How to Eat to Live Longer in 2024 w/ Dr. Helen Messier | EP #76

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One of the keys of diet is variety.

What are your thoughts on sodas?

I would say don't fruit juices? The same thing?

Alcohol?

There's really no benefit from alcohol.

Okay, what should I eat? Is there a one diet for everybody?

There is no one right diet for everybody and there's no one right diet for everybody at all stages of their life. One of the things that plants have, and the only place we can get it is fiber. Typically, the USDA recommends 35 grams a day for people. Most of us get around 5 or 10.

Wow.

We don't get nearly enough.

I can't think of anything more valuable than your health. And it's no longer something that's just for the wealthy, just for the elite. It's something that all of us can be thinking about. I think it's one of the single most important things that you can do.

Everybody. Peter here. This episode is sponsored by xprize. Imagine a future where aging brings more time with your family and friends, opportunities for continued learning, second or third careers, and actually allows you to fulfill your entire bucket list and go for a second one. A future where healthy aging is not a luxury but a necessity. We designed XPRIZE healthspan to make that future a reality. XPRIZE healthspan is the world's largest health prize. In fact, it's the largest prize on the planet. It's a seven year, $101 million global competition that incentivizes teams to develop and test therapeutics that target the biology of aging to improve function and extend your healthy lifespan. Now, here's the details on the prize. This radical collaborative effort is going to bring together top scientists, clinicians, policymakers, industry experts, non profits to create a future where aging is something that we're not scared about because we're making 100 years old and you 60. We're adding decades onto our healthspan. So if you'd like to be involved, please join the conversation by following XPRIZE on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook on X and Discord, or go to xprize.org and learn more about XPRIZE Healthspan. I cannot tell you how pumped I am about this competition. You know, going to space has been something I wanted to do since a kid. XPRIZE has really opened up the doors and living to 120 in a healthful fashion. That's what this XPRIZE is going to do.

Now back to the episode, everybody. Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moonshots. The moonshot conversation we're having today is how do you add 20 healthy years onto your life? I'm joined by an extraordinary brilliant physician and friend, Dr. Helen Messier. Helen, good to see you.

Great to see you, Peter. So excited to be here with you. I just love this stuff and I can't wait for our conversation.

Yeah, no, it's amazing. And for those who don't know, Helen, Helen is the chief medical officer and the chief scientific officer of Fountain Life. She is very much a renowned functional medicine thought leader and physician. She's founded the national chain of concierge practices in Canada. She has a PhD in molecular immunology. And most importantly, everybody I speak to about her says, oh my God, she's amazing. She's had previous leadership positions at Human Longevity in Viome and so thrilled to have you as part of Fountain. So everybody, let me just start by a disclaimer. This is not medical advice. This is advice that you should think about, take to your physician if you want to dive deeper. And we're going to be talking about the things you can do today to extend your health span. Not just your lifespan, but your health span. And it's no longer something that's just for the wealthy, just for the elite. It's something that all of us can be thinking about. And in a post Covid world and In a world where you can do almost anything, I can't think of anything more valuable than your health. I like the saying, your health is your new wealth. So, Helen, where are you today?

I am talking to you out of our headquarters in Lake Nona in Orlando, Florida.

Yeah, it's super proud. Fountain has four centers. Today we're going to be growing towards 30 or 40 centers around the world. But Helen and I just had a chance to publish a book. It's called Longevity Practical Playbook. And we're going to talk about the things that you can do. And I want to go system by system, area by area. This is the stuff that over the last decade I've started to completely shift my life. And one of the things I love about you, Helen, is you not only understand the general elements, but at a molecular level, what's going on. So let's begin with a topic that is one of the easiest, I think, and lowest cost things people can do to extend their life, which is their diet and we are what we eat. Why don't you kick us off there when people say, okay, what should I eat? Is there one diet for everybody? What are your thoughts?

That is a loaded question. Because people get very. Diet becomes a religion for many people and it becomes very challenging. And I think the first thing to understand is there is no one right diet for everybody, and there's no one right diet for everybody at all stages of their life. You know, depending on what they're trying to achieve, depending on your genetic background, I think your dietary needs are going to change over your lifetime and they're going to be different from your neighbor. Now, having said that, there are some certain principles that are, I think, the same across most people. You know, getting your phytonutrients from plants, making sure you get enough of your. Your basic nutri, vitamins, minerals and so on is critical. Making sure you get enough protein for muscle mass and muscle synthesis is critical. Making sure you get enough of the healthy fats. Because our cell membranes, our brain, are made up of fats. So everything you're going to hear me say probably many times through our conversation, Peter, that it's all about balance, right? There's nothing all good or all bad about most things. It's really getting them in the proper proportions and balance. And I think that applies really mostly to food and fatty acids and even the different components of food. Omega 3s, omega 6s, you know, saturated fats. Nothing's bad if you take it in the right combination in the right amounts.

You know, you said something a minute ago about your genetic background, and it's. It's very true. Right. If you're an Alaskan Eskimo, the diet your body wants and needs is very different than if you're, you know, of European descent or Asian descent. And there's an interesting fact that was studied and I think is well documented that your longevity outcome. And let me take a second just to define healthspan versus lifespan for folks. We're going to talk about that, right? A lifespan is how long your heart and your brain waves are going. It's like, are you alive or dead?

