What Are Zombie Cells?

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

The body is such a beautiful, elegant thing. It wants to live a long time. It wants to repair itself. But it's going to make a decision. Let's see. Donut? Self repair. And if you let the body decide.

Without intervening, it's going to pick the donut every single time. Hi everyone, I'm Kaya Perowich, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. We tend to equate aging with decline, but the truth is it doesn't have to be that way. There is a big difference between aging and aging well. And we're starting to learn a lot about the body's innate repair mechanisms that we can harness to work in our favor, including reducing senescent or zombie cells. Dr. Hyman has spoken to several guests on the podcast about this topic, including.

Harvard Medical School's Dr. David Sinclair. There have been a few paradigm shifts in the field. So when I started out, and this is we're talking about the early 1990s, the idea was our bodies are like cars. We eventually wear out. There's not much you can do about it. You can slow down the rusting, free radicals, and that's about it. But what we discovered in the 90s, thanks to works by Cynthia Kenyon and Lenny Guarente and others, is that these genes, sirtuins, and there are some others we can talk about later, I think. But these protective pathways exist. We didn't know that we had protective pathways. It's as though we've discovered not just that our bodies are better than cars, that we actually have inbuilt repair systems.

Yeah, it's like a body shop.

It's like a self-cleaning oven, right? Yeah, and they get lazy if you're lazy. They get lazy if you become obese and don't eat well. well, and if you eat too much, there are other things you can do to keep them into action with how you eat, what you eat. But also what we found is that they're basically inbuilt survival mechanisms that are very ancient. They're found in yeast cells and plants in our bodies. Probably our microbiome plays a role. And so we can basically make a call to the Pentagon of the body and they can send out the troops without actually damaging the body. You don't have to have a war to get ready for war. And these protect us against diseases. many cases reverse aspects of aging. Another paradigm shift was that we could delete the bad cells in the body, the senescent cells that accumulate. And there are some molecules in clinical trials as well that might be paradigm shifting. How do you delete those? Well, they're called senolytics. Senolytics, lytic meaning lyse, the cells kill them. And there are molecules that can do that. There are some natural molecules, quercetin, quercetin from onions and apples. Yeah, to sat nibs, a drug on the market. We, well, actually work at the Mayo Clinic primarily, and Judy Campisi out at the Buck Institute found that you can treat animals and delete their senescent cells.

And they get younger. So you basically like go in and.

Like clean up all the bad cells. Yeah, we call these the zombie cells. Senescent cells and zombie cells. They, they, they're, they're half dead. They sit there, they should be dead, but they're actually causing havoc. They're secreting inflammation factors, cytokines that cause other cells to senescent. become potentially cancerous. And when you delete them, mice live longer. And what's exciting about that technology, that's exciting. Science is you can, instead of taking a pill every day, which is the kind of stuff that I work on, if their stuff works, you can have a treatment once every decade maybe, and that's it.

Dr. Hyman also spoke to biohacking expert Dave Asprey about why taking action to clean up these zombie cells is an important part of aging well.

People don't know this, but we have something called zombie cells that I write about in Superhuman. And what a zombie cell is, is a cell just like a real zombie. It sits there and it's not dead really, but it's not alive really either. And it sits there, makes free radicals, it takes up space, and it does nothing good for you, but it adds to your metabolic burden. So what do you do? Well, these are called senescent cells in the aging field. And there are things you can do to encourage your body to get rid of senescent cells.

And they range from something- You can.

Hire Pac-Man to come and clean them up? Yeah, that's pretty much it. We have little robots that come in. And there are people who actually wanna make little nanobots and stuff unnecessary. The body is such a beautiful, elegant thing. It wants to live a long time. It wants to repair itself. But it's gonna make a decision. Let's see, donut, self-repair. And if you let the body decide without intervening, it's gonna pick the donut every single time. You know why? Because throughout all of human history, there have been regular famines. And if there's a donut, it's a good idea to eat it in case there isn't a donut tomorrow.

That's right. You know better. We all know better. We evolved in an era where there.

Wasn'T Krispy Kreme or Dunkin' Donuts in every corner. And our cells don't know that, though they're still stuck in that. So they will self-sacrifice. They'll turn off their ability to save energy to take care of themselves for the donut. So this is just about knowing, oh, if I brush my teeth, I'm better off, I don't get cavities. There are basic metabolic maintenance things that I write about in Superhuman that we haven't been taught to do.

Yeah, it's pretty interesting. When we look at all the things we do know about aging, and all the interventions that seem to turn off aging and turn on youthing, let's call it.

She wrote a book called Youthing. That's a great name.

