The Liz Moody Podcast - Reverse Cancer, Avoid Alzheimer’s, Decrease Your Biological Age: The Future Of Healthcare & How To Take Full Advantage with Dr. Leroy Hood & Dr. Nathan Price

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

Biotechnologist Dr. Leroy Hood and longevity researcher Dr. Nathan Price share the newest developments coming down the pipeline in healthcare & technology, as well as what you can do TODAY to support long-term health.  what our lifespan and healthcare will look like in 10, 20, & 100 years  the ways healthcare will become more accessible for everyone how to use your wearables, genetic testing, & more to detect and even treat disease  the daily lifestyle changes that literally decrease your biological age  the technologies that have reversed cancer, avoided Alzheimer’s, and prevented autoimmune conditions  how to actually use DNA testing to change your health & life why you shouldn’t be anxious about doing genetic testing (even for Alzheimer’s) what health tests are truly worth your time & money + what to ask for how cancer treatment is likely to completely change in the next 10 years and so much more!  For more from Dr. Hood & Dr. Price, be sure to grab their book The Age of Scientific Wellness: Why the Future of Medicine Is Personalized, Predictive, Data-Rich, and in Your Hands.  To join the Healthier Together Podcast Club Facebook group, go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthiertogetherpodcast. Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Pre-order my new book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  This episode is sponsored by: AG1: visit AG1.com/healthiertogether and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 10 free travel packs today.  ZocDoc: go to ZocDoc.com/Liz and download the Zocdoc app for FREE and book a top-rated doctor today.  Paleovalley: go to paleovalley.com/lizmoody for 15% off your order. ARMRA: go to tryarmra.com/LIZM or enter LIZM to get 15% off your first order. Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the healthier together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a best-selling author and long-time journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest, happiest life, whether we're learning how to make our pets live as long as possible, hearing about the pros and cons of having children, or getting science-backed blood sugar-balancing hacks for more energy. And yes, those are all real episodes, so if any of those topics sound good to you, scroll on back in the archives.

Today, I am so excited to welcome two guests to the podcast, Dr. Leroy Hood and Dr. Nathan Price. Dr. Hood is a world-renowned scientist. He's a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine. He's received 18 honorary degrees, published more than 850 peer-reviewed articles, currently holds 36 patents, and has received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science. in 2011. Scientific American named him one of the 10 most influential people in the field of biotechnology, and he's played a role in founding 15 biotechnology companies, founded and chaired the Department

of Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Washington, and is now carrying out studies in Alzheimer's disease, cancer, and wellness, including a 1 million patient genome project. It is quite the impressive resume. I'm almost out of breath just from saying all of that. Dr. Price, our other guests for this episode, serves as a co-director of the Hood Price Lab for Systems Biomedicine. He's a longevity researcher and the chief scientific officer at Thorne Health Tech. He's been named one of the 10 emerging leaders in health and medicine by the National Academy of Medicine. He serves on the Board of Life Sciences of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and he has won numerous awards for his incredible research. Their new book, which they co-authored is called the Age of Scientific Wellness. It was released this past year and it outlines their findings on living a longer, healthier life, as well as what the future of medicine will look like,

which is what we are going to get into in this episode. There are so many amazing new things coming down the pipeline in terms of how we take care of our bodies, feel our best, beat diseases, and live longer. And a lot of the cool stuff is actually available right now. And it's a lot more affordable and accessible than you might think. You just have to know about it. This is an episode about where health and wellness is going, but also the cutting edge of where it is and what we can be doing to improve how we feel today. We get into so many interesting topics, including what our lifespan and health care will look like in 10, 20, and 100 years, the ways health care will become more accessible for everyone, how to use your wearables, genetic testing, and more to detect and even

treat disease, the daily lifestyle changes that literally decrease your biological age, the technologies that have reversed cancer, avoided Alzheimer's, and prevented autoimmune conditions, how to actually use DNA testing to change your health and life, like what to do with all that information that you're getting, while you shouldn't be anxious about doing genetic testing, even for Alzheimer's, which health tests are truly worth your time and money and exactly what to ask for, how cancer treatment is likely to completely change in the next 10 years and so much more. I would love to hear your thoughts and your biggest takeaways as you're listening to the episode. So definitely screenshot and tag me.

I am at Liz Moody on Instagram. Two final things. We are a little over a month away from the launch of my new book, which is wild to actually say out loud. It's called 100 ways to change your life. And I promise it is the most pragmatic, doable, fun, to read book you will ever buy. When I was reading the audiobook, the producers kept commenting on how not wishy-washy the content was. This isn't a raw-rah self-help book. Like, you've got the power.

All you need to do is love yourself. No, it's like, here's what the science says about loving yourself, and here are the action tips that you can do today to love yourself so that you can see real results. We also get into gut health, longevity, career success, sticking to habits, achieving goals and so much more. Pre-orders are incredibly important to authors. They essentially tell the publishing house how much power to put behind a book. And also that means the book will come to your door on Pub Day and honestly sometimes a few days early, which is fun.

I'm actually giving away $1,000 to an airline of your choice if you pre-order just as a little extra incentive. So if you are thinking of buying the book, please do it now. just go to 100 Ways to Change Your Life.com. That is 100Ways to Change Your Life.com. Also, this is officially the last week you'll be seeing the title healthier together when you search for the pod. That is right. Next week, we will officially become the Liz Moody podcast.

The content is not going to change at all. The podcast name is just going to reflect the scope of everything that we talk about on here. It is so much more than what a lot of people would consider a health. podcast and I am so excited for this change to officially take place. So look for the Liz Moody podcast in your feed. There is no need to resubscribe. Just do not unsubscribe when you see our new name and our cover art, which is really, really pretty. I am so excited to evolve and grow this podcast even more and take it to even more exciting, interesting places. Okay, let's get into it with Dr. Hood and Dr. Price. Lee and Nathan.

Welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to have you both here. I would love to start out in a super brief way just to get us excited. What does the future of health care really look like in 10, 20, 30, and maybe 100 years from now? My feeling is that we'll have devices which will let us assess our health trajectory and optimize it leading to a health span that will take us into a health span that will take us into a. our 90s, mentally alert, physically capable, totally hopefully engaged with the world and so forth, and that the device is necessary to do this will all be capable of being used at home. So your entire health is going to be directed from your home and will be an integral part of your ordinary everyday life. We'll be able to follow your health trajectory. and optimize it at every step. We have health care today, which is largely disease care.

