A Bit of Optimism - Live A Long, Happy Life with physician Mark Hyman

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

Turns out laughter isn't the best medicine. Medicine might not even be the best medicine. If you were to ask Dr Mark Hyman, he would tell you that food is the best medicine.Some would say Mark is a modern age miracle worker. In reality, he has figured out ways to help the body perform its own miracles. From curing diseases to extending our lifespans, his approach to wellness is unlike what most of us are used to. His work is inspirational, anthropological and downright fascinating.This is… A Bit of Optimism.For more on Mark and his work check out:his forthcoming book, Young Forever, at www.youngforeverbook.comhttps://drhyman.com/  

In our modern day, with all our technology, we think we're so smart. We think because of modern medicine, we are now living longer than we ever have. Well, it turns out that's not true. Apparently, back in caveman times, they regularly lived to 80 and 90 years old. And it's only when we came together and lived in larger communities bigger than the tribe because of farming and industrialization did the average age go down. You know, we hear these stories about average age being 40 years old or something, and now because of modern medicine, we're living to our 70s. But what if

we just kept our bodies healthy in the first place? This is really the idea behind functional medicine. And Dr. Mark Hyman is one of the pioneers of functional medicine, which basically says, keep the body healthy, keep the body in tip-top form, and it largely knows how to protect itself. Not only can we fix disease and avoid disease in the first place, according to his new book, Young Forever, we can actually live longer too. This is a bit of optimism. Mark, you and I met at an event where we were both speakers, but where we really became friends was in the sauna. Absolutely. Where all good things happen when you get hot and sweaty.

But it wasn't the sauna per se. It was what was happening outside the sauna because we were in Colorado and there was a bathtub filled with ice water in the middle of winter outside. And one by one, we all took turns to do an ice plunge from the hot sauna to the ice bath and it became because there was too many a-type personalities in the song oh my god it became a competition it was in fact your lovely lady i think won the competition which was very impressive i think she stayed in 10 minutes in an ice bath. Yeah. Yeah. That was pretty amazing. I know everybody tells me that going from hot to cold and the cold plungers is healthy. What exactly about that is healthy?

Well, you know, it's really remarkable, Simon, because these practices have been around forever. The Finnish saunas, the Native American sweat lodges, the polar bear plunge. Everybody in many cultures loves to sort of do hot and cold therapies, the Russian baths, you know, the banyas. It's kind of a cultural thing, but it turns out it's an extraordinarily healthy thing to do because your body loves stress, believe it or not, and the right kinds of stress. Most of us live in this perfectly temperature-controlled environments with no biological stresses, but our ancestors had to deal with extremes of hot and cold. And when we have those exposures, it triggers these ancient mechanisms in our body to help us get healthy and live longer.

So for example, one study in Finland looked at people who did saunas two to three times a week versus like four to five. And the control group was like everybody else in Finland, which goes in once a week. Because I think there's enough saunas in Finland for everybody to be in a sauna at the same time. But they found a reduction by about 24% if you did a couple of saunas a week in mortality and about 40 some percent if you did four or five saunas a week in mortality, and about 40-something percent if you did four or five saunas a week. And what happens when you take a sauna is you heat your body up, and it not only increases circulation and blood flow,

which is great, it actually helps reduce stress in your body, increases something called heart rate variability, which is the complexity of your heart rate, which is a sign of good cardiovascular health. It also improves your immune system. So it activates this ancient part of your immune system called which is a sign of good cardiovascular health. It also improves your immune system. So it activates this ancient part of your immune system called the innate immune system, helps you fight infections and cancer. And it helps also to heal these things that are

damaged proteins in your body. As we age, we get these damaged proteins that causes rapid aging. And I haven't even got to the cold stuff yet. Oh, okay. So that's the heat. Now what about the cold? Yeah. So you get all these benefits from the, and the cold also is amazing because again, it's a shock. Now if you get too much heat, you're going to get heat stroke and die. If you have too much cold, you're going to get hypothermia and die. So it's like Goldilocks amount, right? But the cold temperatures increase dopamine focus attention, which is makes you alert and feel good, or also stimulates brown fat, which increases your metabolism, helps your mitochondria, and activates all these ancient longevity switches that we have

that help us feel better and live longer and stay healthier. So it's part of my regular routine. In fact, this morning I took a cold shower, believe it or not. What I love about this, and I think we all forget about this, which is the human animal is a very, very old legacy machine. Yeah, it is. And we are not built for the world we live in. And I've written about this in terms of behavior and leadership, where the things that make

