A MASTERCLASS On Health: How To Heal Your Body, Prevent Diseases & Live Longer EP 1285

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When We Eat Too Much sugar okay. And these days the average American is.

Eating a lot of sugar, like a.

Hundred times more than we were like 100 years ago into the rest of human history. It's like this massive overload of this substrate. What that does is it causes welcome.

Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur, and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Today's episode is a very powerful one because we've created a top masterclass from the best experts that will break down today's theme to help you improve the quality of your life. Are all bodies the same when it.

Comes to how foods, I guess, are.

Consumed and assimilated through the body and the bloodstream and all these different things?

Or is everybody different?

Where some nutritional foods might impact positively.

But negatively in other bodies, what should.

We be knowing about the body?

Yeah, it's a great question. And first of all, I'm a scientist, so I will tell you. How you can tell that I'm a scientist is that real scientists tell you we don't know everything. Okay. And it's the kind of humility that we have to start with because so often you think about, you know, scientists being very smart in things. Real scientists spend their time talking about what we, what we don't know, not what we do know. Right. So. But you're asking me what we do know. All right, so I'll give you that. I'll give you that answer. Look, our bodies are hardwired to be healthy. So when we're growing in our mom's womb, our body, as we're forming our bones and our heart and our organs and our limbs inside the form of the human that's being created are these health defenses. So you think about the body like a fortress. You know, you've seen them, we all seen it. A medieval fortress, a castle, right? And basically, like it's a happy community that lives inside there. You got a king, you got a queen, you got a princess, you got everything else going inside there. But that fortress has got to protect itself. So it's designed to repel enemies. It's got a moat, it's got a drawbridge. It's got the little slits you throw, you fire arrows out of. It's got sloping walls so enemies can't crawl up. It's got traps, by the way, you know, like in a medieval fort. The thing that I never realized, having been to quite a few castles, is that when you go into the entrance, there is a hole right above you and it's called a murder hole. And it's basically, if people breach the drawbridge, they would just drop rocks, boulders down through that hole. All right? So the body is designed better than a medieval castle. We've got our own defense systems. And there's five of them that I know about. And I helped to kind of put together this picture partly because I studied the biotechnology. How do you actually treat diseases using these systems? And when you forget about the disease part and you think about the health part, these are the systems, these five systems that maintain our health. So I'll tell you what they are. First, health defense system is called angiogenesis is what I study. Blood Vessels, a 60,000 mile channel that delivers oxygen and nutrients everywhere. Got to have enough of them or our body is in trouble.

Second, angiogenesis. This is, this is the channel of blood vessels.

Or this is the, this is how this. This is how the body grows blood vessels, okay? It is a whole system of growth, okay? When we have just the right amount of blood vessels, our body is healthy. Now, are you going to go to work out? All right, you're going to pump some iron. Your. Your muscles got to grow. Now you need a few more blood vessels, all right? If you skin your knee and fall off a bike, got to heal that wound. Underneath that scab, you got new blood vessels growing to heal. Now, the body never lets too many blood vessels to grow or causes problems. For example, cancers are forming in all of our bodies because we're filled with these dividing cells, and some of them make mistakes. But a microscopic cancer is completely harmless because it doesn't have a blood supply. And so our body prevents cancers from growing naturally by controlling the angiogenesis. So we just got enough for our good cells, not enough for the bad cells. So that's one of our health defenses. And there are treatments, including ones that I helped to develop, that can cut off the blood supply to cancer by cutting off it, by starving it. So that's called antiangiogenic therapy. And the same approach has been used to prevent blindness. All right? So you don't have blood vessels leaking in the eye. However, turns out that sometimes your body needs a little help. So now you can actually use foods to actually amp up your body's angiogenesis defenses. So that's just one of the defenses.

Okay, that's the first one. What's the second one?

All right, second one is our stem cells, right? So our. When we were kids, Louis, you know, like our grade school teachers told us, salamanders can regenerate, starfish can regenerate, but people can't regenerate, right? Wrong.

You lose your hand, it's not going to grow back.

Well, it turns out that people do regenerate. We can regenerate that quickly. And we regenerate from the inside out. Like a lizard can regenerate a limb or tail. But we regenerate our organs continuously. Our lung regenerates, our liver regenerates. The lining of our mouth regenerates. If you've ever eaten a chip, all right, and scratched the inside of your mouth, and it hurts, next day, all fixed, right? Because of regeneration. All right, now, here's the thing. Turns out that the way we naturally regenerate is through stem cells. Not the kind you go to a strip mall to have injected into your knee. But this is the kind that we're born with, okay? Because, you know, like, when you and I were like sperm and egg meeting in our mom's womb and dividing. That's what we were. These are stem cells. We were all formed from these primitive cells that could be anything. It could be an eye, it could be a nose, it could be a heart. And they. And they formed our whole body. And there's always some overage. Okay. And so you have more than you need to form your. Into a person. And when we're born, about 750 million stem cells are left over, and they are packed up in a suitcase and stuffed into our bone marrow. All right? And so when we're born, even a little baby, inside their bone marrow, in this hollow of their bones, are 750 million stem cells. And they are stored there like a. Like bullets in a bandolier, waiting for when they're needed. So that when we grow up and we need to be regenerated, you know, you have too many, too much to drink now. Your liver needs to be regenerated. You cut yourself. Now you need to actually heal that wound. These stem cells come flying out of our bone marrow like bees out of a hive. Wow. To regenerate us, renew us from the inside out. And there are biotech efforts that I've been a part of to try to grow new heart, grow new brain, regenerate nerves. Not ready for prime time yet, but it turns out that foods can coax these stem cells out of our bone marrow. So we regenerate faster.

