Meet the Solutionists, with Mark Scott

We’re told to eat better, sleep more, train our bodies and our brains — all in the name of ageing well.  

But how much of that advice is actually backed by science? How might we all live – and stay – well, for longer, at any stage of life? And how much of ageing is really up to us? 

Researcher Gilbert Knaggs, neuroscientist Eleanor Drummond, and clinician Olivier Piguet join together to demystify the science from the pseudoscience and bring fresh insights and evidence, unlocking our understanding of healthy brain ageing.

Mark Scott  00:00

This podcast is recorded at the University of Sydney's Camperdown campus on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. They've been discovering and sharing knowledge here for 10s of 1000s of years. I pay my respects to elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Gilbert Knaggs  00:25

1950s and 60s. Aging was just something that happened, death and taxes, and maybe aging would be added to that, whereas now we're much more concerned about “what can I do”? What can we do to make our aging a better experience?

Mark Scott  00:37

Aging is inevitable, but the speed at which it begins to affect our quality of life is increasingly up for debate. In 2024 the global wellness industry was valued at $6.3 trillion, and by 2028 it's forecast to reach 9 trillion. It's built on the promise of keeping us healthier, sharper and younger for longer, yet, while much of it focuses on slowing the visible signs of aging, what does the science actually tell us about extending our physical and mental longevity? What's really happening to the brain as we age, what's possible when it comes to reducing the risk and burden of dementia and how much of aging well is actually within our control? This is The Solutionists. I'm Mark Scott, and as a man in my 60s, these questions matter to me, not in theory, but in practice. I might be doing Wordle, but what else should I be doing? I wanted to hear from the experts. At a live public talks event presented by Sydney ideas, the University of Sydney's flagship public talks program, journalist and author Elfy Scott, brought together neuroscientist Dr Eleanor Drummond, researcher Gilbert Knaggs and clinician Olivier Piguet, to unpack what we now know about healthy brain aging. Here's Olivier on how understanding of aging has changed in recent years.

Professor Olivier Piguet  02:15

Look, not that long ago, aging was not such a big issue. The primary aim in life was to reproduce, to have children, and once you did your job, that was it, essentially. And life expectancy was about 40 years in prehistoric times, and with the advances in medical research, environment, lifestyle and so on. Our life expectancy has changed so much, so even within the past 40 years, our life expectancy has moved from about 70 years to 85 years. So it means that there are a lot more people in this age bracket now than they used to be. And so we are more aware of being old or being older and what it means to be older. And yeah, things change our bodies, change our mind, our brain changes. So we need to adapt to that, try to understand it, and try to mitigate some of the risks of getting old, like trying not to fall, like trying to delay some disorders that are associated with aging. 

Elfy Scott  03:31

Gilbert, would you like to add anything to that? 

Gilbert Knaggs  03:33

Yeah. So I think even just on a shorter scale, in the last maybe 60 and 70 years, what I found in my research is that aging is a lot more about choices and thinking about the future and also managing risks than it used to be. And there are a few different reasons for that. It seems like, I think one is, I guess, science has become, oh, biomedical science, I should say, has come a long way. So now there's a lot more to think about when we think about aging. And also there's been a bit of a paradigm shift, it seems like, where instead of being interested in the inner causes of aging, and you know how aging occurs as a sort of these, but through biological mechanisms, just in the last 30 years, there's sort of been the shift towards, okay, how does aging actually - how is it influenced from things outside of the body, and what can we do to actually act on aging? So, yeah, there's just sort of been this shift in the science from looking inside the body to looking, I guess, outside of the body, and what we can do through behaviors, and also how society, I guess, ages at different rates, and that's on the one hand, led to a lot more, I guess, opportunities to age well, but also a lot more anxieties, I think, around managing age again, this pressure to constantly, I guess, be on guard on aging and make the correct decision. So it's, yeah, sort of, I guess, pros and cons with that, but definitely different from what was about 67 years ago, where aging was just something that happened. And yeah, 

Elfy Scott  04:53

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, your research is so interesting in this field, so I'm sure we'll get into a lot more of that later. But Eleanor, I wanted to start off with what I imagine is a really simple, easy to answer question, which is, what actually happens in the brain during the aging process? 

