Look Younger, Feel Better: Dr. Mark Hyman’s Anti-Aging Hacks

Foreign. This is open mind. Now, you probably heard a lot about living longer, about increasing your lifespan, but what about increasing your health span? That's the quality of life you enjoy during those years. It's not just about adding years to your life, but life to your years. Let's face it, who doesn't want to feel young and vibrant for as long as possible? I certainly do. Now, some of you might be thinking, aging, that's decades away from me, or chronic diseases, something older people worry about. The signs of aging and chronic diseases can begin much earlier than most of us expect. And the foundation you built with your health today sets the stage for how you age tomorrow. In functional medicine, we view the body not as separate parts, but as a connected whole, a network of systems where each one impacts the others. Now, conventional medicine breaks the body into more than 135 specialties, but here we focus on the big picture. It's about systems medicine, about network medicine. Your body is a system or a network about understanding and optimizing the seven core systems that your body has that are required to work in harmony. So you don't just age well, you can actually reverse aging. Now, here's a fun fact I'm going to brag a little bit. In the last few years, I've been working on my health span because I can't work on my chronological age. I can work on my biological age. And I did a number of things to up level my health based on what I've learned in my research for Young Forever in my book about longevity. And I actually got four years younger biologically, while I got two years older chronologically. So these strategies are about making smarter choices that impact your entire body, unlocking the secrets of functional medicine to help you feel and look younger. So let's get started. Hi, I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to Health Hacks. So what's the first system we look at in functional medicine? It's your gut. We call this the assimilation system. It's assimilating nutrients. It's digestion. It's the gut microbiome. And our gut is intimately connected to our oral health and longevity. We used to think of the gut as just an isolated digestive system, a tube from our mouth to our butt that food passed through on its way and we absorbed what nutrients we needed and got rid of the rest. Well, it's way more than that. Today we understand the gut's extensive influence on overall health. Inflammation on aging, chronic disease like cancer, heart disease, autoimmunity, dementia. Yeah, even dementia is affected by your gut microbiome. You know, the gut is home to about 30 trillion bacterial cells, about the same number of human cells, but it houses about 5,000 different bacterial species. And there's about 2 to 7 million bacterial genes in there, which are way more than your 20,000 genes. So there's all kinds of stuff going on in there that's affecting your health. Now, this whole ecosystem is called the microbiome. Now, a balanced gut microbiome supports optimal health, but an imbalanced gut microbiome causes disease. And an imbalanced microbiome is called dysbiosis. That's when you got too many weeds and not enough good guys. Right? Dysbiosis is the opposite of symbiosis, right? Where everything works together. This is where things don't work together so good. It's like too many weeds growing in the garden. And that's when harmful bacteria take over. And that leads to a weakened gut barrier, also known as a leaky gut, which lets food and bacterial toxins and food particles leak into your bloodstream, causing an immune reaction that leads to something we call endotoxemia. And that's leaking of bad bacterial toxins and other inflammatory things into the body. And that creates something called systemic inflammation. And that systemic inflammation drives up the risk of all chronic diseases, Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, you name it. It's driven up by a leaky gut and inflammation driving system that also leads to autoimmune diseases, allergies, asthma, skin issues, all kinds of stuff. Now, a 2022 study found that transplanting stool, now, it's kind of gross, but, yeah, that's what they did. They transplanted stool from a young mouse to an old mouse and made the old mouse young. Wow. The stool transplant reduced age associated brain inflammation or central nervous system inflammation in the brain and the eye and the gut. They also found, this is kind of crazy, but they also found that putting old poop in a young mouse made the young mouse older, and it increased their brain, eye and gut inflammation, and it caused a leaky gut. Now, some people are doing what we call FMTs, that's fecal microbiota transplant, otherwise known as a poop transplant. And they've been shown to help all sorts of things like autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes. They can help improve blood sugar control, type 2 diabetes, fatty liver, and all sorts of metabolic diseases. Now, we're not quite at the stage of harvesting youthful poop or poop from a healthy person to put into an older person, but maybe we're not that far off. And maybe soon there'll be customized poop pills, but don't worry, they'll be frozen and you won't be able to taste them and they'll be encapsulated, so don't worry about that. But this whole conversation underscores the importance of tending to your inner garden. And healing the gut is a key strategy for reversing disease and extending your lifespan. So you feed your garden every day with everybody food. You feed the good bugs. Or maybe you eat crap and feed the bad bugs and you heal or you harm the gut lining based on what you're eating. You see, bad bacteria thrive on bad stuff. Starches, sugars, ultra processed foods. And the good bacteria feed on the three Ps, prebiotic fiber, things like avocados, artichokes, asparagus, green bananas, chia seeds, pistachios, and there's a whole list of them. And I've written a lot about this and we'll put more in the show notes. Probiotics, things like fermented foods, sauerkraut pickles, tempeh, miso, natto and kimchi polyphenols. That's the third P that's colorful plant compounds, things like olive oil, turmeric, green tea, pomegranate, cranberry. Those are amazing. And they feed the good bugs and they love to eat that stuff. So you can also, you know, obviously take a probiotic supplement. So those all are really key for your gut. Now, I, I actually had ulcerative colitis. I had a horrible gut issue after taking antibiotic, you might have heard me talking about this and ended up with C. Diff and C. Diff colitis. And then colitis and the C. Diff went away. But I still had colitis and I was a mess. And I developed a product that I actually used to cure myself, which included all the three Ps, prebiotics, probiotics and polyphenols. And it's called gut food. And I've used it for myself and my patients with great success. Now, certain bacteria have anti aging effects. They produce postbiotics. Now, what's a postbiotic? A postbiotic is essentially something that bacteria makes that's then released into the gut or absorbed