The Dr. Hyman Show - Longevity Roadmap: Longevity Habits And Innovative Therapies

Episode Date: January 21, 2021

In this special episode, you will hear a sneak peek into episode 7 of my new docu-series, Longevity Roadmap. In this episode, I share all of the innovative testing and information I’ve learned about longevity, and we’ll talk about the importance of community, mindset, and optimism when it comes to increasing our healthspan. 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 Perowit. 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 7. In today's episode, Dr. Hyman reveals all that he has learned about longevity since he turned 60. He discusses innovative therapies and the importance of mindset, optimism, gratitude, and community when strengthening and extending our health span. Here's a sneak peek of episode seven. We all want to know what it takes to live a long, healthy, happy life. Is it just good genes?

Well, that certainly helps as part of the equation, but it's so much more than that. You might have heard of the blue zone communities before. They're regions around the world with a concentrated amount of centenarians, these people who live to be a hundred and beyond and do it well and vibrantly. So what do these communities have in common? Well, they're able to evade the chronic lifestyle diseases that we've been discussing throughout this docuseries and to live long, healthy, engaged lives. We call this the rectangularization of the survival curve, which is a rectangular shape of the survival curve versus a slow, gradual decline as we get older.

Instead of a long, slow, gradual decline into chronic disease and disability and a long, slow, painful, and often expensive death, they live long, vibrant, healthy, active lives and die very old, quickly, painlessly, and cheaply, meaning their health span is their lifespan. Which path do you want to take? What's their secret? Well, my friend Dan Buechner discovered that there are certain common characteristics among Blue Zone communities that can significantly contribute to a longer health span and, of course, lifespan. And these include community, our lifestyle, spirituality, and movement. Incorporating key and powerful practices in each of these areas can create health and neglecting them can create disease. In this episode, we're going to consider all these

factors that add up to create an extended healthspan and a place where your healthspan equals your lifespan and it's very long. Blue zones are areas in the world where people have the longest longevity. People live the longest and live the healthiest. And so they've been studied really carefully to say, well, why are people so healthy in these blue zones? And it's really fascinating. There's some things that they do in common that helps them have a long, healthy, vibrant life.

And one of the first things that we notice is that people in blue zones incorporate exercise into all aspects of their day. You know, they are maybe chopping wood and walking more, going for bike rides. We know that people in blue zones are a part of a community. They have a sense of purpose. We know that the people in blue zones are more likely to eat less, about 20% less calories on average they eat per day. And they eat a much higher amount of plants in their diet, plants that are rich in all those phytonutrients that we know are so good for our health.

We know that they have times of regular exercise every day, but also times of rest every day, times for a nap or relaxation, prayer, meditation, rest. And so all of those things can be helpful for helping us live a long, healthy life if we just take some of these examples from people who are living in the blue zones. So these are really obvious things that most of us sort of know and take for granted. But there are some interesting differences. You look at, for example, the Plains Indians, the Lakota, and the group that lived at the turn of the century longer than any other population in the world.

These were the buffalo hunters. And all they ate pretty much was buffalo and berries, right? They had the longest lived population in the world, the most number of centenarians, people who lived over 100 of any population. And all they ate was meat, but it was buffalo. And then you have this Seventh-day Adventists, who also had very, very long lives

from Loma Linda, California, and they were vegetarians. But what they also had was practices that supported health. They didn't smoke. They didn't drink. They had great community and connection. I mean, if you join a bowling club or a knitting club, you're more likely to live longer than someone who's socially isolated. I mean, loneliness is one of the biggest killers. So when you look at these populations, there's a lot of variables, but they have certain things in common. And I think we have to just look at what those are. And there are things that often we've lost sight of and undervalue in our rapidly aggressive, consuming, advancing society. We need to sort of refocus our priorities on what actually matters, which is love, connection, community. And in this time

