Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - The Secrets To Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life with Dr Mark Hyman #338

Episode Date: February 22, 2023

My guest today is someone who has been leading a global health revolution around using food as medicine to support longevity, energy, mental clarity and happiness. Dr Mark Hyman has been a practicing medical doctor for several decades, he is the Head of Strategy and Innovation at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine and the author of an incredible 18 books. His latest one, Young Forever: The Secrets To Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life, challenges us to reimagine our biology and the entire process of ageing.  In our conversation, Mark walks us through the 10 hallmarks of ageing, and explains what we can all practically do to influence them. He talks about the difference between our chronological age and our biological age and wants to reframe the idea that growing older means becoming frail, weak and less independent. In fact, Mark believes that as a society we have normalised what he calls ‘abnormal ageing’.   We talk in detail about food and how our daily choices influence the speed at which we will age. Mark explains how all the chronic diseases of modern life – heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes and dementia – are in some way related to disturbances in how we regulate blood sugar. And he details the ‘wildfire of downstream effects’ this can lead to - things like inflammation, increased belly fat and an increase in stress hormones.   Mark also shares powerful research showing that we can reverse our biological age by up to three years in just eight weeks. We also cover the controversial topic of protein, the crucial need for resistance training as we get older, and what exactly Mark learned from visiting the Blue Zones – places around the world where the population naturally thrives into old age. Their default culture, he says, is a diet rich in whole foods and phyto-chemicals, a naturally active lifestyle, being socially connected and a strong sense of meaning.   People who live well into old age, it seems, live close to the earth and each other. How’s that for a health goal worth aspiring to? Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore or https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://www.vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://www.calm.com/livemore https://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Show notes https://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 with any questions you may have. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

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. Hey guys, how are you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More.

My guest today is someone who for many years now has been leading a global health revolution. One revolved around using food as medicine to support longevity, energy, mental clarity, and happiness. Dr. Mark Hyman has been a practicing medical doctor for several decades. He's the head of strategy and innovation at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, and he's also the author of an incredible 18 books. His latest one, Young Forever, The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life, challenges us to reimagine our biology and the entire process of aging. Now, in our conversation, Mark walks us through the 10 hallmarks of aging and explains what

we can all practically do to influence them. He talks about the difference between our chronological age and our biological age, and essentially wants to reframe the idea that growing older means becoming frail, weak, and less independent. In fact, Mark believes that as a society, we have normalized what he calls abnormal aging. Of course, we talk in detail about foods and how our daily choices influence the speed at which we will age. Mark explains how all the chronic diseases of modern life, heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, and dementia, are in some way related to disturbances in how we regulate our blood sugar. and he details the wildfire of downstream

effects this can lead to, things like inflammation, increased belly fat, and an increase in stress hormones. He also shares powerful research showing that we can reverse our biological age by up to three years in just eight weeks. We also cover the controversial topic of protein, the crucial need for resistance training as we get older, and what exactly Mark learned from visiting the Blue Zones, places around the world where the population naturally thrives into old age. Their default culture, he says, is a diet rich in whole foods and phytochemicals, a naturally active lifestyle, being socially connected, and a strong sense of meaning. People who live well into old age, it seems, live close to the earth and each other. How's that for

a health goal worth aspiring to? This really is a conversation jam-packed with practical advice. I always enjoy chatting to Mark. I hope you enjoy listening. And now, my conversation with Dr. Mark Hyman. 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 a 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 health span 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?

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, and 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 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. So it's no wonder we're such an obese society increasingly in the UK. I think the United States has you beat a little bit, but not by much. 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%. And in America, 10% of your diet that's ultra-processed food, your risk of death goes up by 14%. And 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 or kids who are having heart attacks at 20 years old because of this. I mean, it's really pretty frightening. 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. Huge study of 195 countries. 11 million people die every year from eating the wrong food. That's more than smoking or mores or anything else. It is the number one killer in the world today. So Mark, despite all this knowledge, why is consumption still going up? What's going on? Is it an individual problem? Or is it the food industry? Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is my last book, which was Food Picks, where I mapped out the problems with our food policies and our food

industry and how everything that we're doing is fostering the production, the growing, the production, the marketing, and the sale of these ultra-processed foods in ways we've never seen in human history. And that's really what's driving it. And I'm working hard on my nonprofit, the Food Fix Campaign, to change those food policies to address food marketing to kids, for example. Boris Johnson, thankfully, he got wise once he got COVID that food was related to his poor health and that he understood that the reason he ended up in the ICU from COVID was because he was in poor metabolic health. And that was because of the starch and sugar in processed foods.

And he then started to restrict marketing and other kinds of initiatives that actually were trying to lower the consumption of sugar and ultra processed food, which I think is great. But that needs to happen globally. In America, the effect of this is not just on aging, but is on everything. If you look at America, it's 4% of the world's population, but it was 16% of the COVID cases and deaths, which means we have a 400% increase compared to what we should have in terms of our population. Why is that? Because COVID hit a population that was pre-inflamed,

that was metabolic and healthy, and that was at high risk for having complications and death from COVID. And that's why, not because we have a crappy healthcare system, we spend more than any other country by double, and yet we did the worst. Yeah. In your experience, Mark,

and you have been, you know, you've seen tens of thousands of patients over maybe what, three decades now, a long, long time. I'm scared to say that I started medical school 40 years ago this fall. Well, one of the reasons I actually love talking to you, Mark, is because you have been a practicing

clinician for so long. You have real world experience with patients. And as much as we both enjoy talking to researchers, it can be very interesting to learn about new research. But I think there is something special, certainly for me, about talking to clinicians, because the research doesn't always apply to that person in front of you. But what are some of the common traps that people fall into, would you say, when they're trying to choose their food? For example, what are some foods that maybe people think are healthy from the way that they're marketed, but actually are causing them short-term and long-term problems? That's a great question. I think to more directly answer your question,

which I indirectly answered about whose responsibility is it? Is it a personal responsibility that we need to just all eat less and exercise more? Or is there something else going on? And there's something else going on, which is that we are highly addicted to these foods. They're designed to hijack our brain chemistry, our hormones, our metabolism, and they do a very good job at that. And so we have to realize that there is some level of person responsibility, but there's also the food environment and the food that's available and

the compounds that are in the food that hijack our biology. So that I think is important to understand, to not blame the person who's overweight. That is one of the most, I think, damaging things that we do as a medical profession, as nutritionists, in our health policy. It's certainly the mantra of food companies, which is there's no good and bad calories. It's all about moderation. And if you want to sort of have Coca Cola or Pepsi and it's part of your caloric intake, then that's okay. And that's just a bunch of nonsense. As far as the foods that we think are okay, that aren't okay, well, I think maybe we sort of don't understand when we see things like whole grains, that actually a lot of the whole grain foods out there are highly processed whole grains that are put in Cheerios or frosted

flakes. So we have new Frosted Flakes with extra whole grains in them. It just is insane. I think we need to be very careful of food marketing and food labeling. If you want to have food, try to have it in its original form. Whole grains are actually that whole grains

and you can cook them yourself at home. And that's really important to not fall for these sort of marketing claims. I think also low fat is a terrible thing that we should be avoiding. A lot of low fat foods are high in sugar. And that was really the damaging message of the 90s with the food pyramid in America, where we were told to eat six to 11 servings of bread, rice, cereal, and pasta a day and cut our fat consumption.

And we did that. And subsequently became increasingly obese around the globe because of that advice that was really shared globally. So there's some really simple things like avoid low-fat foods, eat good fats, and don't fall for false marketing labels where it says it's healthy for you if it's a processed food. Yeah, I definitely agree. Breakfast cereals are a huge culprit, I think. Oh, God.

The majority of breakfast cereals, not all of them, but the majority are probably not helping people. They're certainly not helping them start the day. They're probably putting them on a blood sugar rollercoaster right from the start of the day. But can I just clarify, Mark, what you said on low fat there? Because there's obviously foods that are natural, whole foods that are naturally low fat, and there's low-fat products that the food industry have made. Are you specifically talking- Yeah, I mean, broccoli is low-fat. I mean, that's fine. Asparagus are low-fat. That's okay. It's all the low-fat processed food I'm talking about as a marketing claim. Or if it says high

fiber, or if it has whole grain on it. These are ways in which the food industry uses sort of marketing on the front of package labeling to confuse people. And for example, Cheerios is a great example. Everything's Cheerios. It's a health food. It's oat bran. It's oat fiber. It's healthy. Lower your cholesterol. It sounds good. But in fact, the glycemic index of Cheerios is worse than table sugar. So that is a problem. You know, the glycemic index is 74 out of 100, table sugar is 65. So I think we have to be very careful when we kind of eat these foods and how they impact our blood sugar.

It's really important for us to understand that, you know, how food affects our blood sugar, as we discussed at the outset of the podcast, is the most important determinant of our long-term health and well-being, including things like depression, fertility, acne, all sorts of problems that aren't just about heart attacks, strokes, cancer, dementia, and diabetes. Yeah. Well, thank you for that sort of thorough overview and summary. These are, of course, things that you've discussed and written about many times, particularly in your last book, Food Fits, which was a fantastic deep dive into that area.

