Episode 131. TikTok Brain, How to Live Forever with NAD+ and the Minimum Amount of Exercise You Need.
Episode 131. TikTok Brain, How to Live Forever with NAD+ and the Minimum Amount of Exercise You Need.
In this episode, we delve into two new and important health topics - the impact of TikTok on mental and emotional well-being and the potential benefits of increasing NAD+.
We explore how social media algorithms can manipulate our emotions and the negative impact smartphones have on our physical brain structure. We then discuss a new Australian-developed drug that increases the beneficial anti-aging properties of NAD+. Lastly, we touch on what the minimum amount of movement you should aim for each day looks like.
As always thank you for your support and engagement, it means the world to us!
Episode Relevant Links:
TikTok is a New Kind of Superweapon: https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/tiktok-may-be-a-chinese-bio-weapon
Biogency set to shake up the Aussie anti-ageing supplements industry with Synext: http://www.motherpedia.com.au/article/university-of-sydney-phd-pharmacy-graduates-discover-australias-first-nad-s
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Before we get into today's topics, I just want to thank every single person listening. There has been a spike in listeners over the last couple of weeks and that is thanks to you guys listening, sharing, commenting. And five star reviews wherever you're listening to the podcast. So again, big thank you to everybody. In our yearly reflection show a few weeks ago now, Mack and I said one of the biggest things this year we want to do is grow this podcast to the next level and we are definitely on the way. We sort of. Teased a little bit a couple of weeks ago, but Mac and I are moving to Melbourne. We've had some great opportunities to grow this podcast and it is thanks to you guys. So again, I can't thank every single person enough for supporting this show and yeah, we wouldn't be able to have this opportunity unless it wasn't for you guys. So that's great. Again, thank you all. I can't thank you enough, so make sure you do. If you haven't already, give us a 5 star review positive. If you do get something out of this episode, share it with a friend or family member, you think we'll get something out of it. It does sound a little bit echoey at the moment just because we are in the process of moving, but very soon it's going to sound crisp and clear and smooth for you guys. So give us a couple of weeks and we'll be into that, but we'll be given updates on social media, so if you want to. Follow the journey. Make sure you follow us there. You'll find me on Instagram at Jack L Graham and I am at MAC_Insitu.
02:20
And I feel like that will bring us straight into our first topic. Which is TikTok brain, TikTok TikTok.
02:31
We were watching. We were listening, watching a podcast the other day. And they brought up an article that apparently has gone viral in the US. I don't know, Australia is a little bit slow to the mark sometimes with these trending things, but. They opened the podcast with. The statistics about the effects of TikTok that is having on our brain and apparently on the Internet, it's starting to be called tick tock brain. Like it's actually a noticeable condition. Yeah, TikTok brain. A medical term almost now. Yeah, on the Internet anyway. So I just wanted to bring it up on the podcast because I don't know. It's like it's so normal for everyone to be on social media all the time and consume social media. Like, we post on social media a lot. We like look for new clients on there, like it's not going away anytime soon, right? So I think now more than ever, we need to be conscious of how, when, where, why we consume things online, especially if health and longevity is a priority of yours. So I just have some random statistics that I got from the article. I highly recommend everyone goes and reads the article because it's really good. I've read it twice now. We can link it in the show notes, but within three years tick Tock is the most downloaded app in the entire world. It has been downloaded more times than Google. That's crazy. To me, it's, I don't know. We were a bit slow to the tick tock trend. Maybe. I still not on it. So I've tried to get on TikTok a couple of Times Now. I'll jump on every couple of months, post a couple of things, but I just don't actually live with it. You don't vibe with it. I just can't get around it. Yeah, I just. Yeah, that's funny. So the whole thing that makes it addictive is. The whole product is based around like the recommended or the. It's called the 4U feed. So when you open tick Tock you're immediately in the 4U feed rather than Instagram like you're in. Your regular feed, which is your friends and stuff. And then there's the option to go into reels, which is like new things, I suppose. Yeah. But even before that, Instagram had the Explore page. Yeah, I never used that. No one ever used it. So the difference, I think the main difference between tick tock and all the others, like why it's so difficult is because of the four you page.
