Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - EP #29 The Secret to a Long, Healthy Life w/ Dr. Mark Hyman

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

In this episode, Mark and Peter discuss the principles of longevity, the importance of muscle mass, and why sugar is poison. You will learn about: 18:48 | What Are the principles of longevity: lifestyle, diet, or mindset? 38:17 | Mark Hyman explains the hallmarks of aging. 1:18:23 | Humanity's past may hold the key to healing ourselves today. Dr. Mark Hyman is a leading expert in the field of Functional Medicine. He is a 14-time New York Times bestselling author, the founder, and director of The UltraWellness Center, and the head of strategy and innovation for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. Pre-order Dr. Hyman’s new book today, available on February 21, 2023: Young Forever _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter  Consider a journey to optimize your body with LifeForce. _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That's the sound of unaged whiskey transforming into Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey in Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around 1860, Nearest Green taught Jack Daniel how to filter whiskey through charcoal for a smoother taste, one drop at a time. This is one of many sounds in Tennessee with a story to tell. To hear them in person, plan your trip at tnvacation.com. Tennessee sounds perfect. Based on the science we have now, we understand the basic causes of disease and aging. We understand the basic ingredients for health, the science of creating health, and that Young Forever is simply a roadmap that guides you through how your body works that you were never given.

It's like the owner's manual. And, you know, it's like, you know, your car, you don't know all the features. You don't have to use all the things. But the basic stuff to get around, navigate, and do what you got to do, you got to learn how to do. And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am. This is what I'm going to do. This is the dent I'm going to make in the world. It's like, this is who I am. This is what I'm going to do. This is the dent I'm going to make in the universe. Everybody, Peter Diamandis here. Just had the privilege

of sitting down with a dear friend of mine here at the Bold Offices for a special episode of Moonshots and Mindsets, talking about one of my favorite subjects and hopefully yours, longevity. My guest was none other than Dr. Mark Hyman. Mark is one of the leading thinkers on longevity and functional medicine. He's got one of the top podcasts on health called The Doctor's Pharmacy. He's a regular on many TV shows, CBS This Morning, Today Show, Good Morning America, The View, CNN. He just wrote a book that's coming out very shortly called Young Forever, The Secrets to Living Your Longest Healthiest Life. And in this episode, we're going to talk about the basics, food, diet, exercise, sleep. We're going to talk about what are the

cutting edge therapeutics that have a chance to extend a healthy lifespan. Talk about how a lot of the things that you think might be healthy for you probably are not, and why, in fact, going back to some of the younger, earlier practices of health in the human species is so fundamental. We talk about the nine hallmarks of aging, what they are, and how to combat them.

So if you want some incredible wisdom from someone who's brilliant, please join me for this next episode of Moonshots and Mindsets with Dr. Mark Hyman. Hey, Mark. Great to see you, buddy. Welcome to Santa Monica. It's great to be here, Peter. Last time I saw you, you and I were floating together at zero G. We were. Yeah. With your girlfriend back then, now your fiancee. That's right. Thank you. Yeah. We were floating high. we were floating high yeah did you enjoy your zero g flight it was the most unbelievable experience i mean like going to antarctica seeing the gorillas and the zero g flight or top of the list experience that's the way to romance a girl off her feet literally uh so you know we going to dive into the idea of longevity and slowing, stopping aging.

I want to ask you about what you think around the idea of reversing aging. But how long have you been? Well, let me ask you a different question. How long has the conversation about longevity really been vibrant out there in the world? Because it feels relatively new. It feels new, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, clearly everybody's been thinking about the fountain of youth since Methuselah, right? Yeah, it's been a few thousand years. The Holy Grail and all that. And everybody's looking for the elixir and all the alchemists of old.

We're all looking for the source of longevity. So this is not a new idea. But I think medicine has really ignored the idea that we could do anything about aging. And this is not a new idea, but I think medicine has really ignored the idea that we could do anything about aging. And it's not been a subject of research. It's not been a subject of exploration from any rigorous point of view. And so it sort of was on the back burner as a sort of non-entity until recently when billions of dollars started pouring into the longevity research field. And we started making discoveries about the root causes and how we begin to think differently about this. So I think we're in this extraordinary moment that we haven't been in before. And I can see, you know, even when I, when I wanted to publish this book,

young forever, I said to my publisher, I want to write this book. And it was like, you know, three or four years ago. And he said, Oh no, it's not a hot topic. Most of these books don't do well. And I'm like, listen, listen, I know what's going on. And I can tell you that this is going to be very big. And it is. I mean, is it fair to say that, I don't know, five years ago, maybe seven, eight, maybe it was 10, that if you were a credible physician or scientist talking about slowing and stopping and even reversing aging, that it would have been a black mark against you? Absolutely.

I mean, even talking about reversing disease is a black mark against you as, can I reverse heart disease? Can you reverse diabetes? Can you reverse dementia? No, but actually, yes. So I think medicine is really in this cataclysmic change, this paradigm shift where the old ideas of what we thought were true about disease are shifting. And now we're understanding the underlying mechanisms of things that go wrong that underlie

all disease. And so that's the exciting part of aging research is it's pointing to what I've been looking at for a long time, which is the body as a system. It's systems theory, systems biology, systems medicine, clinically applied through the lens of functional medicine. But most of the practitioners have no education in this and we're learned reductionist medicine Which you did and I did in a medical school. Yeah, I mean so I wanted to find a few things Functional medicine. What is that?

you're you're credited with being one of the fathers one of the Individuals who have been speaking about that for for for many years. I'm certainly the noisiest Well, and and many are following I mean, we're incorporating that into fountain life. So what is functional medicine? Well, I always joke, I say it's the opposite of dysfunctional medicine. At a high level, it's really about understanding the body as an integrated ecosystem where everything is connected and everything is determining everything all the time. So it's about looking at root causes. It's about treating the system, not the symptoms. It's about understanding the why, not the what, not what disease you have and what drug

do I get, but why is this happening and how do I understand the biology underneath it? So it's very much taking sort of the advances that are happening in systems biology and systems medicine and trying to create a clinically useful methodology to apply these ideas. And that's what it is. And it's not a new specialty. It's not a new sort of alternative therapy. It's basically a new methodology for interpreting data through the lens of the body as an ecosystem where you have to look at root causes and you have to treat the body and create health. So it seems kind of obvious. It's obvious, right? It's obvious. I mean, it's really the science of creating health as opposed to treating disease. Yeah. I mean,

and that's interesting, right? Because most of medicine, we talk about healthcare, but it's really sick care. And you and I have jammed on this much. It's like the system out there, and I have jammed on this much. It's like the system out there, you know, unfortunately sort of perpetuates chronic disease and only pays attention to you after you're sick, right? Yeah. And one of the things I think that's interesting is the body doesn't a damn good job at hiding disease. Yeah. I mean, I say the disease is the body's best attempt to deal with a bad set of circumstances. You remove those circumstances and the body has this extraordinary, powerful, innate healing system that repairs, regenerates, renews. And that's what we learn how to activate in longevity medicines.

We're understanding how to activate these ancient longevity switches that are embedded in us that are supposed to keep us alive and healthy as opposed to turning on all the disease switches, which we do through our modern lifestyle. Yeah. I mean, so let me check this out with you because it seems amazing that people don't realize this. You know, people think when they got sick, it happened that morning. Right. Right. So, you know, we, when you have symptoms of cancer, depending which cancer it is, it's really later on, stage 3, stage 4, that you have a physiological response and you're in pain or you look bad. And you've missed everything at stage 0, stage 1, stage 2. I remember someone said if you have Parkinson's, which is a loss of neuronal function and substantia nigra gets, you only have the Parkinsonian trembling

when like 70% of the neurons are gone. So your body is constantly countering this and trying to, but so if you don't look, you don't find. You don't find it. Right. The Bogalusa heart study, which looked at kids and plaque in their arteries found that kids as young as, you know, 10, eight, nine were having plaque in their arteries and that predicted their evidence of their heart disease and risk later on. So these diseases start very early.

I mean, even in utero, in the epigenetic environment in which the baby is bathed from what the mother's doing, her diet, her lifestyle, exposure to toxins, all determine the risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, even before birth. all determine the risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, even before birth. So we actually now know that the exposome, which is the sum total of all the things we're exposed to in our life, whether it's our mother's diet or stress or traumas or toxins or diet or lack of exercise, all the things that are washing over our microbiome are driving the changes that lead to chronic disease. So 90% of chronic disease is caused by our microbiome are driving the changes that lead to chronic disease. So 90% of chronic disease is caused by the exposome, not the genome.

And even single gene disorders can't be modified through lifestyle. I mean, it's a crazy story. I was in a blue bottle of coffee the other day, and I walked in. This guy goes, Dr. Hyman, Dr. Hyman. I'm like, hi. He's like, you saved my life. I'm like, I never met you. He's like, yeah, well, I have sickle cell anemia.

