The Dr. Hyman Show - The Benefits Of Hot And Cold Therapy & Other Longevity Hacks

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Levels, and HigherDOSE. I’m willing to bet all of us would feel a whole lot better about aging if it didn’t actually mean feeling old. Well, I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to; aging can mean another year of joy, adventure, and spending time with people we love—all while feeling great.  Today, as part of my Masterclass series, I am joined by my good friend and podcast host, Dhru Purohit, to answer a question submitted by my community through the video app HiHo about the benefits of hot and cold therapy. We also discuss why adequate protein is vital as we age and how to turn on longevity switches in our bodies to live a longer, healthier life. Find a link below to follow me on HiHo and we may select your question for a future episode! 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, Levels, and HigherDOSE.   Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, and Great Plains. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com.   By leveraging biosensors like continuous glucose monitors (CGM), Levels provides real-time feedback on how diet and lifestyle choices impact your metabolic health. Learn more about Levels by going to levels.link/HYMAN.   Right now, you can get your own Infrared Sauna Blanket or Infrared PEMF Mat at HigherDOSE.com. Use code FARMACY15 at check out to save 15% off OR just go to higherdose.com/hyman to get your 15% off today.   In this episode, we discuss (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): The best way to do hot and cold therapy (4:13 / 00:48)  My tips for hot and cold therapy while traveling (18:44 / 15:10)  Integrating hot and cold therapy with exercise (19:48 / 16:18)  The importance of adequate protein for strength training and healthy muscles as we age (30:14 / 25:00)  Activating the mTOR longevity switch in the body (37:30 / 32:34) Using metformin or other drugs to hack longevity (48:37 / 43:20)  Follow me on HiHo here!

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. It is basically these longevity switches in the body. And if we learn how to activate them in the right way, or turn them off in the right way, we can really extend life. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. I know a lot of you out there are practitioners like me, helping patients heal using real food

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process was, and then it could all feel like a lot of work to keep track of. Now there's Rupa Health, a place for functional medicine practitioners to access more than 2,000 specialty labs from over 20 labs like Dutch, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. Rupa Health helps provide a significantly better patient experience and it's 90% faster, letting you simplify the entire process of getting the functional medicine lab tests you need and giving you more time to focus on patients. This is really a much needed option in functional medicine space and I'm so excited about it. It means better service for you and your patients. You can check it out and look at a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at rupahealth.com. That's R-U-P-A health dot com. There's a reason I'm 62 years old and healthier

than ever and it's because I put a lot of effort into optimizing my health. And I know that if you're listening to this podcast, optimizing your health is important to you too. Like me, you're probably doing your best with your diet to get good nutrients into your body and limit the damage done by toxins. Now, one of the keys I found to eating the right things is monitoring your glucose intake. Poor glucose control is tied to all kinds of issues like weight gain, fatigue, diabetes, Alzheimer's, heart disease, and stroke, just to name a few. But it can be hard to know exactly how much glucose you're getting in your diet and how your body responds to it. But I have found a solution that I'm excited about sharing with you. It's Levels Continuous Glucose Monitors.

Now, I've been using Levels to track and understand my own unique metabolic data. I just stick the small glucose monitor onto my skin and the data starts transferring to my smartphone immediately. And it's helped me learn a lot about what foods work best to support my health and vitality based on my own physiology. In fact, I had one time where I thought, oh, I'm eating a really healthy meal and it was super delicious. And it was really not too starchy or sugary, but I ate a really healthy meal and it was super delicious. And it was really not too starchy or sugary, but I ate a ton of food. I way over ate because my friend ordered so much of this delicious food and it was all farm raised and great and healthy. But eating a giant amount of food also spikes your blood sugar and your insulin levels. And we were

both laughing because our levels monitors both showed levels of blood sugar over 150, which I'd never seen before. So I learned to moderate my food intake and not go overboard. Now, if you're interested in learning more about levels, go to levels.link forward slash Hyman. They've got a super well-researched in-depth blog that I recommend checking out if you want to learn even more about topics like metabolic health, longevity, and nutrition. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to a new series on the doctor's pharmacy called Masterclass, where we dive deep into popular health topics, including inflammation, autoimmune diseases, brain health, sleep, and lots more. And today, my friend and podcast host, Drew Proet, and I are doing something super fun. We're going to be answering

community questions that you guys have submitted through a new video app called HiHo. You can follow me on HiHo and submit your questions there, and you might see them on this podcast. All right, Mark. Great to be here. We got a bunch of great questions. The first one is from Mia on the HiHo app, and she has a question that's right in alignment with everything you've been researching these days, and that's the topic of longevity, senescence, and specifically hot and cold therapy. Let's key up this video for, or vice versa. Thanks in advance. Bye. Listen, Drew, I am so excited about this question because I literally just handed in my book, Young Forever, about longevity. And I went deep into the science of hormesis, which is this idea

that little stress that we give to our bodies creates a response that makes us healthier and stronger. And cold and hot are two hormetic therapies. Too much cold, you get hypothermia and die. Too much heat, you get heat stroke and die. So it's that Goldilocks version of what do you want? And the question was essentially, should you do cold first or heat first? And I don't really think we have the science to really answer that question. But for me personally, I don't want to get in the cold first. I want to get in the hot first and then go in the cold. And then you can go back and forth and back and forth. And what's really amazing about these therapies is that they're accessible to most people. If you have a bathtub, which most people do, you can do these therapies.

If you have a shower, you can do these therapies. So the best way to do it is if you can get access to a sauna or a steam, and I personally had a steam installed in my shower, you can get sauna blankets now, they're not that expensive. If you get yourself really hot, you can do a hot bath if you have a bathtub. So any kind of heat therapy will raise your body temperature. And what that does is two major things. One is it elevates something called heat shock proteins. And what are heat shock proteins? These are compounds that your body makes when you're overheated. And it's something your body makes, for example, when you have a fever, when you're trying to fight infection. So two things happen. One is you increase the activity of your innate immune system. This is the ancient immune system that

you have. It's not antibody related like COVID, you know, COVID antibodies and all that. You get a vaccine. It's a very specific response to a specific infection. But an innate immune system is just a generalized response that fights infection and activates your immune system. So it's really important. Second is it actually creates these heat shock proteins, which help to repair and fix damaged proteins. So just to give you a little background, Drew and everybody, your proteins have to be not just strings of amino acids, but they're three-dimensional structures that have to look a certain way, a certain shape, to bind like a lock and a key into a receptor. And as we go through life and get various insults and stresses and poor diet and toxins and so forth, those proteins get like kind of funky and damaged. Well, these heat shock

proteins help to refold the proteins into their original form and allows them to bind better to receptors or it helps to kind of clean up and repair the whole system. So you get kind of two things. One, you get the activation of your immune system in a good way. And two, you deal with one of the key hallmarks of aging, which is protein damage. And protein damage is what when your proteins get damaged, they don't work very well. And most of our biology is run by proteins. And this is kind of mind blowing, but maybe people know this, or maybe they don't. But what is your DNA? Your DNA basically is code that tells your body how to string together different amino acids to make proteins. And the proteins are the messengers and information molecules, the immune molecules, neurotransmitters.