The new book, Young Forever. Now, I really like it because there's a real practicality throughout it. I just want to ask you, though, why this topic, right? You know, why the topic of aging? And perhaps you could also share where you are in your life. You know, if you're happy to share your age, you know, why is this so important for you? Well, you know, I always joke, everybody's favorite radio station is WIFM. What's in it for me? And I'm 63. So I'm interested in what's in it for me because I don't want to age poorly. I want to be vibrant and do all the things I love to do, whether it's go skiing or gallop down the beach on a horse or go for a long bike ride or do whatever

I want to do. I don't want to be limited. And I want to be able to enjoy life fully and travel and do all the things that really give me joy and make life meaningful. And to be able to enjoy life fully and travel and do all the things that really give me joy and make life meaningful. And to be able to show up and do the work I want to do in the world and to be engaged and focused and healthy, to be able to actually show up for the people that matter and my relationships, to be in contribution. And so in order to do that, I have to be healthy. And so I'm very interested in the topic of how you stay healthy as we get older. But I also find, and by the way, biologically, according to new metrics that we can use to measure our biological age, I'm only 43. So I still, I'm still pretty young. And the truth is, I wanted to focus on this topic of longevity, longevity science, because unlike other disciplines in medicine, this is a relatively new field of research.

And because in the past, we thought there was nothing we can do about aging, that we actually just need to actually stop worrying about it and deal with the disease of aging almost a representation of the truth that we've known a long time in functional medicine, that their body is a system, that their underlying root causes of disease, that if we want to really deal with all these diseases that we see, the 155,000 diseases that are in our international classification system, that we need to sort of go back to understand root causes. And 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 kind of framework of the body as a system of dealing with their causes.

And so I thought by focusing on longevity science, I could help to elucidate what I thought were the flaws in it, which is that it didn't go far enough to look at the causes of the hallmarks. 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. Yeah, Mark, since we last spoke, there's a lot of new listeners to this podcast, and some people may not be familiar with the functional medicine approach.

So you sort of outlined some key tenets there, which are really interesting, but I wonder if you could just give an overview for people who think medicine is medicine. Maybe for someone who's never heard about the difference before, how do you sort of briefly summarize the key differences between conventional, Western allopathic medicine and the functional medicine approach? Well, you know, functional medicine is really what will be medicine. It's our whole view of biology that's shifting from a reductionist disease-based model to a systems model of understanding the body as an interconnected network of biological systems that we have to treat as a whole. And functional medicine from the perspective of the patient is about not treating all the individual symptoms and diseases separately, but really treating your whole system.

And I'll just give you an example that illustrates the clear difference. This is a patient that I talk about in the book, Young Forever. She was around a 50-year-old woman, business executive coach, who had all sorts of problems. Psoriatic arthritis, which is a terrible condition of the skin and joints. It's quite kind of debilitating. And she was on a drug that cost $50,000 a year for this, an immune suppressant. She also had terrible irritable bowel syndrome and bloating. She had been on lots of antibiotics and steroids.

She also had reflux. She had depression. She had insomnia. She had migraines. She also had prediabetes, was overweight. And so rather than treating all her diseases separately, which were being done, right? She saw the psychiatrist for her depression, the endocrinologist for her prediabetes, the neurologist for her migraines, the gastroenterologist for her GI symptoms,

the rheumatologist for her psoriatic arthritis. And she was given the best possible treatment by all these physicians. They were excellent physicians doing exactly what we were taught in medical school and what is exactly the current state of treatment for each of these diseases. However, she was not better. She was marginally improved and her symptoms were mostly or partly managed, but she wasn't better. And so rather than saying, well, I'm just going to kind of up your dose of these drugs or that drugs, I'm going to get to the root cause. And all the diseases that she had were all inflammatory diseases, her diabetes or prediabetes, her

weight issues, her migraines, her depression, her psoriatic arthritis, obviously her gut issues. These are all inflammatory. So from a functional medicine perspective, we go, what's causing the inflammation? And I joke and I say, I'm an inflammologist, which is actually what we need to be if we're studying longevity, because the whole process of aging is called inflammaging. And so rather than treat all these things separately, I said, well, her gut is where 70% of her immune system lives. She's having terrible gut symptoms. I guarantee you she's got a leaky gut.

She's got probably bacterial overgrowth, yeast overgrowth, and a leaky gut, and lots of food sensitivities and reactions. So what I did was simply put her on an elimination diet. I got rid of all the sugar, processed food, gluten, dairy, obviously alcohol, and get her on a whole foods diet with good proteins, lots of good fats, lots of fruits and vegetables. And I said to her, you know, take a fish oil, a vitamin D probiotic, super simple regimen of supplements that I thought she needed based on her history. I said, don't stop your medication, but just continue to do this. And we'll check back in and go over everything in about six weeks. So she came back six weeks later.

She'd stopped all her medication, including the $50,000 drug for her psoriatic arthritis. And I didn't tell her to do it, but she stopped everything. Her symptoms were completely gone from everything. Her skin was cleared up. Her joints were cleared up. Her migraines were gone. Her depression was gone. Her insomnia was gone. She lost 20 pounds. Her irritable bowel, her reflux was gone. I also gave her stuff to reset her gut and it not absorbed antibiotic and any fungal that got rid of all the bad guys in her gut that were causing all this inflammation. So this is a case that I really focused on the root cause, which was her gut, to treat all these other problems. And when we got her gut healthy, everything else went away. So 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. And the book Young Forever is really a roadmap. And how do you, 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? Yeah, that was, that was brilliant. It's a really great summary and And it really showcases how this systems approach that you have been talking about for many, many years now, beautifully

fits alongside the new science of longevity. And I think that was one of the, for me, one of the really rewarding things about reading Young Forever was that, yes, this systems biology approach works beautifully for aging. It's the same approach in many ways that you've been talking about, and I've tried to for many years now. But actually, when you apply it through the lens of longevity, you can actually see it in a completely different light that's very, very empowering for people. You mentioned, Mark, biological age and chronological age. 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, and that's going to progress inevitably toward, you know, however many years I'm alive. However, my biological age is my age on the

inside. It's not my chronological clock, it's my biological clock. And we now know that we can measure our biological clock and our rate of aging through a specific test called DNA methylations, 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, ragtime, 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 that we discuss, whether it's diet

and exactly what to eat, how to eat and so forth, 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 going to 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 of aggressive lifestyle and dietary change with functional medicine, you can 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. I'm 43. I'm trying to get to 25. We'll see how it goes. But I think that's a key point here, Mark. When a lot of people think about longevity, right? 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 into 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, right? So how do you actually feel good to do what you want in life? That's what this is all about. How do we be a more engaged society? How do we become more connected to each other and supportive? How do we actually change this sort of this inexorable sickness, both

biologically and psychologically that we see in our society? And a lot of it has to do with our biological health. We know that our mental health is connected to our our society. And a lot of it has to do with our biological health. 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. That literally the dietary things that we do drive our poor mental health and that particularly starch and sugar and processed food and that can be changed and that'll give us a sense of purpose and meaning and ability to do whatever we want you posted a photo on i think it was on instagram a few months ago of you in your 40s and you now yeah in 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? 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. I thought I'd be in yoga. I'm, you know, that's good enough for doing, you know, biking or running. And I didn't. 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

phytochemically rich fruits and vegetables. And I noticed my body composition change. 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 alone, 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 to, as I showed in that picture, to change radically at any age. So I've seen people, you know, even at 80, 90 start to do things and you see their strength and their function come

back. Yeah. Well, we'll definitely, if you're willing to send me that photo, we'll definitely pop it up on the video. I think it's very inspiring for people. And I think there's a wider point there, Mark, which is, again, if you go down the street and you picked 10 people at random and ask them, would you like to live longer? I suspect that many of them will say no because they perceive old age with frailty and morbidity.

And I think your book's really challenging that, but can you speak to that a little bit? I think you've written in the book that actually what we see around us is actually what you call abnormal aging. Yeah. Well, we've come to expect the typical person who's older as representative of what's supposed to happen, right? We become

hunched over, weaker, more frail, less able to do things we want to do. We become fraught with diseases, you know, and over probably 80% of people over 65 have one or more chronic illnesses. And so we come to expect this is just how life goes and we can't do anything about it. But what we're actually witnessing is an accelerated process of aging that has to do with these underlying hallmarks of aging that go awry and things like damage to our mitochondria, inflammation, change in our microbiome, change in our nutritional sensing apparatus that regulates our food and metabolism, our DNA damage that happens, epigenetic changes,

shortening telomeres, zombie cells that develop. So all these things happen as a result of damage to our proteins, happen as a result of this abnormal process that now we can intervene in. 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. So we don't have to accept this decline and decrepitude and frailty as normal. We can reverse that biological process and actually get younger as we get older. I know as part of the research for this book,

you went on your travels. I really enjoyed watching you sharing a lot of these stories on your social media. This is probably, I don't know, six, nine months ago. I can't remember when exactly. I know two countries you visited, or two places you visited were Sardinia and Ikaria, I think. And I wonder, could you paint us a picture of maybe some of the older residents who you met, who really challenged that modern assumption that as we get older, we're going to be frail, we're going to be sick, we're going to be sat down all day, we're not going to be doing much because, you know, you shared yourself in your early 60s how much vibrancy you have. Okay, that's fantastic. But

paint us a picture from your travels as to, you know, a couple of people who you met who also showcased to us what may be possible as we age. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It contains vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important, especially at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. All of this goodness comes in one

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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. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Yeah, I think that's a very, very important point that, you know, we need to sort of look at cultures where they live a long time and what are their habits and behaviors and how are they different? And I think, you know, they age very well and

live a long time. And now the blue zones are these places around the planet where people are the longest lived humans. The thing is when they move to the Western societies that we come from, they age at the same rate as we get old and sick and die sooner. And so really by default, their habits are those that promote longevity. They're not, you know, doing saunas and cold plunges and taking a lot of supplements and doing IV and AD and doing exosomes and plasmapheresis and all these kind of cool things that are emerging around longevity. Their whole default culture is actually automatically providing them with the inputs that enhance health and promote longevity.

