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- [00:01]
Dan Buettner
I've spent decades studying the world's longest of people and written several New York Times best selling cookbooks about how they eat. But here's the truth. Even I don't always have time to cook from scratch. That's the gap blue zone kitchen meals fill. We now have served over 3 million of these meals built on the same principles. Whole foods, nothing processed, maniacally delicious. When you have the time, cook from scratch by all means. But when you got only five minutes, grab a blue zones kitchen meal from the freezer aisle or go to bluezoneskitchen.com Same principles, real life conveniences. That's how to set up your life for longevity. See you when you're 100.
- [00:50]
Dr. Steve Austad
What's turning out to be really fascinating is that aging rate is not fixed, which means that we could actually manipulate it. Modern life has sort of changed all the things that used to keep us healthy.
- [01:04]
Interviewer
What are some of the most promising types of drugs to produce that 150 year old human?
- [01:10]
Dr. Steve Austad
I think the most promising thing right now is.
- [01:14]
Interviewer
Hi, I'm Dan Buettner and today I'm talking to Dr. Steve Austead, who believes that the secrets to longevity might already exist in the animal kingdom. Steve's nature is smarter than we think philosophy suggests that species like the 500 year old clam and long lived bats have already solved the problems of aging. Today we're exploring how we can learn from these creatures to slow down our own biological clock and redefine how to grow old.
- [01:46]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well.
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Interviewer
So Steve, what do animals teach us about aging?
- [01:51]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well, what animals teach us about aging is that it can happen at an incredibly wide range of rates. Some animals are old in days, some in weeks, some in months, some in centuries. And I think the important thing about that is that we have things to learn, particularly from the ones that live a very long time.
- [02:12]
Interviewer
You wrote this great book, Methuselah Zoo.
- [02:16]
Dr. Steve Austad
Yes.
- [02:17]
Interviewer
Which by the way, it's a phenomenal read. It reads like your favorite uncle explaining to you the fundamentals of aging, but also these interesting stories about animals. But what are the longest lived animals?
- [02:33]
Dr. Steve Austad
The longest live ones that are animals in the way that we think of animals are probably the clams. There are at least 20 species of clams that live. They're known to live over 100 years. The longest lived ones are over 500 years. And the way we know that, because we know that very precisely, is they have growth rings in their shells, just like trees have growth rings. So you can determine the age of a clam to the year. So for instance, we know that one famous clam, the most famous clam in the world, his name was Ming, was born in 1499 and died in 2007 when a researcher killed it because they knew how old it was.
- [03:17]
Interviewer
Is there something we can maybe extract from clams and give to humans or an insight we can learn from clams that are theoretically transferable?
- [03:27]
Dr. Steve Austad
I think so. One of the things that we did. So I studied these clams for a number of years, and one of the things we learned about them is that they have some substance in their tissues, and we don't know what that is yet that keeps their proteins from misfolding and clumping together. And that protein clumping together is at the base of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease and some types of muscular dystrophy and probably a lot of other things that we don't know about, because proteins, to act correctly, have to be folded very precisely, like origami, and over time, they get damaged. And as they get damaged, they get sticky, and that's what causes them to clump. But these clams have some way of preventing that from happening, because we've actually taken basically the juice from the clam and we've put the protein that we think causes Alzheimer's disease in it and tried to make it clump together, and we couldn't do it. So whatever that substance is, it could potentially be a therapy for a lot of diseases. Wow.
- [04:35]
Interviewer
So Alzheimer's researchers ought to be investigating clams, potentially.
- [04:40]
Dr. Steve Austad
Gotta be thinking about it. Yes. Fortunately, my former graduate student who did most of the work on this, now a professor, is in fact, working on this problem.
- [04:49]
Interviewer
What are the longest lived mammals?
- [04:52]
Dr. Steve Austad
Longest lived mammals are, well, the terrestrial ones. The ones that live on the Earth are us. And this is one of the things that makes aging research kind of strange if you look at it from the outside, because here we are, the longest alive terrestrial mammal. But the way we try to study aging is we study mice. And mice are among the shortest live mammals. Now, in the ocean, there are a number of species that live longer than we do. The long slide mammal that we know about is a bowhead whale. And this is the second or third largest whale on the planet. It's also the one that lives in the coldest water. And I think that there may be something to be said about living in a cold environment, because the longest live fish that we know, which is a Greenland shark, also is the only shark that lives as far north as it does. Both of these live in polar waters.
- [05:47]
Interviewer
And how long do they live?
- [05:49]
Dr. Steve Austad
The bowhead whale, we know it lives over 200 years, probably around 250. And the Greenland shark, up to 400 years.
- [05:56]
Dan Buettner
Wow.
- [05:57]
Interviewer
How about the fish we eat? What are the longest lived fish we eat?
- [06:02]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well, the longest lived of those is probably sturgeon. We have a good, a sturgeon from actually from the Midwest that's known to live 157 years. And again, for normal fish, we could tell very precisely because they have these bones in their ears that also get growth rings just like trees and just like clams.
- [06:22]
Interviewer
How about sea bass?
- [06:24]
Dr. Steve Austad
And yeah, most fish, I mean, it's quite interesting, fish seem to live longer the colder the water they're in. And that may be because they live slower in colder water. There's a whole group of fishes called rockfishes, about 100 species of these. And the ones that live in shallow water that you might see scuba diving are the ones that only live 10 or 15 years. But the ones that live in the deep ocean can live over 200 years. And they're very closely related. So it's quite possible we could learn something by comparing the shortest lived ones and the longest lived ones.
