EP #29 The Secret to a Long, Healthy Life w/ Dr. Mark Hyman

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By Granger for the ones who get it done. Based on the science we have now, we understand the basic causes of disease and aging. We understand the basic ingredients for health, the science of creating health. And that young forever is simply a roadmap that guides you through how your body works that you were never given. It's like the owner's manual. And you know, it's like you know your car, you don't know all the features, you don't have to use all the things, but the basic stuff to get around, navigate and do what you got to do, you got to learn how to do.

And a massive transformative purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am. This is what I'm going to do. This is the dent I'm going to make in the universe. Everybody. Peter Diamandis here just had the privilege of sitting down with a dear friend of mine here at the Bold offices for a special episode of Moonshots and Mindsets. Talking about one of my favorite subjects and hopefully yours, longevity. My guest was none other than Dr. Mark Hyman. Mark is one of the leading thinkers on longevity and functional medicine. He's got one of the top podcasts on health called the Doctor's Pharmacy. He's a regular on many TV shows, cbs, this Morning, Today Show, Good morning America, the View, cnn. He just wrote a book that's coming out very shortly called young the secrets to living your longest, healthiest life. And in this episode, we're going to talk about the basics. Food, diet, exercise, Sleep. We're going to talk about what are the cutting edge therapeutics that have a chance to extend a healthy lifespan. Talk about how a lot of the things that you think might be healthy for you probably are not and why, in fact, going back to some of the younger, earlier practices of health and the human species is so fundamental. We talk about the nine hallmarks of aging, what they are and how to combat them. So if you want some incredible wisdom from someone who's brilliant, please join me for this next episode of Moonshots and mindsets with Dr. Mark Hyman. Hey, Mark. Great to see you, buddy. Welcome to Santa Monica.

It's great to be here, Peter.

Last time I saw you, you and I were floating together at zero G. We were with your girlfriend back then, now your fiance. Congratulations.

Thank you. Yeah, we were floating high.

Yeah. Did you enjoy your zero G flight?

It was the most unbelievable experience. I mean, like going to Antarctica, seeing the gorillas and the zero G flight are top of the list for me. Life experience.

That's the way to romance a girl off her feet, literally. So, you know, we're going to dive into the idea of longevity and slowing, stopping aging. I want to ask you about what you think around the idea of reversing aging, but how long have you been. Well, let me ask you a different question. How long has the conversation about longevity really been vibrant out there in the world? Because it feels relatively new.

It feels new, yeah. I mean, I think clearly everybody's been thinking about the Fountain of Youth since Methuselah, right?

It's been a few thousand years, the.

Holy Grail and all that. And everybody's looking for the elixir and all the alchemists of old. We're all looking for the source of longevity. This is not a new idea. But I think medicine has really ignored the idea that we could do anything about aging. It's not been a subject of research. It's not been a subject of exploration from any rigorous point of view. It was on the back burner as a non entity until recently when billions of dollars started pouring into the longevity research field and we started making discoveries about the root causes and how we begin to think differently about this. I think we're in this extraordinary moment that we haven't been in before. I can see even when, when I wanted to publish this book Young Forever, I said to my publisher, I want to write this book. This is like three or four years ago. I said, oh, no, it's not a hot topic. Most of these books don't do well, and I'm like, listen, listen, I know what's going on, and I can tell you that this is going to be very big. And it is.

I mean, is it fair to say that, I don't know, five years ago, maybe seven, eight, maybe it was 10, that if you were a credible physician or scientist talking about slowing and stopping and even reversing aging, that it would have been a black mark against you?

Absolutely. I mean, even talking about reversing disease is a black mark against you, as can I reverse heart disease? Can you reverse diabetes? Can you reverse dementia? No, but actually, yes. So I think medicine is really in this cataclysmic change, this paradigm shift, where the old ideas of what we thought were true about disease are shifting, and now we're understanding the underlying mechanisms of things that go wrong that underlie all disease. And so that's the exciting part of aging research is it's pointing to what I've been looking at for a long time, which is the body as a system. It's systems theory, systems biology, systems medicine, clinically applied through the lens of functional medicine. But most of most of the practitioners have no education in this, and we're learned reductionist medicine, which you did and I did in medical school.

Yeah, I mean, so I wanted to find a few things. Functional medicine. What is that? And you're. I mean, you're credited with being one of the fathers, one of the individuals who have been speaking about that for. For many years. I know.

Certainly the noisiest. Well, well.

And many are following. I mean, we're incorporating that into. Into fountain life. So what is functional medicine?

Well, I always joke, I say it's the opposite of dysfunctional medicine. At a high level. It's really about understanding the body as an integrated ecosystem where everything is connected and everything is determining everything all the time. So it's about looking at root causes. It's about treating the system, not the symptoms. It's about understanding the why, not the what, not. Not what disease you have and what drug do I give, but why is this happening and how do I understand the biology underneath it? So it's very much taking sort of the advances that are happening in systems biology and systems medicine and trying to create a clinically useful methodology to apply these ideas. And that's what it is. And it's not. It's not a new specialty. It's not a new sort of alternative therapy. It's basically a new methodology for interpreting data through the lens of the body as an ecosystem, where you have to look at Root causes, and you have to treat the body and create health.

So it seems kind of obvious.

It's obvious, right? It's obvious. I mean, it's really the science of creating health as opposed to treating disease. Yeah.

And that's interesting, right, because most of medicine, we talk about healthcare, but it's really sick care. And you and I have jammed on this much. It's like the system out there, unfortunately sort of perpetuates chronic disease and only pays attention to you after you're sick.

Right? Yeah.

And one of the things I think that's interesting is the body doesn't a damn good job at hiding disease.

Yeah. I mean, I say disease is the body's best attempt to deal with a bad set of circumstances. You remove those circumstances and the body has this extraordinary, powerful innate healing system that repairs, regenerates, renews. And that's what we learn how to activate in longevity medicines. We're understanding how to activate these ancient longevity switches that are embedded in us, that are supposed to keep us alive and healthy, as opposed to turning on all the disease switches, which we do through our modern lifestyle.

Yeah, I mean, so let me check this out with you because it seems amazing that people don't realize this. People think when they got sick, it happened that morning. When you have symptoms of cancer, depending which cancer it is, it's really later on, stage three, stage four, that you have a physiological response and you're in pain or you look bad and you've missed everything at stage zero, stage one, stage two. I remember someone said if you have Parkinson's, which is a loss of neuronal function and substantia nigra, that you only have the Parkinsonian trembling when like 70% of the neurons are gone. So your body is constantly countering this and trying to. But so if you don't look, you don't find.

You don't find it. Right. The Bogalusa heart study, which looked at kids and plaque in their arteries, found that kids as young as 10, 8, 9 were having plaque in their arteries. And that predicted their evidence of their heart disease and risk later on. So these diseases start very early, I mean, even in utero, in the epigenetic environment in which the baby is bathed from what the mother's doing, her diet, her lifestyle, exposure to toxins, all determine the risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, even before birth. So we actually now know that the exposome, which is the sum total of all the things we're exposed to in our life, whether it's our mother's diet or Stress or traumas or toxins or our diet or lack of exercise. All the things that are washing over our microbiome are driving the changes that lead to chronic disease. So 90% of chronic disease is caused by the exposome, not the genome. And even single gene disorders like, can't be modified through lifestyle. I mean, it's a crazy story. I was in a blue bottle of coffee the other day and I walked in, this guy was Dr. Hyman, Dr. Heim. I'm like, hi. He's like, you saved my life. I'm like, I never met you. He's like, yeah, well, I have sickle cell anemia. And I started following the changes in diet and cleaning everything up. And I was going from having a sickle cell crisis every month to maybe a mild one once a year.

Wow.

And I'm like, wow, that's a single. That's like having down syndrome and like, yeah, fixing it. And so even single genus horse can be modified by the environment.

That is spectacular. What brings us here together this moment is your new book. And let me just take a second to shout it out. The secret to living your longest, healthiest life.

Sounds like a plan.

It sounds like, it's like, listen, let me jump in here. How long do you want to live?

I want to live as long as I can do whatever that frick I want to do. I want to be able to ski, ride horses, make love, hike, do all the things that I love to do. And if it's 120 or 150 or 180, I'll keep going until I'm done. So I think, realistically for me, I think 120 is a good target. I think for sure I'm going to get to 100. I mean, my dad and my mom got to like 90, and they, they ate crap and they smoke when they were younger. And my mother always just say, whenever I get the urge to exercise, I lie down until it goes away. I think I got, I've been exercising some 14, and I've been steady at it, and I've been eating well pretty much most of my life. So I think, you know, I might have had two or three cokes in my entire life.

