The Science Of SLOWING AGING Down By Killing ZOMBIE CELLS | Dr. Mark Hyman

Why do you get zombie cells? There are about 10 major things that go wrong in the body that explain all disease, especially all the diseases of aging. Now, each of us is made up of about 30 trillion cells. They all work together in harmony to do all sorts of things in your body to survive day to day and year to year. But sometimes the process of regulating our cells, of replication, you know, killing the old cells, they need to be killed, recycling the parts that need to be recycled, it goes awry. And it goes awry for a lot of reasons we're gonna get into, but mostly have to do with our really crappy environment, lifestyle and toxins. Now, when cells don't properly die or get recycled through a die through a process called apoptosis, which is basically like just means that cells kind of die normally, or they're not able to be cleaned up through this process of autophagy, which sort of means self-cannibalism or self-eating, they kind of aren't useful as cells anymore, but they become these zombie cells. And these zombie cells turns out are a key part of the aging process or what we call senescence cells. Senescence means the process of aging. I like to call them zombie cells because they're cells that never die. And they're not just floating around just doing nothing. They're producing this really nasty set of compounds that are driving inflammation throughout the body. And then they make other cells into zombie cells. So they just accelerate the collection of zombie cells in your body. And the more zombie cells you have, the less well your body works, the faster you age, the sooner you die. So the key is to learn about why you get them and stop the zombie cell accumulation, the zombie apocalypse, and two, learn really cool tools about how to kill the zombie cells. We're going to talk about what those are in a minute. So stay tuned for this. Now, these inflammatory chemicals, we call them cytokines, and when the zombie cells are active, they're producing, they're doing basically nothing except producing these nasty sets of inflammatory signals and chemicals that are causing everything from heart disease to cancer to osteoarthritis, high blood pressure, Alzheimer's, and the list goes on. and it's one of the underlying things we call the hallmarks of aging. And I just finished my book called Young Forever, the Secrets to yous Healthiest, Longest Life. And it's coming out February 21st, 2023. So make sure you get it. It's going to go way more into detail all this. But bottom line is there are about 10 major things that go wrong in the body that explain all disease. especially all the diseases of aging. And in medicine, we basically go and treat the symptoms and not the cause. Hallmarks are going upstream and working on the root causes of the diseases. But there's also the causes of the Hallmarks, which I get into in the book. We're not going to go down that rabbit hole today, but the problem with zombie cells is we are getting more and more of them and we are not able to actually help our bodies stay healthy. So let's, let's. talk about the zombie apocalypse and why it's so important and know how we have to think about fixing this problem. Now, the zombies cells are not killed by regular programmed cell death. You know, you've got 30 trillion cells, but your cells are constantly turning over some every minute, some every day, some every week, some every year, some every decade, but your cells turn over in every part of your body. And that process is highly organized and it's a very smart process of either killing the cells through programmed cell death we call apoptosis, which clears out old damaged cells. And then this process called autophagy, which actually also basically like a Pac-Man will eat the dying cells and or the old cells and recycle the parts. Like when you, when you, for example, fast, your body can't use food to make new parts. So it basically breaks down old cells and uses them for recycled parts. But the problem is sometimes apoptosis, autophagy don't work and the cells don't really quite die and they become what we call zombie cells or senescent cells. Now, why do you get zombie cells? Well, it can be caused by DNA damage, which is caused by our inflammatory lifestyle, toxins in our diet, processed food, sugar, obviously all the environmental toxins that were exposed to 84,000 toxins the last 100 years, only 1% have been tested for safety. It can be when we're reproducing and our cells, when we're replicating our cells, we use these little things at the end of our chromosomes called telomeres to keep the DNA healthy and proper. And when you have these short telomeres, because as you age your telomeres shorten, sometimes that process will not really lead to the death of the cells, but actually to actually these zombie cells. So the predominant reasons though are chemical toxic stress, our inflammatory diet and lifestyle, and the things that we actually have control over. And these accelerate all the age-related diseases, cancer, heart disease, liver disease, dementia, cataracts, Parkinson's, arthritis, muscle loss, all that stuff and more obviously are affected by these zombie cells. that's why they're one of the key factors in aging. And in fact, there's billions of dollars being spent on looking at how do we kill these zombie cells and what do we do about it? Now, while these zombie cells wander around your body, they secrete really dangerous molecules. These molecules are called cytokines and all kinds of other molecules with big scientific names. Basically, they drive inflammation and then they also cause more zombie cells. So their neighboring cells kind of rapidly become senescent or zombie cells too, and that leads to this vicious cycle. So as we age and our immune system stops functioning as well, which is why, right, as we get older, we're more susceptible to cancer, more susceptible to infection because our immune systems aren't as strong. And so we see more older people dying with COVID Our body can't really handle these zombie cells at all. And, and it just makes this whole thing worse. So, you get this whole inflammatory cascade. These inflammatory molecules flood your body, they cause damage, and they cause something called inflammaging. which is one of the hallmarks of aging as well that I talked about in my book. But inflammaging is driving so many of our chronic