Transcript
A (0:18)
Welcome to Health Em Veritas. I'm Harlan Krumholz.
B (0:20)
And I'm Howie Forman. Where physicians and professors at Yale University, we're trying to get closer to the truth about health and healthcare. We're, we have a very special episode to start off our fifth season and I really can't imagine our fifth season, fifth season. I know it's hard to believe.
A (0:36)
Oh my God, Howie.
B (0:38)
And I can't imagine anyone better to be on the pod with movie swirling about right now than Eric Topol, who we had back on.
A (0:45)
How did, how did we snag Eric Topol? That is extreme.
B (0:49)
We luckily had him on December 1, 2022, in the middle of probably a different COVID wave on episode 58 of the podcast. And now we're able to get him back because he is he just published.
A (1:05)
His newest book, let's sell some of these books because it's a terrific book. It's a really terrific.
B (1:09)
It is a fantastic book. Super Agers An Evidence Based Approach to Longevity. And before he was on the podcast last time, he had launched Ground Truths, which is an amazing newsletter substack. And he's been doing his own podcasts and videos as well. So we're going to try to touch on those topics. I do want to start off with the book and point out to our listeners first of all, that you do a deep dive on an array of topics that are far afield from your specialty of cardiology and really look at the evidence from all angles. And I wanted to ask you, what are the biggest surprises that you think that a reader or our listeners might learn from this book? That may not be apparent if you're reading the popular press every day.
C (2:03)
Yeah, I think the biggest thing was that everyone considers their genetics as their risk for getting a particular disease, age related disease. And turns out that's just a minor component. And as we've learned in recent years, it's really the immune system. How well that hangs on as we get older with respect to protection or getting dysregulated. The immune system is key. And you know, if I go back, I probably become an immunologist and a computer scientist rather than a cardiologist because that's the center of all this right now. And age related diseases. If you get your immune system just right, I think that's the ticket for most people.
B (2:47)
It really is remarkable. I mean, you think about the number of people who can have a relatively healthy young middle part of their lives and then the immune system dysregulates later in life. And you have all sorts of things. We always think about things like arthritis or hepatitis, things like that, or liver dysfunction, but there's just so many things including neurologic implications of that over time. And we're learning more every day. And you go into that in every, like practically every chapter. But you have a specific chapter on the immune system in the book.