Dr. Rhonda Patrick

I am so excited to be here having a conversation with you.

Let's take a step back.

And I think you brought up a really important point here.

We evolved to intermittently challenge ourselves.

And before we had Instacart where you could basically just get your food delivered to you, we were out hunting, gathering, we were moving, and we had to be physically fit.

You couldn't catch your prey if you were a sedentary slob, right?

Physical activity was a part of everyday life.

And caloric restriction or intermittent fasting was also a part of it.

This is another type of challenge.

You know, we we didn't always, you know, have a prey that we caught or maybe temperatures were such that, you know, there was nothing for us to gather.

Right.

So food scarcity was something common as well as eating plants.

So getting these compounds that I mentioned.

So these are all types of stress, intermittent challenges that activate genetic pathways in our bodies.

These are often referred to in science as stress response pathways because they respond to a little bit of stress.

You know, physical activity is strenuous.

Fasting is a little bit stressful.

Heat, cold, these things are all types of little intermittent challenges.

There is a lot of crosstalk between these stressors and the genetic pathways that they activate.

And these genetic pathways that are activated help you deal with stress.