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The Dr. Hyman Show
The Longevity Code: How Purpose, Connection, and Science Are Rewriting Aging Episode Description:
00:41:30
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- [00:00]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman show, one of the biggest factors in terms of your risk for premature death is loneliness. Being lonely and socially isolated is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. That's really serious. Magnesium doesn't get the spotlight like vitamin D or omega 3s, but it should. It helps regulate mood, hormones, energy, sleep and even blood sugar. And yet most of us are either deficient or barely scraping by thanks to stress, caffeine, processed food and even depleted soil. That's where magnesium Breakthrough from Bioptimizers comes in. Unlike typical supplements that only use one form, this delivers seven forms of magnesium to support key systems in the body like your brain, muscles, digestion, heart and stress response all in one capsule. You get support for sleep, mood, focus and energy without the harsh laxative side effects that come from using the wrong form. Whether you're dealing with occasional tension, hormonal shifts, or just feel off, Magnesium Breakthrough helps fill in the gap fast. Go to bioptimizers.com hyman to get 10% off today before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one on one, there just isn't enough time in the day. So I've built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education and community, check out my private membership, the Hyman Hive for live Q&As, exclusive content and direct connection. For real time, lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also Explore my curated doctor trusted supplements and health products@doctor hyman.com and if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad free with Hyman plus just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your 7 day free trial.
- [01:40]
Peter Diamandis
Mindset and attitude is probably one of the most important things you know. It's if you think you're going to die, you can will yourself to death. Who do you hang out with? Right? Are you hanging out with people at the very end of their life or you hang out with people who are youthful? Your mindset is so fundamentally important. And do you have a vision? Is the vision for the years ahead of you bigger than the vision for the years behind you? You know, I mean, that's fundamental. Fundamental, right? I'm more excited to be alive now than I ever have, and the projects I have are going to keep me going for the next few hundred years. So I'M super pumped about that.
- [02:20]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, no, you're right. You know, it's really true. When you look at meaning and purpose, it actually directly correlates with longevity. And optimists live longer even if they're wrong. And I actually spent a lot of time this last week with a 99 year old man who is brilliant, still working. I said, so what are your interests? Well, I'm interested in longevity. And he was 99 years old. He's talking about the projects he's working on, the movies, the film he's making, the. I mean, he's just. It's really stunning to me to see someone that age be so engaged in life and joyful and, and committed to his friends and his community and his family, active. I mean, I was like, wow, that is just really remarkable. You know, you probably know him, Norman Lear. He's just an amazing guy.
- [03:07]
Peter Diamandis
Oh, I love Norman Lear.
- [03:09]
Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm just like, to be able to be that up close and personal with him and, and hear him talking about his life and his stories, but also talking about what he's dreaming about for the future. You know, his dreaming about the future. And that's pretty exciting to me.
- [03:23]
Peter Diamandis
There's another category of what you can do right now that's important. And I jokingly call it not dying from something stupid.
- [03:32]
Dr. Mark Hyman
There you go.
- [03:33]
Peter Diamandis
But it's really important.
- [03:36]
Dr. Mark Hyman
I call it how to Die Young as late as possible.
- [03:38]
Peter Diamandis
Okay, so here's the realization. All of us are optimists about our lives, about what's going on inside our body. We think we're fine, we're great moving along. We're rushing to work and to vacation and spending time with our families. And that's all awesome, but we actually have no idea what's going on inside our bodies. Until you end up with a pain in your side in the hospital. And the doctor says, listen, I hate to tell you this, but whatever it is. And so this is the work that I had done early on in Human Longevity. And really we've taken it the next level with a platform called Fountain Life. We talk about Fountain Life in the book, but it's the notion that every year I go for a digital upload. I go to HLI Human Longevity Inc. Or Fountain Life, and I do a full body mri. Head to toe brain, brain vasculature, A clearly coronary CTA that uses AI to look for soft plaque versus calcified plaque. Calcified plaque is safe. It's the soft plaque that can rupture that you have to worry about.
- [04:51]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yes, yes.
