Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - The Proven Longevity Practices Extending Lifespans w/ Dr. Mark Hyman | EP #80
Episode Date: January 11, 2024In this episode, Peter and Mark discuss if aging is a disease, the science behind sugar- a silent killer, stem cell therapy and how relationships impact Longevity. 23:27 | The Toxic Truth About Su...gar 35:22 | The Risks of Ozempic Use 1:02:31 | Overcoming the Calorie Myth 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. He is also the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy. Read Dr.Hyman’s latest book: www.youngforeverbook.com Listen to Dr. Hyman’s Podcast: The Doctor’s Farmacy Learn more about my executive summit, Abundance360 Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://www.diamandis.com/longevity ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Use my code PETER25 for 25% off your first month's supply of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic: seed.com/moonshots Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ _____________ 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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if you could tell somebody one thing to do to make a change in their life right now,
what would that be?
I think if there's one thing that people need to understand is that aging as a phenomenon
has been ignored.
We focus on the diseases that happen as we get older, but we haven't actually studied
well the process of aging and if it's something that we can do something about.
Could you go back to that earlier state
of the right genes on and the right genes off?
If we address those systematically with diet,
exercise, sleep, stress management reduction,
community relationships, certain biomolecules,
whether they're phytochemicals or pharmaceuticals,
that we actually have right now today.
I believe we can, most of us, get to in our 90s and 100s.
Hi, everybody. Peter D. Mandis here. Welcome to Moonshots.
I'm here with Dr. Mark Hyman, who is just an extraordinary human being.
First and foremost, Mark, a pleasure to see you, pal.
Thank you.
Thank you, Peter.
Thanks for having me back.
You know, you have these people in your life that you just love.
And you like hanging out with them.
It's just like they can do no evil or harm.
But they lift your spirits, and you're one of those individuals for me.
Yeah.
And so when you're in LA, I know you're to Berkshires now.
When you're back in LA.
Well, we're moving to LA, Peter.
So I'll be bothering you a lot.
Awesome.
Awesome.
So are you still in love, my friend?
Oh my God.
Love is the best drug.
It's the best drug.
You know, I was there on one of your first dates with your fiance, I think.
Yeah.
Well, first of all, you were a huge idol for her.
dates with your fiance, I think. Yeah. Well, first of all, you were a huge idol for her.
And I remember, you know, you, you said this thing around about taking a trip on one of the zero gravity flights and it was one of her dreams to do that. And, and you were an idol and I called,
I called you and I said, Hey Peter, you know, like, can we go on your thing? And you're like,
yeah, we got some space. And I looked at her, I said, you want to go? And she like,
her eyes bugged out of her head. And she's like, it was like two dreams come true at once,
meeting you and going into zero gravity.
I just, you know.
And by the way, you should look at her WhatsApp profile
because literally her WhatsApp picture
is her sitting in a meditation posture
in the middle of the air
while she's in zero gravity on the plane.
Oh my God.
What I remember was just you, the two of you just were inseparable. It was this
level of energy between that young love. I hope you have that for a century to come, my friend.
And yeah, zero G has been an amazing experience. I've done, God knows,
probably 50, 60 flights on that airplane.
And it's the only way to really simulate weightlessness in the atmosphere or on the earth.
It's a parabolic arc.
And one of my highlights in my life was flying Professor Stephen Hawking into zero G,
you know, the world's expert in gravity, into zero gravity.
And that was a medical, that was a that was a medical um uh that was a
risky maneuver and you know i've talked about this publicly but uh you know when when we flew him
uh the fda the faa said you know you can't do that you can't fly you can only fly able-bodied humans
and i said well who determines whether
they're able-bodied and and they said well his physician or an aerospace doctor so i got a few
doctors to write letters because he wanted to experience zero g and uh we did eight arcs he
had eight 30 second periods of weightlessness but we had set up an emergency room on the airplane we had uh three or four doctors
two nurses because you know he was very osteoporotic you know easily break a bone puncture
a lung and so we're super gentle with him but he did it he loved it it was a highlight for me and
and uh as he and his daughter lucia said i highlight for him as well. So that was fun.
But not the subject of the day.
It's pretty intense when you're stuck on the floor
and your gravity is pulling you.
It's an intense stress on your body.
It's amazing you can handle that.
It is.
You're pulling out.
The airplane is basically doing this giant sine wave
in the atmosphere.
And you begin straight level flight. and then you do a slight nose down
to pick up speed and then the airplane pulls up at a 45 degree angle and during that pull-up
you're at 1.8 gravity so if you weighed 100 pounds you're now weighing 180 pounds
and then as you push over the top of the arc
Centripetal force is pushing your body up gravity is pulling your body down And if the pilot is flying the perfect trajectory where the velocity and the radius I can write up the physics for you here
But is perfect you're in a arc of an orbit and your weightless inside the middle
So you go from 1.8 gravity to zero gravity.
And sometimes we do lunar gravities and Martian gravities, which are fun as well.
So, but, you know, one of my reasons for being interested in longevity is so I can be around
an extra 30, 50, 100 years to see us on the moon, you know,
and go to build colonies in the asteroid belt.
One of the questions that I have.
I don't know if you're going to have to wait that long because, Peter,
you know, with all this talk about aliens and all this interesting stuff coming out,
there may be an alien spaceship that will just pop you over.
It'll be easy.
Well, listen, every night when I go to sleep um i say my prayer that if they're
out there please come and get me i'd like to go home they are trust me they are they are i i've
talked to people who've literally seen alien spaceships who are astronauts in person so
i you have seen them no i've talked to someone who was a black ops astronaut who went to recover an alien spaceship
that was in orbit and saw it himself.
Like, no joke.
Well, listen, I...
And this guy's not kind of a crazy whack job either.
He's done it.
That gives me great hope.
You know, honestly, I think life is ubiquitous in the universe.
You know, it's interesting when you stop and think about the numbers.
You know, we so uh egotistical
as human beings we look at um you know what we have in our town in our country on our planet
but i don't know if you know the numbers you know how many uh stars in our galaxy
i think i used to know it was like it's 100 billion 100 billion it's billions i took astronomy
with carl sagan but that was like 50 years ago i miss him i miss him um yeah 100 billion
uh galaxy stars in our galaxy and what's fascinating is the number of galaxies in the
universe so uh the number used to be 100 billion galaxies in the universe.
It's now up to somewhere between 2 and 20 trillion galaxies,
each with 100 billion stars.
And if you do the math, for my physics or chemistry geeks out there,
at one point I saw the numbers and I said,
huh, it's about like 6 times 10 to the 23rd.
It's like Avogadro's number worth of stars in the known universe.
And then, of course, there are those who claim that we're living in a multiverse of an infinite number of universes.
So if you're feeling down, don't worry about it.
So I do want to go and see what it's like to start a city on the moon or go to the asteroid belt.