- [07:02]
Interviewer
Talking about Methuselah Zoo, what was the most important point that book makes or points?
- [07:10]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well, I think the most important point it made is that you really need to think about learning from nature. Nature has produced animals that are much more successful at combating the degenerative processes of aging and than humans are. And because nature has had billions of species and billions of years to experiment, it's quite likely that it's come up with some solutions that we're unlikely to come up with. I like to say nature's smarter than we are.
- [07:41]
Interviewer
Besides clams and these cold water fish, what other species teach us?
- [07:47]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well, there's bats of all things. Now, bats don't live 100 or 200 years, but you have to sort of calculate aging by the size of the animal. So smaller animals live shorter lives. They live faster lives too. So bats live faster lives than we do. But on the other hand, if you scale it to their body size, they live a lot longer than we do. So they process, they have more heartbeats in a lifetime, they process more energy in a lifetime. So if you look at humans, we live about four and a half times as long as most mammals our size. If you look at bats, they live up to 10 times as long as animals of that size. And the other interesting thing, because I know that you're particularly interested in health, as am I, is that they seem to stay healthy right to the end. Because when I say bat can live 40 years, I mean in the wild, not in a zoo somewhere. Think about this. They've had to be able to fly 50 to 100 miles a night in the dark, find their way back. They need to eat an insect about every five seconds while they're feeding in order not to starve to death. And they need to be able to locate their pup if maybe there's a million bats in this cave that they just left. So they have to find their way back and then they have to find their pup. So they have to have an incredible spatial memory. And that's one of the first things that we lose is spatial memory. They have to have the kind of endurance to fly that, the agility to catch insects out of the air. And here's a really interesting thing. Insect eating. Bats find insects with their hearing by echolocation. So they've got to preserve their high frequency hearing for decades, which is longer than we do. You know, by the time we're teenagers, we've lost a lot of that high frequency hearing.
- [09:41]
Interviewer
You did your PhD on gaming theory and opossums, what do we learn from opossum behavior?
- [09:49]
Dr. Steve Austad
I think what we learned from opossums is that there is a strategy that's based on living fast, reproducing fast and aging fast. And that's what they do. But they're very successful. Opossums are all over the United States, all over Central and South America. Franklin, that reason. So evolutionary success does not depend on living a long time. In fact, living a long time, if you think about it, could make us vulnerable because things that live a long time usually take a long time to start reproducing. They can't evolve very fast because evolution depends on generation time. So if the environment is changing very fast, things that reproduce fast and don't live very long can adapt to, to it faster than we can. Of course, we have our brains to help us adapt to it so we don't have to do it biologically necessarily.
- [10:44]
Interviewer
You also wrote a, a book that was very fundamental to my work called why We Age. In fact, when I, as I was just starting to write the first Blue Zones book, I called you, and you very generously, A, took my call, but B, endured my very elementary questions. But for the audience listening here, in sort of simple terms, what is the definition of aging? How do we age?
- [11:09]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well, I think the definition is pretty straightforward, although my colleagues spend endless hours arguing about it. I think it's the gradual loss of Function over time that pretty much every animal species is prone to. What I was interested in at the time, and what really got me into the field is I was interested, well, why do we age at all? Why is aging so ubiquitous? If you think about it, nature is just wonderful at taking a fertilized egg and turning it into a healthy adult, whether it's a fish or a human. So it would seem to be a lot easier just to maintain that adult once you had made it. But for some reason, and I think we understand this reason evolutionarily, our bodies gradually deteriorate. And that's not just us, that's dogs, that's mice, that's fish, that's pretty much everything. Answering that fundamental question is actually what got me interested in aging in the first place. I never even thought about the human implications. Probably for the first 15 years that I was studying aging, there's something about
- [12:16]
Interviewer
seven years, that mortality doubles every seven years. In other words, each seven years we get older, our chances of dying doubles. What happens in our body that causes that or these external forces then?
- [12:32]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well, I think what causes that seven year mortality rate doubling? And that, by the way, seems to be relatively independent of the environment. For instance, if you look 100 years ago, when life expectancy is very different than it is now, life expectancy was
- [12:48]
Interviewer
what, 55 or so?
- [12:49]
Dr. Steve Austad
Yeah, let's say 50. Okay, 55. But if you look at the rate of increase in our mortality rate with age, it was just what it is today. It just was higher at all, at all ages. So what goes wrong? Pretty much everything. So our mitochondria that produce all our energy become less functional. Our DNA gets damaged, and that's mostly repaired. Each cell in your body is damaged about 10,000 times a day. That's an enormous amount of.
- [13:19]
Interviewer
Really. How, Wait, how does. So this, this cell right here on my face is being damaged 10,000 times a day?
- [13:27]
Dr. Steve Austad
Yeah. In the time that we've been talking here, you've probably had close to a billion bits of DNA damage in your body.
- [13:35]
Interviewer
I'm surprised I'm still sitting here.
- [13:37]
Dr. Steve Austad
Right, right.
- [13:38]
Interviewer
What do you mean? What kind of damage? What kind of billion. What's happening?
- [13:42]
Dr. Steve Austad
DNA strain. So it's a double helix. Right. It looks like a twisted ladder. So each of the strands gets broken. Some of the DNA letters that code for all the protein, some of those get damaged, some of them get changed. Now the remarkable thing is that almost all of that is repaired.
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Interviewer
That's fascinating.
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Dr. Steve Austad
And, but ultimately.