Dr Eleanor Drummond  05:10

So simple, so simple. I guess, from a basic scientist perspective, when you look in a brain of someone who is older versus younger, the same kind of things that we expect to happen to our body also happen to our brain. It becomes slower. There is atrophy over time, interestingly, in specific regions. So you might start to notice some particular elements of your daily life becoming a little bit more tricky than others, and that's because those parts of your brain are actually shrinking over time. What's interesting, though, is that with aging, it's quite different from those diseases that we associate with aging, like dementia. And with those ones, the neurons are actually dying in the brain. But when you're aging, they're not really dying. There's just less connections, and they're getting as a result, the brain itself gets a bit smaller. And so when we're talking about diseases of aging, like Alzheimer's disease, is the main one. Other ones that we study a lot is Frontotemporal dementia as well. When you look inside the brains of those people, you start to see these really characteristic features that are present, which are the neuropathological hallmarks. And this happens because your waste disposal systems in your brain start to break down, and you start to accumulate these proteins in your brain that clump up, and as a result, it gets in the way of your brain being able to function the way that it wants to. And in addition to that, we see inflammation. We see the brain's energy processes start to get disrupted, and as a result, the brain itself starts to break down. So there's a clear distinction between aging and dementia, but age is obviously associated, is one of the key risk factors for these diseases as well. But in dementia, there is a far more complex process that is happening. 

Elfy Scott  06:56

Yeah, well, and am I correct in thinking that you wrote a sort of Atlas of all of the protein changes that happen in dementia?

Dr Eleanor Drummond  07:03

Yeah, one of the key things of my research was actually trying to create a bit of a road map for all the different protein changes that happens in Alzheimer's disease, because I figured that if we could see everything holistically of all those bad protein changes that are happening at once, this might be able to help us understand which things might be the causative factors and which things potentially could be new drug targets. And so what's really nice is in the lab, at the moment, we're getting to go through and start to study all of these individual proteins that I think might be causative of disease and see if we genuinely can make a difference and understand what they're doing in these diseases. 

Elfy Scott  05:10

Eleanor, can I also ask, are there any sort of persistent mysteries of how the brain, sort of the progression of dementia in the brain? Are there, like, big holes in the research? Another really easy question to answer.

Dr Eleanor Drummond  07:55

Yeah, there are so many mysteries. This is why I'm being like this. Because there is, unfortunately, still so much that we have yet to discover. Some key things that we're really interested in, obviously, from my last answer is, what causes neurodegenerative disease? What causes Alzheimer's disease? We don't know. And we also want to know, why do some people progress much faster than other people when they do get these diseases, we don't know the underlying cause, because you can imagine, if there is a person who may have a lot of characteristic Alzheimer's pathology in their brain, but they progress slower, there's something inherent in that person that is protecting them against the disease. And as scientists, we really want to find out what is that, and can we use that as a potential drug target as well? Those are just two examples. I could go on all night, but I'm sure the other two would have other ideas about giant mysteries in their field. 

Elfy Scott  08:50

I'm sure somebody will be coming up to you after this, or many people, probably. Olivier, can I ask? Has the diagnosis of dementia changed at all in recent years, and are there limitations around it at all? Yes, it has. I think there's a greater awareness of dementia. In general. There's still misconception about dementia. What is dementia? And often you hear conversations such as,

Professor Olivier Piguet  09:05

Yes, it has. I think there's a greater awareness of dementia. In general. There's still misconception about dementia. What is dementia? And often you hear conversations such as, I'm lucky I don't have dementia. I have Alzheimer's disease, or vice versa. So there's confusion around labels, what it means and what it represents. Dementia is not one single disease. There are multiple causes for dementias. There are probably over 100 different types of dementia. Alzheimer's disease is the most common one, which probably accounts for about 60% of all cases of dementia. So there's a natural focus on trying to understand what Alzheimer's disease is, but certainly the research that I do is looking at other types of dementia, and particularly Frontotemporal dementia, and trying to understand the different phenomenology clinical presentations of people with a pathological process that is different to that we see in Alzheimer's disease. So in front of temporal dementia, the pathology is in brain regions that are different to what is found in Alzheimer's disease, and so it leads to different features, clinical symptoms and signs that we see as the disease progresses. The other thing is also that these brain disorders, they progressive, so it starts in a particular region, so that will be associated with some changes, say memory or language or thinking abilities. And then, because the disease progresses across different brain regions, then different symptoms will emerge. So it's not uncommon to see people who start with language problems, then starting showing some behavioral changes, having difficulty moving around, finding their way around, coordination of movements or thinking abilities. The other aspect that I think is important to remember is, as researchers and clinicians, we like neat boxes, so we try to assign a diagnosis to a person which is in realities is a combination of many different features, and so it's not it's hardly ever black and white, and it's more often shades of gray. So you have a little bit of this, little bit of that. But depending on who you see and you can there have been experiments done with that where you show the same presentations to different clinicians, and these people will arrive at a different diagnosis just because of their interest or because of what they focus on, if they're more interested in language or in movement. So there's, there's a level of complexity that is quite enormous. 

