The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Become Young At Any Age

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker, HigherDOSE, and Rupa Health. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing episodes from my Longevity Roadmap docu-series. We’ve covered how to optimize hormones, eat intentionally, increase and preserve brain function, and create healthy habits—all to help you live as well as possible for as long as possible.  Today, we’re going to help you bring it all together. Most diseases of aging are starting younger and younger. So whether you’re in your 20s, 40s, 60s, or beyond, it’s never too late to prevent and even reverse the process we’ve come to call aging. Along with my colleagues Dr. Elizabeth Boham and Dr. Todd LePine, we’ll review the key takeaways you can start using right away to optimize your health for your specific phase of life.  To get all of my longevity tips, sign up for my weekly Longevity newsletter at drhyman.com/longevity. This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker, HigherDOSE, and Rupa Health. ​​InsideTracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. Right now they’re offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman. Get your own Infrared Sauna Blanket at HigherDOSE.com today and use my exclusive promo code FARMACY15 at check out to save 15% off, or just go to higherdose.com/hyman to get your 15% off today. Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, and Great Plains. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version):  How to optimize health at every age and stage of life (5:20 / 1:44)  Supporting your gut health as you age (7:43 / 4:08)  The gut microbiome and its impact on cancer risk (12:03 / 8:30)  Diagnostic testing to determine where you are on the aging spectrum (16:13 / 12:40)  Making your body an unwelcome place for cancer growth (26:40 / 22:40)  Assessing thyroid and overall hormone health (29:12 / 24:19)  Assessing memory, cognitive function, and overall brain health (33:27 / 28:34) The importance of identifying your “why” for achieving optimal health and longevity (40:23 / 35:33) 

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Wherever you are in the spectrum of aging, wherever you are in your life, whether you're 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 or 90, there's always something to do. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now something I get more and more excited about every year is personalized medicine. Now when I began practicing functional medicine over 20 years ago, it was clear to me we have to look at how unique each body is. Now, with technology advancing in amazing ways, we can truly take that concept to the next level. Like one of the tools that I recently discovered

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to unlock deeper, more precise insights into your health. With real-time exercise, resting heart rate, and sleep data synced with your InsideTracker plan, you can truly wear your health on your sleeve. My team took InsideTracker for a spin and really loved it. They discovered some important things about their health that led them to stop procrastinating when it comes to certain parts of their health,

like, for example, finally taking a vitamin D supplement after seeing they were deficient, or eating more iron-rich foods due to low ferritin and hemoglobin, and making an effort to embrace stress reduction techniques after seeing high cortisol levels. Now, health is not black and white. Your wellness plan shouldn't be either. If you're curious about getting your own health program dialed in to your unique needs,

I highly recommend checking out InsideTracker. Right now, they're offering my community 20% off at InsideTracker.com forward slash Dr. Hyman. That's I-N-S-I-D-E-T-R-A-C-K-E-R.com slash Dr. Hyman. That's me, Dr. Hyman. And you'll see the discount quote in your cart. You probably heard me talk about how much I love infrared saunas. Well, they've been linked to so many different benefits like better muscle recovery, calming of the nervous system, improved circulation, and even activation of the immune system to support protection and healing. Now, saunas also promote the release of feel-good endorphins that gives you that blissed-out feeling and gives your skin a healthy

glow. I think it's fascinating that so many cultures around the world have some kind of history of sauna use, but I don't think it's a mistake. People have recognized for centuries that heat exposure and sweating have therapeutic effects. And now it's easier than ever to take advantage of that ancient wisdom on a regular basis. I know not everyone has the room on their budget to have their own sauna at home, so I was really excited to learn about the Infrared Sauna Blanket from Higher Dose. It gives you all the benefits of infrared saunas in an easy-to-use portable blanket at a much lower cost than a standalone sauna.

