The Emerging Science Of Longevity with Peter Diamandis
This is a podcast episode titled "The Emerging Science Of Longevity with Peter Diamandis" recorded in December 2021. It features a conversation between Dr. Mark Hyman, Peter Diamandis, and Ask AI Mark discussing advances in longevity science, aging, gene editing technologies like CRISPR, and practical lifestyle approaches to extend healthy lifespan. The discussion covers complex scientific concepts such as the epigenome, sirtuin genes, and age reversal, alongside functional medicine insights and emerging diagnostic technologies. The episode blends expert interviews with educational content and promotional segments for health supplements and services.
Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.
Muscle is one of the highest correlations with longevity.
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Right now, you can get 10 free travel pracs of AG1 when you make your first purchase. Just go to athleticgreens.com/hyman. That's A-T-H-L-E-T-I-C-G-R-E-E-N-S.com/hyman. Now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's Pharmacy with a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about aging well, living a long time or avoiding all the ravages of aging. Then you better listen up because we have an extraordinary podcast today with my friend and world leader in thinking differently about how to solve our global problems, Peter Diamandis. He is such a guy. I love him. I know him personally for a long time now, but he's the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions. So, for example, going to space or curing cancer or doing all kinds of cool stuff. He was recently named by Fortune as one of the world's 50 greatest leaders. He's also the executive founder of Singularity University, a graduate level Silicon Valley institution that counsels the world leaders on exponentially running technologies. You've also just completed a book with Tony Robbins and Dr. Harari called Life Force about aging and you are starting a whole group of innovative longevity centers called Fountain Health, which we're gonna talk about. So welcome, Peter.
Thank you, Mark. It's a pleasure and we don't see each other anywhere near enough.
So, I know.
A podcast is a great excuse to catch up with each other.
That's true. I think we took a long walk on the Minneapolis boardwalk at five in the morning once, 'cause that was the only time we could figure out how to get a time together. And then we ran into each other in the lobby of some hotel. So listen, Peter, we're in this weird paradox right now, which is we're seeing life expectancy go down, particularly in this last year of COVID where we saw it go down for the average person, probably one plus years. And if you're African-American or Hispanic, it's up to three years of decrease in life expectancy. And at the same time, we're seeing an explosion of longevity science that's helping us understand the causes of aging, how to extend life, how to improve quality of life, how to stop the ravages of aging. And we're learning all kinds of new tools, techniques and technologies, but there's a big mismatch there. So, can you talk about, you know, one, why we're seeing this increase in in earlier and earlier deaths or a decrease in life expectancy and why at the same time we're so optimistic and hopeful about the future of longevity science?
Absolutely. And I think there's nothing that's more valuable to all of us and our families than healthy years. And let's define longevity in the first place. the average age of hominids back 100,000 years ago was probably in their late 20s. Right. And then it expanded during the, you know, Middle Ages into the early 30s. And then 100 years ago, it was in your 40s. Today it's, you know, in their late 70s. And I like to think about the fact that I don't believe humans were on the whole designed to live past age 30. We would have a baby by age 13 before there was birth control. I mean, seriously, you'd go in puberty and you have a baby. And by the time you were 27 or 28, your baby was having a baby. And before McDonald's and Whole Foods, before food was abundant, the worst thing you wanted to do to perpetuate the species was take food out of your grandchildren's mouths. And so that was very much reality for it's the what we evolved during. And then all the diseases of older age, cancer, heart disease, dementia, even when aneurysms take people, the wear and tear of the body, all of those diseases were never selected against if you didn't get it past age 30. So, we're in optimal health in our 20s and 30s. And then we start the ravages of old age. And what's interesting, and I think you know this as much or more than I, that the conversation around longevity, and I'm gonna define it more as age reversal, like how do we slow aging, stop aging, even reverse aging? which would have been a really crazy conversation to have had even five years ago, is now become the conversation du jour in the medical community and in the venture community. And there's more people thinking about and working on it. And so I think I personally believe, and hopefully at the end of this conversation, you'll believe or others will that we're about to go into a renaissance of health. We're about to massively disrupt the health industry, reinvent it, and start to add- Amen to that, right? Of course, you and I are both on carrying the signs around, you know, Vive la Revolution, let's reinvent this crazy insane system which is so moribund. Anyway, but I think this decade we're gonna start to have new tools to slow stop and reverse aging. And I'm convinced myself from the people I've spoken to, you know, I don't know, when I was in medical school, I didn't get a chance to watch much TV, but I remember watching, you know, I would watch Star Trek once in a while. That was sort of like my, you know, if I had a little bit of time, I'd watch a Star Trek episode and that was like, you know, The way the world should be.
-With the spy quarter, right?
-Yes, exactly. But I remember watching one television show on long-lived sea life, that species of bowhead whales could live 200 plus years, and the Greenland shark could live four or 500 years, and sea turtles could live equal. And I was like, if they can live that long, why can't we? I mean, I was really, I was kind of pissed and perplexed at the same time. And I made the decision, it was either a hardware problem or a software problem. And that we were gonna start to understand, how do we change our software or how do we change our hardware? So that's the frame that I have. Yes, we've had some recent decreases and a lot of the increase, as you well know, in average, and the word average here is the key part, average life expectancy has been the massive reduction in childhood mortality. and the ability to deal with diseases early.
Clean water.
Clean water. Oh my God.
Sanitation.
Half the disease burden of the planet is due to unclean drinking water. It's crazy. Knock that domino over. So, I don't think the recent gains in longevity are really the kinds of gains in longevity that I'm, working towards.
It was the first hurdle we had to overcome, which was deal with the bad water and infectious disease. And, we did a good job at that. And now we're looking at the aging process. And, you know, as I began to look at it over the decades, it's really clear to me that what we most of us see as aging in this country is abnormal aging. It's biological processes that have gone awry that are really dysfunctional states of biology. And then if we learn how to work with biology to optimize those states, whether it's inflammation or oxidative stress or changes to the microbiome or hormones or brain chemistry or your structural system tissues, you can really stop and even reverse the phenomena that we see as aging in this country.
For sure. But even doing that, the question becomes, can we all get to 100 healthy? Can we get to 120 healthy? and what's beyond that, right?