And I started following the changes in diet and cleaning everything up. And I was going from having a sickle cell crisis every month to maybe a mild one once a year. And I'm like, wow, that's like having Down syndrome and fixing it. And so even single gene disorders can be modified by the environment. That is spectacular. I mean, what brings us here together this moment is your new book. And let me just take a second to shout it out. Young Forever, The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life. Sounds like a plan. It sounds like, you know, it's like, listen, let me jump in here. How long do you want to live? I want to live as long as I can do whatever the

frick I want to do. I want to be able to ski, ride horses, make love, hike, do all the things that I love to do. And if it's 120 or 150 or 180, I'll keep going until I'm done. So I think realistically for me, I think 120 is a good target. I think for sure I'm going to get to 100. I mean, my dad and my mom got to like 90, and they ate crap. And they smoked when they were younger. And my mother always used to say, whenever I get the urge to exercise, I lie down until it goes away. I think I've been exercising since I was 14, and I've been steady at at it and I've been eating, well, pretty much most of my life. So I think, you know, I might have had two or three Cokes in my entire life.

Yeah, that is fascinating. And biologically, I'm 43. So, you know, even though I'm 63 chronologically, according to the DNA methylation test, I'm 43, which means, you know, you know at least another you know 60 years and that gets me to 120 so and we'll get we'll get we'll get into this because i you know the challenge the thing that most people don't realize is if you can add uh 30 healthy years onto where you are today during those 30 years the breakthroughs we're going to see are extraordinary you know it doesn't like science isn't like stopped and taken a break for 30 years. It's it's accelerating. And so the breakthroughs that we'll see in a whole range of things we'll talk about.

So the book Forever Young. Young Forever. Bob Dylan was the Forever Young. Sorry. Another Jewish guy, but anyway. So Young Forever is out on pre-order now. And depending on when you're listening to this podcast, it may be available on Amazon. And the pre-orders have shot through the roof.

Yeah. What did you say? It was tenfold. Every other book I've done, which is all done very well. That's awesome. Well, I'm excited to be able to support. You're going to be coming and speaking at Abundance 360 this year, which I'm really excited about. Let's talk about why you wrote this. Well, I mean, aside from the fact that I'm getting older

and I'm everybody's favorite radio station at WIFM, which is what's in it for me. I felt that it was important to write this book because as I began to look at the field of longevity research and longevity science, I felt like there was something missing. And what isn't missing is this re-imagination of disease according to the hallmarks of aging, which we can get into what those are, what they mean, and we'll dive into that. But these hallmarks of aging are the things that seem to go wrong as we get older that we can get into what those are, what they mean, and we'll dive into that. But these hallmarks of aging are the things that seem to go wrong as we get older that we can influence and reverse, and literally reverse our biological age. And that are the reasons why we see all the diseases,

from heart disease to diabetes to cancer to dementia, all the age-related diseases are the result of these fundamental biological processes that go awry. are the result of these fundamental biological processes that go awry. Now, what that is is a huge advance in understanding of targets for treatment, whether it's through pharmaceuticals or lifestyle or meditation or stem cells or whatever. But the truth is that what was missing was the question of why. Why do these things go wrong? What is the cause of the hallmarks? So the hallmarks are the cause of disease and diseases are the cause of why. Why do these things go wrong? What is the cause of the hallmarks?

So the hallmarks are the cause of disease and diseases are the cause of aging. What's the cause of the hallmarks? And so functional medicine gives us a way to think about that. And it really comes down to really two simple questions that I learned from my mentor, Sid Baker, which is, you know, what do you have too much of that your body's unlikely to get rid of? Toxins, allergens, microbes, stress, poor diet, et cetera.

And what are the things you need to thrive? What are the ingredients for health? The right food, nutrients, right balance of hormones, light, air, clean water, exercise, sleep, connection, meaning, love, purpose. All these things are the ingredients for health. So you're either dying of too much of something or dying of not enough of something, right? And so that was what I wanted to highlight was take a look at where the longevity field is, what actually could be helping it to actually even accelerate further the results that people get from a biological standpoint.

And how do we not just go back into a reductionist model of treating the hallmarks of aging with reductionist therapies? This episode is brought to you by Levels. One of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my peak vitality and longevity is to monitor my blood glucose. More importantly, the foods that I eat and how they peak the glucose levels in my blood. Now, glucose is the fuel that powers your brain. It's really important. High, prolonged levels of glucose, what's called hyperglycemia leads to everything from heart disease to Alzheimer's to

sexual dysfunction to diabetes and it's not good the challenge is all of us are different all of us respond to different foods in different ways like for me if I eat bananas it spikes my blood glucose if If I eat grapes, it doesn't. If I eat bread by itself, I get this prolonged spike in my blood glucose levels. But if I dip that bread in olive oil, it blunts it. And these are things that I've learned from wearing a continuous glucose monitor and using the Levels app. So Levels is a company that helps you in analyzing what's going on in your body. It's continuous monitoring 24-7. I wear it all the time. It really helps me to stay on top of the food I eat, remain conscious of the food that I eat, and to understand which foods affect me based upon my physiology and my

genetics. You know, on this podcast, I only recommend products and services that I use, that I use not only for myself, but my friends and my family that I think are high quality and safe and really impact a person's life. So check it out, levels.link slash Peter. I'll give you two additional months of membership, and it's something that I think everyone should be doing. Eventually, this stuff is going to be in your body, on your body, part of our future of medicine today. It's a product that I think I'm going to be using for the years ahead and hope you'll consider as well.

So when I think about why we age, I sort of think go back 100,000 years ago when we were getting pregnant at age 12 or 13 and having a baby. And by the time you were 26 or 27, you're a grandparent. And before food was abundant, before McDonald's was around, the last thing you wanted to do to perpetuate the species was steal food from your grandchildren. And so there was no advantage for you being around longer than age 30 at that point in fact it might have been a disadvantage i'm just wondering you know and there was never any selective pressure to i mean i i think if if we could reproduce into our 80s 90s 100s that we

would have been living longer is that make Mick Jagger had a kid at 75. Picasso had one, I think, at 80. True. Women is harder. So it's interesting. You refer to the way we currently age, gradual decline, increased illness, chronic disease, as abnormal.

Yeah. How should we be aging? What would you consider normal? Well, you know, Peter, you look around and you go to the average hospital or see old people, which we kind of hide them in this culture, which is very strange. Hospitals are a terrible place for old people to be. Totally. in this culture, which is very strange. Hospitals are a terrible place for old people to be.

Totally. But we see decrepitude, frailty, disability, disease, and people's health span is far shorter than their lifespan. Maybe the last 20 years of their life are in poor health. That means your health span's, let's say, 60, but you live to 80. That means you've lost 20 years of health span. And that's what we come to think of as normal in this culture. But I've been to places like Sardinia, where people are 100 years old or 95 years old, and they're still hiking five miles up the mountain and straight up as an arrow and booming voices and clear minds. And I'm like, this is impressive. So I think we come to accept what we see around us as normal, but it's really not. And there are many examples around the world where people are practicing habits by default, not because they're into longevity, but just by default,

their cultures have created an environment that promotes longevity. And as soon as they move to a Western world, they get the same rate of death and disease as we do. So these are the blue zones. The blue zones, yeah. I've been in Sardinia and Nicaria and Nic you know, in the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica. I mean, there's a guy who's like riding his horse straight up a narrow at 101 years old in Costa Rica. I'm like, man, most people wouldn't want to walk around the street without a walker at 100 years old. Let's jump up on a horse, you know. And so is it all about just lifestyle and diet and mindset? What are the principal elements here because

you know we talk about the hallmarks of aging which i do want to get into these feel like cellular subcellular physiological uh elements of uh of systems running down right entropy yeah but then you can be getting accelerated or decelerated depending on what you do if you put energy in a system you can change entropy right entropy happens without putting any energy in the system and the and the the reasons i think that we see this sort of acceleration is because of the habits we have in the lifestyle we have but if we actually change those and look at what are the biggest drivers for these hallmarks of aging? It's food You know, I think there's the the hierarchy

They're not all created equal these hallmarks and one of the most important is this deregulated nutrient sensing which is how we sample The food we're eating and how it influences longevity switches, which there are four two of them Basically detect too much Stuff and the other detect too little so mTOR and insulin signaling detect too much stuff, and the other detect too little. So mTOR and insulin signaling detect too much protein and sugar and carbs, and insulin does the same. It's mostly sugar and carbs. And AMPK and sirtuins detect not enough scarcity, and then they get activated.

So when these switches are properly managed, and it's not like you can have them all on or on off. I think a lot of people get confused. Oh, mTOR is bad shut off mtor well no if you do that you're going to end up without any muscle or you'll desynthesize proteins so if food is the biggest driver and so when you look at our diet it's the incredibly high amounts of starch and sugar and processed food so let's i want to i want to hit on all of these during the course of this conversation. For folks who are listening and want to take away, you know, real nuggets that can change their life. Because it doesn't take a lot to make a substantial change in your life. And I'll share mine, but I want to hear yours and what you're teaching here. So let's hit on food.