And one of the questions I ask my abundance members often is,
what would you do with an extra 30 years of life?
Because I think we're going to be able,
I just launched this $101 million health span prize with XPRIZE
asking for an extra 20 years of health. And those extra
20 years buy you the next 20 years. So what would you do, Mark, with an extra 20 or 30 healthy years
of life? You know, for me at this point in my life, Peter, it's a great question. I kind of
climbed all the mountains. You know, there's a great book by David Brooks called The Second
Mountain, which is once you've had your family, built your career, got your financial stability, then what?
I'm in the then what phase, which is scaling up the framework of our new understanding
of human health and biology, which you could call network medicine, functional medicine,
whatever you want to call it. It's just going to be called medicine. And the second is really
deepening my own personal development and growth and healing. In the Hindu tradition, there's this
whole concept of the householder who then goes through this process of being a householder which is essentially the first mountain and then they go and become a sannyasin
which is a wandering kind of wise guy basically where they they are they are seeking out a deeper
spiritual evolution and i think for me that's very important to kind of deepen my sense of self
uh my my sense of relation with myself with my fiance and partner, with my friends and community
and with the people I care and love about.
So it's really being more leaning into that.
And of course, having a hell of a good time while doing it.
Yes.
A.B. White said, I think he said,
he said, every day I wake up determined
to make the world a better place
and have a hell of a good time.
And that makes planning the day very difficult.
You know, I think bringing joy to life is so important.
You know, I've gotten to know Elon really well over 20 plus years.
And he's absolutely brilliant, but he's his own worst enemy in terms of
the level of stress and work.
And he puts it on himself.
And so I think about that.
Humanity is a beneficiary from SpaceX and from Tesla and from X.
But at what price do you do this?
And life-work balance is an interesting term.
It's part of the longevity conversation.
I remember having this conversation with Tony Robbins on stage and Tony goes, no, no, no,
there's no such thing as life-work balance.
It's life-work integration.
And if you love what you do, which you do and I do, and hopefully those listening do,
then you're not working, you're playing.
And I was looking at a tweet from Vinod Khosla who said,
I'm working 80 hours a week and plan to do that and continue investing for the next 25 years.
And I was like, huh, I wonder how much I work.
And I either don't work at all, or I work all the time, depending on how your definition is.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, let's talk, get into the meat of the conversation. I have a number
of questions from my, my, I'm going to still call it a Twitter audience, but, uh,
and some of the vegetables as it may be. Um, so, you know, uh, one of the conversations out there
is aging a disease. Um, and if so, why, right. And, uh, you know, I think it would be super
convenient to call aging a disease so that we had the ability for it to
be funded from government research and so forth. Do you have any opinion about this?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, Peter, what we've seen historically in medicine is that
aging as a phenomenon has been ignored. We focus on the diseases that happen as we get older,
but we haven't actually studied well the process of
aging and if it's something that we can do something about. And I think also we see an
inevitability as we get older. We see people who are frail and weak and decrepit and declining and
loss of function and an inability to do the normal things they want to do. But that's not necessarily
an inevitable part of getting older. It's a process of decrepitude that is a
result of fundamental biological processes that go wrong that we can do something about, just like
we can treat blood pressure or cholesterol or blood sugar. The phenomena of abnormal aging,
which is what I think most of us have in this country and around the world increasingly,
is a treatable condition.
And I've seen this over and over in my patients, whether they're at end stage diseases or whether they're just looking for a tune-up. I've seen people both feel and look younger by applying the science of creating health.
So, I mean, yes.
Yes. And even though we're doing that, we still are getting older and dying and there's nobody living past 120 that at least I know of.
I mean, there may be some Himalayan monks who claim that.
A thousand years old. Yeah, exactly. But so the question I've always asked myself and I've asked George Church and David Sinclair this question, is there an upper limit
to human age? Can we make it to 150? Can we make it to two or 300? Not as we are today,
but with the right genetic engineering and the right cellular therapies or others.
like cellular therapies or, or others. I'm curious where you come out on that.
Do you, do you, do you, is it religion? Do you hope, do you have a sense to say, no, it's impossible?
No. I mean, I, I, I, first of all, the question of immortality and extending life.
And say mortality. I'm not going to go to mortality.
That's a, that's more of like a kind of spiritual, philosophical question about like, what would you do with all that time?
But I think in terms of the science,
I think if we apply to what we know now about the fundamental things that cause damage
to what we call the hallmarks of aging
and drive these biological processes
that underlie all of disease,
heart disease, cancer, diabetes,
dementia, all the disease of aging. If we address those systematically with diet, exercise, sleep,
stress management reduction, community relationships, certain biomolecules, whether they're phytochemicals or pharmaceuticals, that we actually have right now today in 2023,
that we actually have right now today in 2023, soon to be 24,
I believe we can, most of us get to in our 90s and 100.
I don't think that's beyond reach for most people. I do think that getting to 120 or 150 or 180 is a whole different ballgame.
And I think there's some regenerative therapies that may help,
whether they're things like exosomes or peptides or stem cells or osmophoresis,
which are really interesting. I don't know if those are going to get us much more runway. They
might get a little bit more. They might improve healthspan more. But I think there are some
scientific things coming down the pike that are really interesting and are not ready for prime
time. And I think one of the most important ones is the discovery of the Yamanaka factors,
which you write about in Life Force. And this is being studied by David Sinclair
and others in animal models and seeing really kind of remarkable results. But the basic idea
is that we can reprogram our own cells back to a younger version of themselves in sort of a
simplistic way of looking at it. It's by inserting various transcription factors
into your genome,
you can turn them on or off at will.
And when you hit, let's say 50,
if you've had these inserted 25
and you say, I'm getting a little flabby,
my muscle's wasting, my hair's gray,
and I don't have the same sex drive and whatever,
you can just turn this on through some molecular switch
and then reverse your biological age.
Now, that's still a TBD, right?
I think we don't know if that's...
It is.
The conversation I have with George and David is, and I'm curious to bring that into this
conversation because it's important.
I mean, people need to have a goal to shoot for.
It's important.
I mean, people need to have a goal to shoot for. And I think the goal right now is keep yourself as healthy as you can, intercept the breakthroughs
from the Yamanaka factors, epigenetic reprogramming, all of that.
