Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #240 11 Powerful Tips To Help You Live Longer And Better!

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

TRIGGER WARNING: This podcast discusses fasting and its advice may not be suitable for anyone with an eating disorder. If you have an existing health condition or are taking medication, always consult your healthcare practitioner before going for prolonged periods without eating. Every few months or so, my team and I put together a special compilation episode, which features some of the very best tips around a central unified theme. This week’s episode is all about longevity.   Many of us think we would not like to live into old age because we associate it with illness and discomfort. But this does not need to be the case. There are simple things we can all do that could increase our health span as well as our life span. As you will hear in this episode, decline is not inevitable as we get older and there are many factors under our control that can affect how we age - from how we exercise, to how much we sleep, how we use our brain and what and when we eat. You’ll also hear why compassion, community, purpose and friendship are important for our health and our lifespan. And why certain types of stress can actually be good for us and help us to live longer. Studies even show that our happiness, our mindset, and approach to life can be a factor in how long we live. Finally, you’ll hear a clip about whether ageing should be seen as a disease that we can treat and a discussion about what ageing might look like in the future.   I really believe that the changes we can make to improve our health and longevity are a lot more achievable than many of us think.   I hope this episode helps you to find ways to implement some small daily habits that will help you to live a long, healthy, active and fulfilling life.   This episode includes clips from: Episode 208 David Sinclair Episode 147 Matthew Walker Episode 112 Daniel Levitin Episode 74 Felice Jacka Episode 81 Satchin Panda Episode 151 Laurie Santos Episode 138 Julian Abel Episode 167 Tommy Wood Episode 128 Daniel Lieberman Episode 67 Dan Buettner Episode 197 James Nestor Episode 206 Roger Seheult Thanks to our sponsors:   https://www.leafyard.com/livemore   https://www.blublox.com/livemore   https://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Order Dr Chatterjee's new book Happy Mind, Happy Life: UK version and US & Canada version   Show notes available at https://drchatterjee.com/240 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified health care provider with any questions you have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

Hi, my name is Rangan Chatterjee. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. So today's episode is a special compilation episode. If you are new to my show, every few months or so, my team and I put together a very special compilation episode which features some of the very best tips around a central unifying theme. These episodes prove to be really, really popular as they bring together some of the very best tips from my previous guests all in one place. And the theme today is longevity. And when I think about longevity, I think about living

with more vitality for longer, increasing our health span as well as our lifespan. You see, decline is not inevitable as we get older. And in today's special compilation episode, you will hear about the various factors that influence how we age, from exercise to sleep to how we use our brain and what and when we eat. You'll also hear why compassion, community, purpose and friendship are so important for our health and our lifespan and why certain types of stress can actually be good for us and help us to live longer. We also touch upon the studies that show us that our happiness, our mindset, and our approach to life can be a factor in how long we live. And of course, this is a topic that I cover in detail in my upcoming book, Happy Minds, Happy Life,

which is out in just a few weeks. I think this is a really enjoyable episode to listen to. You will hear inspiring stories and lots of actionable tips and advice from some of my former guests, including David Sinclair, Matthew Walker, Daniel Levitin, Felice Jacker, Sachin Pandey, Laurie Santos, Julian Abel, Tommy Wood, Daniel Lieberman, Dan Boettner, and James Nestor. Now I strongly believe that the changes we can make to improve our health and longevity are a lot more achievable than many of us think. And my hope is that this episode inspires you to make a few small changes that will make a really big difference. I hope you enjoy listening. My first guest is one of the world's leading scientific authorities on aging and how to slow its effects, the biologist and Harvard

professor, David Sinclair. Now, many of us think we would not like to live long into old age because we associate it with illness and discomfort. But in this clip from episode 208, David and I discuss how this absolutely does not need to be the case. How much of our view of at what age we think we'd like to die, do you think is shaped by this kind of prevailing view that old age is hard. And when we get old, we can't move and we can't see and we need help. Because that's the big thing, right? I think many people would like to live a lot longer if they felt they'd have that vitality whilst they were aging as well. That's exactly right. I asked the question twice. The first question is, how long do you want to live? And I would say a third of the people say 80, another third say 100. And then there's the

other third that would say 150 and beyond. But then I asked the question again, after I say, but what if you could stay healthy till the end? And then just about everybody's hands go up. So it's clearly a misconception of what I'm talking about. What I'm saying is that we are preventing getting old, preventing diseases, preventing cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, who would not want that. And when we extend lifespan, it's not keeping people in nursing homes for longer. Who would want that? It's allowing people to be 85 and 90, even 100, to play tennis and hang out with their families and start a new career. The best example I can give you is my father, whose star is in the book. He retired at 67 and was not looking forward to being 80. He was thinking he'd be in a wheelchair like most 80-year-old men, if not in

the ground. He's now 82. He's fitter than me, stronger than me, more excited about life than me, seriously. He's got a great social life and he has no diseases, no aches or pains, mentally extremely sharp and has started a new career. But he's not a special person when it comes to life. He's an average guy. He didn't like exercise. He was not looking forward to the future. He's not obsessed with his health at all. And look at what happened. He's living a life that he didn't expect at all. And we're already planning going to Africa. He's looking at life over the next 30 years. I mean, what 80-year-old does that? This is what 82 should look like. And if people change their lifestyles, they have a great chance of reaching

that point and beyond. People think it's an inevitability that we're going to get slower, more tired, our memory's going to go. And I don't buy that, first of all. I've seen that there are many things we can do to mean that's not an inevitability. But I think you take it even further. And you're showing very clearly that that does not have to happen to everyone. Anyone who says they want to die at 80 is misguided, in my view. Because if at 80 you've got friends, you've got family, you're doing something with purpose, whether it's community work or a job, no one says, I want to die. No one wants to die if they've got a healthy life with family. And if there's someone out there who says i'm i'm happy and healthy but kill me now i'm yet to meet them yeah it's so powerful it really is

cognitive decline in later life is not inevitable and there are simple things that we can all do now that will help keep our brain healthy. And in this next clip from episode 167, Dr. Tommy Wood explains why brain health is so important for longevity and why it's vital to keep challenging ourselves as adults in order to maintain a healthy brain. There's always going to be a huge amount of interest in in terms of how do we maintain cognitive function late into life because age-related dementia and age-related cognitive decline are now the leading cause of deaths let's use an athlete analogy which is that if you stop training or you break your leg and it goes in a cast,

when you take that cast off, you'll see the leg on that size is smaller. You've lost muscle mass on that size. So anytime you stop sort of giving an input, a stimulus to the muscles, they will reduce in size because it's energetically expensive. If you don't need them, your body isn't going to keep it around. And everything, all the evidence that exists today suggests that the brain is the same, right? Use it or lose it. And when we think about using the brain, I like to compare back to what it takes to create and build a brain in the first place.