Let's begin with the food right now. Because, you know, the idea of food is medicine. I'll begin with the number one thing I've learned to appreciate is sugar is a poison yeah yeah it really is you know well the dose makes the poison right so having a little bit of sugar is not going to kill you but it's the fact that we eat the equivalent of about a pound a day per person of sugar and flour and below the neck sugar and flour in your body the same fact the glycemic index of bread is 100 that's the gold standard sugar is flour in your body are the same. In fact, the glycemic index of bread is 100. That's the gold standard.

Sugar is 65, which is better than bread. That's because it has fructose, which lowers, doesn't spike glucose. But basically, bread and sugar are the same. And we eat about 152 pounds of sugar and 133 pounds of flour on average per person. That's average. Now, I'm not having that much. So some people are having a lot more and that's driving the fact that we have you know 93 of americans that are metabolically unhealthy which means they have high blood pressure high cholesterol high blood sugar or they're overweight

or they have had a heart attack or a stroke that's like six percent of us basically or 6.8 percent of us are in good metabolic health that's to me. And that's driven by our diet primarily. So, you know, someone once said that sugar is more addicting than cocaine. And, you know, whether that's ever been scientifically proven or whatever, it's addicting. In rats. It's addicting. I just, you know, every year with my abundance community, I do a 22 day sugar fast. Right. And the entire community goes on in a WhatsApp group and we drop all sugar and high glycemic index foods, no pasta, no rice, no bread and so forth. And it's difficult in the beginning, right? But when you're doing it with others, it's, it's achievable. And towards the end,

um, you're off the addiction. People stop wanting it. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm in that, I'm in that phase now. I'm, you know, for me, it's all about high value protein and plant foods. I mean, so what, if you're not eating bread, pasta, rice, sugar, desserts, and so forth, what are you eating? Well, that's a great question. I think, I think if you look at the science of, of longevity, there are like many cultures, many different diets, whether the Inuit or the Maasai who eat primarily animal-based diets. Or you've got, you know, maybe cultures where they eat more plant-based diets like in Okinawa. But they still have pork and they still have meat. I think it's really about the quality of the information you're putting in.

Because, you know, as we talked about, you know, and David Sinclair talks about the information theory of aging. Food is information and it's signal. So everything that you do, whether it's what you eat, how you move, how you sleep, your level of stress, toxins, your microbiome, all is washing over your biology and creating inputs. This is the exposome that influence everything that's happening. And the, and the remarkable thing is Peter, the rapidity of change of your biology when you change those things is so fast. Like you could be type 2 diabetic on insulin and in three days you're off insulin. You know, in three months your, you know, basically your blood sugar is normal and you've reversed all your diseases. So that's the power of food. And so when I think about food, it's about having high amounts of these plant-rich phy power of food. And so when I think about food, it's about having high

amounts of these plant-rich phytochemical diets. And I think some people argue with that, but we should be a carnivore, but I'm not sure that's the best idea. I think high quality protein is really important. This is a highly debatable subject in longevity because many longevity experts are talking about you being vegan or actually eliminating animal protein as a way to extend life. And that really comes from this whole theory about mTOR being a problem and that we need to inhibit mTOR, which means mammalian targeted rapamycin. We'll get into rapamycin. But the idea is that this longevity switch is in every cell in your body.

When you overstimulate it, it creates... Overstimulated how? By eating too much protein or eating all the time protein, that it will cause overgrowth of tissues and cancers and heart diseases and all the problems that we see with aging. The problem is it's like anything else. If you inhibit it all the time, you waste away and you're frail and you die. Like if your calorie restriction, which is what this this does induce the mTOR inhibition right calorie restriction is the thing that

actually everybody agrees will lengthen your life by a third if you eat a third less calories you'll be miserable and scrawny and have no sex drive and your hair's falling out but you'll live longer the question the big hack is how do we mimic calorie restriction? Well, the idea is if you don't, you know, stimulate mTOR with high levels of animal protein, then you can extend your life. And there's some rationale to that, but you also need muscle because muscle is the currency of longevity. And if you don't have muscle. And we're going to get to that because I'm on a, right now for me, my biggest number

one objective is muscle growth. Yes. right now for me my biggest number one objective is muscle growth yes i am like i'm like in the gym constantly um you know and i'm taking my creatine but i'm also i've also massively increased my protein intake yeah so i want to understand where you are because this is all you know i take rapamycin so there's this like increased animal protein yeah working out rapamycin so this triangle here how do you... So slow it down and explain it to folks who would understand all those terms. And what do you recommend at the end?

So it's the Goldilocks problem. You want to turn it on so you can build muscle. You want to turn on what? mTOR. Okay. And you also want to give it a break so you can do cleanup and repair. So think about your body has its own recycling cleanup mechanism. It's called autophagy, which means self-eating, self-cannibalism. And it's basically like a little Pac-Man that runs around and gobbles up all proteins and parts.

And I mean, think of it, if you're starving, your body still needs to get proteins and it still needs to do stuff and make things. But if you're not eating, what are you going to do? So you basically go around and you recycle all the old parts and you make new stuff, which is basically what your body does. It's brilliant. And the way it does it is through this process called autophagy, which is essential to clean up, repair, and renewal regeneration. And it also activates all these other longevity pathways, like reducing inflammation, increasing

mitochondrial function. So everything you need to do to survive if you're starving so you don't die, it kind of turns it on, which is great. And that's an important thing to do every day. So you can do that by not eating for 12 hours between dinner and breakfast. If you want to go to 14, that's great. So that means eating at six at night and having breakfast at eight in the morning. That's not a hard thing to do, right? Or 10 if you want to do 16 hours. So that's a really simple way every day to induce autophagy. The other is to activate mTOR in the right way, which means not eating all the time,

like not eating bed-night snacks and flooding with all this stuff, and then eating a big load of protein in the morning when you wake up in a fasted state. And my favorite way to do it, because I don't necessarily want a steak for breakfast, is I have a healthy aging shake, which I talk about in the book Young Forever. Essentially, it's got regeneratively raised goat whey. I sort of use some other pumpkin seed powders, just a little plant proteins in there. And I put in creatine. I put in something called urolithin A, which is an incredible mitophagy compound that comes from pomegranate and helps build muscle.

And a few other things like adaptogenic mushrooms and you know some things for my gut and i kind of make it like a healthy shape but basically you've got this you know 30 40 grams of protein in the morning to kick you off yeah to kick you off and then you know having 30 at least per meal usually you know this is the problem with protein if If you look at the data, we say, oh, you should eat 0.8 grams per kilo. This is the RDA. Now that people don't understand what that is. That's the minimum you need to not get protein deficiency. Like how much vitamin C do you need to not get scurvy? Like 60 milligrams. How much vitamin D do you need to not get rickets? 30 units. Well, how much vitamin D do you need for optimal health? Maybe 2,000, 4,000. So it's very important to understand what these are.

And particularly when you're older, it actually is important for you to eat more protein because there's something called anabolic resistance, meaning it's harder to build muscle. And the worst thing you can do is not exercise throughout your life and then end up at 65 being the same weight that you were when you're 25, but you're twice as fat because all your muscles get marbled like a big Wagyu ribeye. And then they're metabolically super unhealthy and drive inflammation, low cortisol, no testosterone. I'll put a fine point on this. We'll come back to it later on exercise. But the number one correlate between length of life and longevity is your muscle mass. Absolutely. Right. And so there's a number of reasons,

first of all, if you are older and you fall and break your hip or your pelvis, it's like 70% of people over the age of 65 who have that fall die within a year. It's crazy. My father passed that way. Terminal cancer, yeah. It's awful. So you need the muscle mass to be able to hold yourself from falling and having that accident. But also muscle mass is a supply of stem cells and blood volume.

It's where your metabolism is. And so volume. That's where your metabolism is. Yeah. And so ultimately, you want to maximize your muscle mass. So if you're in your 20s, 30s, 40s, go for it. If you're in your 50s, you need to put the time in. Yeah. Yeah. That's true.

And I think I just want to kind of put a point on this. People say, you know, you can do this with plant proteins. And what I typically found is that people who are vegan, who are jacked, and I've studied this, they actually eat a lot of processed plant protein. So they actually have to supplement with plant protein and you have to eat enormous amount. I was just in Rwanda and we saw the gorillas. Now gorillas are huge and they're, and they're vegans, they're vegans and they're mad, like they're massive. And I'm like, what do they eat? I was like, what do they eat?

They eat 55 pounds of food a day. They can extract from that plenty of protein. But they have different digestive systems. But they have digestive systems that are like 10 times longer than ours. Like huge. And they're big. You know, like these giant bellies. It's not because they're fat.