Yeah, that is fascinating.

I mean, and biologically, I'm 43, so, you know, even though I'm 63, chronologically, according to the DNA methylation test, I'm 43, which means, you know, at least another 60 years. And that gets me to 120.

We'll get into this because the thing that most people don't realize is if you can add 30 healthy years onto where you are today during those 30 years, the breakthroughs we're going to see are extraordinary. Science isn't stopped and taken a break for 30 years. It's accelerating. And so the breakthroughs that we'll see in a whole range of things we'll talk about. So the book Forever Young.

Young Forever. Bob Dylan was the forever young.

Sorry, another Jewish guy. But anyway, so Young Forever is out on pre order now and depending on when you're listening to this podcast, it may be available on Amazon. And the pre orders have shot through the roof.

Yeah.

What'd you say was tenfold?

Every other book I've done, which is all done very well.

That's awesome. Well, I'm excited to be able to support you're going to be coming and speaking at Abundance360 this year, which I'm really excited about. Let's talk about why you wrote this.

Well, I mean, aside from the fact that I'm getting older and everybody's favorite radio station at wifm, which is what's in it for me, I felt that, you know, it was important to write this book because as I began to look at the field of longevity research and longevity science, I felt like there was something missing. And what isn't missing is this reimagination of disease according to the hallmarks of aging, which we can get into what those are, what they mean, and we'll dive into that. But these hallmarks of aging are the things that seem to go wrong as we get older, that we can influence and reverse and literally reverse our biological age. And that are, are the reasons why we see all the diseases, from heart disease to diabetes to cancer to dementia, all the age related diseases are the result of these fundamental biological processes that go awry. Now what that is is a huge advance in understanding of targets for treatment, whether it's through pharmaceuticals or lifestyle or meditation or stem cells or whatever. But the target, the truth is that what was missing was the question of why, why do these things go wrong? What is the cause of the hallmarks? So the hallmarks are the cause of disease and diseases are the cause of aging. What's the cause of the hallmarks? And so functional medicine gives us a way to think about that. And it really comes down to really two simple questions that I learned from my mentor, Sid Baker, which is, you know, what do you have too much of that your body's unlikely to get rid of? Toxins, allergens, microbe, stress, poor diet, et cetera and what are the things you need to thrive? What are the ingredients for health? The right food, nutrients, the right balance of hormones, light, air, clean water, exercise, sleep, connection, meaning love, purpose. All these things are the ingredients for health. So you're either dying of too much of something or dying of not enough of something. Right. And so that was what I wanted to highlight was, was take a look at where the longevity field is. What, what actually could be helping it to actually even accelerate further the results that people get from a biological standpoint. And how do we not just go back into a reductionist model of treating the hallmarks of aging with reductionist therapies?

This episode is brought to you by Levels. One of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my peak vitality and longevity is to monitor my blood glucose. More importantly, the foods that I eat and how they peak the glucose levels in my blood. Now, glucose is the fuel that powers your brain. It's really important. High, prolonged levels of glucose, what's called hyperglycemia, leads to everything from heart disease to Alzheimer's to sexual dysfunction to diabetes, and it's not good. The challenge is all of us are different. All of us respond to different foods in different ways. Like, for me, if I eat bananas, it spikes my blood glucose. If I eat grapes, it doesn't. If I eat bread by itself, I get this prolonged spike in my blood glucose levels. But if I dip that bread in olive oil, it blunts it. And these are things that I've learned from wearing a continuous glucose monitor and using the Levels app. So Levels is a company that helps you in analyzing what's going on in your body. It's continuous monitoring 24 7. I wear it all the time. Really helps me to stay on top of the food I eat, remain conscious of the food that I eat, and to understand which foods affect me based upon my physiology and my genetics. You know, on this podcast, I only recommend products and services that I use that I use not only for myself and my friends and my family that I think are high quality and safe and really impact a person's life. So check it out. Levels link. Peter give you two additional months of membership. And it's something that I think everyone should be doing eventually. This stuff is going to be in your body, on your body. Part of our future of medicine today. It's a product that I think I'm going to be using for the years ahead and hope you'll consider as well. So when I think about why we age, I sort of think go back 100,000 years ago, when we were getting pregnant at age 12 or 13 and having a baby. And by the time you were 26 or 27, you're a grandparent. And before food was abundant, before McDonald's was around, the last thing you wanted to do to perpetuate the species was steal food from your grandchildren. There was no advantage for you being around longer than age 3 at that point. In fact, it might have been a disadvantage. I'm just wondering. There was never any selective pressure to. I mean, I think if we could reproduce into our 80s, 90s, 1, hundreds, that we would have been living longer.

Does that make sense? Mick Jagger had a kid at 75. Picasso had one. I think at 80, women is harder.

But, yeah. So it's interesting you refer to the way we currently age, gradual decline, increased illness, chronic disease, as abnormal.

Yeah.

How should we be aging? What would you consider normal?

Well, you know, Peter, you look around and you go to the average hospital or see old people, which we kind of hide them in this culture, which is very strange.

Hospitals are a terrible place for old people to be.

Totally. But we see decrepitude, frailty, disability, disease. And people's health span is far shorter than their lifespan. Maybe the last 20 years of their life are in poor health. That means your health span's, let's say, 60, but you live to 80. That means you've lost 20 years of health span. And that's what we come to think of as normal in this culture. But I've been to places like Sardinia where people are 100 years old or 95 years old, and they're still hiking five miles up the mountain, straight up as an arrow, and booming voices and clear minds. And I'm like, this is impressive. So I think. I think we. We come to accept what we see around us as normal, but it's really not. And. And there are many examples around the world where people are practicing habits by default, not because they're into longevity, but just by default. Their cultures have created an environment that promotes longevity. And as soon as they move to a Western world, they get the same rate of death and disease as we do.

So these are the blue zones.

The blue zones, yeah. Like, I was in Sardinia and I. Korea and, you know, and Nicoya Peninsula and Costa Rica. I mean, there's a guy like, he was, like, riding his horse straight up and narrow at 101 years old in Costa Rica. I'm like, man, most people even wouldn't. Wouldn't want to walk around the street without a Walker. At 100 years old, let's jump up on a horse.

And so is it all about just lifestyle and diet and mindset? What is it? What are the principal elements here? Because we talk about the hallmarks of aging, which I do want to get into. These feel like cellular, subcellular, physiological elements of systems running down, right? Entropy.

Yeah, but entropy can be getting accelerated or decelerated depending on what you do. If you put energy in a system, you can change entropy. Right? Entropy happens without putting any energy in a system. System. And the, and the, the reasons I think that we see this sort of acceleration is because of the habits we have and the lifestyle we have. But if we actually change those and look at what are the biggest drivers for these hallmarks of aging? It's food. You know, I think there's the. The hierarchy. They're not all created equal, these hallmarks. And one of the most important is this deregulated nutrient sensing, which is how we sample the food we're eating and how it influences longevity. Switches, which there are four, two of them basically detect too much stuff, and the other detect too little. So MTOR and insulin signaling detect too much protein and sugar and carbs, and insulin does the same. It's mostly sugar and carbs and AMPK and sirtuins detect not enough scarcity, and then they get activated. So when these switches are properly managed, and it's not like you can have them all on or on off, I think a lot of people get confused. Oh, MTOR is bad. Let's shut off mtor. Well, no, if you do that, you're going to end up without any muscle or be able to synthesize proteins. So food is the biggest driver. And so when you look at our diet, it's the incredibly high amounts of starch and sugar and processed food.

So I want to hit on all of these during the course of this conversation for folks who are listening and want to take away real nuggets that can change their life, because it doesn't take a lot to make a substantial change in your life. And I'll share mine, but I want to hear yours and what you're teaching here. So let's hit on food. Let's begin with food right now, because the idea of food is medicine. I'll begin with the number one thing I've learned to appreciate is sugar is a poison.

Yeah, yeah, it really is. Well, the dose makes the poison, right? So having a little bit of sugar is not going to kill you, but it's the fact that we eat the equivalent of About a pound a day per person of sugar and flour. And below the neck, sugar and flour in your body are the same. In fact, the glycemic index of bread is 100. That's the gold standard. Sugar is 65, which is better than bread. That's because it has fructose, which lowers the, doesn't spike glucose. But basically bread and sugar are the same. And we eat about 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour on average per person. That's average. Now I'm not having that much. So some people have a lot more. And that's driving the fact that we have 93% of Americans that are metabolically unhealthy, which means they have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, or they're overweight, or they have had a heart attack or a stroke. That's like 6% of us basically, or 6.8% of us are in good metabolic health. That's terrifying to me. And that's driven by our diet primarily.