And then over the next five to 10 years, as we've been talking about in the age of scientific wellness, we're really moving more towards care being more focused on increasing health span, and moving more into your home. COVID really helped accelerate this. So this is now not that far off. There's a big push in that direction. When you start talking about 50 or 100 years out, 100 years out becomes quite interesting, right? Because in that world, AIs are now incredibly well developed. We've probably made huge

breakthroughs on understanding aging and how to slow it down. We've made big breakthroughs and hopefully a pretty massive eradication of chronic diseases. That's what happened in the previous 100 years with infectious diseases that were largely eliminated in, at least many of them, in large industrial countries. We think that if we adopt the principles that we talk about in the age of scientific We want us that we'll be able to really make a massive difference in terms of that chronic disease so that your health span starts to really approximate your full lifespan. Do you foresee these results being available for everybody or just for a small select group of rich people? We'd argue we're going to be designing them so everybody can be a part of it.

So the vision really is to democratize health care and to bring to everyone initially in the states and later across the world the benefits of a health care. The argument is health is fundamental to so many components of our life, your early growth and development, your education, the job that you carry out, how you move into old age, and the options that you have there. In every way, we'd like to see everyone be given an equal, opportunity to make the choice. But the important point is your health is really governed by your own will. That is, you have to direct the health in appropriate ways, and you have to be committed

to the necessary tasks that will come from being required to generate your health data and to analyze your health data, and then to come up with a whole prioritized list of actionable possibilities. that can improve wellness and or avoid disease. The big goal in the future is to take health care, which today, as Nathan said, is entirely virtually oriented toward disease and replace it with one that's oriented toward wellness and prevention. Our argument is that wellness and prevention will, one, increase a, enormously the quality of health care for every individual, and two, will lead to significant

savings in health care as we move into the future. So there'll be every reason for this transformation in health care from a disease to a wellness and prevention orientation. We're going to talk about all of these things you can be tracking and the things you can do with that data and all of that for everybody who has the access, the time, all of that. But I am curious if this is going to be our personal responsibility in some ways, what will people who don't have the time because they're working in various jobs? What will people who maybe don't have access to good doctors because of where they live? They don't have access to the healthy food they need, et cetera.

How is that democratization of health care going to look in practice? This is a major area that we're super interested in because, if you really dive in on your health and you're trying to understand it right from a molecular level and your microbiome and all these things that I'm sure we're going to get into as we talk, it can become quite complicated. The onus is really on those of us that are developing what we call the scientific wellness industry, which is basically a focus on wellness but with the same types of depth that we might think of in precision medicine. We have to take that complexity into ourselves so that the algorithms that we have behind testing that are giving actionable

recommendations to people, that complexity is dealt with inside so that it becomes simple for the person to action. So this means building out programs that they can take advantage of, tests that people can do that are quite simple, products that are delivered to their home, et cetera, et cetera. It's really building that ecosystem to make actioning on improving your health as easy as possible. And do you see the onus of that being on the individual? in the future, like, oh, I need to figure out what trackers I need? Or do you picture an individual in the future going to their doctor and saying, I'm not feeling well in this way. And instead of doing the tests they're doing now, maybe they're doing this completely different set of tests.

That is going to be an initiative that Phenome Health is pushing today. Phenome Health is a nonprofit and one of its major foci is to create the human phenome initiative. That is all the measurements that allow us to follow how we transition from birth all the way up to an older person. And measuring all of those transitions, and those are the phenomic transitions, is governed by your genome, by your behavior, and by your environment. So you have an enormous impact on all of these kinds of factors. We're pushing the idea of the idea of the second genome-like project, a million persons that will be analyzed over a 10-year period, and that's to develop the technologies and optimize a particular pathway that, in the most

economical way, leads to this idealized health that we've talked about. From a program like this, we can come up with basic algorithms that will let you in very simple ways. Optimize health around your brain, which is important, around your body, which is important, and around your gut microbiome, which really plays the central role in your health. And this will all be automatically integrated into the ordinary things you do, your diet, your exercise, your sleep, and your ability to deal with stress, a very common elements of fundamental health today, we'll be able to optimize your approaches and individualize them. Each of us is different, and we each need to take unique pathways to the optimization of our

health. You say that you've already seen some really startling results. You say that you've seen diabetes reverse, cancers eliminated, Alzheimer's avoided, autoimmune conditions prevented. I would love for you to share on a specific basis how you've seen some of these results happen and what's been used to achieve them. We've taken thousands of people through programs in scientific wellness where we can look at exactly that.

Some of those that became really interesting, I'll just give one example of a woman that had worked with us. And we were measuring, in this case, a pretty nonspecific kind of measurement of cortisol levels, but just stress in her body. and one particular month, it jumps massively high. You measure this four times during the day, and she has this huge jump, and a bunch of other biomarkers are just shifting all over the place. So we couldn't tell from just the data alone exactly what was happening in this case,

but you could tell that her body was in panic mode. It was in some sort of serious stress. So anyway, her coaches worked with her, and she said, well, you know, I have a little bit of gastric distress, but not very much. I'm having a little bit. But anyway, encouraged her to get looked at and get into the health care system in this case. She went to a doctor that was specialized in the colon. And the first doctor she went to said, this is all in your head.

But it wasn't in her head. It was actually data from her body. But she went and got a second opinion. It turned out that she had stage three colon cancer very large and was on the verge of going metastatic. Once it goes metastatic, you may die, right? you're in a serious situation at that point. So they were able to get her an emergency procedure, cut it out, saved her life. That was one example where we could see that, and there's many,

many more. But the notion is that if you're monitoring these things, there are signals that happen. And we've looked at about 170 different diseases that came up in these thousands of people that we'd monitor. And what you find is that there are these signals that come up before. There's coordinated elements that are changing. And what we have to do to make this more feasible to stop disease before it starts broadly in the population is to amass lots of information starting from wellness so that we learn how to better and better read those signals, and also to go more and more precise with how much they're telling us and what we can do in advance of those. And we've made a lot of progress on that. And the point I'd really emphasize is if she'd done

what her first doctor suggested, go home and forget about it, she almost certainly would have been done today. You never want to ignore. signals that are screaming at you, something is really wrong. Measuring many different aspects of the body gives us the chance to assess all the major organs and to assess your immune system and your energy metabolism and all of these different kinds of things. But if they send signals, you've got to have them interpreted, listen to them and respond. In that example, she had elevated cortisol.

I don't think I have ever had a doctor ask if I want my cortisol tested in my entire life. Are there tests that you think that we should be asking our doctors for at present that can give us information we really need to make these types of decisions with? There's a whole host of testing that really matters in that way, things that you might want to get access to that your doctor probably doesn't do. one is a gut microbiome test. The microbiome's relatively new. In recent years, we've really learned a lot about it, and you can get a tremendous amount of information that's very relevant to your health. 60 to 70 million Americans have gut health problems.