Okay, that's good. It's fascinating. And it's the, the things that are showing up in the science now, whether it's calorie restriction, the only thing that's been shown to increase longevity reliably in animal models is restricting calories. You eat less by a third, you live a third longer, but you're miserable. So, I don't want to do that. Then there's what we call intermittent fasting, which most people mean by that time-restricted eating where you eat in an eight-hour window. Then there's true intermittent fasting, which maybe fast a day or two a week. and then there's fasting, mimicking diets and there's ketogenic diets. All of those activate the same thing, which is this process of self-repair and healing that is a natural thing that our body does, but that we interfere with all the time by just eating all the time and eating all the.

Wrong foods all the time. In addition to various types of fasting, there are other lifestyle practices that can activate our body's repair mechanisms. Dr. Hyman explored several with health and.

Science journalist, Max Lugavere. exercise, the relationship that we have with nature, the relationship that we have with temperature, the relationship that we have with light, the ever-present environmental toxins that your average human is exposed to on a daily basis. These are all the kinds of topics that I wanted to talk about in the book.

Wow. So people talk about lifestyles, what you eat, sleep, exercise, stress. You don't hear people talking about light and nature and temperature.

Right, right.

Cryotherapy.

Cryotherapy, yeah. Saunas. Yeah, and I always try to make things like my recommendations achievable by average people. So you might not have access to a sauna, you might not have access to a cryotherapy chamber, but just getting into colder water, taking a cold shower, or exposing, wearing your skivvies on your terrace during the cooler months can all be a great way of activating these ancient thermoregulatory mechanisms that we all have in us that we've allowed to gather dust because we all live in a state of chronic climate control. And I think that by staying in that climate comfort zone all the time, it undermines some really powerful reparative and restorative pathways that we have in our body.

So what's the science to that?

Well, I mean, being exposed to cold air boosts the proliferation of brown fat. So, I mean, we're all afraid of gaining even more fat on our waistlines and on our hips, but brown fat is actually something that we want to have more of. It's metabolically active. It's brown because it actually has a lot more mitochondria than normal white adipose tissue. Which are the energy factories in your cells. Energy factories in your cells, yeah. They give you more energy, but they also, this brown fat actually burns fat and it burns sugar. And we can actually increase the amount of brown fat that we have on us. It's not actually visible. You can't see brown fat. It only accumulates in a few parts of the body. In our armpits, around our collarbone, down our spines, shoulder blades. That's where you're going to see the brown fat. You can't actually see it because it's really relative to the amount of white fat that we carry. It's a very small in concentration, but it's really good for our metabolic health. So whether that means turning down the.

Thermostat-- you- get more brown fat if you expose yourself to cold.

Yeah, because brown fat, it burns calories to generate heat. So when you're in a cooler environment, this brown fat is burning calories to generate heat. Brown fat was actually originally identified in babies. Babies, when they get cold, they can't shiver. Babies can't shiver. So they have this brown fat that basically acts like an internal heating pad. And for that reason, it wasn't known whether or not we carried this type of fat with us through adulthood. But now not only do we in fact carry this brown fat with us, which acts like an internal heating pad that burns calories, as I mentioned, but we can encourage its proliferation.

Yeah, well the Tibetan monks knew this for years. They have a practice called tummo. Do you know about this?

No.

Tummo is amazing. It is a technique called drying of the sheets. And so they train the monks to activate their brown fat through meditation. And they have them up in the Himalayas and the monasteries way up in the freezing mountains. And they practice by dipping cold sheets in ice water and they wrap the monks in the sheets. And the monks have to dry the sheets with their internal body heat. and when they can do that, they send them up overnight into the snow with basically a loincloth and they have to stay alive.

Wow.

And they do it. It's quite an amazing practice and we've had such a surge of things like saunas and cryotherapy. And, you know, we haven't talked about it on the show but there's something called zombie cells. Zombie cells?

Exsenescence cells.

Yeah, the things that tend to kill us where these sort of senescence or aging cells and they just create a lot of nasty immune effects and inflammation in the body, and it's hard to get rid of them. Cryotherapy or cold exposure is one of the key mechanisms for getting rid of these zombie cells to help extend longevity. And personally, you know, I found that when I was really sick, and even now it's a standard part of my practice, I go into a hot sauna or a steam, get really hot, and then I turn the bath. big bathtub, only cold water, and they jump in. Wow. And it's pretty invigorating, but you feel afterwards like your whole nervous system is awake and you're alive and you're energetic and it clears your head. It's pretty striking. Yeah, it is striking.

It's...

When I had chronic fatigue syndrome, it was one of the few things that gave me like a half an hour.

An hour of feeling some respite.

Wow.

Yeah.

So many things influence how we age. Diet, lifestyle patterns like exercise, sleep, stress management, and environmental exposures are all involved in forming our biological age. And many other factors like blood sugar, inflammation, and genetics play an important role as well. We are learning so much about why age is not the definitive factor it's made out to be when it comes to our health. And with the right practices we can slow down and even sometimes reverse the aging process. Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. If you'd like to learn more about anything you've heard today, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations with Dr. David Sinclair, Dave Asprey, and Max Lugavere. Until next time.