So, you know, someone once said that sugar is more addicting than cocaine. Yeah. And whether that's ever been scientifically approved or whatever, it's addicting in rats, it's addicting. I just, every year with my abundance community, I do a 22 day sugar fast and the entire community goes on in a WhatsApp group. And we drop all sugar and high glycemic index foods. No pasta, no rice, no bread and so forth. And it's difficult in the beginning. Right. But when you're doing it with others, it's achievable. And towards the end, you're off the addiction.

People stop wanting it. Yeah, yeah.

So I'm in that, I'm in that phase now. I'm, you know, for me it's all about high value protein and plant foods. I mean, so what if you're not eating bread, pasta, rice, sugar, desserts and so forth, what are you eating?

Well, that's a great question. I think, I think if you look at the science of, of longevity, there are like many cultures of many different diets, whether the Inuit or the Maasai who eat primarily animal based diets, or you've got, you know, maybe cultures where they eat more plant based diets like in Okinawa, but they still have pork and they still have meat. I think it's really about the, the quality of the information you're putting in. Because, you know, as we talked about the these, you know, and David, David Sinclair talks about the information theory of aging. Food is information and it's signal. So everything that you do, whether it's what you eat, how you move, how you sleep, your level of stress, toxins, your microbiome, all is washing over your biology and creating inputs. This is the exposome that influence everything that's happening. And the, and the remarkable thing is Peter, the rapidity of change of your biology when you change those things is so fast. Like you could be type 2 diabetic on insulin and in three days you're off insulin, you know, and in three months you're, you know, basically your blood sugar is normal and you've reversed all your diseases. So that's the power of food. And so when I think about food, it's about having high amounts of these plant rich phytochemical diets. And I think some people argue with that, but you should be a carnivore. But I'm not sure that's the best idea. I think high quality protein is really important. This is a highly debatable subject in longevity because many longevity experts are, are talking about you being vegan or actually eliminating animal protein as a way to extend life. And that really comes from this whole theory about MTOR being a problem and that we need to inhibit mtor, which means mammalian target of rapamycin. We'll get into rapamycin. But the idea is that this, this longevity switch is in every cell in your body. When you overstimulate it, it creates overstimulated power by eating too much protein or eating all the time protein, that it will cause overgrowth of tissues and cancers and heart diseases and all the, all the problems that we see with aging. The problem is it's like anything else, you know, if you inhibit it all the time, you waste away and you're frail and you die. Like if your calorie restriction, which is what this does, induce the MTOR inhibition. Right. Calorie restriction is the thing that actually everybody agrees on, will lengthen your life by a third. If you eat a third less calories, you'll be miserable and scrawny and have no sex drive and your hair's falling out, but you'll live longer. The question, the big hack is how do we mimic calorie restriction? Well, the idea is if you don't stimulate MTOR with high levels of animal protein, then you can extend your life. And there's some rationale to that. But you also need muscle because muscle is the currency of longevity. And if you don't have muscle, and.

We'Re going to get to that because I'm on a. Right now, for me, my biggest number one objective is muscle growth.

Yes.

I am, like. I'm like, in the gym constantly, you know, and I'm taking my creatine, but I'm also. I've also massively increased my protein intake.

Yeah.

So I want to understand where you are, because this is all. You know, I take rapamycin, so there's this, like, increased animal protein working out rapamycin. So. So this triangle here, how do you.

So it's a Goldilocks.

So slow it down and explain it to folks who would understand all those terms. But. And what do you recommend at the end?

So it's the Goldilocks problem. You want to turn it on so you can build muscle.

You want to turn on what?

Mtor.

Okay.

And you also want to give it a break so you can do cleanup and repair. So think about. Your body has its own recycling cleanup mechanism. It's called autophagy, which means self eating, self cannibalism. And it's basically like a little pac man that runs around and gobbles up old proteins and parts. And I mean, think of it. If you're starving, your body still needs to get proteins and it still needs to do stuff and make things. But if you're not eating, what are you gonna do? So you basically go around and you recycle all the old parts and you make new stuff, which is basically what your body does. It's brilliant. And the way it does it is through this process called autophagy, which is essential to clean up, repair, renewal, regeneration, and also activates all these other longevity pathways, like reducing inflammation, increasing mitochondrial function. So everything you need to do to survive if you're starving so you don't die, it kind of turns it on, which is great. And that's an important thing to do every day. So you can do that by not eating for 12 hours between dinner and breakfast. If you want to go to 14, that's great. So that means eating at 6 and night and having breakfast at 8 in the morning. That's not a hard thing to do, right? Or 10 if you want to do 16 hours. So that's. That's a really simple way every day to induce autophagy. The other is to activate MTOR in the right way, which means not eating all the time. Like not eating, you know, bed, night, have snacks and flooding it with all this stuff, and then eating a big load of protein in the morning when you wake up in a fasted state. And that in my favorite way to do it, because, you know, I don't necessarily want a steak for breakfast. Is. I have a. I have a healthy aging shake, which I talk about in the book Young Forever. Essentially, it's got regeneratively raised goat way. I sort of use some other pumpkin seed powders, just a little plant proteins in there. And I. And I put in creatine. I put in something called urolithin A, which is an incredible mitophagy compound that comes from pomegranate and helps build muscle and a few other things like adaptogenic mushrooms and, you know, some things from my gut, and I kind of make it like a healthy shake. But basically you've got this, you know, 30, 40 grams of protein in the morning.

To kick you off.

Yeah, to kick you off. And then, you know, having 30 at least per meal. Usually, you know, this is the problem with protein. If you look at the data, we say, oh, you should eat 0.8 grams per kilo. This is the RDA. Now that people don't understand what that is, that's the minimum you need to not get protein deficiency. Like, how much vitamin C do you need to not get scurvy? Like 60 milligrams. How much, you know, how much vitamin D do you need to not get, Rick? It's 30 units. Well, how much vitamin do you need for optimal health? Maybe 2,000, 4,000.

Yeah, right.

So it's very important to understand what these are. And so when you're. And particularly when you're older, it actually is important for you to eat more protein because there's something called anabolic resistance, meaning it's harder to build muscle. And the worst thing you can do is not exercise throughout your life and then end up, you know, at 65, being the same weight that you were when you're 25, but you're twice as fat because you're. All your muscles get marbled like a big wagyu ribeye, and then they're metabolically super unhealthy and drive inflammation, low cortisol, no testosterone.

I'll put a fine point on this. We'll come back to it later on exercise. But the number one correlate between length of life and longevity is your muscle mass. Absolutely right. And so there's a number of reasons. Thought. First of all, if you are older and you, you are, you fall and break your hip or your pelvis. It's a. Like 70% of people over the age of 65 who have that fall die within a year. It's crazy. My father passed that way.

Terminal cancer yeah, it's, it's, it's awful.

So you need the muscle mass to be able to hold yourself from falling and having that accent. But also muscle mass is a supply of stem cells and blood, blood volume.

That's where your metabolism and. Yeah.

And so ultimately you want to maximize your muscle mass. So if you're in your 20s, 30s, 40s, go for it. If you're in your 50s, you need to put the time in.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. And I think, I think when I just want to kind of put a point on this, people say, you know, you know, you can do this with plant proteins. And what I typically found is that people who are vegan, who are jacked, and I studied this, they actually eat a lot of processed plant proteins. So they actually have to supplement with plant protein and you have to eat enormous amount. I was just in Rwanda and we saw the gorillas. Now gorillas are huge.

And they're.

And they're vegans. They're vegans and they're mad. Like, they're massive. And I'm like, what do they eat? I was like, what do they eat? They give you 55 pounds of food a day. They can extract from that, plenty of protein.

But they have different digestive systems.

