You're listening to a Mama Mia podcast. Mamma mea acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on. Eat more protein. How about some salmon with that egg? How about some cottage cheese with that steak? How about you sprinkle some creatine all over that thing? What about protein powder and your protein powder for a morning smoothie full of fiber? And while we're at it, how many supplements? There's too many supplements? Should I, in
fact rattle when I walk? Speaking of walking? Is walking enough? Counting my steps? Is that just propaganda? Now? And if I manage to get to the gym, what should I do there? For decades it's been burned, baby burn, and now it's lift, baby lift. Does it feel suddenly like there's a set of new rules that no one sent you that you just get glimpses of them yelled at you through your phone? One hundred grams of protein, bitch as you scroll past a twenty eight year old with
fluoro athlesia and a neutrib bullet. Well, you'd be right. The rules are new because the old rules they were written for men, sweat, sprint, starve, And they were also written by the toxic body culture we were so surrounded by as we came of age. It was invisible to the naked eye, size zero, low rise genes, thigh gaps, crash diets, and the endless comparison game. Now we've woken up in what feels like a second puberty, and we've only just barely started to understand our bodies. They can
feel like angry strangers. Hormones are fluctuating, sleep is elusive. Joints ache for no reason, and we're told it's just the beginning. What wants work doesn't work anymore. What once felt intuitive now feels like guesswork. The new rules are kinder but also confusing. Move your body more, but don't overdo it. Eat red meat, but not too much, because your heart gets some sun for vitamin D, but also that face from those raisor rays. Sleep more, meditate, fix
your nervous system, add magnesium, track your cycle. Cut out sugar but not fruit or is it fruit too? If we decode it. If we find the new rules and write them down, learn to live by them, can we change what's coming? Protect our minds and our bodies from age, from wrinkles and falls, forgetfulness, aches and pains and the soft stand up grunt? Can eggs really do all that? Hello, I'm Holly Wainwright and I am Mid, Midlife, Midfamily, mid
lifting my tiny pink weights. Does it feel like you hit a certain birthday with a zero and everyone starts yelling at you about protein and dumbbells. Well, if it feels like that, you're right, because that's what happens. And for this last episode of Mid for season five, we wanted to ask someone smart to tell us exactly why that is, And so we found called Louisa Nicola and asked her what she thought of all the things midwomen
are told to do. Why Louisa, Well, because she is an Australian neurophysiologist and human performance coach who's living in the US and working there at the moment, right at the forefront of all the science about longevity and health and performance and exercise and food. She used to be a world championship triathlete, representing Australia at all kinds of major international events before a serious injury stopped her athletic
career in its tracks. But that also set her on the path to understand what she calls brain training and become an expert in basically telling us normies what athletes and high performance people know to be true. One of the things we're going to talk to Louisa about today is how to care for our brains as we age. But we are going to talk to her two about our bodies because that is one of the things that everybody's always talking to us about. What are the things
to prioritize to live better longer? To be honest, the priorities she told me were a serious surprise. So here we go. This is your Nobs guide to the new rules of a better life. But before we get started, I need to make this clear. The information discussed in this episode is not intended to replace professional medical advice. Supplement availability, safety, and regulation vary between countries, including Australia.
You always need to seek guidance from your GP or a pharmacist and ensure that any therapeutic goods are listed on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods before you go
near them. And if you listen to this conversation and you wonder, oh, I thought you might mention this supplement or this supplement, because I see them everywhere, there is a good reason why not, and that is because here in Australia we're actually pretty lucky that our regulations are really tight about what you can and can't talk about and promote. So if there are a few gaps here, that's why. But I still think you are going to
find this conversation with Louisa Nicola really really interesting. Protein, sleep, exercise. Oh my, Louisa, I'm just so happy to be talking to you today because as a woman of my age, I'm kind of completely overwhelmed by all the stuff I'm being told to do and knowing what's real, what's helpful, what's not. And then if i am, I know a lot of other women are right, and I'd like to
start with a big gun. So if there's one thing we can advise a woman who's in her kind of let's say she's in her forties, that her relationship with fitness is pretty typical, which is that maybe she goes and fits and starts. She might stick to a gym regime for a while and then drop out of it. She's had times in her life when she's been fitter
and times in a life where she's been less. So what is the one thing we can advise this woman to do to change the quality of the next twenty years or so, what would it be.
