The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Hack Your Age To Live Longer

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health and ButcherBox.   As the science of longevity has exploded in recent years, we have more access to innovative therapies, techniques, knowledge, and technology than ever before. Traditionally, we view aging as an inevitable consequence that happens to our bodies as we get older. We think that as we gain more years of life, it is a given that we begin to slow down, become less agile, lose our memories, and gain more chronic diseases. We define these things as “aging” when they’re actually signs of dis-ease that can be prevented and often even reversed.  In this episode of my new MasterClass series, I am interviewed by my good friend and podcast host, Dhru Purohit, about creating vibrant, optimal health, to feel younger at any age. We discuss the latest science on whole-body health and longevity and share simple, accessible tips that you can use right now to start feeling younger at any age.  Dhru Purohit is a podcast host, serial entrepreneur, and investor in the health and wellness industry. His podcast, Dhru Purohit Podcast, is a top 50 global health podcast with over 30+ million unique downloads. His interviews focus on the inner workings of the brain and the body and feature the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset.   This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health and ButcherBox.   Rupa Health is a place for Functional Medicine practitioners to access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. Check out a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account here.    This holiday, ButcherBox is proud to give new members 2 pounds of ground beef in your first box plus $10 off. To receive this offer, go to ButcherBox.com/farmacy.   In this episode, we discuss (audio version / Apple Subscriber version):    Reversing your biological age (4:48 / 1:29) The difference between healthspan and lifespan (10:22 / 6:45) Threats to aging well, including insulin resistance, sarcopenia, inflammation, and more (12:55 / 9:30) Addressing the root cause of disease using Functional Medicine (18:42 / 15:27) Learnings about longevity from the Blue Zones (23:16 / 20:00) Eating well for a longer life (28:02 / 24:08)  Why prioritizing your sleep is vital (35:35 / 32:13) Using supplements to optimize all the systems of your body (40:32 / 36:57)  The importance of relationships and community (45:03 / 41:28)  Your questions on addressing early aging, exercise, stress, and more (59:24 / 55:55)    Mentioned in this episode:   Dr. Hyman at 40 yrs vs. 60 yrs  https://www.instagram.com/p/CVAp0fqFhX1/   EMF Bed Canopies https://safelivingtechnologies.com/products/bed-canopies/   Dr. Hyman+ (which includes access to the Longevity Roadmap docuseries) https://drhyman.com/plus/

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. The body at any age has the capacity to reverse biological age, to get stronger, fitter, faster. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. I know a lot of you out there are practitioners like me, helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine as your framework for getting to the root cause. What's critical to understanding what each individual person and body needs is testing, which is why I'm excited to tell you about Rupa Health. Looking at hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and so many other internal variables can help us find the most effective path to optimize health and reverse disease. But up till now, that meant you were usually ordering tests for one patient from multiple labs.

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four-size pharmacy to receive two pounds of ground beef plus $10 off. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman and welcome to a new series on The Doctor's Pharmacy called Masterclass, where we dive into popular health topics including inflammation, autoimmune disease, brain health, aging, sleep, and so much more. And today I'm joined by my guest host, my good friend, my business partner, and host of the Drew Pruitt Podcast, Drew Pruitt. And today we're going to be talking about my favorite topic, which is how very selfishly I can live to be 120 and what I've learned so that you also may be able to live to be 120 and how I hack my life and my brain and my body to age backwards. So I'm super excited for this conversation and I'm so happy to have it with my good friend and partner, Drew. Hi, Drew. Mark, it's great to be here.

This is a topic that a lot of people are interested in. Some people are listening on audio, so if you are, check out the YouTube one because I'm going to ask Patrick, our video editor, put up a screenshot of Mark's Instagram. This is a before and after photo, Mark. On the left-hand side, that was you. At 40. At 40, 20 years ago, a little bit more than 20 years ago.

And on the right-hand side is you now. And for those that are listening on audio, basically you have a six-pack now. You look great. Mark, tell us what you did. In one photo, you're younger biologically, but something happened and you got serious about wanting to tackle longevity and your health. What did you do? Top three things. Okay. Well, here's the thing. I really have been studying functional medicine and how the body works for decades. And I keep learning more and more. We keep getting smarter, the science

advances. So I keep incorporating new ideas and new strategies to help me actually reverse biological age. I can't change my chronological age. I'm going to be 62. I can't change that, but I can change my biological age at any age and age backwards. And so the things that I used to do that I now have changed are one, I used to eat a lot more carbohydrates. Okay. Why is that? Like, talk about that just for a second. Tease that out a little bit more. Because it was at the time we were taught that the best diet is a high starch diet that the government told us to eat six to 11 servings of bread, rice, cereal and pasta a day. And lots more grains, lots more beans, lots more starchy foods, some sugar. But I really was not eating what I'm eating now, which is I've shifted my diet to be much more low starch and sugar, higher good quality protein, not super

high protein, and a lot of good fat. So way more fat, far less starch and sugar, high quality protein to build muscle. That's been the key. And getting rid of all the processed foods and also doing time-restricted eating. So minimum 12, often 14, 16 hours. That really helps my metabolism. It helps me shed fat and build muscle. So they've done studies on animals, which is not the nicest way to study things, where they've given the identical amount of calories, either high starch, low fat, or high fat, low sugar and starch. Same calories. What they had to do to keep the weight the same was the group that was, remember, this is the same calories.

The group that was on the low starch, higher fat diet had to, kept losing weight. So they had to increase the calories so they wouldn't lose weight. It's just this part of the study. What they did at the end was they basically sacrificed the mice and they found that the mice eating the starch and sugar and the starchy diets and the low fat diets accumulated a lot of visceral fat, belly fat, which is a dangerous fat. And the ones eating the high fat, low starch diet actually built more muscle and lost fat, eating exactly the same calories. So all calories are not the same and each has a very different effect on our health. As we age, we need to be more careful about starch and sugar and we need to eat more

fat and we need to eat higher quality protein. So maybe when you're younger, you can get away with eating protein that's not as high quality, like a lot of plant proteins. As you get older, the evidence is really clear that we don't synthesize muscle without muscle. I mean, it's very hard. You need to either take supplements that enhance the missing amino acids in plant proteins, the low amino acids like leucine, which is a rate limiting step. So I've become very smart about that. The second thing I've doneine which is a rate limiting step so i become very smart about that the second thing i've done which is something i've resisted my whole life because i i was a runner play tennis bike do yoga i'm like yeah i'm good you know i'm good and i always tell people to weight lift and i just i just hated it i hate gyms they're smelly stinky i don't like

going in there um it takes too much time it painful. I just didn't like it. And, and then I decided, okay, I turned 60. I better, I better get on this. Uh, and, and I started and, uh, I've learned to really love it. And I've actually encountered a program, which I love, which is TB12 sports, uh, Tom Brady's program using bands, loop bands, handle bands, body weight. And I'm committed to it because one, it's not only removed all my back pain, but it's totally changed my body, made me feel younger, made me much more

agile, have more balance, core strength, not to brag, well, a little bragging, but I was just in an event and we were having workouts with this trainer. And at the end of the workout, it was probably about 30 people, mostly 30, 40 year olds. Um, and there was a plant competition and, uh, you know, I didn't know how it would do a lot of young people. Most of them are 20 years younger than I am. And I basically lasted the longest in the plant competition. There was one woman, she was kind of cheating, but we won't count her. She was like getting up and down, but, but I, you know, it was over almost five minutes. And, and I think that's really because the body at any age has the capacity to reverse biological age, to get stronger, fitter, faster. And I'm just seeing that I'm at 62 almost,

