Written by Christopher Kelly
July 1, 2016
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Christopher: Hello. Welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly. Today, I'm joined by Dan Pardi. Hi, Dan.
Daniel: Hey. Great to be here.
Christopher: Thank you for being here. I'm really excited to have you. For people who don't know Dan, Dan is an entrepreneur and he's a researcher. He's done some work at Stanford. I think of you as someone who is super smart and very committed to making people feel awesome. You've created a whole bunch of very powerful tools to make that happen. For people who didn't hear you on my previous podcast, we'll link to that in the show notes. Dan, can you just give us a parted version of your background and interests?
Daniel: Yeah. Thank you. That's really nice of you to offer those compliments. Gosh. I've been interested in health, really, my whole life. I think it started from developing an injury early in my athletic career. I was playing soccer, twisted an ankle. I think experiencing that early in life shifted how I viewed the body because I wanted to solve these problems so that I could get back on to the field or the court and continue to play because I was pretty much obsessed with athletics growing up. I think that was probably the origin. Of course there were a lot of other experiences along the way that continued to, I think, show me that this was the path to pursue.
As I went into college I didn't really know what to study. So I studied sports medicine. I got a double major, double minor sports medicine, exercise physiology, and then even from sports facility management. I kind of took everything to try to see what the right fit was for me. Basic sciences were really attractive at that time so I pursued a master's in exercise physiology. In that course there are two different applications. You could have more of an application type of exercise physiology track which is learning how to apply the scientific knowledge to help train people better. Even in that program I was still attracted towards more of the basic mechanisms. I studied, really, more of a neuroscience control of cardiovascular systems and then also body fat regulation.
When I graduated with my degree there I went to work with Dean Ornish at the Preventive Medicine Lifestyle Institute. What I really like about his research still is that he was looking at not just one factor like selenium levels in his research, he was looking at a whole lifestyle approach to affect internal hormonal milieu of the body to see if that could then affect things like progression of cardiovascular disease, progression of prostate cancer. So whether or not you agree with his, if you are aware of his work and you agree with his kind of perspective on nutrition or not I thought that that was really valuable work.
So I was there for a little less than a year and then I went to work in the pharmaceutical industry for almost a decade. I worked in scientific and medical affairs which does scientific support on approved products. So I ran a research grant program and scientific publications. Going into that company we had a drug on sleep. I knew nothing about sleep. I just fell in love with the subject. In that role I got to interact with really the top sleep researchers from around the world on a daily basis. I felt so lucky to be in that position interacting with the people that I was, and then also learning about this fascinating subject, a subject that is really a window into how the body works in general whether you're talking about the immune system, whether you're talking about how well we think day by day, whether we're talking about just simple health processes like cellular repair.
When I was there for a while I decided then to leave to pursue my PhD which I'm doing now, and then also thinking about the rest of my career, what I really want to do, what I want my contribution to be. I harken back to the work with Ornish, I loved this lifestyle approach as a means of prevention. That made kind of indelible impression on me at that time in my life so I wanted to get back to it. Since 2010 I've been pursuing my PhD but slowly since I'm also working on my organization at the same time.
My PhD work is at Leiden in the Netherlands and at Stanford under Jamie Zeitzer in the Circadian Biology Department. I look at things like hormones related to sleep and then also cognition and eating patterns in response to what I call ecologically relevant sleep loss. So not missing an entire night of sleep but just a little bit of sleep, does that affect how we live the next day? Concurrently I developed this behavior model called the loop model to sustain health behaviors which I developed in collaboration with a group of behavioral economists to say, "Okay. What are the different factors that shape how we live? What can change how we live? If we have this aspiration to be something different or better or to be the best version of ourselves, how we can get people to do that?"
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I think it'll be a lifetime quest but one where I feel I will not only continue to learn but there's contributions that can be made. I'm thrilled with how I get to spend my time. It's just a high degree resonance and how I live day to day to do what I do.
Christopher: That's awesome. I've got CV envy. That's amazing though. I'm just wondering how it went down, how you were dragged out of what sounded like a really good job and back into academia. Did you have to make a clean break or did both things happen at once?
Daniel: Yeah. That's a great question. I did have the benefit of being able to consult for a period of time with a European counterpart for the US-based company. That was great because it paid well. It gave me a little bit of room to think more deeply on these ideas of how to help people who live an optimized lifestyle, and just in the early stages of the process when you're not even sure what your ideas to just have that space for brainstorming and going off in a bunch of wrong directions to try to find one that's right. Maybe you wouldn't call that the cleanest break. It was fortunate that I could do both. Consulting didn't mean I had to work full time. I could work part time. That gave me that space to really think more deeply on what I'm doing now.