us feel dopamine and endorphins and oxytocin and serotonin, they're all there for important reasons. And in a modern day, we can fire those things off for sometimes bad reasons, the wrong reasons, and trick the body into feeling one thing when we're not really designed for that. But what I love about your doing is you're taking a look at the ancient machine that we are

and you're saying, hold on, why were we designed this way? We're this expertly designed machine that evolved over millions of years. We are built for these conditions that allow for optimum health. And the strange thing is, is modernization and technology works against the machine. And now it's kind of like we took all the natural ingredients out and made food with chemicals and hydrogenated oils and things. It doesn't taste good. So we add more chemicals to restore the taste as opposed to just going back to good food.

So we add more chemicals to restore the taste as opposed to just going back to good food. And what you're suggesting is we have this body. We've ruined it by putting it in the wrong place. And now we add more crap to make it healthy where if we just go back to how the body was designed, you'll find that a lot of things just work. That is such a brilliant description, Simon, because what we're learning now for the first time is how the body truly works. You know, we have the laws of physics. We know what they are. We know how to build bridges and send rockets to the moon and build computers and all these things that are based on physics. But medicine is such a young science and we haven't really discovered the laws of biology until really recently. And so what's extraordinary about these new discoveries in medicine is that we now

understand that there's innate healing system in the body. There's built-in mechanisms to keep us healthy and to help us live long, healthy lives. We do everything in our modern culture to screw that up, basically. And the sciences that I learned in medical school was all about disease, what disease is, how it occurs, how to treat it with drugs. But I never took a course on the scientific basis of wellness, like how does the body create health? And that's essentially what now is happening. And particularly in the science of longevity, we're understanding the root causes

of what goes wrong and how to treat it. And so I get very excited now as a doctor because now I can work with patients to help them recreate the conditions that we evolved with to keep our bodies healthy and turn on these ancient longevity pathways, these ancient switches that activate our own healing mechanisms. I read once, and please confirm or deny this, that this is true. I read once that back in caveman times, we actually lived to 70 and 80. Long life was actually pretty normal. And then it was the advancement of society that we actually started cutting our lives short. And so when we say how, oh, we're living so much longer today because of modern medicine, where 200 years ago, the average lifespan was 52. The reality is

not really. Modern medicine is getting us back to where we started. But what if we actually just went back to where we started and understood our bodies? We'd be healthier without all the nonsense, without all of the treatments. Yeah, I think there is this sort of thing, oh, we all died at 35 years old. And I think that really isn't accurate. I mean, if you have a population, half of them live to 80 and half of them die in childbirth or at two years old, then the average age of death is 40, right? So it's really when you look at these populations, even, you know, look at our fathers of the revolution, they lived well into their 80s and 90s, like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, they died pretty old. And that was when the life expectancy was like 40, right? But it really was

about our sort of modernization that led to the degradation of our health. And if you look at the bones and the science of what happened to our hunter-gatherers versus the advent of agriculture and industrial society, our health degraded quite a bit when we started moving into cities and living in close quarters. And we started developing all these infectious diseases. We've dealt a lot with that through sanitation and modern medicine and vaccines and antibiotics. It's all really helped to extend life. But most of the extension of life has really come from our public health measures than actually medical interventions. It's so interesting. Yeah. And we're seeing actually a decrease in life expectancy for the first time in history because of our sick population. You know, it's shocking to me when I look at the data. You know,

we have six out of 10 Americans that have a chronic disease, four out of 10 that have more than one. But what's even more disturbing is a recent study that came out that looked at metabolic health. And that's, you know, your blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, your weight, whether you've had a heart attack or stroke. And there's only 6.8% of the population in America that has not had any of those things. That means over 93% are sick to some degree or another. That's just shocking. And that's not our natural state. And like you said, Simon, it's a result of, you know, the advent of our industrial food, the sedentary lifestyles, the chronic stresses, the load of environmental toxins, the unnatural living conditions. You know, some scientists have

talked about the harm of the light bulb. It's just changed our circadian rhythms and sleep. And all these things have enormous impact on this functioning organism. That's this ancient organism that we have to learn how to take care of, but most of us have no clue how to. You said something once that I found absolutely fascinating, which is that the human body wants to heal itself. Yeah. And this is sort of one of the philosophies behind one of the fields of medicine that you're pioneering, which is functional medicine. Yeah. If the body is healthy, if the biome is healthy, if you have illness, it kind of just, it knows what to do. Tell me more about that because I find that so fascinating that we think that we're like