So as an infant, you are doing things like learning to talk, learning social interaction, social cues, learning to control this fabulously complicated meat suit with incredible dexterity. And those things take a huge amount of neurological stimulus, input, and effort. Then throughout life, you start to do things that you may think are hard, but compared to that, really not that hard, like biochemistry as an undergrad, or learning to drive a car, or the ins and outs of your job. They feel hard, but in terms of the stimulus and the effort required from your nervous system, it's actually quite small compared to, say, learning how to control your whole body.

As we get older, we just do the same things again and again. They get easier for us. They just become habits. They become patterns which don't require, again, any significant cognitive input. And because of that, you're essentially telling your brain, hey, I don't need you to be as complex as you once were, because we're not doing anything difficult. And you see multiple different strands that kind of come into this. So to be a black cab driver in London, you had to learn the knowledge originally, which is all of the streets in a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. And they once looked at brain scans of people taking the knowledge or learning it before and after. And those who passed – and again, we don't know why they passed, whether it was because they were the ones who actually studied or, you know, they have some other skills that allowed them to be able to gain the knowledge. Those who passed, again, saw an increase in size in certain aspects of the brain on a brain scan.

And those who didn't pass, the knowledge didn't become capitalized, didn't. So you've created this incredibly difficult stimulus, which has then, you know, helped improve the brain. And you see something similar in terms of people who retire earlier tend to die earlier as well. And that's after you're adjusting for all the things that might cause you to retire earlier, such as medical conditions. So again, telling the body, telling the brain that it's required is incredibly powerful for brain health. And so all of this is basically telling me that in order to keep your brain health you need to tell tell your brain that it's needed that requires you to do difficult things which is

going to also require you to be bad at stuff as you learn new skills and then once you acquired a new skill you then have to move on to something else i mean still do the thing if you enjoy it but then if as soon as something becomes habit, becomes patterned, becomes easy, it's no longer the same stimulus. So this could be anything. It could be dancing. It could be some kind of movement or sport. It could be singing. Teaching others seems to be protective as well. Knitting. There are all these things that you can do, but you need some kind of ongoing stimulus to tell your brain that it's still needed, it's still worth keeping around. We're normally told that it's like this inexorable decline over time.

I think it's very positive and empowering to say, you know, wherever you are today, there is potential for improvement if you're, you know, sort of capable and able and interested in doing that. of capable and able and interested in doing them. Imagine if you could reverse aging and cognitive decline and improve your brain health purely through your mindset and approach to life. Well, my next guest is Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist, cognitive psychologist, and best-selling author. What we do day-to-day affects not just our short-term health, but also how our brain changes with age. And in this clip from episode 112, he describes three personality traits or mindsets

that are the key ingredient to long-term health and happiness. to long-term health and happiness. The number one factor that influences how you're going to fare at any age is a personality trait, a mindset, you might call it, of conscientiousness. That swamps all other factors in terms of whether you're going to be healthy and happy at age eight or age 108. So I guess, can you finish a task you started? Not only that, but can you do the best possible job you can? Can you do not just good enough? Can you try to push yourself to do more, to do better? Can you grow in whatever it is that you're doing? If it's keeping a garden, do better? Can you grow in whatever it is that you're doing? If it's keeping a garden,

if it's cooking for yourself and your family, if it's choosing vegetables, learning which ones to choose at the market so you get the most flavorful and healthy ones with the most nutrients, any area of a human endeavor where you can learn and keep learning is what's neuroprotective. I mean, it's fun. It is fun, yeah. It's curiosity, really, which is a separate trait. It's number two on the list after conscientiousness. Is it really? People who are curious do better in life.

So conscientiousness and curiosity, the two Cs of aging well. If you can remain curious and learn new things, that's neuroprotective. It doesn't mean that you won't get Alzheimer's or that you can reverse it or slow it down, but it does mean, based on the research, that you may get it and nobody would notice it for years because you've built up this cognitive reserve. Think of it this way. If you go to the gym and you can bench press 200 kilos, on a bad day, you could still do 50. I can't, but you've got some muscle reserve. Same thing with the brain. You build up this reserve through doing new things, whatever they

are. Just to bring this full circle, the other third quality that we can all work on is gratitude. Yeah. As you know, I had the opportunity to meet with the Dalai Lama. Yeah. As you know, I had the opportunity to meet with the Dalai Lama, and he meditates on gratitude and compassion two to four hours every day. And he believes the real secret to happiness is to embrace gratitude. If you're happy for what you have, and you're not focused on what you don't have and feeling slighted or carrying around anger and such. And how come so-and-so has a Tesla and I don't? Or so-and-so got promoted and I didn't. So-and-so's spouse is better looking than mine. All of that stuff throws

our brain into a kind of fear mode. It activates the amygdala, it releases cortisol. But, you know, Warren Buffett agrees. Yeah. The idea of experiencing gratitude. My grandmother was an immigrant to the United States from Germany, a Holocaust survivor. She escaped the Nazis. And she had written out on a piece of paper the things she was grateful for. Yeah. And she recited them every morning when she woke up and every night before she went to bed. She was not religious, but we were talking about how you can affect change,

and we talked about meditation and medication and psychotherapy. Another thing that works is religion. All the world's religions teach you that you can change yourself. and all the world's religions teach you that you can change yourself. You can become more compassionate or generous or more tolerant or express more gratitude. So she had this list, and she told us that every day she woke up, she told me and my mom around the time she was 79, that she sang God Bless America every morning.

God bless America, written by another immigrant, by the way, Irving Berlin, another Jewish immigrant. And she felt that it was her purpose to do that. She had to express gratitude that her family was saved. So for her 80th birthday, my mother and I bought her a little $80 electronic keyboard. And I got pieces of masking tape and put them on the keys to play the song, and I put numbers on them. So she'd know what order to play them in. And she loved it. She'd never played an instrument before. So she's going one, two, three, four, five, six, you know, like this. And then by the time it was her 81st birthday, she had lifted the masking tape off and was playing it from memory. By her 82nd birthday, she'd worked out a rudimentary harmony with the left hand.

She kept improving. She did this every single morning and every night before she went to bed until she died at 97. And we found the keyboard on her bed table. and we found the keyboard on her bed table. Many people think that we should become less active as we get older, but this really doesn't appear to be the case. In this next clip from episode 128 of the podcast, Dr. Daniel Lieberman explains how exercise turns on repair and maintenance mechanisms in the body and why physical activity is important in slowing down aging and decreasing the likelihood of disease.