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Interviewer
But not 100%.
- [14:02]
Dr. Steve Austad
Not 100%. Not quite 100%. So over time, that damage accumulates. The cell replication machinery, the thing that makes our cells, you know, the cells in your skin are replaced about every 30 days. The cells in your intestines, even more often than that. Some of the cells, your cells, are almost permanent. So your brain cells are pretty much the ones that you were born with.
- [14:26]
Interviewer
All of those, we don't get any more brain cells.
- [14:28]
Dr. Steve Austad
Very few. Very few. And that's one of the problems with diseases like Alzheimer's disease, is once those cells are damaged and die, they don't come back. And so it makes it very difficult to treat those diseases. So DNA damage. Proteins get old, too. One of my early studies on opossums, I actually looked at aging in their tendons. And tendons age. This is why athletes get injured more often as they get older. That happens because of protein, aging your tendons.
- [15:01]
Interviewer
Wait, what do you mean, protein? Is this some subcellular, or are we just talking muscle?
- [15:07]
Dr. Steve Austad
No, no, we're talking if. So your tendon is basically made out of a single protein called collagen. Okay, okay. And as it ages, there are certain things that stick to it. Actually, sugar sticks to it, and it's a simple function. The same thing happens to meat. So if you put meat out, it'll brown. It'll gradually get brown. Right. Even if you put it in the freezer, if you leave it there long enough, it gradually browns. The same thing goes on in your body.
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Interviewer
What is that browning from?
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Dr. Steve Austad
It's from sugar being attached to the proteins in the meat.
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Interviewer
We don't think of sugar and meat together, though, do we?
- [15:44]
Dr. Steve Austad
We don't. We don't. But it's an inevitable process that happens. Our cells use sugar, for the most part, to produce energy.
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Interviewer
Yes.
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Dr. Steve Austad
By doing that, some of that sugar ends up attached to proteins, and that changes them. That makes them actually sticky. So adjoining proteins might stick together. And that happens in your tendons and in your ligaments. And. And you can even see it. If you expose the tendon of 100-year-old, it would look kind of yellowish.
- [16:11]
Interviewer
And that's why older people aren't as flexible.
- [16:14]
Dr. Steve Austad
Yeah, exactly. And that's why athletes more often get injured as they get into their 30s and 40s. And how about muscles?
- [16:23]
Interviewer
What happens to our muscles as we age?
- [16:25]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well, some of the same things happen to them, but also the energy in muscles comes from the mitochondria that are really packed tightly into muscles, and. And those gradually get damaged. Now, mitochondria produce something, free radicals. Right. And so those free radicals are inside the mitochondria. So it makes them very vulnerable to damage.
- [16:48]
Interviewer
So I think of mitochondria as those little factories inside our cells that combine glucose with oxygen and produce energy. But a byproduct is this free radical which kind of rusts us from the inside out.
- [17:01]
Dr. Steve Austad
Yeah, that's a very good description of it. Those things gradually become damaged over time. And actually mitochondria are one of the few things that can be replaced all the time. So those mitochondria, and usually when people see diagrams of these, they see two or three mitochondria in a cell. But cells can have thousands and thousands of mitochondria in them. And inside each of those, they have their own DNA. That DNA gets damaged and that DNA is critical for them producing energy. So muscles lose mitochondrial energy and they shrink. And then also every time a muscle is damaged, sort of, you have these muscle stem cells and those actually help repair the damage, but those become less effective at repair.
- [17:45]
Interviewer
Do we grow more muscle cells over time or do we have a limited number of them?
- [17:50]
Dr. Steve Austad
We don't, but we repair muscle cells. Now, when people lift weights and their muscles expand, that's not because they're getting more cells, it's because those cells are getting bigger to.
- [18:00]
Interviewer
Oh, they're just pump, plumping them up.
- [18:02]
Dr. Steve Austad
That's right. That's right.
- [18:05]
Interviewer
So when we calorically restrict, when we starve ourselves and you lose muscle mass, are we actually losing muscle cells we never get back or are the cells
- [18:16]
Dr. Steve Austad
we have just getting smaller there is shrinking. The muscle cells have a lot of these fibers in them that allow them to contract. Right. And so they, they shrink and they can expand. So if you went on caloric restriction and lost a bunch of weight, you would have lost fat, but you'd also have lost muscle. But you can get it back.
- [18:38]
Interviewer
Okay, so the 18 year old Dan Buettner was buff and the 65 year old Dan Buettner not so much. So why, why? And I've been lifting weights my whole life, why?
- [18:49]
Dr. Steve Austad
Your muscles no longer have so many intact mitochondria. Damn it. The fibers that are making your muscles contract get damaged over time. And also this is interesting is that fat actually invades your muscles. So some of your muscles are no longer just muscle cells. There's fat in there, there's more immune cells, and there's a lot of other stuff in muscle besides just muscle cells.
- [19:19]
Interviewer
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- [20:10]
Dan Buettner
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- [20:13]
Interviewer
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- [20:20]
Dan Buettner
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- [21:37]
Interviewer
what else is fascinating about the aging process that you've revealed in your very good books or you tell your students?
- [21:47]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well, I think what's turning out to be really fascinating is that aging rate is not fixed. It's not fixed in a species, which means that we could actually manipulate it. And we've been able to do this in laboratory animals extensively. We have dozens of ways of keeping them young and healthy longer. We're hoping that some of those things translate to humans. But even in humans, we know that depending on the way you live, you can age more quickly or more slowly. And I think that's something that you're particularly interested in. And I also am particularly interested in because we should be able to to optimize Our health better than most of us do.