Huh.

Which foods? This is the second one.

But I'm curious, which foods can help us?

There are a number of them. I'll give you one right from the get go is dark chocolate.

Oh, you're speaking my language now.

Okay, so dark chocolate.

Can you eat too much dark chocolate?

That's the question.

You know, I have never seen anything about an overdose of cacao, but I will tell you that cacao has been shown to actually double the number of stem cells flowing in your bloodstream just by having two cups of hot chocolate made with 80% high flavanol. Chocolate.

Dark chocolate.

Come on. Yeah, it's been done in people, 60 year olds with heart disease.

So wait, what happens when you. When you drink or you.

You eat this dark chocolate? Okay, what happens?

Yeah, the polyphenols in this dark chocolate that we. We know what they are. They're called proanthocyanidin. So I'm a scientist, so my job is to actually know what are what the inside chemicals actually are. These are natural chemicals. All right? Most people don't need to know that. But you drink it and it tastes good. That's all you need to know. But, but I'll tell you, these, these natural chemicals found in cacao actually trigger a reaction in your body so that they call out the stem cells. It is literally like bees flying out of a hive can double the number of stem cells. And what's the practical impact? Well, there was a study done at UCSF in San Francisco that looked at 60 year old men with heart disease. These are people whose blood vessels were already not doing so well and their blood flow wasn't going so well either. And their blood vessels are kind of sick. That's kind of the definition of heart disease. By having the stem cells coming out, they were able to actually double the resiliency, the function of their blood vessels. So they got better rebound, the better agility. Their blood vessels are in better shape because their stem cells are regenerating their circulation.

Wow.

So this is human studies, right? Like most, most of the time you hear about scientists talking about rats or mice or cells, I'm talking about human studies. And that's kind of where we are with food, is medicine. It's not the kind of like the guesswork, like we can do serious research to get down to exactly what's actually happening at the human level. So that's the second health defense systems.

Okay, third one.

Third one is our gut microbiome. Now people have been talking about gut health and microbiome, it's almost like a buzzword these days. And people are saying, well, we can actually scoop your poop and we can actually measure your microbiome and we can tell you what you need to eat and what you don't need to eat. Again, I'm a scientist, so I will tell you that there are 39 trillion bacteria in the typical body. That's more stars than in a night sky. All right, so we barely understand the gut bacteria, but what we do know is, is that this gut bacteria actually controls our metabolism, communicates with our brain, actually can help us heal from the inside out. And very importantly, our gut bacteria basically lives. If you think of your gut like a garden hose, it's a tube. And you were to cut a garden hose in half, and you look inside it, there's a lining. The bacteria is inside the hose. But inside the wall of the garden hose, that's where your immune system, 70% of our immune system, lives inside our gut. So our gut bacteria.

So if you're feeding your gut a.

Lot of bad foods, it's.

You're poisoning your immune system. You're Preventing your gut bacteria. Now, I'll tell you what's interesting about the gut bacteria. Your gut bacteria talks to the immune system right through the walls of the. Of your gut immune system's in there 70%, right? Like a jelly roll. Like a. Like the jelly in a jelly roll. And the gut bacteria is inside. So think about, like, a college student in a freshman dorm. They are talking to their roommate by pounding on the wall, right? What do you want? What kind of pizza do you want? All right? And they can answer you. And that's basically what our gut bacteria says to our. Our immune system. So we got to keep that gut healthy, by the way, interestingly, and I've done research on this, certain gut bacteria can actually signal to your brain. It's a gut brain axis. And cause your brain to release social hormones, okay. And can affect your mood. So, you know when you've got a crappy gut and you feel crummy in your gut, I guarantee you, like, it's not just because you're irritated. It's affecting your brain as well. That's crazy.

Yeah. We had Dr. Emran Mayer on who has got the gut. I think it's the gut brain connection or the gut immune connection or something like that. So he's got a lot of great research on that.

Yeah. So. Well, the key thing, though, is that foods can actually help, right. Size your gut health. Think about, like, an ecosystem, the Great Barrier Reef. So certain foods can support the ecology, the ecosystem, the Great Barrier Reef, and certain ones actually kill the coral. All right? And so continuously want to keep it in good shape all the way through our lives. And by the way, even conditions like autism, Alzheimer's, and schizophrenia are all now seemingly connected to our gut bacteria.

Really?

Yeah.

Now, is there a way if someone.

Has those, are they pretty easy to reverse, though, or is that hard?

Well, listen, we're just figuring this out because right now, medically, we prescribe medications to try to treat those things. And a lot of times, those medications just blunt the symptoms, okay? They cover up the symptoms. They don't get at the underlying cause. Now, we don't know exactly how the gut bacteria communicates with the brain completely yet, but there's one giant nerve called the vagus nerve. It's like a giant shoe. It's about the thickness of a shoelace. And it hangs from our brain all the way down into our gut, okay. Goes right near wraps around our esophagus on the way down. And we think the gut bacteria basically sends text messages up to the brain through this Big nerve. Okay. So the key though is that foods can actually influence our gut bacteria, either good bacteria or bad bacteria. So that's important. So that's a third health defense system.