I mean, when you are 30 or 40 or 50 as a guy and in your 20s and 30s as a woman, typically,
and you reproduce, that egg is set at a zero age
and it can live an entire full life the data is there for a for continuation um at the same time
you know i remind people when it's true you think just to kind of reemphasize what you're saying
if a 40 year old man and a 40 woman have sex and they have a 40 year old man and a 40-year-old woman have sex, and they have a 40-year-old sperm and a 40-year-old egg, the baby's not 40 years old when it's born. It's zero. Yeah, it's zero. So the potential is
there. And then the other thing I point out to folks is, listen, you've got the same 3.2 billion
letters from your mother and your father when you're born, when you're 20, when you're 80,
when you're 100. Why do you look different? And it's not the code. It's not your genome. It's
which genes are on and which genes are off. It's your epigenome. And if you can, you,
could you go back to that earlier state of the right genes on and the right genes off
of earlier? So you can get that six pack when you're, when you're, you know, in your,
in your seventies or eighties. And so this is the conversation. And then,
in your seventies or eighties. And so this is the conversation. And then, you know, it's the other idea that is thrown out is, you know, this is my grandfather's old hatchet. It's got
four new handles and five new heads, but it's my grandfather's old hatchet. You know, can you just
keep replacing parts? Yeah. I mean, I think that's the other thing that's coming down the pike is
replacement parts, right? We can 3d print organs. we can, you know, from your own cells, basically grow a new heart or grow a new liver. I mean,
this is happening. And I think you've been talking about this and many of your conferences and
workshops. And I, I think it's, it's kind of exciting. I mean, I don't want to be the first
one to get it. But it's gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna come soon. And the reason it's coming even faster, I think, is more capital is coming into this
field than ever before, right?
There's billions of dollars of private capital coming in because you still can't take it
with you, no matter how hard you tried, because ultimately, there's more people playing in
this field.
The tools are getting more powerful and cheaper.
And AI is coming into the rescue.
So I think we're going to see some massive, massive changes.
If you could tell somebody one thing to do to make a change in their life right now,
what would that be?
I mean, it reminds me of this conference I was at when I asked the same question to a longevity scientist,
Leonard Guarti from MIT,
who basically came up with David Sinclair
with the idea of the sirtuins.
And it was this conference with the Dalai Lama on longevity,
and it was Western scientists, Elizabeth Blackburn was there,
and Lenny was there, and Dalai Lama was there,
and all these Tibetan doctors.
And I was walking with Lenny, I was like, so what is the secret here what what is the secret with these sirtuins and what is the
deal he says what's making us age and what's the problem he's like sugar and i'm like what he's
like yeah sugar and i think i think if there's one thing that people need to understand is that
one of the main i think meta categories of the hallmarks of aging is deregulated nutrient
sensing, which has to do with how our bodies sense food.
And when that becomes screwed up because of too much or too little of something, our bodies
become dysregulated and all the hallmarks get accelerated.
All of them.
And I think the most important insulin signaling pathway there is the one that's driving a
lot of the disease of aging.
So if you look at heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, they're all diseases of too much insulin and insulin
resistance. And that's all driven by the enormous loads of sugar and starch we eat. You know, I was
recently, Peter, in Africa and I got to visit the Hadzibi tribe, which is the last remaining hunter
gatherer tribe that's protected in Africa. And they continue to hunt and 20 of their diet is honey and
i'm like geez that's a lot of sugar and and what i also learned was that and i i went gathering with
them and we hunted and gathered a little bit together and they they were you know digging up
these roots and and tubers and they eat 150 grams of fiber a day that's compared to about eight eight
grams for the average american the uptake and the reaction.
Basically, it's like, yeah, it's basically putting Mimucil in your Coca-Cola, basically.
But it mitigates the effect of the sugar.
So I think it's just the enormous amounts of starch and sugar that are driving all these
aging pathways.
And they drive inflammation.
They drive oxidative stress.
They damage your mitochondria.
I cannot stress this enough.
It's the one thing, if you can cut
out starch and sugar or dramatically reduce it, it's going to have a huge impact. Everybody,
I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me
and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. The company is called
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listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And, you know,
it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's
been going on for some time, but because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at
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lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com backslash Peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer
to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. Sugar is a poison. Remove
it from your diet. The body was never designed to deal with this much sugar. And we're living
in a day and age where unfortunately our food manufacturers are pumping out, you know, poison
the same way our cigarette manufacturers were pumping out poison.
Well, they were the same companies, you know, Peter,
like Philip Morris, Kraft, RJR, Nabisco.
They actually redesigned the foods when they owned those companies.
They now have kind of divested.
But when the tobacco companies owned the food companies,
they redesigned the foods to be more addictive.
That comes to a question that Enos Sirach,
one of my followers, asked here, he says, how do you deal
with the emotional challenges of sugar addiction? So to be clear, sugar is, and you're, you get
addicted to sugar. And it's, it takes time to get off of that addiction. And I do that, by the way, Enos, with my abundance community.
Every year we do a 22-day no sugar fast as a group. We all do it together. We just give it all up.
And once you've gone through that process, you have more control. How do you think about it?
It's an emotional issue. Well, yes and no. I mean, I think people think it is, and sometimes it is.
I mean, it's a physiological issue.
It's complex, right? Because there's genetics involved and dopamine receptors and your risk
of becoming more addictive when it comes to sugar or other substances. There's the way that sugar
hijacks your hormones,
your brain chemistry, even your microbiome
to regulate your mood, your appetite, your behavior.
And a lot of times people misappropriate
their emotional state to some psychological reason
as opposed to a physiological reason.
And I think most of us have the experience.
Like if our blood sugar low, we're cranky, right?
If we haven't eaten, it's not because we're mean irritable cranky people it's because there's a
physiological reason so i think i think it's important first to understand that it sometimes
there are emotional reasons for eating it's stress and various kinds of things comfort foods as they
comfort foods for sure for sure but but but what's what's important to understand is that you need to
use science not willpower,
to actually overcome this. And I wrote a book in 2014 called The 10-Day Detox Diet,
The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet. And the idea is if you follow a regimented approach
to resetting your hormones and brain chemistry in your microbiome, you can get off of it very
quickly and not deal with the consequences. It usually takes about two
or three days to go through it. But if you do the right things, you don't suffer as much. So you got
to start the day with protein and fat. You got to actually eat plenty of fiber. You've got to have
lots of fluids and liquid because when you drop sugar, your body's going to dump a lot of fluid
and because insulin keeps you retaining salt and so
you retain a lot of water and and then you need to make sure you do things with your nervous system
to calm your nervous system down and i you know take an epsom salt bath and gentle exercise and
you know really doing simple practices and and i've done this with people over and over groups
and and online thousands of people and it's remarkable how quickly the body resets it
doesn't take that long now you know it's like it's like if you're if you you kind of have to
go cold turkey if you don't you're going to kind of just be constantly just in this dynamic of
stimulating the wrong pathways so it's there is emotional aspect but there's also an understanding
and for example you can look at your genetics and look at dopamine receptor genetics and see if you're one of those people
who really needs a lot of extra stimulation for dopamine which then you can learn how to activate
like a cold plunge if you jump in an ice bath i guarantee you it's going to wake you right up
and it's going to stimulate your dopamine and and i love doing that it's as long as i forget how long
i'm in there and i come out out, and I'm like shaking.