- [22:33]
Interviewer
So let's talk specifically about increasing the aging rate and slowing it down. What somebody asked you both of them. So what are the best things I can do to slow down my aging process?
- [22:46]
Dr. Steve Austad
The best things at this point are probably what your mother told you. Eat sensibly, don't smoke, don't shrink excessively, stay physically active, stay mentally active. I think those two things, they literally
- [23:00]
Interviewer
slow down the process of aging, or
- [23:02]
Dr. Steve Austad
they just seem to slow down the process of aging. Now we have some molecular tools that we can actually look at inside your body, inside your blood even to sort of measure your aging rate. And we can see that it slows down when you live, you know, a healthy life.
- [23:20]
Interviewer
So if I don't smoke and I eat a whole food, plant based or whole food diet, and I'm socially connected and I get eight hours of sleep, my face will literally look younger as I get older.
- [23:33]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well, that will depend on other things. You know, our external aging is affected by our genetics, our lifestyle, but also by the environment we've been in. So if you spend a lot of time out in the sun, I have a photo of a 40 year old Italian woman who looks like she's 80. And that's because she's been a farm worker all her life. She had a pale skin to start off with and the sun has damaged her skin. That's called photo aging. So if you look at people who've spent, say nuns that have spent most of their life in a nunnery, their skin looks fantastic. But that's because first of all, they've led a pretty healthy life. And secondly, they haven't spent much time in the sun.
- [24:18]
Interviewer
So if those are the things that slow aging, what are the things that most speed up aging?
- [24:26]
Dr. Steve Austad
What speeds up aging is obesity, is smoking. And for smoking, you can even see the effects in the skin. Excessive drinking, inactivity, all of these things that we never used to do. For most of our 300,000 year history, we've been very physically active. You know, we haven't eaten excessively because food was hard to come by. But modern life has sort of changed all the things that used to keep us healthy. And you know, having worked among, among people who are still living pretty much like they did 10,000 years ago, I can tell you, even though they, they don't live exceptionally long because they have all kinds of diseases from parasites and pathogens, they don't seem to get some of the diseases that week. I've never seen anybody, let's say that Lives in New guinea and lives a hunter gatherer. I've never seen anybody with osteoporosis.
- [25:25]
Interviewer
It should be pointed out, by the way, that Steve is a fellow explorer, one of the few people I know who, like me, has spent much of their life in the hinterlands of the earth, Papua New guinea and South America. And you've started wars and you've been mauled by lions and. But I think.
- [25:45]
Dr. Steve Austad
I think that living with these people gave me some insight into what it was like to live several thousand years ago. And I think most people aren't fortunate enough to have that kind of experience. I know you've had similar experiences. You know, humans. Humans were very smart even then. They had to be to stay alive.
- [26:05]
Interviewer
And were they as smart as we are? Yes, notwithstanding. Book smarts.
- [26:09]
Dr. Steve Austad
Yeah, not book smarts. But, you know, you and I many times would have probably died in situations if we didn't have the local people to help us survive so incredibly. You know, they can tell the weather. Once when I was in New guinea, so you're surrounded in a rainforest and it's very mountainous and we've been walking for several days and I was completely lost. I said to a group about eight men, I said, which way's your village? And they all pointed in the same direction. I found that remarkable. So, yeah, we've been intelligent and I think that's a lot of our success, is our intelligence. That's why we're no longer confined to the tropics like chimpanzees. Now we cover the Earth. But that intelligence allowed us to live longer and stay healthier than virtually any other animal. The only other animal that was a lived about as long and stayed healthy about as long as hunter gatherer humans were probably elephants. They're big and they're smart, you know, and they're social, and I think that's probably key. Yeah.
- [27:18]
Interviewer
From your time in Papua New guinea with the indigenous people, what did they. Did they teach you anything about living longer?
- [27:25]
Dr. Steve Austad
They taught me that you can survive on a loss a lot less food than you thought you could survive on. Sometimes they will basically have one sweet potato in a day if. If hunting is bad. And I used to like sweet potatoes, but after spending months in the bush and eating them day after day after day, I no longer like them so much. I also learned that, that you. You should be extremely adaptable to the situation that you're in and not worry. And this is one of the things that my colleagues need to learn, not worry too much about how long you're but worry about how you're going to live, enjoying each day, you know, and, and they did. And they died at a great rate of, from, from wars, from accidents. You know, life in the, life in the jungle is hard, but they were very, very happy for the most part. And I think that's an important lesson.
- [28:23]
Interviewer
Yeah. Because it's not only how long you live, it's how much you enjoy the journey. It's not.
- [28:28]
Dr. Steve Austad
That's right, yeah.
- [28:29]
Interviewer
Not worth it. You're an optimist when it comes to how long we can live.
- [28:34]
Dr. Steve Austad
How long?
- [28:35]
Interviewer
What do you think the potential of somebody listening right now? Middle age, if everything goes right, how, how long could they maybe live?
- [28:43]
Dr. Steve Austad
If you don't have any disease genes and we probably all have a few and we live like. I think living into the 90s should be fairly routine. In fact, it already is fairly routine. Even, you know, women in Italy, for instance, a third of them live into their 90s right now. I don't think we're going to live much longer than that unless we do something about addressing the fundamental causes of aging. But as you know, I mean, some people live to 110 and are pretty healthy for most of that time. But I think that's a combination of a good lifestyle and having the right genesis. What I like to say is if you want to be a healthy, happy 80 year old, do all the things that your mother told you to do. If you want to be a healthy, happy 100-year-old, you probably need a little help from your parents. You want to have the right parents. If your parents live to be 100, it increases your chances of living to 100 by 17 times.