This blanket is really cool. It has a layer of amethyst to deepen the infrared benefits, a tourmaline layer to generate negative ions, and a layer of clay to balance heat and a charcoal layer to bind pollutants as you detox. If you don't have the budget or space for a full-size sauna, this is an amazing and less expensive option to uplevel your wellness routine. Right now, get your own infrared sauna blanket or infrared PMF mat at higherdose.com today and use my exclusive promo code pharmacy15 at checkout to save 15% off. That's higherdose.com and the code is pharmacy15, that's F-A-R-M-A-C-Y 15, or just go to higherdose.com forward slash Hyman to get your 15% off today. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Over the last few weeks, you've been hearing the full length episodes of Dr. Hyman's longevity

docuseries. We talked about heart health, brain health, food as medicine, hormones, and more. Today, Dr. Hyman and his team are breaking down everything you've learned into actionable steps that you can take today to improve your healthspan and your lifespan. To get more tips, sign up for Dr. Hyman's newsletter at drhyman.com slash longevity. Welcome to the final episode of the Longevity Roadmap docuseries. Now, as I mentioned, I've been doing everything in my power to boost my health span and my lifespan and feel energetic, focused, and full of vitality every single day. Now, I want to share everything that I've been doing to stay healthy until the end of my life,

which I hope is a long time from now. In this episode, we're going to break down what I believe to be the most critical components of achieving a healthy long life. And most of this stuff is stuff that you can start today. We know that most diseases of aging are starting younger and younger. We're seeing type 2 diabetes in two-year-olds. So we will not only cover what you need to know when you're 50 or 60, but what you can do when you're 20 or 30 or 40. The seeds you plant today will keep you strong and thriving in the future. It's never too late or too early to start. When somebody comes into my office and they're looking to optimize aging and optimize their

longevity, it really depends on their age group what we really focus on. So when a patient comes to see me and they're in their 20s or 30s, the most important thing we start working on is getting on a good routine, making sure that they're incorporating all of those aspects of self-care into their life and working on getting on a routine for optimal health, making sure they've got a good sleep cycle, making sure they're getting enough sleep, making sure that they're not binge drinking. We know that has a huge impact on health and making sure they're not smoking. Those are the things we really focus on when somebody's in their 20s or 30s. When somebody's in their 40s, we really focus on what they're doing for self-care.

Often in our 40s, our life is crazy busy. We've got kids or our parents that we're taking care of, and we need to make sure we're taking care of ourself. So we'll talk about what are you doing daily for self-care? We know that exercise can be a great source of self-care, but so can yoga, meditation, stress reduction techniques, and making sure they're getting a good healthy diet. In their 50s, we're all focusing on body fat and body composition. Is there too much weight around the midsection? Are we gaining too much body fat? And so we really focus on making sure we're strengthening lean

muscle mass and reversing any signs of insulin resistance. In our 60s, it's all about self-care. You know, are you doing all of those things for self-care every day? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you making the right food choices? Are you eating enough protein? Are you getting your exercise in? Are you doing your strength training to increase your lean muscle mass? And are you doing your meditation and yoga? Are you doing your self-care? And in your 70s and 80s, it's all about movement and exercise. Exercise and movement is one of the best things we can all do every day to improve our health span. And we want to make sure we're getting in that 150 minutes at least of cardiovascular exercise, the at least two days a week of strength training. And as we

get older, strength training is more and more important. And it doesn't always have to be with weights. It can be resistance exercise with your own body weight, as well as a more strenuous yoga practice and Pilates with a reformer. All of those things can help improve your lean muscle mass. So exercise, exercise, exercise. Aside from our muscle, our most neglected organ is our gut. Now, I don't just mean our colon and

our small intestine. I mean the incredible ecosystem that is living in us, the holobiome, this incredible symbiotic relationship between us and our microbes that determine almost everything about our health. Now what happens as we age is that our microbe in our gut degrade. We see a loss of gut function. We see an increase in what we call leaky gut, where the contents of the gut,

which should be staying in the gut, except for food which should get filtered across, start to leak through and activate our immune system, causing inflammation. And it happens for a lot of reasons. One, our crappy diet that's low in fiber and high in processed food because of drugs that we take, like antibiotics and acid blockers. It's because of sometimes natural changes that happen as we age in our gut with our acidity or other factors.