It feels great after.
It feels great, yeah.
It feels great.
And there's really a physiological process to reset.
So it's not that hard, but you have to understand what to do and how to do it and how to re-regulate your hormones and brain chemistry.
And then you can see where you're at. But if you you know, but if you're, if you're sleep deprived, that's the other thing. If you're sleep deprived, and they've done this in college students where
they've looked at healthy college students of normal weight, and they gave them basically
normal sleep schedule, or they were deprived of like, you know, a couple extra hours of sleep.
So they had eight or six or five hours. And the ones who had sleep deprivation, all were craving
sugar and carbs. And I remember this from being in an internship and residency and delivering babies up all
night, working in the ER.
And I'm like, it was like 2 a.m.
And I was like, where is the sugar?
Like, I'm going to McDonald's because the only thing open in the hospital, by the way,
having McDonald's in the hospital is ridiculous.
But I would get one of those apple turnovers.
That was my thing.
So I get the apple turnover and i keep going for
the rest of the night oh yeah my god yeah no it's listen in medical school by the way those of you
who are thinking about going to medical school those who had been in medical school it is like
the worst possible uh you know set of of uh operating protocols for help i mean doctors
are terrible in terms of sleepless, the diets we
eat, taking a stress that levels that you have. Yeah. So, you know, let's take a second to explain
to folks why glucose is such an inflammatory molecule, right? How it's glycosylating and how
it's, you know, in the brain brain in the heart uh would you walk through
that a second yeah so so the couple things happen like it's just a whole cascade so it's you know
when you when you have high insulin levels it drives uh your glucose into your cells and also
any every extra calorie right so it drives free fatty acids and other things into your fat cells
and particularly your belly fat and those are the dangerous fat cells. And those fat cells aren't like normal fat cells on your butt or your legs.
They're metabolically active. They're hormonal factories. They're neurotransmitter factories.
They're immune factories. And they're spewing out all this nasty stuff, including cytokines and
hormones that dysregulate your appetite. And so they make you hungry. They make you put on more
weight and they prevent what we
call lipolysis, which is the breakdown of fat. So it's like a one-way turnstile on the subway. You
can get in, but you can't get out. And essentially that's what's going on with insulin. And then
once you start this visceral fat factory of bad stuff, that bad stuff drives inflammation
and you get high levels of inflammation, cytokines,
and inflammation is kind of the final common pathway of all age-related diseases, whether
it's dementia, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obviously autoimmune disease. Aging itself has
been called the inflammation. And so it drives a lot of that process. And the secondary things
that happen is that it is part of that. You get damage
to proteins. And one of the main phenomena in terms of the hallmarks of aging is something
called proteostasis, which is damage to our proteins. And proteins have to be particularly
shape, size, and in three-dimensional structure to work. And what happens is you get glomming on of
sugar and proteins together when there's too
much sugar and it causes a thing called glycation which is basically like a crispy skin on chicken
or a crust on a bread or a creme brulee that crispy thing on the top that's stuff that you
love to eat now those are called advanced glycation end products and are ages and it's
good terminology because they age you and they bind to rages,
which makes you rage and basically get aged. And that leads to, again, the secondary phenomena of more inflammation. And so one, you have damaged proteins, they don't work. Two, it creates a
cascade of more inflammation and you end up in this vicious cycle. And the way we measure, for
example, people with diabetes is something called hemoglobin A1C.
That's glycosylated hemoglobin.
It means hemoglobin, your basically oxygen-carrying molecule in your red cells,
gets sugar on it and forms a crust.
And that crust basically makes it not work well.
And then you get into all these secondary problems.
And that really is a huge phenomenon of aging.
And then we can avoid ages in our food, too, by not microwaving, by not overcooking stuff,
by not having the crispy stuff, which we love.
I mean, I still eat it occasionally.
I make a roast chicken, and I go after the skin, and I get to cut it up because I cooked
it, and I get the little crispy skin.
You're making me hungry, dude.
so i just want people to realize you know sugar is a it's a very you know as it is glancing glomming onto the to the proteins and your immune system recognizes that as a foreign
entity and you hit an inflammatory cascade it's it hits the heart it hits the brain it hits the body in general and it's just um do yourself the favor
of uh of breaking that sugar addiction if at all possible uh your your book on that subject the
name of it again 10 day detox diet 10 day and and you know the beautiful the beautiful thing is it
you know probably hasn't changed since uh in the last in the last decade so it's
relevant go get it and and try it you owe yourself getting yourself off sugar um you know one thing
that i mean what i want to say is peter just to emphasize that people don't realize how bad they
feel until they start feeling good and and i have people fill out a questionnaire it's in the book
where they they give a quality quantitative score to all their symptoms you know headaches digestive issues sleep problems depression snotty nose whatever
and you get a score and then after 10 days you redo it the average reduction in the score was
70 percent from all symptoms from all diseases and i do this over and over when i do workshops
i'm doing a longevity workshop in ibiza in May and another one in Bodrum in Turkey in May at Six
Senses. And I do the same diet there. And it's just remarkable what happens. People walk away
feeling amazing and they didn't realize how quickly it can happen. And guess what? It's all
within your control. It doesn't cost anything. If anything, you're going to save money on the process.
One of the things I put in my recent book, Longevity, Your Practical Playbook,
and we've talked about this before, is even the order in which you eat your food matters.
Eating your fiber first, eating your veggies first so that it slows down digestion, eating your protein next, and then saving
any high glycemic carbs for the end if you have room.
And just doing that alone causes your digestive system to uptake the nutritious molecules
first and minimizes your insulin spike from the white rice or the bread that you're going
to be, or God forbid, the dessert you're going to eat at the end.
Yeah.
Hey everybody, Peter Diamandis here.
I've been asked over and over again,
what do I do for my own health?
Well, I put it down in this book
called Peter's Longevity Practices.
It's very readable in just an hour.
In the book, I cover longevity diet, exercise, sleep,
my annual found upload upload meds and supplements
longevity mindset it's literally consumable in just an hour's time
hopefully to incentivize you to make a difference in your life to intercept the
technologies coming our way if you want this just check out the link below and
download it right now a lot of people are dealing with this with Ozempic, GLP-1 inhibitors and such.
I'm curious what you're hearing about Ozempic.
You know, it's like everybody I know is on Ozempic.
And it's like, you know, the most, all of a sudden, it became the most popular drug out there.
Yeah, I think it's the biggest part of the GDP of Denmark right now, because it's a Danish
company. Yeah, I know, Peter, it can help certain people. And I'm not opposed to its appropriate use
in the appropriate person for the appropriate amount of time in the right way. But I think,
like many, many drugs, the New England Journal basically came out with a great article once.