Yeah.
And I'm working on both sides of the equation, a number of the companies I have and the work that I'm doing, this book that Tony and I have worked three years on, Life Force, is really around increasing your vitality, your energy, avoiding the ravages of obesity and diabetes and heart disease and so forth. And there's incredible new technologies on the horizon. We looked at all of the stuff in phase one, phase two, phase three clinical trials. And then there's the basics, diet, sleeping and exercise, which we so don't want to spend our time doing. But we must. So how do we take this a piece at a time? There's an interesting Let me start with a big exclamation point on something that was a big insight in writing this book. Yeah.
And the book is called Life Force. It's out now. You can get it anywhere you get books.
Yes.
It's a very thick tome, like War and Peace, but it's your life. If you want to put more life in your years and more years in your life, this is the book you should get.
Thank you. And it's written in a way that read section one and then and then you can cherry pick if you're focused on heart disease or dementia or, you know, inflammation or, you know, cancer. The go read the chapter on that. It's a look at all of the everything that's been approved or what's in phase two, phase three clinical research that will be approved in the next few years. It's all really hard science in a very understandable fashion. The goal of this book is to give you hope for the future, to give you a roadmap of what you should be doing now and what you should be looking for, right? It's a roadmap for a longer, healthier life. I mean, I'm looking for myself, you know, and people may think it's insane, a multi-hundred year lifespan. But, you know, if I shoot for that and I get 120 or 150.
Well, I think you're going for the multi-hundreds. I was just going for 120. I feel like I'm kind of falling behind here, you know, trying to get with the program. Multi-hundreds, I didn't even think of that.
Listen, there's a couple of things to think about. First of all, there's a concept called longevity escape velocity, which you're familiar with Aubrey de Grey, Ray Kurzweil have spoken about this. And that the notion is that as science is beginning to understand why we age and why we don't have to, and as science is making more and more breakthroughs in underlying diseases. There is a moment in time where for every year that you're alive, science is extending your life for more than a year. And that moment in time is called longevity escape velocity. When I ask Ray Kurzweil, Ray is brilliant. He's passionate about this area. He's my co-founder at Singularity University. He wrote the Singularity is Near and and has written extensively about longevity. I said, so Ray, when do you expect we're going to hit longevity escape velocity? His answer was in the next 12 to 14 years.
Basically what you're saying is if you can survive 12 years, you can live forever? Is that the idea? That's a comment.
I'm not going to back that up. But then I went and spoke to George Church, and I said to George, and George is professor of genomics at Harvard Medical School. He's brilliant. one of the early people across gene therapy CRISPR, he's created 24 companies in 24 months. We never bet against George. And I said, When do you expect we'll see longevity escape velocity? And he gave me the same answer. He said, in the next 12 to 15 years. But that's crazy, right? So we'll come back to that in a moment. What are the implications?
So you think we can make it to our early 70s, Peter, or you and I will be in our early 70s then?
I'm sure we'll be all right. I'm definitely shooting for it. Here's the realization that we have just in the last 10 years, and you know this so well, the unveiling of CRISPR and all the different modalities of CRISPR and of gene therapy and of.
Reading- Explain for people what CRISPR is, because I don't think people understand what that is.
Yeah, so you can think of our, we have 3.2 billion letters in our genome. that comes from our mother and 3.2 billion letters that comes from our father. And over the last 25 years from the Human Genome Program and Celera, we've developed the technology to read that genome, to actually read out what are the 3.2 billion letters that shape you. It's your genome. And reading your genome is useful. But what we've now done, and the technology called CRISPR, I won't accurately, it's an acronym for clustered repeats is the CR in here, but it's a technology derived from bacteria that were using this technology to protect themselves against bacteriophage, viruses infecting the bacteria. Long story short, it's a tool for being able to accurately edit your genome. So in the same way that word allows you to read a document of all of the letters and words, 3.2 billion letters in the book of your life, CRISPR is the way that you can actually edit it accurately. And so the ability to read your genome and edit your genome and write your genome, and then a new technology called gene therapy comes along, which is the ability to actually use a virus as a robot to inject into the cells you want a specific gene. So it's like being able to inject into the book of your life a paragraph where you want it to say something. Anyway, these are incredible tools that are giving us the ability to not accept what we're born with.
But to begin with, if you have a single gene mutation like, let's say Huntington's chorea.
Or thalassemia, sickle cell anemia, right?
Right, you can actually edit those genes to actually change the proteins that are produced that change the course of that person's life.
And what's incredible is it's not a treatment for these genetic diseases, it is a cure. It is like one and done, you're cured. And so, Editas, a company started by George Church out of Boston, has a CRISPR treatment to cure a form of genetic blindness. And so, a person's born with this particular genetic mutation, they're blind, an injection in the back of the eye, and they can see again, they're cured. It's biblical in nature. It's incredible stuff. But it's interesting. So now the question is, if you have these 3.2 billion letters when you're born and when you have it when you're the same 3.2 billion letters at age 25, when you got all your musculature on the beach or you're in a bikini, you look great, you feel great, and then you have the same 3.2 billion letters when you're 80, why don't you look the same?
That's a great question.
What is it? Why aren't you, I mean, I've got the same, I'm running the same computer code, why am I looking at this?
Yes. Why is the software output different? Right?
Yeah. And so this is fascinating. This is the work that was best explained so far by Dr. David Sinclair, also at a Harvard Medical School, who wrote a book called Lifespan, which is amazing. I think Lifespan and Life Force are two books that will go hand in hand.
He must know something about aging because he's like 50 something. He looks like 12.
I tell you, I'm- I don't know.
What'S up with that.
He's my- I love David.
He's my poster child.
I'm running He's the, you know when you're in a marathon and there's somebody that you're pacing yourself against, he's the guy that I'm like, I've got to pace myself against David. He does, he looks like he's 30. And his, you write in the book, in the chapter, we have all these heroes in the book, David Sinclair, we say, David's got two numbers, he's 53 in chronological age, But his biological age by aging clocks is like 35 or something like that.
And he looks amazing. Well, I did mine. I did mine. I'm 62 and if you did a few years ago, but it was 39.
So amazing.
It's possible.