in the body. That has an influence on your health. And, and there's a really important one called butyrate that keeps inflammation low and it also protects against cancer and chronic diseases. And it's basically the fuel for the intestinal lining. Then the bacteria that produce these butyrate compounds, short, we call Short chain fatty acids. They are incredibly important and the bacteria that produce them include Lactobacillus, Bifidobacterium, and something called Akkermansia. But they have all sorts of other benefits. For example, Akkermansia mucinophilia, which is one of the keystone species in our gut, improves your metabolic health by positively affecting your blood sugar control. Now low levels of Akkermansia have been linked to diabetes and obesity. And guess what? I had really low levels of Akkermansia and I had to feed them, I had to like grow them basically in my inner garden. And what do they like to eat? They like pomegranate, they like cranberries, they like blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, walnuts, pecans. All good plant based foods that are incredibly rich in phytochemicals that feed the good bucks. Now what are other ways to support your gut health? Well, you want to remove potential triggers, sensitivities, allergens, inflammatory foods. So what would that be? Conventionally raised dairy, conventional wheat, gluten, processed sugar, alcohol, gums and emulsifiers, which are an all processed food. And just obviously don't take gut busting drugs long term like Advil, aspirin, acid blockers. I mean that's the third leading class of drugs I think after statins and psychiatric medication. I think you need to get the root cause, not just take an acid blocker for your whole life because they really destroy your overall gut health. You can also supplement with colostrum, which is what comes out of the breast during the first days of breastfeeding, that is full of immune support compounds and they help prepare the gut lining. I like to use those in my patients digestive enzymes, those are also helpful. You can drink bone broth, which is very helpful because it's full of collagen and all sorts of protein and nutrients, supports gut health. It also helps with skin elasticity. You can eat eat fish bones. That's how a lot of people live on islands. Got their calcium, but then a lot of other nutrients they needed like canned sardines or canned salmon. With the bones in you can crush them up. They're pretty easy and they're a great source of collagen and they're more available and much better absorbed. In fact, a randomized double blind placebo controlled trial in middle aged women found that once daily supplementation with a gram of collagen peptides, which are fish derived type 1 collagen, had noticeable improvements in wrinkles, skin elasticity and hydration. So there goes to looking better as you get older. Longevity is also, I think, best achieved from the inside out. It's not putting stuff on your skin and getting facelifts and laser and plastic surgery, because that's a losing game. You want to get healthy and young from the inside out. And that's really what we do in functional medicine. So once we fix our gut, meaning the inside, we fix everything else too. Our skin, our mood, our brain, health, cognition, joint pain, and inflammation. So tending your inner garden, fixing your gut, learning how to take care of your gut, what causes it to be messed up and what caused it to heal is really important. So that's a core life skill like anything else, like driving your car, using your iPhone, basically making your bed. It's just one of those things you have to learn how to do, and it's not that hard. The next system we have to think about, these are, by the way, these are seven core systems in functional medicine. We talked about these. These biological networks or interrelated systems that all influence one each other. They're not really separate. They're dynamic and connected. They're like a web. So like I said, you know, 60% of your immune system is in your gut, right? But it's your gut. Well, what about your immune system? Well, it's all connected, right? So the second system, we. We just talk about these as separate things in order just to discuss them and help you differentiate what's going on. But they're not really separate. The next one is defense and repair. This is our immune system, our inflammatory system. And inflammation is important. Like, we want to get inflamed if we have a sore throat or we sprain our ankle so we can bring in white blood cells and heal and repair and all that stuff is great, but when it's out of control, that's not good. So inflammation is a really important function of the immune system. It helps protect us against infections, viruses, bacteria, heal injuries. The problem is that inflammation in our modern lifestyle has gone rampant. We're overloaded with all sorts of inflammatory triggers. Ultra processed diets, which is the worst. They're high in starch, sugar. Those spike our blood sugar, they spike insulin levels, and high insulin levels drive insulin resistance, and that drives more inflammation. It's a vicious cycle. The next thing that drives inflammation is environmental toxins. Things like heavy metals like mercury or lead, and, um, lots of plastics and petrochemicals, PCBs, phthalates, BPA, all kinds of PFAS, chemicals that are in pretty much everything. The forever chemicals, those are all driving inflammation. A microbiome that's out of balance is a huge driver inflammation. We just discussed that. So bad gut bugs and even stress is an inflammatory trigger. Now stress includes phys physical trauma like accidents or ultraviolet radiation. It includes electromagnetic frequencies and even psychological trauma obviously. And that can really be the result of abuse or neglect. And that has a physiological effect on your body that drives inflammation. So we have so many things that cause inflammation and we don't have enough of the things in our life that protect us against inflammation. So we want to start to eat an anti inflammatory whole foods phytonutrient rich diet. We want optimal levels of vitamins and minerals, exercise, sleep, relaxation, love, community, meaning and purpose. This constant exposure to toxic bad stuff, without enough of the immune supporting and inflammatory good stuff throws our whole immune system out of balance leading to low grade systemic inflammation that accelerates aging. We call this inflammation. Now this results in DNA damage including shortening of the telomeres and cellular damage. And that forms senescent cells or we call zombie cells, half alive, half dead cells that secrete all these pro inflammatory cytokines. And that leads to more inflammation and faster aging of our organs and tissues. And it shows up as damage to our skin wrinkles, it damages our muscles, causing sarcopenia, our joints, leading to arthritis and joint pain. Our blood vessel lining called our endothelium, which leads to atherosclerosis or hardening the arteries or plaque in your arteries leads to heart attacks. Neuroinflammation which can cause dementia, Alzheimer's and depression. Insulin