They said, make sure you use new drugs as soon as they come on the market before the side effects develop and i think that's kind of the
situation we're starting to see now we're seeing you know benefits for people who struggle but
i've seen people who are you know 10 20 15 pounds overweight starting to use this it's i think it's
risky one it causes a significant amount of muscle loss as you lose weight and you already lose
muscle when you lose weight but it seems to be worse and then you end up actually with a lower muscle mass at a lower weight which
actually means your metabolism is slower so often um what happens and with with weight
obsampec we see this 65 percent or more of the weight is gained back if you stop it you will
end up having a slower metabolism at the end of the process than when you started.
So let's say you started 220 pounds,
you lost 30 pounds,
then you gained back a bunch of pounds.
You're going to have a slower metabolism
and have to eat less to just maintain
that 220 pounds at the end.
Second, it seems to increase the risk
of certain GI problems,
which really concerns me.
And it's not just an incremental increase. And we've talked about this before, but essentially when we see a change in a result in a
scientific study of 20, 30%. So statins reduce the risk of heart attack by 20 or 30%. That sounds
like a lot. Okay. That's not that much when you look at the effect of those EPIC drugs.
We're seeing a 900% increase in pancreatitis, a 450% increase in small bowel obstruction,
which is a very serious disease.
This is a problem where you need surgery or hospitalization to deal with the bowel obstruction
because it thickens the wall of your bowel.
And it happens when you've been taking it for a longer period of time. So you might see rapid results, but I think it just kind of misses
the point of why are we struggling in the first place? Again, I mentioned I went to Africa and I
didn't see anybody who was overweight in these hunter-gatherer tribes. There was nobody, not a
single person.
When you look at pictures of America, and I remember seeing this Aretha Franklin movie,
it was from 1970. It was in Oakland where she filmed it. And it was an incredible film about, I call it Amazing Grace or something. And it was in a black church in Oakland. There was not one
overweight person, including Aretha, in that movie who was in the church.
And this was 1970.
And now, you know, 85% of African-Americans are overweight.
Okay, so let's dive there one second.
What is the cause?
Is it our food system?
Is it lack of...
What has changed in the last 40 years here?
Well, I think we never had the degree of ultra-processed foods.
And I think it's becoming clearer and clearer had the degree of ultra-processed foods. And I think it's becoming clear and clear
that this phenomenon of ultra-processed foods
is at the root of so much of what's going on.
Of course, our lifestyles become more sedentary.
We've had more stress.
There's more environmental toxins.
Our microbiomes change.
There's a lot of variables.
But I think the fundamental biggest change
is the introduction of ultra-processed food.
There's over 600,000 of these on the market now and and what what they are not really foods they're
deconstructed food like products so essentially when you take a soybean or a corn cob or a wheat
berry you eat those you're fine it's fine but if you if you take them into a factory and you
deconstruct them into their
molecular parts, and then you reorganize the molecular structure so they're not even recognizable
in their original form, and then you reassemble them into all kinds of sizes, colors, and shapes
of chemically extruded food-like substances that look like food but aren't food, they actually don't
regulate your body in the same way. And Kevin Hall did this really
impressive study. He's from the NIH looking at ultra-processed food. It was a crossover trial
where he took people and fed them as much as they want of regular whole foods. They just eat as much
you want, no limit, go for it. And then he said, here's ultra-processed food. Eat as much you want,
no limit, go for it. The people who had the ultra-processed food ate 500 calories more a day.
Now, in a week, that's 3,500 calories.
3,500 calories is what it takes to gain a pound.
So in a year, that's 52 pounds of weight gain
just from eating, if you eat your ultra-processed food.
Oversize me, baby.
Yeah, and so it's really been a problem.
And then we know the mortality risk is high.
It causes depression.
It causes mood destabilization, inflammation.
It changes your microbiome.
And I think we've seen this horrific change in our food system and supply.
And of course, there's just the overabundance of calories in our system as well.
I mean, we've seen in you know, in 1970s,
President Nixon was afraid of not getting reelected
because the price of milk and meat were going up.
So he told his ag secretary to fix it.
And basically what he did was incentivize farmers
to grow mass amounts by giving subsidies
and essentially created a model
of an accelerated industrial agriculture
and high fructose corn syrup.
And now we produce 500 calories more of corn, essentially turning to corn sugar and syrup than we did before so there's
another 500 calories a day in the food supply per person captain crunch yeah captain crunch
is here to save us exactly i mean it's like i you know i have two 12 year old boys and i think about
the food that they eat and it's like oh my god oh. Oh my God. So listen, I was just on, I saw on Twitter yesterday, a gentleman whose ID was kept
confidential, who's experimented with a phallostatin CRISPR edit and someone in their
forties, fifties, and all of a sudden gained a huge amount of muscle, right? So
have you seen any of this work going on? Yeah. I mean, I've been reading about it. I think it's
a little bit sci-fi and there's been studies, for example, in muscular dystrophy that improves,
for example, ambulation and muscle strength and function. So for certain conditions, I think,
you know, if you have muscular dystrophy and you're gonna put a wheelchair and die i think it's
go for it you know but i think i'm not ready to start taking it yet i think
we need i think a lot more human trials for it but it hasn't even started really in that regard but
i am interested in um uh in the concept of beginning to engineer ourselves. Someone who I've known for a long time,
haven't been in touch lately, is Brian Johnson. I knew him from, he was an investor in a couple
of my companies early on. Have you been followed what he's doing with Blueprint?
Yeah, it's very fascinating. I mean, he's basically measuring and tracking every single thing he can possibly think
of and then seeing the effects of various changes in his lifestyle, diet, supplements, behaviors,
and how those impact his biology. And I would give him credit because he's basically taken one for
the team. He's like, I want to be a human experiment.
And I want to see how far I can push this and how long I can live and basically do science
a favor by spending my own millions of dollars with an N of 1 experiment by myself.
And I think we're going to learn a lot from that.
I do think it makes for a pretty dull guy to be around
i mean his last meal is 11 o'clock at night in the morning i mean he goes to bed at eight o'clock at
night and i'm like okay and you know he says well sometimes i break out and i'm kind of you know
just don't want to be socially kind of weird so i'll i'll go out to dinner and i'll eat some
steamed vegetables and i'm like well okay i don't know if that does the trick yeah i mean it's uh it's like i can't have anybody sleep in bed with me you know i can't
i can't be in a relationship i can't like you know it's like well those are things that are
really important you know uh if you're in a relationship and you have good social connections
it's probably one of the things that impacts longevity the most so i wouldn't miss on that one
you know he um one of the things he's famously done is uh received transfusions from his son
and offered transfusions you know the whole young blood experiment work out there uh thoughts on
that well this is really you know kind of uh an extrapolation of research that was done
on mice called parabiosis where they basically wired up the old mice and young mice circulation
to see what would happen and they found that the old mice became young now they weren't sure young
mice became old right and so they weren't sure what it was so they actually followed up on some
of these studies and they they actually did a plasma exchange where they basically did a filtering of the old mouse blood so instead of just getting
young well they just took out all the old plasma which has all the inflammatory molecules damaged
proteins things that you know are kind of accelerating aging and then just remove them
and it had the same benefit now this is not a new thing i want to make this very clear the the just
taking out the old plasma and putting in instead albumin and saline which is the you know the
fluid segment of the plasma had the rejuvenative effect uh of a plasma exchange yeah yeah it's
fascinating and they've done some interesting studies
that are on humans and Alzheimer's patients
and seen remarkable results
and improvements of their cognition
and activities of daily living.