And some of them may not even know it. I know for myself personally, because I've had these on and off over the years as well, and sometimes when I get myself to a really good place of wellness, or maybe I quit using prebiotics and things that I like to do, and I go back. back, I remember, oh, yeah, I used to feel this way all the time, and I forgot that I'd gotten better. Thorne has a gut health test on the microbiome. There's some other good ones that are out there. If you want to measure these, you can get access to these thousands of species, can inform you about alias that are related to your digestion. It relates to, for example, some of the neurotransmitters

that your brain uses like serotonin, mostly made in your gut. You can see if that's happening. There are different nutrients or vitamins that your body needs that are made by micro-transmitters. in your gut. You can see if that's happening. Cardiovascular risk factors like TMAO, that is a process of having bacteria in your gut that turn part of your food into a toxin that you don't want. And on and on and on. That's like one big category. And then there's lots of blood tests that you can do as well that can get access to, you know, broad-ranging information. We have a biological age test that uses 40 different clinical labs that you can do measurements on. There's just a whole host of things that if you

have the right health care provider, or even if you want to do some of these direct-to-consumer tests, you can get a lot of valuable information that helps you to guide your health because the health care system is not completely aligned with your health goals in terms of prevention. It's a difficult system because the people who are entrusted with our health only get paid well if we're sick. It's not a total alignment. And your insurance company is not totally aligned with you either. When you look at those things, you're the only one that is totally. aligned with your health. So it makes a lot of sense to start owning a number of these measurements and following as long as you can get really high quality scientifically validated advice.

Nathan and I started a company called Aerovail, which over a four-year period was directed at quote, scientific wellness and at taking the data that came from each individual analyzing it and bringing back to them lists of actionable possibilities that could improve wellness. or avoid disease. Because we had people that ranged from 21 to 90, we were able to bin them into 10-year categories and analyze how these people ability to control the expression of analytes in the blood proteins and nutrients and clinical chemistries, how that changed. And it turned out that as you got older, there was kind of a linear loss of your control of the expression of those chemicals into the blood.

From that, we could derive an algorithm that gave you your biological age. So that's the age your body says you are as opposed to the age, your birthday says you are. The lower it is, the better off your aging. And what we were able to show for the women in Airvale is every year they stayed in this wellness program, they lost a year and a half of biological age. So over the four-year period, that was six years. And every year men stayed in, they lost about 0.8 years per year in the program. So that was of the order of three years or so.

And in fact, Nathan had a really dramatic response of losing 10 years of biological age over that four-year period. What is clear from this measurement is, A, it's a good assessment of wellness, and B, it shows you that you can actually change the slope of your aging. And what we can do now is use the core components in that algorithm to not only get your general biological age, but look at the age of major organs, the liver, the kidney, the immune system and the like. And we can also offer suggestions for how you change your global aging rate, but also for how you can change your organs rate as well. So it gives you a powerful adjunct to being able to decrease the rate at which you age.

And because aging is the major factor in most chronic disease transmission, if we really slow a person's aging down, and particularly if we combined it with the other features of scientific wellness, maybe we can, for many people, avoid transition into chronic diseases. And that's a really exciting idea that's being explored now. What are some of those recommendations when you are trying to lower your biological age in this sense? What are some of the shifts that you're recommending? name. Metabolic health is a really important one. Diabetes adds six years to biological age, so that's one of the biggest things. You want to control your glucose. Some of the things that

you can do there are lifestyle kind of things. But if we're going beyond that, you can look at particular supplements that are useful for this. Thorne has one called metabolic health, which is a bergamot and curcumin. You can do things like berberine has been really well studied as an analog of metformin, which is a drug-based version. You can also do the drug if your doctor prescribes that to you. You can wear a continuous glucose monitor, and you can learn in detail how different foods cause your blood to spike. You can learn how your blood is responding in terms of that. There are companies, January AI levels where people can get that kind of information monitor and learn how that works. You can look at lipids, right, which can be a contributor. That's a big factor.

hormones. DHEA, which we use in the biological age test that Lee was alluding to that we co-developed. DHEA is a pool for both testosterone and estrogen. You can work on improving that if it's low. You can take that as a supplement or you can work on increasing your muscle mass and just building out more from a lifestyle point of view and optimizing your gut, which we already talked about. What do you guys do? What are your wellness routines on a daily basis? I think exercise is one of the most powerful routines and makes the biggest difference in anti-aging and avoiding things like diabetes and other kinds of chronic diseases. So I exercise probably 40 minutes a day with push-ups and sit-ups and balancing exercises and deep muscle exercises. And then I typically walk to work, which is.

is a mile either way and do it very vigorously. And that keeps me in pretty good shape. I'm very careful about my diet. The weight really makes a big difference in how you feel, how energetic you are and how you act. Diet, I think, is really important. It's all the things that you've read about lots of vegetables and lots of fruit, lots of fiber. Red meats should be eaten infrequently. fish is good and so forth. I wear an aura ring, so that gives me my heart rate variability, which gives me a sense of the balance of your autonomic system, which is peaceful and relaxed and casual, as opposed to your sympathetic system, which is stress, in danger, and response to pressure and things like that. And clearly, you want to keep the balance.

in the relaxed area, that is, with a higher heart rate variability. I do also take supplements. I have a really interesting deficiency of vitamin D that initially came not only from eating enough foods with it or being in the sun enough, but I have two genetic variants that block the uptake of vitamin D. So to get it up to a normal level, I have to take very large doses. Knowing these key nutrients and where you're deficient and replacing them, I think, is a very important part of it.

Vitamin D is very important. Vitamin C is very important to keep your levels high. I kind of have two different days. I have the days when I come into work in New York, and I have the days when I stay at home. My first meal, if I'm at home, is basically the same thing. every day. I'll have plain Greek yogurt with lots of blueberries and a little bit of oats and shaved almonds. There's a rule of thumb that I find incredibly useful. And I just got this from a nutritionist, but it's made a big difference for me, which is if you look at whatever you're

eating and you just look at the number of calories, so let's say I eat about 300 calories of Greek yogurt in the morning, you look at how much protein is in those calories. And for Greek yogurt, that would be 60. What you're looking is that first number. So at 300, you drop a zero. So what you're trying to get is like 30 grams of protein and something that's 300 calories would be a high protein. I try to aim for that roughly. That's a good target. So if I start with that Greek yogurt in the morning, I start at a ratio of two, right, the six to the three, like right off the bat. I will often in the morning also put collagen into coffee. It makes it a little bit creamier. It's not much of a taste factor, at least to me, but I get an extra about 20 grams of protein. On days that I go into the office,

I'll walk for an hour, and then I do yoga and this seven-minute workout in the morning before I go, so I get about a half-hour yoga, about a seven-minute workout, and then, you know, an hour of walking. So that's a pretty good on a workday. But I'm in my office right now. I have exercise bands in the office, so I will do that about 15 minutes a day, usually in like three, like five-minute periods. I find that super useful just as part of my daily routine, you get a little tired sitting around. I enjoy that. I'll just do shoulder presses or bicep curls or trice. I do that throughout the day.

