Do This DAILY To Increase Your Lifespan & Reverse AGING! | Lewis Howes
In this interview, Lewis Howes and Peter Attia discuss how the human body’s resilience and homeostatic capacity decline with age, especially after the third decade. Attia explains that youthful physiology can tolerate extreme stress—late‑night drinking, excessive training, poor sleep—while the same stressors become harmful in the 40s and beyond due to a loss of tight homeostatic regulation (pH, temperature, glucose). He describes the J‑shaped relationship between exercise volume and mortality, noting that ultra‑high training loads become detrimental after age 40. Six years ago Attia shifted his focus from elite performance to functional longevity, creating a mental model he calls the “Centenarian Olympics,” a set of 18 everyday functional tasks he aims to be able to perform into his 80s and 90s. His current training is organized around four pillars—stability, strength, mitochondrial (aerobic) efficiency, and anaerobic performance—each targeted to support those functional goals. He advises younger adults to think long‑term, allocate limited weekly training time efficiently, and prioritize functional capacity over sport‑specific speed, emphasizing that it’s never too late to adopt these principles but that the window for high‑volume training narrows with age.
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We have to be very careful about how we talk about longevity. Are we talking about living six hours longer? Are we talking about living six weeks longer? What does that mean? And I will tell you, as a trained geriatrician from Wash U, it is about time.
Why are some of the longevity experts who talk about mitochondria and telemeters and all these other things that they're saying that I guess they're saying that the studies are showing the more plants you have, the longer your telemeters And if you're eating more meat, maybe it doesn't work as much.
Let's talk, I love, I'm so excited.
Share with me the studies.
Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, let's define longevity.
Okay.
Longevity is defined as what?
Living as long as you can, I guess. Right. Living longer than expected.
Okay, so that.
And living healthier.
Okay, so but now that's not longevity.
Okay.
So now that is a health span issue and not longevity. And I think We have to be very careful about how we talk about longevity. Are we talking about living six hours longer? Are we talking about living six weeks longer? What does that mean? And I will tell you, as a trained geriatrician from Wash U, it is about the quality of your life.
Yeah, you don't wanna suffer for 10 years.
Nothing is going to determine more quality than muscle. Because you must be able to do your activities of daily living. You must be able to be mobile. you must be able to do the things that you once had the capacity for your own autonomy.
Right.
Now, and let's take a look at the longevity or whatever we mean by that. The one thing that we know and have control over, right, directly is what we eat and how we move. In order to protect muscle, you need high quality protein. This is in the literature.
You can't build muscle without protein?
No, you cannot. It would be very difficult.
Just carbs or...
It would be very difficult. There is an essential, a need. So protein is an essential nutrient. There are 20 amino acids and of those 20, there are nine essential. and you must get those nine essentials. Now, I will say that of those nine essentials, you require-- and I'm so glad you brought this up, because in those early nitrogen studies and the RDA now, it is not taken into account that we have individual amino acid needs. It is looking at protein as a whole. That is incorrect. I just mentioned that there are 20 different amino acids. The information on nutrition as it relates to protein is archaic. When you look at the back of a label, you will see carbohydrates and carbohydrates will be broken down into sugars and fibers and all kinds of things. You look at the back of a nutrient label and you'll see fat and fat will be broken down into, you know, whether it's, you know, trans fats or saturated fats or whatever. You look at the label and it says, Protein. But not all protein is equal. Let me give you an example.
What's the highest grade of protein?
And what's the lowest grade of protein? So eggs would be considered one of the highest forms of protein. Eggs, beef, chicken, fish, whey protein is the gold standard.
Whey is.
Yes.
Not plant protein.
No. And listen, so when we Plants are notoriously low in the essential amino acids.
Really? They are.
You can eat a diet that is plant-based, but you will require 35% more calories. So for example, let's say you wanted to get your protein from quinoa. You would need six cups of quinoa to equal the amino acid profile of one small chicken breast. That is a metabolic disaster.
Why?
Because in order to stimulate muscle, you need the essential amino acids. Well, you need all the amino acids, but in order to stimulate muscle, you need one of the branched-chain amino acids. Now, branched-chain amino acids, they're leucine, isoleucine, and valine. Leucine is necessary in a meal threshold amount to stimulate muscle. And you're like, well, the listener is like, well, what does that mean? That means you need to get 30 grams at a minimum as you age to stimulate muscle tissue because you need two and a half grams of leucine. And this, you know, I earlier talked about Don Layman. These were some of his discoveries. This is his contribution to science is that We have an amino acid meal need of leucine, which eludes people. Let's say you are gonna have 15 grams of a protein for breakfast, 15 grams of a protein for lunch, and then 15 grams of a protein for dinner, and the majority of the rest of your meal was carbs and fat. You will not stimulate muscle.
So you need more protein to stimulate muscle growth.
It either happens or it doesn't. From a nutritional perspective, you require a certain bolus amount at one time to reach the bloodstream. That is 2.5 grams of leucine to begin this as you age. If you are eating sub-threshold, you will not stimulate the tissue nutritionally.
What do you say to the people that these athletes that were extreme meat eaters then went plant-based? They talk about how they're stronger, they recover better, they sleep better. What do you say to some of those cases that are out there of these athletes?
I would say everyone is individual and if they feel better, that's great. I would say that the science doesn't support that in that way from a muscle recovery, from a body mass, body size, skeletal muscle size, but again, everyone is individual. And I want to be very clear that I am not anti-plant. I'm not. And I am not at one extreme or the other. I do believe in eating high quality protein. I know it's important. And I think what's happened now, and part of the reason I was so excited to come and talk to you is that what we need in order to have a healthy world is we need transparent conversations.
So you're not extreme either way. You're saying, where's the science? I am saying, how do we lean into the science?
I'm saying, what is the truth? What is supported by the science? What do we know to be true? And then we can make decisions. Whether an individual is plant-based or an individual is eating a high protein diet, which I believe in because I've seen it for decades, and also it's in the literature, high quality evidence in the literature, I believe that to be true. And what's happened now is- you-'re saying.
It'S also hard to be a high protein diet plant-based.
It is difficult and it can be done, but it needs to have very careful, you know, nutrient complex, or, you know, again, it's not just about a macronutrient. Food is a matrix. You know, for example, in beef, there's creatine, there's components that you won't get from plants. in beef. You cannot get it otherwise. There's no creatine in plant products.
Really?
No, it comes from meat, right? The bioavailability of iron is much higher in red meat, B vitamins, zinc. These are things that are what is offered.
Sure.
Tourine, these...
They're not in plants.
They're just not in plants. So we have to be able to have intelligent conversations. And right now, what we hear is a lot of narrative and a lot of don't eat me because it's bad for the planet. Well, the reality is, in the US, if we care about global warming and we really look at what are the biggest drivers, we're looking at 80% is industry, electricity, and transportation. This makes up a huge chunk, 80-some percent or more. Agriculture in the US makes up what? Maybe 9%.
Right.
Wait, maybe 9%. Of that 9%, how much do you think is related to cattle or animal, maybe it's 3%. Right. So what are we talking about? So the statistics is just not, it is a lot of discussion when the reality is if you look at this book, right, so there's a book here and you take one sheet of paper and that's the entire world. Okay, and then you fold it down to a postcard. Like let's say it's half that. So the entire world, the landmass is one postcard. You take that one postcard and you give me your business card, Louis, and you say, okay, here's my business card. Now we tear it two-thirds and one-third. Okay, so we're now down to, we're talking about landmass. We are now down to one business card and two-thirds of that business card is called marginal land, which means We can't grow anything on it. It can only be used for cattle. One-third of that land can be farmed. So I bring the point up to this saying, are we looking at the right things? If you care about the environment and you live in Minnesota, then you shouldn't eat avocados. And why? Because of transportation. So those are ways that individuals can make a big impact rather than reducing high quality nutrients because ultimately, you know, you live in a beautiful area, you're on a coast and, you know, I'm on the other coast, but it's the people in the middle that we affect the most. So if we tell people to go more plant-based, which they're already eating 70% plants, this is according to the NHANES data, right now people are eating 70% plant-based, who is it going to affect?
Well, I guess if you're focusing on your vision, which is to help people live a healthier, longer life, you need more quality protein.
You do.
Based on the evidence.
Yes.
And so it's not about having less or more plants, it's about having more quality protein to build skeletal muscle. If you want to eat more plants, eat as much plants as you want.
Right ahead.
But it's also make sure you get the quality protein is what I'm hearing you say, because that is one of the main factors to healthy longevity.
And healthy aging.
And healthy aging.
And we need more protein as we age, not less. We actually require more protein.
To build a muscle, to stay healthy.
In front of it. To just keep it. So basically, if you don't stimulate that tissue, you're going to lose it.
And it's harder to gain it back when you're 50, 60, 70 years old.
I mean, I wouldn't know, but yes, yes. If we take the narrative that we are looking at right now, eat less protein, eat less red meat, do all these things, While you are young, you have a much greater margin of error.
What about the inflammation or disease conversation around, I guess, whey with milk, you know, milk products and dairy. I grew up drinking about, I don't know, eight glasses of milk a day. I grew up in Ohio. I think it's the reason I'm a foot taller than everyone in my family because of the hormones probably in the milk and the beef and everything I was eating. But I also had a runny nose every day.
So this is something separate.
And it was like information from the milk and from these types of proteins potentially. Or maybe there's a number of causes, but you got rid of the milk and you got rid of the- so.
That'S just one source of protein.
Sure. Right?
And milk we know is really, I mean, I personally don't drink milk, but dairy is really important. Dairy is very bioavailable for the bones. A lot of people don't tolerate it, but to- Right. You know, I'm not sure that we can equate that with inflammation. So you can equate that with mucus production, but perhaps not inflammation.
But does any red meats cause inflammation?
There is no quality evidence to support that. Okay.
And I will tell you, there's suggestion, but not evidence.
So you bring up a really good point.
Or clogging arteries or these types of conversations.
Absolutely not. When calories are corrected, absolutely not. What do you mean calories corrected? The biggest driver of inflammation and obesity is excess calories.
Too many calories.
It's, yeah, it's not protein and it's not red meat.
It's probably sugary drinks and just sugar in general.
It is excess. It is not inherently bad if you have healthy muscle. It's not inherently bad.
Because your muscle will be able to process it and just flush it out.
So let's go back to red meat being bad for you. There was a series of papers in the Annals of Internal Medicine by a head researcher named Bradley Johnston. And this, he looked at a tremendously large number of people. And he questioned, well, should we reduce the amount of red meat that we're eating? And right now, I think on average, people are eating 1.6 to 1.8 ounces a day. Do you think that's a lot?
It's not that much.
That's like this much. Yeah, it's not that much. Okay, so to say that we need, you know, so is this data true? Is do we really need and believe these negative influences that we're hearing? So he went through the literature and he did something and put it through something called the grade system. The grade system is the global gold standard for evaluating evidence. It doesn't get better than that. And do you know what he found? That there was no reason for us to be cutting back our red meat consumption.
Interesting.
And it created so many issues.
When was this?
This was in 2019.
Okay, interesting.
Pretty recent. They went after him, people went after him. They tried to not get it published.
Wow.
They were, people were so up in arms. Again, Food science. We should just call it, we should replace this with something else.
Emotion. Yeah, yeah.
Exactly. And they were so up in arms and we have yet to see one randomized controlled trial with humans to support red meat being bad. It doesn't exist. There's a lot of epidemiology data talking about, you know, this is where all that information comes from, but epidemiology is not high quality data. And we have many randomized controlled trials talking about the importance of protein, whether it's from Don Layman's lab or Stu Phillips or Doug Patton Jones or Kevin Tipton. These guys are like people that have been looking at it, or Heather Leidy, these, there are some really good researchers out there that are putting together information for the, you know, that's available.
Sure.
And again, it's not to say that plant is bad or animal is bad. The point is we must have transparent conversations. So if the evidence is in fact that this is bad, then we should, that red meat is bad or that protein is bad, we should be able to prove that.
