The Dr. Hyman Show - The 5 Secrets To Looking Younger

Episode Date: March 28, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Athletic Greens, and InsideTracker. Looking younger is not just about what creams you slather on your face; it’s actually an inside job. Treating your body well on the inside has numerous health benefits, including the quality and appearance of your skin. The skin can reflect the level of inflammation in the body, poor gut health, or even food allergies.  In this episode of my Masterclass series, I am interviewed by my good friend and podcast host, Dhru Purohit, about what we can do to support the body—and the skin. We discuss why essential fatty acids, organ meats, and hot and cold therapies are all important, and so much more. Dhru Purohit is a podcast host, serial entrepreneur, and investor in the health and wellness industry. His podcast, The 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, Athletic Greens, and InsideTracker.   Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com.   Right now, when you purchase AG1 from Athletic Greens, you will receive 10 FREE travel packs with your first purchase at athleticgreens.com/hyman.   Right now InsideTracker is offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman.   In this episode, we discuss (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): Testing to evaluate aging in your body (4:44 / 1:53) Looking at the external impact of internal health (11:17 / 8:25)   The importance of essential fatty acids (14:59 / 12:07)  Nutrient density of organ meats for skin health (19:52 / 15:30)  Hot and cold treatments (22:31 / 18:00)  The impact of stress on appearance (31:09 /26:38)  Why we need to focus on hydration (38:06 / 33:38) Foods to eat and not to eat (43:00 / 38:24)  Questions from our community (46:58 / 42:29)  Mentioned in this episode: Commune “The Lab” Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers LyteShow Electrolytes EWG Skin Deep The Wrinkle Cure OmegaQuant 

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. We are what we eat and we're basically creating the building blocks of our structure from the food we eat. So if we eat junk, we end up having junk molecules building our tissues. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Hyman. As a busy doctor with multiple jobs, I'm all about tools that make my life simpler. And since testing is something I rely on to help almost all my patients, I'm really excited because I learned about a new company called Rufa Health. They are doing such great work around making testing simple. Hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria. Those are just some of the many things I like to look at and find the most effective path for my patients to optimal health. But that

means I'm usually placing orders through multiple labs, which is just an overall pain. Plus, it makes me have to keep track of all the results, which is more difficult for me and my patients. Now, Rupa Health has totally changed that. They've made functional medicine testing simpler and more convenient than ever. So practitioners like me can focus on more time helping our patients. With Ruba Health, functional medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like Dutch, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. It's 90% faster, letting you simplify the process of getting functional medicine tests you need and providing a noticeably better patient experience. That's awesome.

This is really a much needed option in functional medicine space and I'm so excited about it. You can check out a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at rupahealth.com. That's r-u-p-a-health.com. I'm all about streamlining my daily health routine to be as powerful and yet simple as possible. And that's why I love AG1 from Athletic Greens. Because when it comes to my health, I want it all. I want my gut to function great, my brain to feel sharp, my immune system to be strong, my body to feel energized and able. And being in my line of work, I know that means I need optimal levels of nutrients, which is one scoop of AG1. I get 75 high quality vitamins, minerals, whole foods, sourced superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens to support my entire body. Even with a really healthy diet, it's hard to hit the mark for all our nutrient needs.

So I feel better knowing that I have some extra help from AG1. Unlike other supplements and powders out there, AG1 is third-party tested and made without GMOs, nasty chemicals, or artificial anything. And it tastes great, kind of like a tropical green drink. I like it on its own mixed with water, but it also works really well in most smoothies. If you're curious about trying AG1 from Athletic Greens for yourself right now, they're offering my community 10 free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com forward slash hyman.

Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash hyman to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to a new series on The Doctor's Pharmacy called Masterclass, where we dive deep into important health topics including inflammation, autoimmune disease, brain health, sleep, and much more. And today, I'm joined by my guest host, my good friend, my business partner, and host of the Drew Pro podcast, Drew Pro himself. And we're going to be talking about longevity and the secrets to looking younger longer. Welcome, Drew. And by the way, this is an important topic because

I think we are all going to get to be able to live to be 100 and 120, but we don't want to look 120. So how do we design a life that causes us to age well on the inside and the outside? It's such an important topic, Mark, and a lot of people have questions about it. And I think that note about we don't want to look 120, we don't want to look like what current society says that you have to look at even at 60, 70, 80, which is usually hunched over, bad posture,

suffering with multiple chronic diseases, and there's no shade thrown at that. There's no judgment. It's just that that's not what health span is about. No, I mean, I'm 93. I mean, pretty good. Well, you're not 93, but you are 63, 62, 62, 62. But before we jump in and we jump and we talk about three things that we want to start off with that can help people look younger from the inside out, I actually want you to expand on something that you told me about before we got started. And there's this new type of testing that's emerging that a lot more doctors are getting familiar with. And it's another way to

look at our actual age, but a different type of age. So what is that test? And what did you learn from doing it? Yeah, it was fascinating, Drew. So, you know, most of the age-related decline that we see is in some way related to inflammation, including what happens on the outside. So when people don't look well on their skin, it's because they have inflammation on the inside that's being expressed on the outside. So it's also key to us. So look at your immune system as part of skin health. And the reason I'm leading with that is because the test looks at something called DNA methylation.

And I mean, this could be an hour podcast just talking about this particular concept, but the basic idea is this. When you're born, you have your DNA. That's your code. You can't really change it except for gene editing or CRISPR. But not all the genes get expressed. Some are silenced, some are turned on, some are turned off. And there's a process by which your body does that that regulates everything. So in every cell of your body, there's the entire code for everything. In other words, in your skin cell is the entire code for your brain. But why don't you grow a brain on your skin? Because those genes are turned off. And so there's a special pattern of turning on and off genes through this meta framework over the genes called the epigenome. So the genes are like the keys on a piano. The

epigenome is like the piano player that determines which songs get played. So one of the ways we look at aging is to see where the marks are on the epigenome that tell which genes, tell the genes which genes should be turned on or off. And this is called DNA methylation. This is the major way that genes are regulated. And that DNA methylation just means they're methylating groups, which are carbon and three hydrogens, just a chemical group that is a common part of our biological currency. And the body uses these little chemical tags like bookmarks in your book to look at which pages should be read. And so this test is a DNA methylation test that looks at your epigenome. And it looks at your immune cells, it looks at other cells. So I'm 62, but I just got my result yesterday. And I'm biologically, even though I'm chronologically

62, I'm biologically 43. So I'm almost 20 years younger than my actual age, which to me is really cool. And I think, I'm thinking about that, I'm going, God, so if I'm 62 and I'm almost 20 years younger than my actual age, which to me is really cool. And I think I'm thinking about that. I'm like, God, so if I'm 62 and I'm actually 43, then I'm probably going to live another 60 years because, you know, I could be 100 and that's 120. So I'm like, I feel good. I'm like, you know, I think I'm going to get there. Knock on wood. That's what we wish for you.

