The Dr. Hyman Show - What Causes Rapid Aging?

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, InsideTracker, and Pendulum. Aging shouldn’t be something we dread; it should be something we celebrate. Yet, as a society, we are sicker than ever. We are so fixated on keeping people alive longer, but what about keeping people healthier? This is the difference between healthspan and life span. Your life span is how long you live. Your healthspan is how long you live a healthy, vibrant life.  I’ve learned so much about this topic over the last few years that my team at The UltraWellness Center and I got together to make a docu-series about the Functional Medicine approach to longevity. Over the next few weeks, I’m excited to share this series with you here. In this episode, we dive into an overview of the seven systems of Functional Medicine and how you can optimize these systems to improve your healthspan. To get all of my longevity tips, sign up for my weekly Longevity newsletter at drhyman.com/longevity. In this series, I am joined by my colleagues at The UltraWellness Center: Elizabeth Boham, MD, MS, RD, Medical Director and Physician; Todd LePine, MD, Physician; and George Papanicolaou, DO, Physician. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, InsideTracker, and Pendulum. 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. InsideTracker is a personalized health and wellness platform like no other. Right now they’re offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com/drhyman. Pendulum is the first company to figure out how to harness the amazing benefits of Akkermansia in a probiotic capsule. To receive 20% off your first purchase of Pendulum’s Akkermansia probiotic supplement, go to Pendulumlife.com and use code MARK20. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version):  The difference between life span and healthspan (6:05 / 2:57)  The science of creating health (10:54 / 7:44)  The unified theory of aging (14:06 / 10:51)  What role does genetics play in aging? (16:19 / 13:00)   This determines 90 percent of our health status (18:19 / 15:08)  Our body’s seven basic systems (19:01 / 15:22) When inflammation leads to rapid aging (24:03 / 19:45)  What are zombie cells? (27:44 / 23:12)

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. We can't change our genes, but we can change how they are expressed. We may have a predisposition to diabetes or dementia, but we're not predestined. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. 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 was really excited to learn about Rupa Health. Hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors,

and gut bacteria are just some of the many things I look at to find the most effective path to optimal health for my patients. But that means I'm placing orders through multiple labs, which is just an overall pain. And it also makes keeping track of results more difficult for me and my patients and other doctors. Rupa Health has totally changed that. They've made functional medicine testing simpler and more convenient than ever so that practitioners like me can focus on helping their patients. With Rupa Health, functional medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specially 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 the functional tests you need and providing a noticeably better patient experience. This is really a very much needed option in the functional medicine space that I'm so excited about. You can check out a free live demo and a Q&A or create an account at rupahealth.com. That's R-U-P-A health.com. Now, something I get more and more excited about every year is personalized medicine. Now, 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 technology advancing in amazing ways, we can truly take that concept to the next level. Like one of the tools that I recently discovered that can help us all do this 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, your 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. And now you can connect InsideTracker with your Apple Watch to unlock deeper, more precise insights into your health. With real-time exercise, resting heart rate, and sleep data synced with your InsideTracker plan, you can truly wear your health on your sleeve. 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 comes to certain parts of their health, like, for example, finally taking a vitamin D supplement 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. Now, health is not black and white. Your wellness plan shouldn't be either. If you're curious about getting your own health program dialed in to your unique needs, I highly recommend checking out InsideTracker.

Right now, they're offering my community 20% off at insidetracker.com forward slash Dr. Hyman. That's I-N-S-I-D-E-T-R-A-C-K-E-R dot com slash Dr. Hyman. That's me, Dr. Hyman. And you'll see the discount quote in your cart. Now, let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, everyone. My name is Kea. I'm one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. I'm so excited to announce that we are going to be airing Dr. Heiman's longevity docu-series right here on The Doctor's Pharmacy. In today's episode, Dr. Hyman and his team discuss the importance of understanding and supporting our healthspan.

Our lifespan is how long we live, and our healthspan is how long we live a happy and healthy life. Functional medicine is all about extending and enhancing our lifespan by taking steps to evade the most prevalent diseases of aging, including heart disease, cancer, dementia, and more. If you're interested in your longest, healthiest life, you won't want to miss this episode. And to get all of Dr. Hyman's longevity tips and secrets, sign up for the longevity newsletter at drhyman.com slash longevity. Welcome to the Longevity Roadmap docuseries. This is an eight-part docuseries about accelerating your health at any age. It's also about preventing, slowing, and reversing disease. It's about turning back your aging clock at any age.

