The ANTI-AGING HACKS To Reduce Chronic Inflammation & LIVE LONGER | Dr. Mark Hyman

The central thing you have to do if you want to stay healthy, if you want to live a long time, if you want to feel good, if you want to avoid the chronic diseases of aging is to address this phenomena of inflammation. What are the things that we can do to actually reduce inflammation and cut inflammation feel better? Most important thing is change our diet. Eating the diet we're eating, our sad diet, our inflammatory diet, our ultra processed diet, our diet is high in starch and sugar and refined oils. It's full of additives, pesticides, herbicides. emulsifiers, thickeners, additives, sweeteners. I mean, it's a disaster and it's an inflammation causing mess. So we want to get rid of those inflammatory foods in our diet. And we'll talk about some specific ones in addition to the just junk food. For example, gluten is a huge inflammatory food in our diet because of the way we've changed our wheat production. People go to Europe and they don't react. But in America, the dwarf wheat has way more gluten proteins, way more starch and sugar, so it's way more inflammatory. So we really want to avoid as much as possible if we have any kinds of inflammation, gluten foods. And ideally, you know, if you can get a hold of heirloom gluten foods like farro and triticale and kemet and, and emmer wheat and einkorn wheat and zeo wheat, I mean, these may be better for you if you don't have celiac disease and they may not cause the same level of inflammation. But, but we're mostly not eating those foods. Dairy is the other big one. And in my practice, I see it all the time. It creates congestion and digestive issues and allergies. acne and generalized inflammation. I really encourage people to kind of get rid of most conventional dairy and obviously gluten. And then of course sugar. Sugar is a huge factor in inflammation in the body by its effect on laying down belly fat. Belly fat is not just holding up your pants, but it's producing things called adipocytokines, these adipocytes, which are your fat cells produce cytokines, these inflammatory molecules. that rove around your body creating basically a wildfire of inflammation. So the more belly fat you have, the more inflammation you have, the more sugar you eat, the more belly fat you have, it's a vicious cycle. So getting off of all these refined processed foods, sugars, dairy, dairy, that's conventional dairy, goat and sheep might be okay, some heirloom forms of wheat may be okay or gluten, but basically keep those things really down. Then the question is what do you instead? Well, you eat an anti-inflammatory diet. And the main thing that you eat in your diet that's anti-inflammatory are the rich array of colorful powerful phytochemicals in plant foods. The deep reds, blues, purples, oranges, yellows, greens, these are powerful medicines in food that reduce inflammation significantly in the body through multiple mechanisms. And, the more close to the wild you can get, the better, the more organic or regeneratively you can get, the better. The farmers markets are great for that. I mean, your average tomato that's been shipped across the country and stored in a box and can last for months on a shelf is not going to be full much. But if you go have that, you know, August tomato that's ripened on your vine and your little cherry tomato and you pop it in your mouth, it's like an explosion of flavor. So I encourage you to think about how you can up regulate your anti-inflammatory system by eating these phytochemicals. Next is omega-3 fats, hugely important in regulating inflammation. And I would stick with the small fish, sardines, herring, mackerel, anchovies, small wild salmon can be very good. Lots of low glycemic fruit, berries, kiwis, berries are great. Nuts and seeds are very anti-inflammatory as well. Walnuts, almonds, pecans, hazelnuts, macadamia nuts. Also, you can have pasture raised animals. We know that grass fed animals, pasture raised animals, very different than conventional. We know from studies that if you have conventional meat, you'll raise inflammation. If you have, for example, wild or pasture raised grass, it'll lower inflammation. The metabolomic profiles are quite different of these foods, even gram for gram of protein. So all meat is not the same. Also, there's importance in keeping your gut healthy. So making sure you're having prebiotic foods, probiotic foods. Prebiotic foods are different fibers that you can get from artichokes, from Jerusalem artichokes, from asparagus, from plantains, very, very important. And then probiotics foods to keep your gut healthy. Kimchi, sauerkraut, pickles, miso, natto, tempeh, all these are traditional ancient foods that have been fermented to help your microbiome. And of course, herbs and spices are really, really helpful in reducing inflammation, particularly rosemary, ginger, garlic, turmeric, oregano, parsley, very anti-inflammatory, and you can include these as just part of your general cooking. Curcumin, super important, one of the most important anti-inflammatories, which is found in turmeric, which you make curries with, but this yellow spice is a super anti-inflammatory compound. Guess what? Also exercise is hugely anti-inflammatory, not if you over exercise, but if you exercise enough. So have having 30 minutes of vigorous exercise a day and strength training a few times a week can really help reduce inflammation, strengthen your immune system, help to improve your insulin sensitivity, reduce the inflammation that comes from that. So really important to move. Getting your mind straight, our mind is a great source of inflammation. When we're stressed, we produce a lot of inflammation in our bodies and stress molecules increase. We know that gene expression for stress compounds for inflammation compounds increase when you're stressed. So we can't avoid stress, but we have to learn how to regulate our cortisol levels. We have to learn how to master our minds. We can master