- [04:52]
Peter Diamandis
DEXA scan my genome, my microbiome, my omics and so forth. And my goal is two things. Has anything changed in the last year I need to know about and is there anything, you know. So first of all, it's given me a baseline of this is where my body is. Like originally when I first did it, I saw I had a large aortic root where the aorta enters the heart. And it was like, is that dangerous? Should I be concerned? But then after doing it four or five times, it didn't change. That's just me. That's just normal for me. But we have found in like 14, 15% of people who've come through it, and these are all relatively wealthy.
- [05:41]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Who.
- [05:42]
Peter Diamandis
Can get the, any hair health care they want, who are typically in their 50s, 60s, 70s, two and a half percent have an aneurysm they didn't know about, 2% of cancer they don't know about. And all in all, I think the number was like 14 or 15% have something that they need to know about that's going to impact their, their health. And so that's my, you know, wear your seatbelt, get yourself uploaded every year and if you find something, take action. People say, I don't want to know. And I call bullshit. Of course you want to know, because you can do a lot about things right now.
- [06:21]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Absolutely. I think when you're talking about, it's really important, Peter, because what you're talking about is sort of a host of diagnostics that often are not something we would get in traditional doctors. Hopefully the prices are going to come down so we can get them. But you know, there's a lot of imaging, a lot of diagnostics that are great, but then there's a whole layer of things that doctors aren't looking at. And I see this all the time, you know, with people who are coming to see me. For functional medicine, there's subclinical changes that happen and you can detect changes in your biology and physiology decades before you ever get a symptom or before you get diagnosed with the disease. Whether it's insulin resistance that you can see early on by raising, looking at insulin levels after a meal or, or fasting insulin, which is the first thing you go up way before your blood sugar goes up, or whether there's low grade autoimmune disease, or whether your microbiome's off or you have nutritional deficiencies, your mitochondria are functioning, you can start to see these things and it's really just like a tune up. They're not quite diseases yet. And in traditional medicine just hasn't had a way of thinking about this because it's really complex and what's, I think emerging. And what you're finding, Peter, is that there's this emerging field of omics revolution, which is, you know, when you think about the, the number of data points that we get, when you go to the doctor, you get like 20, 30, 40, 50 lab tests maybe. There's literally tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of things you can measure, most of which we're ignoring. You know, like, like David Furman at Stanford has looked at the throughput analysis of thousands and thousands of molecules around inflammation, which are those ones that relate to aging and chronic disease. And they're things you never heard of before, the things your doctor never tests for that aren't a lab requisition, but are the most important things that we can be measuring to look at long term inflammation and aging. So I think there's a whole host of things that we can start to look at. And from a functional medicine perspective, that's what excites me because I see these things and I can then see the changes that happen. I can see the changes in biology that happen. And I've noticed in myself, I've literally kind of changed my biology and how I posted a picture recently of when I was 40 and when I was 60 in my body and it's totally different. I was sort of like skinny fat back then. I was eating more carbohydrates, I wasn't overweight, but I didn't really have much muscle. You know, look at me now, I look like 20 years younger, but I was, I was 20 years younger than that picture than I am now. So it's like really quite, it's quite staggering what you can do when you begin to understand these things.
- [08:26]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah. And there are two reasons we haven't done this in the past, maybe three. One, we couldn't before we couldn't measure it. We didn't even know it was there or measurable, but we now do. And second, it's getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. But the third is that no human physician could ever deal with the amount of data we're talking about. It's a massive amount of data.
- [08:46]
Dr. Mark Hyman
No.
- [08:47]
Peter Diamandis
And it's really the use of machine learning algorithms that are helping us understand the patterns, understand what it means. I think it's going to become in the next five years malpractice not to do a diagnosis without AI in the loop just because.
- [09:05]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Absolutely.
- [09:06]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah.