These are all the important compounds that regulate almost everything in your body. Peptides are all little proteins. So that's what they do. And your proteins have to be a certain shape and a certain sequence of amino acids, and they get damaged as we age. So as a longevity strategy, heating up your body is super awesome. That's why the Finnish live longer. And they did an amazing study in Finland where they – it's kind of funny. They basically tried to, like, see how saunas were affecting your health and longevity.

And the control group was people only had a sauna once a week because pretty much they do it all the time there. And if you did it like up to four or five or six times a week, you had a dramatic extension in your life. That was compared to the control, which was just once a week. So who knows if you don't do any, you might even be better than that. So getting heat is really important. And I find it really important whether it's a hot bath, whether it's a sauna or a steam. I got lucky yesterday. I went to a friend who built the Russian banya and and we went really hot in there it gets really hot and you know it just kind of

heats up and it just helped my body feel all kinds of amazing when you say really hot mark like what was the temperature inside of there i think like 180 i think it was like really hot i guess like if you look at a lot of these finished studies and you look at the temperature that they're hitting they're hitting 180 right 175, for sure. And then they go in the cold and they jump, you know, they have the cold plunge. So then the cold plunge does something quite different. The cold plunge does two major things. One, it activates your brown fat. This is your mitochondrial superpower where basically between your shoulder blades and your back, there's a special kind of

fat called brown fat. And it's metabolically active fat. And you activate this brown fat, it increases your metabolism. And it's really interesting because, you know, I can't do it, but like guys like Wim Hof and other people learn how to activate the brown fat to heat up their bodies in the face of extreme cold temperatures. And this was originally a Tibetan practice where they would take these Tibetan monks and they had a practice called drying of the sheets. And this practice called tummo. They literally wrapped these young monks after they learned this practice and sheets dipped in ice water.

They'd wrapped them in the sheets in the middle of the Himalayas in the wintertime and they had to like dry the sheets. And when they could finally dry the sheets, they would send them up basically in their underwear up into the snow overnight. And basically they didn't die because they learned how to activate this brown fat. So cold therapy really helps activate this brown fat,

speed up your metabolism. The other thing it does is really amazing. It's like, I hate to say it, but it's like cocaine for me. It activates dopamine, which is what cocaine does. And it creates a sustained release of dopamine, which is what we're all trying to get more of for pleasure focus attention feeling good alert and and and just like able to really do stuff and it's it's really quite amazing and so it's like it's like taking a snort of cocaine when you go in an ice bath and you come out you're like whoa i feel alert i feel focused i feel energetic i can do. So I love going back and forth and I would go hot and cold, hot and cold. And to me, I mean, when I had chronic fatigue syndrome,

it was the only thing that really helped me have moments of actually feeling okay was through this hot and cold therapy. So I'm kind of addicted to it. I do it wherever I go in the world. I try to find it. I was in Turkey recently. I went to one of the hammams. I, you know, I always am trying to figure out, I did the polar plunge in Antarctica. You know, I just, I had a sauna on the boat and the polar plunge. So it's kind of like amazing. And, and the cold plunges are quite, quite awesome. I was just in, I was just in, in Idaho and I went in and it's really, really hot, hot springs and then jumped in the icy river. And so the more you can do that and you can't, not everybody can do the things I do, but, but if you can do it, even in your cold shower in the in the morning, like two, one to two minutes in a cold shower, fill up a hot bath with hot water as hot as you can stand it.

It'll go back and forth, hot and cold. I go in my steam and I felt my bath with really cold water and I just go back and forth. I have a friend who's got like a, he bought like at the hardware store, like a trough they use for like feeding cows and horses water. And he basically is an ice maker. like at the hardware store, like a trough they use for like feeding cows and horses water. And he basically is an ice maker. He got like all his ice in there, poison water. And he'd go like with ice cubes all around you. So there's lots of creative ways to do it that don't cost a lot of money.

Awesome. I love it. So a bunch of clarifying questions, Mark, before we go to the next question. Yeah. So first thing, I think you're on record saying it's like cocaine, but obviously everybody knows that we're not. No, no, no. I don't snort cocaine. I'm not a fan of cocaine. I'm just saying we're not i don't snort cocaine i'm not a fan of cocaine i'm just saying we're all trying to activate dopamine right we're all like think

about the things that activate dopamine you know heroin cocaine you know smoking caffeine you know all the things you use to kind of prop us up but this is a natural way that you can enhance dopamine and what's amazing about it is that it has a sustained effect. It's not just like one shot and you're, you know, you get a snort and then you're on a crash. It's like, it really helps us sustain the dopamine and the noradrenaline and norepinephrine in a way that actually helps you stay focused and alert. So no, I'm not saying that you should go down and snort cocaine. And by the way, the other thing that activates it, and I got to do this other night, it was super fun. I didn't tell you about this crew yet, but I thing that activates it, and I got to do this the other night. It was super fun. I didn't tell you about this crew yet, but I'm an older dude, and I grew up in the era of the Grateful Dead.

And I got to go to one of the Dead & Company shows recently in Boulder. And a friend of mine is the manager, and he gave us these free tickets. And I had another friend with me. And basically, you go out and you give tickets to people who are trying to get in, who don't have tickets. There's a lot of people that are dead shows and they're desperate to get in, but they don't have money or they couldn't get a ticket. And, and there's a song called waiting for a miracle. And, and it's, you know, and everybody has these signs of waiting for a miracle. And so you go out and you give these tickets to people. And it's like, it's like a miracle. I might post one of the pictures where this is the amount of joy and the amount of pleasure you get from actually giving an altruism because we're all wired to help each other. We're all wired as social creatures because think about a human being out in the forest by himself. They're kind of screwed, right? We are tribal people. We have to help each other. We have to work together. And so there's, we're hardwired for altruism and altruism also activates dopamine in the brain. So there's lots of ways to activate it.

But I like giving things away and cold therapy. Yeah. And the best part about that compared to drugs that are out there. And by the way, it's really interesting. I've heard a lot of anecdotal stories of people using, in conjunction with maybe AA or treatment centers that they're going to, how a lot of these processes actually help them get over their addictions. Again, I'm sure some people are out there studying it, like they're studying it with psilocybin and smoking succession. We had Dr. Roland Griffiths on the podcast before, but it'll be exciting to see people starting to use hot therapy, cold therapy to actually treat addiction. So a couple other, Claire. Wait, wait, wait, I want to add one more thing.