I'd love to continue to keep a foot in academia because there's a sharpness of thought that academic thinking will foster but then I wouldn't want to just be doing research to say, "Hey, is this effective?" I want to be able to say, "Okay. Let's now actually serve as a scientific journalist to say what does the research say and then what is the appropriate way to try to apply that or help somebody apply that to their life" because as you know, scientific researchers are so incredibly valuable to how we live but so many research studies, they're not looking necessarily to find an optimal approach for an individual. They're looking to asses interventions at highs and low, extremes like let's give X amount of this, X grams of this substance compared to none at all or very low amount. You have to then look at the data but then the art of health science is then weaving it together in a way that uses good sense and wisdom across studies to come up with something that's practical and achievable.
Christopher: Do you ever get the opportunity to talk to an academic that made some discovery and say to them, "Well, that's super interesting but clinically it's totally useless," and you would be in a position to know that because you have developed tools like dance plan and the ideal weight program?
Daniel: I wouldn't say that it's clinically useless but what I would say is that it's connected from a clinical directive. So it might just be several steps away that could lead to a potential intervention. That is something that I think a lot of people misunderstand when they talk about like "Oh, this is poor science" or often times might write a study in mice. A very common comment that you'll get somewhere in the social media is like "Oh, because we're just like mice." It's not that you can necessarily apply research in animals directly to humans but part of that process of moving in that direction is to think "Okay. If this data was to perfectly apply to humans, what would it look like?" That's hypothesis for me, and then you think about it that way, and then that advances the science a little bit because you can then come up with a protocol that might test the intervention in human.
It's not like animal work is bad research. It's understanding how to appropriately apply it and the steps along that process to turn work that's not in humans because there's so much work we can't do in humans directly but then to say, "Okay. Yeah. How could this apply to people?" Sometimes even with clinical work we're left to speculate on okay, all right, so we can't wait for all the research to be done and then try to be healthy. We have to make our best guest today. So if I see that certain [0:09:36] [Indiscernible] are affecting circadian genes in mice but those same genes are within humans then I feel okay to speculate on what that might look like if it was a human intervention, and people can do with what they want with that info.
I think a lot of "poor science" that you hear is usually misinterpretation of data whether it's in the press or even by the researchers themselves. You can tell that they're excited about a thesis. Their bias is shifting their analysis which happens. It happens for human but it doesn't necessarily mean the research is bad.
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Christopher: I think I've been in one of those trials that complained about your reporting on rodent studies because I work with the guy that does rodent studies. He talked about the limitations of those rodent studies on my podcast. That's Tommy, of course. I have several concerns with those. I wonder whether you should be reporting those to lay people at all. That science, is it for other scientists and not for people like me?
Daniel: Yeah. That's a fair question. It depends on what you're looking at. I think sometimes people forget that there's some overlap between what's happening within the physiology of an animal and us. Now, it doesn't necessarily translate perfectly most times. It doesn't even translate perfectly from human to human if you're doing human work. It does depend.
Now, if you're looking at dietary studies in particular, for example, in mice, when mice eat a high fat diet then that can cause them to become obese. What is the diet composed of? It doesn't necessarily mean that humans are going to experience the same clinical impact from eating a high fat diet. When you can show, for example, that by eating a high fat diet that you see inflammation in the hypothalamus and you see microgliosis and you see endoplasmic reticulum stress, all markers of stress from the high fat diet is in the mouse, but then you also now see radiographic studies at University of Washington that show yeah, in response to high fat diet humans actually show high overlap in terms of negative consequences to certain types of dietary fats.
The right thing to do is to look at the body of work and not just say, "Here's one study. This is what it says. We should do stuff based off of that." But it's to say, "Okay. Here's a new interesting study. What does it mean or what could it mean? What else can we look at to basically" -- it's like you're in a dark room. You want to piece together samples of what you can feel. Where are you? That's the fun part and the maddening part about scientific research. I think the more you do it over time you become better at, hopefully -- I guess that saying practice makes perfect. The more you do anything it just makes it go in that direction. So if you're doing it well then it'll make you better at it over time. If you're not doing it perfectly well it might make you worse over time. That's how I view it. I take it as like kind of a fun, interesting puzzle and challenge.
A good thing to think about too is what is the risk of suggesting that this might be something you could apply to your life. If it's a very high risk then I'm very conservative about that but if it's something that you can try to assess if you feel like there's a benefit and there's very low risk to it, that I feel you can offer to let people test.
Christopher: That seems like a good strategy. Some of the criticisms of the high fat diet in rodents, you could make the same ones of studies that shows supposedly positive outcomes. I've seen some ketogenic cancer studies done recently where the outcome was supposedly positive, and this is in rodents. And then you look at the diet that's being fed to these mice and seen it's exactly the same chunk that they feed in the bad high fat diets. It's industrially processed seed oils and a whole bunch of emulsifiers and stabilizers and stuff that you wouldn't even recognize as food. It's a really difficult area. I wish somebody would just create a [0:13:54] [Indiscernible] that didn't suck. That's maybe an opportunity there for you.