It's because their intestines are enormous. Because it takes forever to digest all this stuff and extract the food. And they have much longer, large intestines where you can start to sort of ferment and break down these foods and start to absorb them. So we have shorter intestines. We have the ability to actually use animal protein, which they don't really. They eat insects, but they're massive. And the key about muscle building is you need a certain amount of a particular amino acid called leucine. Now, leucine is what we call rate-limiting amino acid. It means if you don't have this amino acid, it's hard to turn on muscle synthesis, like turning on light switch. So plant proteins are

typically low in leucine. So you can get enough by eating tons of plant protein, but you need like a lot more than you could possibly eat. You're not going to eat 55 pounds of food a day. And so, you know, especially as you get older, you need about the size of your palm, depending on your, you know, if you're Shaquille O'Neal, if you're a little lady, it's going to be a different palm size of protein. But basically you need probably 1.2 to 1.6, even two grams per kilo, if you want to build muscle and get stronger and you need probably 1.2 to 1.6, even two grams per kilo if you want to build muscle and get stronger. And you need to have high leucine protein. Now you can take plant proteins and supplement with leucine. I call them like jacked up plant proteins. And that's fine if you are a committed

vegan, you want to do that. But you can't ignore the fact that you're going to have to eat a lot of processed proteins. And that meat has carnosine and also creatine and carnitine, which are incredibly helpful compounds that are not in plant proteins that are required for health. So let's go back to what do you eat right now? Personally? Personally, yes. Well, my day, if I'm at home, I'll have my healthy aging shake.

I'll usually have a 14-hour fast minimum. I usually work out yep do band resistance training which is great because i can do anywhere and don't hurt myself and then i have my healthy aging shake yep well actually i do some hormesis practice first which is essentially uh steam and then an ice bath and then and then and then i have my shake and i take my supplements and then uh lunch can be a combination of things but it can be usually a salad with like protein. So I'll put in sardines or canned salmon or something like that. Nuts and seeds, avocado, pumpkin seeds.

So I do a lot of fat and protein and veggies. And then dinner will typically be, you know, grass or regenerative fed beef or lamb or organic chicken or pastry chicken or different kinds of fish that are low in mercury. And then I'll usually have like a, maybe like maybe, I'm kind of very low body fat and I don't do well if I don't eat a little bit of carbohydrates. So I'll have like a Japanese sweet potato. I'll have some side of mushrooms and lots of veggies. But it is high quality protein and plant.

Yeah, lots of veggies. Yeah. And just basics. And again, going back to what you said earlier. A piece of chocolate occasionally. Yeah. But still, it's minimizing uh minimizing sugar intake yeah and it's um uh you know let's talk about the impact of sugar it's an inflammatory agent right it like it it makes all the proteins in your bloodstream

sticky yeah i mean so let's just walk through it so when you eat sugar what happens or when i say sugar i mean any kind of starch that will raise your blood sugar. You produce insulin. And insulin is a special kind of hormone that's produced by your pancreas that is designed to put blood sugar into your cells. But when you have high levels of sugar, you have to make more insulin. And insulin not only drives the fat into the fat cells to store, but it also shuts off the release valve so you can't actually burn the fat. So it shuts down lipolysis, which is the burning of fat. It slows your metabolism down and it increases your hunger hormones. So you're hungrier, you're gaining weight, you can't burn the fat and your metabolism is slower. So it totally

screws you up. And then it produces these special kinds of fat cells in your belly called adipocytes, which are producing adipocytokines, which are inflammatory compounds. So you basically have a fire in your belly spewing out all this inflammation throughout your body. It lowers your hormones. So males, their testosterone drops way down. Their sex drive and function goes down. Women get all kinds of other hormonal dysregulation. It affects your brain. You get increased cortisol and adrenaline with sugar. And cortisol causes literally shrinkage of your hippocampus, which is the memory center. So it's just bad news. And then it does this thing, which you were just hinting at, which it kind of, too much sugar goes around

and forms globs with proteins called glycation products. And when you measure hemoglobin MC, which is what we do to measure how your blood sugar is controlled if you're diabetic, you get high levels of these glycated hemoglobins.

But it happens to all these proteins. It happens in your brain. They're called ages. Literally, the name of it is called ages, advanced glycation end products. And they bind to receptors called rages. So you're aging and raging. called ages literally the name of it yes it's called ages advanced glycation end products and they bind the receptors called rages so you're aging and raging when you eat sugar uh and and

really just driving heart disease and uh and neurogeric disease it's just it's just bad stuff the human body type dimension now type 3 diabetes most cardiovascular heart disease is driven by metabolic syndrome, prediabetes. The lipid panels that are the worst are the ones that are really driven by too much sugar and starch, not fat. And, of course, diabetes. And cancer. People just realize, yeah, it's the fuel for cancer. That we never had sugar as we were evolving 100,000 years ago. This is a recent development,

as is all the food companies that are pushing on this. So if I could say, if you remember nothing else from this podcast, minimize sugar and maximize exercise, which everybody knows already. It's not like, you know, breakthrough science, but it's like a reminder. Yeah, you can take all these supplements,

do all these hacks, take all the stem cells you if you're if you don't have the basics right you know a brief note from our sponsors let's talk about sleep sleep has become one of my number one longevity priorities in life you're getting eight deep uninterrupted hours of sleep is one of the most important things you can do to increase your vitality and energy and increase the health span that you have here on earth. You know, when I was in medical school years ago, I used to pride myself on how little sleep I could get. You know, it used to be five, five and a half hours. Today, I pride myself on how much sleep I can get.

And I shoot for eight hours every single night. Now, usually I'm great at going to sleep. If I'm exhausted, you know, I've worked a hard day, I'm right out. But if I'm having difficulty, and it occurs, I'm having insomnia, or my mind's overactive, and I need help to get that eight hours, I turn to a supplement product by Lifeforce called Peak Rest. Now, Peak Rest has been formulated with an extraordinary scientific depth and background, includes everything from long-lasting melatonin to magnesium to L-glycine to rosemary extract, just to name a few. This product is about creating a

sense of rest and really giving you the depth and length of sleep that you need for recovery. It's a product I hope you'll try. It works for me and I'm sure it will work for you if you're interested go to my life force calm backslash Peter to get a discount from a life force on this product but you'll also see a whole set of other longevity and vitality related supplements that I use we'll talk about them some other time but in terms of sleep peak rest is my go-to supplement hope you'll enjoy it to mylifehorse.com backslash Peter for your discount. All right. We talked about the hallmarks of aging.

How many do you believe there are? I sort of imagine, remember there was like nine hallmarks. Nine original ones. Yeah. I think I added one. Okay. So I might add one, but I added one. Why not?

Called the microbiome. I think the gut plays such a huge role. Increasing. Wow. We know that's been another area of explosive knowledge. So let's pick a few of them that are your favorites and talk about them. Well, I think the deregulated nutrient sensing is so important because, you know. So by the way, the nine hallmarks of aging now with 10 with Mark's microbiome,

these were what are the underlying causes of why we age? That's right. And I'll just go listen through them quickly so we can talk about it briefly. But there's the new nutrient sensing problem, which leads to problems with these four longevity switches, which is insulin, too much insulin, sugar, mTOR, which is overstimulation with too much food in general and protein, sirtuins, which are really important in DNA repair, which, which if you're always eating, never get turned on. And, and that's why we're talking about NAD, uh, AMPK, which also is, is regulating glucose and

mitochondrial function. That's what people are taking metformin for to sort of regulate that. So these are really important. And I talk a lot about them in the book. Then the next one is, um, that we see is thing. And in no particular order, there's telomere shortening, which are little caps at the end of your chromosomes that open up so you can basically replicate like a copy machine your DNA. And we replicate like, I don't know, some quadrillion amount of times for our life. It's ridiculous. But sometimes that goes wrong, and you end up shortening your telomeres, and you end up with shorter life because you have

shorter telomeres. And that's highly influenced by your lifestyle, what you do. Senescent cells, also known as zombie cells. Zombie cells are produced in part sometimes by this problem of DNA replication that goes wrong. And cells, instead of being like exploded and dying, we call apoptosis, they turn into these zombie cells that never die and run around your body spewing inflammation and kind of almost infecting other cells as you get this runaway senescent inflammation. And there's some really cool things that are out there that can regulate those, some compounds like fisetin from strawberries. There's things like hyperbaric oxygen therapy that's been shown to kill zombie cells. There's all these sort of good things about killing zombie cells.

And then we have mitochondrial dysfunction. The mitochondria are the cellular energy powerhouses. And when those go wrong, we just lose energy. Why does a three-year-old run around like a jackrabbit and a 90-year-old is moving super slow? It's because their mitochondria are running at different rates. They're less mitochondria. They're poor functioning mitochondria. So keeping your mitochondria healthy is a key part of healthy aging.

