Reverse Aging: What To Eat & When To Eat For Insane Longevity EP 1375

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.

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So one of the key things I talk about in the book is mindset, is how our minds really play a role in our longevity. And if we don't get that straight, we're screwed. When people kill themselves by their thoughts.

Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

You've got a book, Young Forever, the Secrets to Living youg Longest, Healthiest Life. I'm curious, you've been studying this for a while now. You've gone all over the world and studied this with people who've lived the longest. You've been a doctor for many, many years. You've researched this stuff for a long time. Do you think it's possible to live in our 90s, in our hundreds, fit, mentally sharp, healthy at that age still. A thousand percent. Really?

I mean, here's my plan. I wanna be 120, maybe 150, we'll see how it goes. Wow. I wanna go for a hike in the mountains, I wanna swim in a cool lake with my love, I wanna go back to the cabin, make a beautiful dinner, have a glass of wine.

Make love, and just drift off into the Neverland. At 150.

Yeah, why not? 120, 150. Actually, yes, 'cause you know, what we see as aging, this country is really abnormal aging. Decrepitude, decline, frailty, disease, disability, loss of cognitive function, faculties. And those are abnormal things that happen. They don't have to happen. You know, I was in Sardinia and I met this guy Pietro who was 95 years old and he had literally just stopped being a shepherd where he was hiking up and down the mountains five miles a day, guarding his sheep, for, I don't know, 80 years probably. And he was like straight up fit, strong, bellowing voice, super strong handshake, eyes clear. I'm like, man, you know, it's possible to be very vibrant if we know how to take care of ourselves. And what we've done in our culture is activate all of our disease systems and degradation and dysfunction. But we now know that we have an innate healing system, and we can activate our healing system. When I was in medical school, I studied a book called the Pathologic Basis of Disease. We never had a book called the Scientific Basis of Wellness, right? We never took that class. But now we understand that the body has its innate mechanisms for repair and healing, rejuvenation, renewal that can be activated at any point in life.

Okay, so what are the disease systems that most of us turning on throughout the world.

Well, so listen, we have an extraordinarily sick society. America was 4% of the population of the world now and it's 16% of the cases and deaths for COVID. Why?

So 4% America is 4% of the population.

In the world.

Of the world.

But we were 16% of the cases and deaths, four times what it should have been. And probably, considering we have a great health care system, it should have been half of that, right?

Why is that you think?

Well, it's not a question. There's a clear answer. It's because we are a very sick population. So we were pre-inflamed. We were overweight as a society. 93.2% of us are metabolically unhealthy, meaning we have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, have had a heart attack or stroke, or are overweight. That means 6.8% of us are healthy. So when COVID hits that population who is obese and pre-inflamed, who is chronically ill, which is also a disease of inflammation, or is elderly, which is also a disease of inflammation, the COVID takes over and just kind of wipes these people out. And so we are suffering from diseases of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, all the things we see as people get older. And these are all entirely preventable. They're relatively new. I mean, if you look back in the 150 years ago, in all the hospital records in Mass General or the hospitals in Boston, diabetes was almost nonexistent as an admitting diagnosis. So there was a case of a heart attack, the entire medical school, the residents, the doctors would all come around to see this rare case. It's like if somebody had like shistosomiasis today in a hospital. Really? They'd come in and everyone's like, what is this disease? Yeah, for sure. It was so unusual. So we now have a society where six in 10 of us have chronic disease, where four in 10 have more than one, where if you're over 65, 80% have a chronic disease. And probably even more when you look at things a little more subtly about dysfunction that happens. So what we see as aging today is something that gives us an impression that it's bad to get older because you're gonna become disabled, decrepit, dysfunctional, frail. But that's a model that is now being challenged by researchers in longevity and who are proposing that we may be able to even create something called longevity escape velocity, meaning we can escape death by advancing science that will keep us living longer and longer each year we're alive. Really? Now I'm not sure I'm into that, because I don't know if I want to live to be a thousand, but I do think that it is pushing the boundaries of what we thought is possible. And we know in animal models we've been able to extend life by a third, right? So if we do certain interventions, we can take animals and make them live a third longer, which means For humans, you'd live to be 120. So we've had women who lived to be very old, like Madame Clement, who lived to be 122 years old, who was a French woman who was documented legitimately to be 122 years old. Incredible. It's incredible. And she was a wine drinking, smoking chocoholic. But I wouldn't follow her longevity plan.

She had other things going for her.

To go against that, yeah, for sure. So that was an anomaly, but there are, cases of very vital, healthy people. And I traveled through the blue zones around the world where people lived to be well over 100. I saw this couple that had a combined age of 210.

Oh my gosh. How long were they married together?

Too long according to that. Maybe like 100 years. I don't know. My gosh. You know, 90 years or something. It's really wild, right? So we see these pockets and We've learned a lot from them about how to activate our longevity pathways. And they have a society and a culture that by default does it. We don't have it. We have a default society that makes us sick and overweight and creates early death.

What would you say are the three to five main causes of our society that causes us to get overweight and get sick easily?

