Slow Aging Webinar: A New Approach to Longevity

All right, let's go ahead and get started with this conversation. The topic of the day is Slow Aging A new approach to longevity. I am Dr. Austin Perlmutter. I am a medical doctor and I have spent the majority of the last decade educating people doing research on topics related to lifestyle modification and specifically how our environment and our diet change who we are and modify our health. And so today's topic is going to be about something that we are seeing so much interest in and I think compared to other topics, even the topics that we've all discussed in my previous webinars that you can watch on demand, I know they're all available now. Slow aging or longevity. These are themes that really capture the interest of everyone. Longevity and the quality of those years is something that interests people across the lifespan. So whether people are investing in anti aging or are investing in ways to improve the quality of their age, these are all the conversations that I know all of you are happy are having in your, in your families, in your friend groups, in science, conversations with your healthcare practitioners. So this is something I believe that is relevant to all of us. If you were to ask, and I know we got some questions ahead of time, is there a specific age of person that this conversation is geared towards? The answer is no. This is actually a conversation that impacts everyone from people who are incredibly, incredibly young, much younger than myself, to people who are in their older years. This is the conversation because it is not just about, as you'll hear in a minute, just living more years. This is a question about infusing quality into those years and making sure that we don't get duped by all these conversations that often skip over the most important part of what it means to have good health as we age. So with that said, and just to set the tone, if you have questions that you want me to address, I will hopefully be able to get to those at the end. We'll see how we do on time. But you can drop those in the Q and A section of the Zoom and I will try to get to them again as time permits. But with that said, let's get started. Slow Aging A New Approach to Longevity. So the first thing I'll just say, disclaimer, I am not your healthcare practitioner. I'm not making recommendations for your health care. This is just general education. And anything you decide you want to change as a result of this should really be discussed with your health care practitioner. The goals that I'm going to set forth for this conversation, and they're pretty bold, there are some big topics to get through, but I know incredibly interesting to many, many people, myself included, are that we want to talk about what longevity actually represents as well as a concept that I will define for you called Healthspan, and where this stands today in 2024 or maybe a little bit later, depending on when you listen to this conversation or what does this mean in the context of the science and the general discussion that we're having as a population today. We're going to talk about what I think is a much more helpful reframing of how we can target pathways related to longevity. And that is going to be around slower cell aging. And we'll talk about that at detail or in detail. We're going to talk about some core mechanisms that are driving cell aging. We'll talk about why biological aging, which is a different way of measuring aging, is probably a better way of looking at aging than chronological aging. And chronological aging is as we'll discuss what most people are concerned about. But really that's not the core of what the science is telling us to care about. We're going to talk about two terms, epigenetics and the immune system. If you've heard my conversations here before, at Big Bold Health, we talk at length about immunity. And and the reason for that is because immunity is at the absolute center of what it means to increase well being and have an amazing quality of life, as well as to promote general health. We'll talk about diets. You all know that I care a lot about food. And at Big Bold Health, we are very, very focused on leveraging nutrition science to improve people's healthspan. And then we'll talk about some of the really incredible research that we just put out literally within the last couple of weeks, showing how food, and in particular plant based food, can act on pathways of longevity in a way that changes the entire dynamic, the entire conversation around how food influences longevity, around how food influences healthspan. And then we'll talk about I want to make sure I give you some tangible information here, some of the foods that are best associated with healthspan, some of the nutrients in those foods best associated with healthspan and where to find them. So we're going to begin here with this point, meaning that everyone is talking, it feels like in my world, and let me know in the comments and in the chat whether you feel this is the case. But it feels like everybody is talking about this theme, which is longevity. How do you promote longevity? How do I go to this wellness center where they're going to Give me some sort of a treatment to promote longevity. How can I live my life in a way that promotes longevity? So I'm curious again, as you've heard about this topic, where are you hearing about it and what are the types of things that you're hearing about longevity? When I look as a quick sample of where I am hearing about longevity and where I think many of you may be hearing about it, it's in the context of these types of news articles. So you may have heard of Brian Johnson. He's a very wealthy man who sold a company that you may have heard of called Braintree. And he in essence has used so much of this wealth to try to live forever. He has a Don't Die program in place. And he is one of kind of the leading voices in this conversation around how do we live a really long time? We also see, and I'm sure you've all seen this, that lots of people are talking about these hacks. What can you do? Whether it's buying a cold plunge pool where you sit in your backyard and maybe feel miserable for 10 minutes, but supposedly activate things within your body that can promote longevity. And you've probably heard, or maybe not about some of the recent initiatives, including the xprize initiative that is designed to promote research into how to live a longer, healthier life. And so this prize here, if you're interested in competing for this, is $101 million that you can receive if you find a solution to this. And I thought I'd just bring up here as an example too. These types of headlines are really permeating into every domain of our lives. So this is a Yahoo. Finance headline from a couple of days ago. 3 longevity stocks to Buy for Anti Aging Breakthroughs. So it is not just that people are thinking about this in the context of what they can do for themselves. This is becoming a theme, a trend where we now think that longevity is so important that we should invest in companies that are trying to tackle aspects of longevity because that might improve our stock portfolio. And just for what it's worth, I'm not giving you any investment advice. So whatever you happen to see up on this screen, I have absolutely no insight into whether those are or not good stocks. Okay, let's then take a step back from this and let's talk about what is longevity? And as we do this, add your comments to this video. What do you think longevity actually means? And I will give you here the definition that I think is most helpful. So I would say longevity is basically living a long life Not a very ingenious kind of definition of this, but longevity, when applied to other circumstances is kind of the same thing. When we apply it to our lives, it just means more years. And the key theme that I want to emphasize here in this conversation is that this is only part of what we should be prioritizing. We should be focusing on not just the number of years, but the quality of those years. And this is a little bit of a controversial thing to say, perhaps, but would you rather have decades of low quality life or a shorter amount of time, of incredibly quality years? And I think that it's important that we ask this question because by and large, as we'll talk about in a minute, people in the last decades have been living longer, but the quality of those years has actually declined. So what does this mean? We'll talk about this as it relates to health span. Here's a graph demonstrating what we've seen happen in the last couple of hundred years around just how long people are living. So if we look at the green graph, what you see here is that about 50% of people are dead by roughly age 20. That was in the early 19th century. And so you can see that curve keeps pretty low numbers after around age 20. And it's really rapid drop off in lifespan. By around the early 20th century, we were having a much higher level of people or percentage of people who were surviving into their 20s and then 40s. And. And here in the early 21st century, what we see is that people by and large are making it to their, what we now call kind of the middle of their lives, what would have been called in the past, you know, living a really long life at age 40. But there's more to this conversation than simply the years of life. And this is going to be again, a fundamental point in this argument that I want to make, which is that the lifespan conversation or the longevity conversation is not enough. That is not the single most important outcome. Because what we see here is that as we live more years, the quality of those years tends to dramatically drop off. And what that translates into is what we see in the United States, for example, which is that the longer we live, the more incredibly high the burden is placed on the health care system because we have so many age related conditions. And the point here to make is that we are living longer lives, but we're not necessarily improving the quality of those years. So this is really important. And I will comment. There's a comment that's made as far as these graphs don't necessarily take into account things like infant mortality. They are actually going to be showing though the percentage of people who are alive at each phase in their lives. And the main point that I want to make here is, is that as we look at the years of life versus the quality of those years, and so this is talking about percentage healthy, what do I mean by that? Well, let's say a person