← The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
What it takes to be “Young Forever!” | Mark Hyman : 1385
01:02:30
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- [00:01]
A
Meat is definitely bad because meat causes MTOR to turn on and that's really bad. So we should never eat any meat.
- [00:06]
B
I mean, if you're restricting animal protein because cancer and you're having any sugar at all, you're doing it wrong because sugar is way stronger than animal protein at raising mtor, the hallmarks are the.
- [00:16]
A
Cause of all these diseases. What is the cause of the hallmarks?
- [00:20]
B
Do you really see people who eat only meat and fat too healthy in the long term?
- [00:25]
A
The Plains Indians at the turn of the century had the largest amount of centenarians. People lived to be 100 years old and they basically survived on bison.
- [00:31]
B
If you put on your 10 years from now, hat how many causes of aging are we going to have? You're listening to the Human upgrade with Dave Asprey. Every time you reach for a healthy snack, you could be sabotaging your energy, focus and long term health. That's because even if you think it's healthy, it probably contains seed oils which make up 20% of the average person's daily calories. And recent studies show seed oils can cause metabolic issues and inflammation in your body. Masa decided to do something about it. They created a delicious tortilla chip with just three organic nixtamalized corn, sea salt and 100% grass fed beef tallow. And no seed oils. This is one of the few times I'll eat corn because this corn is nixtamalized, which is a process that removes mycotoxins and anti nutrients. Masa chips don't only avoid all the bad stuff, they taste incredible too. Snacking on Masa chips is nothing like eating regular chips. They're crunchier, tastier and sturdier than other chips so they won't break in your guac. With Masa, you feel satisfied, light and energetic with no crash, bloat or gross sluggishness afterwards. And an added bonus is that the beef tallow makes the chips much more satiating, so you won't find yourself uncontrollably binging and still feeling hungry afterwards. Ready to give Masa a try, go to Massachips.com DaveAsprey and use code DaveAsprey for 25% off your first order. That's M A S A Chips.com DaveAsprey and Use Code DaveAsprey. You're gonna love these chips. Doctor Mark Hyman, welcome back to the show.
- [02:18]
A
Thanks, Dave. It's been a bit, but I'm happy to be back.
- [02:21]
B
You're looking young. What are you doing?
- [02:23]
A
What am I not Doing, you know, Dave, I, when I turned 60, I was like, okay, wait a minute. I think there's a bunch of stuff that I need to really understand about why we're seeing such a terrible epidemic of chronic disease and rapid aging in this country. And I don't want to be subjected to that. And I've been practicing functional medicine for 30 years almost and using the principles to help upgrade my health. But I kind of wanted to double down on looking at, you know, what's really the latest science of how do I optimize my biological age, how do I actually not just live longer, but feel better, and how do I optimize my function and not go down the trajectory of what I see as abnormal aging? In America, what we typically see is people getting older and getting decrepit and frail and disabled and dysfunctional, not able to do what they want to do. But I don't want that for myself or anybody else. And I realize that we have sort of within us this incredible healing system that we can activate through the understanding of this emerging science of longevity. So when you talking about, you know, 20 years ago, looking at longevity, we didn't know as much because this was sort of a, sort of a step, kid, you know, to science. People didn't study it, people didn't fund the research in longevity. But now there's a tremendous amount of research and we've learned so much about what actually causes rapid biological aging, and we know what to do to reverse it. So I'm biologically 63. I mean, sorry, I'm chronologically 63, but I'm biologically 43 because I've applied a lot of these principles to myself.
- [04:01]
B
You actually have a 20 year gap now.
- [04:03]
A
Yeah, 20 years.
- [04:04]
B
And that's what DNA age, which tests DNA methylation.
- [04:07]
A
I also did telomeres a couple years ago and it was also about a 20 year difference.