Exercise really does improve your health. Exercise really decreases your chances of getting sick. You know, the data are unquestionable. 150 minutes a week of physical activity, just, you know, a brisk walk, can lower your relative risk of dying at a given age by 50%. That's not a number I just pulled out of a hat. That's a really, really, really solid number based on many, many, many studies. You know, we have this idea that as you get older, you know,

it's time to kick up your heels and, you Florida or whatever it is, and just kind of be less active and take it easy and enjoy your retirement. But humans are unusual species. We're one of the few species that evolved to live after we reproduce. We evolved to be grandparents. But we didn't evolve just to be grandparents to enjoy our grandchildren. We evolved to be grandparents to help our grandchildren. So if you look in the hunter-gatherer societies and in farming societies, grandparents are out there foraging and hunting and gathering and digging and doing all kinds of stuff and helping out their children and their grandchildren, providing food surplus, being active. We have data showing that people tend to be often are more active when they're

grandparents than when they're parents because they don't have kids in tow right and what's important about that it's kind of like a chicken and egg question you know which came first living long in order to be active or being active in order to live long and you know they're they're both there right and and it turns out that that physical activity is really important in in slowing processes of aging and decreasing disease because when you're physically active you turn on all kinds of aging and decreasing disease. Because when you're physically active, you turn on all kinds of repair and maintenance mechanisms, right? So when you're active, you stress your body, you produce reactive oxygen species, you turn up your sympathetic nervous system, your fight and flight nervous system. But then you spend energy after you're

exercising to deal with all that, right? We produce antioxidants. We produce molecules to fix all the proteins that we damaged because they got affected by heat. We lower our blood temperature. We turn on our parasympathetic, you know, rest and digest system to lower sympathetic activity. We turn on all these mechanisms that keep our bodies repaired and maintained. And the trick is that because we never evolved not to be physically active, we never evolved to turn on these mechanisms in the absence of physical activity. We need that stress to mount the anti-stress response. This is why physical activity is so good for us. It turns on all kinds of good processes in our body that keep us from aging and keep us from getting sick. And so as we get older, that becomes even more important, right? You want to keep your

muscles healthy. You want to keep your chromosomes healthy. You want to keep your cells from deteriorating. You want to keep the mitochondrial numbers up on your muscles. The list goes on and on and on. And that's why physical activity is so important. So as we get older, it becomes even more important to stay physically active because that, and of course the data are there. We know the epidemiological data. We know the mechanistic data, but we don't have this sort of cultural idea that as we age, that's the time to keep up the activity, not turn it down. Of course, any exercise is good for us, but could there be a certain type of exercise which is optimal for longevity?

Well, next, we're going to hear again from Professor David Sinclair, as he describes the findings of his own research. A lot of research shows us that, you know, walking 30 to 45 minutes a day seems to give us all the kind of health and longevity benefits we might want. But I'm wondering, is that through the old lens where we thought aging is inevitable and therefore walking 30 to 40 minutes a day is simply just doing the best that we can within that paradigm? Whereas if you look at it through your lens and actually aging is not inevitable, sure, maybe walking is helpful,

but maybe it's not enough. So what is your perspective on movement, exercise, and how that fits in to your kind of theory and philosophy on aging? Well, far be it from me to say don't walk and don't move. That's step one. If you don't walk or move, then you're in big trouble when you get older. So that's a minimum. But if we're talking about what's not maximum, but optimal, we don't know that for sure. And it might be everyone's different. But in general, losing your breath is important. High intensity exercise, you don't need a lot. I just mentioned 10 minutes a few times a week. That appears to be sufficient to give you the longer term health benefits. And what's probably going on is in part is that we, well, we discovered and we published

this in 2018 in the journal Cell, that old muscle starts to think that it doesn't have enough oxygen, even though there is enough oxygen, and it shuts itself down and doesn't make a lot of energy. And the blood vessels start to be depleted. And it's just a terrible feed forward process after that. So by making your body hypoxic and giving it a stress, you can actually do excess oxygen or lack of oxygen. You just want to shock the system. Then your body gets to reset. And one of the most popular things to do in the longevity world now is high pressure bariatric oxygen therapy. And that I think is also resetting this problem that our bodies have are what we call pseudo hypoxic.

One of the ways that we could reset that without exercise and without high pressure oxygen chambers was using NMN, this molecule that I take. It actually boosted the body's ability to make new blood vessels that restored the ability to measure oxygen in the muscle. And when we gave it to mice, they could run 50% further without having trained. But the important point is that the mice that were young and exercised and got the molecule in their water ran twice as far. So it shouldn't be an excuse to pop a pill and not do anything. But there are some little changes you can make. I lift weights,

I have them around my house. I'm at a standing desk, which goes up and down here. These are changes that I make that, you know, I'm standing most of the day now. And this will really help. It builds the muscles in your leg and your butt and your back. That's important now, especially for a male my age, where I'm losing 1% muscle if I don't do something about it every year. But also the hormones, testosterone comes from having those large muscles signal to the testes. And I've been able to correct and raise my testosterone levels just by keeping those large muscles in shape. So much to dive into there. It's incredibly fascinating that potentially to get these longevity benefits that you're talking just maybe 10 minutes off this kind of pulsed exercise where we're out of breath, so high intensity interval training several times a week, which is very

achievable even for the busiest person out there. It's also a fallacy that older people cannot build up muscle. My father, who's 82, has built up a lot of muscle. He goes to the gym twice a week. He runs, he hikes, and he literally is stronger than me. And he says he hasn't felt this good since he was in his 30s. Though he does say that he probably felt like crap when he was 30. Even then, even if he did feel like crap when he was in his 30s, that's a pretty powerful thought, isn't it? That someone in their 80s can be quite confident

in saying, doesn't matter how I felt in my 30s, I'm feeling better in my 80s than my 30s. That is, that's incredible. Sleep is so important for our health and our longevity, but many of us simply are not getting enough. My next guest is the world-leading sleep researcher, Professor Matthew Walker. And in this clip from episode 147,

he explains what the optimal amount of sleep is for good health and why getting just an extra 15 minutes of sleep a day could have benefits for our health span and our lifespan. Sleep is the single most effective thing that you can do to reset your brain and body health each and every day. Sleep is, on the basis of all of the scientific evidence, it is the elixir of life. It is the Swiss army knife of health.

And I think the decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is having a very clear and significant impact on our health and our wellness. If you use this sweet spot of seven to nine hours, which we'll come on to, there's a very simple truth, which is that the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep predicts all cause mortality. But to me, I think what's more important is that most people right now think of sleep as a cost. You know, how can I sleep less

because I sort of want to be awake more and do more. And I see sleep as the opposite. I see sleep as an investment. And it's an investment, not just in your lifespan, but it's an investment in something you care about so critically and I do, which is your health span. And both of those sleep, you know, sleep is almost like the tide that raises all of the health boats. And I think it's wonderful that people think about

these individual silos of health, your cardiovascular health, your metabolic health, your mental health. But what's remarkable is that you can focus on each one of those separately if you want, but there is this Archimedes lever. There is this one thing that if you improve it, all of the other health boats rise on that singular tide of sufficient sleep. That's why I think we should care about it and care about it very passionately. People often hear folks like me say, okay, how much sleep do we need? And the response is somewhere between seven to nine hours of sleep a night. That's what seems to maintain health. Once you get below seven hours, we can measure objective impairments in your brain and your body.

seven hours, we can measure objective impairments in your brain and your body. But then people think, well, seven hours of sleep, so I'm okay to go to bed at 11 and wake up at six. That's actually not true. Because for you to get seven hours of sleep, you normally have to be in bed for at least eight hours. And maybe you do believe that sleep is an investment and it's great and it helps with productivity, but your day is just such that you can't manage that amount. I would then really start to take a step back and say, but honestly, is that true? Think about what you want in life. What do you really want? And with concrete details, do you want to live a life that is going to be filled with health and is not inviting disease and sickness into your body or your brain? And if those are goals that you have, which I think for most people are, then coming to

terms with the reality that we just have to find the right amount of time. You know, I think increasingly people are finding the right amount of time. You know, I think increasingly people are finding the right amount of time to exercise and they're also finding the ability to purchase food that is of better quality and make food that is of higher quality. And I think we need to take the same mentality approach to sleep. The final thing I would say is practically, okay, how can you help me even just get a little bit more sleep in terms of opportunity time? I think there are several tricks.