I mean, hands down, it's the food. You know, we are eating a diet, a toxic diet that is unlike anything we've eaten in human history. 60% of our calories are ultra-processed food, which means they're made from basically food-like substances that are from soy, corn, and wheat, and other additives and ingredients and fillers and colors and dyes and thickeners that are highly toxic to our systems. And they're inordinately high in sugar and starch. We've talked about this, but we eat about a pound a day of sugar and starch per person per day in America, flour, sugar, and that's average. You might have a lot more. And it's just physiologically not something we evolved with. We used to eat 22 teaspoons a year as hunter gathers if we were lucky to find a beehive or a berry patch. No, we have that every day on average. And kids have like 34, which is like two and a half soda, like large sodas a day. So that's what's driving a lot of this. And that drives this phenomenon called insulin resistance, which is at the heart of the aging process. And that insulin resistance causes inflammation and all the age-related diseases. What is insulin for those who don't know what that is? So insulin is what your pancreas makes in order to drop your blood sugar and keep your blood sugar balanced. So we all know type 1 diabetics need to take insulin shots. But type 2 diabetics, I mean, by the way, there's been a 400% increase in type 2 diabetes in kids in the last 30 years, which is frightening to me. But they used to call it adult-onset diabetes and they had to change the name because little kids were getting it. 15-year-olds are now getting liver transplants because of fatty liver from drinking too much soda. This is really scary stuff. So insulin is important to keep your blood sugar in balance, but if you eat too much sugar, your body pumps out more and more insulin. And then just like the boy who cried wolf, your cells don't pay attention anymore. You get resistant to the effects of insulin. And then you need more insulin. And that causes the deposition of belly fat. And belly fat is this dangerous fat around your organs that is not just holding up your pants, but it's a whole organ itself. It's producing hormones and inflammatory molecules and neurotransmitters that are regulating your appetite. So it makes you really sick. And it's the central driver of all these age-related diseases. So that's a huge factor. There are other factors like toxins, our sedentary lifestyle, chronic stress, our sleep disruption. These are all things that are activating our disease systems, not our healing systems. But the food is the main thing. Food is for sure the main thing. 'Cause think about it, you eat pounds of this stuff every day. and it's not just calories, it's information. So the molecules in the food make a difference. So in Icaria, for example, one of the blue zones in Greece, they eat tons of wild food. Wild greens, they have summer greens, winter greens, wild mushrooms. Every day they have wild sage tea, because it's just free and cheap, right? They're poor over there. They don't go out in the backyard and they pull this in. And it's like, turns out I looked it up and it's full of catechins, which are these compounds in green tea that make green tea such a longevity compound. an antioxidant compound, an anti-inflammatory compound. So we really have this amazing cornucopia of drugs all around us in our plant chemicals that we don't consume very often. I think what 2% of the Americans eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables. Sure, sure.

What would you say the five main ingredients or foods to support longevity? Whether it be like a, you know?

Well, this is great, it's a great question. Right, so what should we be eating? We shouldn't be eating ultra processed food. We shouldn't be eating too much sugar. We shouldn't be eating refined oils. We shouldn't be eating additives and chemicals. We each about five pounds of additives per person a year. We shouldn't be eating pesticides, herbicides, all that crap. So that's just a given. But what should we be eating? Well, start out with the most important things for longevity, which are these phytochemicals in plant foods. So the majority of your diet by volume should be colorful fruits and vegetables and weird stuff if you can. Eat dandelion greens, eat seaweed, eat all this weird stuff because that's where all the medicine is. So the more colorful it is, the more heirloom it is, the more regenerative it is, the more organic it is, the more wild it is, the better it is. So if you had a wild strawberry, it's about the size of a peanut, but it tastes like an explosion of flavor if you ever ate a summer wild strawberry. You can go to the supermarket and buy this giant strawberry that look great, but they put in your mouth, it's like, I think it's a strawberry, it's so sour. It's like an apple. Yeah, they're gonna have an apple, you know? But it's not very tasty because the phytochemicals aren't there. So we know that you want to include a rich array of these phytochemicals. And the special ones for longevity are things like fisetin that's in strawberries. From pomegranate, you can produce urolithin A, which improves your mitochondrial function. So you can have green tea, which is epigallocatechin gallate compounds, which I talked about in the sage. You can have resveratrol, which is in red grape skins. There's a lot of plant compounds that you can start to include, curcumin, which is a powerful anti-inflammatory. So you can have a wonderful time having a delicious diet. And then mushrooms, they're not really a vegetable, they're in their own category. And mushrooms have an incredible array of compounds, these polysaccharides that turn out are immune modulating, anti-cancer, adaptogenic. And so we need to be including a lot more good mushrooms. And you can take mushrooms as supplements, but you can also eat a lot more of the good mushrooms. Also, garlic and onions are really important for sulfur in the broccoli family specifically because they upregulate glutathione, which is important for detox. So you really want to have a wide array of these medicines in these plant foods. The second thing you want to do is eat the right fats. So omega-3 fats are key, olive oil is key. Those are real longevity foods. And then protein, and this is where it gets sticky for people in terms of controversy because A lot of longevity researchers saying, well, we shouldn't eat protein because it activates this pathway that inhibits the body's own ability to clean itself called autophagy. Autophagy means self-cleaning, self-cannibalism. It's like a Pac-Man that runs around cleaning up old cells. We've all heard about now time-restricted eating, intermittent fasting, and all these things. Ketogenic diets, well, they activate this process which is built-in. It's a built-in recycling, repair, and regeneration renewal and longevity pathway. Now, when we eat all the time, we inhibit that pathway. So it's like making food in your kitchen for a month and never washing the dishes, right? It's gonna be a mess. So you don't want that to happen. You wanted the cleaning crew to come in every night and clean up. And so that's what we have to have. But if you eat protein all the time, that pathway is inhibited. I mean, that pathway is stimulated, so you can't actually get the autophagy to happen, the cleanup to happen. So, the key is you want to inhibit this pathway called mTOR, which we can talk about. mTOR is this really amazing kind of key longevity switch. I call it a longevity switch that is inhibited by fasting. It's inhibited by certain plant compounds. It can be inhibited by drugs like rapamycin. And so, this is being looked at as a key strategy for enhancing longevity. In animal models, they can extend life again by a third by inhibiting this pathway. but it's stimulated by protein and by sugar. So many longevity research say, well, no, you shouldn't have protein. But, well, the other part of longevity is muscle.