who is 100% healthy is able to do anything they want in the course of the day. They're not limited by health related issues. Now, we can define health in whatever form we want to. There are certain limitations that we can't necessarily get around. But it's saying based on the physiology that we have, what is kind of the best way that we can live our lives from a health perspective. So what we see here is that let's just say we start out very healthy when we're younger. Again, this isn't universal, but let's just assume here, because it is true, that most people start their lives kind of healthier as far as having less age related health problems than people who are later in their lives. And so here what we're talking about is the typical graph for the typical American, which largely can be generalized to how people are doing around the world. Which means that as we go on in our years of aging, that the quality of our health drops off. So by the time we get past, let's say 70 or so years of age, our quality of health is actually not so good. So we may still have a couple of decades ahead of us in terms of lifespan, but the health span is not so good. So healthspan is talking here about both the number of years and the quality of those years. And I think about that as the area under the curb. So it's all this space and it really is a much better metric I think, as far as what we should be prioritizing in as we look at the different things we can do for our wellness. So really the question here is how do we improve not just the number of our years, but the quality of our years? And how do we go towards a graph that is more like this? This has been called variably things like squaring the curve and basically prolonging health over our lifespans. But the point being here is the goal should be to maximize the quality and quantity of our years at the same time. So this is the background that I'm sure many of you are already aware of, basically saying it's not just about longevity, it's about the quality of those years. And Then the next part of this conversation is to say, if we agree, and I hope you agree, it feels pretty practical to me, what can we actually do to target this better health? Spanish and I would say of all the different frameworks that we could look at as it relates to how to target the pathways involved in health span, the idea of refocusing on a slower rate of cell aging is the key. This is what the research is telling us, this is what scientists are telling us. And I think this makes so much sense. I believe you'll follow along as I can kind of explain certain aspects of this. So here's the premise of it is that our health as an individual out in the world is a reflection of the health of our individual cells. And you have within you. I mean, I guess variably, depending on the day and depending on how big of a person you are, somewhere in the neighborhood of 39 trillion cells, it's a similar number, by the way, to the number of bacteria that live on you. But the health of those individual cells, it's going to determine the health of your individual organs. It's going to determine how you function as an individual. So it's really looking at what happens here with individual cells that can help us to understand where things can go right and where things can go wrong. Now, as we think about the health of our cells, this is a reflection of our cells ability to weather the challenges of our lives, to weather the years of our lives. And we know that there are a host of different factors that can contribute to either a better or worse weathering of our cells in the context of the years of our lives slowing cell aging. This is, I guess, a somewhat bold statement, is probably the single most important longevity strategy of the 21st century as it relates to a mechanistic strategy. Now, this isn't saying that there is a specific thing that we need to do, meaning this is the exact drug that is going to target it. Instead, what I'm saying is the general strategy of slowing cellular aging and improving the health of our individual cells and their ability to be resilient in the face of the invariable stressors that life will throw at us is the way that we need to reframe the conversation around longevity and certainly health span. So then the next question here is, what is it that is actually driving cell aging in our bodies? And if you've heard other people like Peter Atia or Mark Hyman discuss longevity, you've probably heard of a number of these pathways already. These pathways are always expanding. So at One point, there were less than 10 hallmarks of aging. Now it's 14. It might be 17, depending on the day. The point being, these are some of the key pathways at a cell level that have been implicating it, implicated in how well we age, how quickly we age. And to that end, this has been the focal point of scientists in terms of what we target to help prevent more premature aging. And really, again, I will emphasize this point, which is the goal is not to not age. I think that might be a little different from maybe what other people are saying. From all I can tell, you really can't stop the aging process, but you can slow the rate at which you're aging. You can slow dramatically the rate at the level of an individual cell, at the level of an individual organ. But we're not talking about, you know, some sort of cryotherapy level reversal. What we're talking about here is aging, meaning years of age is a process that is invariable, but what we can do is change the way those years actually influence ourselves. All right, I'm just going to go over a couple of these here because this tends to be an area that lots of people have questions around. And I just want to highlight a little bit of how this works. So damage to mitochondria. You probably know that the mitochondrion is, which is the singular of mitochondria, is a energy source for our cells. And when damage occurs in the mitochondria, which are also respond responsible for producing things like sex hormones, this translates into significant issues with the whole body. This has been linked to basically more quick aging impairments and autophagy. Autophagy is the ability of a cell to clean out and get rid of things that are not helping it. This, for many reasons, has a lot to say or a lot to do with how well we age. Issues with nutrient sensing. So this has a lot to do with metabolism, how we intake nutrients, and things that have certain macronutrients. Can we process them in a healthy way or not? Loss of protein balance. We'll talk about in a moment. Epigenetics as well. Loss of telomeres. So telomeres are the caps on the ends of our DNA that keep them safe. It's been shown that telomeres kind of decrease over time, and so anything we can do to decrease the rate of that loss or potentially increase the production of our telomeres seems like a good thing. Gut we've spoken about in previous webinars in detail, but changes in the gut are linked to Changes in aging, impaired immune balance and cellular senescence will be two things we will discuss in this conversation. Stem cells, kind of. For obvious reasons, stem cells are the ability to create new cells that can replace old ones. Intercellular communication. So this is the ability of cells to speak to each other in a positive way. And then genomic instability, which is how well are our genes able to be stabilized over the course of our lives. And if they become less stable, does that contribute to aging? It seems like it does. There are some points here that I'll just see people making as far as you can, reverse cellular age. And I think that what I would just say here is we'll talk about this in just a moment, but there's a huge difference between saying what we can do at the level of a cell versus how I, @ least I am looking at this at the level of an individual. And I do think we have by and large kind of seen some sensationalized claims which are aging backwards that don't make as much sense unless you start looking at the level of the cell. So great point that was made here about whether it's reversing aging or slowing it. And we'll talk about that at length in this conversation. So going back to this slide and looking at all these pathways, you have probably heard of many products on the market, many interventions on the market, everything from saunas to cold plunge pools, to laser therapy, to injections that promise to act on these various pathways. And just to give you some examples, you've probably heard of these NAD supplements or NAD interventions. Why is it that they are supposed to work? Well, they target DNA damage, mitochondrial health, epigenetics. So really what we're saying here is that all of these popular anti aging longevity interventions act on these pathways. So again, NAD acts on multiple pathways that I just described. Cold exposure, cold exposure, which you've seen popularized through the cold plunge pools, potentially those cryotherapy chambers that you get into and they bring your temperature way down. These interventions are thought to target mitochondria, immune balance. Sauna, on the other hand, is believed to activate heat shock proteins. And these are things that are involved in protein signaling, mitochondrial health, autophagy and immunity. And I guess just real quick, we're going to be covering some science here. There's going to be some data involved. I know that this might be a little bit of a bigger chew for some of you who aren't necessarily ready for a ton of science at once. What I would say is you can always come back, watch this presentation later. You can pause the presentation. You can learn more if you watch the replay so you don't have to get it. All right, now, this is definitely gonna be one of my more nutrient dense presentations. All right, so what I think I've described to you, and hopefully you agree, is that as we look at longevity, we need to look instead at a combination of years and of quality of those years, which we will call health span. And as we're looking at the kind of targets of what we can do to act on healthspan, we really wanna be thinking about a slowing of cellular aging. There is some indication of the potential to reverse aspects of cellular aging, but I think that slowing the rate of cellular aging is the best substantiated method of thinking about how we can target healthspan. And one of the points that I think is so important for me to make is while there are so many things on the market that promise to target longevity by kind of looking at one of these specific pathways, we've got to ask this