Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Mark Hyman on the Secrets to Living Young Forever EP 258

Episode Date: February 23, 2023

On Passion Struck today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Mark Hyman, a prominent figure in the world of Functional Medicine with a global reputation as a leader, speaker, educator, and advocate. Dr. Hyman is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, as well as the Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. With fourteen New York Times best-selling books under his belt, he joins us to discuss his latest publication, Young Forever. Dr. Mark Hyman and I Explore His New Book Young Forever Published on February 21, 2023, Dr. Mark Hyman’s latest book, “Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life,” delves into the science of longevity and features the latest breakthroughs in science and medicine. According to Dr. Hyman, when properly applied, these developments can reverse your biological age even as you continue to grow chronologically older. In the book, Dr. Hyman outlines the Young Forever program, which includes crucial information on optimizing our core biological systems and providing advice on how to eat, exercise, and live in a way that promotes longevity. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/dr-mark-hyman-secrets-to-living-young-forever/  Brought to you by Indeed. With Indeed, you can search for millions of jobs online to find the next step in your career, with tools for job searches, resumes, company reviews, and more. Head to https://www.indeed.com/passionstruck, where you can receive a $75 credit to attract, interview, and hire in one place. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/XVxFwLOcaZY  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Want to hear my best interviews from 2022? Check out episode 233 on intentional greatness and episode 234 on intentional behavior change. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on the Passion Struct Podcast, we can change those epigenetic marks on our DNA that read our genes. So at any age, we can change the epigenetic expression through what we call the expose home. The expose home is to some total of all the things that we're exposed to in our life. And that's modifiable, and that's the good news.

We can't change our genes, they're fixed, unless we do gene editing, but we can change our gene expression. And the biological aging phenomena is really a disordered gene expression. And that's the key to understanding the biological age and to influencing it through regulating all of the kind of doorways or the pathways we have to get to it. Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles. And on the show, we decipher

the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews, the rest of the week with guest ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.

Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 258 of PassionStruck. Recently rated by Apple is one of the top 20 health podcasts. And thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly to listen and learn, how to live better, be better, and impact the world. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, where you simply want to introduce this to a friend or family member. We now have episode sturgers packs, which are collections of our fans favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics

to give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com, slash starder packs to get started. And in case you missed my episode from earlier in the week, it featured Oksana Masters. And we talk about her journey from a Ukrainian orphanage to the podium.

She was nominated for three ESPY awards this year, including Best Female Athlete. During our interview, we launched her absorbing and triumphant new book, The Hard Parts, a memoir of Courage and Triumph. Please check it out if you didn't have a chance to watch that really inspiring episode. I wanted to thank you so much for your continued support of the show. Your ratings and reviews go such a long way in helping improve our popularity, but more importantly, bringing more people into the passion strike community

where we can teach them how to create an intentional, purposeful life. Now let's talk about today's episode. Imagine if it were possible to maintain physical fitness, mental sharpness, and overall mental health well into our 80s, 90s, hundreds, and beyond, without experiencing the degeneration and illness commonly associated with normal aging. Recent breakthroughs in longevity science suggest that this is now achievable.

According to my guest, Dr. Mark Heimann, a renowned physician and number one New York Times best-selling author, aging should not be viewed as an inevitable fate, but rather as a condition that can be prevented, slow down and even reversed. Although it's not possible to turn back the clock, it is possible to turn back the biological clock. In other words, aging is not inevitable. In his latest book, Young Forever, the secrets to living your longest, healthiest life, Dr. Heimann presents Cutting Edge Research and Practical Advice on how to expand your health span, thereby adding more happy disease-free years to your life.

In this episode of PassionStruck, you will discover why our bodies deteriorate and how to reverse the process. The crucial difference between chronological and biological aging, how to become three years younger in just eight weeks. The most effective intervention to extend your life and prevent chronic disease. The implication of new scientific discoveries for your lifespan, moreover, you'll learn that you don't need to be extremely wealthy, or have access to advanced medical facilities to reap the benefits. Dr. Heiman provides

free accessible and simple ways that you can start reversing the aging process naturally, beginning today. Dr. Heiman is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of functional medicine. He is the director and founder of the Ultra Wellness Center, senior advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center of Functional Medicine, a 14-time New York Times best-selling author, and board president for clinical affairs, the Institute for Functional Medicine. He is a host of one of the leading podcasts, The Doctors' Pharmacy, and a regular contributor to many different TV shows,

including CBS this morning. Today, Good Morning America, The View, and CNN. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your hosting guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am absolutely thrilled and humbled to have Dr. Mark Heimann, one of my all-time favorite authors on the show today. Welcome, Mark. Oh, it's good to see you. It's so great to be here.

Well, and we're here to discuss, and I'm putting it up here, your incredible new book, Young Forever. Congratulations on its upcoming release. Well, thanks John, I appreciate it. Well, I'm going to start off with a question about Antarctica. I understand you took a trip there last year to visit what's really happening to our environment as a result of climate change and how it's affecting our whole body health from impacting chronic disease to mental health. And I was hoping you could shed some light on what you found. Well, absolutely.

I know it's an extraordinary place and it's sort of the place where you see this sort of coming apart of our planetary ecosystem with enormous losses of ice shelves. And it's just accelerating faster than we could ever imagine and we're seeing populations of animals decreasing. And it's tell-tale sign of a lot of things that are going on wrong in our environment.

But the truth is that our environment as a whole is driving so much of our health crises, environmental toxins, how we farm and grow food, which is a huge contributor to climate change. The increasing instability in terms of farming is driving so many issues. We're seeing, for example, with our oil-based economy around agriculture with the worn Ukraine

and the increasing oil prices, leading to the increasing food prices, leading to increasing starvation and hunger around the world, because people can't afford to eat anymore, particularly in developing countries. And we're seeing climate refugees, increasing, we're seeing heat deaths and all kinds of stuff happening as a result of the change in our climate.