Daniel: Yeah. They certainly have developed so many different rat models and animal models. This one develops diabetes more quickly. So we can induce diabetes in it through lifestyle, then we can measure interventions. There are so many of those but the utility of them really depend on is it a genetic knockout mouse. That's a good thing to test really early in the process. You can definitely induce diabetes in a mouse and then see what happens when you put them on a different diet but there are limitations to that model because they were born with genetic deficiencies, there might've some acclamation that's taken place once they've been born. Other genes fill in the gaps to make the physiology function better. That's pretty common. The body is amazingly adaptive in that sense.
So then you just have to say, "Okay. What are the limitations? How do we meet those?" Science is just this slow, grueling process. If you have those perspectives then you just have to keep plotting along with a smile and, again, try to be smart along the way.
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I think it's really important to remember that we can't wait for all the data to finally be perfect, then we can wait to be healthy which obviously you or nobody that I've heard in the health space is saying that. So you have to be trying to make smart decisions as you can with limited information, knowing it'll probably be always limited but will always be improving hopefully.
Christopher: I understand that from the computer science world. It's people that wait until next year for the new faster model of a computer to come out. They'd be waiting a long time because it's always going to be getting better.
Daniel: Totally.
Christopher: That's a very flimsy segue into me asking you about humanOS. OS I think of operating system. Human, of course I am one. Maybe this is where the two things coincide. Tell me. What is humanOS?
Daniel: You nailed it. Human Operating System is the platform that I'm working on which is to operationalize this behavior model that I've developed a long time ago which basically turns this into a tool that people can use to augment their health and to support their health practice long term. What I define as a health practice is the total of all the efforts that you make to try to be healthy, good or bad. It's the effort that you make, the willful effort that you make to try to be healthy. Sometimes people will be healthy accidentally simply based off of where they live. I walk a mile to work and I walk a mile back. I don't really think about health too much on a day to day basis but if you look at the snapshot of it, it's actually pretty healthy.
On one hand your health practice, it doesn't totally depend on what you know. You can have a professor in nutritional sciences, and let's say they added grease in circadian biology and exercise physiology, all these things that matter. If they still sit at their desk and they don't the right behaviors that get them results, all the knowledge in the world will not protect them. Conversely, if you know nothing, if you're just a teenager that lives with their mom, you go surfing in the morning, you get plenty of sleep, your mom makes you good food, you're going to have all the benefits without having any of the knowledge.
The argument for having a mindset as an individual of somebody who should learn, somebody who stays engage with their health practice and somebody who stays engage with health information, is that if your lifestyle is disadvantaged to the point where in order of you to be healthy you need to actually counteract your environment, you need to make decisions that counteract just sitting all day in an indoor environment with artificial light and eating food out of convenience which is really the default for so many people that work at a computer-based job in the modern world. Your behaviors need to be informed by good information.
Information is interesting because if you look at my blogs or even the podcasts, they tend to be a little bit technical. I write in a way where I usually write something that's more scientific and then I go through a translation process. So I say as long as you're interested you don't have to have a background to be able to follow this because I'll explain things along the way. Again, it also requires a little bit of effort. My idea there is just to get ideas out or do commentary on a new interesting study. Ultimately I think even if you listen to 10 health podcasts a week and read 20 blogs you can actually find yourself in a situation where you feel paralysis about what to do because you have information overload.
Part of humanOS is to structure information on a subject in a manner that gives somebody a lot of confidence about what the highlights of a certain topic are in the field. I'm creating content in a course format with experts on a particular subject, so somebody that's published in that field. We then go through a workshop process to say, "Okay. What are the things that are most important for somebody to know in order for them to do the right things on this subject?"
Sometimes doing the right thing means not acting. Sometimes, as you know, ideas become popular perhaps precautiously. There are a lot of excitements. There are some data that's really positive. It gets widespread adoption. But there's [0:19:31] [Indiscernible] we don't know still. Sometimes those things do lead to interventions that have merit and other times they fizzle out. New study comes out and it contradicts the former and shows that there are serious side effects. That's part of the process of them saying what is really important on this subject and then how do we communicate that in a manner where six months after you've had exposure to that information you can still recall it and you can still talk to a friend about it. That's really critical.
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Let's say you are really interested in the subject of vitamin D and you've had tons of exposure to ideas on it. I would say, "Hey, tell me about what's important about vitamin D," then you might find yourself choked up like "I can't." First you have interest then you understand but then you can actually communicate it well. The better you are to communicate that the better you are able to then implement it actually in your own life. So that's a pretty important part of what we do.
