May Q&A - Women's Health Awareness Month | Ep. 286

Welcome to the Gladden longevity podcast with Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, where our passion is helping you to become an AJ hacker. On this show, we want to help you optimize your life energy, longevity, health and human performance with impactful and actionable information by answering four questions. How good can we be? How do we make 100 the new 30? How do we live well beyond 120? And how do we live young for a lifetime? Now, here's today's episode of the Gladden Longevity Podcast.

Welcome, everybody, to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, and as always, we're here answering the big questions. How good can we be? How do we make 130? How do we live well beyond 120? How do we live young for a lifetime? And how do we develop a 300-year-old mind? And today we're going to be answering questions from the audience. We have about five of them that are really quite interesting. And Autumn Calabresi is going to join me as co host today and bring her perspective as well. But the questions are really good and I think the answers are equally good. So I hope you enjoy this podcast. Welcome, everybody, to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, and I'm here today with Autumn Calabresi, co hosting. Good to see you back.

Hi, Dr. Gladden. Good to be back. Thank you again for having me, as always.

Yeah, absolutely. Always fun.

Yeah.

So I think today we're going to be focusing on listener questions, if I'm not mistaken.

Yes.

Okay. And if I'm not mistaken, you have the list in front of you over there, which I don't.

So I do. I do. And we got some really great, great questions coming in that I think are going to be very helpful for people. So the first one is obviously in regards to May and being Mental Health Awareness Month and how mental health and stress affect longevity. Chronic stress is linked to inflammation and faster biological aging. What is your approach to managing it through lifestyle mindse or supplementation?

Yeah, I think, you know, at Glad Longevity, we have the. The life energy circle. Right. Which is really the psycho spiritual space, if you will. And mental health is one of the areas there. The idea of being able to go back and heal trauma. Right. Because we're all living in reaction to it. And I think that. And being able to feel safe. Right. I think when we don't feel safe, it. It puts us under a lot of stress. And I think one of the insights that I'VE had is that nothing external to us can ever make us feel safe. Right. So when you think about that, there's no money, there's no relationship, there's no degree, there's no job, there's no even family that can ultimately make us feel safe. Then how do you give yourself that? Right. So for me, it's really the psycho spiritual quest, if you will, to. So you get connected to source energy and feel the safety that comes through that. Right. And then healing those traumas is really. It requires help. I think seeing somebody, a therapist or someone that can help you dissect what actually went on so you can actually understand it, take responsibility for your part in it, my part in it, and then forgive everybody involved. Right. I think is so helpful. And forgiveness for me was always such an abstraction for such a long time. Like, if somebody said, I forgive you, I don't know, I didn't really feel. It's like, I don't know what just happened. Right. It doesn't feel like that much happened. And then I had this, this kind of insight that, you know, we have unconditional positive regard. Right? Right. There's nothing, nothing blocking that. And if something happens, what happens is we put up a wall. It's like, oh, I'm no longer going to receive or feel unconditional regard for this positive reg other person. And I think forgiveness for me is when we get to a point where it's like, okay, it takes a lot of psychic energy to hold that wall up and I'm going to take that wall down. It doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to go to lunch with my, you know, ex this or that or whatever. But it does mean that I'm just going to allow positive energy to flow and if there's anything coming back, I'll just go ahead and receive it. And when you, when you forgive, it just means all of a sudden there's less stress in your system. And I think it's really fascinating because it not only drives inflammation and aging, you know, just look at every president, right. How much stress they're under and how they age in four years. But there was a recent study that looked at yogis when they're meditating that showed that when they go into a deep theta state, which is like deep meditation, theta is the brainwave just below, just above delta. Delta is when you're asleep. So it's in that kind of hypnagogic state that, that almost right before sleep state. What they found is that in the first 15 minutes, they had a 40% increase in the release of stem cells, endogenous stem cells, into their system to facilitate healing. Wow. Right. Isn't that massive? Yeah. Right. So it's the combination of being able to release stress and go into a deep restorative, meditative state. Those two things kind of work hand in hand. So I think, I think stress is massive on the, on the aging side. I also think it represents a massive opportunity. In fact, I think it's hard to really age well if you're still angry, resentful, you know, living in reaction to. Right. What do you want to be an angry old person? Is that, what, is that what you're going for?