So it's a big concern, a long term. I think for most people, it doesn't feel as immediate, but it is definitely having any impact on us, even just the stress of thinking about what's happening and the world we're living in, a big enough factor in terms of determining our health outcomes. Yes, I brought Seth Godin on the podcast so that he could discuss the book he worked on the carbon almond act. And one of the things he brought up was the Doomsday Glacier. And I just happened to read an article today on CNN that scientists are seeing it melting

at a faster rate than they expected. So there really are some huge repercussions, which is why I wanted to bring this topic up here first so we can continue to bring this topic up here first, so we can continue to bring awareness to it. Absolutely. Well, speaking of Antarctica, last year, we both interviewed a common friend of ours, Colinoper AD, who was the first to transverse Antarctica, the audiences and aware of him, pulling amazingly 300 pounds sled.

I think it was 54 days and over a 900 miles. Can you talk about the nutritional action plan he used for mitochondria fuel during that challenge? Yeah, very scientific about it. And he's a very smart guy. And he basically designed a program that was extremely high in fat and protein as a fuel rather than carbs and sugar,

perfuming his adventurer across Antarctica. And he was still in a calorie deficit because the amount of exercise he was doing every day, but he was able to maintain his general health and be able to get across and basically be the first guy to do a solo crossing in Antarctica and support it. And I think that was because he had designed his nutrition so well to optimize his metabolic function and his mitochondria, which by the way, run a lot on fat. So I think that's a key part of our long-javiti strategy, which is keeping our mitochondria healthy. And he certainly was very smart about how he did that.

Yes, well, I'm gonna jump to the book. You open up the book by talking about our why and the importance of our why or what the Japanese call ikigai or the reason for being. How does our why relate to our ability to live a longer, more fulfilling life? The research is really remarkable about this. We think we eradicated heart disease and cancer

from the face of the planet. We'd see a five to seven year life extension globally. If you have meaning and purpose in your life, you have a seven year life extension. It's that powerful. So I think most of us underestimate the power of finding what matters in our life to follow our dreams, our passions, what we care about,

to align our life with who we are and what we want and making that an integral part of our life journey. And I think that's important. It doesn't have to be some huge, great thing. It can be simply wanting to be a good part of your family member and bringing your family into cohesion and connection or could be just being a good member of your community and being a good citizen. It could be a lot of different things, but it doesn't be discovering the cure for cancer or something like that. It could be something much more modest,

but it is belonging. It's feeling connected. When in Sardinia and in Carrier where I went in the Blue Zones, it had a deep sense of connection and meaning and purpose. And they knew why they were there. They knew what they were doing. They were part of their community. They were helping to grow the food and to be part of the fabric of what it was to have a community. And that just sense of belonging and meaning and purpose, the huge factor in longevity. Yeah, maybe in case the audience isn't

familiar with a blue zone, you could describe what they are. Well, blue zones were basically places on the map where people lived to be very old. And so the scientists who are studying it had a blue marker and you basically circled them in blue, which is what they call them, tells them blue sounds. But they didn't do anything. They basically are places where people live a long time and they tried to identify the characteristics, the traits, the things that they had in common.

So we could learn from them and apply those lessons to our life. What they ate, how they moved, their social relationships, stress, sleep, all these things that are really important. They were a number of different factors that they had in common. And a lot of it had to do with living close to nature, eating real food, moving their bodies naturally, having deep social connection and having meaning and purpose. And actually not having a huge amount

of chronic stress, which we all do. And they weren't, again, you had a meaning and purpose, but they weren't like just solving giant problems or curing crazy diseases and putting a man on the moon. They were just living their lives, but it was with a sense of meaning and purpose. Well, as we get further into this, longevity is a topic that I love. And I regularly do the inside tracker testing myself and I'm always trying to find ways

that I can reduce my own biological age. And we're gonna get into today the difference between that and chronological age. But before we do, I interviewed our mutual friend, Dr. Kira Fitzgerald, who has a great book that came out last year called Younger You. And in it, she cites as you do that according to the World Health Organization,

we spend about 20% of our life in gradual decline with increased illness and chronic disease. But what's interesting is you refer to that as abnormal. Why do you think that's abnormal as opposed to what most people think is how we should live normally? Well, Jen, I was in Sardinia, for example, and I saw this guy, Pietro, who was 95 years old, bolt upright, booming voice, clear eyes, who was a shepherd most of his life, he literally just retired, hiking up and down, rugged terrain of Sardinia five miles a day. And that, to me, was normal aging. He was vital, engaged alive, still hanging out with his friends and being a part of his community. That's what we should see.

What we typically see is people who are declining, we're frail, disabled, decrepit, dysfunctional and end up with diseases and early death. And that's not normal. That is a sign of abnormal aging. And what we now understood from the longevity researchers and scientists is that aging as we typically see it is a disease. Not getting older, getting older just happens when you live a long time, but actually the process of decline and decrepitude is the process of disease in the body that can be identified, can be measured and can be treated and can be reversed. And that's the whole thesis of my book,

young forever, is that we now know scientifically the tools and the ways to pull the levers on your biology to both extend your health span and your lifespan to basically make most of your life healthy. And then maybe even all of it and then just drop off at the end a quick sudden exit, which I think is how most like to go. Well, I think the audience is probably familiar with health span and lifespan, but maybe you can talk about how they're complimentary and why you want your health span to be extended along with your lifespan, which seems like it's obvious, but now who is is? Well, this idea came with a scientist James Freezeries from Stanford who in the 80s he published

a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine talking about the compression of morbidity. And it's a big medical mouthful. But essentially what he found was that people who exercised, who saved their ideal body weight and who didn't smoke just three simple characteristics predicted that they were going to live long and healthy lives and not have a lot of disease and then kind of fall off the cliff and just die like we said. Whereas people who didn't fall those three simple principles of living a healthy life who didn't were not their idea of body weight, who smoked and denectorized had long slow

painful expensive deaths. And so their health span was far shorter than their lifespan. The number of years they were healthy might let's say be 60 or 50. And the number of years are sick might be 30 years. So maybe you looked at be 80, but the last 30 years you have a chronic disease like high blood pressure or heart disease or diabetes or worse. And so we now know that's not inevitable. And that we can actually not only increase the value to an individual human being, but we can till she was 101 and I remember as she was getting older just amazed at the activity she was doing and I think some of them were extremely important.