Okay. Okay.

So at the first angiogenesis, number one.

Yeah.

Stem cells, number two, gut microbiome, number three.

Okay.

The fourth one, number four are DNA. Now, if you watch csi, DNA is just sort of like a genetic fingerprint, a code that you can find on a crime scene. Or if you're actually trying to do ancestry, look for your ancestors, you figure out how much of you is Neanderthal, right?

I think I was 1% Neanderthal when I did it.

Yes.

So the key though is DNA is a lot more than our genetic code. It actually protects us from the environment. Now what do I mean by that? Well, you know how if we are exposed to, we get sunburn, ultraviolet light, you damage your DNA and what happens? Skin cancer. Right. If you inhale lots of fumes from a chemical plant, it's going to actually damage your DNA in your lungs. You get lung cancer. Right. But think about it. If you are in Los Angeles and you're driving on the i10, or if you're actually just walking on a beach, you are actually getting ultraviolet radiation. So how come we don't get skin cancer all the time? Because our DNA is hardwired to fix itself from damage. And so the DNA is a protective mechanism from the environment. I always tell people, when you're pumping gas, if you still drive a gas vehicle, as opposed to an ev, I always ask people, do you stand upwind or downwind? What do you do? Are you upwind or downwind? Do you know?

Upwind, Right. So you're not getting the fumes in, Is that what you mean?

Right, right, right. Well, if you're standing downwind, you can smell the fumes, right? And if you're smelling the fumes, you are poisoning the DNA in your lung. So how come we don't develop lung cancer after pumping gas? Because our DNA is hardwired to fix itself. And so our DNA is sort of like a self defense mechanism against the environment. Radon from your basement. Okay. Off gassing from the, from the new car you just got or the Uber that you're riding in, you know, or the furniture that you got, right? So like this is, this, is this incredible defense mechanism against our environment. And then, and foods can actually speed up the repair, help fix holes that are in our DNA. And then the other kind of piece, the resistance for our DNA's defense is that there's something called a telomere. I don't know if you've ever had anybody your show talk about telomeres.

Telomeres.

Yeah.

Yes.

These are. These are.

See, if you're at. The longer the telomere, the. The longer you can live or something. Or they can.

Right. Well. Well, I'll tell you basically what, you know, like to. To give a. To remind you. To remind your listeners and viewers, basically, if your DNA is like a shoelace, the telomere is like the little plastic cap at the end of the shoelace. And over time, that little cap kind of wears down just like on the shoelace. And, you know, when they. When that cap is gone, man, that your shoelace just falls apart. Yeah. And that's what happens to our DNA. So we need that cap. That's called the telomere. And it burns down like a life fuse. So, you know, like mission impossible, light diffuse, Right? So this thing is burning down, and when it burns down, that's it. Your cell's done. So what you want to do is to slow down your cellular aging and harsh things that you do to your body. Smoking cigarettes, being in a couch potato, being exposed to damaging oxidative stress, actually just being stressed out like we are now with this frigging pandemic. Those things all shorten our telomeres. They burn the fuse faster.

Stress.

Yeah. But foods can slow it down, and some foods can reverse it and lengthen the telomere, which is really cool from an aging perspective.

What are those top three foods that help lengthen the telomeres?

Green tea is one of them. Coffee. I got it. I got a. Yeah, it's amazing. I got. I got a little. I used to live in Italy, and I just got into this habit of drinking espresso. So I got a little cup here. Amazingly, coffee actually lengthens your telomere.

Come on.

I kid you not. It's quite amazing. And leafy greens, some of the polyphenols and leafy greens can also slow down. And some of them actually look like they can lengthen the telomeres as well. So the key thing is that we, you know, we are not just hapless pawns of aging. We can actually do something about it. And we can also fight against our environment because, look, the tax that we pay for being on planet Earth is we're exposed to stuff all the time, and we need to. We count on our body's health defenses to fix it. So that's a fourth defense.

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Our immune system, which, you know, after two years, over the last two years, we all know how important our immune system is. But what if I told you that your immune system is so powerful that when it's in its best shape, Even when you're 80 years old, it is strong enough to fight cancer. In fact, it can even wipe out metastatic cancer that's spread all over your body. That's how strong your immune system is. If you give it the chance. Here's what the immune system does. It's like an army of super soldiers. So Rangers, seals, Marines, Special forces, they've all got. These are all parts of the immune system, cells of the immune system. And like the special forces, they got their own weapons, their own training, their own tactics, but they all work together for the collective good. And what happens is that when you've got good, strong defenses, you can fight off invaders from the outside. Bacteria and viruses, for example. But it's not just outside invaders. You got inside invaders as well. And those little microscopic cancers are inside invaders. And so our immune system patrols our body. Okay? Cops on a beat. And they're looking for things that don't look right. And you see that microscopic cancer that is. It can't grow because it doesn't have a blood vessel, but blood vessels feeding it. Androgenesis, Basically, the immune system goes there and takes them right out. Okay. And takes a sniper shot and it's gone. And so that's why we got to protect our immune system. And there are lots of foods that can actually boost our immunity as well.

What would you be those.

What would be those top three that boost the immune system?

Blueberries are a food that definitely boosts immune system. It's in young people as well as older people. They boost the natural killer cells, which is really cool. Broccoli sprouts can boost our immune system. Now, these are the three day old. These are like the three day old sprouts, right?