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Interviewer
17 times. That's best secret for longevity is have a hundred year old parent.
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Dr. Steve Austad
That's right.
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Interviewer
What if I had a 100-year-old grandparent?
- [29:53]
Dr. Steve Austad
That helps, just not quite as much.
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Interviewer
Okay, but you famously made a bet with Jay Oshansky that there's somebody alive today who's going to make it to 150. It's a billion dollar bet too. I mean, that's a lot of confidence.
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Dr. Steve Austad
It is. And that bet was made 24 years ago now. And so at that time, the oldest person to ever live that we had good records on, it was 122. And now some 24 years later, the oldest person ever is still 122.
- [30:28]
Interviewer
That doesn't look like J.L.
- [30:30]
Dr. Steve Austad
shanski. Great confidence. Right. The reason I'm confident is that we've been so successful at increasing the health and longevity of animals in the laboratory. And like I say, we know how to do that dozens of ways.
- [30:42]
Interviewer
Now, oh, give us a good example.
- [30:44]
Dr. Steve Austad
If we feed them 30 or 40% less then they want to eat, they will live 20% longer and stay healthier in pretty much every way we can measure. Another way we've done it is with drugs. There are certain drugs that we can give mice that makes them live 20, 30% longer and stay healthy longer. Now, whether those things are going to work in people is an open question. The reason I'm confident in my bet is because we have so many ways of doing it. I'm hoping that some of those translate. And actually, for me to win the bet, only one person has to live to 150. And I think for that to happen, life expectancy in some population somewhere has to be about 100 or a little over. And I think if we can target aging, we can do that. We're not gonna do that with traditional medicine. It's one of the reasons that I think Jay and I were cleverer than we thought at the time when we said 150 years. Because I don't think just getting better at diagnosing cancer, getting better an earlier heart disease, that's not going to get us there. What's going to get us there is actually targeting and basically manipulating the biology of aging again, which we know how to do in some animals.
- [32:03]
Interviewer
What are some of the most promising types of drugs or types of intervention that hold the most promise to produce that 150 year old human?
- [32:16]
Dr. Steve Austad
I think the most promising thing right now is the GLP1 drugs.
- [32:21]
Interviewer
Is that right?
- [32:22]
Dr. Steve Austad
Yeah. Which of course were not developed for aging, they were developed for diabetes. But it turns out that they have all of these effects that nobody suspected. You know, protection against dementia, protection against cardiovascular disease, protection against some forms of cancer, protection against kidney disease, addictive behavior. All of these things, if you put them all together, if someone had told me 25 years ago there'd be a drug that did all of those things, I just said, well, the only way to explain that is it's doing something to the underlying process of aging. Now, in mice, we've got a dozen or so drugs that do that, but we don't know if they're doing the same things in humans. The things about the GLP1s is that all the information that we have comes from humans. There are going to be drugs like GLP1s and maybe something that basically additive to the effects of GLP1. Now will that get us all the way to 150? Well, I don't know. But 150 is only 21% more than 122, which we've already had. And one of the other things that we've learned from the animal work is that it seems to work if you find something that targets aging, it seems to work almost as well if you start it late as if you started early. The first drug that was found to extend life in mice was not started till the mice were the equivalent of about 60.
- [33:48]
Interviewer
What was that drug?
- [33:49]
Dr. Steve Austad
That was rapamycin. And that was an accident. A lot of science turns out to be serendipity. They didn't intend that. It's just that they had problems finding out how to put the rapamycin in the food, which is the way they wanted to give it to them. And while they were working that out, they'd set these mice aside for the experiment. And they kept getting older and older and older. And by the time they figured it out, they were the equivalent of 60 years old. So they had to decide, are we going to go ahead with the experiment with those mice or start with some young mice? And then went ahead and tried it in the older mice. And they got over 30% extension in life from the time those mice started getting the drug.
- [34:32]
Interviewer
So I'm the equivalent of 60. Should I start taking rapamycin?
- [34:36]
Dr. Steve Austad
I would say no. That's because we don't use. Now, rapamycin is an interesting drug. Cause it's used in humans already. You know, it's used for people who have cardiac stents. It's embedded in the stents. It's very good at turning off cell division. And so one of the problems that happens with stents is that the cells will regrow over the stent. Rapamycin is good at that. It's good. They use it as part of an immunosuppressive cocktail for people that have had kidney transplant. So it's already used, but it's used in a very different way. And it's used in people that have health problems. And it's used at doses that are probably higher than we would use in humans, but we don't yet know.
- [35:21]
Interviewer
But if it worked for mice, why wouldn't it work for me? I'm a mammal.
- [35:24]
Dr. Steve Austad
Because mice are really poor at aging, and we're really successful at aging. And so it's quite easy to fix something that's pretty much already broken to make it better. But if something is working really well already, making it work even better is
- [35:40]
Interviewer
a bigger challenge of all the things that are tried and work on mice, what percentage those actually then later work on human?
- [35:49]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well, for diseases of aging, which we know a lot about. So for instance, Alzheimer's disease, they've had over 300 drugs in mice, versions of Alzheimer's disease that worked, and we have basically none that work that well in human. There are a couple of drugs that basically slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease a little bit and some that treat the symptoms. But 300 failures, let's just say two successes, that's extreme. About one out of 10 cancer drugs that works in mice works in humans. So mice are not great animals for trying to understand aging processes in humans. But we know so much about their biology, we're almost stuck using them because we can do very neat, very cool biology with mice.
