How Nature Improves Your Physical Health | Dr. Marc Berman & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | I want to make sure that I ask you about stroke, diabetes, and heart disease.

00:00:08.280 | You have some really interesting data that people who take on this practice of getting into nature

00:00:14.380 | can actually improve their health outcomes beyond just being able to focus better.

00:00:18.240 | Right. So there's, you know, there's all this incredible work on physical health benefits of nature.

00:00:26.800 | Now, of course, mind and body are united.

00:00:29.900 | And, you know, that's one thing that we talk about in the book, that it's mind, body are united.

00:00:34.000 | And then we have to deal with the environment, too.

00:00:36.080 | But it's interesting that there have been these studies about these incredible physical health benefits

00:00:44.600 | that people get from interacting with nature.

00:00:46.500 | And one of the most incredible ones, I don't know if you're familiar with this, Andrew,

00:00:50.360 | was a study done by Roger Ulrich in the 1980s.

00:00:53.980 | And what Roger Ulrich was looking at was a hospital corridor in this hospital in Philadelphia.

00:01:00.960 | And he looked at, in these hospital rooms, what view did they have out of the window of these hospital rooms?

00:01:09.200 | And some of the hospital rooms had views of modest nature, like a tree and some shrubs.

00:01:15.220 | Others were just looking out to a brick wall.

00:01:20.240 | And it was interesting that patients who were recovering from gallbladder surgery, when they had the view of nature out of their window,

00:01:31.640 | this modest view of nature, they recovered from gallbladder surgery a day earlier and they used less pain medication compared to the people that had the view of the brick wall.

00:01:39.720 | And what's cool about this study is that it wasn't, you know, Ulrich didn't have the power to randomly put people in different rooms,

00:01:47.200 | but essentially patients were just randomly put into these different hospital rooms.

00:01:52.100 | So it's not like healthier people got the views of nature or wealthier people got the views of nature.

00:01:56.360 | These patients were just randomly placed into these different hospital rooms.

00:02:02.500 | And the ones that have the modest view of nature recovered faster from gallbladder surgery and used less pain medication.

00:02:08.260 | And you've got to be thinking, what's up with that?

00:02:11.420 | Like, what's the mechanism there?

00:02:12.860 | I don't think it's air quality.

00:02:16.500 | I don't think the people with the views of nature somehow exercised more.

00:02:22.400 | There's something about the aesthetic of nature that can also be physically healing.

00:02:28.180 | I mean, that's pretty wild.

00:02:32.340 | We kind of followed up on that in a study that we did in Toronto, which was kind of cool.

00:02:38.540 | We had health data from about 30,000 people in Toronto.

00:02:42.680 | And then we had two incredible data sets to quantify green space in people's neighborhoods that we then could relate to health.

00:02:51.700 | So the University of Toronto Forestry Department had a data set where they cataloged every single tree on public land in the city of Toronto.

00:03:00.040 | So we had data for 580,000 trees in the city of Toronto.

00:03:04.700 | We knew the species of the tree and the diameter of the tree at breast height, basically saying how old the tree was.

00:03:12.960 | And then my student, Omid Cardan, calculated basically how much tree canopy each individual tree provided.

00:03:20.160 | Then we had this other data set that was satellite imagery of the whole city of Toronto, where we could quantify all the other trees that were like in people's backyards or something like that.

00:03:33.820 | And from those data, we basically related health, the health data to the tree data.

00:03:40.140 | And we found, so for one variable is subjective.

00:03:44.660 | So how healthy do people think they are?

00:03:48.880 | How healthy do they feel?

00:03:50.100 | And we found that if you just added one tree on their city block, that was related to a 1% increase in people's health perception.

00:04:01.300 | Now, that sounds pretty modest, but to get that equivalent benefit monetarily, you'd have to give everybody in that neighborhood $10,000 and have them move to a neighborhood that had a median income that was $10,000 wealthier, or it was also related with being seven years younger.

00:04:19.340 | And again, the tree effect was controlling for age, education, and income, so that was pretty interesting.

00:04:24.600 | We also had data on more objective health measures.

00:04:28.260 | Does somebody have a stroke?

00:04:30.080 | Do they have diabetes or heart disease?

00:04:31.560 | And there we found if you increased the amount of trees on the street by one tree per neighborhood, that was related to a 1% reduction in stroke, diabetes, and heart disease.

00:04:44.760 | Again, sounds pretty modest, but to get that equivalent benefit monetarily, you'd have to give every household in that neighborhood $20,000, have them all move to a neighborhood that's $20,000 wealthier, or it was also related to being one and a half years younger.

00:04:58.940 | So pretty incredible.

00:05:01.020 | Again, I can't say causality because it's correlational, but I'm fairly confident in the direction because the worst case scenario is just healthier people choose to live in neighborhoods that have more trees.

00:05:13.960 | But they can't be younger, they can't be wealthier, they can't be more educated because we controlled for that.

00:05:19.020 | Now, for that study, maybe the mechanism could be air quality, or maybe the mechanism could be, you know, maybe people are more willing to exercise if there's more trees on the street.

00:05:30.640 | But pretty incredible stuff that just increasing the tree canopy a little bit, you could get these physical health benefits.

00:05:40.920 | That is impressive.

00:05:41.580 | For people that don't have the opportunity to plant more trees in their neighborhood, would getting and tending to an indoor plant have any positive effects?

00:05:50.160 | So people have found some effects of having indoor plants, not necessarily to these physical health benefits, but there's some attention benefits of having indoor greenery.

00:06:03.740 | There's also been some benefits, like hospitals now are starting to take this seriously, that patients subjectively feel better when there's this greenery around.

00:06:15.080 | I've seen other work too, that people that are having some procedures that are very painful, that actually bringing greenery into the hospital rooms can be helpful for reducing feelings of pain.

00:06:34.480 | Interesting.

00:06:35.480 | Interesting.

00:06:36.480 | Yeah.

00:06:37.480 | Yeah, I'm about to embark on putting a bunch of plants in my place.

00:06:41.100 | I'm also a big fan of fish tanks.

00:06:43.420 | As long as you take good care of them, underwater scapes are really cool.

00:06:46.860 | Yes.

00:06:47.360 | And I like to think, I don't have any data on this, but I like to think that they are passive and restorative.

00:06:51.980 | Staring at a fish tank is a lot like being in a dream.

00:06:56.260 | Yeah, there's a, in Toronto, there's a Ripley's Aquarium and they have this tank that's got kelp and you can see the kelp kind of moving in the water.

00:07:06.900 | It definitely feels very restorative and watching the fish swim around also feels very, very restorative.

00:07:13.640 | Yeah, the feeling that might be familiar to people that visited, for instance, the Monterey Bay Aquarium or this aquarium that you're describing is when the tanks are at eye level or higher, it puts you into this other world, right?

00:07:29.280 | Yes.

00:07:30.280 | Like you're at the bottom of the ocean or you're in the ocean.

00:07:32.280 | Yes.

00:07:33.280 | But the feeling that's always striking to me is when you leave an aquarium and you're out into the real world again, it feels so different.

00:07:39.840 | It's what you take away from it that's equally interesting, in the same way that when you walk out of a really great movie, the world feels different.

00:07:48.000 | Yes.

00:07:49.000 | It feels lighter, brighter, it's of course, physically brighter, but there's really something to it, the contrast between experiences, which is so much of what we're talking about today.

00:07:57.080 | It feels better.

How Nature Improves Your Physical Health | Dr. Marc Berman & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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