05:00
Like it's all new content every single time. You're not seeing the same content or the same people. You're always seeing something different to a certain extent. So apparently it's the fastest learning app also, so as soon as you. Show TikTok that you like a video. Like if you like a video, comment on it, save it, or watch it more than once. Then it double down on whatever that content is, which is kind of scary. So I've tried to do it. I tried. I think I fail at posting on their frequently because I don't want to go on the app at all. Because I go on the app and I'll be on there just scrolling for half an hour and then I'm like, what have I even been doing this whole time? But. Yeah, so I've, I've definitely noticed that how it double down on anything you show a slight interest to like I watched. I don't know a couple of marketing videos or like how to reach a big audience on TikTok style videos. And I watch them once or twice because they're so fast-paced. I have to watch them once or twice to actually get the point. And now my feed. That's all I see. Like tick Tock hacks and. Stuff like that. So like if you think about that in. Like our audience, this is perspective. Like obviously I want to get better at marketing. I'm going to watch marketing videos. Our audience probably hopefully wants to get in shape. So they're going to watch day in the Life, Fitness, gym, meal prep kind of videos. And apparently that's leading to like a lot of food obsession and eating disorders and self harm because that's all you're being fed is how perfect everyone is at their health and fitness routine. Yeah. And like we do health and fitness for a living and a life and it's never perfect like. Like you might have. It doesn't look like it does on Instagram. You only seeing the highlights. But when you're seeing highlight after highlight after highlight,
07:00
you're like, well, why don't all my meals look like that? Well, why don't all my workouts look like that? So yeah, why don't I have abs like that? Why aren't I skinny as that? Why all of the things? The article brings up one. Noticeable case of. Girls starting to watch. Other people's videos who suffer from Tourettes and then they actually develop a tick like a Tourette's tick. Isn't that insane? I remember when I very first got tick tock, I watched. One video of a woman with seizures. And it was a long video and it was literally just like a compilation of her having seizures and her family having to move stuff and hold her down or wet her head and whatever you do when someone has a seizure. But I watched that one video, it made me feel terrible, like sick nauseous. And then I was just getting those videos all the time and then it felt being on TikTok felt very negative and stuff for a while because. The video is sad. It's like this is my life. I have stages all the time. My family has to be with me all the time. And like, I probably only probably stopped going on TikTok altogether after that because, like, this is bad for my brain. I feel so anxious and. Depressed about this?
08:23
Yeah, well, and but that's a **** thing about the algorithm these days. Like, because I'm not, like I said, I'm not on TikTok, but Instagram, I've hardly been going on there because. I want to see cool stuff, but like, I'll watch a sausage dog video, then I'll watch it again, and then the next 5 things I see are sausage dogs. And I'm like, yeah, they're cool, but not that I don't want. Yeah. YouTube's probably the only one that doesn't do that as much, but it's starting to get worse off the end. Ohh, really. Yeah. Even this article said that there's no proof, but it's predicted. They predict that. TikTok actually monitors your face expressions while you watch the video because like if you read the terms and conditions, which who does? No one, no one, they have access to every single thing, everything. So like why wouldn't they be watching your facial expressions? So if you smile at a video then they're gonna show you more of that video, you know what I mean? Anyway, into the brain side of it, the tick tock brain side of it. Research shows that there is a strong association developing between just smartphones in general and all smartphone addiction, I should say, and brain shrinkage. So I think we've spoken about like. The negative effects of your brain shrinking as you age and it causes you to lose, like motor function, memory, attention span, concentration, all of the things that. I guess we see that it's common in elderly people. So TikTok or smartphones in general are just causing.
