Dhru Purohit Show - #255: The Wild and Crazy Science on How to Age in Reverse with Dr. Kara Fitzgerald

Episode Date: January 6, 2022

This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker, BiOptimizers, and Eight Sleep. It’s true: getting older is inevitable and our chronological age can only move in one direction. But we also have a biological age, which scientists can measure by assessing how our genes are expressed through epigenetics. This week on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sat down with Dr. Kara Fitzgerald to talk about the exciting new research that shows that our biological age can actually move in reverse and her groundbreaking, clinical trial that proved it’s possible. Dr. Fitzgerald received her doctorate of naturopathic medicine from the National College of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon. She is on faculty at the Institute for Functional Medicine, and is in private practice in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. Her study Potential Reversal of Epigenetic Age Using a Diet and Lifestyle Intervention: A Pilot Randomized Clinical Trial is the first of its kind to show biological age reversal in humans. In this episode, we dive into:   -The top three things you can do to age in reverse (6:56) -Why stress is one of the biggest drives of aging (8:43)  -How much of our genes are set in stone (13:17)  -How epigenetics are involved in cellular aging (18:58) -DNA methylation and how it powerfully influences epigenetic expression (22:03) -Zombie cells and aging (32:35) -What we can learn from the centenarians of Sardinia (41:33)  -Biological age vs. chronological age (45:56) -Dr. Fitzgerald’s study for aging in reverse (50:41) -How trauma can impact genetic expression (1:15:34)  This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker, BiOptimizers, and Eight Sleep. InsideTracker looks at everything from metabolic and inflammatory markers to nutrients and hormones. Traditional lab tests can be hard to read on your own, but InsideTracker makes their results easy to understand and provides tips on how to use food first for optimal nutrition. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 25% off. Just go to insidetracker.com/DHRU.   BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough contains 7 different forms of magnesium, which all have different functions in the body. I haven’t found anything else like it on the market. Right now, BiOptimizers is offering my audience 10% off. Just head over to magbreakthrough.com/dhru, with code DHRU10.   Eight Sleep is the only system on the market that actively regulates temperature using their patented hydro-powered cooling technology and automatically gives you personalized recommendations on your ideal temperature zone. Go to eightsleep.com/dhru and use code DHRU to check out the Pod Pro mattress or mattress cover and save $150 at checkout. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stress is like gasoline on aging. It just pushes it forward aggressively. Hi everyone, Drew Prode here. Today we're talking about how to age in reverse, specifically how to take three years off of your biological age. We have Dr. Kara Fitzgerald walking us through her groundbreaking study. And in eight weeks, eight weeks, it might sound like a long time, but it's not.

In eight weeks, she took the participants of her study through a specific protocol. We're going to work through what that protocol is. And at the end of that eight weeks, on average, they reversed their biological age by three plus years. Stay tuned to find out what her study participants did in detail. It's a fascinating conversation. You're going to enjoy it.

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Each week, we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Dr. Kara Fitzgerald. Dr. Kara Fitzgerald is the first ever recipient of the 2018 Emerging Leadership Award from the personalized lifestyle medicine institute in recognition of her work on DNA methylation. Receiving her doctorate in naturopetic medicine from the National University of Natural Medicine, she lectures globally on functional medicine and personalized medicine, and is on the faculty of the Institute of Functional Medicine and is an IFM certified practitioner with a clinical practice based in Newtown, Connecticut.

her groundbreaking first of its kind clinical research trial that was conducted this year that showed that she could reverse the biological age of participants by three years made headlines all across the world and was the material that her new book younger you reduce your bio age and live longer better in today's conversation we break down her study and some practical simple tips that anybody can incorporate starting today to begin to age in reverse. Dr. Cara Fitzgerald, welcome to the podcast. It's an honor and pleasure to have you here. I'm going to jump right in and I'm going to talk about a little bit, or I'm going to ask you to talk about aging in reverse. You were involved, and we're going to talk all about this study, but just to give a little preview, you were involved in a landmark study first of its kind study where you actually showed that within eight weeks you could reverse people's biological age. So let's give some immediate value to the audience that's listening and watching on YouTube. What are a couple things, one, two, or three things that you could think of right

off the bat that anybody who's listening today could do to begin that process to age in reverse? Add some rosemary to whatever you're eating. It's delicious. So literally, I've got a rosemary grinder on my desk and I'm popping it on my salad. If I have a good tea, I'm adding it. And tea, have some green tea and brew it strongly. And then, you know, enjoy curry. Get your turmeric in. And then the final thing I'll say is don't forget to take some deep breaths and just bring it down a notch from time to time.

Beautiful. I love it. Those were great. That was like super succinct. So rosemary, green tea, probably because of the catacans, we'll talk a little bit more about that and the beautiful polyphenols and all these foods that are there. And then we talked about curry, which, of course, I love. That's my background.

And we made all sorts of different spices and things like that and turmeric. It was one of the reasons that often India was cited. Unfortunately, it's changing as having a protective layer against Alzheimer's. Was all these incredibly anti-inflammatory spices that were there. Again, unfortunately, that's changing as we've exported our diets. The standard American diet starts to be exported all around the world. And the last one, deep breaths. Deep breaths.

You know, I wouldn't have thought as that being one of them. Everybody knows the importance of breathing. Why deep breaths? Tell us about why that's so key and so important for folks. Because stress is like gasoline on aging. It just pushes it forward aggressively. And you see that in the literature. The clock that we used in our study, a full 25% of those methylation sites,

are influenced by glucocorticoids. They're driven by stress. So it's one of the biggest things that we can do to interrupt that pro-aging. And when you look in the literature at stress reduction, like if you look at meditators, if you look at Tai Chi, if you look at yoga, et cetera, the outcome is actually beautiful. So long-term meditators are biologically younger. But thank God, and thank God for those of us who aren't sitting up perched on a mountain high, even one meditation practice can favorably change epigenetic expression.

So clearly we want to do it for the long haul, and we do want to cultivate a practice that works for us in our lives, but anywhere you enter into the distress conversation is going to be beneficial in anti-aging. So let's lay the groundwork a little bit, and let's talk about some of these keywords that you've used, and let's talk about them in the concept of this was the first of a kind of study, as we mentioned earlier, because there's a lot of studies on meditation. There's a lot of studies that have been done. I think I looked the other day. And on green tea catechins, I found over 10,000 different publications that were in PubMed that in some way referenced the polyphenols and sort of green

tea. Then there's a lot of studies that are being done on sleep. But your study, you combined all of these studies together, all these items together. And let's talk a little bit about that. And what were you specifically looking for? You've used the word epigenetics. Tell us a little bit about what you were looking for when you were thinking about the design of this landmark study. So, you know, I'm starting to think, and we can circle back to this in a minute, but I want to throw it out there that, you know, those 10,000 studies you just pulled up on green tea, we know it's anti-cancer, it's anti-inflammatory, it helps cognition, you know, it helps, you know, bone, skin health, you can go on and on with this group of catechins in green tea and how amazing they are.