I feel slightly odd because in our new offices are all glass or everyone kind of watch me do it. I used to do it behind closed doors, which was easier. I felt better about it. You're probably inspiring people. That's certainly possible. On days I stay home, then I've got a dedicated weight room in my house. So I'll do like heavier lifting or runs and things like that on days that I stay home when I don't have the walk. And then other little things that I do that I find really useful.

So in every room that I have where there is a television, there's also a small personal trampoline. And then I also keep like grip strength exercises near places that if I'm watching a show or something, I'll do that. I often just try to work as much of these kind of smaller things into my daily routine on top of going out and exercising. Because I am a big believer that it's not just about the exercise of the workout that you go do, as important as that is. It's really movement, right? Standing up, have a standing desk. Lee's really been kind of a paragon of health throughout his life.

And I really started from a bad place, I'll say. So I've been working my way up from the standpoint that in the not so distant past, couldn't straighten my legs without pain. I couldn't stand up without pain. I had horrible sciatica. I was pre-diabetic. I had all these issues because I had become a computational biologist, and I was very dedicated as a scientist, but that just meant that I sat on my butt and had very low movement for probably about a decade, and I suffered immensely for that. It was kind of a process for me to build up some muscle mass because that had atrophied really badly.

Trying to get myself into a good exercise routine was hard because I had horrible sciatic thing. I'd go out, I'm like, I'm going to go running, and I would instead. be on the ground with electric shock pain, you know, for a few minutes until that resolved. There's all kinds of stuff like that. And I bring that up because there's always a tendency to project this like, oh, everything is always awesome. But there's also the fact that for me, the wellness journey has made an incredible opportunity. And I'm working to get to where I ultimately want to be. But man, the steps like moving up have been incredibly useful. And as mentioned my biological age dropping from being right around my chronologic age to 10 years younger.

All those kind of elements have been very, very motivating and made a big difference in my health and energy and cognitive clarity and all those kind of things. One additional point I will at, I really try and get roughly every hour 250 steps. I think just getting out for a few minutes in getting that exercise, you know, makes you alert, gets you going again, keeps you from getting sleepy if you didn't get that much rest the night before. When I walk in, I use grippers for the entire mile both ways. And as you age, one of the things that you really have to watch, and it's very hard to reverse, is the loss of muscle cells. And it's the exercise that can keep those strong and vital. And one of the classic test,

for older folks is to see how strong their grip is. So keeping your hand as well as your body really strong paves the way for consciously trying to keep as much muscle mass as you can as you age. The mattress that you sleep on is one of the highest exposures that you have. Like if it's off gassing, you're breathing that in for basically a third of your life. And most conventional mattresses are loaded with synthetic foams, flame retardant. and more. Plus, if it's not comfy, you're going to be tossing and turning, you're going to be really hot. And sleep is the foundation of health. It is so important. Because of all of this, if I were

not going to invest in any other part of my house, no other things in my house, I would invest in my mattress. And in fact, I have four years well before I had much money to spend on any of these things because it is such a big needle mover. The birch mattress is incredible. It is made with organic cotton, natural latex, and ethically sourced wool. So it has literally no off-gassing. You can not smell anything right when you unbox it. It has no microplastics, no synthetic foams or flame retardants. And the wool makes it so breathable, which if you've listened to this podcast for more than five minutes, you know that I run very, very hot. Like I am a furnace. Zach has basically accepted that sleepy next to me is like sleeping next to like a little fire. And the birch mattress has

been a game changer for that. It's made me sleep so much better like I can see my sleep score going up because I'm not hot all night long. It's also hypoallergenic, which is really worth paying attention to if you find yourself waking up stuffy or congested. Dust mites in a conventional mattress can actually impact your breathing and your sleep quality without you even realizing it. And again, we need to be able to breathe to get good sleep and getting good sleep is the foundation of our health. And then comfort wise, Zach sleeps on his back and then I sleep on my side in my stomach. So we have two completely different sleep styles and we both wake up feeling really good, no aches and pains. CNN actually named the Birch mattress, the best mattress for side sleepers.

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Nate, you mentioned protein. There's a lot of debate in the wellness community about high protein, low protein. How are we thinking about protein in terms of aging? People have very, very thoughts. What is the data show in your opinion about the role of protein and how much we should be aiming for in terms of living our longest, healthiest lives? The data that I've seen, you know, and I know there's a lot of different opinions on this, and there are different things that can work, I think that higher protein diets are really useful.

And I'm not talking necessarily about going to some massively extreme level. That rule of thumb that I mentioned, which is a little bit high, although it works, I think, particularly well when you're in a calorie deficit, but you really want to get about one gram of protein per pound of your target weight, your kind of lean weight. In my experience that if you're able to hit that minimum protein target, one, you're so much less hungry. It makes it a lot more sustainable. And it helps support that muscle loss. Because as you get older, on average, you're going to lose 0.5 to 1% of your muscle mass every year if you don't do something serious to fight against that. And even if you do, you're still losing some. That

intake of protein is incredibly useful. I would never go under that myself if I could avoid it. Okay. That's really helpful. Going back into some other different types of testing. What do you guys think about pro novo or other sort of early cancer screening testing? There is a absolutely fascinating cancer assay that uses epigenetics. That's the modification of your DNA, so it blanks out certain kinds of expression. But the claim is that you can measure epigenetic factors, and this gives you insights into whether you might have any one of 40 or so different cancers. And this was an enormously exciting idea, and it was an idea that led Aluminah to pay an awful

lot of money for the company that generated this kind of possibility. What I do understand is there are starting to be some questions about how efficient it is, whether you really can detect all of these cancers. But my own feeling is there are real signals there, and it will be useful for at least some kind of cancers. I think the confusion needs to be cleared. I can't say where it is really in the whole rubric of should use this, that part of your annual routine and things like that, it's probably safe to wait a little bit and hear what it does successfully so that you know what you're looking at. But anyway,

it's a very exciting new approach to the early detection of cancer and it's worth following very closely. I would love to get into DNA testing. What are your thoughts on the DNA testing that is available to consumers and do you have favorite companies to use for it? And is there specific data that you find especially meaningful that we should be looking out for? There's a lot of DNA testing that I think is really helpful. And I am a fan of it. There's obviously the really big companies, 23 and me, Ancestry.com and places like that where millions of people have done DNA analysis. One company who has reports that I like quite a lot are self-decode, which will give you quite a lot of actionable information off of that. Doctors use this kind of report.