We also have like an organizing principle or a north star that ties things all together. That tends to be the ancestral approach to wellness which is evolutionary medicine. We've been on this planet for a very long time and yet life has changed drastically in a very short period of time from a gene's perspective. We're now born into a world that is extremely foreign to our physiology. If you just live according to societal norms then your likelihood of developing chronic disease is very high. We all have that responsibility now to develop a personal health practice that is informed, that is consistent and that is effective. That is what humanOS is aiming to do is to help you with all of that so that you develop basically lifestyle skills that help you perform well and live well throughout life.
Christopher: What are the nuts and bolts of this look like? I've already discovered the podcast, humanOS Radio, that's now available in iTunes and Stitcher, and my favorite app, Overcast, it's there too. What are the other nuts and bolts?
Daniel: humanOS I going to be launching in about four weeks. We're creating, again, courses on all sorts of subjects that are related to health. We're also developing mastery pads. So for somebody to come in and not just take one class but it's basically a series of classes that are short, beautifully designed, entertaining that really help you have very deep understanding of health subject matter without necessarily being a student in the subject.
We don't want to offer anything cheap. We're making no promises that you can come to the site and within a day or a week you'll achieve a black belt. I view health as almost like a martial art. It's really worth having that knowledge and skill but it takes time to develop that skill over time. It's not something that you can just have somebody do for you or buy it. It takes a little bit of investment but it's so worth it. So that's part of it.
The other part of it is then translating that knowledge into practical steps to make it simpler for somebody to live day by day whether that's daily workouts and recipes. It's like hey, what am I going to do today to get some physical activity into my life. What am I going to eat today? Just to make that simpler, to simplify that process for somebody.
Another step is then tracking. Tracking is really exploding in terms of how many people are using it. I have very strong opinions about how to do it well. I think it provides great value. If you give somebody a clear goal and means to objectively monitor that goal, they're much more likely to achieve a goal. If they don't have a clear goal and they don't have a way to asses it, then you're much more likely to have your behavior peter out. We're integrated with about 50 different services from Fitbit to Apple Watch to Garmin. The idea there is that you can use these devices and apps that you like. We can make more meaning out of that data so it's complementary to the services you're already using.
We're going to be adding a lot more in the future being able to do deeper assessment whether it's blood work or work with your microbiome or your viralome or your epigenetics to then get a really impressive snapshot of where you are today in terms of what's available in terms of diagnostics, and to let you know this is your health status, and here are your opportunities for you to either do better or things to maintain or to make some changes. They always say build what you want to use. That's definitely what we've done.
Christopher: We have a lot in common. It sounds like all of my favorite things in one box.
Daniel: Good.
Christopher: Tell me about how you do tracking well because my recent experience of it is not being very good. Somebody sent me a Jawbone, those wristbands. I was just seriously underwhelmed by it. The food logging was just totally appalling. Everything that you ate needed to have a barcode in order for it to work. My wife is like "Forget it." We don't eat anything with a barcode. There's literally nothing in this house edible with a barcode.
Daniel: It's so funny. If it has a barcode on it, don't eat it.
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Christopher: Don't eat it. You got an app that logs everything that you shouldn't be eating. So that part was painful to say the least. I've managed to fix my sleep, something that's always been a problem. I sleep like a baby which is a terrible analogy because I have a baby and she doesn't sleep as well as me.
Daniel: I know.
Christopher: I do sleep really well now. I was interested about the Jawbone and find out how well I was sleeping. On the second night I took it off and put it on the bed stand and never touched it again because I realized I was lying there thinking about how much sleep I wasn't getting and that it was a self-fulfilling prophecy of not getting any sleep. How do you do tracking well?
Daniel: Let's talk about sleep specifically. One of the first quantified self devices was called Zeo. It was a headband that has a unipolar lead. Imagine a headband with a tracking device right in the front of the forehead. It was monitoring brain in wave activity and was then giving you an analysis of your sleep when you wake up in the morning. Here's the problem. As a sleep scientist, somebody who loves sleep in all its glory, who cares, really, what's going on? You can't control your sleep by squinting harder. Unless you're trying to identify a sleep disorder then giving somebody a lot of information about what's happening to their sleep that changes day by day in response to environmental stimuli and lifestyle, it's like monitoring something that's not actionable.
So what I do is I track behaviors to get good sleep. Are you going to bed at the right time every night? Is the timing of your sleep shifting greatly night by night? Because that alone will have a serious impact on circadian rhythms and daily performance the next day, hormones. Am I spending enough time in bed? Part of the value is then defining that time and defining the amount of time that you want to be in bed. It can take a little interaction with trying to figure out how much time do I need to spend in bed, et cetera. I write a good amount about this sort of thing.
What I call sleep is the mundane but meaningful. It's easy to have modern life encroach into getting optimal sleep but the benefits of optimal sleep affects every part of your life. Going to bed at the right time usually is in competition with being entertained by whether it's another episode of Game of Thrones or a book that you're reading or something else. You have to sometimes make a decision to say, "All right. You know what. I'm tired. I'm going to go to bed."