Before the interview continues, if you feel like you're not living your most authentic life, not leaning into your purpose and not living the life that your future self would be extremely proud of. I've written a new book called the Greatness Mindset, and I think you're gonna love this. Through powerful stories, science-backed strategies, and step-by-step guidance, the Greatness Mindset will help you overcome all the different challenges in your life to design the life of your dreams and then turn it into your reality. Make sure to click the link below in the description to get your copy today. Okay, let's get back to this video. What is part of this 45-day process? Is it multiple days of fasting throughout? Is it certain foods? Is it what is the process like?
Well, it is a 45-day program and there's no really long fasts in the book. I mean, they're no longer than a day and a half, but because it's meeting people where they are. So, some people have been fasting, they're ready for the challenges. Some people are like, I'm a standard American diet person. I've been a couch potato for 30 years. I need help so we can kind of meet all their needs. But I think it really speaks to the fact that we have to talk about lifestyle. We have to talk about are you getting good sleep? Are you managing your stress? And that's not five minutes of meditation once a week. And how many of us think that, you know, check the box, that's what's done it. And it's really talking to people about anti-inflammatory nutrition. Unfortunately, most of the foods that proliferate in the processed food industry are highly inflammatory. And I'm talking about gluten. and dairy, I always get the side eye from people that are like, no, not dairy. Sometimes in certain instances, sometimes grains, processed sugars, alcohol. Alcohol is a big one, unfortunately.
Alcohol is really bad.
Yeah.
Especially if you're having it consistently. I don't know, I think Andrew Huberman just did a whole breakdown, masterclass on alcohol for the brain and the body. And he was essentially like, there is no benefit. Yeah. You know, there's only, bad things that can come from that. Not even like, oh, what about a little bit of wine every now and then? And there's veratrol that's in the wine. But he's like, it doesn't outweigh the. The alcohol itself having a little bit in that resveratrol, whatever. So I think I've never been drunk in my life or high, and I'll have, like, maybe, like, a Bailey's on ice a couple times a year to sip on, but I'm like, yeah, I just feel like there is no added value. Try to find something fast during that time, right? You'll get a lot more value for your body with that.
Well, and it's interesting because I feel like more and more people in the health and wellness space are either no longer drinking and never had problems with it, but just choose not to drink. And when I go to these events, like I was in an event in New York this past weekend and most, if not all of us, don't drink. And so, I think it's a very personal decision. I know for women north of 40, all of a sudden, They get hot flashes, they don't, I mean, who makes good choices when you've had too much to drink? You're not going to make good choices personally or with nutrition because you're going to crave the salty, sweet junk and your body processes alcohol as a toxin. So, it's one of those things that I'm glad that more and more experts, and obviously Dr. Hibberman is absolutely brilliant and so glad that he is using his platform to help educate people because I think we've been convinced otherwise for a long period of time. Sure. and certainly for me, being a former ER nurse in inner city Baltimore and working with thousands and thousands of patients, having those hard discussions about does alcohol serve you? And I think that's a really important point.
Yeah, and I get it. There's people that like their alcohol, they like their wine, all these things, I get it. Their tequila, the shots, they like going to the bar and having fun. and I just think, I mean, it's kind of like with me with sugar. Like, I love sugar, but I know it's not good for me. It doesn't do good things to my body. So I try to have days where I don't have any, and then I have some, and I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna enjoy this, but I know this is not benefiting me. This is not giving me any nutritional value. It's not helping my brain, my digestion, my heart, none of that. It might bring me some joy in the moment, right? Just like alcohol might for people, but you gotta understand the risks. Obviously, just being in moderation is the best thing. What do you think is worse, sugar or alcohol?
I think it depends on the susceptibility of the individual. I don't drink alcohol anymore, but I was always someone that didn't drink a whole lot. That wasn't a problem, but I think processed sugars, because we start people so young, think about what we do at children's birthday parties. every sporting event that you're constantly doling out sugar, we get people addicted really early on. I would imagine that processed sugars are really in almost everything. And so I think that is a greater issue. But I would be remiss if I said, I personally have been impacted by alcoholism with a family member. And so for me, alcoholism holds a special spot in that I recognize a lot of people, and it's not just alcohol, it could be any, it could be food addiction, it could be so many other things, that people have uncomfortable feelings that they aren't comfortable processing or acknowledging, and so that might be why they choose to, you know, numbing a little bit, yeah. Correct. And so no judgment, no of course. Completely sympathetic to all that, but I.
Would say processed sugars, for sure. And what if someone's never fasted before, what do they need to understand as a potential effects that will happen with fasting, whether it be 16 hours, 24 hours, or two days? What do people need to know before they do their first fast?
Yeah, I mean, I usually have kind of a graduated perspective. First, you stop snacking. It really is that simple. So, if someone is really starting from a place where they've been eating a standard American diet, they're not physically active, I'm like, We need to teach you to stop snacking because I promise you're not going to get hungry in between because we're going to teach you how to balance your macros. So you're going to have more protein with your meals so that you can get from breakfast to lunch and lunch and dinner and you're going to eventually get to a position where you can.
Go from dinner to breakfast. Now that freaks everyone out. Without having chips at night or something. Correct. It's so challenging when you're so used to it. You have dinner and you just want to have a couple, you know, some.
Chips or something, a cookie or whatever it is.
Before you go to bed.
Yeah, and I think you have to replace that habit with something else.
Like tea. Right.
Even if I have a lot of people that have herbal tea at nighttime, they take a walk with their dogs, they call a friend, maybe they've got a friend who's fasting with them. So it starts with no snacking, restructuring those macros. And then really the next step is going from dinner to breakfast.
Just dinner and that's it for breakfast.
But I think you have to kind of get yourself out of that headspace think very clearly about why are you choosing to fast? Is it because you want to get healthier? I can't tell you how many people I meet who were like, I was told I had pre-diabetes. That was a powerful impetus to shake things up. Or, I've got young children at home or I've got a loved one I have to take care of. And so all of a sudden, people's priorities shift. It's like, I have to take care of me because other people depend on me. So getting very clear about your intentions because that's what you're going to need to reflect on. when you are considering what the options will be. So for a lot of people, that evening snacking, and I think the last two and a half years in particular, people have just been stressed and they don't know how to deal with the stress. And so stress eating has really become a huge issue. But I always remind people that we become less insulin sensitive as the day goes on. So you would be better off having an early breakfast than eating late at night. You know, that three-hour window before bed is really important. And so understanding-- To not eat at night. that insulin sensitivity is lowered at nighttime. And so, you know, that late night eating can really derail even if you're doing all the right things. So when someone's new to fasting, those are usually the first three things that we talk about. And then I say, listen, baby steps. We go from 12 hours to 12 and a half. If you need a break, we do that. Then we go to 13. And so really saying to people like, you are eventually going to get to a point, but also explaining to them that if you are primarily using glucose, as your primary fuel source, it's going to take you longer to become fat adapted to where your insulin levels are low enough that they can go in and free up these fatty acids to fuel the body. So saying it could take four, six, eight weeks for that to happen, depending on how metabolically flexible someone is. I mean, some people are like a duck to water. It's two weeks, easy, no big deal. But more often than not, that's not the case. helping people understand that everyone's an individual. Some people, it's, you know, you take two steps forward and four back. It's all okay. It's part of the process. We want this to be sustainable.
Yes.
And there's no benefit to white knuckling it with fasting. Like some people white knuckle everything they do, and I'm like, that is not the way to live.
No, it's not. It's not sustainable. No. What's the lifestyle approach you have now after these last few years of testing it and trying it and having case studies of other women, how do you live your life moving forward personally? Is it a fasting once a week? Is it every other day? What's your style?
Yeah, I would say I'm very intuitive. So, depending on how hungry am I, did I lift that day? What was my sleep like? Did my Oura ring bark at me and tell me my sleep score is in the toilet? Maybe that's not the day to push the fasting envelope and push doing a heavy workout. I tend to really listen to my body, but the consistent things are I don't eat after 6:00 at night ideally. Really? I do much better having an earlier feeding window. That works for me. It might not work for someone else. I really focus in on sleep. I eat a lot of protein. I always say I'm carnivore-ish. I like vegetables. I do eat carbs, but I carb cycle. And that's worked really well for me. I don't drink alcohol, and there's no judgment for those that do. I just know it was the only thing that gave me hot flashes. and messed up my sleep and my sleep, like on the hierarchy of important sleep is so high up there that to me, I'm like, it's not worth it to have a martini every six months.
It just isn't. What about sugar? What's your sugar intake like?
I'll be honest with you. My vice in life is dark chocolate. That's my only, but that's really like the one thing. And so I have a little bit of dark chocolate every day, but most of the time it's sweetened with stevia. I don't have it on today, but I usually wear a continuous glucose monitor kind of episodically. And so for me, it's like that's my one vice. I don't eat dairy, I don't eat grains, I don't eat gluten, and I.
Haven'T for a long time.
No bread, no cereals, no pastries. No, and I don't really love that.
Stuff, but my dark chocolate is my thing. I wish I had that disease where.
I didn't love bread and pastries. Yeah, no, but I think for me, it's like you mentioned, the cost benefit. I don't feel good when I eat those things. Of course. And I put an autoimmune disease into.
Remission when I went gluten-free.
So, you had an autoimmune disease? I did. I had two. And so, yeah. And so, once you get leaky gut, that kind of opens up that, it's like once you have one, you're more prone to others. And for me, I was like, you know, I have to get myself together.
And so, for 11 years, I've been gluten-free. Wow. So, you eliminated certain foods where you're.
Like, let's try this. And then it started to heal. Yeah.
And then you're like, well, why go back on now? Right.
And so for me, it's funny, on vacation, people say, oh, we have gluten-free bread. Might I have a piece of gluten-free bread?
But I also recognize it sets up that I get that dopamine hit.
I'm like, oh, it tastes so good. Let's get more.
Exactly.
It's so hard to have one. Yeah, and that's why, and so my kind of mindset now is it used to be moderation, not deprivation. But if you can't moderate, you eliminate. And so that's kind of how I think, like each one of us has to decide. I don't know.
I don't have moderation in me. It's either all in or all out.
Right.
But you recognize that about yourself. That's really what's so important.
So challenging. I would love to get to the point where I could be like, okay, you know, once or twice a week I can have a small taste of ice cream, not like a whole bucket of ice cream or something, you know. But once you have a little bit, it's so hard to trick your brain that you don't desire this so much. Well, do you get that massive- Bring the drug on your tongue and it.
Tastes, it just rushes your whole body. It's casomorphin, so it's actually, and it's interesting, even Peter Attia loves ice cream. So my husband actually came home one day and said, I was listening to Peter Attia and even he has a weakness for ice cream. He said, so I don't feel quite so bad. But ice cream in our house, not.
That I eat it, but like that is their crack. Of course, yeah. Is there an ice cream that, You could eat that's good for you, like a protein ice cream that has no sugar or something. I'm sure you could probably make it.
I mean, probably wouldn't taste the same, but you know. I just try to get them like Aldi's, which is this organic ice cream, and then I feel like, okay, now I'm like, listen guys, when the half gallon is gone, it's gone. And so the teenagers will sneak downstairs and they'll eat it. I mean, they'll literally just eat it out of the carton. And they'll do it to one another so that the one teenager will try to eat it so the other one can't eat it. Then my husband will eat it.
Oh, man, the teenage days when I had eight Dr. Peppers a day in the summer and, you know, just ice cream all night.
Yeah, and they're impervious.
Like my 17-year-old six feet tall.
The six pack and yeah, oh, he's ridiculous.
He plays football and he can eat anything he wants. That's crazy. So you're kind of like an intuitive person right now. You'll fast.
Are you doing intermittent fasting every other day? How does that work? I do, I would say I fast most days. So it could be 14, it could be 18 hours. I can tell you when I came out from the East Coast, we had a 90-minute ground delay in Denver. And so when I got to the hotel, I remember saying to my husband, I was like, normally I wouldn't eat this much food this late in the day, but I'm like, I ordered a double burger, I ordered hard-boiled eggs, and I just ate this massive meal. So for me, I think a lot of it is based on what's going on with my schedule. I fast every day, but sometimes I fast only 12 or 13 hours.