Three-by-four genetics has built a nice interface and been able to give a lot of that kind of information. One of the places where I think genomics becomes super actionable is when you take genomics and you map it in with blood measures or other kind of dynamic changes. So one paper that Lee and I did with colleagues a few years ago showed that when we took people through a wellness program and we evaluated whether or not they could do things like lower LDL cholesterol. And there's been lots of studies that try to do this. Can you buy lifestyle, lower LDL cholesterol? And you get kind of a mixed bag.

Some people do it. Some people don't. And you say like the overall signal is kind of weak. But when we had all these different types of data, including genetics, what we found was that there was a subset of people that would respond very well in terms of lowering LDL cholesterol and others wouldn't. And the main variable was you can use your genome to predict your level of LDL cholesterol. So if you were high and your genome predicted that you were high, you couldn't change. It didn't lower by lifestyle. But if your genome predicted low and you were

high, then you could. So the whole element of predictability was in the gap, the different between what your genome said and what your actual value was. Now, the reason I bring that up is because if you look at medicine today, where we give millions of people statins and we're evaluating things like LDL cholesterol, then we ignore what I would argue is maybe the most important fact, which is what the genome prediction is because most of medicine ignores the genome still. So that's super important. And these are not small numbers.

The people who could change it in terms of the gap was top 40%. of the population and the bottom 40% of the population couldn't. So you're talking about millions and millions of people. Now, that was also true for HDL cholesterol. Only the top 20% in terms of the size of this gap were able to raise their HDL cholesterol, so-called good cholesterol. Hemoglobin A1C, a marker for diabetes. Again, the genome allows you to predict which people at the same level of hemoglobin A1C would be likely to transition to diabetes versus not. In that case, we know the mechanism, or at least a mechanism, because your red blood cells circulate in your body about 120 days.

But some people might be more like 130, others might be more like 110. That's encoded genetically. Since hemoglobin A1C, this marker is the protein, and you have these sugars, glycosylations, these sugars that come on, and you look at the aggregate of that over time to see if you are at risk for diabetes. Well, the longer they're in there, the more time they have to accumulate. If you're on one side of the genomic signal, then the same level of marker would be a warning sign for you and not for somebody else.

So there's many things that you can get into then in terms of interpreting your blood measures in the context of your physiology that you can only do for genetics. That we think is a really important aspect. So what I would say concisely is there are genes that predisposed to cancer and so Certainly, if you know you have those gene variants, you want to be very careful. Lynch syndrome predisposes you to colon cancer, and the RCA2 predisposes you to ovarian and breast cancer and so forth. But in all cases, it doesn't necessarily guarantee you'll get the cancer. An interesting alternative is in studying people in the Aarvale program over that four-year period,

what we discovered were that there were about 200 of them that transitioned from wellness to disease. And actually, the very first one we found was a woman that transitioned to stage four pancreatic cancer about two years into the program. What we did was go back and look at her blood draws six months apart prior to her diagnosis and show that she had five proteins whose levels were elevated strikingly, and three of them were actually a part of disease-betterved networks common to stage four pancreatic cancer. So two years before she got a detectable disease, you saw changes in the cancer. And what's ideal about this, and it's something we're going to be studying in the future,

is if we could reverse the cancer at that early stage, you'd never get the clinically manifest disease. We went on to look at 10 additional people that transitioned to cancer two and found roughly the same kind of thing. And the detection was a year before they got the clinical disease up to three or four years before they got the disease. So we believe that if you follow these blood analytes regularly, they'll give us clues about virtually any of your transitions in the chronic disease. and in the future we'll be able to prevent you from getting those chronic disease by the appropriate preventive actions or the appropriate therapeutic reactions. It's an exciting alternative to just DNA analysis and risk.

Okay. I have a lot of questions. First of all, if you are a person who is not genetically going to respond to the cholesterol treatment, or the lifestyle interventions, are you just screwed? Not necessarily. It does get really interesting. So if you want to lower LDL cholesterol, the statins do work, right? So you can lower that. It turns out this was another paper we published last year.

If you have a certain kind of microbiome, statins are double as effective for those people, than it does for the rest of the population. It's about a quarter of the population. That has a big effect. But you can lower by statin or some sort of intervention. So what we showed, though, is that if you want to just move things by lifestyle intervention, what you can do with this kind of genetic test is you can look at all your blood measures, and then for all the ones where you can do a genetic prediction,

you can rank order them from where you have the largest gap down to the smallest gap. And what it will tell you is here are the things that if you focus on, they'll be very likely to change. So you'll be likely to make progress on those measures, whereas if you're focused elsewhere, you won't. What's so fascinating then is that the genomics, when you tie it together with the other data types, it opens up this personalized map for you of where you'll get return on your health investment. If I put effort here, you'll see output.

But it doesn't necessarily mean that you won't be able to make an impact, but you will probably have to hit it harder with something that might be a pharmaceutical or maybe there's other things. The other element, though, is in some cases, you should just be treated differently. So think about the example I gave of hemoglobin A1C. That's related to the residence time of your red blood cells. So in that sense, if your red blood cells tend to stay in your body longer than the average person and you have a hemoglobin A1C, let's say, that's borderline prediabetic, it's not that your

problem is you can't lower it. In that case, it's that your steady state should be higher. The range is wrong for you. So you should be thinking about a personalized range. So we don't know the answers on all these things yet, but there's both those factors, right? One, you're dealt a bad hand and you just have to play with that. But the flip side is that a lot of these ranges, they're just developed from population averages, sometimes on studies on relatively small numbers of people a long time ago.

And they just might not be relevant to you. That's what we're learning to personalize through the genome so that you're now looking at you as your own control. what is your body physiology, what should it look like as opposed to how do you fit into the average? Is there anything that you'd say to somebody who wants to get their DNA tested, but they're scared of getting results that frighten them like having a gene that can indicate a greater chance of disease down the road? That's really an excellent question. So we now have polygenic scores that actually account for up the order of 150 different disease phenotypes and actually wellness phenotypes.

And what that means is if you have your genome sequence, you can actually look at these polygenic scores and you can determine your risk, whether very low or very high for that phenotype. And for people where it's high risk for disease, they may have reservations about not knowing about that or reservations about worrying about if they do know they're going to get neurotic about it. You could have these things done and give them to your physician and have him tell you about them as it becomes relevant to treatments that he can use to deal with those different kind of genetic risk. Or alternatively, we should really be educating the populace about genomics and polygenic scores because knowing about what your risks are means you can take personal responsibility for identifying when we discover new approaches to things you're at high risk for that you can use.

I'd add one thing to that, which is probably the disease to which this is applied. the most is Alzheimer's disease. When genetic testing was first listed, it was in like all the news reports. I'd always say this like, and you might not want to get your genome tested because you'll find out you have Alzheimer's and there's nothing you can do. And it was just repeated over and over and over again. And it's largely nonsense. And the reason that I say that is when they say that there's nothing you can do for Alzheimer's, what is meant by that is there is no drug that has a major effect on Alzheimer's. You talk about, are you going to have psychological stress from this? Turns out that for most genomic testing, there isn't a long-lasting effect of that kind of.