It's about becoming resilient, strong, and youthful. We all deserve a long life filled with energy and vitality. And while we can't control everything, the science of longevity teaches us what makes us age quickly and how to age backwards. Rather than a disease-focused approach, we can follow a health-focused approach. Most of us have the same goal. I want to add years to my life and life to my years. I want to live a long, active, engaged, and healthy life, or as I like to say, to die young as late as possible. Now, as a doctor on the front lines of treating chronic disease, in my patients and the population, I have spent my life learning about how to build a strong, healthy body and a healthy mind. And I teach this to my patients every day. And I apply these principles to myself, my family. I share them with my community.

We're in a very strange time. Most of us live longer than any time in history. But most of us spend the last few decades, and sometimes more, with dysfunction and disability and suffering from preventable and reversible ailments on piles of pills. Modern medicine is more advanced than ever. and yet we're sicker than ever. Advances in surgery and medication helps many of us live a longer lifespan. But what about our healthspan?

Your lifespan is how long you live. Your healthspan is how many years you live a healthy, vibrant life. You want your health span to equal your lifespan. Rather than live the last 10 or 20 years or more of your lives, incredibly sick and disabled, like most of us, how about living to 90 or 100 and be able to be fully engaged in life and love and play and work? We're so fixated on living longer, but how about living healthier? Right now, six in ten Americans suffer from at least one chronic disease, and four in ten have more than one chronic disease. In a few years, 83 million Americans will have three or more chronic diseases, diseases that rob them of their quality of life, seal years from their life, and

are almost entirely preventable. We have more information than ever before, more technology, more therapies, and more illness. And this is how it goes for most of us. Chronic disease, problems like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, depression, osteoporosis, autoimmune disease, and lots more, comes on gradually, starting around age 45 or 50. For most of us, we see a slow, steady decline in energy, function, well-being. And then, after 60, we often see a steeper decline. And by 70, we've resigned ourselves to poor function and health. And it only gets worse from there. Pills, doctors, hospitals, procedures, nursing homes are worse.

And often diseases of aging start really young in our 30s and 40s and being your best self and having the greatest health span to really be something that you should be addressing your entire life. But when it really comes to where disease is causing the most damage, where we're seeing the most morbidity or reduction in performance, it's in that zone from 65 to 80. That's the red zone. So the goal of medicine should now be really focusing on how do we shorten that? Of course, if you spoke to a room full of people and you said, okay, everybody, who here wants to live to be 100 years old? You don't see a lot of hands go up right away because most people start thinking, ah, you know, I'm going to be 100 years old and I'm going to be in a nursing home and somebody's going to be feeding me. I'm not

going to have a great quality of life. I don't think I'm in for that. But if you say, who wants to live to be 100 years old, and you'll only be sick for a week or a day, then I think everybody's going to raise their hands. That's pushing back disease. That's increasing our health span. And that should be the focus of what we're doing in medicine now. And the problem is that medicine has focused on treating disease. But the new science of longevity, based on the principles of functional medicine, teach us how to create health, to optimize our health, well-being, and our function. Unfortunately, today, instead of going on long hikes up the mountain, as we age, most of us take regular pilgrimages to the doctor and the hospital.

And then our families and our health care system spends massive amounts of money trying to keep us alive for as long as possible while we're suffering. We spend about 90% of our lifelong healthcare dollars in the last two to three years of our lives. And these are long, painful, expensive deaths. What kind of life is that? I propose a different way of living, one in which we take the steps we need to take today to feel better than ever. And in turn, we're going to experience health in our later years. I don't know about you, but I'm training for the Centenary Olympics, something my friend Peter Attia talks about all the time. How do you become a vibrant, alive, connected, healthy human at 100 years old? Think 10, 20, 30 years from now.

