The Dr. Hyman Show - What Are Zombie Cells?

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

What Are Zombie Cells? | This episode is brought to you by Perfect Keto We used to think that aging is synonymous with decline but we’re now learning that this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. We’re also learning that there are ways we can harness our body’s innate repair mechanisms to slow down, and even sometimes, reverse the aging process. One such way is to reduce the number of senescent--or zombie--cells that we have. So what are zombie cells, and how can we get rid of them? Dr. Hyman recently discussed this in his conversation with Dr. David Sinclair, Dave Asprey, and Max Lugavere. Dr. David Sinclair is a professor in the Department of Genetics and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School, where he and his colleagues study longevity, aging, and how to slow its effects. More specifically, their focus is on studying sirtuins—protein-modifying enzymes that respond to changing NAD+ levels and to caloric restriction—as well as metabolism, neurodegeneration, cancer, cellular reprogramming, and more. Among other awards, he was included in Time Magazine’s list of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” and Time's “Top 50 in Healthcare.” Dave Asprey is the founder and CEO of Bulletproof 360, creator of the global phenomenon Bulletproof Coffee, a two-time New York Times bestselling author, the host of the Webby award-winning podcast Bulletproof Radio, serial entrepreneur, and global change agent. By employing the principles of biohacking (a term added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in September of 2018 with Dave’s influence) Dave has lost over 100 pounds, upgraded his brain, learned to sleep more efficiently in less time, and become a more effective entrepreneur, husband, father, and overall human being. In this episode, he shares his top tips and tricks for being superhuman and living to be 180 or beyond.  Max Lugavere is a filmmaker, health, and science journalist and the author of the New York Times bestselling book Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life. He is also the host of the #1 iTunes health podcast The Genius Life. Max’s sophomore book, The Genius Life: Heal Your Mind, Strengthen Your Body, and Become Extraordinary, is a lifestyle guide to living happily and healthily with proven, research-based lifestyle tactics, which we dig into more throughout this episode.  This episode is brought to you by Perfect Keto. Right now, Perfect Keto is offering Doctor’s Farmacy listeners 20% off plus free shipping with the code DRMARK. Just go to perfectketo.com/drmark, and make sure you try their Nut Butters and Keto Cookies. Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dr. David Sinclair, “Death is Inevitable but Aging is Not” here:  https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DrDavidSinclair Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dave Asprey, “Can You Age Backwards?” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DaveAsprey Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Max Lugavere, “How To Fix Your Brain And Live A Genius Life” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/MaxLugavere

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. The body is such a beautiful, elegant thing. It wants to live a long time. It wants to repair itself. But it's going to make a decision. Let's see. Donut, self-repair. And if you let the body decide without intervening, it's going to pick the donut every single time. Hey, everyone. It's Dr. Mark. You know, I'm all about the benefits of healthy fats, and I've had some patients find that a high-fat keto diet is the best way to support better cognition, lose some stubborn belly fat and even reverse certain signs of aging. But I often hear them say that it can be really hard to stick to especially if they have busy lives and they need food they can grab on the go. So when I found Perfect Keto I was really

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I'm all about finding what diet works best for your unique body, but whatever it is, it's important to be prepared with different options so you don't get stuck in a food emergency. If you're trying keto, be sure to check out Perfect Keto Snacks and keep some of them on hand to help you stay successful. Right now is a great time to stock up. They're offering Doctors Pharmacy listeners 20% off plus free shipping with the code DrMark. Just go to perfectketo.com forward slash DrMark, that's D-R-M-A-R-K, and use the code DrMark to get 20% off plus free shipping and make sure you try their nut butters and keto cookies. Now let's get back to this week episode of the Doctors Pharmacy. Hi everyone, I'm Kea Perowit, one of the producers of The

Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. We tend to equate aging with decline, but the truth is it doesn't have to be that way. There is a big difference between aging and aging well, and we're starting to learn a lot about the body's innate repair mechanisms that we can harness to work in our favor, including reducing senescent or zombie cells. Dr. Hyman has spoken to several guests on the podcast about this topic, including Harvard Medical School's Dr. David Sinclair. There have been a few paradigm shifts in the field. So when I started out, and this is, we're talking about the early 1990s, the idea was our bodies are like cars we eventually wear out.