And by focusing on your microbiome throughout your life, and especially as you age, you can regenerate your health. You can reduce inflammation. You can repair a leaky gut. And the best way to do that is by avoiding the gut-busting things, right? Which is what? Processed food, sugar, starch, artificial chemicals, toxins in your diet. Also drugs that are gut-busting drugs. Antibiotics. Acid-blocking drugs, which almost everybody takes, like Pepsid and Protonix and Prilosec and Prevacid and Nexium and the whole category of those drugs that block your acid production and really destroy your microbiome Advil Aleve those are not good for you got over a long time occasionally is fine

Steroids even sex hormones like the pill can mess up your gut so avoiding those as much as possible and then designing a Gut healthy life, which means upgrading your diet to increase the amount of special kinds of fiber called prebiotics. Now what are prebiotics? They're fertilizer for the good bugs in your gut. Right, so you wanna increase those which come from all kinds of incredible plant foods like artichokes,

asparagus, acacia fibers, cognac root, which is a Japanese root that's used in shiitake noodles that you can make pasta with that have no calories and no carbohydrates. These are all great fertilizers for the good bugs in your gut. You can even take plantain and even things like even rice that you can heat and then cool in the fridge becomes a resistant starch that helps fertilize the good bugs in your gut. And then you want to have probiotic foods. Things like sauerkraut and kimchi and tempeh and miso and natto and all these incredible foods. Yogurts that are ideally made from sheep or goat can be great sources of probiotic foods. So you want the good bugs you want to add in,

you want to fertilize them, and you want to get rid of all the stuff that's damaging your gut. So eating the right diet is so critical to cultivating an inner garden, and even including phytochemicals. And this is a big discovery in the last few decades, is that not only do you need these fibers and probiotics, but that things like colorful nutrient-dense compounds in your food that are in the rainbow foods have enormous benefits on your gut. For example, cranberry, green tea, pomegranate, they fertilize these really important microbes in your gut called acromantia. Now, if acromantia levels drop down, you're more likely to get autoimmune disease,

more likely to get diabetes, more likely to get cancer. And all you need to do is feed them the right stuff and they grow and you reduce your risk of all these things. So there's a lot of strategies around keeping your gut healthy, but it is one of the most important things to learn how to do. And yes, there's a lot to do as you age. You have to reduce inflammation. You have to help your mitochondria. You have to help your gut. You have to help your muscle. You have to help your hormones. It's just the way we're designed. I'm just a messenger. I didn't design this thing, but I'm just telling you what you got to do. And the beautiful thing about it is that the principles that we're discussing around food and exercise, lifestyle, supplementation, they work on all of these things.

We know that the gut microbiome has a huge impact on our of these things. We know that the gut microbiome has a huge impact on our risk of cancer. We know that the gut microbiome can create insulin resistance, which causes inflammation. We know that the gut microbiome is really critical for mobilization of toxins, including our own body's estrogen. And there's much more we're going to learn about the microbiome in the future, for sure. But paying attention to the gut microbiome, I think, is really important when you're looking at a comprehensive approach to somebody's cancer risk. One of the things we know that the gut microbiome is involved in is in the elimination of toxins and estrogens in the body. And we know that when

somebody's estrogen level is high, that that can increase their risk of breast cancer, it can increase their risk of uterine cancer, and for men, it can increase their risk of prostate cancer. So we want to really pay attention to how the body is mobilizing and eliminating this estrogen because it can have an impact on somebody's risk. There's a substance called beta-glucuronidase. And beta-glucuronidase is an enzyme that will allow, will unfortunately allow estrogen to get reabsorbed into the body. So glucuronic acid is bound to estrogen in the intestines. And if there's too much beta glucuronidase, that that will get cleaved, and then estrogen can get reabsorbed into the body. And then people can have signs of estrogen dominance. And we know that that estrogen

dominance can be a trigger for growth of breast cancers. It can be a trigger for growth of uterine cancers, it can be a trigger for growth of prostate cancers, and it can also be involved in things like PMS and breast tenderness and irritability, other hormone imbalances. And so we know that when the gut microbiome is out of balance, that's one of the things that can cause this excessive amount of beta-glucuronidase. And we can check for that. We do stool tests all the time that measure level of beta-glucuronidase. And if it's high, then we can use things that can lower it. And we also want to think about the microbiome and what we can do to rebalance it. For example, I had a patient who came to see me, and she had just finished treatment for