the parent of this very fragile thing, a little child that we have to protect it constantly, otherwise it's going to get hurt without our help. But the reality is the body is way more sophisticated than we are and it wants to and knows how to protect itself. Totally. Disease is just the body's best attempt to deal with a bad set of circumstances. So when you remove those bad set of circumstances, whether it's bad diet or toxins or changes in your microbiome

or late infections or allergens or stress, different kinds of stresses, and you add in the ingredients for health, you create the conditions for health, the body naturally wants to get back to being right. And so we have so many ancient repair mechanisms. And this is, you know, as I've been sort of researching my book on longevity young forever, I was just sort of shocked to discover all these ancient pathways that we can activate through various techniques that we all did by default historically, but now we don't,

that activate these longevity switches and pathways that activate our own repair, healing, and recycling and renewal systems and our ability to regenerate. We all know we have that ability. You cut your skin and somehow magically the skin heals, right? What's going on inside the body? How do you activate that inside? And that's what it sort of excites me now. It's like, how do we, through simple, accessible strategies like diet and exercise and optimizing our sleep and stress reduction and even supplements to even far more advanced technologies that are being used to sort of help the body repair and renew like stem cells and exosomes and peptides and things like plasmapheresis, which is where you clean your blood and you filter out all the bad stuff. So there's all these incredible new things that are

emerging that help us activate these longevity switches. So we're working with the body rather than against it. Most modern medicine is anti, right? Antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, ACE inhibitors. So we're blocking and anti-inhibiting everything instead of saying, hey, how does the body function? How do we help it function better? How do we give it the raw materials to do what it's supposed to do and take out the stuff that's causing it to have impaired function? So that's really what we call functional medicine. Can you give an example of functional medicine where when everything is working, the body knows what to do and it can fix itself

without medicines? Yeah, I'll give you a couple of stories of two patients in particular that come to mind. One had severe metabolic issues, heart disease and diabetes and high blood pressure and kidney failure and liver failure and all these things were going on high blood pressure. Another one had a whole set of autoimmune inflammatory conditions. So the first patient was 66 years old. And again, what I'm going to share with you sounds like a miracle, like crazy and impossible because most of us in medicine have never seen it because we don't know how to do the thing that actually creates the result that we're seeing, right? So we don't know how powerful food is. So this was a woman who was 66. She had severe obesity.

Her body mass index was 43. Anything over 30 is obese. So she was just huge. And her diabetes had been uncontrolled for a long time. She was on insulin, on a pile of medications. She had heart failure, which her heart wasn't pumping. And this is usually considered an irreversible condition. Her kidneys were starting to go down.

So basically, she was on her way to a heart transplant and a kidney transplant. And she was managed with all sorts of medications. She had had stents and she had blood pressure pills and was pretty miserable. And she had eaten a processed food diet her whole life. It was what her family did. It's what she knew. It's what she grew up with. So she never really understood anything about nutrition. And she was a fairly well-educated person, believe it or not. And she just didn't have experience with what to eat. So we put her on a really whole foods diet that was anti-inflammatory as part of our group program. And I love, Simon, you talk about community and the importance of community as instead of a self-help book,

an us-help book. And so I think we have that same sort of need to be supported in behavior change through groups. And so she was in a group program that all were supporting each other to live better lives. And within three days of changing her diet, she got off the insulin. Within three months, she reversed her heart failure. Her diabetes went from extremely out of control to perfectly normal. Her heart blood pressure normalized. She lost 43 pounds and was off all her medications. And in a year, she lost 116 pounds and was completely healthy and normal at 66. So we don't see reversal of heart failure in medicine. We don't see reversal of diabetes. We don't see reversal of kidney damage. These things are possible if you provide the right conditions for the body to thrive. So it was remarkable to see this. And it's not an anomaly.

This is a repeatable phenomena when you apply this strategy of how to take care of people with food as medicine. And I'm agnostic. I don't care if it's exercise or exorcism, whatever works, I'm going to prescribe it. If a pill could have done all that, I would have done it. But there is no drug on the planet that can do that. And it's just food, which is the most powerful drug. I just love this philosophy where instead of treating and managing the illness, you actually look past the illness and say, okay, what's wrong with the whole system, the whole body? Let's go repair the machine, get the machine to optimal state, and the machine knows how to fix itself. It does. It's the science of creating health is all it is. And it's not complicated.