- [09:06]
Dr. Mark Hyman
No I mean, I mean, it's like I've seen literally millions and millions of data points on tens of thousands of patients. But I'm one guy and I've seen patterns and correlations on things that no one has described try before and yet I know are true because I see them over and over again. But nobody's really kind of described in the literature. And I think that's just sort of the tip of the iceberg of what's really going on when we begin to look at these things. So that's what's sort of exciting was we can look at the longevity perspective. We get to look at how do we start to do diagnostics differently, not looking for disease per se, but looking for sort of variations from optimal function and health.
- [09:39]
Peter Diamandis
So, so that's what we've done at Fountain Life. We have, you know, by the end of 2022 we'll have a dozen centers set up in Dubai, in India, in UK and Toronto, and about 10 in the US we're doubling in the 2022 timeframe. And we basically digitize you and upload you into the system where we can understand what changes have occurred since last time. And that's part of what Fountain Life does. The other part is performance and recovery. It's how do we use, how do we actually, what are your goals? Is it muscle, is it obesity, is it, you know, energy levels? And we help direct you in our programs that way. But then there's a regenerative medicine side that is important because the regenerative medicine arena is growing tremendously. But we've built something called Fountain os, which is an app that allows you to upload the data into your app, but it allows you to provision these things wherever you are. If you don't live in the city where there's a Fountain center, we have identified the imaging centers and facilities in Schenectady or in Des Moines where you can get all of the tests put together and uploaded to the system independent of where you live. And the fun part is we have something called Fountain Health, which is life insurance, I'm sorry, health insurance business. So, you know, health insurance, it pays you after you have disease and after treatment. But what if instead health insurance was the opposite? Which is we're going to provide you all of the imaging that Fountain Life does for free every year to catch disease at the very beginning and prevent it in the first place. So it's insurance that's going to be for self insured companies initially, but it's about giving all of your employees all of this extensive testing as part of the insurance package for free to prevent the disease in the long run. So, you know, fountain life is doing, is doing great and super pumped about it.
- [12:09]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So basically, these clinics where you can go and get a range of different assessments and therapies that assess where you are now, where you are in the deviations in your sort of longevity track and how to actually change those back to a younger biological age using a combination of lifestyle supportive therapies, functional medicine, regenerative therapies that are all out there now and be able to incorporate as in real time, as new therapies come online. When we hit longevity escape velocity, we'll be able to actually all, you know, get to take advantage of that, which is pretty exciting.
- [12:40]
Peter Diamandis
Yeah, it is. We also have a very limited, we call our edge program. So as you well know, there's a lot of open investigational new drugs out there on the cutting edge, like rapamycin, like total plasma exchange and so forth. So we give a. A small number of our fountain Life members the ability to participate in these research protocols.
- [13:08]
Dr. Mark Hyman
We're seeing life expectancy go down, particularly in this last year of COVID where we saw it go down for the average person probably one plus years, and if you're African American, Hispanic, is up to three years of decrease in life expectancy. And at the same time, we're seeing an explosion of longevity science that's helping us understand the causes of aging, how to extend life, how to improve quality of life, how to stop the ravages of aging. And we're learning all kinds of new tools, techniques and technologies, but there's a big mismatch there. So can you talk about one, why we're seeing this increase in earlier and earlier deaths or a decrease in life expectancy, and why at the same time, we're so optimistic and hopeful about the future of longevity science?
- [13:51]
Peter Diamandis
Absolutely. And I think there's nothing that's more viable to all of us and our families than healthy years. And let's define longevity in the first place. You know, the average age of hominids back a hundred thousand years ago was probably in their late 20s. Right. And then it expanded during the, you know, middle ages into the early 30s. And then 100 years ago it was in your 40s. Today it's, you know, in their late 70s. And I like to think about the fact that I don't believe humans were, on the whole, designed to live past age 30. We would have a baby by age 13, before there was birth control. I mean, seriously, before, you know, you go to puberty and you have a baby and by the time you were, you know, 27 or 28, your baby was having a baby. And before McDonald's and Whole Foods, before food was abundant, the worst thing you wanted to do to perpetuate the species was take food out of your grandchildren's mouths. And so that was very much reality. For it's what we evolved during. And then all the diseases of older age, cancer, heart disease, dementia, even when aneurysms take people, the wear and tear of the body, all of those diseases were never selected against if you didn't get it past age 30. So we're in optimal health in our 20s and 30s. And then we start the ravages of old age. And what's interesting, and I think you know this as much or more than I, that the conversation around longevity, and I'm going to define it more as age reversal, like how do we slow aging, stop aging, even reverse aging, which would have been a really crazy conversation to have had even five years ago, has now become the conversation du jour in the medical community and in the venture community and there's more people thinking about and working on it. And so I think, I personally believe, and hopefully at the end of this conversation you'll, you'll believe or others will, that we're about to go into a renaissance of, of health. We're about to massively disrupt the health industry, reinvent it and start to.
