#74 Ketones, Fasting, and Flexibility: The Science of Optimizing Your Energy Systems for Endurance and Longevity with Dr Brianna Stubbs

Ageless Athlete - Brianna Stubbs
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kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: [00:00:00] I typically start with this question, which is Brianna, where are you right now? And what did you have for breakfast this morning?

Brianna: Yeah. So right now I'm at my home in Richmond, Point Richmond, which is in the East Bay area. And this morning I had for breakfast, um, my standard breakfast is a big old scoop of Greek yogurt with an extra scoop of protein powder and then a big handful of frozen berries. And this morning because I wasn't at work and I have a few extra like, you know, bits that I can add into it.

I had some flax seed and some chia as well to get some bit more, bit more nutrition in there. But I'm a big protein girly in the morning and Greek yogurt is good for that.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Your breakfast is so similar to mine, but I believe that you also went for a nice round of outdoor exercise this morning.

Brianna: Always.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: do you get your breakfast in pre exercise to fuel up or is it a recovery, 

Brianna: Typically recovery. So I had [00:01:00] a little bit of peanut butter before I rocked my run, but I can't do a big feed right before I go out in the morning. So I had a cup of, you can tell from the accent, I'm a Brit. So I had a cup of like English builder's tea, get a little bit of like hydration and some caffeine in before I went running.

And then, you know, I'm a, I'm a peanut butter from the jar lady as well. So a little bit of peanut butter from the jar. It was an easy run today. I've got a big run tomorrow. So it wasn't, um, wasn't too, strenuous. So, you know, bit of peanut butter set me up and then came back and had my, my yogurt and berry melange when I, as a recovery, when I got back.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: you know, I am just a, I'm an average athlete and a humble podcaster. But now that I know that, You and Jamie Justice, who was on the podcast recently, I have this one thing in common with you, which is I also love my peanut butter ~and I, yeah, I take it right from the jar as well. . So~

Brianna: ~I, when I~

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: ~I,~

Brianna: ~to America from England, I grew up, I love, love nut butter. Um, we can talk more. I was a lightweight row really into nut butters, but in England, there's just like not as much selection as there is over here. And one of the things that I did when I moved to America was every week I would buy a different, um, Brand of nut butter like different flavors. I mean, there's just like infinite varieties of nut butter here in the US And so I would buy the nut butter and then I would review it on my facebook page and give it school I can't remember what my categories were, you know, like taste texture How interesting it was like generally like, you know some different it was like a pokemon card for peanut butter did that for about a year when I moved and tried a lot of different types of nut butter, but But now I just, you know, get whatever's at the store.~

~I'm a crunchy peanut butter lady I do not like smooth peanut butter too claggy. It has to be crunchy~

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: ~I, same, you know, the crunchier, the, the nuttier the better. I'll just ask one more thing, uh, given you are, given, you're such a, a, a nut, but aficionado.~

Brianna: ~Okay~

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: ~Uh, what's, what's his favorite kind that you lost after?~

Brianna: ~Oh, mean so favorite nut butter ever was actually a homemade nut butter that a friend of mine made for me He's um, he's rather well off and he is the sort of person that has like really fancy Um food processor and can afford to just buy like how many pounds of macadamia nuts and one time he~

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: ~Mm.~

Brianna: ~This macadamia nut butter that he'd also put some white chocolate in and that I just could not Stop eating that and~

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: ~Wow.~

Brianna: ~that was that was my that's like peak nut butter You that's the best, but I'm also, I do like a bit of cashew nut butter with a little bit of honey in it,~

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: ~Mm.~

Brianna: ~but you know, day to day peanut butter, you can't go wrong, but as a treat, macadamia or cashew pistachio butter is pretty nice too, yeah,~

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: ~Yeah. No,~ we'll have to stop right now because otherwise I'll have to, uh, go, go, go around and like raid my pantry. That's got me, uh, s [00:02:00] waiting. Brianna, for those of us who don't know who you are, who are you and what do you do?

Brianna: So I work at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, I'm the Director of Translational Science, which means that My North Star is taking the basic science that's done on the bench at the Buck and figuring out how to make it applicable to people. So, um, when I joined the Buck, I was involved as a, as a, as a subject matter expert, helping companies commercialize, um, discoveries that came from the Buck.

And then in the more recent years, I've actually been more of what my, my boss calls an intrapreneur and helped to, um, co establish the clinical research unit at the Buck. So last two or three years, like mainly thinking a lot about how to. Do the same, answer the same kind of aging biology questions that we do with our mice and our worms and our flies and how we can answer those in people.

And, I'm sure we'll talk a bit about, the different things that I do, but one of my, one of my favorite studies that I hope we have a chance to talk about is a study where I'm studying aging athletes and trying to understand, hopefully, I mean, [00:03:00] you know, I'm, I think we're both probably biased, right?

We think that exercise is good for aging, but nobody has ever studied. Um, the hallmarks of aging in, in people who are really elite, you know, not just like the problem is when you read a paper about exercise, average for the American population is so low that someone can be like a high exerciser. If they do two hours a week, you know, that, that would be, I've seen papers where it's like, yeah, these are active older adults and it's like two hours a week.

But the people that we're recruiting are people who are still running marathons and competing in the senior games and all kinds of, you know, really, it's, it's been super inspiring. So, um, yeah. That's one of the things I'm working on right now that I'm really passionate about. But you know, if, if you had to distill it down, it's like. understanding how we can age more resiliently, um, from a biological lens and doing it in people.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Beautiful. Well, Brianna, welcome again to the Ageless Athlete Podcast. You have had. Such a unique journey, elite rower, [00:04:00] world champion, and now a scientist at the forefront of, metabolic research. before we dive into your work, I would love to start with your roots. I read that your dad rode the Atlantic across the Atlantic twice.

So growing up in a family like that, did you even have a choice, uh, but to become an endurance athlete yourself?

Brianna: I mean, you'd think not that my sister actually isn't really into sport at all. So I guess, you know, it was, there was always, I was very easy for my dad to go and bring along. I think he'd, you know, not that he wanted a son, but I was kind of like the replacement son for him. Um, we would go out as, as early as I can remember.

I remember, I think my first ever Running competition was aged seven and it was a one mile competition and my dad took me out training with him and he made [00:05:00] me do hill repeats up and down. We lived by the beach and there was sort of like a zigzag that would kind of go up and down the cliff to the beach.

And he made me do hill repeats until I was sick. Um, and I have a really vivid memory of like, you know, tra working out and training with my dad at an early age. Um, and, um. But I was very easy for him, you know, I had that drive and that hunger to compete and that sort of Drive to be out there as well as my sister is much more mellow and my mom's also kind of you know She'll they'll do things but they don't have the itch for it like that I have and that my dad has so um, it's been as long as I can remember I was kind of my dad's partner in crime.

We used to surf together I have another memory of being I think it must have been nine or ten and we went down to the Cornish coast so kind of where there's big waves there and it's cold, it's the Atlantic Ocean, and I think it must have been, you know, February, you know, the, the spring break kind of time in the UK.

And my dad takes me out surfing and I'm this tiny little girl. I'm in a short arms and sleeves wetsuit. He's [00:06:00] in a full wetsuit, of course. I'm in a short wetsuit. And, um, just, he just chucked me out into the waves with a board and, you know, he'd be off doing his own thing and he'd be kind of keeping an eye on me, but I'm pretty sure a few times I was under the water churning around a little bit and another thing that happened on that trip was the short wetsuit It gave me like neck rash and it looked like someone had tried to like, you know Hang me or something because I had been so rubbed raw by this wetsuit But you know, I was a very hard kid and I would kind of do anything to go out and like be playing with my dad out in the outdoors from a really young age. lots and lots of, we used to camp overnight in the caves together. There was, we lived near, um, on the coast, but near, um, old, like, limestone quarries. So

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Hmm.

Brianna: a section of the cliffs kind of cut out. And my dad used to take me down and we would watch the lighthouse and watch the stars and listen to the ocean and he would take these little tea light candles and put them all in the caves and it was just, you know, like lots of experiences like that when I was growing up.

So I was very lucky.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Well, [00:07:00] sounds like a A beautiful, adventurous, uh, bringing. Though, just one thing, you're still, you know, I had this full wetsuit. But he gave you, as somebody who is, uh, who is, he's trying to, you know, wean into the outdoors, this, uh, lighter weight shorty.

Brianna: Yeah,

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: normally the advice, for example, yeah, the advice I got when I was trying to take people out surfing again in the Bay Area where the water is cold is

Brianna: hmm.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: comfortize

Brianna: Mm

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: as much as possible.

Make sure they're warm. Make sure they have a nice board. Make sure they have a hot cup of cocoa after, but it sounds like, sounds like your dad kind of threw you into the deep end.

Brianna: Yeah, I think you know when you have a kid who's eight or ten or something They're not gonna be in that wetsuit for very long So I don't think he was keen on, you know, buying or renting me a proper wetsuit that I was actually comfortable. Yeah, [00:08:00] I'd have no idea how I made that work and how I kept coming back for more But you know Here we are.

And I'm remembering it fondly now, even though I must have been pretty cold at the time.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: And perhaps, yeah, perhaps your dad. your dad knew you well and knew maybe what you were capable of,

Brianna: Yeah.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: you know, for the rest of us, again, like you throw a little kid into the, into cold water with like a light wetsuit, you know, most of us would revolt and maybe not want to go back into surfing again.

So what is it about you that perhaps, uh, took on that challenge and

Brianna: Yeah.

I think I've always enjoyed or always been comfortable being uncomfortable. Um, I think it was, always been, always been a challenge to see how far I can kind of push myself. and how much I can kind of, uh, how much I can resist the urge to give up. Um, and it's taken, yeah, it's taken, it's taken me a long time to even be able to kind of entertain.

You know, I don't have to do that really hard thing, you know, [00:09:00] I very much, is there something like, is there a mountain in front of me? I'm going up that mountain. Is there, you know, when I finished rowing, is I, um, moved out to, to the Bay Area and, you know, like the, the joke I like to make is I wanted to do, wanted something a bit more relaxed after my, um, elite rowing career.