There's also proteins that get damaged. And just talked about that the glycated proteins and you get all proteins are three-dimensional structures they're everything have to be you know are they like the information super high with your body and there's peptides there's proteins and they have to be functioning in the right shape and the right size and in the right kind of amino acid sequence and when they're not right they cause all kinds of damage. And you get these old funky proteins. And so things like saunas, for example, increase heat shock proteins in your body, which help kind of fix these damaged proteins. Increasing autophagy helps that. And even transfer plasma exchanges where you kind of filter out the old blood and the plasma, you can get rid of a lot of stuff so there's all these cool therapies that are coming to fix these we also see um in addition

dna damage so dna damage is something that happens all day you got a thousand hundred thousand little cuts a day and your body has a whole dna repair system yeah that tied to the sirtuins it's their suit sirtuins that are activated by nad and by the right diet and screwed up by sugar, by the way. And those mechanisms might miss a couple here and there to repair. It's amazing it does what it does, but there's ways of improving that. And then we have also the tiring of your stem cells. Your stem cells kind of poop out. Yeah, stem cell exhaustion.

Yeah. So that also has to do with um our lifestyle and so forth so many ways to sort of activate your stem cells there's some really cool things looking at you know i'm not gonna get into it's kind of wacky but like using different kinds of light and stuff in your pineal gland to activate different stem cells and harvest them and they're doing the stuff in costa rica it's kind of wacky but um that there's ways of dealing with that. And then we also have the, the problem of inflammation, which is in a sense, the final common pathway for that either causes or is a consequence of almost all these things. So inflammation, the body is, is driving almost

all the chronic diseases of aging, whether it's arthritis or dementia or cancer or heart disease or diabetes, or all these are inflammatory problems and and so we we have to understand the cause of inflammation we have to become an inflammologist and if you fix a lot of these other things like you know and some things we can't do anything about right we live in a sea of toxins like you know 200 years ago we didn't have all the crap we make all the petrochemical toxins what was in the graduate he says plastic that's the thing right plastic so that's my favorite petrochemicals and you know heavy metals are more in the ocean because of coal and lead i mean so i see a lot of these things that aren't people's fault that are the result of environmental stresses but we can deal with those and so thinking and the last

hallmark i talked about is the is theome. I think I got all 10. I don't know if I did. The microbiome is this whole ecosystem of bugs in your gut that's so critical for regulating immunity, for regulating cancer risk, heart disease risk, diabetes, even dementia. Your mood, everything is controlled by the microbiome. And, and, you know, we may be just carrying a carrying vessel for this kind of glob of bacteria that live in us that is 10, almost a hundred times as much DNA as our own DNA, or maybe more. And you're a four, you're a 40 trillion human cells and you've got, you know, a hundred trillion bacteria, vira and fungi around you. Yeah. It's quite amazing. And what's interesting is that we're now measuring your metabolome, which is some total of all the metabolites in your blood. And a huge portion of these come

from the microbiome and they're regulating everything. So one of the cool things in the book I talk about is how if you eat pomegranate and you have the right bacteria, the metabolite of pomegranate is called urolithin A. And this this compound which you have to have the right gut bacteria which most of us don't actually is an anti-aging compound it enhances fitness vo2 max muscle building and fitness fitness and also mitophagy without even exercising okay what's not like uh it all did i miss any i think i know i think you hit them all um uh oh i know epigenetic changes that was the one i missed okay that was dr sinclair that's a really important one yes yeah because that can i just finish yeah please yeah so so the epigenetic one is is is

really um a way we're now understanding that aging occurs at a metal level but your genome is basically fixed and you've talked about this with Tony in your book. The genome is fixed. You've got a certain amount of genes. That doesn't change. But what genes get turned on or off, which gets expressed, is determined by everything washing over those genes,

your exposome. Like you talk about the piano player and how the piano player can play ragtime jazz, classical rock on the same genes, right? And so we have to understand that most of the insults that we do to ourselves, too much stress, lack of sleep, poor diet, lack of exercise, exposure to toxins, all these things influence our epigenome. And we'll put little tags and determine which genes

get read or not. But those are changeable. Yeah. I like to say, listen, you've got the same 3.2 billion letters from your mom and your dad when you're born, when you're 20, when you're 60, when you're 80, when you're a hundred. So why don't you look like you're ripped when you're 20, when you're 80, right? What, what is different if your genes are the same and it's not the genes you have, it's which genes are on and off. Right. And that's epi from the Greek word above is that control. And what we're seeing is a lot of science this is coming from david sinclair's lab it's coming from george church's lab it's coming from salk institute uh about being able to potentially slow stop and reverse aging maybe go back to those earlier epigenetic markers do you believe that's going to happen? Yes. I mean, look, we now for the first

time, and it clearly needs to be refined, but we have a biomarker that we didn't have to track influences of whatever we want to do, whether it's our diet or lifestyle or medication on our biological age. So our biological age is different than our chronological age. I'm 63. I was born in 1959. Nothing I can do about that. Unless I go out into outer space and whatever. I think Einstein would help with that. But basically, that's what I got. But biologically, I'm 43 according to DNA methylation testing.

So DNA methylation is how our epigenome is regulated. And mostly, there's a few other ways. But essentially, that's how our epigenome is regulated. And mostly there's a few other ways, but essentially that's how our epigenome is determined. And so we can now do an intervention and see what happens. And so in the book, I talked about some of the early studies, whether giving quercetin or dastanib

or whether using vitamin D or whether using a Mediterranean diet. And they're all seeing changes from months to years. And one of the studies that was most impressive was a functional medicine study looking at a very aggressive functional medicine diet, which is way more than just like a Mediterranean diet, but it's super anti-inflammatory. It's very rich in phytochemicals, very rich in methylating compounds combined with a simple lifestyle things. And they found within eight weeks,

they were able to change their DNA methylation patterns, reverse their biological clock in eight weeks by three years. Wow. So, you know, there's this guy who's like, uh, this was, I might've read about this, who spent $2 million. I know. And you know, like, you know, he got, he got five years. I got like 20 years. So I think, I think we have the ability to, to really influence these things and then

track what we're doing over time. So that's what's exciting to me. You can use intermediate biomarkers, you know, like inflammation markers, cholesterol, and I think we have the ability to really influence these things and then track what we're doing over time. So that's what's exciting to me. You can use intermediate biomarkers, like inflammation markers, cholesterol, and other things which are helpful, and insulin levels, and hormone levels, and all this stuff. And I think that's important. But that's variable. You don't really know what's happening to your epigenome with that. But you can measure directly the epigenome.

And that's what's so exciting. It is an exciting time. I mean, there's this concept called longevity escape velocity, which you know of. I write about it in the book. I first heard it from Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey. And it's the idea that today science is extending your life for a quarter of a year for every year you're alive. And that it may be possible at some time in the future that science will extend your life for more than a year for every year your life so it becomes divergent and i asked ray when he thinks

uh it's going to be and i asked uh i asked george church when he thinks it's gonna be uh do you know what they what they said i think i think ray was like 10 15 years yeah i think george was kind of squishy about it he was about 15 to 20 years yeah uh do you ever say do you do you believe we're going to reach that point do you think that science can actually add uh meaningful decades onto our life i think yeah meaningful decades healthy decades is the is the key uh descriptor but i i do think that there's some things coming down the road that you talk about that are kind of weird and wacky things that are more sci-fi. They're not the basics that

we're talking about that I think are safe and effective. And that has to do with genetic manipulation, like the Yamanaka factors. And I think that stuff's really interesting to me. I mean, it's still not ready for prime time, but basically this is discovery by this guy, Yamanaka, from Japan, who won the Nobel Prize for understanding these four transcription factors that seem to help embryonic cells differentiate into their mature cells. So how does your nose become a nose, or your kidney become a kidney, or your brain become a brain? And then it stops.

It doesn't just keep developing, right? Like there's a thing and then it stops. It doesn't just keep developing, right? And so if you can go back and somehow modify or insert these transcription factors into the body and then have a switch externally that you turn them on. So let's say you're 50 and your hair's a little gray. Your joints are good. Your erections aren't so good. Your muscle wasting a little bit.