Yes, please, please. The one thing I forgot forgot to say which is something i've written about for the last 30 years that activates dopamine is sugar so i don't know why i forgot you know when you go for that cookie or that pint of ice cream or whatever it is that is activating the same receptors that that we're talking about through the dopamine receptors in the brain in the nucleus accumbens. And so that's why people literally get addicted to sugar. But I'm more addicted to cold therapy and giving and service. And that's how I get high, basically. So you mentioned a few things that I think are worth breaking down. So we talked about the Finnish studies and the high temperatures that are there, you know, 170, 175, 180 potentially. And generally the time length inside of those. And again, if somebody is new to hot therapy, obviously, first of all,

saunas can be, you know, it's expensive to have a sauna in your house, but you can find saunas at local like gyms and other places. And, you know, you could borrow friends and use them. But a lot of people ask, and there's some great companies that are out there that, you know, we've known throughout the years, but they ask, and there's some great companies that are out there that we've known throughout the years, but they ask, what about infrared sauna? It can't get that hot.

Are there still the benefits that are there, even if the body of literature may not support the heat that they're getting to? So thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, I think there is literature

on infrared saunas too, and it penetrates a little deeper. You can stay in it longer and it doesn't get, the timber doesn't get hot, but it does heat you up quite a bit. So I think either work. And there are a number of things I didn't actually mention about heat, which is that it also increases the health of your cardiovascular system.

It helps with weight loss. It increases the release of toxins from your skin through your sweat. It increases heart rate variability, which is one of the best metrics of your autonomic nervous system, your health of your stress response. So a lot of us are overstressed and we have really poor heart rate variability. I wear an oral ring and I can track my heart rate variability and I can see what makes it good or bad. And it's amazing to see how correlated was your stress response. And the higher your heart rate variability, the more complex your heart rhythm is, the

healthier you are. So people, for example, have heart failure, go into these saunas and they actually improve their heart failure just by increasing the health of their autonomic nervous system. So it's really quite powerful. Okay, great. That's a good option because for a lot of people, like you mentioned earlier, sauna blankets, and there's a bunch of great brands that are out there. Those can be an entryway that's a little bit more affordable.

But like you said, you could even do a bath. So if somebody was going to do a bath, you know, and they were going to hop in, how long are we talking about staying in? Just like a general rule of thumb, if people are going to use their bath in a warm bath, how long are we talking about staying in there? Well, I've been about this for years. One of my favorite things to do is I do an Epsom salt bath with lavender drops. Lavender lowers cortisol. That's why they put it in baby bath. Johnson & Johnson actually is in the research on this and lowers the stress response. And Epsom salt has magnesium, which relaxes your muscles and nervous system, helps you sleep. And the sulfur

in Epsom salts, magnesium sulfate helps you detoxify. So it's really great. And I heat the water up as hot as I can stand. So everybody's got a different tolerance for heat, but it's like where you have to get in, you kind of have to get in slowly because it's kind of too hot and you can barely stand it. That's kind of good. And you might be able to stay five minutes, you might be able to stay 15 minutes. So you stay until you kind of get really hot and then you can go in right into bed, and as your body cools down, you'll fall right asleep. So it's a great tool for sleep. It's a great tool for muscle relaxation. It's a great tool for detoxification.

It's a great tool for doing things like heat shock proteins. And, you know, it's quite amazing. I don't know. It just reminded me of this data that I saw and this sort of anecdotal stuff that I've heard of case reports of autism. So autism is a disease of the brain that actually is about inflammation. And a lot of the inflammation causes a lot of malfunction in the brain through these B-form proteins and other things in the immune system. And it's been observed that when kids who have autism have high fevers, that they wake up from autism. And then when the

fever goes back, they go back to being autistic. So it's really fascinating to see how heat plays a role in so many of the functions of our body. We're just really beginning to understand this. So Mark, one more follow-up question. You know, right now you're recording the podcast out of San Francisco. It's great that we have modern technology that allows us to record anywhere. So this is awesome. So for instance, because you travel a lot, what are one of the ways, for example, now, you know, how you're looking to incorporate hot and cold therapy in because it's become part of your routine. So on a practical level, is it that you just have a lot of friends that are so into this too, that you stay at their house and you just get to borrow their sauna? Like any tips for people when they're on traveling? I mean, yeah.

I mean, listen, you know, if you're booking a hotel room, try to get one with a bathtub. And I mean, most hotel rooms hopefully will have a shower. So you've got a hot tub and you got a cold shower. It's pretty easy. Or you can fill the bathtub with cold water or you can get ice cubes from the shower. So there's a lot of ways to do it. I really make a point of seeking this out. And I really have learned how to sort of hack my travel life so that I can stay healthy and that I can stay rested and I can keep rejuvenating myself.

So, yeah, I have friends who have this. And I'm lucky because I'll tell my friends about it and then they'll get it. And that's sort of kind of fun. But it doesn't have to be super fancy. You can just have a shower and a bathtub. And that really is the easy way to do it for most people. And a couple more clarifying questions. So how does this fit in your day with your normal routine?

And also when it comes to exercising and your movement that you have in your life, is this something that you typically like to do before that or after that? So when does hot and cold therapy come in? And how does that play a role in timeline, again, with exercise? So let's say I'm in my routine at home and I've written about this in my new book, Young Traver, what's Dr. Hyman's daily longevity routine.

I mean, I just saw a guy who kind of was a fan. He hadn't seen me in person. We were actually in the sauna together in the Russian Banya yesterday. And he's like, man, you look better than you did five years ago. And the other person, you look better than you did 10 years ago. I'm like, yeah, because I'm figuring all this stuff out. And so I actually have a routine in the morning where I'll wake up and meditate 20 minutes.

And then it usually works out. And I travel with these bands. And I had back surgery a couple of years ago. And I learned really how to rehabilitate through Tom Brady's training program. I don't get any money for it. I'm not associated with it anyway, but it's the TB12 sports program. And I use these basically bands and I bring them with me. I travel everywhere. And all I need is the bands and a floor basically. And sometimes something to hook it onto like a doorknob, an hotel room or a post somewhere to do some of the exercises.