Elfy Scott  11:51

I mean, I'm going to ask you another question that has, I'm sure, an enormous level of complexity, a question that I'm sure many of us are looking to ask tonight, and that is, what are the biggest lifestyle and environmental factors that determine healthy aging of the brain?

Professor Olivier Piguet  12:06

Well, there's a good paper that has been commissioned by the Lancet journal, and so they've done three round tables on trying to identify the what they call modifiable risk factor. And they did one in 2019, 23, and the latest one was released earlier this year, and they've identified 14 lifestyle risk factors, so modifiable risk factors that we can potentially modulate our risk of developing a brain neurodegenerative disorder, some of these things are quite obvious. It's about eating well, eating healthy foods, sleeping well, doing some exercise, not drinking too much. I don't like this one, but you know, you know what I mean. So a couple of drinks is fine, but you don't want to go over the top. There's also education, your social engagement, social activities, being engaged socially and intellectually, will make a difference. The limitation of these papers is that it gives you some information at a population-based level. So it tells you something if we aggregate data from many different studies, this is what we find. However, it never tells you exactly what is your risk for Mr. X or Mrs. Y, because it depends on your life, your life history, where you grew up, what your life events were. And Gilbert can certainly talk more about this and also your genetic makeup. So it's not just environmental risk factors, it's also how these risk factors will talk to what you were born with, your genetic makeup, and which will modulate how these genes are expressed, and how it will then modulate your risk of developing these brain disorders. 

Elfy Scott  14:01

What about mobile phone games? Sudoku is in the audience. 

Professor Olivier Piguet  14:08

Oh, they're fantastic. If you do them, you'll get better at them. On a more serious note, whether you translate to other cognitive abilities. There's no clear evidence for that. So if you enjoy doing these games, by all means, do them, and I do some of them, but there's no clear evidence that by doing that, it will rewire your brain in a way that will help you fight against dementia.

Elfy Scott  14:39

Moving on from those sort of environmental and lifestyle factors. Gilbert, you obviously have extensive research in this area. Can we talk a little bit about social and economic inequality when we talk about those lifestyle factors? Because that is something that you focus on, right? 

Gilbert Knaggs  14:54

Yeah, yeah. I think just the whole idea of being able to, you know, age, healthier, and age better and avoid certain risks in later life through lifestyle factors. It's really appealing, and obviously, I think it's a good thing to do, to think about stuff like that, but it just gets a bit more complicated when you look or you start, I guess, asking what is a lifestyle factor and how much control over, I guess, our health choices do we really have when you look at society as this sort of big monster of many different people with different possibilities for making choices and different histories and something simple, like, you know, we should eat better to avoid a risk of dementia, you should eat a Mediterranean diet. Is really well documented correlations between poverty and obesity, so if you can't afford to eat well, and then someone says, you know, just eat a Mediterranean diet and you'll be fine. It's misleading, but it's also maybe not going to be as effective than if you looked at a bigger picture and thought, okay, what kind of really tricky, difficult social action or political action would need to happen for us all to sort of have a better, you know, chance at living a happy, healthy later life. The idea of lifestyle, it's just very appealing. I think we all do worry about that stuff. But when you start to think, Okay, what kind of reforms, and how long would this take, and how much would it cost to make sure we could all have a better diet? Realistically, it's just a lot more complicated, and it's a harder job to do. The main issue is it's sort of misleading to think about risks as up to us to sort of manage as individuals. But when we look at risk as sort of collectively distributed across, you know, an unequal society, it's probably a bit more effective, and it's going to the outcomes that we might achieve might be a bit more tangible in that way, I think, yeah. 

Elfy Scott  16:43

And you have also conducted research on healthy aging in rural and remote communities, as opposed to urban communities. Do you mind telling us about that? 