It is possible. Yeah, I'm tracking, I'm 60 and I'm tracking in my mid-late 40s. My goal is to get down to a David Sinclair level of my mid-30s. And then I feel like, you know, I feel like I'm 28, but I have sort of the emotional maturity of a nine-year-old, but that's a different story.
I think you're good. You're curious, you're in wonder all the time and awe, which is actually a trait you should never give up. I don't ever want to hear about you most, Peter. I know a lot of you out there are practitioners like me, helping patients heal using real food and functional medicine as your framework for getting to the root cause. What's critical to understanding what each individual person and body needs is testing, which is why I'm excited to tell you about Rupa Health. Looking at hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and so many other internal variables can help us find the most effective path to optimize health and reverse disease. But up till now, that meant you are usually ordering tests for one patient from multiple labs. and I'm sure many of you can relate how time consuming this process was and then it could all feel like a lot of work to keep track of. Now there's Rupa Health, a place for functional medicine practitioners to access more than 2000 specialty labs from over 20 labs like Dutch, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains and more. Rupa Health helps provide a significantly better patient experience and it's 90% faster, letting you simplify the entire process of getting the functional medicine lab tests you need and giving you more time to focus on patients. this is really a much needed option in functional medicine space and I'm so excited about it. It means better service for you and your patients. You can check it out and look at a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com that's R-U-P-A-Health.com Now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.
So let's go back to the question if you have your same genome at birth at 25 and 80, what's going on? And so it's a concept called the epigenome, epi meaning above in Greek, and it is in fact the way that your genome is controlled. So what's going on at birth at age 25 and 80 plus, as you know, is not all your genes are turned on or all your genes are turned off. So your epigenome controls which genes are on and which genes are off. And so in your youth, you've got many more genes turned on to create the proteins in your skin. And as you get older, some of those genes turn off and they should be on genes that are on that should be off and genes that are off that should be on. And that is what's thought to account for the aging process. And so let's double click on that because there's a very interesting construct and rationale of why that occurs. I find it one of the most, when I'm on the stage talking about aging, I want to convey this because it helps people understand what's going on. It turns out that we have a set of seven genes, which are our sirtuin genes that generate the sirtuin proteins. These sirtuins control which genes are on and which genes are off. It controls the epigenome. But these sirtuins also are responsible for DNA repair. And I want you to imagine that your 3.2 billion letters are the piano keys on the piano. And you're playing the piano. You're the sirtuins that are determining which keys should be played and which keys should not be played. and early in your life, you've got this thing on the side of you, like this clock you have to repair. And early in your life, the clock is doing fine and you're not distracted by repairing it. But as you get, as you're, as the Pianist, as you're, as you're continuing in life, you're playing the right keys, you're, you're pushing the right ones and not pushing the wrong ones. But as things go on, you have to repair this, this. clock more and more and you're being distracted. So you're trying to keep the clock repaired at the same time you're trying to play the right keys and it becomes more and more difficult. But then there's another part of this, which is that these sirtuin proteins are powered by NAD in your cells. And as you get older, your NAD levels, sort of a energy currency, if you would, in the cells, your energy levels drop by half. So, all of a sudden, as the pianist, you're spending more and more of your time repairing, doing repairs, and having less and less energy to do the whole thing, and you become distracted and the epigenome regulation of your body falls apart. So, what David believes he has been able to demonstrate, and we talk about this in the chapter on on David Sinclair and another chapter I wrote on longevity, that he has discovered that using three out of the four Yamanaka factors allows him to reset the epigenome in the living cell.
It's a big mouthful. What's the Yamanaka factor?
Yeah, what's the Yamanaka factor? I mean, it's interesting. Can I get one on the kitchen counter? Yeah. So, a guy My Dr. Yamanaka Nobel Laureate discovered that you can take a differentiated cell, a skin cell, a nerve cell, a heart cell, a liver cell, whatever it is, and return it back to its pluripotent state. What does that mean? When we're born, we have one cell, the fertilized egg, and that grows and grows and grows and eventually differentiates into all these different kinds of cells in your body, your skin cell, your bone, your muscle, your heart, your nerve, your liver, your kidney. And all those cells have the same genome, but again, it's which of those genes are turned on and which of those genes are turned off determine what kind of a cell it is, what its function is. And we've heard of stem cells and those stem cells have the ability to differentiate into any one of these specialized cells. Well, Yamanaka determined that these four factors, these four genes, proteins, if you utilize them, you can turn a differentiated cell back into a pluripotent stem cell that could then, you could take it from a skin cell to a pluripotent stem cell and then make it a heart cell or make it a nerve cell.
Wow. So you can reverse the process of the evolution of the cell into its final form into its pre-existing state.
Exactly. And we'll come back to this in a little bit on the work of Dean Kamen, who's manufacturing or backup set of organs for all of us, which is insane. Hold on for that one. So long story short, David Sinclair, working with three out of the four Yamanaka factors, was able to reverse the age and publish this in December of 2020 on the COVID of Nature, reverse the age of the vision system of long-lived mice. So these mice who had gone blind with a whole set of of age-related decrepitation of their vision system, their optic nerve, he was able to bring them back to an earlier state where they were fully functional. It's since been done with the heart of mice. And so, the question is, can you reverse, can you get your body to go back to a state of, hey, this is what your body should look like. These are the genes that should be on and off when you're, you know, instead of 60 when you're at 40 or at 30. And it's. The concept is age reversal, which is extraordinary. You know, I'm working on Mark right now. And when we did our walk, if we talked about this, I'm working on a 100 million dollar age reversal X prize. And- that's pretty exciting. Yeah, I've raised about three quarters of the capital for it. We launched $100 million gigaton carbon removal prize at Elon funded. And this is the next big one I want to do. Get teams around the world working on how do you reverse aging. In this case, we'll ask them to do 20%, I mean 25%, 20 years in humans with a therapeutic that lasts less than a year. But there are serious conversations about this now.