And I took up Ironman triathlon and, you know, then it was like, as soon as I started that, it was never like, Oh, I'm just going to do this for fun. It was like, I'm going to try and qualify for the world championships in Kona. And it's, you know, it was kind of one thing after another. And then after that, I, um, I took up trail running and I didn't just, you know, do a 50k.

I did a 250 mile, six day stage race. You know, this is it. Well, I'm training for a hundred mile race. This is, that's the next thing that I'm training for. So maybe I'm not fully out of that phase just yet, but, um, that's kind of, That's, that's how I've always operated. Like what's the biggest, most audacious, most difficult thing.

And so I think in a way, in a micro way, getting through that surfing session in the cold wetsuit, you know, in the cold with short wetsuits, kind of [00:10:00] I got going with that.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: indoctrination by cold water.

Okay, so I also believe you were the youngest person to row across the English channel when you were but, uh, you know, a young, young teen at 12. And then you went on to do these, uh, to do triathlons and like epic, uh, epic runs. What is, uh, what do you think is the most audacious thing that you have set out to do?

Brianna: Um, I feel like, you know, you know, just going into my dad's office at age 11 or 12 and saying I wanted to run the English channel that was like audacious at the time and kind of out of nowhere. Um, I think the thing that was the biggest endeavor was, you know, getting to the level to compete at the, you know, the world level at rowing that was, the single most longest, most [00:11:00] hardest thing that I did. then I think that the race that I did last year, the dragon's back, was the single most like kind of intense, physically hard thing that I did, like much harder, even than like an Ironman triathlon. Cause it just, you know, broke your body down and

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Mm

Brianna: And there was like sleep deprivation after six days of, you know, getting in at 9.

00 PM and getting up again at 5. 00 AM. So that, that was, that was really, really hard. know, you're like, go on and try all the different flavors of hard, you know. I was, it was interesting cause I was doing the, the dragon's back to stage rates, 240 miles over six days. And I was thinking like, yeah, I've never been as wiped out as this before, but it really didn't take away from the fact that it did take me, you know, eight, 10 years of just daily grinding, daily showing up to be like a champion as well.

So, you know, it's different things can be hard in different ways. They can be like intensely hard. can be, or they can be hard just because you have to, up over such a long time. So yeah, hard to pick. I'm, [00:12:00] I'm proud of all of the things I've done and they've given me something different. I mean, in an academic sense, like doing my PhD and doing the rowing at that level at the same time as doing my PhD was probably the hardest thing that I've ever done.

Um, and

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: hmm. Mm hmm. Fair enough. Yeah, I think I, if I, if I look back at my life and, uh, I think about, uh, you know, accomplishments versus, uh, having to slog during, uh, school and university. I think I would, uh, choose the, the sporting, even type two stuff, you know,

Brianna: yeah.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: yeah, yeah, just, just way, uh, way quicker. um, you went from being this, uh, this high level athlete, this world champion athlete to becoming a scientist, um, studying metabolism and aging, right? so fun question. Do you think of [00:13:00] yourself as an athlete who became a scientist

Brianna: Yeah,

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: who happens to be an athlete?

Brianna: was interesting because as you were asking that question, the way you laid it out was, you know, an athlete who became a scientist and like the two things happen very simultaneously and it's really hard. I think, you know, I often say that I'm really lucky to have been at the right place at the right time.

Obviously, it took a lot of work and my interests and whatnot, but, um, you know, the, it was kind of like the perfect storm. I was at medical school. And I was, I was an athlete first, I guess, if anything, I was an athlete first. I was at medical school and so I was always interested in science. Maybe, maybe, maybe if we're gonna, if you're gonna force me to pick, I think, I guess, I'd just say, I'd say I was an, I'd always been an athlete. You know, I was always, I was always interested and, you know, able academically and interested in a lot of things, always sort of leaned towards sciences, but I wasn't the kind of kid. Who [00:14:00] exclusively had like science toys and was like building science experiments. I loved like the section, you know, we had like a, you know, Like a bird I had like a carcass.

I used to love like kind of pulling it apart the bits I used to love like collecting insects in the garden and I would like tag Snails with nail varnish and then release them and try and find them You know, like I did I did I did a lot of sort of Science adjacent things,

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Hmm.

Brianna: read and I love languages, you know, I wasn't just a scientist Um as a you know a teen And then as I was sort of coming out of high school and into into college, I knew that I wanted to work understanding the human body you know, figure out things to help people with their lives, you know, I think that in England you choose to go to medical school directly out of high school, so really early, and it just seemed like something which married my interest in, in the human body and how it worked with [00:15:00] my, you know, enjoyment of kind of communicating with people and making, and making a difference.

know, so that's how I ended up at medical school. And then I was training at, you know, a high level to, to, um, compete on the junior and E23 national rowing team at that time and, um, participated in some of the research experiments that I ended up joining the research team, after having been a participant in the experiment.

So it was all, it was all kind of right place, right time, right research question. You know, I was, I saw the flyer and signed up to be in a study, in a study. So that was just, you know, muck in a way. Yeah.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: I can sense that. You were drawn to the outdoor world, maybe sometimes by lack of choice. And then, and then you were also deeply curious. and you chose to continue, uh, let's say, uh, investing in your curiosity and to the point that you are here today. [00:16:00] But was there a turning point in the journey where you made that shift from wanting to also understand the body at a deeper level, right?

Because obviously there is this connection between what you thrived on as an athlete and the science, and then wanting to focus on the work you do today.

Brianna: That's an interesting journey because I feel like my early research career was very much informed by what I was doing at the time, which was elite performance. So a lot of the experiments I was involved with during my PhD were looking at getting that extra, you know, 2 percent out of elite athletes and, and using, extreme exercise as a model for stressed metabolism.

And, you know, that was then relevant to disease, but kind of my focus was on metabolism as a model for other types of, you know, metabolic stress. Um, and [00:17:00] then, yeah, I think it was kind of a shift in my own interest of after, you know, I finished competing at like that really high level, but it kind of became apparent that, um, Using exercise and metabolic stress that you see during exercise was the super powerful model for various diseases and also aging.

Um, lots of things that are accelerated by, or processes that are accelerated, accelerated acutely with exercise are, um, also accelerated in aging. So inflammation, oxidative stress, that kind of thing. But on the flip side, exercise itself is very powerfully protective, um, for healthy aging as well. And it just became, it was something that had been, um, I'd been sort of very focused on performance.

One of the things that started getting me more broadly interested was I started doing work with, um, the department of defense, um, on resilience in the military. And again, you know, that, that's sort of that, Sweet spot between physical and cognitive performance being really important, but also you know, they [00:18:00] are experiencing accelerated aging because of all the stresses of those jobs, the extreme environments that they put themselves in.

And it's sort of, you start to see aging everywhere. And you start to see all of the cross, you know, like the, the, the links and the connections between metabolic stress, whether it's from exercise or from being altitude and aging. it just sort of being something that I kind of came back to.

And that's, that's sort of how I ended. It was a, it was a slow change rather than being one moment, perhaps.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Also, okay, so now you're studying, let's say, metabolic strategies to slow aging. And 

you witnessed, you conducted all these studies, and you saw all this research. What excited you about the work that you're doing on its [00:19:00] promise towards helping us prolong our, maybe both our lifespan and the quality of our aging years,

Brianna: Yeah. So in, in the, in the aging field, we call that idea that you just articulated health span. So really just focusing on how long can we be, how long can we be healthy? How long can we have fewer chronic diseases of aging? And we can kind of also think about off the, uh, curve. So rather than kind of having 20 years where you kind of get more sick and more sick and your function declines and declines and declines, and then you die staying really high functioning and then having kind of a cliff where, you know, you just, we all, we would all, I'm sure. rather just be in our beds one night and just, you know, quietly pass away having, you know, hugged our grandkids and like completed a crossword puzzle and been for a hike the day before. Like, I think that nobody pictures the last few years of their life the [00:20:00] way that like, what is the reality for so many people now, which is, you know, poor physical or cognitive health.

So, um, you know, that's, it's just such a big. mission. It's so important. Um, it's relevant to everyone. It's, um, you know, um, understanding, understanding how we can democratize that as well. Like I'm kind of, I'm really, passionate about not, not, you know, Coming up with a pill that's like the Tesla model that only like the super wealthy can afford.

You know, we have a lot of the tools to do to age better in our arsenal now. And so understanding how, you know, and for me, obviously, has been one of those really powerful things. And we know it's one of the most powerful ways we can live healthier. And so, you know, trying to understand that better to make it more compelling for people to find ways to reach people where they're at, um, you know, to me, it's probably One of the single most important problems [00:21:00] that society is facing now is just increasing lifespan.

Yes, burden on the health care system, burdens on various like social systems, but also just opportunities that we could kind of reimagine what it is to grow old. You know, up until. You know, a generation or two ago, if our life expectancy was in our 70s, you'd retire in your like early 10 years and it was fine to, you know, putter around the house and garden.

But now if we retire age 60, we could have 20 or maybe even 30 years of life. And if that could be high quality life, think of all the things that, you know. We could do. And I loved, um, listening back to the episode that you did with my friend and colleague, Dr. Jamie Justice, who was talking about her mom going and buying the van and traveling around and like, what if more people could live like that? And so finding ways to enable that, um, make it as accessible as possible. It's just so exciting. And even on the days, and recently, you know, we've had a lot of turbulence in like biomedical research. Um, and also [00:22:00] just, you know, there's, it's. And I heard, uh, Dr. Eric Bergen, our CEO, was interviewed by the news, uh, news recently, and, um, just making a comment that, you know, scientists wouldn't do science if they wanted to make money, and the way that we do it, um, kind of in a research setting, in a, in a not for profit setting, you know, scientists wouldn't do it, it doesn't, it's not like we're doing it for money, um, we're doing it because we really care about the mission and we're really curious, like said, And so the opportunity to that, that, um, ability to just explore things that I'm curious about, feel like you're making a difference, feel like you're working on an important problem.