Gilbert Knaggs  16:52

Yeah. So I've been looking at these ideas of healthy aging, and aging is something that we can manage ourselves, and how these ideas have come about in the last 60, 70, years. Where, you know, I think a lot of people back sort of 1950s and 60s, aging was just something that more happened. And that's a bit of a generalization, but aging was just seen as something that, you know, death and taxes, and maybe aging would be added to that, whereas now we're much more concerned about, what can I do? What can we do to make our aging, you know, a better experience, and in rural areas, yeah, there's certain specific difficulties that I think people face where there's, I guess, three factors where rural areas are aging faster than urban areas. A lot of that has to do with changing economies and rural spaces. So a lot of traditional industries have sort of been corporatised or have just sort of disappeared. So younger people are moving to cities. So there's less, I guess, family connection there. There's also, I think it's, everyone will know, there's health services and even community care services often struggle to get out to remote communities. And the people I spoke to had this idea of healthy aging and aging well as a lot to do with being independent and being able to age in the place that they maybe live for 40, 50, years, but when there's no services, I guess, to support healthy aging, because healthy aging isn't just about being independent. It's actually about getting the care that you need as you get older and your body changes, people were left in this, I guess, rock and a hard place where they didn't want to become a burden on their loved ones, who often live quite far away. There was also not no services to support their aging in place. The idea of moving to a city to be closer to family and health services wasn't very attractive. Just because you know, you want to grow old in the place that you've called home, there was not really any way to move in that kind of that space. And ended up just thinking, okay, I'm just going to manage as best I can until something quite significant happens and I have to go into an aged care facility. So yeah, I think rural Australia had, I think, unique issues across the board, but I think a lot of it has to do with this aspiration to remain independent, but also not really having the infrastructure to support that desire that I think we all have. Yeah.

Elfy Scott  19:09

You mentioned families back there. What is it specifically about those sort of family connections that facilitates healthy aging? 

Gilbert Knaggs  19:18

The idea that I think healthy aging is being independent indefinitely. It's not really realistic. So I think it's just a matter of care and support. So we're all as we get older, we're going to need more of that. It's kind of inevitable and then. But there's also, again, it's just most people I talked to were really anxious, and it was sort of a moral concern. I don't want to be a burden on my children. I'd rather have formal care, but that's also not available, so it was sort of this moral issue for a lot of people, but I think the family for healthy aging, yeah, care and support and also companionship. I mean, social isolation, loneliness are never good for anyone's health in any way. But, yeah, just, in rural areas, it's, I think, more pronounced that struggle to manage certain aspirations and also family relations. Yeah.

Elfy Scott  20:08

Yeah, wow. Okay, I'm going to throw a question to the whole panel, because I know that everybody got really excited about this question, but there is so much pseudoscience in this space, as an area which I think a lot of people hold natural fear towards aging just is a breeding ground for pseudoscience. So what are the things that you come across personally in your own work? Eleanor, if you want to jump in. 

Dr Eleanor Drummond  20:33

Sure, I think one of the issues with pseudoscience is a lot of it comes from actual, real lab science. And I think the issue that we all face is that the pseudoscience happens because everyone wants it to work so well, and we just, we want to accelerate it towards being actually helpful. We want to translate it into all of your lives, into helping you age well or preventing you from getting dementia. A key example that we were discussing upstairs before, which just boggles my mind is this idea, and you mentioned it earlier about this idea that maybe if you inject yourself with blood from young people, this will help your brains, which sounds crazy, and I know that I've spoken to some people who then say, oh yes, this sounds like an excellent, doable thing. And the problem is, is that it sounds crazy, but it's not actually that crazy. There is lab science there backing it up, where they have done lab experiments showing that if you give an old mouse blood from a young mouse, the old mouse actually gets better. That is real. The problem is, is that humans are not mice. And so if there is one takeaway in terms of pseudoscience, here it is, please make health decisions based on things that have actual scientific evidence and has a clinical trial for humans. We do the mouse experiments for a reason. But you know, the human experiments are critical, because for the blood example, we don't know how many times a person needs a blood injection from a young person? We don't know what's in the blood that is making their brains react in a great way to kind of rejuvenate a little bit. And these are the questions that basic scientists are trying to answer in humans so that we can eventually translate it. Another key area that Olivier and I were talking about upstairs was supplements, because there are so many supplements targeted to people, particularly for aging. And the key, again, the key issue is, is that there is some lab science that backs it up, and the companies because they know they can make money, then spruik that basic lab science and say, yes, you should take this supplement, because it is going to rejuvenate you. And that's not entirely untrue, except for the fact that it was done in a mouse and not in a human. So please face your human decisions on human studies.