of COVID-19 with social distancing, the paradox is that many of us are actually connecting more with each other, connecting more with those we love, spending more time engaging in relationships that matter. And I think that's a good thing. And I hope we don't go back to the old normal and we find a new normal that maintains that level of connection. Everybody gets excited by the next new flashy thing or the next big supplement or the next big treatment to help solve the problem of aging. But we often overlook some of the most important things that we know already scientifically play such a huge role. And they're relationships, community, and even meaning and purpose, which, I mean, how could that be related to longevity? But it really is, even optimism is related to longevity. So your mindset, your beliefs,

your relationships, the quality of your relationships, and your community all play an enormous role in determining your health and longevity. And that's why, for example, the Okinawans may have found the secret to longevity. It might be their diet, which I think plays somewhat of a role. But when they're born, they're placed into a group of babies called a moai. And this is a group of four or five little babies that literally grow up together through every stage of life and stay together all the way through school, marriages, children, careers, you know, and retirement. But they don't actually retire. They keep being part of the community all the way through until they die. And so they have this sense of belonging.

They have this sense of connection. They have this sense of belonging. They have this sense of connection. They have this sense of purpose. And it's an incredible thing to see how that relates to longevity and how the opposite is also true. That if you look at as a risk factor, what's more important than diet, more important than smoking, more important than exercise, It's social isolation. It's social disconnection. It's a loss of sense of connectivity. It's a much bigger risk factor for death

than all those other things. So you can do everything right, but if you don't tend to your relationships, if you don't tend to your community, if you don't tend to your spiritual life, to your meaning and purpose for being, for living, it's very tough to live a long, vibrant, healthy life. Mindset is very, very important

because your thoughts create your reality. If you think something's going to happen, it will happen. And if you think something's not gonna happen, it won't happen. So I call it the placebo effect and the nocebo effect. And there's a wonderful book by Bruce Lipton called The Biology of Belief. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. It's one of the books that sort of changed how I look at medicine. I look at my patients. And it's the concept of your thoughts and your beliefs

and your mindset affect the expression of your genes. And he was a cellular membrane scientist and geneticist. And what he realized is that our thoughts and our mindset actually affect the expression of our genes. And we're all sort of told that everything, the brain of the cell is in the DNA. And what he said is that there was an interesting experiment they did. They took cells, and they basically took the DNA out of the cell. And the cell was happy as a clam. It would live for like two or three weeks without all the nucleus, no DNA. So it was running, you know, just happily. The DNA, if you will, is a little bit like a recipe book that gives you recipes for proteins and various building blocks. But when the cell does not have the nucleus and not have the DNA, the cell works just fine. Only when it needs to go in there to

do a reparative mechanism does it have to then tap into the DNA. And the person's mindset, you're having a positive mindset, is really, really critical. And there is a concept called the nocebo. So when a doctor says something to a patient and that, you know, you're going to die from this, that literally is like voodoo death. It's that negative mindset is toxic. And placebo is the effect where the doctor gives you a sugar pill and says, this is going to get you better. And lo and behold, it's just a sugar pill and the person does get better. So mindset and beliefs can actually have a positive effect or a negative effect. And it's a question of, you know, is the glass half empty or is the glass half full?

Well, the glass just is. The glass, you know, it depends on how you want to look at it. So, your perspective on things, and you can shift your perspective. You know, that's one thing that, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy, people go to therapists. One of the things that a therapist does is allow them to sort of see themselves from another angle, another shift. So yes, the glass is half empty. Yes, the glass is half full. Yes, the glass is. It's a matter of how you want to change how you see things and also your emotional connection to whatever it is that you're seeing. Like right now, we have the COVID crisis going on and you can say, oh my God, I'm going to die or whatever. Now you can

also, you can, that's one perspective. You can also say, you know what? I got more free time on my hands. I'm a little bit less busy. What can I do to do better self-care? What can I do to expand my awareness of nature? You can just spend some quiet time by yourself and just be, get off your Netflix, get off your smartphone and just, you know, look at the world around you. And, you know, there are small, subtle things that we can do that give us joy and, you know, change our perspective and change our mindset in a day-to-day comings and goings. One of the biggest signs of less than optimal aging is when I notice that somebody has a decrease in their mobility. Mobility is incredibly important for our health. We want to stay active and mobile and have good lean muscle mass and good flexibility.