She was gardening almost to the day she died. I remember she was cutting her own yard until she was in her late 80s, early 90s, but she loved to play bridge and back amin and other things, which I think spurred her cognitive muscles. And she truly was happy and healthy and sharp as a whip until the day she died. So I think that's how we all would want to live. Totally, absolutely. Well, I'm a military veteran and experience some combat injuries and trauma from my time there. And as I was being treated, the things that I were facing was I was being treated in silos or by protocols, and I wasn't getting any better.

And it wasn't until I saw a functional medicine doctor who started treating me as a system instead of in silos that my conditions started to improve. And you're one of the pioneers in this space. And I have to tell you a personal hero of mine for what you're doing. Thank you. Can you describe for the audience in case they're not aware

what functional medicine is and why it's bringing a revolutionary approach to longevity science. Yeah, thank you for asking that question. Well, most people are aware of what we typically have, which is dysfunctional medicine. You go to the doctor, you're sort of siphoned off to different specialists, depending on which part

of the body is affected, and nobody's talking to each other. And basically, their children is trying to suppress your symptoms with various medication, which generally doesn't work that well. And so we're all kind of limping by. And the truth is, we spend more than double any other nation and we're sicker than ever. And it's because we're not really dealing with the root causes of disease.

And functional medicine is an approach of thinking about disease is quite different. It's based on the body as a system, not treating the symptoms only, but just getting through the cause of the symptoms, and understanding the why. Why is this going on as opposed to what disease to have and what drug do I give? And that's really a powerful model

for creating a healthy ecosystem in the body, rather than treating the bodies as a bunch of separate parts. With longevity science, what's really exciting is that the advances that are coming outside the world of functional medicine are pointing to the things that we've known in functional medicine for decades. And they're finding, for example, that underlying all diseases of aging are these things called the hallmarks of aging, which are disturbances in certain functional systems in the body that tend to get worse as we get older, that explain all the diseases.

So for example, if you cured all the age related diseases, you might not see that greater life extension. But if you were to fix the hallmarks of aging, you could see a 30 or 40 year life extension. That means living to 120. And so those are the things that really are underlying cancer and heart disease and diabetes and dementia and arthritis and all the things that we see.

They're not normal processes. These are abnormal things that happen as we get older that we can do something about. So the functional medicine and longevity science are really starting to kind of match up in terms of their frameworks. Yeah, so I'm going to ask you about the hallmarks of aging here in a second. In the book, one of the approach that you take with functional medicine is the first thing that you look at is the root causes of aging. Why is that the lens through which your approach and your patients? I mean, because it's better than any other lens out there. I mean, the idea that we should be just treating symptoms and diseases with medication, it just doesn't make sense, given what we now know about biology.

And most medicine is pretty much outdated, I would say. There's certainly value in medications and surgery and a lot of the medical practices and helping people. But it kind of misses the very fundamental issue, which is that the things that we're struggling with as a society, the chronic diseases that affect six out of 10 of us that affect over 85% of people over 65 and we have one or more of these diseases are simply the result of imbalances that if we treated we could literally reverse these problems and not just treat them or manage them But literally worst diabetes and heart disease and dementia and I've seen this over to where my practice So by applying the science of functional medicine by laying on these sort of insights of longevity medicine and the hallmarks of aging, we can really start to create a roadmap for people and that's what my book young forever is it's a roadmap. Very practical, very doable for people.

Most of the stuff is free are coming down the pike. But I think for most of us, it's really a set of simple practices that can turn all in these longevity switches and reverse our biological age. Okay, and I think that's an important terminology for us to get down. And that is, what is the difference between chronological age and biological age? And how can biological age, as you just talked about work in reverse. I'm 63, I'm as born in 1959, I can't change that, I'm chronologically getting older every minute, but I am biologically 43. When I measured my biological age through a technique that's only recently available called DNA methylation, which measures our epigenome is basically the

master control system for our genes. That can be modified. We can't change our genes, but we can change how our genes are controlled or regulated. And we can literally reverse our biological age by affecting our epigenome through our lifestyle, through diet, exercise, just management, sleep,

various nutraceutical supplements, sometimes medications, various other therapies, like hormesis that I talked about in the book. So we can change our biological age at any time no matter how old you are. And in one study by Carifix Gerald and her group, they were able to take a group of people and give them a very aggressive functional medicine intervention, meaning a very optimized diet, not just the Mediterranean diet, but a diet super high in phytochemicals, it's high in all the right stuff, very low sugar and starch, it has all the right stuff in it. In eight weeks, simply eight weeks of following this program, they were able to reverse

the biological age of the participants by three years. That's just staggering to me. When you think about what if you did it for a year? It's all young, would you? Yeah. But that's the power of this approach, which is that actually we can change our biological age, that we are not destined to get older younger on the inside. So I'm 43, I'm going to maybe go for 25, I'll see how it goes, I'll keep you updated. Yeah, I'm not doing as well as you are and I have asked Kera about the differences between the testing she does and testing I get done with inside tracker. But that's a very different methodology for sure. Yes, but I've been able to do it in methodology, but the DNA methylation has a much more direct measurement.

