747_Dr. Sharon Bergquist
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[00:00:00] JJ: I’m J. J. Virgin, Ph. D. dropout, sorry mom, turned four time New York Times best selling author. I’m a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe, but I’m driven most of all. By my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information that I uncover with as many people as I can.

[00:00:33] JJ: And that’s where you come in. That’s why I created the Well Beyond 40 podcast. to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we’ll talk about what’s working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to powerful aging and prescriptive fitness.

[00:00:57] JJ: Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out. at 100. Don’t miss an episode. Subscribe now at subscribe to JJ. com to start unlocking your healthiest, most energetic self. I just heard what’s possibly my new favorite Mantra, and it’s this, the leading cause of disability in this country is disuse.

[00:01:27] JJ: This is what we’re going to be unpacking in this interview that I’m doing with Dr. Sharon Berquist. She’s an award winning physician, innovative healthcare leader, and visionary researcher, and she has been renowned for spearheading a science based approach to applying lifestyle as medicine. She’s helped lead numerous clinical trials, including the Emory Healthy Aging Study and the NIH.

[00:01:47] JJ: Funded Emory Healthy Brain Study. She’s widely published in peer reviewed journals and has contributed to over 200 news segments, including Good Morning America, CNN, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR. She hosts the Whole Health Cure podcast and her popular TED Ed video on how stress affects the body has been viewed over six Million times and she is a total smarty pants received her degrees from Yale and Harvard Medical School So we are going to be talking about her new book.

[00:02:20] JJ: It’s called the stress paradox. Why you need stress Did you hear that? Why you need stress to live longer healthier and happier And this is a fantastic interview. I am super excited about it. If you’ve been wondering about things like hot and cold therapy, about what do we do about these plant toxins?

[00:02:38] JJ: Are they scary? Should I be doing Zone 2? We’re digging into all of that. And again, that’s where that cool line, the leading cause of disability in this country is disuse, came from. So, stay with me. I’ll be right back with Dr. Sharon. And she also has a very cool List for you so that you’ll be able to measure and monitor where you’re at now and what happens when you start to put these principles into place.

[00:03:03] JJ: You can grab that at jj virgin.com/stress paradox. Alright, I’ll be right back with Dr. Sharon. Stay with me.

[00:03:18] JJ: Dr. Sharon Bergquist, welcome to Well Beyond 40.

[00:03:22] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: It is an absolute

[00:03:24] JJ: pleasure being with you. We have never talked about this before, so I am excited to unpack it. This idea, and great title for a book, The Stress Paradox, but the idea that, that not all stress is bad, and that we might need some good stress.

[00:03:41] JJ: And so we’re going to dig into that. How did you get into this subject?

[00:03:46] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: So, my background is I’ve spent the last 30 years in internal medicine and I also do research centered around prevention and how to age healthy. And so a lot of the goal of the work I’ve done is to help people prevent disease and age well.

[00:04:04] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: And along the way in the research, I stumbled really across this whole idea that stress is one of the most powerful ways that we can make our bodies healthier. Um, and there’s a lot of history behind how we understand stress today. And in the last 20 years, a lot of cellular and molecular biology that has enabled us to understand what stress is doing down to the level of our cells.

[00:04:37] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: And that is really my interest because I’m always looking for a unified way. Where we can make health simple and help people just do a few things that are striking at the heart of our foundation, ourselves. And, and ultimately stress is that thing.

[00:04:56] JJ: Well, so let’s, cause it sounds like we’re really reframing stress.

[00:05:00] JJ: And I think when people think of stress, they only think of bad stress. So let’s first start with what stress is.

[00:05:08] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: Yeah. So stress is really anything that throws your body out of balance. Anything that challenges you, it could be psychological, it could be physiological. And like you said, we understand stress to be something that harms us.

[00:05:24] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: In fact, our group has actually published studies on how stress can lead to heart disease. But what the new science is showing us is that it is also equally true that stress, that the stress can strengthen and enrich us. And that we can use these good stressors to build resilience against the harmful stress.

[00:05:48] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: And that’s really the paradox, that we need stress to build stress resilience, right? So it’s counterintuitive, it’s reframing our understanding. So our goal really now is not to, quote, cure stress, get rid of it out of our lives. Our goal is to optimize it. And that has huge implications for our health. Not just mental, but physical, how we age.

[00:06:14] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: Um, so that’s really what the new science is about. Um, and, and that’s what the book is about as well. Well,

[00:06:20] JJ: this is, this is, I mean, it’s, when you say it this way, it’s so obvious because it’s, it’s like, what do we do when we go to the gym? Right. Right? You know? Exactly it. So, then, it strikes me that it’s really A balance?