And so I do a workout for 30 minutes. And that's kind of a standard thing I can do anywhere I am. And then I like if I'm home, I like to do steam, I have a steam shower. So I put the steam on while I'm working out, I'll go into steam super hot, like 10 minutes. And then I'll fill up a bath just with ice cold water. And I go back and forth maybe a couple of times and and then afterwards I have a protein shake and I'll usually use my pecan shake protein powder I think we're discontinuing that and I'll use goat whey and really use goat whey is because goats are one they're they're regenerative the way that the ones that I find are regeneratively raised and two they have um because all all the wh way has some casein in it can be inflammatory i use goat way because it has a2 casein and then i add the way and then i put all my other goodies in it which i talked about in the book my longevity kind of package of stuff and and that's my kind of routine and then i just feel amazing for the day i don't have any uh problems you know with energy

and i really can focus and it's just a great way to start the day and i can probably get all that done in about an hour. So it's, or the meditation sort of adds probably 20 minutes. So maybe hour, hour and a half, but it's really an amazing way to start the day. And then I get to do what I do. And I'm sure you have a truncated version that you do on days where you don't have that full hour.

Cause there's probably people that are listening today that are like, whoa, an hour. I'm lucky if I get 20 minutes that's there. Of course, a big part of your message is always that you feel so good. So it's not like a chore for you to do this. You actually are looking forward to doing it, but give us the truncated version. When you have 20 minutes and there's a super busy day and you're in launch mode or whatever, you got to catch like four or five flights. What is kind of your absolute one or two things that is like crucial for you in the day? Well, I mean, I think, you know, even if I can just get like 20 minutes of my workout in and not a full half hour, or I do two sets instead of

three sets, like I did today, because I was, I had a lot going on. So I did two sets and then, you know, I'm ready for my podcast. And, and sometimes I have time for, you know, hot and cold or I don't, and I just don't do it on those days so i always make sure that i i and i take quality time and and the meditation thing is super portable so i do a kind of meditation it's like a version of a vedic mantra meditation so you don't need to be like in a quiet room and like i can do it on an airplane i can do in the back of an uber i can do it you know anywhere and and i can just kind of go in and i just kind of the world disappears and and i disappear i don't know where i go but it's like a it's like taking a three-hour nap so for me these are productivity tools if i work out and if i do this meditation

i have so much more focus and more energy that whatever i'm doing i do way better and more focused instead of taking me twice as long it takes me half as long and I do a better job. So in some ways, it seems like it's taking time, but actually it's saving time in the end. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. You probably heard me talk about how much I love infrared saunas. Well, they've been linked to so many different benefits like better muscle recovery, calming of the nervous system, improved circulation, and even activation of the immune system to support protection and healing. Now, saunas also promote the release of feel-good endorphins that gives you that blissed-out feeling and gives your skin a healthy glow. I think it's fascinating that so many cultures around the world have some kind of history of sauna use, but I don't think it's a mistake. People have recognized for centuries that heat exposure and sweating have therapeutic

effects. And now it's easier than ever to take advantage of that ancient wisdom on a regular basis. I know not everyone has the room on their budget to have their own sauna at home. So I was really excited to learn about the infrared sauna blanket from Higher Dose. It gives you all the benefits of infrared saunas in an easy to use portable blanket at a much lower cost than a standalone sauna. This blanket is really cool. It has a layer of amethyst to deepen the infrared benefits, a tourmaline layer to generate negative ions, and a layer of clay to balance heat and a charcoal layer to bind pollutants as you detox. If you don't have the budget or space for a full-size sauna, this is an amazing and less expensive option to uplevel your wellness routine. Right now, get your own infrared sauna blanket or infrared PMF

mat at higherdose.com today and use my exclusive promo code pharmacy15 at checkout to save 15% off. That's higherdose.com and the code is pharmacy15. That's F-A-R-M-A-C-Y 15 or just go to higherdose.com forward slash Hyman to get your 15% off today. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. So Mark, before we get back to these video questions, I actually have a question for you

that maybe I'm not super clear on, even though we're business partners and close friends. Working out now is such a core part of your life. And I know you like the word movement, right? That's a big part of your approach. It's kind of a movement mindset. What happened a few years ago that shifted for you where it was kind of like a nice thing. You were active.

You'd play tennis every so often. You might do some, you know, hiking to like it's switched. And it was like, whoa, this is foundational to my life. And it's kind of like, I'm not going to sacrifice it in my day. What was that switch that took place? Yeah. I mean, listen, I've always exercised to be a runner. I did yoga. I was a yoga teacher. I bike, I play tennis. So I always stayed very active. But in my mind, I had this rationale that, oh, if I do yoga and I ride my bike or I play tennis, I'm good.

And I always told people they should lift weights, but I just hated the gym. It was smelly. It was stinky. I didn't like it. And it hurt when I did weights. I couldn't do 10 push-ups when I was 50 years old. I was like, this hurts every time. I don't like it.

It's the truth. What kind of pain? Just curious. What kind of pain just just just curious what kind of pain you have your chest hurts for days like i could do 10 push-ups my chest like my head all this muscle pain you know i'm lifting weights i would try and i'm like a sore for days i'm like this is stupid i'm not doing this so i mean even though i know in my head it was like i knew i should do it and then i'm like you know then i then i turned 60 and i'm like all right all right i'm like i gotta get

smart here because i tell everybody to do it and i can't be a hypocrite and i have to do it so i started to uh i joined a gym and i got a trainer and i started doing a little bit but then and then i had a back problem again after 20 30 years i had another back thing and i had surgery in 2020 and then i couldn't move i couldn walk. I was in pain all the time. It was pretty miserable. And I'm like, look, this is bad. And I have a limp. I had a limp for 20 years. And my body was all out of kilter. And so it was just getting worse and worse. I'm like, how can I live to be 120 if I can't walk? So I basically had the surgery, took my time to sort of heal from the surgery. And then I went to the Tom Brady training program. And I, you know, it was such a revelation for me because I was able to start really slow. The bands, you know,

they don't injure your joints. You can do them anywhere. It's not like I have to take an hour, drive to the gym, you know, get going. It's like a whole, takes hours of my day. I just don't have that kind of time. So I literally, I got back from what I was doing today. I, you know, had some food ordered, jumped down and, you know, was down here in my – in where I'm staying. I just put my underwear on. I didn't even have – you know, I didn't work out shorts and I didn't use shoes or anything. I just, like, grabbed my band and I did a quick workout. So – but it really became foundational when I realized that if I wanted to stay strong and out of pain, I had to do this. So, I really doubled down on it.

And I will do it minimum three times a week, sometimes four or five. So I really am committed to it. And I think it would be everywhere. And in fact, I forgot it at a friend's house the other day. I was traveling and we were all working out and I was eating a workout of five people. And we had it in this one spot and I left and I forgot it. And I was like in a panic. And I go, hey, you got it.