10:01
Early onset brain shrinkage, which is terrible. And then there's also another term that they mentioned in the article called Digital Dementia. So the onset of anxiety, depression and the deterioration of memory, attention spans, self-control and self esteem. So apparently on Reddit, I'm not really on Reddit, but apparently on Reddit there's like a big. I guess movement maybe around digital dementia and people are leaving platforms like TikTok and going to Reddit because Reddit is mostly text based, right? Or you mean based? I don't really know. And just talking about like, that's already is really talking about topics, talking about how they have noticed literal digital dementia from being on TikTok. Like how are we supposed to function in society? I don't know. And there's this whole movement for longevity and everything yet that, like social media is the most present it's ever been. And how can it get any more present? I don't really know. Yeah, it's scary because. Imagine teenagers like their brain is developing, absorbing all this stuff, but then they're doing other stuff that. Slows like shrinks their brain during these years. But then at the same time, those ages you've probably not eaten the best. You're drinking a lot more than what you normally do like. All these things in that period of your life when. Your body is still developing, especially your brain and everything like that. That's. That's. Actually scary to think what's going to happen in the next decade or two? Who like, yeah, what? How is the brain function of the people that are going to be in charge of society? Like, what is that going to be like? I don't know. Yeah. Did they give any suggestions on? You
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know, minimising or. It was more just bringing awareness to it, tearing shreds off tick tock, yeah. Like I think that minimizing it. Like sure, you could delete the app, you could delete TikTok and you still, you can still go on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, even has videos now and get a similar YouTube and get a similar thing, but it's just that TikTok is so. I guess the others are slightly less addictive, but the whole tick tock interface is like. It takes up your whole screen. There's not a single bit of yeah, like it's it's designed so intentionally to be addictive, you know what I mean? Like a lot of effort has gone into how it looks and what you see as soon as you open the app to make it that way. So I guess like the first thing you could do is. Delete. Tick tock. You can actually, um I'm pretty sure you can set a time limit on your phone. So like say you set it for an hour a day and if you once you accumulate an hour a day on any app. A password comes up and like you could get your friend or your partner to set the password and they don't tell you the password. I have heard of that before, yeah. But that is. Somebody that is addicted to social media. Yeah right. If somebody like everybody listening at home, if you don't think you're addicted, then go and delete tick tock and see how you feel about it. And if you go through withdrawals or you thinking about it all the time, what are you missing? I need to download it again. You're addicted. So you do need to break that cycle and have a thing about it. You can even on iPhones you can have different home screens. For different times of the day. So you can have a home screen that has all of your work apps on it, you can have a home screen that has all of your social media apps on it, and you can change between the home screens or you can set them to change at certain times and I've done that now.
14:00
So at night time I change to like a do not disturb home screen, which pretty much has like. Add the text messages, audio books, podcasts and that's all the apps that are on there. Like I could go to the social media apps if I went looking for them. But I noticed when I have that home screen on, I'll open my phone to do something and automatically go to open Instagram or tick Tock and the app isn't there and I'm like, what the heck? And I'm like, oh that's right, I got on here to message a client. Whereas if I have the quote UN work screen because I guess social media is a part of our job when I have the work screen. During the day, I'll open my phone to do something specific, like text to client, and it'll automatically open TikTok scroll for 15 minutes. And then I'm like, wait, what was I here for? Just because it's just our brains just love. Like they know where to go to get the dopamine hit. So it's just automatically going to take you there. Yeah. And you don't think about it. Don't think about it, yeah. Crazy, yeah. Moving on.