You need the muscle. Right, so you need to have strength, you need muscle, you need to be.

Able to get yourself off the ground if you fall.

Exactly, like all these things.

Muscle is the currency of bone density, right? For sure. So, you know, muscle is the currency of aging and longevity. And what happens as we age is we lose muscle. So we can be the same weight as we were at 25, at 70, but be twice as fat, like a rib eye instead of a filet mignon. Yeah, it's not very good. And that marbled muscle filled with fat doesn't work right, and it causes inflammation and aging and diabetes and heart disease and cancer and dementia and all this stuff is coming from this. Plus you can't get out of a chair and do the normal things you want to do. I mean, most of the reason people end up in nursing homes is because they can't do their daily functions. They can't tie their shoes, they can't get out of bed, they're kind of weak, you know, they can't get out of a chair. It's not because they're sick. So sarcopenia is real. So you have to figure out the balance between building muscle and having the cleaning and repair crew come in at night. So you want to have at least a 12 to 14, even 16 hour overnight fast. We used to call it breakfast.

Sure, sure.

If you eat dinner at 6 and you eat breakfast at 6 in the morning, that's a 12 hour fast. But we just keep eating all night and eat in the morning. So we really got to give yourself a body a break to do the cleaning. and then you want to load protein in at the right times, like when you wake up and have done this overnight fast, a good dose of protein, like 30, 40, 50 grams, to activate muscle synthesis. And you need the right quality protein. And this is where it's controversial because a lot of people are saying be vegan because it's going to save you and save the planet. But the truth is that plant proteins are low in leucine, which is a really important amino acid that's needed to turn on muscle. So if you want to turn on the switch to build muscle, you got to have the right amounts of this. It's like the rate limiting step. But plant proteins, you don't have that much. You can eat six cups of brown rice, but no one's gonna do that. You have a four ounce piece of chicken, people can eat that.

So you want to have a balance of protein and fasting is what I'm hearing you say.

Right, so time on and time off. So it's like that Goldilocks, right? You want the demolition crew and the construction crew. And so that's the beauty. So you don't want to stop protein synthesis because it's essential for life and if you start to lose muscle, that's when you start to become frail and disabled. so I think I write a lot about this in the book. It's not my opinion, this is a group of protein experts from around the world who got together and wrote this paper surveying all the literature in the world looking at this and what we should be doing. And it was called the ProteAge study. What's it called? P-R-O-T-A-G-E study. It's in the book. And essentially it says, look, as you get older, we need more protein, not less. And as you get older, we need more protein.

Because the body, it's harder to keep the protein. That's right.

It's harder to keep the muscle, right? Right. So there's a phenomena called anabolic resistance, where anabolic means to build, to build muscle. So we want to build muscle, but there's resistance of the muscles to build more muscle. So you need more exercise and more protein.

So key is to eat a good.

Dose of protein about an hour or two after a workout. That's the best way. And then you can add some things to it like creatine. Interesting. other things. Now, if you're vegan, you can also add amino acids. You can eat your plant proteins, but then you need to add amino acids. And I've seen these really jacked up bodybuilders who are vegan. I'm like, how do you do that? It's like, oh, you eat so much plant protein shakes, these highly processed, pulverized things that are jacked up with all sorts of amino acids. It's cheating a little bit. Sure, sure. So, you can't really get it directly from plants. Yeah, I mean, it's just a science. I'm not making this up. I wish it was different. I mean, I was a vegetarian vegan for 10 years. And I have a picture of me when I was 40 and 63, I'll show you the difference. You won't believe it.

Really?

Yeah, it's, you can post it on that. Well, post it up. But it's like, what? Who's who? Because it's like, I look like so jacked up at 62 compared to 40.