It's my thinking that as we move towards being able to measure gene expression and look what's happening at the level of, you know, right on our DNA and the modifying factors, what they're doing to allow certain genes on and to inhibit certain genes, it's my belief that we're going to see that these beautiful polyphenols, exercise, meditation, the things that we looked at in our study, that where they do their heavy lifting, their most impactful lifting, is right there at genetic expression. And then we've been for a long time looking at this downstream effect, okay, it's anti-inflammatory, it preserves brain health, et cetera, et cetera. But fundamentally, I think as the science moves forward, we're going to see that it influences genetic expression. And that's what we were really interested in studying.

our, this diet and lifestyle intervention, our read on the literature is that this is going to optimize DNA methylation patterns. So this is a biochemical process that happens on the genome and influences which genes are on and which genes are off. It becomes wonky. You know, there's my scientific word, as we age. It actually, when we look at the chronic diseases of aging, So aging is the biggest risk factor for all the chronic diseases. And when we look at them together, when we look at them epigenetically, we see the chronic diseases share the same sort of damaged gene expression that aging itself does. So if we get in there and we optimize gene expression for aging, we should by extension be reducing risk considerably for all of the associated diseases of aging. but I just want to stop because I've said a mouthful

and I just want to see what you think and what you want to add. It's kind of super mind-blowing. And sometimes we hear something and we know it's mind-blowing, but we don't know all the reasons that it is mind-blowing like in detail. So that's exactly the beauty of long-format podcasts like this. We can tease every single one of those things out. So let's start at the basics. You know, many people have gone to their doctor's office,

especially as genetics have become more popular and companies like 23 and me and other stuff. And we've heard terms like, hey, you're at a genetic risk for something. You have a higher likelihood that's there. Sometimes we hear the other side that's still pervasive in the medical community, which is, you know, you're going to end up with this disease because it just runs in your genes. Your dad had it. You know, your grandfather had it. You're most likely going to have it.

And there's other people that are out there, practitioners and physicians like yourself, that are starting to introduce this other concept that actually that may not be. the full story. So talk to us about our genes and how much is set in stone and how much is variable based on everything that you've learned. Right. That's a, you know, that's a really important question. I would say that what is happened, our environmental exposure, so that is how we're living our life, actually how we're living our lives, how we have been over the course of time, our exposures to toxins, the stress that we've been raised with, you know, what we have eaten or haven't eaten, how we move our bodies or don't. Like all of these, the interface of environment and gene is more influential, ultimately, on genetic expression than the genetic

changes themselves. So it's that environmental infaith. interface or the epigenome, if you will, that will play a role in whether we get a disease or not with a far greater likelihood than what's happening or what's happened to our genetic material or what mutations we've inherited. But I do want to be clear, though, that there is a continuum. So there are some genetic conditions that can show up at birth. You know, they can be fatal or they can, you know, they can be associated with a very short life expectancy. I mean, actually, but even there. You know, we get to get involved and we can influence it. One of the, I wrote about this in Younger You, just an incredibly important case in my lifetime. I was a new, I was into my new postdoc,

a new graduate, and I was consulting with clinicians around the world. Looking at laboratory, patient laboratory data, complex patient laboratory data, and helping them interpret how they would treat based on these labs. And I worked for years with a physician who was treating a boy who had a rare collagen defect. And this collagen defect was excellent. So, you know, it's worse in males. And it's fatal in single digits. I think, you know, maybe around life expectancy is around five years old or so. He was wheelchair bound. He had a feed tube. You know, he had some pretty significant physical deformities. But this physician, this brilliant physician, would run a battery of testing on him to identify all of his micronutrient needs, his macronutrient

needs. He would look at what was going on in his stool microbiome. And he would design that feed tube intervention based on V's laboratory data, exactly what this boy needed and in the amounts that he needed. So this is a fatal genetic condition, but he's getting in there with very individualized treatment. And the last I had contact with this clinician, this young boy was the oldest individual with this particular genetic defect. He was actually graduating high school. So a condition that's considered to be absolutely fatal, you know, we can get in there and influence it. And the other example, nobody's going to argue, I mean, Angelina Jolie brought this to the fore that if you've got the BRCA mutation, your likelihood for cancer, a hormone-sensitive cancer,

like breast cancer ovarian uterine, is very, very high. It's, you know, it's 80% plus. And for that reason, the appropriate course of action for many women is mastectomy, is hysterectomy, and so forth. However, when they looked retrospectively at blood and identified women who had the mutation, you know, early on in the 40s and 50s, the incidence of cancer in that population was much, much lower, showing a clear environmental interface, even for that particular, you know, what's considered a deadly or a shoe-in for cancer gene. So environment still plays a big role, even in the most significant genetic mutations. Those are the exception. You know, the vast majority of cancers have nothing to do with the genetic mutation. The vast majority of cancers

are something we need to be thinking about. I think it's like 90% of cancers are not directly related to and primarily influenced by the gene. They're going to be lifestyle related, smoking, diet, all the other things that are there. And cancer is one of those ones that having had a mom who's had cancer, she's doing great, knock on wood. Cancer is one of those ones that people often think like, oh, you are just, oh, it was your genetics. You just got dealt a bad set of cards. And they forget that there's this term epigenetics. And a lot of people don't even know epigenetics. So let's even just break that down. I know I cut you off. But I want to add in here to just to tease, tease out a little bit, define epigenetics and tell everyone how it actually,

you know, works inside of the body. Sure. And you can interrupt me at any time and you can ask clarifying questions as needed. I know some of this gets complex and I want to make sure I get it out in a way that's understandable. And by the way, a few-way street. Anytime you want to chime in, please cut me off because the thing is that when we get excited, we cut each other off. That's what friends do when they're talking together. So I'll be mindful of that. You know, like hearing your process on the journey. So it's fun. All right. So I'm going to just go back and say that, you know, we mapped the genome. We mapped the human genome out, discovered there were about 23,000 genes in the early 2000s. And I'm, I'm going to, you know,

you know, it was pretty simple. I mean, our genome is infinitely more simple than most plants. Plants' genomes are wildly complex. So we mapped out the genome and it was a little anticlimactic. I mean, it was extraordinary. It opened the door to sort of a revolution in technology, but it was also like we thought we were going to find one gene associated with one disease, something very simple. Oh, you know, you've got gene mutation X, you're getting heart disease. So if we influence gene mutation X, you won't or you won't get cancer or you won't get diabetes. That was the expectation. And it was disheartening that in fact it was not the truth. Everything was wildly complex and many genes seem to have to get involved. Like for instance, just I'm in the topic of, you know, I'm looking at

longevity. And, you know, there's plenty of scientists who think if you're going to live a long time, you know, it's genetics and you can look at, you know, you can look at some evidence for that. But can they nail a gene down? No. They can't. Can they nail even a hand? handful of genes down? Not really. You know, they're small contributors. So what next? You know, we think we find the answer. We cracked the biggest nut. And in fact, we were like, oh, shoot. So it turns out that the epigenome, epigenome, epi above the genome gene, above the gene, those things which sort of regulate which genes get turned down, the processes and they're involved and it's incredibly complex, you know, that regulates who's on and who's off, is far more pertinent

in what's happening physiologically than the genes are themselves. And it's been, Moshe Saf, who is a mentor actually in an author and an advisor on our study, refers to the genes as being our hardware, and then the epigenome being our software. You know, so the hardware is kind of inert until there's, you know, really complex software interface to make it do what you want. And so there are many different epigenetic processes. So, for instance, DNA is wrapped around proteins called histones. And right in those proteins, there's ways that the gene might unwrap and wrap and

that will influence, you know, expression. There's all sorts of complex interfaces. RNA, for instance, will influence it. But my area of focus has been on DNA methylation. So this is another epigenetic process. And this is simply a carbon and three hydrogens. That's what a methyl group is. And these are placed through DNMT enzymes or DNA methyl transferase enzymes

on certain regions of the gene. primarily, well, they're all over the place, but primarily the most influential are on the promoter regions of genes. When there are a lot of these methyl groups placed down, that gene is turned off when those methyl groups are removed or when they're inhibited from being laid down, that gene can then be on. DNA methylation is compelling for a number of reasons. It's the most studied by far of all of the epigenetic marks, as they're referred to. It has built-in heritability components. So when a DNA strand, when a DNA divides, when a cell goes through a division, one of those, a daughter, the DNA, the methylation patterns of the original DNA strand are

faithfully transferred onto the daughter strand. That's not the case, as far as we understand now, with the other epigenetic marks. And why this is incredibly important is this heritability and this continuous potential for that particular mark to exist. Not just in our own body and in the many cell divisions that we go through, but heritability from our parents, our grandparents, our great-grandparents, et cetera. So I think DNA methylation plays an incredibly important role of all of the epigenetic marks, although I do want to say clearly that as we move forward in this amazing field, we will see these other epigenetic processes be, you know, sort of better able to test and we'll look at them

in conjunction with each other. I mean, this is a new field and it's blowing up. The other piece is that DNA methylation is relatively easy to test these days, and it's pretty reliable and reproducible. So there's a number of different reasons it's kind of moved to the fore. And I want to say one other piece about DNA methylation. And we can talk about some studies looking at it, like out of Sinclair's lab that really suggest its importance. When we're just, you know, when during embryogenesis, when a, when a pluripotent stem cell is getting its fate if it's going to become a brain cell or a heart cell or a skin cell, that's via DNA methylation.