What kind of life do you want to live? Do you want to be able to keep up with your kids, your grandkids, and your great-grandkids? Do you want to be able to travel, have adventures, walk without pain, be mentally sharp, be focused, be learning your whole life? I want those things, and I want them for you too. I want you to be resilient and strong in the face of the global pandemic of disease like

the one we're currently facing. I want you to thrive, and I want you to die young as late as possible. Most doctors learn nothing about health, only about disease. Functional medicine is all about the science of creating health. It teaches us how to optimize the essential functions of our body to create health. Our immune system, our gut microbiome, our hormones, our energy systems, how we make energy in our bodies,

our detoxification system, our muscles, and our nutritional status. With my team at the Ultra Wellness Center, we will walk you through the major obstacles that are interfering with extending your health span our muscles, and our nutritional status. With my team at the Ultra Wellness Center, we will walk you through the major obstacles that are interfering with extending your health span and your lifespan, and the exciting science of supercharging your health using the principles of functional medicine. Now, if you're not familiar with functional medicine, it's the future of medicine available now. Functional medicine seeks to identify and address the root causes of disease and views the body as one integrated system, not a collection of a whole

bunch of independent organs divided up by medical specialties. It treats the whole system, not just the symptoms. It is, as I said, simply the science of how to create a healthy human. And when you create health, often disease goes away as a side effect. In functional medicine, we recognize that all the different systems in the body are interrelated and are related to each other. We recognize that when somebody has gum disease, that can be a trigger for their heart disease. We recognize that when there's imbalances in the microbiota in our digestive system, that's influencing our metabolism. That's influencing level of inflammation in the body. And we know sometimes that causes, it can be an underlying cause of autoimmune disease. So as opposed to just naming a disease and then sending that person to a specific specialist, we're looking

and recognizing how all the different systems in the body are interrelated. And then working on that individual person to rebalance the systems in their body. Simply put, we are medical detectives. We work with our patients to uncover what's going on underneath the disease and dysfunction. Getting the diagnosis of heart disease doesn't tell you everything. Heart disease, diabetes, dementia, these are really just symptoms. They're labels that we give to people who share common symptoms. But knowing the name of the disease doesn't tell you what causes it. For example, diabetes just means you have high blood sugar,

but why? Is it from the starch and sugar in your diet, environmental toxins, or maybe an inflammatory microbiome, or maybe nutritional deficiencies, or maybe all of it? The key to successful aging and to health in general is to find all the underlying causes. So let's find them and let's tackle them. In functional medicine, rather than treating the tens of thousands of diseases all as separate things, we restore balance in the basic functional systems of your body that are all connected. When they're in balance and they're functioning well, you're healthy. And when they're not, you're sick. What we know now is that there seems to be a unified theory of aging, that there are common underlying factors that seem to lead to all these downstream diseases.

And the diseases that we see that we think are the causes of death, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, these are just downstream consequences of imbalances in our biology that we can do something about. And for different people, depending on their genetics and various factors, it can be expressed as heart disease in one person, cancer in another, diabetes in another, Alzheimer's in another. But if you look at the underlying factors like inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction, which is your energy factories, your microbiome, and your diet, all these things play a huge role in determining whether or not you get these diseases.

So these diseases, for the most part, are preventable if we understand how to follow a lifestyle and a way of being and eating and exercising and sleeping and relationships and connection and meaning and purpose and nutritional status that optimize our exposure. Medicine is undergoing an incredible scientific revolution, a massive paradigm shift. We now know the body isn't just a collection of separate organs and parts, all to be treated separately by different specialists. It is one whole integrated, dynamic, interconnected system. The key is treating the system and removing the things that create imbalance and providing those things that restore balance and optimal function. And this can be done at any age, at any stage of disease.

But of course, the sooner you start, the better. Your health status at this moment in time is determined by all the inputs of your life. Your diet, exercise, quality of your sleep, stress, your nutritional status, your exposure to toxins and allergens, microbes, your relationships, your beliefs, your thoughts, the meaning and purpose that you have in life, all wash over your genes and determine your health status. We can't change our genes, but we can change how they are expressed. We may have a predisposition to diabetes

or dementia, but we're not predestined. All those inputs affect your gene expression for better or for worse. We have the power to influence all of it. If we get rid of those things that impair health and we add in those things that create health, we can live a long, healthy life. I'll talk about genes and longevity. And I always like to tell patients that, you know, your DNA is not your destiny. A lot of people have been taught that your genes are your destiny. So if mom had heart disease, dad had diabetes, that you're going to get it. And that's not necessarily the way it is. Your genes are more or less a recipe for making proteins and various body chemicals in the body and body parts. And your genes are a little bit like a loaded gun. So you can have the genes that make you more predisposed towards inflammation or you can have the genes that make you

more predisposed towards oxidative stress and inflammation. And a gun that's loaded never kills anyone until you pull the trigger. And a person's lifestyle and environment is the the finger that pulls the trigger on your genes. So it's really important to have that mindset that you are not destined by your DNA. The things that influence our lifespan and healthspan are often similar, but our lifespan in part is determined by our genetics. There's only so many years humans can live. The maximum life of any human has been reported to be 122 years. Most of us don't get anywhere close to that.