For example, their diet is incredibly rich in phytochemicals, in whole foods, in things that are wild and really simple foods that they've eaten for thousands of years. They exercise as an all part of their life, whether it's gardening or whether it's shepherding and climbing up and down the mountains all the day long. And it's the social connections and the tight-knit family groups and the social fabric and the idea that we should just be there to help and support each other is really quite important. And so when you have these defaults, longevity happens as a natural consequence. They actually were quite incredible. I met this guy, Pietro, who was 95 years old.

He just retired, quote, retired from being a shepherd, where he was shepherding his sheep five miles up and down the Rocky Mountains every single day for probably when he was like 12. And it was straight up as an arrow, booming voice, clear eyes, just looked like the average sort of probably 67-year year old in America. And I'm like, wow, this guy's 95 years old. It was a, a, a, a, a, who was almost 90 years old. This woman cooked us a meal from her garden. She took care of this entire, I wouldn't call it a garden, more like a farm. She had on a hillside, all these orchards and fruit trees, many, many garden beds, animals she took care of. And she did it all by herself.

Her husband was like 100, so he was sort of chilling. I mean, she just was so fit. And I was literally chasing after her, going up this hill, huffing and puffing. And she just was like a little mountain goat. I was like, holy cow, this is impressive. And she cooks all her own food. They graze all their own food. She cans all her food. She preserves all her food. And she's like 97 years old. I'm like, this is

not what we see in America at 90 years old. We see people in nursing homes or sitting in a wheelchair or rocking chair and not doing a whole lot. Yeah. It's so interesting to hear that, Mark. And I'm just wondering for you, you're someone who's known the science that's come out of the blue zones. You've spoken about it before. You've known about this for many, many years. Was it different? You can know it with your rational mind, but then you show up and you spend time with these people, these families, these elderly individuals who are maybe more active than you are potentially and you know going out right you know what did that do to how did that influence your writing of this book because

i i always think about this as a as you know you like me as someone we try to communicate these ideas in a simple way to the public yeah and we can nose up with our rational brain but i think there's something quite powerful about stories and actually seeing people who embody what we actually want, right? Totally. I mean, it just was so inspiring about what really matters in life. It's not being on your cell phone or being on social media or achieving something or having some great goals.

It's about just the process of living. And they did that so well. They really lived close to the earth. They lived close to each other. They celebrated together. It was just, it was just quite amazing. You didn't see any nursing homes. If somebody's spouse died, they would move in with their kids or their, you know, niece and nephew. It was just, there was one woman, Julia, she was a hundred years old and three months. She said, I'm a hundred and three months. I'm like, okay. Like I'm five and three quarters, you know, when you look into it and you're like, I'm a hundred and three months.

Like I'm five and three quarters, you know, when you look into that. And she's like, I'm 103 months. And, you know, she didn't have kids of her own. She wasn't ever married. All the men she was dating when she was younger all died off. And she lived with her niece and nephew and they were taking care of her. There was no sense that they would be putting someone in a nursing home. And she was still working at 100 years old.

She was sewing all these doilies and embroideries for weddings and different celebrations and so she was very active she'd go on walks every day and you know she really didn't have any health issues i think she had her thyroid just a little slow so she she maybe took some thyroid medication but she was quite amazing and clear-eyed and sharp and funny as heck would you say since coming back from your travels, seeing people like that, has it inspired you to change anything? Are you more active than you were before? You've always been very conscious about your health. So I'm just so fascinated by what that experience did to you on a personal level. Well, it was just profoundly moving and inspiring. And it made me realize that, you know, a lot of the things that we value in our Western culture are not the

things that really matter. And, you know, the, the, the, the, what matters is our friendships, our community, our connections is, is taking care of each other, is taking care of the earth, is actually living in a way that's not harmful to ourselves or everybody else. And that's how they lived. And they lived that way for thousands of years. And they naturally developed these environments and habits that fostered health and longevity. And so as much as I can, I try to learn from them and incorporate some of the habits they have. And it's beautiful for me. I've read every page of the new book, Mark. And as I say, I really, really like it. I think it's going to help a lot of people. And we're going to

talk about a bit more on food and exercise and protein and stress. We're going to get to all of that. But I wanted this little surprise for you. I think for me, through the lens at which I look at life now, I think the most powerful sentence in the book is this one. In places like the Blue Zones, people seem to understand their place and purpose in the community in which they live. Now, Mark, when I read that, I paused because it really speaks to so much of what I try to write about in my book on happiness, how I think about the world now. You know, you've touched on this a little bit in a couple of ways, Mark. You've said that these guys aren't doing cold plunges. They're not like thinking about their diet. They're not trying to practice anti-aging.

Their environment just kind of supports them so that they live well, right? And I remember, I haven't been to these so-called blue zones, right? But last summer, I was in Ithaki, small island in Greece with my family. And we were there for about five days. It was this beautiful small island. And there's so many things I remember. There was one family restaurant which we would go to most days. Very small. It was all local foods.

The families helped out. It was three or four generations all around the entire time. And I remember once, Mark, I remember, I think my kids were getting a bit tired of the same vegetables every night. So they say, Daddy, they've got broccoli. So I said, hey, and I think I shared this once on the podcast before, I asked the lady who was serving us,

do you have any other vegetables, for example, like broccoli? And she looked at me, she was super nice. She said, almost with a look of confusion, she said, oh, that's not in season. And it was such a powerful lesson. I thought, actually, what they're feeding us is literally what is in season

and being grown on that small island. So that was a very powerful lesson. But the overwhelming sense I got was that these guys aren't searching for status. They're not trying to necessarily compete, or certainly from what I could see in a way that I think we are in the West. They're not striving. And as I say, why that phrase in the book, it's so powerful. People seem to understand their place and purpose in the community in which they live. I think that's a big problem for many of us in the West. And I think that is getting in the

way. Any thoughts on that, Mark? Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, think about, you know, when you look at some of the data, it's a little startling. If you were to erase heart disease and cancer from the face of the planet, we would maybe extend life globally by five to seven years, which is, these are the number one and two killers. If you have meaning and purpose, your life extension is seven years. So having meaning and purpose in your life, meaning that you know who you are, why you're here, what you're doing, what your place is in the community and connection to others, you're here, what you're doing, what your place is in the community and connection to others. That actually is a benefit as great as eliminating heart disease and cancer from the face of the earth. I mean, think about that for a minute. Yeah. And I guess these would be seen as the

sort of soft things, right? Real health is about food, protein, movement, right? But, you know, a bit of meaning and purpose on the side but that that kind of data you just shared shows that actually it's not the soft stuff on the side it's at least equally as important if not potentially more importance totally actually i think people think of it as soft but it's not really soft. It's actually hard science. We know the ways in which stress and being isolated, being disconnected, not having meaning and purpose, being lonely, these are extreme risk factors, as great as smoking, for example. And if you understand the way in which this process of stress affects our biology, you will understand that it works through these

hallmarks of aging. It works through, for example, our epigenome, through our environment, through our thoughts, our feelings, our relationships, all the things we just talked about. That influences the epigenome to age faster, to cause more heart disease, more cancer, more diabetes, more dementia, because it's affecting so many of these processes. Stress causes inflammation. Stress causes your nutritional regulation to be affected and you'd be more likely to be pre-diabetic. It affects your mitochondria.

It affects your microbiome. Your microbiome is literally listening to your thoughts. And if you don't say nice thoughts, your bacteria don't like it, literally. So we now understand that this is not some abstract idea that stress isn't some nebulous thing, that it actually is a real phenomena that's translated into biological signals that either can create health if you are connected and have purpose and meaning and learn how to regulate your stress response, which is a big part of longevity. It's as important as anything else that we do. I read in the book that over the past couple of years since COVID hit and there

were restrictions in place, you shared that you actually reached out to your close male friends to have regular Zoom meetings. Yeah. It was quite powerful reading that because you've obviously known this science for many years. Yeah, yeah. But that was you really on a practical way going, wow, I need my male buddies. I need to stay connected to them. You know, what's that done for you, would you say? Oh, it's been profound. You know, I think, you know, in Okinawa, when people are born,

they're put in a moai, which is like a little group of friends. And you basically go through your whole life with this small group of friends that are there throughout your childhood, through your adolescence and your early adulthood, all the way through to very old age. And they know you, they love you, they are there for you. They're not there because you're this one or that one, or if this success or that success, but they're your, your basically soul family in a sense. And, and for me, I think I realized that this is such an important piece of my happiness and my wellbeing is being connected to those I care about and I love. And so I reached out to friends I've had for 40 plus years in some 25, some 35, but long-term friendships who know me well. And I said to them, you know, Hey, it's COVID.