- [04:11]
B
Yeah, nice. So 20 year difference is at the upper end of what I've seen. And the DNA methylation clocks that we can use. If you're new to the science of this and listening, there's different ways of deciding how your or what your biological age is. And I've, I've done a bunch of them. I'm only nine years younger or, no, 11 years younger. Yeah, I'm 11 years old.
- [04:32]
A
You know how it is, like the more overweight you are, the more weight you can lose. The older you are, the more age you can lose. I think it's something like that.
- [04:40]
B
There might be some truth to that. All I know is that because if.
- [04:43]
A
You'Re like 12, you can't go back to zero. Right.
- [04:45]
B
I think I would have been 70 when I was 20 because, I mean, I was really unhealthy too. But it's interesting. I know many people who are at least five years younger biologically. And then you and I both have know people who are way older than their age.
- [04:58]
A
Yeah, yeah, right.
- [04:59]
B
And how much do you trust those measurements?
- [05:02]
A
I think there's, you know, there are kind of lot of companies that are coming out with DNA methylation, epigenetic clock testing, which is the way we kind of look at your biological age. And there are other metrics, you know, like telomere length and things. But I think, you know, there is some variability. But I think if you kind of look at the companies that are doing the best job, I think True Diagnostic is one of the best. I don't have any affiliation with them, but you know, they, they, they pretty good with reproducible results and then you can track what you're doing over time. So the, the beautiful thing is that we have a program that we can change in our biology by understanding how to affect these underlying factors we call the hallmarks of aging that accelerate aging. So we can literally reprogram our, our biology and our genes and our epigenome to a younger self at any time if we know actually what to do. And that's really what led me to write Young Forever. What was the sort of central thesis is that we have now finally unlocked the causes of aging, of abnormal aging, let's say, not chronological aging. That's just time. I can't do anything about that. But we've unlocked the causes of rapid biological aging, which is abnormal and it's treatable. So all of a sudden we're kind of reframing aging as a disease, as a treatable disease. And that's a very big frame shift for many people.
- [06:18]
B
It's something that was very hotly debated, even going back as far as the 90s and the early aughts. When you say disease, when you would say aging was a disease, you would get a really reactive response, especially from Western medical doctors. They'd get angry. Why does it make people angry when you say it?
- [06:39]
A
Well, because I think there's a sense that there's inevitability to the process of.
- [06:45]
B
Decline and dysfunction, and people just don't like that inevitability. And they get mad.
- [06:49]
A
No, because they think that it's, it's, it's actually a disservice to science to talk about something that's impossible, which is.
- [06:56]
B
Like flying or nuclear power, all those pesky things that actually change the world.
- [07:01]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, I'll get to the moon. Like, we just don't think it's possible. Right. So we have a paradigm shift that's happening. And so the paradigm was this is what happens as you get older. I mean, even when I was in medical school, you know, and still today we talk about chronic disease management, which drives me freaking crazy because I don't want to manage someone's chronic disease. I want to get rid of it.
- [07:23]
B
Yeah.
- [07:23]
A
And I, and I share a story in the book of a woman named Janice who, you know, had, you know, such an accelerated path of aging. She was 66, her body mass index was 43, which is huge. It was huge. Obese, type 2, diabetic for 10 years, heart failure, multiple stents, hypertension, high cholesterol, kidneys were failing, liver was fatty, just a mess on 20,000 of co pay a year. And she was on her way to a cart transplant and a kidney transplant. Three days, I'm changing her diet, she was off insulin. Three months, she was off all medications. Her heart failure reversed, which is something we don't see in medicine unless you.
- [08:04]
B
Get a hard cough causing this in her diet.