Come on. Yeah, really?

Yeah. What are you doing differently at 60? I just changed my diet and I did a little bit of band resistance training. Always doing yoga, running, biking. I thought, oh, that's enough. But then I started doing a little bit resistance training. I started doing this strategy of, you know, this time-restricted eating and then adding a bunch of protein after my workouts. And it just, and it worked. Now what is, what's something you want to see?

Let's see it.

Yeah, yeah, do you want to see? Okay, I'll show you.

You have to send it to me a while. I'll send it to you. It's pretty wild.

Like, I can't quite believe it. Will the same strategy be at 60?

In your 60s as in your 80s?

Yeah, I think the possibility of staying young longer is amazing. The research has shown that if you take even 60 years old, they can perform at the level of 30 year olds if they're trained right. So, they don't have to lose that much function. And there's an amazing study on the Tarahumara Indians. The Tarahumara Indians live in Mexico and they were really very, here's the picture, brother.

Oh my gosh. That's crazy.

Yeah.

The Tarahumara Indians, yeah, we'll put it.

Up on the screen for you. Had this belief that if you were older, you were a better runner. These were runners. They would run 100 miles a day, right? They would just do these ultra marathons before there was anything like that. They would run from village to village, mountain to mountain. And so they went down from Harvard and they tested these people. And this is the power of mindset, right? And the beliefs and what that does. And so they believed that as you got older, you got better. So the 20-year-olds are good, the 40-year-olds are better, and the 60-year-olds were better by every objective metric, their pulmonary function tests, their VO2 max, all their performance metrics that were objective, not just how fast they could run, but all the objective measures of fitness were better than the 20-year-olds, which is unbelievable, right?

Wow. What do they do?

What do they do differently? You know what? It's a great question. I just think they had this belief, and they trained themselves. It's incredible. It's really quite incredible.

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Okay, I want to complete this five foods for longevity. We talked about more colorful.

Vegetables and phytochemicals.

Phytochemicals. Then we talked about the right fats. I think you said protein was the next thing.

Yeah.

Is that right?

Yeah, and I think the other thing is to understand how to eat for your microbiome because we didn't get into this yet, but there's a phenomena 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 treat these things or if you correct these problems called the hallmarks of aging, that it will dramatically extend life. So if we cured all the cancer and heart disease from the planet, how many years extra do you think we'd live?

Probably an extra 10, I don't know.

Three to five, three to five. Maybe push it seven. If you address the hallmarks, we'd go to 120 or 150.

So if we eliminate diseases, the number.

One and two killers in the world, we got rid of them, it's only gonna give us a few extra years of life. Yeah.

What are the other hallmarks then?

So the other hallmarks are really well driven around these 10, I call it 10 things. One of them is the microbiome and we'll get back to how to take care of your microbiome, but I'll just sort of list the hallmarks and then we can come back to how to eat for your microbiome. But the first thing that happens is you get damage to your DNA. So every day there's little insults, toxins, that are diet or eating, whatever it is, stress, causing little death by a thousand cuts. But thank God you have a repair system. you know, you have a DNA repair system that goes out on a mission and starts to fix all the damages. Now, over time, you may have 99.9% fixing, but then there's that 1.1% that keeps getting worse over time. So that's one thing. Seconds, we get damage to our telomeres, which are these little things at the end of our chromosomes that keep them safe and intact, and they shorten as we get older, and if they're too short, the cells stop replicating and you die. Then there's epigenetic changes. And epigenetics are really important because it helps us distinguish between our chronological age and our biological age. So our chronological age is how long we're alive. I was born in 1959, I can't do anything about that. I just can't. I'm 63 on the calendar and I can't do anything about that. But my biological age is how old I am on the inside.

So how do we reverse the biological age? while we continue to age chronologically.

That's the plan. So I did my biological age and I at 62 and I was 43. Wow. So biologically I'm 43, I'm going for 25, but I'm chronologically 62. That's crazy. We can get biologically younger as we get chronologically older. And studies have found even in eight weeks with a high intensity dietary intervention, some lifestyle stuff, you can reverse biological age in eight weeks by three years.

That's incredible. What's the biggest gap that has been recorded, do you know, in terms of chronological and biological?

Well, this is really new because we really only started measuring the epigenetic ages through a biological clock over the last couple of years.

Oh my gosh.