You go, oh, I'm going to just take this thing and switch it on. I'm going to turn back to 25. That's not out of the realm of possibility based on my understanding. But it's like, I think, you know, it has a lot more mice and other animals have to try and burn. So let's be clear. There are the basics today. It is diet. It is exercise. It is sleep. It is mindset is important, huge huge right huge you know if if i think if you you can will yourself to death and you can will yourself to life yeah and we've all seen examples about that and one of the most exciting uh things that i've seen is the data on meaning and purpose

if you look at if we cured heart disease and cancer from the face of the planet we might extend life by five to seven years like if we got rid of all of it from everywhere. And there was, and these are the number one and two killers. If you have meaning and purpose in life, your life extension is seven years. If you play tennis, it's X seven years too. Okay, good. I'm playing once a week and God knows I'm filled as are you with, with meaning and purpose. And that's what I teach. It's like the most important thing you can have is be, have a purpose driven life. Yeah. But I do think there's also the idea of a longevity mindset, um, that, uh, and I'm just curious if you have, how you think about that terminology of longevity mindset. I mean, I feel like I have it. I mean,

I, I, most of my friends are now in their thirties and forties, uh, and I do all the same things we do, you know, it's bombed down the mountain at, you know, stupid miles an hour or a ski or, you know, ride my bike. I feel like it's really an idea. The, the concept of, of slowing down of aging is idea. Now things happen. Like, you know, I have more, I've had back injuries and I have more little aches and pains, but, but those, but I've used regenerative medicine to help me deal with those, which we can talk about. And I think for me, I'm feel like I'm just beginning my life. I mean, honestly, Peter, I feel like I'm 63 and I finally figured my shit out. I figured out what it takes to be happy. I like kind of not struggling and suffering and figuring out what, how to love properly. When I saw you with your fiance, I was like, there is a happy man and a happy couple. She was equally

glowing, but it's, it's interesting, right? Because, uh, if you have that mindset, um, uh, it's, it's the most exciting time ever to be alive. It's, uh, my, my dear friend, Dan Sullivan says it's important to have a future that's bigger than your past yeah i think that's a very important statement because most of us you know i can see it even some of my friends are like winding down and i'm like why are you winding down i'm winding up i've had some people say they're bored it's like really oh my god what do you board what do you not realize the incredible world we're living into, this incredible video game that we're part of? So, you know, I think about, again, the basics.

Food, diet, sleep, exercise, mindset. The other thing I put on the list is not dying from something stupid, right? Wear your helmet when you're skiing. Put on your seatbelt. You've been an advisor for Fountain Life. Go and have yourself digitally uploaded every year. Look and see if there's anything going on because most of us are optimists about what's going on inside our bodies, but we don't actually have an idea what's going on inside our bodies. By the time you feel something, it's too late. Another stat we wrote about,

Tony and I wrote about in Life Force, I'm curious you're thinking on it because it feels barbaric, in Lifeforce, I'm curious, you're thinking on it because it feels barbaric, is that the delay between there being a breakthrough and it showing up in your physician's office is like 17 years. Oh, yeah, it's terrible. That was from, I think, a Bill Frist article in the New England Journal years ago. And I agree. I mean, I think it may be even more. I mean, it took Semmelweis, who basically was this Austrian physician who decided he's watching all these women give birth and seeing all the people who are women who are taken care by doctors were dying of childbirth fever, but all the women who were taken care by midwives weren't. And he noticed the midwives washed their hands. And he was like, maybe we should wash our hands. And the doctors, the medical committee was, you know, up in arms. They thought this was just heresy. They banished

him. They got rid of him. How could you ever imply that doctors would be causing your patient's harm? And turned out he was right. We have to wash our hands before surgery. You know, that took 50 years. So I think, I think we are unfortunately, but why does it take so long? What is the mindset that is, that is inherent that stops this progression? I think, you know, Thomas Kuhn talked about this whole idea of normal science, which is in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And he talked about this term, the paradigm shift, and how hard it is to change paradigms from Newtonian physics to quantum physics, from, you know, kind of creation theory to you know evolution from you know galileo saying hey guys the earth is not the center of the universe and got put in jail for

that you know like it's really tough to change all ideas and then you know my daughter's in medical school now and and they're learning good stuff but it's still the old paradigm it's all sick here it's like the old paradigm of disease-based paradigm and now with these hallmarks it's still the old paradigm. It's all sick care. It's like the old paradigm of disease-based paradigm. And now with these hallmarks, it's an opportunity to go, wait a minute. This whole framework of disease is wrong. We cannot be studying diseases. We need to be studying mechanisms and causes. And then we need to be working on those.

Because if we're just basically dealing with the downstream effects of all these causes that we can just think about, we're just like people, let's find the drug for alzheimer's good luck with that let's find the drug to cure heart disease good luck with that we're better managing it we're maybe reducing deaths we're having better treatments i mean look at look at this whole treatment for diabetes with ozempic this is like makes me so crazy beater like yes these glp-1 agonists are helpful and if you you'll help you lose weight and help if you're a really advanced diabetic. But I can take someone who's got a hemoglobin in the C of 11 and in a few, six weeks, get them to five with no drugs, with food. If that's the best treatment, we should be using it.

I love this cartoon that we've all seen. On one side, there's a line of people and the window says, you know, sign up for surgery. On the other side, there's a window with no one in line that says, you know, lifestyle change. It's like we all want the pill or the. Yeah. We still are taking rapamycin and metformin and NMN and all these compounds for longevity. But if you're not dealing with the basics, it's a waste of time. Hey, everybody.

This is Peter. A quick break from the episode. the basics. It's a waste of time. Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. Now I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world, by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are

transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to demandus.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode.

All right. So let's actually go to some of those longevity therapeutics because there are a number of them people may have read about, heard about, a number I'm using and doing. And I'm curious what your thinking is. So you listed some. Let's begin with metformin. Okay. So metformin is a drug that was found in 1957.

It's been used for diabetes forever. It helps with improving insulin sensitivity. It has some side effects, some GI side effects, which sometimes are temporary, but also has some long-term mitochondrial issues. There's a large trial going on called the TAME trial, targeting aging with metformin. And the idea is that if we can use this drug to optimize the AMPK function, AMPK, when it's

properly activated, will induce autophagy, will help with DNA repair, will stimulate sirtuins, will cause the improvement in glucose regulation, all these things we want to happen with aging. the improvement in glucose regulation, all these things we want to happen with aging. But does that mean it's the right treatment? You know, like that joke about the farm, Vermont farmer, he says, how's your wife? He goes, compared to what?

You know, so isn't it farming compared to nothing? Yeah. But is it better than lifestyle? I don't think so. And here's why. There was a big trial, and it's hard to do randomized control trials in medicine and people with large amounts of people with lifestyle. It's just hard.

But they did this trial called the Diabetes Prevention Trial back in the 90s when the food pyramid was big. And we were told to eat 6 to 11 servings of bread, rice, or pasta a day. And that was the best diet, which is a low-fat diet. So it was not the optimized diet for diabetes. But they took these pre-diabetics and they basically said, okay, you're going to get lifestyle or you're going to get metformin or you're going to get nothing. So nothing, you know, basically was whatever. And then metformin reduced their risk to progression of diabetes by 31%. Lifestyle was 58%. And that was, in my view, the wrong diet.

And so if a crappy diet would work better than this drug, shouldn't we be doubling down on the sugar stuff and the lifestyle stuff? Yeah, for sure. Because if you optimize your insulin, your insulin level's under two, and you're exercising, and you're low on the carbohydrates and stuff,

isn't my form going to create added value? I don't know. My gut feeling is no. That's what I'm on a respectful pause with. I don't recommend it. I'm, I'm, I'm waiting to hear what the tame trial says, but I, I kind of have a, a more of a bias against it because of some of this data. Do you, how do you come out on calorie restriction, not severe, but limiting your calories per day? Let's say your calories are coming from uh from high quality protein and plants um and you're avoiding high glycemic index foods do you still think you need to limit your your caloric intake

well i mean i met this guy once and he was from the calorie restriction society and he wanted to live a long time and i was like hanging out with this guy i'm like so what do you have for breakfast he's like i have five pounds of celery. And I'm like, no, thanks. And I think, you know, the idea that we can restrict our calories to extend our life is a good one. But the question is, what else happens? You know, what happens to your hormones? What happens to your muscle mass? What happens to your mood?

What happens to your sex drive? What happens to a lot of things? And they did those biosphere experiments where they showed. I was i was my friends were in the biosphere yeah yeah and they did the calorie restriction and they had improvements in their cholesterol all these biomarkers everything but they also were not very happy and they were miserable and it was not great in many ways for their health so i think it's a mixed bag the real question is how do we how do we find the goldilocks solution which is how do we mimic or hack calorie restriction without actually starving ourselves? So it could be time-restricted eating.

It could be periodic fasting. Have you tried the fasting mimicking diet, Prolon? Yeah. So Prolon is great. Prolon is a way to eat 800 calories a day for five days. It makes it very manageable. It makes it very easy to do. And the data is really impressive. And Walter is doing great work on this. And I think it's just showing how when we overstimulate all of these pathways that are longevity switches by food, our bodies don't like it. And it needs a break. So, yes, whether you do fasting-mimic diet or whether you don't eat for 24 hours once a week or you do a three-day fast once a quarter.

There's lots of ways to do it. But the easiest way is just to have something called breakfast, which means you're breaking your fast, which means you don't eat for 12 to 14 hours every night. That's just a no-brainer for everybody. And I think in terms of the amount, I don't think we should be overeating for sure. And I think we need to be lean and muscular is the best strategy for longevity. And if you're gaining belly fat, that's the death knell.