There's not much you can do about it. You can slow down the rusting, be radicals, and that's about it. But what we discovered in the 90s, thanks to by cynthia kenyon and lenny garanti and others is that these genes are two ends and there are some others we can talk about later i think but these these protective pathways exist we didn't know that we had protective pathways it's as though we've discovered the not just that our bodies are better than cars that we actually have inbuilt repair systems. Yeah, it's like a self-cleaning oven, right?

Yeah, and they get lazy if you're lazy. They get lazy if you become obese and don't eat well and if you eat too much. There are other things you can do to kick them into action with how you eat, what you eat. But also what we found is that you can, they're basically inbuilt survival mechanisms that are very ancient.

They're found in yeast cells and plants in our bodies. Probably our microbiome plays a role. And so we can basically make a call to the Pentagon of the body and they can send out the troops without actually damaging the body. You don't have to have a war to get ready for war. And these protect us against diseases and many cases, reverse aspects of aging.

Another paradigm shift was that we could delete the bad cells in the body, the senescent cells that accumulate. And there are some molecules in clinical trials as well that might be paradigm shifting. How do you delete those? Well, they're called senolytics. Senescentlytics, lytic meaning lice, the cells kill them. Yeah. And there are molecules that can do that.

There are some natural molecules, quercetin, quercetin from onions and apples. Desatinib's a drug on the market. We, well, actually work at the Mayo Clinic primarily and Judy Campisi out at the Buck Institute found that you can treat animals and delete their senescent cells and they get younger. So you basically like go in and like clean up all the bad cells. Yeah, we call these the zombie cells, senescent cells and zombie cells. They're half dead. They sit there, they should be dead, but they're actually causing havoc. They're secreting inflammation factors, cytokines that cause other cells to senescent to become

potentially cancerous. inflammation factors cytokines that cause other cells to senescent to become Potentially cancerous and when you delete them Mice live longer and what's exciting about that technology? That's a science is you can instead of taking a pill every day Which is the kind of stuff that I work on if their stuff works you can have a treatment once every decade maybe and that's it Dr. Hyman also spoke to biohacking expert Dave Asprey about why taking action to clean up these zombie cells is an important part of aging well. People don't know this, but we have something called zombie cells that I write about in Superhuman. And what a zombie cell is, is a cell just like a real zombie. It sits there,

and it's not dead really, but it's not alive really either. And it sits there and it's not dead really but it's not alive really either and it sits there makes free radicals it takes up space and it does nothing good for you but it it adds to your metabolic burden so what do you do well these are called senescent cells in the aging field and there are things you can do to encourage your body to get rid of senescent cells and they range from something you hire pac-man to come and clean them up. Yeah, that's pretty much it. We have little robots that come in and there are people actually want to make little nanobots and stuff. Unnecessary. The body is such a beautiful, elegant thing. It wants to live a long time. It wants to repair itself, but it's going to make a decision. Let's see. Donut, self-repair. And if you let the body decide without intervening,

it's going to pick the donut every single time time You know why because throughout all of human history there have been regular famines and if there's a doughnut It's a good idea to eat it in case there isn't a doughnut tomorrow and you know better We all know better, but we evolved in an era. Yeah, it wasn't Krispy Kreme or Dunkin Donuts every corner So and ourselves don't know that though. They're still stuck in that so they will self-sacrifice They'll turn off their ability to save energy to take care of themselves for the donut so this is just about knowing oh if i brush my teeth i'm better off i don't get cavities there are basic metabolic maintenance things that i write about in superhuman that we haven't been taught to do yeah it's pretty interesting you know when we look at all the things we do know about aging right and and all the interventions that seem to turn off aging and turn on

you thing let's call it she read a book called you thing that's a great name okay that's good it's fascinating and it and it's um the the things that are showing up in the science now whether it's calorie restriction the only thing that's been shown to increase longevity reliably in animal models is restricting calories. You eat less by a third, you live a third longer, but you're miserable. So I don't want to do that. Then there's what we call intermittent fasting, which most people mean by that time-restricted eating where you eat an eight-hour window.

Then there's true intermittent fasting, which may be fast a day or two a week. And then there's fasting-mimicking diets and there's ketogenic diets. All those activate the same thing, which is this process of self-repair and healing that is a natural thing that our body does, but that we interfere with all the time by just eating all the time and eating all the wrong foods all the time. Yes. In addition to various types of fasting, there are other lifestyle practices that can activate our body's repair mechanisms.

