The Dr. Hyman Show - Introducing The Longevity Roadmap

Episode Date: January 12, 2021

In this special episode, you will hear a sneak peek into episode 1 of my new docu-series, Longevity Roadmap. In the Longevity Roadmap docu-series, we’ll dive into the science behind preventing the most prevalent diseases of aging, and we’ll talk about what it means to build a resilient body. Learn more and sign up to watch the Longevity Roadmap docu-series at longevityfilm.com In the Longevity Roadmap docuseries, we will walk you through the latest research on longevity, healthspan, and how to live better, longer. We also dive into the science behind preventing the most prevalent diseases of aging, and we’ll talk about what it means to build a resilient body. Each episode will take on a specific focus to help you understand the diseases of aging and what Functional Medicine teaches us about prevention, testing, nutrition, and more. 

Hi, everyone. My name is Kea. I'm one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy Podcast and the director of Dr. Mark Hyman's new Longevity Roadmap docuseries. I'm so excited to announce that Dr. Hyman's docuseries is now live, and today we wanted to give you a sneak peek of episode one. In today's episode, Dr. Hyman and his team at the Ultra Wellness Center discuss the importance of understanding and supporting our healthspan. Our lifespan is how long we live, and our healthspan is how long we live a happy, healthy life. Functional medicine is all about extending and enhancing our lifespan and our healthspan by taking steps to evade the most prevalent diseases of aging, including heart disease, cancer, dementia, and more.

You're about to get a sneak peek of the first 15 minutes of this brand new docuseries and the functional medicine approach to healthspan and longevity. Welcome to the Longevity Roadmap docuseries. This is an eight-part docuseries about accelerating your health at any age. It's also about preventing, slowing, and reversing disease. It's about turning back your aging clock at any age. It's about becoming resilient, strong, and youthful. We all deserve a long life filled with energy and vitality. And while we can't control everything, the science of longevity teaches us what makes us age quickly

and how to age backwards. Rather than a disease-focused approach, we can follow a health-focused approach. Most of us have the same goal. I want to add years to my life and life to my years. I want to live a long, active, engaged, and healthy life, or as I like to say, to die young as late as possible. Now, as a doctor on the front lines of treating chronic disease,

in my patients and the population, I have spent my life learning about how to build a strong, healthy body and a healthy mind. And I teach this to my patients every day. And I apply these principles to myself, my family, I share them with my community. We're in a very strange time. Most of us live longer than any time in history, but most of us spend the last few decades and sometimes more with dysfunction and disability and suffering from preventable and reversible ailments on piles of pills. Modern medicine is more advanced than ever and yet we're sicker than ever. Advances in surgery and medication helps many of us live a longer lifespan. But

what about our health span? Your lifespan is how long you live. Your healthspan is how many years you live a healthy, vibrant life. You want your healthspan to equal your lifespan. Rather than live the last 10 or 20 years or more of your lives, incredibly sick and disabled like most of us, how about living to 90 or 100 and be able to be fully engaged in life and love and play and work? We're so fixated on living longer, but how about living healthier? Right now, six in 10 Americans suffer

from at least one chronic disease, and four in 10 have more than one chronic disease. In a few years, 83 million Americans will have three or more chronic diseases. Diseases that rob them of their quality of life, seal years from their life, and are almost entirely preventable. We have more information than ever before, more technology, more therapies, and more illness. And this is how it goes for most of us. Chronic disease, problems like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, depression, osteoporosis, autoimmune disease, and lots more, comes on gradually, starting around age 45 or 50. For most

of us, we see a slow, steady decline in energy, function, well-being. And then after 60, we often see a steeper decline. And by 70, we've resigned ourselves to poor function and health. And it only gets worse from there. Pills, doctors, hospitals, procedures, nursing homes are worse. And often diseases of aging start really young in our 30s and 40s and smolder along and manifest in our 50s and beyond. Now, you can consider the idea of optimal wellness and being your best self and having the greatest health span to really be something that you should be addressing your entire life. But when it really comes to where disease is causing the most damage, where we're seeing the most morbidity or reduction in

performance, it's in that zone from 65 to 80. That's the red zone. So the goal of medicine should now be really focusing on how do we shorten that? Of course, if you spoke to a room full of people and you said, okay, everybody, who here wants to live to be 100 years old? You don't see a lot of hands go up right away because most people start thinking, ah, you know, I'm going to be 100 years old and I'm going to be in a nursing home and somebody's going to be feeding me. I'm not going to have a great quality of life. I don't think I'm in for that. But if you say, who wants to live to be 100 years old and you'll only be sick for a week or a day? Then I think everybody's going to raise their hands. That's pushing back disease.