[00:06:37] JJ: There’s obviously some things that are bad stress, harmful, and there are things that could be good stress, but then, you know, even good stress, too much of a good thing becomes bad, right? 100%. So a lot of it seems like it’s about having the right amount of balance and I like you said it’s not about having no stress because, you know, I remember hearing, hearing this before and people talking about stress management.

[00:07:02] JJ: I’m like, what is stress management? It should be called stress balance, really, or creating resilience. So you talked about good stressors. What would good stressors be then?

[00:07:12] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: Yeah, so. Good stressors, so like you just said, there are a couple things that can differentiate good versus bad stress. So it’s the kind of stress, it’s the intensity of the stress.

[00:07:26] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: And the duration, um, that we are exposed to the stress, but one of the key things that has been borne out from this new research is that we have historically thought of, you know, like you said, too much stress is so harmful. So we can just bring that stress level down through meditation mindfulness. we can avoid the harm of the harmful stress.

[00:07:49] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: But what we’re really learning is that when we bring stress from that extreme to that mild moderate range, we don’t just not harm, we actually take off. There’s a Goldilocks zone, which we call the hormetic zone, based on the science of good stress called hormesis, hormesis being from the Greek to excite.

[00:08:12] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: That when we’re in this zone, we’re actually strengthening. So it’s not just finding that balance of getting less stress, but getting into that sweet spot where it is actually benefiting us. So the relationship, you picture the St. Louis arch, right? So in that middle Goldilocks zone is where that arch is at a peak, where our resilience.

[00:08:35] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: Is at its best when we have too much or too little. That is what is making us vulnerable to so much of the mental and physical illnesses that we’re seeing.

[00:08:48] JJ: And so even if it’s good stress, and I would think good stress would be, I mean, exercise is a great example. Too much good stress would take you out of the Goldilocks zone.

[00:09:00] JJ: How would one know? Because I would think for, you know, there’s a lot of talk out there, especially online about, you know, exercise and cortisol and blah, blah. And I think, wow, we have maybe, I don’t know, 20 percent of the people really hitting the exercise recommendations. Are we really concerned about over exercising?

[00:09:20] JJ: Like, is that really our big challenge out there in the world right now? I don’t think so, you know, but How would someone know whatever type of good stress it is? I’d love to unpack what those can be, but how do you hit the Goldilocks zone? How do you know how much is your right amount?

[00:09:40] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: A lot of it comes down to where you are and you just have to hit a point where there’s some discomfort, okay?

[00:09:49] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: Some sense of challenge. You have to be a little bit out of your comfort zone, but still feel safe and not overwhelmed. And for every person that’s going to be different, like to your point, if someone has never exercised, well, maybe doing a five pound weight can push them to that discomfort zone. If someone is a professional athlete, obviously it’s higher, but every time we go through that.

[00:10:17] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: Lift the five pounds, recover that stress, recover the recovery, of course, is when we’re building so much of our resilience and it’s like lifting weights, right? Every person has to start where they’re at. And then work their way up and keep pushing themselves out of that comfort zone. So there’s a lot of tuning in to your body and getting a sense of how you felt after that stress exposure.

[00:10:45] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: You know, if you’re invigorated, you feel energized, you hit that sweet spot. If you’re fatigued and if you need to be in bed, you know, you’ve clearly overexerted yourself.

[00:10:59] JJ: Are there tools, things like HRV that can be helpful here or are they relevant or not?

[00:11:06] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: Yes. Um, you can definitely use, you know, some people like to track, um, HRV.

[00:11:12] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: You can also use heart rate monitoring, however you want to track. Um, absolutely with heart rate variability. So for, um, anyone listening who may or may not be familiar, it’s the beat to beat variation. Because our heart doesn’t beat like a metronome between each beat, there’s a slight bit of difference.

[00:11:32] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: And the higher that variability from beat to beat, it’s a sign that our nervous system, the balance between our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, is doing well. So we want a higher heart rate variability to show that your body’s in a less stressed state. So you can track that day to day. I, I personally track mine and it gives me a sense if this is a day to, you know, have a big workout or, you know, cut back, um, but to your point about what you said of, you know, we hear all this talk about worrying.

[00:12:09] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: Did I? Over stress myself with this workout and oh goodness, this high intensity exercise, um, elevated my cortisol. I think what gets lost in the conversation, and this is I think what you’re alluding to, is that when we have a quick spike of stress, and it’s brief and intermittent, that our bodies love it.