I'm going through a bit of a rough time. I'd love to sort of maybe get together every maybe other week for maybe an hour. Are you guys up for it? And they're like, no, no, no. We want to do it two hours every week. And we've been doing that for over two years now. And it's been a profound change in my life where you have an opportunity with people who know and love you to be seen, to celebrate the things you want to celebrate, to hear

the challenges in your life, to be there for each other, to call each other out, to support each other, you know, really hold each other accountable. And it's such a, it's such a beautiful, magical thing. And I wish it on everybody. And if you don't have that, you know, it takes time and it takes effort, but it's worth building because it really forms the foundation of a good life, even if it's just one or two other people. Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that. And I really did enjoy that chapter in the book where you spoke about the importance of purpose and meaning. And I think you were sharing that optimistic people live longer, even if they're wrong. I'm pretty sure I read that this morning. Is that right? That's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yes. Optimists live longer if they're wrong.

So it's really your mindset that I talk about in the book and how important your mindset is and your beliefs. You know, Ellen Langer did an incredible study years ago where she put people who were older in a house for a week, or maybe I forget exactly how long it was. It was not that long. And everything in the house was sort of basically historical. It was not that long. And everything in the house was sort of basically historical. It was taking them back to a time when they were young adults. So let's say in the 50s. So they had magazines from the 50s and the TV was from the 50s and all the furniture was from the 50s. And their whole environment was basically as it was when they were younger.

And when they then measured objective metrics of longevity and aging, their grip strength and their fitness level and all these weird things, they found that they actually got younger just by believing they were younger, by acting as if they were younger. So, you know, I think it's important to realize that we actually have an important role to play in our health and our longevity through the power of our minds and our beliefs and our mindset. And so there's a bunch of suggestions and ideas in the book about how do we get our mind right? How do we reset our mindset to a positive mindset that can help us to achieve health and longevity? I think that speaks to this wider point which we've been making, which is if we think that getting older means more frailty and more morbidity, well, it's sort of gonna be our reality because that's what we're expecting to happen.

We know there's a lot of research on that, your mindset, your thoughts, as you're saying, and I think that's why your book and this movement is important. It's very, very important because it challenges those kind of preconceptions, which is you're sharing from your journeys need not necessarily be the case, right? So I think that's a really, really key point. I want to talk about protein, Mark.

Protein is something you've written a lot about. And I know it's a divisive topic, right? So I wonder if you could help walk us through it. And you shared before in this conversation that one of the things you've changed as you have got older is you brought in resistance training into your life, which has made a big difference.

So maybe just talk to us about this sort of area and why it's so important for aging. Well, I think, you know, the protein conversation is super important. I think it's polarized and it's ideological, unfortunately, but it should be scientific. You know, people think being a vegan is the way to go for longevity. Others think that you should be eating more protein. And I think there's a lot of confusion out there. And part of it has to do with beliefs and ideology. And I'm not going to get into all that. I do think that you can be a healthy vegan, but it is a lot of work and you need to know what you're doing and you need to supplement with certain things that can protect

you from the challenges of being a vegan, which is getting adequate levels of certain amino acids for protein synthesis and muscle buildings or nutrients that are deficient. It's not easy, but it's doable. So I'm not saying I'm opposed to it. I'm just saying it's a harder road to hoe in terms of longevity and well-being. So when you look at protein, the feeling is that in the longevity community that we should potentially be vegan because we don't want to overstimulate a particular pathway, one of the hallmarks of aging, which we call mTOR. Now, this is one of the four nutrient-sensing pathways in our body that samples the environment and the food we're eating and regulates all sorts of biological processes. And this is really the

meta hallmark. This is the one that's, I think, the most important, which is how food interacts with our biology to create health or disease or longevity or early death. And so mTOR is stimulated by protein and particularly by animal protein because it has higher levels of an amino acid called leucine. Leucine is so important for tripping the switch that builds muscle. So I'm just going to stop for a minute because I want to emphasize how important muscle is to longevity. Without muscle, your metabolism goes down, your stress hormones go up, you become more insulin resistant and pre-diabetic, you become more inflamed. And it's this whole cascade of phenomena that occur because your muscle gets replaced with fat. So the key is to build and keep and increase muscle if you can,

as you get older, to enhance longevity. And that you do, you have to do that by tripping the switch of mTOR to build muscle. The problem is if you do that all the time, if mTOR is always stimulated, you actually don't give your body a chance to engage in one of the most important processes that are important for longevity, which is what we call autophagy. Autophagy means self-cleaning or self-cannibalism or self-eating, literally like Pac-Man. And this is a good thing because our body has the ability to go and recycle old parts, to get rid of old proteins and old cells and clean them up and actually build new stuff, which is great. It's like recycling plastic bottles and making clothes out of it, right? So we have that internal system in our bodies that we have to turn on on a regular basis

in order to clean up and prevent rapid aging. So that's a good thing. And the way you activate autophagy is by inhibiting mTOR, which means don't give it food or protein, which is a good thing. So what do you do? Do you not eat protein to turn on autophagy or do you eat lots of protein to build muscle? Well, the key is both. You need, like any system, you need sometimes it on and sometimes off. You need to sleep and you need to be awake.

I mean, it's basically how the body works. So we need overnight to stimulate autophagy by giving ourselves a break from eating, meaning getting no food from dinner until breakfast. So no late night snacking. And you should give at least 12 hours. So if you eat dinner at 6, you can eat 6 in the morning. If you want to extend to 14, that's eating at 8 in the morning. That's doable for most people. 16 hours is a little bit longer.

That can also have benefits. And that gives your body a chance to sort of pretend that it's starving because you're not really starving, but your body thinks it's kind of maybe starving. So it starts to turn all these protective mechanisms that is related to the stress of not eating called hormesis. And so we can talk about that more. But basically, the idea is when you activate autophagy at night, it's a good thing and it's against life.

However, you need to give a good protein load in the morning on a fasted state, probably 30, 40 grams of high quality protein. When I say high quality, I mean it has to have at least two and a half grams of leucine, which is almost impossible to get from plant protein unless you eat a huge amount or, which people can't do, like having six cups of brown rice or two, three cups of beans. It's hard for people to eat that much of that stuff. And then you can add the leucine to a plant protein, but you actually have to get the leucine to turn on this. So you can have plant protein powders that are supplemented with amino acids, or you can just have a whey protein shake or some animal protein eggs or chicken or fish or whatever you want to eat.

And that will turn on mTOR and build muscle. And then if you fast and then load up with protein in the morning and do the resistance training, maybe before you do your protein load, that's the best strategy. And that's how I built muscle, which I basically would be in this fasted state. I would work out and do my half hour band routine. And then I would have a good protein shake with 40 grams of protein and a bunch of other goodies in it to help me build muscle. And it really works.

And it works even despite the fact that as you get older, you get something called anabolic resistance, meaning your body is more resistant to building muscle. So you have to work harder and take more protein. So as we get older, we need more protein and we need more high quality protein. And I think that's really the clear evidence from the scientific literature about what we need to do.

But people get into ideological battles about whether you should or shouldn't eat meat. I think it's really beside the point. The point is, how does our biology work? How do we work with it? How do we activate these pathways in the right way? And how do we give them a rest when we need to give them a rest? Yeah, really, really useful. I think one of the key things that I've learned over the past few years is regarding the science on leucine, right? That's probably something I didn't know five, 10 years ago, how important getting that minimum threshold of leucine is. And you've written about that in the book,

you've detailed it really nicely. And you shared last time you came on this podcast that you have been vegetarian and I think vegan in the past. Yeah, yeah, I was. And I was pretty much more vegetarian when I took the 40-year-old picture. So I was kind of vegan vegetarian. I was a skinny kind of guy. And my body totally changed, which I couldn't do 10 push-ups when I was 50. Now I can do 80 push-ups without rest. So my body can do that. Yeah, that's incredible, right? You're getting stronger as you age. So a few things there, Mark, I just wanted to clarify. So for someone, and I guess anyone who listens to my show regularly will be familiar with this idea of time-restricted eating

or intermittent fasting. In your experience, right, is the minimum we should be all aiming for 12 hours in every 24-hour period where we are not eating. Is that what you say? Minimum. Well, that's what's called breakfast. I get it. The fast, right? No, I get it. These days we call that fasting, but maybe 40, 50 years ago, that was probably the norm for most humans on this planet. In fact, when you were on your travels, Mark, could you share what you observed with respect to meal timings?