And by the way, there's no drug
that can do what the plasma does.
I mean, it's quite amazing
that we're seeing these sort of level of results
that are in a pretty advanced disease.
Dr. Ziproff, I guess, has the protocols there.
And at Fountain, we've just installed this therapeutic plasma exchange technology so our
members can go and start doing that. I've done it. You've done it as well. How often do you
recommend doing it? Well, I don't think we know the frequency yet, but I probably would like to
do it every quarter.
I think it's sort of just a tune-up.
It's like an oil filter change, right?
And actually, one time I did it, if you feel good, I say, if you don't have a headache and aspirin doesn't do much.
So it might do something subclinically or subperceptually, but it's not going to affect you, right?
So I've had plasma exchange when I feel fine.
I definitely feel a boost of energy and well-being and you know more subjective things but once i had covid and i was
really sick and i and i it was the worst covid i'd had i had it like three times and i and i
developed arthritis after my hands swelled up i had severe fatigue i was just really incapacitated
and i was worried you know and I ended up going having
plasmapheresis and literally within hours my swelling went away in my hand my joints became
normal the next morning I felt like a million bucks and I was like wow there's something to
this you know because we use it in medicine already we use it for people with autoimmune
diseases with inflammatory diseases with neurologic diseases with Guillain-Barre syndrome
with vaccine injury so it's used a lot for people who have and by the way I've seen people with COVID vaccine injury and
I'm sending them for plasma resists and they do remarkably well so it takes out all the inflammatory
guck basically in your system that's a medical word right Peter yes we learn about that. Yeah. So a lot of people have desired to go get stem cells after reading Life Force.
And of course, in the United States, stem cell from placental stem cells or cord stem
cells, allergenic from somebody else is not legal today.
And what you need to do is you can get stem cells from your own bone
marrow, your own fat, and you can concentrate them and give them back to yourself. And, or you can
go down to Costa Rica, RMI is down there, or, you know, Mexico. There's a number of different
locations south of the border. You can go and get stem cells. What's a number of different locations south of the border you can go and get
stem cells. What's your thinking today on stem cells? Well, full disclosure, I'm going down in
nine days to RMI for a full stem cell treatment. So what I'm doing is IV stem cells. I'm doing
orthopedic stem cells in my back and my knee. I jumped off a golf cart trying to save my girlfriend.
She fell off and banged her head and I twisted my knee and got a little meniscal knee. I jumped off a golf cart trying to save my girlfriend. She fell off and banged her head.
And I twisted my knee and got a little meniscal thing.
I'm doing my knee.
I'm going to do the sexual enhancement one because I'm 64.
Why not?
And do the skin rejuvenation and sort of just do the whole thing.
And I'll give you a report afterwards.
But I've done systemic stem cells, I think, three times.
I've done once in my knee for a knee injury.
And I found it incredibly helpful. I think- You felt I've done once in my knee for a knee injury and I found it incredibly helpful.
You felt a visceral change?
I did.
You felt functional change?
Yeah, I definitely felt overall more energy,
more clarity, improvement in my overall fitness.
So I did notice certain things.
Now they're subjective.
I didn't have any objective metrics
and I'm going to do this again.
I'm going to recheck my biological age after. So I've been tracking it and I'm getting some biomarkers done before and after. I'm curious about it. I think, you know, we definitely need more data. I'm like you, Peter. I'm definitely on the bleeding edge of things. And I wouldn't recommend the things that I'm doing to myself to my patients sometimes. But I'm willing to take one for the team. Chief guinea pig, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
So I think I study it.
I think about it.
And it sounds, there's scientific basis.
If the risks are low and it's something that I can afford, I'll do it.
And that's kind of how I play the game.
But I think it's really about your risk tolerance.
And I think what we need is a large infusion of capital into
a research and clinical trials using stem cells from everything from longevity to autoimmune
diseases to orthopedic issues. I mean, we just have so many applications for these. And I think
we're unfortunately just so behind on this. Yeah. no, it is unfortunate. It's not something that the FDA has the proper guidelines to regulate yet.
And so it is sort of just kept in the don't do it category.
We are standing up at Fountain under an investigation of new drug protocol, placental-derived stem
cells.
new drug protocol, placental-derived stem cells. The other area that we're standing up with our sister company, Cellulari, that Bob Hurie,
who's my dear friend, is natural killer cell supplementation.
People should know, natural killer cells are your innate immune system that detects cancer,
detects senile cells, detects infected cells. And as we age-
They're like your body's Pac-Man, right?
Yeah, exactly, exactly. As we age, our immune system becomes dysfunctional, dysregulated.
And so the results we've seen early on with natural killer cells, where you can give it from an
exogenous source, placental derived source, looks super promising.
So I think that's going to be another IND where we give people natural killer cells
to help address building up of senescent cells in the body.
Yeah, I've done that too.
I've done it actually for my own cells.
I dropped 20 vials of blood, sent it to a lab that was cultured, had to go to a different
country to do it.
But basically, I did the infusion of my own natural killer cells as well.
So I think it's hard to kind of say what these things do.
And again, this is sort of experimental.
But I think that these things are all things
that need to be more rigorously studied.
And there is data, it's just slow and plotting.
And I think we need to put capital into this
because it can help people
with so many different conditions.
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All right, let's go back to the episode.
Yeah, I mean, sarcopenia is, you know,
whenever I have a venture fund, Bold Capital,
I'm actually in their offices right now.
And I tell people, if you've got a,
we're now probably two thirds biotech, health tech.
I say, if you've got a company that addresses sarcopenia, I want to
hear about it. I think it's one of the biggest challenges we have, the loss of functional
muscle tissue and muscle strength as we grow old. You know the numbers even better than I.
If you fall and fracture your hip, there's a damn good chance you're not going to make it
out of the hospital. And so having the ability to regain or maintain muscle mass in your 70s,
80s, 90s is super critical. What do you do? What do you think about, besides a CRISPR gene edit,
Besides a CRISPR gene edit, what do you recommend for somebody?
What's your protocol for maintaining and growing muscle mass? Well, I think I've doubled down on it as I've got older.