Okay.

Okay. I mean, okay, here's something. Here's something. Most people don't know the big broccoli, that when we eat broccoli, we really, you know, our moms told us to eat the treetops, right? Those, they're all. You go to the freezer section of a grocery store and you buy some frozen broccoli, and they all look the same. They're all the same size. That's not really what broccoli looks like. If you go to the farmer's market and you see a real broccoli, is this Gigantic stem with a little bit of treetop. Okay, so what's in a broccoli? It's called sulforaphane. So that's what gives broccoli that unique taste of broccoli. It's a little sulfurous, okay? So you got to put a little olive oil, a little bit of garlic. You know, you could saute it up. Okay, so the sulforaphanes, we've done research now looking at what, what's in the treetops. It turns out that these sulforaphanes can starve cancer. Anti androgenic, help your body cut off the blood supply to cancer. Broccoli treetops have it. But guess what? The stalk of the broccoli has twice as much of the good stuff than the treetops.

Eat the stalks.

Eat the stalks. So, man, if you don't want to eat, if you don't want to saute the stocks, a lot of cultures will just cut the stalks and saute them. Stick it in a blender, you can make it into a smoothie or Korea, make a soup out of it, you know, and so there's a lot of good things you can do. Put a little broccoli stem, little oregano powder, you know, you can light it, light it right up, a little turmeric. It'll be really good smoothie or a soup. However, here's the thing. So this, imagine this adult broccoli having these sulforaphanes. Well, it turns out that these big broccoli plants used to be sprouts. And the sprouts pretty much were born or sprouted from the seed with all the sulforaphanes it's ever going to have. All right, so when it gets bigger, it just gets distributed with the stock closer to the ground having more of it, of course. But the broccoli sprouts have 100 times more wow. Of the sulforaphane of good stuff as a grown up broccoli. So sprouts. Broccoli sprouts. Now, studies have been done to show that if you give people a flu shot, people in the winter should get a flu shot. So you don't get the flu. All right, Just go to your drugstore to get one. Turns out that if you people, they did a study looking at people getting the flu shot, and they gave half the people a little shake made with broccoli sprouts. And the other group just got a placebo. And the people who got the broccoli sprout shake and the flu shot, their beneficial response of their immune system is 22 times higher.

Huh.

Like, it totally rocked if they actually had a broccoli sprout shake. So that's not food versus medicine. That is food and medicine, which is really cool.

Blood sugar management or control, is one of the key factors of either being healthy or potentially linking to one of these other, I guess, diseases. Is that right?

That's right, yeah. And what it really comes down to, which kind of gets to your question of what is metabolism? Metabolism is fundamentally the way that we make energy in the body. So we eat food, and food has fat and glucose in it. And either fat or glucose. Glucose is sugar can be used to convert into a type of energy that our cells can use, which is called ATP. So we take in this substrate, but we have to convert it through our mitochondria in our cells to a form of energy we can use, a currency that our body understands and can use. That process of conversion is metabolism. And this is happening in every single one of the 37 trillion cells in our body. And it has to work properly.

So break it down for me. Then fat or glucose or I guess carbohydrates enters the body through the foods we're eating, Right. What happens after that? How is it processed in the body through the cells, through the mitochondria? How is it processed?

Yeah. So looking at carbohydrates, for instance, they go into our digestive tract, they're broken down and absorbed into the bloodstream, broken down into simple sugars like glucose and fructose. These go into the bloodstream. And let's say we're talking about glucose, which is blood sugar. This signals to the body, particularly an organ called the pancreas, to release insulin, which is a hormone. That hormone allows you to take that sugar out of the bloodstream through the cell membrane, into the cell. Once it's inside the cell, it's broken down even further and then goes into the mitochondria to go through a chemical processing that then creates ATP, which is this molecule that can be then used to essentially power all the millions of cellular processes that are happening every second.

So ATP is the power, is the fuel.

It's the fuel. It's the battery in our body.

Okay. And so the way it's processed is it's based on the foods we eat, whether it be fat or sugar that comes through. Does that determine how the quality of the energy or what does that mean? Is it all equally the same when it to comes converts an ATP or.

Well, I think the way to think about it is to really focus on the mitochondria, this is the energy factory of the cell. This is the powerhouse of the cell. And the thing that people really need to understand is that our diet and our lifestyle in the modern Western world, so past 50 to 100 years, so much of it is actually damaging the mitochondria of our cell and creating problems in that conversion process.

So.

So, for instance, when we eat too much sugar, okay, and these days, the average American is eating a lot of sugar, like, 100 times more than we were, like, 100 years ago into the rest of human history. It's like this massive overload of this substrate. What that does is it causes stress on the mitochondria and creates damage. And one analogy I sometimes use is, like, imagine you had a factory that was making something like cheese, and, like, all of a sudden, you get, like, a hundred times more of, like, the raw product, like milk delivered to the factory. The workers would be like, we don't know where to put this. We can't work. Like, they go on strike. There's nowhere to store it. There's no refrigerators. It would all go bad. All of a sudden, you actually produce less cheese, even though you have more substrate, you know, Interesting. And so it's like we are giving so much of the substrate to the body that it's gumming up the system. It's breaking down the f factory and creating problems. And the molecular way this is happening is that each time you have these glucose spikes from eating these refined products or added sugars, your body's releasing more of that insulin. It's saying, okay, more glucose in the bloodstream, so we have to produce more insulin to get it out of the bloodstream. And over time, the body sees all this insulin circulating, and it's like, we can't bring more of this into the cell. There's too much. And so it actually puts up a block, which is called insulin resistance, which is that cellular process that leads you towards problems like diabetes. And so what's happening now is the.