resistance which lead to diabetes and cancer. All this is affected by all these triggers. And so we're kind of in this vicious cycle of inflammation that's accelerating our rate of aging. In fact, the whole process of aging is sometimes called inflammaging. Now here's something that might shock you. I've measured biological ages in people who are in their 30s and 40s, who are biologically a decade or two older inside their bodies than their chronological age. And it's for sure an eye opener. And I mentioned I'm 39 biologically, even though I'm 64 chronologically. Well that's good for me, but not for everybody else who's aging faster. So the good news is if you know what to do, you can get a handle on it. Now you can get your inflammation level checked by your doctor, or you can put the data in your own hands using full service testing platform like the one I co founded called Function Health. It's a modern healthcare company that gives you access to the first ever 100 plus lab tests for less than 500 bucks a year. With insights from top specialists and myself obviously. And there's no doctor's appointments, there's no health insurance needed. Just you, completely in charge of your own health and the knowledge to help avoid disease and vastly improve the quality and lengthen your life. Now I help build function health to make low cost comprehensive testing available to everybody. We're very mission oriented with a very long term perspective. 100 years to be exact. We want everybody to live 100 healthy years so you can check it out. You can sign up and jump the wait list by going to functionhealth.com mark now what are the strategies to reduce inflammaging? Well first get rid of the bad stuff, right? Eliminate sources of chronic inflammation like ultra processed food, sugar, starch, often gluten, conventional dairy, alcohol, refined oils and excessive snacking. All bad for you. Try to reduce your exposure to environmental toxins like heavy metals, bpa, phthalates, parabens. Make sure you don't have any mold exposure in your house. Focus on eating good stuff, right? Eat a whole foods pegan diet. I wrote a book about it. Check it out. Basically joke between paleo and vegan, but it's just real food, whole food, low glycemic food, lots of colorful plant foods for gut and immune support. Phytochemicals that are great for your immune system like turmeric, ginger, leafy greens like the broccoli family, cauliflower, cabbage, bok choy, brussels sprouts, all those are incredibly helpful and anti inflammatory and detoxifying good fats, right? Olive oil, avocados, nuts and seeds, omega 3 fats, wild caught, low mercury, fatty fish is really important like sardines, mackerel, anchovies and herring. Flax seeds are great. Pasture age eggs can be great sources of omega 3s. Big anti inflammatory thing is exercise. Move your body. Regular exercise helps you lower inflammation by increasing nad production. It the antioxidants are increased like glutathione and increase your blood flow through nitric oxide. All good. So what should you do about you know, three to four days of strength training or resistance training. Working on each muscle group followed by rest. Resistance bands are great. Lifting weights, body weight, exercise, whatever you can do, do it. You know if you haven't worked in strength training before, you might want to work with a trainer so you don't mess up your body and you do the exercises correctly and avoid injury. My dad was really trying to lift weights. I'm like, I saw him like no, no, this is all bad. You need a trainer. I got him a trainer and he, he was like, whoa, this is so different. Yeah. So you need to really know what you're doing. But it's never too late to start. I know. My father was 89 years old when he started. He was having trouble getting out of a chair. And you know what put people in a nursing home is not, is not a disease. Usually it's something called sarcopenia, which is the loss of muscle and the inability to do the tasks of daily life. Next, cardio, right? Aerobic training, really important, about 150 minutes a week. Swimming, biking, hiking, risk walking. You gotta get your heart rate up. Also flexibility and agility are really important. Staying young and pain free is key because you need to move your body in functional movements. Yoga, pilates, kettlebells, TRX. Really important yoga. And in fact the 12 week intervention study using yoga postures, breathing exercises and meditation was associated with changes in biomarkers that were positive across the whole suite of cellular aging. It also improves neural connections, memory, inflammation. It's great. Not bad for a little stretching, right? You also want to monitor your biomarkers. I talked about this before, but Function Health offers tests to track inflammation related biomarkers like high sensitivity C reactive protein, which is cytokine, white blood count, omega 6 to omega 3 ratios. All important to know what's going on with your immune system. And of course there are supplements. You know, you can use supplements not as a replacement but as a supplement to reduce the inflammatory secretions. To target senescent cells you can use quercetin fisetin, which is a senolytic. These are called senolytics, compounds that actually kill the zombie cells, which is great. So quercetin, fisetin, curcumin, you can use also immuno rejuvenating chemicals like rutin. Also quercetin, which is in, in, in Himalayan Tari buckwheat, which is one of my favorite products. And just transparency. I'm a, I'm a investor and supporter of Himalayan Hurry Buckwheat through the work of my mentor, Jeffrey Bland. He's amazing. And tell me I put about a tablespoon or two of Himalayan Turi buckwheat sprout powder in my smoothie every morning. It's a great way to get those phytochemicals foreign. So you've managed inflammation, you manage your gut. What's the next system? The next system is energy. It's our third biological network. And, and this is basically our cellular Power plants. How do we make energy to run everything? Well, each of our body's 30 trillion plus cells has hundreds of thousands of mitochondria and mitochondria ourselves. Energy factories. They convert food and oxygen into ATP, also known as adenosine triphosphate. It's basically the gas that runs everything. It's the energy molecule that powers nearly every process in your body, every biochemical process. Now, free radicals are a type of reactive oxygen species that are highly reactive molecules and they have something called unpaired electrons in their outer shell. A little bit of physics, but basically it's like kind of a loose cannon. And these are byproducts of ATP production and they have these unpaired electrons. And all electrons should be paired in your body to be stable. So they're unstable and they're called free radicals. And these unstable compounds react with other cellular components like your DNA, proteins and lipids. Now you probably don't know what oxidative stress is in your mind, but if you look at a car that's rusting, or an apple that turns brown in the air, or an avocado that's brown, or your skin that wrinkles, that's all oxidation. It's