Those are things that, you know, just keep me going through all the kind of difficult times and the busy times. And I, I've never, never had a day where I'm like, gosh, I wish I was doing another job. Even, even though when it's really hard, I wish that I had a better work life balance perhaps, or I had a bit more time, or, you know, it was a bit less demanding, but I know not, I mean, I've always been happy to be where I am, and like working with the people that I am, and all of those things.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: [00:23:00] Brianna, if I can ask you a personal question and, um, I apologize in advance, but normally you would be a little young to be in this podcast. I am in my forties now, and I think I only started thinking about my mortality or maybe my decline, uh, after I crossed 35.

Why this focus or what is it about this mission that inspires you to, let's say, commit your work at, at your age?

Brianna: I mean, that's a, that's a great question. And I think that more people should be thinking about the aging process sooner because all of the choice, and this, this comes from like my years as a lightweight rower where, you know, every little marginal gain mattered, like every choice to have or not have like that one cookie that someone had like left out on the side or every choice to [00:24:00] have or not have that extra, like 30 minutes of sleep versus staying out with friends.

Like I used to, yeah. I kind of rationalize it to myself that you can't be perfect all of the time, but if you can make like an eight, eight to nine out of ten of the correct choices, then all of those are going to kind of accrue and, and, you know, build up interest for the long term. And I think about aging like that, like, if we were If we were thinking about aging and how well we wanted to be in our 70s when we were in our 20s, we'd likely make some really different decisions.

So I think that finding ways to bring aging into the conversation, empowering people that choices that they make, you know, that they don't have to make all of the right choices. You know, I think it's kind of frightening for people when they think, you know, Oh, it's the only way to age. You know, if that's it, then like, why should we even bother that I think that it's the one decision that's in front of you right now.

And can you make that decision? The, the right one. And if you are, you know, [00:25:00] if you're deciding to have the cookie, then there's a reason for that, because it's like, because it's not like you have to be perfect all of the time. So I think, yeah. It's important to be thinking about aging earlier because the earlier you think about it, the better position you're going to be when you, when you start to age. Um, also just, you know, there's just more and more older adults in society now, you know, we're, we're doing better at keeping people alive for longer. And I think that aging is, is a, has been sort of sadly a bit of a taboo topic, like the, every industry. I don't know whether idolizes is the right word.

Lionize, lionize is the right word? Like, you know, kind of, youth is like this prized thing. Everyone wants to look younger. don't talk about, um, we don't, in the Western culture, less so than perhaps, you know, my impression of like Asian cultures is there's more respect for elders. I feel like we're not, we're not really in a place where we Always value and respect a aging.

And I think that that's just something that has to change generally. And now that we have, you know, so many more years of [00:26:00] quality life, thinking about ways to um, like intergenerational and like how we interact and, and, you know, working with, with people at different ages. So, I mean, aging is not just for people who are at that age, you are aging.

And it's important to understand aging. From as early as, you know, when you're a child, you know, it's so interesting to study how things change across the lifespan. And for women as well, you know, this is something that is like personal to me. You reach your like, You know, I'm, I'm 33, nearly 34, and in a year, I'll be like, a geriatric in terms of like, having children, right?

And so, one of the areas that we have at the Buck is the, um, Center for Female Reproductive Longevity and Equality, which is studying aging ovaries. And they call them the canary in the coal mine. It's the thing that becomes geriatric way before everything else in the body. Um, know, so for me, important to think about eating in your thirties because this, this kind of thing is happening.

And as an athlete, you, I feel different in my body exercising now than I [00:27:00] did in my twenties. And there's things that I could have kind of put my body through now, now that I couldn't now, but then equally things that I can do now that I couldn't do in my twenties. So it's Cedar. celebrating those differences, understanding those differences, not shutting out or, you know, diminishing. The upsides of aging because I think there are upsides it just shouldn't aging shouldn't just be for people who are starting to really experience it because we're all experiencing it all The time and we can all make positive choices today that set us up for aging better, and that's empowering

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Well, I love that. And, you know, it's funny. I look at the listener stats for. This podcast. And most people seem to be over the age of 35. And I sometimes feel that we should have, well, when I tell younger people about the podcast, they sometimes roll their eyes. [00:28:00] And I really think that more people should listen to what you just talked about, which is a healthy aging podcast.

begins when one is still young. So one can be prepared just the same way we, you know, we prepare, let's say our finances and our life and our careers to be able to have those things, have that like that retirement nest egg. We should also invest in like a healthful aging. And the earlier we think about it, the better.

Brianna: and just you know It's interesting, I feel like when, you're younger, almost it feels like possibilities are infinite, and as you age you start to either refocus on things that are more important to you, but you kind of, you almost, you know, it doesn't have to be this way, you almost take things off your own plate.

You're like, well, you I'm 35 now and I do this to myself. I'm like, well, I'm 35 I'm never going to be as good at anything else in sport as I was at rowing and like, okay I'm, okay with that, you know Um, but it doesn't have to be like [00:29:00] that and um some of the athletes that we're working with in our um aging athlete study You know, they're still like they're still breaking age group records and, you know, like they do still do, people still do like wonderful things.

I mean, perhaps, um, there's this paradigm where, you know, when you're young, you can focus on performance to the exclusion of everything else. The possibilities kind of feel endless as you get older. I mean, to me as well, I just, it just feels like I I'm less prepared to make the sacrifices that I know it takes to really perform because I want to build like an enjoyable and sustainable and like fulfilling, um, whole life. And that means like not sacrificing as many things as perhaps I did when all I cared about was performance. So it's, you know, I don't know, especially in the last couple of years, I've noticed a change in myself where it's like, you know, I just don't want to be training for three hours anymore. Like I want to go out in the morning, have a nice run.

Then I want to go be really committed at work and then I want to come home and have a good time with the dog and like go, you know, see some friends and [00:30:00] like hang out with my husband and read a book and you know, I don't know, like the things that I want have sort of changed a little bit. Um, and it took a while to get there, but um, yeah, you know, it could come back.

I'm prepared for the future. Maybe the fire will come back and I just train like a bad person again, but we'll see.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Well, from whatever I, I can, I can, I can sense you are not slacking, uh, when it comes to the performance department. So, hey, so talking about your work, um, you, are leading some groundbreaking research at, uh, AdBuck. And I heard about this MOVE study and I believe it stands for Molecular Optimization via Exercise.

Brianna: Perfect. Yes.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Can you break that down for us? What are you trying to uncover? [00:31:00] Hmm.

Brianna: Um, if you have a higher VO2 max, you tend to live longer. You tend to have fewer health conditions. of studies have been done by people in exercise physiology field, looking at like muscle function, for example, and, and, um, exercise training and aging. But, um, at the Buck, Our bread and butter is looking at what we call the hallmarks of aging. So those include things like inflammation, oxidative stress, DNA damage, um, cellular senescence. That's when cells turn into like zombie cells, um, cell communication. And we, we have these, um, the hallmarks of aging are things which change in every system of the body with age. So, The old approach to health and disease is to look at organ systems in in silos. So we would look at like brain, health, and we would be looking at, know, plaques and tangles with Alzheimer's disease, for example, like neuron function, but the hallmarks of aging. Kind of the stilts down the changes in into the most kind of pure form things that are very, [00:32:00] very conserved and maybe the brain, maybe the heart, maybe the skin, maybe the muscle and things that we can look for to kind of measure aging in all systems of the body. And so. That approach had never been applied to aging athletes. So we kind of, we know that there are better outcomes, but we didn't know whether that's because of a change in these fundamental conserved hallmarks of aging. And so what we're doing with the MOOC study is really asking the question, is exercise anti aging, um, on the most sort of fundamental hallmarks of aging level. as I mentioned before, it's, surprisingly hard to recruit a really good elite athlete cohort, older adult athlete cohort, and when we started designing the study, we had a lot of conversations around whether, you know, how important was it that people had were actually lifelong exercises? What if there's some people, you know, they start, you know, Sport in their forties perhaps, and now they're in their sixties.

Do we actually want people who have been their whole lives or [00:33:00] competing their whole lives? And like, what does that look like for women? Because, you know, 65 is around the time that Title IX came in. Not, not all women had access to sport at that point. So we spent some time thinking about like, what do we want this cohort to look like? In the end, we have required that people be pretty consistently active across their lifespan, but also still are training in a structured way. Now, that's the best way to describe it, because it's really hard to say you have to be doing more than like this many hours a week, or, you know, whatever, but it's like, you can tell when you talk to an athlete.

They like, okay, Tuesday is track day, Thursday is tempo day, Saturday is long run day. And like, they have, they have ideas about how their training is intentional. It has some structure and some progression that often, you know, sometimes people have competed their whole lives and then they, you know, they're not competing anymore, but they're still training in like a structured way and running with people faster than them or cycling with people faster than them.

And so competition isn't a prerequisite to be in the study, but again, it's something we need to look. For, to see, you know, really define this, um, very, [00:34:00] very high caliber cohort. we are recruiting, uh, 40 people who are athletes and 40 people who are, you know, I, I, I kind of joke like allergic to exercise, so they're healthy.

But you know, they maybe, like my mom would be a great example of this. Um, my mom she'll like, you know, tootle on her bike down at the beach with my dad, they'll kind of like go for walks. She's, she looks in great shape. She's pretty healthy, but she doesn't. train. She's never been an athlete. Um, so that's the kind of person we're looking for on as our controls, like, you know, people who are in quite good condition, but they just don't and have never really like trained that we had.

We had one woman come in the study and she's like, yeah, I did run a marathon once I trained for eight weeks and then I ran the marathon and I've never run again. And I was like, okay, well, like good for you doing that. Like, that like boggles my mind because whenever I train, you know, the idea of doing a five hour marathon or eight weeks of training is kind of, you know, that's some guts to me.

