EP #41 Why You're Not Leading a Healthy Life w/ Dr. Doris Taylor & Dr. Mark Hyman (Q&A)

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Visit phoenix.edu if you're alignment in charge of keeping the lights on. Grainger understands that you go to great lengths and sometimes heights to ensure the power is always flowing. Which is why you can count on Grainger for professional grade products and next day delivery so you have everything you need to get the job done. Call 1-800-GRAINGER clickgrainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. Welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. I recently had a conversation with two extraordinary leaders in the health and longevity arena. Mark Hyman is best known as a functional medicine physician, the best selling author most recently of Young Forever and other books including the Blood Sugar Solution Food, what the Heck Should I Eat? He's appeared on the Dr. Oz show and CBS this Morning. He's a dear friend, an extraordinary thinker on health and our future in health. With him, I paired Dr. Doris Taylor. Dr. Taylor is really out of the pages of science fiction novels. She is a regenerative medicine researcher, previously at the Texas Heart Institute, now at the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute with Dean Kamen, and she is building pediatric hearts, small hearts for children who need them. So you're going to join a conversation that comes from my private summit at Abundance360 that took place in March of 2023. And we're going to talk about everything from understanding how to combat chronic disease with the food you eat and how you take care of yourself to what should we expect in the future? Do we have an extra set of spare organs? We truly are living during the most extraordinary time and I think health is the new wealth. Enjoy this episode. Let's dive in. Let's kick it off. Babs. Hey, good morning. Thank you very much. Both of you. From the opposite ends of the spectrum, right?

The question, right, we need replacement parts too if we screw up. So it's okay.

Yeah. Anyway.

It'S a point of clarification for.

Doris that we, we ghost heart.

What's the ghost heart and what part does it play? So the ghost heart is basically the scaffold on which we put your stem cells to pig heart, from which we've removed every cell. And as we remove every cell, what's left is what we call the extracellular matrix. And it's basically hundreds of proteins and sugars and Molecules that tell every single cell how to grow up and how to behave.

Okay.

And then it basically, the stem cells, human heart.

After that. The stem. Yes, the human stem cells grow onto it. Right. Differentiate appropriately. Got it. Okay.

Thank you.

It's a scaffold and amazing. And if you, if you come to the platinum event, you'll see that happening in real life.

We will be coming. Yeah. Perhaps you'll be there in August. Yes. With that.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Awesome.

We've been to last two.

Just keep getting more and love it. Thank you. Thank you. Annie.

I'm so blown away by our panel today. And Doris, I was working in biotech around the time that you started on this amazing journey, so thank you for this. I was blown away back when I entered the industry. I left thereafter for a number of reasons. But when I look at you creating a solution that can help save the number one killer in the world and that we can accelerate that solution with the right resources within five years at only $300 million, to me, that's shocking. One, and number two, with the resources. I'm part of a new fund out of the EU for biotech and innovation, and the EU has agreed to match that fund. And my question here, for most of us here in the US where's the matching dollars and where is our industry? And I also want to talk to you afterwards, by the way.

Fantastic. You'll meet each other at the patron lunch for sure. Sit next to each other. Great. Thank you, Annie. Let's go to Jordi. Dr. Rose, terrific question for Mark. A couple years ago, I went almost entirely carnivore. I eat steak and eggs almost exclusively. I feel terrific. Best I've ever felt. But my cholesterol levels are through the roof. And my doctor put me on a statin, which I'm reluctantly taking. That was question number one. Question number two, running or weightlifting? Which is better?