Are you alive?

Yeah, it's a zero or one. And your health span is how long you feel healthy, how long you're able to play with your grandkids, go up the stairs, walk around, feel cognitively alert. And I think it's health span we're after, first and foremost.

Yeah, absolutely. Typically, if we think of our. If you think of your grandparents and think of aging in our society as it is now, there tends to be this very long, slow decline in terms of our health. We hit a certain age and we tend to get. You can't do quite as much anymore. And over time, we start to accumulate these chronic diseases. We get some diabetes, we get heart disease, disease. And it happens over time, and it happens for a long time. And we get less and less able to do the things that make life worth living. And if we look at even healthcare costs, the majority of healthcare is spent in those last years of a person's life when they're really sick.

I mean, you can spend a ton of money at the last few years of your life. And I just point out, if you spend it earlier and spend your time differently earlier, it makes, you know, you want to make that correction as early in your life as you can.

You do, you absolutely do. And the idea is to square off that mortality curve. You know, instead of having this long, slow decline over the end of your life, you want to live fully and healthily right to the end and then kind of drop off, you know, square.

I want to extend, and I want to extend that end a little further. As I like to say, life, life is short until you extend it. You know, one interesting stat that, you know, I think most people. We'll talk about this when we get to mindset. Most people have an age in their mind by which they expect to die. And you've gotten it from their mom or their dads, their grandparents or society as a whole. And we have to remember that, you know, if you had had that image in your mind 100 years ago, it might have been. You'd expect to get to 50 versus 80. That line keeps on moving. And your mindset is a lot to do, but your genetics have some to do, but not as much as people would think. Right. So how much of your lifespan, your health span, is a function of lifestyle versus genetics?

Yeah, the vast majority is a function of our environment and our lifestyle. You know, under 10%, probably. Some estimates around 7% of our actual longevity is due to genetics. The rest is really due to what we do. And this really brings in the whole concept of epigenetics. Right. Epi, just meaning on top of genetics. So we're all familiar with our genetic sequence, the color of our eyes that we inherit from our parents, the predisposition, even certain diseases we understand or genetic, like cystic fibrosis. But the vast majority of chronic diseases that we're really familiar with that really lead to that long decline as we get older. Remember, aging is the biggest risk factor for all chronic disease. Cardiovascular disease, cognitive disease, diabetes, metabolic disease. Those, yes, there are certain genetic predispositions, but you do not by any means have to get it. So your genetics, your DNA is not your destiny. It's what you do with that genetics and what environment you put it in. So the food you eat, the thoughts you think, how you move actually affects how that DNA is expressed. You know, and that's the, that's the epigenetics. And we can get. Dive into that a little, you know, a lot more if you like. But understand that the really, the key is your health and who you are is really a function of your environment and your genetics interacting for sure.

And I think that's a lot of hope for people because they say, oh, my God, my grandparents, my parents died at this age. And am I, you know, yes, they did. It doesn't mean you have to. You can catch and change a disease early. And I think you have to come to it with that mindset, a belief that I'm not going to succumb. I'm going to overcome that situation. And going back to our subject at hand, which is diet, I think diet is one of the places you can make one of the biggest, easiest changes. I would say it's easy. Changing one's diet is not. Not easy, but it's not expensive and it is doable. And like you said, there's no absolutes. There are a couple of absolutes as far as I'm concerned. Let's dive into those. I would say the first absolute. And I've been on TikTok and Twitter, and I've gotten more of a reputation as a no sugar guy than I want, because I don't want to be the guy who's just. That's the only thing I'm speaking about. But sugar is a poison. Let's talk about sugar. One second, Helen.

Yeah. So sugar is a poison. Now, we need sugar. Let's put that first and foremost. If we don't have sugar ourselves, we can't say alive, stay alive. If our sugar drops to zero in our bloodstream, we will die. So we need sugar. And this is, again, it's about balance. But too much sugar becomes very problematic. And when we have sugar floating around in our bloodstream. So that happens when we eat things that get absorbed very quickly. So simple carbohydrates.

What's that mean? Rice, bread.

Yeah, so. So anything like basic sugar, and then things like rice and white bread, things that don't have fiber in them, when we eat those, those get absorbed very quickly by our body, and it goes directly into sugar in our bloodstream. Now, when that happens, that's really dangerous because when we have sugar, it starts to bind to all the different proteins. Now, some of you may understand, one of the proteins it binds to is hemoglobin. That's why we can kind of get a meas of how much sugar, the average sugar in your bloodstream by measuring your hemoglobin A1C. That's just a measurement of how much sugar has attached to your hemoglobin molecules or your red blood cells. But sugar also attaches to a lot of other proteins. Now, when that happens, and that's what we call a glycation reaction. So when sugar binds to proteins, it's a glycation. It happens without enzymes. It's just. It's called again, an Amadori reaction. And it will happen on its own when sugar is in contact with the proteins. And then what happens is our immun system goes, ooh, that looks foreign. Right. Our immune system's used to seeing our own proteins, but it's not used to seeing the proteins with sugar molecules attached to it. And so it will actually mount an immune response to it. So we call these proteins that have all the sugars attached to them, we call those ages. And I think that's a really appropriate name, Advanced glycation end products. Right. And it does. It ages us. And that those ages attach, we actually have receptors for them specifically to get rid of them in our body because they're so dangerous. And those are called receptors of advanced glycation end products or rages and rages. I think they're really well named. And it does, it causes a full body wide inflammatory reaction. And we can get into what inflammation is as well. But inflammation, that's, that's the pain in your joints, the redness in your skin. And we do know that inflammation that doesn't shut off can cause a lot of damage. It's one of the underlying factors of a lot of chronic diseases.