It really depends on what's going on. And then you focus on the protein intake. How do I get my protein in? And usually when you eat enough protein, you don't feel as hungry. Correct. That's the thing.
When we have carbs, we need more carbs. Right, and so I always say when you break your fast, protein and healthy fats or protein and carbs, it's never carbs naked. You know, I use the term naked carbs, meaning you don't just sit down and eat a bowl of chips. You want to have a steak or.
A piece of chicken or a piece of fish or some egg. And you can have some carbs with that. Correct. But eat the meat or the protein first. Yep. So that's the first thing we should do once we break the fast, whether it's 14 hours or 24 hours is have protein first. Right.
And I think the other thing is that some people, and I'm certainly guilty of this, if I do a longer fast, the longer the fast, the lighter the meal when you break your fast. So, when I used to do longer fasts, I would have bone broth because if I sat down and ate a meal, my stomach was like, no.
Like a four or five-day fast. Right.
I had to have very light meals. My soup, salad, soup. And there are people that are definitely more sensitive to when they break their fast. So, I always say if you get digestive stressed or you don't feel good, lighter meal, break it with something light and then eat a more substantial meal later.
What's the worst foods to eat after you fast?
Oh, I would say just sitting down and eating a bunch of processed carbs. Don't sit down and have a bowl of ice cream. You're gonna spike your blood sugar, spike your insulin. I would say the processed carbs, if you sat down and had some rice and had some chicken, I mean, that would be fine. But I would say most of the processed foods because your appetite and satiety cues are not going to be clicked in. And I'm sure you probably have had experts that have talked about this, but the Bliss Point, the processed food industry hijacks your brain chemistry so you don't realize you can eat two bags of Cheetos and you don't feel it.
No, you don't. It's crazy.
Right.
And it's designed to be that way.
Oh, they taste so good. How much money could we save if we just invested in the prevention and the lifestyle nutrition training and coaching versus just spending money on these things that are masking and not solving the problem.
I think trillions of dollars.
Wow. Yeah.
And the funny thing is, is that, you know, what taxpayers don't realize is that they're paying for this, like, four times over. It's crazy. We are paying taxpayer money to, of course, fund, you know, Health Care, Medicare, Medicaid, all these things. We are then going to the doctor and paying our co-pays we're paying our insurance premiums, we're paying for that service. We are also paying taxpayer money for the farm bills and for the food subsidies that are making all the disease-promoting foods cheaper for Americans. So we spend $31 billion on our farm bills, which directly subsidize the foods that cause disease, making them artificially cheaper. So this is corn, sugar, soy, wheat, and other foods like that does not go towards the vegetables and the fruits, which are actually part of a separate, very small horticulture bill, which is like not even, like a fraction of... 10.
Million or something, yeah, so small.
It's a tiny little amount. So they're paying for those that then make us sick. And then, of course, we're paying for the environmental damage of those terrible farming practices of the foods that make us sick that are then ruining our top soil and creating horrible runoff in our rivers and oceans. So literally, like you walk into the store and you grab, you know, Skittles or you grab Wonder Bread. And I think what people don't realize is that if that had a real price tag on it, it would be like $150. You know, because it's the health care costs, it's the cost of the food, it's the cost of the taxpayer money for health care for others. It's the cost of the environmental damage and it's the cost of the farm bills. We're paying all that.
That's crazy.
And yet it's, $3.00.
Yeah, what I think is cool that you're doing and a lot of other of your peers are doing is trying to give people information and access to take back control of their own health and prevent a lot of these things from happening by just making better choices every day. Having the information and the education of what makes you sick and what keeps you healthy with all these different factors you've talked about and also just staying on track with it, staying on track. consistently to prevent and stay healthy as long as possible. The challenge is there's so much temptation in the world. There's so much temptation and so much available at all the times to make poor choices, whether it becomes nutrition, diet, sugar, all these different things, processed foods, it's very challenging for a lot of people. Even myself, I would consider a healthy person, active. I just ran a marathon three days ago for my first marathon.
Congratulations.
Thank you. but I still feel like, oh, but I still, I'm not in the best shape that I could be in, right? Because of the nutritional aspect. I can go months of eating super clean and healthy and then other months where I'm like, I feel great. Let me just have some sugar every day now. So it's the accountability, it's the structure, it's the accessibility to so much processed foods, which I think is challenging for a lot of people. And I think that's what's one of the hardest things is just the discipline it takes. The personal discipline. So how do you manage it personally? Knowing all this information, do you still eat a lot of sugar or are you kind of like cut sugar out of your life now?
Yeah.
Well, first of all, I think the points you made are so important. It is hard. And that is why I'm excited about technology that helps people eat better because continuous glucose monitoring and of course what we've started with levels is because it's not like I wanna walk around and see everyone being a cyborg with technology on their arm. I'm actually a very crunchy granola person. I'm not the most tech savvy person and I wanna just be in the backcountry unplugged. That is my ideal. However, the cards are stacked against us so monumentally in the ways we've talked about. The past 50 to 100 years, human body has had to be bombarded with all these external signals that it's never had to deal with in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, and it's breaking our bodies. We have broken bodies by and large in America, as evidenced by the fact that six in 10 American adults have at least one chronic disease. We're breaking. And so those cards are sort of stacked against us. Of course, there's governmental factors, there's all this stuff, there's food marketing, arts, School lunches for kids are awful. And so in the face of that modern reality, tools to empower ourselves to make decisions that are better, I think are very important. And ideally, you could use these tools to gain awareness, to gain learning, to gain knowledge of how to eat and live in a way that keeps your blood sugar more stable, that keeps your metabolic health on point, And then maybe you don't have to use it anymore.
Right.
Maybe it's just a no. You know, I'm not wearing one right now. I've been at this for three years, and I can go months now without wearing one. I mean, it can be very helpful for accountability at this point.
But you know what works and what doesn't work now.
Yes, and it's a nuanced balance. And so that's what I'm so excited about, is empowerment. I think that is the key word.
Yes.
Because your doctor might say to you, Oatmeals, you've got high cholesterol, so eat oatmeal. This is a heart-healthy whole grain food.
That might be not bad for you.
Well, put your blood sugar monitor on your arm and eat the oatmeal and see what happens. And maybe for you, your blood sugar stays quite stable and you don't have a big spike. But for me, because I've tested this, one serving of Quaker rolled oats caused me an 80-point glucose rise and crash, which is about four times higher than the highest I want to go. I want to go up like 20 points after a meal.
You want to stay here, not here.
Exactly. So for my body, terrible metabolic choice. For yours, maybe it's okay. But the fact that the doctor is saying it sort of works for everyone, that's where we can kind of get into trouble because every single body is different. We are so biochemically individual and what works for you and me might be very different in terms of what causes a blood glucose spike. And it can also be different day to day. Sure. Like again, if I'm sleep deprived, it might hit me a lot harder than on the day that I'm not. So knowing what those variables are can be really useful information. So for me, like when I started wearing continuous glucose monitors, when we started Levels, I was almost 100% plant-based. And what I learned super quickly was.
That there were- Before the monitor, you were plant-based.
And I'm still like 93% plant-based, but like I'll eat a little bit of really thoughtfully sourced animal protein now. But what it did for me was make me realize that within my plant-based diet, there were certain foods that were causing really big spikes and how I could modify plant foods and balance them with adding fat, protein, and fiber to my carbohydrates to keep the spikes much less.
So it- Because you could be plant-based and be unhealthy.
Absolutely.
Oh my gosh. You could be having sugar all day.
Long and be spiking left and right still. You can just be trashing your health that way. And I think that one of the things I'm most excited about with this personal biofeedback data about nutrition is that I think it's gonna pull the rug out from diet wars and from all.
These really- Let's just show the proof.
Here's the evidence. Because I can look, someone who's carnivore and this has happened, can be ripping on vegans on social media And if I can come out and say, here are my blood sugar curves, they're flat, my insulin is three, my cholesterol is XYZ, my inflammation markers are this, my vitamin D is this, and my omega-3 levels are this, how can you fight with me? This is healthy for me. And it might actually look identical to their lab work because the body is such a complex system. There are many different redundant pathways to kind of getting to the same outcomes, but the key is you have to be so thoughtful about how you're doing it. The run-of-the-mill vegan diet is probably not going to be great for people. Neither is the run-of-the-mill carnivore diet. And so just having insight into that, but I think it's again, it's like the proof is in the pudding. And that's where I'm excited to see more data helping to quell some of the debate of what's better. Because each body is different. and, you know. That's interesting.
So tell me about levels then. What are you guys doing at levels with this? Is it called constant glucose monitors? That's what it's called?
Continuous glucose monitors.
Yeah, CGM. Where you put on, you essentially put on a monitor in your skin, right, for two weeks, is that what it is? And then it monitors your blood levels for 24/7 for two weeks. Anything you consume or don't consume, it tells you what's happening. You have an app that shows you and tracks it. Yeah. So why is this essential for someone to be curious about and to potentially want to try this out? Yeah.
The reason why it's something that I think is relevant to pretty much everyone is because of the rates of what we're seeing in our country. If you're just living your life standard American diet, more likely than not you're going to end up with a metabolic disease. That's just now common reality. And so having some information to both see what the trajectory is over time, have a real sense of ownership over what's going on metabolically in your body. I think that's really empowering. Right now, you kind of get crumbs of information from your doctor once a year, but imagine if you could really have ownership over that foundational aspect of your health. So that's one thing is just the awareness. And then the bigger piece is to have this closed-loop biofeedback on everything you're eating and everything you're doing. to keep glucose more stable because we want to get off those ups and downs swings not only to improve our day-to-day functioning and the subjective experience of our days, the energy, the mood, the cravings, the fatigue, but also to set us out for the long-term avoidance of the glucose-related metabolic diseases. And so that's really the reason to use it. What I love about it is just like with the oatmeal example, try a food, see what happens. The cool thing is even if you do spike, it doesn't necessarily mean you have to get rid of that food forever. It means that you can potentially modify it and work with it. Let's take the oatmeal example for instance. If you love oatmeal, you're just like, I do not want to live without oatmeal. That's fine. One thing we've seen in our data set, so we've had about close to 25,000 people go through our program. We have over 50 million glucose data points. We have a lot of information here. People who eat rolled oats, like instant oats, which are fairly processed, spike higher than people who eat less processed forms of oats, like steel cut oats or groats, which are kind of like a chewy, very whole food form of oats. So eat one of the less processed ones potentially, or add fat, protein, and fiber to that carb. The carb alone, if you're eating what I call a naked carb, essentially a meal that's just dominant Carb, yeah.
No fat, protein.
Yeah, like two bananas or oatmeal or Skittles. You think about some candies, like Skittles are basically just like sugar. Whereas like a Snickers bar actually has- Peanut butter.
Peanut butter, chocolate, nuts.
And chocolate. And crazily enough, Skittles have an over 80 point glucose spike in our data set. And Snickers is like 35 or something. So it's like half. And because Skittles are more of a naked carb. And so Skittles are actually the highest spiking food in our entire data set. Come on. Just a straight sugar ball. Straight sugar ball. Skittles, candy corn, milk duds, it's like they're all very similar.
Jelly beans. It's like sugar coated on sugar. Exactly.
More sugar. It's crazy. So yeah, so you want to avoid that naked carb situation. So I see oatmeal with chia seeds, which has tons of fiber and protein. a little bit of almond butter, which has fat, protein, and fiber, add a few maybe low glycemic berries, like a couple blueberries or raspberries or whatever, which have a good amount of fiber and antioxidants, maybe some flax seeds on top, which is going to be fiber and fat, mix it all together, and you're going to probably absorb the glucose slower. It's going to slow digestion. The fiber can actually block the amount of glucose that gets into the bloodstream. The fiber also has the effect of feed in the microbiome, which has downstream positive effects on metabolic health. So it's like keep the oatmeal, but modify it. And if you're not wedded to oatmeal, then start experimenting with other breakfasts. So for me, I'm like, I couldn't care less about oatmeal. So if I saw that it spiked me and I think I never ate it again, I'm like, I don't even like this. I just thought it was healthy. So like-- you- cut it out or you're saying-- for me, that's gone. And if you look in our data set at what some of the best scoring breakfasts are. We see things logged like eggs and avocado, eggs and greens. We see frittata, we see chia pudding. We see actually one that we see is like green, some, there's a particular smoothie that we actually see logged a lot. It's called the Fab Four Smoothie. It's popularized by Kelly LeVeque.