Of course, that's what we wish for everyone. I mean, honestly, it was surprising to me, Drew, because I've been through so much. I've been through mercury poisoning, mold toxicity, Lyme disease, babesia, autoimmune diseases, colitis. I mean, it's been quite a journey. And I've come through all of it through functional medicine. And to see that even though I've undergone such a brutal battery of insults that are inflammatory and that accelerate aging, that I have actually used the practice of functional medicine and the

principles of creating health to revive myself in such a way that my DNA methylation pattern looks like I'm 43. Now, the interesting thing about that particular test is you can track it over time. So I just did it now, but I'm, I'm not going to settle for 43. I want to get to 25. I'm going to see what I can do. And it could be possible. Obviously there's certain things that you can do on your own, but there's, you're writing a whole book on this. There's a whole other category of new and experimental technologies that could break through a whole new aspect. Yeah. We have no affiliation with this test company. This is not an endorsement, but people are always asking and they want to know,

can they do that same test that you did? Do you mind mentioning? Sure. I mean, the company I use was True Diagnostic, but I also did four other companies because I wanted to compare. I haven't got those results yet, so stay tuned. But this one, True Diagnostic, is I think among the most reputable and reliable tests. And I think that they were the one that powered the study that Kara Fitzgerald did,

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald, who was on your podcast and our podcast. And she published that landmark study in the journal Aging, showing that she could, in eight weeks, biologically reverse people's age by about three years. So when people talk about like, oh, but it's, you know, maybe it's Dr. Hyman or somebody else who's living a quote unquote, perfect lifestyle. And obviously we've dispelled that, you know, it's not about living the perfect lifestyle, perfect lifestyle. I could, but I don't. Yeah. Yeah. You got to sneak in some tequila here and there a little bit, a little bit of sugar here and there, but in very short time, that's the power of food and lifestyle intervention and stress reduction is you can make a huge difference

in a very short period of time. And, you know, it can take, it can take years depending on what you've gone through, but in a very short period of time, if we're looking at DNA methylation as one of the markers that are there for aging, you can see substantial differences in a short period of time by following very specific recommendations, some which we'll get into in a little bit. It's so true, Drew, because when you look at what we think of as the inexorable decline in terms of our appearance as we age, it's not a one-way street. And as I've gotten smarter and I've started working on myself more, people who I haven't seen in years say, God, you look 10 years younger. What are you doing? I'm like, well, I've gotten 10 years older, but I actually look 10 years younger. So there is a way that this technology works from the inside out.

That's why I really think the framing of this conversation about how we look is about beauty from the inside out as opposed to the outside in. So you go to the dermatologist, they slide their stuff on your skin. And I'm not saying taking care of your skin on the outside is bad. I'm just saying it's part of an overall package. Because if you're eating an inflammatory diet and your skin's inflamed from the inside and you're swollen and have fluid retention and puffiness, that ain't going away with a bunch of skin cream. Totally.

Especially super expensive skin creams and treatments and lasers. Again, nothing wrong with those things. But we spend so much time as a society thinking about those aspects. And there's some of that that ends up actually working. And there's a whole other category that's underappreciated. So with that being said, let's jump into it. You know, I asked you before we got started here, if you would take three areas, three categories that we can expand on a little bit. We talk about it at high level, then we'll break each one down. Give us three things that are deeply connected to looking young on the outside, but by starting on the inside. So what's one of the first ones

you want to chat about? Well, they're all related to ways to lower inflammation and help repair and rejuvenation of your entire body, including your skin and your face and so forth. The first is food, obviously. So what you eat plays an enormous role, and we'll talk about what to not eat and what to eat. But the key thing is you want to have high levels of certain nutrients, whether it's vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc, biotin, omega-3 fats. These are critical nutrients, the carotenoids that help produce healthy skin, healthy collagen, reduce inflammation or antioxidants. The next is hot and cold therapies because our skin is an excretory organ. It's the biggest organ in our body. So when you sweat, when you actually create this experience of your body in these extreme temperatures of extreme heat and cold. And I'm

staying in a place now where literally I'm doing it twice a day. They have a sauna and a cold plunge. And it's amazing when you come out, your skin looks revived and fresh. You excrete out all the sort of superficial toxins, deeper toxins. And your skin just feels healthier. Actually, you can like feel it and it just feels tighter. It feels healthier. It feels like your skin can actually breathe. Yeah, exactly. And we're supposed to sweat and we're supposed to excrete those things. And then the cold also resets your autonomic nervous system. So your skin is innervated by nerves, brings blood flow and circulation. So it helps to revive your skin. The third is movement. Exercise plays a huge role too, for the same reasons. It actually

increases circulation, lymphatic flow, lymphatic function. The way that your lymph system works, which is the detoxification system in your body that clears all the fluids that are full of metabolites and inflammatory compounds, it removes them from your body and things that aren't even in your circulation from the tissues, puts it into your lymph system, then it dumps into your circulation so you can detoxify it. And exercise is the only way to really activate that. Diet helps too, but exercise is super important. And I think also just it helps with reducing inflammation and it can activate your antioxidant systems. It can help with excretion of toxins from your skin. It can just overall help your overall sense of wellness and wellbeing. So I think from that perspective, it also makes you feel younger too.

We had a gentleman on your podcast and mine, Dr. Ben Bickman, who is one of the world's experts in insulin resistance and all the pathways of insulin. And one of the things that I learned about from him when it came to food and how food can age us is that I'd shared with them that, you know, my background's Indian, I'm South Asian, and a lot of South Asians, I noticed this when I go to India, they, as they and this is, it used to be if you were a lot older, but now I started seeing it on some of my extended family members who are in like their later 20s or 30s. Yeah, they start to develop these dark patches under their eyes. And there's a lot of also what are called like these skin tags. If you've seen individuals with those.

Yeah. And it's called acanthosis nigrans. Yeah. Which is this problem you get from eating too much sugar. So a lot of sugar and refined carbohydrates. So that's like one just very practical way. If we're talking about like reduction of dark circles under our eyes which can be caused by a lot of different things or influenced by a lot of things and if we're

talking about keeping our skin healthy and just like avoiding skin tags and little patches and other stuff our food actually significantly contributes for the better or for the worse towards those things absolutely uh break down some of the other categories on food. Let's talk about like omega three fatty acids. You know, what do people not understand about having the ideal omega three to omega six ratio and how it influences appearance? Well, you know, we are what we eat and and we're we're basically creating the building blocks of our structure from the food we eat so if we eat junk we end up having junk molecules building our tissues right whether it's the fats we eat or the proteins we eat so what's interesting about fat is that you know there are a lot of different kinds of fat i wrote wrote a whole book called Eat Fat, Get Thin, where I go way into detail about this. But essentially, the majority of the fat in American diet is hidden fat in processed food in the form of refined soybean oil. It's about 10%

of our calories, 1,000% fold increase since the 1900s. And these can be very inflammatory when consumed in large amounts. They're easily oxidized and they're not really what we should be built from. Omega-3 fats, on the other hand, and saturated fats are the better fats for our biology. They're the things we've actually evolved eating and help construct better cells, better membranes, better skin. So one of the things, if you're omega-3 deficient, it's really common to have dry, patchy areas on your skin, to have dry skin, pale skin, flaky skin, dry hair, brittle hair. There's a whole bunch of clinical symptoms I look for