15:50
Yeah. So the next one come from a new listener, James. Thanks, James for the topic. I hadn't heard of this before, but once you brought it up, we started talking about it. I'm just like, Oh yeah, here we go again. So. You tell everybody what it is. OK, so James pretty much has asked us. We wrote a barbecue on the weekend and he's like, oh, have you heard of the new study that came out of the University of Sydney about a new drug called NAD Plus? And I was like, I haven't been, I've had what? Two months of UNI holidays. Now, I know what node is, but I haven't been studying for two months, so I don't know anymore, you know, like I haven't been using it now the whole time. He was brain. Pardon the whole yeah, tick tock brain. That's what I was about to say. The whole time Jack was talking to James, I was just like standing there. Paralyzed like Oh my God, I should know what nod is. I know what nod is. But I stopped. I stopped using my like. My proper brain over the holidays. Anyway, so I got home and I started looking in trying to find the study that James was talking about, I couldn't find the study, but I did find a new drug that a group of students PhD graduates. I think maybe it's their. What's it called that when you do anyway? They're last year of uni. They were coming doctors or whatever thesis out of the University of Sydney, which is cool because Australia doesn't do much cool stuff in medicine and they have created a new drug called Synex SYNEXT.
17:29
And. It pretty much is just NAD plus the molecule NAD plus, so. An ad is essential to the creation of energy. It's involved in hundreds of metabolic processes in our body. So that's what it does. It produces energy. And they've made a drug that is NAD Plus and another molecule that I did not write down. But anyway, the whole point of the drug is to reduce signs of aging or reduce the whole aging process. So SYNEX provides benefits for cardiovascular health, it reduces. Arthritis. It improves skin health and increases energy production because you're adding extra NAD plus to your body. So as you age, an ad plus like your ability to produce energy naturally declines. And this like when I just Googled NAD plus so many drugs came up. I was like this is a coenzyme and like the whole market is NAD plus drugs. I didn't even know it existed. So anyway I was doing more digging into like the purpose of it and how if you can if and how you can just increase it naturally because. There's always a natural solution, right? And basically, yes, you can increase it naturally. Obviously it's going to be harder and maybe not
19:00
as quick as taking a pill every day, but personally I wouldn't want to take a pill every day. Yeah, and this like. This is a is going to come up a lot at the moment because there's another. Ave. that I was looking at and because technology is catching up very quick now that we've mapped the human genome, there's epigenetics where we're understanding it better and better every day every month. So things are starting to come out now that do help you live longer but. Like. What? It's hard to describe because if you're unhealthy and then you take a tablet to make you healthier, you're just disguising the unhealthy habits and. I just don't know if.
19:55
I think it's still too early to know whether the human body will get healthy off a pill rather than. Doing the actual healthy habits that you need to live a long healthy life, does that making sense? Yeah. And also I think like taking a tablet like this one to like delay the onset of aging can only do so much work. Like if you have extremely unhealthy habits, there's only so much that a tablet or like the coenzyme NAD plus can do to like improve your cardiovascular health if you don't exercise and you take this as only so much. That's how it's going to be able to do for you. Yeah. So the natural ways to actually increase the amount of NAD plus you have in your body is can you guess the first weight exercise, exercise and in particular resistance training, because the more muscle you have, like the better your metabolism works. But that was going to be my whole point. Like aging means. As you age you can't synthesize protein as good. So the older you get you need to focus on protein intake. But then that protein is important for bone strength, muscle strength, ligament strength. Because as you age all that sort of stuff deteriorates and what prevents that is resistance training. And resistance training is the best thing you can possibly do to root for that anti-aging area is resistance training and if you already do that and then take a pill, that also. Aids that, yes, I think that is going to be a good combination, but if you take away the resistance training, add in the pill. Then I just don't know long term what the body will do. But yes, you can say all these studies, but I think it's going to take a couple of generations for that to for your body to change to get that. Benefit from a pill rather than actually doing the thing, because the human body is. Used to doing the things to get those benefits. Yeah, exactly. That's how we originally evolved. Yeah.