And when somebody is losing some of that, that is a sign that there may be more aging going on in their body. And it's something important we really want to focus on. One of the tests that I do and most physicians do is the get up and go test. It's a really easy test that you can perform. And what you do is you have a patient start sitting. You have them get up, walk for 10 feet, turn around and go walk 10 feet back and sit down. That's called the get up and go test. And it's a really good sign of how much mobility somebody has and what is their risk of falling. So we know that when somebody can get up and go and come back and sit back down in less than 10

seconds, they're doing pretty well. If they're taking more than 14 seconds to do that test, they have an increased risk of fall. And so that's a really important thing that we need to pay attention to. If somebody is not as mobile, if they're not having as easy time getting up and walking, getting down and up and down off the floor, that's something we really wanna work on

because through physical therapy, through exercise, you can improve that for somebody and that has a big impact on their length of life and the quality of their life. Because we know that if somebody falls, the sequela of what happens to their health afterwards can be pretty dramatic and not great. So there's a lot of ways you can improve your get up and go, right? Just spending more time walking throughout the day, adding in daily exercise, but also improving your strength. So I have patients work on just getting up and down out of their chair. That can really help improve all the strength of the muscles around all your joints.

So you can practice this. Just stand up and sit down in your chair and do it 10 times. And over time, you'll get better at it. At first, sometimes people might need to use their walker or they might need to use part of the chair to help them get up. But over time, you want to be able to, if you can, get up out of the chair without holding on to anything. That incorporates so many muscles in your body, in your core, in your legs, in your

glutes that you will be working on and it's a simple exercise that you can do. So we have people do that, you know, 10 times three sets. So a total of 30, once or twice a day, can have a huge impact on their mobility. We know that when people are, when people can walk for two miles or more within an hour, their chance of living for the next 10 years is much higher than somebody who can't walk two miles in an hour. So just getting good exercise in your day is critical for optimal aging. The American College of Sports Medicine recommends 150 minutes of cardiovascular exercise every week and two days a week of strength training. And that strength training could include things like Pilates on a reformer,

more strenuous yoga where you're using your own body weight, things like the seven-minute workout where you're using your own body weight for resistance. Of course, it can include things like weight training, different bands, and pulleys for strength training as well. And that's an important thing to get into your exercise routine at least twice a week. So chronobiology is an area that I find really fascinating, and it's really understanding that our body has internal rhythms. There's the sleep-wake cycle rhythm,

there's the feeding rhythm that we have, there's the menstrual cycle that women have throughout the month, and our circadian rhythm and our chronobiology is very much tied in with our health. So I tell people that it's really important to be sleeping when it's dark out and not be eating. In fact, one of the biggest things that I can do to help my patients to lose weight is tell them, stop eating late at night. Sumo wrestlers have a recipe for getting fat. The way that they do that is they eat a big meal and they go to bed. So the biggest thing is, you know, eating breakfast like a king, lunch like a queen,

and dinner like a pauper. In fact, there's a recent paper which I just read that looked at the thermogenic effect of food. Thermogenic meaning your body's ability to produce heat from the food that you eat. And what they found is that when you eat a hearty breakfast, you produce twice as much heat, the thermogenic effect of that food, as opposed to eating that food later on in the day. So if you want to, you know, a simple way of controlling your weight is not eating late at night, eating a good sized breakfast, moderate lunch, maybe even skipping dinner or having something very, very light for dinner. And that gets your body into a good circadian rhythm. You just heard the first 15 minutes of Episode 7 of Dr. Mark Hyman's brand new Longevity Roadmap docuseries.

To watch this full episode, visit longevityfilm.com and sign up for this free event. We'll be airing the entire Longevity Roadmap docuseries the weekend of January 22nd. Again, sign up for this free event at longevityfilm.com so you can take back your health today. Thanks for tuning in.