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live more. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. live more. Often we have a wake-up alarm. Very few of us have a to-bed alarm. Why not? And so set your alarm that would give you an eight-hour sleep opportunity. Now, you're probably going to ignore it. You're probably going to, and give your ability to have a snooze button on that too. So you can say, okay, I'm going to watch five more minutes of Netflix and you snooze again. But that persistent nagging of the notification will probably get you into bed a little bit earlier. The second thing is this, at least an hour before you are planning to go to bed, get changed into whatever you're going to wear for bed, and then brush your teeth, do everything that you would normally do just before you go to bed, but an hour before, so that when that to bed alarm goes off,

you don't have this 15 or 20 minutes of, okay, I need to sort of now go into the bathroom, do all of these things. And instantly you will add 15 minutes of time to your sleep opportunity. That's like compounding interest on alone. 15 minutes every night, every week, every month is non-trivial. Yeah. I mean, that's absolutely brilliant. And I think what's really encouraging in terms of what you said there, Matt, is that you don't have to be black or white about this. You know, wherever you currently are, assuming you're currently under slet, you're saying that even 15 minutes extra a day is going to have a difference on your health and well-being. And I think that's very powerful.

It really can. You know, if we look at the evidence, there was some fascinating data recently on the importance of REM sleep for lifespan. And what they found was that for, I think it was something like for every five or 10 minutes, or maybe it was 15 minutes of a reduction or a loss of REM sleep, there was a 13% relative increased risk of premature death. And so, you know, don't say, oh, I need to add now an hour and 20 minutes to sleep because I had Matt Walker going on about something. Just try 15 minutes. And even if you can get to bed 15 minutes earlier, then set your wake up alarm five minutes later.

And that way you've already gained 20 minutes. And in truth, your life won't feel that much different. minutes. And in truth, your life won't feel that much different, but yet you've given sleep 20 extra minutes back in terms of its longevity and healthspan boost. Certain types of stress can have long-term consequences for our health, but specific forms of short-term stress can actually be good for our body and help us to live a long and healthy life. Coming up from episode 197 of the podcast, James Nestor describes how we can use specific breathing practices to intentionally stress the body to produce a beneficial hormetic response. But first, we'll hear again from David Sinclair as he explains

how he has changed his mindset in order to reduce the chronic stress in his life. What impact does chronic, unrelenting stress have on our biological clock? And do you have any strategies as to what we might be able to do about that, specifically when it comes to aging? I was a very stressed out kid. I was always nervous, had butterflies every day of my life. And so I've been able to cope with that. I now actively reduce my stress levels, even though my daily life is way more stressful than it ever has been in any previous decade. I've got a dozen companies. I've got millions of dollars to lose that I've invested. I've got a big lab to run. I'm writing another book. This is a lot of

stress, but I don't get stressed. I've managed to cope with it. And one of the big things that I've learned with my older age is that nothing's as bad as you think. And my mother died in front of me from suffocation. And at that moment, I realized that if nobody died today that I know of, it's a great day. And that's how I live life. I'm happy to get up in the morning. I'm still alive. I'm excited about what I do. And that's a conscious thing. I think my default would be to be mopey and depressed and lack energy. So anybody who feels that way, find a purpose, realize that life is here to be enjoyed. Every day is a blessing. We don't get that many days. here to be enjoyed every day is a blessing. We don't get that many days. And you can actively fight to be excited about life rather than pessimistic, but you have to focus on the positive. It doesn't come naturally to most of us. One of the most memorable bits in your book for me

was when you were talking about your own experience of trying tumour breathing. And you said something to the effect of, I was stressing my body out, but this stress felt very different to the stress that I feel when I'm running late for an important meeting. And I thought that was really fascinating, this idea of stress, which we typically associate as being a bad thing. Certainly, the societal narrative around stress is stress is bad, we want to avoid it. But that was a beautiful way of describing sort of helpful stress and unhelpful stress. And I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit.

I think the difference is when you are rushing to a meeting, when you are trying to answer emails and trying to answer calls and getting very frustrated with the amount of work you have to do every day, there's no outlet for that stress. That stress seems to build and build and build, and it starts coming out in different ways. You get angry. You can't think straight. Your blood pressure goes up. You start clenching your fists or your muscles tighten. And that's such bad news. But if you clench your fist and tighten your muscles and control your breath and learn to do this consciously, you can learn what that stress feels like and you can then learn to turn it off for the majority of the time you do want to breathe slowly rhythmically lightly through the nose okay that is how you're going to get the most oxygen the most energy for the least effort and that's exactly what you want throughout the day. But sometimes you want to push your breath and you want to use

it to purposely stress your body out. What these practices do is they focus that stress into a controlled space in your day. So the Wim Hof method, you're not going to do that all day, just like you wouldn't be going to the gym and lifting weights all day. It would destroy your body. Wim's method, you do it for about 20 minutes. And the point is that you use this method to purposely stress your body out so that the other 23 and a half hours of the day, you can be in a state of calm and control. And you know,

Wim calls it the Wim Hof method, but he's so clear that these practices have been around thousands and thousands of years. You can call it tummo, you can call it sudarshan kriya, you can call it pranayama, whatever. They're all doing the same thing. They're forcing you to over-breathe, to stress yourself out, then control your breath, and then to stress yourself out again, then control it again like interval training so that you can control your stress. And the science is very clear that these methods can have an incredible impact on both mental health and physical health. Periodic stress is very good, okay? Hermetic stress is very good for the body. That's how we evolved, to go and run after a tiger or fight off someone and then to chill out for the rest of the day and the rest of the night.

What's happening now is so many of us are staying in this chronic state of stress. It's like this IV drip of stress throughout the day. And you can see that in what this has done to our health. So inflammation is behind the vast majority of modern chronic diseases, whether you're looking at diabetes or heart disease or hypertension or whatever. And so this inflammation is exacerbated by this constant low-grade stress, whether that stress is coming from the foods you're eating, whether it's coming from the environment. So it's no coincidence that hunter-gatherer populations don't have any of these modern diseases that we have. It's no coincidence that our ancestors, as far as we can see, didn't have the vast majority of these modern diseases that we have. It's no coincidence that our ancestors, as far as we can

see, didn't have the vast majority of these diseases we have today either. Controlling the stress and using breathing as your presser release diet can have a negative impact on our health but is there a specific type of diet that might be able to increase our longevity well coming up from episode 74 of the podcast professor felice jacker describes the diet which could help us live longer. But first, my next guest is National Geographic Explorer and bestselling author Dan Buetner. Now, Dan has led teams of researchers across the globe to discover the secrets of blue zones, geographical areas where high percentages of centenarians live long and active lives.