Uh, but you know, that was kind of an example of someone who kind of exercise one time, wasn't for them. And then, you know, [00:35:00] they've not done it any, any since. So, um, The study has these two cohorts, our athlete cohort, very, very unique, very, um, very, very well trained, long history of training. And then our sedentary or non exercise cohort who are healthy. Um, and the idea there is like, you know, we study aging now and this, this, you know, I hope this will blow your mind a little bit, but like when we study aging. study it in people who are like normal American level of active, which is definitely lower than should be, right? So our current ideas around healthy aging are actually in, it'd be like studying lung health in smokers, you know It's just like well, we've got this confound, big confounding factor that most people are sedentary And this is a recent thing, you know, the, you probably heard that sitting is the new smoking, like, um, adage, you know, it's sort of thrown around soundbite, like, and how risky being sedentary is.

It's not always been this way. In the last, like, 50 to 60 years, we've got increasingly sedentary, um, because of the types of [00:36:00] work that we do and things like that. And so, you know, of these scientists and all these people were studying aging. But we're studying it in these people who have this big compounding factor. So, uh, along with my collaborator, Dr. Simon Melov, who's like the muscle, muscle guru at the Buck. yeah, he really thinks that this athlete cohort, this very, very active cohort, they're probably representing like gold standard aging. Because this is more like the level of activity that would have been typical that we should be doing.

And he thinks that our healthy cohort, So, um, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, even though it might be considered gold standard for regular aging research is actually not the gold standard. And so here's kind of, you know, disruptive idea is that if we're trying to find a drug to, you know, treat aging, or, you know, if we, if we have this idea that we can reverse aging, well, it has to at least be as good as exercise, because, you know, if you've got, if you've got your athletes up here, and then healthy people are kind of down here, down here in terms of function. If we can use a drug and bring people up to here, it's still not better than exercise. [00:37:00] you know, a real anti aging drug would be something that could take someone who has already good aging and then make it better. so that's his kind of disruptive idea. So, you know, the, the ultimate aim is to, is to understand if exercise is anti aging, which pathways are most affected.

I mean, I guess I should say as well that I have to be upfront at the start, like potentially exercise might not be anti aging on a molecular level. That would be like, not my worst nightmare, but you know, it'd be helpful to know. And that's, we had some people on the audience of talks I've given say, you know, well, these people do pretty extreme exercise.

Don't you think this might be? Too much, and too much exercise is bad for you, and you know, like all the inflammation, and joint damage, you know, damage to the body, like, is you, are you prepared for, to find that your athlete cohort actually has like, bad hallmarks of aging, and I'm like, yeah, you know, that would be a finding, I'm kind of ready to, ready to see that, it would be, um, it's perfectly possible.

That's the thing about science. You kind of have to have things that you expect to see happen, but not get too [00:38:00] attached to any outcome. And, you know, so what I selfishly, what I hope to find is that exercise is anti aging, but, you know, also have to be prepared for the possibility that too much exercise might be bad for you, um, in terms of aging biology.

I don't know whether it would change what I do because I still believe ultimately in all of that, like functional, um, data that we've seen, if we can understand. the effects of exercise on all of these different triggers of aging, which ones are most important, then we might understand how to better, manipulate that.

Let's just say, um, in the future for other, other people and potentially using therapeutics, things like that. So that's, um, that's kind of the big vision with this project.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Excellent. Well, thank you for walking down, walking us down to the the goals of the project and the hypotheses going into it that you're trying to either prove or disprove. taking this a little bit further, a couple of questions to ask you. One [00:39:00] is you talked about the, the sample groups that you're working with.

I think you said 40 people who are top athletes,

Brianna: 40, 40

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: non athletes. So of those 40 athletes, are these necessarily let's say lifelong athletes or people who, really only got bit by the bug, let's say in their 30s or later, do they also have a chance to qualify to be in this group? And give, give a sense of who those people are

Brianna: yep.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: and if, yeah,

Brianna: I would say, is a probably about a 50 50 split between people who everyone has always been like relatively active. Often people might have had like a down decade. Like a lot of people like, yeah, in my forties, I had kids. I didn't do very much that that's, you know, maybe like three out of 10 people have that kind of, you know, active little bit of less active, very active.

Now everyone has been since, you know, school and college, active, either, you know, just kind of getting around a lot on a bike and going [00:40:00] to the gym and jogging that kind of thing that all all kind of within the last 10 years have been like pretty serious competitors, but there isn't anyone in the group who. didn't really do anything until their forties. You can see there are, there are a lot more, there are more people in my group who got more serious as they got older, have all been, um, very active people most of their lives. And then maybe, you know, Three or four out of the 10 have been people that have, it is more commonly with the men than with the women who have in track in college and have just been competing their whole lives.

So it's definitely more common with men than women, but there are several, both men and women who are active, active, active, and then more competing sort of in their lives. since their 40s or 50s. I think we have, we, our upper age limit is 80 and yesterday I was, um, VO2 max testing someone who was 76 and, you know, it's so inspiring.

These people are really, really wonderful.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: [00:41:00] okay. So you, you hinted at this already towards my next question, which is, what are the types of, let's say sports or athletic activities that, uh, that, that these people are doing

Brianna: Yes,

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: and then how are you, what parameters are you testing? So I think you mentioned VO2max already and yeah.

Brianna: it's a great question. And I would love if I had all of the resources in the world, I would be Um doing like an endurance cohort and then maybe you know, like a team sport cohort Or and then maybe a weightlifting cohort and then maybe you know, like I would want to be I think I should say up front that there's still some holes and we're not, this isn't, uh, sadly, I can't be addressing like all types of athletes because I think, you know, especially outdoor athletes like climbers or hikers or, you know, that kind of, um, lower, sort of, uh, lower, like batter on the body, but more kind of sustained.

I think that that would be like a really [00:42:00] powerful, intervention for aging. So yeah, the, the caveat is that I haven't been able to test all of the different types of athletes that I'd wanted to test. and I would love to get funding and do more different types of athlete cohorts. So, um, with all of that in mind, uh, this first cohort is.

Um, kind of your classic endurance athlete, predominantly runners and cyclists, uh, mainly because it's very easy to find them, very easy, you know, still lots of like, kind of compet competitions, so you can kind of gauge their training, they can give you times, and you can pop them into like an age grading and get a good idea of people's performance level.

It's just saying, and as, as an active runner myself, I actually found, I find a lot of these people by going to running events and chatting to people and like giving them my business card. And I'll typically bring of 15 or 20 names back from, you know, actually the very, very first study participant who I recruited, I was training for my ultramarathon.

So I think I was, Um, those of you who know the Bay Area, I was going up and down Mount Tam, which is just north of San [00:43:00] Francisco. And I think I'd done three Tam summits, so I was doing a lot of climbing and training for this race. And I get up to the top of my third Tam summit, and I'm kind of disheveled in my vest, you know, like, energy drink everywhere.

I'm like, you know, I'm a bit of a sight, let's just say. And these, um, at the top of Mount Tam, there's a fountain and a bathroom, and so I'm sort of hanging out there refilling everything. And these two women roll in on their bikes, and I look at them, I'm like, They're older women and they're at the top of Mount Ham on bikes, you know, and they look, they look like they're pretty serious, you know, cyclists. and I had to figure out a way to not be offensive and go over and be like, Hey, you over 65. And, you know, introduce myself to them. Um, and we had a nice conversation in the end. One of them was our very first study participant. Um, she came along and she was in the study. So, um, yeah, yeah. It's been easier for me to find endurance athletes through my own connections.

Um, It's, um, easier to test them, you know, like on the, on the VO2 max testing. So it's sort of, that's why we started there. Um, I would love to do other types of athletes. So once [00:44:00] people are enrolled in the study, we do, we really look at aging very holistically. So we're not just testing physical function, although we do.

So in terms of physical function, we do VO2 max testing. So we put people on a bicycle. We decided on the bicycle because I don't really like the idea of people like disappearing off the back of my treadmill when they max out at the end of the test, so the bike, you're sitting down. So when you're done, you just, you know, when it's, it's, it just feels safer.

So, um, I, we enjoy testing on the bike. Um, with a VO2 max test, not only can we measure VO2 max, which is kind of like the engine in your car. you know, some people have a great engine in a, in a very like average chassis and they'll be like overall less fast. And sometimes you have people with like a great chassis and an awful engine and, you know, like those things kind of balance out.

So the VO2 max tells us how much oxygen your body needs. can burn. During exercise. And from that test we can also look at people's um, aerobic and anaerobic thresholds where they cross over into burning more carbs. And we can look at the maximum amount of fat that they [00:45:00] burn, and how hard they're working when they burn that amount of fat.

So we can tell a lot about someone's performance from that test. So we do that. Uh, we look at leg strength. So we take them down to the gym and we put them on the leg press machine, um, and look at strength. Uh, we do a grip strength test. So you're squeezing on a dynamometer. Grip strength is a really great predictor of health span and lifespan as well.

So we include that. Um, we look at walking speed, we do some balance tests. So it's really kind of, um, of like we call it like a, almost a geriatric assessment. So all those physical things, uh, we look at body composition, muscle mass, um, fat mass. We use a special technique called D3 creatine, which is, like, like creatine, like you'd take as a supplement, but it's got a special label on it.

And you take this special labeled creatine. We collect a urine sample and it tells us because creatine gets incorporated into our muscles, the amount that is passed in the urine can tell us about muscle mass very accurately. Um, so we look at muscle mass, body composition, physical performance. We look at cognitive performance.

So we [00:46:00] do some brain tests. The kind of thing that people would be having done if they, if they went again for a doctor's assessment, looking at memory, verbal fluency, attention, things like that as well. and then also we ask people questions about their quality of life, uh, mood, sleep quality, stress, um, and then socioeconomic, um, status as well.

So we really, um, In terms of the stuff that's not the molecular sampling piece, that's very thorough and we spend a lot of time measuring things about people. And then in terms of the hard science, the sample analysis, we collect mainly blood and then also a small muscle sample as well. So from the blood, we can look at immune function and then also things that are circulating in the blood that might tell us about people's metabolism and resilience.

