Harvard Professor: "10,000 Steps A Day" Is A LIE! Revealing The 7 BIG LIES About Exercise, Sleep, Running, Cancer & Sugar!!! Daniel Lieberman

**Steven Bartlett** (0:00)
A lot of people exercise because they believe it will help them to lose fat.

**Daniel Lieberman** (0:03)
One of the biggest debates on the planet.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:05)
What advice have you got for me?

**Daniel Lieberman** (0:07)
So this is not a well-known fact, but Daniel Lieberman, he studies and teaches how humans are supposed to live.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:12)
Author and professor at Harvard University, exercise, disease, sleep, nutrition.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:17)
He has the answers on all of those things that most of us care about.

**Daniel Lieberman** (0:20)
We evolved to be very physically active, working in the fields, hunting, gathering. But now we are in a world where only 50% of Americans ever exercise, and the rest of the world is headed our way. Cancers, depression, anxiety can attribute that to less physical activity. In fact, women who get 150 minutes of physical activity a week have a 30 to 50% lower breast cancer risks. And it's crazy, right? The problem is that we spend 3% of our medical budget on prevention, and yet 75% of the time, the disease is a preventable disease. It's a completely backward, stupid system.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:51)
When you started writing this book about exercise, was there any instant changes that you implemented into your own life?

**Daniel Lieberman** (0:56)
Strength training. The more I study the importance of doing weights, especially as you age, the more I start kicking myself for being lazy about that. When people retire, they become less active. They tend to lose muscle, and then that starts off a vicious cycle.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:08)
So would you say we shouldn't retire?

**Daniel Lieberman** (1:09)
It's a very modern Western concept, and yes, we do pay a price for it.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:13)
So how does one go from having a negative opinion towards exercise to becoming an exerciser?

**Daniel Lieberman** (1:18)
As an evolutionary biologist, there are multiple ways of doing that.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:21)
So, Daniel, what are some of the biggest myths within exercise?

**Daniel Lieberman** (1:26)
Gosh, there are so many. One of the most common, of course, is…

**Steven Bartlett** (1:30)
Daniel Lieberman, he's been to every corner of the world, visiting native tribes to understand how humans are supposed to live. And now he has the answers on all of those things that most of us care about, on sleep, nutrition, exercise, disease. You know, on disease, he says that 74% of them can be prevented. And he knows how to prevent them. Aging, running, are we born to run? He tells me the story of a CEO that forces his employees to exercise, and the impact that that's had on that company. And he talks about how as humans, we've evolved to either use it or lose it. So maybe, maybe retirement is a really bad idea for many of us. One of the most thought provoking pivotal conversations I've had on this show. You're really going to take a lot from this one. And I suspect, after listening, you'll probably start running too. For exercise, or from some of the decisions you've spent your life making.
Daniel, your work is so incredibly impressive, reaches such an incredible depth, charters new territory, and it's been an unbelievable, clearly very passion-driven career you had. So my first question for you is, why are you doing this?

**Daniel Lieberman** (2:58)
It's a good question. I started off being obsessed by human evolution. Ever since I was a kid, I was really interested in human evolution and I spent much of my early career working on skulls and heads and why they are the way they are. Then I got involved in public health and issues of health and disease. Through the back door, I slowly shifted my research trajectory towards studying the evolution of running and then the evolution of physical activity and its relationship to health and disease. I've become part of a movement that's often known as evolutionary medicine, which is how to apply evolutionary theory and data to issues of health and disease.

**Steven Bartlett** (3:34)
Evolutionary medicine, I've never heard that term before, but I love it.
Where has your work on evolutionary medicine, let's call it, where has that taken you? Where has it taken you to learn, to research, to study?

**Daniel Lieberman** (3:50)
So much of what we think about in terms of health and disease comes from a tiny fragment of the world's population, almost entirely, like 90% of all the medical information comes from people from the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. So in order to study how bodies really work and how our bodies evolved to be, you have to leave places like Boston, where I live, and go to places like Africa, or Mexico, or wherever, to look at other populations and look at how those populations are transitioning to lifestyles like mine. And so we've been working in Kenya for the last 15 years or so. I've traveled to some other parts of the world as well.