In this clip from episode 67, he explains what we can all learn from his research. If you want to know what a centenarian ate to live to be 100, you have to know what he or she was eating when they were 4, and 24, and and 44 and 64. So we went in and we found dietary surveys done over the past hundred years in all five blue zones. And if you look at what they've eaten over the last hundred years and you average it out, you see, first of all, minimally processed. 90 to 95% of their dietary intake comes from plants, but they're eating mostly complex carbohydrates and the rest is fats and proteins. The five pillars of every

longevity diet in the world, and it took me eight years to tell you what I'm going to tell you right now. Whole grains, corn, wheat, rice, nuts of all kinds, tubers, which include sweet potatoes and like the Okinawan emo, greens. Some of these blue zones, they're eating 80 or 90 different kinds of greens, the kind of stuff we would weed whack from our backyard. They're making beautiful salads and pies with them. And then I argue the cornerstone of every longevity diet in the world is beans. Great source of protein, great source of fiber. We don't know how to make beans taste good in our country. They know how to make beans sing. The beautiful Icarian stew with fennel and extra virgin olive oil and beautiful red onions or a Sardinian minestrone with five different beans and vegetables.

There's something in that, isn't there? That there's this perception with so much of society that healthy eating is boring and it's a bland salad. And I guess what you're saying is in these blue zones that they're eating healthy food, but they're making it taste good as well. You hit the point right on the head. The most important ingredient when it comes to a longevity diet is taste. I could tell you with some evidence that the healthiest foods in the world are turmeric, bitter melon, also known as Goya, or sweet potatoes, purple sweet potatoes or fermented miso. But if you don't like those foods, you're not going to eat them. So it doesn't matter because remember when it comes to longevity, you have to do it for decades or a lifetime.

If I make for you a beautiful minestrone with barley and five beans and tomato, and maybe just a little bit of pecorino cheese on the top and you love it, you might eat it every week. And there's when the longevity power comes into it. It can't be that struggle. I'm doing health this month. Isn't it boring? I can't wait till I finish this health scheme so I can get back to living. If we're thinking like that, we're destined for failure, right? The mistake we make with health in this country, in the United States, is we pursue health. The reality is health ensues. Longevity ensues from the right environment. So in blue zones, for example, they eat mostly a plant-based diet because the cheapest, most accessible foods are beans, nuts, whole grains, greens, and tubers.

They have time-honored recipes to make those delicious. Their kitchens are set up so they can make it fast. And they have rituals around these foods that it figures into their quotidian diet, not necessarily the celebratory. Celebratory, they're going to kill a pig or goat and pig out. But the day-to-day is going to be these very simple peasant foods to taste delightful. We already know what sort of diet is consistently linked to longevity, and that's a diet that is high in plant foods and high in a

diversity of plant foods because the more diverse your diet, the more diverse your gut microbiome, and that seems to be a marker of gut health. The bacteria in your gut in particular, very, very simply speaking, they break down the fibrous foods that our human enzymes can't break down. So fiber is found in plant foods, things such as vegetables, fruits, whole grain cereals, legumes, beans and lentils, etc. So all sorts of different types of plant foods have dietary fiber. The gut microbes break that down by a process of fermentation. And in that process of fermentation, they produce many, many, many metabolites. And it's the production of these metabolites that seems to be so important.

And we know that they, for example, interact with every cell in the body. Whole grains have become quite a controversial area in the diet wars. And I think that's because often what we consider to be whole grains are not whole grains. So I think it's quite clear that there's pretty good research suggesting that real whole grains can have beneficial impacts on your gut microbiome and consequently on your overall health. What do you see the problem with whole grains? Is it that interpretation? Is it that the food industry and marketing refined grains as whole grains? Is it that interpretation? Is it that the food industry are marketing refined grains as whole grains? Yes, basically, yes. And I think people in the US where their food system is just so broken and has been for decades to the point where

nobody alive today in the US remembers what normal food looks like. I mean, it really is, it's a rarity. And for them, whole grain might be a brown bread that's still highly refined and full of all sorts of things. But if you look at certainly the epidemiological data, whole grain intake is, out of all of the food groups, the most strongly associated with improved health outcomes. If you look at the gut and what we know so far, whole grains, and here we're talking about things like oats and barley and frica and spelt and buckwheat and brown rice. So things that are true whole grains are just a really valuable source of fiber for that fermentation process of the gut, but they're

also anti-inflammatory. My recommendation is just try and avoid the ultra processed foods and have as much diversity and of whole foods as you can and so what we call a plant predominant diet you know and it doesn't need to be expensive or fussy or difficult it can just be really basic peasant food you know cooked up without much in the way of complex recipes it it really does help. You can change your gut microbiota and your gut health within a very short space of time, like even within days by changing your diet. And that's such a powerful thing to understand. It's not just what we eat that's important for longevity,

but also when we eat and how much. Coming up, Dr. Sachin Panda of the Salk Institute in California describes some of the incredible findings of his research into time-restricted eating. But first, David Sinclair explains why skipping meals can be beneficial. Now, before we get into this next clip, just a quick reminder that skipping meals and fasting may not be appropriate for everyone. In particular, this information may be unhelpful and damaging for people suffering with eating disorders. Why is eating less important? What signal does it give us? And then how does that impact the way in which we age?

What we do when we're hungry, skip a meal or two, which is what I do every day, it boosts up our longevity genes and they take care of us. We know that if we boost the longevity genes in animals, they live longer, they're healthier, they stay fitter for longer, and they die much quicker at the end of life. And I think everybody would know that in human history, fasting is considered one of the healthiest things you can do. And so there's so much evidence that it's really incontrovertible that skipping meals is not only good for you, but will make you live longer. When you talk about eating less or reducing how often you eat

could potentially give you short-term health benefits, but also long-term health benefits and delay aging, I think it's quite revolutionary for a lot of people to hear these days. aging, I think it's quite revolutionary for a lot of people to hear these days. Well, intermittent fasting now is the most popular diet in the world. And hopefully it's not a fad because this is probably the most effective diet that's ever been promoted on the planet. You said intermittent fasting is the most popular diet or way of eating in the world now. Do you think of intermittent fasting as different to time-restricted eating? And the reason I'm sort of diving in here is, you know, when I see patients,

I have to be very clear with what I'm asking them to do, you know, very specific so they really understand what I'm recommending. And I think for some people intermittent fasting is one meal a day. For some people it's, you know, 16 hours without eating and eight hours a day where I'm consuming food. Then you also have time restricted eating where it's eat all your food within an eight hour window or a 10 hour window or a 12 hour window. And I think there is a little bit of confusion out there as to what these terms actually mean. So how do you put that together for people? I don't think that it's helpful to have all these different names. It's essentially just eat less often. That's how simple it is. Skip a meal, skip the snacks. So intermittent fasting, time-restricted feeding, to me, it's all the same thing. It's just don't keep your body filled with

food. That's pretty simple. But here's the really important point. It's just don't keep your body filled with food. That's pretty simple. But here's the really important point. It's not complicated. You do what you can. You start skipping meals. Start with one, dinner or breakfast. And then if you can do that, then try to go longer. You need to give yourself time.