- [36:41]
Interviewer
Yeah, a lot of people say, well, it worked on mice, so you know how to work on me. I have two ears, heart, lungs and liver, et cetera.
- [36:50]
Dr. Steve Austad
But if you had a tail, it might work, but. Well, you don't have a tail, so.
- [36:54]
Interviewer
But we haven't checked. Well, what besides GLP1s, any other types
- [37:00]
Dr. Steve Austad
of drugs that offer Metformin is another drug. That's again, there's a theme here. So metformin is the most common drug given for type 2 diabetes, and GLP1s were developed to treat diabetes. So managing sugar, managing sugar clearly is very important to managing aging. So metformin, again, there's a lot of data in humans that look very promising. There's just never been a controlled clinical trial.
- [37:31]
Interviewer
So we shouldn't be trying them on ourselves.
- [37:33]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well, metformin I think of as a different category than rapamycin because metformin's been used in people for 60 years. It's been used by millions and millions of people, and we know it has no long term horrible side effects. We don't know that yet with rapamycin. Metformin I don't think you're likely to hurt yourself with. And I know a ton of people when I give a talk to a lay audience on this, particularly if it's an older audience and I say, oh, Metformin, I see all these grins going around the audience because a lot of the people in there are on metformin
- [38:11]
Interviewer
and control their non diabetics live longer by taking metformin.
- [38:16]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well, that's the key question. That is the key question. There's a lot of epidemiology that suggests it's protective against dementia and heart disease and cancer. Now, some people have side effects and they can't really take it, but you figure that out pretty quickly.
- [38:35]
Interviewer
Do you take any supplements or drugs to help you live longer?
- [38:39]
Dr. Steve Austad
I don't. I didn't even take a multivitamin. I.
- [38:43]
Interviewer
Why?
- [38:44]
Dr. Steve Austad
Because I'm an evidence guy and I want the evidence to be there before I start doing something. Now I have nothing against it and certainly if somebody came out tomorrow and said, look, there's really compelling evidence that if you take daily vitamin D, you're going to stay healthy 10 years longer. I do it in a heartbeat.
- [39:06]
Interviewer
You're a curious guy and constant flow of ideas. And one of the ideas you were telling me about was this, this poly drug, poly pill that you thought it might benefit a whole population of people to take it. What is that drug?
- [39:24]
Dr. Steve Austad
Yes. So a poly pill is a pill that contains a fixed combination of drugs. And the poly pill that I'm interested in is one that would contain a statin to lower your cholesterol, some antihypertensives to keep your blood pressure low and low, dose metformin. And the reason I like the polypill idea is now people who are extremely healthy are probably not gonna benefit from the polypill. But a lot of people don't know that they have high blood pressure, you know, high cholesterol, or they're pre diabetic. And my thought is that for people who rarely go to the doctor, who don't really keep in touch with their health, that taking a polypill every day would probably be beneficial. In fact, there's been about a dozen studies over the last 20 years of things very similar that have all shown a benefit. Now the important thing about the polypill is the one that I've sort of designed in my mind it's all drugs that are off patent.
- [40:31]
Interviewer
So what would they be? It'd be a statin.
- [40:32]
Dr. Steve Austad
It'd be a statin, a calcium channel blocker, let's say metformin, let's say those three. And the big advantage is it's one pill once a day. Now people are notoriously non compliant in taking their medications, but one pill once a day is something that pretty much anybody can do. In fact, one of the studies that was done in my home state of Alabama, people were 86% compliant, which is really high for this was a particularly disadvantaged population. So I think we could help the people that need it the most with the poly pill. Of course it'd be better if they started exercising and they stopped smoking and they did all those things. But I think realistically that's. That's not likely to happen. Yeah.
- [41:21]
Interviewer
So 70% of Americans are obese and or overweight. 75% of them don't even get 20 minutes of physical activity. So this kind of targeted at most of the US population. At what age might you start taking this?
- [41:35]
Dr. Steve Austad
Probably around 50, 55. You'd have to screen them a bit. You wouldn't want anybody who had, let's say, exceptionally low blood pressure to start off with. That's usually not a problem for Americans as exceptional, excessively low blood pressure.
- [41:49]
Interviewer
So if I'm your 15 year old son and I say to you, dad, what should I do to live the longest I can, what advice are you giving?
- [42:00]
Dr. Steve Austad
First thing I would say is stay physically active. Now most 15 year olds are already physically active and you don't have to encourage them. But what you do need to say is stay physically active. You know, when you get a job and get married and stay, what does that mean?
- [42:16]
Interviewer
What's the minimum?
- [42:17]
Dr. Steve Austad
Just doing, doing a reasonable amount of physical activity. I don't mean necessarily going to the gym. I think going to the gym is fine. But a lot of people really don't like to sweat. They don't like to do this. And I don't think you really have to do that. The physical activity is good for keeping your muscles in reasonable shape. You don't have to have massive muscles, you just have to have muscles that work. One of the things that we've discovered in the last few years, it was a shock to me, is that physical activity is good for your brain too. Turns out your muscles produce these things. They even have a name, Myokines that get into your brain. And for some reason we know that staying physically active is protective against Alzheimer's disease.
- [42:57]
Interviewer
Is it 30 minute walk a day? Sufficient?