[00:12:33] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: We are wired for this. So if, and this is true of all the good stressors, they’re brief and intermittent. So, if your cortisol goes up during a high intensity interval workout, and it will, and then it comes back down. What matters is not that transient increase in cortisol. What matters is what it does to your baseline level of cortisol.

[00:12:59] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: So when we go through cycles of peak, we are triggering adaptations through a stress response so that our basal cortisol level is lower. Just like you said with heart rate and blood pressure, right? We don’t not exercise because it spikes our heart rate or raises our blood pressure because we know that it’s going to bring our basal Baseline blood pressure and heart rate down over time So I think we also have to not fear these transient spikes in cortisol we’re actually made for it and that’s how we Stress our body enough so that our body becomes resilient to it.

[00:13:39] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: And the next time we encounter that stress, we are more resilient and we can handle more.

[00:13:45] JJ: I’m so happy you said that because I hear so much on the internet about, I, I spiked my cortisol or I spiked my insulin or I, and I went, um,

[00:13:57] JJ: like you could literally look at exercise and go, this is the stupidest thing to do. I’m going to spike my, my cortisol. I, like, I was doing some, um, some resistance training to see how high I could get my blood sugar to go because I was pushing so hard I got to 220 on my, on my CGM because I was, like, killing myself, right?

[00:14:17] JJ: Um, so you, you might spike your blood sugar, you might, like, you’re gonna definitely have blood pressure increase. On the outside, all this stuff looks terrible, but the adaptation is amazing. I do wonder, though, So, especially with women, in looking at women versus men working out, some of the stuff that I’ve read recently says that women have trouble identifying how hard they can really push themselves, that, um, their one rep max, they can generally push themselves more Then, then, um, they realize they can.

[00:14:54] JJ: And I just wonder if we might limit ourselves a bit. That’s why I was like, what tools do we have here? Because I think quite often we could probably push ourselves a little bit more, but there’s been so much fear mongering out there about cortisol. Like, no, you want, you want to do this. You want to train your nervous system to be able to handle hard things and recover.

[00:15:14] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, there’s an element of trial and error with any health habit. You know. No health habit works for everyone, um, but there are certain things that work for most people and what we’re talking about are really the non negotiables of our physiology. So if we ask the question, what are the good stressors, right?

[00:15:39] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: So the good stressors we’re talking about here, we’ve touched on intensity of exercise because it has unique changes in our physiology above and beyond moderate exercise. Um, but other similar good stressors include phytochemicals in plants and, and we can get back to why those, yeah.

[00:16:00] JJ: That’s been another one that’s freaked people out and I’m like, Oh,

[00:16:05] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: absolutely.

[00:16:06] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: Those are good toxins and we can come around to that. Um, fasting in a way that I’m going to call normal eating really in alignment with our circadian biology, yay, heat and heat and cold exposure. And then good mental challenges and good emotional challenges. And we can certainly differentiate the good and the bad.

[00:16:31] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: But the reason these are good stressors is not by accident that we’ve randomly picked these five stressors. These trigger hormesis, or good stress in our body, because what they do is activate our cells and their stress responses. And our cells, essentially, when they get triggered, they can resist damage, oxidative damage, inflammation.

[00:16:58] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: They have repair mechanisms. We can repair DNA. We can repair protein. Our cells start to recycle damaged parts and old parts that are ready to be kind of clothed over and our cells actually recharge themselves through mitochondrial mechanisms where our life force, the mitochondria that are making our energy.

[00:17:23] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: Get regenerated and we make better mitochondria and these are built into our physiology because for over 2 million years, our ancestors had these stressors built in their environment and it’s only been in the last 200 years that we’ve removed these natural stressors and as a result, we are not activating our natural defenses Against all these environmental exposures, against the factors that cause disease and are accelerating aging.

[00:17:59] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: So this lack of good stress has now become a huge risk factor for our health.

[00:18:06] JJ: So you just mentioned, I want to, I would love to unpack each of these. And it’s funny how they become like controversial, especially the plant chemicals. The hip versus moderate, um, Would you say then that the priority really is to do a short burst of intense exercise as contrasted with going out and doing like a jog?

[00:18:33] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: Well, you need the jog to be able to do the high intensity, right? If you don’t have a base of aerobic capacity, it’s gonna be really hard to get to that high intensity. So I think you’re going to need some moderate intensity to be able to reach the high intensity. But if you only did the moderate intensity without the high intensity, I don’t think you’re going to get the same stimulant to the adaptations.