Yeah, she's great.
She's amazing. It basically is a really well-balanced smoothie that's low sugar, high protein and fiber, and healthy fats. And there's some vegetables in there as well. And a lot of our community logs that. And so it's actually got a very low glucose spike. So what you can see from this amazing data set is that there's all these options that have less than 20-point glucose spike.
So choose those.
Choose those options as opposed to.
Interesting. So someone signs up for this, I guess there's a waiting list right now. But when they, what does it do for them? Does it coach them on the foods to eat? Does it tell them, you just ate this and it's not good for your system right now, add this to it if you want to keep eating it? It kind of coaches you for those two weeks or what's it do?
Yeah, it does everything that you just said basically. So a Levels member will actually use it for a full month to start. So the sensors are on the arm for two weeks. So the first month of Levels is two sensors. So you put one on for two weeks, you peel it off, you put a new one on, and so it's 28 days total. And throughout that process, it's doing exactly what you're saying. You log your food, you take a photo of it, and then you get a score for each of those meals. So the score is essentially a one to 10 zone score is what it's called that tells you about the glucose impact of that meal. So you're shooting for tens, and one is lower. Interesting. For example, I could eat sushi. which of course has white rice and sometimes the white rice has sugar actually added to it. And for me, sushi usually scores like a two or a three. Like I have a very, very high spike. And you want it to be a one. You want it to be a 10.
10.
You want it to be a 10. So that's like a pretty, like that would look like a big, sharp spike and crash. So what I learned and what the types of things that we talk about in the Levels app is like, okay, well based on what other people have logged, if you log sashimi, you're probably going to score like a 10, a nine or a 10, because that's of course just like straight fish. People are now logging cauliflower rice sushi, which is kind of interesting, which has like almost no glucose spike. And there's actually restaurants offering this now. Or, I mean, I think like me, there's some people who just don't want to give up sushi. Like that's not like oatmeal. Like for me, I'm like, I'm not giving up sushi. So then there's other things that'll suggest, like for instance, add Preload your meal with, before the sushi, have a salad with protein and fat. Because there's been research that's shown that if you eat, again, fiber, fat, and protein before a carbohydrate, if you sequence the meal differently, you actually have a lower glucose response. So you can eat the exact same sushi, but if there's some other stuff.
In your stomach first, it's processing it.
At a different pace. Processing it differently. And it's changing the hormonal response to food. Or it will say, Take, you're going up, your glucose is going up, take a 10 to 15 minute walk right now.
No way, and they'll bring it back down.
Oh yeah, for sure.
I mean, it can definitely bring it back down. Does it tell you live data?
Is it like, okay, you need to add this or you need to go walk? It's telling you in pretty close succession. Yeah, and helping you.
If it sees a spike, it's going to say, when you're in this range.
Go take a walk or add this or eliminate that. Yeah, and actually, if you have a spike and you haven't logged anything, we'll say to you, to you, Hey, what happened here? What did you do?
Interesting.
And some people will see spikes if they're exercising, like we talked about because of the stress response. Usually if someone's going above about 70 to 80% of their max heart rate, they're going to see a spike in the stress response type thing. And people will be able to exclude that from their scores because we know it's not a food-induced spike. It's not the same as a potentially damaging food-induced This is fascinating.
Yeah. 'Cause it gives you information on your body.
Yeah, and then we'll give people tons of swap options. Like for instance, if they log a tortilla, let's say they log tacos and they have a really big spike, we have a ton of content on like, here's 10 other tortilla alternatives that we don't know don't spike as much. So for instance, like, Hikama tortillas from Trader Joe's. There's now, there's keto tortillas. Like, I just got to LA yesterday, first stop, Erewhon, got their almond flour keto tortilla.
I'm like in love with them.
I spent $70 on those. Oh yeah.
They're like, you know, $40 a piece. But I love those tacos.
Aging is a disease, is that right?
Well, that's what I think.
Yeah, that's what you think it is. Would that mean death is a disease as well?
Well, death is the end product of aging.
Okay.
So we've cured just about every other major disease. So you don't die from an infection. You typically don't die in childbirth if you're a woman. So now what's left is aging. and while we're whacking each of these diseases, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, trying to whack them on the head like a whacK-A-Mole game, we forget that the main reason all these diseases occur is that our bodies are aging.
If you don't get old, you don't get those diseases. Is that because your immune system is.
Strong and so that you fight against disease essentially? Well, yes, it's similar, but it's not the immune system that you're thinking of. We actually have inbuilt defenses. We call them longevity genes. that we can activate in our daily lives by doing certain things.
Longevity genes.
Yes, that's what we call them.
How many genes do we have?
Oh, we've got about 23, 24,000 of them.
23 or 24,000 genes.
Right, but there's only about 50 really important ones for longevity.
Okay, and what are the ones of this longevity gene?
Well, the ones we study are called sirtuins, and there are seven of those. and they're in all parts of the body and they do all really crazy good stuff for us.
Okay. And where do telomeres come into play?
Well, they're part of it. Okay. Yeah, there are seven hallmarks or eight, depending. These are causes of aging. So telomeres are one of those hallmarks. Other things are like the battery packs winding down, those mitochondria in our cells, we lose stem cells, all this other stuff. But here's the important point. We think, A, that there's a unified cause, a whole upstream cause of all of those things. We can talk about that. But also these sirtuins, they defend against all of those. So while we used to think we'd have to develop eight different drugs to slow down aging, if you just tap into these longevity genes, they take care of everything.
Really? They continue to regenerate good cells. They continue to fight against disease or stress or whatever it may be.
They do. They're really smart. They make proteins that act like traffic cops telling the body how to fend against adversity. And they've been with us on the planet since life first arose.
And it's seven of them?
Well, the ones I studied, there are seven.
There are others.
There are seven sirtuins and there are three classes of longevity gene, the ones I study. those seven. And there's a couple of others that you can turn on.
Why don't you study the others? Are they not credible enough?
We do.
We do. But we scientists, we like to specialize.
Gotcha, gotcha.
But in truth, even though 10 years ago we used to fight with each other, my longevity gene is more important than your longevity gene. It was ridiculous. My worm's living longer than your worm. It was really silly. But now we've realized most of us admit that all these genes are talking to each other. And if you tweak one set, the others will be tweaked, too.
Right. Okay, so these genes, when you say you study them, what does that actually mean? You're pulling, like, blood out of different humans, and you're putting them in a tube, and you're researching, and you're like, what's actually happening to study these? Yeah, because I'm a non-scientist I have no clue what that actually means. Right. Is it, like, rats? Is it. humans is it, you know?
You've got to come to the lab. You've got to see what's going on because it's crazy stuff. We do anything we can to answer a question.
You're cloning humans in there.
You're doing all sorts of stuff, right?
It's crazy stuff.
So we're driven by the question, not by the technology. So most labs will say, okay, I'm an expert in rats. I don't give a rats about a rat. I care about answering a question. And our question is, why do we age and what can we do about it? And we'll let transform medicine. And so what we do, if you came to the lab, you'd see we've got You've got jellyfish growing. We've got mice that are living longer and running on little treadmills. Wow. Up in the lab, we have stem cells that we're growing and actually turning them back in time. We can reverse the aging of these human cells. Stem cells.
Yeah. So, what does that mean? You take a cell from a human, like a sample, like a skin sample, like a blood- Brain cells growing the dish. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What? Brain cells growing the dish.
Yeah.
So like you take it from like a living human, you take a little piece of brain, you put it in a dish and you reverse the age of the brain.
Correct.
Wow.
Yeah, that's what we do. Now we can actually grow little brains in the dish too.
From scratch?
Well, you start with a network of cells and then you coax them into forming networks and it's like a mini brain.
Yeah. Okay.
And we can age them forwards, make them older.
No.
Because we think we understand what's driving the aging process.
Really?
And then we reverse it.
So you can create a brain from nothing, a bunch of little cells that come together and create a thinking brain.
Well, I don't know how much it thinks, but it'll respond to stimuli. It'll fire, yeah.
And then you can make it older, like Benjamin Button, and then reverse its aging.
Right.
Wow.
I'm telling you, it's crazy. But when I'm in the lab and with my students, For us, it's just every day.
It's like, oh, there's the brain.
It's getting older, it's getting younger. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. But now that I'm talking about it.
With you, it does sound fascinating. It sounds bizarre. For a non-scientist.
Yeah.
The other thing that's weird about this profession, anyone who wants to go into it, is that essentially you're an apprentice under me, and you work in the lab and you spend a few years learning how to do all this stuff. It's not easy. The first two years, basically, you screw up.
Yeah.
But it's weird that to think about it, you get a bench, in a lab and some chemicals and you have to make the chemicals yourself usually. And then your job is to discover something nobody else has discovered. It's got to be not just slightly new, radically new. Because I'm at Harvard, they don't give prizes for discovering something obvious. It's got to be shocking. And if it's not shocking, it's not worth studying.
And haven't you discovered like tens or 30 something, 35 awards for new discoveries or something or 35 patents? What do you have?
Some numbers like that.
You've discovered a lot of new things.
Well, yeah, yeah. If I didn't, I wouldn't have a job. There's motivation to always be doing cutting-edge stuff. But what drives us, and the reason I think we've been successful is that we're driven by the question, not by the technology. And the technology comes second. So what I'll do is I'll say, okay, here's a question. We want to figure out why does cold improve health or why does fasting not eating, improve health. How do you figure that out? Well, then you got to pull together teams of people, molecular biologists, biochemists, mathematicians, computer software people, and we get in a room and we figure it out. Really?
So what would you say? Your questions are, why do we age and how do we reverse it? Is that the two questions you're focused on the most right now? Yeah, that's, that's pretty good. Yeah. Why do we age and how to reverse aging? Right. Do you think. And so you say aging is a disease. is death a disease as well then in your mind? Is it like that just leads into, and can we reverse death? Is that a possibility?
No, not yet.
Okay.
Not yet. So anyone who's had their head frozen, there's nothing I can do for you right now. But we can turn back the clock radically. Just in the last couple of years, we've figured out that there's a backup hard drive of youthfulness in the cell that we can access to reset it. So, usually the earlier you start in turning on your longevity genes, the better. We've learned from studying mice and now humans for many years that if you're in your 20s, 30s, 40s, you want.
To start- Turn it on now.
Do it now, because- Don't wait till.
You'Re 80 and then say, how do I go be 60 again?
But most people do. They wait too long. Why? Well, because they're in denial that they're mortal. We used to think that aging was a one-way street. You couldn't do anything about it. We now know from studying twins that 80% of your health in old age is up to you, how you live your life.
Right. Your community, your positivity, your thinking, your food, the sleep you have, all those things, right? Yeah.
And the reason that they work, we discovered, is because they turn on the longevity genes. That's the breakthrough.
Okay.
So now we're artificially tweaking these longevity genes. genetically or with supplements or hopefully medicine soon.
Gotcha. But you could do it in more natural or organic ways is what I'm hearing.
Well, right now that's what we've got. And even if you just do the five obvious things, things like skip meals and don't smoke and exercise, that'll get you an extra 14 years on average.
Really?
It's that big. That's not even using high tech.
There's no technology, just like living a good life. Right. So, what are the main things to turning on the longevity that anyone can do without technology, without money, you know, science?
Yeah, well, okay, so we. We've. First of all, don't smoke.
Yeah.
That'll damage your DNA. That'll accelerate the aging process.