Yes, I need to get that done. According to inside tracker, I've taken over a decade, but I'd like to improve even on that. So one of the things that Dr. Kareffit-Sgeril talks about a lot, that you just brought up is DNA methylation, but she also talks a lot about epigenetics. And I was hoping for the audience, you could describe what epigenetics are and what are some things that could damage the epigenome and throw off genetic expression.

Well, basically your genes, as I said, are fixed. You might have 20,000 genes, but you probably are influencing those genes in ways that make them turn on things that we don't want to turn on, like inflammation or oxidative stress, or more likely to cause DNA damage. So when you think about how your genes are controlled, there's this control mechanism, and it's called the epigenum, which means it sort of sits above your genes. And think about your genes like the keyboard on a piano. There's 88 keys, but any different kind of music can be played on there

from ragtime to jazz, to classical, to reggae, whatever you want, rock. That's because of the piano player. Well, the epigenome is the piano player, And it controls which genes are turned on or off, which are regulated by everything that you do in your life, by every bite of food you have, by how you move your body, by your thoughts and feelings, by your social connections, by your exposure to environmental toxins,

by your microbiome, by your nutritional status, all these things regulate your epigenome, and we can change those epigenetic marks on our DNA that read our genes. So at any age, we can change the epigenetic expression through what we call the expose on. The expose is to some total of all the things that were exposed to in our life. And that's modifiable, and that's the good news.

We can't change our genes, they're fixed unless we do gene editing, but we can change our gene expression. And the biological aging phenomena is really a disordered gene expression. And that's the key to understanding the biological age and to influencing it through regulating all of the kind of doorways or the pathways we have to get to it. Yeah, and I think a lot of times people here are focusing on the diet, focusing on getting better sleep, but the one I don't think we spend enough time on is the environment that we live in and what that environment is doing to us. And I was hoping maybe you could

just give a couple more examples of that because I know recently there's been a lot of talk about taking gas stoves out of the house because of the environmental effects it has, but it really comes down to the cologne you put on your body, the creams you use, the air we breathe, everything. Yeah, I mean, the expose almost everything, right? And I said, it's your everybody to food, it's your thoughts, it's how you move your body, it's sleep, stress, but it's also things that we might not have total control over. And what's going on with the chemicals on our environment?

What are we exposed to? When you go to gas station, you get a credit card receipt. What's on that? It's BPA, which impairs your metabolism and causes it in some resistance and may cause cancer. So like we're constantly exposed to stuff. The mercury, their fish that lead it's often in our environment from the soil, from when we had let it gas and cold burning in this country and that led to

contamination of plants that were're eating or whatever. So I've been able to hear all our chocolates got let in it. Yeah, because the soil is contaminated. So I think we're constantly exposed to things. Women are using skincare products, ellipsic and have let in it. Many of the sunblocks have parabins, which are not healthy for us. So we're constantly exposed to environmental toxins that are washing over us. And there's a lot of things we can do to reduce the exposures, and I'm on the board of the environmental working group, and we have

many guides on how to reduce exposure from your food, from your skin care products, your household products. So it can be very helpful. Okay, well, I'm going to go back to the hallmarks of aging that you talked about earlier, and you lay out 10 of them in the book. I was hoping you could cover some of them with us, but more importantly, what the most important hallmark is. Well, first of all, the hallmarks are 10 of them, and there were nine that were characterized by scientists. I added one, and some people are coming along, which is the microbiome, because it plays such a role in aging and inflammation and in regulation of so many things. But there are things you might have heard about. One of them

has to do with nutrition, how our bodies regulate its relationship to what we're eating and food. This is the nutrient-sensing pathways that go wrong. There's inflammation, which we've heard about. There's mitochondrial changes. That's our energy factory that decline in our energy. We've seen damaged proteins. We see DNA damage. We see epigenetic changes. we see short and telomeres, we see certain cells called zombie cells form which don't die and cause inflammation throughout the body. We see a lot of these very processes that tend to go wrong as we get older. Now, the most important one in my view is the nutrient sensing pathways because it impacts all the others. So your relationship with food is bad and you're eating the wrong stuff

that eating the right stuff and you're not eating the right timing of the day, for example, you're going to be accelerating all these other hallmarks. You're causing more protein damage, more DNA damage, more epigenetic changes, more shortening of your telomeres, more zombie cells, more problems with your microbiome, more inflammation, more mitochondrial damage, all as a consequence of eating the wrong food. So when we eat too much starch and sugar, we screw up all of our nutrient sensing pathways, we accelerate all the age related diseases, and we create a habit throughout the body. On the other hand, if we eat properly,

which is low in starch and sugar, lots of phytochemicals, good fats, the right kind of protein at the right time. We're going to properly regulate these longevity switches that are part of the nutrient sensing pathways. And there's basically four longevity switches that are in these pathways. You might have heard about one is called insulin signaling. So we've known about diabetes and it's so much insulin. It can cause a problem if you have type 2 diabetes or pre-divities, M-tore, which regulates protein and synthesis and has important functions to develop muscle, but also needs

to be inhibited at times to allow the body to clean up and repair, AMPK, which also is involved in regulating glucose metabolism and certain ones which are very important in DNA repair and activating anti-inflammatory pathways. These are all the sort of longevity pathways. So if we increase the quality of our diet, if we cut out the starch and sugar, if we have the right kinds of protein, not all the time, but at the right times to activate them toward a bill muscle,

if we have the right phytochemicals, if we do certain things that actually activate them, even not through food, like, for example, hormisis, like guys or heat therapy or ferro different phytochemicals all will activate many of these longevity switches. So it's kind of an exciting area because we have the most influence over what we eat and that's one of the biggest things you can do every day to regulate your long-term health and vitality.