But there is a possibility for extending our lifespan as a human species to maybe 120 or even maybe 150 with new technologies and scientific advances. But our health span is determined by things we have control over. 90% of our health status is determined by what we call the exposome. Those are the things that we expose our genes to over our lifetime. Functional medicine is simple. Disease results from imbalances in seven basic functional interconnected systems in your body. The key to health, to optimal aging, to preventing, reversing, and treating disease is really simple. Remove those things that create imbalance in the body and the systems, and add in those things that restore balance,

and the body's natural intelligence does the rest. So let's review those basic systems. The first is your gut. The function and the balance of your digestive system and your microbiome, which we now know is a massive driver of health if it's in balance and a huge contributor to disease if it's not, is the first system we have to look at. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now a few years ago, I went through the worst health crisis of my life. And as a key part of my recovery, I had to revitalize my gut, which meant encouraging the growth of a specific good bacteria called Ackermansia mucinophilia. Yep, that's a mouthful, but it's essentially the bacteria that keeps the mucus layer in your gut and protects from leaky gut.

Now, back when I went through my healing journey, I kind of had to be creative and use lots of different ingredients to support the right kind of growth in my gut of acromantia. But now it's easier than ever to up your acromantia thanks to Pendulum Therapeutics. They've done something nobody else could do because of the first and only company to offer products that directly contain acromancy and mucinophilia. Now, acromancy is the bacterial strain known for strengthening and regulating the gut lining and is also one of the most important determinants of maintaining your long-term health, your weight, your metabolism, and so many other factors. Increasing the acromancy

in my gut has such a big payoff for my health and I've become a real super fan. If you want to try it for yourself, Pendulum is offering my listeners 20% off their first month of acromancy subscription with the code HYMAN. Just head over to PendulumLife.com to check it out. That's P-E-N-D-U-L-U-M Life.com with the code HYMAN for 20% off. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. The next is your immune system and your inflammatory system. So much of aging is caused by inflammation. In fact, we call it inflamaging. Next is your energy production system. Those little factories in your cells that burn food and oxygen and turn into energy that your

body can use. We associate aging with the loss of energy, but learning how to optimize and heal those energy factories called mitochondria is the key to healthy aging. Next is your waste disposal system or what we call detoxification or biotransformation where we transform molecules and get rid of them that are bad. The better we are at eliminating toxins that cause damage to our body and that accelerate disease and aging, the healthier we're going to be. Next is your transport system or your circulation lymphatic system that keeps things flowing and moving throughout your body.

The next one is your communication system, the control tower of your body, your hormones, your neurotransmitters, your brain chemistry, your immune messengers, your chemicals that orchestrate nearly everything in your body and get out of balance if we don't learn how to age well. And finally, your structural system, which is everything from the subcellular membranes in your cells to your musculoskeletal system, your muscles and bones. Dysfunction in any of these systems can lead to dis-ease. They manifest as diseases that we know by their names, but by going deeper to the root causes, by learning how to optimize each of these systems, we can make our health span equal our lifespan. We can add more years to our life and more life to our years. Now,

the major elements that interfere with health span around the world are heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and cognitive declines such as Alzheimer's and dementia, and injury, mostly from falling because we ignore our muscle mass and strength as we age. In this docuseries, we're gonna explain the functional medicine approach to each of these and much, much more so you can take steps toward accelerating your health journey and even age backwards.

Each episode will not only cover the functional medicine approach to disease and disease prevention, but what you can do starting today at home to take charge of your health. And we're going to also share how to work with your doctor to get what you need. We're going to talk about the best tests for heart health, cancer prevention, hormonal health, brain health, and lots more. And we will also discover what functional medicine tests are needed to cover imbalances in those seven systems of your body that are crucial to create health and optimal aging. You will learn how to use food as medicine, functional foods and

superfoods that help with DNA repair, that activate our stem cells, that balance your hormones, that nourish our gut microbiome, that boost your detox system, and even supercharge your mitochondria or your energy factories. You're going to learn about foods that build your muscle and reverse inflammation, enhance your immune system. We're going to talk about every one of these seven systems of the functional medicine matrix and how you can address each of these starting today. Inflammation is a part of the immune system's response to a outside insult, be it a bacteria, a virus, or an injury.