and I can actually tell from someone's actual physical nutritional exam whether they're deficient in omega-3 fats. Hard earwax, for example, is another clue. So we can begin to see that we need to eat the right fats so that we can actually build our tissues from the right substances. And these omega-3 fats are very anti-inflammatory, whereas the omega-6s in the wrong ratio or out of balance are inflammatory. We need the balance. It's not inflammatory, bad or good. We need both. We need, omega-6 fats are, there are essential fats. Linoleic acid is an essential omega-6 fat. Omega-3 fats are essential. You have to get them from the

diet. But you don't need the volume we eat now. We used to eat, you know, maybe one to one omega-3 to six or, you know, two to one omega-6 to omega-3. I had a patient who, if you saw her picture, Janice, we always talk about her, which is like red in the face, super inflamed, chronic illnesses. And I got her lab test, which I was just shocked that I'd never seen such an abnormal ratio of omega-6 to omega-3. It was 20 to one. I was like, whoa. So, you know, my patients usually are pretty self-selected and they're already coming in like pre-cleaned up. They're already pretty good on their diet. They're already exercising. They want the value add that I can provide in solving complex problems. But occasionally, I get what I call a virgin patient

who's never eaten a vegetable in their life. And you just see what they're eating and the processed food and what the effect on their health and their skin. It's amazing. I mean, the side effect of practicing functional medicine is that people look younger and their skin gets better and all these external problems go away. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Something I get more and more excited about every year

is personalized medicine. When I began practicing functional medicine over 20 years ago, it was clear to me we have to look at how unique each body is. Now, with the technology advancing in amazing ways, we can truly take that concept to the next level. help us all do that from home is InsideTracker. Founded in 2009 by top scientists in aging genetics and biometric data from MIT, Tufts, and Harvard, InsideTracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. It's purpose-built to help you live a longer, more productive life. Their cutting-edge technology analyzes your blood DNA lifestyle to give you highly personalized recommendations. Then using the app, you can track your progress every day. InsideTracker tells you what to do and why, so your health goals are clear and actionable, and most importantly, based on exactly what your body needs. My team took InsideTracker for a spin and really loved it. They discovered some

important things about their health that led them to stop procrastinating when it came to certain parts of their health. Like, for example, finally taking vitamin D supplements after seeing they were deficient or eating more iron-rich foods due to low ferritin and hemoglobin and making an effort to embrace stress reduction techniques after seeing high cortisol levels. Health is not black and white, and your wellness plan shouldn't be either. If you're curious about getting your own health program dialed into your unique needs, I highly recommend checking out InsideTracker. Right now, they're offering my community 25% off at InsideTracker.com forward slash DR Hyman. That's Dr. Hyman. InsideTracker.com. That's I-N-S-I-D-E-T-R-A-C-K-E-R.com slash Dr. Hyman, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N.

And you'll see the discount code in your cart. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. I want to talk about one of the foods that was on your list when we were just jotting a couple notes that people don't always think about when it comes to beauty. And that was organ meats. Talk about organ meats and why that was on the list of foods you yeah organ meats are something weird like why do you kidneys or liver or heart or brain my mother used to feed me calf brain when i was a kid that's what it's good now with the that's intense with the uh

mad cow disease but anyway um i i i really uh i think they're an unappreciated source of the most nutrient-dense food on the planet. And I encourage everybody listening to go to their computer after this is over and Google liver and like nutrient density and compared to vegetables. And you'll see like in the graph side by side, liver looks like the most powerful superfood ever invented on the planet, whereas the best kind of plant-based food, like high nutrient density broccoli or something, looks like a very poor second cousin compared to the liver. It is because these organ meats contain the highest levels of nutrients and

medicinal compounds that are essential for our health, like vitamin A, omega-3 fats often, and they're really rich sources of nutrient-dense food. So I think people miss out on that. Now, you want to make sure you're eating organic. And when I was a kid, my mother, we were very poor. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens. She was a teacher. She made like $7,000 a year, and she would make fried chicken liver with onions and over rice. I thought it was like a gourmet meal because I loved it so much. But that was our dinner because it was so cheap

because nobody wants to eat chicken livers. But get organic chicken livers. It's a good thing to add to your diet and it's good for your health and your skin. And if that grosses you out, they actually have companies now like Paleo Valley that make organ meat supplements. Right.

Or even better than organic would be like, if you can find pasture raised. Regenerative, right. Right, regenerative or pasture raised, which again, it's not always accessible. It's not always out there, but we highlight the different options that are there. Still, if the organic chickens

are mostly eating organic corn, right? So their makeup is going to be a little bit different. But again, we do the best that we possibly can. So I want to, I'll come back to food in a second, but I'm really curious, especially do the best that we, uh, we, uh, we possibly can. So I want to, I'll come back to food in a second, but I'm really curious, especially with you being out there, a shout out to our friend, Jeff, who is at, um, one commune and you're staying at their retreat center here in, uh, in Los Angeles, up in Topanga. And, uh, they have a sauna set up. They host retreats there. We'll link to their, uh, center in the show notes. And, um, you know, you can check it

out if you want to. Um, but you're staying there right now working on your next book about longevity longevity yes practicing what you preach so give us the minimum viable dosage when it comes to hot and cold what have you seen from the research and what are you doing um while you're there and also while you're not because you're often traveling so how do you get advantage of the hot and cold treatments when you're traveling or popping around in different places yeah well i'm like super spoiled right now because where i'm staying it's just there's this giant cedar cold plunge and there's also this beautiful barrel sauna which quickly heats up so basically my routine is i'll wake up i'll write for a little bit i'll work out i'll sort of fast sort of do like an intermittent, I mean a time-restricted eating,

and then I'll turn the sauna, I'll go in the sauna, and I'll stand there pretty much until I can't stand it, 10-15 minutes, and then I go on the ice plunge as long as I can. Now what the science says is just fascinating about this. With saunas, it actually activates your innate immune system, it activates heat shock proteins. So a lot of what happens with our skin is the degradation of proteins. And heat shock proteins really help to repair and refold proteins in ways that actually make them back to normal. It also helps you detoxify your skin and get rid of all the sludge and stuff that builds up over time if you're putting stuff on your skin or if you're not sweating. So sweat really helps. And so it's really an anti-inflammatory treatment. It also helps reset your autonomic nervous system. So lower stress means lower cortisol. Cortisol causes your skin to thin

and to break down. And the cold treatments also are really amazing because they reset your autonomic nervous system and they help to actually activate what we call brown fat, which increases metabolism and your overall metabolic health. And so combining those two together will actually extend life and help you look better. Now in Russia, I mean in Finland, they have, I think, enough saunas for everybody in Finland to go on in the same time to be in a sauna. And their control group, because they were so into saunas, was basically people who only get it once a week versus five times a week.