Those marks that are laid down are incredibly important. And, you know, X chromosomes, I have two X chromosomes. It's through DNA methylation that one of those chromosomes is inhibited in each cell in my body and obviously that's going to be replicated, you know, throughout my lifespan that one of those X chromosomes is shut down. So it just, it plays a lot of incredibly important roles. And I'm going to stop and let you jump in. One of the ways that I love to help people understand the science is to talk about what happens when we're not doing it. I put this in air quotes the right way. Obviously, there's no right way. We're all doing our best. But if we want to live optimal and if we want to have

great health, and if we want to have, you know, age well, then we're talking about all the themes that go along with doing those things. So let's talk about it when it doesn't happen. So we know now through a landmark study that review paper that came out, I believe it was last year, the year before, that ultra-processed foods and the lifestyle that comes along often with it, high sugar, high, not working out regularly, other things, those are the biggest contributors. to the global killers that are, according to that paper, which I'll link in the show notes, are killing over 11 million people every single year globally, which makes it, you know, the biggest killer that's out there.

So when somebody has a diet filled with a lot of processed foods, a lot of sugar, their sleep is not dialed in. They may be drinking a lot of alcohol. Talk to us about what's happening in the body when it comes to that methylation process. is so vital to to help us stay young and age gracefully. So what's happening when we're doing all the wrong things? Yeah. So if we speak specifically to DNA methylation, doing the wrong things supports,

will push an inhibition of DNA methylation, but not it'll take. So we need to consume compounds called methyl donors. Methyl donors most famously include folate and B12. Batane is another one that we get in Bete's coline is something that we can get in eggs and we can get in soy and some other products. But these are sort of our classic methyl donors. We need them to engage in DNA methylation. If we're eating processed foods, we are by extension just pulling those right out of the diet. We're not going to be getting sufficient amounts.

If we are, or we're going to get them in an imbalanced kind of a distribution. If we're eating loads of processed fortified grains, we might get an excess of folic acid or synthetic, which is synthetic folic acid. It's not the natural folates that you get in a whole foods diet. So we could be getting an imbalance there that has its, you know, a host of problems that we can circle back to. So you won't have adequate methyl donors. And I refer to those as epinutrients because they influence DNA methylation or epigenetic expression. There's another class of epinutrients that we call methylation adaptogens.

These sort of take the methyl donors and they direct where they're going to methylate. They're like packets of really exquisite genetic regulatory information. And these methylation adaptogens are the green tea I talked about, the rosemary I talked about, the curcumin I talked about. And, you know, the compounds in blueberry, the compounds in all of our colorful veggies, the cruciferous like sulfurophane and diomones, all these beautiful, beautiful polyphenols. I think they're doing some of their heaviest lifting directing DNA expression, directing genetic expression, and a big piece of that is through DNA methylation. So right off the bat, as soon as you move into a Western diet, you're just wreaking havoc with genetic expression.

I mean, you're just, you're just messing it up. You know, layer in a bunch of stress, which is as pro-aging as it gets for a variety of mechanisms. But we can just, we can just see in the literature how it will push the diseases associated with aging, and it can do so via epigenetic manipulation. So stress or lack of movement. What's extraordinary to me, Drew, my read on the literature with exercise, is that it almost acts like one of those beautiful polyphenols.

It's sort of like the physical equivalent of a glass of green tea or a mug of green tea or some turmeric. It helps us re-express genes we want on. There's an amazing paper that I'll send you to post looking at genes that protect us from cancer. These genes are shut off if we have an active cancer. The cancer will do that. They're also shut off as we age. It's just not a fair journey. Aging, the crazy thing about aging is that epigenetically, it does start to look like these chronic diseases. It's nuts. So as we age, we stop being able to fight cancers. And one big reason is that we're inhibiting these tumor suppressor genes. All of these polyphenols allow for reaqis. expression of these important genes, and exercise does as well. One tip, I know I'm sort of getting off track here a little bit, but the older we are, the more exercise bang for our buck we actually get epigenetically, which I think is really pretty cool. And sleep, you know, if we're not

sleeping well, that's pro-aging. And conversely, if we do get enough sleep, that's an anti-aging activity. And again, I'm speaking specifically about the epigenome, but there's certainly the other scientists out there like Matt Walker, for instance, looking at it in a variety of through the lens of, you know, other mechanisms. So, yeah, I mean, exercise, sleep. We talked about stress and meditation, and we talked about diet. And you also mentioned alcohol, because tis the season, right? Alcohol inhibits methylation. So there's a methylation cycle. There's a compound that we need for those DNA methyl transferase enzymes to do. their work and we produce that compound. It's called esedenicil methyanine or Sam, for short,

in the methylation cycle. And we need it. We're engaging in methylation at every cell of the body all of the time. Like it's just a very active process for a variety of reasons, not just DNA methylation. So we need a ton of these methyl donors. Alcohol just shuts that process down. It just shuts it down. If you continue to drink and you're drinking a lot, you actually inhibit nutrient absorption in the stomach. So a long-standing alcoholic is going to have profound B-vitamin deficiencies, thiamine, folate, but again, essential players in the methylation cycle. So for a variety of reasons, in our study, alcohol was a no-no. Just for those eight weeks, there is, there are safe ways to imbibe. I don't want to, you know, I just don't want this to be

a depressing conversation for everyone. There are safe ways to imbibe we can talk about, you know, But as a rule, you want to give your body a break from alcohol periodically. And what I love about this is anybody who's following along with this interview and you're like, you know, frantically writing down notes, your book that's about to come out after this podcast, it's called Younger You, Reduced Your Bio Age and Live Longer Better, has all these flushed out inside of there and is a great companion to this interview. So instead of frantically writing notes, I'm all about notes. You know, definitely pick up the book.