breast cancer, and she wanted to do whatever she could to prevent it from coming back. And so we looked at many things in her health. She actually had good levels of insulin sensitivity, which I was really excited about. And she didn't show a lot of inflammation in her body, but she did have some toxins that we needed to work to lower. And she did have this high level of beta-glucuronidase. So what we did is we worked to shift the microbiome using things like good probiotics, using something called calcium deglucurate, which can help lower the amount of estrogen that gets reabsorbed into the body through that when there's high beta-glucuronidase. And we used prebiotics, which can help feed the good probiotics, so a lot of fiber in her

diet. We added in some probiotic supplements and we even added in some phytonutrients to help feed the microbiome. So we focus on things that help improve the growth of the good bugs in the digestive system. We're so excited about all these phytonutrients and how they have this tremendous ability to feed the good bugs in our gut. We know, for example, that sulforaphane, which comes from your broccoli and is really rich in this phytonutrient that's high in a lot of your cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower, cabbage and kale.

Sulforaphane can actually feed the good bugs in your digestive system. So by incorporating more cruciferous vegetables into her daily routine, we helped with feeding all of that good bacteria. We also know that green tea can feed the good bacteria in your gut. And things like pomegranate has ellagic acid, which also feeds the good bacteria in the digestive system. All of these things are important when you're paying attention to somebody's risk of cancer.

So to have a good sense of where you are in the aging process, there's a whole bunch of tests that really help to figure out where you are in that spectrum. Conventional tests and functional medicine tests, which should be really regular tests anyway, but right now they're functional medicine tests. And when you go to your conventional doctor for heart disease,

you need to look at things that are readily available, that your doctor can order, that they might not be used to ordering, but they can really ask for. And the most important one is looking at the quality and type of your cholesterol. This is a test that's not just your typical cholesterol test. It's called NMR or nuclear magnetic resonance testing. You can get it at LabCorp or the cardio IQ test, which you can get at Quest. These are available. They're not expensive. And they're

really important because they tell you about the size of your particles, the number of your particles, the kind of HDL, the kind of triglycerides. Super helpful test. The next test you want to look at is measurements of your blood sugar control, which play a huge role in your risk of heart disease. You want to measure your blood sugar, obviously, and your insulin levels fasting. You want to measure something called hemoglobin A1c, which is your average blood sugar over six weeks. Now, if you really want to get fancy, you can ask for a glucose tolerance test that measures blood sugar and insulin, because insulin will start to go up, maybe not fasting, but it might go up after you have a sugar drink. And that's an early telltale sign that your metabolic health is going downhill. So those are really important. You also want to look at your inflammation level, something called cardio CRP. This is a really

important test to look at the level of inflammation. You want to look at a few other clues that we use, things like LPA or LP little a we call it, which is a genetic marker, but it's determined by the genes, but it also is influenced by your habits. So you can modify that as well. You want to look at your body's clotting and blood thickness, which you can look at through fibrinogen. You also want to look at your indirect measures of how your metabolic health is, like your liver function tests, which tell you, for example, if you have a fatty liver, which affects 90 million Americans, and it's caused mostly by sugar and starch. So it's another clue. These are really important basic tests. And there's another one that I like, which is called homocysteine. And this is a measure of your B12 and folate and B6 status.

It also plays a role in your risk of heart disease. And then there's other tests that are a little more fancy that some doctors can do called F2 isoprostanes or oxidized LDL or ox LDL. These are available in conventional labs and they look at the oxidative stress level or free radicals. So can you tell if your cholesterol is going rancid? These are basic blood tests. And then there's some other tests that are really important that are imaging tests. I encourage people to do an ultrasound of their carotid glands, which is these blood vessels in your neck, and if you do an ultrasound you can see if they've got

plaque developing or they've developed clogged arteries. You can see that. There's also an important test called a calcium score. It's a very high-speed CAT scan, not a lot of radiation that you don't do all the time, but you do once as a screening test and then you can do it maybe every five or 10 years. And it measures the calcium around your heart. Now, calcium is the body's band-aid. It goes where there's inflammation. And you can see if there's a calcium buildup and that gives you a pretty good prediction of your risk of heart disease. There is another factor. That's super important Super high-tech It's called the tape measure