- [08:06]
A
What do you think? Ultra processed food, which is what she lived on. I honestly was so shocked because. Let me finish the story, then I'll tell you why I was so shocked. So she had heart failure normalized, which does not happen. Like you can manage heart failure. Her diabetes was completely gone. Her A1C went from 11, which is like way the, you know, it's like someone will always be hospitalized with a blood sugar that level to five and a half, which is normal. Her blood pressure normalized, her kidneys normalized, her fatty liver went away and she, in three months she lost 43 pounds. In a year she lost 116 pounds and became a different human being. And so I don't want to manage her heart failure, her diabetes or kidney failure or fatty liver. I want to get rid of them. And that's really what now we know how to do by activating these ancient longevity switches in the body. So as I began to sort of dig deep into the research, I'm like, wait a minute. The body has all these switches, these like levers that we can pull and work on the pathways and, and built in healing, innate regenerative repair, renewal and healing systems that we can activate if we understand how. And so the book is about what are those Systems. And how do we activate them and what exactly do we do?
- [09:20]
B
We talk about ancient systems. I agree with you there. When I did my anti aging book, which was a superhuman probably four or five years ago.
- [09:29]
A
Yeah, Great book.
- [09:30]
B
I had. Thank you. I had seven pillars of aging. And now when I go through young forever, you've. Well, I won't say added three because they don't all line up. They're very similar thinking. But you have 10.
- [09:42]
A
There's 10. And now there's a couple more that have been added. So now there's like 13. So scientists keep like, parsing it, but essentially there's systems that actually we start to understand are all interconnected and can drive aging.
- [09:54]
B
Okay. You have A history of 30 years of practicing functional medicine. And so you've got great pattern recognition that I think only starts to happen after maybe 20 years.
- [10:03]
A
Yeah.
- [10:04]
B
Okay. If you put on your 10 years from now, hat how many causes of aging are we going to have?
- [10:10]
A
Oh, I don't know. I mean, I think, look, I think the body has these certain biological networks that are sort of becoming clear that we now can understand or underlying all disease. So. So the hallmarks of aging are one attempt to map those out. Functional medicine has really created seven physiological systems. And. And the hallmarks kind of fit in that they do. And I think, you know, the. It doesn't really matter, honestly. It's just. It's just. It's not really separate. They're not like, oh, it's 10 different things or 13 different things. It's really one system. It's like a web, all interconnected, and we're just sort of parsing it, be able to describe it and be able to work on it. But. But all these things relate to everything else. So any one of those hallmarks interacts with all the other hallmarks.
- [10:55]
B
Right, Exactly.
- [10:56]
A
So it's not like you can kind of say, oh, this is the thing, or this is the thing. It's very different. So I feel like if you understand how to do the right thing in terms of your lifestyle and certain behaviors, certain supplements, certain medications, certain lifestyle practices or biohacking techniques, then you can actually change those hallmarks and reverse the downslide toward rapid aging, disease, and death.
- [11:25]
B
You definitely can reverse that. And for some people, we don't know how for whatever's going on with them yet. And for many people, it's easy. And for a lot of people, you don't even have to know what's wrong. You just to say, okay, I like to look at this as herding sheep. And maybe because I've raised sheep on my regenerative farm, Right. But people are like, well, what's the one thing that's most important? How many things do you need to know to herd sheep? And, I don't know, there's like a dog, and it moves around, and when one sheep is out, it kind of gets pushed back in. But we know you have to give them water and they have to have enough food and sunlight because it doesn't work if you don't do those. And it feels like our systems are not that different.
- [12:06]
A
Not that different, no.
- [12:08]
B
We can come up with. I love your list of 10, by the way. And I want to go through some.
- [12:11]
A
Of these with you.
- [12:13]
B
We can come up with those, but there's probably five more. And if you handle all these, maybe you don't have to even know the other five.