Because those guys, I'm guessing, haven't heard the latest podcast on time restricted eating or intermittent fasting, right? What were they doing naturally, would you say? Well, it's interesting. They would basically have a relatively light breakfast and they would eat a big lunch. They would take a nap, and then they would wake up, and they would work till late, and

they'd have a light dinner, and then they'd be up late, like one or two in the morning. It was a very different lifestyle than I'm used to, but they managed to do it. So there's no one way to do it. If you're living a European lifestyle, they tend to have these sort of more uh relaxing connected them two-hour lunch you go you go to certain places in italy and everything is shut down like the post office the you know the grocery store like literally everything shuts down for hours in the afternoon which you never see in the west i mean at least the united states so i think uh it they kind of built their culture around these times of rest and connection and meal time and pleasure.

And I think that plays a huge role in it. Yeah, I think that's a really important point, Mark. When we try and study these different areas around the world, it's very hard to take one thing in isolation and go, oh, you know, implement that, right? It's the totality of everything they're doing, all the inputs they're putting in. And so I agree with you. I think for most people in the West, aiming for a minimum 12 hours in every 24 hours is a really good starting point that most people can do. And as you say, you can increase that up a little bit. And for some people, they're going to get all kinds of benefits. And the other key to that, Arangan, is to not eat for three hours before you go to sleep.

So give three hours between when you finish your meal and when you go to sleep. That's really important because you need to metabolize and digest your food. Otherwise, you store it and it accelerates aging and your body's in a fed state, not a fasted state when you go to bed. And that's not a good thing. the fastest tape when you go to bed and that's not a good thing. There's a lot of interest in society about trying to find what is the perfect diet. What is the diet that humans are meant to eat? And I know you've written about diet countless times. How many books have you written now? It's nearly 20. 18, I think. 18, right. And they're still absolutely fantastic, you know, and really, really helpful.

I guess the point I'm trying to get to is something I've been thinking about for a while, Mark, is that all we can ever do is find the right diet that works for us at that point in our life, right? Absolutely. And what you're speaking to, and you detail the protege study in the book, what it showed, which is very, very powerful. But we're almost making a case, I think, that as we get older, potentially we need to increase our protein intake. Is that something you would agree with? Absolutely. Even the study that most vegans quote that show that protein is bad for you show that as you get older, it's actually important that you increase your protein intake. So what people don't understand is that the recommended amounts of protein are the minimum amount to not get a deficiency disease.

So how do you not get protein deficiency, which is a very serious disease? You have to eat 0.8 grams per kilo. But that's like how much vitamin D do you need to not get rickets? Probably 30 units. How much vitamin D do you need to optimize your immune system and to prevent cancer and heart disease and all these other benefits? Probably 2,000 to 4,000, maybe 10 to 100 times the minimum amount. So I'm not saying you should have 100 times the recommended

dietary allowance of protein, but you need more than the minimum amount. And for people getting older, it shouldn't be probably 0.8. It should be more like 1.6. And if you're doing a lot of vigorous activity and strength training, you can even have more. So I think both because there's resistance to the effects of eating protein, meaning you need more protein to get the muscle building effect, and the fact that as we get older, we need to make sure our protein needs are met. We do need more protein as we get older. For someone who's listening, Mark, and goes, okay, I understand that.

Okay, I'm going to increase my protein a little bit. But I'm not sure about strength training. You know, I like going for walks. You know, I hear you, but I'm not interested in that. I'm not worried about my- That was me. That was me. Yeah, why is it so important that people don't neglect resistance training,

particularly as they get older? 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.

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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

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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. Yeah, that was really, that was me. I hated the gym. It was smelly. I didn't want to go in with all the big guys who were intimidating and lifting all these heavy weights. And I was a skinny guy. So I just kind of didn't go.

And I knew I recommended it because the science was clear. But I just, myself, I was kind of resistant to resistance training. And I decided I was going to do it. And I hit 60. It was like in my 59th year, I was like, okay, I'm at 59. I probably should get on it now. And I started to do it. And it hit 60. It was like in my 59th year, I was like, okay, I'm going to 59. I probably should get on it now. And I started to do it and it was really life-changing. And I think that most people don't realize the impact of strength training on your balance, on your mobility, on your function, on your metabolism, on your overall wellbeing, on your hormones,

sex hormones decline as we age. So strength training boosts those. So it has so many benefits that if you want to live a long, healthy life, aside from cutting out sugar and starch, probably the other most important thing is resistance training. If you just get two things from this podcast is to understand that you need to dramatically reduce or eliminate starch and sugar from your diet and to start resistance training at some form. It could be body weight. It could be bands, which I do. It could be weights, but make sure you work with someone to do proper form and so forth so you don't hurt yourself when you're starting out. But it's so important to do. And there's all these apps, there's YouTube videos, there's no lack of instruction out there, but it is something you

should consider essential part of health as you get older. And it doesn't have to be a lot. It can be 30 minutes, three times a week. I like to do more, but the reality is I probably only do three or four times a week because I just don't have the time at this moment. But I, when I do, I try to do it more and more often, but, but I think the minimum is very, is very adequate, an hour and a half a week. If you don't have an hour and a half a week to invest in your health and what's going on with your life. In fact, I often use this cartoon in my talks where it shows a doctor telling his patient, do you have time to exercise an hour a day or be dead 24 hours a day? I think that's a funny cartoon.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for the clarity there. I mean, a couple of things there. On Saturday, Yeah, yeah. Thank you for the clarity there. I mean, a couple of things there. On Saturday, I tend to go to my local park run, sometimes with my son, sometimes with my family. And at the end of park run this Saturday, I bumped into a friend of mine who said, actually, Ron, I heard your conversation with Gabrielle Lyon. I know Gabrielle's been on your podcast. And she said, I heard it. And for the first time in my life, I've actually went and started strength training. She's been doing that for about two months. And she said she's in her mid forties. Right. And she says she feels absolutely fantastic. She was already really active. She would run. Right. So that's in her forties, but a wider point here,

Marcus, and why I'd be thinking a lot about strength over the past two or three months. And again, we can know the science, we can write about it, we can try and practice things. But then sometimes things happen in our lives where the same information lands in a slightly different way. So I've had some real challenges in my personal life over the past two or three months to do with the health of my mother. And mum is now, I think, sort of 82, 83. And she's been mega unwell since Christmas. She was admitted to hospital, she's come out, she's definitely not the same as she was now. And what's really striking is that, you know, my brother and I try our best to look after her and care for her, but because of her muscle strength, or I should say her lack of muscle

strength, basic things now like, you know, the quality of your life can rapidly, rapidly decline. And I know this, I've seen it with patients before, but when I'm now witnessing it on a daily basis with my own mother, I'm like, Rangan, you need to keep moving. You need to work on your muscle mass. And I think there's a wider point, Mark, which I hope you can speak to, which is this idea that as we get older, our muscle mass is declining, right? So if we don't do anything about it, we're on that road to what I just described. So could you maybe sort of speak to that, inspire people about why they need to get going with this? Totally. I mean, it starts, you know, when you're younger, you can kind of manage.

But when you get into your 30s, 40s, we're not talking 60s, 70s, we're talking thirties, forties, you start to decline muscle mass. And unless you are fighting that entropy by the time you're 60 or 70, you're going to be twice as fat as you were, even though you're the same weight, you will become what we call skinny fat and your muscle will be replaced by fat. So think of a Wagyu ribeye versus a filet mignon. You want the filet mignon because it's much more functional muscle. And what happens is we lose that muscle and we get a disease called sarcopenia, which is something most doctors don't know how to diagnose, don't test for, and don't treat. But it is among the most important and most deadly things that happen to us as we age.

What is a big cause of death in the elderly? Falls, falls, falling, and then breaking your hip. And if you break your hip, it's worse than getting a diagnosis of terminal cancer in terms of your mortality rate. So it's a really big deal. And I think that that can be almost entirely prevented by resistance training and giving people the strength to be able to hold themselves up, to ball properly if they end up falling, to have stronger bone density and all the things we need to do as we get older. So the reason people end up in nursing homes and long-term care facilities is not because they're sick with a chronic disease. It's because they can't get out of bed or get out of a chair or tie their shoes

or cut their toenails. And so that's the reason. And that is totally fixable by building muscle as we age and staying strong and fit. I mean, I see, you know, a hundred year old guys riding horses in these blue zones. It's really impressive. People, most people wouldn't even go out

without a walker at a hundred years old or if they can get up at all or if they live that long. So we're seeing, you know, the ability to do functional things as the most important thing. Peter Attia is a friend. He talks about the, the, the, the centenarian decathlon, what are the like 10 things you want to do? Like get up off the floor. I mean, I, I, I went skiing with my dad when he was in his seventies and he fell in the ski slope. He couldn't get up. He just could not get his body off the ground. And then I helped him by getting him strength training and I paid for a trainer for him. And he was able to actually start to regain strength even in his 80s. And even up to almost 90 years

old, it was very impressive to see. Yeah. A couple of key messages there. Let's not wait until we're in our 70s and 80s to face those difficulties, right? The decline is starting already for many of us. So let's do something about it. That was one key message there. The other one was what you said about your father, that even in your 80s, it's not too late. You can make a difference, right? And so I think those are really key points, which again, you make very clear in the book. Mark, talk to me about hormesis. There's a chapter on hormesis in the book. What is it and how can we utilize it, I guess, to help us age better?

