Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | 3 Steps to Reverse Ageing and Live Longer | Professor David Sinclair #293

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Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 208 of the podcast with one of the world's leading scientific authorities on aging, the Harvard professor, David Sinclair. Now, the key to staying young, David explains, is inducing something called hormesis. And in this clip, he describes some simple habits that can help us switch on our body's longevity genes.

Starting point is 00:01:42 Switch on our body's longevity genes. A central theme when I think about your work and your research, for me, is this idea of hormesis and the survival signals we put on the body. And I wonder if you could outline what hormesis is and why it's so important when we come to think about aging? Well, the problem is we've built a world that's very comfortable and we did not evolve in these conditions. We are meant to be typically cold and hungry. And in response to those adversities, our bodies fight back. The problem is that we now sit in chairs, we eat as much food as we want, we don't have to walk anywhere or lift anything heavy, and our bodies become complacent.

Starting point is 00:02:32 Now, what was discovered is you need hormesis. That basically means what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And so what we do when we exercise and if we skip a meal. What we're doing is inducing this very ancient, very, very ancient, billions of years ancient mechanism that protects our body against decay, disease, and the root causes of aging in an effort to survive. And so you really want to do the opposite of what modern life gives you. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:03:07 I guess one of the most easy to understand and simplest interventions you recommend for people is to eat less and i think that fits quite beautifully into this idea of hormesis doesn't it in terms of what eating less signals to the body and then what it causes the body to do. 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 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 you know i think everybody would know that in in human history

Starting point is 00:03:58 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. There was an incredible study that was out of the NIH in Bethesda. A good friend of mine, Rafael Decavo, and his lab had over 10,000 mice. They put them on different diets, different carbs, protein, fat. And they then divided those diets into two groups. Some mice got food all the time and they nibbled on it during the day. And then the others got the meal once. I think it was for an hour only.

Starting point is 00:04:37 And those mice scourged themselves and ate almost as much as the ones that were grazing. And it didn't matter what the food was, it was the ones that ate in that window that lived dramatically longer. So if you can extrapolate, and there's always caveats, but I think the principle still holds in ourselves, which is, it's not as much about what you're eating, but when you're eating. 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

Starting point is 00:05:18 people to hear these days. Well, intermittent fasting now is the most popular diet in the world. 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? intermittent fasting is 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

Starting point is 00:06:06 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 these, 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.

Starting point is 00:06:34 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.

Starting point is 00:06:55 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 and that takes it 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 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. A lot of research shows us that walking 30 to 45 minutes a day seems to give us all the kind

Starting point is 00:07:32 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 that actually aging is not inevitable sure you know 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.

Starting point is 00:08:16 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

Starting point is 00:08:59 blood vessels start to be depleted and it's a 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 with 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.

Starting point is 00:09:53 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 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,

Starting point is 00:10:29 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 of 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.

Starting point is 00:11:15 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, it doesn't matter how I felt in my 30s, I'm feeling better in my

Starting point is 00:11:45 30s. That's incredible. Let's talk about stress. The right dose of stress in the right intensity is a hormetic signal to the body. So it's not that all stress is bad, but many of us around the world these days live with a sort of chronic, unrelenting stress from the way our lives are currently set up. So 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

Starting point is 00:12:40 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

Starting point is 00:13:32 life is 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. Really so grateful to have the opportunity to pick your brain and share your work with my audience. What are your final thoughts for my audience? We are preventing getting old, preventing diseases,

Starting point is 00:14:02 preventing cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's. Who would not want that? 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, 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,

Starting point is 00:14:46 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. And look at what happened. You you know 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

Starting point is 00:15:13 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. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | 3 Steps to Reverse Ageing and Live Longer | Professor David Sinclair #293

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