question of what actually is driving our health span. And so, as a conventional doctor who has kind of now become completely enmeshed in this lifestyle medicine movement, I think there is a huge liability for all of us. If we get sucked into this perception that the best interventions for healthspan are going to be found in something like an intervention that only happens once we're unwell, that is a complete disservice to what we know about what is actually driving healthspan. And when we think about this reality, which is that the most important risk factors that are driving us to have a worse health span are things in our environment that we're consuming, it is, to me, just a complete loss if we don't talk about that as well. So we will be talking now about environment in the context of healthspan. And if you think about our environment, and I know that this is already a conversation with many of you who you'll probably have strong opinions on this, but if we were to ask this question of does the modern day environment foster good healthspan or does it foster the exact opposite? My perception of this is pretty polarized towards what we consume today in terms of the content, the food, the air, other environmental toxins, is dramatically detracting from our potential health span. And this gets to a conversation of the exposome. So this is a term that you may have heard of before, but it's basically this question of we have our genes, we have our cells, what are they being exposed to? And are these exposures promoting the Best versions of our, of our genetic expression promoting the best versions of our cells or is it having the exact opposite effect? So this is again a concept of the exposure. We would define this as the totality of environmental exposures a person experiences throughout their lifetime from conception to death. Physical, chemical, biological and social factors. And as I said before, these are things that directly impact our health span. And if there's something you take away from this, you know we're going to be talking about, we're already talking about all this really interesting science, all of these studies that are being done. It's that you've got to still care about the basics. We have not reached the time in life, in my opinion, even with all of our modern day science where we can afford to wait until we need some sort of a potent intervention when things have already gotten out of hand, we've got to be paying attention to what we're taking in across the lifespan. And I think that's what makes me so excited to see so many of you engaged in this conversation. Because I know that each of you in your own spheres of influence are going to be advocating for these types of things. And so that's how change actually happens. You know, it's, it's each of us basically saying this stuff matters to me being a little bit perceived as weird, I'm sure many of you can resonate with this. But being the person who says actually I'm not going to eat that, or actually I don't want to skip out on my good sleep tonight, or actually I need to go for a walk, I don't want to sit here and continue to consume this television. That's the stuff that is most studied to improve healthspan. So I know I'm cutting to the chase here a little bit, but we'll talk about that at length later. So let's go back to the exposome. The exposome directly impacts our health span. And the point to make here is that the most important variables that contribute to our health span are not our genetics. I'm going to say that again. We know that the most important things that contribute to the quality of, and the number of the years that we have on this earth are not the genes that we were given. There are exceptions, absolutely certain people and certain conditions are exceptions. But for most of us, and most of the time this is a true statement. What that means is that we each have incredible opportunity to write our futures. But the point that I made before, which is so, so important to understand is you've got to Start making changes to deviate from the status quo. Because our exposome is increasingly so overloaded with inputs that program our health span into the gutter. So we've got to make changes to that. All right. If we think about what can be done as it relates to factors that contribute to health span, you know, again, you always hear about all these sensationalized new things that are supposed to revolutionize what we think about longevity. But what do we actually know? So smoking turns out to be one of the most toxic things as it relates to healthspan. So we know that people who stop smoking can add about two years to their lifespan. And if you're a young person and you don't smoke, that can add about five to six years to your lifespan. Not trivial. Any amount of exercise, some exercise, moving your body will add several years on average to a person's lifespan. When we think about alcohol, so alcohol is an interesting topic. I've done a lot of deep dives into this subject, specifically as it relates to brain health. But when we look at heavy consumers of alcohol, we see that people who drink more alcohol are at a dramatically higher risk for developing age related conditions. But more importantly, we have some data here showing that people who drink around 25 drinks a week will on average live between four and five years less. And between one to two drinks a day is around six months shorter. So we can kind of debate the relative merits of this. Many people would take six months of a shorter life to be able to have a drink here and there. But the point here to make is that we know that high levels of alcohol consumption do dramatically decrease health span and lifespan for most people. What about sleep? Getting good sleep has been shown to contribute up to 5 years of additional lifespan for men and 2.4 years of additional lifespan for women. And then additional variables, heavy stress. I always have the caveat here. I think it's a very terrible thing when people say don't experience stress. If you're experiencing stress, you need to not have it. That is ridiculous. But it is important to know that there are well studied ways that we can decrease the amount of stress that we experience. And that's important in the context of understanding that chronic stress absolutely degrades our cellular health and contributes to aging. Finally, I'll just bring this up. And again, what an honor to be here talking with all of you in the context of the conversation that really matters. But social connection is interacting with other people is maybe one of the most important variables that has been shown to extend healthspan. So Basically just spending time with, contacting, enjoying the company of others is an amazing healthspan intervention. Okay, I see some wonderful comments here about some of these things. If you have any thoughts on some of the other non nutrient variables contributing to healthspan, add them to the comments. I'd love to see what you have to say. Okay, next up, here's a point that I would like to make which is most solutions for longevity are just a lot of hype. And here's kind of how I see this field. Right now people are on the hunt for the fountain of youth. They're thinking that this is what's going to happen, that we're going to have a scientific breakthrough, there's going to be some sort of a product, it'll invariably be incredibly expensive, right? But for the low, low price of $100,000 a year, we too can live for an additional 20 to 40 years. Now that I would argue is not the way that we should be having this conversation. And again, I want to kind of democratize this in the context of you understanding that the best studied interventions to enhance your health span are largely things that are not going to cost a lot of money. It's improving quality of sleep, it's moving your body, it is engaging in some sort of connection with, it's spending time in nature, it's doing mindfulness and anti stress intervention. That is what we know are the best studied ways to promote healthspan over the course of the lifespan. And so I think that's, that's just really important. It doesn't mean this won't change. It doesn't mean there won't be the breakthrough. But as we sit here, as we talk in the 21st century, that's the status of the information. So here's, here's the way that I think most of us hear about longevity interventions. We think, okay, I'm not going to worry about it. I'm just going to do what I would like to. And then when things go wrong, I will go see my doctor and I'll say, hey Doc, I'm having issues related to aging. You know, I've gotten to my 70th birthday, things aren't working the way they should. What do you got for me? What's going to work to get rid of these issues? I don't want to change my life. I don't want to make major changes to my diet, but I would like to do something that's going to fix my problems. Additionally, and this has been a real big uptick even in the last decade is we look for superficial ways or outward ways to look younger. And I don't mean superficial as far as meaningless. What I mean here is we look for ways to make ourselves externally look younger rather than asking what's happening at the level of ourselves. This is kind of a larger conversation on human psychology and I'm not trying to have any sort of say as to whether this is good or bad. The point being, however, that we're just looking at one aspect of this larger conversation around what is happening within our bodies and specifically what is happening at the level of our cells. Next up, we stress over our birthdays and we say we'll do better. I think we've all been around or been that person where, okay, now it's the next year. I don't really get excited about the fact that there's another candle on the cake. But this year I'm going to pay attention to my wellness and I'm going to start taking some steps and invariably we get to a New Year's resolution kind of scenario where we get really excited about it for a week or two. We join the gym, we make the dietary changes, and lo and behold, a month later we're back to where we started. We find ourselves eating the same foods, not exercising, watching three hours of TV each day. So again, this is a typical approach that doesn't actually pay off too well in the long run. And then the last one, which speaks to what I just described is we tend to put our faith in these revolutionary new cures for aging. And that I think goes to number one here, which is we don't want to make any major changes to our lives. We don't want to start moving, we don't