our diets, we can exercise, we can sleep and all those things. But unless you get your mindset straight, unless you get your thinking straight, you're gonna be generating a lot of stress in your body, which is gonna age you rapidly. And lastly, there's some supplements you can take that will really make a difference. Vitamin D, super important, regulates over I don't know, probably two, 300 different genes, many of them regulate inflammation. It's involved in improving your immune system, reducing risk of infections and flu, COVID, and also helps to reduce your risk of cancer. Really important, probably about 2 to 4,000, 5,000 units a day of vitamin D3, really important. Also fish oil, you can take fish oil. I recommend highly that people use omega-3 fatty acid supplements because we just don't get enough from our diet. I love the Dutch Harbor Omega supplements from Big Bold Health. They contain resolvins, which are not processed out of them. These resolvins are things that resolve inflammation. They're like the break on your immune system. So they're processed out of most of the fish oils we see, but Big Bold Health Dutch Harbor Omega is full of them. Curcumin, as I mentioned, can be taken as a supplement as well and has very powerful anti-inflammatory antioxidant properties. The B complex also really important in regulating metabolism, immune function, antioxidant levels, glutathione levels, all important in regulating inflammation. and another one that's really great I love is derived from something called Himalayan Tartere Buckwheat, which is an ancient grain, not even really a grain, it's a flower that was grown in the Himalayas and it's full of these powerful anti-inflammatory immune modulating phytochemicals including to a hoba which is found nowhere else in nature that we know of yet, and also high levels of quercetin and luteolin and hesperidin and other bioflavonoids that are really important in regulating immunity and cancer and have been shown to help in longevity and extending life in animal studies. So, pretty impressive. I like to take this as a supplement and something called HTB Rejuvenate, which again you can get from Big Bold Health and it's full of these phytochemicals that modulate your immune system. So, the good news is that we can really do a lot about inflammation. The bad news is we're doing everything wrong in our society, but we can shift that. And, if you really focus on inflammaging as a phenomena that you have to deal with and learn the steps you need to take to resolve it, you can really have a long healthy life without worrying about many of the chronic diseases of aging. So really critical to get your immune system straight and get inflammation under control. Our immune system is important. It should fight against infections and invaders. It should protect us from foreign antigens. It should survey our body for cancers and harmful things and go attack them. All that's good stuff. So we don't want to shut off our immune system, but we want an overactive. When we live our current modern lifestyle, it's highly overactive and starts to create allergies, autoimmune diseases, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, dementia, obviously these are all inflammatory diseases. So the kind of unifying theme in medicine today is this concept of inflammation. And the rate of inflammation is driving this incredible burden of chronic disease and poor metabolic health. And we're having to deal with stresses we never had to deal with before from toxins, from poor diet, from inflammatory foods, from processed foods, that are increasingly causing our bodies to rebel and to become inflamed. And why do we call it inflammaging? Because we see that as we get into the state of sterile chronic inflammation, it's not like an acute infection where you get a red, sore, hot, swollen, pussY thing, or like a sore throat, it's this low-grade, persistent, indolent, chronic inflammation that's sterile, it's not from an infection. And it can be triggered by toxins, environmental toxins which were exposed to, there's 84,000 now on the market since the 1900s. Allergens, which are increasingly common in our food supply from adulteration of our foods. And also our microbiome is hugely disrupted, which causes massive amounts of inflammation because of lack of fiber, gut-busting drugs such as acid blockers and antibiotics and steroids because of glyphosate that's sprayed on all our food, the herbicide Roundup that leads to gut microbiome destroying phenomena in the gut. So all these things and more, stress, lack of exercise, all these things drive inflammation in the body. So how do we begin to think about the process of this chronic low-grade sterile inflammation in our bodies? How do we start to deal with those factors? What are the steps you can do to address this? Because the central thing you have to do if you want to stay healthy, if you want to live a long time, if you want to feel good, if you want to avoid the chronic diseases of aging, is to address this phenomena of inflammation. I just finished my book, I finished writing it and rereading it called Young Forever, where I talked about one of the central hallmarks of aging, which is inflammaging. And it relates to all the other hallmarks of aging and it's central to regulate as we get older because we get more and more of this chronic inflammation. In fact, we create zombie cells in our body and these zombie cells don't completely die, but they roam around our bodies secreting all this inflammatory gunk and it kind of infects other cells in a sense and causes those to become zombie cells and it creates this cascade of inflammaging which we need to stop. If you loved that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. Toxins are also inflammatory. They're called immunotoxins. Low levels, pesticides, chemicals, petrochemicals, heavy metals. I encourage you to go to the Environmental Working Group's website, EWG, and find out how to reduce your exposure through food, including.