Robert Green at Harvard's done these really big studies on analyzing that, but you can make that determination for yourself. But for Alzheimer's, and Lee and I published, you know, an op-ed piece in the LA Times recently that went through this, but if you're thinking about something like the treatment of Alzheimer's once your brain has decayed, the difficult of thinking about bringing your neurons back and interconnecting them the way that they were before and doing that with a small molecule like a drug, completely fanciful. I can't even imagine a world in which that is true. You need a lot more information to put your brain back together the way that it was. But for prevention, which basically means keeping your neurons alive, that is a much

easier problem. And there's tons of things you can do. Some of them that are very simple. Take vitamin D. Low vitamin D is a very high risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. There's big hazard ratios that are associated with that, and there's even a known mechanism. Randomized control trials haven't held up that well on vitamin D, although I will say that we have gone through and we've done a very deep analysis on those things. We don't think any of them were powered to see anything anyway, so we'd say that's not actually tested. We can dive into that in a long, long way if we want to do. But that's a big factor. Phosphatidylcholine, which you can get in eggs or as a supplement. People who eat diets rich in phosphatidyl colon, get Alzheimer's on average three years later than people who don't.

And again, known mechanism. Homo cysteine and vitamin Bs. Tommy Wood at University of Washington. He just did a whole thing on this. It makes a big difference in the delaying of dementia. Exercise. Very protective for dementia because you want to keep oxygenation levels in your brain high as you get older. the decay of oxygenation in your brain is one of the things that leads to not keeping enough energy.

APOE has a big role in that too, which we could dive into if we want to. In the press, too often we have given this notion of that there's nothing you can do for these things other than just be stressed out so don't learn, when in fact that is central to the entire point of our book, you know, the age of scientific wellness, which is that health care is so focused on care after illness and the administration of drugs, that it equates there is no drug that you can treat this disease with after the fact as meaning there's nothing you can do to prevent the disease. And that is not even remotely true. And we've all known this since that we were three years old. It's the story of Humpty Dumpty. Once the egg has fallen and broken, it's hard to put together.

Keeping the egg on the wall, that's easy. And Alzheimer's exactly the same. I was reflecting recently on what a weird rhyme that was, actually. It is a weird rhyme. It's like a weird thing we're teaching children about. Are there any other data from DNA tests that you think people are interpreting wrong or taking the wrong actions for? There are really five or six different classes of things that you can do. And most large clinical centers are doing none of them or at best if you were doing maybe one of these. So the first is the American College of Medical Church.

genetics is actually identified 82 variants in your genome that have actionable possible possibilities that if you know have the variant, you can do something very effective for it. And an example of this is something called malignant hyperthermia. This is a gene defect which if you have, if you go to an operation and take the wrong kind of anesthesia, it activates your heating mechanism. It becomes hypothermic, and usually it leads to your death. So the way around it is to know you have this variant, and then there are certain classes of anesthetics you just don't ever take. So it saves your life totally, if you know,

the variant. So there are 82 of these kinds of things that people can do. A second thing is there are probably several hundred different genes now whose variants block your ability to effectively use given drugs. And this is called pharmacogenomics. And there are a list of probably 10 or 20 of these variants where the data are utterly unequivocal that if you have that variant, you can't use that kind of drug. This is really an important thing to give to your doctor. because he can quickly check anytime you use relevant drugs to see whether you're in that position or not. And another area is this area of what are called rare variants, rare diseases, of which 7,000 have been described. And these are single gene defects that actually can cause a disease either early or,

much later in your life. And obviously, if you know you have the defect as early as possible, you can begin to think about preventive measures that you can use to avoid these kind of things. And then the final category is these 150 polygenic scores that lead to your ability to know genetic risks for all the common diseases. And as Nathan described, the high-risk people will be treated differently from the low-risk people. The LDL example is a beautiful example of that. There are a lot of actionable possibilities out there.

And Phenome Health, this nonprofit I'm talking about, is actually talking with two big health care systems. and the first proposal that we're making is they get into the genomic actionable possibilities that can give so much benefit in different directions to their patients and so forth. And we hope within a five to ten year time, all of these things will be available for every single patient. And some you may want to know about, but your doctor should know about all of these. things. To your question of, what do we get wrong in genomics? And this, you know, is really a central aspect of what we call scientific wellness, but is the notion that I think the genome from the early days was really missold to the public because of this huge focus on disease. And so the genome was

presented to the public as a sort of crystal ball that would tell you how you were most likely to die. Because all of our genetics are Alzheimer's genetics, diabetes genetics, and so forth. Like a good example of this, there's a Native American tribe outside of the Seattle area, and they've been studied in papers because they have, quote, diabetes genes. Now, they, of course, don't have diabetes genes. They have genes that are adapted well to their natural lifestyle. And so the point is that the genome is not about telling you how you're going to die. It's about telling you how you should live and how your body operates at its best. And so if you focus on wellness, we want to flip around this notion that the genetics that we understand in the scientific community are mostly

about disease. But that's only because that's how we've studied them. But what it actually is, it's the code that keeps you alive. It's the code that, you know, it encode your development and all these processes that are operating fairly miraculously on you every day that you stay alive and the ability that you have. We want to refocus and just shift that notion. What does the genome tell us about life and about your life and about how you can optimize your path of health in the context of understanding your own body? That's what we want is the same rigor of science brought to understanding the genome from a wellness perspective as we've done from a disease perspective. Your genome are basically the instructions for developing your body and growing and in a general

sense, becoming who you are. But two things really impact the genome. Your own life decisions about how you behave, you're eating, your exercise, all of those things, and your environment. Your environment can have an enormous impact on your health. And the analogy, I think, is really neat, is a composer writes a hymn or a piece of music, and that's something that musicians can read. But when musicians play the music, they add spirit and dimensional benchanality and vivaciousness and passion to it. So the really important thing in music is the two being put together and realizing that what is really vital to good music is the passion and how you play it. And for good health, it's your