And one of the adaptations is your liver needs to learn to put out glucose to maintain steady levels. So it's not like this through the day. And that takes a while. But once you're at the state that I'm in and your microbiome is optimized and your liver is very happy with its existence, then you will find it very hard to go back to eating the old way. And you also generally look a lot better as well, which is a nice side effect. Nearly 50% of adults in Western countries eat for 15 hours or longer. So that means if their first cup of tea with milk and sugar happens at 6 o'clock in the morning,

then the last sip of wine or last sip of milk might happen at 9 o'clock at night or later. Almost one-tenth of our stomach lining is repaired and replaced every night. And just like you cannot repair a highway when the cars and trucks are moving, we cannot repair our gut if we eat at night. The most obvious circadian rhythm that we all experience is the daily sleep-wake cycle. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other rhythms that go on inside our body. We wanted to test this very simple idea.

If our liver, if our gut is better primed to digest and use these nutrients at a certain time, is it better if we align eating time to that time? And we know that when we sleep, our gut is not functioning well. It's not primed for digestion. We did a simple experiment where we divided the mice to two groups. One group got to eat this high-fat, high-sucrose diet whenever they want. And the other group got the same unhealthy diet, but that was aligned to their circadian rhythm. So they ate all that food within eight hours in the first experiment and then later in 10 to 11 hours.

So these two groups of mice were eating the same number of calories from the same food but to our surprise the mice that ate within 8 to 10 hours were completely protected from all these diseases, obesity, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. If you align your eating time with your circadian rhythm when your liver, when your gut is primed to digest that food, has this huge health benefit. Sachin, that's just incredible. Just to highlight that, you're saying that the mice had the same diet, the same amount of calories, simply the time that they had them was restricted. We repeated this experiment three, four times before I could really believe it, because

this goes right against what we know in nutrition research for the last 150 years. I know many people will listen and be wondering, well, you know, because I know when I lecture about your research, people always say, yeah, but what happens if I do six hours? Or what happens if I eat for four hours? Do we know anything about that? Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me

that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health, and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life, and I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour, All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour. I can't wait to see you there.

This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now, journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits and improve our relationships. There are of course many different ways to journal and as with most things it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three question journal. In it you will find a really simple and structured way of answering

the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question journal

completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. Well, unfortunately, we cannot do this kind of research in mice for a long period of time because when you reduce our time interval then mice also eat less so we get the double benefit of caloric restriction and time restriction and from scientific studies point of view and academics we need to differentiate that we also don't know the very long-term effect of this caloric restriction on circadian rhythm but at least the mouse experiments on the other hand have given us the clue somewhat indirectly there are a lot of caloric restriction

studies in literature very well done from many different labs from all over the world where mice are given 70 calories of what they usually need in a day. And this food is given at a certain time of the day, maybe at 10 o'clock in the morning or sometimes at 5 in the evening. And we know that the caloric-restricted mice live longer than mice that eat their normal diet at libido. So that has led to this idea that caloric restriction increases longevity, improves health from many, many numerous studies. One simple thing that many caloric restriction studies did not pay attention to is when do these mice eat their food? And now what is becoming very

clear is all the CR studies, caloric restriction studies, also involve time restriction. That means these mice eat all their food within four to six hours. So that means these four hours time restriction or six hours time restriction kind of studies have already been done in mice. And those studies have shown that the mice eat slightly less and they live longer and they have many other health benefits but having said that i cannot just go and tell people they should eat between four and six hours the reason being i see time-restricted feeding or time-restricted eating as a public health or a solution to many of the disease or as a family solution to being in sync.

So when I say 10 hours or 12 hours time-restricted eating, I feel that everyone from a 5- to 8-year-old to 80-year-old living in the same house can follow the practice. And when the eating time is synchronized it also brings back family time together and this is kind of a way of life that's way beyond trying to improve your personal health it's a family health it's a community i love that i love that i mean that is it's one thing that you change and it has so many knock-on benefits, doesn't it? For the whole family, as you say, you know, sitting around a table eating together. And again, we know that has many benefits, not only for physical health in terms of

and how much you eat, but also in terms of social health and emotional health. My next guest is Dr. Julian Abel, a retired consultant in palliative care. In this clip from episode 138, he explains why compassion matters so much for our health and our longevity. When you look at the evidence of what happens from the positive side of compassion, the evidence is really profound. And compassion is the basis of social relationships. And there are numerous studies out there which show that social relationships have a profound impact on health. And in particular, there's one that I always quote by Julianne Holt-Lunstad,

and it's the impact of social relationships on mortality. And good social relationships are more powerful than pretty much any other intervention we have, including giving up smoking, drinking, diet, exercise, whatever else you care to mention, helping us live longer. If you give up smoking, you reduce your risk of dying significantly, but not as much as social relationships. I mean, Julian, for me, compassion, it feels almost like it's the right thing to do. It feels good to us as a human being when we're compassionate to another individual. it feels good to us as a human being when we're compassionate to another individual. So what's interesting for me is that you're showcasing in your book a load of science that is backing up kind of what we already know, right? I think that's exactly right. And those moments

where we feel that the love and compassion, we all recognize them. And there might be deeply profound moments like the moment we first see our child or we kiss the person we love or we hold our child's hand. Any of those moments, they're more than just an emotion. You can feel physically different, but they happen on a small scale as well. Like when you go to the shops and you chat to somebody. And when you have that conversation, you feel like, well, this is good. This is a, I enjoyed that and I appreciate it. And all of those things, although they are an emotion, they also have got a physical,

a biochemical and hormonal components to them. But I guess the essence is that we all know that it's the right thing. If people are feeling loved and secure, then their anxiety goes down, their pain levels go down. And actually, you know, then you start producing all the things that we naturally produce as human beings, including oxytocin and endorphins, which are the morphine type compounds that we naturally produce inside us. I can't get that out of my head that your biochemistry, your biology, your physiology changes when you have close social connections,

when you're compassionate to someone else or they're compassionate to you. It matters so much. I mean, it's heartening, isn't it? It's heartwarming. Those moments, even those light moments where you have a gentle chat with someone, they're heartwarming. We feel it and it sustains us. We need to elevate compassion as a high value, something that we need to pay attention to all the time and something that is as applicable in our personal lives, our lives at home, as it is in our schools, our places of work, our politics, our media. And it's not just that it's a nice thing to have. It has a profound impact on everything we do and everything we touch. And even from a personal perspective, if you want to lead a happy, healthy, long life, it's all about relationships.