Right, right.

So I think you want to get to that more transcendent space.

Yeah, yeah. I think coming from the fitness and nutrition expert side, I would say just when you're looking at lifestyle, like some immediate things, just looking at, are you exercising? First of all, because movement can really help release stress. I know for me, when I have a lot of stress or anxiety, just a walk, like a walk out in nature can really help release some of that feeling and that adrenaline that I sort of feel pumping through my body. The infrared sauna can help with inflammation. Breathing techniques, right. Slowing down the inhalation and the exhalation, getting into, you know, getting out of the fight or flight and into the rest and digest. When you're just talking about mental health, I do think being aware of the food that we consume, like, I don't, I don't see people attaching the food that we eat to our mental state very much. And I do think it has such a big impact on us and how, and you know, if you're over sugared and over processed food and under on the fiber and all the vitamins and nutrients and you have those deficiencies that so many other things can start to go out of balance and the hormones go out of balance and you know, we're instantly looking for the drug to fix my mental state. But the drug just might be the food that you're eating or not eating that could help. So just, you know, more whole foods and real foods and less of the processed stuff because that puts less stress on your body as well. So I think all those things can be really helpful to incorporate along with this deep healing that you're referencing.

I think it's a great point that you make. And I think one of the things is that we tend to think of eating as being restorative. Right. Like we're going to sit down and eat and this will be restorative, but in actual fact it's actually stressful. It's a metabolic stress on the body. And so, you know, in all the blue zones they really have this mantra of harihachi bu, I believe is, is the term harihachi buu I believe is Japanese. And it really is aligned with the idea of, of stopping when you're, you know, like 80% full. Like you never eat until you're full. You only eat until you're not hungry.

Right.

And that decreases the metabolic stress on the system as well. So and then there are certain foods that can make you anxious, like foods high in glutamate and things like that that you can look up. So all that becomes super important. Yeah, very cool. I saw something recently too about forest bathing. Right. This was a term I was unfamiliar with, but I was looking at it under the context of stressful things and things that you can do about stress. And the idea of going out into the forest for two hours has a, has a impact on you for the next week in terms of lowering inflammation and stre. So connection with nature. Right. And then I think another thing that lowers stress is increasing oxytocin. Right. Which comes from personal contact with people, you know, hugs, being intimate with people or just being very friendly with people, laughing and things like that raises oxytocin. So very cool.

Yeah, yeah. So many things that we could do immediately to start helping with that process.

That's right.

The next question we got was in, in regards to blood pressure, blood pressure and longevity link, why normal isn't always optimal. What blood pressure markers matter most for long term cardiovascular and brain health. And should we redefine what's normal? I'm going to let you take this one away. That's, that's your ally.

Sure. So, you know, we used to think 140 over 90 was normal. Then we thought, well, 130 is better. Now we know it's 120. What people should understand is that 120 over 80. What people should understand is that it's really a linear risk model. So 115 is better than 120. 110 is better than 115. And of course you could get too low to the point where, you know, you're dizzy. But, but other than that, you know, if you're like at 105 over 64, that's actually better than, you know, 115 over 75. Right. So there seems to be this linear impact with blood pressure and you don't want to take it Too low. But that's really the issue. You know, there are a lot of things. So when you think about defining it, just think about what's the lowest blood pressure I can run and actually feel good. Right. I think that's maybe one way to think about it. Right. The other thing is that, you know, what constricts arteries, right? Well, what constricts arteries are stress, right. The sympathetic nervous system, when it's dumping out stress, squeezes the arteries. Right. And so you could really raise your blood pressure and your heart rate that way. Well, what relaxes arteries? Well, obviously, parasympathetic nervous system, where you're in this deep meditative state will relax arteries. But also, nitric oxide releases or relaxes arteries, right. It's a molecule that causes the arteries to dilate. And what does it take for nitric oxide to be released? Well, it takes a very healthy. What's called glycocalyx. This is like a fuzz that's lining the inside of the artery that works as a sensor for blood flow when blood is flowing past it. Think of it like the moss in the bottom of a cross creek. It senses that rate of blood flow. And when you start walking or exercising or doing something, the blood flow increases. So the moss recognizes that, the glycocalyx, and it basically signals the. The layer of cells just below it, the skin, the endothelium that lines the artery to make nitric oxide. So the artery will dilate, so you get more blood flow to your muscle or your heart or your brain or whatever you're doing. Right. So that's important. But you can't make nitric oxide if you don't have a glycocalyx. And you can't make nitric oxide if you have a glycocalyx. But you don't have the right tools to make it, and you need dietary nitrate to do that. This is why plants like arugula and kale and beets and spinach that are rich in dietary nitrate actually help you have the substrate to make nitric oxide from. So there are supplements that you can take called N101, that'll actually make you make nitric oxide right now. And then there are supplements you can do to help protect the glycocalyx. Well, what destroys the glycocalyx? Well, it's destroyed by sugar, right? So sugar is. Sugar destroys the glycocalyx. Right. And probably, you know, certain saturated fats could do it as well. But the glycocalyx can be destroyed Very quickly. There's been research done. Big Mac fries and a Coke will not only destroy it within a matter of minutes.