Yeah. So the idea that we have the software that kind of gets gummed up as we get older, but there are ways to sort of reset it through various strategies around longevity is really intriguing to me because when I look at the common age-related diseases, they all have common mechanisms, right? Inflammation, oxidative stress, change in the microbiome that all impact that hormonal dysregulation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and you sort of start to look at the root causes of all this, toxin overload and accumulation of all that. Those just seem to me to be the sort of low hanging fruit to kind of work on to affect the ravages of aging. And, a lot of the things that influence those are what we call the exposome, which is what are your genes exposed to? We're talking about how do we modify gene expression, epigenetics, you know, your exposome includes everything from the air you breathe, the water you drink, the thoughts you have, the altitude you're at, the, the microbiome is in your gut, to the food you're eating, the amount you exercise, the way you, whether you are loved or not loved. I mean, they're all things that are affecting these things in real time. So the question is, in your research on longevity and in life force, what did you come up with that were the sort of the, the key anchors that, that people need to focus on? to improve the quality of their health, to add more life to their years and more years to their life.
Well, because at the end of the.
Day, people listening like, what's in it for me? Like, what do I, you know?
So listen, no surprise, Mark, it's everything you've been teaching and talking about and writing about for quite some time. And you are the, definitely the, the, the guy, the Guiding Light, I'm the.
Loudest voice, maybe the most annoying voice.
So, you know, listen, I think it's, It's very clear that first of all, there's people should have hope that they're incredible technologies in development right now and incredible therapeutics. I'm involved with a number of companies I've co-founded that are doing things. We can talk about those. And your job is to live long enough to intercept all these technologies. And there are things you can do right now. And I think about them as the fundamentals. Number one, sleep eight hours. If the body could have evolved to do as well in less than eight hours, it would have. While we're sleeping, we are sitting ducks. And so, a species of hominids that could sleep for six hours and do as well would have out-competed everybody else who slept eight hours. So, for me, that's obvious. Number two, it's what you eat. Eliminate sugar. is first, you know, first second and third in the list and then a whole, you know, whole plants. It's the work that you and Dean Ornish talk about. So it's, I just try and do my best time, not a saint, but I just try and remove all sugar. The way I do it is I don't buy it at the supermarket. I just, if it's not in the house, I can't eat it. You know, when your willpower is a week, don't have it there. That's what I always say.
If there's chunky monkey in the freezer, I'm done. Like, I, if I have a bad day and there's a pint of chunky monkey, there's no holding me back. But if it's not there, I'll just, I'll look, I'll feel depressed for a minute and then I'll go back to my room and read a book.
Exactly, 100%. You know, it's drinking two, three or more liters of water per day. It is exercise, you know, and you and I both are, you know, I try and get my 10,000 steps in every day and I try and do at least a light weight workout. I'm not going to, to benching you record, but I'm using free weights to keep muscle toned. Muscle is one of the highest correlations with longevity.
Unbelievably great that you said that because I think, you know, muscle is the currency of aging. And as we age, we lose muscle. And muscle is where our metabolism is, is when it's lost, we replace it with fat, which generates inflammation and oxidative stress and tanks are good hormones like testosterone and growth hormone and raises our bad hormones like cortisol, all of which accelerate aging. So most people don't think about muscle as an organ. They don't think about how to preserve muscle, create muscle, create better efficient muscle, more highly functional muscle, more mitochondrial intelligence and function. Those are really, to me, some of the most important things with aging. And so, you know, there's really two aspects that I hear you talking about. One is sort of the basic foundational things we know about how to actually upgrade your life. and upgrade your biological software through lifestyle. And then there's all these really extraordinary techniques which are gene editing techniques, which are using various sort of innovative compounds to affect some of these gene expression patterns to things that I don't even probably know about that you've uncovered that are being explored, whether it's things like NAD or whether it's things like, you know, things that help regulate the economic factors, whatever those are. There's a lot of that going on. So I think the basic stuff people have a pretty good handle on, it's sort of the obvious stuff.
Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of other things I just want to hit on. Mindset and attitude is probably one of the most important things. You know, it's, if you think you're gonna die, you can will yourself to death. Who do you hang out with, right? Are you hanging out with people at the very end of their life? Are you hanging out with people who are youthful? your mindset is so fundamentally important. And do you have a vision, is the vision for the years ahead of you bigger than the vision for the years behind you? You know, I mean, that's fundamental. Fundamental, right? I'm more excited to be alive now than I ever have. And the projects I have are going to keep me going for the next few hundred years. So I'm, I'm super pumped about that. Yeah.
No, you're right. You know, it's really true when you look at meaning and purpose. It actually directly correlates with longevity. And optimists live longer, even if they're wrong. And I, I actually spent a lot of time this last week with a 99 year old man who is brilliant, still working. I said, so what are you, what are you, what are your interests? Well, I mentioned longevity. And he was 99 years old. He's telling about the projects he's working on, the movies, the films he's making, the I mean, it's just it's really stunning to me to see someone that age be so engaged in life and joyful and committed to his friends and his community and his family active. I mean, I was like, wow, that is just really remarkable. You know, you probably know him, Norman Lear. He's just an amazing guy.
Oh, I love Norman Lear.
I'm just like, to be able to be that up close and personal with him and hear him talk about his life and his stories, but also talking about what he's dreaming about for the future. he's dreaming about the future. And that's pretty exciting to me.
There's another category of what you can do right now that's important. And I jokingly call it not dying from something stupid.
There you go.
But it's really important.
I call it How to Die Young as Late as Possible.
Okay. Here's the realization. All of us are optimists about our lives. about what's going on inside our body. We think we're fine, we're great, moving along, we're rushing to work and to vacation and spending time with our families, and that's all awesome. But we actually have no idea what's going on inside our bodies until you end up with the pain in your side in the hospital and the doctor says, Listen, I hate to tell you this, but whatever it is. And so this is the work that I had done early on in human longevity, and really we've taken it the next level with a platform called Fountain Life. We talk about Fountain Life in the book. But it's the notion that every year I go for a digital upload. I go to HLI, Human Longevity Inc. or Fountain Life, and I am I do a full body MRI, head to toe, brain, brain vasculature, a clearly coronary CTA that uses AI to look for soft plaque versus calcified plaque. Calcified plaque isn't safe. It's the soft plaque that can rupture that you have to worry about.
Yes, yes.