I'm healthier, fitter, stronger than I've ever been because I learned more how to hack the system. The third thing that I've really done is to understand the pieces around supplementation and mitochondrial health and aging that are a key part of understanding the age-related process, which is the decline in energy in ourselves, the decline of muscle. So preserving, keeping, building, optimizing muscle function is such a key part of aging. And that's been a big focus of mine is both through lifestyle and diet, through exercise and through the right supplements. Now, give us a big picture on this topic of hacking your age and help us understand a little bit of the difference between healthspan and lifespan. Because you ask the average person

walking down the street and you tell them, hey, do you want to live to 120 like you opened up the podcast? And they'll say, absolutely not, because all of their references for somebody who might be even in their late 80s or 90s is somebody that's bedridden and wheelchair bound. So let's talk a little bit about just aging as a whole. Set the stage for us. So there's a concept that's important called healthspan, which is different than lifespan. Healthspan is how many years you're alive that you're healthy, and lifespan is how many years you're alive. So if you spend the first 50 years healthy, and then you start having heart attacks and diabetes and obesity and chronic disease, which by the way affects six out of 10 Americans, 88% of metabolic plan healthy. So there's not that

many of us that are healthy in this country. You decline. And so what we've come to understand as aging is actually abnormal aging. What we see around us all the time as people get older is just a steady decline into decrepitude. That's not inevitable. You know, that's just not inevitable. Our bodies have the capacity at any age, whether you're 90, whether you're 60, 70, 80, to actually reverse the process. And they actually have done this. I remember reading one study where they started with 70-year-olds, changed their diet, got them on a simple exercise program, and they were able to reverse their biological age at 70 and reduce mortality in half simply by simple lifestyle changes.

We're not even talking about the full-on, full-monthly functional medicine approach, which is really, I think, the key to healthy aging. So you want your healthspan to equal your lifespan. Essentially, you want to, what we call, rectangularize the survival curve. As opposed to having a long, slow, painful death, you want to go and be healthy and functional until you're 100 and then just go to sleep and say goodbye and everybody have a nice dinner and go to sleep. That's what would be great without all this chronic illness that we see. It's not inevitable. Chronic disease is not inevitable. This is what we think of as aging. It's actually abnormal aging. It's inflammation. It's oxidative stress. It's

the microbiome problem. It's loss of muscle. It's all these phenomena that start to happen if we don't have the right inputs to the system. So just like we have cars on the road that are from 1930, if they're well-maintained, we can be well-maintained, but it takes a lot more effort. So I'm not going to kid you and say what you could get away with at 20, you can get away with at 60 or 70 or 80. You can't. You have to have those inputs to maintain the system.

But just like you can have a very old car that's 100 years old that keeps driving, you can have a body that's 100 years old that keeps going strong if you understand how to create health. And functional medicine is the science of creating health. What do you believe are the biggest controlling factors when it comes to what we call this abnormal aging. For the person that's listening here, who's thinking about this, whether they're in their 20s and they're interested in health, whether they're in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, at any age, abnormal aging, what are the biggest controlling factors that play a result? I think it's really clear that the most serious threat to longevity and aging is insulin resistance, which is this phenomena of the dysregulation of our metabolism from eating too much starch and sugar. The average American

eats 152 pounds of sugar, 130 pounds of flour. It's about a pound of sugar and flour a day per American. It's poison. And it's poisoning our fat cells. It's poisoning our mitochondria. It's poisoning our liver. It's poisoning our brain. And it's leading to fat cells. It's poisoning our mitochondria. It's poisoning our liver. It's poisoning our brain. And it's leading to all the consequences and all the diseases that we think of as aging. So heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, the big ones. Those are all either caused by or highly influenced by this phenomena of insulin resistance. So how big of a problem is this? Well, really clear from the data that one out of two Americans has diabetes or prediabetes,

which is essentially a state of insulin resistance. But I think it's more than that because 75% of Americans are overweight. And a lot of people who are not overweight are what we call skinny fat. They look thin, but are actually fat on the inside or toffee, thin on the outside, fat on the inside, as opposed to tofu. And a study came out last year that just even shocked me, which was that 88% of Americans, almost nine out of 10 Americans are metabolically unhealthy. And what is metabolically unhealthy mean? It means they have high blood sugar, high blood pressure, or abnormal cholesterol. All of those are caused by insulin resistance. So hacking insulin resistance and getting your blood sugar balanced and normal is so key. That's why these new technologies of continuous glucose monitors

are so helpful. They really should be looking at insulin though, because way before your sugar gets abnormal and you get a perfectly normal CGM monitoring, perfectly normal blood sugar, but your insulin could be going sky high and crashing and sky high. It just keeps your blood sugar even. If that insulin is going wacky like that, and if it's high, it's driving all these diseases. And I once heard a professor from Harvard who was a preventive cardiologist, Dr. Jorge Plutsky say in a lecture, if you could take a group of 100-year-old people who are very healthy and had no cardiovascular disease, they'd have one thing in common. I'm like, what's that? They would be insulin sensitive, meaning their bodies with very little insulin can keep their blood sugar normal, as opposed to needing tons of insulin to keep your blood sugar normal. So we've got a society where almost nine out of 10 Americans are on this accelerated path to aging

and chronic illness. So that would be number one. Number two would be to understand the role of sarcopenia, which is something probably people have never heard of. You've heard of osteopenia and osteoporosis. Sarco is muscle. Penia means less than. So it means less muscle, loss of muscle. And it's inevitable if you don't do something to prevent that, namely exercise and diet, that you will lose muscle as you age. So even if you're the same weight that you were at 25, at 65, you could be twice as fat and your muscle will look like a ribeye instead of filet mignon, you know, marbled fat. You don't want that. You want solid muscle. And that muscle is where your metabolism is. That muscle is how you regulate blood sugar, insulin. That muscle is where your mitochondria are, which are the most important factors in

terms of aging. So insulin resistance will cause mitochondrial problems and loss of muscle. So you need to both improve the function and the number of your mitochondria by two strategies in terms of exercise. One is the increase in muscle mass through strength training. And the other is increase in mitochondrial efficiency through kind of exercise we call HIIT training or high intensity interval training. And that actually causes a stress to your mitochondria and makes them work more efficiently. So you can actually burn more calories. You can be more efficient and create a healthier system. So getting your mitochondria straight is so, so, so key. Getting your muscle straight is so key. And getting your blood sugar and insulin straight is so key. Those are among the top things.

There's a lot more, and we can go into those. But inflammation is another big factor that causes aging. We call it inflammaging because every process of aging that we see, whether it's Alzheimer's, depression, dementia, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity. These are all inflammatory diseases. Even high blood pressure is an inflammatory disease. So it goes down the rabbit hole of how do we live an anti-inflammatory lifestyle? What are the things we can do in terms of diet, exercise, stress reduction, sleep, supplements, various phytochemicals, and all these things that we can do to help reduce inflammation? So I think about mitochondria. I think about inflammation. I think about insulin resistance. I think about muscle. And when you start to sort of start with those big categories, there's so much you can do.

And then there's multiple layers down of really finding out what are individual stresses. So maybe people have latent infections, or they have toxins, or their microbiomes are mass, or they have significant nutrient deficiencies. So we go down those pathways too. But the big ones are the four I mentioned. Now, what's interesting about those four items that you mentioned is that those things, which seem very simple, when they get out of control, we have a whole list of different names to describe different diseases that are tied to every one of those. We have autoimmune diseases. We have neurodegenerative diseases. We have heart disease. We have cancer. We have almost all chronic diseases ultimately come back to those

four in some context. Yeah. So essentially, there are a few final common pathways for disease. And this is what functional medicine looks at is what are the root causes? So instead of looking at the downstream effects, which is heart disease, autoimmune disease, cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes, obesity, et cetera, what are the root causes of those problems? And there's this whole conversation in medicine about comorbidities, which drives me crazy because there is no such thing. What that means essentially is, oh, as someone who's got multiple diseases, you've got heart disease, you've got high blood pressure, you've got diabetes,

you've got reflux, you've got this, you've got that, and we go, oh, these are just, these diseases are something you all have at one time, but they're not related to each other. It's all one problem. And so if you go to the root, you find tremendous leverage

to change people's biology for the better and reverse all these diseases by focusing on first principles. What functional medicine essentially is, is a framework for understanding the natural laws of human biology. Just as we can build bridges and send rocket ships to space and build buildings and do innumerable things by understanding physics, the simple few laws of physics that can produce an extraordinary number of phenomena. The same is true in human biology. We in medicine have grouped and categorized and lumped people into 155,000 different diseases. That's ridiculous.