So, and a sauna has been shown to actually improve cardiovascular fitness, improve cognitive function, to improve heart rate variability, to help with detoxification, to help with innate immune function, to help with reducing inflammation, these heat shock proteins. So there's so many scientific benefits that have been proven.

And I think it's a great longevity strategy. And then when you're on the road, you know, what I'll do is I'll- And sorry, before you talk about the road, how long are you doing each of those? As long as I can stand it. As long as you can stand it. Basically, I go in to the, it depends on how cold the plunge is, but how hot the sauna is, but usually 15 minutes in the sauna. And then I'll try to stay in the ice plunge, just how cold it is for two or three minutes.

Right. Temperature for both is a big part of that process. Yeah, so if you do a 40-degree ice plunge, it's similar to a 50-degree ice plunge, right? I was in one the other day with ice cubes in it. I couldn't, you know, that was like a minute. I could handle a minute. So with the ice cubes, and people build up to it. Uh, but, but then I got really cold after and I needed some chicken soup. Sure. Sure. And for anybody who's listening, obviously

follow a documented protocol. Uh, you had Andrew Huberman on the podcast. He's got a few Wim Hof. You've had him on the podcast. He's got a few as well. Build up your tolerance. But if you would say minimum viable dose and then also minimum viable dose when you're on the road of how you yeah i think you know 10-15 minutes on a hot sauna if it's in the fridge sauna half an hour and at least a minute in cold plunge ideally about three two three four minutes five minutes yeah and then how many times a week if you can get in even once a week twice a week yes i mean i i think more is better so i i try to do it every day if you can't you know two three times a week is good people don't have the availability often,

but there's hacks, right? You can actually take an extremely hot bath. That helps. And then you can go in a cold shower. Most people don't have a problem with that. Most people have a bath, and most people have a shower. So another thing you can do is wake up every morning and take a nice cold shower,

which I did when I was in Vermont for a month by myself, which was quite interesting. I quit coffee and went for the cold shower and I'll tell you it worked. And I was traveling and I found out a cold plunge. I did it every morning when I woke up. It's the best way to wake up. You're like, whoa, okay, I'm up now. Yeah. I don't have a backyard, but my brother-in-law, Dr. Neil Patel, who's a cardiologist down in San Diego, he got for his backyard a little like a little plastic barrel. You dump ice in it, fill it up with water. And then that's like your cold punch.

Yeah, you can get those metal troughs that you use for like feeding cows and horses and water. Totally. And then my friend bought an ice machine and basically filled it up with ice and put water in and then you just get your ice punch. And you're not just doing it for your looks. Like you actually feel good after doing it. Oh yeah, I mean, I'm not doing it for how I look. I'm doing it because it's the most powerful stress reset I've ever experienced.

Literally just clears out all the stress. And then there's, I think I'm tired. And actually not, I'm just, it's the accumulated stress of working, thinking, writing all day, sitting in the chair, it's just stressful, like it's the normal stress. And I'll do something like that, like all my energy will come flooding back and I go, wow,

this is the best magic trick. So if I'm tired or I'm a little, you know, stressed, it's the greatest way to do a reset. It's great. That's fantastic. Um, let's go over to movement. You know, everybody has a different angle on movement and we've covered movement a few times in this podcast, but tell me about movement and its relationship to beauty from the inside out. You know, one of the things that ages us most is, is what we call the hallmarks of aging. And I talk about this in the book, but there's a whole series of underlying breakdowns that happen in our biology as we age that drive accelerated inflammation and oxidative stress. And so when you see wrinkles, when you see skin damage, when you see poor quality skin,

it's often a sign of inflammation and or oxidative stress. With the caveat that we all are meant to, as we get older, we're going to have some wrinkles. We're going to have some of that that's there.'re going to have some of it but we're talking about accelerated amounts that yeah i mean it's interesting like my main sun exposure has been on my face yeah but if i look at you know my skin health and i i know it gives you know getting body work done by somebody say man you have a body of a 30 year old i mean your skin health elasticity this you know because you can actually take your skin you can pull it up and you see how long it takes to go down. And it shouldn't be like if you're old, it takes a long time.

But like for me, it's pretty quick. And it can take up to a minute sometimes if you're old for the skin to go down. So you can actually have youthful skin by taking care of the inside. Now, if you get a lot of sun damage, that's going to cause UV radiation and that creates external inflammation and external oxidative stress, which is what happens. So I need to deal with that because I rented a convertible in LA and I got too much sun this week. But there's ways to fix that. But the beautiful thing about exercise is that it addresses all these hallmarks of aging. So whether it's DNA mutations, whether it's protein issues and protein folding issues,

whether it's inflammation, or whether it's your metabolic health, we call it nutrient sensing, which is blood sugar issues, which are hugely related to your skin health, whether it's mitochondrial and energy production, all these things play a role in your skin health. So the more you can do to actually halt or reverse these hallmarks of aging, which Edmund talked a lot about in my book, Young Forever, you actually can look younger and also be younger, right? A lot of people do a lot of stuff on the outside to look younger, but they don't deal with the easiest hack, which is getting younger from the inside out. One of those that is also on that list is also the health of your fascia, the foundation of your fascia and your ability to move regularly,

and then also get some deep tissue work and make sure you break up that fascial tissue. Chiropractors, especially who are like really aware of the role that fascia plays with your skin health will tell you that people can start looking younger just by getting regular body work done and improving the quality of their fascia and actually if you look at a lot of individuals as they as they age and there's lack of movement there's a lot of sitting and people start to hunch over that's the that's the pulling in of the fascial tissue that's starting to slowly, because there's no resistance counter to that component. So that's another area that movement significantly plays a role in how you look, your posture, your confidence.

That's why I like hot yoga, because you get the sauna and the exercise at the same time. Totally, totally. Let's talk about a bonus one. This one is a good one to talk about. And that one is stress. Stress is one of those ones that can age you very rapidly. You know, some of my favorite presidential photos for any president, regardless of, you know, whatever side they're on, is like the photo of them when they first come into office and the photo four years later four years later or even eight years later and um the level of stress they go through or anybody in any position obviously parents know a lot about this so there's a certain level of uh well actually let me just pass it over to you how should we think about stress and the stress that um we can't do a lot about and the stress that maybe we can mitigate a little bit with lifestyle practice.

