Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | The Secrets to Reversing Your Age and Living Longer | Dr Mark Hyman #457

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

What if you could slow down ageing or even reverse it? Today’s clip is from episode 338 of the podcast with medical doctor and best-selling author Dr Mark Hyman.  His latest book, Young Forever: The Secrets To Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life, challenges us to reimagine our biology and the entire process of ageing. In this clip Mark explains how our daily food choices influence the speed at which we will age, and shares some powerful research showing that we we might be able to reverse our biological age by up to three years in just eight weeks. Thanks to our sponsor https://www.drinkag1.com/livemore Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/338 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

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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 338 of the podcast with medical doctor and best-selling author Dr. Mark Hyman. His latest book, Young Forever, The Secrets to Living Your Longest Healthiest Life, challenges us to reimagine our biology and the entire process of aging. In this clip, Mark explains how our daily food choices influence the speed at which we will age, and shares some powerful research showing how we might be able to reverse

our biological age by up to three years in just eight weeks. I thought I'd start with something you wrote in your new book. If I were to prescribe one intervention to extend life, to prevent and reverse chronic disease, it would be to drastically reduce or eliminate sugar and refined starch from your diet. Yeah. Why is that so important? The idea that sugar and starch are driving the dysfunctions that we see as normal aging, but they're really abnormal aging, is not really new. We know that underlying all the chronic diseases of aging,

heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obviously, dementia, these are all related to disturbances and our ability to regulate our blood sugar to what we call insulin resistance, where our body becomes resistant to the effects of insulin. And this creates this whole downstream cascade that is like a wildfire on the aging process. It causes you to gain belly fat. It drives up inflammation. It lowers your hormones. It increases cortisol, increases your stress hormones. It actually also causes abnormal cholesterol, fatty liver, all sorts of problems. It shrinks your hippocampus in your brain, fuels cancer cells. I mean, it is the nightmare if you want to be someone who's healthy and healthy for a

long time. I mean, the idea basically is to have your lifespan, which is how long you're alive, be equal to your health span, which is how many years of your life you're healthy. And for most people, they're about 20 years short on the healthspan and their lifespan. Yeah, it is incredible. You have been talking about this for years, yet the consumption of these foods, the consumption of ultra-processed foods all over the globe appear to be on the rise. So can you talk to us a little bit about ultra-processed foods? What are they exactly and why are they so problematic for our health? Well, historically, we've evolved eating foods in their original states in the complex matrix

of fiber, vitamins, minerals, protein, fat, carbohydrates. And they're in a rich array of phytochemicals and other matrices that make our bodies able to manage and handle these things. Ultra processed foods are essentially food-like substances that are made from highly processed ingredients from some commodity crops, soy, wheat, and corn mostly, that are then turned into all sizes, shapes, colors of chemically extruded substances that bear no resemblance to the original form and cause

all sorts of havoc in our biology. Aside from all the preservatives, additives, thickeners, artificial sweeteners, things that are also problematic for health, but just the processing of the food itself in a way that pulverizes it into something that isn't resembling food at all and then reassembles it in a way that actually is harmful to our biology. It's quickly absorbed. It sends signals to our biology that we're not getting any real food. In fact, people who eat ultra-processed food, if given, you know, compared to, and this is a controlled trial where they gave people either ultra-processed food or they gave them whole food and the same amount of food they could sort of eat as much as they wanted. The people who

had the ultra processed food ate 500 calories more a day. That's basically the equivalent to gaining a pound a week or 52 pounds a year. I think the reality is that this ultra processed food is driving so much of the challenges we see in our society. For every 10% of your diet that's ultra-processed food, your risk of death goes up by 14%. You said that for every 10% increase in ultra-processed foods, your risk of death goes up by 14%. 14%. Yeah, that's from the Global Burden of Disease Study, a huge study of 195 countries. 11 million people die every year from eating the wrong food. That's more than smoking or wars or anything else. It is the number one killer in the world today. In America, 60% of our diet is ultra-processed food. In kids, it's almost 70% of their diet. This is just a deadly combination

that not only causes long-term problems of shorter lifespan, and we're seeing our life expectancy go down, but also immediate problems of all sorts of conditions that we now know are related to the starch or sugar, whether it's fatty liver in kids that need liver transplants. It's really pretty frightening. When you create health, when you create a healthy system, take out the bad stuff, put in the good stuff, the body has a chance to repair and renew. And that's what's really the exciting part, Rangan, about the longevity research is that now we understand that the body has this extraordinary ability to renew, repair, rejuvenate, and