Does that include, like, e-cigarettes and all these other vaping? Does that also.
Well, I'm a big advocate for. For putting nothing artificial in your body, including. vaping.
Yeah.
My mother died from lung cancer, so I'm pretty militant about it. Wow. I don't think vaping is as bad in terms of the number of chemicals getting into your body.
Yeah, but we've seen recently it's probably not healthy anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
So no smoking. That's one. That's one. Next one is don't eat so much. Eat less often. So not malnutrition. Of course, you don't want to get too thin. But this three meals a day plus snacks is ridiculous. Right.
That's pretty much. In the future. I need to get rid of that. Yeah, well, you're also working it out.
But someone like me who's not an athlete, the most exercise I do during the day typically is typing. Three meals a day is too much. Actually, one meal is enough for someone like me. Wow. Yeah, I'm now 50, so my metabolism is way down.
You look like you're 37.
Oh, thanks. It's great, man.
You might need to eat more. I thought you're like 100 if you look at 37, you've already reversed the aging.
Well, I'm glad I don't look 80, because that would really be bad for your message.
Okay, so we got no smoking, eating less. Yeah.
Next one would be the obvious high intensity interval training. Lose your breath once in a while.
Lose your breath? What do you mean? Just by like working out?
Yeah, become hypoxic. Tell your body that you're being chased by a saber-toothed tiger or something like that. The reason all of this stuff works in terms of the diet and exercise, it's not that your blood flows more or that being hungry is just healthy for the body. It's actually that your longevity genes get turned on by these things. And why does that happen? Why does it happen in humans, in mice, even in yeast cells for bread and beer? The reason is that the body senses adversity and says, crap, we got to fight back. We might die next week. without food and we're running away from tigers and lions. That's what this survival network, this longevity gene, does.
So it turns it on when it feels like it's in survival mode.
That's it. We want to be in survival mode and we spend our whole lives trying to reduce our adversity.
Being comfortable. Right.
Don't be hungry, don't be puffed, don't walk, valet your car, roll your suitcase, don't carry it for goodness sakes. We've done the worst. No wonder we're getting sicker and sicker. We're in a world of convenience. Right, and it's the worst thing we could do for our bodies in terms of longevity. So those three things. Okay. The other two, let's see what else is there. Oh, the type of food you eat is important. There's a big debate of course. Let's say like plant-based is going to.
Extend the telomeres, right? If you're eating leafy greens, that's what I've heard. Right.
Right.
Well, among other things, it's also going to have a couple of really important types of molecules. One are the monounsaturated fats, fatty acids. You get that from olive oil and avocados. Those are great. And we've just learned that that's a really important trigger for a certain longevity.
Olive oil. Yeah. I think when I had Gundry on, he was like, I drink a cup of olive oil a day or something like teaspoons of olive oil. He's just eating it. He's like, I'm trying to get as much in as I can, putting it on everything. Yeah.
Well, let's get back to that because there's a new discovery as of a week ago that says we think we understand how that works. But in olive oil, there's also what are called the other important component of a plant-based diet are polyphenols, which are the molecules that plants make when they're under adversity, when they're stressed. and I believe that we've evolved to sense when our food is running out. So we get that signal when our plants are stressed. So you don't want to eat plants that are like this white, withered, white liquid lettuce you can buy, California lettuce. Right, right. You want these colored vegetables that have been a little bit stressed, a little bit dried out. Wine is a perfect example. It's full of polyphenols, one called resveratrol that we've worked on for 20 years, and it activates these longevity pathways really well.
Wow.
So stress your food, organic. I am for a plant-based diet, but I do eat meat occasionally. It tastes pretty good.
But.
It'S very clear, Dan Buettner is right, where you go to the longest lived places in the world.
The Blue Zones, right?
Sardinia, right? Okinawa Island in Japan, they're not eating all meat. And actually we know that if you eat a lot of meat, you shut down some of these longevity pathways.
Really?
Yeah. So you actually, you might look good and grow muscle. That's great when you're young. You want to find a mate, you want to look good, you want to feel good. But in the long run, I don't think that's healthy.
Really? So cutting down less and less meat, at least having more plants is the way to go.
Yeah, that's, that's what I've done. I was on an Okinawa diet in.
My 20s and 30s. Which is what?
There's rice and leaves and it's a bitter rice. You got to watch out for white rice because it's a spike of sugar.
Yeah, it's a lot.
But it's a lot of tofu, miso soup, green leafy vegetables, dark greens for these phytochemicals. And then what else was it? There was a bit of fish. Okay.
Yeah.
But also what's important is not a lot of food. These days, I'm stopping eating when I'm about 60-70% full. And I'm trying to- I just never feel full.
Until I'm like, okay, I'm full. Well, you're a young, so I probably-.
I'm a hungry man.
Well, here's one of the things. I think one, when you eat slower, you start to get fuller, you start to feel it. And I'm the youngest of four. And so as a kid, we didn't have a lot of money growing up in a small town in Ohio, and there wasn't that much food. So I learned to like grab and just shove it in my mouth. And that became a habit that I've kind of stuck with. And I'm not starving anymore. Like the food's available at any time. I can afford it. And I have it all the time. But I think it's reconditioning my mind or a habit or routine of like, I'm not scarfing my face down right now, but it's that mindset of, what if I'm going to go hungry?
For sure. We all suffer from that. Well, not all of us, but those of us who grew up in regular families, we were told to finish our meals.
Right.
Don't leave anything on the plate.
And if you're hungry kids everywhere. -Friends and sisters, right? They're stealing your food. My wife grew up in a very poor family. And even when she was a student, she could barely afford food. She would scrounge and buy potatoes. And at the dinner table, she'll kill me for this, but she will eat like it's gonna all go away tomorrow. But I have to remind her and everybody, everyone should know this. There's always gonna be another meal. There will be another meal, don't worry. But we're conditioned to eat food when it's in front of us.
I think it's a mental conditioning and it's also like, either your body's tricking you or it's your brain or it's your gut or something is tricking you like, I'm still hungry. Even though you had 2,000 calories in 10 minutes, you're still like, oh, there's food. It's like turning something on. We're like, I want to eat that. I don't know why that is.
Well, yeah. I mean, it's the reason that when our ancestors put on fat and they survived the famine, we don't have famines anymore, thank goodness. But we've descended from those people. So, we've got the genes in our brain that say, eat, eat, eat.
How do you turn that gene off?
Well, you can. you can take certain types of food. I drink a lot of tea and coffee, hot water even, just to fill up my stomach. That works really well. Okay.
Hot water, not cold water.
I just like the feeling of hot water. Cold water isn't as... I actually, it might be something about the heat. I've never thought about it, but for me that's what works. So when I get a little bit hungry at lunchtime, I'll just, I'm basically drinking tea.
Warm water tea, yeah, you put it like some...
Interesting. But it's a fight all the time. you know, I fly a lot and.
People are bringing- Nuts and cookies and ice cream.
And you gotta fight it. And it's really hard to fight.
How do you say no?
Well, I do.
I do.
But how do I do that? So I've trained myself to fight it. And the best thing that I do besides saying, can I have a cup of tea? Is what do I want to look like next week? What do I want to look like a year from now? What do I want to look like when I'm 80?
So you tell yourself that, you ask yourself the question. I think it's also how do you want to feel tonight, tomorrow, next week when you're 80? It's like look like and feel combination is powerful.
Right, because your mind is saying now is important and you got to train yourself to say tomorrow and the next year is just as important.
The rest of my life. Yeah.
Right, and that's more important.
Okay, so was that the fourth thing or the fifth thing?
The fifth thing I didn't mention. There are a couple of things. Let's divide it up. One is get Good night's sleep.
Sleep with everything. Yeah.
And then surround yourself by friends and people who will take care of you.
Yeah. That's like the blues on way too, right? It's like be around a good community, get lots of rest and naps, move a little bit, eat healthy. Right.
So these are things that most people should know, but they don't do. So you and I are here to motivate people to do that.
Exactly.
But the research that I discuss in the book is how to take that to a new level, how to optimize those things and add some science in there.
To reverse it.
Or getting there.
I like this. Okay, before you share that stuff, how did you get into this fascination or curiosity of reversing aging in the first place? Was there someone that inspired you? Was there a moment? Was there an event that something happened?
Yeah, it was an event that I think we've all gone through. We just forgot about. we learnt that there's such thing as death. We don't live in a Disney movie.
Right. It's not all happily ever after.
It's not. It's shocking when we're four or five, we're told this and we realize it and we're in denial, you know, oh, no, that's not going to happen. But for me, I haven't been able to get that out of my mind. Really? It's cruel, don't you think, that we're sentient beings that know that this is.
All going to end. We love people, they take care of us and then they're gone.
Yeah, and I don't want to live forever. I would just like to leave the world a better place. And I think one of the big things that we're missing in medicine is that aging is driving a lot of our sickness. And when we treat diseases, we're treating them far too late. Once you've got, well, I won't say which disease, but take my mother, for example. Let's use her lung cancer as an example. She could have not smoked. She could have done all the things we've talked about. She could have perhaps taken some molecules that we work on and not had lung cancer. By the time she had a tumor that was the size of a grapefruit in her lung, it's game over. She couldn't do anything.
Right.
But we've put billions of dollars trying.
To cure lung cancer, not prevent it. If we just prevented it, we wouldn't have to worry about it. Prevention is easier. Prevention is very easy. Right?
So how old were you when your mom passed away from lung cancer? I was 25.
Okay.
And, no, let me take that back. She was diagnosed when she was 25.
When I was 25. When you were 25.
And she went on another 20 years.
Really? Yeah.
But it wasn't really an enjoyable life. They took out her left lung.
So was she breathing from a tube.
Or was it like... She could breathe, but she wasn't, she was always short of breath. There were times when she thought she was just gonna suffocate. in front of us. Eventually she did, by the way, that was not pleasant.
-Oh gosh.
-That'S not something in front of anyone. -Yeah, and no one tells you what it's like to see your mother die. Your parents die, it's horrific. -Wow. -I've never experienced another death, just this one, but it was not pleasant. And we don't talk about it. We deny it, you know, oh, they're.
Going to drift off into sleep. That's not what happens in my mind.
-It'S suffering. It's pain, it's agony, it's suffering, right? Yeah, my mother was turned into a writhing lizard in front of me, and all I could do is whisper into her ear, Thanks for being the best mum I could ever hope for.
Oh my god.
That was it. A couple of minutes later, she's turned blue and choking.
No way. It can't do anything for her.
Right, that's it. You're helpless. You're helpless. Anyone who smokes, please, please work to give it up. It's just not a good ending.
Wow. Were you Were you with her alone? Were you with family?
Was it friends? Was it? Yeah, my father and my brother and I, I was also in denial because I flew from America to Australia to be with her.
You're like, gosh, she's going to get through this.
Yeah, you tell yourself she's always recovered. Last 20 years, she'll pull through. And the doctor pulled us aside and said, we've x-rayed her lung. There's barely any lung left that's working. Oh my gosh. You better say goodbye. And I said, what are you talking about? Oh my gosh. She's laughing in the bed. She's fine. And 10 minutes later, she starts choking and fluids building up in her lungs. And, you know, if you've ever seen somebody have something stuck in their throat, that's what it was like. Oh, my God.
You can't get it out.
Can't get it out.
She's drowning. I'm like, maneuver, you can't CPR, you.
Can'T try to... Well, I'm running around saying, Help me, help me. And all the nurses are like, It's.
Nothing we can do.
Wow. So that's traumatic. So please, let's try to prevent these diseases as long as possible.
How old was your mom when she passed?
So she's my age when she was diagnosed with lung cancer and then she lived till 70.
Wow.
But she could have hypothetically, if she didn't get hit by a bus or something, she could have lived a much longer life if she didn't have the cancer.
Oh, absolutely. And through my teenage years, I would shout at her, Stop smoking, you're gonna die when you, when you're in hospital, I'm not going to come visit you. Oh my God. You're only given one life. Because I'm pro life. Everything about me is we are so lucky to be alive. You know, one in a trillion sperm from your parent, from your dad, and it's you. What's the chance?