Wow.

But it'll keep it destroyed for up to seven or eight hours. Right.

Wow.

Right. So it's our diet that's destroying the glycocalyx that's impairing nitric oxide production, which raises blood pressure, decreases athletic performance, brain performance and sexual activity. Well, not activity necessarily, but certainly performance.

Sure.

Right. So what you want to do is to have a healthy glycocalyx and low stress and high dietary nitrate intake. If you do those things, you know, then you, you're starting to live young for a lifetime. You have a low blood pressure, you can exercise well, you have better cardiovascular performance, better sexual performance, and life is fun. So that's the idea. So there's a couple supplements that work really well. There's one called Revasca that actually regrows the night, the glycocalyx. Another one called Arterosil. The two work together actually quite nicely to regrow it. And they can regrow it also in a matter of minutes. So that's pretty interesting.

What about the little bit of a follow up question, because we had a second question about blood pressure supplements like magnesium, beet juice, potassium, where would those fall into play? Yeah, also very level of normal.

Also very important. We tend to get so much sodium in our diets. Right. That that can drive blood pressure to go up. Potassium actually helps to relax the arteries. Magnesium also relaxes smooth muscle, which is the muscle in the artery. Right. So those are very important. You can lower blood pressure by eating a higher potassium rich diet or magnesium rich diet. So those are good. And the beet juice is really just dietary nitrate. Right. So yeah, great.

So I think that again, very helpful things that we can do and understand more right now.

Yep.

Let's talk hormone and menopause. So this one is a question about estrogen, estrogen's role in protecting the heart and brain. And should more women be exploring HRT for longevity or for long term vitality? I love this one. Obviously this is something I have been diving into quite a bit the last couple of years. Hormonal health, especially for women.

Yeah, absolutely. So I just finished a podcast. I was a little late to this one because I was just finishing a podcast on women's health on hormone replacement therapy. Interestingly enough. Right. We did it with Dr. Sarah Dacoret. Really fascinating. Was on the Glad Longevity podcast. There are a lot of hormone disruptors in the environment. Right. So many plastics and different Chemicals that are disrupting hormone levels for men and women. Even, you know, when you look at fertility rates and sperm count rates and testosterone levels and estrogen levels and things like that, you know, the, like O3 or some of the deep search models or things like that. I think, unfortunately, physicians were trained that hormones were kind of an adjunct that were used for symptoms, and they weren't really used as a health optimizing kind of technology, if you will. So most of your doctors, especially OB GYNs, that really were taught, well, you give estrogen if somebody's having hot flashes and that's about the end of it, right? They weren't really taught about balancing hormones. And if you are going to take estrogen, you only take it for a year or two and then stop it when you're through menopause. The problem is when you're hormonally depleted, your tissues don't do well. Skin, hair, brain, heart, blood vessels, all of that start to suffer. Bones, for that matter, all of it starts to suffer. And it's really important to understand that Men need estrogen, right? They need estrogen. So taking a testosterone shot and then taking an astrozole to block estrogen production is really counterproductive. I mean, it may be important for certain people that are very fast metabolizers of testosterone into estrogen, but for the majority of men, you want to have estrogen on board. It's really good for your brain, your blood vessels, everything else. And for women, having some testosterone is also good. Progesterone will help there, DHEA will help there. But you want to have muscle mass, you want to have bone density, and you need a combination of both testosterone and estrogen to get that right. And so I think you need to try to track down somebody that focuses on hormone replacement therapy from a more holistic approach, right, where they're looking at the genetics and they're looking at thyroid as well, because thyroid, if it's not working properly, will make the hormones not work properly. And I think if a doctor is only looking at blood tests to make decisions on thyroid, they're missing the boat. You really need a resting metabolic rate to really know where your thyroid is set. You've got to do your research to find a doctor that's really competent in thyroid and hormone replacement therapy. And it's a bit of a struggle, quite honestly. Even people that advertise themselves as experts may not be going about it in the best way. So it's a little tricky.