22:00
It's actually the like the decline in NAD plus that causes the slow of protein synthesis. Yeah, there you go. So if you were just to exercise more than you would increase your nerd plus and be able to. What are we saying? Synthesize protein more effectively? The other things that can help you increase it are. Food, so you can actually find it in small amounts of food, particularly just fruit and veg in general. Hot heat exposure so saunas which are always spoken about for increasing longevity, right? Limiting sign exposure, which I thought was a funny one, but I suppose. In Australia there's like a fine, like we probably only need to go into the sun for 20 minutes to reach our vitamin D levels a day, right? Yeah. And if you're in Australia and you're on holiday, it's likely you're spending hours and hours in the sun. So limiting is sun exposure and fasting and ketosis, which is also coming out to be a very common. There's being, I should say, there's a lot of research being done about. Ketosis in particular. And it's benefits for longevity. Yeah, right. They talked about it on the limitless TV series on Disney, and they also spoke about it. Someone spoke about on the Human Lab podcast. It's just coming up everywhere. Which I think I don't know. Ketosis is a very dramatic way to go about it because carbohydrates aren't bad. But. Yeah. I don't know. I think it would just be another thing to add in, like, yeah. Um, start by doing resistance training again. That should be the basis of everything. Then you can start walking. Then you can dial in your food. Then you can do this like sauna. Next thing, next thing, next thing. And then like if you want to take it to the next level, try ketosis. But don't go well. I'm going to go right to the undue ketosis without doing all the other stuff because it
24:00
could. You know, stuff your body up quite a bit. It should be if you're going to do ketosis. Properly or fast until you are in ketosis, which would be like, what, a two or three, three or four day fast? You should definitely do it like under medical supervision because you actually have to measure the level of ketones in your blood to know when you're in ketosis. Yeah. And I put all this sort of stuff in the other. Basket of supplements that they are supplements. And yeah, a lot of the time we forget that all these things like even I'm putting. I forgot. What are the new? Drugs coming out now. Not forgotten peptides. Ohh yeah, peptides are getting real popular, all that sort of stuff. They're all supplements, so they are there to supplement your lifestyle. So you need to change your lifestyle to be a healthy, fit, active person. And all these little things. Just supplement that. Do not rely on them. Like this is. Again, we see studies like this, we get all excited and then it's like, well, I'm taking this longevity pill. So I'm going to live a long time, but I do think people are going to start living a lot longer. But you need to be healthy fit. Active and then you type these supplements to help that and you are going to slow the aging process so you will live longer but. You need to be actively doing stuff to. Live longer and you know what is ironic? Like all of these longevity pills and drugs and stuff are coming out. But the reason that we need to find new drugs and stuff to help us live longer is because we have such bad habits now and such like bad lifestyles compared to what we had, I don't know, even 100 years ago. And look everything at the moment, it is hard like we just talked about. Social media, like social media shrinks your brain and that's going to aid you faster than anything. Like you might have a healthy fit body, but if your brains deteriorating,
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what's the point? You'll have this healthy. With a deteriorating brain, you've got to. It's a whole big picture that you've got to be working on and it is hard, but that's the whole point. It's meant to be hard. Like, it's not easy, unfortunately, because we have such easy access to bad foods, social media, all this other stuff. So it does take a lot of hard work and. It is worth doing the hard work, yeah. You just have to choose what you want, I guess out of life. And I think that will bring us straight back into not listening questions, but topics. So let's finish off with the topic because. We had a good conversation with some new clients this week about how much you need to do exercise you need to do to be healthy because they signed up and they were worried that I was going to give them working them all this stuff and. But. And that's not the case. I just want people to like, I would go over this a little bit, but just think about the minimal that what's the easiest thing you can add into your life now? To start being healthier, yeah. And that, I can't say do this because it's gonna be different for everybody, but just a 10 minute walk in the morning. Formula work. Just what's the simplest thing you can do to start being healthier? Start drinking a little bit more.
27:23
Yeah, just think about the easiest thing you can do to add in and the easiest thing for these. This couple to do was 315 minute workouts a week. All I did was designed each workout a little bit differently, so they're activating their muscles each muscle group three times a week in 15 minute workouts. And I just want to talk about this because it is so effective, especially if you're going from not doing much to adding in something.