want to start getting outside. We want to keep doing what we're doing, scrolling on our phones and then we want to wait for a scientist to discover the latest thing. And we're going to put our faith in that. So these are all issues that can come up because again, we're really not getting to the core question of what is happening at the level of ourselves. I think two of the biggest areas that we should look for answers in this space is one, looking at epidemiology, where are there people and not just a person? Because you've probably heard this one. I've heard this one many times. My 100 year old grandma smoked and drank a ton of alcohol each day and look at her, she's still alive at 100. To me, that's not necessarily the most helpful information. But if you start Finding a community of people who are all living to age 100 and who are doing the same sorts of things. Basically a blue zone. That seems to be something we should pay attention to because it's no longer just a single data point. It is showing something reproducible. So here we're talking again about places like blue zones, where people tend to not only live longer, but have a higher quality of life or health span across those years. The other part of this, which is going to be the focus of the rest of this presentation, is to rethink the idea of what aging looks like and how we measure age. So I think this is generally the way we look at aging from a chronological perspective. We celebrate our birthday. How many times have we been around the sun each year with a birthday cake, with some presents, with people celebrating us in our existence? But there's something really important that is lost when we compress aging into our age only in birthdays. And the question I would pose to you all is, what if this was the same guy? Meaning. Meaning what if these were identical twins, these two gentlemen in the middle? Now, if that was the case, one might say that if they were, let's say they were both 40 years old, that there's more to how well we age than just the number of years that we have been on this Earth. And this gets to where the actual science is meeting some of the expectation around how we rethink longevity. So this is not chronological aging as far as number of years around the sun. This is a concept called biological aging. And so I'm going to pause here for just one second, and I'd love for you, if you're watching this at any time, or if you're watching this live, to let me know in the comments. Have you heard about biological aging before? Is this still a novel concept, or is this something that you've heard about before? And if you have heard about it before, who did you hear it from? Because this is still pretty new science, but it is absolutely changing the game. And take a quick sip of coffee. You let me know if you've heard about this before. All right, so we're hearing from many people that they've heard about this before, from various webinars, from various groups, from various experts. So it's amazing to know that this is becoming a little bit more widespread as far as the understanding what biological aging attempts to address is not the number of years that we have been on this planet, but how well we are doing in the context of those years. So how are those years Affecting ourselves, how are they affecting us? Which is a much bigger, better question to ask than how many years have we been on Earth? If you think about all of the variables that matter, because whatever it is that you care about, you probably care about that thing more than you care about the number of years, right? So whether it's having better mental state, whether it's having the ability to go on longer hikes, whether it's having clear cognition. So you can think very well when you go to your job or when you're with your family. We know that as the years go on, those things can decline. But it's not inevitable. And it's certainly not a one to one. There are certain people who get to age 80 with clear thinking and with amazing physical health, and other people who get to age 70. And all of those things have been taken away. So it is not just a question of the years, it's how well we do in response to those years. This is the thing that makes me so excited about talking about biological age. Chronological age is fixed. I mean, sure, I've been around people who kind of lie right, about their age. They say, oh, I'm actually celebrating my 20th birthday when it's clear they're in their 50s. The point though here being chronological age is fixed, right? There's an objective how many times you've been around the sun. But biological age is changeable. We can change our biological age because it is a reflection of how well our cells are dealing with the years on this earth. So this is a very different reframe. Another point to make here is unlike chronological age, which refers to all of us, we think about, well, I, me Personally, I am 39 years old. We don't necessarily think about, well, my finger here is 39, but my stomach is 38. We think about it as an individual. Biological age, conversely, can be seen as systemic, can be seen as an organ specific or at a cellular level, what is the biological age? So I think it's far more helpful because what we're now recognizing is that our bodies don't all age at the same rate. You might have eyes that are the eyes of a 25 year old, but you may have a liver that is the liver of a 50 year old. So it's not so helpful just to say, well, I'm 30. It's maybe more helpful to say, well, my liver's aging more rapidly. My eyes are actually doing really well. What should I do in order to kind of bring down the rate of aging for the liver? How do I Optimize so that my eyes continue to be in such a good state of health. So the point here I'm making is that if we look at biological aging, this is a better way of looking at longevity and health span than the typical way we think about chronological age. And I would argue it just brings in so much less blame and so much less of these pointed things of making fun of or otherwise kind of thinking about people based on their years of life. You know, that, honestly, is a very superficial measurement. Let's celebrate people for looking at other aspects of how they're doing. Okay. I wanted to give you one visual representation of what this means in addition to the people. So let's say we have this car. This is not a real car. There's no brand on the car, but it's a generic car. It was built in 2020. However, you have multiple versions of this car built in 2020. And the car on the left has seen some things. It has had a rough go. It's been in a few accidents. It may be landed on the bottom of a lake for a little while. So even though it's only four years old, it is the equivalent of a car that is 40 years old because of the amount of damage that it has achieved over that time. On the other side, there's this car that was same built at the same time, incredibly well cared for. Right. So this is a car that has been kept in a garage, only driven around the neighborhood. It's actually two years old, relatively speaking, because it is in better shape than the same car that was produced in 2022. So you can see here, just as a representation, if we think about what this looks like in terms of humans, it's not about the number of years, it's about how those years have affected us. Now, as we look at how do we actually measure biological age, this is where we start to get to some of the more technical science. As I mentioned before, telomeres, which are in essence, the protective end caps on the top of our chromosomes, they tend to decrease as we age. So looking at telomere length is one way of looking at biological age. You can also look at functional tests. So hand grip strength, interestingly enough, correlates with aspects of how well we age. People with stronger hand grip tend to have better functional health. So this is a way of basically looking at, okay, what is your strength? Because that tells us about how your immune cells are doing and how your muscle cells are doing, how your resilience is doing. And that actually might be a better metric of your biological age than simply looking at how many years of age you have. Standard labs are increasingly being used for this. So looking at the things that you would get in your typical doctor's office and then running algorithms on them sometimes, or just looking at various cell counts, metabolic measurements. We know things like insulin and glucose can also correlate with biological age. Epigenetics and immune measurements. So that'll be the subject of this conversation. These are two of the areas that I think the research has been incredibly compelling. It's going to get a little bit technical. So here's the warning for you all. We will be getting into some pretty new science in this space, but if you bear with me, I'm sure that you'll come out the other side with a pretty good understanding. And again, you can watch this lecture. Again, there's lots more resources on this subject in various places. You can go to bigbold health.com and learn more there. But we'll talk about that at length. So how do you measure biological age? We've got epigenetics and immune measurements. We're going to talk about both of these in turn. Epigenetics. Let's do a quick raising of hands here. Again, if you are watching this live or if you're watching this later on on YouTube or another channel, who here has heard of epigenetics before? And secondarily, who here feels like they understand epigenetics? All right, we're getting some good, some yeses, some people who say they know about it. Who here has heard of epigenetics is again, the question. We got somebody who's heard and understand of, understands epigenetics. Lots of yeses. Okay, this is great to see. Epigenetics is, I will just say it is a bit more complicated science. So it's amazing to see how so many of you have actually heard of this before, because I'm not going to lie, it's a little bit into the, the nerdy science domain of what is usually discussed. But it is absolutely revolutionary as far as what it represents. So let's cover some of the basics of epigenetics. In essence, if you think about your DNA, historically, we've known that our DNA basically, you know, contains our genes, it produces proteins, it sends signals throughout our body. It is the kind of the tapestry from which all of our cells are built. And we've historically thought about this as relatively fixed, meaning we have DNA that we inherit from our mom, from our dad. It gets kind of combined. So we have around 50% from