The Dr. Hyman Show - Longevity Roadmap: Putting It All Together

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

In this special episode, you will hear a sneak peek into episode 8 of my new docu-series, Longevity Roadmap. In this episode, we discuss all of the tests that I recommend you look into so you can get a better idea of your current health status and best enable you to take actionable steps to improve your healthspan today. 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 our finale, episode 8. In today's episode, Dr. Hyman and his team at the Ultra Wellness Center are putting it all together in a comprehensive plan for anyone to start today to work toward improving their health span. If you want to take back your health, the time is now. Here's a sneak peek of the finale of the Longevity Roadmap docuseries. Welcome to the final episode of the Longevity Roadmap docuseries.

Now, as I mentioned, I've been doing everything in my power to boost my healthspan and my lifespan and feel energetic, focused, and full of vitality every single day. Now, I want to share everything that I've been doing to stay healthy until the end of my life, which I hope is a long time from now. In this episode, we're going to break down what I believe to be the most critical components of achieving a healthy, long life. And most of this stuff is stuff that you can start today. We know that most diseases of aging are starting younger and younger. We're seeing type 2 diabetes in two-year-olds.

So we will not only cover what you need to know when you're 50 or 60, but what you can do when you're 20 or 30 or 40. The seeds you plant today will keep you strong and thriving in the future. It's never too late or too early to start. When somebody comes into my office and they're looking to optimize aging and optimize their longevity, it really depends on their age group what we really focus on. So when a patient comes to see me and they're in their 20s or 30s, the most important thing we start working on is getting on a good routine, making sure that they're incorporating

all of those aspects of self-care into their life and working on getting on a routine for optimal health, making sure they've got a good sleep cycle, making sure they're getting enough sleep, making sure that they're not binge drinking. We know that has a huge impact on health and making sure they're not smoking. Those are the things we really focus on when somebody's in their 20s or 30s. When somebody's in their 40s, we really focus on what they're doing for self-care. Often in our 40s our life is crazy busy. We've got kids or our parents that we're taking care of and we need to make sure we're taking care of ourself. So we'll talk about what are you doing daily for

self-care. We know that exercise can be a great source of self-care but so can yoga, meditation, stress reduction techniques, and making sure they're getting a good healthy diet. In their 50s, we're all focusing on body fat and body composition. Is there too much weight around the midsection? Are we gaining too much body fat? And so we really focus on making sure we're strengthening lean muscle mass and reversing any signs of insulin resistance. In our 60s, it's all about self-care. You know, are you doing all of those things for self-care every day? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you making the right food choices?

Are you eating enough protein? Are you getting your exercise in? Are you doing your strength training to increase your lean muscle mass? And are you doing your meditation and yoga? Are you doing your self-care? And in your 70s and 80s, it's all about movement and exercise. Exercise and movement is one of the best things we can all do every day to improve our health span. And we want to make sure

we're getting in that 150 minutes at least of cardiovascular exercise, the at least two days a week of strength training. And as we get older, strength training is more and more important. And it doesn't always have to be with weights. It can be resistance exercise with your own body weight, as well as a more strenuous yoga practice and Pilates with a reformer. All of those things can help improve your lean muscle mass. So exercise, exercise, exercise. Aside from our muscle, our most neglected organ is our gut. Now, I don't just mean our colon and our small intestine. I mean the incredible ecosystem that is living in us, the holobiome, this incredible symbiotic relationship between us and our microbes that determine almost everything about our health. Now what happens as

we age is that our microbe and our gut degrade. We see a loss of gut function. We see an increase in what we call leaky gut, where the contents of the gut, which should be staying in the gut, except for food, which should get filtered across, start to leak through and activate our immune system, causing inflammation. And it happens for a lot of reasons. One, our crappy diet that's low in fiber and high in processed food because of drugs that we take like antibiotics and acid blockers. It's because of sometimes natural changes that happen as we age in our gut with our acidity or other factors. And by focusing on your microbiome throughout your life, and especially as you age, you can regenerate your health. You can reduce inflammation. You can repair a leaky gut.