- [12:18]
A
Well, I think you just said it's so profound because, you know, as a functional medicine doctor, I don't treat disease. I don't try to cure disease. I try to create health. And then disease goes away as a side effect. So the hallmarks of aging are, in a sense, a map of how we deviate from health. And so really, it's about restoration of function. That's what functional medicine is, restoration and optimization of our function and that function of all these systems. How do our. How do our cells regulate themselves with, you know, proper mitochondrial function and immune regulation and the microbiome? And how do proteins function and how do our nutrients get regulated? And how can we properly divide ourselves so we don't get damaged? And so there's. There's all these systems that are part of the hallmarks of aging, but we can actually, like you said, with very few basic principles, kind of fix all these things. You know, Pierre Laplace said, you know, you know, we can explain a large number of complex phenomena by a small set of general laws. Think about physics. There's just few laws of physics. And think of everything you can do with physics. You can build a bridge. You can send a man to the moon. You can, you know, create, you know, our cell phones and whatever. I don't even understand. I mean, I took physics in high school. That was about it. So maybe, you know, I had to take physics in college because I had to go to medical school, so I took a physical physics. But I mean, it's just mind blowing when you think of how many things can be manifested from a few set of small laws. And so I would say what we're now discovering, Dave, is The underlying fundamental laws of the universe, the nature of nature, the laws of biology, because we've never had those. Biology is so complex. It's been so reactive. Okay, you have a headache, you go to the head doctor. You have a stomachache, you go to the stomach doctor, you go to the joint doctor. If you have a joint pain, that's not how the body's organized. Because if you have a joint pain, it might be from your microbiome. Your rheumatologist doesn't say, can I please see your poop? They should, right? And I do. But that's not generally what happens. And when you practice medicine that way, you see extraordinary things. You don't have to treat all the diseases separately. And the hallmarks of aging. The theory around this is that these are things that go wrong that can explain all the disease of aging. So what we're seeing are leaves on the trees, like. Like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, all these things. High blood pressure. These are just downstream of things, effects of these problems that could occur in the hallmarks, and then that. That's something you can actually treat now for. For me, as I began to think about this, I was like, wait a minute. You know, the hallmarks are great, and they. They provide a target for treatment and thinking, but they're also kind of reductionist, too. And the real answer to solving aging is figuring out why the hallmarks become dysfunctional in the first place. So why do we see these problems?
- [15:11]
B
If your hair is looking thinner, weaker, or just less dense lately, you might think it's just something that happens because you're aging. The good news is that that's the type of aging that you can now reverse. It's caused by senescent cells. You might have heard of them as zombie cells. If you read my big book of longevity. These are just old, damaged cells that don't die when they should. They accumulate with age, and they don't do anything useful, but they take up energy. That means they're not growing thick, vibrant hair. When they sit in your scalp, they send out stress signals, and they damage the healthy cells around them as well. And that's where One Skin's OS1 hair comes in. It's a daily scalp serum that targets those senescent cells. It helps your scalp work more like it did when you were younger. Two months after I started using one skin OS one hair more, my barber asked what I was doing because my hair had changed that radically. In a clinical study, people using OS1 hair saw a 40% increase in hair density. After 6 months and 75% noticed new hair growth in 3 months, it contains the same OS1 peptide that OneSkin uses in their skin and sun care formulas. This is the first ingredient shown to reduce your skin's biological age by getting rid of those zombie cells. I've been using Oneskin products on my skin for years, and it really works. And os1 hair is cle and light like water. I just put it in every morning and every night, and my hair doesn't just look better, it actually is better. It's not greasy, there's no residue, and it doesn't mess with hair styling. And for a limited time, you can try one skin for 15% off using code Dave. Just go to oneskin co. Dave. 15% off oneskin co. Use Code Dave. Guess what? Your longevity plan isn't gonna work unless your gut barrier is working too, because that's where inflammation and aging actually start. And everything in modern life, like EMFs and seed oils and stress and whole grains, all that stuff breaks down your gut barrier. And that barrier is the foundation of your immune system, your metabolism, even your brain health. And once your gut barrier weakens, everything from recovery to energy to skin health all start to fall apart. Amrod Colostrum is a unique compound that can rebuild that defense system from the inside out. That's because it has over 4, 400 bioactive nutrients, things like growth factors, peptides, and prebiotics. And those things restore gut integrity. They help you to regulate hormones, and they bring your body back into balance. Clinical studies on bovine colostrum show it improves muscle recovery, it strengthens immunity, and it enhances your body's ability to absorb nutrients. It's incredibly potent, and it is ethically sourced. So if you're serious about longevity or just feeling good all the time, so start where resilience begins. It's in your gut. And because you're a listener, you get a special deal. 30% off your first subscription order. That's a huge discount. Go to armrad.comdave and get 30% off your first subscription order. That's a r m r a.comdave.
