect advice. Lots of 10, 15 minutes here, there and everywhere. Don't sit for three hours and think getting up and walking for five minutes is going to undo the damage of that. Get up every 25 minutes for 10 minutes or something like that. And you'll be more productive as well. I think the other thing that impresses me in Europe, where I spend a lot of time, is so many people walk after dinner and it's a stroll, whether it's on the Ramblas or in London or or wherever. Is there a benefit to just strolling after a meal? Well, I think there's kind of two things going on there. Again, there's walking after a meal helps stabilize the drop in blood sugar or the change in blood sugar levels. I'd rather to correct myself a little because you'll have a surge in blood sugar after you've eaten. But there's also something else going on. You know, if you go to Taramina in Italy, for example, or where the Pasigietta is practiced all over, there's walking is there for social display. And this is one of the great benefits of walking. You're not doing it for cardiac health, but you're doing it for social health. You meet your neighbours, you meet people around that you wouldn't otherwise meet. You get to chat and you have enormous levels of social cohesion in places like this, where people have these random meetings. You get to see the same familiar strangers every day and you get that kind of nice stability. So I think there's really two things going on there. One is that it's good where appetite is concerned, but the other is this social wealth that can be built through walking. Yeah, and that's certainly one of the things that's true of all the blue zones. And I happen to have spent most of my career in the only blue zone in North America, Loma Linda, California. But all the blue zones are in hilly communities, number one. And number two, they walk these hills. They're all their lives. They were all populated before the car was invented and we were kind of always inclined to think the car has been a permanent feature of our lives. And actually, it hasn't been widespread car ownership. Even in the US, it didn't happen until the 1940s and the 1950s. So, you know, we're talking within the lifespan of somebody who's 70 or 80 years old. And really the car as a feature of our streets has only been around since the late 1910s or the early 1920s. Will it be there in 100 years? I don't know. Oh, well, I'll be flying by then. I hope we'll be walking. All right, now, the other argument is walking doesn't help you build muscle mass and you got to lift weights and do weight exercises to get muscle mass. And obviously, muscles are really important. Yeah. And again, the the answer is that that's true. But walking facilitates a particular type of muscle mass building. At least it did in our ancestral kind of times because we carried everything. You know, you carried your child, you carried your water, you carried your animal that you just killed. You carried your spears. So back in those days, we used our hands for lots of other purposes. We used our backs for lots of other purposes. So they would have built core strength in ways that walking typically won't for us now. So it's absolutely true. Walking will not build core muscle. You're going to have to do other things unless you wear weights when you're walking, wear a backpack, you know, do those kinds of things. But there is one thing that I would say that's really interesting where walking and muscle health is concerned. And this is the muscles of the calves. So we know something very interesting about these muscles. If you stand for a long time, you tend to get pooling of the blood in the feet. And of course, pooling of the blood is reduced circulation. Edema is bad for you and you're more likely to faint, to fall over, to have all these deficits in the circulation of blood through the body. However, when you walk, those calf muscles have this peculiar property that they're electrically excitable in ways that the heart is electrically excitable and they help push the blood back up through the body. So they have a kind of an anti-gravity effect where the circulation of blood is concerned and they maintain that kind of orthostatic pressure that you need in order not to faint every time you stand up. So walking in an absolute sense is really good for your thigh muscles, but also for your leg muscles. I just think that's completely undeniable. But if you wanna build arm muscles, obviously lift something. So, you know, you make a good point. We, you know, we're one of the few upright walking mammals and animals for that matter, us and emperor penguins, I guess. So don't have knees, don't have hands. That's right. So this would strike any of us as a pretty lousy design and it must be a lousy design because very few animals have chosen this design. I think it's a brilliant design because there are eight billion of us and we've hunted every other animal off the planet. That's true. It's a good enough design. You know, there is no other species occupying this niche, this particular ecological niche. We got there first and it's gonna be a long time before any other species could come along and push us out of it. We might push ourselves out of it, but that's a different day's discussion. But the key point is that although we do suffer from lower back pain, there's no doubt about that, the cure for lower back pain is persistently misunderstood. Don't sit, get up and walk. And it's clearly the case that people who are very tall kind of have spinal problems. You know, our backs are not well-designed things, but they're good enough and it's been certainly good enough to make eight billion of