Dexa scan, my genome, my microbiome, my omics and so forth. And my goal, is two things. Has anything changed in the last year I need to know about? And is there anything, you know, so first of all, it's given me a baseline of this is where my body is. Like originally when I first did it, I saw I had a large aortic root where the aorta enters the heart. And it was like, is that dangerous? Should I be concerned? But then after doing it four or five times, it didn't change. That's just me. that's just normal for me. But we have found in like 14, 15% of people who've come through it, and these are all relatively wealthy who can get any health care they want, who are typically in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 2.5% have an aneurysm they didn't know about. 2% of cancer they didn't know about. And all in all, I think the number was like 14 or 15% have something that they need to know about that's going to impact their health. And so that's my, you know, wear your seatbelt, get yourself uploaded every year. And if you find something, take action. People say, I don't wanna know. And I call bullshit, of course you wanna know because you can do a lot about things right now.
Absolutely. I think what you're talking about is really important, Peter, 'cause what you're talking about is sort of a host of diagnostics that often are not something we would get in traditional doctors. Hopefully the prices are gonna come down so we can get them. But, you know, there's a lot of imaging, a lot of diagnostics that are great, but then there's a whole layer of things that doctors aren't looking at. And I see this all the time, you know, with people who are coming to see me for a functional medicine. There's subclinical changes that happen and you can detect changes in your biology and physiology decades before you ever get a symptom or before you get diagnosed with the disease, whether it's insulin resistance that you can see early on by raising, looking at insulin levels after a meal or fasting insulin, which is the first thing to go up way before your blood sugar goes up, or whether there's low-grade autoimmune disease, or whether your microbiome's off, or you have nutritional deficiencies, your mitochondria aren't functioning. Exactly. You can start to see these things and it's really just like a tune up. They're not quite diseases yet. And then traditional medicine just hasn't had a way of thinking about this because it's really complex. And what's, I think, emerging and what you're finding, Peter, is that there's this emerging field of omics revolution, which is, you know, when you think about the the number of data points that we get when you go to the doctor, you get like 20, 30, 40, 50 lab tests maybe. There's literally tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of things you can measure, most of which we're ignoring. You know, like, like David Fuhrman at Stanford has looked at the throughput analysis of literally thousands and thousands of molecules around inflammation, which are those ones that relate to aging and chronic disease. And they're things you've never heard of before. They're things your doctor never tests for that aren't a lab requisition, but are the most important things that we can be measuring to look at. long-term inflammation and aging. So, I think there's a whole host of things that we can start to look at and from a functional medicine perspective, that's what excites me because I see these things and I can then see the changes that happen. I can see the changes in biology that happened and I've noticed it myself. I've literally kind of changed my biology and how I posted a picture recently of when I was 40 and when I was 60 in my body and it's totally different. I was sort of like skinny fat back then. I was eating more carbohydrates. I wasn't overweight but I didn't really have much muscle. And, you know, look at me now, I look like 20 years younger, but I was 20 years younger than that picture than I am now. So, it's like really quite staggering what you can do when you begin to understand these things.
Yeah, and there are two reasons we haven't done this in the past, maybe three. One, we couldn't before. We couldn't measure it. We didn't even know it was there or measurable, but we now do. And second, it's getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. But the third is that no human physician could ever deal with the amount of data we're talking about. It's a massive amount of data.
No.
And it's really the use of machine learning algorithms that are helping us understand the patterns, understand what it means. And, you know, I think it's going to become in the next five years, malpractice not to do a diagnosis without AI in the loop, just because.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I mean, it's, it's like I, I've, you know, seen literally millions and millions of data points on tens of thousands of patients, but I'm one guy. And I've, I've seen patterns and correlations on things that no one has described before. And yet I know are true because I see them over and over again, but nobody's really kind of described in the literature. And I think that's just a sort of the tip of the iceberg of what's really going on when we, we need to look at these things. So that's what's sort of exciting was we can look at the longevity perspective. We get to look at how do we start to do Diagnostics differently, not.
Looking for disease per se, but looking for sort of variations from optimal function and health. So that's what we've done at Fountain life. We have by the end of 2022, we'll have a dozen centers set up in Dubai, in India, in UK, in Toronto, and about 10 in the US. We're about, anyway, we're doubling in the 2022 timeframe. And we basically digitize you and upload you into the system where we can understand what changes have occurred since last time. And, that's part of what Fountain Life does. The other part is performance and recovery. It's how do we use, how do we actually, what are your goals? Is it muscle? Is it obesity? Is it energy levels? And, we help direct you in our programs that way. But, then there's a regenerative medicine side. that is important because the regenerative medicine arena is growing tremendously. But we've built something called Fountain OS, which is an app that allows you to upload the data into your app, but it allows you to provision these things wherever you are. So if you don't live in the city where there's a fountain center, we have identified the imaging centers and facilities in Schenectady or in Des Moines, where you can get all of the tests put together and uploaded to the system independent of where you live. And then the fun part is we have something called Fountain Health, which is life insurance, I'm sorry, health insurance business.
So.
You know, health insurance, it pays you after you have disease and after you get treatment. But what if instead health insurance was the opposite, which is we're going to provide you all of the imaging that Fountain Life does for free every year to catch disease at the very beginning and prevent it in the first place. So it's insurance that's going to be for self-insured companies initially, but it's about giving all of your employees all of this extensive testing as part of the insurance package for free to prevent the disease in the long run. So, Fountain Life is doing great and super pumped about it.
So, basically these clinics where you can go and get a range of different assessments and therapies that assess where you are now, where you are in the deviations in your sort of longevity track, and how to actually change those back to a younger biological age using a combination of lifestyle supportive therapies, functional medicine, regenerative therapies that are all out there now and be able to incorporate as in real time as new therapies come online. When we hit longevity escape velocity, we'll be able to actually all get to take advantage of that, which is pretty exciting.
Yeah, it is. We also have a very limited, we call our Edge program. So as you all know, there's a lot of open investigational new drugs out there on the cutting edge. like rapamycin, like total plasma exchange, and so forth. So, we give a small number of our Fountain Life members the ability to participate in these research protocols.