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slash Liz. Again, that's 15% off at oneskin.co with code Liz. I love that. Okay, I have one more quick question I'm going to ask and then I have a quick fire that we'll get into. It occurs to me as we are talking about all this stuff, that a huge part of the equation is having a doctor who is well educated, well versed in these things who can kind of help work with you on this journey. And it sounds like you guys have a lot of faith that that education is certainly coming down the pipeline and in 10, 20 years we'll have a different world of doctors. But right now in this moment, do you have any advice for finding somebody who can provide you with the closest thing to scientific wellness care? So there's increasing number of

physicians that I think you can interface with that will do personalized medicine or functional medicine. If you can find a really good functional medicine doctor, they'll dive in on a lot of these things. We have worked with a number of partners. There are certain telehealth medicine. companies like this. Wild Health is one that we work with quite a lot that has a couple really good physicians who founded that. They've got, I think, a nationwide telehealth group. There's a whole bunch of different practices that are growing up, that are pushing these kind of things forward. And then the other thing I'll say is there's also just a lot you can do from a consumer standpoint if you're able to access that. And you just want to make sure that you're finding good sources

where there's excellent scientists behind them and they're working with physicians. They've got good medical officers and all those kind of elements. But if you can find that, then you can supplement and understand quite a lot about what's happening in your health, in addition to what your health care practitioner will understand and buy into. Because a lot of these things, genomes and microbiomes and a lot of these opportunities are fairly new. There's a study, it's a little bit old now, but they did an analysis of when we knew something was true in biohomes. allergy and it actually impacted medicine. And the average time lag is 17 years, so we're a little bit slow on updick sometimes on these things. In our book, The Art of Wellness, the last chapter has,

I think, a whole series of recommendations about what you as an individual can do to optimize your health. And it would be worth looking at that if you're really serious about it. Absolutely. We've talked about a lot of tests and a lot of things you can do as a consumer. If you were to narrow it down, to maybe two to three, including like get a wearable, get this blood test, get DNA testing. What would you say are your top ones that the average consumer, we're not rich, we don't have all the time in the world, but we want to take care of our health. What should we do? The ones that I would recommend are gut microbiome, like I mentioned before, I think is a really useful one. I do think getting a basic genetic test just to kind of know what your risk profiles

look like and that's something you can do at one time point, right? It's not dynamically changing. I think that that is important. And then monitoring the blood is certainly important. So there are panels, Thorne does panels, inside tracker does panels, your doctor might do panels. Like, there's different places you can get them from. But having kind of a comprehensive view that you go into, maybe once a year or so and just understand like what are the next things that I should be optimizing and working on and tying that together. And as, we move forward, I think we're going to be able to tie more and more of these things together so that you're getting an integrated view and even being able to deliver that back to people

through, you know, AIs and digital twins and all these things that we have under development that will give super highly personalized insights as you go along. And having that baseline for yourself is so valuable because then as you're getting older, you actually know what your body looked like when you were younger and fitter and so forth. Are there specific things? is you would call out that should be on those panels because I know a lot of doctors aren't testing vitamin D. They aren't testing cortisol. Can you name a few things that you think are especially important to include? April B. It's a really important one for cardiovascular health that I would put way up there. Vitamin D is related to so many different processes related to

dementia, as I mentioned before. That connection is a little stronger than it's appreciated generally. I would definitely put that on there. Certainly the lipids with the caveat that, you know, Getting genetic testing along with that's going to make that a lot more impactful. Certainly some of just the basics are important. Your CBC and your metabolic profiles are very important. Metabolic health is probably the biggest factor. And along those lines, if people want to look it up, we did just publish a paper on biological BMI in nature medicine a few weeks ago.

There's kind of a new analysis that people want to look at that kind of information. But those are some of the things that I'd put on the panel. The two biggest factors for biological aging, at least in how we did it, were DHEA, this baseline measure of hormones and hemoglobin A1C for metabolic health. So those are essential as well. Those kind of things are really helpful. I'd love to just get your perspective on somebody if they were currently dealing with some of these diseases that were experiencing credible advancements down the line.

But like right now, if somebody had an autoimmune disease, is there something that you would do differently if you were them? Autoimmune diseases are certainly amongst the toughest that are out there. If you'd want to look at doing some sort of comprehensive profile so you can get a sense for what might be really being affected, so you can find it, because often autoimmune diseases are so tricky to nail down in terms of what's actually being affected. There are new companies, I don't know to what extent they've got consumer products out there, but companies like adaptive biotechnology, certainly in the science. space is doing things like being able to sequence all of the antibodies that your body has made. The ability to try to nail down like what might be driving your autoimmunity, at least in the science realm, is way more advanced now than it was just a few years ago. So searching around to

see how much that may have percolated out there into the world where you might be able to get something like that. Short of that, though, also just lowering chronic inflammation. can be helpful to not be just as elevated so that your autoimmunity like triggers less often, that's really important too. There are two techniques that are really going to transform autoimmunity. One is the ability to take a blood draw and to look at 5,000 white blood cells by single cell analysis, and that lets you define each type of blood cell and their state of development. And this allows us to look at innate immunity and adaptive immunity, the two major types of immunity.

And we're learning, they're much more complicated than we ever thought before, but we're also getting insights on how to regulate that balance and optimize it in health and in disease. That's one very big opportunity. I think the second thing is our ability to measure accurately and rapidly changing metabolic states is going to give us deep insights into long-term innate inflammation and insights in how we might manipulate that. There's some very promising new approaches that are going to be used. And then finally, we can actually look at hundreds of different antibodies. in your blood to see whether there are antibodies against your own components. And we can identify

the things against which your autoimmune reactions are occurring. And again, think about rational ways we can avoid those antibodies coming up in the future or that we can selectively destroy the antibodies that are against your own self. And then I just want to touch really briefly on cancer. I would love to know, one, if you had cancer right now, what you might do that the average person might not be aware or think to do. And then I would also love to know a little bit about cancer coming down the line. I've heard at least that progress we made from the MRNA vaccines during the pandemic is going to completely change how we treat cancer in like five to 10 years. So I'd love to hear about what you see is the future of cancer treatment and what you would do

differently right now in this moment if you had cancer. What's going to fundamentally change cancer in the future are two really important things. In the shorter term, immunotherapy, that is the ability in really diverse ways to activate your own immune system to attack your own cancer cells and be highly specific is the ideal theoretical approach to it. Right now, we have immunotherapies for cancers like melanoma that in most cases can totally cure them, but we have other cancers where that's not effective because in a variety of ways, the tumors are very effective at blocking off the immune system. We're making enormous progress on how to remove those blocks for many tumors and how to be able to activate. highly specifically the immune system. So if I had cancer, the first thing I do is look deeply into immunotherapy and whether that offers any kind of opportunity in the future. The second thing

is I told you earlier that we can detect the transition to cancer anywhere from one to four years before you ever get it. And I think the molecules that allow us to do the detection will tell us downstream what the kind of cancer is. So we'll be able to design therapies that will attack it at its earliest, simplest state. And perhaps the best of those therapies will be immunotherapy. We can use your immune system and attack the tumor when it's at a very small and very simple state really effectively. And my guess is that in a 10 to 20 year period, we can entirely, eliminate cancer of this optimistic view of what's happening. Now, I know Nixon said that back in 1975 and we're not there yet, but I think there is hope for real optimism in the future.