When you look at the fundamental way the body works, the natural laws of biology, there are a few natural laws. There are a few basic systems in the body. They're all a network. And if you work on that network, if you work on that system and create health, all those diseases go away as a side effect. And aging, I think as we see it today, is just a different name for disease. So there are people who can be old but not sick. And those are the people I'm really interested in. And how do we get to that? And how do we reverse the biological age?

Yeah, as you mentioned earlier, we used to have people in our families. And a lot of people can think back and maybe it was their great grandparent who died in their sleep. Now, we're lucky if people have anything remotely close to that when it's their time for passing. My wife's grandfather just passed away recently at the age of 96. Wow. And up until the last year was in mostly good health and then had a lot of muscle loss and fell as a lot of people end up doing. And that left him bedridden.

And then a decline started to happen from there. But most people cannot remember the last time that they heard of somebody die from old age, which was just dying in their sleep. They die from cancer, dementia, heart disease, and a whole list of other components. See, my dream, Drew, is when I'm like maybe 120, I go up to a nice cabin on a lake with my partner.

We have a beautiful meal, a nice glass of wine, make love, take a swim in the pond, and I go to sleep and don't wake up. That's how I want to go out. Well, I wish for you that dream, and I wish for everybody else listening to that dream as well. Now, going back to these root factors that are there, I want to make sure we understand the way that the world has changed that has led to these unique circumstances.

So on the topic of muscle loss, a lot of people look and say, well, we didn't have gyms back in the day. So what's going on with our lifestyles today that we actually need to exercise where previously we didn't really have gyms before? Well, technology and cars. I mean, we've got all these time-saving devices and labor-saving devices and things that make us not move, right? Whether it's our cars, whether it's our laundry machines, whether it's how we heat our homes instead of having to chop wood. So when you look historically at how people lived, they were just very active as a normal part of their life. And it wasn't that they had to go to the gym. They part of their life. And it wasn't that they had

to go to the gym. They just lived their life. And you go to these cultures where you see very, very old people still out in the fields, farming, digging, picking, squatting. I mean, 99-year-old people in a full squat having their meal, totally flexible. I think there's no reason we can't maintain that. And I think we've just lost our natural environment that we grew up in, which evolved in, which was a very active environment. We had to walk. We'd have to walk. I mean, think about it. If you lived in another town, how would you get there?

Horse or you'd have to walk, right? And now we have all these technologies, like even electric bikes they have now, which is kind of funny. So it's like we need less of that and more just natural movement as part of our life. Well, speaking about these cultures, you, this summer actually went to one of these cultures and you took a trip to Italy. Tell us a little about that and some of the families that you spent time with. Yes. I went to Sardinia, which is one of the blue zones, which is an area in the world that has long lived people. And Sardinia has the longest-lived males in the world, 100-year-old plus,

and they have 20 times the rate of centenarians that we do in the U.S. The question is why? And when I went there, it was really immediately obvious because they were a landlocked people who lived up in deep mountainous regions that were inaccessible to conquerors and invaders. So they preserved their traditions for thousands of years. And they still live in the same way.

They still do the same way. And first, they're shepherds, mostly. And they're goats and sheep, primarily. And they have their own garden. So everybody has their own garden. Everybody has their sheep and their goats. And the shepherds have to walk five miles, 10 miles a day every day

and move their sheep around, goat herders, similar things. And so they're just naturally exercising. I met this Pietro who was 96 years old, super cool guy, straight as an arrow, super fit, mentally super sharp, booming voice, vital and full of energy. And he literally just kind of stopped

the five mile hiking shepherding like a year ago. He really was working until he was 95. Now he's still active and doing stuff, but just incredible. And the food they ate was, we don't call it that, right? It was all organic. It was all regenerative.

It was all local. It was all seasonal. It was all the things we aspire to that they just naturally had. That's just the only way that they can exist. There's not a big box store down the street. No. And what was fascinating is they had these things that were so embedded in their culture

that they didn't even realize that they were doing. For example, they understand that in order for their cheese and their milk to taste good, they got to go get the goats to eat and browse on certain plants, certain wild plants. So they have myrtle and all these wild plants. So these animals are eating all these incredible diversity of wild plants that have phytochemicals that are anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, detoxifying, anti-aging, mitochondrially boosting. And you can get them when you eat that cheese and milk from those goats and sheep. If you go to a kind of regular dairy and have the milk, it's got none of that in it because it depends on what the animal ate. And one of those guys, Alinto, said, you know, we season our

meat before we kill the animal. We flavor our meat before we kill the animal. Like, what do you mean? He says, well, we feed it acorns and carob and all these plants to make sure that it tastes good. And so what's fascinating is that taste and flavor are connected to the phytochemical richness of the plant or the food. And by the way, animal foods that eat these plants have these phytochemicals. So your goat milk, eating these plants has, for example, as much catechins as green tea, which we know is really good for you. So the taste and the flavor go with the phytochemical richness, and the phytochemical richness is directly correlated to the medicine in the food. Now, what's interesting is that they don't know the science behind all this. No, no. They just know it tastes better.

They're just following nature's instinct. And one of nature's ways of communicating with us is that food is information. And that when it tastes better, it's not only better for us, but it tastes good and it's better for the animal too. Exactly. And, you know, Dan Barber created a company because he's a chef who's created a company called Rose Seven Seeds to re-hybridize plants to increase the flavor. Now, he's a chef. He cares about flavor. Because he said, oh, we have these butternut squashes that just taste like water. They're designed to be big and starchy. Or tomatoes and various foods that are just built for shipping in a box across country and not smooshing. They're not bred for flavor, taste, or phytochemical richness. So when he's breeding plants to create new types of seeds for flavor, taste, or phytochemical richness. So when he's breeding plants to create new types of seeds for flavor,

the side effect is that they are more phytochemically rich and hence more medicinal. So now the question becomes, how can we start living more like these Sardinians? How can we take after this gentleman? I forgot his name that you mentioned. Pietro. Pietro. How can we start doing that? Let's go through a few different categories,

and we'll talk about some of the things that we can do that are inspired by Pietro and the other blue zones around the world. And then some of the other things that you've learned through your explorations in the world of functional medicine. So let's start first about, we've talked a little bit about what they don't eat,

but let's talk about that a little bit more in detail. And I think one of the ways to do that is that what were some examples of foods that were making up specifically the core of your diet in that before photo that we showed earlier? Yes. That before photo that we showed earlier, what were you eating on a day-to-day basis? You'd wake up, give us an example of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which you genuinely thought at that time was very healthy. Yeah, you know, oatmeal for breakfast, you know, maybe some whole wheat bread and an egg.

I might for lunch, you know. Let's pause there for a second. I'm going to cut you off a little bit because I really want to make sure we break this down. So a lot of people just heard oatmeal. They heard whole wheat bread and they heard an egg. Yeah. And they're thinking, wait, I thought we're talking about the foods that led to you being quote unquote skinny fat or not aging in the best way.

So how are those things tied into the root factors that you talked about earlier? Well, not the egg, but the other stuff. You know, flour and starchy foods and grains, if you're super metabolically healthy and fit and exercising a ton, you can tolerate more of them because you'll burn them off. But for the average person, you know, oatmeal for breakfast is a terrible idea. Cereal is even worse. I mean cereal is 75% sugar. And we think of oatmeal, oh, it's got fiber and it lowers cholesterol and does all these great things.