But they have, digestive systems are like 10 times longer than ours. Like, huge. And they're big, you know, like these giant bellies. Not because they're fat, it's because they're. Their intestines are enormous because it takes forever to digest all this stuff and extract the food. And we have, they have much longer, large intestines where you can start to sort of ferment and break down these foods and start to absorb them. So we, we have shorter intestines. We have, you know, the ability to actually use animal protein, which they, they don't really, they, they eat insects, but they're massive. And the key about muscle building is you need a certain amount of a particular amino acid called leucine. Now, leucine is what we call rate limiting amino acid. It means if you don't have this amino acid, it's hard to turn on muscle synthesis, like turning on light switch. So plant proteins are typically low in leucine. So you can get enough by eating tons of plant protein, but you need, like, a lot more than you could possibly eat. You're not gonna eat 55 pounds of food a day. And so, you know, especially as you get older, you need about the size of your palm. And depending on your, if you're Shaquille O' Neal, if you're a little old lady, it's gonna be a different palm size of protein, but basically you need probably 1.2 to 1.6, even 2 grams per kilo if you want to build muscle and get stronger. And you need to have high leucine protein. Now you can take plant proteins and supplement with leucine. You know, I call them like jacked up plant proteins. And that's fine if you, if you are committed vegan, you want to do that, but you can't ignore the fact that you're going to have to eat a lot of processed proteins and that, and that meat has, you know, carnosine and also creatine and carnitine, which are incredibly helpful compounds that are not in plant proteins that are required for.

So let's go back to what do you, what do you eat right now?

Personally?

Personally?

Yes. Well, my day, if like I'm at home, I'll have like my healthy aging shake. I'll usually have a 14 hour fast minimum. I usually work out.

Yep.

Do band resistance training, which is great because I can do anywhere and don't hurt myself. And then I have my healthy aging shake.

Yep.

Well, actually I do some hormesis practice first, which is essentially steam and then an ice bath. And then, and then, and then I have my shake and I take my supplements. And then lunch can be a combination of things, but can be usually a salad with like protein. So I'll put in sardines or canned salmon or something like that. Nuts and seeds, avocado, pumpkin seeds. So I'll do a lot of fat and protein and veggies. And then dinner will typically be, you know, grass or regeneratively fed beef or lamb or organic chicken or pasteurized chicken or different kinds of fish that are low in mercury. And then I'll usually have like, maybe I need, I'm, I'm kind of very low body fat and I have a, I don't do well. I don't need a little bit of carbohydrates. So I'll have like a Japanese sweet potato. I'll have some side of shell mushrooms and lots of veggies.

High quality protein and plant.

Lots of veggies. Yeah.

Okay. And just basics. And again, going back, will I have.

A piece of chocolate occasionally?

Yeah, but, but still, it's, it's minimizing, Minimizing sugar intake.

Yeah.

And it's, you know, let's talk about the impact of sugar. It's an inflammatory agent. Right. It, like, it, it makes all the proteins in your bloodstream. Sticky.

Yeah. I mean, so let's just walk through it. So when you eat sugar, what happens? Or when I say sugar, I mean any kind of stuff, starch, that will raise your blood sugar, you produce insulin. And insulin is a special kind of hormone that's produced by your pancreas that is designed to put blood sugar into your cells. But when you have high levels of sugar, you have to make more insulin. And insulin not only drives the fat into the fat cells to store, but it also shuts off the release valve, so you can't actually burn the fat. So it shuts down. Lipolysis, which is the burning of fat, it slows your metabolism down and it increases your hunger hormones, so you're hungrier, you're gaining weight, you can't burn the fat, and your metabolism is slower, so it totally screws you up. And then it produces these special kinds of fat cells in your belly called adipocytokines, adipocytes, which are producing adipocytokines, which are inflammatory compounds. So you basically have a fire in your belly, spewing out all this inflammation throughout your body. It lowers your hormones. So males, their testosterone drops way down. Their sex drive and function goes down. Women get all kinds of other hormonal dysregulation, affects your brain. You get increased cortisol and adrenaline with sugar. And cortisol causes literally shrinkage of your hippocampus, which is the memory center. So it's just. It's just bad news. And then. And then does this thing which. Which we were just hinting at, which it kind of too much sugar, goes around and forms globs with proteins called glycation products. And when you measure hemoglobin mc, which is what we do to measure how your blood sugar is controlled, if you're diabetic, you get high levels of these glycated hemoglobins. But it happens to all these proteins that happens in your brain. They're called ages. Literally, the name of it is called AGEs. Advanced glycation end products, and they bind to receptors called rages. So you're aging and raging when you.

Eat sugar and really just driving. Heart disease and neurogenic disease. It's just bad stuff.

The human body, dementia, now type 3 diabetes. Most cardiovascular heart disease is driven by metabolic syndrome, prediabetes. The lipid panels that are the worst are the ones that are really driven by too much sugar and starch, not fat. And, of course, diabetes, you know, and cancer.

People just realize, yeah, it's the fuel for Cancer that we never had sugar as we were evolving 100,000 years ago. This is a recent development, as is all the food companies that are pushing on this. So if I could say, if you remember nothing else from this podcast, minimize sugar and maximize exercise, which everybody knows already, it's not like breakthrough science, but it's like reminder.

Try it. Yeah, you can take all these supplements to all these hacks, take all the stem cells you want, but if you're, if you don't have the basics right, you know.

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Nine original ones. Yeah, I think I added one. Okay, who am I to add one? But I added one called the microbiome. I think the gut plays such a huge role increasing.

Wow. We know that's been another area of explosive knowledge. So let's pick a few of them that are your favorites and talk about them.

Well, I think the deregulated nutrient testing is so important because, you know, so.

By the way, the nine hallmarks of aging now with 10 with Mark's microbiome, these were what are the underlying causes of why we age?

That's right. And I'll just go listen through them quickly so we can talk about it briefly. But there's the new nutrient sensing problem, which leads to problems with these four longevity switches, which is insulin, too much insulin from sugar, mtor, which is overstimulation with too much food in general, and protein sirtuins, which are really important in DNA repair, which if you're always eating, never get turned on. And that's why we're talking about NAD ampk, which also is regulating glucose and mitochondrial function. That's what people are taking metformin for, to sort of regulate that. So these are really important and I talk a lot about them in the book. Then the next one is that we see is thing and in no particular order, there's telomere shortening, which are little caps at the end of your chromosomes that open up so you can basically replicate like a copy machine, your DNA. And we replicate like, I don't know, some quadrillion amount of times for our life. It's ridiculous, but sometimes that goes wrong and you end up or shortening your telomeres and you end up with a shorter life because you have shorter telomeres. And that's highly influenced by your lifestyle. What you do, senescent cells, also known as zombie cells. Zombie cells are produced in part sometimes by this problem, DNA replication that goes wrong in cells. Instead of being like exploded and dying, we call apoptosis. They turn into these zombie cells that never die and run around your body spewing inflammation and kind of almost infecting other cells. And so you get this runaway senescent inflammation. And there's some really cool things that are out there that can, can regulate those. Some compounds like fisetin from strawberries. There's things like hyperbaric oxygen therapy that's been shown to, you know, kill zombie cells. There's all these sort of good things about killing zombie cells. And then we have mitochondrial dysfunction. The mitochondria are the cellular energy powerhouses. And when those go wrong, we just lose energy. Why does a 3 year old run around like a jackrabbit and 90 year olds like moving super slow. It's because their mitochondria are running at different rates. They're less mitochondria, they're poor functioning mitochondria. So keeping your mitochondria healthy is a key part of healthy aging. There's also proteins that get damaged. And we just talked about that. The glycated proteins and you get all proteins are three dimensional structures. Everything have to be, you know, are they like the information super high with your body? And there's peptides, there's proteins and they have to be functioning in the right shape and the right size and in the right kind of amino acid sequence. And when they're not right, they cause all kinds of damage and you get these old funky proteins. And so things like saunas, for example, increase heat shock proteins in your body which help kind of fix these damaged proteins. Increasing autophagy helps that. And even transfer plasma exchanges where you kind of filter out the old blood and the plasma. You can get rid of a lot of this stuff. So there's all these cool therapies that are coming to vixis. We also see in addition DNA damage. So DNA damage is something that happens all day. You got a thousand hundred thousand little cuts a day and your body has a whole DNA repair system that tied to the sirtuins that are activated by nad and by the right diet and screwed up by sugar by the way. And those mechanisms, you know, might miss a couple here and there to repair. It's amazing. It does well, it does. But there's ways of improving that. And then we have also the tiring of your stem cells. Your stem cells kind of. Yeah.

Stem cell exhaustion.