FedEx to me like right away. I need it tomorrow morning. I got it and I have it here and I did my workout. So it really becomes routine and you can take it anywhere. You can do it almost anywhere. And I mean, I even show you, I got the bands right here. So if you want, I can go show you. It's pretty easy.

Well, no, I mean, you got me hooked on it. And now I do a training session with their virtual coaches on a at least two to three times a week and it's been a fantastic thing again we have no affiliation with them they have a free app that's there you know so that people can do those workouts you can go on YouTube type in

TB12 and you know there's a bunch of them that are there so one clarifying question on that you mentioned that you know you used to do 10 pushups before and like your chest would hurt. Do you think you can do 70 now with no, right in a row? I can do like, I can do like three sets of 25 with the bands around my back. So like, it's unbelievable. Like I'm way stronger now at 62 than I was at 40 or 50. All right. Well, we're going to fact check you maybe on one of our next spots. We are going to do pushups together. I'm not bragging, Drew,

but like I work out with my friends. Like I had this, I worked out with a 30 year old and then their 40 year old and like the guy was 50 and like none of them could do what I did. And I was using the heavier bands and they were all like, and I was like, come on guys. Once you've grown up to it, it really works. I've seen you over the years. We've worked out a few times together too. You know, it's very inspiring. So the question that I had was this, is it that you've just been doing a different training routine or also has how you've changed your diet specifically, I have a question about sort of prioritizing protein. Has that also helped you in your ability to build up more strength during your workouts so that's the question that i had for you yeah so again you know this is a really controversial topic which

is protein where do you get your protein how much protein when do you eat your protein like it's complicated and and there's movies like Game Changers that come out, which make people think that, oh, you can be vegan and just be this huge, strong bodybuilder and just, you know, eat vegetables. And I think, you know, there's a subtext to that. These guys are pounding, and I've talked to them, they're pounding highly processed vegan protein powders, or they're eating jacked up protein powders that are supplemented with amino acids. And you can't overcome biology. And the science is so clear. So there was a group of scientists that got together that are protein experts, and they wrote a review paper of all

the literature. It's called PROTE, P-R-O-T-E-A-G-E study. And they basically came up with the conclusion that particularly as we age, we need more high quality protein and we need it regularly throughout the day and we need it to contain certain amino acids in the right amounts. So one of the problems with plant proteins is that it's very low in a key amino acid called leucine and other branch chain amino acids. Leucine is a rate-limiting amino acid when it comes to making more muscle. In other words, it's like if you have a factory and you have an assembly line and you're missing this one key step, like if you're making a car, but you don't have tires, you just can't make the car. And leucine is like that.

If you don't have leucine, you can't kick in the biochemical machinery to synthesize new muscle. So either you have to eat massive amounts of plant protein, like for example, like you have to eat three cups of rice to equal four ounces of chicken. Now, who's going to eat three cups of rice? It's a lot of rice, or a bunch of, two or three cups of beans. And then you get you get thousand or thirteen hundred calories as opposed to 200 calories and now i'm not saying it's bad to eat grains and beans i'm just saying like it it's very tough to get what you need if you look at what happens to a lot of beans as they get older they get skinny and they have low muscle mass and and and their hormones change and they get more insulin resistant and and there are ways around it so if you're vegan and you're committed to being vegan, I'm not against it, but you have to be smart. You have to, for

example, you have to use extra branched amino acid supplements, or you can take, for example, additional amino acids through something that I use in my practice that's been studied a lot in research in Europe, that's called amino acid complex, which is a combination of amino acids that's designed to increase muscle synthesis and combat what we call sarcopenia, which means low muscle mass. So, so for me, and what I also said was you need to eat the right amount of protein within an hour of working out and in order to actually activate the muscle synthesis. And you need to eat it with the right amino acids. And you need to about 20, depending on your, you know, size and build. So obviously, if you're like

Shaquille O'Neal, and, you know, seven feet tall, you know, you might need a lot more. And if you're five foot zero and 100 pounds, you might need less, but it's about 25 grams to 30 grams of protein, which is usually about the size of your palm. So a best way to think about it for the average person is the size of your palm of protein. And I say this, like when I say protein, I mean, if you want to build muscle, you have to eat muscle, basically. And you can kind of cheat by either combining animal protein, like less animal protein with plant protein, or by eating jacked up plant proteins where you add in these amino acids. So there's a lot of ways around it. But you can't argue with with biology and with with with science. And it's just so clear. And if you're, you don't believe me, if you're,

you know, think I'm making this up, just go ahead and look up that protege study. I've written a lot about it in my new book, young forever, which is coming out February 23. And and I've, I've used it on myself. And I'm like, Young Forever, which is coming out February 23. And I've used it on myself. And I'm like, holy cow. Like, I look at pictures of myself when I was 40. And I'm like, you know, I was biking, you know, 30 miles. And I was doing yoga. And I was doing all this stuff.

And my body just looks like I'm, like, it just, it looks like then I was 60. And now I'm like 25. So, I don't know what's going on. But, like, it works. What I'm telling you works. And when I use it with my patients, it really works. And that's really the science that I've adapted to myself. And it's really changed my, my biology and my cognitive function, my energy. And it really, really lowered more dramatically, even the starch and sugar, you know, because,

because I, you know, like I, when I started doing nutrition back in the nineties and being a doctor in functional medicine, that was the era where still we're telling you to do a lot of carbohydrates and even healthy carbohydrates like grains and beans. But for some people, it's tough. And if you're one of the people who are metabolically unhealthy, which is almost 9 out of 10 Americans, then you're not going to tolerate the amount of starch and sugar that you could, for example, if you were more lean and fit and robust. So I can get away with eating stuff sometimes that, if, for example, my diabetic patients can't because they're not metabolically flexible.

And I train myself to become more metabolically flexible. And so I can actually have more metabolic degrees of freedom, we call it. And I'm not saying you should always eat junk, but I'm just saying I can get away with having a dessert once in a while or having some like, you know, coconut ice cream or something like I'm not worried about it. But I think, I think for the most part, it's really about lowering dramatically the starch and sugar, increasing the fat and actually keeping not excess of protein, but keeping the right amount of protein. And the other thing, Drew, is, you know, a lot of people, oh, the government says we should have, you know, about 0.8 grams per kilo of protein. That's a gram, a kilo is about 2.2 pounds. Now, that's the minimum amount to prevent protein deficiency disease. It's not the optimal amount for health. It's like when you say, how much vitamin C is the minimum, the recommended amount? It's like the optimal amount for health. It's like when you say, how much vitamin C is the recommended amount? It's like 60 milligrams. Or how much is the vitamin D amount that's recommended to prevent deficiency? It's like 30 units, which prevents rickets.