Yeah. I mean, I mean, stress affects us, you know, throughout every condition. I mean, 95% of all these diseases are either caused by or worsened by stress. So whether it's your skin or your heart, heart or cancer or your immune system, any, any aspect of your health is influenced by stress. And stress is defined as the perception of a real or imagined threat to your body or your ego. So it can be a physical stress or a mental stress. And often we live in a world that triggers a lot of mental stress. Most of us have enough to eat. Most of us have a place to stress. Most of us have enough to eat. Most of us have a place to sleep. Most of us have clothes to wear. But it's the psychological stresses that

trigger a physiologic response that's the same as a tiger chasing you. And when you get that response, it's meant to be a quick, short burst and run away from the tiger and then stop. But in our society, the stress just keeps going. There's a beautiful book written by Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist from Stanford, one of the most brilliant guys I've ever met, who basically studied the stress response in baboons. He was like the Jane Goodall of baboons. And he wrote a book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, which is based on the idea that

the zebras are all, you know, eating their grass and, you know, grazing, having a good time. And the lion comes and starts chasing them. They all run like crazy. He catches one of them. And then they all go back to eating the grass with the lion standing there eating their friend and then they just like have an accelerated quick stress response and then it's off in our society we keep having chronic stress and and so a lot of uh the hacks that i think we'll talk about this a lot of the hacks that we can do are ways to reset our physiological state we talked about saunas, saunas and cold plunges. That is a massive reset for your autonomic nervous system that can discharge the stress. Exercise. I mean, you're supposed to run from the tiger. So when your body is producing all these molecules that are getting

you ready to run, like cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone, so it makes your blood clot faster. It's good if you're running from a tiger, but not if you don't want to get a heart attack or a stroke. It causes you to have high glucose levels, which is great because you want a lot of sugar to fuel your muscles so you can run as fast as you can. But you don't want that prolonged high glucose because that leads to diabetes and more inflammation. it causes adrenaline to flood through your body, which causes all kinds of downstream consequences in terms of your heart and palpitations and blood pressure, anxiety. It all makes you want to eat more. It makes you probably choose the wrong foods because stress makes you crave carbohydrates like sugar and starch. So this chronic stress response leads to all these secondary downstream effects that that are harmful and cortisol itself is something that increases as we age and growth hormone goes down growth hormone is a repair of hormone cortisol is you know stress hormone

it's not that it's good or bad is that when it's prolonged in its elevation it drives all these downstream pathologies so it makes your skin really damaged. If you ever see someone on cortisol, their skin is like thin as paper, you know, and they get fluid retention and they get inflammation, puffiness. So it's really important to understand that while stress is inevitable, our response to stress determines how that stress affects us. So that's why every day I meditate, I get enough sleep, I exercise, I do hot and cold, I eat foods that are not stressing my body. Because by the way, and this was shocking to me when I learned it, even if you're like a Zen monk and you eat sugar, your cortisol goes through the roof. Your adrenaline goes through the roof. So you could be the calmest person in the world and an enlightened master maybe they can transmute this i don't know but

they if they eat a ton of sugar and starch their body's response to it is danger dr david lindwig did this study it was fascinating to me where he took young boys who were overweight and said, look, I'm going to give you three breakfasts, eggs, steel-cut oats, or a regular oatmeal. And they were all identical calories, identical calories. And then he followed their blood levels. He had a catheter, and he drew their blood like every hour. And then he said, whatever you want to eat, just push the button, it'll bring you food.

And so the group that ate the oatmeal, which we think is a health food, and I'm not talking about donuts or pancakes or French toast or frappa mocha china lattes or whatever the heck you're eating for breakfast, those are worse. But the oatmeal caused these kids not only to crave more food, they ate 81% more calories over the course of the day because they were hungrier because of the biological effects of eating the oatmeal, increasing their cortisol, increasing insulin. They literally had a stress response in their bodies. Their cortisol went up, their adrenaline went up, their blood sugar went up, their insulin went up, their cholesterol went up. It's like danger, danger will represent when they ate the oatmeal. And so over time, that just creates a degradation in your biology. Your collagen breaks down. Your skin breaks down.

In extreme cases, you get increased acne and all kinds of other stuff. So it's a real problem. All right, Mark. I have a list of a few topics where people want to know, is it hyped? Is it underrated, overrated, or appropriately rated when it comes to aging and our appearance and other things like that? Supplemental collagen. What do you think about that? Is it worth it? And is it something that you think people could be including in their coffee or smoothie or taking in water?

Well, it certainly works when you inject it. I think, you know, it certainly is a source of amino acids and protein and your skin structure and collagen is made of protein. So you need to have the raw materials. And if you're protein deficient, your skin breaks down. The quality isn't as good. The glow isn't there. So you need aqua protein. And I think you can get it from many sources, including collagen.

I'm not sure if it completely meets the hype that it has. But I think if people want to use it, it's fine. Um, talk about hydration. People are really wondering at what level, uh, does, you know, a lot of people, I think the context of sort of this note here is that a lot of people don't know that they're dehydrated and they don't drink enough water throughout the day and they over drink caffeinated beverages. Or sugary beverages. Or sugary beverages.

What does that do to the quality of your skin and how your appearances look on the outside? Well, we're 70% water. And if you see someone who's dehydrated, I mean, you know, clinically in medical school, we're trained to see, okay, when someone's dehydrated, they have these signs, you know, their mouth is dry, their skin is more sunken. They actually, we're trained to see, okay, when somebody's dehydrated, they have these signs. Their mouth is dry. Their skin is more sunken. We do this in babies. We can pull their skin up,

and if it doesn't sink down, it means they're dehydrated. So your skin really reflects your state of hydration. Most people need to drink at least half their weight in pounds in ounces of fluids. In other words, if you're 200 pounds, you drink 100 ounces a day. If you're 100 pounds, you drink 50 ounces a day, which isn't really that much. I mean, it's like 50 ounces is less than two liters, right? If you're small. And if you're bigger, you need three liters, four liters. I mean, you can overhydrate, which is important because especially now people are having reverse osmosis filters and they're drinking

demineralized water you need to make sure you have adequate electrolytes so I always add electrolytes to my water because it helps create intracellular hydration what happens is if you get if you get too much water and this this is what happens with marathon runners who die because they essentially will be drinking a lot of water without electrolytes and they dilute their blood. Literally, all your components of your blood become diluted. And so you get low sodium. You get something called hyponatremia. And that causes seizures and comas and death.

So you want to make sure if you're drinking a lot of water that you're actually boosting it with electrolytes and minerals. Yeah, another small version of that people always tell you that uh better than no uh like our tb12 coaches uh who we train with um shout out to john if you drink water and you are cramping a lot from that water that's also a sign that you may not be appropriately having the right amount of electrolytes in there. Um, brand that I like no affiliation, no partnership, whatever, but I like mountain Valley. We have it here. They have naturally occurring electrolytes in there, but do you add electrolytes and what do you want people to know about a lot of the common electrolytes out on the market? Okay. Well, I've tried all of them, or not all of them, but most of them. Most electrolytes either have sugar sweetened or they're stevia sweetened or they have other kinds of sugar alcohols.