And the basis of relationships is compassion. relationships. And the basis of relationships is compassion. Relationships are sometimes seen as the softest side of life. But as we've already heard, our social connections can have profound impacts on our health. Coming up, Dan Buwana explains what his research into blue zones can teach us about the importance of human connection. Then, in a clip from episode 206, the California-based medical doctor Roger Schwelt speaks of his own experience of growing up in a blue zone and why spirituality and a sense of belonging matter so much for our health. But first, David Sinclair explains why relationships and close connections are such an important part of life.

There's a study from Harvard that was done in the 20th century looking at people's lives, war veterans. And the people that had a partner who cared for them deeply, they were the ones that lived the longest. In fact, it was more important than any other component in their lives was having someone who cared for them emotionally and I guess at the end of life physically. So if you're lonely, I think that it's one of the fastest way to age. And loneliness is an epidemic right now. It's just getting worse. So what are the solutions? Well, we have the internet at least. We can be in touch with people. We can have pets. A lot of people bought dogs and cats recently to overcome that. And if you have divorce, try to cope with it, and then find someone new. If you have a job that you don't have a purpose in, you hate your job.

Most people do. If you have a long life, then you have a chance to retrain. You have a chance to do multiple careers like my father did. I call these pauses in life skill radicals. Really what I'm talking about is try not to fall into the trap of being isolated.

Get out there, find friends, connect with people, even if it's through the internet, because loneliness is a very dangerous thing long-term. 1,500 kilometers south of Tokyo, on the islands of Okinawa, there's 161 of these islands, you find the longest-lived population in the history of Okinawa, there's 161 of these islands, you find the longest lived population in the history of the earth. And I thought, aha, now there's a good mystery. How do these islanders, you know, with no great technology, with no great access to top of the line medicine,

how are they living so long and avoiding disease? So the longest lived women in the world live in Okinawa. The longest lived men live in the highlands of Sardinia, an area called the Nuoro province, six villages, 40,000 people. And do we know why there's that difference between male longevity and female longevity? I can only hypothesize. Okay, so in Okinawa, for example, women have much stronger social networks than men do. Men tend to be solo. Women form these and stick with these social constructs known as a moai. They support each other not only literally, but figuratively. They take care of each other. People who are rudderless in the world, they don't know why they wake up.

They don't know how they fit in. They don't know why their lives matter. It is very hard to navigate a world when you don't feel like you need it. In blue zones, they live in places where if you don't show up to the village festival, if you don't show up to church, temple, or mosque, somebody could be pounding on your door saying, where are you? The purpose comes with mother's milk. There's Ikigai in Okinawa, Plante Vida in the Nicoya Peninsula. People know their sense of purpose, live their sense of purpose, and they have a rudder to get through every single day. And that eliminates not only the existential stress of, do I matter?

But it also makes day-to-day decisions really easy. I argue in the Blue Zone, the one most dependable thing you can do to add years to your life is to curate a circle of friends, four or five friends who you can count on. But that also means you have to be willing to be counted on on their bad days. People whose idea of recreation is walking or golfing or playing tennis. People who will keep your mind challenged. People in the blue zones are not only living long lives, they're living happy lives.

They're rich, they're fulfilled, they're full of great social connection, they're full of meaning. They're full of the things that make life worth living. How do you see that, that connection to something beyond ourselves how important is spirituality and these i guess what we would call in medicine the softer things you know how do you look at these things how do you look at the sort of wider big picture and spirituality in terms of

our health as well i see it as something that's universal look i mean there was a famous television show here in the united states called chairs you. Maybe you've heard of Chairs. Yeah. Right. So what was the main theme in the words? You want to go where everybody knows your name, right? You want to belong to something. There's something about being a part of a family, being a part of some sort of a belief structure, and having something that you can depend on and someone that's going to be there for you. And I think the studies have shown, you know, time and time again, that people that are in those kinds of systems seem to do better than those that are alone, that those that have to deal with things by themselves. Uh, I think we're social creatures and, you know, talking about the spiritual aspect of it, you know, I'm

informed by my own spirituality as well, as being a seven-day Adventist growing up here in a blue zone. So that's kind of where I'm sort of coming from this, you know, Loma Linda in Southern California, where you can't see the mountains half the year because of the smog. So like, why Loma Linda? Well, it seems as though it has those ingredients. The interesting thing about Loma Linda is that it's not a genetically homogenous group. I mean, in Okinawa, Japan, you know, homogenous. In Sardinia, homogenous. Here in Southern California, you know, you have African Americans, you've got Hispanics, you've got Caucasians, but they're all part of the blue zone. And Dan Buettner from National Geographic did a

story a number of years ago on these blue zones. And the reason that he felt was, is because of all of those things that we've just talked about diet, feeling of togetherness, resting one day a week, being able to turn things off, and belief in a lot of these things, fresh air, exercise, getting outside. So I think that's where I would be coming from on that topic in terms of spirituality, is being a part of something that informs you and allows you to put your faith in something, and you're not exposed to the ebb and flow of risk and stress by yourself on a daily basis. My next guest is Laurie Santos, professor of psychology at Yale University. In this clip from episode 151, she explains why our happiness can also affect our longevity.

We think about health as doctors, but actually a lot of it's to do with happiness as well. So if people don't have that feeling of happiness or well-being in their life, whether it's a lack of social connection, whether it's that they haven't had any interaction with any other human beings, whether they haven't slept enough, whatever it is, then they start to engage in other behaviors that start to affect their health, like their physical health. that start to affect their health, like their physical health. And it's quite obvious when we say it like this, but it was like a penny dropping moment for me where I thought, actually, if society was happier, then there'd be less patience for me to see because they'd be engaging in different ways and they'd have less harmful physical habits that end up in front of me. Do you know what I mean? I mean, it's...

And in fact, there's lovely data on this. I mean, I think this is another spot where we get happiness wrong. We assume, you know, if all our circumstances go well, if we're healthy, for example, you know, healthy in terms of our like diet and this stuff, then we'll be happier. But actually, the data suggests that the causal arrow might go the other way. If you look at people's cheerfulness levels, if you look at their positivity, if you look at their happiness, you actually see effects on people's health and on people's longevity. So one famous study actually looked at whether or not people who are happier had like stronger immune function. So the way the study worked is they

bring subjects into the lab and they either kind of do some intervention where they're kind of feeling happier or not. They can do these simple things by just like asking people or you tend to be positive or they can even kind of give people like a positivity kind of intervention where you watch some funny movie or something like that. But in one study, they just measured people's positivity in general, like are you a positive person or not so much? And then they shot people's nostrils up with rhinoviruses. Rhinoviruses are the viruses that cause the common cold. And so everybody's exposed. Question is, who gets sick? And what they find is that three times the number of people get sick in the kind of not so positive mood category is in the positive mood category, which is kind of striking, right? That like just your general mood state is probably

affecting your happiness. It's probably not mood directly. It's probably through all the behaviors you suggest, which is like if you're in a bad mood, you don't get out and get social. Maybe you don't exercise. Like you probably eat some like comfort food or whatever. But it's really affecting it. There's also evidence suggesting that your happiness levels really affect longevity. This is another very famous study that tried to figure out if researchers could find a population that was sort of like had the same sort of health risks, basically, that kind of lived a sort of very similar lifestyle. And they converged on studying nuns, in part because nuns, you know, they're not off like bungee jumping or doing, you know,

really, you know, risky things like driving motorcycles and stuff. They tend to eat the same sorts of things and so on. And so these researchers went back and looked at nuns' diaries when they're in their 20s. I guess in some nunneries, when nuns kind of begin their old and look at how long each of the nuns are living. And what they find is that statistically more nuns who had more happy words live into their 70s, statistically more nuns that had the happy words live into their 80s, and statistically more nuns that had the happy words live into their 90s. And what's striking about this is this wasn't their happiness at the time. This was their happiness in their 20s, which is predicting their longevity in their 90s. which is predicting their longevity in their