Well, first, I can't give you personal medical advice because I go to jail. I don't have a license in California. But in general, I think the. The extremes of diet are interesting. You know, being a vegan or being a full carnivore. And I think they both have real limitations. I think, you know, for some people within a lot of inflammatory issues, a lot of gut issues, who are eating a lot of processed food, gluten, sugar, dairy. It's not necessarily the meat that's fixing it. It's what you're not eating. And I think you can include. And I think there's a whole. The whole conversation about anti nutrients and Plant foods is, I think, a little bit misguided. There's a whole framework of what we call phytohormesis. Phytohormesis means when you eat stressed plants, wild plants, regeneratively raised plants, organic plants, better than obviously conventional plants, they have more of these powerful defense molecules in them. And we use those to regulate our biology from an evolutionary perspective. And so mtor, for example, is positively affected by the polyphenols in coffee and inhibits it. Alluropine in olive oil, the curcumin in turmeric, the resveratrol in red grapes. These all actually are inhibitors of mtor, just like rapamycin or fasting or other inputs like exercise or hormesis therapies. So I think for a long term, I do worry about a carnivore diet, but I do know it can create remarkable changes in health. But I think it's because of the elimination, not because of just the meat, Although I think meat is not a problem. We do need to have good quality meat as part of our muscle building strategy and preservation as we age. Emma Morano was 117 years old when she died. Her doctor told her in her 90s, because she was dwindling, eat 150 grams of meat a day, and she did. So I think it's important. Second, in terms of longevity, I think both cardio and resistance training are important, but I do think resistance training becomes more important as we get older because what happens is entropy and muscle loss if you don't do that. And muscle loss is conserved with growth hormone and other hormones when you're younger. When you're older, it takes actual resistance training and adequate protein. So that's probably a far more important intervention. And I think 20, 30 minutes, three, four times a week is a powerful intervention for longevity. To maintain muscle mass, to build muscle mass, to enhance mitochondrial function, and to also induce a lot of these longevity switches that we talked about.

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Amazing.

In the same token, I've done the MRI every year and over the last three years I've watched my prostate almost double in size and form a tumor. In your book, you make a specific statement about if you have latent prostate cancer, don't take nmn. I've started to hear more people say that I jumped on NMN about four years ago. And I wonder if you could expand on that.

I mean, I think, you know, this is a really important question. I think, you know, there's always, we'll call pleiotropic effects of various molecules. NAD plus is a molecule that the body makes as part of its normal function. When energy levels drop, nad goes up and it's, it's an activator of sirtuins which then has all these downstream benefits. But, but you know, there's some animal studies that seem to indicate that it may increase cancer risk, but I think they're really limited and I think, you know, there's some real challenges. Those, those studies that I think don't to me convince me that nad will cause cancer. So it may be other things that are going on there. It's hard to say looking at your, you know, genetics, diet, lifestyle, other things. I don't know if you're having symptoms of prostate disease or if you're having a psa Increasing or if you had latent prostate cancer, I don't know. But I think those are, those are things to explore. But I, I think I wouldn't put the weight on the NMN that you took. And you could ask David Sinclair about it. He's, he's the expert, but he, he, I think recently wrote a rebuttal to that whole cancer hypothesis.

Thank you. Let's go to Ann on Zoom. Ann, what's your question? Where are you on the planet?

Hello, My. The question is for Dr. Taylor, but I did want to say, Dr. Hyman, I live in a blue zone in the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica and I think, well, I hope you come back and maybe visit me.

Yeah, Costa Rica.

What you said about community and love, I mean, I see that, it's so true. That's the biggest difference that I noticed. I lived in Chicago and then London and now in Costa Rica is that connection to family, community and just brings this kind of general sense of joy that has really changed my life. And it's something that I really wish. I'm sorry I'm so emotional. It's something that I really wish that we had more of in the United States. Dr. Taylor, I just wanted to say thank you so much. Hearing your work gave me so much hope because I spent the last year taking care of my mother, flying back and forth because she was diagnosed with stage four and then end stage heart failure. She was so afraid and ignoring the problem and then was really afraid of the only solution. She's 75, so a heart transplant was. And thank goodness, a few years ago the portable lvad, the left Ventricle assist device was approved. And so we spent in January, days from dying. She said yes to having that surgery. And now we're dealing with the implications of her living because of a machine. And it's been so scary. As a mother of two young children, her heart failure, I don't remember the term, but they don't know why and everything else. She's 75 and she's really healthy. Low cholesterol, low blood pressure. And so for me it's been really scary thinking is this something that's going to happen to me? So I just wanted to say thank you. You've given me so much hope and if I had $3 million, I would give it to you.

