2025 October 21 Strong body, strong brain

You can view the original Facebook video here.

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me today to talk about health and science.

If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends and send me a message.

Tonight we're going to take a quick look at some of the emerging trends in health and brain science, especially as it applies to aging. It might sound a little boring, but actually these trends are really exciting in a lot of new ways because, based upon how our bodies and brains actually work, they also tend to turn a lot of the old paradigms we've heard upside down.

They're doing things like encouraging older people to stay really active, to build muscle, to challenge yourself mentally and to just not assume that health decline, both physical and mental, is a normal thing. There's a lot of evidence to show that isn't just really a normal thing.

What's even more interesting is a lot of these trends are being driven by younger people, many in the medical or health related fields who just weren't willing to accept the common story that's been created about aging in Western cultures. So we'll do a series of deep dives about this in the future, but I just wanted to go over a few of the developments and you'll see why I'm so excited about them.

Starting at the top - literally, our brain - there've been some amazing breakthroughs of late, although the research started quite a while ago. One is called the NIH BRAIN. But the whole concept that's been going on for a long time is that the brain is basically impossible to measure what's going on in it because it's too complex.

This project started back in the mid-2010s as the MICrons Project, and the first detailed results were just released in April of 2025. There's been intermediate things, but in April, they released a really detailed set of slides and analysis of what they discovered over the past decade, and the results have rewritten many of the underlying assumptions that have been used in neuroscience over the years.

What was discovered: they used a mouse brain and took a one millimeter by one millimeter by one millimeter cube. A millimeter is very small - take 27 grains of table salt and stack them into a cube, and that's how big the sample was that they were measuring.

So that itty bitty, teeny bit of mouse brain appears to have about 200,000 brain cells, which is kind of on the order of what people expected. But then it was discovered that they also have about 523 million - that's half a billion - connections between those brain cells, and it contained over two and a half miles of axons, which are the little information pathways in the brain.

Now it appears that they're not just information pathways - obviously it appears that now they do a lot more. So here you have this tiny piece of brain that they've been analyzing and they've been able to map it and map the interaction of those half billion connections and realize the brain's not storing information in a simple one-to-one format. It's truly acting in a 3D or more dimensional manner that's not yet fully understood.

To put this in more perspective, a typical human brain is likely to have trillions, if not hundreds of trillions of connections, all of which are interacting in a way that's not fully understood. Remember, this is just the next step in what has been so far a decade-long research project, and it'll likely continue to bring untold understanding and breakthroughs as it continues.

So why does this matter to us? From a scientific standpoint, most of the brain models and the related treatments for Alzheimer's and dementia have been done with pretty blunt instruments, both in technology and interpretation. Now, with the advent and usage of newer types of things like electron scanning microscopes and advanced imaging analysis techniques and software, we're becoming better poised to understand the brain and its problems at a far deeper level, and that may allow much better targeted treatments and even treatments that could be done without drug interventions.

Now moving down our body, we have to remember that our brain typically only makes up about 2% of our weight, but consumes about 20% of the body's energy. So think about that. 98% of your body down here is supplying almost a fifth of its energy just to support what's up in your head. So clearly our body's main function is basically to feed and care for our brain.

The next breakthrough, which started to become more obvious during the COVID pandemic, is that people in poor physical condition had significantly increased health risk. There's certainly been a correlation to that in the past, but COVID made it undeniably clear and also that the facts were not only known, but they were more serious than people had really thought. It wasn't just that they tended to have heart disease or something. People were getting infections and reacting worse to them because of poor physical condition.

So now, finally, more people are talking about the necessity of maintaining not only things like healthy eating habits, but that you really need to maintain strength. Not only to help your body and your muscles, but also to support your brain. And they're not talking about walking a thousand steps or lifting up a gallon jug of water. They're talking about a really intense active exercise program that promotes muscle development and causes your heart to work harder so that it continues to operate at a high efficiency level.

The meta review of over 2,700 studies shows that strenuous exercise lowers the risk of dementia by over 41%. Plus there are numerous other brain benefits as well, and of course the overall health benefits.

This is counter to the recommendations of previous years that emphasized limited gentle exercise as we age. But there's been this long-term knowledge that careful use of strenuous and high impact exercises increases bone density, improves bone structure, increases bone mineral content, tends to reduce spinal and muscle pain, builds up your muscles, builds up your ligaments. Basically it's the best thing you can do for your body.

Obviously that doesn't mean go out, buy a trampoline or start playing tackle football tonight, but it does mean carefully stressing your body slightly over time tends to improve not only your skeleton and your muscles, but also greatly improves your brain.