- [16:29]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Amen.
- [16:30]
Peter Diamandis
Amen to that.
- [16:31]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
- [16:31]
Peter Diamandis
Of course, you and I are both on carrying our, carrying the signs around, you know, viva la revolution. Let's reinvent this crazy insane system which is so moribund anyway. But I think this decade we're going to start to have new tools to slow, stop and reverse aging. And I'm convinced myself from the people I've spoken to, I don't know when I was in medical school I didn't get a chance to watch much tv, but I remember watching, I would watch Star Trek once in a while. That was sort of like my, if I had a little bit of time, I'd watch a Star Trek episode. And that was like the way the.
- [17:15]
Dr. Mark Hyman
World should be with the spy quarter, right?
- [17:18]
Peter Diamandis
Yes, yes, exactly. But I remember watching one television show on long lived sea life that that species of like bowhead whales could live 200 plus years and the Greenland shark lived four or five hundred years and sea turtles could live equal. And I was like, you know, if they can live that long, why can't we? I mean, I was really, it's like, kind of pissed and perplexed at the same time. And I made the decision it was either a hardware problem or a software problem, and that we were going to start to understand how do we change our software or how do we change our hardware? That's the frame that I have. Yes, we've had some recent decreases and a lot of the increase, as you well know, in average. And the word average here is the key part. Average life expectancy has been the massive reduction in childhood mortality and the ability to deal with diseases early.
- [18:15]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Clean water, Clean water.
- [18:17]
Peter Diamandis
Oh, my God, sanitation. Half the disease burden of the planet is due to unclean drinking water. It's crazy. Knock that domino over. So I don't think the recent gains in longevity are really the kinds of gains in longevity that I'm working towards.
- [18:37]
Dr. Mark Hyman
It was the first. The first hurdle we had to overcome, which was deal with the bad water and infectious disease. And we did a good job at that. But now we're looking at the aging process. And as I began to look at it over the decades, it's really clear to me that what most of us see as aging in this country is abnormal aging. It's biological processes that have gone awry that are really dysfunctional states of biology. And then if we learn how to work with biology to optimize those states, whether it's inflammation or oxidative stress or changes to the microbiome or hormones or brain chemistry or your structural system, tissues, you can really stop and even reverse the phenomena that we see as aging.
- [19:16]
Peter Diamandis
In this country, for sure. But even doing that, the question becomes, can we all get to 100 healthy? Can we get to 120 healthy? And what's beyond that? Right?
- [19:33]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
- [19:34]
Peter Diamandis
And I'm working on both sides of the equation. A number of the companies I have and the work that I'm doing, this book that Tony and I have worked three years on, Life Force, is really around increasing your vitality, your energy, avoiding the ravages of obesity and diabetes and heart disease and so forth. And there's incredible new technologies on the. On the horizon. You know, in phase, we looked at all of the stuff in phase one, phase two, phase three, clinical trials, and then there's the basics. Diet, sleeping, and exercise, which we so don't want to spend our time doing, but we must.