It is.
Don't throw it away. And she was the opposite. She was like, you know, drinking and smoking and I've lived a good life. Don't bother me.
And she paid the consequences. The longevity diet is certainly the one diet that is close enough.
To being.
Able to cause these effects, right?
So, really, the longevity diet.
Yeah, so lots of vegetables, lots of legumes, lots of nourishment.
Fish, if you can.
A couple of times a week, two or three times a week. And always, I think each person has to look at their own response.
Right?
Like, as we just say, some people can burn more, some people can burn less. So it's really a matter of watching your abdominal circumference, watching your weight, watching your muscle mass, you know, so if you go too low, then maybe the protein is not enough. Maybe the protein quality is not sufficient, right? So, so these, these are all things that are personalized and different people may have to adjust to make sure that in the end you're okay.
Can you eat too much or too little protein? How much does protein really affect the body? Whether you're more of an athlete training hard every day or just someone who's not working out as much, how does protein, eating protein, play into the body?
Protein is very, very important so you can have too much. Most people have too much.
Really?
So we're about to publish a meta-analysis and people having too high levels of IGF-1 and this IGF-1 is then associated with mortality, early mortality.
Really?
But then we see the opposite. We see that people that have too low IGF-1 doing even worse than the ones that have very high.
So it's better to have more protein than less?
Well, no, the best is to have that like low but sufficient level. Those are the people that live the longest. and those are the people that live the healthiest too, you know, apparently.
What's the amount you should be having on a daily basis, I guess?
Well, we calculated that around, I think it was around 60, 60-70 grams of protein per day seemed to be in that spot where it wasn't either too high or too low. Is this, I mean, is an average. This was based on the NHANES, on the CDC, database in the United States.
And this is no matter how big or small you are or is it kind of based on how, you know, if I'm 230 pounds, do I eat a little bit more? If I'm 130, do I eat a little less?
No, this is per kilogram, right?
Okay. Yeah.
So there should be per, and it should be really per kilogram of lean body mass, bones and muscle, right? They shouldn't be, if somebody has 50% fat, that gets counted by maybe half, right? So yeah, there's some calculation to be done there, but yeah, so if somebody is 200 pounds and it's only like 15% fat, that person needs a lot more protein than somebody that is 120 pounds and 40% fat, you know?
Right, right. Okay. So 60 to 70 grams per day based on your muscle.
The number should be between 0.7, 0.8 grams per kilogram. Okay, which I think it turns out to be about 0.32 to 0.37 grams per pound. Per pound, yeah.
Okay, how much protein you should have for yourself per day?
Yeah, that's how much protein. With then adjustment based on this is not enough for me because I do too much training, too much exercise. So I'm just gonna increase it a little bit until I can, so for example, we just done a clinical trial with cancer patients. and we were trying to keep.
The.
System very hostile to the cancer, right? And the physicians insisted that, so we gave a little training to the women that were with breast cancer, muscle training. So we wanted to make sure that they kept the muscle mass. And interesting thing, they actually ended up gaining muscle mass, right? So we were just giving them too much proteins. And the mistake, I think it was to give them 1.5 grams per kilogram instead of 0.8, so almost twice as much, right? So anyways, yeah, so you can, we measure their grip strength and we measure their lean body mass, their muscle function, and you can see everything going up, right? Especially the muscle function and the muscle mass. So, and it, you know, it doesn't take that, that much. So most people could, I think, come to the clinic here, the foundation clinic, create cure's foundation clinic, and, you know, they can test you and, and just make sure that you have the, the right amount based on your, on what you're trying to achieve, you know.
Gotcha. So how, how much does gaining muscle mass and having strong muscles support in decreasing disease? and also increasing longevity. Is it important to have more muscles or less?
Not really, no.
Really?
No.
Based on longevity and disease.
If you look at the people that are the longest, one of my passion is to go around the world and visit the oldest living people. So for example, Emma Morano, I followed for the last five years of her life. She got to 117, right?
117. The.
Third oldest person who ever lived in this planet.
Wow.
And most of them are really thin, you know, and really frail. Well, I guess at that age though.
You'Re gonna be a lot thinner.
Yeah, but I think, you know, if you look at the way they were, if you look at the pictures, and if you look at their sons and daughters, you know- They were skinny. In most cases, they're very skinny. The Okinawans, for example, it's another place in Japan where they have record longevity, and they're very, very thin. Now, that doesn't mean it's necessarily good to be old and thin. You know, it's probably not good- Break your bones if you fall. You're frail. and that's what we're trying to bring into this, like this age-specific nutrition. We're saying, for example, we published some years ago that those that were 70, 80 years old, I mean, whereas the people that had a low protein diet were doing much better up to age 65 for cancer and overall mortality after age 65. So when we asked the 70, 80, 90 year olds, how much proteins do you eat per day? And they answered, very little, they were not doing well at all.
They weren't doing well. They were not doing well with low protein.
If we asked the 60 year old, the 50 year old, and they said, I have a very low protein diet, they were doing very well. So this is suggesting that eventually that muscle, that strength is going to help you in your older years, but it doesn't really help you that much because it's probably that those growth factors and the food you eat that helps you keep the muscle is also working against you when we're talking about diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, etc.
If you had a magic wand and you could eliminate three foods or three types of foods in the world that we would never be able to eat, what would those three foods be that would support you in longevity, healthier body, less disease? What would you say are those?
I don't like to say that because people then think, oh, I'm gonna remove red meat from the.
Well, if you could minimize it where you could only do it every once in a while.
Yeah, I would say, you know, certainly processed meats, you know, yeah, so those are clearly in the bad category for cancer, cardiovascular disease, et cetera. Then I would say probably fried animal fats, oils, etc. When they're fried, they're not good at all.
What happens to the body when they're fried?
Well, I mean, the fats change and when they change, they can cause inflammation, they can contribute to, I mean, the number one cause of that in the United States is still cardiovascular disease. So, yeah.
That's inflammation is caused.
Inflammation and the fats, right? So, the fats then are gonna help deposit inside walls of the arteries. And then when you have inflammation plus the fats and these saturated fats, particularly now you have a recipe for heart attack, for stroke, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah, so those processed meats, fried animal fats, what would you say would be the third one?
The third one may be like processed sweets, right? So the the type of stuff that you see in a package with lots of sugar in it.
Oh man, the good stuff. The sweet stuff.
Well, I mean, you know, yes and no. For example, every day I eat dark chocolate, you know, 85% dark chocolate. I think if you ask me, you know, when I used to have candy.
It doesn't taste as good.
Well, you know, I will say, I already have the candy. If you ask me now, I will say there is no way I'm so much happier with the dark chocolate, you know.
Why is that?
Well, because I think there is more richness in the flavor and it's kind of like, you know, when we're 16, we drink beer, right? And coke. And then eventually wine comes in and it takes a while, right?
It takes a while to acquire the taste.
Yeah, but then, you know, for most people, if you say the people that are drinking wine or let's say high quality beer, You say you want to go back and have the sugary stuff. I mean, yeah, some people say yes, but lots of people say no. I'd rather have this. I'd rather have high quality beer or wine rather than cheap stuff or sugary drinks. So, I think it's the same way with the sweets. Eventually, you appreciate the incredible taste of some of the very healthy sweets. that are not necessarily viewed as very tasty.
Yeah, yeah, right. But they're more acquired over time and they become very tasty to you over time.
My father had lung cancer back in 2005. He survived, but he shrunk in size by one-third.
His body.
Yeah, yeah. And his quality of life never recovered to this extent. So this is where my passion for longevity.
You want to live longer and more quality.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Okay, so that's number one.
Two, I call it don't die stupid or don't do stupid things or scientifically, I call it passive longevity, right? So if you're smoking, statistically, you're gonna live 10 years, well, less.
Right.
And if you look at the average for your gender and population, group. Okay? So smoking minus 10 years from your life. Not using seat belts. I don't use seat belts. Seat belts in the car? Seat belts. Yeah, minus two years from your life. Well, excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol, I don't even have the figures, but that's dangerous as well. So these are the simple things or don't do in super extreme sports. For example, I've been blessed and I had an opportunity to travel to like South Pole and North Pole, because it's still pretty safe trips. But then I thought, okay, what if I want to go to Everest, like the highest mountain on Earth? So probability of death, if you try to do it, is a little bit around well, a little bit above 6%. So I thought like, as a man who wants to change 1 billion lives and father of four kids, I don't want to do it. So these are the simple choices. And again, they are all rational in regards to smoking or your safety procedures, etc. So that's very important too. And people really underestimate that.
Don't die stupid. Don't do things so extreme that it gives you more chance of dying younger. Okay, number three.
Third is diet. So one of our limiting beliefs, and this is what has changed for us, is we underestimate the power of food and the food and the fact that food can be our medicine, right? So in this regard, there's so many disagreement in scientific circles around what actually extends our life today. But there's almost one agreement, even most skeptical ones say that if you decrease the number of calories, your caloric intake, it's almost, it's almost your guarantee that you're gonna live like two, three, four years longer and the quality actually gonna be better.
Crazy.
Yeah, it is.
You'll look younger, too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But then the question is how you do it, right? Because you don't want, it's for me, it's a nightmare just to three days a week, Sorry, three times a day, seven days a week, just to control the number of calories that you do. So what I do, I'm doing a lot of plant-based food because the caloric intensity of vegetables is so small. Even if we have the whole table full of vegetables, you're still gonna be fine. So that's one. Two, because of the current production practices for meat and fish, The industrial version of this is full of growth hormones, antibiotics, E. coli bacteria itself. So I'm just trying to avoid this. So that's important as well. And this is why you switch to vegetables as well. I also do fasting, but it's not for everyone. I do like 36 hours of fasting every week, Monday evening to Wednesday morning.
I've been starting to do that from Sunday evening. Tuesday morning. Yeah. And I feel great.
It's amazing.
I just did this a couple days ago. Yeah. I've done it a few times this year and I'm kind of like, okay, once a month right now. Try for 24 to 36 hours. Yeah. And it's like maybe every two weeks or maybe every week eventually. I feel like I'm getting leaner. I feel like healthier, younger, all those things.
So, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's, I also like your choice of weekdays because I'm, I'm, I'm kind of trying, I'm killing the blue monster in the beginning.
Right.
So I'm like the most difficult the medical part is like do it on Monday and then for the rest of the week.
Yeah, enjoy.
You enjoy yourself.
Yeah.
I also like wine, but specifically Californian one. But it's really unhealthy, specifically from the age of like 45 when your aging processes are starting to progress. So I, I'm sticking like probably one or two glasses of wine every week, like on my scene days, like Friday evening or Saturday.
Max.
And that's it.
Yeah. I just did a brain scan with Dr. Daniel Amen. Yeah.
Of course.
Yeah. I interviewed him for the book, Amazing Guy. I just got my results back literally last week and did three brain scans. Supposed to go back in four months. He wants me to give me, he's giving me some supplements and some hyperbolic chamber. Did my first one yesterday. I'm doing another one tomorrow. I'm supposed to do 40 sessions. Yeah, it's at Next Healthier. Yeah, yeah. And in the chamber. And he said, I asked him, I go, we just had an interview come out with him, but I asked him, of smoking marijuana, cigarettes, or alcohol, which one is worse for the brain? And he said marijuana, based on 80,000, I think, scan results, those that had marijuana had far worse brains than looking brains than those who didn't. He said, obviously, smoking and alcohol also affected, but marijuana's the worst. And so if we know these things that smoking, alcohol, marijuana is bad for the brain, bad for longevity, why do we keep doing them? Why do we keep doing it?
Look, it's a trillion dollar question. I can guess that I do think through evolution we didn't really have access to all these things. So our body and our mind has never been prepared to tackle the challenge of this kind of over availability of this world.
Yeah. Of the world, right? So much stimulation, so much opportunities, challenges, adversity, pain, suffering, media. It was a much simpler life 100 years ago.
Exactly. Exactly.