We're missing out on 30 to 40 minutes of sleep per night. If you look at week day sleep times versus weekend sleep times, that pattern is very common. So by just making some shifts and basically engaging with your own goals can make a really big difference in your life. That is, I think, emblematic of the problem with a lot of things with health. It's not just about making huge efforts. It's about making little efforts on things that matter that are easy to overlook. The tracking can give you some awareness and insight into actually the pattern of living that you're maintaining.
I know a lot about sleep. I don't monitor my sleep to value its importance more. I value its importance. I monitor my sleep so that I get a little bit of insight to see if my pattern is matching up with my ideal because I know that getting good sleep really helps me perform my best. This just gives me that feedback that says, "Yeah. I'm going to bed a little bit later these last couple of days. I'm going to make it more of a priority." It helps you prioritize things that are easy to overlook. That's how I see the value.
As these sleep devices become more sophisticated and become validated where if you do measure it at night and you have mild sleep apnea or restless leg syndrome that could be a value in the future to say, "Okay. This device had noticed that you're breathing as well at night. Go see a doctor." There's value there. I'm not looking at these devices to try to diagnose clinical problems. I'm looking at them as behavior modification tools to help you align your behavior with your ideals.
Christopher: You don't think it's easy then to look at, say, stages of sleep and then make a decision. Oh, is this working for me? I made some change during the day then I saw some change in the amount or quality of sleep that I get at night. That's a positive feedback that can help me make a better decision.
Daniel: What a system would need to do is to look at a lot of data over months and months at a time to make that determination. I remember reading Tim Ferriss talking about how when he would eat almond butter at night he noticed that his REM would increase. That's not really a statistically valid thing.
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So falsely associate things. I remember that I did this and then I saw this go up, so they must be related. It's possible if you looked at that over time and there was appropriate statistical methods that were baked into the system that showed those associations. But then again, just having increased time spent in certain sleep stages isn't necessarily better. Sometimes we spend more time in a sleep stage because our sleep efficiency is diminished for some reason. It just takes longer for the REM sleep need to satisfy. It's complex. Until we can really have more clear directives, I'd rather focus you on things that you can do that help get you better sleep than speculative things that may or may not mean something.
Christopher: How do these tracking devices then help us make better decisions? There was one example that I quite liked on the Jawbone which was it would buzz on my wrist. So whenever I sat on my fat ass for 25 minutes or whatever or it's 10 minutes past my bedtime, it would buzz on my wrist. That was quite a nice positive feedback. Is that a good thing or is there any other ways in which these devices can help us make better decisions?
Daniel: Good question. There is triggering. Within a day a device can implement a trigger to remind you that it's a certain time, you should start to engage with your practice of going to bed or brushing your teeth, putting your clothes on, whatever you do. I actually do that. I set a little alarm through IFTTT, if this then that, the app. My bedtime is 11:30 so at 10:45 I'd get a little notification that says it's 10:45. Go to bed. I'll start my process as I'm going to bed.
That sort of a reminder can be super valuable but even just setting goals like do you have a time that you would like to go to bed, because a lot of people have a time that they need to wake up for work. If you know that you want to spend eight hours in bed then you know you need to go to bed by -- so if you get up at 7:30 and you want to be in bed for eight hours, you better be in bed by 11:30 otherwise you're just not going to get an adequate sleep period.
Let me explain an important thing. There's a difference between sleep time and sleep period. If I were to ask you how much sleep did you get, a common response would be "I went to bed at midnight and I woke up at 8:00. So I slept the eight hours." You're actually reporting sleep period. If you were to measure your actual sleep within a sleep lab you might've said, "I went to bed at midnight and I woke up at 8:00," but the amount of actual sleep you got might be six hours and 45 minutes. There are a lot of confusions about that. How much sleep do we really need?
That's one of the reasons why people that do self-report, there's a mismatch between how people report sleep and actual sleep time. The data is very muddy because it's not clear what people are really reporting on but it's normal to have reduced sleep efficiency. In fact, if you have perfect sleep efficiency, if you have 95% sleep efficiency, it means that you're so tired and you're not getting enough time in bed usually.
So having imperfect sleep efficiency actually is a marker of a good sleep practice. We wake up, we roll over, you might not even remember those things. You might have periods of what's called wake time after sleep onset where you're up for a little bit during the night, and you don't really remember, sometimes you do. Anyway, that's normal, that is totally normal. It's hard to then say improved sleep efficiency is better. Not necessarily.
Even sleep quality isn't the perfect thing that we want to measure. What we really want to measure is sleep satisfaction. That is how satisfied are you by your sleep. Do you wake up feeling refreshed? Are you alert? Do you feel alert all day? Surprisingly it's been hard to pinpoint and draw perfect associations between sleep satisfaction and even sleep quality. Generally what we do try to do with sleep practice is to aim for high speed quality which tends to be more indicative that you're going to have more satisfaction from sleep. That's what you want. That was a great night sleep.