Let's take this a step further because again, you need glucose in your bloodstream. Your brain works on glucose and ketones, but it's when the levels get too high. And you can wear a, a simple glucose monitor, which I do, a cgm, a continuous glucose monitor to look at the glucose levels in your bloodstream. And if you have pure sugar or white bread, you'll see this spike. And then insulin gets pumped into your body and it drops down. We'll talk about that in a minute. But what's interesting is that the impact of this glycosylation, this, this attachment to the glucose, when I think about this, and if you can expand on this is. It's a cardiovascular inflammatory, a neuroinflammatory. It feeds cancers. I mean, there's like nothing good about it.

Yeah. The rages was just one thing. It causes inflammation in your blood vessels. Absolutely. In your brain. You know, there is nothing good about it. And one of the hallmarks of cancer, to your point, Peter, is the fact that the cells, the cancer cel. Now all the cells in our body, other than our brain cells typically, they, they burn fat. So at rest and when our mitochondria, the little power plants of our cell that take the food that we eat and turn it into energy to fuel our muscles, to fuel, you know, our brain. Everything that we need to do, all the reactions in our body, they, they love to, to take fat and make energy from it. Now cancer cells can only. One of the hallmarks of cancer is that they burn sugar. They can't burn fat. So the mitochondria are so damaged in cancer cells that they cannot burn fat and they only burn sugar. So the whole idea that sugar feeds cancer is absolutely true. And you know, anyone dealing with cancer, the first thing you do is want to limit the sugar. I mean, we know this because PET scans are basically labeled sugar. Right. And that's how we see.

PET scan is a positron emission tomography.

Tomography.

It's a kind of scan. Yeah, yeah.

To look for cancer in the body. And it's radio labeled sugar molecules because that sugar will go directly to where the cancer is.

So I just want to make our first point here, which is the body was never designed to consume this much sugar. Right? This use of sugarcane and sugar in our diet is something recent over the last few hundred years. It didn't evolve with us over hundreds of thousands of years. And it's not easy. In fact, sugar is addicting. You know, I have two 12 year olds and I look at the cereals they're eating and it's like all sugar. I mean, I taste it and I go like, this is disgusting. It's so sweet. It brings back memories. But you know, it's not easy to break a sugar addiction.

Yeah, it's difficult. I think, Peter, to your point, with evolution, we've actually evolved to have a sweet tooth. So if we think of human evolution, you know, we would have periods of feast kind of in the fall during harvest, when we had an abundance of food. And then we would have kind of periods of famine, especially over the winter. Now during the fall is when things, sweet things were available. You know, ripened fruit is sweet, right? Honey that's available that we would go and get. So we have this innate need and I'd say we search out sweet things and sugar, I think that's in all humans. And at the time it was very beneficial. So what would happen when we ate that sugar? It would induce some insulin resistance. Okay, so remember when we eat sugar, it comes into our bloodstream and we then our, our body senses it, it says, sugar's too high and it will produce insulin. Our pancreas, the beta cells in our pancreas, make the insulin. And the insulin is like the little door knocker on the cell and it says, binds to this. The receptor on the cell basically knocks on the door and it says, open up, let the sugar inside. And so the sugar can now go from the bloodstream inside the cell where it's safe. Okay, so, so that's a good thing. Now, over time, when we have a lot of sugar around and also, you know, fat in there as well, but think of a lot of sugar, what happens is the cell kind of gets tired of opening up that door. And the little door knocker, our body has to actually produce more and more insulin for the sugar to get inside, for the cell to open up the door. Almost like the little boy who cried wolf too many times. And so, and so that's what we call insulin resistance, where our cells become, start becoming resistant to the action of insulin and therefore the sugar ends up staying around in our bloodstream much longer. And that's the first sign of, of course, diabetes when it gets to a certain point. But if we think back to the evolution, we, during the fall, we would induce by eating a lot of sweets this, this sort of state of insulin resistance, which what did that do? That allowed us to store fat. Right. When we're insulin resistant, we store a lot of fat. That sugar gets converted very quickly to fat. And those fat stores would then allow us to survive through the winter when there wasn't a lot of food there. So you know, the people genetically that can do this, the people that are much more prone to insulin resistance, those are the people that survived. Right. And we're all usually descendants of that. So they're really, if you think about the fit genes, certain, certain traits depending on your environment are very beneficial. You take those and you put those in a different environment and they very detrimental. So humans were never meant to be exposed to vast amounts of calories and food and sugar at all times. We're meant to go through those periods of feasting and famine.