It just follows the natural laws of biology. Einstein said, I don't want to know the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know the thoughts of God and the rest are details. So it's really, what is the mind of God? How does our body work? How are we designed? And that's what's so exciting about medicine right now is the science, it takes 20, 30, sometimes 50 years to enter the clinic, right? So you're not seeing this in your doctor's office, but this is what's happening as science has been uncovering these underlying laws of biology. Why is it when I go get a checkup that they'll take blood every time, but when you see a patient for the first time, you do a stool sample as the most important thing? Well, I take blood. I like all body fluids.

Whatever body fluids you got, I'll take them. But I don't, I've never had a doctor tell me at a checkup, we'd like a stool sample. They do urine, they do blood, but nobody has ever asked me for a stool sample. Well, that is a great lead-in to this next patient, and I'll tell you why, because her problems are all related to her gut.

And she was treated by top specialists at Cleveland Clinic. She had psoriatic arthritis, which is a horrible autoimmune condition where not only do you have like this horrible heartbreak of psoriasis on your skin, but your joints are all inflamed and swollen. She had prediabetes, was overweight, depression. She was also having migraines and she had terrible reflux and irritable bowel syndrome. And she was a mess. So she saw the gastroenterologist for her gut medication, the psychiatrist for her psych

medication, the rheumatologist for autoimmune medication. She had saw the neurologist for her migraine medication, and basically was seeing a doctor for every inch of her. She was managing these diseases, but still was not better and was really struggling. So I know how the body works and the gut is such a core part of our overall health and 60 to 70% of our immune systems in our gut, our microbiome is this extraordinary organism that lives within us. In fact, it's about three pounds of bacteria. It's probably the most important organ in your body. It has as many cells, maybe a little more than your own cells. It has 100 to 400 times as much DNA as your DNA,

thousands of species that are all having interactions with each other and with yourself. In fact, if you took a blood sample, Simon, you might find up to 30 to 50% of the metabolites in your blood are coming from the bacteria products. In other words, bacteria make proteins, those get absorbed, and we use those in our body to regulate all sorts of things. And if they're bad bugs, it makes us sick. If they're good bugs, it keeps us healthy. And you literally can take in the mouse studies and swap out bacteria from a fat mouse,

give them a skinny mouse's bacteria, and the fat mouse will lose all the weight. Or we've seen this in humans where you do a fecal transplant and you can fix diabetes or all kinds of crazy stuff that doesn't even make any sense given the current paradigm. So for this patient, I looked at her stool test. I looked at also her gut bacteria through what we call a breath test, looking at bacterial overgrowth, and really found out she had this terrible bloating and yeast overgrowth and fungal overgrowth and bacterial overgrowth. So I basically killed all the bad guys. We took out

the bad stuff. So functional medicine is basically taking out the bad stuff, putting in the good stuff. We took out the bugs that were a problem through a non-absorbed antibiotic and any fungal. And then I gave her an elimination diet. I got rid of all the inflammatory foods, gluten, dairy, sugar, processed foods. I gave her some probiotics and vitamin got rid of all the inflammatory foods, gluten, dairy, sugar, processed foods. I gave her some probiotics and vitamin D, some fish oil. Comes back six weeks later. And this was a very low cost, simple intervention, right? And literally, she's on a medication.

One of the medications cost 50,000 a year. And she said she had gotten off all her medication. She had completely resolved her irritable bowel, her reflux, her depression. She lost 20 pounds. Her arthritis went away. Her psoriasis went away. And I had not told her to stop her medications, but she did. And I was kind of shocked because it was like such a dramatic outcome, even getting off her medication. So I think when we see these things happen, we know that if we just reset the normal ecosystem in the gut, all these downstream problems go away. So functional medicine

kind of goes to the root cause, what's upstream, how do we get the body back in balance? And it's really quite simple, actually. I understand why pharmaceutical companies hate you. Maybe they do. Or at least not promoting functional medicine. Yeah, no. I get that. But why is it that the rest of the medical community, the doctors, like why isn't every doctor learning functional medicine when they go to medical school? Like why isn't my doctor taking, and my doctor is a really good guy. He's like a little bit paranoid, which I like. He's constantly studying and going to conferences and learning whatever the latest thing is. Like why isn't he studying my microbiome and taking stool samples? And why aren't we talking about

functional medicine and diet? Like why is your work not normal? Like why are you considered a revolutionary and outlier? That seems mad to me. I'm definitely a weirdo. But I, you know, I think it's not really a fault of the doctors. Our whole educational system is based on an outdated paradigm that's based on diseases. And it doesn't address some of the most important things that drive health, which is diet, the gut and environmental toxins, which are three things that we have zero education about. And so they learn a very sort of specific paradigm. And, you know, Thomas Kuhn, who wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was really clear about the problems with paradigm shifts. You know, people are so attached to what we call normal science. What is the sort of science of the day? I mean, remember Copernicus and Galileo. I mean, they were heretics. It wasn't Galileo in