- [18:07]
A
What's the cause of the hallmarks? If the hallmarks are the cause of all these diseases, what is the cause of the hallmarks? And that's what I really think is different about Young Forever is that it's through a functional medicine lens which allows you to treat the root causes of everything. So not treating the like hallmarks like with a drug. Oh. Inflammation is part of the hallmarks of agent. Let me give You a anti inflammatory drug.
- [18:29]
B
Right, right.
- [18:31]
A
It doesn't make sense. Right?
- [18:33]
B
It, it doesn't make sense.
- [18:34]
A
Or, or you're like metformin. I, I think this is really good.
- [18:36]
B
Well, let's talk about metformin. Yeah, this is. Well, yeah.
- [18:41]
A
So one of the hallmarks of aging that I think is, if we can dive into it, is super important. And I think it's kind of a meta hallmark. It's kind of above all the hallmarks because it influences all of them.
- [18:52]
B
The God of all hallmarks.
- [18:53]
A
The God of all hallmarks. Exactly. And they call it deregulated nutrient sensing. Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But it means basically that your body's regulation of the food you're eating is screwed up. And when that's screwed up, it turns on all these pathways that accelerate aging. So we, we. There are really four of these pathways that are key, or I call them longevity switches. So two of them sense too much of stuff that we're eating, and two of them sense a lack or scarcity of nutrients. So insulin signaling is probably one of the major drivers of aging. Too much insulin is the, is the worst thing you could possibly think of for aging. So you want to measure a biomarker that's 10 bucks that any lab can do that your doctor is not doing. That's probably the most important metric in terms of determining your progression to aging is your fasting insulin level. The insulin signaling is such a big factor, and so we eat too much sugar, too much starch, and that pushes this pathway to go, go, go, go, go. And that creates everything we see as aging. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia. The high levels of sugar and starch we consume, like the mountains of pharmacologic doses, about almost a pound a day per person of flour and sugar just drive this pathway to the ground and cause obesity, cause heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia. It's the worst. And then it also drives inflammation, it drives mitochondrial dysfunction, it drives damage to proteins, it drives zombie cell production, it drives epigenetic change in the drug.
- [20:28]
B
All of the tin get driven by insulin.
- [20:29]
A
Right. It screws up your microbiome when you eat too much sugar and starch. So literally everything that happens is that the second, the second. So the key to that is, you know, eat very low glycemic diet, low starch and sugar. Diet is so important.
- [20:43]
B
Low or zero?
- [20:44]
A
I wouldn't say zero. We don't have to have zero. I mean, I think zero is, you know, you can be a carnivore and have a zero carbohydrate diet. There's no, there's no biological requirement for carbohydrates. But I don't, I don't think we're very like metabolically flexible when we're healthy. So we can manage different kinds of carbohydrates from whole grains. I mean, even, even if, like, you know, if you're for example, a marathon runner or you're really active, you know, you can consume a lot of carbohydrates. Not going to mess up your metabolism, but if you're just sitting around the couch, you know, a little bit can be bad. So it really depends on you, your metabolic health, your body fat, your, you know.
- [21:19]
B
Do you really see people who eat only meat and fat do healthy in the long term?
- [21:25]
A
I don't know because I think I haven't seen people do that very much. The only thing I would say is like the, the, the, the Plains Indians at the turn of the century had the largest amount of centenarians. People lived to be 100 years old and they basically survived on bison.
- [21:40]
B
But they ate small amounts of carbs too.