each. And this DNA, which is grouped into genes, turns into various proteins, and in essence, turns into who we become. And so we've thought about the idea that who we are is a reflection of our DNA, and then in addition to the DNA, we get some sort of overlay from our life's experience, but that those two things are different, meaning that half of who we are, let's say, comes from our DNA, and half of who we are comes from the environment that we live in. Epigenetics has changed that conversation forever and basically irreversibly, because what it says is that the environment influences the way our DNA is being used. So if you had DNA and environment, they used to be separate. They are now completely linked because our environment changes the way our DNA is being used. Again, this is complicated stuff. There are many different ways of looking at epigenetics across different degrees of complexity. But what I would make sure that you all understand is that epigenetics is the study of how DNA can be changed in terms of how it is expressed based on markings that go on top of the DNA epigenetics. And the most important of these markings are going to be methyl groups or DNA methylation, and then modification to histones. So the point here being that marks are placed on our DNA and determined how that DNA is being used, whether that DNA or a gene is going to be increased or decreased or anything in between. An environment we now know plays a key role in how our epigenetics are programmed. One of the things here to understand about epigenetics is that kind of, by definition, epigenetic marks require some degree of being converted from one cell to another. So after a cell divides, epigenetic marks persist on that cell, and it can either be from one cell division, or it can be actually transferred from one person to another, meaning from mom to a fetus. So epigenetics can be trans generationally inherited. Heritability, again, is part. And I know this is something that was commented on here, but yes, we can basically take epigenetics from our parents and they can get passed on to us. But the reversibility aspect of it is what makes it interesting. So unlike DNA, where we basically say, well, we got the DNA from my mom, from my dad, half and half, we know that epigenetics can, to some extent, be modified based on how we live our lives. How does this relate to the process of aging? Well, why it's so interesting is because epigenetics allows us to leverage the incredible power of AI, machine learning and large dataset analysis to create second level algorithms that tell us all sorts of things about a person. I'm going to be talking about that in detail, so if that was confusing, just bear with me. But when you measure epigenetics from a single sample, you can actually provide millions of data points. So in the study that I'll be telling you about here in a moment, we measured 850,000 data points per person, per sample, and we measured those samples twice. So that is basically over a million data points for one person. So that allows us to do really deep interrogation of this, where if you were looking, let's say at a red blood cell count, it's a pretty static number, you have some number of red blood cells, and you can look at that same number of red blood cells the next day. Maybe it's gone up, maybe it's gone down. But with epigenetics, you now have hundreds of thousands, up to millions of data points that you can compare. And so that allows us to extract a whole lot more data than used to be the case with individual lab markers. So we take all this data, right? We take these hundreds of thousands or millions of data points and then we plug them into computer algorithms. And there are many different algorithms. We have names for some of them, specifically clock algorithms, because these algorithms take all this epigenetic data and they give us a sense as to a person's biological age. There have been many of these epigenetic clocks developed over the last 10 years. And it does get technical pretty quick. But the understanding here for you all is to know that we take the data, we run it through a clock, and based on the output of that clock, it will give us a pretty solid, in most cases, sense as to a person's biological age. And that biological age tells us a whole lot of things about their risk for various things or their general wellness. So I know this again can get a little bit technical, but that's the basic understanding is we take this data, which is the markings on top of a person's DNA, primarily methylation, we run it through an algorithm, and then that algorithm can tell us something about that person's biological age, in addition to a lot of other stuff, which we'll talk about here in a moment. Key point, epigenetics change over the lifespan due to internal and external events. And we know that epigenetic markings influence longevity related outcomes. So measuring a person's epigenetics isn't just like knowing a person's chronological age, where we'd Say, okay, well, Epigenetics says you're 60 years old, and so that's interesting. It tells us about what else is happening in your body. With epigenetics, we know that those markings that tell us something about a person's biological age are markings that also influence aspects of aging. So the epigenetic markings might be occurring on genes that relate to longevity. So what I'm trying to say here is you get kind of two bits of data. One is to say, here's your biological age, and the other one is actually to say, well, we have a sense as to these markings change the way you're aging, as I mentioned before. But as I'll mention again, epigenetic marks are partially reversible or modifiable. This is not to say that every epigenetic marking on our DNA can be changed, but rather that there are certain areas of epigenetics that we know do change in response to our environment, including things like nutritional intervention. This is really changing the entire conversation around how do lifestyle modifications and even pharmaceuticals influence health? Because they can target epigenetic marks and in doing so, can influence outcomes related to things like longevity. I would also just say, again, there are many forms of biological age. Epigenetics is the most common way in which biological age is being measured right now. It is not the only way. It is not necessarily the way that everyone agrees is best, but the general consensus is that epigenetics is the most promising way of detecting biological age. So, again, here, just to give you a sense, there are many different ways to measure biological age. Epigenetics is kind of a front runner, in part because many of these algorithms have been, well, substantiated. They're also developed by the most leading academic institutions in the United States around the world. But we also want to talk here in this conversation about immunity, because I think this is an area that can be seen as far more accessible to many people than epigenetics. If you're here, if you're in this webinar, chances are you've heard me, heard the big, bold health team talk about immunity. I do think that immunity is just about the most misunderstood aspect of the conversation around health right now. And the reason for that is to understand that immunity is not just the defense system. That tends to be the way that we hear about it. You go to the airport, you pick up some vitamin C. Before you get on the plane, you say you're going to boost your immune system, and that's all there is to it. The reality is that the immune system is so much more nuanced and complex that these types of things don't even scratch the surface as far as what the immune system is. So one thing to understand is that the immune system programs the entire body. Immunity is not just, you know, one place. It is throughout the body and it changes the entire body. And we know that the environment and what happens within our bodies program the immune system. We know the immune system is heavily influenced by the makeup of the gut microbiome and the gut state. And maybe the most important takeaway here is to know that the immune system changes mood, changes how we think, changes how we behave, and basically impacts every part and every organ system in our bodies. So again, you may have heard me lecturing on this before, but if this is of any interest to you, again, that we have lots of resources at Big Bold Health. If you're interested in more brain specific immunity, I've got lots of stuff on my website as well and on my YouTube channel. Point being that immunity changes every aspect of who we are. Now, as we look at the topic of immunity and has it as it relates to aging, most people as they age will have changes in their immune system that don't really positively influence health span. So as we age, our immune system ages. This tends to be in a way that is disadvantageous to health span. What are some of these changes? Well, the immune system is less able to fend off new threats. Our immune function declines. There's a term for this called immunosenescence. And we're less able to make fresh new immune cells. We also have less diversity of our existing immune cells. And point here being as we age, our immune system tends to age. An aged immune system both reflects and actually drives worse health span. So everyone, follow me. What I'm saying here, what I'm saying is that as we age, our immune system tends to age alongside us. This is both a reflection of unhealthy aging and can drive unhealthy aging, meaning a shorter health span. All right, like I said, we're covering some science today. And if anything that I just said was either a little bit too much or a little bit too much at the time for you, you can always go back. Watch this. Later we'll be sending out the replay. And if you're watching the replay, you can always go back and listen again. But the core bullets so far is first of all to understand it's not about longevity, it's about health span. It's not about number of years, it's about Quality and number of those years. It's about maximizing the area under the curve, which is a function of both quality and quantity of our years left on this planet. If we want to promote healthspan, which I would argue we want to promote healthspan, I mean, this seems like about the most important thing for most people, then we should think about how can we slow the rate of aging at the level of our cells. This is so different from the largely cosmetic or otherwise superficial or sensationalized ways that we tend to see conversations around longevity today. If