Well, you know, we all evolved in a much more stressful environment. We didn't have perfectly controlled temperatures and humidity and air conditioning and heating. And we just sort of lived out there in nature. And we had periods where we had access to food. We didn't have grocery stores or periods where we didn't have access to food. And we had to move our bodies a lot just to function. And all these are stresses. So hormesis is essentially a stress that doesn't kill you.

And it activates these ancient healing pathways, these ancient longevity switches in your body in ways that we now are fully understanding. And I'll just go through some of them. What's a stress? Well, not eating is a stress. So starvation would be considered a stress. So not eating from six o'clock at night to eight in the morning, your body's like, oh, I'm a little short on food here. That's a stress. Let me kick into gear all these healing systems like autophagy, which we mentioned before. Exercise is another kind of stress. When you lift weights, you're tearing your muscles. When you sprint, you're stressing your mitochondria, and that causes them to rebound and become stronger. Those are two

examples of hormesis, but there's a lot of other cool ones that are now being used. Hot and cold therapy. Saunas, for example, show a reduction in death by like 40-something percent in Finland in these large studies, and does so by, for example, activating your immune system by fixing your proteins that are damaged as we age with these products that are produced in a sauna called heat shock proteins. Or cold therapy, cold plunges. They don't even have to be a sauna. It can be a hot bath. It can be a cold shower. Most people have a bath and a shower.

You know, so I take a cold shower in the morning for two minutes. So it's a really inexpensive way to activate hormesis. If you want a cold plunge and splurge on that, great. And those are powerful. But I just, you know, fill my bathtub full of cold water. And if you live in a warm climate, you can throw a couple of bags of I just, you know, fill my bathtub full of cold water and if you live in a warm climate, you can throw a couple of bags of ice in, you know, and then sit in there

for three, four minutes. That activates these healing things in your body. And there are also other forms of hormesis that are phytohormesis, plant foods that have little stress molecules that they make to defend themselves.

When we consume those in small amounts, they kind of trigger these healing responses and many of them through these hallmarks of aging. For example, fisetin, which is from strawberries, helps you kill zombie cells. And quercetin also helps to reverse your biological age for working on your epigenetics and reduces inflammation. So there's all these compounds that we can consume from plants that do this. And then there's some other kind of more advanced therapies like hyperbaric oxygen therapy or hypoxia therapy where you reduce oxygen levels.

These are stresses on the body and it can actually help to activate longevity pathways. Like in Israel, they did a study in hyperbaric oxygen and they found that it increased telomeres and killed zombie cells more than any other treatment. more than any other treatment. And these are things that we see as two of the hallmarks of aging that get worse, and it made them better simply by lying in a 100% oxygen at a higher pressure than atmospheric pressure for 60 minutes, for 60 sessions over a period of time. So we have real insights into how these stresses can activate these ancient longevity pathways. Well, you mentioned a couple of terms there that some people may not recognize, zombie cells and telomeres, right? So you mentioned that some of these therapies can help with those two things, two hallmarks of aging, but perhaps you could just expand a little bit on what telomeres are and what zombie cells are. Yeah. So we mentioned

these 10 hallmarks of aging, and then these things that kind of happen as we get older. One of them is, you know, we replicate our DNA, I don't know, some quadrillion times in our lifetime. And so our DNA has to kind of open up and it has to be read and then it has to close back up. And that's regulated by these things at the end of your chromosomes called telomeres. As they keep replicating, there's a little bit that gets cut off each time and they get shorter. They're like the little caps on the end of your shoelaces that prevent

it from unraveling. And when they get too short, you end up having problems and that shortens your life. So telomeres are important metric to look at as about how we're doing with longevity. The other is zombie cells. Zombie cells are also known as senescent cells. And normally, when cells have gone through their normal process of doing what they do, they die off. And we have a process to do that in our body called apoptosis, which just means you kind of explode the cell and you die and you eat all the parts and it's sort of a recycling system.

But sometimes those cells don't die and they become zombie cells. And those zombie cells produce all these inflammatory chemicals that go all over your body. And then they kind of make other cells, zombie cells, and it creates this whole zombie apocalypse inside and end up with this state of accelerated inflammation. And that's why we call it aging, inflammation. So senescent cells are things that can be changed or gotten rid of through some things like hyperbaric oxygen or certain senolytic therapies that can be from plant compounds that we can use.

So, maybe even drugs will be senolytic drugs. We're learning more about this as we go on, but these zombie cells are not good for you and hyperbaric oxygen can help to get rid of them, which is great. Yeah. You also, as you've just explained, and I really did enjoy reading this section where all these kind of plants compounds can also help us get rid of zombie cells. And you mentioned a few of them there. In that section, Mark, you wrote quite a provocative sentence. What's new? Yeah, what's new? But it really got me thinking it was it's quite a beautiful

statement actually you believe we co-evolved with plants to borrow their medicines to keep us healthy talk to me about that yeah well you know like guinea pigs make uh don't make vitamin c humans don't make vitamin c uh many other species of animals do we don't make it C. Humans don't make vitamin C. Many other species of animals do. We don't make it because we're lazy. Our biology, we don't want to do anything that we don't have to do with our biology to conserve energy. So we co-evolve with plants to use their compounds as medicines to help regulate our biology. And animals do this. If you see a wild animal or a cow that's pasture raised, they will graze on a few major food crops, but then they'll sample maybe a hundred other crops, plants to actually activate medicinal properties in those plants for themselves.

They don't know that, but they kind of intuitively figure this out and keep themselves healthy, which is quite interesting. And so the same thing with humans, we've co-evolved with these plants and over 800 species of plants as Hunter-gatherers that contain these rich phytochemical compounds that we now are understanding that maybe we thought there were 25,000. There may be a million of these things in plants. And we're starting to catalog them and understand their mechanisms of action, how they work. When we say food is medicine, that's what we mean. We mean inside the food we're eating, there are medicinal compounds that our body uses

to activate various pathways. For example, one of the key findings, for example, around longevity was the activation of sirtuins. Sirtuins is one of the four longevity switches that are in the hallmark of aging called deregulated nutrient sensing, meaning how do we sense our nutrition environment and how do we regulate different processes based on whether we're eating the wrong stuff or the right stuff. And so resveratrol, which comes from grapes, actually works on sirtuins to activate sirtuins, which kicks in this whole system of DNA repair and improving insulin sensitivity and mitochondrial function

and helping to reduce inflammation. And it's a really amazing thing that happens when you properly regulate sirtuins. Well, resveratrol is a plant compound that is acting on that pathway, for example. It doesn't mean you should be drinking red wine. I want to be careful with that because we now know that alcohol is actually even in lower amounts than we thought can be harmful and increase risk of cancer.

And it's definitely not a health promoting activity. It's fine to do once in a while as a recreational fun thing to do, but it's not something you want to do every day. And I think the compounds in the red grapes actually do act on this pathway. So that's one example. Yeah. But then also, I think we have to acknowledge that I'm guessing in these blue zones where you went to that people are drinking as well, right? Yeah, they are. Yeah, they are. They're having a glass of wine here and there. But we have to understand that there is a phenomenon in science

called the healthy user effect. And this means that we can get kind of confused in studies where we see, oh, things like people drinking alcohol live longer or they do this or that. It may be the other things they're doing, right? If we're told that, you know, having a glass of wine is good for you, then maybe the people who are drinking the wine are engaging in other healthy behaviors, right? They're exercising, they're eating more fruits and vegetables, they're not smoking. So we have to be careful of these biases that are inherent in studying people,

where we thought, for example, that hormones were protective for women against heart disease and cancer and stroke and dementia because of a population study where they found women who seem to take hormones had less of these problems. Well, it was because these women were healthier as a group because they went to the doctor more, they paid more attention to their health, they exercised more, they didn't smoke, they ate more fruits and vegetables. That's why they had less heart disease, cancer, stroke, and dementia. And when they did a randomized controlled trial called the Women's Health Initiative, it was a billion-dollar study, 160,000 women.

They literally had to stop the trial partway through because so many women were dying who were taking the hormones. It's because of the bias in the first study that was called the healthy user effect. And that's what's going on when you look at some of the data. Well, yes, the people in the blue zones drink a little wine, but what else did they do? They weren't exposed to environmental toxins. They had really no chronic stresses. They had deep sense of meaning, purpose, and community.

They ate foods that were original, like almost heirloom foods. A lot of wild foods they eat in the Karya. They had animal foods, but they had animals that were eating all these wild plants that had phytochemicals in them. You know, they had a natural exercise that they did as part of their life. So what was it? Was it the alcohol or was it all this other stuff? Yeah. Thanks for explaining that. I was just bringing that up to stimulate conversation because I think one of the problems when we look at these blue zones is that we, as I've already mentioned, we take these things in isolation and it's the totality of their experience that leads

to it. And we're trying to learn principles. And also the truth is like in the West, most people, certainly if I speak about my, the patient population I have seen, most people are consuming alcohol to de-stress, right? So it's a way of mitigating chronic levels of high stress. So I imagine in the blue zones, it's a very different relationship with that alcohol. It's not to de-stress, maybe it's a small amount to connect, right? Maybe it's a small amount to connect. Maybe it's also true. And maybe it's also different. Like in Ikaria, they made wine according to their ancient methods. They kind of smushed it with their feet. The grapes were grown in tough soils, so they were much higher in phytochemicals. They didn't have any sulfites.