Body, and that's why you're storing fat or you're storing other dead cells that you don't need to keep in the body, I guess.

Right, Right.

Because insulin is the signal saying, tons of glucose around for energy, so we don't need to burn fat for energy. So insulin is also a block on fat burning. So it's this chemical signal saying too much glucose around, blocking it from getting into the cell, and also telling the body not to burn fat. So, of course, for people who are dealing with trouble, losing Weight. Insulin is the hormone we really, really need to be thinking about. And so we reduce our insulin sensitivity. Now we have lots of glucose circulating in the bloodstream, but it's not able to efficiently get into the cell. And then you've got all these other things that can hurt our mitochondria. And, and really a mitochondria energy centric view of health can really help us. Some other things that can hurt the mitochondria are oxidative stress. So I know you talked about this a little bit on the podcast with David Perlmutter, but aside from glucose eating too much fructose, this comes with sodas or fruit juice or things that have really high concentration of fructose. It's not going to actually stimulate insulin in the way that glucose does. But what it does is it goes into the cell and it's converted into something called uric acid. And that uric acid creates oxidative stress, which is sort of this sort of damaging, reactive molecule in the mitochondria and creates mitochondrial damage. So now again, you've got more trouble processing energy through mitochondria. Environmental toxins are actually a huge problem as well. They can directly damage the machinery of the mitochondria. So we're thinking about things like pesticides and a lot of the fragrances in our personal care products and of a lot, a lot of the fragrances and chemicals in our home care products. These things actually go into our bodies, damage our mitochondria, make it difficult to produce energy. Effectively. Chronic stress can damage our mitochondria through cortisol and through our stress hormones. So it's interesting to think about how all these different aspects of modern life fundamentally feed down into damaging this precious part of our cell that creates, creates energy. And when we have the mitochondria, the mitochondria, and when we have problems creating energy in our body, this can happen in any cell type. Again, 37 trillion cells, you know, dozens of organs in the body. Where this is showing up most prominently in the body is where you're going to see symptoms. And this is why metabolic dysfunction and blood sugar dysregulation can look like so many different things. It can mask, grade as so many different symptoms. And in the conventional system, we see those all as separate. But when we think about it as this is actually just where a fundamental core problem is showing up in different cell types. And so if you can address that, you can potentially kind of melt a lot of things away. So just as some concrete examples, if metabolic dysfunction is showing up in the blood vessels. Well, if it's sort of most prominently showing up in the penis, that could look like erectile dysfunction. If it's happening in the heart, it could look like heart disease. If it's happening in the liver, it could look like fatty liver disease. If it's happening in the ovaries, it could look like polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is the leading cause of infertility in the United States, which is a metabolic problem. And if it's happening in the brain, it could look like Alzheimer's dementia. And so it's got all these different faces, but fundamentally is rooted in a core dysfunction in how our body is converting food to energy. And a lot of that has to do with this chronic overnutrition, overloading our cells with too much to process, gumming up these systems, and then the many other lifestyle factors like toxins, stress, sleep deprivation, and sedentary behavior that can also hurt the mitochondria.

Right. So blood sugar management and. And metabolism management. Is that.

Right.

So the main things we think about, how does blood sugar and metabolism work together?

Yeah. So the way that those sort of things link up is that if your blood sugar is quite erratic, like, let's say it's going up and down in big spikes in volumes every day.

Yeah. You're having lots of sugar, you're just eating poorly, you're stressed, you're overwhelmed.

Yeah. And the majority of foods on the shelves in our grocery stores now have added sugar, like well over 60%. So it's not unusual for an American to be on that blood sugar roller coaster. Up, down, up, down, up, down. And that's called glycemic variability. And that process of glycemic variability is very damaging to our metabolism through the mechanisms we spoke about of causing insulin resistance by stressing the body to make too much insulin over and over. But those high blood sugar spikes in their own right can cause damage as well. When your blood sugar acutely goes really high, like after eating a pop tart or eating a pastry or something like that, or a big bowl of pasta, that spike can lead to inflammation. It can lead to oxidative stress because of the way that it's overwhelming our systems and creating free radicals, it can also cause a process called glycation, which is where sugar sticks to things in the body. And so if you can imagine if your concentration of blood sugar is really high, it's kind of going to just stick to things more like your blood vessels and proteins. And that's not good. That's like a signal for the body that something's wrong. And so all of these things kind of coalesce to just creating problems. So the more that we can minimize our glycemic variability and go from spikes and valleys to more gentle rolling hills, the better we are, the better we're going to basically be treating our cells. And it's not just, it's not just the sort of like cellular optimization we're trying to do. It's also the way you, you feel. I think a lot of us have had that experience where we have a really high carb meal, a big dessert, and we feel like we kind of have a crash afterwards. It's like, like that post meal crash. We feel lethargic, like we may need to have another cup of coffee or even feel jittery after, like a big high carb meal. That's. We really understand how that works. The body sees a huge load of glucose from a high carb meal. The body then surges out. That insulin overcompensates, soaks up all that glucose, and you crash. And in that crash state is when we first feel fatigue, potentially some anxiety, and it's when people usually feel cravings. So by learning you want more, when you rush, you want more to bring yourself back up because you've kind of crashed.