Can I speak to that, please? Yes. Well, first of all, thank you and I want to make the point, following up on what Mark said and what you just said. You're building hard too. We're all building Hard. And the piece that Mark talked about, love, it's really a piece of the future of all of this. So hope matters. Hope matters so much. And heart failure in women is often different than heart failure in men. And if you want to reach out afterwards, we can have a conversation about that because I'd love to talk more about it. And we have a biologic that is going to have an impact on heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, which is the heart failure that most women get and actually is increasing as men age. So thank you.

Thank you, Ann.

Thank you.

Pleasure, Guillermo. Wow, glad to have you. Thank you. Peter. Yes. This is for Dr. Mark Hyman. Doctor, is so exciting to have you here. Your book, the Eat Fat get thing, changed so many people's life and so many professional, healthcare professional and nutrition practitioners way of practicing. So thank you for that, but thank you. Following one of the questions today, how are your thoughts on after doing a high fat diet and a low sugar diet, having your cholesterol levels raised, how do you see cholesterol being a marker of heart disease for the future or not? And second, if I can do another one, we all know sugar is the number one cause of disease in the world, but what are your thoughts on blue light or artificial light causing the same insulin resistance that sugar can cause in our body?

That's a great question. I think in terms of the sugar issue and light, I think photobiomodulation is a real thing. I think blue light at night definitely affects our metabolism in an adverse way, but I don't think it compares to sugar. Honestly, I think it's such a much bigger effect. In your first question, what was that again?

The cholesterol being a market of disease, cholesterol.

Okay, so cholesterol is a, is a, is a real controversial subject because is it, is it the cause or is it a biomarker of something else going on? And I think we know that heart disease is an inflammatory state and that cholesterol elevations in the absence of inflammation are not a huge risk. Now, there is huge risk genetic variability in the population when it comes to lipid metabolism, in terms of lipid absorption in the gut, in terms of lipid synthesis in the liver, and in terms of the patterns of cholesterol that people form. So it's really got to be an individualized approach. I'm not opposed to pharmacotherapy for lipid disorders, but most of the problems with our lipids come from eating sugar and starch, not necessarily fat, because it increases triglycerides and it Lowers hdl, it increases the particle number, decreases the particle size. All these are the most dangerous type of cholesterol pattern. So your cholesterol could be 150, but if your HDL is 30 and your triglycerides 100, you're in terrible shape. Whereas if your cholesterol is 300 and your HDL is 80 and your triglycerides are 70, I'm not so worried, particularly if you have low inflammation. So it's really about a personalized approach and the right diagnostics. And I think Fountain Life is such an important company because it's helping people map out the right diagnostics, both laboratory, conventional tests, but things that your doctor may not be checking, like lipid fractionation, which most cardiologists and doctors don't do. And it's the pretty much the only way to look at your lipids in terms of saturated fat and high fat diets and lipids. Again, there's real heterogeneity. I've had people go on a keto diet with butter and coconut oil, which is all saturated fat, and their lipids drop like a stone. Everything improves. Other people are, you know, lead athletes will say, I want to try keto, and their cholesterol goes to hell. So I think it's about understanding that there's, there's genetic differences. Now, for me, for example, I'm a we'll call lean mass hyper responder. There's a phenomena that in certain people, when they eat a lot of saturated fat, it actually raises the, you know, it creates an adverse cholesterol profile. And we don't exactly know why. There's some genetics involved, but you got to really personalize the approach.

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Hi. So my question, Dr. Mark Hyman, your book the Food Fix was phenomenal and an absolute game changer. And Dr. Taylor, hearing the statistic that $32,000 worth a month for these drugs is. Yeah, is the current status quo. And so there's been a lot of money and profit made from people being sick and overweight. So how are you bridging the gap? What is the marketing strategy, in essence, to prove that having a fit, healthy society can actually be more profitable for people who have profited from sick care?