That's increasing our health span. And that should be the focus of what we're doing in medicine now. And the problem is that medicine has focused on treating disease. But the new science of longevity, based on the principles of functional medicine, teach us how to create health, to optimize our health, well-being, and our function. Unfortunately, today, instead of going on long hikes up the mountain, as we age, most of us take regular pilgrimages to the doctor and the hospital.

And then our families and our healthcare system spends massive amounts of money trying to keep us alive for as long as possible while we're suffering. We spend about 90% of our lifelong healthcare dollars in the last two to three years of our lives. And these are long, painful, expensive deaths. What kind of life is that? I propose a different way of living. One in which we take the steps we need to take today to feel better than ever. And in turn, we're going to experience health in our later years.

I don't know about you, but I'm training for the Centenary Olympics, something my friend Peter Attia talks about all the time. How do you become a vibrant, alive, connected, healthy human at 100 years old? Think 10, 20, 30 years from now. What kind of life do you want to live? Do you want to be able to keep up with your kids, your grandkids, and your great-grandkids?

Do you want to be able to travel, have adventures, walk without pain, be mentally sharp, be focused, be learning your whole life? I want those things, and I want them for you too. I want you to be resilient and strong in the face of the global pandemic of disease like the one we're currently facing. I want you to thrive, and I want you to die young as late as possible. Most doctors learn nothing about health, only about disease. Functional

medicine is all about the science of creating health. It teaches us how to optimize the essential functions of our body to create health. Our immune system, our gut microbiome, our hormones, our energy systems, how we make energy in our bodies, our detoxification system, our muscles, and our nutritional status. With my team at the Ultra Wellness Center, we will walk you through the major obstacles that are interfering with extending your health span and your lifespan, and the exciting science of supercharging your health using the principles of functional medicine. Now, if you're not familiar with functional medicine, it's the future of medicine available now. Functional medicine

seeks to identify and address the root causes of disease and views the body as one integrated system, not a collection of a whole bunch of independent organs divided up by medical specialties. It treats the whole system, not just the symptoms. It is, as I said, simply the science of how to create a healthy human. And when you create health, often disease goes away as a side effect. In functional medicine, we recognize that all the different systems in the body are interrelated and are related to each other. We recognize that when somebody has gum disease, that can be a trigger for their heart disease. We recognize that when there's imbalances

in the microbiota in our digestive system, that's influencing our metabolism. That's influencing level of inflammation in the body. And we know sometimes that causes, it can be an underlying cause of autoimmune disease. So as opposed to just naming a disease and then sending that person to a specific specialist, we're looking and recognizing how all the different systems in the body are interrelated. And then working on that individual person to rebalance the systems in their body. Simply put, we are medical detectives. We work

with our patients to uncover what's going on underneath the disease and dysfunction. Getting the diagnosis of heart disease doesn't tell you everything. Heart disease, diabetes, dementia, these are really just symptoms. They're labels that we give to people who share common symptoms. But knowing the name of the disease doesn't tell you what causes it. For example, diabetes just means you have high blood sugar. But why? Is it from the starch and sugar in your diet, environmental toxins, or maybe an inflammatory microbiome, or maybe nutritional deficiencies, or maybe all of it. The key to successful aging and to health in general is to find all the underlying causes. So let's find them and let's tackle them. In functional medicine, rather than treating the tens of thousands of diseases all as separate things, we

restore balance in the basic functional systems of your body that are all connected. When they're in balance and they're functioning well, you're healthy. And when they're not, you're sick. What we know now is that there seems to be a unified theory of aging, that there are common underlying factors that seem to lead to all these downstream diseases. And the diseases that we see that we think are the causes of death, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, these are just downstream consequences of imbalances in our biology that we can do something about. And for different people, depending on their genetics and various factors, it can be expressed as heart disease in one person, cancer

in another, diabetes in another, Alzheimer's in another. But if you look at the underlying factors like inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction, which is your energy factories, your microbiome, and your diet, all these things play a huge role in determining whether or not you get these diseases. So these diseases, for the most part, are preventable if we understand how to follow a lifestyle and a way of being and eating and exercising and sleeping and relationships and connection and meaning and purpose and nutritional status that optimize our exposure. Medicine is undergoing an incredible scientific revolution, a massive paradigm shift. We now know the body isn't just a collection