- [43:00]
Dr. Steve Austad
Yeah, every day. That's consistent with the best advice that physicians have right now is 30 minutes of moderate activity a day. That's actually more than is required. They say if you do that five days a week, that that's sufficient activity. So yeah, I would certainly tell my 15 year old son, regardless of what else you're doing, when you get older, make it a priority to get some physical activity. I also think that's good psychologically. I know myself, I feel a lot better after, you know, I do some physical activity. Don't smoke. That would probably be the number one thing. But that's one of the things that we've, we've been fairly successful at getting people to suck. Watch what you eat, you know, don't get obese. For most people if you stay physically active, I don't think that you'll probably get obese. That's not 100% true, but. And then I'd probably say it's equally important to stay mentally active. And there are lots of ways to be mentally active. Learning new things, liking to read. But also I think part of mental activity is interacting with other people. Because when you interact with other people, you're exchanging information, you're getting new ideas, you're stimulating all kinds of things in your brain that I think is good. So hermits, as far as I know, do not live particularly long lives.
- [44:26]
Interviewer
What are the most dangerous myths, the anti aging myths out there?
- [44:32]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well, I think the most dangerous ones now is there are so many things on the market that are advertised, that are marketed as anti aging products that have no evidence to support them, that people think of. Well, if I take this, I don't have to do all of the other things that I need to do.
- [44:50]
Interviewer
What are some of those ones you really don't like?
- [44:54]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well, all the antioxidants, for one thing. All the antioxidants, the supplements, even things that were really popular initially. So there was a paper a few years ago that said taurine supplements are very beneficial. And a few years later a paper came out that basically debunked pretty much everything that was in that paper that didn't get nearly as much attention as the original paper. Some of the things that are out there may turn out to be beneficial. The sort of NAD precursors. We don't know that they're beneficial yet in humans, but we don't think they're toxic. We just don't have enough information.
- [45:34]
Interviewer
All right, just quick fire scale, 1 to 10, 10. They probably beneficial. One not at all. Okay.
- [45:41]
Dr. Steve Austad
Creatine beneficial for building muscle, probably 8. Beneficial for living longer.
- [45:47]
Interviewer
Living longer.
- [45:48]
Dr. Steve Austad
Probably 2 for living longer. Yeah. Stem cells at this point, 1.
- [45:54]
Interviewer
Vitamin C, 1.
- [45:56]
Dr. Steve Austad
Vitamin E, 1.
- [45:58]
Interviewer
Omega 3 fatty acids, 4. NAD 3. Resveratrol, 1. Beans.
- [46:10]
Dr. Steve Austad
Beans. 3.
- [46:13]
Dan Buettner
That's all?
- [46:14]
Dr. Steve Austad
Yeah, yeah.
- [46:16]
Interviewer
Well, anything you put up in the
- [46:18]
Dr. Steve Austad
eight or nine category, not supplements, not, not drugs, not at this point. Exercise, I'd put nine, I mean, something
- [46:26]
Interviewer
we put in our mouth.
- [46:27]
Dr. Steve Austad
No, I'm, I'm, you know, my, my thought is, and I know we probably have a different idea of this, so I think the timing of when you eat is probably as important, maybe more important than what you eat. You know, we used to, for most of our history we've eaten, you know, when it's light or when it's dusk. Or dawn. And now we eat it all kind, we snack all the time and we
- [46:51]
Interviewer
never, I call it a seafood diet. We see food and we eat it.
- [46:55]
Dr. Steve Austad
That's right, that's right. So that's, that's new. And you combine that with, you know, lack of physical activity, evidence on the timing of eating is actually getting better and better and better. So the idea that if you fast for a certain number of hours a day, at least 12 hours a day or more, and if you eat between at times, let's say when the sun would normally be up, that seems to be as effect, almost as effective as restricting your calories.
- [47:29]
Interviewer
People who listen to this podcast love to, to hear what, what they should do or at least what they should think about doing. So you know, from what you've distillation of all these studies, what kind of general advice might you give people about when they should start eating and when they should stop eating?
- [47:48]
Dr. Steve Austad
Choose a window, a time window that works for your schedule. Maybe it's having your first meal at 8 o' clock and your last meal at 6 o'. Clock. So that's a 10 hour time window. That means you're fasting for 14 hours. And we know that fasting physiology, which seems to be extremely beneficial, it, you know, it helps repair DNA better and all that would work for some people. For other people it might be 8, it might be 10 to 8, whatever works for your schedule. But don't snack at the other times. That's a way in that time feel like you can eat whatever you want. I mean, it's better if you eat healthy food in that time. But I think that's the best dietary advice that I could give at this time. Now, we don't know if it's going to make you live longer, but all the indications are that that kind of diet, it'll keep you from getting obese. If you're obese, you'll start losing weight and those two things typically improve your health.
- [48:45]
Interviewer
Is it, would it be even better if I had my first meal at noon and my last meal at 6?
- [48:52]
Dr. Steve Austad
Probably, probably would be better, but that's harder to do. The thing that we've known for 80 years now is that for rats and mice, at least if you feed them less, they will live longer. But what we also know is we know people can't do that. You know, people simply can't do that. The longest study has been two years and you tell people to restrict 25% and they end up restricting about half that much. Okay, but people can go 12, 14, 16 hours a day without eating. Especially if they can eat all they want when they do eat.
- [49:27]
Interviewer
You think there's a benefit of two meals a day over three meals a day?
- [49:30]
Dr. Steve Austad
I hope there is because that's what I do.