called oxidation or oxidative stress. Now some reactive oxygen species or oxidative stress is necessary for cell signaling, for immune response, for maintaining cellular homeostasis. And on the other hand, excessive oxidative stress or reactive oxygen species leads to all sorts of problems like mitochondrial dysfunction, cell damage, inflammation and age related decline. Now as we age, the quality and the quantity of our mitochondria naturally go down, which results in what? Less energy. And you know that you see a two year old run around, bounce off the walls and a nine year old just sitting around his chair, not moving much. That's what that's about. It's about mitochondria. And that results in reduced ATP production and also increased reactive oxygen species. And that creates a vicious cycle of damage and inflammation. And what can it look like in your body? Maybe premature wrink, loss of skin elasticity, thinner, dull looking skin, muscle loss, slower wound healing, gray hair, lower energy levels. Like when our mitochondria start declining, they stop producing energy, which is why fatigue is really a common symptom of aging. Now, once our energy factories die, guess what? So do we. It doesn't have to be that way. Like when your mitochondria stop, like for example, you take cyanide, it poisons your mitochondria, you're dead, literally in minutes. Now maintaining mitochondrial health is really important if you want to live a healthy long life. Now we have the good news. We have built in repair mechanisms that renew and rebuild our mitochondria. We just have to know how to activate them. Time restricted eating is great. Most of us snack all day and night, never giving our bodies a rest. And so our cells really can't clean up the waste and repair and rebuild our damaged mitochondria. We just kind of wake up, eat, and we eat all day and we eat before we go to bed. And that's just the worst thing you could do. Top of that, we're eating the worst foods we call the SAD diet, Standard American diet, ultra processed foods, bad fats, refined oils, chemicals, food additives. Now if you give your body a break by just having an overnight fast, it's not really fasting, we just call it breakfast, right? Break the fast. It should be 12 hours between dinner and breakfast. It's not a big deal. For example, if you eat dinner at 6 and you have breakfast at 6 in the morning, that's 12 hours. If you go dinner at 6 and breakfast at 8, that's 14 hours, right? Don't snack after dinner. That's a powerful way to keep your cells clean and improve our mitochondrial housekeeping. So don't eat three hours before bed and make sure you don't eat within anything within at least 12 to 14 hour window. Now what are the things can you do for your mitochondria? Well, there are supplements that support mitochondrial health. NAD plus, which is sometimes given by injection or IV rapamycin might be helpful, which is being studied for longevity, metformin, although that may be a problem, I think it has some benefits but also inhibits mitochondrial complex 1, which I worry about and I think I don't recommend it at this point. Resveratrol, fiset and coursetin are all really great phytochemicals that I take regularly to help optimize my mitochondrial health. But there's also vitamins too like CoQ10, PQQ, alpha lipoic acid, NMN, acetylcarnitine, all of which help energy production and mitochondrial efficiency. Now a groundbreaking longevity compound that I love and I take every, is called urolithanine. I have no financial relationship with them, but it's amazing because the data on it, it's very impressive and it's been clinically shown to support mitochondria repair and recycling. And I take it as powder, I put it in my smoothie, you can take it as capsules, but it's, it's, it's a great product. What about other things you can do for your mitochondria? Well, there's something called hormesis, and that's based on the idea that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and it activates your longevity switches. Now what are those things? Well, cold therapy. So cold therapy converts white adipose tissue, or wat, to brown adipose tissue or bat. So basically, white fat is not good, brown fat is good fat. So brown fat is brown because it has a lot of mitochondria. And that makes more heat and more ATP and better blood sugar control and more insulin sensitivity and better metabolic health. It's all good. Now this brown adipo tissue also increases something called SIRT1, which is Sirtuin. It's one of the longevity switches I wrote about in my book Young Forever. And it's a longevity gene that boosts antioxidant production, it supports immunity, it lowers the risk of chronic disease. But there's a lot of other things you can do, like red light therapy, hyperbaric oxygen, ozone therapy, exposure to low oxygen states like a low oxygen mask, or even a machine that makes you feel like you're at Mount Everest. All those really support tissue rejuvenation and repair. Amazing. I love these therapies. What else can you do for your mitochondria? Exercise. Now, I already mentioned the anti inflammatory power of exercise, which is also a great hormetic stressor for building and growing new mitochondria. In fact, it's one of the best ways to do it right. In addition to resistance training, building more muscle, which is great, you have more mitochondria, you want better functioning mitochondria. And that can be done by aerobic exercise zone two to four exercises, which basically increases lung capacity, VO2 max and basically gives you a basically higher metabolic rate. VO2 max is probably the most important biomarker for longevity. It's not easy to measure. You need to go to a metabolic cart and be in some fitness center or doctor's office or metabolic office. There are some places that do it. Longevity centers. But it's really important because it's basically how much oxygen you can burn per minute. And the rate of oxygen you convert per minute is directly related to your metabolism and your mitochondrial health. So when you have low VO2 max, it's associated with shorter lives and sicker lives. Now, how do you increase your VO2 max? Well, you can fix it even as you get to be older. I saw a guy who's 100 years old who actually increases VO2 max by training. So it's high intensity interval training, short bursts of intense exercise followed by rest or low intensity period. So you sprint for a minute and then you walk for three. That's it. You do that for half an hour, you're good to go. And that's been shown to increase mitochondrial production really rapidly. So mitochondria, important, they're key to longevity. You have to learn how to take care of them. And this is basic maintenance. You know, you know you have to change your oil, you know you have to get new tires or rotate your tires. You know you have to put washer fluid in your car. You know you have just basic tune up things you have to do. What is this? That for your body? Nobody taught us that. Right? This is what I'm talking to you about today. This is the owner's manual for your body. This is how your body works. What's the next system? Well, the next system is about