This one is fantastic. I want you to break down this term that goes along with all this research that you're doing that a lot more people are becoming aware of, and that's these senescent cells, or as we've sort of nicknamed zombie cells. What are they and where do they fit into this picture of us trying to influence our biological age and potentially age in reverse? Right, right, right. Well, these are basically, you know, cells that have, that are existing in sort of a static, well, I wouldn't even call it that. So they've moved through their useful life as fighting inflammation, as fighting infection and so forth. And now they've moved

into this zombie state, which, you know, it would be one thing if they were inert. But they actually begin to produce quite a few pro-inflammatory compounds. And they accumulate really kind of exponentially or the potential is there for them to accumulate as we age. And so they're literally zombies. Like if anybody's watched The Walking Dead, they've watched anything else. They know the characteristics of a zombie. They're scary. They once were functional and they spread to other people causing damage and havoc all along

the way. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty extraordinary. So they do. They release, they move into this, what we call a pro-inflammatory phenotype where, you wherever they are, they're wreaking havoc, not just locally, but they can have a systemic effect. So, yeah, we want, zombie cells are something that we want to be, you know, directly addressing in

some form in our diet and lifestyle program. So that would be a piece of the puzzle. I mean, again, over here, we're focused on DNA methylation. However, our program is designed. So circling back to some of those amazing polyphenols, those, some of those help directly combat zombie. cells. And one of the most classic compound compounds to do that is called quercetin. Resperatrol does, interestingly, but it's hard to get, and I know you're thinking, well, respiratrol is in wine, but it's hard to get actually a therapeutic amount of resperatrol from wine. But there are a host department. Yeah, you have to take a lot, which some people want to, but then you get the side effects of too much wine. We did, we had some gentle intermittent

fasting in our program, which is another way to address the so-called zombie cell. as well. So before we break down your study and a little bit of what your inspiration was in designing it and how you did it and you're kind of walking us through the results of the participants. Again, you know, many people, part of it aging in reverse and we'll talk about what that means. Let's tease out a few more definitions of some words. We just did an entire newsletter to my audience about the groundbreaking work and research about the world of polyphenols. And you've been a huge advocate of this for such a long time. So let's just remind people, what are polyphenols and why are they so much more important to not just our human cells, but our bacterial cells, our bacteria in the body? So what are they? What do they do? And

what are some of the items that you've mentioned along the way in this interview that have the highest concentrations of the ones that we know that are beneficial for health? So polyphenols are, interestingly, you know, early science, we dismissed them. I mean, we, they're, they're not minerals, they're not vitamins. I mean, we refer to them as nutrients, but technically by the hardest definition, they don't, you know, they're not minerals or vitamins. But, you know, they're the, they're the, they're, they just play such incredible roles in a plant's life. So again, recall that I mentioned plants, um, have an infinitely more complex genome than us. I mean, they're right there, they're stuck in the ground. You know, they're interacting with the soil, with the compounds in the

soil, with the microbes in the soil. They need to produce compounds, you know, much like we have an immune system to sort of balance life with good and bad soil microbes. So they produce a host of these antimicrobial compounds, for example. And these fall into the polyphenol camp. They, you know, they're taking in sun to make their energy. So they are, by extension, generating loads of potential oxidative compounds. They need to protect themselves from that exposure as well as harness the sun to make their energy. The polyphenols are key players in that. So they're generating antioxidants and other mitochondrial supportive compounds.

Just a really interesting and complex. and sort of underappreciated array of compounds that act on plant survival. We call it, it's been referred to as the dark matter of nutrition. There's tens of thousands of these compounds that we haven't characterized yet. We're only starting to characterize them and characterize what their mechanisms are in plant life. And then when we look, I mean, we evolved, obviously, eating plants. And so what we're starting to appreciate now is when we consume the complexity of whole food, the complexity of that entire plant nutrient status, those compounds were hardwired to interact with.

We're hardwired to have them transform when they're exposed to our microbiome, as you alluded to. So our polyphenols are acted upon by our gut bugs, and that changes their behavior. that changes our ability to absorb them into circulation. And it also changes what they do once they're in circulation. So if you can imagine eating a salad, I just had a really big salad with probably 20 different veggies. So that's tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of information I've just fed my body. Hundreds of thousands of compounds and they know how to interact with each other, with my microbiome. They're absorbed into circulation.

And then they, these compounds, and they're transformed and absorbed. and absorbed, and then they really kind of cascade over, you know, our cell membranes, the receptors, they enter into the cytosol of the cell and ultimately into the nucleus, or they influence what's happening in the nucleus and DNA expression. So it's an extraordinarily complex cascade of events that we were designed to experience, really, with every bite. I mean, this is how we evolved. And in real time, with every bite, with food being information, and our gut bug, interacting with these, we have to understand that in real time, those metabolites and a whole bunch of other things that are happening, they're turning certain genes on and turning certain genes off.

So this is not just theoretical. This is not just happening over years or decades or centuries. This is happening on a regular basis. And that's the power of food, but also sleep and also love and community and exercise and all these beautiful things that you've highlighted in your book. That we have, and yes, you know, as we blast out into the stratosphere of technology where we can look at gene expression with the kind of insight that we're able to now, the take home has been, you know, walking more closely from where we came.

There's an appreciation from this whole foods, you know, minimally processed diet, from moving, you know, moving our bodies, sleeping enough, et cetera. I mean, it's really extraordinary. the more complex we get as a species in our understanding, the more validation there is for the simplicity from, you know, where we came. I'm thinking also that you can't digest food if you're in a sympathetic state, which you know, you have to be, you know,

your parasympathetic system has to be on. You have to rest and digest. I mean, to allow that full cascade of digestive events that I just outlined. I mean, it actually starts mentally with turning the volume down, taking, going back to taking a few breaths. That, just that step alone can help us harness the nutrient potential from our food. We won't access the full nutrient potential if we're rushing between meetings or we're in a, you know, horrible New York City traffic jam or, you know, the suburbs of New York, which are basically where I live. I mean, you're not going to be, you're, you may be

eating a beautiful, well-prepared organic salad. But if your mind space isn't able to actually receive that nutrition, you're not going to harvest its potential. I mean, it's really kind of extraordinary. One item that I just wanted to toss in, I'd love to get your thoughts on it because we just wrote this whole deep dive. You know, my business partner who you know well, Dr. Mark Hyman, he recently spent this summer with the group of centenarians and very close to being centenarians in Italy.

in Sardinia. And one of the things that he was talking about is like, you know, he was reminding people on social media that, hey, by the way, animals can also have higher concentrations of polyphenols. And one of the things that he saw that the Sardinians do is that right before they harvest their goat milk's cheese, they will go and have those goats feed on rosemary and all these other really incredible compounds that are there. And they pre-flavor that cheese, that highly amazing, wild, you know, fed, grass-fed sort of cheese that these goats are producing. And then now that cheese has a higher concentration. Now, they don't know what polyphenols are, but they've just understood over centuries

and centuries that one, probably the cheese tastes way better when they do that. And that also that it probably feels good to them to them too. So in addition to plants, we also, for those that include animal protein in their diet, it's an important reminder that we want to start looking out for more grass-fed and getting away from conventionally farmed meats are out there. And as the world of regenerative farming starts to explode and become more available, it's still quite small now, that is another interesting area to, you know, pay attention to. So any thoughts on that from your perspective? Yeah. I mean, I just, I, yes, it's just, it's so interesting. I was talking to Jeff Land

about this recently that, you know, if you're eating a conventionally grown tomato, you know, after many, many cycles of it being hybridized and hybridized and hybridized and hybridized, those original nutrient, that original nutrient picture that it once had before this conventional treatment has a nutrition profile that doesn't even compare to this end result, this sort of pale pinkish tomato that has almost no flavor that's sitting on the store shelf and might actually last a little longer. So it's been bred for that. But it's got no nutritive value or minimal nutritive value. Yeah, it's, it's, it's extraordinary. So it's not, so, so how that, you know, that tomato, you know, that tomato, if it's been, you know, allowed to say, remain with its, you know,

its original genome or, or a minimally altered genome is huge. And then, you know, concurrently, if we're eating animal, if we're eating dairy, yes, how has that animal been raised? Yeah. I think, we recommend, So for those of us, those willing to actually eat liver, or in my case, I take liver capsules, you don't have to in our program, but we do recommend it. And you need to get clean source liver. You need to get grass fed. You want to go as clean as possible if you're going to consume liver. But it is an extraordinary superfood.