Huh.

I think the first thing we have to do is tell the truth about the status quo. And we don't currently talk about organ transplant not being a panacea. Everyone thinks, got a new organ, got a new lease on life, going to go forward. Life is great. That's not the reality. And I think telling the truth about cost and that you have to have access is a first step, because now there's a whole room of people who know that, who didn't before this conversation, and that may impact it.

The other thing is, it's just, it's no different than smoking. If there's profit to be made, it's going to be marketed, it's going to be promoted. And we live in an industry where the addiction is sugar and the poison is sugar. And the question is, will the government step in? We also live where people have freedom. The question is, do they know that it's not healthy? Most everybody does. They choose to ignore it. It's a quick fix, Mark.

It's also less expensive it's also less expensive.

Yes.

So the question, I think, yeah, it's complicated. I wrote a whole book on this. Summarize in five minutes. But I think the essential idea here is that, you know, we're not facing the biggest national emergency we have, which is from our food system that's driving the majority of age related diseases, majority of costs, probably over 80% of our $4.1 trillion in health care costs, not to mention the additional indirect costs from disability dysfunction because of the food we're eating. It's the biggest national emergency. 11 million people die every year globally from poor food. I think that's an underestimate and we're just not addressing it. I actually went on Tucker Carlson this week talking about this issue because I think we need a, we need to face this as we should be faced, Covid or any other national emergency and deal with it head on. And it requires a huge amount of change in industry innovation, in regulatory and legislative actions, in consumer education, behavior change. And it's, it's a, it's a, it's a work that's going to take a while. And so that's why I started a nonprofit to change policy in Washington to drive the right changes around food is medicine in our system to really deincentivize the wrong things and incentivize the right things. Right now it's kind of a mess. So I think I'm hopeful for the future, but we're way too slow. We tend to deal with problems way after they happen rather than before. And we're seeing this juggernaut coming that I don't think policymakers have really grappled with. Clearly.

Everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world 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 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 dashmantis.com blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. I want to go to two questions on Zoom. We go to Allison first and then Orlando. Then we'll go to you, Michael. Allison Great.

First of all, thank you so much. This is so inspiring and I can't help thinking what would Mozart have done with an extra 30 years?

Yes, I love that.

Deep, deep thanks to both of you. Mark, I'd love to hear from you your quick take on the microbiome and supplements. You hear varying views and then Doris, I would love to hear from you Caring about hearts, which of all of Mark's advice you actually take?

Fun question Allison well, the microbiome is so important and in fact it was not included in the original hallmarks of aging. I added it in my book because I thought it was so important in the the era of the microbiome is just emerging. There's an enormous amount of research needs to be done to categorize, classify, understand what is going on in there. It's just like a black box. And we've learned so much in the last 10 years, 20 years on this, but we still have a lot more to learn. What's really exciting is that we know that as we age, our microbiome degrades, our microbial diversity degrades. And we also know how to change that through various strategies by limiting things that are gut busting sugar, starchy processed food, diets, food additives and environmental chemicals all damage the gut. The glyphosate is one of the worst ones from our food supply. It's on 70% of crops, is the weed killer that we use, also the use of antibiotics, anti inflammatory drugs, acid blocking drugs. I think it's acid blocking turns out the third leading cause of, of, of drug use in this country or third leading, third leading category. I mean and so we need to stop all the gut busting stuff and then we need to add prebiotics, probiotics and, and, and polyphenols, which are the plant compounds that help fertilize the gut bugs. And then there's, you know, precision probiotic therapy. So not all probiotics are same. They have different uses for different things. So it's really important to try to restore our guts. And I think one of the most important exciting discoveries is the importance of Bifidobacterium infantis in children. And a lot of us are, have taken antibiotics. Most women have and their, their population of this particular keystone bacteria is either absent or very Low. So when babies are born, they don't. They born through C section. They for sure don't get it when their antibiotics are used in pregnancy or in early life kills it all. So giving babies, Bifidobacterium infantis can, can actually colonize the gut with a really important keystone species that then regulates all the inflammatory diseases, obviously all the allergy, autoimmune, asthma, but also like the late stage autoimmune diseases like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. So we really kind of need to learn how to restore our gut microbiome. And I have a whole section of my book about how to do that. But it's really important to track it, to measure it, optimize it, and to constantly iterate on how to do that.