Well, I have just a larger philosophical question and that is, do you think if we can address the upstream cause of these chronic conditions, we can cure them all at once? Well, that's the theory. I mean, you talked about longevity researchers and the scientists, they're basically talking about this information theory of aging, that's what David Sinclair talks about. And then what goes wrong is really not these diseases showing up. It's these hallmarks that go wrong. And so a lot of the interventions are around how do we modify

the hallmarks, which is good, but it doesn't go far enough. Functional medicine asks why are the hallmarks dysregulated and how do we fix that? And in the book, I have a whole section called dying of too much or dying of too little. So there's other too much of something that causes the hallmarks to go wrong or not enough of stuff that we need to make them work properly. And so that's the key, is taking out the bad stuff, putting in the good stuff in the body, it has its own innate healing system that will be activated and work beautifully to repair itself. You just brought up Dr. David Sinclair and it's hard to discuss the so-called out-and-of-youth and not talk about Dr. Sinclair. And he talks about many things from intermittent fasting to taking Resvera Troll,

which I'll just show right here, Metformin and M&N. I know he's been on your show and he even endorsed your book. What is Metformin as a potential fountain of youth and is it something that we should be actively considering using or something we should be cautious about? Yeah, so Metformin, the latest hottest craze, and I'm just looking for the quick fix

longevity prescription. And a lot of people are taking a lot of doctors up, prescribing it. I'm very cautious about it. And here's why it does regulate one of these key longevity switches that I talked about, AMPK, and it does so in a positive way. However, the question is compared to what? And in one of the studies that I quote in the book that I think is really important when considering

whether to use this or not, is a diabetes prevention trial. This was over 1,000 people. They randomized them to either nothing, midformin or lifestyle interventions. And a lifestyle intervention that they had was not even a very good one at the time. It was using a low fat diet for prediabetic, which is the absolute opposite of what you do now, which is a low carbohydrate, low starch, higher fat diet.

So high fat, low carb is really what we should have been prescribing, but they did a low fat, high carb diet. And even though they didn't have the optimal diet, the midformin performed very poorly compared to lifestyle. The midformin showed a 31% reduction in the progression of diabetes and the lifestyle showed a 58% reduction. Now, if you do the optimized lifestyle, given what I would say we know now, you might see not double the benefit, but maybe triple or 10 times the benefit of an informant. And the midformin comes with certain side effects. It's a mitochondrial effects. I don't like which are really important for healthy mitochondria

as you get older. It also may cause a lot of side effects like nausea and stomach issues, a fexion microbio-medversely. So I'm not a big fan of it yet. There's a large trog going on called the tame trial targeting aging with midformant that's coming out in the next few years. That'll give us more information. But again, it's compared to what? So compared to nothing, maybe, but compared to an optimized lifestyle, I don't think it holds a candle. Okay, and let's just tackle the other two.

It was very tall. It was studied with the Davidson Claire and Lenny Gorkay at MIT, with yeast and mice. And they basically found that it actually was an incredible compound in activating Surtun's, another one Another one is long you have any pathways. You have to give enormous doses and it may not be as effective as some other things like NMN, which is our NAD, which is a natural thing that binds to it. So I think it has some promise, but I don't think it's one of those blockbuster things and I think it can be part of a combination of things you do, but I do think that NMN and its derivatives, NAD, the downstream byproduct, NAD can be helpful. Okay, and the last thing I wanted to touch on

is intermittent fasting. And you probably know Dr. Dom, dog, Estina. Yes, who does a lot in the keto world, but he is also big in intermittent fasting. I intermittent fast almost every single day. And in a discussion with him, he was telling me I do it too much. What are your thoughts on intermittent fasting? Well, it depends on your body type or age or other underlying health issues, but what most people mean when they say intermittent fasting is time restricted eating, which means you should give yourself a break from eating between dinner and breakfast. It's a good idea.

between dinner and breakfast. It's a good idea. Most was eat all night and then wake up and eat that idea. Most was eat the wrong things in the morning, which is mostly carbs and sugar, whether it's our sugar-dried coffee, or whether it's muffin, a bagel, cereal, the worst thing you possibly do. So ideally, you want to give yourself a break from eating between dinner and breakfast. Ideally, 12 hours minimum, even 14 to 16 hours can be helpful. Intermittent fasting typically means 24 hours, it's a week or three days once a month or a week once a quarter. There's lots of ways to do that, but what most people refer to as intermittent fasting

is time restricted eating. Okay, yeah, I tend to do 16 hours a day. And people ask me all the time, don't you get hungry? And I'm like, after why, you just get used to it. And then I try to eat within an eight hour period after that, closer to that if I can. Well, one of the people I had on the show was Dr. Cynthia Lee, who I think you also know.

Yeah. And she provided me this great analogy of functional medicine that has stuck with me. And that's the analogy of a tree. And that most of modern medicine is treating the leaves or the branches, but they're not treating the actual tree. When I spoke to her last, a lot of what she talked to me about was Higong, but more importantly,

balance in keeping our systems regulated. And you touch on this in chapter five and six. Can you discuss this importance of balancing our seven core biological systems? Yeah, so I think what's really important is that in the body, not organized according to medical specialties, it's not organized according to your heart, your lungs, or your brain, or your endocrine system, or your digestive system, it's organized in a very different way. That is now being reflected in lung-jebodies science

as scientists are looking at these hallmarks of aging. Functional medicine has basically distilled the science of systems biology into a clinical applicable model, which allows us to, with patients in real time, apply this model by looking at their seven core biological systems and what's in balance or out of balance. So when I look at the field of longevity science, I look at it through the lens of functional medicine

and see that a lot of the things that go wrong are problems with these seven systems, right? Our gut and our microbiome, our immune system, our mitochondria. These are all functional medicine systems. These are all part of the hallmarks of aging, detoxification, which plays a role in toxins with many of these hallmarks. Our transport and circulation system, our communication systems, our neurotransmitters, our hormones, and our ability regulator and nutrition, our structural system, our biomechanical system. These seven systems are so key in regulating everything

that goes on in our body. So my work, basically, is to find out what's causing imbalance in each of these systems. What do I need to get rid of? What do I need to add in to make them work better? that everything that goes on in our body. So my work basically is to find out what's causing imbalance in each of these systems. What do I need to get rid of? What do I need to add in to make them work better? And that's really, yeah. And that's what the book describes in very clear detail.