- [20:20]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Feeling tired, tense, or foggy? Magnesium might be the missing link. Most people are low, and standard supplements don't cut it. Magnesium breakthrough gives you all seven essential forms in one powerful formula. Better sleep, less muscle tension, mental clarity, all with no laxative side effects. Try magnesium Breakthrough by bioptimizers@bioptimizers.com Hyman for 10% off the biggest one of the biggest factors in, in terms of your risk for premature death is loneliness. Being lonely and socially isolated is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. That's really serious. So biological aging as a result of all of our stressors and our psychological stressors and relational stressors, our lack of connection is really important. Lack of physical touch, lack of intimacy plays a huge role. Not lack of being understood and seen and witnessed plays a huge role in so much of the ail that we're suffering not just mental illness, but also physical illness and our longevity. So this whole idea of sociogenomics I actually came up with this term years ago when I was in Haiti. And then it became part of medical literature. Not, not because of me, because other people also started glomming onto it. And it was the idea that our social relationships and our social networks may be more important than our genetic connections in determining our health and our health outcomes. And that that our lifestyle certainly influences our genes, but so does our social connections. Our relationships influence our gene expression. And it's really not an abstract theory or notion. It literally is biology. Our thoughts, our beliefs, our relationships all drive real changes that we can measure in our gene expression that control inflammation, stress hormones. So for example, you're having a conversation with somebody, if it's a loving, connected, intimate conversation, your anti inflammatory genes will turn on, your healing and repair genes will turn on. Whereas if you're in a conflictual relationship or a conversation with somebody, you're going to have your stress hormones increase, you're going to have inflammation increase, you're going to increase all sorts of bad things in your body that are produced by your body that cause harm. So we have huge, huge, huge motivation I think to focus as a key part of our health strategy and just life happiness strategy, A a deep sense of community and making sure we build that. So our social connections, our community, our relationships all are associated with long lifespan, with a better mental health, with improved physical health, things like blood pressure, waist circumference, body mass, inflammation. Now I was in Icaria and Sardinia, which are two of the blue zones in the Queue peninsula. And one of the things these communities have in common, where people live to be longer than anywhere else. And I wrote a lot about this in Young Forever. My new book was the Power of Community. They all were part of this fabric and they all had their place, they all had their role, they all had a meaning and purpose, even if you're 100 years old. I remember Julia was 103 months, she said, and she basically was still working at 100 years old, making all sorts of wedding accoutrements like doilies and little lace things. I don't know what they do or in Italy, but it was kind of cool. She was constantly working and making stuff for all these weddings and was still involved in the community life. So I want to share a little bit about a study that kind of reflects the power of this. And it was an 80 year study called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. And it had been producing data on so many different things, on, on who lives longer, happier, healthier lives. And they wanted to understand not what makes people sick, but what makes people thrive, what makes them well. So what were the lessons from this study? Was 84 year study, right? Long study. They were tracking the same people and over generations asking thousands of questions, hundreds of measurements to find out what really makes people healthy and happy. And they were giving. These people are giving regular updates on their life, their health, their income, their employment, their marital status. They filled out questionnaires and were part of interviews where they revealed their fears and their hopes or disappointments or accomplishments or regrets, life satisfaction and lots more. And this had a really incredible impact by providing lots of data. Then researchers use this data to assess how people's lives, their experiences, their attitudes affect their well being. And one of the things that was so powerful from this study was sort of surprising. It wasn't career achievement, it wasn't exercise, it wasn't a healthy diet that determined the quality and happiness of your life. It was good relationships. Good relationships keeps us healthier and happier. That was powerful. And the study's leaders that are, I mean, obviously the people who started the study are dead. The current leader of the study, Robert Waldinger from Harvard and Mark Schultz have a new book. It's called the Good Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. And it's a great book. I actually had Robert Waldinger on the podcast the Doctors Pharmacy. And you can learn more about the book and things there. But what are the, what are the things that we can do? What are the lessons learned from the study about how do we improve the quality of our relationships? First we have to look at ourselves, right? Who are we? What is our life like? What are the choices we're making? How are we not prioritizing relationships so we can get really busy, we can do all sorts of stuff that we think is Helping us get ahead. We can spend too much time on social media, but we often don't really think about building and investing in the quality and the number of our relationships. And for me, I know personally that my relationships, my friendships, my community is the most important thing. For me, it really is what keeps me grounded, keeps me healthy, keeps me happy. And then more and more as I get older, I focus more on this as opposed to, like when you have kids and a career and you try to just kind of get by. And it's like sometimes friends can fall by the wayside, but it's really