And we wanna have a robust response to inflammation that allows us to fight off an attack, if you will. However, our body then needs to turn that inflammation off. And inflammaging is when we have low levels of inflammation in the body that are like a smoldering burn. And that predisposes towards more rapid aging. So it's inflammation aging is what we call it. And all of the conditions which we commonly see in the office, be they inflammatory arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer's, are tied in intimately with inflammation. And when our immune system does not properly turn

off the inflammatory process, sort of like a, it's like the smoke alarm. It's like the smoke alarm goes off and it gets sort of stuck in that loop. That can happen in the body, and you have to sort of reset or reboot the immune system. Well, most diseases that we see that are chronic diseases, that affect six in 10 Americans, that four in 10 Americans have two or more,

and that in a few years, 83 million Americans will have two or more, and then in a few years, 83 million Americans will have three or more. These are all inflammatory diseases. And what we're understanding is this unified theory of aging, inflammation plays a huge role. And that's what we call inflamaging. And it happens because a whole series of factors that we have control over get out of control. We eat an inflammatory

diet. We don't exercise, which leads to inflammation. We don't focus on the quality of our sleep, which leads to inflammation. We don't learn how to regulate our stress response. We all get stressed. For sure, I get stressed, but I make sure I meditate every day, and that reduces inflammation. It turns on anti-inflammatory genes. We don't have a nutrient-dense diet full of ingredients that help to regulate inflammation, like phytochemicals that are tens of thousands of molecules in the food we eat that are in plant-rich foods. We're even finding phytochemicals in grass-fed meat. So we can consume these that help regulate the inflammation in our body. We can change our thoughts. Our thoughts literally drive inflammation. We can change the quality of our relationships. If you're in a toxic relationship,

it drives up inflammation. If you're in a loving relationship, it slows down inflammation. If we avoid toxins, we stop the inflammatory trigger from that. And you can't avoid all toxins, but we sure know how to avoid a lot of them. And we also know how to help our bodies detoxify from them. So we have the ability to slow down this inflammatory process and to actually reverse it. And I think this is what we don't think about in medicine. We don't have inflammologists. Functional medicine doctors are inflammologists. We ask the question, why is there inflammation? Not just, oh, how do I treat the downstream effects like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, autoimmune diseases, and so on. We go, well,

why is there inflammation in the first place? Is it something you're eating? Is it a toxin? Is it an allergen? Is it stress? Is it bad relationships? Is it lack of sleep? What is it? And then we navigate to find the cause. And by finding the cause, we literally can unwind the effects of inflammation on aging and literally turn back the clock biologically. When we talk about aging, or when I talk about aging with my patients, I can't help but talk about something called zombie cells. But before we talk about zombie cells, let's talk about something else, something called apoptosis. Apoptosis is basically programmed suicide of cells in our body.

When cells get to a certain point where they've outlived their function, they have a suicide program that says, okay, time's up, you need to go. And they die, and they're taken out of the system. Zombie cells are also known as senescent cells. I like to call them zombie cells. That's a lot cooler. The senescent cells, they have damaged DNA. It's damaged by inflammation and oxidation.

And they end up in this condition of suspended animation, where they're not completely functioning, but they are functioning enough to actually release compounds that will make a toxic environment around them, will actually impact other cells with oxidative stress, inflammation, damage those cells, and worse yet, program them to be zombie or senescent cells. And this process goes on and on and on. And if we took care of every other disease and we didn't address senescent cells, that process alone would lead to our death. And that's aging. Senescent cells can be any cells. We have different types of cells in our body. We have immune cells, for example. So when immune cells do their job, they rush to a scene of the accident in your body where there's a foreign invader, and they mop up the mess, clean everything up. But when they're done,

they die. Most of them. Some of them don't die, and they become senescent cells. And these senescent cells begin to impact the immune system. And it's believed that senescent cells and their multiplication in the immune system lead to immune suppression or immune dysregulation that makes people as they age much more susceptible to infectious diseases. Senescent cells can also be found in joints. So if you have an accumulation of these zombie cells, these cells suspended in animation, then they can't lubricate the joint. They can't protect it and they can't regenerate like chondrocytes in a joint will. And you will have more inflammation in your joints, and that will lead to disability.