You know, it's probably the coral area of, you know, I don't know, maybe not quite Himalayan tartary buckwheat that you're aware of. Jeff Bland's polyphenol darling. It is a pretty amazing food. But it's up there. So liver is a multivitamin in a food matrix. It's extraordinary the nutrients that are present in liver for people who are willing to eat it. You know, it's got, it's what we used back in the day. So before we were, we synthesized vitamins and sort of isolated them and gave them a separate

constituents. Liver was how we treated, you know, many conditions of nutrient depletion like pernicious anemia or B-12 neuropathies or folate deficiencies, alcoholism, et cetera, you know, you got a, you got an injection of some pulverized liver, basically. And so we brought that back as an important component for those who will consume it. For sure, it's been a big part of ancestral diets, and we're rediscovering it in a way that we are understanding the power of these things. But of course, as you mentioned, quality matters. We know, we can eat less overall animal protein compared to the standard American diet, but the animal protein we do have, we can make sure that it's of the

highest quality that's out there. I want to define two more areas. Again, this is all laying out the groundwork before we get to the to the shebang, which is talking about, you know, study and how it's all been, you know, laid out and the findings that you found. And this is a really good opportunity here to just break down the landscape of a few terms that have come up. So what is biological age in contrast to chronological age? Again, I love to just break down. down the basics for people. And then how do we think of lifespan and health span within those two? Yeah. Okay. Good. So chronological age is really quite simply how long we've been on the planet. That's it. How many years we've, you know, we've been here. Biological age is actually what's

happening physiologically with regard to, you know, the length of time we've been here. biological age can move forward faster than chronological age so we can be aging faster biological age can also move in reverse actually we didn't know that until recently but you know new studies including ours are suggesting that we can slow it down or even turn it around so we're improving physiology in such a way it's consistent with a younger youthful sort of phenotype. Right. So I turn 40 next year, but if I'm doing all the right things, then I could actually test and measure, which we'll talk about how people at home can do this. You know, there's actually some tools that they have access to where you can get a good reading of your biological age.

I might be turning 40 next year, which, you know, again, back in the day, that's over the hill, that's this, that's that. But biologically, you know, I could be looking like a 32-year-old because my organ systems or my methylation ability or my telomeres, you know, we'll get into all those look like that of what a 32-year-olds would look like. Yes. Yeah, there's a number of ways that we can consider biological age. Probably the most rigorous way that we can measure it at this point is by looking at DNA methylation and patterns that are consistent with age. But there are other ways we can consider

it as well. So, you know, high blood pressure, muscle mass, grip strength, sleep quality, flexibility. I mean, there's, you know, blood sugar is a good one. So there's a host of ways that when imbalanced, they can push biological age forward. So there's lots of things that we can do. But the gold standard tool at this point is DNA methylation bioage. This episode is brought to you by eight sleep. There is nothing worse than restlessness, nasty night sweats and constant tossing and turning when you just want some restful deep sleep. But did you know that studies actually show that our body temperature could play a major

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protocol that they were placed on, and then the end results and findings that came out of it. Yeah. So we wanted to look, we wanted to look at the aging phenotype. We know methylation, DNA methylation gets wonky. So we didn't want to look at, you know, really young, healthy people. We looked at a population between the ages of 50 and 72. So we knew we would see some, we should see some changes there, some negative changes. It's just the journey of aging. But we wanted our participants to be healthy. We didn't want to look at, you know, diabetics or people with cardiovascular disease. So we, you know, we had to, it took us a year, interestingly, to recruit for an eight-week study because we had to sift through a lot of,

of people who wanted to participate and weren't sufficiently healthy. And it's a relatively really rigorous eight-week program. I think it's highly doable, but, you know, they needed to be all in. So it took us a while to recruit. We limited, because we had a, it's a pilot study, we limited our population to a total of 40. In the end, we ended up having 18 in our study group and then 20 in our control group. We looked at men only. We did not include women in this first go, and certainly, that's one of the biggest criticisms I've gotten. But the fact of the matter is women in the age range of 50 to 72 will be premenopausal, there'll be perimenopausal, and they'll be postmenopausal. And we would need much higher numbers for us to tease out the hormonal

influence because there's no question that hormones absolutely influence DNA methylation and biological age. And we just couldn't, in that small population, tussle with that level of information. We are now recruiting for a larger study, and of course, women are involved, and it's really important to me. So we were looking at healthy men, middle-aged to healthy men. What else do I want to say about these guys? The study was, again, done at my alma mater at HealthGut Institute. We did a whole battery of testing on them at baseline, including the Illumina Epic Array or the, you know, the DNA methylation. The study group.

And when you were doing their intake of where they started off with so that you could see how you could reverse the biological age and if the protocol did end up reversing the biological age, is there, and again, it may not be helpful in the context of this interview, but just asking because I didn't get a chance to go through this in the paper, was there an average median biological age? you gave us the age range of the 40 participants that were there, but was there, or was it just, you know, people were all over the map. And it's not really how you kind of think about it. You know what? I don't actually, I don't know, interestingly enough. I mean, it would be easy

enough for us to figure out. But we, I mean, well then, yeah, let's actually, since that part, you know, it may not be as useful. Again, so that's why I prefaced it, take us to the end of it. After going through this eight-week protocol, which is also many of the things that you put people on, are outlined in the book and the things you did. Again, we're talking about not just diet interventions, but also sleep recommendations that were brought into it. So diet, sleep, anything else, any other big categories that you have been doing? Yeah.

So diet, we wanted them to get, we wanted them to go for seven hours. I mean, you obviously can't make people sleep, but we supported them in good sleep hygiene practices and we checked in with them. I need to talk about when I say that we checked in with them, our nutritionists here worked with our participants, and it's an important, important piece, I think, in our success. Our nutritionists met with our participants at least weekly. That was a requirement. And they could meet with the more. And they did that through like the first month of the study and then they were able to drop back if they had their sea legs around the intervention. They used a very dry institutional

review board script to communicate with the study participants. Like, do you have any questions? Are you meeting your vegetable targets? Have you gotten your cruciferous? Like boring questions. But that contact was, in my mind, a likely imperative piece of adherence. And we will at some point hopefully publish on our adherence data because it's really, really good. And nutritional interventions are notoriously just sloppy and poorly recorded. And outcome is it's difficult to tease out what's significant and what's not. And nutrition interventions are often challenged.

So I think having the nutrition team work with them, even in this drawing, eye capacity was the difference between success and failure. If we had just given them a printout at the beginning of the study and said, you know, Godspeed to you, I just don't think we would have seen the changes at all. And on the topic of the polyphenols, was there an amount that you recommended that people had daily? Was there specific ones that you recommended for folks to, to include? Yeah. Yes. So, yes, absolutely. We, just as I mentioned in the beginning, we gave them a greens powder. So they had to go with at least seven cups of vegetables. We needed them to get some beets. And in the breakdown of those vegetables, they were getting cruciferous veggies. They were

getting colorful veggies. The veggies that we wanted them to choose were lower glycemic. So we didn't want them to do, you know, a ton of carrots or sweet potatoes. They can. They can. But we just wanted to be mindful around glycemic load and, you know, just sugar cycling. For the polyphenols, so those vegetables are all going to include some of the epinutrient polyphenols, but we specifically wanted them to do consume green tea. We wanted them to have daily turmeric powder. We wanted them to have rosemary. We wanted them to consume pumpkin seeds and, you know, a host of other seeds, but primarily

pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds, although. So they had some basic targets that they needed to achieve daily, which I just outlined and then they had subcategories of things that we would encourage. So the daily targets wouldn't be calorically sufficient for them. So they'd need to incorporate some of these secondary components and they could choose additional polyphenols and, you know, additional really nutrient dense foods as well. We wanted them to have a little. Liver, liver was one of those foods that you recommended them. Yeah, that's right. So five eggs a week, five to ten eggs a week, I should say. So a minimum of five eggs. They don't have to have them every day, but we gave them a weekly

target. We wanted them to try for three servings of liver per week. So not a daily thing, but three servings per week. And really most of our participants were able to do so. The nutritionists would guide them towards where they could get quality sources. Our study was, again, it was out in Portland, Oregon, where there's pretty readily accessible, clean sources. So they were able to do that. We gave them a probiotic lactobacillus plantarium. We know all of the benefits of a healthy microbiome and certainly lots of research on the healthy microbiome influencing healthy epigenetic expression.