That is the indication that you're eating too much of the wrong thing. Let's go to rapamycin next. So rapamycin is this compound that was found in Rapa Nui, the Easter Island. And basically in the 60s, these scientists went and they scraped the stuff off the back of one of the statues that were delivered by aliens or something. I don't know why. And they found, oh, maybe this is going to be a good drug compound. It was kind of a shitty antifungal.

And then they found it maybe has some immune modulating property. So it's been used in transplant medicine. It's not an immune suppressive, but it does have benefits in reducing inflammation. And then people started researching around longevity and finding that it inhibits mTOR. In fact, this pathway mTOR, which already talks about longevity, means mammalian target of rapamycin. So literally it's named after this drug from Rapanu. That's hilarious. It's great. And I think the animal studies are very promising. The mechanism is really interesting. So instead of calorie restriction, this is a drug that could induce calorie restriction without

actually starving yourself. So it induces the benefits like autophagy. So I think taking it at night, there's different people experimenting with it. You know, I mean, to deepak chopra he takes you know six milligrams once a week there's people take it two milligrams three times a week for five weeks eight weeks off there's a million different regimens we're all guessing yes we're all guessing it's all a giant experiment it's all a giant experiment and depending on your your adventurousness and you're willing for risk tolerance you know you might be willing to try it maybe you want want to try it. I try it. I'm on six once a week. Yeah. So that's an interesting thing. And, and it's, it's, uh, it, it kind of makes sense, but I wonder why six once a week, why not more intermittent shorter doses? Why, you know, what, what actually are we kind of basing on? I think we need more

data. We need more human studies. And the trials are just beginning now. Yeah. So I think we need to pour money into that. And I, you know, I think there are, there are maybe other compounds that have modulating effects that inhibit mTOR and there are a lot of the plant kingdom. So there are a lot of compounds in the plant kingdom that do this as well. All right. So we've covered metformin and rapamycin. Let's go next to, to exogenous stem cells. So you, one of the things that is very true when, you born in utero, we are basically the placenta is generating stem cells and populating your body and all of the tissues differentiating. And when you're born, you have the highest percentage of stem cells in your body that you have. And as you grow older, your stem cell population is all downhill. In fact, for those wondering, it's pretty clear that after your mid to late 20s, it's downhill across almost all systems. Your thymus, your stem cell populations, your growth hormone, everything.

So we really were designed to live till age 30 to get our children up to reproductive age. our children up to reproductive age and then yeah anyway but having said that our stem cell populations drop by a hundred to a thousand fold as we get older and the idea is could we supplement it to regenerate repair yeah i mean there are they're interesting some interesting early data on certain therapies that can induce stem cell production, whether it's hyperbaric oxygen therapy or ozone therapy. So there are exogenous treatments that without getting a stem cell transplant, which is stupidly expensive, you could actually stimulate your own. And there may be more and more data on how we do that through lifestyle. And I think there's some really interesting things around how we can make that happen.

I do think that there are intermediate steps like exosomes, which may be the active components in stem cells that are much cheaper, that are easily available, that you don't have to suck your bone marrow out of your fat cells, and you don't have to go to Panama to do it.

And so I think those are... By the way, is this going to be like, you know, leeches were, you know, back in the old days? Like, do you think they really used to do that? Oh my God, that's great. Maybe. Yeah. You know, I don't know.

I think, I think that the exosomes are interesting. I've had a few experience with exosomes. One was I had colitis from getting C diff, which is caused by a bacteria that I got after taking an antibiotic for a root canal. It was bad. And I was a mess. And then I got C. diff, and then I got severe ulcerative colitis afterwards. And through a different, my usual tricks weren't working.

And then I tried exosomes. Are we okay? Yeah, we're okay. Okay. I tried my usual tricks, and then I tried exosomesomes and it literally sort of got rid of it. And this is IV exosomes, intravenous exosomes. And exosomes for everybody is the product that comes out of a stem cell. A stem cell is a little, think of it as a factory of growth factors and healing factors, repair factors,

RNA, marker RNAs. And it just pumps it out in little vacuoles of materials. Yeah. Yeah. Think of it like, think of messengers, think of like, you know, think of like, uh, the, the, the, the stem cells is like a big aircraft carrier and then they bring in all the, like the special forces and then they, the special forces go out and do all the work or the FedEx truck and the FedEx package is coming out. Exactly. Whatever you want to call it. Exactly. And exosomes, it's great because you can basically take the placenta, you make sure it's all clean, no disease or anything, and you can culture the lab and you can grow the stem cells in there. And then you can extract the exosomes and you can get

billions and billions and billions. There's no limit to the amount you can get. But another thing I had with exosomes was when I had a back issue. I had back surgery that went bad, and I was having tons of inflammation in my spine because I had bleeding in my spine. Bad news. And my friend Matt Cook injected 30 cc's of exosomes right up my spinal cord. And it was amazing. The pain went away immediately. And then I had COVID.

And, of course, these are all anecdotal, but I've used these with patients as well and seen results. And I had severe brain fog, depression. I don't get depressed. I'm like, wow, now I get why people get depressed. I had depression in my time from divorce or things like that, but I just felt physiologically depressed and inflamed. And COVID affects the brain and causes tons of inflammation in the brain. And so I kind of got a shipment to my house and I gave myself an IV because I'm a doctor and it was like, boom, the lights turned on and my brain fog went away. My brain came back. So I think they have a real value. And again, this is the early, one of my companies that, you know, cellularity, Bob hurry, uh, we are producing placental derived stem cells and

exosomes and just now entering the scientific studies to look at can we prove the impact it has and yeah you know you have a choice of where your stem cells from you can either get it from your own fat your own bone marrow or you can get it uh from a placenta or umbilical cord in the afterbirth. But end of the day, that's getting it from a placenta or from an umbilical cord is not legal in the United States because the science isn't there. So right now, when I hear someone's looking for stem cell therapies, I'm sending them down to Costa Rica, to Regenerative Medicine Institute down there with Vince Giampapa. Yeah, exactly. at the regenerative medicine institute down uh down there with uh with vince g and papa yeah exactly and but the science will will bear out the data over the next few years hopefully within this decade so we can have it available domestically safely with the science behind it

yeah i mean it's pretty exciting and it's being used in orthopedic medicine a lot. It's being used by athletes. I know when I had, I had a reconstruction on my right shoulder and my left shoulder about 10 years apart, my left shoulder, after I had done the reconstruction, I had two different exosome injections and it healed so much faster. So fast, right? Yeah. I mean, I had back pain for 30 years after a surgery when I was 30. And Matt put all this stuff in my placental matrix with healing factors and exosomes. And I'm sitting here really with no pain, which I couldn't even sit before without being offered. I managed it. I just dealt with it. I massaged, I yoga'd and everything. But it's like now I was sort of shocked to believe that this field of regenerative medicine

has these solutions that most orthopedic doctors don't know about or scoff at. But when I was told I needed back surgery and I needed to have metal rods put in and a whole spinal fusion and reconstruction, I'd be in bed for a year. And I'm like, I just got back from skiing in switzerland you know going full blast down the mountain you know so i i didn't do that not very good i mean right now one of the things that i'm proud of that we're doing at at uh at fountain life is we're searching the world for anything that sounds promising and then vetting it to identify is it safe is it low risk is it a high high efficacy and then trying to make that available to our members and so hopefully it will be uh the exosomes are available the stem cells

are not yet domestically yeah um a few other things total plasma exchange tpe this is fascinating and oil changes something might have heard of like you know that's right that tv show uh silicon valley and they had this one episode called blood boy yes i love that with the silicon valley entrepreneur was like getting some young guy and getting his blood and making him younger you know mouths of tongue used to take the blood of young red army soldiers and transfuse it into himself for longevity you know so but but there's a bunch of studies that were done on animals that are called parabiosis and essentially what they did was they took old mice and young mice and they kind of wired

their circulations together and they watched what happened. And the old mice became young. And the young mice became old. So the question was, what was it? Was it the old mice's blood that was bad? That was, you know, they were giving to the young. Like, well, what was going on? So they kind of reverse engineered the study a little bit.

And they found that if they just did plasma cleaning of the old mice, that they would get the same longevity benefits. Now, plasmapheresis is a medical treatment that's been around for a long, long time. It's used in autoimmune diseases. It's used in various neurologic conditions. It's really a well-established medical treatment. But it's being explored as a longevity therapy and can be done in ways that aren't as aggressive. Like you don't have to take your whole plasma out, but you can take a liter or two out. And essentially the idea is you're filtering your blood. You're filtering out all these old proteins and all these inflammatory compounds and who knows what else is in there.