Yeah. So again, bottom line is high glycemic index foods, sugar, candy, all of these things not healthy for you. You know, my dad used to say in ancient Greek pan metronidistan, which means everything in moderation. And that's fine. But we are addicted to it. One thing that I do every year with dear friend Guillermo Navarrete is as part of Abundance360 and Abundance Platinum, we do a 22 day, no sugar fast and everybody together in a WhatsApp group. So it's much easier to do this as a group than on your own, is you give up sugar and we go to really a ketogenic diet for 22 days. And at the end of that, you feel like you have control back. Right. You have control back over that sweet tooth and you can say no a lot easier. And so I did that two and a half years ago and I've had really, I'm very, very careful about when I eat any sugar. If I'm going to eat something, it's going to be very mindful and it's going to be a very limited amount.

And you'll notice when you actually get rid of that sweet toothpaste that you things just taste ultra sweet. You know, when I first cut out sugar in my diet, it takes about three months to completely overcome that craving and that addiction to sugar. And just so you know, sugar is as addictive as cocaine.

Yeah, well, I Haven't tried cocaine, so I wouldn't actually know. But I have tried sugar, but.

So it takes about three months. And then things like the corn flakes that, you know, I used to sprinkle sugar on top of cornflakes.

It's all sweet already.

It's exactly.

All right, let's move beyond sugar. So please consider trying a continuous glucose monitor so you can see which foods actually spike your glucose. There's a free Libre three. Now there's A levels.

Yeah, the Dexcom Freestyle Libre. They're really very easy. You just stick them on the back of your arm. You monitor the readout with your iPhone, you just download the app. Very easy and very, very informative. And I think when you start using a continuous glucose monitor, I can't recommend it enough because not only are you going to find which foods actually spike your blood sugar, I think that's important. And you will notice that that's not the same food for everybody. Some foods, it might not spike up one person's blood sugar and another food will spike a different person's blood sugar very high. And so that's number one. And then the other thing you're going to get insights in is all the other things that you do. And we're going to jump into more. I know later, but how sleep and how stress and how all of those other things have an effect on your blood sugar. So if you don't sleep very well the night before, the same food can spike your blood sugar more. You'll also notice how at different times of day, you're going to be more or. And less insulin sensitive. So in the morning, typically, we have these, basically the circadian rhythms, and we have clock genes that control those circadian rhythms. In the morning, you're much more insulin sensitive, meaning the same food will not spike your blood sugar as much as eating that same food in the evening, when we're much more insulin resistant. So from a diet perspective, you know, what you eat is critical. When you eat is also critical. So the whole, you know, the old adage of breakfast like a king and lunch like a prince and dinner like a popper is actually very true. When you take your circadian rhythm into account and then you know how you eat, which we're going to get into in a bit.

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To you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. Let's jump in beyond it. So I was saying, what are the absolutes? So the absolutes are, listen, sugar's a poison. Minimize your sugar, Measure what's Going on, Try yourself going through a 22 day sugar fast. Do it with a group of people. That's one piece of advice. The other sort of, I think absolute piece of advice is the idea of a whole plant diet that I think everybody can benefit from. A whole plant diet. So what is a whole plant diet?

Yeah, I mean, a whole plant diet is really just what it says is eat plants, they eat everything in as close to its natural state as possible, right? You want to not too much. And again, mostly plants is really how you want to think about diet. But whole plant food diet is plant forward. Doesn't mean that you have to be vegan, doesn't mean you have to be vegetarian. It just means that you should eat. Really focus on getting plants first and making sure that you get all of the phytonutrients, all of the.

So why plants, Helen? You know, I've been a vegan, I've gone a whole keto diet. I've done everything. I'm back to sort of Mediterranean diet. But when I see, literally when I see plants on my plate, I attack them. I'm like, okay, the brussels sprouts, the asparagus, the spinach. It's like, I've learned to love my plants. But why is that important?

Why is that important? So plants have so many important things. So one of the things that plants have, and the only place we can get it, is fiber. Now, fiber is not only does it fill you up, not only does it control how fast sugar is absorbed into your bloodstream, so it controls your blood sugar, but fiber feeds our microbiome and our microbiome. As you know, there's all of the trillions of microorganisms that live. It lives everywhere in our body, in our skin and everywhere. But the vast majority of them live in our GI tract or in our gut. And those microbes, turns out, do so many important things for us. You know, the list could go on. I think every day there's hundreds of papers published on how important the microbiome is for our overall health. And what plants do is that fiber feeds the beneficial microbes. That's absolutely critical. We do not get nearly enough fiber in our diet. You know, if we look at a lot of times, I. This is only my own kind of hypothesis, but I think, you know, we talk a lot about the Paleo diet being all meat and the animal that our caveman ancestors would kill. But if you look at what our ancestors ate in terms of fiber, it would be in the hundred gram per day range, even if you look at traditional populations now, it's around that. Typically, the USDA recommends 35 grams a day for people. Most of us get around 5 or 10.