- [49:34]
Interviewer
What's your pattern? What do you eat?
- [49:35]
Dr. Steve Austad
My pattern is that I eat my first meal around 11 and I try to eat my last meal no later than seven. I don't always stick to that because I'm traveling and all, but that's, that's the pattern that I try to keep.
- [49:48]
Interviewer
And no snacking in between.
- [49:50]
Dr. Steve Austad
Snacking is breaking your fast. That's the problem with it.
- [49:53]
Interviewer
And what's your, what foods would you that evidence suggests people should be avoiding?
- [50:00]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well, I mean there's quite a bit of evidence that says eating, eating red meat is not the best thing for you and I love red meat, so I hate to hear that. But the evidence certainly does support that, you know, a heavily plant based diet is. There's tons of evidence saying that that's a healthier diet than a heavily meat based diet. Over the long term.
- [50:23]
Interviewer
Are you as worried about ultra processed food and sugar as the sort of common wisdom would have us believe?
- [50:30]
Dr. Steve Austad
I personally am not. I don't think you can lump all ultra processed food together. I think it depends on the food. There are certain ultra processed foods that I think are fine and others that may not be, that probably aren't. I think that's an easy rule and if you avoid ultra processed foods, you can't help but benefit.
- [50:54]
Interviewer
Any foods that we ought to load up on that favor our longevity, I
- [50:59]
Dr. Steve Austad
don't think we know enough about that. And I also think that our individual biology is different enough that it's going to be hard to tell. My thought is I would want to sequence your genome first and actually know about more about the genome than we currently know and then do it. So for instance, I have some close relatives who went on a ketogenic diet to lose weight and it was dramatically successful. One of them lost over £100. That had to be beneficial for his health. Even though ketogenic diets loading up on fat not typically good for your health. But that person's spouse who was not obese went on the same ketogenic diet and for only about a week because she felt no energy, she felt terrible on it. So it was great for him in the short run, horrible for her. So I don't think there's a one size fits all diet that everybody should do.
- [52:01]
Interviewer
I know in Birmingham where you're A professor. You also started to get involved in trying to make that a healthier city, and it's one of the least healthy areas in the country. So if you were going to take what you've learned over the years and apply it to a city, what kinds of things would you do?
- [52:19]
Dr. Steve Austad
I would try to get more organized physical activity in the areas that need it most. There's a number of ways to do that. One of the ways that interests me is sort of having activity concierges, having students, let's say, go into the neighborhoods where they've grown up and lived and having them sort of organize group walks, because sometimes people don't want to walk. But you can go in and you say, hey, come on, come on. We're going to just walk down to the park and back. I think that that might do something in these neighborhoods. That's probably where I would start, because I would say if we can get people more physically active, that's the road to a lot of other good things happening. Once they get more physically active, they might get more attentive to their health and they might think more about what they eat. You know, that southern fried chicken, it tastes really good, and maybe I can have it once a week, but I certainly don't want to have it five times a week.
- [53:16]
Interviewer
In all, all your years of studying animals and humans and focusing on longevity, what else surprised you that most people don't know?
- [53:28]
Dr. Steve Austad
Well, one of the surprising things that happened in all the mouse studies, and we don't know if this is true yet for humans, is that most of the drugs that we've discovered that successfully make them live longer only work in one sex, and nobody suspected that that was going to be the case. About 70% of the drugs only work in male mice. That's a shock.
- [53:51]
Interviewer
Well, men, females, and males are way more different than we think, at least in.
- [53:57]
Dr. Steve Austad
Yes, they are. Almost everything we can think of in aging, even the way we experience pain.
- [54:02]
Interviewer
If the US Government decided that they really wanted to put investments increasing longevity, increasing healthy life expectancy in Americans, what would they do?
- [54:17]
Dr. Steve Austad
I would say at this point, I would deploy funding into testing, evaluating in human trials a number of the things that we know. Slow aging in animals, because there are ways to do human trials that you don't have to study humans for 50 years to figure out if this is work. You could do it in five or six years.
- [54:39]
Interviewer
In the meantime, what are those that have worked on animals that we might be trying on humans?
- [54:44]
Dr. Steve Austad
Oh, there are tons of drugs. There's SGL2 inhibitors. There's a hormone called 17 alpha estradiol. It's, it's an estrogen but it's a non feminizing estrogen. Of course there's rapamycin, there's metformin. Metformin for all the promise has never had a real clinical trial for healthy aging. And I think that we should be doing that. But at the same time we need to really be working on personalized diets. I would put money into figuring out for my particular genetics and life experience what's the best diet that I could be on. Now should I go on a vegetarian diet? Maybe that's the case. Or should I not? Or could I. Could I eat meat five times a week and it not be so I would do those things. There are other things that of course would be good, but there. But people are resistant to change, as you know very, very well. The only thing in my lifetime that we've been really successful at changing human behavior is the smoking behavior. You can tell people don't be obese. How long have we been telling people not to be obese? And what's happening.
- [55:54]
Interviewer
Right, we keep getting more obese.
- [55:56]
Dr. Steve Austad
Yeah. So I just say telling people stuff doesn't work. But maybe helping people, helping people live a better life. So finding ways, well, like you do, you know, go into a community and say let's figure out how we can help you people do a better job of it.
- [56:10]
Interviewer
Rockstar biologist Steve Austead. Thank you very much. And you bet a billion dollars will be a human alive today will make it to 150. I hope you win that bet.
- [56:21]
Dr. Steve Austad
Thank you.