Tommy Wood: Brain Health, Novel Stimuli, and Actionable Advice to Keep You Sharp as You Age
The Ready State Podcast
Kelly Starrett & Juliet Starrett
4.9 • 623 Ratings
🗓️ 14 December 2023
⏱️ 71 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Tommy Wood BM BCh, PhD is a neuroscientist, elite-level professional nerd, and performance consultant to world class athletes in a dozen sports. He received an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge, a medical degree from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in physiology and neuroscience from the University of Oslo. Tommy is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience at the University of Washington and Visiting Scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. His research focuses on brain health and brain injury treatment across the lifespan, as well as developing easily-accessible methods with which to track health, performance, and longevity in both professional athletes and the general population. Tommy serves as deputy editor of the Wiley Journal Lifestyle Medicine, is a Director of the British Society for Lifestyle Medicine, and consults for a number of digital health companies and charities that focus on how lifestyle and the environment can affect long-term health and chronic disease.
We really appreciate Tommy’s unique perspective working as a physician and neuroscientist from pediatrics up through aging adults. This episode is packed with practical information about brain health and maintaining cognitive function as we age.
SPONSORS
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Kelly Starrett. And I'm Juliette, and you're listening to The Ready |
| 0:09.6 | State podcast. |
| 0:14.4 | This episode of the Ready State podcast is brought to you by Element. And the thing that we want to talk about today is dehydration. |
| 0:23.8 | I know. We have taken dehydration and made it like a disease, like hydrate or die. |
| 0:30.0 | Well, as a matter of fact, I have a dear friend who just got a bunch of blood work back and had some kind of weird markers. |
| 0:35.4 | And one of the theories of her physician based on her blood work was that she was super dehydrated. And I learned after talking to her that she was drinking something like 80 ounces of water a day, so plenty of actual water. Let me be clear, if you've ever done Edward 40 Hands, that's about how much that is, right? It's a lot of water. And my theory is that she wasn't actually absorbing |
| 0:55.3 | any of the water she was drinking. Yeah, you know, we see this a lot. We've actually run into |
| 1:00.5 | athletes having this problem called hyponetremia, where they just blow out all their salts. And |
| 1:05.7 | subsequently, if you start only drinking just mass amounts of water and you're not eating with food |
| 1:10.1 | and you're not supplement with food and you're not |
| 1:10.9 | supplementing with salts, then you are going to, I mean, this is just osmosis, right? I mean, |
| 1:16.5 | your body is going to put salts into that and you're going to lose salt. Yeah, and so she just |
| 1:21.0 | started actually adding some element into her water every day and already notices a big |
| 1:25.2 | difference in terms of like honestly how often she has to pee every single day that she already can just tell from that basic metric that she feels |
| 1:32.2 | like she's absorbing. If you're drinking tons and tons of water, look, we're not experts in this |
| 1:35.8 | field except if you're drinking tons of water and peeing all the time obsessively, that's a good |
| 1:41.1 | indicator that you've topped that off and your your bite is no longer taking that water in. |
| 1:44.4 | You're just hitting your kidneys and it's bouncing off. |
| 1:46.5 | So if you want to increase your water because you're an athlete or want to drink more, |
| 1:51.2 | make sure you're just adding some salts to it. |
| 1:52.9 | An element is the tastiest, as tasty as salt there is. |
| 1:55.8 | It's so tasty. |
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