reverse our biological age. Just as our skin has the ability to heal when we cut it, our body has that innate healing system. We've just done everything possible to interfere with it, to impede it. In longevity science, there are 10 hallmarks of aging that have been discussed that are underlying all the disease of aging. So heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, the aging process, self-frailty, all those things we now understand are not normal processes. They're abnormal processes that are resulting from disturbances in these fundamental systems or functions. And when they go wrong, we call these the hallmarks of aging. But we can intervene with these things. And they're very much

in the functional medicine framework of the body as a system of dealing with root causes. So the hallmarks of aging are the causes of all the diseases in aging. What causes the hallmarks in the first place? And that's where functional medicine comes in, to be able to be a detective and find out where the imbalances are and how we can correct them so we can possibly influence these hallmarks of aging. And a lot of longevity scientists are looking for drugs or interventions to interrupt these hallmarks of aging, which may be helpful, like rapamycin, for example, or metformin. But the reality is that we have a greater, far greater influence through dealing with the root cause of those hallmarks, what I call dying of too much or dying of too little, which is not enough of the good stuff and not too much of the bad stuff that we're exposed to. That all, these hallmarks, and then we don't actually have to actually treat them individually. We can optimize our health and our mitochondria will be better. Our blood sugar regulation will be better.

Our inflammation will be less. And everything tends to work better when we deal with those root causes of the hallmarks. We don't have to accept this decline and decrepitude of frailty as normal. We can reverse that biological process and actually get younger as we get older. Biological age and chronological age. Yes.

Please explain for people who don't know the difference. Sure. So, you know, I'm 63. I can't change that. I was born in 1959. However, my biological age is my age on the inside. It's not my chronological clock. It's my biological clock. Biologically, I'm only 43. And we now know that we can measure our biological clock and our rate of aging through

a specific test called DNA methylation, something relatively new. And it tests what's called our epigenome. Our genes are fixed. We have 20,000 genes. We can't change that or 25, whatever. But we have on top of those genes, a regulating system. Epi means above. And the epigenome basically is like the piano player that plays all the different keys, which are our genes. We've got 88 keys, but they can play thousands of tunes. You can have rock, jazz, blues, whatever, classical, all in the same 88 keys. Same thing with your epigenome. And it can control your biology in real time in ways that either accelerate or reverse the aging process. And now we know that a lot of the interventions,

whether it's diet, exercise, the types of exercise, stress reduction, sleep, environmental toxins, nutritional level, our microbiome, all these things influence our epigenome and can change it either into something that's causing us to age fast or slow or reverse our biological plate. So if you're eating ultra processed food, you're not exercising, you're under tons of stress, you're not sleeping, you're nutritionally deficient, you're exposed to toxins, guess what, your epigenome is gonna be bad. You will be older than your chronological age

as opposed to younger. So we know through interventions, even short interventions of, for example, eight weeks, we can have aggressive lifestyle and dietary change with functional medicine. You can reverse your biological age by three years. So in eight weeks, you turn reverse your biological age by three years. So in eight weeks, you turn back the biological clock by three years.

That's profound. In eight weeks? In eight weeks, yeah. And so, I mean, that's- I'm 43, I'm trying to get to 25. We'll see how it goes. You posted a photo on, I think it was on Instagram a few months ago,

of you in your 40s and you now in your 60s, right? And there was quite a noticeable difference. There was, yeah. I think if people didn't know, they may not be sure which one was which. I think you can tell which one's which from looking at your face. I had a little more gray hair.

I had a little more gray hair. But why did you post that? What was so important for you to show people? Well, I think two things. One, when I was in my 40s, I was athletic. I was running. I was biking 100 miles. I was very active.