Yeah. So you know that, that also has to do with our lifestyle and so forth. So many ways to sort of activate your stem cells. There's some really cool things looking at, you know, I'm not going to get into this kind of wacky, but like using different kinds of light and stuff in your pineal gland to activate different stem cells and harvest them and they're doing stuff in Costa Rica. It's kind of wacky, but there's ways of dealing with that. And then we also have the problem of inflammation, which is in a sense the final common pathway that either causes or is a consequence of almost all these things. So inflammation in the body is, is driving almost all the chronic diseases of aging, whether it's arthritis or dementia or cancer or heart disease or diabetes or all these are inflammatory problems. And, and so we, we have to understand the Cause of inflammation. We have to become inflammatist. And if you fix a lot of these other things, like, you know, and some things we can't do anything about, right. We, we live in a sea of toxins. Like you know, 200 years ago we didn't have all the crap we make all the petrochemical toxins. What was in the Graduate? He says plastic. That's the thing, right? Plastic. So that's my favorite petrochemicals. And you know, heavy metals are more in the ocean because of coal and lead. I mean, so I see a lot of these things that aren't people's fault that are the result of environmental stresses, but we can deal with those. And so thinking. And the last hallmark that I talked about is the microbiome. I think I got all 10. I don't know if I did. The microbiome is this whole ecosystem of bugs in your gut that's so critical for regulating immunity, for regulating cancer risk, heart disease risk, diabetes, even dementia. Your mood, everything is controlled by the microbiome. And you know, we may be just carrying a caring vessel for this kind of glob of bacteria that live in us. That is 10, almost 100 times as much DNA as their own DNA or maybe more.

And you're 40 trillion human cells and you've got 100 trillion bacteria, viri and fungi around you.

Yeah, it's quite amazing. And what's interesting is that we're now measuring your metabolome, which is sum total of all the metabolites in your blood. And a huge portion of these come from the microbiome and they're regulating everything. So one of the cool things in the book I talk about is how if you eat pomegranate and you have the right bacteria, the metabolite of pomegranate is called urolithin A. And this compound, which you have to have the right gut bacteria, which most of us don't actually is an anti aging compound. It enhances fitness, VO2 max, muscle building and fitness, and also mitophagy without even exercising.

Okay, what's not. I like.

Did I miss any?

No, I think you hit them all.

Oh, I know. Epigenetic changes. That was the one I missed.

Okay. That was Dr. Sinclair.

That's a really important one.

Yes.

Yeah, because that. Can I just finish? Yeah, please.

Yeah.

So. So the epigenetic one is, is, is really a way we're now understanding that aging occurs at a meta level, that your genome is basically fixed. And you've talked about this with Tony in your book, the genome is fixed. You've got a certain amount of genes that doesn't change. But what genes get turned on or off, which gets expressed is determined by everything washing over those genes. You're exposed them. Like you talk about the piano player and how the piano player can play, you know, ragtime, jazz, classical, rock on the same genes. Right. And so we, we have to understand that most of the insults that we do to ourselves, you know, too much stress, lack of sleep, poor diet, lack of exercise, exposure, toxins, all these things influence our epigenome. And, and we'll put little, little tags and determine which genes get ripped or not. But those are changeable.

Yeah, I like to say, listen, you got the same 3.2 billion letters from your mom and your dad when you're born, when you're 20, when you're 60, when you're 80, when you're 100. So why don't you look like you're ripped when you're 20, when you're 80. Right. What is different if your genes are the same? And it's not the genes you have, it's which genes are on and off. And that's epi from the Greek word above, is that control. And what we're seeing is a lot of science. This is coming from David Sinclair's lab, it's coming from George Church's lab, it's coming from Salk Institute about being able to potentially slow, stop and reverse aging, maybe go back to those earlier epigenetic markers. Do you believe that's going to happen?

Yes. I mean, look, we now for the first time and clearly needs to be refined, but we have a biomarker that we didn't have to track influences of whatever we want to do, whether it's our diet or lifestyle or medication, on our biological age. So our biological age is different than our chronological age. I'm 63. I was born in 1959. Nothing I can do about that. Let's say go out to outer space and whatever. I think Einstein would help with that. But basically that's what I got. But biologically, I'm 43, according to DNA methylation testing. So DNA methylation is how our epigenome is regulated. Mostly. There's a few other ways, but essentially that's how our epigenome is determined. And so we can now do an intervention and see what happens. And so in the book, I talk about some of the early studies, whether giving quercetin or dastinib or whether using vitamin D or whether using a Mediterranean diet and they're all seeing changes from months to years. And one of the studies that was most impressive was a functional medicine study. Study looking at a very aggressive functional medicine diet which is, is way more than just like a Mediterranean diet, but it's super anti inflammatory, it's very rich in phytochemicals, very rich in methylating compounds combined with a simple lifestyles things. And they found within eight weeks they were able to change their DNA methylation patterns, reverse their biological clock in eight weeks by three years. Wow. So you know, there's this guy who's like this was, I might have read about this, who spent $2 million, I know projects and you know like, you know he got, he got five years, I got like 20 years. So I think, I think we have the ability to really influence these things and then track what we're doing over time. So that's what's exciting to me. You can use intermediate biomarkers, you know, like inflammation markers, cholesterol and other things which are helpful and insulin levels and hormone levels and all this stuff. And I think that's important but, but you know that's variable. You don't really know what's happening to your epigenome with that. But you can measure directly the epigenome and that's what's so exciting.

It is an exciting time. I mean there's this concept called longevity escape velocity which you know of we write about in the book. I first heard it from Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Gray. And it's the idea that today science is extending your life for a quarter, quarter of a year for every year alive. And that it may be possible at some time in the future that science will extend your life for more than, than a year for every year of your life. So it becomes divergent. And I asked Ray when he thinks it's going to be and I asked George Church when he thinks he's going to be. Do you know what they said?

I think ray was like 10, 15 years. I think George was kind of squishy about it.

Yeah, he was about 15 to 20 years. Do you have a, do you believe we're going to reach that point? Do you think that science can actually add meaningful decades onto our life?

I think yeah. Meaningful decades, healthy decades is the, is the key descriptor. But I do think that there's some things coming down the road that you talk about that are kind of weird and wacky. Things that are more sci fi. They're not the basics that we're talking about that I think are safe and effective. And that's to do with genetic manipulation like the Yamanaka factors. And I think that that stuff's really interesting to me. I mean, it's still not ready for prime time. But basically this is discovery by this guy Yamanaka from Japan who won the Nobel prize for understanding that these four transcription factors that seem to help embryonic cells differentiate into their mature cells. So how does your nose become a nose or your kidney become a kidney or your brain become a grain? Like there's a thing and then it stops. It doesn't just keep developing. Right. And so if you can go back and somehow modify or insert these transcription factors into the body and then have a switch externally that you turn them on. So let's say you're 50 and your hair's a little gray, your joints are good, your erections aren't so good, your muscle wasting a little bit, you go, oh, I'm going to just take this thing and switch it on. I'm going to turn back to 25. That's not out of the realm of possibility based on my understanding. But it's like, I think, you know, it has a lot more mice and other animals have to try and other people. So let's be clear.

There are the basics today. It is diet, it is exercise, it is sleep, it is mindset is important. Right.

Huge.

Huge.

Right. Huge.

You know, if, if I think if you, you can will yourself to death and you can will yourself to life.

Yeah.

And we've all seen examples about that.

And one of the most exciting things that I've seen is the data on meaning and purpose. If you look at, if we cured heart disease and cancer from the face of planet, we might extend life by five to seven years. Like if we got rid of all of it from everywhere and there was. And these are the number one and two killers, if you have meaning and purpose in life, your life extension is seven years. If you play tennis, it's like seven years too.

Okay, good. I'm playing once a week and God knows I'm filled, as are you, with meaning and purpose. And that's what I teach. It's like the most important thing you can have is be, have a purpose driven life.

Yeah.

But I do think there's also the idea of a longevity mindset. That, and I'm just curious if you have, how you think about that terminology, a longevity mindset.

I mean, I feel like I have it. I mean, I, I, most of my friends are now in their 30s and 40s and I do all the same things they do. You know, it's bomb down the mountain at, you know, stupid miles an hour.

Stupid.

Or, you know, ride my bike. I feel like it's really an idea, the concept of slowing down, of aging's idea. Now things happen. Like, you know, I have more. I've had back injuries and I have more little aches and pains, but I've used regenerative medicine to help me deal with those, which we can talk about. And I think for me, I feel like I'm just beginning my life. I mean, honestly, Peter, I feel like I'm 63 and I finally figured my shit out. I figured out what it takes to be happy. I'm, like, kind of not struggling and suffering and figuring out how to love properly.

When I saw you with your fiance, I was like, there is a happy man and a happy couple. She was equally glowing. But it's interesting, right? Because if you have that mindset, it's the most exciting time ever to be alive. My dear friend Dan Sullivan says it's important to have a future that's. That's bigger than your past.