But the lactobacillus plantarium specifically was to, with the potential that it could increase microbial production of folate, you know, of a natural folate. And we did, with all of these interventions, increase circulating folate in our participants by 15%. So, you know, it was significant and quite appreciable. We can't target it back to the probiotic, but it could have been a piece of it. We also gave them a greens powder concentrate, so more of those really beautiful polyphenols, and they were to take that twice daily. Sleep tracking, a twice daily relaxation response,

breathing practice. So just twice daily, you know, 10 to 20 minutes at each time, you know, a meditation, a basic meditation practice. Exercise was prescribed at a minimum of five days per week, minimum of 30 minutes time with a perceived exertion of 60 to 80 percent. So 60 is, you know, you might be breathing slightly heavy. 80 is you're breathing heavier, but you're still able to carry on a conversation. one could do whatever they were called to do for that. And what are the most common ones were things that would be recommended? Because I know that a lot of people struggle with finding that movement,

and we've done whole episodes on this. It's all about figuring out what works for you. That could be tennis. They could be going on a hike with friends or a long walk, a little bit of uphill action. What did you find that a lot of the study participants were doing that met that requirement of exercise that you were looking? for at the exertion levels that you wanted to see? I'm going to say that probably the biggest

activity was actually walking. I know one guy in the study I remember started walking back to and forth to his job, which is, yeah, what a smart habit to develop. But again, these guys are healthy. And so they came to us with exercise practices by and large. What's interesting is that some of them had to drop back on their exercise. One guy wanted to do it. He was going to go hike in the Rockies or something. And he wanted to do the intervention while he was on this. And, you know, that was going to be outside of our exercise prescription. So he had to wait until he got back from it. I think, you know, there's a range of what's going, my healthy exercise is not going to be yours. I mean, there's a real individualization of exercise. And I think we're still working on

teasing that out. And I think, you know, the more we're able to readily measure biological age and what's influencing it favorably and not. And, you know, the more we're able to kind of, to have these tools at our fingertips and wearables, the more we'll be able to see, oh, this exercise is fabulous for me. Might not be for you. So. And even though you mentioned that all these folks are healthy, but the vast majority of them are doing walking, there's probably not many people here who are listening that can,

cannot take advantage of that. That's a double negative, but almost everybody here can, walk at a level and then if they want to turn it up a little bit, then they can do that contextually for themselves. That might, for some people who are more active, be, you know, going a little bit uphill and carefully downhill. For other people, it just might be, you're picking up the pace a little bit. Instead of a very gentle walk, you're getting a little bit faster of a step in. So that piece, which was a crucial piece, a part of the study on top of the diet, to sleep, the other components of relaxation, anybody, anybody who's listening

that thinks, well, they were also doing exercise too, but you can do that same version for yourself, a little bit of walking and then just turn up the volume just slightly to get that 60% exertion that you're talking about. Yeah, 60% is not a high bar. And, you know, okay, you have bad knees. Well, you know, you can do an exercise bike. You can do a rowing machine. You can dance if you like dancing. I mean, you can clean the house. Honestly, there's research on favorable epigenetic changes with house cleaning and house cleaning. people who have really long, long-term house cleaning habits are biologically younger. So I'm sure some people out there are thinking about that one.

Not me, but it's really anything that our participants felt like doing. And that's the same way that I'm approaching it in the book. It's the act of actually doing it. And I talk a lot about in the book, you know, how to do it. And I think you brought this up earlier. Community is a huge component, I think, for, establishing an exercise habit that's going to be sticky. You know, who can you, my, my best conversations, I think, happen. I'm a cyclist and I like being outside on my bike because I love the feeling of

the outside. But, you know, that's when I get to catch up with my sister. You know, that's when I kind of, I make sure I go on safe roads and I can chit chat and, you know, I'll get a hill climb in, so I'll be huffing away sometimes. But I also get to bond with people. And it's just such an important part of my exercise routine. And it keeps me going. The key term that you use there is sticky. You know, we want to set this up in a way so that we don't kill ourselves by trying to be perfect in any one of these categories, but we do it in a way that we can make it a regular part of our life. And when it becomes a regular part of our life, that's when the results end up taking place because anybody can do this for a week using willpower, but really we want to set it up as a

lifelong habit. And that's a big part of your recommendations inside of the book. So take us to the results, the results, and what you do. And what you do. guys showed in the course of eight weeks. And again, all this is listed out in the book. And you can turn it into your own plan that's there for yourself where you can have the same results that you talked about in the book. So tell us what the results were and how you measured them. So we saw, as I mentioned earlier, that folate increased significantly in our participants. Their triglycerides dropped. And we did, you know, we wanted it to be slightly keto leaning. And so there was a, you know, lower glycemic load on, on what they were consuming. And we did a judge.

intermittent fasting, 12 hours on, 12 hours off. And so their triglycerides dropped, their LDL and total cholesterol dropped a little bit. These were healthy guys, so they didn't need to be making any great changes here. This was like a refinement. And then, you know, the biggest, the most exciting finding was that their biological age as measured by sort of the flagship biological age clock, it's called DNAM age, put out by Steve Horvath at UCLA. as compared to our control group, it dropped by 3.24 years.

So in eight weeks' time, our study subjects got, you know, over three years younger as compared to our controls, which hasn't been shown before. It still, you know, it still hasn't. Yeah, it's a big freaking deal. And it just shows you that the right combinations of things, because these are all designed. Often in the world of pharmaceutical drugs and even in the world of a lot of supplement, research, the way that scientific studies are set up is you want to isolate. You want to isolate that one specific compound, that one thing, whether it's vitamin D or that one prescription drug metformin or nexium or whatever it is that people are studying so that you can say, hey,

just take this pill and this pill will have impact on this area. And those are needed. Those are studies that are needed. And a lot more of what we're looking at now is these multivariate studies that reflect more that the true power and the true results that come into anybody's life who's listening and watching really happens when we combine these things. So I think that I'm excited to see a study like this because that will hopefully encourage more people instead of just looking at isolated things, which are of course needed and is very much a part of the way that we develop drugs, a lot of lifesaving drugs that are out there and the way that we research a lot of supplement protocols that might be there. But for the average person who's listening, what is the true potential

of combining these protocols together, combining these individual areas into one protocol so that we can show that you can make a significant difference in your health. In this case, reversing three plus years in biological age by a simple program. Now that begs the question. And as you mentioned, this was just, you know, a pilot study. What happens when somebody's doing this, you know, over months or over years? What is the potential then, not just in terms of living longer, but of course, in terms of living healthier, not just in terms of the lifespan, which we may not be able to, you know, significantly have that big of a difference on. We're still sort of figuring that out, but definitely we can live into our 80s, 90s, 100s and 100s plus being a way healthier version of ourselves,

not, you know, knock on wood in a nursing home where we don't have the capacity to take care of ourselves or look after ourselves or function at a level that allows us to fully show up in life. It's true. It's really, it's extraordinary. I, you know, we may have a longer lifespan in our country as compared to, you know, the earlier turn of the century from the 19th to the 20th centuries. But our health span is horrible and it's deteriorating.