biotransformation and elimination, also known as detoxification. Now this is a normal process in your body. Now the term detox often brings up all sorts of stupid things like fad diets or maybe rehab from alcohol. But the biological detoxification system that each of us have is sophisticated and it's crucial for removing internal waste and environmental toxins. Now what are our detox organs? Well, there are liver, which processes toxins and excretes them through the bile and the gut. Our kidneys, which filter waste from the blood and urine. And lungs which we breathe out the toxins. Our skin which excretes them by a sweat. And our gut which removes food waste, ingested toxins and hormone metabolites by the colon and also the lymphatic system which cleans the metabolic waste and the environmental toxins. Now the problem is our modern environments are often overloaded and our detox systems are overloaded. We're exposed to toxins everywhere we go. Heavy metals like lead, mercury, cadmium, pesticides, PCBs, air pollution, food additives. I mean the average person who eats an ultra processed diet has 22 pounds of food additives a year. We also exposed to mold. Our modern diet is full of toxins and things like high fructose corn syrup and trans fats. Alcohol is not so good for you. Caffeine may be okay, but depending on how your liver works, plastics for sure not good for you. Bpa, phthalates and fragrance. Fragrances, Parabens, which is like in personal care products like makeup, shampoo, pfas, chemicals. These are the forever chemicals in Our water and food packaging, hormones, antibiotics in our food supply, all this stuff we have to deal with, right? Many chronic conditions that make us die young and age faster, including Parkinson's, for example, are related to environmental toxins. For example, trichloroethylene is commonly seen dry cleaning degreasing decaffeinated coffee. That's linked to increased risk of Parkinson's. Alzheimer's can be linked to exposure to heavy metals, for example, and many other neurodegenerative diseases. What about heart disease? Well, microplastics are linked to increased risk for heart attack and stroke, for cancer and autoimmunity and chronic kidney disease and type 2 diabetes, all have been linked to environmental toxins like pesticides, plastics and heavy metals. So you want to really reduce your exposures. The other things that can happen if you have environmental toxins, like menopause symptoms, severity, because a lot of the endocrine disruptors mimic hormones, even obesity. There are now well researched studies that show that environmental chemicals cause obesity. We call them obesogens. And it happens through many mechanisms. I wrote about this years ago. In fact, my book Ultra Metabolism, I wrote in 2005 had a chapter called Love youe Liver about how to lose weight. Because it really is about the environmental toxins that can affect you. And that's pretty crazy. But, you know, the thing is, environmental toxins are stored in our fat tissue. And when they're released as we start to lose weight, they also create resistance to weight loss. Right? They interpret metabolism, they promote insulin resistance, they can affect our thyroid function, they increase inflammation in the body, which resists weight loss. They damage our mitochondria and all that reduces our ability to burn fat and to lose weight. So we get a vicious cycle. So how do you support your detox system? The first thing is you want to reduce your exposures, right? So. And the Environmental Working Group has a really wonderful guide on how to reduce exposures from every source, right? Skincare products, household cleaning products, food and so forth. But you also need to learn how to fix your own detox system. I call it the P4 system or the 4P system. Right. It focuses on enhancing the body's natural detoxification systems. The first step is to enhance your liver function, and that's how it processes toxins. That's the first P. So how do you enhance your liver's detoxification system and help its ability to process toxins? Well, eat a lot more of the cruciferous vegetable family. They're my go to. That's broccoli, cauliflower kale, cabbage, arugula, collards, kohlrabi, brussels sprouts. All those foods are rich in something called glucosinolates, which is a precursor to something called sulforaphane, which is a powerful detoxifying compound and it boosts glutathione. One of the most powerful foods that does this is broccoli sprouts. And you can get those in some stores. You can make them yourself. The other thing you can often use is whey protein, particularly goat whey, because whey protein does increase glutathione and has a lot of amino acids that are needed for detoxification. You also need a lot of nutrients to metabolize your toxins. Things like folate, zinc, selenium, magnesium, manganese. You need all the methylating B vitamins, folate, B12, B6, and you need, these are all cofactors that basically power all those detox enzymes that are processing all the toxins. So eating a whole foods diet, taking a multivitamin mineral, that'll help fill in nutrient gaps and get you most of the way there. What about protein? Protein's important because one of the major pathways, well, many of the major pathways, in fact, are reliant on amino acids to properly detoxify, like glycine condition, gluconidation, so forth. And these are, these are basic biochemical steps that require the right amount of amino acids and protein. And I encourage people generally who are trying to stay healthy and keep muscle is to eat 0.7 to 1 gram of per pound of ideal body weight of protein. The beautiful thing about protein is it's full of other good things like B vitamins, amino acids, glycine, taurine, cysteine, methionine, all critical. Methionine is important for making glutathione. L glutamine also is important for making glutathione as well. So it's really important to make sure you're, you're taking the right proteins to boost your detoxification pathways. Also, spices are great. You can use lots of spices and herbal therapies for, for helping your liver. Milk thistle, which is great. Turmeric is great for detoxification and liver inflammation. Flaxseeds are great because they help bind to and excrete excess estrogen in the gut. Chlorella can be helpful as a heavy metal chelator. Cilantro also is a great heavy metal chelator. So you can use phytochemicals and nutrients and protein to help your body process all the toxins that's the first step. So once you process them, they go into your bile and out into your gut. But then you have to poop them out. So you have to make sure you're going to the bathroom and people sort of say, you know, constipated or I don't go regularly. I mean it's, it's an issue. I had a patient, I said, do have regular bowel movement? She goes, yeah, I do. I said, well, how often do you go? She goes, I go once a week. I'm like. I said that's not good. She's well, that's not regular. She's like, yeah, it's regular for me. I go every week. So that's really a problem. You need to go once or twice a day. And if you're not going once or twice a day, you're in trouble. You probably need to eat more fiber and you can get that from non starchy veggies. 