Yeah, I think that's a very important statement because most of us, you know, I can see it, even some of my friends are like, winding down. And I'm like, why are you winding down? I'm winding up.

I've had some people say they're bored. It's like, really? Oh, my God. Bored? What? Do you not realize the incredible world we're living into, this incredible video game that we're part of? So, you know, I think about, again, the basics. Food, diet, sleep, sleep, exercise, mindset. The other thing I put on the list is not dying from something stupid, Right? Wear your helmet when you're skiing. Put on your seatbelt. You've been an advisor for Fountain Life. Go and have yourself digitally uploaded every year. Look and see if there's anything going on. Because most of us are optimists about what's going inside our bodies, but we don't actually have an idea what's going on inside our bodies. By the time you feel something, it's too late. Another stat we wrote about, Tony and I wrote about in Lifeforce. I'm curious your thinking on it because it feels barbaric. Is that the delay between there being a breakthrough and it showing up in your physician's office is like 17 years?

Oh, yeah, it's terrible. That was from, I think, a Bill Frisk article in the New England Journal years ago. And I agree. I mean, I think it may be even More. I mean, it took Semmelweis, who basically was this Austrian physician who dissolved. You know, he's watching all these women give birth and seeing all the people who are women who are taken care of by doctors were dying of childbirth fever, but all the women who were taken care by midwives weren't. And he noticed the midwives washed their hands. And he was like, maybe we should wash our hands. And the doctors, the medical committee was, you know, up in arms. They thought this was just heresy. They banished him. They got rid of him. How could you ever imply the doctors would be causing their patients harm? And turned out he was right. We have to wash our hands before surgery. You know, that took 50 years. So I think, I think we are, unfortunately.

But why does it take so long? What is the mindset that is, that is inherent that stops this progression?

I think, you know, Thomas Kuhn talked about this whole idea of normal science which is in his book the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And he talked about this term the paradigm shift and how hard it is to change paradigms from Newtonian physics to quantum physics, from, you know, kind of creation theory to, you know, evolution, from, you know, Galileo saying, hey guys, the Earth is not the center of the universe and got put in jail for that. You know, like, it's really tough to change all ideas. And then, you know, my daughter's in medical school now and they're learning good stuff. But it's still the old paradigm.

It's all sick here.

It's like the old paradigm of disease based paradigm. And now with these hallmarks, it's an opportunity to go, wait a minute. This whole framework of disease is wrong. We cannot be studying diseases. We need to be studying mechanisms and causes. And then we need to be working on those. Because if we're just dealing with, basically dealing with the downstream effects of all these causes that we can just think about, we're just like people. I'm. Let's find a drug for Alzheimer's. Good luck with that. Let's find the drug to cure heart disease. Good luck with that. We're better managing it. We're maybe reducing deaths. We're having better treatments. I mean, look at, look at this whole treatment for diabetes with Ozempic. This is like, makes me so crazy, Peter. Like, yes, these GLP1 agonists are helpful and if you help you lose weight and help if you're a really advanced diabetic. But I can take someone who's got a hemoglobin AC of 11 and in a few six weeks get them to 5. With no drugs. Yeah, with food. If that's the best treatment, we should be using it.

I love this cartoon that we've all seen. On one side there's a line of people and the window says sign up for surgery. On the other side, there's a window with no one in line that says lifestyle change. It's like we all want the pill or the.

Yeah, which is why people are taking rapamycin and metformin and NMN and all these compounds for longevity. But if you're not dealing with the basics, it's a waste of time.

Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. You know, I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the Crisis News Network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at Export exponential technologies, AI 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR.VR blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to dmantis.comblog and learn more. Now back to the episode. All right, so let's actually go to some of those longevity therapeutics because there are a number of them people may have read about, heard about, a number I'm using and doing. And I'm curious what your thinking is. So you listed some. Let's begin with Metformin.

Okay, so Metformin is a drug that was founded in 1957. It's been used for diabetes forever. It helps with improving insulin sensitivity. It has some side effects, some GI side effects, which sometimes are temporary, but also some long term mitochondrial issues. There's a large trial going on called the TAME trial targeting aging with metformin. And the idea is that if we can use this drug to optimize the AMPK function, ampk, when it's properly activated, will induce autophagy, will help with DNA repair, will stimulate sirtuins, will cause the improvement in glucose regulation. All these things we want to happen with aging, but does that mean it's the right treatment. You know, like that joke about the farm. Vermont farmer, he says, how's your wife? He goes, compared to what? You know, so isn't it forming compared to nothing? Yeah, but is it better than lifestyle? I don't think so. And here's why. There was a big trial and it's hard to do randomized controlled trials in medicine and people with large amounts of people in, you know, with lifestyle. It's just hard. But they did this trial called the Diabetes Prevention Trial back in the 90s when the food pyramid was big and we were told to eat six to 11 servings of bread, rice or on pasta a day. And that was the best diet, which is a low fat diet. So it was not the optimized diet for diabetes. But they took these pre diabetics and they basically said, okay, you're going to get lifestyle or you're going to get metformin or you're going to get nothing. So nothing, you know, basically was whatever. And then metformin reduced the risk to progression in diabetes by 31%. Lifestyle was 58%. And that was in my view, the wrong diet. And so if a crappy diet would work better than this drug, shouldn't we be like doubling down on the sugar stuff and the lifestyle stuff?

For sure.

Because is it going to add, is it if you optimize your insulin, your insulin levels under 2 and you're exercising and you're low on the car carbohydrates and stuff, is metformin going to create added value? I don't know. I don't, I, my gut feeling is no, it's, that's one. I'm, I'm on a respectful pause with, I don't recommend it. I'm, I'm, I'm waiting to hear what the TAME trial says, but I, I kind of have a, more of a bias against it, it, because of some of this data.

Do you, how do you come out on calorie restriction? Not severe, but limiting your calories per day. Let's say your calories are coming from, from high quality protein and plants and you're avoiding high glycemic index foods. Do you still think you need to limit your, your caloric intake?

Well, I mean, I met this guy once and he was from the Calorie Restriction Society and he wanted to live a long time. And I was like hanging out with this guy. I'm like, so what do you have for breakfast? He's like, I have five pounds of celery. And I'm like, no thanks. And I think, you know, the idea that we can restrict our calories to extend our life is a good one. But the question is what else happens? You know, what happens to your hormones, what happens to your muscle mass, what happens to your mood, what happens to your sex drive? What happens to a lot of things? And they did those biosphere experiments where they showed these.

I was there, my friends were in the biosphere.

Yeah, yeah, they did the calorie restriction and they had improvements in their cholesterol, all these biomarkers, everything. But they also were not very happy and they were miserably gone. And it was not great in many ways for their health. So I think it's a mixed bag. The real question is how do we, how do we find the Goldilocks solution, which is how do we mimic or hack calorie restriction without actually starving ourselves? So it could be time restricted eating. It could be periodic fasting.

Try the, the fasting mimicking diet. Prolon.

Yeah. So Prolon is great and Prolon is a way to eat 800 calories a day for five days.

Yeah. And it makes it very manageable, makes.

It very easy to do and the data is really impressive and Valter is doing great work on this and I think it's just showing how when we overstimulate our, all of these pathways that our longevity switches by food. Our bodies don't like it and it needs a break. So yes, whether you do fasting diet or whether you eat, you don't eat for 24 hours once a week or you do a three day fast once a quarter, like there's lots of ways to do it, but the easiest way is just to have something called breakfast, which means you're breaking your fast, which means you don't eat for 12 to 14 hours every night. That's just a no brainer for everybody. And I think in terms of the amount, I don't think we should be overeating for sure. And I think we need to be lean and muscular is the best strategy for longevity. And if you're gaining belly fat, that's, that's the death knell.

I mean that's the indication that you're, yeah, eating too much of the wrong thing. Yeah, let's go, let's go to rapamycin next.

So rapamycin is, you know, this compound that was found in Rapa Nui, the Easter Island. And basically in the 60s these scientists went and they scraped the stuff off the back of one of the statues that were delivered by aliens or something. I don't know why. And they found, oh, maybe there's going to be a good drug compound. And it was kind of a shitty antifungal. And then they found it maybe has some immune modulating properties. So it's been used in transplant medicine. It's not an immune suppressive, but it does have benefits in reducing inflammation. And then people started researching around longevity and finding that it inhibits mtor. In fact, this pathway, mtor, which always talks about longevity, means mammalian target of rapamycin. So literally it's named after this drug from rapinoe.

It's hilarious.

