STAY YOUNG FOREVER: How To Live Over 100+ By Focusing ON THIS... | Dr. Mark Hyman

The truth is that for most people, the last 20 of your life is not healthy. We are in this moment in history where we don't have to accept that we have to just keep degrading as we get older. Let's talk a little bit about why we have such a flawed framework around aging and the, and the science of Aging, or at least the science we've had up to date. You know, our whole approach is wrong. We're going Downstream to treat the disease is sort of like I call whacK-A-Mole medicine. Essentially, we we treat about diabetes and heart disease and cancer and dementia, all as separate problems. But like I said, if we eradicated heart disease and cancer from the face of the planet, the two biggest killers, life expectancy would go up maybe five to seven years. It wouldn't go up 30 or 40 years, but there are now ways that we can understand the root causes of those conditions and how they're all very similar. And if we address those root causes, we call the hallmarks of aging and the causes of those hallmarks, and we'll get to that, that we can actually change the trajectory and create a healthier population. So we don't have to treat these diseases separately. We have to just look at the underlying dysfunctions that occur in our biology with aging and that are modifiable through our lifestyle and our environment. We have massive control over what happens to our biology by what we eat, by our activity levels, by our baths and our stress level, by sleep, and by many, many other things, including the nutrients we take in from plants and compounds, our microbiome, oh, so many things we have control over that we can modify that regulate the aging process. So we don't really treat disease in functional medicine, we create health. And as a side effect, disease goes away. The same thing is, I don't treat diabetes, I don't treat heart disease, I don't treat cancer. I create the conditions for health and those diseases then often just go away. So when we think about, you know, aging, for example, if you look at risk factors for diseases, we talk about risk factor management and prevention, but let's look at smoking. If you're a 30-year-old smoker and you smoke two packs a day, your risk of lung cancer is dramatically lower than if you were a 70 or 75-year-old person who's never smoked, right? So if age is such a big risk factor, we should be treating the underlying biology of aging rather than treating all these downstream diseases. And that's really what functional medicine does. It looks at how we understand the body from a functional dynamic perspective. What are the systems in the body? How are those interacting? How are they imbalanced or out of balance? What can we do to create balance in the body? It's a huge paradigm shift. And I've been banging this drum for 30 years now, and I think it's finally catching on. And what's so exciting to me around aging, and David Sinclair talks about this, information theory of aging, which is basically, it's an information problem. We're putting the wrong information in or not putting the right information in the body, and that's what creates the dysfunction that leads to diseases of aging. Rather than trying to block the processes or the symptoms, we need to actually look at the underlying mechanisms that allow our bodies to actually create health. And you wanna treat the cause, you treat the disease. It's very beautiful. So I think, you know, In functional medicine, we have something we call the TAC rules. And the basic idea is if you're standing on a TAC, it takes a lot of ask to make it feel better. If you're standing on two TACs, taking one of them out won't make you 50% better. So you basically have to find all the triggers and problems and remove them, right? If you, for example, are, let's say, heavy metal toxic like I was, well, that's gonna destroy so many of your biological functions unless you address that. unless you get rid of the toxin, your body can't heal. I just read an article about microplastics the other day, and it's just frightening a little bit how many of these compounds are now in our bodies, are affecting our health, and that we need to start to learn how to remove. What longevity research is now revealing is that the very process of aging is based on dysfunctions in the body that we've identified that we can transform and change and literally reverse the process of biological aging. We can't become chronologically younger. I was born in 1953. 59. I got that for the rest of my life. No matter what I do, I'm not going to be chronologically younger unless I maybe go into outer space and, you know, the laws of relatively apply. But I can change my biological age. And it's important because your biological age determines your youthfulness, your ability to do what you want to do, to feel good. I mean, down in Costa Rica now, and I'm surfing, I'm playing tennis, I'm hiking mountains, I'm having a great time, and. I can do exactly what I did when I was 20 or 30 or 40 without limitation because I've learned how to work on my own biology using the principles that I'm going to share with you today and also in the upcoming podcast and that are really covered in great depth in my book Young Forever, which is out soon. So most of us look at the aging population around us and we go, we don't want any of that, right? I mean, it sounds terrible. It's not appealing when you see people in their 80s or 90s in seventies, you see frailty, you see disability, you see dependency, loss of mobility, pain, disease. I mean, who wants that? I mean, if you ask anybody, they're gonna say no. I mean, but what if we could live into our nineties, hundreds and beyond, disease free, active and mentally sharp? Yeah. And that's possible. In fact, right now, I'm in one of the blue zones in the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica. And there's people here who, I saw a guy riding his horse the other day, he was a hundred years old, he was upright, you know, I mean, like most people think getting a horse at 100 is a pretty stupid idea, but I count on it. And this guy was just super fit and healthy and 100 years old, and it was pretty impressive to see. So we have that potential within our biology if we learn how to create the conditions for health and remove the conditions for disease. So when we look at whether or not we can do that, the science is really telling us very clearly that we can. And that's what my book, Young Forever, is about. It's about the revolutionary science of how we can stay young