Wow.

We don't get nearly enough. Wow.

You know, by the way, one thing that we said about the microbiome, we'll talk about that more. I mean, every day. The research is showing how it's connected to every aspect of your health. Your Alzheimer's, brain clarity, cancers, and so forth. And then one of the things I just, you know, you and I talked about this for me a little, a little bit ago, a few months ago, which was I had to take some antibiotics for some after my. Some dental work. And I tried to avoid it, but I took it in. The final result because of a sinus infection. But, oh, my God, I hate antibiotics. It's like they've saved our lives. They've added decades onto your ear. But keeping your microbiome in good state of health is so important. We'll get to that. But I just want to put that note in for folks to think about. Do not take antibiotics. If you have a viral infection, there's so many reasons not to do it. So please, please, please think about antibiotics.

Absolutely. Not only do the antibiotics, and yeah, with the caveat, if you need them, definitely take them. But if there's any doubt, you know, like you said, a viral infection. Antibiotics don't kill viruses. They kill bacteria. Not only do they kill the bad bacteria, they also kill all of the good bacteria in your gut that we, those beneficial microbes we talked about, and.

I will talk later about, your mitochondria are in fact bacteria that were incorporated into cells. And antibiotics can actually damage your mitochondria. I don't want to dive in the rabbit hole right now. I want to get back to food. So whole plant diets. So one of the things that I recently learned, and I found it really an important tidbit, which is the order in which you eat your food can have a massive benefit.

It.

So let me lay it out. When you're looking at your plate, eat your veggies first, eat that fiber first, then eat your protein. And then if you still have hunger, you can eat your rice or your bread or your carbs. So why is that?

Yeah, absolutely. So the order that you eat, it will fill your stomach up and it will slow the absorption of the sugar from those rice and carbs. If you have the fiber and the protein in your digestive system first, you have much lower glycemic response to those foods. So that's that's a big reason. Another reason is you get filled up with the good stuff and then less room for you to eat the stuff that's not so good. Sort of that calorie, you know, the nutrient poor food, you want to eat the nutrient dense food first. And you know, the other thing that's in the plants. We talked about fiber, but all of the phytonutrients. So phyto just means from plants and nutrients being, you know, all of the such important components that why do we eat? We eat to get building blocks for our body, the protein and to get energy and also to give cofactors for all of the biochemical reactions that we need to stay alive. All of those enzymes that carry out those biochemical reactions, those are required cofactors and that's what vitamins and minerals are. They're cofactors for these enzymes. We can't carry out any of these reactions without those. So that's really important as well. That, and that comes from the plants. It's, I think that's really critical. And the other thing plants give us is antioxidants. You know, we will get into the whole oxidative stress and free radicals, we can go down that rabbit hole if you like. But free radicals damage in the process of making energy, you taking in oxygen in the food we eat, those mitochondria, which you're going to hear over and over again because we're talking about longevity. So they're so important. They have, they, they have smoke essentially. Think them, think of them as a power plant that produces a biology. They're burning something, they're burning something. And that smoke is reactive oxygen species or what we call free radicals. And those free radicals cause oxidative damage. So you know, think of when a metal piece of metal rust, that's free radical damage or oxidative damage of the metal rusting. So think of the rusting inside our body. It will damage a lot of our proteins and cell or cell membranes get damaged quite significantly with those free radicals. So in order to deal with that, if we didn't have antioxidants, again, we would all die. We make antioxidants, but we also need to get them from our diet.

A couple of key points here as takeaways. Again, please think about this tonight when you're eating dinner or lunch, attack your veggies first. Get that fiber in. You know, I like to pour extra virgin olive oil on all my veggies and really consume olive oil in that, in that capacity. So that's the first thing. And then your protein. You can talk about protein from legumes, protein from beans, protein from fish, chicken. I don't take in red meat, but. And then the final thing, and I typically skip it because I fill myself on the veggies, and the. And the protein can be your. Your carbohydrates. One of the challenges is you go to a beautiful French or Italian restaurant, and what's the very first thing they do? They feed you a giant bowl of bread and a glass of wine. And it's like, so, you know, pro tip here. When they bring it to the table, say, can you please bring this back with the main course? Because if it's sitting in front of you, you're going to eat it. Or if you need to make sure that you soak your bread in the extra virgin olive oil to blunt the glycemic response of the bread, but better yet, to eat it on the back end of your meal.

Exactly.

There's another thing you taught me, which is eat the rainbow. And that doesn't mean Froot Loops or Skittles. So what does eat the rainbow mean?

People try to make it be Froot Loops and Skittles, but, yeah, eating the rainbow just means eating all of the colors of the rainbow, because the phytonutrients, the densest nutrition in these plants are come from the colors. So think of the green and kale and beans and peas. Think of the red and tomatoes and strawberries. Think of the orange, oranges and carrots and the blue and blueberries and blackberries. That's like. So you want to get. What I tell people is try to get one. At least one food of every color every day that's going to give you. Because the key. One of the keys of diet is variety. You know, it's great to. And you know how much I love broccoli, Peter.