all you have to do is measure around your belly button and Measure around the widest part of your hips and you divide the waist number by the hip number. If your waist is more than 0.8 as a woman or more than 0.9 as a man, if your waist hip ratio is more than that, then you have what we call a lot of belly fat. And that is an indicator of poor metabolic health. So that's a quick screening test that everybody can do at home with a tape measure. So these are the basic things that I look at. There's more fancy tests like the endopat test, which looks at the vascular health.

There's tests of heart rate variability, which you can use your iPhone to measure. Essentially looks at the beat to beat variability in your heart and tells you about your overall heart health because when your beats are too homogenous, if it's 72, 72, 72, 72, that's a sign of lack of resilience and flexibility. You want a lot of flexibility and resilience in your health. So your heart rate should be a little bit more complex and variable. Complexity is health. An ecosystem, a rainforest is incredibly complex and resilient. A cornfield is a monocrop and you get a corn beetle in there, the whole thing's dead.

Not very resilient. So you want a lot of complexity in your health. So those are the kinds of things I look at when I look at cardiovascular health. And I take those as a whole to look at what the issues are and what the pictures are. I also look at some genetic tests. We can look at genetic tests that look at your lipid metabolism, your cholesterol metabolism, what you should be eating and not eating. Tests that look at your likelihood of clotting and whether you should be taking various kinds

of things that help thin your blood like fish oil or natokinase or lumbokinase, which are natural supplements or other things that can help reduce inflammation and clotting in your blood. So those are the kinds of things as a doctor that I can do from a conventional perspective. From a functional medicine perspective, there may be other tests that I want to look at. And I think for the cardiovascular system, it might be looking at more advanced tests to look at inflammation, at whole profiles of inflammatory biomarkers that you can do from various companies that provide these tests. I might look at other things that maybe people aren't thinking about, like absorption and production tests, where you look at the amount of cholesterol your liver is producing

versus the amount of dietary cholesterol you're absorbing, and then I can customize my treatment along that route. I might look at something called TMAO, which is a microbial metabolite from the gut that may increase inflammation and the risk of heart disease that comes from what you're eating, but also can be because your microbiome's not healthy. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

As a busy doctor with multiple jobs, I'm all about tools that make my life simpler. And since testing is something I rely on to help almost all my patients, I was really excited to learn about Rupa Health. Hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, and gut bacteria are just some of the many things I look at to find the most effective path to optimal health for my patients. But that means I'm placing orders through multiple labs, which is an overall pain. And it also makes keeping track of results more difficult for me and my patients and other doctors. Rupa Health has totally changed that. They've made functional medicine testing simpler and more convenient than ever so that practitioners like me can focus on

helping their patients. With Rupa Health, functional medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like Dutch, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. It's 90% faster, letting you simplify the process of getting the functional tests you need and providing a noticeably better patient experience. This is really a very much needed option in the functional medicine space that I'm so excited about. You can check out a free live demo and a Q&A or create an account at rupahealth.com. That's R-U-P-A health.com. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. So low-grade inflammation, which we talked about earlier, which is the inflammation. Every time a person is having a cheeseburger fries and a Coke, you're going to have low-grade metabolic endotoxemia. And if you're doing this on a regular basis, you're basically flooding your body with these gram-negative bacteria and the compounds which are associated with them, which stimulates the immune system. And this is ongoing immune activation. And that is the thing that leads to

cardiovascular disease, leads to diabetes, leads to neurodegenerative conditions. So they're really intimately tied in with the aging process. And again, it's not just fat. It's really related to the amount of fat and the types of fat that is really tied in with You know heart disease. In fact, there's one of the tests that we do is a test called TMAO trimethylamine oxide and this is a newer test and what we found is that this particular compound is strongly associated with heart disease and when we find out is that this TMAO molecule is produced in certain individuals, not all individuals, but certain individuals whose gut microbiome