And then from the muscle. Um, we do all kinds of really cool things. what's, this is what's kind of magic about doing this experiment at the Buck, um, because we have world class laboratory steps away [00:47:00] from our clinical unit, the muscle sample can be collected and then within an hour it's in someone's lab, um, Simon Meloff cultures can, can grow cells from an individual donor. So, you know, there's a piece of my leg. that's in a cell culture dish and it's sort of just growing more cells. He can, he can grow the cells like that and then use those cells for future experiments. So one thing that we do is, um, there's a little, um, a little, a little, dish with a little, uh, structure, like kind of a scaffolding across it.

You can place the muscles on that scaffolding and it will grow into basically a little mini muscle on a dish. And then you can pop electricity on it and your little mini muscle in a dish is going to contract. so it's like, it's like Brianna's muscle in a dish exercising. So not only can you look at like, what is Brianna's muscle releasing into the dish, you could treat it with drugs or you could train it, like, you know, exercise it every day and see how my muscle, uh, you know, behaves in the dish compared with someone who's sedentary or so, you know, young versus old, sedentary versus active, [00:48:00] um, having this like very.

very relevant model that's like from that individual with those, you know, that lifelong, we call it, you know, like it's kind of a pun, but like muscle memory, like what has happened in the cells of that individual over their lifespan. And can we reflect that in what's happening in the dish? So we look at, you know, those things with the muscle, we can do histology for that kind of chopping the muscle into bits and looking at it under the microscope to look at the structure, um, looking at the genes that are expressed, um, all kinds of things.

It's really, you know, amount of data that you can get like really boggles the mind. and so given that we can look so widely all of the different properties of, of the genes and the proteins and the structure and, and the function of the muscle as well, it's a really powerful model to really interrogate. aging in muscle in these athletes, um, and compared with cemetery people. I'm, I'm excited. Hopefully you can tell.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: one question I have, which, if it doesn't seem obvious, this study that you're doing, [00:49:00] the, let's say, observing, about, or how these people run through, let's say, certain types of fitness tests, you know, the results, you know, right from, uh, group strength, and then you go down something which is a bit more scientific, which is the VO2 max thing.

And then, then. that much more scientific, which is looking at, you know, their biology, right? Sorry, this is my layman's way of like, uh, just distilling the pyramid. So you look at those things, but I'm guessing this is done over time to be able to assess changes in that person's, person's, uh, data to see how they, how those, those numbers, those metrics are moving as that person is aging.

Is that correct? Is that what we're doing?

Brianna: that would be what I would love to do. Um, that is what

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Okay.

Brianna: seeking funding for right now. It would be wonderful to turn this cohort into what we call a longitudinal cohort. So bring them back. This year, and then in two years time, and then another two years after [00:50:00] that, and look, as you just described, at aging trajectories in those individuals, that would be, that would be wonderful. what we are doing currently is what's called an observational So it's like, let's take a snapshot now of these people and compare the differences at this point. So we're, we're relying on the fact that we have taken this good, History of their exercise to know that their exposures have been different enough across their lifespan to give us sort of divergent so that that's this is a single snapshot observational study, it'd be like, again, if we use the smoking analogy of recruiting.

A bunch of people who had smoked, you know, a pack a day for the last 20 years, and then just picking off the street, a bunch of people who had never smoked and like looking, you know, what changes can we see between these two groups? So that's the approach that we're taking now. And as you just described, then the, the, the, what we would be doing, hopefully, would be to be bringing them back and then look at health outcomes and trajectories for years to come.

So, I would love to be able to do that. Um, this is a great cohort it's the more, it would be [00:51:00] much more powerful to be able to follow them longitudinally, but, um, it's hard to, you know, it's hard to secure funding. Like, research cycles, a typical research grant is five years and by the time that you've, you know, You know, had a year to sort of set up the project and get it going.

Then it's hard to really do kind of longitudinal stuff. So you need like very good, institutional and financial stability to run longitudinal studies. And, you know, I hope that we can build that. And, you know, we have written into our, when people sign up to be in the study, they say that they agree that we can recontact them.

So that is the possibility that we could do that. And I hope that we can.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Fair enough. I can only imagine how challenging it is to run a study like this right from recruiting the right cohort and then to be able to study long term. Hopefully you will accomplish that as well because I feel people will be quite interested in learning on how exercise may, continuing to [00:52:00] exercise may or may not improve their baseline parameters.

One thing that I was thinking of, again, it could be like a silly point, but, and I think you talked about this earlier, which is like this hypothesis that we have, which is, Hey, people who exercise, exercise should be healthier. Like it seems like a bit of a foregone conclusion,

Brianna: Yeah.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: just based on what we know about, again, anecdotally from the world around us, I think you're trying to do something greater than just that, than proving that.

Yeah. Sorry. Could you, would you mind just going over this one more point? Like what, what is so special that you're trying to unearth?

Brianna: yes. So, I mean, there's a, there's a few elements to [00:53:00] it. firstly. As you said, we know that, big outcomes tend to be better with people who exercise. We don't know why that is. So, the, the first thing that I expect to find might, for example, be that athletes have a, a very good resistance to inflammation.

Pick, pick one key word. process of aging, we're maybe expecting to identify that athletes have built up a specific, uh, strength and resilience in that one or two, like, what are the most important contributors, to this, um, aging resilience that athletes have, you know, firstly, identifying why that is, because then that allows us to, you know, unpick and kind of go back, you know, 20 years earlier and say, well, okay, what we need is to be, you know, Training you specifically or providing a stimulus that helps you.

Let's say for argument's sake our athlete group is very resistant to or very Robust has a very robust and [00:54:00] healthy Inflammatory and inflammation and then resolving inflammation response and post exercise. Let's just say We can then try and study which elements of exercise really build up that response and people could be kind of doubling down into strategies that really promote that early on.

So it would take some of the guesswork out of, um, you know, why is exercise good for aging from a therapeutics perspective. there's a lot of conditions and I mean, as insidious and maybe it's innocuous seeming as like bed rest. and I was talking to my physician colleague about this the other day, and this is relevant.

It's relevant for young people, but it becomes more and more relevant as you age. like limb immobilization, you have a cut, so you break your arm, you're in your 30s, and you break your arm, you're 40s, and you break your arm. If you can't move around, you decline pretty quickly, and as you get older, you decline even more quickly.

And as you get older, it's also harder and harder to get that back. And so if we can understand some of the properties that makes exercise anti aging, then we know what areas of biology to zoom [00:55:00] in on that could be treatments or helpful for those, um, Kind of conditions that are almost like unavoidable just as a course of like of living um, so, you know, there is there is therapeutic applications We're understanding this biology better as well. Um, and that you know for me a outcome would be identifying the key pathways, seeing if we can find ways to train or boost those pathways either earlier in life or restore them later in life. And then potentially also if these pathways are also implicated in, um, conditions or just, you know, conditions or life situations like bed rest or conditions like sarcopenia, which is like premature muscle wasting, which happens again as we age.

Like if we can understand how. these things that are boosted by exercise, how they work, then that gives us a potential angle into sort of treating those diseases as well.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: thanks for humoring me. Uh, this is [00:56:00] a really juicy stuff here. If I understood correctly, you are,

you doing this to be able to also identify some things that are so relevant to all of us around certain types of exercises, perhaps certain things we can, we can do to combat some of this decline that may happen inevitably as, Disease, accidents may disrupt, our aging process. I'm not sure where we are with this study today, but are there any immediate takeaways for us, Brianna, on some things we can maybe double down on, some things we should

Brianna: You'll have to have me back on in maybe like a year's time. So at the moment we started recruiting in November. So we've recruited about 20 people. So about a quarter of the way through. A lot of them have been athletes so far. So a lot of the, I [00:57:00] guess, you know, Reflections I have on the study so far are really just from doing the exercise history interviews with the people and, you know, learning about their, um, how, how sports has been a part and athletics has been like a part of their life and, and how they feel now. Um, so. I guess, uh, what I would share with you all and the listeners, and again, I'm sure I don't have to convince anyone of this, is that it seems that exercise and, and the purpose that people find through sport, um, and their sense of belonging and, Um, the motivation and all of those things is just really, really powerful. that people, people pick goals that are like stretches that, you know, that they pick, they pick goals that are, that shift and change as they age, that are still appropriately challenging, that get them excited. They seem like very, like the exercise is very fulfilling for them. Um, and that that's all something that we can all aspire towards.

It's been very, very motivating and inspiring to see how [00:58:00] people continue to push themselves and get purpose and satisfaction from sports. So I'd want people listening to this to take away that, um, it can, exercise is so important. Not just for our physical health, but also for our sense of self purpose, connection, all of those things, and just to encourage people that, you know, wherever they're at with it, I've heard exercise described as, uh, as a practice or a habit or something that we should be doing, like brushing our teeth.

It's just something that is so good for us. Um, again, sure. I don't need to convince all of your listeners of that, but to reaffirm that there are, yeah. There are of people living really well doing these things. Um, I hope that we'll have, you know, and then again, fitness, lots of people, 80 year olds are as fit as the top, the top 90 percent of like 30 and 40 year olds. You know, I put them on my machine and [00:59:00] we have like a chart with the percentiles. And I have yet to test someone who has not been like the chart for two decades younger. And that's also really, really inspiring. You know, again, not surprising, they are trained.

Um, but it's, it's reversing their aging in terms of the VO2 max by as much as 20 years. And that's really powerful. one thing I'd say is, um, in the lead up to setting up this study, um, There was some really interesting research, um, by two scientists called Lazarus and Harridge, who are based over in the UK and they had done some plots where they had plotted VO2 max across the lifespan. And in the very, in the very highest brackets of VO2 max, there's generally not that many older people. And then in the very lowest brackets of VO2 max, there's generally not very many younger people, but really in the middle. In those middle ranges of VO two max training matters more than age. And it's interesting because a lot of, you know, VO two max for an individual, it's [01:00:00] been always been kind of said over and over again, oh, you know, your VO two max declines with age and it does on average.

And if you even, you track yourself as an individual. But, but just because you're in your fifties, you could still have a higher VO2 max than a lot of 30 year olds if you're trained. So training, training and being active, it's something that we can all do right here, right now, and keep doing. And it is making a difference to our aging. Um, you know, we see that in this cohort as well. So, um, what else to say? We haven't done very many of our sedentary people yet, so I can't really compare, but I would say that, um, It's been very interesting to see the visual quality of the muscle samples that we get from our athletes. Muscle biopsy samples are kind of the size of a pea.