We haven't even touched on sleep and circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythms is very close to my heart. I used to be co-founder of a circadian lighting company. We were a little bit too early. It didn't start to catch on until a couple years ago - we were long gone by then. But happily, mainstream medical opinion is finally starting to catch up with the studies which show that the various types of artificial lighting that are commonly used in our workspaces and even our homes can have a significant negative impact on both our sleep and our overall health.

Sleep itself can be a whole separate topic since the quality of our sleep has a huge impact both upon our brain health overall, and especially cleaning out the waste products while we're sleeping. It was discovered that the spinal column and the spinal fluid in your spinal column were kind of just like a reservoir. It turns out there's an actual regular pathway where the spinal fluid goes up, circulates through your brain at night when you're in a deep sleep and washes out all the things that try to get out of your brain.

If you don't get good sleep, that impedes that process and it really accelerates brain deterioration.

However, there's even more. Finally, psychology and social sciences are starting to realize that things like ADD or ADHD are kind of a design feature, but one that's actually typically a more purposeful development in response to environmental stress. Environment in this case is in the general sense - not just things like the weather, but your entire environment. If it's a noisy and stressful environment, all of that actually has an effect upon things like ADHD.

One author in particular, Dr. Helen Taylor, described ADHD as many people diagnosed with ADHD being specialized in broad exploratory learning, and then goes on to develop that whole theory in a recent book she published with others, talking about how societies and cultures used to, and still do, nurture different types of thinkers to be more resilient against unexpected challenges.

So rather than being alarmed that so many children and adults are being diagnosed as being on the spectrum, perhaps the better question they ask is, what is it about the environment that's causing this form of exploratory learning to be increasing within our society? Typically that's used when there's stress in the society. So what is it about our society and our living habits that's putting so much stress into our life?

This is all very exciting and it's finally opening up, ever so slightly, a tiny crack in society that may once again allow for more creative thinkers to be accepted because a lot of people with ADHD - it's finally been pretty much publicly debunked that they can't concentrate on things. It's that they concentrate differently and often very intently.

Remember, many of our great discoverers in the past, they weren't normal people. Whether it was people like Michelangelo, George Washington Carver, Madam Curie, Daniel Webster, Hedy Lamarr - yes, the actress who was also heavily involved in the war effort during World War II, doing secret radio code methodology as a developer - W.E.B. Du Bois, Albert Einstein. The list goes on. All these people worked outside of the norm and the world was far better off because of them.

There's even more, such as diet recommendations and things along that line, but not tonight. I do hope you can see why I'm excited that many of the health and wellness developments, both in general, but especially as they apply to our aging population, and especially as they apply to brain health - it's not only that good advice is once again starting to become more mainstream, it's that we can see the opportunity for maintaining or even improving our lives as we age without the need for pharmaceuticals.

We'll do more on this because it's such an important and timely topic, but remember, even if you just start with the basics: Eat better. Avoid known junk foods. Be as active as you can comfortably be. Always talk to your doctor, obviously, and of course, have social interactions. Look to the good, be thankful, help others. All these are excellent steps towards maintaining or even improving your health and your brain as we age.

So that's it for the evening. Your homework for tonight is to pick one physical thing that you could do, but perhaps have been putting off starting, and just think about it and say, I was thinking maybe I could walk around the block, maybe I could do some chair exercises. Whatever it is. Think about one thing and just bring that to the forefront of your mind.

Extra points if you take that action and work it into your schedule and actually start doing it for a week or two. However, remember to write down how it makes you feel. And if you discover that you're starting to think more clearly and with a more upbeat attitude, those are things that usually come out of exercise that puts a little more effort on your body. Again, talk to your physician if you have any concerns about that, but your body is meant to work and when you work it a little bit, a lot of good things happen.

Thanks. That's it for the evening. Of course, as always, remember UKR7.com to support the people in Ukraine. Things there are just continuing to be not good. It's in the fourth year of the war and it's just a mess. And WCK.org, World Central Kitchen - they work in disaster areas around the world, do amazing things, bring in food and help support the local people until the bigger aid agencies come in. One of the things is they usually get in and get started very fast, so they're really effective at doing that.

Remember, there's a lot of things going on in the world and there are these big national, international organizations, but there are also organizations right near your town and they can always use help and they can always use volunteers or time or money. And if you're not in a position to do that or you're just not in a mindset to do that, all of us have the ability to just look outside ourselves and smile at somebody, or just make somebody's day a little bit better.

One of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. And whether you do it on a huge scale, national, international scale, or just smile at somebody in the street, it can change the day for the better and just make the world a little bit better place. 

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along. Please subscribe and hit the like button, and please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dreamed of because that's the path to true contentment, love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.