They kind of fermented them in these clay pots underneath the soil. And, and, you know, sometimes it didn't work out and they were all organic. There were no pesticides. So who knows? It was quite different. I actually, I actually drank the wine in a car and I was like, normally wine makes me feel like crap. I just get brain fog and feel kind of off. And, and I, I drank this wine. I felt great. I was like, wow, this is really different, but it's not wine that you can actually even take home with you because they can't ship it, they can't really bottle it. It's really served fresh.

It's very different. Yeah. And just to be clear, none of us as medical doctors are promoting alcohol consumption. We're just having a conversation about how these things may influence health and longevity. If you want to climb five miles on a rocky mountain every day, if you want to sleep eight, nine hours,

if you want to have no chronic stress, be exposed to no toxins, have a deep sense of community, meaning, and purpose, and eat only heirloom traditional foods that are completely unprocessed, you're probably going to have a glass of wine. It's not going to hurt you. So I think just be careful of all the yeah just be yeah well coming back to nutrition it's it's a very confusing topic for many people

right and i'm always conscious i never want to leave people at the end of these podcasts more confused and i think sometimes that does happen because you speak to someone who may have a certain food philosophy and you speak to someone else with another food philosophy and they sound very knowledgeable and they quote research to support their point of view. And so in the interest of moving this forward for people, let's just go through what everyone can agree on. We started off this conversation talking about reducing ultra-processed foods. I don't think there's many people in this space who would disagree with that. I think that's a universally accepted thing. And then sugar and starch in

general are really not great for you. I think most people also agree about that. Excess sugar, for sure. I think most people can agree with, we're eating way more than we used to and reducing it, stroke it. Eliminating, I think, is pretty hard for most people in the current environment. But reducing it. You're a type 2 diabetic and you're really overweight and your metabolism is so screwed up. Those people, I think, do probably need to be on an extremely restricted carbohydrate diet, but once you're metabolically healthy, you can eat more and be more resilient. And that's the goal. So then the third thing, I think we, we, we discussed protein now. Yes, it's controversial. Um, and it is, you know, as you even admit in your book, it is confusing for

people. There's a line where you actually say that, so you understand the confusion. But the protease study, which was very thorough, does seem to support increased protein intake to help us prevent sarcopenia, particularly as we get older. And I think you've very eloquently explained your view is that actually it's easy with animal protein, but if you want to do it with plant protein, you can do it. You're going to need to supplement. You may need to make sure you're hitting that 2.5 grams of leucine. So I think, again, broad agreement there,

I would say. Would you agree with that? I agree, and I agree. In terms of plant proteins, you have to make sure that you add extra amino acids or that they're added already to the plant protein. And you have to probably take a plant protein powder, which is pea protein or other forms of protein that may be pumpkin seed. There's good protein powders out there, but they're not going to be

sufficient on their own unless they have added amino acids to bring leucine content up to two and a half grams per serving, which is about 30 plus grams. Okay, great. And then let's move on to a term that you have said on numerous occasions in this conversation, previous podcast conversations, which is phytochemicals or phytonutrients, right? And these are compounds that are found within plants. Now, I think there's broad consensus

that phytonutrients are probably helpful for us, right? There are a couple of people I follow online. The carnivore community thinks those are toxins in plants, but I don't quite agree. Technically, they kind of are, right? The phytochemicals in plants are the plant's defense systems. But as I said, a little bit of stress, a little bit of phytochemical hormesis actually helps our own biology work better. Yeah. And I think another somewhere that I think people get confused with phytochemicals is that they don't understand the way in which it works in the body.

They sort of break it down into the constituents. They'll look at a food and go, well, how much fiber, how much protein, how much fat, how many carbs? If you go to the supermarket, you don't see the phytonutrient numbers on the back, right? You should. Well, yeah, and maybe that's the way we'll move

at some point in the future. But I wonder if you could just really expand on that, you know, why are phytonutrients so important in your view? And it's, we need to move beyond this kind of fat protein carb model to really understand that because it's to do with signaling our genes, isn't it? Totally. I mean, I think, I think the thing that we've missed is that, you know, nutrition, we look at a reductionist view, what is needed, amino acids, fatty acids, carbohydrates, some vitamins and minerals. And it turns out that, you know, you can give people nutrition through an intravenous tube, which contains all these elements. But what is missing is a lot of the

stuff that actually really is necessary for health, which are these things that were not considered essential nutrients, but that I consider essential. They're not necessarily going to give you a deficiency disease if you don't eat them. But if you don't eat them over a long period of time, chronic disease will accelerate and you won't protect yourself against all these ravages of aging. And I think this is such an important concept for people to understand that these are medicines in food. 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 glucofernan, which is important for

longevity, or whether it's certain, you know, 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. So it's not hard to do, but it's important that we consider that these compounds are really essential for us if we want to have vibrant health. You mentioned the carnivore community, which is growing. And I think it's something that doctors like ourselves should be talking about because a lot of people are saying, I've tried everything. And since I went carnivore, so for people who are not familiar, basically, pretty much an all meat

diet is the way I think many people practice it. And they are reporting all kinds of improvements, you know, joint pain, skin, weight loss, you know, vitality, vibrancy, right? So I want to, with sensitivity and compassion, sort of tease this out a little bit because on one hand, and this is my view with any patient, you cannot blame anyone for doing something where they've made a change and they feel better, especially when what they tried before did not make them feel good. Agreed, 100%. So what do you think is going on for people in that community?

Obviously, you don't know every single patient there. And where does the phytochemical story come in for those people, would you say? Yeah, so the truth is that there are therapeutic diets that can be applied in different patients that need different things. So do I think everybody should be on a keto diet? No. Do I think it's therapeutic diet that could be very effective for some people? Absolutely. Do I think carnivore diet is the diet we should all be on? No. Do I think it can be effective for certain people? Yes. And part of it

is not the meat that they're eating. It's what they're not eating, right? They're not eating sugar. They're not eating processed food. They're not having gluten. They're typically not having dairy. They're not having any of the typical processed inflammatory foods that are causing so many of the symptoms. So for example, if you get off grains and beans, you're removing a lot of things that potentially are bothering people's gut. And not that grains and beans are bad, but for certain people, they are, right? So if you have an autoimmune disease, if you have leaky gut, if you have various inflammatory

problems, it may be a real factor. So I often will put people on a more restricted diet in order to reset their biology and see what's working and what's not. And we call that in functional medicine an elimination diet. So a carnivore diet, in a sense, is a very extreme elimination diet with one basic food group. Now, the truth is that, you know, you can get phytochemicals from animal foods if you eat regeneratively raised animals or wild animals. In Ikari and Sardinia, they were taking their goats and sheep and they were taking them to eat all these different wild plants at different times

of the year because they knew, not because it had phytochemicals, they knew it would taste better if it had this plant or that plant at this time of the year, that the milk and the meat would taste better, the cheese would taste better. Flavor always follows phytochemical richness in our food. So where our flavor comes from, other than the additives, is from the colorful compounds in the food, like a ripe tomato or a nice juicy peach in the summer, or something that is from asparagus, just picked from the garden, tastes way different than asparagus you buy in the store. These are because of the phytochemicals in them. It's way different than asparagus you buy in the store. These are because of the phytochemicals in them.

But when you are eating a carnivore diet, you're eliminating most of the things, which you are maybe getting some phytochemicals in the food. You're also getting fatty acids. And if you're eating the right kinds of meat, you're getting some omega-3s. You're getting lots of nutrients. You have to probably eat organ meats to get all the vitamins that you need. So there's some tricks to it. But I think that it is a pretty interesting way of thinking about treating lots of different conditions that are

inflammatory. And I'm not opposed to it, but I don't think it's a long-term strategy. And when you look at our biological needs, we need small amounts of essential fatty acids in the gram level. There is no biological requirement for carbohydrate, but there is a large requirement for the macronutrient protein. It's the only one for which there's a large requirement as part of our diet. So I think people can do fine on that. I worry long-term, but it's about looking at the numbers. What does your numbers look like? How does it, I mean, I just saw a patient the other day who was on it and their cholesterol went crazy. So there may be individual responses that are quite different, even to the same diet.

And I think that's what people need to understand. There's no one size fits all. There's not, you know, vegan diet's great for everybody or carnivore diet's great for everybody. It's really about what's great for you, what works for you. And that's, as a physician, what my interest is, is not in, you know, research studies with thousands of people. It's like, what is happening to that person in front of me? And let's do what we call an N of one experiment.