The only thing I'll add is that the connection is this notion that you can identify these very specific signals or characteristics of tumor cells because your body clears cancer cells all the time. But the ones that grow into tumors are because it has escaped it. So this notion that you could take those features, program it back either with what's called a cancer vaccine to teach it to go ahead and kill those cancer cells or with a technology that was developed by one of Lee's best and oldest friends at Stanford, Irv Weissman. Basically, it's a program where you go in, it recognizes certain features of a cancer cell and it sticks up a protein, which he calls an eat me signal, which again is just a signal to the immune system to come and clear them out.

I'm very excited about the immunotherapy area. The big challenge there is it only affects a very small percentage of cancers currently, and some of the approaches are super expensive. When they first came out, it was like a million and a half bucks to get these done. But what I love is that it is an inflection point. Never use the cure word in cancer, but these immunotherapies, when they really hit, they make a huge difference very quickly. So I'd much rather have this super effective therapy that we've got to figure out how to make

cheaper and apply to more cancers as opposed to what we had before, which is just this devastating, kill every fast-growing cell in your body with chemotherapy, have a race between you dying and the cancer and hope that you win. We've moved into a much better area. We've got to expand it. You've got to make it cheaper. Those are much better problems to have than what we used to have. And really push the prevention.

I want to push the idea that in the end, that may be the final solution. I love that. Can you each leave us with just one homework assignment, something that everyone listening can do the moment they stop listening to this podcast to begin to transition themselves into the future of wellness? If you have a health issue or if you don't or you're concerned or you want to learn, is to take your first step into the journey of learning deeply about your body, whether that be a microbiome test or a blood test or you.

your genome, choose the one that is of interest to you. This whole process of just learning about how your body operates, how you're unique, what's different about you at a molecular level. It's a really cool chance to do that and we haven't had it around for so long. Choose your first step and take a step forward on that front. I love that. Can you guys just tell me a little bit in your own words about your amazing book and why everybody should run out and buy it today? The book attempts to make a very simple proposition, the idea with a data-driven health that we can follow your health trajectory and we can continually optimize your health directory. So you are what you have the potential to be. And this will give you a health span that equals your lifespan. That is, you'll move

hopefully into your 90s or even your hundreds, healthy, active, mentally alert, physically capable, all of those kind of things. But it does, on the other side, raise really interesting psychological and sociological problems. What happens to retirement? What keeps you alive for an extra 20 or 30 years where you could be very productive? And I think a key is joy. and passion and happiness, and the best thing you can do is be committed to doing something that makes a difference in the world. And it can make a small difference or it can make a big difference, but it can be a wonderful motivating factor. Well, I could talk to you guys forever, but I so appreciate you taking the time to join me today and to share all of this incredible

information. I'm certainly excited about the present and the future of wellness. So I really appreciate you all you sharing this information with us and with the world. Thanks so much, Liz. Great to be with you. It's been a pleasure, Ms. This episode blew my mind. It also made me feel really hopeful for the future of health care. Like we're finally focusing on how to prevent disease and live as healthy a life as possible

before we are in crisis. And also, there's so much that we can do now to start impacting all of these things. I know that you're going to want to share this episode with so many people, just so you can talk about this stuff and be like, this is the future. I've predicted the future. So just a friendly reminder that sharing the podcast is truly the best way to support it. And it is so, so appreciated. I see all of those messages from you telling me about putting on your company Slack, about all your friends you texted. And I see all of our most shared on Spotify, which is absolutely wild. There's hundreds of thousands of podcast episodes that go live every

single week. So when we're in the top, top, top, top sliver of most shared on there, I'm just like, oh, it gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling. So friendly reminder to share and just a big, big, big, thank you for me for all of the people who are doing that. And if you did love this episode, I would be so grateful if you would write a quick rating or review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It's hugely helpful for other people deciding whether to listen to the podcast. I know when I'm about to listen to a new podcast, I go to the reviews and I scroll through and I'm like, what are people saying about this podcast? Like, what am I going to get here? So I appreciate that hugely as well. If you are new here, welcome. I am so happy that you're here. Make sure that you're

following the podcast on whatever platform you like to listen on. Just go to the main podcast page. That's the one that lists all of the healthier together episodes, the soon-to-be Liz Moody episodes, the Liz Moody podcast episodes. Oh, gosh. So exciting. You're going to see the word follow under the logo on Spotify. And then there's a little follow with a plus sign button on the top right that same page on Apple Podcasts. And if you hit that button, if you hit that follow button, all of the new episodes will show up right in your feed so you will never miss out on one. And we have some incredible episodes coming up, including one that offers a new way to heal from trauma and one that will make you rethink everything that you know about productivity

and time management. So make sure that you're following so you do not miss out. Okay, I love you and I'll see you next Wednesday on the next episode of what is now officially the Liz Moody podcast. When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from? Most people say working out or good nutrition, and yes, of course that matters. But there is a biological foundation underneath all of that that most people are completely overlooking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline and what I've learned has genuinely shifted how I think about my own health. Every single,

movement that your body makes every step, every workout, every muscle contraction depends on energy produced at the cellular level. And at the center of that is your mitochondria. Here's the thing that nobody tells you, certainly nobody told me, starting around age 30, our mitochondria naturally become less efficient. More get damaged, more become sluggish, and over time that impacts your energy, your strength, your recovery, and your resilience. Most of us respond by pushing more. We're like noticing these things and we're at adding in more protein. We're trying to fix it with more supplements. We're trying to do harder workouts. And those things do help. But timelines research suggests that we also need to be supporting

the cellular machinery underneath. And that is exactly what their supplement, Mitopure, does. It contains urolithin A, which helps your body clear out damage mitochondria and support healthier ones so that your cells can produce energy more efficiently. Because this is happening to your cells, it's going to impact your entire body, your immune system, your muscles. One study found that taking mitochondrial increased muscle strength by 12% in four months with no change in exercise routine. It's going to impact your energy, your sleep, your skin, your cell health impacts all of this, and urolithinea keeps your cells healthy. Timeline has done over 15 years of research and testing on this one product, urolithin A,

which, by the way, most of us lack the gut bacteria to synthesize naturally. That's why many of us need to supplement it to get the benefits. This has become a staple supplement for, me. It is my top way to support how I want to look and feel as I age. Support yourselves and how you age with mitopure gummies from Timeline. Visit Timeline.com slash Liz and save up to 39% on your mitopure gummies. That is timeline.com slash Liz. I'm genuinely confused how master class gets literally the absolute top people in every single field to teach every single one of their classes. I use it when I want to learn things directly like the cooking class from Thomas Keller has all of the wisdom that you would normally have to go to culinary school for.

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