Well, first of all, Holly, thank you for how you're definitely tapping on something that is becoming quite an epidemic. We all are inevitably going to face the decline of estrogen and progesterone somewhere throughout our life. I think what's happening now is menopause is really at the spotlight. It is gaining a lot of traction. And this is really due to the fact that we had a lot of misinformation around menopause and estrogen, etc. And this is now causing a lot of women in midlife and even at
the age of forty to start rethinking their decisions. So to cut a long story shot, because I know we're going to evolve throughout this conversation, and to answer your question, what can a woman do right now to improve the next twenty years of her life? Well, look, she can do many things, Okay, but let's talk about what actually happens at this stage of life in the fourth decade. Well, the transition into many menopause comes at around a decade
prior to the menopause onset. So if we're thinking it around the average age, maybe forty two forty three is the onset of perimenopause. When we start to see the decline of estrogen and progesterome, we need to start thinking about what is actually happening, because in my opinion, menopause
doesn't just happen to your ovaries. It's a neuroendocrine malfunction. Really, we have a lot of things that happen to our brain and as a result of that, we then go through a cascade of issues ranging from bone mineral density. We see a decline in that, we see a decline in bone mass, in strength, in muscle mass, in cognitive functions, and these are the things we need throughout our lifespan, throughout my work and through what I do for a
living and what I research, which is Alzheimer's disease. What I can safely say is the one thing you should do right now in your forties is practice good exercise. You mentioned people. You know some women go through stages of they're really motivated, they go to the gym for a week, and maybe they go off the gym. And what we know is that consistency is key, right because if we're going to build a good foundation for our body when we're eighty and when we're ninety, even in
in your sixties and seventies. Really it's got to be consistent effort, consistently going to the gym, consistently putting in work, and if you have to follow a structured program from a personal trainer, I think that's actually becoming more of a need these days just to really get the foundation set.
So what we keep being told right now is to forget the hardcore cardio that we might have been doing to chase a dress size in our twenties and focus on weights. Is it that simple and is that the shift we should definitely make.
It's not that simple, But let me tell you there is a need for everything, every part of exercise. When we are looking into the scientific literature, we're usually separating exercises into three buckets. Right, We've got strength training, We've got cardiovascular training, which is your zone too easy, long long runs, long swim sessions, et cetera, cardio if you will,
and then we've got this high intensity training. Right, So if we look at across the board, what is going to give you the biggest bang for your buck it would be strength and that's because we lose strength and muscle mass at a very rapid rate. It comes on in the fourth decade, right, and we females need more strength if we had to, we still need to work
on our cardiovascular fitness. Right. When we're looking at cardiovascular fitness, we're also taking into account that we're training the powerhouses of ourselves, which is called the mitochondria. We've got more mitochondria than men. So a lot of this marketing what you're seeing when you're talking about zone two training, which is dubbed out you should be doing cardio at least three hours a week. That's really looking at males. Women
should actually be prioritizing strength. And when I say strength, I'm talking about weights, so resistance training and then high intensity training. That's like when you're going hard out, not hit training, but high intensity, hard out efforts, and then cardio.
I've heard you rail against the little pink weights we all.
Have, Yes, it's you want I try and say women should move away from the pink weights because listen, it's not doing you anything. You're actually wasting your time if you're at the gym lifting small lightweights. If we want to prevent sycopenia, which is age related muscle loss. If we want to enhance our metabolic rate and glucose metabolism, we need to without being too scientific, but we need to trigger mechano receptors in muscle fibers, right, and that
is triggered when we lift heavy. To improve our muscle mouse increase our muscle musk, we have to lift heavy. You're not going to get anything from lifting these two kilo dumbbells, which are often painted pink.