27:53
15 minutes three times a week is plenty to start getting healthy and active. I think the whole um, like minimum. What do I call it? I've, I've set this goal with clients in the past where I get them to set exercise minimums and nutrition minimums. So like on your absolute worst day, what is the minimum amount of exercise you could definitely, definitely do? So that could be a 5 minute walk, it could be 2 push-ups. Like what is the absolute minimum that no matter what you know, you'll be able to achieve that minimum? Because once you have that. That habit and that timing of where the habit is and when the habit is. That's the hardest part about adding exercise or anything in like that. And obviously everyone's minimum is going to be different. So like for these guys, their new minimum is going to be 15 minutes three times a week. For us, our minimum is like a 25 minute walk, absolute minimum. For someone else who's like more of an athlete, they're minimum might be a 45 minute run every day no matter what. So you can always have a minimum no matter what your situation is or where you are on your journey and it just helps you never completely. Drop the bowl or like lose the habit. Yeah, it's like it's a great exercise to do and you it all like if you have a minimum. You are always achieving something which is extremely motivating. Like it's a lot easier for you to keep going if you're like easily achieving your minimum everyday no matter what life throws at you, right? Yeah. And I just feel like people overlook it because it is boring. Yeah, exactly. It's like, how could 15 minutes three times a week be? Like, and you just people just overlook it because it is so simple and it is so boring. Yeah. Because you see all these influences and all this sort of stuff doing all these workouts, eating all this good food, do all this stuff all the time. Like, well, I've got to do that to be successful. And it's like, well, no, you've just got to do a little bit more than what you were doing now. Yeah. And that's all it is. I I
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think I've said this in the past, but I'm gonna say again because it's a really good line or mindset to have. Doing 20% of your effort is still better than doing 0%. So if you can put 20% effort into exercise rather than 100%, it's still better than 0% effort into something. Yeah. And I'm going to give a real world scenario, Mac and I. So obviously we're packing up the house, moving. Anybody that's moved know that knows that it's. Stressful, so stressful. We're trying to organise our life here, to pack up and then organise a life in Melbourne to start and there's just a lot in between. So but we are still going, we still are. Still had a set up in the garage, our little home gym, we'd still go in there. As a habit of going in there, we didn't do much. Like I think one day I'll probably done. 30 or 40 reps in total? Yeah. So two exercises, probably two or three sets, didn't do much, but was still building that habit and continuing that habit of going into the gym and doing something. Yeah, because I knew if I didn't do that, I would have sat at the computer for the rest of the day doing what I needed to do. But I still kept that habit up. And you know what else we have, I think really been prioritizing since packing the house up is getting up and going for a walk immediately. Because when you have a million and one things to do, something like exercise or cooking food seems like an easy thing to drop from your To Do List. Or it seems like the thing that has the most resistance. Like it's the hardest thing for you to do that day because you could be doing so many other things. So by getting up and going for a walk, doing the hardest thing that is going to be like the hardest thing we have to choose to do, it's just like done. You don't have as much time to think about not doing it because you've already done it and. But a lot of people go well. I have to get up and do a hard workout. Well, no, just get
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up and do something easy. Yeah, right, because we've already got enough going on. Why would we go and do something that's hard? It's not going to be attractive where if we just let's get up and go for a walk easy, we can do that. Doesn't take a lot of effort because it's just walking. But we know we're getting our minimum effective dosing and then no matter what happens for the rest of the day, at least we've done that. Awesome. Yeah. Following thoughts on that? No, I'm good. Cool. Again, thank you everybody for tuning in. Like I said at the start, I can't think every single one of you enough for your love and support of this show. I'm excited for the next couple of weeks. What is coming up? But yeah, make sure you stay tuned and we'll talk to you all in the next episode. Bye.