And I was eating what I thought was healthy, which was whole foods. But I tended to eat a lot more carbohydrates, a lot less fat and less protein. And I didn't do resistance training. And so when I was 60, I decided to start doing resistance bands and strength training. And I also have changed my diet over the years to be much more low glycemic, to be higher in protein and fat and lower in starch and sugar, but lots of protein and fat and lower in starch and sugar with lots of phytochemically rich fruits and vegetables. And I have a whole chart in the book about how different compounds in food, whether it's certain classes of foods like onions and garlic, which have quercetin or other foods like the broccoli family that has glucophernin, which is important for longevity,

or whether it's certain phytochemicals in green tea like catechins that activate different pathways or the mushrooms that have polysaccharides that regulate immunity. I go through all the different foods that we can choose from the grocery store, what I call the pharmacy, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. And we can use those foods as a part of our daily consumption

to activate some of these longevity pathways and switches. And I noticed my body composition changed. I went from like, you know, 12% body fat to 6% body fat. I had, you know, increasing health and strength as I got older, which I think most people don't see. They see, you know, as you get older, you lose muscle, you become more flabby, you know, and that is truly usually what happens.

And that is the death knell. If you want to age fast, then don't exercise and keep your diet high in starch and sugar and low in protein and fat. And that is the recipe for disaster. It's really the recipe that most of us are following. But the body has the ability, as I showed in that picture, to change radically at any age. So I've seen people even at 80, 90, start to do things,

and you see their strength and their function come back. Yeah. You know, I think that's a key point here, Mark. When a lot of people think about longevity, I think there is a slight mismatch in their brain where it's like, well, why should I be bothered about what happens in 20, 30 years? I want to live my life now, right? So there's always been this slight disconnect. Whereas what I love about the things that you recommend in Young Forever is that, yes, it's going to slow down the aging process if that's your goal, but it's also going to help you feel great straight away, right? So it's not something that we can kick down as the future.

It's going to have an immediate impact on the quality of your life. Immediate, yeah, absolutely. Adding more life to your years, not just years to your life. And we know that our mental health is connected to our physical health. And a lot of the raging depression and anxiety

and mental health issues that are exploding across the globe are really related to our overall stress of society, but also to the food we're eating. Literally, the dietary things that we do drive our poor mental health, particularly starch and sugar and processed food. That can be changed, and that'll give us a sense of purpose and meaning and ability to do whatever we want. These days, for most people, is it more important to focus on what to bring into your diet or is it more important to focus on what to take out of it? That's a great question. I think it's both. I mean, you, you, you have to add in all the good stuff and you

have to take out the bad stuff. I mean, if you're, if you're eating, you know, three cups of broccoli a day, but having three Coca-Colas, I don't think it's going to do the same thing as if you get rid of the Coca-Colas and eat more whole foods. So I think, I think we do need to get rid of stuff and we also need to add stuff. So they're both really important. I think, I think the key is, is trying to include more and more of the things that are good for you and slowly eliminate things that are bad for you. And I think people can get there. Now, what I often recommend, because if you do the incremental approach, you might not see the benefits as fast, is a short-term 10-day reset. And I call it the 10-day detox diet. I've written a book about it. It's sort of

highlighted in a little bit in the book about how to do that. But the key is when you kind of remove all the bad stuff, potentially bad stuff, because it may not be bad, right? Gluten may not be bad for everybody. But if you remove all the stuff that potentially is bad for 10 days, your body will get the chance to reset. And what I've seen by doing that, that there's a 70% reduction in all symptoms from all diseases in 10 days. That's migraines, irritable bowel, depression, arthritis, whatever it is, gets better in 10 days. Now, if it doesn't get better,

maybe something else is going on. Maybe you have Lyme disease or mercury poisoning or something else causing it. But most of the time, a lot of the ailments that we're suffering from are because of what we're eating and a short-term reset can be extremely powerful. So you can do an incremental approach if you want, but I encourage people to do a reset because then you go, shoot, you know,

I didn't realize how much food was affecting how I feel and how much better I can feel in so few days. It's not like months or years of doing this to see a result. It's literally days. days. It's not like months or years of doing this to see a result. It's literally days. Mark, this podcast is called Feel Better, Live More. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of our lives. For that person who feels inspired by what you've said and is thinking, yeah, all right, Dr. Hyman, I'm with you. I'm going to do it. I'm going to turn the ship around. I'm going to change the rates at which I age. What are some of your final words of wisdom for them? Well, I think that the thing that people just absolutely need to understand is that you have this exquisite thing called the body that you are inhabiting for a

short period of time. And that embedded in that body is an incredible healing system that we are able to activate if we just learn how. And the book, Young Forever, is really a roadmap on how do you actually activate these ancient embedded healing systems in our body that can reverse our biological age and make us younger as we get older. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I 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.