How do you know where you're out of balance? How do you know which system is out of balance? And how do you optimize each system through the process of using lifestyle and other interventions to actually make things work better? Okay. I'm going to say audience good opportunity to read Mark's book and learn so much more about that. And speaking of books, Tony Robbins came out with a great one last year. I'm still trying to plow

through it. Last year I listened to you interview him about his use of stem cells to unlock his own fountain of youth. And I wanted to ask you, where do you see this technology going? And when can you foresee the price point reaching a point that it's available to more of us? Well, everybody has an iPhone or some phone, right? You know, you think about the super computer in your pocket. It's more powerful than all the technology that sent a man to the moon for the first time, right? So that was billions of dollars, and now it's a couple of hundred bucks. And I think we're going to see the prices come down over time. Right now it's still very experimental. It's very much only for the elite. But I do think that

stem cells, exosomes, peptides, things like plasmix, change, ozone, these are therapies that are really starting to prove their metal when it comes to understanding how to activate the body's own system. They're more in the realm of regenerative therapies. They're not drugs. They're using the body's own repair system. So for example, stem cells in your body, when you cut yourself, you don't go, oh, gee, I better call the doctor. So he can tell me what to do to heal my skin. It just does it, right? I mean, that is going on not only outside on the inside too. And stem cells are a big part of that.

So I think they're going to be very helpful for many conditions. I think they're going to be important part of medicine. Right now, they're a little bit out of reach. But I do think that a lot of these other therapies like exosomes may be cheaper and is effective peptide therapy again is something that can be very effective. So a lot of things we can do to optimize our health. But don't forget that 80% or more is basically lifestyle.

And then you add in a few supplements, you maybe get to 85, 90, and then the 10% of the extra stuff is sort of where the leading edge is. And we're going to see those prices come down and the signs get better. Yeah, another topic that's all the rage today is a new tropics. And I was wondering if you had a point of view on them. Yes, coffee is a new topic. It just means what is something that helps your cognitive function, right? So it can be everything from herbs, like certain supplements, can be coffee,

but there's a lot of compounds that help your cognitive function improve the acetam family. And so forth. So I'm not opposed to them. I think they can be very helpful. Certain drugs like provigial, new vigile are out there that help people with cognitive function. I don't think those are ideally used for basic therapy for most people, but it's important to understand how do you improve your cognitive function. So one of the best new tropics is cold therapy. You want to jump in an ice cold bath that'll wake you up. That'll get your neurotransmitters kicking in. That'll increase your dopamine and it works probably better than anything else. I mean, honestly, if I'm doing a little sl just going to be doing a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little

bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of natural ones that are using part of it as you said caffeine, but also some plant-based abstracts. And it really does give you that incredible boost. I just didn't know the

long-term potential negative health consequences from using them. So I've gotten into it gingerly. I did want to ask you in the book you talk about the natural killer cell. And I was hoping you could talk about what that is and why as we age does it decline and can we all that? Well, as we age typically our immune systems don't work as well. Right? Why do we see more people who are older dying of COVID because our immune systems can't fight the infections as well? And there's something called antagonistic pleotropy. We want a strong immune system when we're young to fight infections, but we don't, as we get older, things kind of may not be as adaptable to get more cancer and more infections. The natural killer cells are part of our immune system that fights infections and cancer,

just that they're like the special forces of our immune system. And we want to activate them. And there are ways to do that naturally, but there's also through herbal therapies, like astragalists and other things, but there's also natural killer cell infusions that are being researched as parts of potential longevity intervention. So those are down the road, but I just wanted to include some of the things that I think are the most exciting on the horizon for longevity. Okay. And one of the things I wanted to expose the audience to was the type of testing that you do in the forever young program. Well, I started a company called Function Health with a colleague and friend of mine to provide people a very low cost option to get over 100 biomarkers. That it normally costs $15,000 for $500. It maps out everything that you need to know about your biology from your hormones.

It maps out everything that you need to know about your biology from your hormones to your metabolic health your cardiovascular health your kidneys liver thyroid all things that matter your nutritional status inflammation levels and it gives you incredible road map to figure out where you are and what your biomarkers are because you can think I'm healthy but you got to look under the hood, right? Your car could be in a flash like you might not know until you sort of look under the hood. And so this is really something we all need to do and take ownership over our health. And for a very low price compared to what it actually costs, you can get these biomarkers, you can find out what they mean, how to act on them, how to improve your health using them and track them over time. And you don't have to do it with a doctor

because most doctors are not going to be familiar with these tests or not going to be ordering them. They to do it with a doctor because most doctors are not gonna be familiar with these tests or not gonna be ordering them. You might think it's a waste or your insurance company won't pay for them. But now there's a way for people to get them on their own and be to see how they're on health. So I've included what that young forever longevity panel is in the book and it's all detailed in there

what you get and what it means. And then whether a test you might wanna do as well. Yeah, and if you get this test done, how many vials of blood does it normally take. And if you get this test done, how many vials of blood does it normally take? And I only asked this because I did go to my primary care physician, a number of years back, and I asked him to run this huge battery of tests. I go to Quest and they take 18 vials of

blood. Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot. Now, you have a lot of blood. So just to be clear, you can give blood for blood donation. They take a liter of blood, right? It's a lot of blood when you think about it, right? That's basic Lord cups of blood. So when they take a blood sample, they might just take half a cup of blood, which sounds like a lot, but it's really not that much blood.