we want to look at how to measure cell aging, then we should be thinking about biological age, not chronological age. When we look at biological age, epigenetics is the most common way in which we look at that. And just side note here, you can measure epigenetics using multiple samples. The most common samples used today are going to be from the blood. And if you're sampling from the blood, you're basically measuring immune cells. You can also sample from the mouth. Some epigenetics companies actually sample from within the mouth. But point being here, that most epigenetics tests actually are measuring your immune cells. So you are getting simultaneously an understanding of the immune system and epigenetics. So here's the question. What can we do to help slow aging as measured using biological age? And more specifically, how does this relate to diet? I think this is maybe one of the most important questions of our day. It's certainly something many, many people ask me about. Come to Big Bold Health to learn more about. So how does diet influence biological aging? How can it influence a slower cell aging? Here's the question. How does diet influence healthspan? That's kind of the macro question here. What do we know as far as which diets around the world are associated with healthspan with exceptional longevity and quality of those years? Now, I will tell you before we jump in here that anytime you talk about diet there will be people with different perspectives. They will say, oh well, you can't eat plants because plants have anti nutrients. You can't eat meat because all meat is bad. I'm going to try to do my best here to be agnostic in this and say here is what the research tells us. And I'm not trying to say that there is one diet that you absolutely shouldn't follow or one diet that you absolutely should follow. What I am going to talk about here is that certain dietary patterns are associated with exceptional longevity and health span. So what do we know? First off, Mediterranean diet, which is arguably My favorite diet, because it is the most strongly associated with better brain health outcomes. And the Mediterranean diet is one that is rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains. We can debate a little bit what we mean when we say whole grains. Is it all grains? Is it just a certain amount of grain? Legumes, nuts, olive oil also includes in many contexts. There's no, you know, universally agreed Mediterranean diet. But as we look at the protein content of this, it does incorporate primarily fish and then poultry, and it deprioritizes red meat. Now, I know many of you might be saying, wait, there are regions in the Mediterranean where they do eat red meat. And that's what I'm saying here is when we look at this, it isn't some sort of a universal agreed upon protocol. What we're saying is generally this is a diet that is rich in minimally processed foods, tends to prioritize things like fish and to some extent, poultry instead of red meat. And by and large, people who eat a diet consistent with these basic tenants, and I should say, who also optimize other parts of their lives, they're not doing this in isolation, tend to live longer lives and tend to have better quality of those lives. Next up, the Okinawan diet. So Okinawa is in Japan. If you've seen the Blue Zones documentary with Dan Buettner, you'll see lots around this. But this is a diet that is lower in meat. It's vegetables, There's a specific type of polyphenol, rich sweet potato, tofu, which is soy, of course, and fish. Um, this is thought to be a diet that is a little bit lower in calories. You may have heard that a lower calorie diet tends to promote longer lifespan. Um, I'd say, again, you gotta put it into balance. If you're super frail because you're never eating, and you might live a long life but not have quality of those years, that's maybe a worthy consideration. But again, this is a blue zone. These are foods that people tend to eat here. And I'm not trying to say you have to eat this diet. I'm simply pointing out this is what some of the data is telling us. There's also the Nordic diet. Nordic diet is similar to the Mediterranean diet, but it's got some additional components here. More fatty fish, which makes sense based on the fact that in Scandinavia they had more access to fatty fish like salmon and herring. Again, some whole grains, berries, minimally processed diet. That's always going to be the key here. Finally, Blue zone diets. This is based on regions of the world where people tend to live a long life, some of which we've already mentioned, but also Sardinia, Icaria Ecolla, which is a peninsula in Costa Rica. One of the cornerstones of these tends to be that they are rich in plant based foods with more limited meat consumption. What I'm going to tell you here is that you're always going to hear some degree of variability in what is the quote, best diet. And I think what we need to be thinking about isn't that, you know, there's one diet that everybody should eat, but you need an overlay as to what your personal objectives are. So in my case, I care so, so much about my brain function. I've had multiple members of my family who have been diagnosed with issues related to brain function. And I'm really, really concerned about trying to optimize my diet based on the latest research for what to do for my brain. In that respect, the Mediterranean diet is the best studied diet for brain wellness. So that tends to be what I do. But is that necessarily the best diet for maintaining the healthiest weight? Some people might argue that in certain context, decreasing carbohydrate and working with a healthcare practitioner on that could be better for certain people with metabolic issues. So what I'm trying to say here is, in regard to longevity, here is the data we have epidemiologically as far as these are groups of people who tend to live a long and healthy diet. But please consider if this is of interest to you and you want to make substantial changes to work with somebody who can help you to layer in your personal objectives so you don't find yourself in the same spiral that most people find themselves, which is to say I made a dietary change, I stuck to it for a month, I had some positive changes, and then I went back to eating what I've always eaten because that's what was comfortable or because it didn't seem meaningful enough. We are not talking about short term fixes, we are talking about decades of life. So it's really about finding sustainability. Okay, let's talk now a little bit about nutrients. We've talked about diets. What about nutrients? So some of the nutrients that are best associated with healthspan. I'm going to keep this a little bit broad, but healthy fats, including omega 3 fatty acids, polyphenols and fiber. I would say if you were to look at kind of the core tenants of these diets that are associated with good healthspan, these are three of the nutrient groups that really come up consistently. Now, again, There is active debate and you probably have some thoughts on this as well. What about things like anti nutrients? And should a person who was born in Iowa but moved to Sardinia be eating a pineapple on every third Thursday? What we're trying to discuss here is general ideas as to what the research tells us. And what I would say is for most people, simply adopting a diet richer in minimally processed foods is going to be incredibly beneficial. But if you're looking for the higher degree of nuance, something around, well, how much protein should I be consuming for healthspan? Should I be coupling it with resistance exercises in the gym or should I be walking five miles a day? That's where I think it really makes sense to work with a healthcare provider who can tailor these approaches to your goals. Okay, here's the question that gets us to the most recent research that is available. And I know this to be the case because this case it is my actual research with the team at Big Bold Health. So here's the question that gets us to the nerdy science of this, which is to say starting tall at the or starting at the beginning, health span should be the goal. We know that certain lifestyle strategies are associated with more health span. We know certain diets are associated with better health span. We know certain nutrients in those diets are linked to better health span. But can we actually change metrics of cell aging? Can we help slow cell aging measured by biological age? In this case, epigenetics using dietary modification? And this again gets us right up to the line of asking these questions as to what can science tell us about mechanisms and practical strategies. So here, the focal point for the research that I was part of is this idea that polyphenols, which are a group of 8,000 plus molecules found naturally occurring within plant foods, and to some extent animal foods, but primarily plant foods. And how can they act on cellular aging? On biological aging? We have seen a flurry of research in just the last decade suggesting that these molecules, these polyphenols, which are found naturally in plant based foods, are not just throwaway molecules and they're not just antioxidant molecules. Instead, these are data that come from plants that when we consume or when our microbiome acts upon them and then we basically absorb what comes from the microbes, can act on a host of different processes in our bodies. So they have been associated with autophagy, with senescence, with immune aging, and with epigenetic effects. And if you'll recall from earlier in this conversation, these are some of the core pathways that are involved with healthspan. So this is interesting. We have primarily seen this data in cell data. So this is not in vivo, it's in vitro, which is always a good starting place. But we need to have a better sense as to does it do in humans. So this is what we are attempting to test. And this is the preprint study, which is now available online, which is for our paper, the impact of a polyphenol rich supplement on epigenetic and cellular markers of immune A pilot clinical study, which is a mouthful. And saying that as the person who helped to come up with this title, I understand it's a lot of words. What did we actually look at here? What we wanted to see is that when you gave healthy humans a dose of polyphenols, if it changed pathways related to slowing cellular aging or just in general influencing cell aging. And this is in the context of, as I said, a host of other publications that are looking at the role of these molecules called polyphenols and how they can influence aspects of aging. And these are being published around the world and across a diversity of different articles and different journals. You can see nature, aging, biochemical pharmacology. These are really interesting topics to a number of researchers because it's in the context of knowing that people who eat diets richer in polyphenols tend to just do better. But why and how? And is there something there that we can take out so that we can help to make this more available to the public? So here's what we did and for those who are tuning in, who are going to say, I want to learn more, you know, I want tons more science. This study is now available. You can go online. It's open access and preprint, so you can read through, read all the specifics of it. But I'm going to do a summary here because it is many, many pages of very technical information. We did this study with 50 people. So these were people who had to be generally healthy before they came into the study. 