of separate organs and parts, all to be treated separately by different specialists. It is one whole integrated, dynamic, interconnected system. The key is treating the system and removing the things that create imbalance and providing those things that restore balance and optimal function. And this can be done at any age, at any stage of disease. But of course, the sooner you start, the better. Your health status at this moment in time is determined by all the inputs of your life. Your diet, exercise, quality of your sleep, stress, your nutritional status,

your exposure to toxins and allergens, microbes, your relationships, your beliefs, your thoughts, the meaning and purpose that you have in life all wash over your genes and determine your health status. We can't change our genes, but we can change how they are expressed. We may have a predisposition to diabetes or dementia, but we're not predestined. All those inputs affect your gene expression for better or for worse.

We have the power to influence all of it. If we get rid of those things that impair health and we add in those things that create health, we can live a long, healthy life. I'll talk about genes and longevity. And I always like to tell patients that, you know, your DNA is not your destiny. A lot of people have been taught that your genes are your destiny. So if mom had heart disease, dad had diabetes, that you're going to get it. And that's not necessarily the way it is. Your genes are more or less a recipe for making proteins and various body chemicals in the body and body parts. And your genes are a little bit like a loaded gun.

So you can have the genes that make you more predisposed towards inflammation, or you can have the genes that make you more predisposed towards oxidative stress and inflammation. And a gun that's loaded never kills anyone until you pull the trigger. And a person that's loaded never kills anyone until you pull the trigger. And a person's lifestyle and environment is the finger that pulls the trigger on your genes. So it's really important to have that mindset that you are not destined by your DNA. The things that influence our lifespan and healthspan are often similar,

but our lifespan in part is determined by our genetics. There's only so many years humans can live. The maximum life of any human has been reported to be 122 years. Most of us don't get anywhere close to that. But there is a possibility for extending our lifespan as a human species to maybe 120 or even maybe 150 with new technologies and scientific advances. But our health span is determined by things we have control over. 90% of our health status is determined by what we call the exposome. Those are the things that we expose our genes to over our lifetime. Functional medicine is simple.

Disease results from imbalances in seven basic, functional, interconnected systems in your body. The key to health, to optimal aging, to preventing, reversing, and treating disease is really simple. Remove those things that create imbalance in the body and the systems, and add in those things that restore balance, and the body's natural systems, and add in those things that restore balance, and the body's

natural intelligence does the rest. So let's review those basic systems. The first is your gut. The function and the balance of your digestive system and your microbiome, which we now know is a massive driver of health if it's in balance, and a huge contributor to disease, if it's not, is the first system we have to look at. The next is your immune system and your inflammatory system. So much of aging is caused by inflammation. In fact, we call it inflammaging. Next is your energy production system. Those little factories in your cells that burn food and oxygen and turn into energy that your body can use. We associate aging with the loss of energy, but learning how to optimize and heal those energy factories called mitochondria is the key to healthy aging.

Next is your waste disposal system, or what we call detoxification or bio transformation where we transform molecules and get rid of them that are bad. The better we are at eliminating toxins that cause damage to our body and that accelerate disease and aging, the healthier we're gonna be. Next is your transport system

or your circulation lymphatic system that keeps things flowing and moving throughout your body. The next one is your transport system or your circulation and lymphatic system that keeps things flowing and moving throughout your body. The next one is your communication system, the control tower of your body, your hormones, your neurotransmitters, your brain chemistry, your immune messengers, your chemicals that orchestrate nearly everything in your body

and get out of balance if we don't learn how to age well. And finally, your structural system, which is everything from the subcellular membranes in your cells to your musculoskeletal system, your muscles and bones. Dysfunction in any of these systems can lead to dis-ease. You just heard the first 15 minutes of episode one of Dr. Hyman's brand new Longevity Roadmap docuseries. To watch this full episode, visit longevityfilm.com and sign up for this free event. Between January 13th and the 24th, we'll be airing the Longevity Roadmap episodes for free. If you missed an episode, don't worry, we'll be playing all the episodes of this docuseries for free the weekend of the 22nd.

Again, to watch this docuseries, visit longevityfilm.com so you can take back your health today. Thanks for tuning in.