I mean, it's divided into little tubes, which are anywhere from two to five CCs, but you add it all up and if it's 250 CCs, that's 50 miles of blood. You're not gonna go trick in a trouble by just doing that. In fact, it may be stimulating for you in a good way to make your bone marrow get back into gear and make some blood cells.

Okay. Well, I was hoping you could describe the core components of the forever young diet. Well, the food is really important. I think we need to understand that food is the biggest regulator of our biology in real time. It's not just energy or calories, it's information, it's instructions, it's code.

And so the quality of the food we eat matters. So above all, focus on quality, get rid of all ultra-process food, sugar and starch. If you wanna die soon and get all the disease of aging, then eat lots of sugar and starch, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, all caused by sugar and starch. When I mean starch, I mean flour,

any flour products, mean bread, all that stuff, that's deadly. Eat lots of phytochemicals. So all the colorful plant foods, all those compounds are really important for activating many of these longevity pathways and providing waste or regulate inflammation and mitochondrial function in many more. Next, you want to make sure you have good fats, lots of avocados, olive oil, nuts and seeds that you body is made up of a lot of fat and you need good fats.

It's not going to make you gain weight in the absence of starch and sugar. And then protein is the big question mark for a lot of people. Should I be vegan? Should I eat lots of meat? What's the truth? How do I figure it out? I don't know. People are confused. So the bottom line is we need high quality protein, particularly more as we get older in order to synthesize the muscle. Because when we, any of you, we lose muscle and when we lose muscle, we lose function. And we get poor metabolism and our blood sugar control gets worse and our cholesterol gets worse. We get more inflammation or sex hormones go down or cortisol stress hormone goes up.

Our growth hormone goes down, which is important for healing and repair. So pretty much as we lose muscle, everything goes to hell and ham basket. So building muscle is important through strain training, but also through eating the right amount of protein. And we need about 30 to 40 grams on a fastest state in the morning. So after you dinner, don't eat for 12 to 14 hours and then have a good load of protein in the morning, particularly in the form of the goat way. I like that's my favorite or way protein. You can use plant proteins that are jacked up, but they have to add adid amino acids. So you have to add enough amino acids to get the losing content to 2.5 grams. Otherwise, you're not building

muscle at all. You're just using that protein as energy, which is not great. So I think you also need to make sure you're getting proteins throughout the day. And the average person needs far more than they think. The minimum requirement is 0.8 per kilo, 0.8 grams per kilo.

That's if you're preventing starvation, deficiency diseases. This is not the amount needed for optimal health. And people get confused, oh, I can get 0y, ran through kill. Yeah, you can, but it's actually important to get probably double that if you want to build muscle, particularly as you get older. Because when you get older, you end up having resistance to building muscle and you need more protein and more high quality protein. And plant proteins just don't cut it. Okay. And I've listened to a lot of your podcast episodes

and the other day I happened to watch an older video of yours that aired just before you were about ready to get a procedure done and you were having to sit in bed for it, but during that interview, and I'm bringing this up for the audience, you talked about that you reached a point where you had written 20 books, you were going full tilt and you reached a point where you had written 20 books.

You were going full tilt and you reached this point where stress was leading you to burn out. And I think people sit here and they hear you talk and they're like, this is Dr. Mark Heimann, he's Superman. And I just wanted to ask you about this because I have reached the point of burn out in my life. You have as well. What is your advice to the audience about someone who might be experiencing components of it and what they should do about it? Well, burnout's real, and I have had various health issues and have had to learn from those about how to reconstruct my own health, which is what gives me a lot of insight

into how the body works and longevity. But I think we have to realize that we're biological organisms. We have certain biological needs. We need to eat, we need to sleep, we need to move, we need to relax. I mean, it's just built into us. So we can try to deny it, we can try to push, we can go beyond our physical limits. But most of us really need to pay attention to what it means to have a human body and to take care of it. I think most of us have no clue how to do that. Most of us never got the instruction manual when we were born.

And so young forever, my book is really an instruction manual for your body, how it works, how to work with it rather than against it, and how to activate all these healing and longevity pathways that will reverse disease and make you feel better and live longer. Okay. I wanted to jump to part three of the book. And a year ago to the day that this episode is going to air, I was in Houston with about 40 or 50 other veterans doing the David Goggins 4 by 4 by 48 challenge on behalf of Prometherapies for veterans. And while I was there, we had that organization and Heroa Carts project, as well as the War Angels Foundation,

who were all exploring how the promise of MDMA, SIDLE of Sibon and ketamine are assisting this. And it's something that you write about in the book as well. Can you discuss them, but also the role that our microbiome plays? Those are two separate questions. One's our mind and one's our gut. And they're not unrelated.

But I think what you're speaking to is something that's really important in the whole field of longevity and health in general, is our mindset is the health of our biggest pharmacy, which is between our ears. And we can literally kill ourselves by our thoughts and we can make ourselves healthy by our thoughts. And many of us are unfortunately in our society been victims of trauma, whether it's big trauma, with a big T,

whether it's rape or incest or abuse, physical emotional abuse or being subject to war, like veterans are, which causes real severe trauma in the nervous system or micro trauma, small trauma with little T, which is maybe being neglected or not loved well by your parents or not seen and recognizes a human being. And many little things that can influence us. And it's important to get your minds at straight because when you do, it has profound impacts on your health and well-being, in terms of turning on all the right things and

your epigenum is a lot of it, how it's modified. And unfortunately in our society, there's not a lot of great tools. There's therapy, which can be helpful for some people, but it's talk therapy. And often it's as somatic as in the body. It's in the nervous system. And so some of the new approaches, like MDMA,