I love broccoli, too.

But the key is you can eat a big plate of broccoli, which is great, but you want to get variety. You want to get lots of different types. So really go for those colors. And when my kids were little, I used to have them check off the colors of the rainbow, make sure they got one of each.

So that's another thing that I attack ferociously. It's like, you know, we were at our. Our Longevity Platinum dinner, and my team's amazing. They feed us great longevity diets. And I remember in front of the group was these plates of every color out there, and I was like, I was just grabbing at them. So the order in which you eat your food, the color of the food, putting off the high glycemic index. Let's talk about one second. Nuts, beans, legumes, and then how many calories to consume per day because that is all over the place. So how much protein do you consume? Where do you get your protein from and how many calories? That's an important part of our diet conversation.

Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, honestly, calories, I think it is important. You don't want to over consume calories. But if, to your point, if you eat the right foods first, I think it's really hard to get too many calories when you eat plants. Plants, that becomes very difficult. You'll be, you'll be full before you can have too many calories. Right. And so, so really go with that first. And that the calories tend to really take care of themselves if you do that. You know, I used to calorie count. I used to, you know, I don't think, I think from kind of an ease perspective, just focus on the good foods and then, you know, don't stuff yourself. Stop. When you're about 80% full, before you go for those seconds, you want to wait about 15 minutes. It takes about 15 minutes for the food to register from your stomach to your brain that you've had something to.

Eat that's so important, right.

Do you ever have that feel like.

Oh my God, I ate too much? Like it sneaks up on you because there is that delay chewing your food and waiting and having a conversation. And then there's, there's vitamin O. Talk about vitamin O here people are going, wait, what's a vitamin O? I don't remember that from medical school.

Yeah, I love it, the vitamin O. And that came from Mark David, who's just a fantastic, wrote the Slow down diet. It's oxygen. Make sure you breathe. And we talked about.

I'm taking a deep breath right now when you eat.

But how you eat, right? So everyone, let's do this together. Take a deep breath. Breath and then let it out. Out breath longer than your in breath. And suddenly I think you can feel how your nervous system switches. Right? It switches from that sympathetic nervous system or the, the fight or flight nervous system. And it switches to your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and digest nervous system. So all of our bodily functions, whether it's, you know, urinating or salivating, you know how you're stressed, your mouth dries up, up, you're clenching. Yeah. All of those things happen only when we're in a parasympathetic state. And the key is that they can, one or the other can be active at one time. They both cannot be active at the same time. So you're either sympathetic or you're parasympathetic. And so when you eat in that parasympathetic state, you actually make the best use of your food. You're going to digest your food, you're going to absorb the nutrients, you're going to utilize them properly. If you eat in a stressed state, you tend to just take it all and store it away as fat for a later date. You don't, you don't.

Yeah, I mean, I remember just like shoveling the food in my mouth just to have to get it done and then get back to my work. And the worst thing, and you said this the other day, and I agree with you, is sitting there watching Crisis News Network, watching CNN and having dinner as bombs are flying and people are, it's, it's like that's the worst state to have had, you know, to eat.

Yeah.

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It is. If you think about how we tend to eat in our society, right. In our culture, we eat when we're driving, right. We'll go through the drive through and eat when we go through. And that's obviously stressful. We eat at our desk when we're trying to do work. We eat, we read. We can never think of how many times you actually sit and pay attention to your food and don't do anything else other than maybe good conversation with a friend. How many times in our week, think about that, that we actually Pay attention. Taste our food, chew our food, pay attention to it versus just kind of shoveling it in because you have to get some calories in.

You know, my sister made a good point. This is part of. From cultures around the world. This is why they say a prayer in the beginning or gratitude, grace. It's slowing you down and it's getting you into a conversation. It's preparing your body to absorb the foods. So, yeah, really, really important stuff, protein. So. And intermittent fasting. A lot of conversations here, a lot of depth on diet. So I'm focused this year on building muscle mass, which comes from lifting weights and creatine and other supplements. We'll talk about that later. But it's also getting enough protein in my diet. Diet. But then you hear conversations around, well, too much protein is not good for longevity. So help me dissect the situation around protein. How much should we get?

Yeah, and I think, you know, a lot of it does. We do need protein, number one.

We do, for sure.

Protein makes up the building blocks our muscles are in. Our body is really made up of protein, collagen, and our skin, our bones. So protein is essential. And we also know that. That our muscle mass is a key determiner of our longevity. Right. So if we get weaker, one of the best predictors of mortality and longevity is just grip strength. Right. So overall strength and muscle mass is very important for longevity. So that's really critical. If you think of the elderly, frail people, that not only do you risk falling and all of those things, but.

And we'll get to this conversation in depth when we talk about exercise.

Yeah, so.

So how much protein should a person get?