Actually, even our lifespan is dropping. compared to our parents. It's just mind-blowing to me. And the bulk, you know, you and I were talking about this previously, you know, the final 16 years of the average American is spent sick. It's spent, you know, in the hospital or in a skilled nursing facility or on multiple medications. I mean, there's no quality of life there. And so as important or really arguably more important, I think both can exist together, but it's the health span where the rubber meets the road. And there is, you know, there's some really interesting, you know, studies looking at the potential financial savings. I mean, we don't get this.

We have no, where do you put it in your brain that we're bankrupting our country because of health care spent? You know, like those final 16 years, we're not only bankrupting the individual who's suffering that illness, you know, and taking all their money and their home so that they can pay for the skilled nursing facility that they live in and they don't even know they're there. I mean, you know, they're taking their inheritance from their kids and, you know, everything that they've worked for. They're just, it's, it's gone to go to be propped up in something that's supposedly a life. I mean, it's just so horrible to me. I mean, not to mention that from my understanding, and I'll fact check this and put the accurate one in the show notes, but from my understanding of the last review paper that I saw on this is that 90% of what we pay into insurance is spent back on us in the last. two years to 18 months of an average person's life when it comes to paying for heart surgery,

cancer care, all these other things. So all this money that we're spending and the number one reason in the United States, unfortunately for medical, for bankruptcies is medical bills still the number one reason. So all this money that we're spending and we spend more than anybody else around the world on health care in the U.S. is being spent in the last, you know, few years of our life. And again, I'll fact check that and write the appropriate amount. I know it's a huge amount. It's a huge amount. And it, so yeah, so yeah, the expense just, you know, goes up exponentially, but we're starting 16 years out to be sicker than we need to be, to be sick. So we have to be thinking about health span. We have to be thinking about, you know, changing the trajectory of our

existence. And one of the reviewers in our study said something cool. So when we were going through peer review, we got comments back from, you know, scientists, like reading our work and reviewing it critically. But one person was excited about the fact that this is doable. This isn't injection. This isn't a risky drug, you know, with potential side effects or, you know, what, you know, all of the sort of the, in the, in the, in the biogarantology space, they're looking at some pretty radical interventions and they're putting billions of dollars behind those interventions. But, you know, this is safe. This is just going to the grocery. or in moving around and sleeping.

I mean, these are very foundational interventions that turned around biological age in our participants. And I just want to mention a Sinclair paper that he wrote with a couple, you know, a University of Oxford and London School of Business economists looking at the cost of health care spend. And if they figured that if we could slow down aging by a year, so sort of improve biological age by just a year,

that they were looking at a $38 trillion savings, $38 trillion just by one year. And here you guys are three years that people are getting back, right? Three years plus. In eight weeks time. Yeah. And so they said 10 years. Yeah, that's right. And that was already for people that were pretty healthy, right?

That's the other components. Yes. Right? That's a really good. Yeah. That's an important point. What happens with somebody who's suffering a lot more, you know, goes on these interventions and gets a massive uptick in return on investment because they're starting at a place of being

a little bit more unhealthier. And now they're getting so much more of an impact that's there. You know, did you guys ever, I know it's in the context of all things, COVID and the world and everything like that, but did you throw yourself a party for putting this landmark study together? You guys pop a little, you know, dry farm wine or some little opportunity to celebrate a little kombucha and just toast yourself and pat yourself on the back. You know, my experience is super high achievers and having gotten to know you over the course of the last week a little bit and us being on some calls and stuff. I think you're one of those individuals. We tend to be on to the next thing. But did you really take a moment and say like, wow, you know, the magnitude of this is pretty amazing. And we're just really getting started. But still, this is pretty awesome. I need to take a moment to pat myself on the back. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much, Drew. That's awesome. I just appreciate your vision in the world. It's needed. I think, Drew, for me, well, I need to do that. And it has been, we've been running at a breakneck pace. I mean, the study came out. I can't believe the amount of tension it got. If people are interested, they can go to my website and click on the media tab. Mind blowing. I mean, honestly, I am somebody who's been teaching other professionals for really the most of my career. and I do some patient care, but I've been really relatively behind the scenes, I think, in the world, in this space for many, many years, but really kind of behind the scenes. And to see this being covered

on Martha Stewart or the Times of London and just, you know, Yahoo and so forth, it was amazing. And I think it's only, it's taken some time for me to really understand, you know, what it is we did in terms of sort of hedging our bets. that DNA methylation, that massaging DNA methylation was where it was at, and in so doing, we would be directly addressing what is probably, you know, the fundamental driver of aging. I don't, I think putting those pieces together has been, you know, just like, whoa, we did that. It's really the connecting of a lot of different dots, right? It's the connecting of a lot of different dots that people knew about.

And a study is fantastic because even if we inherently know that certain things and a lot of functional medicine, naturopathic medicine, is based on sort of these ancient principles that a lot of different groups around the world practiced in Chinese medicine or Aruveda or ancestral things. But it's one thing for them to know it and it's another thing to study it. We still have to study it because we have to show the rest of the world that may not be practicing and integrating these habits that this is possible. this is doable and it needs more attention to resources. So it's amazing that you did the study. It's amazing that it got great attention because a lot of studies, as you know, don't get the attention that they deserve and they kind of are read and cited by maybe a hundred people at the most and then everybody moves on to the next thing. So you even took it further and you put a book around it. And that's the beautiful part because just because somebody sees a study in a headline

on and it's beautiful that these headlines came. Again, the Times and Martha Stewart and so many other ones that were out there, people that we look up to highlighting it like Dr. Rhonda Patrick, other people that are out there in the world sharing it in their longevity newsletters. I saw it in a couple places. But now it's like how do we actually practically contextualize this advice for our life? And people need a little bit of handholding to be able to do that. So that's where the book came in to the mix. And we've, of course, all the things that we've mentioned today throughout the podcast or highlight in the book.

Anything else that you want to talk about that was unique that you wanted to bring into the book in highlighting this message of what is really possible when it comes to aging and reverse? You know, my final chapter is really interesting. There's actually, you know, there's a lot of the book that I find interesting because I'm, you know, I'm the author. And I want to say that I worked with somebody to help me plain language it. So hopefully it's very accessible to people, even though the science can feel kind of complex. hopefully we achieved that. There's a concept that really sort of that moved me, and it's something, it's something called biological embedding, and it's where we translate experience into the biochemical

marks that get laid down onto our genome and influence genetic expression. Most of that, most of that science has been done in like PTSD or trauma through generations like the Holocaust or Moshay Sab was looking at something called Rajak ice storm where, you know, a really serious ice storm in Montreal, women who were pregnant during that time gave birth to offspring who had higher risks of asthma and autism. And you can see sort of this trauma pattern biologically embedding on our epigenome and influencing our stress response, our ability to make oxytocin, cardiovascular disease, diabetes like this. So this early imprally of stress even inherited, so we might not have even experienced it, can have this profound

influence. And one of the things I tussled with was, well, what about the biological embedding of wisdom, you know, of maturity, of aging? You know, there's something that happens on the aging journey where we get a little softer. We get a little more empathetic. We're able to experience love quicker and longer. We care about people. We're We're a little bit, we're trying to go a little bit more slowly. There are, there are extraordinarily important things that occur as far as maturation goes as we age, right? Well, look, think about our grandparents or, you know, our parents or, you know, our mentors, people who we love deeply. There's something about them.