Christopher: I never think that now. I really don't. It's like having something in your eye. You don't really feel appreciative of not having something in your eye. You only think about it when there's something in your eye. For me, sleep is the same. You only think about it when it's wrong. What do you then with these tracking devices when your situation is compromised by something that you don't have control over like a child or a job with shift work or maybe you live in a part of the world like Iceland where it doesn't really get dark at night and the house is always heated to a certain temperature? What do you do in those situations where you can't control the environment?
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Daniel: That is a great question. If you can't be perfect, what do you do? I think that there's still an opportunity to do better. In fact you could argue that there's more importance placed upon the things that you can control, for example, the shift work. So you have high variability in your sleep time if you undergo shift work because one day you're working from 8:00 to 5:00 during the day, another day you're working from midnight to 8:00 in the morning. That tends to be a pattern that is not very good for our circadian rhythms, but then I would pay extra attention to the fact that I'm getting enough sleep period duration, I'm getting enough time in bed.
If you undergo the dual consequences of high variability in terms of when you're going to sleep, the sleep timing, and getting inadequate duration for sleep, that's going to be the double whammy. There are other things too that you can do if you're living in the latitude or Iceland where it's very dark all the time.
Christopher: At the moment it's light all the time. It's the opposite. I'm sure there is a period in the winter where it's dark all the time. At the moment it just doesn't get dark at all.
Daniel: Right. So during the winter or during the period of the year where it's light all the time, then you can sleep with shades on like an eye mask, and you can turn down the shades. At a certain time you can control your light environment so that you're not getting stimulated by the external environment. Conversely when it's dark all the time you can use blue-enriched white light to tell the brain that indeed it's day.
Some research that was done on the Concordia-based station in Antarctica looked at it was a perfect place to do research because it's 24 hours of darkness during certain times of year. What they looked at is normal room light and how people performed under those conditions. So they looked at daily mood, reaction time and when they wanted to sleep. What they found is that normal artificial light wasn't enough to anchor your circadian rhythm. People wanted to go to bed later every day and wake up later every day. Their mood suffered and their reaction time was really poor.
When they put blue-enriched white light into the room then their mood was fine, their reaction time was stable and their sleep period was stable. It just shows you that there are some things that you can do with the right knowledge to significantly benefit yourself. Anyway, that was some research that was done. Part of the behavioral intervention is just having goals and being mindful of how you're living. Part of it though is also making environmental changes, operating under the right guidance so that you can counteract a disadvantaged situation.
Christopher: Tell me. Have you created a food log that doesn't suck?
Daniel: No because I don't know how to.
Christopher: You know what I'd really want? I just want to take a picture and that's it, and then I want some Mechanical Turk to tell me what macro and micronutrients are in it.
Daniel: There are some things that are on the horizon that might be able to do that basically like scanners. I don't know if they'll still be able to do that with food unless you blended it and you could say what's in there. Honestly, I think that the way that I like food logging is for people who want to do it to do it occasionally for a week. You commit to doing it for a short period of time and you can't get some insight into what you're really doing, and then focusing on trying to eat the right food. So it's occasionally informative.
Some people really like to do it and do it long term, it's not really my thing. I would rather prime people to eat well, giving them a lot of examples of like hey, this is good food. So part of what we do in humanOS is send people daily workouts and recipes. Surprisingly, it has a really parallel impact on our behavior when you see images of health versus images of junk food. Both can guide the decisions that you make over the day.
There was some really interesting work at CalTech. What they did is they had people watched. Their brains were being imaged. They had them look at 180 different types of foods ranging from apples to Twinkies, all different things, but every 10 items they told people to think about nothing, next 10 items, think about health, next 10 items, think about taste. They just kept cycling through that. Basically what they found is when you're thinking about nothing or when sure thinking about taste the same parts of their brain light up. So basically if you're not really thinking about anything, you're focusing on taste.
When they said think about health, then what happens is an area of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex kicks in, and it starts to modify the activity of this basically taste responsive area, the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, and it changed the types of decisions that people were making about the food and how they viewed them. So if you can get people into a healthy mindset it actually can shift how you perceive these food stimuli in your environment.
[0:40:09]
So there are other ways to shift how people eat besides just tracking. There are health trackers out there. We integrate with them. I would say use my fitness, pal, if you want to do that. We'll eventually port that data in but I want to do it in a really smart way. I like the tracking which is really to sue. You just instrument yourself with a sensor like a watch or a wristband or something. It's there passively collecting information.