It's a big snow job. When you look at the data, and there's one profound study done by my friend David Ludwig at Harvard where he took a group of overweight young guys, kids, teenagers, and he gave them three different breakfasts, exactly the same calories. Oatmeal, steel cutouts, omelet. And then he locked them in a room, they measured their blood every hour, and they tracked everything. And they said, when you guys are hungry, push this button, we'll bring you more food. So they can eat whatever they wanted. The oatmeal group not only had higher levels of insulin, cortisol, adrenaline, which

is the stress hormone. So eating oatmeal literally was like being chased by a tiger in your body. Your body didn't know the difference. It actually made these kids hungrier and they ate 81% more food than the omelet group. Remember, they eat the same calories of omelet, oatmeal, or stilcroats. The stilcroats was better, but they still ate 50% more food than the omelet group. So when you have starch or sugar in the morning, whether it's a muffin, a bagel, oatmeal, French toast, pancakes, fruit smoothie, whatever people are eating, it's the worst thing you could do. You want to start your day with protein and fat. So I was starting my day with starch, which is the typical American breakfast. And often people might have orange juice

along with it. So it's fruit juice and that on top of the oatmeal. Then sugar in their coffee or whatever. Sugar in the coffee. So basically having, as you say, dessert for breakfast. The amount of sugar that they're having for breakfast is- It's dessert for breakfast, right. And it'll throw you on a metabolic rollercoaster for the rest of the day. Absolutely. Okay, so that was you. And that would mean a lot more grains, a lot more beans,

a lot more what I thought were healthy breads. So just pausing again right there. A lot of people who, especially if they're familiar with the world of plant-based eating and maybe learning from some of the best practices from other cultures, they think that grains, beans,

those things are the foundation and actually might be the key to even reversing climate change, right? This is a lot of the topic that people hear. So help us break that down and talk a little bit about that because a lot of people do think that that's the healthy way to go.

And it's not that it can't be healthy. Let's talk about how it maybe wasn't the healthiest the way you were doing it. Well, I think there's a couple of things to parse there. One is, you know, if we're eating ancient grains and ancient beans and we're having that in the context of an overall low-starch and sugar diet and we're very active, like we all historically were when we were eating those foods over the last 10,000 years, you know, we'd probably do better. But the modernization of our industrial agricultural system has produced starchy, really starchy versions of these grains, particularly like flour, whole wheat, right?

Even whole wheat flour made from dwarf wheat is a sugar bomb, right? It raises your blood sugar more than table sugar. So when you don't understand that the food that we're eating is a driver of this insulin problem we talked about with aging, we're never going to get through this. And so I'm very careful. Do I eat grains? Sure. Will I eat them every day as a staple? No. Do I have quinoa? Will I have black rice sometimes? Will I have a little white rice sometimes? Sure. But it's not something I eat on a regular basis. It's not something that I think is dangerous if you're metabolically healthy. But for people who are metabolically unhealthy, it's bad. And we're talking about 88% of Americans. My blood sugar,

my insulin is less than two. So I'm okay. I can tolerate a little bit. But I also work out a lot and I exercise and I burn it off and I do a lot of other things to optimize my health. So in a perfect world, yes, you can tolerate more. But what I see often is very low levels of protein in vegans. I see this over and over and I wish it weren't true, but I have to believe what I'm seeing, which is people have low energy, they lose muscle mass, they have poor cognitive function, they get hormonal dysfunction, low sex drive, libido, infertility, nutritional deficiencies that are really widespread in the vegan community, omega-3, vitamin D, iron, zinc, and more are really common. And so we have to say, well,

how do we create a diet that is inclusive of many different foods but focus on the quality? So, for example, if you make your pancakes with regular flour, bad news, right? If you make them with, like in the Pagan Diet book, there's a recipe for chai pancakes, which is delicious, but it's using almond flour and buckwheat flour. Now you can use regular buckwheat flour, or you can even upgrade that to Himalayan tartary buckwheat, which is available through bigboldhealth.com. It's an ancient grain, 3,500 years old, higher in protein, lower in starch and sugar, more magnesium, more zinc. And what's really amazing is that since it was grown in such harsh conditions, very low water levels, high altitude, cold temperatures, poor soils, it's really robust. And that robustness, that stress on

that plant forced that plant to make its own defense system. And that defense system is phytochemicals. So the plant doesn't make phytochemicals for us, it makes it for himself. And so those phytochemicals in the Himalayan buckwheat are more than almost any other plant on the planet. There's 132 phytochemicals. Some of them are not available anywhere else. They have age-reversing properties. They have immune rejuvenating properties. And so having pancakes from that flower is okay. And will I do that from time to time? Sure. Do I do it every day? No. But yeah, I'll make Himalayan buckwheat pancakes for a Sunday brunch with berries

and don't pour too much maple syrup on it because that'll screw it up. But you can actually include the right grains. So what should we be eating? Ancient grains. I mean, one of the things that I'm just shocked at in Europe, in Germany, they make this rye bread and these dense whole grain breads,

not made from flour, but made from ancient grains, that if you stood on it, it wouldn't dent the bread. And the only way you can cut it is with an industrial meat slicer. Like even a knife can't cut through it. You need these from slicing ham in the deli. Use those to cut the bread. And it's just so rich and good for you. So it's not that I'm against grains. It's just the grains that we eat in this culture are so highly processed, pulverized, high

glycemic grains, corn, wheat. Those are the main ones. And they're deadly in the form that we're eating them. So I think that's a huge factor for people to understand. Let's talk about sleep. How was that approached? And when did you really start to get serious when it came to your sleep regimen, especially in the context of longevity? You were an ER doctor. We've talked

about that previously on one of the masterclasses. Give us a little bit of history with that. Well, I hope I haven't messed myself up for life because I definitely have used up all my sleep credits through many sleepless nights, delivering babies, working in the ER for many, many years. And it really was, you know, I saw my health really decline as I began to not sleep. And so sleep is really critical. I try to get at least eight hours a night. I try to prioritize sleep. I make sure that I create an environment that's healthy for me for sleeping, which is complete blackness. I use earplugs, nightshades, eye shades if I travel to make sure that I blot out all the noise.

I try to turn off EMF and Wi-Fi in my room. You know, I think I just was in the mountains and there was no Wi-Fi, no cell, and I have never slept deeper. So I think there's a lot of things that are disrupting our sleep that we can use to modify our environment. In New York, I had bought this thing to go over our bed, which basically blocks out all cell signals and EMS. Because we bought basically a meter that measures the electromagnetic waves. And in the apartment, it said, danger, danger, danger. It was like on the extreme, like get out immediately. And when you go to look at your Wi-fi there's like 50 50 uh wi-fi networks on there right especially an apartment complex in new york and then plus the plus the cell service

and when you put this special you know fabric over your bed and the grounding sheet you go in there with your cell phone or your computer and you can't make a call you can't get on wi-fi it blocks everything out do you feel comfortable recommending the company? I actually don't remember. Okay. We'll see if we can dig it up and include it in the show notes. My wife got it all, but it was really amazing. It was like a party trick. You could go in there and everything was so neutralized. So I think sleep is so important. And I think there are many things that disrupt sleep. Our diet does, stress does, toxins do, it did for me, microbiome changes do, nutritional deficiencies do like magnesium. So there's a lot of ways to understand how to hack your sleep that are really important. So getting your sleep straight is super important.

So a couple more things on sleep. There's a lot more innovative products and trackers and other things that are out there for sleep. I'm going to run through a couple and you tell me, do you use anything for sleep tracking, whether that be some sort of heart rate monitor or anything like that? Yeah. So there's a lot of things out there available. There's all kinds of devices that track sleep. There's beds that track sleep. There's the aura ring I've used that track sleep. There's Apple watch that can track your sleep. There's apps that go along with it. There's sleep cycle, which just measures, you just measures your breathing and ambient noise that detects sleep disruption. So I think the technology for sleep tracking is getting better and better. There's even home sleep apnea testing, which people can use to see if they have sleep apnea,

which really affects your aging and increases insulin resistance, weight gain, and aging and stress response in the body. So it's important to make sure you don't have that. And I think using all these tools, you can kind of learn what works, what doesn't work for you, what disrupts your sleep. And I'm in shock. Like if I look at my ring in my morning, if I drink alcohol, my sleep. And when you say ring, you're talking about the oral ring? The oral ring, yeah.