Because this is really new science. So now we have a metric to determine interventions and how they work on affecting your biological age. Because before we say, eat better, exercise, take this vitamin, okay, whatever, take this drug. How do we measure how it's really affecting you in your biological clock? Well, now we have metrics. How do we measure that? So it's measured by taking a blood sample and looking at the epigenome, which basically means above your genes. Your genes are fixed. You've got 20,000 genes. They're like the keyboard on a piano. There's 88 keys. You can't do anything about that. But the epigenome is like a piano player. The piano player can play jazz, rock, classical, Mozart, you know, reggae, whatever that you want. Blues, ragtime, all on the same piano. So that's the epigenome, is the piano player. And what determines which Songs get played in your book of life, in your song book of life, is everything washing over your genes throughout your life. Your thoughts, your relationships, what you eat, your exercise, sleep, how you handle stress, environmental toxins, your microbiome, literally everything is washing over the genes constantly and regulating the epigenome. So by living a healthy lifestyle, by doing some of the things we're going to talk about around how do we sort of hack longevity, we can actually improve the expression of our epigenome and reverse our biological clock. So that's one of the hallmarks of aging. The epigenetic degradation happens as we get older, but we can fix that. And then there's damage to proteins. So you have proteins that are the communication systems in your body. And it's like, you know, having kind of a scratched CD or, I don't know if anybody knows what a CD is anymore. Sure, sure. A record. Yeah, yeah, a record. And these proteins get misfolded or misshapen, they don't work right. And so you have this damaged protein, so we have to fix that. And then there's problems with stem cells. Stem cells get tired, they don't produce as well, you can't rejuvenate your body as well, so they get what we call stem cell exhaustion. And then there's these horrible things that happen called zombie cells. Zombie cells are called senescent cells. Senescence means aging. So basically these cells are supposed to die, but they don't die. And they just continue to spew out nasty chemicals, inflammatory chemicals and produce inflammation. And that's another one of the hallmarks of aging is inflammaging. Inflammaging. Inflammaging, right? Everything that happens as you get older connects to inflammation. So inflammation is kind of the disease of aging. And it's why so many people were susceptible to COVID because we really were all pre-inflamed. And then the COVID hit, it's like gasoline on a fire. So we have inflammaging is about hallmarks of aging. And then we have Mitochondrial changes. Mitochondria are the energy factories in your cells or in your muscle, they're in every organ, every cell, and our mitochondria poop out. That's why you see like a two-year-old running around like a jackrabbit and someone who's 90 kind of moving kind of slow because their mitochondria are not working right. But those are things we can regenerate, repair, renew, recreate, we can build through like the protein and the exercise and various supplements and foods all help rejuvenate mitochondria. And then there's Another group, which is of Hallmarks, it's really one class, but it's called Deregulated Nutrient Sensing. And that's a big mumbo-jumbo of words, but it basically means how your body senses food. And that screws up as we get older. And there's basically, this is really the crux of a lot of the interventions around longevity, is how do we properly activate these nutrient sensing pathways to enhance our health and extend our life versus the opposite. So, your body's constantly picking up signals from the food you're eating, right? Proteins, fats, sugars, all that. And these four pathways are influenced by what you're eating. We talked about one of them, mTOR. So, that detects too much of protein or sugar. And then that can be important. And if that's overstimulated, your body's going to age faster. if it's inhibited periodically, right? Like fasting is good, but if you fast all the time, you're gonna die of starvation. Right? Right. Cold plunges are great. And I know you did Wim Hof's thing. Yeah, I know that.

If you're in there for two hours, you might.

Yeah, if you're in there for like three days, you're gonna die. Right? So like you can, there's a Goldilocks dose, right? So that's really important to remember. So there's mTOR, there's also something called insulin signaling pathways. So insulin, signaling is really important to regulate your blood sugar. But if you're constantly eating starch and sugar, it's like an avalanche of starch and sugar that over activates this pathway and drives cancer, heart disease, dementia, disease, inflammation, mitochondrial damage, DNA damage, all the things that we don't want to happen. All the epigenetic changes that we see, all the hallmarks of aging are all driven by these pathways. And then there's two other pathways. They detect insulin signaling and mTOR detect too much of stuff, right? Too much sugar and protein. And then the other two pathways, sirtuin pathways and AMPK are important for sensing lack or scarcity that turns them on. So sirtuins are really amazing because they get activated and they send out an army of repair team throughout your body to repair all your DNA, to make new mitochondria, to shut off inflammation, to improve insulin sensitivity, to do all kinds of great things to increase your antioxidant systems. and that's activated by resveratrol. We might have heard about the work of David Sinclair and how red wine and red berries, resveratrol might extend life. Well, it did in these mice, it's extended by a third, but it was the equivalent of 1,500 bottles of red wine.

So you don't want to be doing that.