is unbalanced or dysbiotic. And if you eat certain foods like eggs and red meat, which contain higher levels of carnitine and choline, you'll produce higher levels of this very reactive compound called TMAO. Now, what we know is that for a long time, heart doctors have told us that red meat and eggs are bad for you because they contain cholesterol. Well, that's not necessarily the whole story. In certain individuals with a dysbiotic gut microbiome who then feed them red meat and

eggs and you produce this compound that leads to more systemic inflammation. So it's there's more to it than just cholesterol and just the cholesterol hypothesis. So I look at a whole series of these parameters. I might look at acromancy on your stool test because we know that if your acromancy is low you might have an increased risk of poor cardiometabolic health. And I might want to say, OK, you should have more cranberry or pomegranate or green tea to help grow the acromantia back. So I use a lot of things that seem a little outside the norm. I might also look at heavy metals because we know that mercury and lead and arsenic

are risk factors for poor cardiovascular health outcomes. So I'll look at a lot of things that traditional doctors may not look at, but that are helpful as part of the picture. But in heart disease, the conventional tests often tell you so much that you can get a great picture just from ordinary tests that you can get at any doctor's office. So cancer testing is, at this point in time, pretty much early detection. It's not really true prevention and they're important. A pap test for cervical cancer, prostate exam and PSA test for prostate cancer, a colonoscopy for colon cancer, a

mammogram or breast MRI or aography for breast cancer, and maybe sometimes even a lung scan for lung cancer. The problem with these tests is that by the time you see something growing on an imaging test, it's often been there for a while, and you may catch it in time so that you don't die, which is a good thing, but it really isn't true prevention. So what I'm much more interested around cancer is looking at measuring what we call the biological terrain. Rather than the tumor, I'm looking at the soil in which the tumor grows. And how do I optimize that to make it an inhospitable place. So how do we look at causes of inflammation? How do we

analyze nutritional levels and diet? How do we analyze the load of toxins in the body? How do we look at the gut microbiome in ways that we can optimize that to reduce cancer risk? Because we know the problems of the microbiome cause cancer. How do I look at things like insulin and blood sugar, which are related to heart disease, but also related to cancer? So I look at all these parameters, nutritional status, metabolic status, toxic load, inflammation, and immune function? And how do I optimize those things so that if there are tumors growing, they can't continue to grow? The fact is that every single

one of us, all of you listening and watching, all have cancer right now. I do, you do, we all do. But our body has a surveillance system. It has a system of finding and getting rid of those cancerous cells. And you want to tip the balance in favor of your body doing that by finding out what are those things that are carcinogenic, whether it's sugar or whether it's pesticides or whether it's a low vitamin D level or whether it's bad bugs in your gut. How do you fix all that so that cancer doesn't have a place to grow? You know, hormones are typically not well evaluated by traditional medicine unless things are really bad. So rather than identifying things that are slowly degrading or out of balance or a little

dysfunctional, we only treat you if you're way off the spectrum on the biomarker, right? So if your thyroid is really high, we'll give you something. But we don't usually check your thyroid antibodies. We don't check something called free T3 which can go down as we age because of stress and other factors. So we do a more comprehensive view of traditional tests looking at T3, T4, TSH and thyroid antibodies when we're looking at thyroid. For sex hormones we look at a lot of different things that may not be looked at. We look at for women we look at estrogen, progesterone, FSH, LH. Those are the

pituitary hormones that control your hormones. We look at testosterone in women too and see what their testosterone levels are. We look at DHEA, which is an adrenal hormone. We might look at pregnenolone. Same thing for men. We look at their estrogen levels. Men have estrogen too. In fact, a lot of men have very high estrogen levels if they're eating a lot of starch and sugar. We look at their free testosterone, their total testosterone. We look at other factors that may be important, like their sex hormone binding globulin. These are all tests that are available through a conventional lab. They give you a really good picture of whether their hormones are off or not. We might look at pregnenolone and DHEA in men as well.

So we get a really comprehensive picture. Stress hormones are a little more challenging to look at pregnenolone and DHEA in men as well. So we get a really comprehensive picture. Stress hormones are a little more challenging to look at. You can look at DHEA, but we do saliva testing for cortisol, which is actually available conventionally, but many people don't order it. And that looks at your stress hormone level over the course of a day that can help.