Okay, let's get a bit more serious. I think we'll come back to exercise in a while. So women in my age, apparently we cannot eat enough protein. It's just protein, protein protein. You can't buy cottage cheese anywhere in the shops at the moment because the older women have eaten it all. Eat eggs, fish, meat, eggs and fish more and more. I wonder if what we're being told is right.
Look, I actually thought it was and I still do. I think that bare minimum, every single individual, but mainly women, should be having at minimum one hundred grams of protein a day. In it it varies right, because we should be eating around one point six to one point eight grams perk of body weight. So you know, if you're seventy kilos, then literally just seventy kilos, you literally multiply seventy by one point six and that's how much protein you should be having a day, and that varies.
What does that much protein actually look like?
To be honest, it's quite difficult for a lot of women. It's quite difficult for me to hit my protein goals every day. But it looks like having one hundred and fifty grams of chicken breast for lunch, another one hundred and fifty grams of chicken breast or similar for dinner, having two to three eggs in the morning.
So the protein is key.
Protein is key. However, I just interviewed one of the biggest scientists in protein, so he was actually responsible for the twin study that was actually documented on Netflix, and he said something really interesting to me. He noted that muscle mass is actually muscle mass, and strength is actually ninety percent resistance training and ten percent protein. So I was even fed this lie. I was even fed this lie that we needed we needed so much protein to
gain muscle mass. But it turns out that if you're not actually stimulating the mechana receptors. As I mentioned earlier, if you're not even lifting heavy, but you're meeting your protein requirement needs, it doesn't even matter. But I just want to add on top of that as well. Protein also has other wonders where you can increase your metabolic rate by eating it. So it takes a lot to
digest protein. So once you eat protein, you're also burning calories and it keeps you full of for longer if you can try and prioritize at least one hundred grams a day.
Okay, that's good, sensible advice, good for me to know. I want to ask you about something else, vitamin D sunshine. I'm also being told lots of vitamin D.
Vitamin D is really interesting, right we call it vitamin D, but it's a hormone synthesized by the sun. Right now, I live in the US, I live in New York, so a lot of people in the US are actually vitamin D deficient. So we measure it over here with nanograms per deesoleader. And what we are trying to and you can do the conversions in Australian metrics, and so what we're trying to get everyone too is around sixty nanograms per deesoleader, but the average is around twenty nanograms
per desoleader. This doesn't mean that you are sun deficient, right, I mean it can, but it could mean that you are magnesium deficient. So I've had private clients and patients who we've worked on their vitamin D levels and we've brought their vitamin D levels up just by supplementing them with magnesium alone, because we need magnesium to make vitamin D. So vitamin D is extremely, extremely important. It's involved in
many and zomatic processes in the body. So if you want vitamin D deficient, and it's so easy to get tested, just go to the GP, get a blood test and you will see if you're vitamin D deficient or not.
How would you feel if you were vitamin D deficient? Like, how would you know if you were?
That's a thing you wouldn't know. It could present as dry skin, it could present as fatigue. It could present as going to the gym and not getting that not being able to lift heavy fast enough. But it's not like a you can't get a headache and think, oh I'm vitamin D deficient.
Yeah right, okay, And a few of those things you just said are often symptoms that menopausal or perimenopause or women living with anyway.
I know right.
After this break, Louise and Nicola and I discussed what might feel like the most elusive part of this whole thing.
Sleep.
All right, I want to ask you about sleep, because that's another thing we're being told is so important. And we all know that that's true, of course, but sleep hygiene is such a buzz term right now. Lots of products we can buy to optimize our sleep and measure our sleep and see how it's going. Sleep often becomes a really big problem for women around this phase of life. Anyway, We've got the anxious two am wake up that would be very familiar to lots of our listeners. How important is sleep?
So sleep is incredibly important. We go through many things during sleep. Sleep is not just this thing that happens right during sleep. We go through two different phases. We go through non REM sleep, and then we go through REM sleep. During the non rapid eye movement sleep, we go through a period which is stage three deep sleep. And I can't tell you how important this stage is to get into and to stay into.