Well, okay, you're not going to get rickets, but what's the optimal amount of vitamin D you need to operate all your biological systems well? Well, it might be 2,000 or 4 be 2000 or 4000 or 5000 or 10,000. So I think this is where we get all confused in nutrition because the government recommendations are designed around deficiency diseases, not for optimal health. So one last follow up on that question, and thank you for that breakdown on the protein. I think some people who are paying attention to the space of longevity, which a lot of different people are talking about, there is the question of like, okay, well, we know we need enough protein to avoid sarcopenia. And then some people are saying,

whether it's IGF-1 or other stuff, that excess protein could hinder longevity. And then you have people like Peter Attia, who kind of has a philosophy that you do, which is that if we look at a lot of these large observational studies that are being used to say that excess protein can harm our longevity, they're looking at people who are not really consuming a lot of vegetables in their diet. And on top of that, they have poor metabolic health as well too. So is it the metabolic health or is the high protein? So we'd love to get your take on the situation since we're all I mean, it's super complicated, right? Because because a lot of people who look at the data

on protein and aging go, wow, you know, protein activates and they call mTOR. And I mean, I don't want to get into that now, Drew, but I literally, I'm so deep in it, because I just finished my book. So I'll sort of explain what the science is about. So this is basically these longevity switches in the body. And they're really powerful. And if we learn how to activate them in the right way or turn them off in the right way, the ones that need to be turned off, we can really extend life. So, for example, calorie restriction is one of the few things that's been shown to dramatically extend life. So for example, calorie restriction is one of the few things that's been

shown to dramatically extend life. If you cut your calories by a third, you extend your life by a third. And that for a human means living to 120. Now, personally, I don't want to do that because I like to eat and it's not fun and you're going to be grumpy and hungry and you're going to have other downside effects from it. I met this guy who was part of the calorie restriction society. He's like, I said, what do you have for breakfast? I have five pounds of celery. And I'm like, okay, no thanks. Right.

And if he's also eating five pounds of celery, is he more likely to fall and have a hip fracture and end up dying at the age of 80 because he doesn't have enough muscle mass. Exactly. So the main thing that people are talking about protein, it's this thing called mTOR. Now that's one of the longevity switches, but there's four of them. Two of them are detecting excess and are turned on by an abundance or excess of compounds like amino acids and carbohydrates. So that's the mTOR pathway. And that's the insulin pathway. Now we need both of them, right? It's like you need mTOR to be turned on. Otherwise, you can't build muscle and synthesize protein, right? But if it's turned on all the time, and it's, by the way, turned on by not just protein, but also by sugar, okay, then you're just going to create like,

you know, it's like a tumor that grows out of hand. You don't get this chance to repair the body. So think about like your kitchen. Like if you just kind of threw dishes in the sink and you never cleaned up and you kept putting garbage in the garbage can and you just never clean up, well, then your kitchen is going to be a mess and you're not going to be able to do anything. That's basically what the body is. You need time to both, you know, cook dinner and then clean up, right? And so that's what the body does. And mTOR, when it's turned on, actually synthesizes protein, which is not a bad thing. It's a good thing, like muscle. But if it's turned on all the time, you can't activate this really essential process that we now know is so critical to longevity that we activate during starvation

or calorie restriction, which is something called autophagy, which essentially means self-cannibalism. Auto means self and fadji means to eat like a you know macrophages or some and a white blood cell that eats bad things and you know so you want to eat yourself up essentially it's recycling so you need both the construction crew and you need a recycling crew and it's got to be in the right balance so yes we need to shut off mtor or silence mtor or lower mtor but not all the time. And so that's why we talk about, you know, having a 12 to 14 to 16 hour window between dinner and breakfast. That's really important.

And you can you can decide when you want to do that. But you got to be sure you don't eat three hours before bed, whatever you do. It's not going to work if you start you know, say you start eating at like, you know, six o'clock at night and then eat till midnight and go to bed at midnight. That's a bad idea. So you want to make sure you give yourself three hours before bed. But if you give yourself these periods of temporary starvation, right? Like a 12-hour fast, 14, 16, it really activates this self-cleaning process. It's like a self-cleaning oven, right?

And our bodies can do that. And you can also do it by doing a deeper clean, like a 24 or 36-hour fast once a week or a three to seven-day fast once a quarter. So there's a lot of ways to do it or the fasting mimicking diet, which is Walter Longo's work, which does the same thing.

It's a 800-calorie diet for five days. You can do that once a month or once a quarter. So there's a lot of ways to hack the system. Ketogenic diets do the same thing. But the idea is you want to give your body a period of rest. So the people who say, well, don't eat protein, it's going to activate mTOR and mTOR activated, it's going to kill you and make you live shorter. It just doesn't take into account the whole picture. And so you have to look at all the data. Even the main study that people quote about this shows that if you're younger and you eat protein, it may not be good, but a lot of protein. But if you're older, if you don't, it's really bad. So even the people who are like saying that we should be restricting protein, as you get older,

there really is no debate that we need protein. In fact, as you get older, you need way more protein. Why? Because there's something called anabolic resistance. Anabolic resistance means like, you know, anabolic hormones and what steroids people take to kind of build up the bodybuilders. Anabolic means to build up, right? There's an anabolic, it's like yin and yang. It's like, you know, the sun and the moon.

It's like day and night. There's this balance in the universe. And we have the anabolic, which is to build up, and we have a catabolic, which is to break down and clean up. So if you're always in anabolic state, that's bad. But anabolic resistance happens as you get older, where your body is harder to make protein muscle. So you actually have to eat more protein as you get older. And that doesn't mean you have to be eating like 24-ounce ribeye steaks every day. It just means you need to actually understand like, you know, 24 ounce ribeye steaks every day. It just means you need to actually understand what your body is doing and measure it and see and pay attention to what happens to your body.

Are you gaining muscle? Are you losing muscle? And then you can tell by just looking in the mirror or you can do these body composition tests and look at your muscle mass and your body fat mass and so forth. So, science is so interesting about this, but it's like everything in the universe, there's a balance. And so it's not like we always want to shut off mTOR. And there may be hacks, like I talked about in my book, this thing called rapamycin, which is essentially a compound that's really cool, Drew. They found on Rapa Nui, which is Easter Island, where they had these statues that they don't know how they got there. And it's like, maybe it's aliens or who the hell knows.

But basically, they found this compound in the back of one of the statues that they started studying and they thought, oh, maybe it's an antifungal. They call rapamycin like erythromycin. But then it didn't really work that well. Then they found it helps to modulate immune function. So it's used in transplant medicine. But they also found it actually silences mTOR. In fact, mTOR means the mammalian target of rapamycin.