So they were giving- I don't think that's the way to go. 1,500 bottles of red wine to be dead. So basically, you can activate these pathways, but NAD, people have heard of NAD and NAD shots and eye drips, that works on their sirtuin pathways. So this is how this works. You might have heard about metformin as a drug for longevity. That works on AMPK to help improve insulin sensitivity. So there's other ways to activate that through plant compounds and through exercise and all sorts of things. So we don't really need the drugs. I am not a big fan of metformin. We can talk more about that if you want. But I don't know if I got to all 10, but I think those are the 10 hallmarks of aging. And the last one is the microbiome. And the microbiome is really important. It's not on the classic list of hallmarks of aging. I added it. But when you look at the literature, it's really clear that as we age our microbiome degrades. We get what we call dysbiosis, imbalances in our gut bacteria, and those gut bacteria become toxic and inflammatory. So part of the diet you have to have is to take care of your inner garden. We need pre and probiotic foods and polyphenols. So prebiotic foods are things like asparagus, artichokes, Jerusalem artichokes, jicama, plantains, these are foods that feed the good bacteria. And then there's probiotic foods, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, tempeh, these ancient foods that have been around forever that are fermented foods that are prebiotic foods. I grew up on pickles, I'm Jewish, I didn't even know that was a probiotic food. And then there's polyphenols, and this is an incredible discovery, that there are certain compounds in plants that your gut bacteria love. so you're not only eating for yourself, you're eating for the trillions of microbes that almost outnumber your cells in your gut. And those microbes, when they're bad, cause inflammation and disease and diabetes and cancer and everything else. But when they're good, they regulate inflammation, they help you stay healthy. It's super important to feed them right. So you have to learn how to tend your inner garden. And there's a couple of ones that are really important, like green tea, pomegranate, cranberry. And in pomegranate, it's an interesting one. I talk about this in the book. Most people have pretty crappy microbiomes, pun intended. And the truth is that you've lost a lot of important species that you need to work with your diet to make good stuff. So if you eat pomegranate, it has a compound in it that gets converted by good gut bacteria to something called urolithin A. Now, urolithin A you might not have heard about. but you will. It's really amazing. There's millions of dollars of research on this compound that is derived from pomegranate being metabolized by your gut bacteria and producing this compound. But you could also make it and give it externally. And in studies, they found that without exercise, it increases fitness level through VO2 max, increases muscle strength, and increases mitochondrial clean up or a mitochondrial autophagy. Without exercise. Without exercise and also increases mitochondrial renewal and biogenesis to make new mitochondria. So basically you're taking, think about it, you're taking this like pomegranate, your gut's metabolizing it, you create this magical longevity compound and that's just one example, right? So we need to feed our gut.

Bacteria with lots of these colorful vegetables. That's beautiful.

Yeah.

Wow, okay. So eat for your microbiome is something you said to come back to. Is that what we're talking about here?

We just did.

And then what would be the fifth thing to add to this?

I think, you know, the five main.

Things, foods for longevity.

Yeah, I think, you know, I probably would say it would be eating with joy.

You know, I love that.

I think people get so screwed up about food and get so obsessive and so rigid about it that, you know, part of the key is celebration, enjoyment, you know, It's my birthday soon. I'm having a crew over. We're having a Friendsgiving. You know, it's going to be yummy and delicious. We're probably going to overeat. There's definitely going to be some pecan pie. Oh man. You know, that was incredible. So that's okay. So it shouldn't be too rigid, but I think the key of community and.

Eating with joy and eating with pleasure.

And savoring your food, and it's really, really important. Enjoying it. Not being so stressed and overwhelmed about it. For sure. And also eating in celebration with joy, like with community.

In celebration with joy, with people. Yeah. What was the things that you saw when you went to these blue zones that they did that maybe you weren't even thinking they would do? Like, what were the surprising things they did? Or the unsurprising things?

Yeah. I mean, there were a few things that I saw that were kind of striking to me that made sense. But one was that in Korea, which was one of the Greek blue zones, they eat so much wild food. so they had wild greens, summer greens, winter greens, they had wild mushrooms, they had wild sage tea, they had wild fish, they had so much wild food in their diet. And we know that wild foods are much more nutrient dense. Why? Because they're stressed. And stressed plants make more protective compounds. Those protective compounds are called phytochemicals. They give the color and the richness and the flavor. What people don't understand is the more flavorful a food is naturally, the more phytochemicals it has.

Interesting.

You know if you go to your garden at the end of August and pick a cherry tomato that's ripened in the hot sun that explodes in your mouth like the most incredible flavor. But if you go to a store bought tomato and you cut it, it's like cardboard tasteless. What's the difference? It's the phytochemicals. So flavor always follows the phytochemical richness of a food. So not the stuff you put on it or sauces or salt or fat or sugar to make it taste better, which food industry does, but just the natural flavor. So, you know, the more flavorful the food is, the better it is. So, it's wild, they eat a lot of wild food and it's so flavorful. The other thing was interesting was that shepherds, you know, had this culture of going and knowing exactly which plants to feed their animals at which time of year to graze them. So, we'd shepherd them, they'd eat all these wild plants, but they knew if this herb was coming in at this time of year, they'd go eat this herb. And if this plant was coming in this time, you're gonna go eat that thing. I'm like, why are you doing that? He says, We know because the meat and the milk tastes better when we- yeah. And so it kind of, you know, they were not doing it because it was better for them or because it was for longevity or because- Tastes better. Right, the cheese, yeah, it tastes better. So it turns out that we know now that phytochemicals are not just in plants and phyto means plant.

Right?

They're not just in plants, they're also in animals. So the work of Fred Provenza and Steven Banvollet from Duke have clearly shown that when animals are eating a wide array of wild plants or a wild array of, you know, planted grasses and flowers and different things, they will seek out medicine in the food. So they will literally go and eat major, like, you know, calorie crops, let's say, but then they'll go and sample from like 100 different plants to get their medicines. And so these wild animals, these wild plants are being eaten and the phytochemicals are accumulating in the meat and the milk of these animals. So studies have shown, for example, that you can have as high levels of the catechins in green tea in goat milk that's from goats eating certain wild plants.