When I look at my heart rate variability, when I look at my heart rate, when I look at my quality of sleep, my sleep score after I had a few glasses of wine. I'm not talking about getting drunk. I'm just talking about a little alcohol. It messes it all up. And that's information for me. It says, oh, maybe I shouldn't be drinking. Or maybe I should only drink occasionally.

And so I really don't really drink much anymore. Occasionally I'll have a tequila, but I really, I don't because I'm like, oh, this is bad. Especially as you get older, alcohol continues to affect you more and more and it puts more pressure on the body. So it's really something that we should consider. So in addition to alcohol, is there anything else that you've seen personally for you that significantly impacts your sleep quality? I've heard you talk about often you're in LA right now and we'll try to have an earlier dinner. Talk about that and how it impacts your sleep quality. Yeah, of course. I mean, if you eat late, it definitely affects your sleep. And I was in

Europe for a couple of months and it was terrible because they don't eat there until, the restaurants don't even open until 8.30 at night. And there are people eating at 10, 11, midnight, and then going to bed. It's a bad idea because you need at least three hours before you go to bed for proper digestion. Otherwise, you tend to store. You become more insulin resistant. You have higher cortisol levels. You might sleep as well. So having an empty stomach when you go to bed is a good idea. Now, in the beginning of the podcast, you talked about some of the advances that you've seen

when it comes to supplementation. Now, as you mentioned before, supplementation is supplemental. These are additional components that you add in on top of the base foundations of the right exercise, balanced blood sugar, sleep, and great quality exercise. So talk to us a little about supplementation in the context of this whole topic of hacking your age. So when I think about supplementation, I don't think about it randomly. I think about how do we optimize the systems in the body that affect aging? How do we optimize our gut microbiome? How do we optimize our mitochondria? How do we optimize our immune system? How do we optimize our gut microbiome? How do we optimize our mitochondria? How do we optimize our immune system? How do we optimize our detox system? How do we optimize our structural system?

How do we optimize our communication systems, which is hormones and neurotransmitters? So I actually create a cocktail in the morning that includes a lot of things and take a bunch of supplements. I can take you through it, but it's sort of my latest shake after I work out. I basically designed a shake that's anti-inflammatory, that's muscle building, that's gut rebuilding, that's mitochondrial boosting, and that is hormone balancing. And I do that all in a shake, believe it or not. So I put in not only high quality protein, so I use our Pegan Diet protein powder, our Pegan protein powder, which is essentially protein, fat, and fiber, no starch. I use goat whey because whey protein from traditional dairy might be a problem for me. But if I use goat whey,

it's A2 casein. If there's any casein there, it's better tolerated and it works well. And then I put in adaptogenic mushrooms. So lion's mane, cordyceps, reishi, shaga, and so forth that help my adrenals, that help my stress hormones. I put in curcumin, which is basically anti-inflammatory liquid curcumin for my immune system. I put in probiotics. I put in something called MitoPure, which is a product that is derived from pomegranate that increases mitophagy, which helps you clean up your mitochondria and rebuild muscle and mitochondria. I also put in a bunch of things that help my gut flora, polyphenols from a microbiome in addition to probiotics, so green tea, pomegranate, cranberry. And I put this

whole cocktail and a few other things in this smoothie with some berries and some macadamia milk. And I literally have already come in revving up all the systems that helped me be healthy. And then I focus on, okay, well, what else do I need to take? And so for me, I know that I've had mitochondrial issues, that my muscle enzymes are really high because I have chronic fatigue and mercury poisoning. And I have a muscle, a mitochondrial problem. And so I take a lot of mitochondrial supplements, CoQ10, lipoic acid, ribose, a little creatine sometimes, and carnitine, various compounds that NAD that help my mitochondria. And there's a lot of research where people are looking at one thing. We're going to focus on NAD or NMN. This is the cure to aging. Nonsense. You have to look at everything. And once you've

cleaned up everything, then these things will help. But if you're mercury poisoned or you're severely insulin resistant or you're not exercising and you take a little NAD, it ain't going to do much, right? It ain't going to do much. You have to make sure that you build a foundation and these things will help as sort of value enhancers or- Not that they can't help, but it's got to be holistic. You know, for me, the key to understanding aging is to understand what causes aging and how do we optimize these fundamental systems in functional medicine. That's really the key to healthy aging is not just focusing on one thing, which a lot of people get, oh, I'm going to focus on inflammation or it's the microbiome or it's the mitochondria or it's insulin or it's this or nonsense. It's all of it.

And you have to find out for each person, what's the worst things that they have that we need to address. But in general, you have to look at keeping all these systems optimized. So I don't, I'm not treating disease in myself. I'm looking at how do I leverage what I know about how the body works to optimize the function of all these key systems, of my energy system, my detox system, my gut, my immune system, my structural system, what I'm made of, my hormones and my communication systems, my detox system. And it's really food, it's exercise, it's sleep, it's stress reduction, it's the right supplements. And then it's making sure you get rid of from your life all the things that disrupt those systems.

Now, you went to go visit one of these blue zones and you're friends with the original author of the blue zones. Dan, yeah. Dan Harder. And one of the things inside of the blue zones is also about finding our tribe. Yes. So in addition to all the things that you the Blue Zones is also about finding our tribe. So in addition to all the things that you mentioned, a big part of this is actually connecting with

the right people to support us in our journey and to lift us up. Soul friendships. Talk a little bit about that and how that's evolved in your life. And how did you create the friend group that you have now? So to just take a step back a little bit, you know, when I said, what are the ingredients for health? You know, and we think, oh, it's food, it's exercise, it's sleep, it's, you know, stress reduction, et cetera, the supplements. But what we find is that there are more intangible things that may be as or more important, like meaning and purpose.

A study came out in JAMA last year that if you had higher meaning and purpose in your life, you live longer. Many, many studies have shown that if you actually have a strong community, that you live longer. If you're part of a bowling group or a knitting group, even if you eat crappy, you live longer. And one of the best studies was in Rosetta, Pennsylvania, where a whole group of Italians came over from a small town in Italy, and they basically relocated to Rosetta, Pennsylvania. But they kind of adopted the American diet, but they didn't get all the diseases that Americans get. And when you looked at that community, there was this really thick fabric there. They all participated, wealthy, poor, all the whole across the spectrum. We're all friends. They gathered,

they celebrated all holidays together, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries. There's a really profound community. And in Sardinia, that's what you see. Nobody's alone. Everybody's got community, family, connected, celebrate together, laugh together, sit and chat together. There's a deep sense of community and connection. So we know from the science, it's not just an abstract idea, that the power of community, connection, meaning, and purpose are important as ingredients for longevity and health as almost anything else. And so I think food and that is probably the two most important things, and you just see how powerful it is. And for me, and I've been really blessed to have so many good friends in my life, so many different kinds of tribes, which are all intersecting. And I feel so seen, loved, taken care of, and honored in my friend group that I just feel like it gives me a sense of safety and possibility that if you're

alone and isolated, you can't get. And when you look at the risk for disease and you look at the risk for death, it's not necessarily what you think. It's not smoking. It's not bad food, although they are big. Even more important is loneliness and what we call agency. And one of the most shocking studies I ever saw was looking at, we talked about the social determinants of health, which is sort of the things that people are exposed to in their communities that make it difficult to be healthy, whether it's poverty or lack of access to healthy foods or various kinds of stresses or living in communities where there's a lot of pollution, right? Whether you're living next to a factory farm in North Carolina, whether you're living in the Bronx and exposed to tremendous waste plants that are polluting your air and causing asthma in kids and so forth.