important to find and it even can be just one or two good friends. It makes a huge difference. Now, when these people in the study actually were interviewed, they really, actually benefited from this interview because it helped them realize where they neglected their relationships. And then they considered sort of looking and finding, well, how can we improve that? So maybe look at your own life. What's your social life like? Who are the people in your life that you care most about that you want to have a relationship? Think about how they support you and how often you spend time together and maybe do a little bit of effort to actually focus on what matters to you most and help you make decisions that actually can enhance the quality and number of your relationships. So maybe spend more time with people who, who make you laugh and who elevate you and less time with people who drain you and are, are, you know, energy saps. So I, I, you know, I, I think it's important to, to find friends and community members that help bring you up and not take you down. You know, sometimes you meet with people, all you want to do is complain and go on and on about everything. And I think they're, you know, there are, there are other people who you, when you're around them, you laugh, you have fun, you play, and it's just, that's what you want, you know, prioritize your relationships. We schedule in exercise, we make ourselves maybe time to make a healthy diet. We, we focus on our career and work, but we don't focus on prioritizing those relationships that matter and being, showing up and being present for us rather than zoning out on social media, you know, rather than, like, you know, doing a million things at once. Focus on your relationships. The phenomena of aging and as we've learned from you over the years, is really an inflammatory process. So let's kind of start with what causes the immune system to become dysfunctional as we age? What causes the acceleration of inflammation as we age, and how does that connect to the aging of our whole body? And then we'll kind of loop back to how to use plants to affect that and what you found in your research.
- [28:28]
Jeff Bland
Yeah, so you said this beautifully in your book. You know, Mark, as you know, if you've read his books, and I'm sure everybody here has read one or more of his books, is a brilliant narrator. He tells the story better than anyone. The first time I read anything he wrote, I said, this man's on the path because he can make very complicated topics, very engaging and understandable.
- [28:49]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Because I have logaria, which is diarrhea of words.
- [28:54]
Jeff Bland
You do not need to diminish your genius. You're very, very good at this. So one of the things that I've learned that Mark picked up beautifully and he's done elegantly in Young Forever is the discussion about how our body responds to the experience of life and how that's associated with biological aging. So, you know, my father used to say to me, you know, Jeff, life is what happens in between your plans. So we got this whole thing about a planned life. I remember my daughter in law when she had her pregnancy plan with her first child. And I said, no woman can live by this plan. Oh yes, Jeff, I am very disciplined. I'm living by this plan. Then of course, stuff happened during her pregnancy. She said, oh, my plan went to hell. I'm not able to do my plan. Well, that's life, right? Stuff comes up, it happens, and we have to be resilient. So what is resilience? Resilience in our body is manifest through principally three different cell types, three different tissues that are constantly sampling the outside world. 247365. They're the only parts of our body that are constantly sampling the outside world. And what are they? They are our nervous system. They are our mucosal tissues in our respiratory tract and our gastrointestinal tract, and they're our immune system. And they're all cross talking all the time, one to the other. And so when we start talking then about what happens with the experience of life as it relates to aging, is that this system, this information system, picks up bad news because everybody's life has trauma along the road. Right now the question is, how do you deal with the trauma? Does it stick and stay there irreversibly? And if it does, you just accumulate road tar over life, which then depreciates the function of those cells that are taking the message from this reporter system, this communication system. Some people call this immune scars. We've just Had a big episode of immune scars called SARS COV2, haven't we? And there are now people, well, not some people, probably the majority of people are carrying some legacy of what that virus left on their immune system. These are epigenetic marks of an immune system that's altered from that experience. Now, is that a one way street? And that's where Mark's book, I think is so beautiful because it describes that. No, nothing in life is a one way street. Even loss of neuronal reserve. We're now finding there is neuronal plasticity and neurons can be regenerated. Maybe not as quickly as skin cells, but. But they can be regenerated. So there is this other street that goes back the other direction. If there is damage, there is repair. So that's what I call rejuvenation. And our body is capable of rejuvenating. And fortunately, what we're starting to learn is that these marks that we carry that are associated then with the principles of aging or the hallmarks of aging that Mark has summarized so beautifully. These are kind of scientific geek isms, these hallmarks of aging. But you've made them accessible in your book. They can be modulated by a reversible set of principles that is in our physiology. If we give it the right thing to work from, if we don't give it the right thing to work from, it doesn't have the ability to power up that rejuvenation system. And we just take the luck of the draw and we get worse as we grow older. By the way, when I say worse, it's not just physiologically or metabolically worse. It can be behaviorally worse. It can be feeling like we're not loved, we're not appreciated, we have no attribution. It's socially deprived. It's a form of deficiency. It's not a vitamin deficiency, It's a social support deficiency. Those leave marks.