They have strong flavors. And the one I like, I found is super simple. It has a little lemony flavor. There's no sweeteners to it. It's called Light Show. I don't have any affiliation with it. It's L-Y-T-E, show, S-H-O-W. And it comes in capsules. It comes in also liquid. So I like the liquid. I just squirt it in. I do it every morning. I drink two glasses of water when I

wake up. I squirt it in electrolytes. It's a great way to start the day. So you got to get 16 ounces, boom. Some people say you should drink 32 ounces before you do anything else. And I probably should do that. But it really is important to flush your system and I think a lot of people's fatigue and many health issues are due to sort of like low grade dehydration that people have and suffer from and aren't really thinking about it so I encourage people skip plastic bottles because phthalates and bpa and often in those and it's bad for the environment you know get metal bottles now this is great that mountain valley has this mountain metal bottles i i actually bought a hydro flask which is a 32 ounce container it's really nice you can drink from it i throw my electrolytes in there i keep it with me

all day it's great there's another one i just want to mention it because you've recommended in mark's picks before and a few other places it's called um elite by uh yeah body bio do you still recommend that yeah elite is great uh elite is great it it it's just it's not for everybody because it it's just really strong like it tastes it's like salty so it's a taste thing it's like yeah so light show has some like lemony flavor that makes it but you can see with with with elite you could actually just squeeze lemon into it sure i like it i use it a lot. And it's one of the most amazing things, particularly when you're doing sports or athletics and you do it.

If you take too much electrolytes, you'll cause loose stools and you'll be pooping, which I once filled up my 70-ounce Camelback when I was on a long bike ride in Maui and I put a ton of electrolytes in there. I was like, oh, boy, this is another idea of exercise and detox. So I said, we're going to come back to food. Um, there's a few foods and nutrients that you want to give a little special love and attention to. So I'm going to pass over to you to jump into some. Yes. So, so before you into what

to eat, I want to just mention what not to eat if you want nice skin. We talked about the oils, and it's important because you want to have the right oils. And most of us need an oil change. We need avocado oil, omega-3 oils, olive oil. Those should be your staples. And skip all the other oils, all the processed oils, trans fat, and so forth. Animal saturated fat is fine. If it's from a regeneratively raised cow, it's different. But mostly, those are the fats. But the reality is that most people's skin looks terrible because of the amount of processed food and refined carbohydrates and sugar.

So not only is sugar and carbohydrates one of the number one source of acne, but it also drives inflammation and oxidative stress, which accelerate aging. There was a wonderful book by Nicholas Perricone called The Wrinkle Cure that I read years ago, which talked about the power of food to actually improve the quality of your skin. And he talks about upregulating, obviously, omega-3s by eating wild salmon or wild fish like sardines, organ meats, obviously, but also cutting out all the processed foods, sugar and starch, which is just the basic vegan diet. And in addition, there's some really important nutrients that are important for skin. It's like vitamin A and vitamin C,

vitamin E, antioxidants that help protect your skin. For example, beta carotene or the carotenoids, which from all the orange, yellow vegetables, sweet potatoes, avocados, they actually have UV protection. So when you look at some of the data, it's really interesting. If you take people who are sun exposed, if they eat these foods or if they take antioxidants, their skin doesn't get as damaged because there's antioxidant protection in the skin. There's this really cool machine that I saw years ago. It's a spectrophotometer. You basically put it on your skin and you get a score of your antioxidant score because it shines a light through and it can actually detect the level of antioxidants or carotenoids in your skin. And so, I mean, you can also get a fake tan by eating a lot of carrots. I did that once. I was like on a carrot

juice kick like 30 years ago. It was a really bad idea. And I was like, wow, why am I so orange? That happened to Steve Jobs. I'm like, so orange. I'm like, wow, why am I so orange? That happened to Steve Jobs. I'm like, so orange. I'm like, I look like Donald Trump. It's orange. But it's important to eat that. And also biotin, which is really important. And that's found in more in organ meats and other things. Biotin is a very important, it's called B7 or biotin, your gut bacteria make it very important for your hair, skin, and nails. So making sure you're having adequate foods with these and even taking supplements can really be helpful. You know, a few years ago, I came across this book called Facercise. I don't know if you've

heard of this, but they're basically these facial movements that you can do and they like strengthen, it's like lifting weights for your fates, but you just need to do certain movements. So it's a way to like stretch your neck skin out and like, you don't do all these things. And I was thinking, you know, for a while I was like really curious about it and I would do it. And I actually saw like interesting results. Like your, your, your face looks more defined and the muscles look more defined. And I was chatting about it with a friend. I was like, you know what? I think if you just live an active life, you have a lot of friends and you laugh a lot, you laugh a lot, you hang out with people that make you laugh.

Uh, you cry a lot, right? You just like whatever the full range of emotions are. And, um, also I think working out, you know, the beautiful thing about working out is that you make all sorts of weird face contortions. You know, if you're doing like a deadlift or you're pushing things out, you're the tongue out guy. I've seen that. Uh, so I think that's another way to incorporate it in without having to do – I mean, it's a lot of work to do those exercises. It reminded me, my mother had this thing when we were growing up. I think it was called a Dynatone.

And it basically had these two electrodes. And it looked like a taser, basically. And she would put it on her face and make her face go like this. And all the muscles would contract in her neck. And she would put it on. I was like, wow, that is a weird thing. and i used to try to sneak in and try it yeah it's a kind of a facial like uh stimulation electrical stimulation machine yeah that's funny that's funny uh all right mark this is the part of the podcast where we go into some community questions from folks on the topic of aging i I know you're not a dermatologist,

but everybody always wants to know what are your thoughts on Botox and, or are there resources that out there that you could refer people to when it comes to, uh, well, let's start off with Botox first, right? People want to know there's a lot of people that eat really healthy, live really active lives, other things like that. And then they feel like, well, I'm in a career or a place or whatever that I want to do a little bit of Botox. It just, I like the way that it looks for my skin. Are you worried about it? Are you neutral about it? Are you cautious about it? I'm not so worried about Botox. I think it's a short acting compound that, you know, causes muscle paralysis that makes it look like you don't have wrinkles.

And I think that's fine if people want to do it for cosmetic reasons. I think, you know, I met this woman once who she never went anywhere without an umbrella. I'm like, what's up with the umbrella? She's like, son. And she literally had an umbrella wherever she went and never went out without her umbrella.

And her skin, 50 years old, looked like she was 20. So skin is highly damaged by the sun. And my skin clearly has been damaged by the sun because I like to be outside a lot. And I don't always put sunblock on, or I should, but I forget sometimes. So I think that there's a really important way to protect yourself from sun damage, which leads to the need for all these by wearing sun block and the right kinds of sun block. I'd encourage people to go to ewg.org, the Environmental Working Group, where they have a database called Skin Deep. And it's a beautiful way to look up different products for your skin, sunblocks to find out which have the least toxins because I had a woman who was always

using sunblock and she had high levels of parabens in her body and it was kind of toxic and so I'm gonna be careful with that. Also there's a lot of techniques that actually help rejuvenate the skin that are available to people including lasers and microdermabrasion and fillers and a lot of stuff people are doing and I don't have any judgment about it. I think it's fine. I think where I have a problem with it is when people focus on that and don't also focus on beauty from the inside out.