So what we found is that if your locus of control is gone, if you feel like you have no agency over your life, if you feel like you're powerless in your life, which is a lot of people in America, that that is a bigger risk of death than anything else. So, so how do we build a society and a culture that's less individualistic and more focused on community and love and connection? It's, it's, it's one of the greatest things about America, but it's also one of the worst things, the pursuit of individualism and individual happiness at the expense of the

collective happiness at the expense of community. And I think that has really been the downfall of a collective happiness, at the expense of community. And I think that has really been the downfall of a lot of America in this sort of modern day where we're really not focused on how we build a better community, how we build a better society, how we help each other, how we can support each other. And we've lost that. We've lost tribe. And I just think of my own family. My daughter's in Utah, my son's in New York, my niece is in Texas, my nephew's in California.

I mean like it's not easy and you know even my friend group, I mean a lot of my friends are all over the place and everybody's kind of mobile and moving and I mean Sardinia, you know Julia who was 103 months,

she made sure to tell me she was 103 months, like was made sure to tell me she was 103 months, like she's five and three quarters, uh, that, uh, you know, uh, they live there for their entire life. They know everybody, they see everybody, they have a sense of optimism and hope and connection and belonging. It's so powerful. And that that's what we're missing. And it's not that we want to return back to that lifestyle, which has its own limitations. It's just that we have to ask yourself, how can we create a version of that and that connection and still have the advantages of being able to live where we want to live? It just means being intentional about it.

Yeah, exactly. Every week I gathered all my deep old men friends to gather and we gather in a men's group online because of COVID. I was speaking to a guy last night. It made me really sad. You know, we were, I was at a weekend where we were with a group of people and re-imagining the future. How do we re-imagine society, the economy, spirituality? And it was beautiful, deep conversations. And there was one gentleman there who said, you know, this is so great. We're having connection and conversations. And I was sharing how, you know, in my community, we have intentional conversations around dinner. We create a container to have honest, deep conversations with each other. So we get to know each other.

We get to hear the truth. We get to tell our stories. We get to be seen. We get to hear others. And he's like, I mean, this is great here, but I don't have this in my life. We have social events, but they're just very superficial. I'm like, well mean, this is great here, but I don't have this in my life. We have social events, but they're just very superficial. I'm like, well, you can change that. You can be the activist in your little friend group to start to have these conversations, to create, you know, supper clubs

or dinner parties where there's, there's a theme or an intention where there's intentional focused conversations and it's nourishing. It's, it's, it's, it's. It allows you to actually feel more connected to the people in your life. And it's available to all of us. Maybe you don't have it, you have to create it. When I go somewhere, I invite people over. I was in Hawaii last year. I didn't know anybody and I started meeting people, inviting them for dinner. We started having deep conversations and you can build it wherever you are, but it takes an intentionality. It just takes one person to raise their hand and say, hey, I need this in my life. There's chances are that other people need this too.

Let me get everybody together. Here in Los Angeles, when I first moved here, I didn't know anybody because I grew up on the East Coast. And almost six and a half years ago, I started a weekly men's group. We call it Man Morning Thursday because we go on a walk every Thursday morning. And it was a bunch of other people, individuals, other friends that all moved to Los Angeles around the same time. And we just go on a walk. We walk and talk about things that are in our life and things that are on our mind. And something so simple makes a profound difference in my life. Okay. I want to shift

from community, which is super important topic, community and relationships. I want to talk about innovative therapies. This is a whole area that maybe a little bit of a disclaimer should be put out that this is emerging. It's not always accessible to everybody, but it's worth pursuing and talking about. So you've been interested in a whole classification of innovative therapies as it relates to just overall performance in the body, but might also support the topic of aging. What are some of the things that you've been into that have supported you and might provide support

for other people that are out there? Yeah. I mean, there's a whole field now emerging called regenerative medicine, which is how do we regenerate our biology, regenerate health. And there's a whole field now emerging called regenerative medicine, which is how do we regenerate our biology, regenerate health? And there's a whole cocktail of things that you can do in the context of regenerative medicine, which I see as just another extension of functional medicine. So functional medicine asks the question, how do we create health?

How do we optimize health? And how do we work with the body rather than against it? And so what are the kind of therapies out there that are not treating a specific disease, but that are enhancing function? How do we optimize the way the body works? How do we get the systems in the body to heal? How do we activate our own healing and repair systems? The biggest pharmacy in the world is the one between your ears, right? We have the power to radically change our health through the

power of our minds, through our lifestyle, through a lot of things that actually we have access to very easily and that we can upgrade our biological software at any age, whether it's simple things like time-restricted eating or intermittent fasting, or whether it's more advanced therapy. So I'm just going to sort of talk about what are the, I think, the low-hanging fruit in terms of therapies that are out there that can be started to incorporate into medicine that will help to increase our health and increase longevity. The first is not only what we eat, and we covered that pretty well, but it's when we eat. And taking time for your body to have rest from food, even for 12 hours, is so important for your body to repair, clean, and do all the work it needs to deal with the consequences of eating all the time.

We used to call it breakfast. You know, you eat dinner at 6, you have breakfast at 6 or 7, that's a 12-hour fast. But now because of the snacking culture, because of food marketing, because of the ubiquitous nature of food, because of the fact that we're all addicted to sugar and carbs and have cravings and can't control how much we eat, we tend to eat late. And we often will eat as soon as we wake up. And so we don't give our bodies that natural rest. So the strategies around activating all the healing systems in your body that help longevity are all doing the same thing, whether it's a time-restricted eating, eating within an air window, whether it's an intermittent fast, a 24-hour fast once a week or a 36-hour fast, whether it's a fasting and mimicking diet,

which is a short time of five days of calorie restriction for, for example, 800 calories a day, whether it's more prolonged fast or whether it's a ketogenic diet, they all do the same thing. They activate the body's repair and healing system. So what do they do? They decrease inflammation. They increase your antioxidant systems. They boost your mitochondrial function, improve the efficiency and function of your mitochondria, and upgrade your energy systems. They increase stem cell production. They build muscle. They build bone. They reduce stress hormones like cortisol. They increase growth factors, repair factors in your body that help healing.

So there's a lot of different ways to get there, but these dietary strategies around when you eat are important as what you eat. The second is a number of therapies out there that are, and the supplements we're going to kind of leave to one side because a lot of people are working on interesting supplements to help around NMN and AD and so forth. But it's certain therapies that help to activate the healing system. So what do they think are the most exciting ones?

One of them is ozone. Ozone is also a therapy that activates the body's healing response. Now you say, what is ozone? It sounds crazy. Isn't it dangerous? You breathe it, you die. Yes. If you breathe, if you go online and you go to the FDA website and you read up on ozone, it's going to say it's dangerous. Don't do it. It'll kill you. Why? Because if you breathe it, it will kill you, right? If it's in the ozone layers destroyed and we're all breathing more ozone, it's bad for our lungs. But guess what?

Water will also kill you if you inhale it. It's called drowning. It doesn't mean water's not good for you. It just means you got to know where to put it. Same thing with ozone. So when you mix it with your blood and you put it back in your body, when it kills all these latent infections, so it's great for COVID, for tick infections, viral infections, all this stuff that we have, but it also is hormetic. And hormesis is the simple idea that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. So when you lift weights, you're tearing your muscle fibers. Sounds bad, but actually it makes your muscles stronger, right? If you exercise and do high intensity training, it's a stress on your mitochondria, but it makes them come back stronger and smarter. So hormesis is basically when you stress your body with something, it kind of rebounds and

creates a healing response. So ozone does that. It's an oxidative therapy that creates oxidation, which we think is bad. But what that does is it activates your body's own antioxidant system. It shuts off inflammation. It turns on your anti-inflammatory system. It boosts your mitochondria. It increases stem cells.