It's great. And I think the animal studies are very promising. The mechanism is really interesting. So instead of calorie restriction, this is a drug that could induce calorie restriction without actually starving yourself. So it induces the benefits like autophagy. So I think taking it at night, there's different people experimenting with it. I just talked to Deepak Chopra. He takes, you know, 6 milligrams once a week. There's people who take it 2 milligrams three times a week for five weeks, eight weeks off. There's a million different regimens. We're all guessing.

Yes, we're all guessing. It's all a giant experiment.

It's all a giant experiment. And depending on your, your adventurousness and you're willing for risk tolerance, you know, you might be willing to try it and maybe you want to try it. I try it.

I'm on six once a week.

Yeah. So that's an interesting thing. And, and it's, it's, it, it kind of makes sense. But I wonder why six once a week, why not more intermittent shorter doses? What actually are we kind of basing on? I think we need more data, we need more human studies.

And the trials are just beginning now.

Yeah. So I think we need to pour money into that. And I think there are maybe other compounds that have modulating effects that inhibit mtor. And there are a lot in the plant kingdom. So there are a lot of compounds in the plant kingdom that do this as well.

All right, so we've covered metformin and rapamycin. Let's go next to exogenous stem cells. So one of the things that is very true, when we're born in utero, we are basically, the placenta is generating stem cells and populating your body and all of the tissues differentiating. When you're born, you have the highest percentage of stem cells in your body that you have. And as you grow older, your stem cell population is all downhill. In fact, for those wondering. But it's pretty clear that after your mid to late 20s, it's downhill across almost all systems. Your thymus, your stem cell populations, your growth hormone, everything. So we really were designed to live till age 30 to get our children up to reproductive age. And then anyway, but having said that, our stem cell populations dropped by 100 to 1000 fold as we get older. And the idea is, could we supplement it to regenerate, repair?

Yeah, I mean, there are, there are interesting, some interesting early data on certain therapies that can induce stem cell production, whether it's hyperbaric oxygen therapy or ozone therapy. So there are exogenous treatments that without getting a stem cell transplant, which is stupidly expensive, you could, you could actually stimulate your own. Stimulate your own. And there may be more and more data on how we do that through lifestyle. And I think there's some really interesting things around how we can make that happen. I do, I do think that, that, you know, there are intermediate steps like exosomes, which may be the active components in stem cells that are much cheaper, that are easily available, that don't. You have to suck your bone marrow out of your fat cells and you have to like, go to Panama to do it. And so I think those are.

By the way, is this going to be like, you know, leeches were, you know, back in the old days. Like, do you think they, they really used to do that? Oh, my God, that's great.

Maybe. Yeah. You know, I don't know. I think, I think that the exosomes are interesting. I've had a few experience with exosomes. One was I had colitis from getting C. Diff, which is caused by a bacteria that I got after taking antibiotic for a root canal. That was bad. And I was a mess. And then I got C. Diff and then I got severe ulcerative colitis afterwards. And through a different. My usual tricks weren't working. And then I tried exosomes. We. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

I tried my usual tricks and then I tried exosomes and it literally sort of got rid of it. And this is IV exosomes, intravenous exosomes.

Exosomes for everybody is the product that comes out, out of a stem cell. A stem cell is as a little. Think of it as a. A factory of growth factors and healing.

Factors, repair factors, regenerative, like micrornas.

And it just pumps it out, little vacuoles of materials.

Yeah, yeah. Think of it like, think of messengers. Think of like, you know, think of like the, the the, the stem cells is like a big aircraft carrier. And then they bring in all the, like the special forces, and then they. The special forces go out and do all the work.

Or the FedEx truck and the FedEx package is coming out.

Exactly. Whatever you want to call it. Exactly. And. And exosomes. It's great because you can basically take the placenta, you make sure it's all clean, no disease or anything. And you can culture the lab, you can grow the stem cells in there, and then you can extract the exosomes and you can get billions and billions of billions. There's no limit to amount you can get. Another thing I had with exosomes was when I had a back issue and had back surgery that went bad. And I was having tons of inflammation in my spine because I had bleeding in my spine. Bad news. And my friend Matt Cook injected 30cc's of exosomes right up my spinal cord. And it was amazing. The pain went away immediately. And then I had Covid. And of course, these are all anecdotal, but. And I've used these with patients as well and seeing results. And I had severe brain fog depression. Like, I don't get depressed. I'm like, wow, now I get why people get depressed. Like, you know, I had depression my time from, like divorce or things like that, but like, I just felt like physiologically depressed and inflamed. And Covid affects the brain and causes tons of inflammation in the brain. And so I kind of got a shipment to my house and I gave myself an IV because I'm a doctor. And it was like, boom, the lights turned on and my brain fog went away. My brain came back. So I think they have a real value.

And again, this is the early one of my companies that you. Cellularity. Bob, hurry. We are producing placental derived stem cells and exosomes. And just now entering the scientific studies to look at. Can we prove the impact it has? And you have a choice of where you get your stem cells from. You can either get it from your own fat, your own bone marrow, or you can get it from a placenta or umbilical cord in the afterbirth. But end of the day, that's getting it from a placenta or from built cord is not legal in the United States because the science isn't there. Right now. When I hear someone's looking for stem cell therapies, I'm sending them down to Costa Rica to regenerative Medicine Institute down there with Vince Giampapa.

Exactly.

But the science will bear out the data over the next few years, hopefully within this decade, so we can have it available domestically, safely, with the science behind it.

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty exciting. And it's being used in orthopedic medicine a lot. It's being used by athletes.

I know when I had a reconstruction, my right shoulder and my left shoulder, about 10 years apart, my left shoulder, after I had done the reconstruction, I had two different exosome injections, and it healed so much faster, so fast.

Right? Yeah. I mean, I had back pain for 30 years after surgery when I was 30. And, you know, Matt put all this stuff in my placental matrix with healing factors and exosomes, and I'm, like, sitting here really, with no pain, which I couldn't even sit before without being. I managed it, I just dealt with it. I massaged, I yogaed and everything. But it's like now I was sort of shocked to believe that this field of regenerative medicine has these solutions that, you know, most orthopedic doctors don't know about or scoff at. But, yeah, when I was told I needed back surgery, I needed to have, like, metal rods put in and a whole spinal fusion and reconstruction. I'd be in bed for a year, and I'm like, you know, I just got back from skiing in Switzerland, you know, going full blast down the mountain, you know, so I. I didn't do that.

Not very good. I mean, right now, one of the things that I'm proud of that we're doing at Fountain Life is we're searching the world for anything that sounds promising and then vetting it to identify is it safe, is it low risk, is it high efficacy, and then trying to make that available to our members. Hopefully the exosomes are available, the stem cells are not yet domestically, A few other things. Total plasma exchange, tpe.

This is fascinating. And oil. Oil changes some of you might have heard of, like, you know, the. That TV show Silicon Valley, and they had this one episode called Blood Boy, where the Silicon Valley entrepreneur was, like, getting some young guy and getting his blood and making him younger. And, you know, Mao Zedong used to take the blood of young Red army soldiers and transfuse it into himself for longevity, you know, so, but. But there's this bunch of studies that were done on animals that are called parabiosis. And essentially what they did was they took old mice and young mice and they kind of wired their circulations together, and they watched what happened, and the old mice became young and the young mice became old. So the question Was what was it, Was it the old mice's blood that was bad? That was, you know, they were giving to the young, like, well, what was going on. So they kind of reverse engineered the study a little bit and they found that if they just did plasma cleaning of the old mice that they would get the same longevity benefits. Now, plasma phoresis is a medical treatment that's been around for a long, long time, that's used in autoimmune diseases, it's used in various neurologic conditions. It's, it's really a well established medical treatment, but it's being explored as a longevity therapy and, and can be done in, in ways that aren't as aggressive. Like you don't take your whole plasma out, but you can take a liter or two out. Essentially the idea is you're filtering your blood, you're filtering out all these old proteins and all these inflammatory compounds and who knows what else in there and.

Whatever you put in there and you.

Either throw back some albumin, which is going to reconstitute your blood.

By the way, your plasma is mostly this protein. Albumin. And some saline and some.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there's all this other gunk in there that seems to be getting change. And I'll tell you another story. I. I had Covid second time and I. It was kind of rougher than the first and I had a terrible post Covid syndrome of like arthritis. So I developed. My hand blew up and I was really swollen and painful. I couldn't make a fist and I felt like crap again. I went to see Matt Cook and he got this plasma fresis and they always knew the blood when it went in.

Yeah.