Whatever you're putting there. And you throw back some albumin, which is going to reconstitute your blood by the way your plasma is mostly this protein albumin and some saline and some yeah yeah yeah but there's all this other gunk in there that seems to be getting changed and i'll tell you another story i i had covid second time and i it was kind of rougher than the first and i had a terrible post-covid syndrome of arthritis. So I developed my hand blew up and I was really swollen and painful. I couldn't make a fist and I felt like crap. Again, I went to see Matt Cook

and he got this plebophoresis and the oocytogenesis of the blood went in. And literally the next day, I was good as new. My hand was normal, had full energy and I went and like- Good old Matt. I love Matt Cook. He's awesome.

Yeah, and I'm like, God, this stuff is amazing. So, I mean, honestly, if I had my perfect world, I'd get like a plasmapheresis once a month. I do ozone every month. I do hyperbarics once a year for 30, 40 treatments. I mean, I kind of. All right, let's go to hyperbarics next. So, all of the experiments in Israel that show if you're spending like three hours a day for how many days?

One thing was they took people who were about, I think it was 60 people or so, they gave them I think a 60 to 90 minute treatment in about two atmospheres of 100% oxygen. 100% oxygen. But actually the protocol was kind of questionable because I know somebody who knows the Israeli scientists, and he was telling me what they did. And they basically would kind of raise and lower the oxygenation. So it was not just steady. But basically, the idea is you go in this pressure chamber that they use for scuba divers who come up too fast,

and it hyper-oxygenates your tissues. Now, it's being used in wound repair. People can't heal a wound or an all-diabetic ulcer or strokes. And I've had incredible results in stroke patients, although it's not really approved for that, but it's being researched, used for autism, for Alzheimer's, for all kinds of stuff, Lyme disease. And when you hyperoxygenate the body and you do it under pressure,

it seems to be very healing for a lot of things. And so what they do is they measured telomeres and they measured zombie cells. And it had a bigger impact on lengthening telomeres and killing zombie cells than any other known treatment. So I think it's very promising. I just was in Dubai with a gentleman who's the chairman of DP World and has a hyperbaric chamber facility there. I try to remember exactly the numbers, but you have to go. Was this Aviv? Was this Aviv? No.

The facility name? It might have been. It's based on this Israeli guy's work. It's based on this Israeli guy's work. Yeah, this is called Aviv. And they have one in Dubai and one in Florida.ida yes exactly that's right that's right and so i i gather you go five days a week for like six weeks for like it's 90 sessions it's 90 days over three months you do like whatever and so you're in you're in there for like how long a process an hour an hour and a half. Yeah.

It's a lot of time. It's a lot of time. It's a lot of time. I mean, and you're not sitting there sleeping or reading or working. No, they actually have masks and you can like read and you can watch. Yes, but you're supposed to be like actually doing mental exercises to drive things, right? So you're assigned work while you're in there. So you're assigned work while you're in there. And what he was saying apparently was that it brings your neuronal oxygenation level expectations up to a point that when you're outside of the hyperbaric chambers, your brain is creating a larger vascular supply. Do you know what the cause of it is?

Why has more vascular? From the cause of it is? Why has more from the mechanism hyperbarics brain exercises? No, no. I'm just one of the, one of the concerns I had is, you know, hyperoxygenation is also bad for you. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's oxidative stress on your, on your body. Yeah. So I feel like the, like the we may haven't heard the full story. Well, I think, I think that's a very important point you bring up because in our minds, we think antioxidants, health, longevity, oxidation, bad, right? And I think it depends on how much and when and with what. So yes, you're getting potentially an increase in oxidative stress, but your body, in order to heal stuff and kill stuff,

has its own oxidative stress mechanisms. When body in order to heal stuff and kill stuff has its own oxidative stress mechanisms. When your white blood cells want to kill something, they make hydrogen peroxide, they make ozone, like literally. And so we have our own like kind of chemical systems. Yeah. So, uh, these, these help us stay healthy and young and kill all kinds of infections. So infections are really not happy about the high oxygen. And a lot of low-grade infections, we can have that create chronic inflammation, whether it's viruses or whether it's HSV1, which is herpes in the brain for dementia. So I think there's something about the infection rate.

I also think that the dose and the length of time matters, right? If you're at 100% oxygen for a long time, it's super dangerous. But if you have a pulsed amount for a short time, it kicks in the body's own healing system. And this is, I wanted to talk about hormesis. We have a few minutes left, but I think it's such a, this is a hormetic therapy. So basically the idea of hormesis is what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And so when, when we now live in this perfectly regulated environment, it's 68 degrees. We never have to deal with any stresses. We always have food. And so we don't, we're not starving. We're not, we're not using our bodies, which is a stress. We don't have to run from tigers anymore. We, we, we know we, we have a, it's a cush

lifestyle, cush lifestyle. And so the truth is as as human beings, we learn to live in tough environments, and we have great systems for dealing with that. So hormesis is like cold therapy or saunas or cold plunges or ozone or hyperbaric oxygen or exercise or calorie restriction or time-restricted eating. or calorie restriction or time-restricted eating, these are all different forms of hormesis, low oxygen states, hypoxia states, which are really a whole other interesting therapy for longevity. And so we have all these potential tools to use, and I try to incorporate them as much as I can.

Exercise, obviously, time-restricted eating is easy. I do hot and cold therapies whenever I can. I did hot yoga yesterday, and it was like really hot. But I felt so good after. I take a cold shower every morning, and it's painful at first, and I get used to it. Yeah, a cold shower is great. But ice bath is just tough for me right now. I mean, you know, it's better if you go from sauna to cold plunge. It's better.

But I think these, you know, Wim Hof does these whole training programs, and a lot, you know, breath work. These are different kinds of hormetic therapies, and we can induce these in our modern lifestyle in a way that activate these ancient healing systems. So at the bottom line, the message here is that we're doing everything to screw up our ancient healing systems. There's so much we can do to activate our body's own healing, longevity, repair, and healing systems. There's one last on the list for me. It's senolytic medicine. So you talked about the notion that we have these zombie cells, grouchy old men cells. There's something called the Hayflick limit, as you know, that cells will

replicate a certain number of times, and then they should have the decency to die. Sometimes they become cancers, or sometimes they stick around and pump out inflammatory. And there are a variety of these senolytics that are meant to kill these senile cells. You mentioned quercetin and dastanab as one. There are others. Do you use any of them? Yes. I mean, I take fisetin, I take quercetin, I take extract of Himalayan tartary buckwheat, which has all 132 different phytochemicals and bioflavonoids, quercetin, rutin, asparadin, all these compounds that- How many pills a day do you take? Oh, you know, it's a good handful.

I think I'm around six. It's not a bowl full, but it's a handful. I remember talking to Ray Kurzweil's wife and she said, yeah, Ray is a superpower. Pill taking. Yeah, I'm good. I can like, I mean, one at a time. If I had to do that, I wouldn't. No, I take all bagful.

Yes. I'm up to about 60 right now, which is crazy. So a lot. And I think to summarize, you know, what you've been preaching is there's certain things that you can do that are basic and are really going back to what it is to live a healthy lifestyle. The 80-20 on this is stuff that is free, accessible. It's literally understanding how your bodies were designed and working with them. And basically getting rid of the bad stuff, putting in the good stuff. And that's really why I wrote Young Forever. It was a roadmap. It's not deep dives into all the science, although the science is there.

It's really about taking the science and creating an interpretive map for people to design their lives and include what they like and leave what they don't, but build these practices on a daily level that keep you feeling better and younger longer. I mean, my goal is to die young as late as possible. Yes. I love that. I love that. Let me ask you for a summation here at the end. So those of you who are going to go out there and buy Young Forever, please do. Those of you who are going to eventually go and buy it, please do. But in the meantime, all right, buddy, what's your summation here? What should people remember?

I think the key thing to remember is that it's not that hard. Based on the science we have now, we understand the basic causes of disease and aging. We understand the basic ingredients for health, the science of creating health, and that Young Forever is simply a roadmap that guides you through how your body works that you were never given. It's like the owner's manual. And it's like your car, you don't know all the features, you don't have to use all the things, but the basic stuff to get around, navigate and do what you got to do, you got to learn how to do. And it maps out what to eat, how to exercise, how to hack your sleep, how to discharge stress, how to deal with trauma,

what the latest and most sort of useful nutraceuticals are and supplements are, what's coming down the pike, the hormesis therapies that are easy to use. So it's really a practical user's guide to your body. Yeah, that's great. Where can people find you? Anywhere and everywhere. Just go to all the social medias, Dr. Mark Hyman. That's Dr. Mark Hyman.

My website is drhyman.com. It won't be hard to find me. All right, buddy. Thank you so much for what you do. It's a pleasure to call you a friend. And thanks for joining me on Moonshots and Mindsets. My pleasure. It's great.

Let's do it again. I feel like we just scratched the surface. We did. We got another five or six years of work to report back on soon. Take care.