at any age, and how we can literally reverse biological aging. Now, it's important to understand that this is not a hedonistic pursuit. It's not about a selfish desire to extend our lives so we can never die. I mean, there are maybe some billionaires who want to do that, I get it. But the truth is it's about how do we put more life into our years, not just more years to our life. How do we actually feel good enough to show up in life at any age and do what matters to make ourselves live a better life, those we love, to support them, and to create meaning and purpose in the world that allows us to give our best gifts. The truth is, by the time we get in our 60s, 70s, and 80s, we've accumulated a lot of wisdom, but our bodies start to break down. What if we could actually take that incredible resource, that wealth of knowledge of elders and experience, and continue to harvest that for society, for our families, for our communities. So it's really not about, you know, some hedonistic pursuit, but finding your why. What matters to you? What do you care about? What do you want to do? I mean, I feel like I'm 63, but I'm just beginning. I have so much I'm interested in, so much I want to learn, I want to discover a place I want to travel to, things I want to accomplish in life. And I honestly feel like I'm just getting started, believe it or not. I've done so much already. I feel like now I can actually start to begin to live Fully. And so if you want to live to be 100 or 120 or 150 or 200, why? For me, the answer is pretty simple, is to actually bring more love into the world and to do more good in the world, to make the world a slightly better place before I leave. And to just, that's it. So that's my why. What is your why? What do you care about? What matters to you? actually begin to look at your life and discover those things. And there's a concept that the Japanese called Ikigai, which is a beautiful concept that, by the way, I think the Japanese are the longest lived population as a whole on the planet. And Okinawans are very long lived. And Ikigai means the reason for being. We know that if you have meaning and purpose in your life, that you live seven years longer on average. Now, if we eradicated cancer and heart disease from the face of the planet, we'd only extend lifespan by about five years or so. So literally by having meaning and purpose, you can do a better job than if you got rid of all heart disease and cancer from the planet. Now, that doesn't apply on an individual level, but it kind of proves the point that having meaning and purpose and a why, finding your why is so key. So Ikigai basically has four elements. Find out what you love. what you're good at, what you maybe can be paid for, and what the world needs. And I'm personally lucky that I found that for myself, which is bringing functional medicine to the world. I really love to help people. I really become good at it because I've seen so many thousands of patients and have had to heal myself from so much of my own illness. And I think the world needs to be healthier. So I think it's all a good thing. That's my icky guy. And if you have more meaning and purpose and you figure out your icky guy, I think you're in a little happier, longer life. Now, often we look around us and we see God, you know, it doesn't look pretty to get older. You know, we charge golden years and we're tired, we're spent, you know, we're sick often. I mean, about six out of 10 Americans has a chronic illness. That's a lot of people. If you're over 65, according to the National Council on Aging, 80% of older adults have at least one disease and 68% have at least two, that's heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia. I mean, I get it. It makes sense of why people don't want to live to be 100 because it's scary and it seems horrible, but it doesn't have to be that way. If you can imagine a life where you live to be 120, you go for a hike with your beloved, you know, swim in a mountain pond, make a delicious meal, make love, and then drift blissfully off to sleep, that would be good. That's kind of how I want to go. Maybe 120, maybe 180. I'm not sure yet. I'm still working out the details, but I'll let you know how it goes. So let's talk about a key concept that I talked about in the book is called health span versus lifespan. And our health span is how many years of our life we are healthy. Our lifespan is how many years we are alive. So if you spend, you know, the first 50 years of your life healthy, but the next 30 years unhealthy, and with diabetes or heart disease or obesity or arthritis or whatever it is, your health span may only be 50 years, but your lifespan could be 80. The truth is that for most people, the last 20% of your life is not healthy. but in places like the Blue Zones, they are healthy and working and active and their health span equals their lifespan. I met this guy Pietro in Sardinia who basically was unbelievable. He was 95 years old. He was a shepherd. He literally just retired from being a shepherd and was herding his sheep five miles up and down this rugged mountain pathways all the time and really was so healthy and and I mean, you see old people, they like kind of crunch over. Here was like upright. He was booming voice. He was clear eyed. I'm like, holy cow, you know, they are engaged and they're working and they're active. And in the Blue Zones, they are really an integral part of their society. They're not discarded nursing homes. So I think, you know, we kind of imagine aging population as a drain on society, but it actually doesn't have to be. Guys like Pietro, other people I met in the Blue Zones, they're really active members of their community and society. One guy, Carmen, was 80, I think 88 years old, and he was tending to his own farm, which we had like tons of veggies he was growing. All these fruit trees, had pigs, he had chickens, he had a bunch of sheep, and he took care of the whole thing himself. And he was 88 years old. It was like a steep rocky hillside. I could barely keep up with him going up the hill. And he gave the food away. He couldn't eat on himself, obviously. He gave it to his family, his friends, his community. He already fed it back to the animals. He just liked being out there. and having a purpose. And we know that if you are looking at the economics of this, so people go, oh God, we're gonna have a bunch of old people, it's gonna be a drain on society, it's terrible. But actually, David Sinclair and others, he's a leading aging researcher from Harvard, they published a paper in Nature