So actually, they named this particular pathway after rapamycin. And when you take rapamycin, it kind of silences mTOR. So now there's a lot of people who are in the longevity space taking it. I don't recommend it yet. They're actually studying, for example, rapalogs, which are things that mimic rapamycin without some of the side effects because it can have side effects. So I think you're going to be kind of smart about this, but the whole longevity research is fascinating. So they're kind of thinking of it as starvation in a pill where you mimic starvation without actually starving. I kind of like that. I think one central point that you made that's really important for anybody

who's following along with the subject is that even something like exercise, that increases mTOR, but just acutely. And nobody says that exercise is bad. So to all of a sudden say that eating a lot of, eating a higher protein diet to make sure that you don't have muscle mass loss, especially as you age, but even when you're younger, and you mentioned vegans. I used to be a vegan back in the day.

I'm not a vegan now. But even still, people who are not vegan and eat all sorts of different food, they can also be under eating on protein because they have a lot of refined carbohydrates and other things inside of their diet. And they're just not tactical about making sure that they get enough protein. And of course the importance of strength training. So it's all, um, a lot of layers to it, but it feels like through discussion and more people talking about it, we can, we can all get a chance to benefit from the industry and experts understanding how to better convey, uh, the messaging inside of, uh, you know, the right context for the public to follow. Yeah, maybe we can have like a debate with like Peter

Attia and David Sinclair and, you know, and Chris Kresser and Walter Longo and have like a conversation about this because I think it'll be so fascinating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of really great people. And, you know, there are, you know, just to- And by the way, they're all my friends and I respect them all. And I've learned a lot from all of them. Because everybody's got a little bit of a, it's like the blind man and the elephant is looking at a different piece of it. Totally, totally. And we should never assume that we're not, I mean, not me. I'm just an interviewer.

You're the action- I'm one of the blind men too. I'm one of the blind men too. Yeah, we should never underestimate that. We should never underestimate our ability to be also with that camp as well. But you know, just for anybody who is vegan, just a little shout out that I want to make a mention of. There are people inside of the vegan community that are talking about the importance of making sure that vegans especially get protein and have high quality protein recipes. You know, Mark, I come from the Hindu background and that's like the Vedic tradition, the Hindu tradition.

A lot of those people, the Jain tradition, they sort of spiritually believe that, you know, we shouldn't be eating animals. And obviously, you know, that's a tradition. They eat a lot of dairy too, right? And they eat a lot of dairy and, you know, that sort of thing. So they don't believe in eating animal meat, but there's still an importance in prioritizing protein. So one gentleman, Simon Hill, he's a nutritionist,

and I believe as a PhD in nutrition, he is a vegan plant-based who talks a lot about, you know, high protein recipes. And I'm sure there's so many things that he disagrees with you on or me on, but he is telling people to prioritize protein. So there is even a divide in the camp. It's not like all of a sudden all vegans think that don't eat protein. There are people that are looking at the literature and saying, no, actually we have to prioritize protein, especially as we age. And by the way, I do have a lot of patients that are vegetarian or vegan, they're Buddhist. I mean, I don't, I don't think you have to eat meat to be healthy, but I do say, look, here's how you adjust your amino acids through supplements or through various protein powders to compensate.

And it makes a huge difference. It does. It does. So, you know, since we're on this train, Mark, and, you know, we've only taken one question here, but I feel like we're on a roll. So let's keep on going here, right? I'm going to just take you on. I know, you know, when we have to record these podcasts together, people are like, what are

you going to talk about? I'm like, look, anytime I can get Mark talking about his favorite subjects, these things will fly by and it'll be a lot easier to record. And this is actually what most people are interested in right now. So last week on the topic of things that people take for longevity last week, uh, metformin was in the news, uh, for a few different reasons. Can you talk a little bit about that? And again, whether or not this changes your perspective when we're talking about potentially prescription drugs that people are leaning on in the biohacking space to maybe help with longevity or maybe not help with longevity?

Yeah, fair enough. So listen, I'm not against medication, just out of the gate, not at all. I think there are compounds, right? These are compounds we use. And I joke, I say I'm a medicine man. I'll use whatever works, whether it's, you know, an herb or whether it's medication. It's just how it's used, when it's used, why it's used. Is it the right medicine for the right problem, the right dose, the right time? And so it's really important to understand the mechanisms, how they work, what the risks are, what the side effects are. And I think with metformin, we're going to learn a lot more. There's a large trial going on called the TAIN trial, which is targeting aging with metformin. And it's a very big, you know, government-funded, rigorous trial where we're going to get better answers.

My view of metformin is, I would say, I'm on the fence. Just to be honest, I'm on the fence. I was a hard no, and now I'm on the fence. And I really looked deeply into the literature as I was researching my book. I'm like, okay, put all my biases aside, all my judgments aside against it. The thing that concerns me is that there's so – and when I was researching my book and just being a doctor doing this for decades, there are so many ways to do the same thing that metformin does without some of the risks or the problems. And the things that actually are not medications may work better. Like rapamycin, for example, it's tough like that. It's tough to replicate that through lifestyle, right? Yes, you can eat 30% less food, but you're

going to be hungry and cranky and miserable and feel a lot longer even though you live longer, right? But with metformin, there was a large trial a number of years ago called the Diabetes Prevention Trial, the DPP. And this is a very well-respected trial. It's been replicated on those following data. And this trial basically looked at pre-diabetics, about 10,000 people, and then gave them lifestyle changes. And I'll explain that in a minute. Metformin or nothing. And the lifestyle changes far outperformed metformin.

Far outperformed metformin. So, you know, I think the metformin reduced the progression to diabetes by 31%. The lifestyle reduced the progression of diabetes by 58%. Now, I actually had a woman who worked with me on one of my books as a sort of helping editor. And she was in the diabetes prevention trial. So tell me exactly what did you do? So well, we had a low fat diet. We had group support, we had supervised exercise. And we had to account for everything we did. So I'm like, oh, okay. So yes, you ate a healthier diet. It was not processed junk food, but it was a low-fat diet. So it was a higher carbohydrate diet. Two, you had group support.

Three, you had accountability. And four, you had supervised exercise. So that collection, we all know that all those things can make a difference. Getting off junk food helps. But it turns out that high carbohydrate diets are not the best diets for diabetics. In fact, they're the worst diets for diabetics. And David Ludwig's work has really demonstrated this. The work of Sarah Hallberg, a friend of mine who recently died of breast cancer, God bless her. She has done tremendous research using some of the Virta health data on ketogenic diets and diabetics, fully reversing types of diabetes. Not managing diabetes, but fully reversing it in 60% of patients.