There are very few people that are going to mind their food for years at a time, very few. You can easily wear a Fitbit for a long time and get example of your low intensity physical activity. That's valuable information. It's easy to step on a scale in the morning and get an idea of how your weight is changing over months to years. That's easy. But sitting down and actually writing stuff down about your food, I think, again, there's occasional utility to do that to understand your reading habits a little bit better because it might reveal that you're not getting enough mineral or you're eating way more carbs than you thought, whatever. I don't see that as a long term behavioral strategy for most.
Christopher: Julie is my wife. She's a food scientist. She's the one that does coaching with the athletes that we work with. That's what she does. She gets them to use a spreadsheet. It's just a Google Docs spreadsheet. It's really simple. We don't know macros or weights or micros or anything like that. She doesn't really feel that she needs to know that stuff because it's not going to change what she says with the person when they're on video conferencing afterwards. She also gets them to record their postprandial glucose as well. That's something else that the food loggers don't allow you to track normally too. That is really valuable information.
Daniel: Yeah. Totally. That's another thing. We're going to add tracking over time so that basically if you want to crack what you just said, postprandial glucose, then you'd be able to do that. When I look at these devices a lot of people think of them as trackers. I'm going to wear them and it's going to tell me what I've done. I also view them as performance enhancing devices. When I see my Fitbit, they're marker in my environment to remind me that I care about steps and I want to get my goal. It's also a reminder in the evening that I have a bedtime goal. So this is something that is kind of reminding me of what my aspirations are for that day. It would be different if it was always invisible and I just get feedback. The feedback can matter but it's also matters that it's visible and you can see it, and that's reminding you of what you aspire to do.
Christopher: You've just given me an idea. Imagine if you have one of these logging systems. Like you say, not just look backwards but also look forwards. So I could get a notification that said, "Hey, Christopher. You're about to eat a whole bar of chocolate." That would be based on your previous data. Your blood glucose is dropping. You ate the same thing for breakfast as you did yesterday or some other point in history when you made this similar bad decision. It's going to happen. If you have that forewarning maybe you'd be more motivated to try and avoid that situation or maybe you could make another decision earlier on. If your blood glucose is dropping or your ketones are dropping or something that you could do something to prevent that other thing that's coming down the road that you don't want to do.
Daniel: That is, I think, some of the future of tracking, of what we can do. If you start to collect data on yourself on these mundane behaviors over time, you can actually see some pretty cool insights if you ask the right questions. So I'd rather have the data. Part of what my research looked at is when you're not getting basically your habitual sleep time, when you're getting inadequacy of sleep relative to your need, that can actually lead to a next day vulnerability in the food choices that you're making.
Just like you said, we might be able to say, "Hey, you know what. You got 25% less sleep than usual." Just something that makes you a little bit more mindful is say, "Hey, be careful today. Watch your choices because you might be prone to making ones that don't align with your own goals. That's actually what my research showed is that when you get less sleep than what's common for you, even for just one day, you do have an impairment in your vigilance or your alertness the day. That associates with eating foods that a person would rate as less healthy. So it might represent a defection of your own personal health standard.
It is shown before in sleep that you do something called effort discounting. Let's say you really care to go for a bike ride, it's something that you value and care about. You're less likely to make an effort towards things that you care about when you're in a sleep deprived condition. That can mean either going to the gym or it can be saying no to something that you find pleasurable but you recognize it's not healthy.
[0:45:05]
Christopher: Everybody understands that. When you had a crappy night sleep you make all kinds of different decisions.
Daniel: It's true.
Christopher: I could think of another example actually. The endurance athlete listeners will recognize this. You might even call it an apastat where your brain knows how much energy it needs roughly on a daily basis based on the huge amount of exercise that you do, maybe 10 or 15 or even 20 plus hours per week. So your brain is set at 7,000 calories a day or something. And then you take a week off. Your brain is still set at 7,000 calories even though you're not spending that energy anymore. I don't know whether that's something that could be predicted or maybe it's already predictable without you having to do any tracking or sophisticated logging.
Daniel: I don't see a world where everything is tracked to the detail. That's the perfect solution for us being healthy. I see that the best way to kind of view these trackers is a way to give us a little bit more input to help us understand ourselves better. Ultimately we're in the control center making the decisions. I don't want there to be like a disconnect. Don't listen to myself. Listen to the data. I want for people to be in tuned with their body.
What you've described is that when people, let's say, exercise they can eat 7,000 calories because their exercise level means that they're at homeostasis or balance when they do because of the amount of energy that they're spending, and then they take a week off, and now all of a sudden -- their hunger system, if they're in tune with their body, is probably going to make them less hungry then they won't have the need of eating 7,000 calories.
We also build behaviors from repetition. So if you're eating 7,000 calories a day you can basically continue to do that just because that's the pattern that you've maintained for a period of time. That's actually part of the problem with football players, et cetera, is that they have to eat so much to maintain mass. They teach themselves to eat in a certain manner. When they cut off the amount of physical activity that they're getting, then there's a very huge body composition shift of loss of muscle, gain of lots of fat. It's a problem for a lot of these guys.