Yeah, so you need protein in order to build muscle mass. And, you know, and I think part of it depends on how active you are. You want to, like, with exercise, you definitely want to be able to lift weight. You know, weight or some kind of resistance training is really important to build and make use of that protein. You want to make sure you digest your protein appropriately because undigested protein can get down into the lower reaches of your colon. And then your bacteria start to ferment. That that becomes a problem because they produce a lot of harmful substances from that protein fermentation. So you definitely want the protein that you eat. You want to be able to digest it and absorb it appropriately, and you want to make use of it by. By exercising. Having said that, you know, the estimates are somewhere around 0.8 to 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight, every sort of daily. And so that kind of gives You a rough estimate. You know, people obviously with kidney disease and other things, they have to be a little bit more careful with the protein. But that's a general kind of.

So I weigh roughly 150 pounds and I take in 150 grams a day. And one of the things that's interesting is you can't just take in 150 grams at a sitting. No, it's, no, it's spacing it out through the day.

That's exactly right. Yeah. And that stimulates muscle building is when you actually space it out during the day. So that's really important. You don't want to just fast all day and then eat a 20 pound steak. You know, the idea is to definitely space it out to the day and so you stimulate that muscle kind of building throughout the day. I think that's really important. And you know, we can get into the whole mtor ampk and fasting if we want to.

Well, let's touch base on it a little bit because I used to focus on intermittent fasting and I would typically eat dinner at six or six, done by seven and then I would fast until the next day at about noon, 1 o', clock, have a lunch and dinner, skip breakfast. And I've changed that. And one of the reasons it looks like the data of intermittent fasting in terms of during the day doesn't impact all cause mortality, but it does impact my ability to take in enough protein. So I said I'm going to actually take in a protein shake. I use a cachava, which I enjoy as a plant based protein shake I do every morning. So what are your thoughts on intermittent fasting?

Yeah, so, you know, there are some, there is some evidence out there for intermittent fasting being good for people with metabolic syndrome, you know, sort of that whole insulin resistance and that, that abdominal weight. So if you're, you know, really overweight or obese and, and you need to lose that weight, intermittent fasting can be helpful. But if we pull back and we look at kind of what are, you know, what we did in terms of evolution, what our humans kind of did. Remember we talked about the, the feast and the famine. You know, how you feast in the fall and famine through the winter. I think that there is a role for going for periods without eating. One of the challenges if you go for longer periods without eating is you do lose muscle mass. So when people lose weight, there is a portion of that weight that you definitely lose body fat, but you also lose muscle mass. So that's something you really have to be Careful of, I was going to.

Say one of the strategies for fasting because you know, some people do a four or five day water fast where it like just water and electrolytes and that's it. And that's really hard. There is a product that I love that I write about in Longevity, which is the Prolon fasting mimicking diet, which is a little bit different. Right. It's a five day diet but like day one is like 1200 calories and day two through five is like 800 calories. And it's nutritional. And the studies that they've done, if I understand correctly and you can amplify, is it's actually more beneficial for you than just a water diet?

Yes, absolutely, absolutely. So the fasting mimicking diet there you get a little bit of food so it's easier to do because you're not completely not eating. So you get some olives and other things. They also give you something to kind of feed your mitochondria energy without the sugar and that can be helpful. And they've done some really good studies on it. You know that people lost body weight, right? They, they lost that kind of fat mass, their waist circumference, their blood pressure went down, their cholesterol markers improved. So there are, you know, there's been some good studies around the fasting mimicking diet that have been very beneficial. You know, sometimes I use it, you know, in patients as well just to kind of kick start this. Them often people with autoimmune diseases and that kind of thing that kickstart using the, the fasting mimicking diet is a really great way to kind of really get them started, especially around elimination diets. We can get into that later. But so there is benefit. I think that, you know, some people, there's still some, you know, not sort of misunderstanding maybe around fasting and women versus men. Who does it work better for? I think all of that is, is we're still trying to tease it out, but there's a role for going for periods without eating and a role for eating and so doing that once in a while can make sense.

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All right, let's go back to the episode. Let me hit a few other key points on diet. What I eat, don't eat. What I drink, don't drink. So I've eliminated all sodas with full disclosure when I go see an epic movie. I may have a Coke zero once or twice a year, but that's it. I've gotten rid of sodas. I don't want, first of all, sugary sodas, and then I don't want the phosphoric acid that comes from that. What are your thoughts on sodas?

I would say don't.

Fair enough.

Yeah, I mean, I can't really think of anything good that comes from drinking a soda, whether it's a Coca Cola.

Is definitely not going to sponsor this podcast. Okay, so sodas don't. Fruit juices the same thing.

Fruit juices are really all sugar. Fruit is different because fruit comes with the fiber, the other things that slow down the absorption of the sugar. But the fruit juices are pretty much all sugar. And if you wear that CGM and you monitor your blood sugar when you drink, say, orange juice, you'll probably notice it go really high.

Yeah, spikes. All right, here's a controversial one.

And too much fructose isn't too good either.

All right, alcohol, vitamin E to H. So, I mean, let's. Let's talk about alcohol. Is it eliminate? Is it partial? You know, there's a lot of people who swear by it. I have personally basically gotten rid of alcohol, 99%. I will have a half a glass of red wine once every two or three weeks. I'll have a shot of tequila on a, you know, a special occasion, but otherwise I minimize my alcohol intake. How do you think about alcohol? Any, any benefits for you?