Right.
We don't want to just get into deep sleep for ten minutes out of the night. We really want to be spending maybe at least three hours of deep sleep at night. I track my sleep, you know, rigorously, using three different types of monitors, and I can tell you even sometimes I am experiencing fluctuations in my sleep. So during deep sleep, what happens is we activate this system, which is called the glymphatic system, and this is like
a washing machine in your brain. What happens is all of the cerebral spinal fluid goes through your brain and cleans out all of the debris throughout the day. I'm talking amyloid beta that builds up during the day. We've got toxins, we've got oh the burdens. Apparently now we've got microplastics in our brain, which was actually stated first in an Australian study. So sleep is so important and there's so many things that we can do to improve both the quality of our sleep and the quantity of
our sleep. However, we now know that consistency and regularity of sleep is more important than quantity and quality. So going to sleep at the same time every day and waking up at the same time every day, which is so hard, right, I travel like every three weeks for work, so that's incredibly hard for me. But maintaining a regular sleep and wake up time and actually doesn't matter whether you're sleeping twelve pm till eight am, all right or ten pm till six am is based on your chronotype.
And you can take a chronotype quiz online. Just type it in. Take a quiz figure out whether you're an early bird or a night owl, and you can go to sleep at whatever time that you like.
There used to be saying that, like the hours before midnight are worth more than the sleep you get after. Is that true? No?
I thought that was true as well. But I sit on the board with one of the most well known sleep doctors and we had dinner probably i would say, two months ago, and I brought this up with here and he slammed the table. He's like, stop saying this, And he explained it to me that it's built on chronotypes.
Tell me what your sleep hygen looks like to get the kind of sleep that you do, Oh, tell me.
So it's really important for me to be able to bring my nervous system down prior to sleep. So a lot of people, if you work in a sleep lab right, for example, and you get a patient, you're often asked two things. Do you have problem falling asleep or trouble staying asleep? And it varies across the board. So for me, I sleep first of all, i sleep in a pitch black room, so I've got blackout curtains. I wear religiously an eyemask every night. Even though I've got blackout curtains,
i still wear an eye mask. I sleep on a temperature controlled mattress, and i know not everyone can do that, but it's a bit fancy, but it basically I have an app on my phone and I can control the temperature of the bed, so it goes cold and then hot and all throughout the night. I have said it at around fifty nine degrees fahrenheit, but it's actually separated into cycles, so it matches. It knows Louisa's in deep sleep, so I'm going to bring the temperature of the bed down.
Louisa is in light sleep, so I'm going to bring it down. I'm going to bring it up a bit more, and I've got an alarm on it. I'm like, well, bed, wake me up at seven am, so it starts to heat up at six point thirty in the morning because heat is actually what wakes us up. Well, heat and light. But it's like when the sun comes up, it warms your body, which then releases quartersole, and quartersole is what wakes you up. Right, So I've got the bed to heat up half an hour prior to waking.
Look that sounds awesome. Do you use mouth tape? I see mouth tape everywhere.
I sometimes do. I don't think it plays as big of a role as what we think. I think that's more in line with the beauty hacks. If you will, so, I don't mouth theare but I also don't mouthbreak.
So if I don't have a temperature controlled mattress and perfect blackout, the best thing I can do to get myself in a good place for sleep is to wind down. Yes, we've all heard no phones, no blue light, how long before bed? And also I hear the longevity guys saying you should stop eating a long time before you go to sleep. Does that make a big difference?
So when we eat, it raises our core body temperature. Now, in order to fall asleep and stay asleep, our core body temperature needs to drop at least two degrees. This is why I sleep on a temperature controlled mattress. You
don't want to be eating too close to bedtime. I usually say, make sure you've had your last meal an hour and a half to two hours prior to going to bed, and that's to allow for digestion, right, anything above that, right, I mean, Brian Johnson is having his last meal at eleven am, and I think that's just really really poor education and marketing for the world. That is, in my opinion, stupid. So I think that's in line with females.
So it's also that realistic to most people's lives.
