Rhonda Patrick

And it reacts with proteins, including collagen, which is lining our blood vessels.

It's lining our myocardium, our pericardium, right?

This is where our heart is.

And that collagen, when it reacts with glucose in the maillard reaction, it causes the protein, the collagen, to become stiffer.

And so that affects the stiffness of our vascular system, of our heart, and also our blood vessels.

As we start to get into late middle age, this would be like 50 to 65, in addition to our heart getting stiffer, our heart shrinks.

So it atrophies.

And so our heart is getting smaller and it's getting stiffer.

And these sorts of structural changes are affecting our cardiovascular health and our cardiovascular performance, right?

Dr. Levine has done a whole lot of research, lots of different studies trying to identify...

how much exercise, what exercise is doing to the structure of the heart, for one, and how much exercise is really needed to help really stave off a lot of those changes, those structural changes with age.

And he had one of the studies that he had done early on, which were done in master's athletes.

They are physically active every single day, and they're competing at a national level in many cases.

So they're doing a lot of cardiovascular and aerobic exercise.

Their hearts, structurally, so we're talking about seniors, so these are people that are older, their hearts looked like healthy 30-year-olds.

So 30-year-olds that don't have any identifiable diseases like cardiovascular disease or type 2 diabetes or hypertension, right?

And so that's pretty profound when you're talking about, you know, a 50-, 60-year-old person's structure at least looking very similar to what a healthy 30-year-old would look.

But we're not all going to be

endurance athletes and masters athletes throughout our lives.

So the next question is, well, what is the exercise dose that's really needed to get you most of the way there to maintain that youthful cardiovascular structure?