Really?

Yeah. So it's my mind blowing and there may be ways that even these get transmuted. eating regenerately raised meat. I went to a restaurant here in LA last night called Matu, where they.

Have regenerately raised meat.

Was it amazing? It was amazing. Now, it wasn't as like fatty and like kind of like marble like corn-fed meat, but it was delicious and it was tasty and yummy and amazing. What was this place called? Matu, M-A-T-U. Check it out. Really good, Beverly Hills. And it's, you'd love it. So good. And, and, you know, you can eat that and know you're eating from an animal that's been well taken care of, that's living out in its natural habitat, that's regenerating the environment, that's storing the ecosystems, increasing biodiversity, conserving water in the soils, it's reducing climate change, it's producing more nutrient dense food that enrich in phytochemicals and good fats and more antioxidants and more minerals and just pretty much everything. So that was a sort of a, I think a key part of their longevity was the lived on this stuff. You know, they basically were shepherds and goats and sheep for their livelihood.

What was about their relationships? How did that play in? Did they have certain types of relationships with family members? Did they have intimate relationships? Were they married for long periods of time? Did they have 10 wives? What was the whole process?

One couple I saw had a collective age of 210.

That's crazy.

So, I don't know. I think being married is definitely a key to longevity for men. For women, not always, depends on if they're happy or not.

Oh man.

So, I think having a happy, healthy relationship is such a key part of longevity. And they were very much in the realm of community. It wasn't just like this isolated relationship. They were embedded in a context of a community that was totally supportive, that celebrated together, that played together, that worked together. together, that, you know, harvested together, that shared sheep together, that, you know, made cheese together. They were just doing stuff together as part of the way of life. And so, and they would just stop and talk and hang out and, like, chill. And it was like, there was nobody was, like, starting a company or, you know, nobody was, like, you know, getting ahead in social media for likes and followers. I mean, they were just, they were just living life. They weren't striving or trying to get anywhere. They were just being. Interesting. And so their culture was all about the power of these incredible moments where you share with people you love and care about and celebrate life and enjoy life and talk. We were driving out of this one town in Sardinia that had these two guys that were really great and they were local Sardinians. And this car stops in front of us and blocks us. And this old guy gets out and walks over to this stone wall and waves us to come over. And I'm like, what's going on here? And he just waved us over. he wanted to talk. You saw us in the car, he's like, he just wanted to talk. So we sat in the stone wall for like an hour or so and chit chatted about life and about his life. He was Carmen, he was 85 years old and super vibrant fit guy. And he started telling us about his life and how, you know, there was a mudslide that destroyed the village he grew up in, which they moved the town a little bit higher on the mountain. But he still had his farm on that old area, his old family land. So he took us down, he had like six sheep and he had a pig and he had some chickens and had orchards and he had a whole garden where he grew eggplants and peppers and tomatoes and zucchini and herbs and spices. It was amazing. He literally took care of his entire property by himself at 85 years old. I mean, I don't think I could do it. And I'm chasing this guy up this hill after his sheep and I'm like, I can't keep up with this guy. He's 85 years old. And so he was super vibrant, mentally sharp. He lived with his family. And they just had this incredibly deep culture. There wasn't nursing homes. I met Julia, who was 103 months. Oh my. Like you say, I'm 5 and 3/4. She's like, I'm 103 months. And she was like, didn't have kids and lived with her niece and nephew who loved her and took care of her. And she was still working. She was still working making all this stuff for weddings, all the little tablecloths and doilies and embroidery stuff. I don't know how to do that. She was making all this stuff and she was just so bright and still was walking around every day and taking her walks and hanging out with everybody and her friends. And it was really amazing to see this culture where, you know, people were not ostracized or excluded, but, you know, they were included in life.

And it doesn't sound like they're hustling for something. They're working hard to maintain their life, like their home, their farm, their land, whatever they have, maybe they're a small business, but they're not, hustling for something greater, is that right? Yeah.

No.

Why can you live long and still hustle? Or just want more? Want to build something greater in your life?

I think you can. I think it's really about what happens on the inside. Because one of the biggest things that regulates your epigenome is your mind. So your biggest pharmacy in your body is between your ears. It's the most powerful pharmacy in the world. and you can activate it for good or bad. So when we are having thoughts that are, you know, stressful thoughts, when we're in toxic relationships, when we're worried or anxious, when we aren't in harmony with ourselves, it activates all these really nasty pathways that drive inflammation and harm your mitochondria and destroy, I mean, your microbiome is listening in on your thoughts, is eavesdropping. So, those bugs don't like it when you are not happy. Really?

Yeah. What is the process of that from an idea, a thought into the mitochondria? How does that transfer into a healthy information into a physical manifestation versus unhealthy information, data and a thought into physical unhealthy?

