#083 How Vitamin D, Omega-3s, & Exercise May Increase Longevity | Dr. Rhonda Patrick

The most important thing that you can do in your life is to sweat and get physically active. There's nothing that is going to be better for you know. No aging drug, nothing. Nothing's going to be better than what exercise can do.

About 50% of the US population does not basically get adequate intake of magnesium ... If you are a physically active adult—so let's say you exercise frequently, you are maybe using the sauna—you can excrete magnesium through sweat. And so, physically active adults actually require anywhere between 10-20% more than the RDA.

People are not eating enough seafood and fish. And because of that, it was calculated that... something like 84,000 deaths per year were attributed to not getting enough EPA and DHA from the diet. And this was really comparable to people that were eating trans fats.

In smokers that had a high omega-3 index—so they were smoking but they were also eating a lot of fish, supplementing with fish oil; they had an 8% omega-3 index—they had the same life expectancy as non-smokers with a low omega-3 index. In other words, smoking was like being deficient in omega-3.

Omega-3, the way I like to think of it, is it's got the safety profile of a nutrient, but it is pharmacologically active. And so many people are not getting enough of it. I think something like 80% globally do not get enough EPA and DHA, and like 95% of people in the US do not get enough.

About 70% of the US population has inadequate vitamin D. And that's kind of defined as less than 30ng/mL ... It's pretty clear that having levels above 30 is associated with a lower all-cause mortality.

People with the highest magnesium levels have a 40% lower all-cause mortality and a 50% lower cancer mortality compared to people with the lowest magnesium levels ... For every 100 mg decrease in magnesium intake, there was a 24% increase in pancreatic cancer incidence.

Exercise is probably the biggest and most important thing. Irrespective of anything else, I think being physically active, very clear, is the most important thing for healthy aging, for staving off dementia, for staving off cancer, for staving off cardiovascular disease, all the age-related diseases.

Even though fish have these contaminants... the omega-3 fatty acids protect against them, even during pregnancy. So, there was this big push decades ago about pregnant women should avoid eating fish because of the mercury; I think that was a huge mistake, huge mistake.

Magnesium is high in dark leafy greens. Most people are not eating multiple servings of dark leafy greens daily. It's also pretty high in legumes. Almonds are another great source of magnesium. Oats are a great source of magnesium.

I also do a supplement of about 125 milligrams of magnesium. I do magnesium glycinate. Most of the magnesium supplements are, with respect, I would say the one that's not very bioavailable is magnesium dioxide ... Magnesium glycinate has very good bioavailability. So does magnesium malate or magnesium citrate.

Most people in the United States have an omega-3 index of less than 5% ... People that have an omega-3 index of 8% have a 5-year increased life expectancy compared to those that have an omega-3 index of 4%.

There are some fish that you should be scared of like swordfish, which is terribly high in mercury and not so high in omega-3. But things like salmon, wild-caught salmon, is low in mercury, high in omega-3.

There are a variety of factors that actually regulate whether or not we can make enough vitamin D in our skin. Everything from age—so a 70-year-old person makes, literally, 25% of what they made as their 20-year-old self.

I do a lot of Tabatas. I go between my all-outs, and also, I'm in a zone 3, sometimes a zone 2, when I'm sort of tapering it down before I'm about to go all-out again. And I do that 10 or 15 minutes a day, 5 days a week. And then I also like to resistance training.

This recent study also looked at physical activity. And it was interesting because sleep quality and quantity ... Lower quantity was associated with higher all-cause mortality, but only in people that were not physically active. In other words, physical activity forgave the sleep disruption, the poor sleep.

There's a variety of very common SNPs that people do not convert the vitamin D3 into the 25-hydroxy vitamin D very well, or they do not convert the 25-hydroxy vitamin D into the steroid hormone very well ... I've seen people have to take between 20 to 30,000 IUs/day to even just get a normal 30 or 40 ng/mL blood concentration of 25-hydroxy vitamin D...

There's also been studies looking at... fish intake during pregnancy and intelligence ... It was shown that omega-3 correlated with improved intelligence if the mothers were eating fish.

There's been some studies showing that 1.5-2 grams a day supplemental omega-3 can bring people from a 4% omega-3 index to an 8% omega-3 index.

Two, I think oxidation status. So, fish oil is a polyunsaturated fatty acid, so it is prone to oxidation ... There are third-party testing sites that will test omega-3 oxidation status ... I think the best one I use is called the International Fish Oil Standards website, it's IFOS.

People need to be physically active. Whatever it is they're going to do and do it regularly... is, in my opinion, the most important thing ... What you need to do is do what you know you will do—that's the most important thing.

Doing something for anywhere, like 1 minute to 3 minutes, 3 times a day— So, this is like the 'exercise snacks' ... People that do this—again, this is measured by actual data, empirical data—have anywhere between a 30-40% lower all-cause mortality and cancer-related mortality.

Once you start to reach a certain age, it becomes very hard to gain muscle mass ... You have a harder time gaining that mass but you're losing it ... The more you start with, the losses aren't quite as big. So, I think resistance training is very important for that as well.

High-intensity interval training can basically ameliorate the negative effects of sleep deprivation on blood blood glucose regulation.

Vitamin D is basically very different because it basically can enter what's called the nucleus of a cell, and that is where all your DNA is ... It binds to your DNA and turns genes on, activates them, and turns other genes off, and deactivates them in this coordinated fashion. And these are genes that are important for everything from brain function... to immune function. And it's why vitamin D plays such a critical role in helping prevent respiratory diseases.

I think the important thing here also is getting some blood work done. Unless you go and measure your vitamin D levels, you're not going to know how deficient or if you're deficient or insufficient you are; you're not going to know how well a supplement is raising your levels. Like, is it even doing anything?

That omega-6, when it's too high, can compete with that enzyme that's required to convert ALA into EPA ... That conversion is very inefficient when there's a lot of omega-6.

Lactate, actually, is a signaling molecule. It has been shown to activate brain-derived neurotrophic factor—at the blood-brain barrier it activates it. It also gets into other tissues, including the brain... It's used for neurotransmitter synthesis—norepinephrine uses lactate, serotonin, dopamine. It's used for energy instead of neurons; its a very efficient source of energy.

Exercise itself, there's something called shear force, the sheer force of blood flow going going through the circulatory system itself kills these circulating tumor cells.

People that are deficient and supplement with about 4,000 IUs per day [of vitamin D] can bring their self up to a sufficient level—closer, above 30 ng/mL, perhaps even closer to 40.

The conversion of ALA into EPA and then subsequently DHA—it's very inefficient and there's widespread genetic differences with respect to that conversion.

Inflammation, chronic low-level inflammation, is a driver of the aging process itself.