prison for saying that the sun did not revolve around the earth, but the earth revolved around the sun, right? That was a huge problem. These are very hard things to overcome because when you see these entities that we call diseases, and they seem very real, and we understand the pathology of them, but we don't really have any education about how the body functions from a health perspective. You go to your doctor and say, I want you to help me get as healthy as I possibly can. They might just have this blank stare because there's nothing really they can offer.

You say, well, I have arthritis, or I have diabetes, or I have high blood pressure. They're all great. I can write this prescription. I know what to do because that's what I learned in medical school. So it's no fault of their own. The entire reimbursement system, the entire educational system, all of it has the wrong incentives for doing the right thing. It's like positive psychology, right? Psychology, we study broken people. The positive psychology is, well, let's study the people who

are fine and really, really happy and copy that. I mean, that's what you're doing here. It's like, we study broken, we study disease, we study broken, we study illness, and we try and fix it, as opposed to studying healthy and trying to recreate it. Yeah, it's absolutely right. And so now as I've sort of been doing this for so many decades, and I'm getting older, I got very interested in the topic of longevity. And some of my patients are, and it's sort of, it seems to be this hot topic. I think there's been very little research on longevity, because I think people think that getting older and decrepit and sick is just a normal part of life, but it's normal because we see it and it doesn't mean it's optimal, right? It's normal to be overweight

in America. That doesn't mean it's a good thing. So now scientists are saying, well, you know, aging is a disease and people get very offended by that because what do you mean? It's like this happens to all of us. Yes, chronologically getting older is inevitable. But biologically getting older is not. So I'm going to be 63 next week and I'm biologically 43. And that's because I've learned over time how to activate these ancient pathways and deal with these underlying root causes of disease. And it's available to all of us. And so I'm super excited about this science of longevity because

now instead of just a couple of hundred million dollars being spent by the government, which is dwarfed by the tens of billions spent on diseases like heart disease and cancer and Alzheimer's, right? We spend almost nothing to look at why those diseases happen in the first place, right? We're trying to find the drugs to fix them because we have a pharmaceutically based system. But the truth is if we eliminated heart disease and cancer from the face of the planet, the number one and two killers, we would extend life by maybe three to five years. But if we understood the root cause of aging and dealt with what we call the hallmarks of aging, we might extend life by 30, 40, or 50 years, which is pretty remarkable. So I'm very excited to see the scientists now

reframing health from the perspective of the body as an ecosystem, these underlying laws of biology of how do we enhance health and optimize function rather than just play around in the downstream effects. So it's sort of like what we're doing in medicine is mopping up the floor constantly while how do we enhance health and optimize function rather than just play around in the downstream effects? So it's sort of like what we're doing in medicine is mopping up the floor constantly while the sink's overflowing instead of turning off the faucet, right? So if we turn off the faucet,

you don't have to keep mopping the floor. I know what everybody's thinking as they're listening to you is like, okay, tell me. So in your research, what are some of the basics that we can all do to extend our lives and be happy and healthy? Because nobody wants to live an extra 20 years, but be decrepit.

That's exactly right. I mean, this is the problem, Simon. In our world, we see aging as a bad thing because people spend the last 20% of their lives sick and diseased and decrepit, basically. And that's a bad thing. You don't want to have 20% of your life be miserable. You want your health span, which is how many years you're alive as a healthy person, to equal your lifespan. In other words, my dream is when I'm 120 or maybe 150, take a hike with my beloved, swim in a beautiful mountain lake, make a beautiful dinner, have a bottle of wine, make love, and just go to sleep. And that's it. That's how I want to go. So it's not that far off from what's possible if we understand how to get the body systems activated. So what are the things

that we know are so important? Food is the most important thing we interact with every day, and is not just calories, it's information. So it regulates every single biological system in your body, from your hormones, to your brain chemistry, to your gene expression, to your gut microbiome, to your mitochondria, to your brain chemistry. Pretty much everything you can think of is regulated by every bite of food you take. So the quality of the food you eat really matters. And the quality of our food in America is just frighteningly bad. 60% of our calories come from ultra-processed food, which is made from these pulverized ingredients that are made from corn, wheat, and soy, then reassembled with all kinds of food additives and extra salt and sugar and processed fats into

really toxic, harmful compounds. So every 10% of your diet that's ultra-processed food, your mortality and risk of death goes up by 14%. And we eat 60% of our diet that way, so it's pretty bad. I think we need to say that again really slowly. If 10% of your diet is processed food, your mortality goes up by 14%. Yeah, but 60% of our diet is ultra-processed food. So multiply that times six, right? And kids, it's 67%. Today, we think smoking is bad, but food is the number one killer on the planet today. It's the number one killer. Over 11 million people conservatively, I think it's far more than that. And the example in America is very clear.