Elfy Scott  22:52

Seems like a very baseline. What do you think the real risks are, buying into the pseudoscience, maybe even just beyond, like, wasting a bit of money. Because everybody wastes a bit of money. What are the real risks of it? 

Dr Eleanor Drummond  23:07

Well, there's financial ones for sure, because you have to, like, the companies are marketing this to you, because they're going to make money. But the key risk, I think, is people's hopes. And this is what we as scientists try not to do. We really try not to get people's hopes up to a point probably where we err on the side of caution, where, if you ask me, do you know anything that might be good in the Alzheimer's field, I'm like, oh, I don't know if I want to tell you this in case I get your hopes up. And in the pseudoscience world, it's the total opposite. Everyone's hopes are up, thinking that they're going to take this and it's going to cure a disease or make them age slower, and it's just not real. And as scientists, we do this research to try and help people, not for a company, to make lots of money on something that's not proven.

Elfy Scott  23:57

Yeah, yeah. 100%. Where are we going from here in terms of drug treatments, I know we were just talking about not getting your hopes up, but what are the novel drug treatments that are emerging at the moment? 

Dr Eleanor Drummond  24:08

From an Alzheimer's perspective, it's actually been quite an exciting time over the last year, because for 20 years, we had no new drugs that any doctors could offer anyone. And I'm sure you've seen in the media, there are these cures for Alzheimer's disease. They're called the amyloid immunotherapies. And just today, another one was, so there's one that has been approved by the TGA in Australia, and today, a second one was approved. So probably be in the media tomorrow. And while this is really exciting, I think a key thing to think about is to talk to your doctor if you're interested in these because there are some significant limitations that potentially the media don't always touch on, but as scientists and clinicians, we're very aware of, and this is where these drugs target a particular protein that accumulates in your brain, which is called beta amyloid. And what these drugs do is bind to it and then enhance its removal from the brain, which, in theory, is a great thing. And indeed, these drugs do this, which is why they've been approved. The main problem is that, from a clinical standpoint, they don't cure the disease. They possibly offer you maybe six months-ish, maybe a year slowing of the disease symptoms, which is amazing. And if you're faced with Alzheimer's disease, you may want to have that. But then there are other considerations too, and there's quite significant side effects associated with brain swelling and bleeding. And then there is also the cost. These are not covered by the PBS, and it is about, it's very expensive. I think it's $46,000 a year, but I'd have to double-check that. Oh and Olivier was also telling me that because they're infusions every month, you have to go to a place where you get an infusion of this drug. Now, scientists are working really hard at the moment to try and make these drugs better. So there is a whole field of research focused in on these amyloid immunotherapies to try and make them work better, which is amazing. But what I want to point out as well is that there is a whole field of drug discovery scientists like myself who are really focused in on diversifying this potential drug discovery pathway. And this is some of the research that we're doing here at the University of Sydney, where we are trying to uncover these new drug targets. This is where I'm using my road map of the brain, because beta amyloid is just one thing that happens. It is really important. But what if there is something else that is easier to target and has less side effects, and we potentially can slow the disease or alter earlier as well? And so this is, I think it's an exciting time for drug discovery. I know it's frustrating for people who want answers now. And drug discovery is inherently slow. But I'd bring it back to my point before, where it needs to be slow for a reason, so we can have the confidence in telling you that you are getting the drugs that are actually going to clinically help you in your disease. 

Elfy Scott  26:56

Yeah. Well, I mean, talk about inequitable healthcare as well with the $46,000 fee Eleanor, are there any gaps in the research that you think need to be addressed right now?