It's a couple of hundred milligrams, like, kind of small. Um, but when it comes from an athlete compared with some of our sedentary, People, you can just even see in the muscle tissue, it looks a bit like, you know, like a nice sashimi compared with it, like holds [01:01:00] its shape, it's red, it's got, you can tell that it's got good, like, you can tell it's good quality tissue as well as from someone who doesn't exercise, when it comes out, it kind of goes, like, it's sort of like kind of goopy, you can tell that the muscle isn't like as good quality, so you can even just Having not run any analysis, we can see that the tissue is not as good quality.

It's more kind of fatty, less structure, kind of like, um, less dense. So we can, we can see a lot of things that are different in our cohorts, even just now before we've done any analysis, um, all things, which I think kind of continue to hammer home the point that, um, exercises, exercise is important. And, you know, what we hope to answer when we do that molecular analysis is how, and so then how can we, you know, Boost it, as I said earlier.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Wonderful. Well, it sounds like early, early results seem to indicate that exercise indeed is beneficial [01:02:00] and we'll have to keep in touch and we'll have to have you back here maybe when the study is more mature, moving on. I understand Brianna that you have spent a lot of your career also in understanding how we fuel endurance and performance and longevity.

Brianna: Yes.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: this upfront question, which is, do you ever look at, um, traditional sports nutrition and think, wow, um, we have been doing it, uh, all wrong?

Brianna: Ah, gosh. is such a thorny question because everyone eats and so everyone has an opinion and especially in sports, has different gut tolerances and everyone, you know, I, I guess I'll pre preface everything that I say right now by saying that, everyone should be trying out, trying out things in [01:03:00] training first, never listen to someone on a podcast and then do it for the first day on your half marathon, please. You know, you'd surprise, surprise, lots of people do that kind of thing, you know, try things out in training, sports, nutrition, research. has historically been very focused on cohorts than like 20 to 25 year old white men. So like, you know, like I would, again, a lot the research that guides best practice now isn't even done in women.

So that's a big problem. and, and, you know, I, I, I guess I would defend researchers saying that it's hard, as you said, it's really hard to run these studies anyway. And if you add in the, like, we want to control for where women are in their menstrual cycle, a lot of sports and exercise science studies are typically done by like PhD, PhD masters program, you know, like they're like, There's not, there's not such a big, you know, cohort of like really, really, um, [01:04:00] professional sports science researchers.

So, you know, yeah, you know, you've got to do this project in 18 months or two years for your master's like it's going to be difficult for you to recruit and then bring them back at specific stages. I mentioned, you know, it's hard. It's hard. It's hard. I get it, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be at least Raising it as a caveat to all of this research.

So, um, lots of the research is only done in men. Lots of the research is, um, especially done in younger men. A lot of the paradigms that are used to test, um, performance in the lab are not, um, Don't represent how the actual demands of competition. for example, one of the papers that came out that I was part of during my PhD, we tested ketone drinks in cyclists, and we found that the ketone drinks improve performance, but, you know, it was an interesting study from a metabolic perspective.

And that's why we, we, as a scientist, We're interested in the metabolism, but everyone in the press focused in on the performance result, is fine. You know, it was, it was part of the study. [01:05:00] However, it was the paradigm that we used was, fasted one hour pre fatigue into a 30 minute time trial. And like, who actually races like that?

So it's like, soundbite is that ketones improve performance. The reality is that it was under this kind of like not very real world setting. So whenever you, again, you want to try and peel through the layers of the onion or whatever research it is being that's supporting your conclusions that every, every time I kind of dig into sports science research, mind kind of gets blown.

So recently I was reviewing a paper, that was written by people who were kind of pro low carb diets for athletes. And they made this statement. that I thought was wild, which was, um, I'm trying to remember exactly, but it was along the lines of has been no, response established between amount of carbohydrate that you consume and performance.

And I was like, what? Like what? I was like, I'm always being told that I need to have like this many [01:06:00] grams an hour. Like, you know, like what? I was like, how can they be saying this? As a reviewer, I was like, no, no, I gotta go and like, look at this. So I spent an hour or they were right. There is science around, uh, dose of carbohydrate and the amount you can take up.

There is science around dose of carbohydrate and the amount that you can burn. But that, like, 2 plus 2 is hasn't been made Like, so few people And there's been a few performance studies But it's not like that consistent that if you can dose 90 grams of carbs an hour, it will improve your performance, is kind of wild to me.

kind of wild. So, um, I approach sports nutrition with a healthy degree of skepticism with a high degree of, you know, you have to look at what's right for you. generally am pretty skeptical of anything that a company says when they're trying to send me a product, sell me a product. I would always try stuff out on myself.

I would never assume that because it worked in the [01:07:00] study of 15 healthy college aged men that it's going to work for me. I'm like very, very skeptical and kind of believe in the power of trying things out for yourself. Um, you know, based on the science, fine, like that's a good place to start. but yes, it's a bit of a wild west and there are sometimes like some, some assumptions that are made. And, you know, I guess I should be clear. I do still think for myself, I use carbohydrate while I'm doing, you know, I'm like, I'm a carb, I'm a carb fueled athlete myself, but I'm not pounding 120 grams of goo shots every hour, you know, I don't, I don't do that.

There's also a difference between, you know, what, what's our strategy if you're Elliot Kipchoge and you're trying to run the two hour marathon, uh, versus your, you know, my, my parents and you're doing your first marathon, it's going to take you four or five hours, you know, that's, or even just, you know, like enough amateur and you're trying to, you know, break three and a half hours and qualify for Boston, right?

Like at that point, you're still, it still kind of matters, but it's a [01:08:00] whole different fueling system. Your metabolism is different. You might be optimizing for different things. And yeah, so it's, um, the Wild West and there's an awful lot of context and nuance that gets missed off in the, in the, in the service of soundbites and in the service of simplicity, um, And in the service of selling products.

So, um, I think, yeah, I don't know whether, I don't know whether there's one single takeaway from everything that I just

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: yeah,

Brianna: you want to pull out a bit more.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: yeah, Brianna, for sure. Like, uh, that sounds like for the longest time that was the gospel, you know, if you're doing like a, like a long endurance type activity, then, you know, fuel your body with carbohydrates and well, fun is every type of carbohydrate is different, you know, eating pizza versus, you know, goo shots.

The other thing I find is now that I've had. You know, over, let's say 60, uh, you know, elite outdoor athletes on my show. And I've been, uh, uh, you know, climbing and, and [01:09:00] surfing for most of my life. I find that everybody diet is so different. It's like, you know, a jar of jelly beans. Like they all have some people, some people are very scientific.

Some people are, some people will not, will do like a hundred mile plus ultra runs. And they will not eat any foods. They will just drink liquids. Some people will not drink. Well, we'll eat all kinds of foods. They'll be slurping pasta at the aid stations, right? So, uh, And sounds like some of these, I think that a lot of these athletes, they're also very, um, self aware of what works for them.

And maybe that's what makes them world class because they can, they have an intuitive sense of like, Hey, these types of foods are good for me and these types are not good for me. And they're relentlessly experimenting, but the rest of us, you know, maybe we don't have that level of, uh, self observation and the ability to keep testing ourselves because we're not, professionals.

Are there any simple, [01:10:00] tests or any things we can deploy to understand how Everyday athlete can, can learn about what works for them. I just give you one simple example. Like I'm currently in, um, New Berlin, Mexico on a long climbing trip. And I realized the other day that, um, going to the crack to climb, like I took some boiled eggs and I felt totally weighed down, like I was eating boiled eggs, like every two hours I was eating a boiled egg.

On the other hand, I know that. Typically when I just eat like simple, um, you know, energy bars or just light foods and just keep snacking, that seems to work better for me, though I am not entirely sure. So, again, this is very anecdotal, but I just wanted to relate that a lot of us seem I'm sure about how do we feel ourselves?

Any advice there?

Brianna: Well, why do you feel unsure? It sounds like you, you [01:11:00] feel better when you do a certain thing. So what, what makes you still

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Sure.

Brianna: the

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Good question. I think because those are like very, um, uh, polarized types of fuel, you know, boiled eggs versus, uh, light snacking on, energy bars or granola or mandarins and those are the extremes. So I was trying to understand like, Hey, what might be, well, how can I fine tune things better?

Brianna: Yeah, um, that's a hard question. I'll give you some suggestions and you know, there might be some things that I'm not thinking about. So, um, it depends on the level of rigor that you want to bring to it. Um, on the simplest level, one thing that most of us just don't, you know, Um, do well enough in that I don't do consistently anymore, but used to do is just having somewhere where, um, you keep a short [01:12:00] record of what you did and how you did it. So we, we take back a lot of power and control, um, if we, um, you know, you would need like a note on your phone. And you would put the date in, and you know, like, today I had boiled eggs, felt heavy, today I had this, so, you know, and just, you know, you don't know whether there's a pattern unless you have a way of looking back to see if there's a pattern, so, you know, before we, before we do this really over engineered, you know, like, super scientific approach, I think that we, maybe don't trust our feelings because, you know, we second guess ourselves a lot, but you take some of that second guessing out If you create a way to track, um, so, you know, things like suggest tracking would be the specific, you know, a little bit of detail about the specific nutritional hydration, any, you know, think about what words sort of sum it up for you.

So in my training log, when I was on the, um, on the international rowing team, um, I had readiness to train and [01:13:00] motivation to train and like they're being kind of like two different like physical how was I feeling in my body and how was I feeling like mentally in terms of my energy so you might want to break it down into like you know how was how was my mental and physical energy for example and then know like a section where you might want to note like yeah you know I I to cut the trip short by, my climbing short by an hour because I just ran out of fuel or, you know, actually the sun was going down.

I felt like I could have gone for another couple hours. So if you, if you track those things, it doesn't have to be like a full, you know, multi page journal entry. Simplify it. Make it, if you can make it something that's easy for you to do. and that's great. you can track, you can start to see those patterns emerge and kind of do it in a, in a thoughtful way.

