MOVE LIKE A MIDDLE-AGER, EAT CHOCOLATE, DRINK COFFEE

I was recently in Brussels and took the opportunity to visit the city’s fabulous collection of Old Masters.  The Brueghels (or Bruegels, as you prefer) caught my eye – not only for their colour and verve but for their insight into how our ancestors lived.  Look closely at these paintings of sixteenth century village life and you’ll notice that everyone is moving, lifting, pulling, pushing, carrying, tugging, bending, twisting, reaching, and so on.  Sacks are yanked, wood is axed, fruit is picked, sledges are pulled – and so on

How, I wondered, would Bruegel paint a present-day suburb?  I’ll let you ponder that one…

But what really interested me was the variety of movement innate in an average day.  Our ancestors lifted, turned, bent, hoisted, perhaps not as we might in a yoga class but as part of their everyday lives.  Call it a movement-rich environment, if you like. It’s how we evolved to live, our bodies constantly working through full ranges of motion.

That evening three new studies appeared on my longevity news feed (requisite daily reading here at the Age-Well Project) that reflected – in a very modern way – some of what I witnessed in Brueghel’s paintings: the importance of short bursts of activity, the power of CrossFit (I’ll explain) and the link between muscle and dementia.

Firstly, a new study found that  just 1.5 to 4 minute bursts of heart-pumping movement spread over the day —  researchers call these vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activities (VILPA) – can reduce the chance of heart disease and heart failure by a whopping 40-67%. Particularly among women.

The researchers found that female participants doing an average of 3.4 minutes of activity bursts a day were 51% less likely to have a heart attack, 67% less likely to have a fatal heart attack, and 45% less likely to develop any type of cardiovascular event/heart disease, when compared to female participants not doing any heart-pumping minutes of activity.

Nor was this all: the researchers also found that, for women, tiny doses of heart-pumping movement (amounting to as little as 1.2 to 1.6 minutes over a day) were linked to a 40% decreased risk of heart failure, a 33% lowered risk of heart attack, and a 30% lower risk of all major cardiovascular events.  Susan and I both lost our fathers, too soon, from heart attacks. So we’ll take this!

But what are examples of VILPA? Well, they’re exactly what Brueghel shows us.  The daily activities of our ancestors included: carrying baskets of logs/apples/fish; carrying babies and toddlers; kneading dough; washing sheets by hand, before wringing them out and hanging them to dry; digging the garden; splitting logs; dancing; dragging fallen tree branches; beating cushions and turning over mattresses. And so on. Any of which could have lasted for just a few seconds. The authors of this study suggest taking the stairs instead of the lift, and carrying bags of shopping. But once upon a time (and not so far back in time), an average day would have included all manner of VILPA.

Which brings me to CrossFit – a (trade-marked) term used to describe a style of exercising that involves both cardio/aerobic and strength/resistance often at the same time.  Our ancestors, unbeknown to them, were doing CrossFit constantly.  When you pull a sledge uphill or run home carrying a sack of logs (etc etc – just look at a Bruegel painting)  you’re working heart, bone, muscle – as well as things like hand-eye coordination.

A new study of CrossFit followers found that CrossFit had impressive results on health and medication usage:   54% of participants who’d been taking a prescription drug before starting CrossFit said they had decreased their dosage. Among this group, almost 50% stopped using their medication entirely.  What sort of medication did this include? Antidepressants, painkillers for arthritic and back pain, medication for anxiety, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes (although it’s not clear exactly which medication was relinquished.)

CrossFit programmes excel at changing and varying movements, which we know is important for targeting all the body’s muscle groups.  But it’s also a shared, social activity (you attend CrossFit classes) and the researchers speculated that this sense of community might be contributing to its health effects.

To which I recalled (yet again) Brueghel’s paintings.  In the Belgian villages he depicted, no one was puffing away in a lonely gym or a shared CrossFit class.  As they heaved logs and danced, (often dressed in the wintry equivalent of a weighted vest) the Belgian villagers were surrounded by their very own community – family, neighbours, fellow labourers, animals.

So if CrossFit (find out more here) doesn’t appeal, try carrying your Christmas shopping home as you greet passers-by, perhaps picking up the pace between a few lamp-posts, and lifting your bags occasionally in the manner of a bicep curl.

The bicep curl is important. Perhaps more important than we once thought. The final study to assault me after perusing Brueghel’s masterful paintings, linked good muscular health to good brain health.