There are tests looking at melatonin levels for those who aren't sleeping at night. There are tests that look at growth hormone related hormones like IGF-1. So there's a lot of things we can look at that tell you what the balance of hormones are on your sex hormones, on thyroid hormones, on your adrenal hormones that are all playing a role.

And of course, insulin, we've talked a lot about on how to measure that through looking at fasting insulin and even maybe doing a challenge test to look at what happens after you have a sugar load on your insulin that'll often go up early so we can get a really good idea of where your hormones are in or out of balance and then we can target how to fix those things so for women particularly it's important to look at estrogens because there is no such thing as estrogen there are different forms of estrogen

and they vary throughout the lifespan and life cycles for women. But one of the big risks we look at is how are your estrogens metabolized by your body? And often if you have a high risk of breast cancer or if your estrogens aren't being metabolized properly, there are certain estrogens that promote breast cancer and others that are protective against breast cancer. So we look at ratios for example of the metabolites of the hormones like 2 or 16 estrogens or 4 estrogens and we can see do you need more of the B vitamins to get this pathway going? If you have high levels of two, it's protective. What makes those goes up?

That's exercise and isoflavones from whole soy, not GMO soy. Flax seeds, green vegetables like broccoli, sulforaphane, indole-3-carbinol. These are compounds that are basically from the broccoli family that can raise this and actually prevent, and even in some studies, looking at reversing cervical cancer. And then there's the 16 estrogen,

which is often increased because of insulin resistance or lack of exercise or toxins. So we can modify these levels and measure them in the urine in a way that actually help improve the quality of hormones, improve the quality of hormone metabolism, and reduce your risk of cancer and fibroids and bad PMS symptoms and all sorts of things that help to actually give you more health and hormone balance. And it's done through a very sophisticated urine test that looks at all these different metabolites. And it's a really important test we use in functional medicine to help optimize women's hormonal health. Well, if you're

having memory problems and you're concerned about that family history, or maybe you have early onset Alzheimer's, when you go to the doctor, they're going to check a number of things that are pretty standard. They're going to look at your vitamin B12 level, which is probably not the best test to look at your vitamin B12 status. It should be a different test called methylmalonic acid, but they usually do the B12 tests. You would look at homocysteine, which also checks your folate status. They'll look at your thyroid function. They might look to see if you have dementia related to many strokes and cardiovascular disease. But for the most part, they'll do a neuropsychological test which is a series of questions to test your memory and they might do an MRI brain scan to see

if your brain volume is shrunk or your hippocampus is small. If they're very fancy they might do an amyloid scan which looks at the development of amyloid plaque in your brain, which is associated with Alzheimer's. And that's about it. And they might offer you a few drugs, which have very limited benefit or evidence. And they will probably tell you to get your affairs in order. When you go to someone who's expert in understanding brain health and functional medicine approach to brain health, they're going to do a cognoscopy, which we've discussed in earlier

episodes, but it looks at a whole array of parameters that are highly relevant in determining whether your brain is going to work well or not and what you can do to reverse some of these factors that are what we call Dementogens. So we look at nutritional status, optimizing your vitamin levels and your mineral levels, vitamin b12, vitamin D, making sure your zinc is good, your omega-3 fats, these are all really important, folate, b12, b6, critical. We look at your dietary patterns and the effects on your metabolic health. Do you have insulin resistance and how do we optimize that? We look at toxin levels, heavy metals,

using heavy metal challenge tests, looking at urine levels of mercury and lead. We will also look at your microbiome to see if there's inflammatory processes happening there. We can optimize your gut health. We'll look for hidden infections like tick infections, like Lyme or other tick-related infections or mold exposure.

And we'll look at all these parameters in a very sophisticated way to see what's happening. How are your mitochondria? Are they functioning well or not? What is the level of inflammation in your body? What is causing inflammation? And we'll look at all these molecules and all these parameters. And there may be 1,000 of different analytes compared to just a few dozen or 10 or 12 that a traditional doctor will do. And we'll be able to see through this pattern of these analytes what's out of balance,

how to restore balance and optimize your health. And then it'll give us direction where to go. So we know, oh gee, this person is really low in B12. They need B12 shots. Or this one's really low in vitamin D. Or this one has high copper, low zinc. We have to give lots more zinc. Or this person has high levels of mercury. We better get rid of that. Or this person's gut's a mess. We better fix their gut and optimize their microbiome.