Dr Eleanor Drummond  27:08

So we touched on it earlier, some of these mysteries that we see, such as, why do people progress slower in disease versus others? But I think the key thing that we need to focus in on now is thinking number one about the cause of disease, because if I can impart another thing that I obviously am very passionate about, many things, it is that for us to find a cure for these diseases, we need to understand the cause. It's really hard for us to develop a drug if we don't know what's causing the disease. So I'm very passionate about the need for basic science and fundamental understanding of these diseases, because I think this will translate, hopefully in the future, to therapies. But also there is this push in the field of recognising the fact that a lot of our research is done on a very small population of people, usually it's Caucasians, and it is usually highly educated people, and so this makes it really tricky from an equitable perspective, when thinking about, what if we're doing all this drug discovery research and it only works for a small population of people, and so diversifying our pools of people who are involved in these trials, I think, is critical. For a long time, we ignored women because they were too hard to study, apparently. And then the FDA had to come out in America and say, everyone should include women in their experiments and female mice in their experiments. And that seems crazy, right? But we need to consider these things and advocate for them so that we're not just developing treatments for a particular cluster of people. 

Elfy Scott  28:33

Yeah, absolutely. I have a last question, and maybe we can quickly run around the panel with this one, but this one is from Bobby, and they ask, how has studying dementia, or, I'll change that to how has studying dementia and aging changed how you view your own life and what you value?

Gilbert Knaggs  28:53

For one, I think more before I started aging was something that I guess worried me a lot more, and I think just talking to a lot of different people from different parts of Australia, I think I'm a lot more at peace just with the realities of aging and also coming to terms with the fact that while there's certain things you can do to control and minimise your risks of certain difficulties and pathologies and diseases later in life. The other challenge is just coming to terms and thinking about how we can sort of live with aging in a way that, I guess, acknowledges aging's reality. So that's, yeah, that's what it's done to me. 

Dr Eleanor Drummond  29:36

Well, I guess for me, I got into this research because of intellectual curiosity. Most people get into dementia research because they have a family member who is affected by it. But I started off just because I thought it was fascinating that we knew so much and so little about these diseases that I wanted to study them. As I've gone through I've really started to appreciate the critical need for this research, and it's gotten me even more excited. And this has come from interacting with people who are worried about dementia, who have dementia, who have people with dementia in their families. And as a result, it's just given me this extra oomph of, oh, I must do things. There is this sense of, I must, I must work faster. And so I think from that aspect. It's given me an extra passion for doing the research as I've gone through.

Elfy Scott  30:25

Oh, brilliant. I love that. And Olivier?

Professor Olivier Piguet  30:27

It's a bit like Gilbert. I like who I am. Now, I don't think I would like to be 20 again. I'm at a point in my life where there's a history, there's experience, and this comes with aging. You don't, you can't jump ahead. And I think that's what is wonderful about aging, is that, and as far as I can go back in my studies, I always been interested in aging and dementia, because there's so much to be learned about the life histories, what people have done, what they've gone through, and to understand, yep, their life and and again, coming back to the point I was making earlier, having a diagnosis of dementia is difficult, but it's not necessarily the end of your story is still there as a person. There's still things you can experience and live and enjoy and be part of. And I think there's a lot that needs to be done still in that space for the general audience, the general public, to understand.

Mark Scott  31:38

That's researcher and clinician, Olivier Piguet and you also heard from neuroscientist Eleanor Drummond and researcher Gilbert Knaggs. For more insight into how your diet can maintain brain health, listen to our episode featuring nutrition and longevity expert Luigi Fontana.

Luigi Fontana  31:57

Calorie restriction with optimal nutrition is the most powerful intervention to delay aging. So if you envision like a chess game, nutrition is the king and exercise is the queen. 

Mark Scott  32:11

You can listen to that right now through the link in our show notes, and make sure you're following The Solutionists so you don't miss an episode and for more great ideas from the University of Sydney, and to hear the full hour long version of this public conversation, visit the Sydney ideas website. We'll put a link for that in the show notes too.

Mark Scott  32:33

The Solutionists is a podcast from the University of Sydney, produced by Deadset Studios. 

The Solutionists is a podcast from the University of Sydney, produced by Deadset Studios. Keep up to date with The Solutionists by following @sydney_uni on Facebook and Instagram, and @sydney.edu.au on Bluesky.

This conversation is originally from a live public talks event, presented by Sydney Ideas – the University of Sydney’s flagship public talks program. You can hear the full hour-long version of this public conversation here.

Hear our episode with nutrition and longevity expert Luigi Fontana here.

This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. For thousands of years, across innumerable generations, knowledge has been taught, shared and exchanged here. We pay respect to elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.