8 to 12 servings a day. You can smoothies, you can use flaxseeds, you can add extra fiber to all your foods and vegetables and soups. You can roast them, you can stir fry them, you can throw them in a vegetable smoothie. All great fruit. It's also a great source of fiber. You want soluble fiber too that binds to bile acids in the intestines, which is really important because the liver excretes many waste products in the bile. So you have to get those out. Uh, and there are a lot of common sources of soluble fiber like oats, apples, oranges, carrots, barley, cilium, flax seeds, beans, lentils, nuts, all great. Uh, if you're not going, you need to take stuff. Magnesium is really important. So magnesium citrate helps with lots of constipation and staying regular. And you need to pee. That's the pee system, right? Getting rid of the kidney toxins. So making sure you have clear urine and don't have really concentrated urine, it's really important. You need to get rid of those toxins and drinking enough to get your urine pretty clear. And that's hydration. Probably half your weight in ounces. If your weight's 180, that's 90 ounces of water a day and it helps flush the toxins out of your system. The next one is perspire, right? Use the skin sweat glands to release this toxins. Sauna, sweating, exercise is great. My 10 day detox is also a great way to get started for a complete diet over hall and reset your system. Okay, what's the next key chorus System? Well, it's our communication system. This is called the communication system, but it's a network of messenger molecules in your body. It's your hormones, neurotransmitters, so all your cell signaling molecules, or cytokines, and there's all these peptides. Everything's just running around sending message everywhere. And these messenger molecules, including what I mentioned, the hormones, neurotransmitters, peptides, and lots of other cell signaling molecules, they really are required to help us maintain optimum biological function. Now, when these messengers are balanced, your health is good. And when they're imbalanced, you get problems with your health. Right. Aging typically brings about hormonal changes that are commonly affecting our hormones, like insulin resistance or pre diabetes. Low thyroid function, higher cortisol levels, decreased sex hormones like testosterone in men and estrogen, progesterone women, decreased growth hormone and even altered neurotransmitters and more cytokines. So just because it's common doesn't mean it's normal. Insulin resistance is the biggest hormonal disorder we face. It probably affects nine in 10Americans. The root cause of inflammation is insulin resistance, and it's also the root cause of chronic disease, of sexual dysfunction, of worsened perimenopause and menopause symptoms. Hot flashes, mood swings, and too much insulin causes stubborn belly fat. It's just bad. And this is inflammatory fat, and that causes cytokine production. It slows your metabolism, it prevents fat burning, it lowers testosterone. It increases estrogen in men and estrogen and testosterone in women. So men, you know, kind of get man boobs. It's really bad. Cortisol also is affected as we age, and our bodies can handle acute stress when we're younger. And as we get older, our stress response can get overloaded. So it's really a problem. So we have all these stress hormones and we have all these these things running around our body and there's just. Our body's just overloaded with all kinds of things that cause more stress. So stress can be triggered through either a physical stress or a psychological stress. But there's a lot of physical stresses, and your body doesn't know the difference. Right. Has a simple way of reacting, which is to produce more cortisol. Where are we getting a lot of these stressors? Well, our ultra processed diet, our stressed out lifestyle, our exposure to toxins, social media, economic disparities, all these drive stress in the body and that creates significant dysfunction. Um, and when you get stressed, what happens to your sex hormones? Well, testosterone goes down and estrogen goes up, what happens? Well, you get belly fat, you get reduced muscle strength, lower muscle mass, lower sex drive, lower sexual function. Uh, and that's why we have to exercise as we get older, because resistance training increases testosterone, and having muscle also supports your body's insulin sensitivity. It's like the sink that soaks up all the fuel in your body, so you need muscles. So start with walking, maybe something you like to do one or two times a week. Work your way up. It doesn't have to be crazy, but you have to do something and then do more. What about women? Well, as women get older, estrogen, progesterone, go down with age because it's mainly ovaries and you get menopause. What's really going on is that, is that these hormones are not just for menstruation, but they're also critical for bone health, for blood clotting, for skin and hair health, for mood, sex drive in addition to reproductive function. And, and women just suffer more from these imbalances and sex hormones and are more susceptible to the hormonal changes. Now, low levels of estrogen are associated with a lot of problems. Mood changes, sleep problems, low sex drive, vaginal dryness, night sweats, hot flashes, and all this puts women at high risk for depression, osteoporosis, dementia, and heart disease. High levels of estrogen is a common problem, particularly in perimenopausal women or young, even younger women. And this is called estrogen dominance. And it can lead to irregular periods, severe pms, pcos, heavy bleeding, clotting, irregular cycles, hair loss on your head, increased risk of cancers like breast, ovarian and uterine cancer. And it's not good. Now, what is the biggest driver of this? Well, it's the biggest driver is high insulin levels, which is the primary driver because it promotes more body fat and body fat produces estrogen. It's not just your ovaries. Now, bringing insulin down is really the first step in helping you resolve these symptoms. And so to stay young, you've got to take care of your hormones. How do you do that? Well, it's the same old, same old, same old because basically your body is one ecosystem and everything responds beneficially to the same sort of positive inputs around diet, exercise, stress, sleep, lifestyle and so forth, and reducing toxins. So it's really the same stuff. But avoiding the ultra processed foods, getting rid of the added sugar and the starch, keeping your insulin low is key. Eating an anti inflammatory pegan diet that's full of good micronutrients, healthy fats, fiber that Support the gut and detoxification of excess estrogen and some of the cancer causing metabolites that are excreted in the gut, they need to be removed. It makes you eat healthy fats. All are really important to balance your hormones. Now women can actually take something called isoflavones which come from soy. Soy is not going to give you breast cancer. Probably 40, 50 milligrams a day of Genestein and diadzine which have been shown to alleviate