Let's be honest, and I really want the women listening to understand that we are not men, all right, So if you hear a male say something, it might be great for us, right, but we have to do we have to dig a little bit deeper, and women just need more fuel in different ranges of you know, different stages of our lives. So I don't think that's correct. But I also don't think eating at ten pm and then going to bed at ten thirty is correct.
So, just while we're on what you were just saying about the men, do you think that one of the reasons. It can feel that the health advice coming at women, particularly women going through hormonal changes, feels like a lot is because we're sort of waking up to the fact that a lot of the medical conventions we've been sold about what's good for us, we're all about men. And now as we're learning more about women, there's all this new information to share.
Yes, so first of all, women very hard to study in the lab, So a lot of the studies that have been done have been done on men because they're easier. Why are they easier because you have to conduct the gold standard in academic medicine, which is called a randomized control trial. You need women over a long period of time. Now what happens with women, Well, we go through menopause, so hormones change. That's going to skew the data. Some women want to have a child with enter tain year framework,
so that skews the data. So women just became somewhat difficult to work with, right, So therefore not a lot of funding was placed upon them. So a lot of the funding was placed on men because they were just easier subjects. And then we put out all of this information.
Scientists were like, well, this fasting does this, or zone to training does this, and it improves this, but we've forgot to include women in that, and we just thought, Okay, well, this study says this, but we don't really understand sex differences. We're now becoming more attuned with sex differences between men and women. We know that women have more estrogen receptors in their brain than men. We know that men go through their own type of metopause, but the average age
of metopause for a woman is fifty two. Men it's in their seventies, so that's called andropause. So that was why all of the marketing was really geared at men. Yeah.
Right, and now we're understanding that better. There's a lot to learn all this.
So look, I'm I'm in neurosurgery three days a week. I study the brain rigorously. It's all I do. It's all I've done for the past fifteen years. And every day I'm like, oh my gosh, I don't know that.
Much before we get to dementia and Alzheimer's. You mentioned fasting just now, and I wanted to ask you about eating in general. A lot of women around my age have lived in diet culture forever, right, we've sort of withheld food food from ourselves. We've tried a million different diets. We've tried Atkins and keto, We've gone donat before two pm,
only at this time, not at that time. Do you think that women, maybe a lot of women are actually restricting themselves too much with food at this time in their life rather than not enough.
Yeah. I think women just don't understand food, right. We just you know, there's so much to learn. Fasting is both beneficial and can be detrimental. It depends and even with women just because we're all it depends on stages of menstrual cycle. What if you are planning for a pregnancy, you're starving yourself and then you claim that you're infertile, but maybe you're just not eating enough to produce the necessary amount of estrogen to go into ovulation, etc. So
fasting is great. It can turn on autophagy, which is whatever they can actually stimulate stem cells. But I think that women should maybe move away from that and maybe move towards understanding macro nutrients like how much protein do I need in a day, and how can I maybe get off sugar and saturated fats and ultra processed foods and eat a really good lean diet and exercise. It's not rocket science, right, It's like, you know, then we can look at calories in, calories out, but it's not
rocket science. If you are lifting and you are working out every day and moving your body, getting your ten thousand steps and eating a whole food diet without going overboard, I mean, that's the secret, sauce.
It's really interesting to shift to that. Nourish yourself rather than punish yourself. You know, I think a lot of women have lived a lot of years of life. I shouldn't eat that. I can't have that. I'm bad if my lunch is too big. It's like we've got a lot of emotion attached to it and we need to shift. Oh yeah, to a nourish active right yeah.
Nourishing your body and eating well to lift heavy is I think the new sexy. That's what we have to start to think. You know, skinny frail is just not going to cut it anymore. If you want to lift heavy, if you want to have the energy, and if you don't want to fall and break your hip, well, you have to get used to eating. You have to get
used to eating. The rainbow I just did a podcast with doctor Tim Spector, who's a professor and he is an epidemiologist who looks into the gut microbiome, and he was telling me how eating the rainbow is really important and that our gut microbiome is very much correlated to diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease. So feeding your microbiome, getting the necessary amount of nutrients is going to help you throughout midlife.