Right, because that friend of yours, again, no judgment on the situation or whatever, she was protecting her skin from the sun. But if you don't have regular sun exposure, there's a whole host of other things you're missing out on. Vitamin E deficiency, right? And your circadian rhythm is not synced with a day. I have a friend who is an esthetician here in LA

and everywhere she goes, she wears a sun mask and then carries an umbrella and other stuff. And I, again, people can do anything that they want to do, but we obsess over one thing and we might be losing out on other stuff. Not to mention the joy. If you're constantly worried about sun and you think the sun is doing something to you

all the time. Yeah. It's a, yeah, it's a problem instead of just being smart. Right. Yeah. And I, you know, I had a lot of sun damage on my skin from just years of being in the sun. And I, and I actually went, um, to dermat went to dermatologist. They can actually look at this

skin through these incredible fluorescent imaging things. And you see all these precancerous spots. So I had a treatment that kind of cleared all that stuff. And all these spots, literally all these precancerous lesions fell off. What was that treatment called? There's laser treatments, fractal lasers. There's also creams like 5-FU that dermatologists use to deal with kind of cleaning up all the surface damage. And there's ways to build collagen in the skin naturally. So there's a lot of really exciting dermatologic advances in looking younger. And we just had Tony Robbins on our podcast and Peter Diamandis talking about their book, Life Force. And there's a whole section in there on

what's emerging in the world of skin rejuvenation and dermatology. So it's kind of exciting. I mean, the future looks even more wild. I mean, we're going to be able to actually reprogram our cells back to younger cells through really cool technologies that seem sci-fi, but I think are around the corner, such as, for example, through process of gene editing, inserting a combination of genes that have been discovered called the Yamanaka factors that can be switched on to reprogram your cells to reverse back to their embryonic state. We call those inducible pluripotent stem cells. And those undefined stem cells could then re-differentiate into whatever tissue organ. So skin rejuvenation, there's, there's just so much fun stuff coming down the road.

So not only will you be able to live to be 120, but you'll be able to look maybe 60 at 120. Yeah. And you know, one thing that we'll share in here and I'm sure you'll talk about in your conclusion is that we want people to look however they want to look right at the end of the day, be happy with yourself and there's a sense of just accepting yourself and however you want to show up. So this is really not a conversation about looks. It's really that the way the byproduct of feeling good is that also the likelihood is you tend to look good as well too if you want to do those things comparatively to what the baseline would be if you're eating a standard processed diet that's out there. So number one, we want people to feel great because when you feel great,

you can give love and attention to all the things in life that truly matter. And that's way more than just your looks. It's being there for your grandkids. It's being able to show up for your partner. It's being able to give back to the world. It's being able to make a difference in your spiritual or church community that's out there.

It's being able to give back or build a business or whatever it might be, make a difference. So that's why we wanna feel good. And as a byproduct of that, because we know we'll catch some people's attention who are focused on wanting to look better. Nothing wrong with that. The best way to do that is from the inside out. All right, Mark, we have a few more questions. This is from the Dr. Hyman plus community. One of the first questions we have is from Charlotte who asks, what kind of sauna does Dr. Hyman use, infrared or regular? And what would you recommend to the population that's out there? I'll take whatever I can get. Steam, sauna, you know, infrared sauna. I think there's

varying arguments about which is better or worse. I think they all work. I think the infrared saunas, you can stay longer. There's a little more penetration of your skin, a little more detox benefits. It's less sort of hot and intolerable, which some people don't like actual saunas. For me, I like to go to the Russian room at the 10th Street Bathhouse in Lower East Side, New York, where my great-grandfather used used to go which is like this stone room literally it's made of stone and there's an there's a giant oven in the room which is turned at full blast you're literally in a sitting in a baking oven and i don't know how much it is but it's really hot it's super hot i took you there didn't i yeah we went there we went there but i had been there one time before previously that place is like an institution it's been there forever um i'm a little worried about mold though

it's a little gross it's a little intense but it's a great place i don't think the mold can live in the 180 degree of that yeah i'm probably thinking about it too much okay next question also from charlotte is what is the ideal omega-3 to 6 ratio? Do you know that offhand? Yes. I mean, I think that there's conversation about it. I think anywhere from 4 to 1 and down is fine. So 4 to 1 omega-6 with 3, 3 to 1, 2 to 1, 1 to 1. And there are tests that we use to look at this as part of a diagnostics I do as a functional medicine doctor. We do the omega check, which is one. We use the ion panel, other from Genova diagnostics. So we can actually tell, you know, what the composition of the fats that people are made of. And it's fascinating to see. It's like, wow,

you're really, you need an oil change. Or no, you're good. Or you're deficient in this. Or you have too much of that. As it really helps people. I go, and you can really tell what people are eating from. I mean, it's so amazing. People are like, how do you know I'm eating that? I'm like, I can see. You know, I had a friend the other day come to me with his neurotransmitter test and he was freaking out because he had this really high level of one analyte, which was phenylethylamine, which sounds like something bad or I don't know what. And it was off the chart. I was like, what is this? Should I be worried? I'm like, hmm, do you eat a lot of chocolate? And he's like, yeah, every day. every day and i'm like well that's what it

is you're peeing out the phenylethylamine which is the love bomb chemical in chocolate and it's not a problem but you know just that's where you're getting it from that's funny one of the first tests that i did when i discovered the world of functional medicine it's actually a test that people can order at home and it's uh the omega quant test it's a little prick test you could do it at home you don't need a practitioner order it again no affiliation with the company and um it's uh 99 bucks and you get your full omega three to six ratio and a whole bunch of other details on the quality of your fats including they have one marker inside of there that helps you understand the level of trans fats that you're consuming yeah that's the other thing you can tell people

eating junk food i'm like oh you're in junk food aren't you they're consuming. Yeah. That's the other thing. You can tell people eating junk food. I'm like, ah, you're in junk food, aren't you? They're like, how do you know? I'm like, well, it says it on your lab test. You've got high levels of hydrogenated or trans fats, which are highly dangerous and really can, can be deadly. Yeah. We'll have the link to that in the show notes. Again, cool test. I love anytime people can order tests and get it from home. That one's relatively inexpensive as tests go, but still about a hundred bucks. Okay, great. Next question. Anine asks, how do you ensure that all those good fats you're eating are absorbed well by your body? So let's even take a step back and say, are there things that can be happening in our body that prevent us from absorbing good quality fats that we're having in our body? Sure. I mean, Drew, we, you know,

functional medicine, I do stool testing all the time, and I can see if there's fat malabsorption. I think it's a pancreatic problem, enzyme problem. And the truth is though, most people do a pretty good job of absorbing fats. There's a system in the gut that breaks down the fats or absorbs through the lymphatic system, except for MCTO, which is a little bit different.

