Dr Michael Mosley's 7 best science-backed tips to improve your health
Looking to improve your sleep, diet and overall happiness? The TV doctor serves up advice on each.
The internet is full of health hacks. Some are great, some are nonsense, and some are even actively harmful. It can be hard to tell which is which, especially when it comes to what we should be eating. Here to help you sort the fact from the fiction is Dr Michael Mosley, with seven of his best science-backed tips for improving your health, drawn from his column in BBC Science Focus Magazine.
If you're looking for even more easy changes you can make to your daily routine to improve your diet, sleep, exercise and more, check out his podcast, Just One Thing.
Dr Michael Mosley's top health tips
1. Eat more protein to lose weight
As you have probably noticed, in the world of diets there is an ongoing battle between fans of low-fat foods and those who prefer to embrace a low-carb lifestyle. Yet as I discovered when I began researching my latest book, The Fast 800 Keto, the biggest driver of appetite is that other macronutrient: protein.
Eggs, fish, meat and tofu are all rich in protein and help build muscles, enzymes and much of the infrastructure of our bodies; eating enough of it is absolutely vital for growth and repair. And as two leading Australian academics, Prof David Raubenheimer and Prof Steve Simpson, argue, lack of protein is one of the major drivers of the current obesity epidemic.
If you don’t get enough protein in your diet, then you will develop cravings and overeat in a largely unconscious attempt to hit critical protein targets. They say that we need to consume around 15 to 20 per cent of our daily calories in the form of protein. This amounts to around 100 grams of protein, if you are eating the normal 2,000 to 2,500 calories a day.
Balance on one foot
A common New Year’s resolution is to get fitter. Although people determinedly heave weights or run, they often forget the importance of working on their balance. Worldwide, falls are the most common cause of accidental death after road traffic accidents, and unless you do something about it, your balance will deteriorate as you get older. And having good balance is a powerful predictor of how long and how healthily you will live.
A good test of your balance is to see how long you can stand on one leg, first with your eyes open and then closed. Take your shoes off, put your hands on your hips and stand on one leg. See how long you last. The test is over as soon as you shift your planted foot or put your raised foot down on the ground. Best of three. Then repeat, with your eyes closed. You will be dismayed by how quickly you start to fall over. Here are the targets that different age groups should be able to manage:
Under 40: 45 seconds with eyes open, 15 seconds with eyes closed.
Aged 40-49: 42 seconds open, 13 seconds closed.
Aged 50-59: 41 seconds open, 8 seconds closed.
Aged 60-69: 32 seconds open, 4 seconds closed.
Aged 70-79: 22 seconds open, 3 seconds closed.
Practise deep breathing
One of the things that has made a big difference to my life, and which is very simple to do, is to practise a bit of deep breathing. When I feel stressed or when I’m awake in the middle of the night and struggling to go back to sleep, which is quite common, I do a breathing exercise called 4-2-4.
I breathe in for a count of four, hold it for two, then breathe out to a count of four.
Deep breathing switches on your parasympathetic nervous system, which acts like a brake, calming your body down. Long, deep breaths will slow your heart and also reduce your blood pressure. That way it reduces anxiety.
Deep breathing can also be an effective way of dealing with pain. Chronic pain is closely linked to stress and learning how to do ‘controlled breathing’ is an important part of treatment for managing both.
Take cold showers
One of the most popular episodes from the first series of Just One Thing explored the risks and benefits of cold water immersion. For this episode I started having cold showers every morning, starting with a brief burst of hot water, followed by 45 seconds or so of an icy cold blast.
It certainly perks you up, but is there anything more to it than that? Well, there was a Dutch study published in 2016 in the journal PLOS One where they recruited 3,018 people online and then randomly allocated them to having a cold shower every morning for a month, or to a control group who continued as normal. Those having the cold shower were further divided into those asked to do it for 30 seconds, 60 seconds or 90 seconds.
Over the following winter there was an outbreak of flu and it turned out that those people having cold showers were 30 per cent less likely to take time off for sickness than those in a control group, though it didn’t matter whether you were in the 30-second group or either of the longer groups.
Eat a Mediterranean-style diet
Some of the components of the Med diet (such as oily fish and the olive oil) have a well-established anti-inflammatory effect, and there is mounting evidence that many cases of depression and anxiety may be linked to brain inflammation. But the foods that make up the Mediterranean diet also boost ‘good’ bacteria in your gut, and they, in turn, produce their own anti-inflammatory compounds. Foods which have a positive effect on our mood are called ‘psychobiotics’.
As part of a podcast series I’ve made for the BBC called Just One Thing, I interviewed Dr Kirsten Berding Harold, a researcher from University College Cork, who is part of a team who first coined the word, ‘psychobiotics’.
In one of her most recent studies she asked a group of volunteers to eat what she calls, ‘microbiota-friendly food’, which included more wholegrains, fruits and vegetables, but also fermented foods like kefir (a form of fermented yoghurt), which are rich in probiotics.
Their mood and microbiota were tested at the beginning and end of the study, and there were some impressive changes. Not only did their microbiome change, but as Kirsten explained, “after four weeks on the diet they felt a lot less stressed and had an improved mood. So the preliminary results suggest that it really does help your mood and mental health to eat a diet that is microbiota friendly.”
Eat plenty of beetroot and garlic to keep your blood pressure down
An ideal healthy systolic blood pressure is between 90 and 120mmHg, so what can you do if your blood pressure is slightly too high? Well, losing a bit of weight, exercising more and stopping smoking will all help, but so can consuming certain foods – or at least that is what we discovered on Trust Me, I’m A Doctor, when we did a small experiment with Dr Andy Webb at King’s College, London, a few years ago.
We wanted to test the claims that beetroot, garlic and watermelon could lower blood pressure. All three foods are said to work by boosting levels of nitric oxide in the body, which in turn causes blood vessels to open up and blood pressure to fall.
So what happened? Well the average systolic blood pressure of the volunteers at the start was 133.6mmHg. On the beetroot diet, this went down to 128.7mmHg. Consuming two cloves of garlic a day gave a similar result (129.3mmHg).
A fall in blood pressure of around 5mmHg doesn’t sound a lot, but studies suggest that if was maintained it would translate into a reduction of the risk of stroke and heart attack of around 10 per cent.
I love garlic and I am happy to pile my plate with beetroot and other nitrate-rich veg, such as rocket, spinach, chard and broccoli.
Caffeine isn't all bad: it also has major health benefits
Apart from the flavour, what I love about tea and coffee is that they’re stimulants, rich with the world’s most widely consumed psychoactive drug, caffeine. A white, crystalline powder, it’s produced by plants to protect them against insect attack.
Not only do tea and coffee perk me up in the mornings, but there is strong evidence that caffeine consumers enjoy a range of other health benefits, with the benefits being clearer for coffee than tea.
A massive review of studies, ‘Coffee consumption and health: umbrella review of meta-analyses of multiple health outcomes’, published in the British Medical Journal, which looked at more than 220 studies, found that drinking coffee was associated with a significantly lower risk of heart disease and cancer, possibly because it’s rich in antioxidants and other anti-inflammatory compounds. Coffee drinking was also associated with a lower rate of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.