Christopher: So tell me what's humanOS going to look like in terms of is it an app on my phone. What would my average day be in connected to humanOS look like?
Daniel: Dan's Plan is basically the site that it's currently live. That's been like a beta site towards the development of humanOS. humanOS is going to help all the features of Dan's plan and quite a few more. These experiences are going to be different. If you're a power user on Dan's Plan, that's great. If you have a WiFi scale connected on your Fitbit, you arrive at the site, and it's colorful. Information is graphed. It's giving you feedback on what you've been doing. It's giving you some insight.
We also have daily recipes and workouts. You have to scroll down the page in order to find those. What if you just want the recipe of the day, that's what you're in to, and you don't want to track? With humanOS that's actually a big thing that we've designed, is the ability for people to construct their own user experience based off of their interests and have it be super successful.
So you don't have to track. You don't have to take a course. You can use it in a lot of different ways. You could come just for our workout of the day, just for the recipe of the day, a combination of both, just an occasional course. You could just do tracking and not everything else. There's basically like a front page dashboard that has the information that you choose to prioritize front and center. You can turn stuff on or off.
The idea is that every day you arrive at this page and it changes daily. There are new recipes. There are new workouts. Your statistics and your data are updated. You have this variability in terms of checking in and saying, "Okay. Where am I today?" So not only is it giving like a snapshot but then it's also giving you ideas about what you can do.
So that's basically what it's going to look like. It won't be an app at first, but it will be a website that's responsive. I didn't want to undertake developing an app at the same time as the website because it's really like building a whole other website. This is a self-funded project. I'm going to sequence that out.
Christopher: So for the people that are listening that don't know, responsive just means it works really well on your phone. This is a website that works really well on your phone. I can't resist asking the question. Will humanOS be an open source? All my favorite operating systems are open source.
Daniel: It's an interesting question. It's one that I've thought about a little bit. What I want it to be is collaborative. There's a way that I want to use the website for researchers to collect data and to test interventions. There is a way for other people that have health professionals to utilize the system in a way with their clients or people [0:49:49] [Indiscernible] patients. There is a way to use the system just as an individual or through a company.
Another thing that I'm really interested in is putting out our ideas but then being open and responsible to feedback. I imagine that we're going to get great ideas on everything that we put out that can improve what we've done. An unfortunate, typical response for a lot of people is to be defensive to ideas that are perhaps different or not in line. I look forward to identifying certain things that are brought up by the community. We'll make changes and version what we do. That's really important to me.
[0:50:30]
Now, I think sometimes people are going to offer ideas that we don't want to implement. I'm okay with that as well. We're not simply just going to implement ideas that are offered but we're going to be receptive to good ideas and we're going to think about them seriously.
Christopher: I love that. I can't wait to try it.
Daniel: Thank you.
Christopher: Dan, this has been great. Thank you very much. I should let people know that you are a regular excellent writer, something else I'm quite jealous of, Dan's writing. Dan blogs over at blog.dansplan.com. You get a whole article out per week. Is that right?
Daniel: Well, sometimes. I try. I tend to write really long articles. I just said okay, instead of putting out 4,000 words per article I'm going to try to make them shorter and a little more frequent because it was such a bear to even think about writing an article because it would take a lot of time. So this has been better.
As you mentioned earlier, I just started the podcast. That's been fun. I'm interviewing mostly professors in all sorts of lifestyle sciences. So I get to bring them on, hear about their journey, and then have them basically translate all right, tell us about your work and how it can help people live better. So that's been really, really fun.
I think doing the writing and the course development and the site development and stuff, it's definitely keeping me busy. I can't wait to release it to the world. Chris, I'll make sure you have VIP access to everything.
Christopher: That's awesome. I will definitely report back on that. I'm sure it would be awesome. I'm quite excited about it.
Daniel: Yeah. Thank you, man.
Christopher: Excellent. Thanks, Dan. Was there anything else I missed? I know you're very active on Twitter. I'm not sure about Facebook. Is there anything else you want people to know about?
Daniel: Yeah. Thanks. I do twit every day over at Twitter. It's mostly the science that I'm looking at. So I'll see an interesting study, put it up there. On Facebook too, starting to write more articles. Twitter is great but it's frustrating. It's just not perfect for everything. With Facebook I can write something that's a little bit longer, myself or Ginny Robards who does some content development as well. We put up a couple of paragraphs that's an analysis of a new study or a couple of studies that came out. It's Facebook@dansplan for now but of course we're switching over to humanOS. If you follow it now we'll let you know when it converts. Thank you. Those are all the channels through which to see the work we're putting out.
Christopher: Thank you very much, Dan. This has been great.
Daniel: Thanks, Chris. I really appreciate you having me on the show.
[0:53:00] End of Audio
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