And literally the next day I was good as new. My hand was normal at full energy. And I went. And like, I love Matt Cook.

He's awesome.

Yeah. And I'm like, God, this stuff is amazing. So, I mean, honestly, if I had my perfect world, I'd get like a plasmapheresis once a month. I do ozone every month. I do hyperbarics once a year for 30 or 40 treatments. I mean, I would, I kind of.

All right, let's talk. Let's go to hyperbarics next. So all of the experiments in Israel that show if you're spending like three hours a day for how many days?

Like, what they did was they took people who, who were about, I think it was 60 people or so. They gave them, I think, 60 to 90 minute treatment at about 2 atmospheres of 100% oxygen. 100% oxygen, but actually the protocol was kind of questionable because they. I know somebody who knows the Israeli scientists and he was telling me what they did and they basically would kind of raise and lower the pressure, the oxygenation. So it was not just steady, but basically the idea is you go in this pressure chamber that they use for scuba divers who, you know, come up too fast and it hyper oxygenates your tissues. Now it's being used in wound repair. People can't heal a wound or diabetic ulcer, strokes. And I've had incredible results in stroke patients, although it's not really approved for that. But it's being researched, used for autism, for Alzheimer's, for all kinds of stuff, Lyme disease. And when you hyper oxygenate the body and you do it under pressure, it seems to be very healing for a lot of things. And so what they do is they measured telomeres and they measured zombie cells. And it had a bigger impact on lengthening telomeres and killing zombie cells than any other known treatment. So I think it's very promising.

And I just was with, in Dubai with a gentleman who's the chairman of DP World and has a, a hyperbaric chamber facility there. And I try to remember exactly the numbers, but you have to go, was this Aviv?

Was this Aviv? No.

The facility name, it might have been.

It's based on this. Israeli guys, it's based on this is called Aviv. And they have one in Dubai and one in Florida.

Yes, exactly. That's right. That's right. And so I gather you go five days a week for like six weeks.

For like it's 90 sessions. It's 90 days over three months. You do like whatever.

And so you're in, you're in there for like how long process?

An hour, an hour and a half?

Yeah, it's a lot of time.

It's a lot of time.

It's a lot of time. I mean, and you're not sitting there sleeping or reading or working. No, you could.

They actually have mass and you can like read and you can watch.

Yes. But you're supposed to be like actually doing mental exercises, mental exercises to drive things. Right. So you're assigned work while you're in there. And what he was saying apparently was that it brings your neuronal oxygenation level expectations up to a point that when you're outside of the hyperbaric chambers, your brain is creating more larger vascular supply. Do you know what the cause of it is?

Why has more vascular. From the mechanism. Hyperbarics from the brain. Exercise exercises.

No, no, I'm Just one of the, one of the concerns I had is, you know, hyperoxygenation is also bad for you. Yeah, yeah, it's. I mean it's oxidative stress on your, on your body.

Yeah.

So I feel like the. We may haven't heard the full story.

Well, I think, I think it's a very important point you bring up because in our minds we think antioxidants, health, longevity, oxidation bad. Right. And I think it depends and how much and when and with what. So, so yes, you're getting potentially an increase in oxidative stress, but your body, in order to heal stuff and kill stuff, has its own oxidative stress mechanisms. When your white blood cells want to kill something, they make hydrogen peroxide, they make ozone, like literally. And so we have our own like kind of chemical weapon systems.

Yeah, yeah.

So these help us stay healthy and young and kill all kinds of infections. So infections are really not happy about the high oxygen and a lot of low grade infections. We can have a creek chronic inflammation with their viruses or whether it's HSV1 herpes in the brain for dementia. So I think there's something about the infection rate. I also think that the, the, the dose and the length of time matters. Right. If you're at 100% oxygen for a long time, it's super dangerous. But if you have a pulsed amount for a short time, it kicks in the body's own healing system. And this is. I wanted to talk about hormesis. We have a few minutes left, but I think it's such a. These are hormetic therapy. So basically the idea of hormesis is what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And so when, when we now live in this perfectly regulated environment at 68 degrees, we never have to deal with any stresses. We always have food. And so we don't, we're not starving, we're not, we don't have to use our bodies, which is a stress. We don't have to run from tigers anymore. We know we have, it's a Kush lifestyle. Kush lifestyle. And so the truth is as human beings we learn to live in tough environments and we have great systems for dealing with that. So hormesis is like cold therapy or saunas or cold plunges or ozone or hyperbaric oxygen or exercise or calorie restriction or time restricted eating. These are all different forms of hormesis. Low oxygen states, hypoxia states, which are really a whole nother interesting therapy for longevity. And so we have all these potential Tools to use and I try to incorporate them as much as I can. Exercise, obviously time restricted, eating is easy. I do hot and cold therapies whenever I can. I did hot yoga yesterday, like and it was like really hot but. But I felt so good after it.

I take a cold shower every morning and it's painful at first and I get used to it.

Yeah, cold shower is great.

This bath is just tough for me right now.

I mean, you know, it's better if you go from sauna to cold plunge. It's better. But I think these, you know, Wim Hof does these whole training programs and a lot, you know, breath work. These are different kinds of hormetic therapies and we can induce these in our modern lifestyle in a way that activate these ancient healing systems. So at the bottom line, the message here is that we're doing everything to screw up our ancient healing systems. There's so much we can do to activate our body's own innate healing, longevity, repair and healing systems.

There's one last on the list for me. It's senolytic medicine. So you talked about the notion that we have these zombie cells. Groucho men. Cells. Cells. There's something called the Hayflick limit, as you know, that cells will replicate a certain number of times and then they should have the decency to die.

Yeah.

Sometimes they become cancer, sometimes they stick around and pump out inflammatory. And there are a variety of these senolytics that are meant to kill these senile cells. You mentioned quercetin and dastinib as one. There are others. Do you use any of them?

Yes, I mean I take fisetin, I take quercetin, I take extract of Himalayan tartary buckwheat, which has all 132 different phytochemicals and bioflavonoids. Quercetin, rutin, asperidin, all these compounds that.

How many pills a day do you take?

Oh, you know, it's a good handful, I think. I'm. It's not a bowl full, but it's a handful.

I remember talking to Ray Kurzweil's wife and she said, yeah, Ray is a superpower. Pill taking.

Yeah, I'm good. I can like, I mean, one at a time. If I had to do that, I wouldn't.

No, I take a whole bag full. Yes. I'm up to about 60 right now, which is crazy. So a lot. And I think to summarize what you've been preaching is there's certain things that you can do that are basic and are really going back to what it is to live a healthy lifestyle.

Yeah, we talked a lot about a lot of crazy, esoteric stuff that is coming down the pike. But the truth is the. The 8020 on this is stuff that is free, accessible. It's literally understanding how your bodies were designed and working with them and basically getting rid of the bad stuff, putting in the good stuff. And that's really why I wrote Young Forever was a roadmap. It's not, you know, you know, deep dives into all the science, although the science is there. It's really about taking the science and. And creating an interpretive map for people to design their lives and include what they like and leave what they don't. But build these practices on a daily level that keep you feeling better and younger longer. My goal is to die young as late as possible.

Yes. I love that. I love that. Let me ask you for a summation here at the end. So those you who are going to go out there and buy Young Forever, please do. Those you who. Who are going to eventually go and buy it, please do. But in the meantime.

Yeah.

All right, buddy, what's your summation here? What should you remember?

I think the key thing to remember is that it's not that hard. Based on the science we have now, we understand the basic causes of disease and aging. We understand the basic ingredients for health, the science of creating health. And that Young Forever is simply a roadmap that guides you through how your body works that you were never given. It's like the owner's manual. And, you know, it's like, you know, your car, you don't know all the features, you don't have to use all the things, but the basic stuff to get around, navigate and do what you got to do, you got to learn how to do. And it maps out what to eat, how to exercise, how to hack your sleep, how to discharge stress, how to deal with trauma, what the latest and most sort of useful nutraceuticals are. And supplements are what's coming down the pike, the hormesis therapies that are easy to use. So it's really a practical user's guide to your body.

Yeah, that's great. Where can people find you anywhere and everywhere.

Just go to all the social medias. DrMark Hyman. That's Dr. Mark Hyman. My website's drhyman.com it won't be hard to find me.

All right, buddy, thank you so much for what you do. It's a pleasure to call you a friend and thanks for joining me on moonshots and mindsets.

My pleasure. It's great. Let's do it again. I feel like we just scratched the service.

We did. We got another five or six years of work to report back on soon. Take care.