And essentially, I focused on a regular strength training routine, three or four, sometimes five times a week with bands and weights if I have them available.
five times a week with bands and weights if i have them available i then uh focus on my protein intake which is basically a gram of protein per pound for me that's about 175 to 180 grams so
that's what i do as well yeah and then i i make sure that i and this is really important to
understand for people is that you know people talk intermittent fasting well okay you probably
should not eat for 12 hours between dinner and
breakfast. That's just called breakfast. If you eat dinner at six, you can eat breakfast at six.
It's not exactly fasting, right? If you eat dinner at eight, you can eat breakfast at eight,
maybe 14 hours. But when you're fasted, and it's important, I think, to do at least a 12-hour
overnight fast, the first meal really matters because it's not just the and it's important, I think, to do at least a 12-hour overnight fast, the first meal
really matters because it's not just the fasting that's important that induces activation of mTOR
or inhibition of mTOR and autophagy or self-cleaning, like your self-cleaning oven.
It's the first meal that you have after you do that that's critical because that first meal
determines what happens next and what happens next if you do it right meaning right being having 40
to 50 grams of protein when you do that then it activates mTOR but also does it in a way that
synthesizes muscle protein or muscle protein synthesis and it activates your stem cells it
activates all these longevity pathways.
So it's got a sort of kind of a dual benefit.
So it's both the feeding, fasting and the feeding that matter.
And the feeding has to be right.
So what's your breakfast?
So for example, this morning I woke up early.
I was kind of up early.
I did some meditation and wrote my journal for a bit.
Then I went for about an hour and a half hike up mountain behind my house,
came back, did a 30 minute rigorous band workout um did some stretching and then you know
took a quick steam and an ice bath and then i had my my shake and my my i call my healthy aging
shake i'm happy to give you the recipe you can it's in my book actually young forever and you
can you can check it out but essentially i take goat whey and whey protein is
is more well tolerated by my most people some of the dairy is a little hard it's regeneratively
raised go away and it's about 40 50 grams i put in mito pure which is uh urolithin a i use my
appear as well yeah and i use a thousand milligrams and urolithin a the data on this is really
impressive and it induces mitochondrial synthesis mitochondrial biogenesis induces mitophagy improves uh it reduces
sarcopenia and and improves muscle synthesis as well as uh also reducing inflammation and many
other really impressive things i also add in five grams of creatine to help muscle building
and i put a bunch of other stuff in there, which isn't necessarily for muscle building,
but I'll put in adaptogenic mushrooms.
I'll put in my gut food product, which essentially has pre and probiotics and polyphenols.
What else do I put in there?
I sometimes put in other immunoglobulins for my gut and gut healing, probiotics.
And so that's kind of my morning shake. And I'll put in some almond milk orbulins for my gut and gut healing probiotics and so that that's kind of
my morning shake and i'll put in some almond milk or or maybe macadamia milk and some frozen berries
and that's basically my shake and i don't have it so it's not sweetened it doesn't have any sugar
uh and and the berries give it a nice flavor and make it like like a milkshake i love it that is
so close to i do do you i i've enjoyed cachava as well as a protein drink.
Yeah. The thing that's important is make sure, plant-based proteins can be great,
but you have to make sure that they're the right ratio of amino acids. And as you get older,
you get anabolic resistance, meaning it's harder to build muscle.
And the great limiting amino acid for activating mTOR, which builds muscle, is leucine.
So if you don't have two and a half grams of leucine in a serving of protein that you're having, you're not actually switching on the switch to build the muscle.
So you can add leucine.
You can actually add a scoop of branched-chain amino acids, or you can take something called
amino acid complex by thorn i don't have any relation with them or any financial thing with
them at all but but this has been well studied it was actually a product that they bought from a
european company that was used to treat sarcopenia in elderly and it's basically an amino acid
complex that has high levels of leucine so you can throw that in your shake if you want but i would
be careful to make sure you look at the amino acid composition and at least has two and a half grams
and and goat whey versus uh versus grass-fed beef well you know if you have you know the thing is
if it's grass-fed grass finished okay that's fine but what kind of cow is it is an a2 cow or is an
a1 cow so a A2 casein is less
inflammatory. It's like Guernsey and Jersey cows and other heirloom cows. Whereas most cows in
America are Holstein cows and they're all A1 casein, which is super inflammatory, creates a
lot of risk issues that I'm concerned about. And most way doesn't have that much casein, but it'll
have a little. And I think I noticed, for example, when I have, because I'm sensitive to dairy,
it's one of the foods that I'm just sensitive to. If i have because i'm sensitive to dairy it's one of
the foods i'm just sensitive to if i have i do not i do not eat dairy if yeah if i if i have
like whey protein like somewhere i'll be somewhere i just want to think i'll have a whey protein
i'll notice my nose gets all congested and i have i'm phlegmy and if i do a podcast it's terrible
but but but if i have the goat way i don't't have any of that. So I know there's something
going on where it's triggering some immune inflammatory response when I have regular,
regular way. You said, you know, 12 hours, you should, you should fast these 12 hours.
I am curious your views on intermittent fasting because, you know, it was, you know, there's so much conversation around, you know, 18 hours off, you know,
six hours on, you know, 20 hours off, four hours on. And, you know, I was reading that the studies
actually don't show that that makes a difference. And what really matters is your total caloric
intake. Sure. Can you speak to that? Yeah, for sure.
Well, it does give you a little bit time more for autophagy.
And I think having at least 12 hours is minimum.
And that's not really a fast.
It's just normal.
It's like you shouldn't eat before bed and you can eat when you wake up.
It's basically, in America, we just keep eating until we have dinner.
Then we have after dinner snacks.
Then we have a snack before bed. We have second dinner that's that that's just terrible for you
it's really bad uh it'll make you gain weight basically it's i call it the sumo wrestler diet
is what i wrote about in one of my first books called ultra metabolism how do the sumo wrestlers
gain so much weight they're normal little japanese guys well they they basically feed
them an enormous calorie dense food and then they make them go take a nap.
And then they wake them up, and they do exercise,
and they have another huge meal, and then they take another nap.
So basically, then they go to sleep.
So it's basically you eat on a full stomach is the way to gain weight.
But I think intermittent fasting can be challenging
because if you do it, you can lose muscle,
and then you end up in know in a kind of a
counterproductive state so i think it's really individual if you're very overweight and you want
to use it as a strategy to drop a bunch of weight i think it's great i think if you're for someone
like you know you and i who are mostly metabolically optimized i think extended extended fasting
probably is not a great idea because the reason i the reason I stopped as well is because I'm trying to, you can't load all of your protein at one sitting.
Your body is not going to absorb it.
And so I like to spread my 150 grams, including a breakfast, because I work out first thing in the morning.
So it helps me make sure I get protein breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I'm curious, total calories, what's your view on caloric intake?
I think it's really important. I think, you know, we, we, excess calories are not good.