One of the things that are on the horizon from that sort of other than the foundational lifestyle stuff, which is really all the stuff we've been talking about forever, but it actually really matters, whether it's relationships and community and meaning and purpose and eating whole foods and extras. All those things obviously are important. And then, you know, there may be some new things around various kinds of supplements or NAD and things that are coming out. But there's a whole range of other things that people are exploring, whether it's, you know, massive stem cell injections, 200 million stem cells, IV, they're doing exosomes, ozone, hyperbaric oxygen. They're, they're, they're even doing blood exchange. I mean, there, there's studies in animals where you can basically Hook up a young rat to an old rat and the old rat becomes a young rat. So there's all kinds of crazy stuff going on. What did you find within Life Force that was the most promising among all those different topics? What should people think about?
Yeah, I'll share a few. And these are the ones that I know personally, 'cause I'm involved. So one of the companies that Bob Hariri, who's also a co-author and I started, Bob's the chairman and CEO, and I serve as co-founder and vice chairman called cellularity. We built the largest cellular manufacturing facility out there. It's based out of New Jersey. The company, if anybody is pregnant listening to this, you know that you can store your cord blood, but what cellularity does also is store the child's placenta. We receive the placenta in the facility. We take the cord blood, but then we decellularize the placenta and pull out of it the placental T-cells, natural killer cells, and stem cells. And that's a incredible treasure chest of valuable cellular medicines and capability. So, I think of the placenta as the 3D printer that manufactures the baby. Every cell that becomes the baby has come from the placenta. And the placenta, we actually pay to throw it away afterwards, but I want you to imagine that when we mine the placenta for these cells, we have.
A.
Bob Hurley says, listen, if your baby came with an extra spare set of organs, would you throw them away?
Right?
And that's what I think about this.
So, yeah.
So, we're a cellularity is producing large supplies of very high quality stem cells and then exosomes. Again, the placenta is also very rich in exosomes. And exosomes are these small vesicles of growth factors that are pumped out by the stem cells. But then the other cells, the natural killer cells, for example, and this is what the company's current business that we went public on back in summer of 21. It turns out that the placenta is an incredibly protective organ for a fetus. If the mother has a viral infection, the placenta and the natural killer cells of the placenta protect the baby. If the mother has cancer, it's very, very rare that you ever get a metastasis to the fetus. It turns out that natural killer cells are the cells that protect you today as you're sitting there against cancer and viral infection. So what we've been able to do is take these most powerful natural killer cells from the placenta and then develop them and use them as drugs and infuse them into the body to augment your immunity. And we have incredible science data, some of which we release, some of which will be released. And so then same thing for T cells and CAR T cells, which you're familiar with. But then the ability to use stem cells, so one of the hallmarks of aging is that the stem cells in your body and these cells are resonant throughout your body, in your fat, in your muscle, other tissues, and these cells that are sitting there latent, ready to differentiate into muscle, liver, lung, kidney, whatever it might be. But your stem cell populations in your body can go down by a hundred or a thousand fold. So it's this. this ability to repair your body. The analogy that I love, I don't know if it was Aubrey de Grey who first came up with this, he said, imagine you build a brand new mansion. And this mansion is amazing. It's beautiful. It's got 30 rooms in it. And it's so much work to keep up. But you have a army of maintenance and repair people in the mansion. But as the mansion goes on, these repair people start to die and they start to go senile, and eventually the mansion goes into disrepair. And this is like the human body, where the stem cells are the regenerative agents. They're the repair agents that start to reduce in number 100-fold, 1000-fold, and as they age, they become less capable. But what if you could augment the stem cells in your body from this really incredibly, you know, this will date us in terms of our computer background, like the boot disc, you know, the earliest software.
Yeah.
So, that's fun. That's a super cool tech.
So, basically the idea is preserve your placenta when you're born and then keep it as a storage house for all these amazing healing cells that you can access it anytime when you get sick when you're older, is that the idea?
Well, yes, and it turns out that the placenta, it becomes a universal donor. Placental cells are universal donor because they haven't been thymonized yet. If you imagine a surrogate mother who's not related to the child in any way.
Yeah, right.
But she doesn't reject the child and the child.
That's right.
Reject her. and so the placenta's cells are a universal donor and recipient. So, yeah.
People are using like exosomes from placenta and those things, right?
Yeah, 100%. And cellularity is developing those products and going into IND, investigational new drugs, idea of cells as drugs, very powerful. Another company, vacinity, which I'm very proud of, again, serving as co-founder and vice chairman. It's a, it's a company that realized there's, so there's a $160 billion biologics market out there. And it's the idea of using antibodies that you inject into your body, and those antibodies can go find a specific protein and knock it out. So I have, I have high. Cholesterol, it's familial, it's genetic, high LDL, low-density lipoprotein, and I don't like taking statins. That's my personal opinion. But it turns out that there's this monoclonal antibody called Repatha against an enzyme in my liver called PCSK9. And PCSK9 in the liver is the enzyme that generates the LDL. And, I think it's Regeneron makes this monoclonal antibody. They make it in a giant vat in New York, and every two weeks, I get this little self-injector, five mLs injected in my belly fat, and it's about $600, $700 per injection. It's not cheap.
It's a lot.
And, for that reason, it's the last line of defense. But those, antibodies I'm injecting into my body go to my liver and they shut down the PCSK9 enzyme and my LDL level falls beautifully in line and it's kept me, you know, really feeling healthy and safe. But it's expensive to have those antibodies created outside the body and so forth. But so what vaccinity, it's V-A-X-X-I-N-I-T-Y is the name of it. What we've done at Vaccinity is been able to design a vaccine that you inject once a year, maybe twice a year, and that vaccine turns your immune system into the producer of those monoclonal antibodies. And so you vaccinate yourself against this endogenous protein, this protein in your body against PCSK9. and so we're in phase one there and phase one on same typical target for migraines, a phase two for Parkinson's and a phase three for Alzheimer's. So it's the idea of imagine being able to give yourself an injection once a year and protect yourself from ever coming down with Alzheimer's.
That would be amazing. So it's going to be kind of cool little hacks that we can use to somehow stave up some of the age-related diseases, but. what you're doing a lot with this work on life force and longevity is actually going upstream to get to the root causes years before you'll ever get the problem.