Also, the rainbow is a nice pet. Did to remember, eat the rain in bone. Make it as simple as you can. Yeah, okay, you talked before about if you want to not fall and break a hip. This is a large part of why we're telling women to eat so well and lift heavy. Right, it's trying to avoid osteoporosis. Is that right? Is that what we're all trying to avoid?
Yep. Yep Osteoporosis is something that occurs during the late stages, like postmenopausal women, just because of the depletion of estrogen. We have estrogen receptors on our bones, so if they are not stimulated through estrogen, and this is even if you're you're taking hit for example, if you're you're getting on hormones even if it's not. We need to stimulate our bone mass because bone mass obviously reduces the risk of osteoporosis and fractures. But what happens is we need
to stimulate something called osteoblasts. Okay, and that's the creation of these new bone cells. But what happens is we get during menopause a huge turnover of osteoclass, so the breaking down of the bones at a much faster rate than the osteoblasts. So we're not regenerating our bone cells as much. Now, how do we overcome that? Well, Vitamin D actually is incredibly important for that because our bones are made of many things, so vitamin D can help
you offset that. But nothing, and I mean nothing, compares to working out at the gym and lifting heavy like I mentioned earlier, weight training, mechanical loading.
After this break, I asked Louisa about what most of us fear the most when we think about getting older, dementia, Alzheimer's disease, and cognitive decline. I've heard you say that your mission to eradicate Alzheimer's disease? Now, am I incorrect? When I'm sometimes saying dementia and sometimes saying Alzheimer's Are they different things? Just so I've got my language right.
Yes, So dementia is the umbrella term that is used just to speak about a deficit in our cognitive abilities. Now underneath dementia sits Alzheimer's disease, dementia with Lewis body Parkinson's dementia front to temporal dementia. The reason why we know Alzheimer's disease is because it is the most prevalent out of all of the dementia's Alzheimer's dementia fifty five million people that I actually around sixty million people worldwide have this disease. That number is going to triple by
the year twenty fifty. So Alzheimer's disease is different. They've all got different pathologies.
Why is it going to triple?
We have substantial evidence to show that lifestyle and environment affects the rates of our Ceimer's disease. So I mentioned around sixty million people worldwide. If you have a look across the board, around ninety five percent of these people got Alzheimer's disease through lifestyle, not because of a genetic makeup.
So that's why when you say your mission is to eradicate it, you believe this is preventable with lifestyle changes.
I believe it is a one hundred percent preventable disease.
So a lot of the people listening to this will have loved ones who've been through this, and again maybe the umbrella term dementia, maybe not specifically Alzheimer's, and a lot of midlife women are terrified that's what's going to happen to them, because sometimes they've seen really distressing things happen to their loved ones in this space. So, of all the things we've been talking about today, is that part of what will help this prevention or is this the whole separate thing.
So, first of all, it's interesting to note that, yeah, one in three people, you'll you know, you look around you. If you're in a room with two other people, one of you is going to get the disease. Two out of three cases of Alzheimer's disease is female, which is even more scarier for females. Good and bad news. Right, when we talk about genetics, there is a difference between genetic risk factors and genetic mutations. Genetic mutations are mistakes
in the genetic code. For example, if you've got a genetic mutation on chromosome four, you will get Huntington's disease. Okay, we have When it comes to Alzheimer's disease, there's only three genetic mutations involved in the disease. That's Presnell and one, Presnell and two, and the APP gene. That only accounts for about I would say point five percent of the Alzheimer's disease cases. The other part of it is genetic risk factors. You've probably heard of the APE four gene.