Or this person has Lyme disease. We better treat that and see what happens. So we basically customize and personalize a treatment based on this diagnostic roadmap. Now, it may be a little bit more expensive by the time you get to dementia to do all this stuff, but the cost of Alzheimer's is so great, the human cost, social cost, the economic cost, that doing this work up front is so worth it because you can literally stop slow and even reverse cognitive decline in so many

patients. And this is just not my opinion. There's more emerging data on this. Dr. Richard Isaacson from New York, I think he's at Cornell, has done rigorous study looking at how we can personalize these treatments based on their metabolic type and their vitamin D levels and their homocysteine and their insulin and various aspects that they can customize. And they didn't even do a full cognoscopy and look at all the dementogens. They just did the basics and saw really amazing changes.

So if anybody's listening and they feel like they have family history of dementia or they have family history of Alzheimer's or they're worried about their memory or their brain function, it's important to go deep and to learn about what you can test and what you can do. And this is what we do with the Ultra Wellness Center every single day. We've been doing it for almost a decade and a half or more than a decade and a half. And we're seeing how our science is matching our practice rather

than having all these discoveries that are happening out there and not being translated into medical practice, that's what we do at the Ultra Wellness Center is take these discoveries and implement them. And we do it in a way that is safe, that's effective, that actually uses the best of science. And we do an incredible job for so many people.

And it's one of the most satisfying things for me as a doctor to be able to do this work and to see the changes in people's lives and to see people get their lives back when often they've been given up on by traditional medicine. So wherever you are in the spectrum of aging, wherever you are in your life, whether you're 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 or 90, there's always something to do. I just literally signed up a new patient who's 87 years old who wants to optimize his health. And I will work as hard to help him optimize and maximize his health and increase his health span to equal his lifespan as I would do on someone who's 20. Because I believe in the power of rejuvenation,

in the power of regeneration, in the power of functional medicine, and in the science of longevity to give us all healthy, long, vibrant lives and be able to get up in the morning and do whatever it is we'd love to do, whether it's take a walk with our spouse, play with our grandkids, hike a mountain,

or just sit and read a book and have the quality of life that we all deserve. Now I know this feels like a lot of information but here's the good news. With a plan and daily action you can slowly incorporate these habits into your daily life. Soon they're gonna become second nature. Remember pretty much 90% of what we discussed in this docuseries can be incorporated at home starting today. You don't always need to see a special doctor or use innovative therapies. Sometimes you just need to start with the basics.

When we feed our body the right information, real whole foods, when we get our mindset right, positivity is important. when we focus on our purpose, on our spiritual life, on movement, when we double down on proper sleep and we take out all the bad information going into our systems from processed foods and sugars and negativity and lack of sleep and lack of movement and purpose, we are well on our way to aging backwards. So I want you to think about the reason why you might want to live a long and healthy life. See, understanding why you want to live a long and healthy life

is as important as taking the steps. So why is a long, healthy, happy life important to you? For me, I want to play with my future grandkids and maybe great-grandkids. I want to go on adventures with my wife. I want to play with my future grandkids and maybe great-grandkids. I want to go on adventures with my wife. I want to keep learning. I mean, there's millions of books I haven't read yet. Once you identify this why, I want you to write it down.

And I want you to come back to this intention. Think of it as your guiding light. And the more you focus on this intention, the more motivated you will be to achieve your best health. Now, aging is inevitable chronologically, but we don't have to age the way we imagined. I truly believe that we can become the picture of health throughout our lives. I hope you take the lessons that you've learned in this docuseries and you apply them starting today. You deserve to live a life of

vitality. Thank you for watching. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you to all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I wanna tell you about something else I'm doing,

which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements, to gadgets, to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays, nothing else, I promise. And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter,

and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger, longer. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their Find a Practitioner database.

It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.