Yes. So I'm one of the, remember we talked earlier about the sirtuins that are doing this dance between DNA repair and DNA regulation, and they're powered by NAD that's dropping in the cells as we age. And so one of the things you can do is is supplement the precursors of NAD. And, this is a lot of the work that's done by David Sinclair as well. And, so, I take NMN nicotinamide mononucleotide that is converted to NAD intracellularly. And, that helps to, at least in theory, I've not been measuring my NAD levels, but upright increase the amount of NAD in my cells to keep those sirtuins bouncing back and forth and keeping me my epigenome properly regulated. Right? So there are things like that. I take metformin to reduce my blood glucose levels. And, you know, there's a whole slew of things. There's a number of trials going on, and I'm tracking all of these age reversal therapeutics and companies out there. You know, it's interesting when you look.
At the metformin, for example, I remember the diabetes prevention trial and it showed that, you know, giving metformin helped to reduce the progression to type 2 diabetes from pre-diabetics, you know, by a relatively good amount. But the lifestyle and diet were far exceeded the benefit of metformin. So, you know, I mean, is it incremental only in terms of its benefit? Or, I mean, you think it has some other benefit? 'cause to me it seems like if we just reverse insulin resistance doing the things that we know work, which is diet and lifestyle, that actually you won't need Metformin.
Yeah. So, for me, it's built-in suspenders. I'm really focused in on my diet and my sleep and my exercise and my mindset. And, you know, I'm doing everything I can to maximize my opportunities to intercept the technologies that are coming our way. And it's, you know, it's a choice. I mean, chunky monkey and sitting on the couch watching Netflix for five hours a day is a choice.
Yes, for sure. Yeah, no, that's right. I think, you know, it's interesting to try to sort through all these different technologies, whether it's lifestyle things, supplements like NMN or NAD, and what is the 80 20 on it? What is 80 20? And I think that, you know, by that I mean, you know, what are the most leverage interventions that we can focus on now given what we know for people listening? Could you help us sort of come down with what are the 80 20 on, on this? What are the 20% of things that are going to make 80% of the difference? And if we focus on those, we're going to be good. And then we can kind of micro-tune the other things as the research comes on. We hit this longevity escape velocity.
There is so much data coming out and this massive increase in information and stories and journal articles and such. I'll just share with you something that I'm pumped about. I built over the last couple of years a platform called Future Loop and it creates a a newsletter for me called Longevity Insider. You go to longevityinsider.org and it's free. We scan 250,000 to half a million journals, newspapers, magazines, tweets every day looking.
For.
Valid, future positive semantic breakthroughs on converging technologies impacting health and longevity. So it is a, I get the top 15 articles every day on breakthroughs regarding health and longevity and age reversal. And we have built an AI on it that summarizes the article really well about what it is and why it's important. And for me, it's about how do you keep, you know, part of the mindset part is realizing holy shit, that's happening and that's happening and that's happening. You know, it's a realization that the amount that this area is massively exploding in a very positive, a positive sense. So, you know, longevityinsider.org is, you can go and get on, instead of all of the dystopian news you get every day from everything else you read.
Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of these things that you're most excited about, is it these gene editing things? Is it the stem cell work? Is it the sort of exosomes? I mean, what's sort of the thing that's sort of most exciting on the horizon?
You know, I think it's It's all of these. I mean, we probably, we did 160 interviews in the book, and we look at, you know, I think the gene therapies to be able to, you know, we were all given a genetic lottery when we're born, depending upon our mother and our father. And there are things that you can do and lifestyle changes, which we should and must do. But the tools that are coming to attack the different hallmarks of aging from stem cells and exosomes on one end to gene therapies to, you know, just even treatments for mitochondrial dysfunction. I mean, I'm tracking as many of them and all of them. You know, I'm lucky Fountain Life as a platform is where I have a list of an incredible group of advisors and supporters who are the fiduciaries to help us identify and then say, this is scientifically credible. Let's watch this. Let's make this available to our members. And so, I'm constantly tracking that. I mean, there's another technology coming out of Total Plasma Exchange, right, where you basically have changing the oil in your car You explain that. You take out of, so in our bodies, we're accumulating products of metabolism all the time, and our liver and our kidneys should clear that, but it doesn't always. And so there is a couple of things happen. One, as you said, experiments done in what are called the parabiosis experiments, where the circulatory system of a young mouse and the circulatory system of an old mouse were connected. And the young mouse got old and the old mouse got young.
Yeah.
You know, and like, this is like, you know, the vampire experiments. And it was like, what up? What's going on here? You know, what's these factors in the blood that, in the blood? you clean them out in this blood exchange. And so two things came out of that. One is out of Harvard, out of Amy Wagers lab came identification of a protein called GDF-11. And GDF-11 is a protein that goes, you produce less and less of it as you age and there are antibodies against it as you age. And so in mice, when you give GDF-11, and we're just in the animal phase studies, the mouse reduces inflammation, it increases its circulatory capabilities. You get a lot of revitalization from GDF-11. So it may be that GDF-11 is the factor responsible for the rejuvenation of these older mice. so that's one thing. And so we write about GDF-11 in the book. I'm an investor in a company called Eleveen that is producing GDF-11 or doing the research behind GDF-11. But then these same scientists took these older mice and basically took blood out, spun out the cells and put the cells back in. But with albumeN and dextrose and saline. Basically, you know, albumeN, as you well know, is the major protein in the bloodstream. And your blood is a lot of albumeN, a lot of salt water and some sugar. And so they took all of the plasma out and replaced the plasma with fresh constituent parts. And that revitalized the old mice too. And so there is in particular reducing signs of dementia. And if you, anyway, so there's, there's a lot of protocols going on right now. We're tracking that inside of fountain life. It'll probably become available in our Edge program. I look forward to trying it. And it's a notion of basically, like, changing your oil.
So, so what is it? Plasma pheresis. Is that what it is?
It is basically, yes, it's basically. Again, you're pulling out two liters of blood, you're spinning it down, and you're replacing the plasma with albumin and dextrose and ringer solution.
So, the series is a lot of old crud, kind of like space junk floating around in your blood that needs to be cleaned out. It can cause aging and inflammation and oxidative stress and all these problems. and that kind of exchanging your plasma or blood like this will actually help to improve your overall health. And I think a lot of doctors in plasma freezers and other things for chronic illness and seeing really significant benefits.