Researchers used MRI scans of a specific jaw muscle to track 600 adults for nearly 6 years. People with the biggest muscle loss were 60% more likely to develop dementia.

How so? Well, scientists now think that muscle tissue operates like an endocrine organ, releasing  hormones – called myokines  – that improve the health of our nerve cells. In other words, when we use our muscles, hormones pass into our blood, benefitting all of our cells, including those in our brain. Myokines also keep inflammation in check. And as we age, our bodies typically become more inflamed (a process known as inflammaging which we covered in detail in our first book, The Age-Well Project).  So building muscle may be as essential to our brain as it is to our balance and bone strength.

In case you’re wondering whether lots of gnashing, chatting or masticating might exercise the jaw muscle, I should point out that this is actually a skull muscle that has proven to be an excellent indicator of overall muscle strength.  So, no, neither talking nor munching will have the same effects!

And it’s our bodily skeletal muscle that needs working, and can be worked in the manner of Bruegel by lifting, pulling and pushing (carefully of course). Or by working out with a pair of dumbbells and the usual squats, lunges and whatever resistance training you like to do.

In homage to Michael Mosley, I do two minutes of squats (that’s around 40-45 of them) as I’m having my daily cold shower. I top up with two minutes of lunges on my morning walk. I tackle my  upper body with a few minutes of weights in the afternoon\evening (when we can lift more, thanks to the circadian nature of muscles which I wrote about in The Guardian).  Not quite Brueghel, but it avoids the Gym and the necessity to diarise a CrossFit class, and feels effortless enough to me. If you’ve tried a CrossFit class, please leave a comment in the box. I’m tempted to try a class in the new year (just for research purposes but who knows…)

And before I finish with muscle, let’s not forget that muscle appears to benefit – a little weirdly – from probiotics, or a diet rich in fermented food.  An October meta analysis (that’s a study of studies) found that people aged 60+ with sarcopenia (muscle wastage) improved their handgrip and walking speed merely by supplementing with probiotics.  This is fascinating: ‘Nutritional strategies based on probiotic supplementation had statistically significant positive effects on the improvement of muscle strength and physical function,’ noted the researchers.  You can dig into the details here. The probiotics used were, for the most part, a brand called Vivomixx (Visbiome in the US). If anyone has used this brand, please do leave a comment in the box.

Christmas is coming and we like chocolate, so here’s some good news that landed today: in a study of milk and dark chocolate (involving over 100,000 people), researchers found that participants who ate 5 or more servings of dark chocolate a week (a serving was anything between one ounce and a typical bar) had a 21% decreased risk of developing type 2 diabetes…. ‘Epicatechin intake may partially account for this,’ noted the lead researcher.  These results were more marked in men.  Dark chocolate (50-80% cacao in this study) didn’t result in any weight gain either.  Milk chocolate, however, was associated with weight gain and had no preventative effect on diabetes. So tuck joyfully into dark chocolate over Christmas.

The same goes for coffee.  Drinking coffee in moderation has been linked to better health for several years now. But researchers didn’t fully understand the reasons for this.  A new study – the largest examination ever of coffee and the microbiome –  suggests it’s to do with the gut.  In this study, researchers noted ‘a tight interplay between coffee and a specific microbiome member, Lawsonibacter asaccharolyticus.’  This species of bacteria was only discovered in 2017 when it was first isolated from human faeces.

After comparing data from stool samples collected from coffee drinkers and non-drinkers, the researchers found that coffee drinkers had up to eight times more of this bacteria than non-drinkers.  Why is this interesting or important? The researchers speculate that Lawsonibacter asaccharolyticus might help our bodies better metabolise the coffee’s polyphenols, simultaneously turning them into the prebiotics on which our gut microbiome depends.

So if you want to improve the diversity and abundance of good gut bacteria, keep drinking coffee. And yes, the results were the same for decaff. You can read the full report here.

We have lots of coffee and chocolate recipes on the site (just put those words into the search engine or have a browse around), but a cup of coffee and a piece of dark chocolate is all you need. If you’re in a baking mood, you could knock up a batch of these chocolate and coffee brainies/brownies.

On that note, I and the Age-Well Project wish you all a very happy Christmas and a wonderful New Year.  We’ll see you in 2025, with lots of fascinating and exciting news on other ways to age well…

Annabel