- [32:45]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Vitamin L deficiency.
- [32:47]
Jeff Bland
Yes, vitamin L deficiency, exactly right. So all of these things work together to create who we are and how we've. How we see our aging process manifest in our body.
- [32:59]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So, Jeff, what, what's, you know, take us down into the rabbit hole a little bit of the science of what's happening to our immune system as we get older that causes it to generate more of this chronic sterile inflammation that is at the root of what we call inflammaging. And then, and then I want to kind of dive deep into how do we combat that and how do we change that, reverse that process.
- [33:22]
Jeff Bland
Yeah. So I'm Just reviewing now what Mark has already said in his book. So I'm kind of the speaking book for his book. But in his book, he talks about these cell types that are associated with biological aging that are called SASP cells. That stands for senescent associated secretory phenotypes. What does that mean in English? What it means is that these cells.
- [33:46]
Dr. Mark Hyman
They'Re called zombie cells in English, they don't die, and they run around spewing out inflammation, right?
- [33:52]
Jeff Bland
Yep, exactly. So the genes of these cells are the same, but they're communicating a different message because they've been modulated by epigenetic experiences to be shifted into an alarm state. And that alarm state, the body's inflammatory pathways coming from a damaged immune system are there for a purpose, right? To recycle dead tissue to help defend us against foreign invaders. Inflammation is not like a bad thing. It's a good process. It's what is uncontrolled, simmering like a burning like a boiling pot on the stove all the time that's associated with the development of these senescent associated secretory phenotype type cells. Zombie cells. Zombie cells. So the question is, once you got a zombie cell, does it A zombie that's going to live in your body forever? And the answer is no. We now know that there are processes in the body for which Nobel Prizes have been won for the discovery only recently, like the process you talk about, autophagy or mitophagy, that are processes that activate the rejuvenation of cells to give room for new naive cells to come in and replace them. Remember that in our body, our bone marrow is producing on the order of several million new white blood cells every few minutes. So we're constantly remodeling ourselves. So the question is, those white blood cells that are coming out into our body, are they as good as the ones that were there before? Are they worse or are they better? And rejuvenation is making them better, not making them worse. That's the process that we're really speaking to when we talk about Jung Forever. It doesn't mean that you've completely eradicated aging, because the clock still ticks, but it's removing these accelerants of the process of chronic inflammation that's associated with fibrosis, insulin resistance, cellular proliferation, all the things that we associate with the physiology of aging. By the way, it's very interesting when the investigators. And again, Mark talks about this in the book, investigators that are measuring these age clocks, like Stephen Horvath, who is at ucla, is one of the world's experts in this area. They're able to actually take photographs of people and they're able to match the photographs based upon the physiognomy of whether they look old for their age, with their biological age clock of their immune system. Right. They're able to show that, yes, there's that anti. And so you say, hold up. Does that mean the inside of my body, if I could take a picture of the inside organs, they look not so good too. Yeah, that's, that's what it's saying, that you're altering the physiognomy, the architecture of your body and its function as a consequence of these processes.
- [36:44]
Dr. Mark Hyman
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