We're going to go to Michael and then to Orlando on Zoom, but I hope that helped your answer your question. Michael, please. So the topic of regrowing the horse is very close to me because my.

Mom'S heart disease for many years.

So I've always fantasized whether we can grow 3D print, construct something like that. So I wanted to ask what are kind of the steps remaining in a process, because I know there might be challenges around hemodynamics, the details of how cells are differentiated to be exactly like a human heart. I imagine there's animal trials or not. What is the rough roadmap you have? We talked about doing an X prize in that area at one point. We did, yeah. Michael's one of the founders of Oculus.

So our steps in the process obtain blood from an individual, bank their cells. Our rate limiting step for 10 years was how to grow billions of heart cells. Because, by the way, heart cells don't divide. Right. So what we had to do was figure out, and the advent of human IPS cells changed this. It let us begin to think about personalized cells. So we grow 350 billion of your cells. We differentiate those to cardiac mesoderm, the cells that during development are going to give rise to the heart. Then we actually treat about 70% of those and make them become the different heart muscle cells. But they're very immature. They're not even as mature as fetal heart cells. And then we take the other 30%, we put it all in our heart after we've built the vasculature, which we do first. And then we train it. So we have to train it electrically and we have to train it against the blood pressure and we have to dial that up over time. And every heart's a little bit different because Everybody's cells are a little bit different.

That's amazing. And please get a chance to connect here while you're here together. Let's hear it for Doris. I love the engineering mind here. Orlando, we have just a minute and a half left. Orlando, a short question. Yes, hello, I'm.

So I think one of our biggest concern as parents is how do we teach these to our children? How do we make it simple in a place where we have sugar all.

Over and processed foods?

So what do you think about it?

I think we need really face the fact that a foreign country, we're doing what we're doing to our children, we go to war to protect them. And somehow the narrative in this society right now from the American Academy of Pediatrics is treat kids aggressively with obesity with bariatric surgery and Ozempic, which is just mind blowing to me as opposed to why don't we fix the problem, which is our food system. So it requires regulatory changes around food labeling, around marketing junk food to kids, around school lunches, dietary guidelines. All of this really needs to change. And that's what we're working on in Washington. But it's not an easy fix. And there are many forces that are not interested in having this change. And unfortunately Big Food and I wrote about this in Food Fixed is very focused on manipulating public opinion, manipulating policy, and influencing professional organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics or Academy Nutrition Dietetics, the ada, aha, American Cancer Society. All the things that we think of as a trustworthy organizations are all co opted and manipulated. And then they fund billions of dollars of research, 12 times what the NIH funds on nutrition studies. So the data is flooded with a lot of misinformation. So we have to, you know, as a society stand up for our children. And I think we have to sort of make a stand that this is really important and address the fact that 40% of our kids are overweight, almost 20 or obese. One in four teenage boys has prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. Something I never saw in medical school. I think Peter and I went to medical school, just didn't exist. And we have, we have increasing metabolic disease in kids. Kids are now facing liver transplants and as teenagers from fatty liver, from soda. Bariatric surgery at 15 years old just doesn't make sense. So I think, I think we have to kind of face this and it requires, you know, kind of an uprising. I think most people understand that this is a fixable problem. You know, we can't and climate change overnight, we can't you know, end war. But this is one of those problems that we can solve.

Guys, I apologize that we're out of time, but please give it up for Doris Taylor. Mark Hyman.

Sam.