[00:19:02] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: So there are unique benefits, and by that I’m referring to the fact that when we hit that certain intensity, like we talked about, our brain, our central nervous system, gets an adaptation that we wouldn’t otherwise with a moderate intensity. So with the hit, we’re releasing growth hormone and testosterone.

[00:19:21] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: And the hormones that we’re secreting are different, and that’s what’s causing our baseline cortisol to decrease. We’re also stimulating mitophagy, which is a selective form of autophagy. And so essentially what we’re doing is as we hit that super high intensity, we are rapidly depleting our energy and our cells have an energy sensor, A MPK or a MP kinase.

[00:19:50] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: And that sensor tells our mitochondria that we need to make more. So mitochondrial biogenesis, the growth of new mitochondria, starts to occur. And it triggers mitophagy where the old mitochondria are that are damaged, get removed. So essentially we are creating clean energy in our body, right? We are creating a renewable energy source, and all the mitochondria that are creating these emissions in the form of oxidative stress are being removed.

[00:20:23] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: So all the pollutants that are coming with these mitochondria are being cleaned up. So we’re essentially. Making our body full of clean energy and that stimulus of that rapid energy depletion is what really is this potent stimulus. And we also know that just from moderate intensity exercise, if we’re trying to improve our aerobic capacity or cardiorespiratory fitness, which is probably the single biggest predictor of our longevity.

[00:20:53] JJ: It is. It’s the biggest one. Why are we not testing CO2 max? It’s like crazy.

[00:20:58] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: Yeah, well, we do in our practice, um, and we can get to that, but, um, But I 100 percent agree that that is missing in medicine and it is so critical and 40 percent of people who do moderate intensity exercise are non responders to an increase in their cardiorespiratory fitness.

[00:21:21] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: We need to engage vigorous activity for that 40 percent of the population to be able to really push to the peaks of their cardiorespiratory fitness.

[00:21:33] JJ: I, you know, I think back, so I’m an exercise physiologist, that’s my training, and I think back to a client I had when I lived in Palm Springs, California.

[00:21:44] JJ: And I took her, she wanted to work out at the gym at the Desert Hospital’s Cardiovascular Rehab Center. So we go in there, and they’ve got everybody in there walking on a treadmill two miles an hour. Now they’ve got an amazing weight room. No one’s using and then no one’s really using it like the treadmills beyond just walking.

[00:22:06] JJ: So I have her doing little sprinting activity and then doing resistance training and the funniest thing was then everybody else wanted to do it too. And, and the PTs were absolutely freaked out about this because they thought this would hurt them. I’m like, oh my gosh, come on. And I think the cool thing about high intensity interval training is It’s what’s intense for you.

[00:22:29] JJ: So, I would start people out, like, I have people walk, but then I’ll start them right away, because someone’s high intensity interval training might be getting up and down off, out of a chair ten times. And someone else’s might be jumping onto the chair, you know? And it doesn’t matter, it’s as long as it’s intense for you.

[00:22:46] JJ: So this is, This is fantastic. And I’m really excited. This message is starting to get out there because I think for so long, the old way of aging was to slow down and take it easy and be gentle as you age. And I’m like, Nope, that’s not, that’s not the way to age. The new way to age is to continue to challenge yourself.

[00:23:05] JJ: And I just wonder if so many of these statistics we have about what happens as we age, losing our muscle strength and power is just because of the way we’ve approached aging, which is all wrong.

[00:23:16] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: The leading cause of disability in this country is disuse. So most people think it’s arthritis. It is actually disuse, which is so profound.

[00:23:31] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: Because we can control the leading cause that is leading to so many people being handicapped.

[00:23:39] JJ: That is the biggest, I just wrote this down, like, that is the biggest treatable line. I guess it’s no longer treatable, it’s X able. That is, what a line that is. The leading cause of disability in the country is disuse.

[00:23:53] JJ: And, you know, you look at what, 50 percent of the population is sedentary? The average amount of steps per day is 3, 000 to 4, 000. Steps a day. Like, it is, it’s, it’s horrifying and I feel like finally, you look at all of these things and if all we did was get people moving more, everything changes, everything.

[00:24:16] JJ: Okay, so that’s one of them. Let’s, let’s step into the landmine of, of, um, toxic plants. Ha ha ha. Those scary plants doing all those terrible things to people.

[00:24:29] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: So again, let’s go back to our relationship with plants and how we co evolve because I think that explains the toxins. So when our ancestors were hunter gatherers, they had to subsist on whatever food they could find.

[00:24:47] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: And so as a survival strategy, they needed to be able to have as many different types of plant food as possible. So some were potentially poisonous, others may not have been. So our bodies, over the two million years, have developed ways to rapidly detoxify any toxin that is entering our body. And we ramp up our own antioxidant capability.