Senescent cells also can impact mitochondrial function in other cells around them. And mitochondria are those powerhouses that play a very big role in how you function every day and how you age. When your mitochondria aren't functioning appropriately, that actually leads to cell death. It actually can lead to more senescent cells. And that's one of the mechanisms by which senescent cells are able to affect the cells around them and put them in suspended animation.

The good news is that there's lots of research being done on how to eliminate senescent cells. And we don't have to go far into our nutritional armamentarium to find something that works. Polyphenols or resveratrol has been shown to actually eliminate senescent cells. Where do you get polyphenols? Well, one of the favorite places people like to get polyphenols is in a glass of red wine. The good news is that there are compounds that can help remove senescent cells. One of them is a polyphenol called fisetin. Fisetin can be found in strawberries and seaweeds, and it's formulated as a supplement. It's actually a potent antioxidant and can support brain health as well. So it might be worth taking. Another compound, actually a potent antioxidant and can support brain health as well. So it might be worth taking.

Another compound, actually a pharmaceutical drug used to treat diabetes called metformin, has also been studied. And in mice, it's been shown to increase their lifespan by 10%. And the proposed mechanism is that it actually slows the aging process down by limiting the number of senescent cells or zombie cells that form. And finally, there's a compound that comes from the red pepper called piperlongamine. Piperlongamine, it's also been researched and studied and found to be able to limit senescent cells and may extend lifespan. So if you like red peppers, hot peppers, that's a place to go. When we're talking about aging and understanding how senescent cells can impact the immune system, it's interesting to think of that in context of health span and what I had mentioned before about as we age, we become more frail. Well, part of that reason is because of senescent cells.

They're actually destroying some of the really important systems in our body. And so as we do age, our immune systems get weaker. With the current crisis, this pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19 disease, a lot of focus is on the immune system. And we're finding that it's elderly people that are having the most problems with COVID-19, and that's where the rate of death is the highest. They're not dying specifically from the virus. They're dying from the immune response. They have dysregulated immune systems. Younger folks are also struggling. Many have died. And so the question is, if the immune system is just going to get weaker as we get older, well, why are the immune systems of younger people being impacted? And are there other reasons why they might be dying from COVID? And there probably are.

But we do find that they are also having an abnormal immune response that creates a cascade of events that leads to other physiologic issues that might lead to the demise. But it's the immune system that's the real key here. Immune resilience is something that we all should develop, but it's very hard to in our current lifestyles where people struggle with sleep, people struggle with stress, people struggle with eating the right foods, they're getting way too many sugars in their diet, processed carbohydrates, they're getting toxins in the're getting way too many sugars in their diet, processed carbohydrates. They're getting toxins in the air. They're getting toxins in their food. They're getting toxins in their cosmetics and clothing. You're going to hear that refrain a lot during this, you know, as we speak about health, because those are the elements that are eroding our health.

And every one of those things I just mentioned dysregulate the immune system. They amp it up, causing autoimmunity, so that you're actually going to start creating antibodies against self. They're going to depress it so that you can't respond appropriately to infections that will invade you. And in the case of COVID, we have a amplified cytokine response that results in as almost the final pathway to death in patients. And that's because their immune systems are not strong. Their immune systems are in some way broken.

So when we think about health, now, I think from now on, we're going to start thinking about what do I need to do to improve my immune system? Now, as soon as I turned 60, longevity and healthspan became a major focus in my life. I want to show up as my best self. I want to give my highest gifts to the world, to spend every day able to fully be present with my loved ones, to cook, go on adventures, travel, do all the things that make me happy. How I define health is to be able to get up in the morning

and do whatever I want, read a book or write a book, climb a mountain, ride my bike, play tennis with energy and vitality. Now, I know many of you want your version of the same thing. So I'm bringing you all the extraordinary new science of longevity so you can train with me for the centenarian Olympics. I'm already on my way. I checked my telomeres, those little end caps at the end of our chromosomes that shrink with age. They tell you your biological age. My chronological age is 60, but my biological age is 39. Now, I'm going to teach you how to do the same and reverse your biological age,

and it's not that hard. This is innovative, exciting new information that I have not shared yet. You're going to love it, and you're going to want to share it with everyone you know. Thank you for watching this Longevity Docu-S Series. I'll see you next time for episode two. 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 wanna 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 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 and get healthier and better and live younger longer. 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.