Why were we 4% of the world's population, but 16% of the COVID cases and deaths? Not because we have a crappy healthcare system, but because we're all pre-sick and pre-inflamed and sitting ducks for the COVID virus, which attacks people who are overweight, who are inflamed or chronically ill or elderly. And so that's the problem. We're all like that. And I think eating the amount of starch and sugar we eat is the biggest problem. If we could eliminate or dramatically reduce starch and sugar in our diet, we would go a long way to fixing this metabolic disaster that's called America and increasingly the rest of the world. Because the truth is, Simon, we've created the worst diet on the planet and exported

to every country in the world. And we're seeing rising rates of diabetes and chronic disease. Now, in Africa, chronic disease of diabetes and chronic disease. Now, in Africa, chronic disease kills more people than infectious disease, believe it or not. And this is in a really developing countries. I had a meeting with Hillary Clinton when she was a senator. And she said, you know, I went to India and I asked the minister and the prime minister what they need in terms of support around health. And I thought he was gonna say malaria and infectious disease. And he's like, diabetes. Like in India, it's just so affected by diabetes. In China, we've gone from one in 150 people with diabetes to one in 10 in just a generation. This is a

frightening thing. And we see it in America, I think. So that's the biggest thing. The next is increasing the quality of your diet by increasing phytochemicals. These are compounds in plants that are medicines, the colorful, dark vegetables and fruits that provide a lot of the medicinal things that help us live a long time that we've co-evolved with and we've stopped eating, right? We barely eat any foods and vegetables anymore. And we need the right kinds of protein at the right times to build muscle because muscle is the currency of aging. We need the right kinds of good fats. So it's really about optimizing your diet. And I've written a lot about this. I've probably written too many books about diet, the vegan diet, food, what the heck

should I eat, and cookbooks. And those are all available to guide you through what the science says and how to choose the quality of food that you need and have food as medicine. I remember Thomas Jefferson said, and he lived pretty old, as you said, in a time where the average age was 40-something, quote unquote average. He said that he has vegetables with a side of meat. That's right. That's right. That's pretty much what I say. A plate should be 80% veggies and a little piece of protein, which can help us maintain our protein needs, which increase,

by the way, as we age. But yeah, that's pretty much what I call the vegan diet. How do we snack? Because I you know, I get it. I get it. I got a plate. I got all these greens. Yeah, I can do that. But snacking is the killer to me. And I don't want to eat baby carrots every time I get peckish.

Why do we think we need snacks? Probably because I'm not eating enough. I mean, I have to tell you something. You go to Europe, there's no such thing as snacks, right? It's an American invention to sell more processed food. So most of the foods we eat in America are just factory science projects that have been developed to keep us highly addicted and crave more and want more. The truth is, if you're eating well, you don't need snacks.

If you eat the right kinds of food in the right times, you won't be starving and craving. If you eat at breakfast in America, you're going to be eating waffles, pancakes, muffins, bagels, you know, these super sweet and sugary drinks from Starbucks that have more sugar than a can of soda. You think it's, oh, it's having a latte, whatever. We are just inundated with cereal and high carbohydrate breakfast. And what those do is they jack up our blood sugar, that jacks up our insulin, and then we crash.

So we're going to want more food. We're going to crave more food. We're going to be tired and hungry. But if you eat fat and protein in the morning, you won't be hungry, and you won't be having these cravings. You won't need snacks. And so it's really protein and fat that make you feel full. really protein and fat that make you feel full. And most of your diet should be protein and fat by calories, but by volume, most of it should be vegetables, right? Because protein and fat are

more calorie dense, but vegetables aren't. You can have one big gulp, which is 750 calories, or you could have 35 cups of broccoli, which is an equivalent amount of calories. So you can't ever eat 35 cups of broccoli. So it's really important to understand how your body works so you're not in these fluctuating cycles of sugar swings, which is what's going on in America today. And why you might feel that, Simon, is because you're eating in a way that's not keeping your blood sugar even. And now there's these devices, these continuous glucose monitors, which you can track and say, oh, God, I like crashed or I spiked. And then you can see, oh, if I had this, I'm good. Or if I have, you know, this food, I'm not good. And it'll tell you in real time, because everybody's different,

what foods they, that are regulating their blood sugar well, and which ones are causing it to swing all over the place. And those swings are what causes you to feel like you want a snack. So in terms of snack foods, if you're snacking, I was out, you were doing podcasts yesterday and running around. I didn't grab a time for lunch, but I had like a bag of cashews. I had some grass-fed bison jerky that I ate that had like 30 grams of protein and I was fine.