And then you're on the vicious cycle.

And I think the majority of American bodies are on that cycle because you think about what we eat, it's like breakfast, it's cereal, juice, toast, pop tarts, pastries, you know, sweetened coffee, beverages, that's all refined sugar and refined grains. Then you go to lunch and it's bread, tortillas, wraps, chips, you know, all of that stuff. And then you go to dinner, pasta, potatoes, whatever. And then it's, and then it's dessert. And it's like if you're not, if you're just going along the normal American cultural treadmill of what's normal to eat, you're on a glucose roller coaster. And that means that your day might be highly labile in terms of the energy, mood, performance, cravings. And so learning just simple ways to balance out that glucose rollercoaster can be an amazing life hack and really a superpower for essentially getting your day under better control, making you feel better in the moment.

Yes.

How much does alcohol smoking or marijuana or psychedelics actually affect lifespan? Do we have enough research on this?

Well, we do on tobacco smoking. Obviously, it's very clear that's a decade off your life. And what's interesting is that what we're learning about these various things that you can do to hurt yourself or to protect yourself. Is that what's happening is that your body is aging at a different rate? So smokers, you can measure it, are older biologically than people who've never smoked. That's why they look older, too. Wow. We can measure that now in my lab, if I took your blood, I could tell you how old you are biologically, not just your chronological.

I want to do that. I saw you post this on Instagram that you're like 46, is that right? Or you're 42.

Or. What is it?

I went down to. What was it? 44, I think, or 42. It bounces around, but it's usually a decade younger than I.

So what do you do? You take a blood sample and then you, what, measure the blood?

There's two ways of doing it. There's one company that I advise called InsideTracker, and that's what I use.

I've had that, too.

Yeah, you've done that.

Yeah, yeah.

So they come to your home or you donate, and then you get this readout of. I think it's 40 different parameters, and they use an algorithm and tell you how old you are. So I'm 42 or something like that. I'm in the top 2% of people for my age, for youthfulness. I'm happy with that.

Just dust it off.

A little.

Brag of it.

I like it.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, you better be if you're researching this and the top scientists in the world on this.

Yeah, I don't like to brag. That's not what Australians and scientists do. But what I do want to say is I use my body as an experiment and try to be a role model. And I've been optimizing my lifestyle for 20 years now based on this feedback from InsideTracker for the last 12, 13 years. And you can see the graphs of things going out of the optimal zone. And then I make a change based on science, and it comes back.

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Know from smokers that their biological age is older when they smoke is what you're saying, right?

Yeah.

Well, that's one test. The insight tracker test is what I do routinely every few months. But there's a new type of test that my colleagues and in my lab we've developed. It's called the DNA methylation test. It's also known as the Horwath test, named after my friend Stephen Horvath at ucla. The way to think of this is if you've ever heard of the epigenome. Uh huh, I've heard of that. These are the control systems that control our DNA. It turns out that that system you can measure it's Chemicals on your DNA that change over time predictably. And we've just developed a way to measure that 100 times cheaper than it was before. And I'm gonna bring this test to the public so people can test their.

Biological at home or something or.

It should be a cheek swab. That's what we're developing.

So you don't have to prick or take blood or anything. You do a cheek swab.

Exactly.

And then you ship it in or something.

Yeah, you'll post it in and then you get. Hopefully just a week later or less. Here's your credit score for your body.

That's cool.

And then even better, here's how you. How do you slow it down or reverse it based on everything we know about you.

Wow, that's cool.

Take you on that journey. So do this, eat this, swallow this.

That is cool. I gotta take that test.

Yeah. Well, you can get on the wait list if you want.

Okay.

There's a website because we are taking names right now. We may do some studies with early adoptive too.

That's cool. Where's the waitlist for.

It's called tally t a l l y tallyhealth.com and the reason I'm excited about it is it's very hard to focus on what works because we have no idea. You exercise, you hope that it's good.

Yeah.

Is it too much, too little? If I eat this, does it help me? We need a dashboard for our bodies. And that's what, that's what these give you.

That is really cool. Okay, so we know that smoking makes you age biologically. That's why it makes you look older. Smoking. What about drinking alcohol? We talked about wine and the substance in wine, that could be supportive. But alcohol in general, does that affect biological age and aging?

Well, it all depends on quantity. One glass a day, Most doctors would say, especially if it's red wine, it's fine. And the alcohol actually can help with the cardiovascular system, reduces bad cholesterol, and more importantly, raises the good cholesterol, hdl.

This is for red wine.

And the alcohol in white wine does a little bit of good too. But beer, so beer will raise the levels of uric acid, which is a breakdown product of a protein breakdown product that you can pee out. But if you have too much beer and other types of food that contain a lot of this type of protein, you will raise your uric acid level. So why does that matter? It's being becoming very clear that if you have high uric acid levels, your body will age faster.

We just had Dr. David Perlmutter on. Who has a book about uric acid, talking about, like, this is one of the. The root causes of poor health.

Yeah.

And aging faster and things like that. So alcohol. You talk to him a lot?

Yeah, yeah. I actually was one of the first people to read his book before it came out.

Yeah, it's really good.

