So I wanna shift gears for a minute and talk about exercise snacks. So we're gonna talk about improving metabolic health but also longevity, and exercise snacks, it's kind of a broader term but it really can refer to either a deliberate sort of type of exercise that you do for 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes, and this is anything from burpees to squats, you can do high knees, you can do, you know, there's a variety of different things that you can do to get your heart rate up really high in a short period of time. And we're talking at least 75% max heart rate. And there's studies showing that there's a real metabolic benefit to even doing a minute or 2 of this exercise snack type of exercise. And that again comes down to lactate.

Lactate, you know, you're forcing your muscles to work really hard, lactate gets into circulation, gets taken back up by the muscle, and it causes glucose transporters to come up to the muscle and sort of open the gates so that glucose can come in. And, you know, so this really improves blood glucose levels and there's been a lot of studies looking at this, particularly in people with type 2 diabetes, doing exercise snacks around mealtime. So anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour before or after a meal can really dramatically decrease the postprandial glucose response and improve blood glucose levels. Now sure, that's important for people that are metabolically dysregulated, people with type 2 diabetes, But like who doesn't wanna improve their postprandial glucose response?

I mean, that's part of what makes you feel sleepy and reduces mental clarity after a meal. So doing, timing these exercise snacks around meals is a great and sort of easy way to improve your blood glucose levels as well, and it's pretty easy to do. The other way it improves metabolic health is these exercise snacks, when you're doing a high-intensity interval training sort of thing, even 1 or 2 minutes, but mostly when you're going higher than that, like 10 minutes, 20 minutes, it's a very potent stimulus to increase the number of mitochondria in your muscle tissue. Again, it's an adaptation. You are forcing your muscles to work so hard that they can't use their mitochondria because it's— again, oxygen can't get there fast enough and so they're forced to make energy another way.

But your muscle's smart, it's like, oh, I need to like adapt so that the next time I'm working hard I can use my mitochondria. And the way it adapts is by making new mitochondria. It's called mitochondrial biogenesis. And high-intensity interval training is one of the best ways to increase mitochondrial biogenesis in skeletal muscle. Again, lactate plays a role in that because lactate is that signaling molecule, increases a protein called PGC-1 alpha that regulates mitochondrial biogenesis. Exercise snacks have also been associated with improved longevity. So there's another type of exercise snack that's a little bit more of taking advantage of like everyday situations. It's called vigorous intensity lifestyle— sorry, vigorous intermittent lifestyle activity.

And these types of exercises are like, let's say you work on the 4th floor of some office building. So rather than just walking up the stairs every day, which is better than taking the elevator, you sprint. Or let's say you walk to your office. Well, rather than just walking, you interval walk or you sprint there. You do some sort of interval where you're getting your heart rate up. So So there have been multiple studies showing that doing 1 to 2 minutes of vigorous intensity exercise, so people, these large studies, people are wearing wearable devices and so researchers are getting their data, their heart rate data, and able to measure something and identify people that are getting their heart rate up, right?

And so people that do 1 to 2 minutes of vigorous intensity exercise a day, sorry, 3 times a day, had about a 40% reduction in all-cause mortality, so that's dying from all like non-accidental causes of death, and a 50% reduction in cardiovascular-related mortality, which is like the number one killer in most developed nations. So this is again just 1 to 2 minutes, 3 times a day, where you just, you're doing those exercise snacks. It adds up, it's beneficial, and clearly it's making an effect in people's lives. And these benefits were also found in people that identified themselves as non-exercisers.

In other words, they don't like go to the gym, they're not, you know, they're not— They're not taking time to deliberately engage in a sort of exercise routine, and they still have these benefits. So how do you implement exercise snacks in your day? Why would you want to? Well, there's evidence out there that just being sedentary— so like right now, we're all sedentary. You're sitting— well, you guys are. I'm not. Yeah, you're sitting in your chair. You've been in here for about, what, an hour or so? That is sedentary time. When you're sitting at your desk at your computer for 6 hours or whatever, fill in the blank time, even though you're gonna go to the gym later or maybe you went earlier, that time that you're sitting is sedentary.

And being sedentary is an independent risk factor for cancer. So there is reason to kind of break up your sedentary time with exercise snacks. And again, these would be like a deliberate snack. sort of thing that you can do. So I think that maybe if we all just kind of stand up for a second and we're gonna do high knees because I feel like that's like the easiest thing to do, right? Like there's enough space for that. Like I don't think we can do burpees right here. All right. So to wrap this part of my talk up, all you need to do is some high knees, right? There you go. Yeah, so finding something that you're gonna do consistently, that's really important, right? I'm talking a lot about vigorous exercise, but it needs to be something that you're gonna do consistently.

Whatever it is, Norwegian 4x4, if that's your thing, I definitely like— you're amazing. So, you know, the thing is to really just measure your heart rate, right? That's the easiest thing. Make it consistent, do something you like.