diseases. Everything you know about as far as a chronic illness is usually caused by inflammation. Heart disease, obviously, cancer, diabetes, obesity, dementia, even things like depression, autism, all these diseases that we see out, in addition, obviously, autoimmune diseases all are connected to inflammation. So what's interesting though is if we can break this cycle of the self-perpetuating zombie apocalypse and kill these zombie cells, which we're learning about through our research, we can actually slow the process of aging down, maybe even reverse it. Now what's really cool is that there's these natural and pharmaceutical compounds that actually kill them and stop the progression of inflamaging and allow for your body to repair tissue and rejuvenate and remodel. And these compounds are called senolytics. So senescence is aging. Lytic means to stop or blow up or break or so you basically stop the process of these senescent cells. And senolytics are a new category of both natural compounds and pharmaceutical compounds. Now, one really cool study actually used something called quercetin. Quercetin is a natural compound. It's found in apples and onions. And it actually has so many beneficial effects. It's antiviral. It actually can be helpful in COVID. It helps gut healing. It's like a natural antihistamine. It's an amazing compound, and it comes from our food. And they basically combined this with a leukemia chemo drug called dasatinib, which was incredibly effective in killing zombie cells, and they did this in mice, and their lifespan was extended by 36%. That means if you're like a human, you live to 80, that means you're going to live to over 120 if you take these two compounds. Now, it hasn't been done in humans yet, so I wouldn't start doing that, but of course it is benign. It's relatively inexpensive, it's accessible, and there's no downside and potentially a lot of upside. It's one of my key parts of my longevity strategy. Now, other natural compounds also kill zombie cells. Now, in the edible plant kingdom, there's about 25, 000 different compounds we call phytochemicals. These molecules are produced by plants. They. They're their defense systems. They help defend against harsh conditions and predators. But our bodies use them. And what's really interesting is that, you know, these are plant compounds. Why? What would they have to do with us? But we've co-evolved with these plants, I believe, in this process. of symbiotic phytoadaptation and, or, you know, we kind of co-evolve with these compounds to use them for different bodily functions. And, and I think this is a really important thing to understand because when we start to understand that food is medicine and that actually there are certain ways that our bodies are lazy and use things, things to help regulate our function, we know about this. For example, we know about resveratrol, which is a come out with red wine that apparently helps extend life in animals and rodents and so forth. Well, how does it work? It works on certain pathways like SIRT1, which is a regulator of aging. So, we know that these actual plant compounds bind to different receptors and pathways in our body just like medication and actually work in ways that activate things in a way that's optimal rather than blocking or inhibiting a pathway, which what most medication does, it actually helps optimize function and improve the systems working. Now, what are some of these senolytic compounds? And by the way, there's a lot of money being thrown at drug discovery to try to find drugs that are senolytics, but you don't have to look very far to find plant compounds that are senolytics. So my favorite is called fisetin, comes from strawberries, persimmons, apples, cucumbers and onions. Super important. It's part of my daily regimen. and it's shown to be a very powerful antioxidant. Luteolin, another plant compound found in carrots, broccoli, artichokes, onions, cabbage, apple skins. Of course Tim we talked about, that's something you can get in food as well, apples, grapes, berries, broccoli, citrus fruits, cherries, curcumin which is found in turmeric which is a curry spice. There's also alkaloids found in long peppers, all kinds of things that we can use to actually activate these things. Now, there are pharmaceuticals that are coming out to look at this, but it probably is going to be not too far in the future that we're going to look at taking a supplement with the right combination of these natural selenatics, maybe new pharmacologic compounds that arrest and stop this zombie apocalypse. And there's one other thing that works besides food, which is hyperbaric oxygen. In Israel, they did a lung control study showing that Better than actually any plant or pharmaceutical compounds that we've discovered so far, that hyperbaric oxygen, which is where you go in a decompression chamber, 100% oxygen, they put you in an atmosphere to under the water or basically it'd be 33 to 66 feet under the ocean. And that much pressure will actually create an anti-inflammatory state, will create this process whereby you both lengthen telomeres and you kill zombie cells, which is pretty amazing. I'm kind of excited about how we're using these new and innovative therapies to help us stave off aging and to help reverse what's going on. Also, intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating can help. Exercise is really key. Hot therapy, saunas, hemesis, as great we've talked about hemesis on the podcast, but essentially it's a process of something that doesn't kill you but makes you stronger. For example, like exercise, if you carry your muscles, you're injuring yourself, but you also come back stronger. So heat therapy is one of those things. There's a lot of ways we can actually learn to reduce the production of zombie cells by our healthy lifestyle and to increase the killing of the zombie cells by both lifestyle habits, as we talked about, hyperbaric oxygen and natural plant-based analytics, and maybe even around the corner, more advanced combinations of these compounds or even pharmaceutical drugs that help to kill the zombie cells. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. We also think for so many years that fat causes you to be fat. But it's actually not fat that causes you to be fat. It's starch and sugar. And not just any kind of sugar. We're gonna talk about fructose in a minute and why it's such a unique factor in fatty.