There was still adversity, but it was like, okay, we're just hanging out with a few friends in the farm.
Yeah, that's it. Yeah, I agree. We've never been, well, that's why I talk about discipline and the unit and longevity because otherwise your body through centuries, actually through million years of evolution has not really been prepared to handle all this stress and all these choices. That's probably the shortest way to answer that.
Okay, so that's the diet.
And also the final, you know.
That was three, right?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, final. piece on the diet is the importance of like take out the sugar drinks. So like we're drinking water today. So that's super important. We have way too much sugar that we should and we can't process in terms of how our body works. The fourth is physical activity. And we have a funny view on physical activity. So, I mean, as humans, everything is like black and white. everything is binary extremes. So it's a group of people just sitting and watching football on TV. The other group of people are, okay, I need to run a marathon. But there's so many things in between. The easiest thing you can do is just wear your Whoop or Fitbit or Apple Watch and count the steps. 10,000 steps a day is enough actually to transform your metabolic state to support your longevity. like a healthy state of your body. If you look at science, starting from 6.5,000 steps or 7,000 steps is actually enough then it's a plateau. But usually say like 10,000 steps a day because we tend to under-deliver in terms of our target. And it's very easy, it's gamified, you can have immediate feedback like a badges, congratulations, prizes. that's the whole thing. I had an interview with Adrian Gore, the founder of insurance companies. I don't know who's their partner in the US, in the UK, it's Vitality UK. They started from South Africa and the only option and tools and resources they had to make people healthy is lifestyle changes. Because of the way the country was run and how poor they were, like it was like the only thing that they did. And they work a lot with guys like Apple, with Fitbit, just to make a change in your health through giving you different stimulus to do physical activity every day in form of steps. So like if you do every week, if you complete your seven goals, you get like a cup of coffee from Starbucks every two weeks is I think tickets to the cinema. But then the funny thing, you'd be amazed how many things that we can do for free cup of coffee at Starbucks.
Like, oh, I'm gonna go do this for an hour. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So that's the thing. So gamify it. And then obviously on top of that, if you can, you should add stretching, you should add like a cardio exercise because this is the best training for your heart and vessels. And remember, it's one of the top risk for death. So then, yeah, it's heart disease and cancer. So that's, that's super important as well. And also heavy lifting. What I've, what I've heard, I've seen the study, actually, that people who are professional, like heavy lifters, they have zero problem in any stage of their life, even during the old stage, zero problem with joints and bones as well. I don't know how it works, but it's, it's really amazing. So that's worth, that's your health. Yeah, everything is, I mean, there are.
Some heavy lifter bodybuilders who have destroyed their bodies. So if you're an extremist with it, obviously it's gonna shut your body down. But I think the science behind this is like the resistance training, the heavy lifting is increasing bone density. It's like, it's doing all the muscles for your body. Yeah. And muscle burns fat, so it's like helping you keep fat off, which is helping you stay younger and all those things. So that's physical activity. Number five.
Yeah, number five. I call it peace of mind. And as we discussed, every time we, we think about health, we kind of defer to and we focus on, on physical health. And I do think we underestimate the importance of the mental aspect of that, because if we want to live longer, we want to live in healthy and happy state. So that's important and that's a lot of simple things like sleeping. My rule is eight hours in the bed, seven hours of sleep.
So that's what I- Resting for an hour sleeping.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's what I do. I might fall asleep earlier but then it's just I don't want to mix that time in the bed is not always your kind of quality sleep time. Then meditation is very important. the problem. You just mentioned how difficult and destructing this world is. So by this means we have, we all probably have very high level of cortisol, the stress hormone.
Yes.
And the way Mother Nature constructed our body, it's actually meant to be like a spike. So you see a bear or something dangerous in the forest. you have a spike of cortisol, the stress hormone, you run, and then in, if you're lucky, in, you know, 10 or 20 minutes, then you can actually relax and your cortisol level goes down.
So.
But we live in with extremely high cortisol level, level, hour by hour, day by day, week by week. And it's, it's, and it's very dangerous. So meditation is a, is a really simple way to decrease your cortisol level and it's has enormous health effect. And also in terms of the happiness, I think the sense of purpose and sharing the social realization sense of purpose is super important. And again, as we discussed pre-show, if you think about religious leaders or people who have a big mission in life, they tend to shine more, have more energy, and live longer. So, how many meaningful purposes? Yeah, exactly.
A meaningful purpose. So those are the five out of the 10 buckets. Going back to the psychological age and social, I guess, pressures or social norms. Something my father did as a child growing up is he would never celebrate my birthday. and I remember all the other kids in my class would have birthday parties, cakes, balloons, presents, all this. It was like this big celebration. My birthday comes around, nothing. I got no gifts, no parties, no nothing. It was just another day. And I remember after like a few years of this, you know, once I realized at like five, I was like, oh, I'm not even, and there was like seven and eight, I was like, Dad, why don't you celebrate my birthday? What's like, you not love me? You know, it was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he goes, Son, we celebrate you every day, but I don't want to put emphasis on your age, on how old you're getting, because I've seen so many people focus on their age and be held back mentally and emotionally, physically by how young they are or how old they are. And so we never celebrated it. And I was like, Dad, but we can still get like a cake or something, you know, and have like presents. But he was like, I just don't want you to be limited by your age, by focusing on time. as a factor that's of importance for you that could hold you back. And I thought it was, you know, after of like the sadness of it, I was like, yeah, this makes sense. And I grew up feeling just like, it doesn't matter how old I'm getting biologically, right? But psychologically, I'm staying young and healthy and fulfilled and fun and joyful. Yeah. I'm expressing myself like a child. And therefore I feel young. And so, and I never feel like limited because I'm like, oh, I'm now 38 biologically, so it's like, I can't do this. It's like, no, you can't.
I can still do whatever I want. Oh, yeah, that's a great story. I mean, it's obviously a little bit painful for the kids, if I can imagine.
But that's a great lesson, but it's kind of a great habit. It's breaking down the social norms of like how to put emphasis on our age and how, okay, now you're a big milestone 30, now it's 40, like, oh, you're getting over the hill. It's like saying these things, words have meaning and start to psychologically affect us. Like now I'm middle aged. Okay, so you only got half your life left?
What do you mean?
Yeah. So Stalwart Downhill from here, it's like the words we use transform our mindset, which affects our physiology.
Exactly, exactly. You also touched on very important topic of how society and our life will change if we're all gonna live much, much longer. Whether it's 150 years or 200 years as well. And then I think the biggest mindset shift that we need to do is that our life will consist of several beautiful mini lives. Okay? So there's mini lives. Mini lives.
Seasons.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, that's a great metaphor or way to call it. So then every 10 to 20 years, we will have a. An opportunity. and the pleasure of changing career, right? Or start to do things that you always were dreaming of doing. So that's that I do think it's important to recognize and we always be on this trajectory of redefining ourselves. And I do think it's very soon that we'll have it's going to be a social norm to make a lot of changes in your life in terms of, you know, education, career, even purpose, even a dream, every 10 to 20 years. Well, that's one of the things to grow young, but also I think it's a necessity in a world where our lifespan will go beyond or well beyond 100 years.
Yeah, that's cool. I'm curious about environment and weather. How does that play into age and aging or ants are staying young. Do people that live in cold, extreme colds live longer? Do people live in extreme hots? Is it more mild temperature where they live longer? Do we have any research around this?
Yes.
So.
And this is very interesting actually. So every time we're talking about extremes, it's not really great.
Either way.
So if you're like right in the middle of Africa, Right. And always under the sun, it's not that great because it, what it does, it's actually speeds up, like the aging processes in your body. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the other, the other extreme, if you are like really up north, that.
Then the body has to work so hard.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
To stay warm.
So that's, that's one. Well, the other thing is, you are deprived of sun because it's like six months or, yeah, what? vitamin D, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of polar night and six months of polar day, you don't have like a vitamin D which process naturally in your body. And also you usually have certain limitations in terms of your access to nutritional food. Food is in deficit there in terms of variety and like vegetables as well. So you're really far away from your organic farm or wherever you take your vegetables from. So I do think that we all, like if you think about US or Europe in a sweet spot of where we can live to maximize our longevity, I also talk about this in a concept called longevity revolution. I do think, and I say there are seven signs of longevity revolution just for communication purposes. And first sign for me is that I want you and all of us to watch out how longevity friendly our environment is becoming. So, like China and India added 10% of their timberlands in the last 10 years. Or driver's cars.
They added what?
Timberlands, like forestry area. Forestry area increased, right?
Is that for oxygen? Is that for nature?
Well, let's stay, because I mean, I.
Think.
Making sure world is becoming better, right? And fighting global warming is on everyone's agenda. And, you know, like these countries, they kind of thought, okay, if we will increase the timber like a forest land, that's going to help to solve a problem. The other sign is like driverless cars. So if you are, I was about to say, if you're driving driver's car. So if you are in a driver's car, your chances to get in severe accidents or die is actually 10 times smaller.
If you're not driving the car. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If it's driven by a computer.
Is that out there yet? I mean, there's the Tesla that I have has like self-driving, but you're still.
Yeah, yeah.
Get in there. It's just a matter of in the next, because, you know, I want to prepare all of us, not only for changes that we just discussed for today, but like, you need to stay on Longevity Bridge in the next 5 to 10, 15 years. You need to be healthy and happy to make sure you enjoy the benefit of all these technologies which are coming.
It's not too late.
I call it Horizon 2. So we will discuss that as well. But then drive these cars. So that's a natural choice. You just decrease mortality rate by factor of 10. Isn't it amazing? Or plant-based meat or lab-grown meat? Well, that's just another caloric restriction intervention, if you think so. I'm actually very hopeful and positive about the fact that right now we have a choice whether you go for like a usual meat or plant-based meat. as well. And I'm not religious about being vegan or vegetarian. I have plenty of friends who are.
Gonna.
Have this habit. But, you know, obviously all these changes in the environment contributes to.
Right.
You know, our ability to live longer and enjoy our life. In fact, I'm actually. I'm doing a lot of pro bono programs called longevity at work. with the largest corporations on earth. I just, I don't want to use their names. And again, everything I do in longevity is me sharing the best of me, so I do it for free. But what we do, we create longevity bubbles, like a longevity enabling environment in their offices. So people use the stairs, there's healthy food in canteens and vending machines. They all have wearables. And then week by week, you just compare this department with this department, this state with this state as well. They have. And, and right now you have so many apps for, like, meditation, for smoking cessation and, and annual checkup is, is a part of so many health plans. So you just need to have, like, a good focus on that.
Yeah.
So this is what we do. It's just another way for you to improve your longevity chances to make sure you have, you're surrounded with healthy choices rather than, you know, just you opening out your fridge and it's like alcohol and chocolate. I love all of this, but it's just not really healthy.
A healthy meal, let's say an hour before bed. I'm talking about grains and lean meat and healthy stuff. Or, if you eat pizza an hour before bed, are they both going to impact your ability to sleep better? Or, is the quality of the food before you go to bed matter?
Yeah, that's a really good question. The short answer is, yeah, it does matter. So, probably the two things that would have the greatest determination would be the simplicity of the carbohydrates or the glycemic load, because that's going to impact the sort of glycemic roller coaster you go on at night, and then probably the amount of protein, because that has a greater contribution to what's called the thermogenic effect of food. So the thermogenic effect is how much does your body temperature actually rise to digest the food. Our bodies want to be very cold at night, so anything you do that opposes that leads to lousy sleep.
So what foods help you sleep better? That keep you colder? What are those foods? Whether it's an hour before or three hours before?
Yeah, I, I, I, honestly, it's like almost anything you're gonna eat is gonna come with something that's gonna slightly raise your temperature. So I just generally say try to not eat too much before bed. Um, and, and I go out of my way to avoid the two things that I think are worse. So I just say I, I wouldn't have huge protein before bed and I don't wanna have anything that's gonna raise my blood sugar before before bed. So, you know, I'd have an avocado before bed. I'd have, you know, something that's like, you know, I just generally don't eat before bed.