You know, that, that happens with experience on the planet. And it hasn't been sufficiently studied, but I'm absolutely. But it will be. You know, trauma is loud. It's a voice everybody wants to look at. And we'll get insight into how to reverse trauma epigenetically. That is something that will happen. So you don't spend your lifetime in therapy or as a drug addict or, you know, battling your trauma, battling your demons that will be able to use some of these interventions, maybe even, you know, in utero or in infancy if we see these patterns.

So there's some, the possibility of epigenetics is extraordinary. But I just want to have an appreciation for the aging journey and the biological embedding of wisdom, of maturity, of all of these important things. And it's so extraordinary to me to think that this is translated into biochemical marks that are then placed on our DNA and sort of enable us to live in this grounded, centered, broader, more universal way. So it's part of the takeaway, just so I can make sure I understand, and for the audience too, it's like we all know how much trauma. We've done a few episodes in the past with folks on the Aces studies and the Aces questionnaire. And the idea that these adverse childhood experiences can make somebody, if you have a father that's an alcoholic or a parent that was doing drugs or was beating you or wasn't there for you when you, you know, went through these very. challenging things, but then you never re-contextualized it and gave meaning around it. So it's not necessarily just the event. It's actually the support that you had around that event. Like,

hey, that was a really tough time, that divorced that you and mom and dad had. And, you know, together as a family, we went through it. We made through it. And I understood why it was the right reason. So it's not just the trauma. It's about giving the context and the meaning, but the people that don't have that context in the meaning are more likely to develop diabetes, heart disease, all sorts of different, you know, things. So we know that's there. So on the flip side, what does it look like? And people can pass that trauma down through generations. We did an episode with Dr. Gabor Mate talking about his parents and Holocaust survivors

and how that might have played into a little bit of his addiction and ADHD that he suffered with in his life. So on the flip side, we don't give enough attention to love is what you're sharing, that doing the right things can also pass down these benevolent traits, the sense of resilience, the sense of calm wisdom that can come not just through. diet and lifestyle and better sleep, but also through practicing things like breathing, as you talked about in the beginning part of the podcast and exercise. And we are getting a chance to hand that down to our offspring and future generations as well. That's exactly right. And there's

plenty of research showing cuddling in infancy. They actually show this in an animal model and you can see it in humans, that this contact will change the trajectory of a kid's existence. Even children who are in orphanages, who are then adopted, and they don't have to be, it doesn't have to be early on, but they're afforded their, in epigenetically primed windows. And I actually talk about that in the book. It's when you can sort of give this nurture and set a kid on an amazing trajectory. But I also think, even if we don't have that, even if we've, you know, were unfortunately birthed into a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a. environment of tragedy, we can recapture that. We have this opportunity as adults, just as you

outlined doing, you know, we can use the younger you principles, but we can go much more deeply into, you know, doing interventions that can help influence the epigenome. I mean, honestly, I'll just say there was a study that just came out. This is an animal study, but looking at the epigenetic influence of psychoactive compounds. I mean, it's just, we're just cracking it open, but I think we're going to have a host of ways to deal with deep trauma that is a little bit easier and doesn't require sort of living it or reliving it or some of the therapies that we use today. I think the possibilities are extraordinary. Yeah.

And I think the biology, I think all of it has to do with changing genetic expression, probably a primary driver in that is DNA methylation. So I would stand by using these principles in a variety of ways. In fact, a group out of the Netherlands reached out to us to suggest a research project looking at immigrants from actually Kosovo. so people who've experienced war trauma and tragedies and looking at what this intervention might do with them in conjunction with some of the psychotherapeutic interventions

that they're using, and I just think it would be great. You know, the implications of this work are profound, and there's a lot of reverberations that it's going to continue to have. And as we start to get into the tail end of this and wrap up this interview, I just want to take a moment to just acknowledge you because everybody that's come across this work that you and your team have put together is just, I hear a lot of, I hear a lot of two things that are there. Number one, I can't believe this is the first of its kind study, right?

And finally, somebody did this study that's out there. I hear both of those, and often I'll heal them together. So I want to applaud you and your team. Let's talk a little bit about the ecosystem that's out there. We've mentioned the book. The link is in the show notes. younger you, reduce your bio age, live longer, better. And you also have a whole entire program and protocol, again, inspired by the study that you're walking people through. And it's been kind of put

together in a little bit of like an online university and with support and other stuff. Talk to us about that and how people can sign up and find more information. We're calling that simply three Y Y, three years younger. And that's the digital program. So, you know, you can download it on your phone and you can walk with us and, you know, replicate the study within this easy to use app format. You can access the nutrition team. The nutritionists who worked in our study and we've trained other nutritionists in our practice. So the badass nutritionists we've got here, you will be able to get your bio age at baseline and at the end of the study. You'll have, it'll be easier. It'll be more turnkey than our study was. Just all of the recipes that you need, how you do them, you can

talk to the nutrition team, what you need to buy at the grocery store, you'll be able to get your supplements. Just the full tilt program in one turnkey solution is in the 3YY program. And then if you want to do the research arm, you can opt to do that, which is really exciting. And you'll, you know, will require you to fill out, you know, more baseline forms than you have to in the non-research arm. So you can just choose either. But we would love to have as many people as possible participate in, you know, mining more science around what it is we're doing. We have, once you graduate, once you do that based the study, you can go into every day, the younger you every day, and it's the program we transition people on.

It's in the book, and we'll build it out into the app. We're going to have something like a stacked Younger You program where some of the interventions that I think are important that we didn't use in the study will be available in this digital program, some testing that we think is useful, some wearables. That sort of stratosphere-stacked Younger-U will be fun for those of us who are biohackers who've done the study and maybe, you know, live the study principles regularly and want to think about the next level. I'm pretty excited about that. We have a Younger-U hybrid in the book, which I wrote for people getting ready for conception. So pre-conception planning for men and women. I mean, this is when you're going to be

You want to hand down pristine epigenetics, right? You want your DNA methylation to just be like as exquisite as possible. So we have a preconception and then a pregnancy program that I built in the book. I'm just calling it the Younger U-Hybrid, but I just couldn't help it because it's such an important time. So I wanted to use these principles, but make sure that they're, you know, the nutrition demands of pregnancy are met. So I just tweaked what we're doing a little bit for that. And we'll eventually build that out into the digital program as well. but it's in the book. So there's a lot of ways that we can use it.

That's beautiful. I love the idea of people being able to participate in the research. A lot of the people that listen to this podcast, they're in the category of what we call pro-ams, professional amateurs. They may not be the folks that are out there that we do have a lot of practitioners that listen to the podcast, but they may not be the folks that are doing the research that are doing the studies, but they want to be a part of it. They want to, they consider themselves as one of the healthiest people in their sort of friend group, and everybody comes to them and asks them for advice, you know, what should I be taking? What's like a food that I should be incorporating or what's the latest research on this? So I know a lot of those individuals would love to sign up about, sign up for that.

And of course, check out the book as well too. Dr. Cara Fitzgerald, this has been a fantastic interview. You're showing us what's possible. We're showing us how to use this hardware that we've all been given and through the right software, optimize it and have it functioning in the best way that it can, not just to be healthier. The question really is at the end of the day, what do you care about a lot that getting healthier is worth doing? Because if we're healthier, if we feel good, we can give all the love and attention to the areas of our life that we, that matter to us the most, that could be

volunteering, that could be starting your business, that could be starting a family, that could be looking after your grandkids, that could be just having the energy to get up every day and just make the world a little bit of a better place. So you're helping us all do that by showing us what's possible. I honor you and I thank you for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Drew. It's really been a pleasure. All the links are in the show notes. And I look forward to having you around two. Who knows what we'll dive into next. Thanks again.