And so we know that even in the diabetes prevention trial, the diet was far from optimized. And even that was far better than metformin, like almost twice as good as metformin in preventing diabetes. So then I say to myself, well, if that's true, why lean on the drug when we know we can activate the same longevity pathways as metformin? Now, what metformin does is it works on, remember I mentioned these longevity switches. So two of them are detecting excess insulin, it detects excess glucose and sugars and carbohydrates, mTOR, excess protein, and also sugar. And then there's sirtuins and also the AMPK. And I'll explain it in a minute because it's a little complicated.

This is the hardest part of the book, and my editor is giving me a hard time because it's like, it's really important science, but it's kind of geeky. And I tried to like simplify it. But basically, the way I describe it is like there's four longevity switches, the mTOR and the insulin ones, which respond to excess of calories and carbohydrates, sugars, proteins. And then there's the ones that detect scarcity. There's sirtuins and the one called AMPK. AMPK stands for AMP, adenosine monophosphate kinase. Now, that sounds like a big mumbo jumbo full of words, but essentially your body makes energy called ATP. It's what happens when you eat and you breathe, you make the gasoline that runs everything in your body through the mitochondria, the powerhouse of your cell.

And instead of gasoline, your body produces ATP. Now, when it's used up, you're giving two phosphorus molecules away as part of the way you release energy. The phosphorus is like the sparklers on July 4th. That's like that bright energy. You're basically using that to kind of run and power your body. So when you use up two of the phosphorus molecules, it goes from ATP, which is triphosphate, to monophosphate. That's AMP. And so basically, the body says, oh, shoot, there's not enough energy around.

I better do something. And so that activates all these amazing compensation processes, these sort of adaptations to starvation, which is a good thing. And that actually turns off inflammation. It gets your mitochondria, making new mitochondria. It activates sirtuins to activate DNA repair. It shuts up mTOR to increase autophagy. It's like all this cool stuff that happens that basically makes you younger and heals your body. So it's all these innate healing mechanisms we have. And it's so cool because all these innate healing mechanisms allow us to repair, heal, and live longer and not die if we don't have enough food. Okay?

So metformin is an AMPK activator. And that's good. And that's how it lowers blood sugar makes you more insulin sensitive it's a diabetes drug and it seemed to be that people who take these drugs seem to live longer have less death it's kind of interesting so i i kind of think there's a promise to it but there's some downsides to it it can cause gi defect uh distress it can maybe affect the mitochondria in a bad way so i'm kind of on the fence. And I personally want to be healthy and vibrant and want to be 120 or 180. But I'm not taking that drug yet.

And I know a lot of people are in the space like David Sinclair and others. And I respect what they're doing. And they're amazing scientists. I just know the power of lifestyle. And I know the power of lifestyle to activate these pathways. And what's even more interesting, and it's a whole other podcast we can get into sometime, is the plant compounds that we have co-evolved with also regulate these pathways. So there are all these cool things that we can eat or herbs we can use.

And Drew, I just got back from Ikaria, which is one of the blue zones. And Dan Buettner hooked me up with somebody there. And he's the guy who wrote the Blue Z book a really amazing friend and great great guy who's really uh i discovered a lot of the longevity secrets of these blue zones where people have to be very old they were they for example were uh eating all these wild foods like wild greens and every day they drank this special tea that's made from wild herbs and there's wild herbs everywhere one of them's wild sage and i was like i and i one morning i went to go milk goats with this goat guy this goat shepherd and and uh he's like come on sit down so we had he showed me how to make the goat cheese and we made

the goat cheese it was kind of fun and then after he's like let's have some tea and you know talk and of course he's he's a greek i didn't speak Greek, but they had a translator there. And we had this amazing wild sage tea. And I'm like, wow, this is really amazing. So I looked up what it was, and I looked up the scientific name, and tea, but there was no caffeine. And these are, again, these green tea extracts, these compounds, are also in wild sage, activate a lot of these longevity switches. So there's all these plant compounds we can use that are part of food and other things that I think are way better than taking metformin. So that's my opinion now. It might change when the tame trial comes out if the benefits are so great. So I'm not against it.

I'm just kind of waiting. Yeah. And I think that, you know, I didn't dig into the science of what came up last week, but I think it was in the news specifically for potentially interfering with muscle growth inside of the body. Do you know if that was the case? Yeah, so mitochondria, that's the thing. So that's the thing.

It's got a dark side. All drugs have a dark side, right? So like, for example, rapamycin turns up mTOR, but also may cause all kinds of other problems like immune suppression and other things you don't want. So, it's like, you got to be careful with these compounds and you got to know how to use them. And personally, I like the idea of using these phytochemicals. And there's this concept that called phytohormesis which people are talking about which is like you know the hot and cold we talked about earlier in the podcast

these plants are like toxins they're the they're the plants defense mechanisms but like a little dose of them kind of active also activates our biology to repair and heal it's kind of mind blowing and i don't want to get too kind of woo-woo about it, but actually, when you understand how does these molecules know to bind to these receptors in our body? It's just mind-blowing. So, I think we co-evolve with these plants, and our bodies are kind of lazy, and we don't make vitamin C because we can get it from food. Well, we don't make a lot of these compounds because we can get it from these plants that we grew, co-evolved with. And so, I think this whole science of food as medicine is just beginning.

And what's really exciting is the Rockefeller Foundation, I think, is spending $200 million partnering with other groups to create the periodic table of phytochemicals. There's 25,000. There's probably a lot more that we haven't even discovered. You know, it's like just a kind of a treasure trove of medicines that are out there that we now can use as part of our diet or as as teas or as herbs and spices or supplements to actually help us live a long time and be healthy. Well, that's great, Mark. I think that's a lot of fantastic information for today's episode.

You know, we only took one question, but that question got us rolling on a topic that you're just super passionate about, which is longevity. So thank you for the breakdown. And I'm going to pass it over to you to go ahead and conclude us out for today's episode. Well, Drew, I feel bad because I literally could talk forever and I don't want to lose people. And I hope you guys actually understood

half of what I said. And if you don't, I promise, it's all going to be in my new book. So you should definitely wait. It's coming out February 2023. And I'm not trying to sell new books, but I just really want to get new books, but I just really want to get this information out there. I really want people to understand how to activate their body's

own innate healing mechanisms. And that's really all we have time for in today's masterclass. So if you really liked it, I want you to submit your questions for next time on HiHo, and maybe I'll answer them in the next upcoming masterclass. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please share with your friends and family. I bet they'll get a lot out of it. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please share with your friends and family. I bet they'll get a lot out of it. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a comment. How have you used hot and cold therapy?

How have you experimented with some of these things? And what has it done for you? So I'd love to hear from you. And we'll see you next time 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 to all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your 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 forwardICS, 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.