The body really rewards you in terms of if you wait or if you don't eat right before bed, is it going to sleep better, sleep deeper, be cooler, and therefore help we help you have more energy the next day if you don't eat before bed? Yeah.
And this is, at least for me, been most easy to exhibit. And I think many of my patients would agree during periods of so fasting is kind of a funky state because you're altering so many other things in the physiology. But one of the things that happens, especially by about the second day of a water-only fast, is you really are seeing the impacts of what deep sleep can look like in a state that is totally absent food. And it's very interesting because you're competing with two forces, one that's keeping you awake and one that's helping you sleep a lot deeper. The one that's keeping you awake is Cortisol, you have more of it. You have more stress hormones when you're fasting because that's the thing from a prehistoric standpoint that would have been going on, right? Fasting would trigger a signal that says go get more food. Be alert, be focused.
Go get food.
We don't want to die. And so that's kind of keeping you awake. But the flip side of that is the total absence of nutrient is allowing you to get into this amazing sleep and your body temperature is really going down because your body's turning down its Metabolism. So I actually find fasting sleep to be some of the most amazing physiology because I'm watching this plummeting temperature, rising heart rate variability, falling heart rate, all of these really valuable things, but a little bit of rising cortisol that can lead to shorter sleep times. But I still feel quite, you know, rejuvenated by sleep.
If you're a kid and you're eating a lot of junk food, you're not sleep, you're staying up late because you're whatever, playing video games all night, but you've got all this energy all day and you're active. Is there a negative for in your early ages, teens, early 20s through lacking sleep, eating poorly, or is there a way to recover in your 20s from the damage you've done in your before 20?
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, certainly you can break it down into sort of the behavioral habit side and you can talk about it through the physiologic lens. The good news is Before the age of 20 or 30, we are pretty remarkably resilient. I mean, you're an athlete, so you can relate. How old are you now, Louis?
You're nearing 40. 37. 37.
So you might not have fully appreciated, I'm 47, so I'm a full decade older than you. And when I think about 17 to 27 to 30 to 11 to 47, I can really talk about those decades through the lens of resilience. Like at 17, you could shoot me and I think I'd still get up the next day. Like you just couldn't, right?
You're Superman, yeah.
You're absolutely Superman. And I don't know, I feel like the first observation of not being Superman for me kind of kicked in about 42-ish, about five years ago. was the first time I was like, oh, so this is what people talk about, right? Like, you can't just go out and crush it every minute of every day. And I think that's just one lens, which is through the lens of exercise. But the same is true of physiology, right? Like, or I'll give you another example. Many of my patients have observed this. I've observed this. Like, I was never a big drinker in college, but certainly there were enough occasions in med school or college where I'd go out and drink far more than anyone should. And yet somehow the next day I could get up at six in the morning and go and do whatever I need to do. I remember one night actually being out drinking until three in the morning. I mean, having so much to drink, it was ridiculous. And somehow getting up at six in that morning to do a 100-mile bike ride.
Oh my gosh, man.
Probably still partially drunk. But it felt fine by about two hours into the ride. Today, if I had three glasses of wine, like the headache I'm going to have the next day is going to last me till the middle of the day.
Is that because your body was able to assimilate the glucose into the muscles and it used it for its to its advantage then?
And now it's like it takes over. It's a very good question. I really, I mean, I could sort of, you know, speculate on what it is, but I just think there's an over, so there's this thing called homeostasis, right? Which is one of the hallmarks of youth. And it's one of the hallmarks of aging. And, you know, it's the ability to or it's our lack of homeostasis. We lose this ability to get the body back into the zone of optimal performance. So everything about the human body is very particular. For example, take pH, which is the amount of acidity in our body. We're so highly regulated, like our body really needs to be at a pH of 7.4. So seven would kill you and 7.6 or 7.7 would kill you. And this is a scale that goes from zero to 14. to put that in perspective. Okay, so tiny perturbations will kill you. How good is our body at staying in that? Amazing. Temperature, right? You go much below about 94, you're dead. You go much above about 104, you're dead. How good are we at staying in that range? Oh, I mean good. I mean, we generally stay within a 1.5 degree band. So this homeostasis thing is amazing. It gets weaker and weaker as we get older. And so your ability to tolerate bad food, Bad sleep, sedentary behavior, more stress, all those things. It just gets weaker and weaker and weaker. And I think it declines non-linearly. So again, what you experience is a decline between 30 and 40. Eh, it's bad. 40 to 50, yeah, that's worse. 50 to 60, you can fall off a cliff.
Is there a way to reverse this?
I don't think we know. I think you can definitely slow the progression of it. And, you know what? I would say you probably can reverse it, right? So just as you can clearly reverse diabetes, diabetes is a glucose homeostasis problem, and it's clearly reversible. But, you know, so there are probably some variants of this that, that are harder to reverse than others. But, but, no, I, I think we can reverse this process, but it gets, it gets harder. You know, it gets harder as time goes on. It gets harder the further, the further you are into, you know, sort of the physiologic trap.
What are you doing to reverse it now that you've been experiencing this kind of not maybe a cliff, but a dip over the last five years for yourself. How are you thinking about it?
Well, I sort of had a change of heart five years ago. So actually six years ago, 2014. So I sort of hung up my bike, which at that point I'd switched from swimming to cycling as sort of my main sport. But at that point, a couple of things had happened. So one, I had become very familiar with a lot of emerging research on excessive cardiovascular training, which again, is a rich man's problem.
Ultramarathons, ultra biking, ultra swimming, hiking.
That's right. That's right. So again, and it's the same sort of curve, right? Where as exercise dose of exercise goes up, mortality comes down, but it has this little bit of a J where once you start to get into hyper amounts of exercise, especially over the age of 40, you're actually driving an increase in mortality. Now again- Really? Yes.
Does that mean running a marathon once a year or is it running a marathon every week?
Yeah, great, great point. Running a marathon once a year probably not increasing your mortality at all. But running 40, 50 miles a week probably is, especially at that age. Now again, this gets to your point about resilience. someone in their 20s doing that doesn't seem to have any impact on mortality. It really only seems to be an issue if you continue. In fact, I did an interview with a cardiologist, James O'Keefe, on my podcast who is the world's expert on this. And it was actually James's work six years ago because I heard him speak at a conference 10 years ago. We became friends. It's one of those things I'm sure you've experienced this where You hear something and you don't want it to be true. So you basically come up with all the reasons you're gonna poke holes in.
It until you find the evidence the other way. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And eventually it became very difficult to ignore that this hyper amount of exercise was counterproductive. So that's one piece of the change six years ago.
It's probably bad that I just committed to doing the marathon next year yesterday.
That's all right though. You'll be fine. I just think don't do one a month. Yeah, exactly. And then I think the second thing was I realized Like, it was sort of funny, but I realized like my prime was so far behind me that I needed to think about like, what, what was, what was I doing this in service of, right? Like, and not that I needed anyone other than myself to do these things, because I'm very self-motivated. So I don't like, but just as a joke one day I asked my wife, I said, Hey, do you know what my PR is for 20k?
Like, bike, run or swim?
Yeah, bike on a 20K bike on the time trial. And I was like, this is my wife. She hears me talk about this stuff all the time. I have spreadsheets and models and data, and I analyze my power data every single day. And I'm trying to break the record for San Diego. Like, I'm really so switched on to this. She'll probably get it within a minute. She'll guess what my PR is within a minute. She was off by 20 minutes, meaning she wasn't even in the zip code. So I was like, Huh, that's funny. Like, it's like literally the most important person in my life couldn't care less about this. And what I realized was, you know, I need to start thinking about a different sport, which is the sport of longevity. So what does it mean to be a kick-ass 100-year-old? And so that was the beginning of a mental model for me that in the past two years has gained much more traction called the Centenarian Olympics. So how do you train to kick ass at 100 should you get there? And of course, everywhere along the way. So that now dominates my landscape of training, which means I don't, you know, care about how fast I can, you know, ride a 40 kilometer time trial, because that doesn't quite fit into what a centenarian needs to be able to do.
What is your mindset going into a 40 mile bike then or some type of experience? Is it more the joy of it?
So, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't train. No, my training is very specific, but now it is fundamentally organized around four pillars. So the pillars being stability, strength, mitochondrial or aerobic efficiency and anaerobic performance. And so each of those then has a super layer detail.
Approach.
And, I still ride my bike four hours a week. So, it's a fraction of what I used to do and it's now very much geared to a certain energy system and a type of training.
What was the fourth one?
Stability, strength, mitochondria, and- Mitochondrial efficiency or aerobic efficiency. And then the fourth and final one is anaerobic performance.
So, you focus on those four metrics now on a day-to-day basis.
Yeah, yeah. Those four pillars sort of make up the training program. Which is then in service of something that I invite every patient to define for themselves, which is because you will have a different set of variables for me potentially. But my Centenarian Olympics has 18 events in it. I want to be able to pull myself out of a pool where there's a one-foot gap between the water and the curb, like lift myself up. I want to be able to hop over a three-foot fence. I want to be able to walk three miles in an hour. I want to be able to carry two 10-pound bags up four flights of stairs. I want to be able to goblet squat 30 pounds because that's about the weight of a kid. I want to be able to get up off the floor without using my hands. So I could rattle off all of my 18 things and you would say, Peter, those seem really easy and you'd be right as a 37-year-old stud. But the point is, as a 30.
Year old, a lot of them aren't easy.
Most 60 year olds couldn't do this if their life depended on it. And I have yet to meet, but maybe one person in their 80s or 90s who can. And so that's the aspiration, is to get to that level in your 80s or 90s. How do you work that backwards to inform your training in your 60s, in your 50s and in your 40s? And it's actually very hard.
And as I'm getting into, you know, I'm three years away from 40, what should someone in my age range be thinking about when they're, you know, I'm healthy, I feel good, you know, maybe have some aches and pains here and there when I'm training hard or something, but for the most part, I feel amazing. What should I be thinking about moving forward so that I continue to feel amazing and have the ability to do these things?
So I don't, I think it's never too late to at least become familiar with what these ideas mean. And it doesn't mean that you have to go whole hog and devote yourself to this. Like I've, obviously made a very conscious choice that I don't go to swim meets, I don't go to bike races. Like, I don't train for those things anymore. And a big part of that is just time. You know, there are only 168 hours in a week and, you know, I have a very clear set of priorities and I'm willing to set aside 10 to 12 hours a week for exercise, which by many people's standards is still quite a lot, but probably by the standards that you exercise and certainly by the standards that I used to exercise, I've never exercised so little in my life. So I have to be very efficient with every one of those minutes. And that means I'm laser focused on the four principles of that. In your case, I think it comes down to saying, okay, how much time do you want to devote to the long game? How much time do you want to devote to the short game? Another way to think about this would be investing. If you're looking at an investment portfolio, you might say, how much do I want to put both time and money, so the actual capital I set aside, but also the amount of time I spend deliberating over it into my retirement account, versus how much do I want to invest as a day trader for short-term gains for money that I'm going to be using in the near term that's maybe even supplementing my income today. You could have totally different strategies for that, and that's totally fine. So I'm just in the category where I'm only thinking about long-term permanent capital. And so that's the first question is you have to decide how do you want to do that? And it might be that you say, you know, Peter at 37, I just want to focus on running a marathon. I've always wanted to do an Ironman, so I'm going to go and do that. And, you know, I want to climb Mount Everest and that's going to require, like, you might have a whole bunch of these bucket list things.
And truthfully, I would say do them.
Now, because it's only going to get harder. Because you're not going to be able to do it later.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't think you're going to want to do it later. So get those things out of the way. Um, and then maybe when you turn 40, you say, okay, now it's time I'm gonna really focus on my centenarian Olympics when I have a better sense.
Of what those events look like for me personally. Understand how to eat for your microbiome. Mm-. Because we, we didn't get into this yet, but there's a, a phenomenon called the hallmarks of aging, which are these underlying things that go wrong as we age. And these are phenomena that seem to underlie all disease. So the idea is if you, if you treat these things.
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