Yeah, you know, there is. A lot of people will say, yeah, there's. Studies show that there's a protection of cardiovascular disease if you have. Have a glass of red wine a day and it's the resveratrol. But if you really look at the evidence and the scientific literature, there's really no benefit from alcohol. You know, as sad as that makes me to say, there's nothing really good that comes from alcohol. It doesn't mean that you can't enjoy it once in a while. To your point, Peter, but be aware that alcohol is a poison. You know, it has a lot of damage. It kills our brain cells. It. It kills our gut cells and causes, you know, this increased leaky gut, so to speak. It, you know, it takes a big tax on our liver to actually detoxify it. Even though it can make you sleepy, it doesn't actually improve your sleep. It can actually disrupts your deep sleep and your different phases of sleep. There's really nothing good that comes from alcohol other than, you know, maybe in a social situation where you can.

A social lubricant. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Unfortunately, I mean, what I have noted is if you're. If you're trying to keep your, your glycemic index down, Tequila is probably the thing that spikes the. Your blood glucose the least.

Yeah, sometimes you'll see that alcohol will. If you're wearing a cgm, alcohol can drop your blood sugar. That's very common. But that doesn't mean that, you know, it's lowering. It's not a good way to drop it.

All right, one last topic here is water. Water intake, which most people, I think, don't sufficiently do.

That's correct. We. We have to get water. You know, our body is made up of mostly water, and we need to drink that and replenish it. We lose water all the time just in evaporation. And we, it's really critical. I would say a vast majority of us are walking around dehydrated. You know, so many times we also confuse thirst with hunger. And a lot of times when we're thirsty, we're going to interpret that as hunger and we'll eat instead of drinking. And so one of the things you should do is really, anytime you feel hungry, number one, drink a glass of water, do that first. If you're still hungry, then, okay, go ahead and have something to eat. But absolutely drink the water first because a lot of times it's because you're. You feel it because you're thirsty.

Is there any downside to sparkling water, to carbonated water?

Yeah. So, you know, I like it. You know, I've got my Pellegrino here. Yeah, I, you know, there, there's certain soda water, for example, is quite salty, it will make you feel thirsty or. But if you like the bubbles, there's not really a huge downside of.

And alkaline water.

Yeah.

You know, there's a lot of conversation.

Around, a lot of controversy around that. I've yet to see some really good data around the alkaline water. You know, body alkalinity. Fruits and vegetables are going to really help with that more than the water. If we think of our stomach, our stomach is very acidic. And so you want that hydrochloric acid. You want that acid in your stomach. And so I think the alkaline water, it's fine. I don't think there's harm, but I think it's more important just to drink water, good, clean water. Water is filled with toxins, so make sure it's clean. A lot of the water bottles, even getting the plastics, it's a challenge, getting good, clean.

I'll wrap up on a few of the products I use here. I use athletic greens as a, you know, if I'm drinking water out of a, you know, a couple liter bottle just to flavor it and to get a little bit of additional nutrients, I'll use athletic greens. One of my favorite products that introduced this year is Nutra 11, which is a hot protein drink in the morning. I'm addicted to it, bluntly. And It's. I get 20. I replaced coffee with. With it. We should talk about coffee. You know, I get, you know, some 20 grams of protein and it's very. It's flavored with monk fruit, has zero sugar, zero carbs. And again, I'm addicted to it. Caffeine. I used to, you know, when I was in medical school, you know, I would five, six, seven, eight cups, you know, keep me going. It was like I prided myself on being able to down. Down a few cups and go so straight to sleep. But now I'm like, holy cow, I can't do that to myself. How do you think about coffee?

Yeah. Now coffee in and of itself is filled with antioxidants. And a lot of really beneficial nutrients in coffee. So coffee is a good thing. Now, some people are more sensitive to caffeine than others. Right? Caffeine can increase your heart rate. It can cause adrenaline cortisol to be released. And some people can handle a lot more than others. Now, genetically, we can metabolize. We all have sort of different ability to metabolize coffee. It's a CYP1A2 gene. If you guys are interested. If you're the C in the CYP1A2, you will be a slow metabolizer. I'm a slow metabolizer. I love my caffeine, my coffee.

And so I used to think I was a fast metabolizer, but my genetics came back then. I'm a slow metabolizer. And you and George were like one cup a day, Peter. That's it. And I tried to go to like one or zero a day.

Yeah, yeah. So the idea is to, you know, limit it. If you're a slow metabolizer, just limit, kind of maybe stop drinking it by noon so that it can. If you do otherwise, you'll have a lot of difficulty falling asleep.

All right, so listen, I think we gave diet a pretty good run for its money. And hopefully people have taken away some, some concrete things that you can do immediately. And it's not expensive to be clear. These are things that you can do immediately that are available to everybody. And a lot of it is the way you change what you eat, when you eat, the order you eat it in. And I think it's one of the single most important things that you can do. I want to take a moment to tell you about Abundance360 my year round leadership mastermind for people who want to go big big, create wealth and uplift humanity. It's Singularity University's highest level program. We are a global community of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, philanthropists who have come together based upon a set of shared beliefs.

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