90s. And so I think this is another spot where we get happiness wrong. We can kind of think of happiness as like, oh, it's this ephemeral thing. Like, we'll worry about that once we sort out, you know, people's high blood pressure and people's, you know, whatever, like cancer risk. But it could be that we have the model backwards, right? That if you're just experiencing a lot of positive emotion in your life, if you're satisfied with your life, it might make it easier to make choices that allow you to protect your health in a way that can make you healthier and allow you to even live longer. So if we consistently do the right things, what age could we reasonably expect to live to?

And should we be looking to treat aging as a disease? Well, in the next clip, David Sinclair describes what the future of aging might look like and why it's important to improve quality of life no matter what age we live to. I think that just an extra 15 years of life is easy. If you just don't smoke, don't drink, eat the right things, eat less, get good sleep, don't stress out, do a bit of exercise, that gets you 15 years more of life. We already know that.

That's not hard. Imagine if everybody did that on the planet or at least, you know, in advanced countries where they have the time and money to do so. But then on top of that, we've got drugs like metformin, rapamycin. There's others. There's one called bicarbose. There's a spermidine one.

There's a long list. And if those are used, I am quite confident we can add more years on. Then there's the age reversal technology that we've just discovered that could change everything. So what's realistic? I think if you do the right things, you should be able to make it to 100 if you're lucky. You know, everyone's unlucky or can be unlucky. Cancer can hit you or a bus can hit you. But I think 100 is a realistic goal um i think i should

be able to reach that with what i'm doing uh but what about beyond now we know that humans can live to 120 why couldn't we all just we have to level the playing field and give us those uh advantages that they had and typically the people that live to 100 and 120 don't look after themselves. They don't exercise, they smoke, they overeat. So what would have happened to their lives if they did do the right things? Why couldn't those people have lived to 125, 130? 150 is not unreasonable for somebody to reach. Someone who lives to 150, or at least over 100, who's born today, will live into the 22nd century. We can't even imagine what the technology is going to be like then. It'll make the kind of things we're talking about now seem medieval, the same

way that the world was pre-antibiotics. So I'm optimistic. I'm often classified as someone who's overly sanguine. But so far, I haven't been proven wrong in any of my predictions. I haven't been proven wrong in any of my scientific publications. So we'll see. If we are going this far upstream to delay and prevent aging, then presumably as well as doing that, we are going to improve people's vitality and their quality of life because all kinds of other things are going to get better as well. Yeah. Well, so modern medicine, as we call it, it needs an overhaul. It's very 19th century where we've been classifying diseases based on how they look at the end of the process. Yeah.

The real underlying process is aging for most diseases that kill people in, in fact, most of the world. And we've been ignoring the root cause of these diseases. It's like in physics, when you've got periodic table, and then in the early 20th century, it was figured out that the same particles are within each of those atoms. And so they're all made up of the same stuff. And that's a huge breakthrough.

And the same with medicine and disease. We've realized that there's one unifying underlying cause for most disease and disability on the planet that we've literally been ignoring for hundreds of years. It's not good enough to stick band-aids on a disease after it's occurred because it's often too late. We need to get ahead of it and address the root causes of aging itself. And one of the things that I'd like to say, because I believe it, and it's also important that we move towards this as a society and that is that aging is a medical condition. Admittedly it's common but just because something's common doesn't mean it shouldn't be a medical condition and if that definition was made formal or formalized by the governments around the world, then doctors like yourself could more freely

prescribe very cheap and relatively safe medicines that could extend someone's life and make them healthier for five or even 10 years longer. But we're still at an early stage where most doctors have not even conceived that aging is something worth talking to their patients about, or that it's even malleable. If aging is the root cause of all the problems that come into see me as a doctor and afflict humanity, well, if we can just sort of tackle that right, you know, turn the tap off, how many lives do we improve? No matter whether their lifespans are 80, 90, 70, 100, actually the quality of all of those lives is going to be so much better and enhanced, irrespective of that final age, right? Yeah, it is. I don't want to get too emotional, but the way you described it is really what I'm

living my life to achieve. And that is that we will be in a world where there's much less suffering and a lot more happiness, joy, and productivity. The economy will boom and families will be happier. And it's just going to be a much better world. And when we reach that world, and maybe it's only 10 years away, we'll look back at today and think, why did we ignore this for so long? we'll look back at today and think, why did we ignore this for so long? And finally, we conclude today's special compilation episode with David Sinclair explaining what studying aging and delaying death has taught him about what it really means to be alive. This is what I think everybody should try to do, and that is to consciously

think about your death every day. It's scary, right? If you imagine your funeral, or even worse, imagine your last 10 minutes of life, what that's going to be like. Will you have regrets? Will you be surrounded by family? What will people say about you when you're gone? I think about that a lot because it's in my job. I'm working on ways to not prevent, but slow that eventuality. And what I've ended up doing in my life is being much more cognizant of the brevity of life. doing in my life is being much more cognizant of the brevity of life. When I was in my 20s, like all 20-year-olds, we think the future is so far away you don't even worry about your mortality. Tell you what, by the time you get to 50, you can actually see that there are fewer days potentially than you've lived already. If you're young, try to live life like every day counts.

One saying, I hear that it's a Jewish saying, but one that I think of often is, I do live my life like it could be my last, but I have the optimism of someone who can live forever. And that's really the secret. It's to be excited, but realistic that you may not be here tomorrow. So tell your loved ones that you love them, make the most of every day, work hard on what you find passion in, and just be energetic. And if you do take control of your life, mentally and physically, eating the right things, doing the right things, reducing stress, mentally and physically, eating the right things, doing the right things, reducing stress,

you will naturally be more optimistic about the future and every day that you wake up. Really hope you enjoyed listening to that very special compilation episode. Of course, these were all short clips from previous conversations on the show. So do consider going back to the original episodes to hear more from your favorite guests. And before you take off, do you remember from this episode that our happiness, our mental wellbeing, and the way that we think and approach life, yes, it affects our longevity,

but it also affects our short and long-term health. It influences the way that we feel, our relationships, how much stress we carry. Thank you so much for listening. I really hope you have a wonderful week. Please do press follow or subscribe on whichever podcast platform you listen on. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health.

Making lifestyle changes always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.