And the best way to do that is by avoiding the gut-busting things, right? Which is what? Processed food, sugar, starch, artificial chemicals, toxins in your diet. Also drugs that are gut busting drugs, antibiotics, acid blocking drugs, which almost everybody takes like Pepsin and Protonix and Prilosec and Prevacid and Nexium and the whole category of those drugs that block your acid production and really destroy your microbiome. Advil, Aleve, those are not

good for your gut over a long time. Occasionally it's fine. Steroids, even sex hormones like the pill can mess up your gut. So avoiding those as much as possible. And then designing a gut healthy life, which means upgrading your diet to increase the amount of special kinds of fiber called prebiotics. Now what are prebiotics? They're fertilizer for the good bugs in your gut, right? So you want to increase those which come from all kinds of incredible plant foods like artichokes, asparagus, acacia fibers, a cognac root which is a Japanese root that's used in shirataki noodles that you can make pasta with that have no

calories and no carbohydrates. These are all great fertilizers for the good bugs in your gut. You can even take plantain and even things like even rice that you can heat and then cool in the fridge becomes a resistant starch that helps fertilize the good bugs in your gut. And then you want to have probiotic foods, things like sauerkraut and kimchi and tempeh and miso and natto and all these incredible foods, yogurts that are ideally made from sheep or goat can be great sources of probiotic foods. So you want the good bugs, you want to add in, you want to fertilize them, and you want to get rid of all the stuff that's damaging your gut. So eating the right diet is so critical to cultivating an inner garden, and even including phytochemicals. And this is a big discovery in the last few decades, is that

not only do you need these fibers and probiotics, but that things like colorful nutrient-dense compounds in your food that are in the rainbow foods have enormous benefits on your gut. For example, cranberry, green tea, pomegranate, they fertilize these really important microbes in your gut called acromantia. Now, if acromantia levels drop down, you're more likely to get autoimmune disease, more likely to get diabetes, more likely to get cancer. And all you need to do is feed them the right stuff and they grow and you reduce your risk of all these things. So there's a lot of strategies around keeping your gut healthy, but it is one of the most important things to learn how to do.

And yes, there's a lot to do as you age. You have to reduce inflammation. You have to help your mitochondria. You have to help your gut. You have to help your muscle. You have to help your hormones. It's just the way we're designed. I'm just a messenger. I didn't design this thing, but I'm just telling you what you got to do. And the beautiful thing about it is that the principles that we're discussing around food and exercise, lifestyle, supplementation, they work on all of these things. We know that the gut microbiome has a huge impact on our risk of cancer. We know that the gut microbiome has a huge impact on our risk of cancer. We know that the gut microbiome can create insulin resistance, which causes inflammation. We know that the gut microbiome is really critical for mobilization of toxins, including our own body's estrogen.

And there's much more we're going to learn about the microbiome in the future, for sure. But paying attention to the gut microbiome, I think, is really important when you're looking at a comprehensive approach to somebody's cancer risk. One of the things we know that the gut microbiome is involved in is in the elimination of toxins and estrogens in the body. And we know that when somebody's estrogen level is high, that that can increase their risk of breast cancer, it can increase the risk of uterine cancer, and for men, it can increase their risk of prostate cancer. So we want to really pay attention to how the body is mobilizing and eliminating this estrogen because it can have an impact on somebody's risk.

There's a substance called beta-glucuronidase, and beta-glucuronidase is an enzyme that will allow, will unfortunately allow estrogen to get reabsorbed into the body. So glucuronic acid is bound to estrogen in the intestines, and if there's too much beta-glucuronidase, that that will get cleaved and then estrogen can get reabsorbed into the body and then people can have signs of estrogen dominance. And we know that that estrogen dominance

can be a trigger for growth of breast cancers. It can be a trigger for growth of uterine cancers. It can be a trigger for growth of prostate cancers. And it can also be involved in things like PMS and breast tenderness and irritability, other hormone imbalances. And so we know that when the gut microbiome is out of balance, that's one of the things that can cause this excessive amount of beta-glucuronidase. And we can check for that. We do stool tests all the time that measure level of beta-glucuronidase. And if it's high, then we can check for that. We do stool tests all the time that measure level of beta-glucuronidase.