[00:25:17] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: And when we eat these stressed plants, um, and we’ll, we’ll get to why they’re called toxins, but when we consume a plant chemical, a phytochemical, what it does is it activates our body’s own ability to ramp up our antioxidant defenses. So, in the last 50 years of Nutrition research. We have come to think of antioxidants as something we eat in our food.

[00:25:48] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: And again, I, I do a lot of work around nutritional science and I’ve been guilty of doing that. We call antioxidants kind of the, the skin or, you know, in the colors of the rainbow, right? That’s what makes this. And what we’ve come to realize is if you measured the actual amount of antioxidants that we are consuming, when we get them absorbed in our body.

[00:26:11] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: They are in these micromolar amounts and the amount that we need to neutralize free radicals is actually more of a, like a macro, uh, macro, uh, uh, macro amount. Um, and so there’s this disconnect, right, between the micromolar and the macromolar amounts that we need. And what’s really happening is when we consume the toxin, it’s activating our body’s own defenses.

[00:26:46] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: That toxin is signaling our cells. to tell our DNA to get expressed differently and we are ramping up our genes that have that code for antioxidant genes and we’re ramping up our detoxification enzymes. So the food is giving us what we need to build our defenses and it’s rapidly metabolizing that toxin and we have come Those toxins, which are the phytochemicals in plants, to really activate all of our defenses, right?

[00:27:24] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: That’s how we co evolved over time. So the question is, okay, why do plants make these phytochemicals? Why do they make the toxins in the first place? And, and the plants have no way of escaping predators, right? All plants can do is they can create These molecules, these toxins that are their phytochemicals to deter us and any animal or anyone who wants to chomp on it.

[00:27:52] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: And so these toxins are essentially the phytochemicals that they make as a strategy to be like a natural pesticide. When we consume that toxin, it activates our stress response, and our bodies have developed ways, again, to rapidly detoxify them, but, but the key here is that if we want to have a strong antioxidant defense system and to detoxify so much of microplastics, etc.,

[00:28:25] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: We have got to ramp up our body’s own ability to be able to neutralize and essentially fend off the potential damage in our environment. So this is. The good stress essentially balancing out the harmful stress that we’re, you know, it’s ubiquitous in our environment.

[00:28:46] JJ: So I remember having this conversation.

[00:28:50] JJ: I think you probably know Dr. Jeff Bland, right? Yes. You know, and he has Found this amazing Himalayan tart buckwheat, he’s actually now invested in, he’s growing it and it is one of those plants that people would’ve avoided before, and it’s so rich in nutrients that rejuvenate your immune system. And I was like, gosh, it’s, it’s like the poster child of this.

[00:29:12] JJ: So how did this get out there? You know, we got so afraid of all of these things, like, you know, lectins on down,

[00:29:21] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: you know, I don’t

[00:29:23] JJ: know,

[00:29:24] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: right, how these things happen, you know, honestly, JJ, I think what motivated me to actually write this book is we have to step away from What’s culturally now, what is the expectation?

[00:29:39] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: We have to step back and say, what does our body need? How has our physiology adapted? And these are non negotiables. This is 2 million years of how our bodies were designed to make us strong, help us thrive. And we have to go back to these basics. I mean, right now, one out of ten people in this country actually consumes the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables.

[00:30:08] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: We have more disease and more mortality from people not getting enough of what they need from food than mortality attributed to the things that we’re demonizing, like the sugar and the red meat. So the lack of these phytochemicals. Are the bigger risk factor and by

[00:30:30] JJ: many

[00:30:30] Dr. Sharon Bergquist: fold

[00:30:31] JJ: Wow You know what I love about this?

[00:30:34] JJ: One of the things one of my nutrition mentors taught me early on, he was like, add before you take away. And I remember when I used to see a lot of people one on one, they’d come in and they would have like emptied out their fridge and pantry the day before because they knew they were coming in to see me.

[00:30:51] JJ: Now when I say empty out, I mean empty out into their mouth, right? And I’d go, I’d go, you’re going to be disappointed because I’m not. Not taking anything away from you at the moment. Like right now, I’m just going to focus on, let’s make sure you eat your protein and get that in first. Let’s make sure you get your vegetables and your fruit because then we’ll just crowd the other stuff out.

[00:31:10] JJ: You know, it’s like, you’ll be full. Imagine that. So I love that idea. I had no idea that one in 10 people are actually eating the fruits and veggies that they need. That’s. That’s wild. I k
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