Yeah. And so there's just so many different. And, I mean, we, we could spend another three hours and maybe we'll, we'll do another session to actually dive down into another dozen. targets, but it's extraordinary. I've never been more excited about disrupting the healthcare industry and extending the healthy lifespan. And there's nothing more important than that. I love the saying, the man or woman who has their health has a thousand dreams, and the man or woman who does not has but one.
I think you're right, Peter. You're in this moment where the kinds of things you're talking about are not just disrupting aging and longevity science, but they're disrupting our whole way of thinking about chronic illness and, and subsequently our healthcare system. Yeah. Now we need to refocus on the science of creating health. Cuz what you're talking about, a lot of the therapies you're talking about are not necessarily targeted specific disease. They're targeted at mechanisms that, that are related to the degradation of our biology over time that are really about optimizing the, the, the inherent functions of the body. So they're supportive and enhancing therapies. I think of the difference between antibiotics and probiotics. You know, anybody can kill a bug, but a probiotic will help your gut work better. and a lot of these therapies are much like that. They're not designed to be interfering or blocking a pathway as much as actually enhancing and optimizing the functions of your biology that degrade over time as we age and as we have insults. I think a lot of the, the insults that we see are, you know, because of how we treat our bodies. You know, I got a Bodywork the other day, and, you know, below the neck, like, she's like, look how your body's 30 years old. I'm like, yeah, it feels like 30 years old. I mean, I I feel I'm actually more fit, more muscular, more in shape than I was when I was 30 at 62 almost. So, that's possible if we understand the science of how to create health and how the body works. And, that's really the beautiful thing about your book, Life Force, with Tony Robbins and Bob Hariri, which is, I think, an incredible contribution to the field of longevity science because it's a kaleidoscopic view of everything that's going on in the field. And, a lot of people are sort of the blind man in the elephant and a lot of longevity books out there. But, they're from experts or people are focused on one particular slice, right? And we're really taking a meta view at 30,000 feet and looking at, you know, what do we know? What do we not know? Where is this all going? And how do we start to begin to incorporate some of these things in an intelligent way? And what are the things we need to be looking out for on the horizon?
I appreciate that summary. And the intention is, you know, we got a large advance for the book. And we donated 100% of all the proceeds to the research labs that we talk about in the book and other research labs. And this is one of the, again, I think I'm so thankful to be alive now compared to 100 years ago, even 50 years ago. You know, it's an extraordinary time to be alive. And we're discovering so much, you know, I spent an entire chapter talking about how exponential technologies are going to impact the entire reinvention of the healthcare industry and longevity. And it's just, it's amazing.
And.
There'S no bigger business and no bigger impact. Oh, very cool. I'll just add, I'll maybe close on this. A study recently done at Harvard and Oxford and the London School of Business concluded that for every year you can.
Increase.
The average life expectancy of humanity, It's worth $38 trillion to the global economy.
Wow.
$38 trillion. So imagine adding a decade of life. And I think my mission is be able to increase my health span by a decade, and then during that decade intercept the next generation of technologies that will increase it by two decades, and then three.
But who's chasing that? All right, well let's play tennis when we're 200 together. How's that?
I love that. I love that. For sure.
We'll walk on the Venice boardwalk. We might go a little slower, but you know. All right.
When you're in town next, I would love to actually take you up on that tennis game.
All right. You know, and I'm going to brag a little bit, but you know, I've noticed that, you know, if you actually understand this model and you start to work on it. You can actually achieve amazing levels of health at any age. And I was just at a thing called Summit, which is a gathering of a group of folks. And there was mostly 30, 40 year olds there. And there was a workout class. And after the workout class, the she was like, okay, we're gonna do plank. I'll see who can last the longest. And I'm like, okay, I'll try. What do I know? And everybody's dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping. And I was like the last one to drop after five minutes, everybody dropped. And so here I'm probably 20 or 30 years older than most of the people in that room. but by understanding how to work with my biology through nutrition and sleep and exercise and fitness, you can actually, it's like the Tarahumara Indians, you know, they had this belief that these Indians, there's a great book called Born to Run that talks about them. They believe that as you got older, you got to be healthier and fitter. And they were these native indigenous people from Mexico who used to run 100 mile distances, right? And they found that when they went and studied them from Harvard, they had better vital capacity in their lungs, better cardiovascular fitness, better VO2 max levels, all the things that we measure as objective metrics of aging, they were better than the 40 and the 20 year olds, which is pretty fascinating to me. So, I think what we, as I'm going to just reframe what we said at the beginning, which is I think most of what we see as people age in this country is abnormal aging. It's the consequence of the ravages of a horrible lifestyle, terrible diet, lack of exercise, too much stress, a lack of agency over our lives and other things that are in our environment, including toxins and pollution. And if we can learn how to sort of work with those things in our life, we can actually change the course of our own well-being and health. And we can start to sort of reimagine society in quite a different way. Because one of the things we didn't really talk about was what happens when you have all these 150-year-olds running around the planet? You know, what are they doing?
That's another conversation, my friend.
So, Peter, it's been so great to talk to you. Your work is always great. You work on the X-Prize is reimagining and dreaming about the future, creating incentive to solve some of the world's biggest problems.
Like a lot of the most positive.
Most optimistic, you know, just brilliant people I know. And I'm just so thrilled you got to be on the podcast. The book is called Life Force.
Yeah, just go to life force.
Get a copy.
Yeah, go to lifeforce.com, you can find out everything that's in the book. is there. You can find out about Fountain Life, you can find out about all of the research and such. And, you know, don't be scared by the book at 600 and some odd pages. You know, read the first few chapters and then cherry pick the ones that are relevant to you. Yeah, but be excited. It's an extraordinary time to be alive and thank God for it.
And I just signed up for your Longevity Insider at longevityinsider.org, so get that newsletter, you'll be probably happy with what you find. If you love this podcast and you know that people are getting older, which is pretty much everybody, then make sure you share this podcast with them because it might change their life. Leave a comment on how you've hacked aging for yourself and understood how to actually reverse your biological age. We'd love to know and subscribe wherever you get your podcast and we'll see you next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you to all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses. to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to DrHyman.com/picks to sign up. That's DrHyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer.
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