psilocybin, eboga for addiction, and ketamine therapy are being used for all sorts of things from treatment and resistance and depression to PTSD. And it's really quite interesting to see how powerful these things are, how quickly they work, how few side effects they have. And so that's why there's this explosion of research in the psychedelic field with maps, which is the multi-disciplinary association for psychedelic studies. Really important group that's received tens and tens of millions of dollars and is doing

really rigorous research and is going to get these compounds passed through the FDA through the drug approval route and actually being able to be used clinically for a lot of problems that we really can't deal well with. So they really help with the context, the meaning, the purpose, the why we library here. It's quite interesting to see how these compounds work. Now you think you can take an any depressant, you take it for years, this is something you take once, or maybe a couple of times, and has profound long lasting effects. And it does so in part to potentially reorganizing the patterns in your brain that are disorganized and increasing neuroplasticity and neurogenesis and a lot of things that really want to see to actually help prepare the brain not just put a bandit on it.

Yeah, I actually had Dr. David Yaden on the show who's at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness research and what he was telling me is that the efficacy rate on talk therapy is somewhere in the high 20s to low 30s. But what they've been finding in the stage three and stage three clinical trials is that the efficacy for MDMA and silocybin is 60% or higher, which is domestic. Or more 90% in some of these cases I've seen. Well, and you talk about, I've done a lot of the talk therapy and cognitive processing therapy and other modalities. And how many hours of that you have to go through, where she talked about a lot of these

other ones, you do a one, two, or three rounds of treatment, and it has lasting results. Oh, well, I can't get this far into the interview without asking, what does a day in the life of Dr. Mark Hyman look like when it comes to your longevity? Fair enough. Well, I think that every day is a little bit different, but I try to include a lot of different practices that help with my overall well-being and health. So obviously, food is a big part of it. And I think that's a key foundation of my health exercise, certain supplements, certain practices that I do. But for example, an average day of the eye wake up, I'll meditate for 20 minutes to reset my nervous system, or if I don't do it the morning,

I might do the afternoon. I'll do a workout for 20 minutes, usually 30 minutes, high intensity resistance band training, which is strength training. Then I'll take a steam shower, I have a steam at home, jump in my bathtub full of ice, which I like, but maybe not ice in it, but I'll put it on ice cold, which is about 47 degrees. I'll soak in that. So that would be a, we'll call hormesis, a

hormetic stressor that stress my body into healing repair. Then I'll have my healthy aging shake, which I talk about in the book, which essentially is, originally, it's goatway and creatine and adeption mushrooms and some pomegranate extract. And a bunch of things that from the research really helps to optimize my health and well-being and boost my longevity. And then that sort of sets myself foundation for the day. And then when I eat, I generally eat a very plant-rich diet,

lots of phytochemicals, lots of good fats. So I'll make sure I get an approaching throughout the day. And then I try to get a good eight hour sleep every night, wind down at night, get off the blue light at night, do really simple practices. And I have a whole schedule of what I do every day or the things that I like to include. And sometimes all of you have other kind of experimental stuff,

like exosomes or peptides or plasma free cis or fun and stuff, but those are generally not available. The most people, I can get them because I'm a doctor and do fun stuff. Yeah. Well, we've talked about a lot of different things people could do, but if you had to boil it down to three things that people could start with today to increase their longevity and health span, what would they be?

They can be pretty easy. So clean up your diet. That means get rid of all the starch and sugar, older processed food, make sure you're getting an protein throughout the day and do time-insure-cated eating. Second would be resistance training, and also some cardiovascular fitness. And the third would be make sure you focus on building your connections and community relationships because that's a key part of staying healthy as you get older is filling a sense of belonging connection, meaning and purpose. Yeah, I just had Bob Waldinger on who talked about the Harvard study of adult development and relationships as you bring up our key.

Well, Mark, the last question I'd like to ask the guests, especially if they're an author, is if there was one takeaway that you wanted the listener or a reader of the book to take, what would it be? The thing is that we all have within us this incredible innate healing system. And then we have to learn how to get out of the way and put in the things into our body and into our life that actually turn on our wellness built in healing system that can both extend our health span and our lifespan.

Okay, and I know people can reach you many places, but where would be the primary one? You would want them to go too. I mean, they can see my podcast, Dr. Pharmacy, Dr. Mark Heimann on social media. You can learn all about me there. Dr. Heimann is my website. So you want a problem fighting me?

No. Okay, well, Mark, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was truly an honor. And congratulations on your book. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It was truly an honor. And congratulations on your book. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. What an honor and privilege that was to have Dr. Mark Heimann on the Passion Struck Podcast. And I wanted to thank Mark, Dr. Carefidsturial and Little Brown Spark for giving us the honor of having him appear. Links to all things Mark will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.

All the proceeds go to supporting the show. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Videos are on YouTube at passionstruckclips and John R. Miles. You can also find me on LinkedIn or at John R. Miles on Instagram and Twitter. If you wanna know how I book Amazing Guests, lock Dr. Mark common, it's because of my network. Build those relationships before you need them.

Most of the guests you hear on the show actually subscribe to the podcast and contribute ideas for topics. Come join us, you'll be in very smart company. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStrike podcast interview I did with New York Times best selling author, Stephen Kotler, who's an award-winning journalist and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world's leading experts on human performance and we discuss his brand new for them to just successfully aging. Strong legs, it's weird,

but even in terms of cognitive benefits and preserved brain function, strong legs. There's a number of reasons they think that might be the case, but it doesn't change the fact that like, wow, my quadriceps, my amp strings, my calves are gonna determine the quality of second half of my life in a really big way. Remember, we rise by lifting others, so share the show with those that you love.

And if you found today's episode useful, please share it with somebody else who can use the advice that we gave here on today's show. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life, action, Struggle.