us. We talked earlier about, and you're interested in mood and stress. So what's the connection between walking and mood and stress or managing mood and stress? Yeah, so there's lots of different pieces of data, all converging in the same place. So if you do a very simple experiment on university students, you bring them to the lab and you say, I'm gonna ask you to do the following task. We're gonna walk around the university campus and we're gonna get you to judge the beauty of the buildings we're looking at. Or for another group, you say, thank you for coming to the lab. We're gonna get you to judge the beauty of these pictures of these buildings. And incidentally, will you fill out a form just saying how good you're feeling at this moment on a scale of one to five? What you find is the group that were taken out for the walk to look at the buildings, their aesthetic judgments will be about the same as the group that look at the pictures. But their mood goes up and it goes up quite a bit. And this is just from an incidental walk. So that's kind of interesting in that group. But what we see is if you track people with pedometers who are not currently sick, who do not have a psychiatric disorder, or who do not have a physical disability, you track them over an eight or 10 or 12 year period and you break them into bands from the least active, those who walk the least, those who walk the most. What you see is that for every level of movement above the lowest level of movement where people are hardly walking at all, your risk of major depressive disorder falls and falls really substantially. Something around about 12 or so percent. And it is, I think beyond doubt at this stage that people who walk regularly are simply at much less risk of succumbing to major depressive disorder compared to people who are physically inactive. So that the causality here is a little hard to tease out because it's hard to get people who have got major depressive disorder to walk, that they've got enough going on ethically there might be issues. But in terms of a kind of a preventative physical activity and walking is the one that we're designed to profit from very easily, reduces your risk and reduces it very substantially. Speaking of reducing risk, as you know and I know we have an epidemic of dementia, any relationship between walking and preventing dementia? Yeah, so there's a major commission by the Lancet Journal that I'm sure you know well published about two or three years ago looking at lifestyle factors and dementia. So there are things that you can't do anything about. So your genetic liability for dementia it's really difficult to do anything about that. But there are lifestyle factors that can make a big difference. Not smoking is one of them. Controlling your weight and eating an appropriate diet is another, but regular exercise a couple of times a week reduces the risk of dementia quite substantially. It's probably given the data we've got too late once dementia has started but if you've been walking regularly throughout life that's kind of almost like money in the bank that you've put away to look after your own brain health as you get older. So a simple thing to remember this is what's good for your heart is also good for your brain. No, it's very true. In fact, I mentioned in the longevity paradox book that I wrote that if you look at women who unfortunately develop far more Alzheimer's than men, women who exercise regularly and most of that is walking they have an 80% reduction in dementia compared to women who don't exercise regularly. But what's fascinating is the genetic component to that people who carry the apoE4 gene, they, if they get dementia, their dementia arrives 11 years later than the group that didn't exercise. Now, I mean, that's significant, you know. Yeah, so there's a really interesting paper just out on apoE4 and what it seems to be happening in those people who are carriers is that the blood brain barrier is compromised or at least more easily compromisable because of the apoE4 gene. And one of the great things that walking does for you is it causes you to express an amazing molecule called vascular endothelial growth factor which actually repairs. VEGF. So VEGF and there's a couple of others but these myokines are just amazing for this SM VEGF is another one. So it may actually be that the causal thing there is not anything to do with changes in the brain but actually having a leaky blood brain barrier and lots of exercise helps reduce the likelihood that that BBB will be leaky. Yeah, no, I agree with you. Dale Bredesen has become a good friend of mine and both of us are really deeply involved with the apoE4 folks. And yeah, we're beginning to realize why that's a risk factor but that both of us believe it's a very modifiable risk factor and I think exercise is right up there. All right, so okay, you can convince me I gotta walk more. Our listeners and viewers say, oh my gosh I gotta walk more. Come on, how do you do that realistically? So there's two things that really have to happen. The first is you have to take out your smartphone and turn on your pedometer and check it religiously and be very, very annoyed with yourself if you haven't managed to get your steps in. So I am a little obsessive about that and I always check it regularly during the day. I have an alarm that goes off so I get up and I walk regularly and you do things like I've said you go for if you've to take a phone call don't sit, walk around when you're doing it walk to the shop rather than actually taking your car if you can help it, do all of those kinds of things but there's another thing and this is where I don't wanna