menopausal symptoms including hot flashes and night sweats. You can have non GMO real unprocessed whole soil like tofu or tempeh. Or you can take a supplement with soy isoflavones for about 12 weeks. Most study interventions are that long, but you can take it longer. Now there's other supplements that can help women with hormone balance like black cohosh, chase berry, particularly for pms, diy, methane or dim, which is from broccoli, evening primo or epo. All really helpful in balancing hormones. I use that a lot in my practice. What else can balance your hormones? Exercise, because it just balances everything. Alcohol definitely messes up hormones and just drinking alcohol will increase estrogen levels and it'll also have negative effects on hormones in many, many ways. So you don't want to be drinking actively and it's not good for your health. It's, you know, recreational drug occasionally is fine, but it's really quite, quite clear that the data does not support alcohol for any health benefits. Just to be clear, actively managing your stress is important and not with drugs, but things like adaptogens, Rhodiola, ashwagandha, ginseng, Siberian ginseng, all can be helpful. Helpful. Theanine is an amino acid that can be helpful also. Sleep. Getting your sleep sorted really helps your hormones wake and sleep at the same time every day. Get morning sunlight, don't get blue light at night. Maybe if you're struggling with hormones, you might need bioidentical hormones for men or women. Now there's synthetic hormones, there's animal derived hormones, but those gave hormone replacement therapy a bad rap due to its linked to high risk of heart attacks, inflammation, stroke, weight gain and cancer. But bioidentical hormones, topical bioidentical estradiol, progesterone, even vaginal estradiol or low dose or topical testosterone. Or men can take intramuscular, even oral, they're better tolerated. You want to basically do the lowest dose possible and for the shortest amount of time possible. But biodental hormones can be an important part of a optimal Health regimen. The next system is optimizing circulation and blood flow. We call this transportation. Our body contains about a hundred thousand miles of blood vessels, enough to go around the earth about two and a half times. The lining of the vessels is called the endothelium. Now, the endothelium makes something called nitric oxide, which you probably heard about from Viagra, because it's what increases blood flow, but it's a gaseous substance that dilates our blood vessels and keeps the blood flowing. Now, when you don't have healthy levels of nitric oxide or you have problems with your endothelium, your arteries get stiff and that can result in blood high blood pressure. You can have more cholesterol deposits in there, causes oxidative stress, plaque buildup, clogs our arteries and cause hardening of the arteries. When our blood vessels get dysfunctional, then our arteries get stiff, that causes high blood pressure, cholesterol gets clogged up in there and you get oxidative stress, you get plaque buildup. And this basically causes atherosclerosis. And this cause of heart disease. Right. This is the number one killer worldwide. Now, why should you care? Well, the rate of heart disease in young people 25 to 44 is increasing. Now, I've seen 30 year olds having heart attacks, which is terrifying. Now becoming way more common, rising by about 2% each year for the last 10 years. That's kind of scary. Now what are the signs of having blood vessel issues? Well, sexual dysfunction, erectile dysfunction is a big one. Insulin resistance, weight gain, high blood pressure, all those are clues. There's about 700,000 people who die every year from heart disease. And half of these cases have no prior symptoms before the event. In fact, in 50% of the cases of heart disease, the first symptom is sudden death. So you don't want to be that. Right? So the key is prevention. You gotta know your numbers, you gotta have the right testing. And you need comprehensive lipid testing, including total cholesterol, triglycerides, hdl, ldl, and also apob, which most people don't get checked, and something called lipoprotein fractionation, which is a measure of how the sizes and the, and the number of particles are. This is a much better indicator of your risk of heart disease. This measures the size, the density and the number of the LDL particles. There's another big risk factor that often doesn't get checked, called lipoprotein delay, which is more genetic, but it's important and can be managed. Now, most cholesterol Panels just don't include these and they don't give you a full picture so you want to get the right tests. So how do you protect your endothelium? Well, clean up your diet, same as always. Poor diet is the number one cause of heart disease. So heart disease and insulin resistance are pretty much two peas in a pod. People with type 2 diabetes are two to four times more likely to get heart disease or heart attacks. So you gotta fix the insulin resistance. And how do you do that? Well, you know by now, don't eat ultra processed foods, don't eat bad fats, rancid omegas succeed oils which are bad. Focus on low glycemic whole foods, fruits, veggies, healthy fats, fiber, non starchy veggies, non starchy fruit that are like, you know, berries for example, not like a lot of pineapple. Heart healthy fats like olive oil, avocados, you know, macadamia nuts, polyphenols, really important green tea, ginger, turmeric, oregano, rosemary, all full of antioxidants. Obviously you don't smoke. Obviously. Learn how to regulate stress. Limit your alcohol intake. Like max one drink three times a week. And a drink is, you know, an ounce of liquor, 5 ounces of wine or 10 ounce of beer. But that's really even too much. It should be just basically the healthiest dose is none. Now certain supplements may be helpful with people with insulin resistance and I use them in my practice, like lipoic acid, magnesium, chromium, berberine, vitamin D, Omega 3 is all really helpful. Also, I encourage people to look at their heart in a different way. Now there's some new advances in technology that you should know about which uses AI technology to interpret a coronary angiogram that's done by a CT scan. And the company that does this is called clearly. And I recommend everybody get one as a baseline. It's not covered by insurance most of the time, but it's well worth the investment, especially if you have a family history of heart disease. It's an AI enabled CT or coronary computed tomography angiography, basically blah blah, blah. We call it a CT angiogram and it uses proprietary FDA approved machine learning algorithms to identify issues before they ever are seen in non invasive analysis of atherosclerosis or stenosis. And it's better than even a regular angiogram or regular CT angiogram because it looks at things in a much different way. I had mine done not too long ago. In fact, I found out a little bit of plaque. I have a very strong family History of heart disease. I have a lot of genetic lipid disorder issues and I did a bunch of interventions and I was able to reverse my plaque