Aging, which is a medical journal called the Economic Value of Targeting Aging. And they looked at rigorous data analysis that if you actually improve people's health and the health span got longer, which eliminated the periods of life that they were sick or reduced them dramatically, that if you did that for every year of life extension, we would save $38 trillion globally. If we could do it by 10 years, we'd save $367 trillion. But that's only if we improve health span. I mean, think about that. I mean, that's almost 10 times the amount we spend on healthcare a year in America alone. So the economic payout is huge. And, you know, kind of 86% of the $4.1 trillion that we currently spend on healthcare in America, 86% of that is on lifestyle preventable chronic disease, things that are not inevitable parts of aging. and worse even still, and this is why we have to be so focused on not just longevity, but the science of health, which is what informs longevity. We are seeing an incredibly metabolic and healthy population. I've talked about this on the podcast before, but you know, a few years ago we had 88% of the population that was metabolic and healthy. Now it's 93.2%. That means 6.2% of Americans are healthy and don't have high cholesterol, high blood sugar, high blood pressure, are not overweight and haven't had a heart attack or stroke. I mean, think about that. There's only less than 7% of Americans that are metabolically healthy and that's terrifying. And in COVID, it was a big problem in America. We're 4% of the world's population, but 16% of the cases and deaths. So we're four times what we should have been in with the best healthcare system in the world, we should have been far less. And yet, we got so sick and we got so much death from COVID because we're unhealthy. And it was estimated that about 63% of all the hospitalizations and deaths from COVID could have been prevented by better diet. That's amazing to me. So the moral of the story is that if you invest in your health, that you will earn big dividends both in the quality of your life, then the length of your life, and that you actually don't have to worry about when you start. You can start at any age. There was actually one study they started 70 years old, and they got people exercising and eating a healthier diet, and they were able to reduce mortality in that age group by 50. So it's quite amazing what we can do at any age. And I've seen this. I've seen this and people who are in their 70s, 80s in my patients, that there's so much room for improvement in our health at any age. What's really happening is now we we have a new framework for thinking about disease. And in the next podcast about Young Forever, I'm going to talk about the hallmarks of aging, what they are, how we think about them, what we can do about them, what causes them. But we basically now are in this moment in history where we don't have to accept that our biological aging is inexorable, that we have to just keep degrading as we get older. And yes, eventually things will break down, but we can maintain our biology in a very high functioning state until very, very old. And we can do this by using the science of functional medicine, the science we call systems biology or network medicine, which is really underlying a lot of the discoveries in the field of aging. And a lot of aging researchers don't quite get this because they're like the blind men in the elephant. They're looking at their particular thing, but they are now talking about these hallmarks of aging. They are now talking about the information theory of aging. They are getting that there are these underlying things that are going wrong, that if we work on those things, we can modify our trajectory in life toward disease or improve our trajectory and actually get healthier and reverse our biological age. I've been studying this for 30 years. I've been looking into these biological networks that we have. I've been looking for the root cause of disease. I'm looking at things like genetics, the microbiome, our immune system, hormones, our mitochondria. our detoxification system, our structural system, our whole interconnected network of systems, we're basically a system of systems, a network of networks. By doing that, we actually can begin to uncover the real story of disease. It's a massive paradigm shift. It's like Columbus saying the Earth is not flat or Galileo saying that the sun doesn't revolve around the Earth, it's the other way around. I think these are really hard things for people to accept, especially back then, I think there are still people who believe that the Earth is flat, but I don't know what to do about that. I think these are hard concepts to change. I say that diseases as we conceive them don't really exist. They're just downstream expressions of dysfunctions that we can actually identify and treat using the model of functional medicine. I think you can make changes at any age. I'm 63 and I'm in better shape than I was when I was 40. My biological age, I've tested and we'll talk about how to test your biological age in an upcoming podcast about Young Forever. My biological age is 43, so I'm 20 years younger biologically and I wanna get to 25. We'll see how that goes, I'll keep you posted. What I've learned over the last few decades of doing this work is really revolutionary and it's helped me grow biologically younger as I get chronologically older and I want that for you too. it's really possible. So whether you want to live to be 70, 80, 90, 100, 120, that's possible right now. Now, we might be looking at a even longer life extension with the upcoming advances in longevity research. We'll see, stay tuned. But the basic pillars are there for everybody to take advantage of what we eat, how we move, our purpose, meaning, community, our sleep, our way of dealing with stress, our relational fields, all these things we can have impact on. So we don't have to continue things as they've been. We can really create a real transformational roadmap for healthy aging using functional medicine, and we can understand these root causes, and we can get rid of these things that are causing disease, and we can put in the things that are creating health. And that's such a beautiful framework. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. check it out here. Dairy is the other big one. And in my practice, I see it all the time. It creates congestion and digestive issues and allergies and acne and generalized inflammation. I really encourage people to kind of get rid of most conventional dairy and obviously.