focus too much on the individual, where you live makes a huge difference. So again, if you look at the great spread of cities that you have in the United States some are amazingly walkable cities and New York being one that scores as I've mentioned very highly on the walkability index but other places have very poor provision of sidewalks so there's an issue to do with how we build our societies and make it easy for people to get out and walk because if you design your society so that everything happens in a car well then nobody's gonna walk but if you design your society around let's say a philosophy of individual mobility of the person, not of a box and four wheels then you end up with a different way of thinking about how your city should be put together and there's a great thing happening in Paris at the moment the 15 minute city idea so that what they're planning to do over the next decade or so is engineer the city so that all of the homes that are within the periphery will have all of the facilities of life that they need within a 15 minute walk of the front door your school, your shop, your place of work all of those kinds of things will all be easily accessible designs like that will transform how our cities will work and the old idea that we should have the places for work over in one zone a place for living in another and a place for shopping in another these kind of mixed residential areas mixed use areas are going to be I think much more popular but make them walkable don't make them places where people have to get into a car all the time so is there hope that we can actually take existing cities and redesign them to make them work? Yeah, why not? Just takes will, you know it costs a lot of money to build freeways it costs a lot of money to do things we just have to decide that actually we're going to spend our budgets a little bit differently and you have this, I think it's in Houston there's a great example of a 24 lane wide freeway and the joke the engineers had was we thought for all those extra billions we'd get an extra movement but you don't, you get induced demand and induced demand is a real thing so we have to think again about how far-flung our suburbs should be how connected up our cities should be what is our provision for things like transport what are our zoning regulations do they maintain a distance between shopping and housing and offices and all of the other things or do they mix them all up so you can have very big differences in outcome for very small changes in regulations so I think these things are entirely possible All right, all right before I let you go this is something that's talked about all the time the older we get the slower we walk and there is I'm sure you know the slower you walk the worse your health is going to be how the heck am I gonna speed up my walking Oh, so yeah, it's a very good question and I think one of the issues again comes back to how we design our towns and cities and our streets to make them safe for people who have mobility issues as they get older so there's a lovely study from the UK a few years ago showing that the average person over there aged over 70 has a mobility impairment about 85% of males and 95% of females have a walking impairment and what's the consequence of this well the consequence is that we've designed crosswalks on streets for adults that can walk at 1.2 meters a second and of course somebody who's 85 with a frame can't walk at that speed so they're trapped in their homes and that just makes the problem they've got worse so if we change again, design in the environment so that walking across streets becomes safer you raise the middle of the road so people can walk across that easily you slow down car speeds think about the surfaces that we walk on you know are they slip proof if you fall are you gonna break your hip there are all sorts of ways of thinking about how we design things so that even though you're gonna slow down a little as you get older the fear that you have slowing down can be taken away you know what's happening to all our old car tires they could be recycled and be made into pavements they're already used in children's playgrounds there's lots and lots of things we can think about doing we don't have to do just pour concrete on everything and hope that that would be the best outcome there are lots of other ways of doing things so lastly with COVID-19 and everybody trapped inside has there been a study yet showing that the fact that a lot of people cannot get out and walk has that increased stress levels and what do we do let's all get a mask on and get out there or what so there's a study which has appeared it's only a preprint at the moment but it's under review and what it shows is something interesting again it's smartphone data people who are inactive have stayed at the same level of inactivity that they were always at so COVID has made no difference to those people people who were very active before at the outbreak of COVID their levels of activity fell and fell quite a bit what we don't have because we're only three months into this is enough data to know what has happened in terms of an upswing from that but currently and this is on a US population and this is again one of these examples of how having access to smartphone data can tell us really interesting things about what we do but I think my own local town or local suburb here what it's an old medieval little village and the streets are quite narrow and of course we have street parking for cars to make it possible for people to engage in spatial distancing while walking we've had to take or at least the urban district council has taken away