Dr. Hyman explored several with health and science journalist Max Lugavere. Exercise, the relationship that we have with nature, the relationship that we have with temperature, the relationship that we have with light, the ever-present environmental toxins that your average human is exposed to on a daily basis. These are all the kinds of topics that I wanted to talk about in the book. Wow. So people talk about lifestyles, what you eat, sleep, exercise, stress. You don't hear people talking about light and nature and temperature, right? Cryotherapy, saunas, hot and cold. Yeah. And I always try to make things like my recommendations achievable by average people. So you might not have access to a sauna. You might not have access to a cryotherapy chamber, but just getting into colder water, taking a cold

shower or exposing your, wearing your skivvies like on your terrace, um, during the cooler months can all be a great way of activating these ancient thermoregulatory mechanisms that we all have in us that we've allowed to gather dust because we all live in a state of chronic climate control. And I think that by staying in that, in that climate comfort zone all the time, it undermines some really powerful, um, you know, reparative and restorative, uh, pathways that we have in our body. So what's the science of that? Well, I mean, cold being exposed to cold air boosts the proliferation of brown fat. So, I mean, we're all afraid of gaining even more fat on our waistlines and on our hips. But brown fat is actually something that we want to have more of.

It's metabolically active. It's brown because it actually has a lot more mitochondria than normal white adipose tissue. But you have the energy factories in your cells. Energy factories in your cells, yeah. They give you more energy. But they also, this brown fat actually burns fat and it burns sugar. And we can actually increase the amount of brown fat that we have on us. It's not actually visible.

You can't see brown fat. It only accumulates in a few parts of the body. In our armpits, around our collarbone, down our spines, shoulder blades. That's where you're going to see the brown fat. You can't actually see it because it's really relative to the amount of white fat that we carry it's like a very small small in concentration but it's really good for our metabolic health so whether that means turning down the thermostat get more brown fat if you expose yourself to cold yeah because brown fat it's there to it it burns calories to generate heat so when you're in a cooler environment this brown fat, it's there to, it, it burns calories to generate heat. So when you're in a

cooler environment, this brown fat is burning calories to generate heat. Brown fat was actually, um, originally identified in babies, babies, when they get cold, they can't shiver. Babies can't shiver. So they have this brown fat that basically acts like an internal heating pad. Yeah. And for that reason, it wasn't known whether or not we carried this type of fat with us through adulthood. But now not only do we, in fact, carry this brown fat with us, which acts like an internal heating pad that burns calories, as I mentioned, but we can encourage its proliferation. Well, the Tibetan monks knew this for years.

They have a practice called tummo. You know about this? No. Oh, tummo is amazing. It is a technique called drying of the sheets. And so they train the monks to activate their brown fat through meditation. And they have them up in like the Himalayas and the monasteries way up in the freezing mountains. And they practice by dipping cold sheets in ice water.

And they wrap the monks in the sheets and the monks have to dry the sheets with their internal body heat and when they can do that they send them up overnight into the snow with a basically a loin cloth and they have to stay alive Wow and they do it it's quite an amazing practice and you know we've had such a surge of things like saunas and cryotherapy. And, you know, we haven't talked about it on the show, but there's something called zombie cells. Zombie cells.

Exenescent cells. Yeah, the things that tend to kill us, where are these sort of senescent or aging cells, and they just create a lot of nasty immune effects and inflammation in the body, and it's hard to get rid of them. But cryotherapy or cold exposure is one of the key mechanisms for getting rid of these zombie cells to help extend longevity and personally you know i found that when i was really sick and even now it's the standard part of my practice i go into a hot sauna or a steam you're really hot and then i turn the bath big bathtub only, only cold water, and I jump in.

Wow. And it's pretty invigorating, but you feel afterwards like your whole nervous system is awake and you're alive and you're energetic and it clears your head. It's pretty striking. Yeah, it is striking. It's... And when I had chronic fatigue syndrome, it was one of the few things that gave me like a half an hour, an hour of feeling some respite.

Wow. Yeah. So many things influence how we age. Diet, lifestyle patterns like exercise, sleep, stress management, and environmental exposures are all involved in forming our biological age. And many other factors like blood sugar, inflammation, and genetics play an important role as well. We are learning so much about why age is not the definitive factor

it's made out to be when it comes to our health. And with the right practices, we can slow down and even sometimes reverse the aging process. Thank you for tuning into this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. If you'd like to learn more about anything you've heard today, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations with Dr. David Sinclair, Dave Asprey, and Max Lucabere. Until next time. 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 Thank you.