Let's try whatever you want to try, or let's try what I think might be best based on the research. And let's measure again and how you do. If you get better, great. If you get worse, let's change our strategy. Yeah. I think that was a beautiful breakdown and sort of very similar to my view on it, which is it's a phenomenal elimination diet. You know, the case study of psoriatic arthritis, which you mentioned earlier on in this conversation, again, the principle was you put that patient on a very strict elimination diet to help them because they were sick. And, you know, maybe a year down the line, six months down the line, six months down the line,

as they rebuild their body, they rebuild their gut lining, potentially they can start to reintroduce things. We see that all the time. And I guess phytochemicals aren't just in your broccoli and your asparagus. Green tea, black tea, the herbs that you might put on the cooking, they all contain these, turmeric, curcumin, all sort of stuff do you know what i mean there's there's other ways people can get that even if they are on quite a restrictive diet absolutely absolutely yeah yeah no totally yeah um mark there's a point there as you mentioned the elimination diets and i really welcome your thoughts on this 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's a great question. I think it's both. I mean, you have to add in all the good stuff and you have to take out the bad stuff. I mean, if you're eating 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 we do need to do the same thing as if you get rid of the Coca-Cola and eat more whole foods. So 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 the key 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 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. Yeah. That's one of the things I really like in the new book, Young Forever, Mark, is that there are some complex things in there if you have the resources and you're able to access them. But the majority are simple things that we can all do. You explained the science. The science can be complex. It's really interesting to read about it. But actually, the practical takeaways are actually not that

difficult. And one thing that people will often say, and we'll probably get comments on this video on YouTube, that yes, but it's hard we'll probably get comments on this video on YouTube, that yes, but it's hard for us to find a doctor like you, Mark, or a doctor like me, who looks at these root cause solutions for people. And the one thing I try and emphasize is that 80% of what I'd end up doing anyway is the stuff that we're talking about, right? So get stuck in and do this basic stuff first, your diet, your movement, your sleep, your stress. Do you know what I mean?

And if that doesn't work, then we can go in deeper. Yeah, and in the book, I go through, okay, well, there's quizzes. So you can identify where your imbalances are, what's going on with you. You can be someone who can self-diagnose what's happening. And then there's guidelines about, what are the specific extra dietary changes or extra supplements that might help or other things that could be necessary

or even further testing or medical care. So there's a roadmap for you to be the CEO of your own health, to dive deep into the things that are out of balance and to correct those things, not just live longer, but to actually feel better now. A couple of things I wanted to cover before we ended, Mark. One was, you just mentioned the 10-day detoxification diet that you sometimes, you know, you've written a book about it, you've spoken about before. Now, the term detoxification is something that seems to, people get triggered by that term. Let's put it like that, right? So, it means you like to go to rehab, right? Yeah, but if we think about it, people understand the term hangover.

They understand, right? If they toxify themselves with too much alcohol, they're going to get symptoms. And they also understand that, oh, if I have a hangover and I drink more water, or instead of having fatty fried foods, let's say, but have more whole foods and fruits and vegetables, for example, then I'm going to feel better more quickly, right? So I think that's a really simple way for them to understand, yes, detox organs exist, but you can

enhance the way that they work by what you're putting in. So for people who are pushing back when they hear you say detoxification, I wonder if you could explain what you mean by it and why it's so important. Well, if people don't believe in detoxification, then you should basically not pee, not poop, not sweat, and not breathe, because those are all the ways that our bodies are naturally designed to eliminate. But Mark, on that, people will say, they will say, Mark, yes, but they're all working for me. So why do I need to focus on detoxification? My body will do that naturally. So what do you say to that? It's true. Your body does have these natural systems, but we do everything to impede them, right? We are overloading our metabolisms with bad food. We're not eating enough fiber and

our guts are often messed up. We're often not drinking enough water and eliminating our liver pathways aren't optimized to detoxify all the chemicals that we're consuming from our foods and our environment. And so we need to help boost them a little bit. And I think most of the science around detoxification is very clear. We have these detoxification systems. They're often not working well, and we need to increase their function in order to be healthy. And the other kind of connotation of detox means get rid of the bad stuff, right? So yes, it does mean detox from sugar and processed food and so forth.

So there's both the sort of hard science of our detoxification organs and systems and how to optimize those. But there's also the reality that we're eating a lot of crap and we need to get rid of it. And that's another sort of way of thinking about it. Yeah, thank you. The final thing I want to talk about before we end off, Mark, is you mentioned in the book these 10 hallmarks of aging, and we touched on a few of them. And I think people are going to really enjoy reading about them all and think about how it applies to them. You mentioned sugar and starch and too much of it a few times in this conversation and I'm drawn to that fourth hallmark of aging, damaged proteins, where you talk about glycation. So I wonder if you could just explain sort of what is that and how our diet plays into damaging our proteins like this.

For sure. So, you know, we have a lot of ways in which diet influences these hallmarks. The main way is through what we call deregulated nutrient sensing. It affects these four longevity switches, which has to do with insulin signaling, mTOR, which we talked about, and protein, and two others. For two, as we mentioned about how it works to repair DNA, and also one we didn't talk about called AMPK that is involved in regulating blood sugar and so forth. And those are really important impacts. And if we eat too much sugar and starch, it screws all those longevity switches up. But it also does something else. It actually forms these globs with protein. So sugar and proteins interact and form these damaged proteins. So think about creme brulee or think about crispy chicken skin or crust on a bread.

That's the proteins and the sugars in that kind of forming this crust. And that is not bad if you're eating it, although you don't eat too much of those because they do affect you. But it's what happens on the inside. So we become literally crusted on the inside and we get what we call advanced glycation end products. They're called ages. Literally, they're called ages and they bind to these receptors called rages or receptors for advanced glycation end products. So you are aging and raging, literally, if you eat too much sugar and starch. And they form these globs. And one of the ways we regulate people with diabetes is measuring this glob of protein and sugar called hemoglobin A1c, meaning your hemoglobin, your oxygen-carrying

system, is damaged by the sugar. And it forms these funky proteins that are kind of sticky and drive inflammation. So that's really a bad thing. It's not just a measure of your blood sugar, but this is happening everywhere in your body. We just measure it in terms of blood sugar, but it's happening everywhere in the brain. It causes dementia.

So we need to be very clear that damaged proteins are a big part of aging. Now we can fix those damaged proteins. We can learn how to recycle them, clean them up. We can use saunas. And there's lots of ways to fix these damaged proteins. But the key is to make sure you don't create them in the first place through eating too much starch and sugar.

Yeah, thank you. Mark, just to finish off, given how you feel now at 63, what's the goal here? Is the goal to not age at all? Is the goal to be like those centenarians you met in the blue zones? Because that kind of feels like a natural way that we could age. Because a lot of people, of course, are talking about 150, 180. you know? And I wonder, is thinking about aging like that fundamentally problematic to the human experience, right? The way we live is special because we're going to die at some point, you know? Or certainly that could be one perspective, right? So, you know, maybe if you could just speak to this to end off this conversation, I'd be really grateful. Look, I mean, there's two things here. One is,

do we want to live forever? That's a very big philosophical question. And I think in my perspective, this is a personal view. I don't want to live forever, but what if I could live another 50 or 60 or 80 years of vibrant life, what could I contribute? What could I do? What could I add in terms of value to the world? And I think people in their minds think of an aging population as being a drain on society, as being a cost, as being a huge risk for our population

because we're going to end up with all these old people who need care and so forth. But when you look at some of the data from Davidson Sinclair and others who've looked at the macroeconomic analysis of what happens if you create healthy older people, not sick older people. Because we all agree that sick older people is bad for everybody and bad for the economy and bad for society. But if they're healthy older people, if you extend life by a year, healthy life by a year, you add $37 trillion to the economy. If you do a 10-year life extension, that's $367 trillion. That is an enormous amount of money. I mean, the GDP of the United States is like, I think it's like $20 trillion.

So I mean, that's an enormous amount of money. And so, we actually have to look at it from a social perspective and say, okay, well, if we did this right, it would add a lot of healthy older people. And what does that do? Well, that adds more wisdom, more insight, more learning. And at 63, I think I could easily get to 100 years of healthy life, You know, I think I could easily get to 100 years of healthy life, functional life. I think maybe by the time I get there, we'll learn enough so I can probably get to 120. Do I want to be 150? Depends.

I mean, if I'm functional, if I can ski and I can make love and I can ride my bike and I can hang on my friends and I can do all the things I want to do, well, why not? And the truth about my life, and this I think is probably true for most people, as we get older, we get a little smarter. We understand how life works a little better. We understand that we can be in contribution to the world. So imagine people who actually can add value and be in contribution, just as in the old society, there were elders who were revered and respected and held the wisdom. We've lost that. And so I think there's an opportunity for us to actually kind of regain some of the wisdom of being older instead of people who are on the decline.

So I'm 63. I feel like I'm just starting my life now. I finally feel like I'm figuring this stuff out of how to live well and be well and be happy and to be of value and to add back into the world. And now I don't want to stop. I want to keep going. Yeah, what an inspiring answer. Mark, this podcast is called Feel Better, Live More.

When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of our lives. You just beautifully spoken to that with your last answer. Right at the end of every conversation, I love to leave my audience with some take-homes. There's plenty throughout this conversation. But 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 rate 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 Young Forever is a roadmap to activating these ancient healing, longevity, rejuvenating, repairing, renewing systems that will provide us not just longer life, but a healthier, better life so we can feel better and live more, as you say. Mark, it's a great book, Young Forever, The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life. That's coming on the podcast.

Thanks, Duncan. This is great. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. As always, do think about one thing that you can take away and start applying into your own life. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better,

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