BITESIZE | How to Age Well, Stay Independent & “Unbreakable” | Dr Vonda Wright #680

Dr Rangan Chatterjee (0:01)

Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bitesize, your weekly dose of inspiration, insights, and practical ideas to help you live well and thrive. Each episode brings you some of my favorite moments, useful tools, and inspiring ideas from the many incredible conversations I've had on my podcast. Today's Bitesize is from episode 588 of the podcast, with orthopedic surgeon and internationally recognized authority on active aging and mobility, Dr Vonda Wright. Vonda explains why we have more control over our bone health than we might realize, why our mid-30s to mid-40s are such a pivotal window for investing in our future health, and she also shares some simple practical strategies that could help protect our bones and keep us strong. So if we just take that broader theme about how we don't have to age with frailty, we can age with vitality.

When you look around across society, what are some of the common things people are doing that are perhaps resulting in them neglecting their bodies and therefore increasing the speed at which they age?

Dr Vonda Wright (1:26)

I think the first reason people begin to decline without even realizing it is this bias or this myth we believe that aging is an inevitable decline and that there's something abnormal about it. But I say quite frequently that aging alone is the most natural thing we do from the minute of our conception to the moment of our death. And it's how we handle the passage of time that matters. But if you believe that there's absolutely nothing you can do about the future, then you're going to resign yourself to the first time you feel an ache or a pain or the first time you come up against a no as, well, that's just getting old. I guess I'll just accept it. And what I find people doing is giving things up one at a time until they don't recognize it. I'll give you some examples. So, believing the myth that it's inevitable is, I think, a primary motivator.

The second motivator I see is that sometimes people don't believe they're worth the effort. Maybe everybody else is worth the effort, particularly for women, like the self-neglect comes because we're not neglecting others, we're investing all of our energy externally and not redirecting anything internally. And so, those being primary drivers I see in the step-wise allowing decline.

Dr Rangan Chatterjee (3:00)

It's interesting, this idea about mindset or beliefs. You know, if we believe, if we get the message in the world around us that getting older means frailty, means weakness, means you have to give up the things that you don't want to give up necessarily, and of course, your behaviors are going to follow your beliefs. And there's so many things about your new book Unbreakable that I really, really enjoy. And in the introduction, you actually say, I contend that although we certainly undergo some life stage changes, what we call normal aging is actually normal aging, the stressed out, undernourished people who are not intentionally building muscle, not attending to their hormonal health, and not prioritizing mobility.

Dr Vonda Wright (3:54)

Exactly. And what I mean by that is if you go back to the medical literature, there was a study, and there are many studies like this. There was a study called the Health ABC in the United States, funded by our National Institutes of Health, that took a cohort of 70 year olds and just watched them age over a decade.

These were people straight out of the population. Well, what do we know about people in the world, and in the United States in particular, is that more than 70% of them do not invest any energy any day in mobility or health habits. So if we're watching a population of people to see how they age, and they're truly just a random sample of the population, then you are sampling sedentary people who make very little effort to age in a different way. So I state that so clearly is because I contend and why we formed the research group at the University of Pittsburgh called PRIMA, the Performance and Research Initiative for Masters Athletes, is because I wanted to see what we were capable of if we took the variable of sedentary living out of the way.

So we began studying active people, not professional masters age athletes, but people over 40 who were consistently active. Many of them were podium type age group athletes, meaning winning the 50-year-old podium. So they were invested but not pros, and what we found was very different than we find in the population. We found over 15 years, we can retain muscle mass and bone density and brain function. And so, when I say that we don't really truly know the state of healthy, active aging, it's based on facts, not fiction.