Yeah, very important to do your research and to not just Be out there, let me get some testosterone and start injecting yourself or whatever it might be, really understanding how it all works and doing it supervised properly is key.

That's right.

Okay, let's see. Can you rewire an aging brain for youthful performance? How does brain flexibility change with age? And can we practice things like meditation, move or movement to reverse decline?

Yeah, I'm a big fan of optimizing the nervous system. I think that the nervous system is the key to everything. And I think one of the, you know, you've heard about people saying they're old and fixed in their ways, right? And what that means to me is that they've, they've basically landed on their answers and they're, they're, they're just married to those answers. And I really think youthfulness is curiosity, right? So you want to be married to your questions. You want to be curious about everything. It's like, oh, well, that's interesting. Let me learn more about that. You know, and you're constantly changing your answers to basically better serve your questions. And so, you know, we have five questions here, right? How good can we be? How do we make 100 to new 30, etc. Etc. And it's those questions that drive all innovation. So as you're aging, you want to make sure that you stay curious. You want to make sure that you find your questions and that you keep asking them over and over again. Even if you have an answer that you like, you can continue to iterate on it. Like, for example, you love exercise, but there are ways to iterate on that, right? It's like, well, how do we do that better? How do I challenge my nervous system better? I was just at a conference speaking in Arizona, and there were a number of people in the audience. All of them were very longevity minded. And I was showing them how to walk in figure eights, right, with their eyes open, then walk backwards with their eyes open, then walk forwards with their eyes closed, then walk backwards with their eyes closed as a challenge to the nervous system. So one of the things you want to do to keep your nervous system young is to constantly challenge it. Because if the nervous system isn't challenged, it gets lazy, right? And it gets sort of fixed, if you will. So challenging yourself. It's one of the reasons I like your workouts is because my theory is you can never really get in shape in a gym. You have to be in a context where there's variable things coming at you, right? Either the wind or the rocks or the tree you're climbing over or whatever it is or the movement that you're doing that's creating some. What shall I say, some unexpected variations that you have to adapt to. Your nervous system stays young and healthy when it has to adapt and has to recognize the environment and change. So you want to put yourself in new environments and where you're forced to adapt and change, where you're constantly learning new things, learn how to dance, learn how to play an instrument. You know, you've heard all these things, but you want to keep challenging the nervousness, make new friends, for that matter. Right. Have a new conversation about a topic you don't know anything about. That's a great way to learn something.

So I love that so many people were so afraid to go talk to new people. I actually just had people asking on the other podcast that I host, like, can you please do a show about meeting friends after a certain age? Because in your four 30s, 40s, it gets so much harder. And we're also used to being on our phones that even strike to talk to each other or be in an uncomfortable situation. We don't even look up when we're crossing the street anymore.

Right.

And I also think, you know, like you were saying, be curious. So it's like you can have a fitness routine. Obviously, I love having a fitness routine, but I also, especially this time of year, like getting outside and playing pickleball with my son, that's something new that. That we've taken up.

Yeah.

And having to try to learn that, what are the techniques of pickleball and how does this work and what. What are we supposed to do? And the agility of it all. So getting in the pool and swimming and trying new things so it doesn't have to feel tedious.

That's right. It's fun. It becomes fun.

Yeah.