40% male, 60% female, and their ages range from 18 to 85. We used a supplement called HTB Rejuvenate, which is based around the polyphenols that are found in a plant called Himalayan tartary buckwheat. The reason we did this is because we knew that historically people who eat either tartary buckwheat or foods like tartary buckwheat tend to have better wellness outcomes. And so we knew that if a person was to get if we were going to discover what is it within this plant that seems to carry this positive message. We need to study the nutrients found in this plant. So here we are using polyphenols that occur naturally in Tardary buckwheat and things like quercetin, rutin. Turns out tartary buckwheat is one of the highest sources of rutin, which is a polyphenol in the entire plant kingdom. So we gave people a little over one gram worth of these polyphenols from Tardary Buckwheat a day. And we measured their epigenetics and their immune cells using epigenetics after 90 days of intervention and at the start of this intervention period. So here is what we found. If you've never seen one of these, it's called the volcano plot. And in essence, what this told us was at a level of sensitivity, which was a p value of 0.001 or less. Sorry, 0.01 or less. How many of these changes were statistically significant? So what we're looking at here is coming back to how we look at epigenetics. Were there changes in methylation, meaning were there places where a methyl group was added and were there places where a methyl group was removed? Because methylation changes the way that DNA is being used. That's basic epigenetics. What we found is that 551 gene sites were hypo methylated and 336 gene sites were significantly hyper methylid. So I should just say here, this is in essence the complex science of doing the preliminary research. Right? So what you're seeing here is basically the forefront of our understanding of how food influences human wellness and specifically health span. To put this into a little bit easier to understand context, what we showed here is that there were over 800 statistically significant changes in epigenetics as a reflection of this 90 day period of people consuming this supplement that was basically polyphenols found in Himalayan Tardary buckwheat. So beyond this, what actually changed? These epigenetic changes were found to be related to pathways that were connected to immunity and aging. In particular, we found that these, these changes in epigenetics related to a 22% or, sorry, 22 fold change in ceramide kinase activity. And if you're new to any of this science, I mean, honestly, unless you're a biochemist, you probably not heard of the ceramide kinase pathway. We're going to talk about that in just a moment. We also found a 6.7x change in COP9 activity. So what does that mean, beyond being interesting science and using some terms that you probably haven't heard about before? Well, we need to actually drill into what these pathways do, and we're going to pick ceramide kinase because as I just described, that was the biggest change in statistical significance in pathways that we saw in the context of this study. So ceramides are basically fats. They're found in the cell membrane. Ceramide kinase is an enzyme that adds a phosphate to ceramide. And ceramide kinase activity is linked to immune imbalances. And when we look at pre clinical research, so meaning before it gets to humans, we see that when we block ceramide kinase, it may actually have beneficial effects on senescence, meaning it has a beneficial effect on aging pathways. Interestingly, looking just at the general research on what we know about the Mediterranean diet and the polyphenols, it does seem like polyphenols in Mediterranean diet influence ceramides. So again, this is a little bit complicated information, but what we found here is that there was a significant impact on ceramide kinase activity after 90 days of consuming this supplement that was fortified with these polyphenols from Chard Re Buckwheat. So if you have questions, comments, please drop them in. Again, this paper is available. You can look at it in your leisure. But what we're saying here is we studied what happened when we took healthy people, gave them the polyphenol concentrate, including the nutrients found in Himalayan chartered buckwheat. And what we found is a significant impact on these pathways, one of which was ceramide kinase, which is related to aging and related to immune function. In addition to this, we looked at epigenetic age algorithms. So this is getting to these clocks that I've already described. Basically, we take epigenetic data, we plug it into an algorithm, and it gives us a sense as to what is happening with biological age. We saw changes that reached statistical significance in three epigenetic age clocks in groups of people from the start to the end of the study. And we found that these changes related to differences in immune cells. So to give you one example, and we use multiple aging clocks. Again, you can see all these. In the study, we use one clock called the pheno age clock. It's an age algorithm. And we found that in a group of people who were aging more rapidly, There was a 47% reduction in the rate of aging. So in essence, a slowing of cellular aging found across the 90 days in this study. Now let's get to this in a little Bit more straightforward terms. Here's what we found. We were studying whether nutrients that are naturally found in food could influence pathways beyond just what we typically think about in the context of saying it is an antioxidant. We are trying to interrogate, to understand why is it that people who consume diets rich in polyphenols tend to be people who do better from a health perspective. And we were looking at what are the pathways that appear to be activated or deactivated as a reflection of consuming the nutrients found in these foods. And here we found multiple significant changes in pathways related to aging, and these correlated with changes in immune cells and immune cell subsets in these healthy people. So this is, I would argue, some of the kind of leading research suggesting in this conversation of food is medicine. How do certain nutrients in food act on pathways that can promote changes in cell aging? So again, let's back this up here just for a second. I'm seeing some questions here. Let's zoom back out and put this into the context of this larger conversation. What we're saying here is the goal should be health span, not longevity, not lifespan. It's to say, how do we maximize the quality and number of the years that we have left on this planet? And from that perspective, we would be looking at all the different things that may influence that health span, some of the pathways. And if you've ever heard me speak on any stage, done any lecture on my YouTube channel or on my website, you will know that these are my favorite things to talk about. The best things, the best studied things that we know of to support healthspan, are the simple things. As much as the hype is all out there around the latest this, that or the other, here are the things that you can do to enhance your health span. Get good sleep. Get regular exercise. Engage in mindfulness and stress reduction. Don't smoke. If you do smoke, talk to a practitioner about it. I have sat there across from so many patients and I just want people to know there are lots of tools. You shouldn't get bogged down in this whole willpower thing, which I think is so unhelpful. Let's talk about how things actually happen in the human brain. So not smoking, same thing with alcohol. But reducing alcohol use is an amazing way to prioritize healthspan. Again, talk to a health practitioner if you have trouble with this social connection. I've seen some comments here about things like religious ceremonies, spiritual engagement, spending time with friends. This is what the people who do the best do. And I think we have to get outside of this idea of, you know, time optimization towards other things for people who do the best they are people who prioritize, who don't just make, don't just try to create some time, but rather prioritize each day these social engagements for a good health span. And then another point here, I would just say novel experiences, staying engaged with life. This has absolutely been found to promote good health span. So all of you here who are either watching this live or after the fact, you're, you're, you're a little bit nerdy, you're a little bit science oriented because otherwise you wouldn't have stuck with me till this point in the video. But this is an amazing thing because we know learning new information, even if it's a little bit complicated, even if it may be, it doesn't jive with your pre existing ideas of how the world works. This is an amazing way to keep your brain fresh and it's an amazing way to promote health span. So yes, curiosity that is absolutely associated with better health span. But what about diet? So what are the best studied ways from a dietary perspective to enhance healthspan? I've mentioned these, but I just wanted to kind of make it a little bit more straightforward. It's eating minimally processed foods. It's increasing your diversity of plant based foods. It is eating healthy fats, including nuts, seeds. Olive oil is one of my favorite things. Olive oil, specifically extra virgin olive oil, has been studied across a host of different research publications to correlate with better overall wellness and better brain wellness. Decrease added sugar. I'm sure most of you already know about this one, but