So, what's the biochemistry of it? Well, for example, if you're stressed, you're producing cortisol and adrenaline and all these other hormones and proteins that then will trigger a whole cascade of downstream effects that activate transcription factors that transcription factors that turn on genes that cause inflammation and all these other problems. So, you're basically creating inflammatory thoughts are creating inflammation in your body, literally. Isn't that crazy? And you have receptors on your immune cells, for example, for neurotransmitters. So if you're stressed, your immune system is eavesdropping on your thoughts. That's why if you're stressed, you are more likely to have an infection or get sick or have other bad health consequences.

Why do you think it is that our body is built this way that a thought can either make us feel and physically transform into joy and health or feel sick and then become sick? why do you think our body, why.

From an evolutionary point of view?

Why do you think that is? Isn't that crazy? It's a crazy thing. You think something, it's not actually, it's.

In your mind, right?

Where it, you know, it's like, and then it transfers into your body. Well, I think, I don't know, Louis, but I think, you know, we have a built-in stress response system, which we need it. Like if we were getting chased by a saber-toothed tiger, well, you know, we need to get on a move, and we need to like, run, jack up our cortisol, pump our blood sugar up and get our blood pressure up and our heart rate up and flood our body with glucose and just all this stuff that needs to survive. It's like the story of how someone sees their kid under a car and can lift up a car. Why can that happen? Because we have the system built in to deal with acute stress. That's a good thing. The problem is we have a society and a life that drives chronic, unmitigated, unrelenting stress. So unless you are very clear about how to discharge that stress, because we can't avoid it, right? But how do you discharge it? How do you not react? And how do you have a different perception of relationship and what's happening to you? It's all about perception, right? So I always say stress is the perception of a real or imagined threat to your body. So it could be a real threat to your body, like a tiger chasing you, or it could be an imagined threat to your ego, like you think your wife's cheating on you, but she's not. And you get the same physiology. Or you can have the same input. Let's say you're James Bond and I put a gun to your head versus Woody Allen. It's going to be a very different set of responses, right? Same input, very different response. So that's the beauty of our minds is we have the power over our thoughts. You remember Viktor Frankl who wrote Man's Search for Meaning? He said, Between stimulus and response, there's a pause. And in that pause lies a choice. And in that choice lies our freedom. For those of you who don't know about Viktor Frankl, he was an Auschwitz and he was a psychiatrist in Auschwitz and he chose not to let even the most horrific thing that's almost ever happened to human beings affect his own well-being and happiness and inner life. That just blows my mind. We always have a choice, you know, and whether you have stuff or don't have stuff, it's all about our perceptions. So mindset and your thoughts are key part of longevity and health and having meaning and purpose. That was the other thing in these cultures. They had so much meaning and purpose. Carmine had such purpose. He had to go and take care of his sheep and he had to feed his family and he wanted to support the other members of the community by giving them food and he fed his animals the extra. He had a meaningful life and he also had a very active mind, was reading books and learning all the time. So, that extends your life up to seven years.

Having meaning and purpose. Because you hear the story sometimes of like, you know, someone in their older years, their husband or their wife dies, and then within six months or a year later, they die.

Or a week later, yeah. Or a week later, right?

You hear that story often.

All the time.

And is that because their meaning has lost or just when they have a broken heart and they don't know how to.

Both, I mean, there actually is a phenomena of a broken heart. I had a patient with this once who had this incredible wife. deeply in love. They were married for decades and decades. She got breast cancer and died. And he was relatively healthy and all of a sudden he went into heart failure.

Come on.

Like boom. And it's in the medical literature. It's literally a broken heart and it causes actual clinical heart failure where your heart muscle can't pump the blood around.

Now, that's from, what is that from? Is that from thinking and then feeling the heart, you know, the pain in your heart?

Yeah. It's the physiological phenomena that happen when you have a stress response, the flood of all these stress molecules in your body that damages the heart. And we were able to get him better, but it was through energy healing, which sounds kind of wacky and weird, but it was really through his own, you know, getting back in his body, being touched, being held, being energetically reset. He was able to reverse the heart failure.

It wasn't by taking some fancy drug or getting a heart transplant. So he didn't, pass away from that. No, he didn't.

But some people do. We fixed it, yeah.

But some people do. They might isolate themselves even more and then their body just starts to shut down.

Loneliness is the biggest killer. Really? Loneliness seems to be a bigger risk factor than smoking or bad food or almost anything else.

What happens when we're lonely?

Again, it's a stress. We're social creatures, Louis. We all are meant to belong. We have a longing to belong. And if you look at it from an evolutionary point of view, you stick a human out in the desert or a forest by himself.

They're not gonna last long.

Forget it, you know. And so this is not true just of humans, but it's all of creation. And E.O. Wilson, who was a Harvard professor, wrote many, many books. He's a very, he just died, but he was a very, very thoughtful guy. And he wrote a book called the Social Conquest of the Earth. And it's about how from ants to humans, we all work together, like ant colonies, right? They're all working together. And so we have to work together to survive. And that's why altruism is actually a medicine. Altruism and serving and helping others actually activates healing mechanisms in our body. It activates dopamine in the same way that cocaine or heroin does.

Altruism and serving, giving. It's the best thing to be addicted to. It is.

It's way better than heroin. Exactly.

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