And they're then metabolized and put into the circulation. So I think for most people, it's not an issue. But there are certain people who have enzymatic issues with their pancreas, whether it's, you know, they've had pancreatitis, or they have cystic fibrosis, or they have, you know, low-grade pancreatic insufficiency. As we get older, we have more pancreatic insufficiency. So sometimes taking digestive enzymes can be very, very helpful. And so I recommend people take digestive enzymes if they're concerned about that. That's great. Fantastic. I also know that some people don't always do great with concentrated dosages of single fats, especially if you have a

history of leaky gut or other stuff. You can have a reaction to if you have a history of like leaky gut or other stuff, you can have a reaction to if you use a lot of coconut oil or cook with coconut oil or using a lot of saturated fats like butter and things like that. I know that I can do generally okay with coconut, but if I have coconut oil, then I find that it's a little bit problematic. I actually noticed a few years ago that a really strong redness that I was having in my face and inflammation that was on my skin. And I had a history of having acne was directly connected to a high dose. Anytime I would use coconut oil or MCT

oil, I'd get a little bit of reaction. And I found out that it was an endotoxemia situation. Again, that's more of a unique situation, but sometimes go to like whole food type fats that you have and dial back a little bit from the concentrated sources of fats if you seem to be not doing well with them. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think, you know, there's some interesting studies. You just mentioned a word I think it's important to talk about, which is this idea of metabolic endotoxemia. What that means is that when you eat certain foods, it drives the production of certain bacteria that then produce these secondary compounds, these endotoxins called lipopolysaccharides, which are basically poisons. It's the bacteria's way of doing bad stuff. And those are absorbed in the body.

And then the immune system says, ooh, that's bad. And it starts triggering inflammation. That inflammation starts triggering insulin resistance and diabetes and fluid retention. Because, by the way, inflammation drives fluid retention. So when you see people go through a functional medicine program or eat the pecan diet, they'll just look younger because they'll get rid of all the inflammation in their body. The fluid just drops out of their tissues and they have kind of a more normal looking appearance. I had one patient who was, she wasn't overweight or anything, but she had long, long standing inflammatory issues. And she said, Dr. Hyman, Dr. Hyman, there's something

wrong. I'm like, what? I said, well, I can't, I have, I can see all my knuckles and I never saw my knuckles before because her hands were like sausages because of all the inflammation. And when inflammation went down, she could actually see her, her knuckles. She thought there was something wrong. I'm like, no, no, that's okay. So here's another question from the community and a little unrelated, but a little related to the longevity topic. So the community member says, I've heard metformin mentioned as possibly having longevity

effects. I was on this for almost 15 years and I was very happy to get off of it when I lost 65 pounds following the peaking diet. Do the benefits outweigh the negatives with metformin? I've listened to so much functional medicine that someone, even a non-diabetic, taking metformin confuses me. Yes, I agree. It still confuses people, and it even confuses me, to be honest with you. And I've been digging deep into this. So what you're talking about is a drug that's been available from a Vilek plant, I think from France, that has been used for a long time as a foundational treatment for type 2 diabetes because it helps with insulin sensitivity. This particular drug is generally very safe. It can cause problems. It can cause

digestive issues. It can maybe have adverse effects in the mitochondria over time. But there's some really interesting emerging research around its effect on longevity because one of the key pathways, and I write about this in my book Young Forever, which is coming out in February 2023, is that it helps to regulate the nutrient-sensing pathways that control aging around longevity, like AMPK, which is a particular nutrient-sensing pathway. And so if you're eating a lot of sugar and starch and having a lot of insulin resistance, it actually can be very effective in helping to activate a number of pathways. And there seem to be other secondary effects that we're just learning about that may be beneficial for longevity.

So am I taking it? No. Am I learning more and thinking I might take it? Maybe. So stay tuned. I just need to do more work on it because I'm not convinced. And here's why I'm not convinced. I think that there are so many better ways to access the same pathways and to regulate those nutrient sensing pathways. And the reason is there's a major study called the diabetes prevention trial or

DPP that was done many years ago where they did an experiment where they said, and these are people who are pre-diabetic. They said, okay, if we give people who are pre-diabetic metformin, nothing, or lifestyle change, what happens? And they found a dramatic improvement through the lifestyle change. The lifestyle change worked 58% better than the metformin, which worked better than doing nothing. But, you know, if changing your lifestyle works 60% better than metformin, why take metformin? You know, if, if, if you're changing your lifestyle, work 60% better than metformin, why take that? You know, that's my view. Super fascinating, Mark. All right, we're wrapping up. Let's do a little bit of a recap on some of the top things that you think can play a significant role when it comes to the secrets to looking younger, which is really beauty

from the inside out. So do a little recap on some of the stuff that we mentioned and some of the take-homes that people can implement really starting today. Absolutely. I mean, I think the most important thing to do is to clean up your diet. It's just that is number one, two, and three. So pegan diet is great. You can even go further than that and eliminate all dairy, which can be inflammatory, all gluten, all sugar, alcohol. All those things can be pretty damaging in terms of your appearance and skin. But it depends on the person. So if you really want to do a reset and see how you feel, that's a good way to do it. I had a friend who I saw the other night who's 65 and was complaining about getting older and

aches and pains and her skin or this and the fluid. And I'm like, she's like, can I come see you? I said, save your money. Don't pay me anything. Do this 10 day detox diet, the reset we talked about, but do it for 21 days. And she says, and she came over, she says, I'm so mad at you. I'm like, what? And she starts hitting me and I'm like, what, what? She says, I feel so great, but I'm not having alcohol. I'm not having this. I'm having that. I'm like, okay, fine. But you know, you're feeling so good and you look so good because you changed your diet. That's the first thing. Get rid of inflammatory foods, add in all the anti-inflammatory foods we talked about. Things like guacamole, chopped liver, and sweet potato is a good skin meal with a little bit of maybe sardines on the side. How about that?

I would like that meal, actually. That sounds really good to me. Maybe not everybody. The second is move, move, move your body because it activates all the longevity pathways, longevity switches. It shuts down all the hallmarks of aging. Super powerful. Hot and cold therapy is really easy. As we talked about, can be implanted. Don't really cost much. I mean, if you want to buy a sauna and so forth, it can be expensive, but there are ways to do it without. And then make sure you're taking the right nutrients. I think fish oil, a good multivitamin, making sure you have vitamin A and zinc and vitamin C and vitamin E. And then I think for the other pieces, which are the sort of outside in, I think, you know, whatever feels good to you.

I think people want to get really aggressive and do a lot of laser treatments and Botox and fillers and collagen. I have no judgment about that. But I think that, you know, often the results are so powerful from the inside out that people often won't need that. Yeah, or they'll need less of it. Or less of it, yeah. Or those things influence your brain

and you also start to feel more contented with yourself. Right. So you're like, I'm not as worried about that wrinkle or that thing or whatever, because I feel good. And again, you want to do any treatments you want to do, great, there's no judgment at all. Let's try the lifestyle interventions first so we can actually

feel better not just look better fantastic all right mark that was great perfect recap let's go ahead and conclude out for today's episode thanks so everybody thanks for listening if you want to look younger and feel younger i encourage you to follow what we talked about and for anybody else who you think might care about living younger, longer, and looking younger, longer, send this podcast to them. I'm sure they'd love to hear about it. Leave your comments. What have you used? What's worked for you? How have you rejuvenated your skin and your appearance? And subscribe for every year podcast. And we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. 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 gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise.

And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics, P-I-C-K-S and sign up for the newsletter. And I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger, longer. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other

professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.