sugar is added to over 70% of the foods and beverages in America and increasingly that number is the same around the world as it relates to diet for longevity. I think fish is going to be kind of always at the top of the list. As far as animal protein sources, I would say there's some interesting nuance to the red meat conversation. What does seem to be the case is that the higher up in the food chain you go, the more you have to pay attention to the source of that food and the source of that food's food. So eating a wild salmon is different from eating a grasslot cow because of what actually happens when you bioaccumulate things across layers. Fiber and polyphenols. So here we're just really talking about some of the things that feed the microbiome. This is a host of different nutrients. So we could talk about prebiotics, probiotics, we could talk about Postbiotics, we could talk about fermented food, but fiber and polyphenols are two of the nutrient groups that have been best studied in the context of healthspan. So as we're looking at these things, I think that looking at combination foods that are rich in both polyphenols and fiber is a great way to prioritize healthspan. What are some of those foods? You'll see many things on this list. Just give you a couple of examples here. Dark chocolate, because of the cocoa content, is actually quite rich in polyphenols. Red wine, it does have polyphenols, doesn't really have much fiber. But I would highly recommend, if your goal is to optimize polyphenols, don't look at red wine as your way of doing that. It's probably not being offset by the. Or the alcohol is probably offsetting the polyphenol benefits. Green tea, black tea, kale, chard, leafy greens, artichokes, these are all great combinations of polyphenols and fiber. Just to note this here real quick, coffee actually turns out to be quite rich in polyphenols, but it also has a little bit of fiber. I'm not telling you you have to drink coffee, but it's one of the reasons, not the main reason, why I like my morning cup of black coffee. When we look at foods that are uniquely rich in polyphenols, specifically, so lots of different things on this list, spices actually turn out to be some of the most concentrated sources of polyphenols. So cloves, rosemary, all of these things that we use historically to season our food, these are incredibly rich in polyphenols. So it's a great way to get those into your diet. And coming back to why we're so interested in this Himalayan tarted buckwheat, and why we studied this in the first place, so you probably know this, but most people spend most of their caloric intake consuming things like rice and corn and wheat, and I guess to some extent things like soy. But the point here being that most of the grains that we consume, and even pseudo grains, are going to be pretty stripped of nutrients. So if you were to eat a loaf of white bread, yeah, you know, it came from a grain at some point, but you've stripped out a whole lot of the quality ingredients like the fiber. In addition, here's what we're learning, that the more we process food, the more we strip out polyphenols. And so if you were just to look here at kind of the polyphenol content. And arguably here about a healthier flour, which is whole wheat, which has been less processed than something like a bleached wheat flour, you have about 250 milligrams per 100 grams. So it's about 0.25% by weight, going to be these polyphenols. When you go to something like a quinoa, it goes up to around 330. Common buckwheat, which is a seed, it's not actually a grain, can be up to 190 milligrams. But the reason that we're studying tardary buckwheat is that conventional, or actually I should just say standard tartery buckwheat flour can be up to 1.34, can be up to 1,340 milligrams per 100 grams, which is up to 1.34% polyphenols. And this new version of it, which we're very excited about, sprouted tartary buckwheat. You can sprout it, and it actually goes up to almost 6% by weight in polyphenols. So this is the reason why we actually got invested in the first place in studying tardary buckwheat, because it is not only a combination of fiber and polyphenols, but is one of nature's most potent sources of natural polyphenol production. Okay, let's go through. And now talk about some concluding thoughts. Let's aggregate this and then if we have a moment, I know we're, we're really deep into this conversation, and if you've stuck with me for this entire conversation, kudos to you. I will try to take some questions if you put them into the Q and A. I know a couple have already put questions in there, but let's try to bring this together. So first point being health span should be the key. Not lifespan, but health span. There is tons of new science showing us how we can potentially optimize our longevity, optimize our health span. But the best studied tactics, the best studied techniques in the current literature is going to be for us to work on doing the basics well. And I really want you to remember that because you're going to hear these sensationalized pitches about, you know, get into this chamber for five minutes and you'll live another 20 years. Or you go to this event and you're sold something that if you consume it, you're going to live to 200. The research is telling us that the best tactics, the best techniques for extending health span and to Helping target some of these pathways of slower cell aging is basically just doing the basics well. So it's going to require you to be a little bit weird relative to most people to prioritize these things. Most people don't really move, most people don't eat real food, most people don't engage in stress reducing practices. Most people don't spend time each day talking to their friends and family because we're on our phones 24, 7. Doing those things well is the key. In addition to this, I would say that if you can optimize your core lifestyle habits, again those things I've already described, you will benefit in both quality and quantity of the years of your life. And as we're looking at some of the specific pathways and the reason that we did this research at Big Bold Health around Himalayan Chartered Buckwheat, we're starting to learn that certain nutrients found in our foods can selectively activate specific pathways involved in slower cell aging. So this is really, really interesting new stuff and it gets us to, you know, not some sort of crazy science, but rather an understanding of what we've already known, which is that people who eat real foods do better. And we've been asking this question of okay, great, but how and why? And so that's what we're starting to see here is that certain nutrients found within certain foods that people have been eating that are associated with better well being change various pathways involved in cell aging. So it's really interesting stuff. And again, if you're interested in that study, it is available now and I'd be very curious to hear what you have to think. So with that said, I'm going to pause the main presentation here and we will be posting this afterwards. So for anybody who missed any of this, you'll be getting access to the replay. I'm just going to take a quick look here at the open questions to see if there's anything that I can address. So I kind of should have said this at the beginning, but I can't answer any personal medical questions. Some of the questions that I saw come up are about different types of testing and whether there's one biological age test that is better than the others. There are many ways you can look at biological tests. You can look at the glycome, which is carbohydrates that are associated with our cells. You can look at epigenetics, you can look at immunity. I think all of these are interesting. We're still learning and we're still asking the question of which is the best test in terms of both telling us about our relative state of wellness at the time we've taken it, and maybe more importantly, telling us what we can do to change that test. Because if the test itself simply tells us, hey, here's how you're doing better than our years of age, but there's nothing we can do about it, that's far less valuable to me than a test that tells us, here's how you're doing. And we know that if you do X, Y or Z, this is going to change. So that's where I'm spending a lot of my time, is trying to better understand which of these tests change as a reflection of lifestyle intervention. That's also one of the reasons we use the epigenetic test and immune combination tests we did, because it's one of the ways in which we're starting to see how lifestyle modification can influence biological aging. But check back with me in a year or two and I will give you probably a slightly different take based on the latest research. Thank you so much to everybody here who is putting comments in, and I really appreciate your, your wonderful comments. I'm so excited that you all care about this topic. It makes me very, very happy. Some questions here about different types of diets regarding keto, regarding sources of omegas, regarding sources of fiber. You know, I, I, I, I'll just say my kind of general disclaimer around this is it's very different to talk about a general diet that benefits most people than it is to talk about a diet that is going to work best for you and your needs. I think we have simultaneously downplayed the value of working with somebody on a customized diet and overplayed the value in necessitating that if anybody makes a dietary change, they have to talk to their doctor about it. What I think is that different people have different needs, and these needs can change across the year depending on what else is going on in their lives. But I do think that if you're looking at something like a ketogenic diet, you know, I don't necessarily see that as a sustainable diet linked to longevity for the average person. I think that's where it really benefits you to ask, well, what are you targeting with this and who are you working with to help you make sure that you do it in a way that you don't get nutrient deficiencies and some of the other things that have been associated with a ketogenic diet? Okay, so with all of this here, I see some really amazing comments from some people I know. Thank you. So much for tuning in. I will just say if you're excited to learn more, which hopefully you are, you can find lots more material on the big Bold health website. If you're interested in the brain specific information on longevity, you can go to my website austinpromutter. Com or to my YouTube channel and learn more.