This is a risk factor gene. Now we've all got the apoe gene, the APO lipoprotein epsilon gene, and we get two allyls. We get one from mum, one from Dad, and where it consists of a po E two, three and four. If we get two copies of the Apo E two gene, for example, which is extremely rare, but Apo E two is a protective, protective gene. So if you've got at least one ALLYL, then you're in a really good place. Then you can be an E three E three which doesn't raise your risk at all of
getting the disease, and it doesn't lower your risk. It's the average. I'm an E three E three carrier. I've had a patient who was E three E two, which was phenomenal. That's what I wish I had. But you don't determine that your parents do. Then we've got the APO e four gene. Now, the APO e four you can either have one copy or you can have two copies. Now Chris Hamsworth has two copies of the gene, which means that he raises his risk over ten times of
getting the disease. And this gene is involved in what we call lipid metabolism. So basically in our brain, we have different transporters that help transport fats, and so we can utilize fat in our brain, different types of fats. Right, and if we have the APO e four gene as opposed to the APOE two, the APO e four basically becomes a dumb transport. It doesn't help us. It doesn't allow us to transport fat as well as we do.
So what ends up happening, Well, our brain is the most vascular rich organ in the entire body, so then we end up getting the accumulation of fat in the vessels of our brain. So just like we do with cardiovascular disease, which is an occlusion in a blood vessel because of the build up of PLAK can happen in our brain. Now, this could lead to a stroke, or it could lead to an occlusion in one of the vessels in the brain, which stops our brain from functioning correctly.
So the APO E four gene raises your risk of getting the disease, but it's not a foe gun conclusion if you are an E four E four carrier. By the way, I think everybody should get tested. Everyone can get tested, and if you're scared, it's just like figuring out whether the bus is coming if you're on the road. You want to know what you're up against. You don't have to do it, but it's.
Nice to know.
So let's just say you do have either one copy or two copies. It just means you have to be a bit more vigilant with your lifestyle interventions. It may mean really honing down with your cholesterol panel right, looking at your LDL cholesterol, looking at your APO B cholesterol. We know that especially in women, and this was a really well known study that was released, especially in women who are E four carriers. You want to maintain a
LDL cholesterol level below seven that's American units. So we know that we need to really really consider cardiovascular disease risk as well.
So assuming that testing is available, but even if not, we should be considering all these lifestyle choices we're talking about today to be helpful in safeguarding against Alzheimer's as well as cardio issues and all the other things we might worry about in terms of our aging bodies.
Yeah, there's a real nice saying, which is what's good for the heart is good for the brain. So just remember that even if you don't have an E four copy, you are still at risk of getting Alzheimer's disease if you do not sleep well, if you do not exercise every day, if you do not lower your stress, if you do not look at your micro nutrient profiles.
So to recap, if you are going to tell midlife women who are totally lost when it comes to how to care for themselves, what should they start doing today?
I have this pyramid and the pyramid at the bottom of the pyramid for you to age well sits exercise. It is the ultimate, in my opinion, the ultimate elixa for longevity and brain health. So we really want to hone in the exercise. On top of that is sleep, and then it's nutrition. I would definitely recommend everybody getting a blood test, figure out what you might be deficient in, figure out are you perimenopausal? Is do you need to
discuss hormone replacement therapy with your obgyn. These are the things that we need to be doing. But the biggest bang for your buck. Oh and also lower the bad stress that comes into your life and manage anxiety. If you can.
There, you are friends. If there's one takeaway from that that I've internalized, it's exercise that the pyramid for well being goes. Exercise, then sleep, then nutrition of course protein, creatine, magnesium, sleep. If you like me, you probably need to listen to
this again and write some things down. And the other most important thing that Luisa said to us is to remember that we are not men as we start to understand our bodies again and learn to care for them now, respecting the complexities of the female body and specifically your female body is key. Okay, friends, go and eat an egg and lift something heavy and enjoy feeling kick ass. I will see you back here for mid season six
in a few short weeks until then. Thank you so much for being with us through this season of mid The executive producer of this episode is name A. Brown, The producer is Charlie Blackman, and we've had audio production by Jacob Brown. I'll see you next time. The information discussed in this episode is not intended to replace professional medical advice. Please remember that supplement availability, safety, and regulation
vary between countries, including Australia. Always seek guidance from your GP or pharmacist and ensure any therapeutic goods are listed on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods the AARTG