I do have snack foods in me, my bag, but it's mostly because if I'm traveling or in an extreme situation, I don't want to be in a food emergency. So, but most of the time it's just snack foods are just not necessary if you're eating well. High protein and fat for breakfast. And do you prescribe three meals a day, three squares a day, is sort of that? It depends.

I mean, sometimes people are more, and we can talk about this. We talked about the hot and cold therapy at the beginning. Those are stresses to the body. And there's a word for this kind of stress. It's called hormesis, which means what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And so what we know is, for example, fasting or starvation actually is a positive stress in the short term because it activates your body's innate healing system. One of them is called autophagy. This means self-cannibalism or self-cleaning. So we have our own cleaning, recycling, and repair system that activates when we take a break from eating. So a lot of people

are trying to do time-restricted eating, which is eating within an eight-hour window or a 10-hour window. Minimum should be 12. In other words, you shouldn't eat for at least 12 hours a day. And if you can extend it to 14 or 16, that can be very helpful for people because it activates these healing systems. So you can eat two or three meals a day within that eight to 12 hour window. And it depends on what you're eating. So I like to have like a good protein shake in the morning with lots of good fats in it. I'll have like a fat salad for lunch, which I'll have like lots of veggies, all kinds of avocados.

And I'll put some pumpkin seeds on, maybe a can of wild salmon, lots of olive oil. So it's lots of good fats and protein. And that keeps me going. And then for dinner, it's, you know, it's usually a ton of veggies with a side of some protein that I like, whether it's regeneratively raised meat or a safe fish, which I just found this great new company. I have no affiliation with them. It's called Seatopia. And you can go to seatopia.fish. and they've sourced all these incredibly clean fish from regenerative aquaculture sources. So there's ways to eat clean protein and then like fill up your plate with veggies. So I went to this conference where the topic was longevity. I want to get back to what you've been working on. And they had one guy there who's obsessed with living a long time, but to your point, but not like being decrepit in 90, but being able to be functional.

And his standards were that he can put a suitcase in the overhead compartment at 90 years old. Yeah, yeah. And he can easily get up off the ground so he can play with his grandkids or great-grandkids. Mind you, he's in his 40s or early 50s right now. I'm more ambitious than that. I want to be able to hike up a mountain. I want to be able to keep skiing. I want to ride horses. It's possible to be very vigorous and fit at any age. So this guy, he was obsessed with the science of longevity. And he'd read everything and he devoted his life to doing all the things you have to do. And he was highly structured and

highly disciplined and doing all the exercises and all the diets and all of this and all of that. But the guy struck me as unbelievably unhappy. And I was like, I'm pretty sure the obsession with everything is not going to work because I think he forgot the most important thing, which was people. Yeah, totally. In your science of longevity, I get all of the body stuff and the diet stuff, but what have you learned about friendships and relationships and love as they support our longevity? A hundred percent, Simon. I mean, food is medicine, but so is love. Love is medicine.

And what's interesting about these longevity cultures, the blue zones, you know, in Okinawa and the Koi Peninsula and Ikaria, where I went, and Sardinia, is that they have a really profound sense of meaning and purpose and belonging and community. And so there were no nursing homes that people were shipped off to. Everybody was a contributing member of their society. Everybody had deep social relationships. They weren't striving to do anything, build anything, increase their social media following or get ahead in life or build some company. They were just living. And the joy and celebration, and Italy is kind of funny because you go there and everything is kind of like doesn't quite work, raise a little slow, but they just know how to live life. They just savor

food. They savor each other. They have this community and pleasure. And I think we know that loneliness is a huge killer and the isolation we have is such a big driver of disease. It's as big a killer as almost anything else. I love that word savoring, by the way. Yeah. Savoring life. I mean, that's what it is. It's like we are rushing through so headlong all the time and never just stop to be. And their culture was a lot about being. Yeah, they had to grow their vegetables and do their thing. And it was, you know, it was work, but it was such joy in it and such pleasure and such play and fun and celebration. And it was just such a refreshing experience to be in that. And what I realized through my work is that unless you have a sense of connection and meaning and belonging, you know, you can't really fully, one, be happy and two, live a healthy life.