It blew my mind. I now measure my uric acid levels. You can get little test strips. You can just buy them usual.

You just pee on it, you just.

Spit on it, and 10 seconds later, you see.

You see your acid levels.

Yeah.

And so the lower the level, the better.

Right.

The higher the level means there's risk. For what?

Everything. According to David, it's really bad for cancers and heart disease. Disease mainly. But I think he's right, that it's a sign of accelerated aging.

The higher the uric level, the faster you're going to be aging.

Yeah.

And a larger amount of consumption of alcohol, specifically beer, I'm hearing, raises that level.

Beer in particular has a lot of the chemicals in it that will raise uric acid, unfortunately. And that's from David Palmari. He gave me a list of foods. I saw beer on there. I was like, oh, that sucks.

Now, is there any benefit to beer in biology, in science? Does it help you improve the quality of your health? Does your brain get better? Does your body, your system get better? Does it make you younger at all? Or are there no benefits to beer biologically and in your brain?

There are benefits because there's alcohol in there. And a little bit of alcohol is good for your cardiovascular system. But.

But there's other things that's good for your cardiovascular system. Right. That you don't need.

So beer on the. On the list of alcohols is at the bottom for health.

Got it.

Mostly. Unless it's full of sugar. You know, like, there's very sweet wines, I think would be a problem. But beer does have a lot of vitamin B, B group vitamins B3, tons of it.

But you can get that in other ways, too.

You can.

So what can you do? I mean, you got to live as well.

Well, Right, right.

I don't prescribe a life that's. That's prolonging and feels longer. You know, you gotta live a little. Right, right.

Enjoyment. The enjoyment of the richness of life. Yeah.

Right.

Though I am trying not to drink alcohol these days.

I've never been drunk in my life.

Yeah. Amazing.

Never been drunk. I don't find it amazing because I just never found the. I never had the desire to do It I never saw. I, like, tasted some when I was 16 and I was like, I don't understand why I would ever drink this. Plus, it was also for me. Maybe that's one of the reasons, in your mind I look younger, I look like I haven't aged more, is because I found it as an advantage in sports. When everyone else was drinking, I was like, oh, it's weakening their immune system. It's making them slower mentally. This will give me an edge in athletics. They were hungover after games in practice, and I was like, I'm going to be sure sharp. And so I just kept on with it. I was like, this is just going to make me sharper. Now I have my other vi. I use, you know, sugar in other ways is my vice. So I'm not perfect. But does alcohol make you look older, too?

In excess.

In excess.

Gotcha.

Yeah. Yeah. So a little bit every day is okay. A little bit. But most doctors, like physicians, would say if you overdo it, you will age. And actually, what you do as a researcher, you should look at people who live a long time and compare them to either their twin, which has been done, or family members. Yeah. And actually how you live your life has a massive impact on how long you live. There's a twin study. They took identical twins, genetically identical in Denmark, and they said, okay, let's look at them through their life. And there were massive differences in how they looked and how long they lived. And when they went back to see what the causes were, they could figure out, first of all, that 80% of their lifespan was determined by how they lived, not their genetics.

You mean the way they felt about themselves, the people they hung out with, their environment, the activities they took on, or.

What do you mean?

Well, mostly their lifestyle. What they ate, did they smoke, did they drink, did they exercise? Those.

Did they sleep well?

All that stuff.

Right. And those that did all the good things. The same genetics. Twins born the same day, one could live 10 years longer than the other.

Now, this is what I'm curious about. Were these twins hanging out all the time or were they. Because usually when you're hanging out with someone all the time, you pick up the similar habits.

Right.

You pick up a similar lifestyle habit as your parents, as your partner, and you kind of eat the same things. It's really hard to be like, I'm going to drink every day and I'm not going to drink every day. If you're living together and in the same room.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know how that is. Maybe they got separated at birth or something.

Interesting.

But does tell you a lot. The fact that 80% of our future health is in our own hands is liberating because often we think, ah, it's not going to make a big difference. It really makes a big difference how you live your life every day. Focus on that. And one thing that I do is I look at my future self and I ask myself, what's that guy saying to me today? If he could speak to me, what's he saying?

Please don't eat that.

Exactly.

Please don't drink that anymore.

You had enough.

Like, you're gonna hurt me in 10 years.

That's how you need to think about it.

It's coaching yourself 10, 20, 30 years out.

Right.

It's interesting. I asked David Perlmutter, I said, what are some things you wish you would have done young sooner to improve the quality of your health? And he was like flossing. He was like, he's like. And I didn't go deeper into that, but I remember him saying that. And I was like, there's wisdom in whatever it is. Maybe he had some gum issues or something he had to deal with at one point. That was really affecting him for a year or two. I don't know, I'm just making this up. But if he could go back, he'd be like, I wish you would have done this better so I didn't have to suffer later. Right, yeah. What are the things you've done or you're doing now that your 10 year old self will be so happy for? But if he was in front of you right now, he'd just be hugging you and high fiving you non stop. The things you're doing that he will appreciate in 10 years. And then what are a few things that he's gonna say, Man, I really wish he wouldn't do that right now.

Oh, yeah. Okay. All right. So let's see. So I'm. So I measure myself so I can speak scientifically. Not just that it makes me feel good. It's the one meal, one main meal.

A day he would be grateful for.

I'm sure of it. And as a result, I'm leaner and, you know, more ripped.