It increases your circulation and decreases blood clotting. So it has all these incredibly beneficial effects that will help with aging and longevity. Also, there's other therapies like hyperbaric oxygen, which increases blood flow and oxygenation of tissues and is also an oxidative therapy. There's exosomes, which are stem cell derived compounds that are essentially little tiny packets of the healing factors that are in stem cells that are extracted, grown in the lab. So instead of having to suck your bone marrow out, instead of having to do a fat liposuction to spin your stem cells down and getting, however, I might be getting 62-year-old stem cells. I want to get fresh young ones. And you can't really get stem cells from somebody else because your body will reject them.

So exosomes are really powerful because they're grown in a lab from placenta or other sources. And they actually are extraordinarily healing and reparative. And then, of course, there's other therapies besides ozone and exosomes, hyperbaric oxygen, that might be helpful that we're just learning about. And one of the things that I really am fascinated with is the use of things that enhance neuroplasticity and neuroconnectivity. And there's a lot of research in the psychedelic space now looking at how, for example, microdose psilocybin, which is magic mushrooms, will actually reduce the symptoms of Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease that helps repair the brain.

And that it's incredibly helpful for depression. So a lot of things out there that may be coming down the pike that we're learning about that can help to regenerate and repair and heal that are supporting the body to age well as opposed to simply just relying on the normal stuff we rely on. Yeah, that's a great breakdown. And I think that you're going to be writing a whole book on this one day. Soon. It's due soon. So stay tuned. Yeah. So it's March 2023. Fantastic. Well, stay tuned on that because there's a lot more to say on that subject. And in the meantime, I'm sure you'll do plenty of episodes in the doctor's pharmacy to keep people posted about what you come across. Let's shift over to a few questions from the community that

we got from Instagram and YouTube. So Mark, we're going to toss out about four or five questions here before we go into the conclusions on today's episode. So one of our community members asked, the best things to do in your early forties? Broad question, but it's a good question. Well, the truth is that aging starts very early. And I just did a podcast with Dale Bredesen about Alzheimer's and with Richard Isaacson, that's coming out soon, who's a neurologist from Cornell that has studied extensively the effects of lifestyle and various personalized interventions on reversing Alzheimer's. And it's shocking, but when you look at their studies and other studies, Alzheimer's, you can detect on brain imaging 30 years before you ever forget your first symptom. The Bogalusa Heart Study was a study on children. Children looking at their biomarkers around cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, could predict who was going to get heart disease when they were 40, 50, or 60.

So the truth is that aging can start in childhood. When you see, for example, children who are obese, which by the way is a lot of kids, okay, like 40% of kids are overweight and a good percentage of them are obese. Their life expectancy is 13 years less than the average kid, right? So when do you start? It's never too soon.

So I think getting yourself on a program early in childhood is really important. With that said, I think the key strategies are as you're getting older, you need to reduce starch and sugar, increase fat, and make sure you have high quality protein. Not a lot of protein, because too much protein can affect this master control switch called mTOR, which means the mammalian target of rapamycin, which is a fancy kind of sentence, but essentially it's about this regulatory pathway that affects your mitochondria. So too much protein is not good, but the right protein is

really important and enough protein is important. And in the studies on mTOR and aging, as you get older, we need more protein. We need more protein for building muscle. Remember we talked about muscle synthesis, sarcopenia. It just makes sense when you think about it. How do you build muscle? You eat muscle, right? You need the building blocks of muscle to build more muscle. You don't want to become a bean or a grain. They don't have the quantity of the amino acids that are necessary for building muscle. Or we don't have the right digestive track and we're not eating as many calories as like a gorilla or a cow or a horse

that's eating literally all day long and has a completely different digestive system. That's a good point. So people say, oh, what about the ox or the gorilla? Well, yeah. Okay. Well, ruminants have four stomachs and the gorillas are strong for sure, but they have to eat enormous amounts of food. Now, if you were looking at plant-based athletes, you would be shocked at the amount of protein powders they are pounding. In other words, they're not getting it from eating grains and beans. They're getting it from actually processed protein powders that actually are souped up in order to build muscle.

So yes, you can do it. And I met these guys and they're like, they're pumped. And I'm like, well, how do you do that? They're like, oh, I have like 14 protein shakes. And they're like, it's just not as easy. For example, there's a protein powder that's a plant-based protein powder that's souped up. For example, they add all the branched amino acids that are low in plant proteins in order to actually make it useful for building muscle. So you can do it, but you've got to kind of eat processed food to do it. Right. Or in other instances, because I was vegan and vegetarian at one point in time, as were you, people, and again, we want people to eat any way they want to. You can be a healthy

vegetarian, healthy vegan. You can be unhealthy, you know, meat eater, you know, everything. It's all about really hitting the basics. But sometimes you'll have people who already had built up a certain level of muscle and then switch, but their body has already built in that muscle memory and that core foundation in their youth. So it's a little bit disingenuous to say that it all came from plant protein. That being said, again, we want people to eat however they want to eat. We're just talking about the basics that actually lead to health. I'm just talking about the science. I actually just went through a review paper by all the top protein scientists in the world. So it was a consensus paper reviewing all the literature. And it was really clear that, especially as we age, we need more high quality protein and that the best proteins for building

muscle or other muscle, essentially meat, fish a little less good. And then of course, you know, grains and means are not as good. So I think, I think, you know, you can mix and match and you can enhance the value of the plant proteins by adding animal protein. So for example, I have a mostly plant based protein shake, but I add a little goat whey to kind of soup it up a little bit. So that's what I'll do to mitigate the problem of just plant proteins. So another question from the community, how often should we exercise and how often does Dr. Hyman exercise? Ooh, well, I love moving.

It makes me feel good, and I get people don't feel like that. But it's really about slogging through the rough parts where you are so out of shape that it's painful to get in shape. But once you're in shape, like I couldn't even do 10 push-ups when I was 50. Like I couldn't even do 10 push-ups. And I would do 10 push-ups and then my chest would hurt for a week. And I'm like, this is crazy. I'm not doing this. So, but when you start to kind of work on it and work through it, uh, I don't get sore anymore. I can exercise. I can ride my bike 50 miles. I can do, you know, 50, 60 pushups straight. Uh, I can do a plank for four or five minutes

and, and it's, I had to work up to it. But, uh to work up to it but I find now that if I do basically two hours of strength training a week which is 30 minutes four times a day and cardio I like to do tennis, I don't really like to be in a gym so I hate machines but if I have to I'll do it but I like to play tennis

I like to play basketball I like to cross country ski, snowshoe, hike I like to ride my bike You like to cross country ski, snowshoe, hike. I like to ride my bike. I like to do other types of movement with people because that's a big part of your joy in life. So that is, and I, you know, if I had my perfect day, I would do a half an hour of strength training, an hour of cardio, some type of fun play tennis, probably an hour of yoga. And, uh, and that's what I would do in my perfect life. But I don't always get to do it. And I have to sort of compromise sometimes when I'm traveling.

But typically, I will do probably an hour of cardio four or five times a week and strength training four or five times a week for half an hour. And for the person that's watching here, of course, it's specific to their maybe age, their goals, their other stuff, but is there a minimum viable dose when it comes to movement for folks? Yeah. I mean, I think if you can do half an hour of high intensity interval training three times a week minimum, which means like on a bike, you can do a Peloton or a treadmill or sprinting, but it's basically going fast as you can for 45 seconds to 60 seconds, and then slow pace for three minutes to kind of cool off and do it again. 30 minutes of that,

it's basically sprints and 30 minutes of strength training. And it can be bands, it can be weights, it can be body weight and whatever, whatever program you want to do. Um, that's kind of a minimum three times a week of strength and three times a week of cardio. Obviously you can do more, uh, you should take a day of rest, but I essentially like to do five or six days at least of cardio and at least four days a week of strength training. And I like to throw yoga in there too, and stretching. And for the person who's like, wow, that sounds like a lot and I'm not doing anything right now. Can they get started? You often hear this with a long walk. Absolutely. Walk five minutes. Just walk five minutes. Then walk 10 minutes.