So that's the easiest thing. We all need to facilitate ways that we can trust our own feelings more. And I would say, as you mentioned, I don't think that elite athletes get very good at that, but it's something we can all learn. There was a really interesting research paper on, Grand Tour cyclists. And for those, [01:14:00] um, cyclists, their perceived exertion in a workout was as good a predictor as their power pedal, like output and heart rate data for the load of that session on them.

So that is not, I'm pretty sure that that can be learned. That's just lots and lots of years of practice. And so, uh, you have to start. almost like, um, sometimes I think about myself as like a black box and it's like, okay, I have all of this information about my performance. I have my heart rate and I have my speed and I have my power and I have, then I also have how I feel and, you know, like all of these things.

And sometimes, you know, to triangulate between different bits of information. And another example of that is, you know, when I competed in the Iron Man World Champs in Hawaii, it's really hot. So all of a sudden your heart rate isn't, isn't, isn't, isn't, isn't, isn't, It's different to what you'd be training at like a cooler temperature.

And so you can't like, you look at the heart and you're like, Oh, that doesn't look like kind of where I want it to be like, well, my effort's about right. And power's like, you know, you kind of like look at these different things and weight them differently [01:15:00] with not one or other of them being kind of the be all or end all.

So, um, um, Build up ways to build more confidence in your feelings, however that is, that would, tracking would help. You can track, um, more objective biological data, now there are so many different, uh, wearables, so now, you know, like my, my watch is a Garmin, it tracks my heart rate variability, and so something that would tell you about, um, how well you fueled in your, in your workout, or your climbing trip, or your long hike, um, would be the quality of your sleep and how your body is actually kind of responding and the stress that the device can detect overnight. So, you know, last week, you know, I've been doing this for years. I still make mistakes. I went, I did a 24 mile run, fueled like, you know, six out of 10 during the run, didn't completely blow up during the run, but it wasn't enough. And then my recovery was just Awful, and all of my metrics, my, you know, objective metrics that my device was picking up were just in the toilet because I hadn't fueled properly during this run. that could be, and that a lot of us have [01:16:00] sport watches, they're also, um, like the Aura ring, it's a ring you wear on your finger, the Wook band, people use that kind of thing. Things that, um, you that extra bit of feedback to confirm. Ultimately, I think it should probably be confirming how you're feeling and not the other way around.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Yeah,

Brianna: you know, uh, at one time with the Woot Band, I was wearing the Woot Band and, uh, I was doing a half marathon race and I got up and I was like, I don't want to look at my Woot score. And I got to the race and like, by accident hit the app and I had this awful, ridiculous score. And I didn't want to see that because I'm here at the race.

I'm doing this race. I had a great race. That was fine. So sometimes you. you know, take it with a pinch of salt or don't let it kind of completely define what you, how you approach things. But, um, you know, that, that's an extra layer of, of, you can get. And then if you want to get like kind of super nerdy nowadays, there's more and more consumer technologies for us to actually measure our mechanicalism at home. So, um, for example, there's a continuous glucose monitors. So that's the kind of thing that a diabetic would wear. There [01:17:00] isn't good consensus on how people without diabetes should use the profession, I should preface everything by saying that, you know, it's like, it's an interesting way that all of us can now start to see how different foods affect our blood sugar, and how our blood sugar affects how we feel, um, it's a learning tool, we don't really know yet, you know, because, um, They've been most widely used in people with diabetes.

We kind of know what it should look like for people with diabetes. We actually don't really know what like a quote unquote really healthy pattern would look like. But you might notice for yourself that, yeah, you were having the boiled eggs and your blood sugar was kind of maybe even like dipping a bit low, um, and that that didn't feel good.

And you're like, okay, well, there's something going on in my metabolism. I also didn't feel very good. So maybe those things kind of combine together and, you know, maybe it's not, That's not a good fueling strategy for me. And then on the flip side, you know, if you were every, every 90 minutes, you were having like a whole, maybe you had two goo shots or three goo shots every 90 minutes and you were seeing these big spikes and crashes, and then that didn't feel [01:18:00] very good.

And that just gives you something, again, to say, oh, like, I see this pattern, I have this feeling. Maybe this thing didn't work. Um, so it can be, um, an interesting window into your metabolism that, that could be another piece of the puzzle,

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: yeah,

Brianna: we don't know yet, like, I can't tell you, you need to, if you wore a continuous glucose monitor, an ideal profile would look like this, because at the moment, We don't really know, um, very well what it looks like for healthy people. And a worry with people is that you give them a continuous glucose monitor and they try and cut out all of their spikes and they end up like, you know, fueling wrong. Um, and yeah, so a bit of a, um, fresh area still kind of understanding how to implement it in the mainstream. Yeah, I

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: certainly. Well, that was a.

Brianna: 20 minutes.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: a very well rounded answer. And what I love about what you said is, yes, we have all kinds of tools out there, all kinds of variables and other things, [01:19:00] which allow us to track again, different metrics, which can be very powerful when used judiciously with some caveats. But I love how you underscored the importance of just something simple yet profound, like taking regular action.

notes and observing things. And yes, maybe some of us are gifted and they can just remember, you know, uh, everything that they felt over time. But most of us, uh, would be benefited by just taking those simple notes, you know, like how are we feeling, what we did, and, and, and then be able to refer back. Brianna, I want to talk a little bit about your research with ketones, but I want to be mindful of our time.

How are we doing there?

Okay, perfect. Yeah. I have to also run in around that time. Um, yeah, today is a cold day here. Super cold. So [01:20:00] we are going to do this little adventure to these hot springs we discovered. So,

Brianna: lovely. Lovely. I'm jealous.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: okay, great. So I believe you have, uh, done some extensive work with, ketones and the benefits beyond, uh, just, just energy, right? My, my little knowledge and maybe for a lot of our listeners about ketones is limited to, at least in my case, my little, adventure with, trying to adopt a ketogenic diet, which didn't last very long, which was, uh, several years ago.

So, uh, what excites you the most about ketones for aging athletes?

Brianna: Yes. Um, so my research is focused on drinks that contain ketones. And so the idea is that you can ketones in a targeted way without having to follow the ketogenic diet. The ketogenic diet [01:21:00] is interesting. It's cool. It's distinct and different to what I do, so I do, I, you know, I'm, I'm researching how ketones could be used alongside or instead of carbohydrates to fuel performance, um, or as a, you know, let's call it like a macronutrient for people with certain metabolic needs, say in the case of aging. where providing ketones as a fuel could be helpful. And then also you alluded to, um, in the last 10 years or so, people have started to understand that ketones themselves can, actually behave like a signal inside the body and activate various pathways that are associated with, um, better health. Um, you know, particularly, Inflammation ketones have been very implicated in that.

And so again, the idea is that if we could give you this ketone drink without having to follow the ketogenic diet, you could start to get some of those benefits from a fueling and signaling perspective, um, without having to change [01:22:00] your diet. So my, I guess, you know, like the big research question I've been asking for a number of years now is like, What are the benefits?

What are the effects of ketone drinks for healthy performance, resilience, for healthy aging? what we do know is that, um, ketone drinks are a very powerful way to deliver ketones into the body. They really, they really do work, uh, when you have one of these drinks. your ketone levels go up a bit.

Like, if you had a good shot your sugar levels would go up. So you take one of these drinks and it would almost within 30 minutes, 60 minutes. It would be like you were on the ketogenic diet for the weeks. So it's kind of an injection of ketones into the system through, through a drink typically. Using those as like pre workouts, post workouts, we started to understand the possible ways that they could impact on performance.

Like I said, under certain specific there looks like there might be a performance effect. It's not been very consistently replicated, but again, you know, like there are some individuals who. Use ketones for performance and like it [01:23:00] and so, you know, that's something that individuals could experiment with possible possible benefits there Helping people with kind of like a dual fueling approach carbohydrates and ketones before exercise But recently especially in the sporting field more and more people have looked at how ketones could be used for recovery ketones have been shown to help with resupplying the muscle with glycogen, um, reducing muscle protein breakdown. and then also interestingly, um, you know, I'll see this is a dirty word in cycling, but, affecting, uh, endogenous EPO. Red blood cells, um, and things like that. So there's been a couple of interesting papers that have come out there, and it seems like more scientists using ketones as tools, are focusing on ketones as a post workout, way to kind of recover quicker, and especially in multi day events, like I watched the Tour de France the last few years, and I, obviously I'm watching for it because it's my field, but I watch for people, they come over the line, and if they're given a tiny little bottle and they drink it and they pull a funny face, because these ketones, they taste pretty bad, um, [01:24:00] Typically I'm like, oh yeah, they're definitely drinking ketones there.

So I've seen, seems like a lot of cyclists at the pro level use ketones as a post, uh, post race refueling strategy. So, so yeah, that's, um, I don't do quite as much of that sort of sports focused research as I used to. Now we're using ketones and aging. and as I mentioned at the very outset, our metabolism changes with age, especially in, Metabolically hungry organs like the brain and the heart, and there's a lot of emerging evidence that suggests that ketones can be a really good fuel for the aging brain and the aging heart, especially in, a disease setting.

So people are looking at ketones for cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease, and people are looking at ketones for heart failure, but the key theme there is over both. High energy demand organs that work all the time, right? Like they, so they have very, big energy needs then as we get older and as we have diseases. One of those hallmarks of aging, which I've mentioned a few times in this podcast is mitochondrial dysfunction. So, [01:25:00] mitochondria are inside our cells, they make energy from food and, um, mitochondrial dysfunction happens with age, it happens with disease, and providing ketones can sort of alleviate, you know, provide an alternative to sugar.

and

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Hmm.

Brianna: provide energy for the heart and the brain. you know, we have collaborators doing that kind of work. Um, some of our work focuses on frailty. So people who are slowing down and have like, uh, reduced physical performance and resilience. And again, we're looking at key terms for them too. Um, so a variety.