And how much do you suggest a person eat? How much do you eat?
It depends, right? So it depends on your metabolic engine, if you're someone's been on ozempic and you've lost all this muscle and you're you know 180 pounds like me you're probably going to need
far less calories than i do because you know my vo2 max is high i have high muscle mass i very
low body fat so i need a lot of calories i need like almost 3 000 calories a day but but if if you are someone who's not as active if you're someone
who's you know not metabolically tuned up then you may need less calories so it really depends on
your body type and you can do measurements of your basal metabolic rate uh with various kinds
of devices now you can do it in a lab now where they measure oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange
we used to do that when i worked at kenya ranch and you can see you know it's usually basically uh the way to
figure it out is is 10 times your body weight in calories so if you're 180 pounds like me my basal
metabolic rate is 1800 calories and then for your activities of daily living, you usually add on another 30%,
right? So 30% on top of that would be like 2,400 calories. So that's basically my basic needs. Now,
if I'm like going for a five hour bike ride, right? Or I'm climbing up the Everest base camp
where I went, you know, like, like I did this summer and was hiking, you know, 10 miles at
14,000 feet straight up,
I might need more.
So it depends on what you're doing,
but that's basically kind of how you figure it out.
And by the way,
calories as a way of thinking about looking at your food
just is kind of a hopeless endeavor.
If you take the top nutritional scientists
who study calories and you tell them, okay,
I want you to determine the calorie count of the food you ate without actually like
measuring it and weighing it and everything, they won't be able to do it.
And if you're off by 100 calories a day, like just 100 calories a day, which is not
very much, it's like a bite of food, you're going to gain like 20 pounds in a year, right?
much it's like a bite of food you're going to gain like 20 pounds in a year right so you know what you have to understand is it's really about regulating your metabolic system so that your
brain chemistry your hormones and your metabolism are all working in synergy so that you're going
to self-regulate and do it in a way that that is your body is smart knows what to do because if you
try to count calories,
it's kind of forget it. A question from my Twitter audience here says, what real-time metrics do you
look at to track longevity? And, you know, it's interesting. I wish there were good metrics. I
mean, true age as a, you know, your methylation clock. Interesting. And since it's the only real thing
I think there is out there, I measure that, but I measure percent by, you know, fat and muscle
mass and things like that. What do you measure? Well, there's more to think of like, what are
the risk factors? And then what are the, what are the actual measurements of biological age? And
I'll send you a paper after we get off that kind of looks at all the different biological age clocks.
And there's a number of them.
And there's a number of inferential ones.
For example, Maureen Levin has used a number of different epigenetic markers than, for example, the Horvath clock, which is more or less what's used for true age.
And they vary minute to minute, day to day in the same person.
And they can vary decade to decade by different tests, even with the same person and the same time.
So she's calculated based on some simple blood biomarkers, whether it's albumin, red cell distribution of width, CRP, glucose, ALK-FOS, which a lot of markers that don't exactly make sense to me for biological age
but apparently it pretty reliably uh calculated to correlate with a lot of the epigenetic marks
so it's sort of a it's sort of an you know uses large data sets to come up with a kind of a
surrogate way of measuring these epigenetic marks using regular blood tests. And I think it's interesting.
But the question is, what do you do with those? Well, you have to find one or you can use multiple and then change your lifestyle or habits or supplements and then check it again as a way
of sort of being your own control. But the real things I look at are blood biomarkers,
imaging biomarkers to see what's really going on in the body.
And from a functional medicine perspective, I'm actually giving a talk on Friday at the Buck Institute of Aging on longevity diagnostics. And it's really about what are the things we
should be looking at. And from a functional medicine perspective, I think about how do we
assess health, not just what we're looking for disease. And I do that too. But I do the gallery
screen to look for cancer biomarkers
and look at biopsy, or I'll do the clearly heart scan to look at atherosclerotic plaque,
whether it's soft or hard plaque. And that's all looking for actual disease. But I'm also looking
for where the trajectory of people are from wellness to illness, right? It's not like an
on or off phenomena. It's a continuum of shifts and
change in your biological systems. So we look at your microbiome and your gut and the health of
that. We look at the various immune biomarkers. We look at your mitochondrial function. We look at
detoxification and toxic load. We look at the health of your vascular and lymphatic system,
your communication networks from the hormones to neurotransmitters, to peptides, to cytokines.
I mean, we look at your structural system and there's various biomarkers. You can look at all
those. And then we look at the fundamental things like nutritional status. We look at
muscle mass and fat mass. We look at VO2 max testing. We look at inflammatory markers.
And so we can get a real sense of what's going on in the body.
And I co-founded a company called Function Health, which gives you access to over 110 biomarkers for less than 500 bucks.
You can get checked twice a year.
It's a membership model.
And it's amazing people we found.
We've had over 20,000 people go through.
We've had over a million biomarkers tested.
And the things we're finding are just shocking
because this is a health-forward population.
And we're seeing 95% with LDL particle number problems,
89% with small LDL.
We're seeing 51% with high ApoB,
which is a big risk factor for heart disease.
We're seeing 30% with high ANA, which is an autoimmune marker,
46% with high CRP. It's amazing's amazing like 20 with severe vitamin d deficiency it's like amazing right
so if you don't look you don't see it and and by the way um you know functional medicine uh what
function health is doing what fountain is doing both of them based on on function on functional
medicine is you is root cause.
It is nothing I ever learned about in medical school, but it is the most important basis
for me for choosing a physician.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, they're the only ones thinking about the network effect of everything that's
happening in your body.
I mean, the body is a network.
And when you go to the doctor, they're focused on a reductionist disease-based model. And so you're
such a super specialist. And it's amazing to me how limited training is. When you're an X, Y,
or Z specialist, you really have no clue about anything else. And it's just like, I'm like,
wow, well, the body's a system. So how do you treat one thing without thinking of everything? I just can't do that. My brain doesn't work that way. I see everything together, I'm like, wow, well, the body's a system. So how do you treat one thing without thinking of everything?
I just can't do that.
My brain doesn't work that way.
I see everything together.
I'm like, okay, well, here's the hierarchy of problems.
Here's the hierarchy of solutions.
Let's get going.
Well, buddy, listen, first of all, I take great joy and confidence in knowing that our
diet, our sleep plan, our exercise plan, our
supplement plan, our med plan is very similar.
It's very similar.
So that's great.
I love that.
I love that.
Yeah.
And I'm also excited you're moving to LA.
Yeah.
And third, when you get here, I'm open for a sunrise walk on the beach here.
All right.
Down.
Awesome.
Awesome.
Well, listen, Pat, thank you so much for joining me on Moonshots
again. And as always, grateful for you in my life. And me too. And thanks for what you're doing,
Peter, just to make the world a better place. You're a big force for good. Thank you, buddy.
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