Then walk 15 minutes. Then walk half an hour. Then walk faster. And then eventually, you know, you can build up. I often will not tell people to exercise at all until we get their body feeling better. Because sometimes people are just so sick and inflamed and overweight, it's really hard. So I say, let's get your biology tuned up. And then maybe in three, four weeks, you'll start to feel like you can start to exercise. So it's really, and exercise, by the way, I always say this,

you can't exercise your way out of a bad diet, right? You drink 120 ounce soda, you have to walk four miles. You eat one supersized meal, you have to run a marathon. You cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet, right? You drink 120 ounce soda, you have to walk four miles. You eat one supersized meal, you have to run a marathon. You cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet. However, exercise is critical to maintain your healthy metabolism and combined with the right diet can really enhance longevity. Another question from the community, how can we defeat the daily stressors in life and step back into the mindset of youth. So I'll let you run with that. That's a big question. Tackle in any way you want to. Well, what is stress, right? What is stress? Stress is defined as a real or imagined threat to your body or your ego. So it could be a tiger

chasing you and want to eat you. Or it could be that you think your spouse had an affair, but they didn't. Your body has the same biological response, which is to increase adrenaline, increase cortisol, increase blood sugar, increase blood pressure, shrink your brain, and cause all these horrible hazardous effects when it's chronic and unremitting. So the biggest way to deal with stress is your mindset. And it's really important to look at life in a way that, you know, like super stupid, but it's sort of like the life of Brian, you know, that Monty Python movie, look at the bright side of life. It's like, you know, being an optimist, having a positive mindset, you know, looking how to roll with the

punches, not letting things bother you, learning how to regulate your stress response is so important. So we always have tools that are available. The most powerful tool to regulate your stress response is your breath. And guess what? It's always there and you always have access to it. And all you have to do is take a deep breath and that starts to shift, immediately shift the stress response. And then there's ways to sort of hack stress, which is making sure you're not eating foods that create a stress response like starch and sugar. Make sure you're exercising.

Because by the way, there's a great book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky. And essentially the book is about why do we all get sick from stress? Well, the zebras, they're eating their grass in their herd and the lion comes and chase them all down. They run like crazy, totally stressed, freaking out. And then he kills the zebra and then he's sitting there right by the other zebras eating the other zebra. And they all just go back to eating their grass and they're relaxed because they know he got somebody. So they don't have any chronic level of stress. It's an acute stress and it stops. We have chronic unremitting stress. So you have to learn, one, how to change your mindset and two, how to learn techniques that

help to discharge stress. So exercise is a huge one. Running or, you know, I mean, right? We run from a tiger, you're going to like burn up those stress hormones. That's why people feel calm and relaxed after exercise. Meditation, yoga, getting up to sleep, hot bath, ice and hot plunges, so steam, sauna, ice plunges. These all reset your nervous system. Breath work, massage. There's a whole array of techniques

that allow you to access the nervous system that causes stress and to calm down the sympathetic part of your nervous system, that's the stress response, and activate the relaxation response. So I think about this every day and I make sure I meditate. I make sure I'm stretching. I try to get massaged when I can. I do hot and cold when I can. Exercise. I'm very focused on getting rid of it because it accumulates. And we have to learn how to just discharge it. We can't avoid stress. It's there.

But we can change our mindset and we can change the practices we do every day to regulate the stress response. Last question from the community. Can we grow and create new mitochondria? the right kinds of exercise and strength training and by the right amount of protein and by cutting out the things that cause your muscle to dissolve, essentially starch and sugar, think about that, alcohol, you literally can build new mitochondria and you can increase the efficiency and function and health of your mitochondria. So one, you get more and smarter mitochondria, which is really the key to aging. Beautiful. Mark, let's zoom out and give us a little bit of a recap of what we talked about today when it comes to the topic of healthy aging and this wish that you have that we all get a chance to live till our hundreds, but not just live longer, but live healthier, the health span and the lifespan.

So give us a little bit of a recap of some of the key things that we covered that people can walk away with. So I'm going to put aside a lot of the things that we do in functional medicine to really upgrade your health. So how do we optimize your gut function? And a lot of people have gut issues. How do we get rid of toxins from your body, heavy metals and other toxins that impair aging? How do we deal with the inflammatory triggers from mold or toxins or other things? So there's a lot of things that we need to do that are not part of what I'm going to say that are about unloading the body from the stresses that promote aging and inflammation. In terms of the basic foundational stuff, it's pretty simple. So one, eat a diet that's low in starch and sugar, biochemically rich, lots of colorful rainbow plant compounds,

lots of good fats, high quality protein that has all the amino acids that you need in the right amounts and ratios to build muscle from high quality protein. Diet's key. Second is when you eat. Time-restricted eating. Nobody should be eating within less than a 12-hour window. So if you're eating eight hours after you ate the last time, that's bad. Make sure it's at least 12 hours since your last meal when you go to sleep, right? It can be 14, 16, but that's a minimum. Make sure you exercise and find out what you love to do. I hate to be in a gym, but I love to exercise and move. So find things that are fun.

Find things that are playful. Find out what works for you. And it's both building muscle. It's increasing the efficiency and function of mitochondria through HIIT training. And also agility and balance are key, which has to do with stretching and things like yoga. So those are really key. And then learn how to do what we just talked about, which is actually discharge stress and learn that set of techniques that works for you on a daily basis to reduce the stress response so your body can function better.

And of course, sleep, eight hours of sleep a night. Those are the simplest things. And in terms of the top supplements, I would say, you know, it's the usual characters, right? It's omega-3s, it's vitamin D, and I would sort of add, obviously, a multivitamin and the B vitamins, but I would add a cocktail of mitochondrial nutrients to that. And I think a lot of the age-related research is on how do we boost mitochondria. NAD is sort of the latest rage or NMN, which is a derivative of that. But there's a whole cocktail of mitochondrial supports, CoQ10 and carnitine and lipoic acid and ribose and so forth. Bruce Ames, who's one of the most published scientists in the world,

incredibly smart guy, talked about how we can get a metabolic tune-up at any age by having the right micronutrients to optimize our mitochondrial function. So make sure you get a mitochondrial tune-up. Beautiful. Well, Mark, this masterclass on all things on how to hack your age and reduce inflammation has been super helpful. We covered a lot of stuff.

And I can tell that you're really excited about this book because I saw you perk up about this topic as soon as we got a chance to go into it. Well, obviously I'm self-interested, right? When my brain was broken, I wrote The Ultra Mind Solution. Now that I'm looking toward the other side of 60, I'm like, okay, better double down on this. Well, we get to get the benefit of all these explorations that you get a chance to do. So that being said, I'm going to pass it over to you to conclude us out for today's Masterclass. Oh, thanks, Drew.

I really love chatting with you. You have great questions and it makes me think a lot. It pushes me to crystallize what I know. And I think people are struggling in this country with chronic disease, with rapid aging. And I want people to know there's hope that we have the science and technology now to really stop and even reverse biological age. And we're going to learn more. We're literally just at the beginning.

And I think this next 10, 20 years is going to be so exciting in terms of age reversal strategies that we're going to be uncovering. So stay tuned. If you have found out ways to reverse your age, let us know, share it with comment. If you want to help people you love live longer, better, and have their healthspan equal or lifespan, share this podcast with them wherever you can. Subscribe to every year podcast and we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. And I'll add in one more thing. Okay. You have a longevity masterclass. And you can sign up for it.

And anybody can watch it. You sign up for a free trial for Dr. Hyman Plus. And you can get access to this incredible docuseries that you, our other team member, who's also my sister, Kea, was the director of it. It's called the Longevity Masterclass. It's a fantastic- Longevity Roadmap, right? Longevity Road masterclass. Yep.

And it's a great breakdown of many of the things that we covered here and goes even a little bit deeper, a little deeper. We only had a short time, but yeah, that was hours and hours and hours. So that's great. And then there's more coming. There's more coming. It's a very exciting field. 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 all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to 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 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-kS, 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 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.