My own work now focuses more on the, Um, age related diseases and aging. but, and in the sports science field, it seems like people are more focused on recovery perhaps than performance, but the idea is delivering ketones as an energy, delivering ketones as a signal without having to follow the ketogenic diet by taking a drink that contains ketones.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Okay. So exogenous ketones. These are ketones we can consume as a supplement. So firstly, um, [01:26:00] can, can you just, can one just go over to a sports nutrition store and buy ketones off the shelf? Are they readily available now in the West?

Brianna: There's an increasing number of companies that sell these products as well. So there, they, when

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Okay.

Brianna: working on this field, 10 years ago, there was only one or two places that made, made them. And now there's a number of places that make

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Okay. Got it. So again, so, okay, so over the counter ketones. It sounds like it's almost a shortcut to ketosis, uh, without

Brianna: it's

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: up like pizza. Yeah.

Brianna: said ketone drinks and not the ketogenic diet. If you're on the ketogenic diet, you're lowering your carbohydrate intake. So you're going to get a whole range of different benefits, right? You're going to be.

Lowering your carbohydrate intake, lowering those sugar and insulin, like spikes and troughs, like all of that happens because of the lower dietary carbohydrate intake. [01:27:00] You're also, once, once you lower your sugar, lower your insulin, your body starts to break down its own fat. That's great for weight loss.

That's good for metabolism. Like all of those things are upstream of the effects of ketones themselves. So when I try and explain it to people, it's like a Venn diagram where there's benefits of. endogenous ketosis and ketogenic diets and fasting and things where you're triggering the body to make ketones. Those benefits come from lower sugar, lower calories, lower insulin, more fat burning and making ketones. But then you have the ketones in the blood and then that, those benefits are kind of overlapped with the ketone drinks, which is Once the ketones in the blood, they can be an energy, they can be a signal.

And so what my research is trying to tease apart is like, how, how much is there an overlap of this Venn diagram? how much, how much, if any of the benefits of a ketogenic diet, can we replicate with ketone drinks? So, but the key thing here is like, once the ketones are present in the [01:28:00] blood, They can be used as an energy, they can be used as a signal, regardless of where they came from.

It's, it's, it's not even a shortcut, it's just like a whole different approach. to, and you're doing it for different reasons, like if you are an athlete, you want to maybe be fueling with carbohydrates and you don't want to be on the ketogenic diet, but you can still tap into, um, occasionally on demand in a therapeutic sense, you know, if you're, if you are caring for someone with Alzheimer's disease, it might be really hard to put them on a ketogenic diet because of their, you know, cognitive status. but you could use ketone drinks in those people. you could drop those in, that could be a more, um, accessible way to, give that person some of the benefits of ketones.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Thank you for clarifying that nuance. between some of the, some of the other benefits that, the ketogenic diet produces and what are the benefits of, uh, of consuming, [01:29:00] ketones exogenously. So again, you know, I come back to trying to get some real world, uh, advice from you, which is, uh, again, for the everyday person, you know, who's concerned with aging also wants performance.

What would you advise them about, you know, between, uh, on how should they manage their diet between, uh, which type of modality should they embrace and when it's a, it's, it's a confusing landscape

Brianna: Yeah,

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: and you, you mentioned some things already between, let's say, taking on a ketogenic diet, fasting, taking things orally,

Brianna: Okay. Um, all right again this up front by saying everyone's different And if you do something and it doesn't feel good for you, you should not do that thing Gosh, I took a phone call the other day from a lady who was using a supplement that had kind of been developed in conjunction It wasn't anything to do with me particularly, but she called up the buck and was like, yeah I take this and it gives me heartburn [01:30:00] every time but I'm still taking like You should just stop.

She's like, is it good for me? I'm like if you're having heartburn every day when you're taking this supplement, you should just stop just please just stop so With that context in mind if you're doing something and it doesn't feel good for you Maybe try and debug it a little bit try some different ways of approaching it But do not continue with things that don't work for you. Um, so I guess my overall advice for people is what we want function and metabolic function. It's flexibility You We, I think, and this is something I've had to think about in my own life, when you're training for performance to be really good at one thing, you need to be specialized, and the demands for that are different to perhaps what we're thinking about as a ageless athlete community where we want to, we want to perform short, but we also want to be robust building like, um, health for the long term. So I think that, Really, you want to be metabolically flexible. You want to, you can, it's fine to do a day of low intensity [01:31:00] fasted training, but if you want to do high quality interval training, then you're going to need some carbohydrates for that. So really, we're seeing this more and more with some of the like professional cyclists that they'll do. Um, some lower carbohydrate training, some high carbohydrate training. I think that locking your body into one or other state is, is not really desirable. What we really want is to be able to, fuel appropriately for the work that you're doing. you, if you're going out for a one hour easy run, then you probably, like I did this morning, it's probably okay that I just had a tablespoon of peanut butter before that.

But if I was going out and I was about to do, you know, a 13 mile half marathon prep run with intervals, And that would be, you know, a different story and you want to be fueling appropriately before that. So, really focusing on flexibility, using different fuels, for the work appropriately, um, and hydration as well, obviously, really important to just going out and like feeling good every day.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: fantastic, most of our listeners are active, and they want to stay that way [01:32:00] for, uh, life. what are maybe two or three key things, Brianna, that they should focus on to maintain that peak metabolic, uh, health stage as they age?

Brianna: I think if you can, you know, like I said earlier, we're trying to stack up the number of good decisions so that ultimately they are more than the This isn't perfection all of the time, this is like striving towards, know, a little bit better every day. So, um, I think, you know, if you can reduce your consumption of things that come from a package, your number of things that you're eating where you don't know the name of the fifth thing on the ingredients list, focusing on whole foods and real foods, that's something that we should all, you know, just be kind of trying to prioritize in a way that's going to be setting us up, um, to be healthy.

making sure, especially for women, we do tend to underfuel we're kind of concerned. Um, around like body image and stuff. And, you know, that's, that's not good for our health, but also not good for our performance. So fueling appropriately, um, with whole [01:33:00] foods before and after exercises is vitally important for long term health. and then in terms of just also the types of exercise you do as you age, it's really important to make sure you're incorporating strength training. It's going to help you avoid injury, um, especially for sports like running, where there's a lot of impact and a lot of sort of stress and strains. But, strength, flexibility, you know, you mentioned you're a climber and a surfer, you want to be able to have that reach and the strength at extremes of motion.

These are all things like if we can lay, it only gets harder to build them back up again as you get older. So you want to be, to go back to another question you asked, like the better foundations you can lay when you're younger or the better you can kind of maintain your foundations in your 40s and 50s, the better function that you're going to have when you're in your 70s or 80s.

So really, Despecializing yourself as much as possible. doing flexibility, doing balance, balance is really important. Doing, you know, accessory strength work, keeping in some cardio. If you don't like that like intense stuff, you still need to do it. We need to, we [01:34:00] need to do a little bit of everything. the, the kind of the, the goal for optimal health is to do as much as you can and then bring in some of these other things wherever you, wherever you can possible as well. But it doesn't have to be perfect all of the time. Perfect is the enemy of the good.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Lovely. And then maybe last question, Brianna. So like throughout your career, elite drawing to the cutting edge research that you do now, what may be the, the, the single biggest lesson you have learned about, sustaining performance over a lifetime?

Brianna: Yeah, I mean, I think I've said it a few times, the point that I just made about, um, not being discouraged if you can't achieve perfection. You, you only get anywhere in life if you show up day after day after day. And, you know, I was not, you know, I was always like in my teens going through rowing and really you know up into my early 20s as well It always felt like I was like fourth [01:35:00] place third place fourth place third place I would just just show up year after year after year and you know, some people have talent But yeah, what is it?

It's hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard enough that kind of thing as well You know really, you know Consistency. Consistency is king and you see this now with um, people who run through injuries and then they're off for six weeks and then they're back at square one, you know, like really whatever you can do to listen to your body, build consistency and just, just show up, just keep showing up, keep showing up, whatever it takes for you to need to be able to show up, to make it, ways to make it enjoyable, ways to make it nourishing for your soul, ways to build community, like whatever it takes so that you can keep showing up for yourself.

That's going to be how you, you know, achieve the best performance that you can over time. And like, there are times when you have to make sacrifices. Um, but, you know, it's not, you know, going back to everything being a habit. It shouldn't consistently be a sacrifice. It should be, know, nourishing and sustaining as well.[01:36:00] 

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Keep showing up. Yeah. Words to live by. If listeners want to. Uh, stay abreast of the work you're doing, Brianna, and learn more about the research. And then also, also, I, I sense that many people listening could also be good, uh,

Brianna: Yeah,

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: target subjects for your studies. Uh, how can they be of service?

Brianna: So, um, I'm on, on X, um, I'm at Brianna Stubbs. That's where, I mean, I'm, I'm a lot less active there than it used to be, but that's the best way to keep up with me. Um, You can find out more about our research. Um, if you go to the Buck Institute website, so type into Google Bucket Buck Institute, B U C K, actually it's on my hat here. and from there we have, um, information about the studies that we're running, information about all of the research that's going on at Buck. Um, there's an excellent podcast that is released by the Buck with other interviews with other scientists about different elements of aging. Um, there's a free.

biology of aging course. Um, and also [01:37:00] from the website, you can sign up and put your name on our interest list to be contacted for our clinical trials. And, um, best if you're in the Bay area, because at the moment we do don't do any remote trials, but lots of stuff going on. And if people live in the Bay area, they can, they're welcome to participate.

And we, we always treat our, our research participants like they're the stars of the show. So I'm. Hopefully people would enjoy a visit. And, um, we do tours as well. Like if you're local, you should definitely come. The building, um, was designed by I. M. Pei, who's a famous architect who does lots of, you know, very stunning.

And it's, you know, up a mountain, very beautiful. And people can come take a tour and learn more about the science as well.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: They can run up to the building and get some exercise

Brianna: absolutely.

kush--he-him-_1_02-21-2025_102433: Brianna, thank you so much for giving us your precious time this Friday morning and for sharing so much of your research and your knowledge. Thank you so much.

Brianna: Thank you so much for having me, Kush.