You look lean.

I am lean.

Look really lean.

I've gone over the last two years from £150 to 133.

Yeah, you look leaner. Even from when I. The first time I had you on, your face is leaner and chiseled.

Yeah, I don't think I can lose any. I want to lose Any more? Yeah, I need to go back to the gym and do a little bit more.

So the one meal a day. But you weren't doing one meal a day, what, five, ten years ago?

No, I only started during the pandemic. Yeah, this is new for me, too. It's hard, actually, when you begin. Very hard. You feel hungry because you've got those crashes that make you really hungry. And you've got this hormone called ghrelin that makes you hungry. But once you get through that, it takes about three weeks. So anyone who tries it, make sure that you don't give up early. Just power through and then your liver will wake up.

One main meal a day.

So that's one. The other thing I think that he will be happy is don't eat sugary foods. Yeah. Don't eat that cake. So at a restaurant, when they said, you want dessert? I always say no, but then I'm hoping that someone at the table orders what I want. Yeah, but that's all you. All I need. I need to taste it. I don't need to fill myself with a cake.

Gotcha. Because you still want to enjoy your life and live a full life, but you don't want to in 10 years be like, why do they eat cake every day?

It's not worth it. Yeah, really, Your future self will thank you for it. Lifting weights, I know you do that. So I need to do more of that. I got a standing desk, so most of the day I'm standing, which is great. Again, you have to get used to it. You'll feel tired for the first few weeks.

Yes.

Are your legs. Well, I'm now mostly focused on eating plants.

When did you start that?

That's recently.

Eating mostly plants.

Yeah, I've switched. I love meat. I wish that I could eat more, but you just gotta look at the science. There's some really good studies of thousands of people who just look at how long people live and what they eat. And I mean, it's not even an.

Argument, but there's so many people that bring in the argument, well, all these people have cured these diseases or whatever, you know, gotten rid of these things from meat only. But people make the argument, right? Like you see that online, People making the argument for meat, meat, meat. So where are they finding these research studies of people living longer on an only meat diet?

I don't know.

But you're not seeing them. You're not seeing studies of anyone that lives over 100 that all they do is eat meat.

Well, there might be one person or two but when you look at 10,000 people, what they eat, it's the vegan and the pescatarian that win out in.

The blue zones, right?

Yeah. And the numbers are something like that. You drop it down to. You've got 88% less chance or actually it's 12% chance for most diseases. So most diseases are protected by these diets.

Really? Wait a minute, 80% less chance of what?

Of dying at any one point in the age range of the study, which.

Is by being a pescetarian.

Yeah, yeah. So it's vegan, pescatarian. Those are the best then above, that would be. Actually pescatarian was better than vegetarian. A little bit of meat seemed to help. But it has to be fish with.

The Omega 3s in there, right?

Yeah. And particularly oleic acid is good, which is found in avocados and olive oil. That activates one of the protective enzymes that we study in the lab, which acid. Oleic, O, L, E, I, C. What.

Is some of that? But not a lot of that.

It's a monounsaturated fatty acid or mufa. If you have a bit of olive oil. There's a supplement online that I get that has high levels of oleic acid in it that I take every day.

Okay, cool.

With the DHA and epa, all that stuff. Yeah, all that good stuff.

Yes.

Okay.

So that's my fish intake as a pill.

You don't eat fish or you eat very little?

Well, you know, I'm evolving my diet. So I've gone from a Mediterranean diet over the last 10 years to the last two, three months to all plant based, no dairy and yet no meat. And I'm just seeing what happens to my body. I'm measuring things. It's an experiment.

Yes.

It's not a philosophy. And if things don't work out biologically, I'll go back. I mean I'd love to go back to a state. I'm Australian after all. But you know, I'm driven by science and that's all it is.

Yeah. Okay, so you got these four. Is there another thing that your future self would thank you for? One meal a day. Don't eat sugary foods. That's going to be one of the most challenging for me. Lifting weights, eating mostly plants. Was there anything else?

Get control over psychological stress.

Oh yeah. Why is this so important?

Well, the main problem is you have high levels of cortisol when you're stressed out psychologically. And it's clear that people who have high levels of really high levels of stress are Chronically ill. And even it accelerates gray hair. That's actually a fact. It's not just a myth. You really are getting older if you have stress.

Really this scientifically proven that if you're stressed out all the time or more frequently, you're gonna get older? Biologically correct. Wow.

Yeah.

Can you reverse gray hair without dyes?

Yes.

Really?

Well, not routinely, but there are examples of that. There are some drugs that have shown in the clinic that. That make hair go from gray to brown. The best example I can tell you is that when people are stressed out, let's say they're in the banking world and they're losing their minds, you can find hairs that start to turn gray. So you look at them and they're a little bit gray at the bottom. Oh, God, I'm turning gray. Okay. Then they get given a vacation and they go away for a couple of weeks. And guess what happens to the hair shaft?

It gets brown.

It's brown again. You can find these gray, brown segments of hair in people. Yeah. And what they tracked it down to was that the cells that make the hair pigment start to shut down, but they can be reinvigorated. But I suspect once you've been gray for a number of years, it's really hard.

It's hard to reverse that. Yeah.

Yeah. But, you know, I'm the first person to say aging is not unidirectional. In my lab, we're driving it forwards and backwards at will. It's not really difficult anymore once you figure it out.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on.

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