That we know that these social connections are so critical, that we're social beings and we actually need each other to thrive. And I learned a lot about this when I went to Haiti and I worked with Paul Farmer who helped cure TB and AIDS in one of the worst places in the world where the public health community had given up on them by, not because we didn't have good drugs to fix these diseases, but because the social systems weren't set up. And so he basically created this model of accompaniment. We accompany each other to health. And I took that concept and I applied it to chronic disease because I realized that although chronic disease is not infectious, it's contagious. You're more likely to be overweight if your friends are overweight than if your family

is overweight. And the opposite is true too. If you're surrounded by healthy people with healthy habits, you're going to be motivated to do that. I know the funniest thing is for going out to dinner with me because like I don't have to say anything. I don't have any judgment. I don't care what people eat.

They can do what they want. And then when I'm there, they won't order a dessert. They order the healthy thing on the menu. Like it's the peer pressure of belonging. And we took this and did it in this big church in California. And we got, you know, 15,000 people to sign up and they all met together in small groups every week and they led healthier lives and they lost a quarter million pounds by doing it together. So community is such a key part of this. In Okinawa, they have Moai, which is basically when you're born, you get assigned to like three or four other little kids and you spend your whole life with these people. They're there in every stage of life,

through every heartbreak, every joy, every celebration. They're like kind of your family. And I find that for me, it's a key part of my life. This is an important insight here. And if I run your work through my filter, which is if everybody wants to live longer and like everybody goes buy your book and follows everything in there, it's going to fail, right? Because at the end of the day, what we do in America is we make everything a selfish pursuit, which is how can I live longer? And I'm going to do all the things so that I can live longer. And that's what this guy was doing on the stage. He didn't care about anybody else

around him. It's just like, how can I live longer? And the reality is this stuff really works best when you say, how can I help the people I love live longer? I mean, that's a very important point, Simon. I mean, the point of writing a book on longevity for me, Young Forever, was not to create some hedonistic pursuit of development of yourself and perfection of yourself for your own narcissistic desires. It was really about how do we create a healthy society where we all can show up and contribute and love each other. It's sort of like what Neem Karoli Baba said, he said, Ram Das's guru, he said, you know, love everybody, serve everybody, feed everybody, you know, and it's a very simple idea, but the idea that we can create a culture where we can create healthy people to show up, to love each

other better, to contribute and develop, you know, the advancement of our society better, and particularly, you know, as we get older, I feel like I'm, you know, I'm about to turn 63, and I finally feel like I've figured stuff out and I can be in contribution in a way that I don't think I could earlier on in my life. And I've checked a lot of the boxes off. So I want to give back and I want to serve and I want to contribute. And imagine in a world of healthy elderly people who are elders, true elders with wisdom and can add value to society who aren't drained because they're sick and ill. And I think, you know, David Sinclair, one of the longevity researchers at Harvard, you know, wrote a paper in nature aging about the economics of extending life. And he said,

you know, we think it's going to cost more, but if people are healthy, yeah, they actually will add value to society. And for every life extension of a year, we'll see a $37 trillion economic benefit globally. And if we add 10 years, it'll be like $370 trillion value, which is just a staggering amount of money. It far exceeds the GDP of the entire world. So we have the potential to do this. We know how to do this. And I think the science is only advancing further. So I think it's important that we solve the big problems, that we try to make the world a better place that we we help support and love each other and these things you can't do if you feel

like shit you know if you're old and decrepit and you're draining society and on that note well mark as always i leave enlightened and i leave inspired and more than anything i started this conversation sort of how can i understand these topics how can i look after myself and i realize more and more as we've talked which is i want to do it with someone how can we do this and how can i do this for you and hold space for you to and encourage you to turn down that dessert you know have dessert now and then because this is the thing i love about, which is you're not obsessive about these things. You eat dessert and you eat unhealthily occasionally. And I think you said it, which is treat sugar like a recreational drug, right? Right. Right. Right. You'll get addicted if you do too much, but every now and then is

just a little bit of fun. Absolutely. Absolutely. Mark, thank you so, so much. I so appreciate your time. So amazing. Such amazing work. My pleasure. More to come, hopefully. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism,

check out my website, simonsenic.com, for classes, videos, and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.