And if it's high, then we can use things that can lower it. And we also want to think about the microbiome and what we can do to rebalance it. For example, I had a patient who came to see me, and she had just finished treatment for breast cancer, and she wanted to do whatever she could to prevent it from coming back. And so we looked at many things in her health. She actually had good levels of insulin sensitivity, which I was really excited about. And she didn't show a lot of inflammation in her body, but she did have some toxins that we needed to work to lower. And she did have this high level of beta-glucuronidase. So what we did is we worked

to shift the microbiome using things like good probiotics, using something called calcium deglucurate, which can help lower the amount of estrogen that gets reabsorbed into the body when there's high beta-glucuronidase. And we used prebiotics, which can help feed the good probiotics, so a lot of fiber in her diet. We added in some probiotic supplements and we even added in some phytonutrients to help feed the microbiome. So we focus on things that help improve the growth

of the good bugs in the digestive system. We're so excited about all these phytonutrients and how they have this tremendous ability to feed the good bugs in our gut. We know, for example, that sulforaphane, which comes from your broccoli and is really rich in, it's this phytonutrient that's high in a lot of your cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower, cabbage and kale. Sulforaphane can actually feed the good bugs in your digestive system. So by incorporating more cruciferous vegetables into her daily routine, we helped with feeding all of that good bacteria. We also know that green tea can feed the good bacteria in your gut. And things like pomegranate has ellagic acid,

which also feeds the good bacteria in the digestive system. All of these things are important when you're paying attention to somebody's risk of cancer. So to have a good sense of where you are in the aging process, there's a whole bunch of tests that really help to figure out where you are in that spectrum. Conventional tests and functional medicine tests, which should be really regular tests anyway, but right now they're functional medicine tests. And when you go to your conventional doctor for heart disease, you need to look at things that are readily available, that your doctor can order, that they might not be used to ordering, but they can really ask for. And the most important one

is looking at the quality and type of your cholesterol. This is a test that's not just your typical cholesterol test. It's called NMR, or nuclear magnetic resonance testing. You can get it at LabCorp. Or the Cardio IQ test, which you can get at Quest. These are available. They're not expensive. And they're really important because they tell you about the size of your particles,

the number of your particles, the kind of HDL, the kind of triglycerides. Super helpful test. The next test you want to look at is measurements of your blood sugar control, which play a huge role in your risk of heart disease. You want to measure your blood sugar, obviously, and your insulin levels fasting. You want to measure something called hemoglobin A1c, which is your average blood sugar over six weeks. Now, if you really want to get fancy, you can ask for a glucose

tolerance test that measures blood sugar and insulin, because insulin will start to go up, maybe not fasting, but it might go up after you have a sugar drink. And that's an early telltale sign that your metabolic health is going downhill. So those are really important. You also want to look at your inflammation level, something called cardio CRP. This is a really important test to look at the level of inflammation. You want to look at a few other clues that we use, things like LPA or LP little a we call it which is a genetic marker but it's determined by the genes but also is influenced by your habits so you can modify that as well you want to look at your body's clotting and blood thickness which you

can look at through fibrinogen you also want to look at your indirect measures of how your metabolic health is, like your liver function tests, which tell you, for example, if you have a fatty liver, which affects 90 million Americans, and it's caused mostly by sugar and starch. That's another clue. These are really important basic tests. And there's another one that I like, which is called homocysteine. And this is a measure of your B12 and folate and B6 status. It also plays a role in your risk of heart disease. And then there's other tests that are a little more fancy that some doctors can do called F2 isoprostanes or oxidized LDL or oxLDL. These are available in conventional labs and they look at

the oxidative stress level or free radicals. So can you tell if your cholesterol is going rancid? These are basic blood tests. And then there's some other tests that are really important that are imaging tests. I encourage people to do an ultrasound of their carotid glands, which is these blood vessels in your neck. And if you do an ultrasound, you can see if they've got plaque developing or they've developed clogged arteries. You can see that. There's also an important test called a calcium score. It's a very high-speed CAT scan, not a lot of radiation that you don't do all the time, but you do once as a screening test, and then you can do it maybe every five or 10 years. And it measures the calcium around your heart. Now, calcium is the

body's band-aid. It goes where there's inflammation. And you can see if there's a calcium buildup, and that gives you a pretty good prediction of your risk of heart disease. There is another factor that's super important Super high-tech It's called the tape measure all you have to do is measure around your belly button and Measure around the widest part of your hips and you divide the waist number by the hip number if your waist is more than 0.8 as a woman or more than 0.9 as a man, if your waist-hip ratio is more than that, then you have what we call a lot of belly fat. And that is an indicator of

poor metabolic health. So that's a quick screening test that everybody can do at home with a tape measure. You just heard a little bit of the conclusion of Dr. Hyman's brand new longevity roadmap docuseries. To watch this full episode, visit longevityfilm.com. Between January 22nd and the 24th, we are airing all episodes for free. So head over to longevityfilm.com to sign up for this free event today. Thanks for tuning in.