street parking in certain places so that the footpaths are widened and I think there's something interesting going on with walking at the moment where we're paying attention to each other in a way that we didn't before we look in each other's eyes we say hello and we swing carefully around each other as we walk so in some respects I think walking in a way has become a little bit more interesting and a bit more pleasurable because there's a greater degree of social contact that there wasn't before Well maybe that will be the right side of COVID that we're out and about Well there aren't many so we have to grasp whatever ones we can find All right so what's one takeaway from in praise of walking that our listeners can get that they didn't know before? If you walk it will benefit you in ways that you didn't know and it will do so for the whole of your life That's a good summary, very good so I really appreciate you coming on I know you it's late there so where can they find you, your work, the book, anywhere? If you go to ShaneOMarra.com they'll get a link to the book and of course if you go to the usual online retailers you'll find it very easily there as well in Kindle and in Hardback and you can get it in about 14 different languages now so it's available in Spanish and it will be available in French it's in Polish and all sorts of other languages as well Very good, very good All right in praise of walking SeanOMarra, thank you so much and we appreciate you being on Good luck with the book and let's everybody keep walking out there And that's a really great message to end on Thank you so much Thanks a lot All right, time for our audience question Keith Elcoat, I think, on YouTube, bro I follow the Plant Paradox diet here in the UK while speaking of which and I am a lot healthier as a result There is a trend here for using tomato leaves in salad and for cooking do tomato leaves contain lectins like the fruit? Hey, that is an excellent question Well, actually most of the nightshades do contain lectins in their leaves and I personally have a number of patients who even brushing up against a tomato plant will actually make them break out in rash on their arms or wherever they brushed up on tomato Now I often get a question not to avoid yours but ashwagandha, many of you know, is a nightshade and ashwagandha is a very popular adaptogen and the root of ashwagandha doesn't have any lectins in it and that's actually what you're getting when you're taking ashwagandha But I would stay away from tomato leaves Just one more thing, a lot of these plants may not have a lectin in their fruit but they may actually have a lectin in their leaves and I've talked about this before, for instance aquaporins are lectins in leaves of some plants or instance, tobacco leaf as an aquaporin spinach leaves have an aquaporin that some people absolutely react to I don't want to start a quite spread panic you can go ahead and have your spinach a lot we see a number of people who do react to the aquaporin and spinach So I would stay away from the tomato leaves but heck, just peel and de-seed your tomato and you'll be fine or pressure cook them and that'll do it Okay, review of the week following our episode on cannabis, CBD and magic mushrooms with Jenny Sansussi Kathy Strickland on YouTube wrote Thank you for having Jenny on to talk about all of the benefits of alternative medicine Well, that's what we want to do we want to make sure you know what's out there I may agree or disagree but this is a forum for voices to be heard and we're going to keep having you listen to it Okay, thanks for writing that Oh, and now this is for the second For the next year, what we're doing up here Yep Okay, it's time for our audience question S. Vamps Vamps on Instagram asks Can you talk about amino acids impact on the gut lining? Well, sure So amino acids of course are the building blocks of proteins and we have certain amino acids that we cannot manufacture ourselves so they are essential amino acids There are some that are quasi essential We don't make a lot of them but we make enough but most of those we have to get from our diet as well Quite frankly, most foods that you eat will have enough of the essential amino acids for you to do fine with There is a movement to get peptides which are one or more amino acids that are combined to improve your health to improve your gut lining Certainly one of the most interesting of the amino acids is glutamine We know that intestinal cells, particularly colon cells really like glutamine to eat and to heal themselves and you'll see that glutamine is a part of multiple formulas for gut health, including mine But there is some worry that excessive glutamine over a few months can actually become toxic turning into glutamate which is neurotoxin So I like to use these in my patients or personally for a few months at a time and then we back away from them So maybe that was your question But in general, really most people even eating a total plant-based diet will get plenty of the essential amino acids for health You do not need animal protein to get essential amino acid Again, nothing wrong per se with animal protein but that's not the purpose of this question Review of the Week, Chris Tripp on YouTube Bro Dr. Gendry, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to devote to these podcasts Incredible I look forward to the topics you bring us All the best, you are a wonderful human Wow, Chris, thanks, the check is in the mail Love you and we'll keep doing this All right, that's it for today Thanks a lot Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts Because I'm Dr. Gendry and I'm always looking out for you