after a couple of years. So it's really important to know these things. All right, last system, Here we are, home stretch. Thanks for staying with me. But this is really important. You want to understand how your body works. That's what I'm giving you, a course 101. It's like the owner's manual for your body. And if you don't actually pay attention to how your body works, you're not going to learn how to use it properly and it won't last a long time and you'll get sick. So it's really important. So the last system is structural imbalances. And you know, these are really important. And this has to do with both subcellular structures all the way to your cell membranes, all the way to your biomechanical structure and your muscles and so forth. My friend Gabrielle Lyon, physician, she says we're not over fat, we're under muscled. And she's right. Sarcopenia, which is the loss of muscle mass, is one of the biggest risk factors for nearly every age related risk of death among the elderly once we reach age 40. Here's the bad news, our muscle mass starts to decline by about 3 to 8% every decade. Now, muscle not only helps to insulate our bones, providing a cushion in the case of a fall, it also supports metabolic health by supporting glycemic control. It helps prevent insulin resistance, it makes us stronger and more resilient for life. Stressors. It's just key. You gotta have muscle. Now low muscle mass means low metabolism because it's also where your metabolism is and an increase in the risk for diabetes, for heart disease, for cancer, dementia, inflammation, aging. So basically everything that can go wrong as you get older is correlated with low muscle mass. That's a take home. We become less efficient at digesting and absorbing protein as we age, right, because our stomach acid declines and we don't build muscle as easily because we get something called anabolic resistance where we need more protein and more exercise to build muscle. And that makes it more crucial to start building muscle young. I wish I'd done that. It's one of my big regrets. I never really like lifting weights and I should have done it and I should have in the gym. I do it now religiously, but you know, I didn't do enough muscle building as I go older, younger and I have to make up for it. And I can. You can, but it's, it's work easier when you're younger. We need high quality protein to build muscle. There's no doubt about that. The science is clear. And people that eat more protein have an easier time maintaining their muscle mass and their body composition. And it has to be high quality protein, which is generally means animal protein. Now you can get it with vegetable protein but you know, really doesn't work as well. And we'll talk about how to fix that. Also great heat protein because it helps you feel full and helps with weight loss and weight maintenance. Now the best type of, of protein to build muscle is other muscle animal protein. You can get protein from plant foods, but it has lower levels of these key amino acids that you need to synthesize new muscle, especially what are called the branch chain amino acids including leucine, which is a rate limiting step for tring on muscle synthesis. Isolucine, baleen, lysine. Now it also contains a lot of other things that are not great when you eat plant protein like phytates that can inhibit protein absorption but you can get around if you're a vegan. But you need to increase your net volume of protein. Rich plant foods have usually high quality protein powders like sprouted pea or pumpkin. And you probably need to have them jacked up with amino acids that you're synthesized in the lab and added. So they're not from animals but like branch chain amino acids really important. So if you want to eat primarily plant protein, you got to combine them with, with other things to get a complete protein. But you really need the extra and you're never going to get enough by just having grains and beans. You've got to take the protein powders with amino acids. Now tactically maintain or build your muscle. We need to combine quality protein with strength training because the protein is just putting the ingredients on the pot. The strength training is like turning on the heat to make the soup right. And it makes you better at everything, right? It, it makes you look better, it firms up saggy skin, it makes your mental health better. It increases testosterone by strength training. It increases your insulin sensitivity, it balances your hormones. It's great. Everything keeps you young. Now you also need important nutrients for the integrity of your tissues and your structure and your muscles and your bones. Things like vitamin D, vitamin K, calcium, magnesium, zinc, phosphorus, iron. You need the right fats to build healthy cell membranes. For example, if your membrane is made of Crisco, it's stiff, hard and dysfunctional, right? Or trans fat, if it's made of olive oil and fish oil or monounsaturated and omega 3 fats from sardines, for example. It's soft and pliable and able to receive all those cellular messengers. So what do you eat? Well, it's the same thing, right? A whole foods pegan diet with a foundation of non starchy veggies, healthy fats, good quality protein, animal protein pretty much covers it. Now there's some other things you can do like peptides. They can support healing and repair of tissue. And I like, e.g. bPC157 help me relieve tendinitis in my shoulder. Many other things I use it for. You can find a certified practitioner. The FDA is coming down on this. But you can go to the peptidesociety.org to learn how to find someone who knows what they're doing. But unfortunately the FDA likes to shut down things that work and these really work. So just be aware of where you're getting them from and work with a qualified physician who understands these. So you know what I just gave you was an entire medical school curriculum in about an hour, which unfortunately is not taught in medical school, but it should be taught in medical school. But it's how your body works. It's how your body was designed. Now these seven biological systems are basically descriptions of how your body works. It's not perfect, it obviously will be modified, improved as we begin to understand things more. But these basic systems are all on network. They're all connected, they're all dynamically influence one another. So you have to understand all of them and work to optimize all of them by taking out the bad stuff, putting in the good stuff. And that's essentially what functional medicine is all about. So I really appreciate your tuning into this episode. Remember, the journey today to feeling younger and looking younger starts with understanding and nurturing how your body is one integrated ecosystem. There's just so much we can do without a doctor to optimize our environment and our diet and our lifestyle, to improve our gene expression and to slow and even reverse biological aging. Now what we talked about today, if you do those things, you're on your way to a healthier, more vibrant life. So stay healthy, stay informed. I'll catch you next Tuesday for another episode of Health Hacks.