You know. You know, you're doing the right thing when it's fun. Right. You know, you're doing the right thing when you feel like a beginner. And I think one of the things that works against us is that as we age, we start to identify with the fact that we're competent. Right. We were told in school you're getting good grades because you're competent at this. Right. And so now as an adult, it's like, well, you're good at that. So now I'm competent. So now my identity is tied up with being competent. So we're. We're reluctant to put ourselves in a situation where we're a novice and we have no idea how to do this. Right. And so I tell People imagine you're five years old and somebody just went buying a scooter and it's like, oh, I want to try that. You know, take that mindset. Right. Take that mindset into everything. When you go to a gym, when you go out for a hike, when you whatever and just be a kid again. It's, it's, it's fun. It's super fun.

Yeah, I love that so much. That's such a great one. And then just finishing touching on that, the question of meditation or breath work or getting into that very deep, relaxed relax.

Yeah.

Get your words out on them. Does that impact how our brain. It does fires itself.

It does it, it really calms it down. It'll calm down. Neuroinflammation, it enables things to actually work better. Like when we're so hyper focused or anxious or worried, it decreases the ability to make new memories. When we have a lot of cortisol in our system from stress, it decreases the hippocampals. Hippocampus's ability to actually put down new memories. And so super important meditation. And I'm a big fan of Braintap. It's a device where you wear like headphones with a visor. Binaural beats photobiomodulation and it can put you right into a meditative state in a matter of seconds, quite honestly. And so doing that is really restorative for your brain. There are other things to really improve cognitive abilities though too. And that's another conversation altogether. We can deconstruct that later. But in general, you know, meditation is wonderful for that.

I, I love, I'm anything that gets me into that relaxed state meditation, because for me, stress is a big one. And you've said it to me many times that when it comes to all of my health and longevity. Manage your stress, Autumn, or we're only going to get so far.

That's right. Well, I'll. Yeah, I'll have send you some information on Braintap. Maybe you can grab one.

Yeah, I would love to.

Yeah.

That's, that's all the questions that we got for this episode. Dr. Gladden, I think we gave great information. Is there anything else that we need to cover for everybody today?

Well, we are finding out some really, really interesting uses for medications in the longevity space. Medications that were originally developed for one purpose but are now actually being found to have significant impact on longevity itself. There's a category of diabetes medicines called SGLT2s that were introduced. Everybody's familiar with GLP1s like Ozempic and things, but SGLT2s were also introduced not long ago, and they don't have some of the side effects that GLP1s have, like muscle loss and bone density loss and things like that. They do control blood sugar by allowing people to excrete it out through the urine. It blocks the reabsorption of sugar through the kidney back into the bloodstream, so it's filtered out in the urine and not reabsorbed. So it could potentially increase somebody's urinary tract infection risk if they were prone to that. But it turns out now that it also increases autophagy. It activates ampk, it decreases mtor. So now it's like rapamycin plus metformin, you know, and it's also increasing your ability to prune senescent cells from your body by decreasing a molecule that actually exposes them, and then it's activating your natural killer cells to go prune them. So here's a medication that's actually has multiple longevity benefits. So we're really excited to. To look at these. And we now have new tests that can actually measure some of the things that this drug is actually doing. So lots of progress in terms of the true longevity stuff. Yeah.

Can I ask a question about that? Just curious, because I think that's fascinating. What would. I'm assuming it's still very much in the discovery phase of how it would be used for longevity, but when it comes to somebody like, who's already healthy and in good shape and at an ideal weight or a healthy weight, would that be something that they would potentially be able to use in a low dose or a micro dose for longevity?

Yes. Yes. The answer is yes. Yes. I'm going to start taking it actually, and I'll let you know how it works out.

I think that. Yeah, I think that's really interesting to hear and learn more about. So we'll definitely have to touch base on that one again in a future episode.

Yeah, lots of really cool stuff coming, so. Well, we really appreciate your questions. I hope that's helpful. And Autumn, always a pleasure.

Always a pleasure. I know I learned new things today. I hope everybody else did. And always, as always, thank you for having me on Dr. Gladden.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay.

Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. If you would like more information on what we've discussed or other topics, please reference the show notes or go to gladdenlongevitypodcast.com youm can also find us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter by Searching Gladden Longevity if you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe to get future episodes delivered to you and share our podcast or this episode with someone in your life that you may find benefit. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with another exciting episode. The Collide and Longevity Podcast is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute medical advice. This content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of a physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding your medical condition. The use of any information and materials linked to this podcast is at the listener's own risk.