- [21:41]
A
Yeah, they did. They had berries and they forged for plants and so they did it. Yeah, right.
- [21:46]
B
They did eat the plants for, I.
- [21:48]
A
Mean, you know, there are cultures that were more carnivorous, but I think, you know, we have these built in systems to regulate carbohydrate metabolism. So it's not bad, it's just when it gets flooded. The second is mtor and this is a long conversation.
- [22:00]
B
I love mtor.
- [22:01]
A
MTOR is a really interesting pathway that is regulating protein synthesis and it can be overstimulated by eating all the time, by not giving it a break, by eating too much in general carbohydrate or protein. And if you don't give yourself a break from eating, you can't give this pathway a rest. At least you need it to actually create one of the key central things that makes you live a long time, which is autophagy. It's essentially self cleanup, self cannibalism. It's your recycling, repair, regeneration mode. It's where you take old parts and you get rid of them and you digest them and you break them down and you build them into new things. It's like a recycling plant. Basically. We desperately need that to function and to be turned on every day and to maybe have longer periods where it's turned on by more, more periods of fasting. We saw, for example, people who survive the concentration camps. They live really long time and it's fascinating and it's not like a genetic thing. They Just seem to live like in their 90s hundreds. And it's like, wow, they're still, they're still around. And it was 75 years ago.
- [23:02]
B
Right.
- [23:02]
A
You know, and so a lot of that had to do with this sort of shutting down their, their systems through starvation. And then that, that actually activated all these longevity pathways. And we'll talk about MTOR and what to do and everything. But that's where you get time restricted eating, intermittent fasting, you get drugs like rapamycin, there's other plant compounds and things that can actually affect MTOR. C15 is a fatty acid that actually stimulates the inhibition of mtor. And then you've got these two pathways that sense not enough, which is AMPK and sirtuins. So if you have a low nutrient state, you're basically. Well, AMPK means adenosine monophosphate kinase. Essentially it's a. When you run an ATP, which is your fuel, you run carbons on gas, you run ATP, and when the phosphate molecules are given away, instead of adenosine triphosphate, it becomes monophosphate, meaning one phosphate molecule instead of three. And then your body goes away. I'm starving. And then it kicks in all these beneficial switches and pathways to conserve energy, to make your system optimized, to reduce inflammation, to improve your mitochondrial function, to do all these really beneficial things, which is great. And that's where metformin comes in. So I'm going to answer your metformin question. And the last pathway is the sirtuin pathway, which has you know, been kind of highlighted by David Sinclair and Lenny Guarantee, who from mit, who basically found that you could extend life by a third by giving huge amounts of resveratrol to rats or mice. And, and that was amazing. And they found it increased their metabolism and improved their, their fitness level, did all kinds of things, even if they were eating crappy and not exercising. So it was like a very powerful pathway. This pathway is actually important because when it's activated, it stimulates DNA repair. So one of the hallmarks of aging is damaged DNA. So when you stimulate sirtuins, it activates DNA repair. And that's a good thing. And it also improves mitochondrial function, reduces inflammation, improves insulin sensitivity, does all the things. So all the things. Do all the things. Basically when you look at it, right, and that's where NAD is being used. So you might have heard that NAD and metformin, rapamycin and insulin, they all work through these central.
- [25:08]
B
I think listeners of the show, at least for a long time, have heard at Least one episode on each of those topics.
- [25:13]
A
Right.
- [25:14]
B
And, but now you're putting them all together.
- [25:15]
A
Yeah, it's not, they're not all separate. It's like one system.
- [25:18]
B
Yeah. Okay, so what do they all do?
- [25:20]
A
And so, so they're regulating your, your body's entire biological system. So they're regulating mitochondria, which regulate energy. They're regulating immune function and inflammation. They're regulating your antioxidant systems. They're regulating your, your insulin sensitivity. They're regulating the, the autophagy process. All these things that have to be dialed in. If you want to prevent and reverse disease and live a long time, you have to dial these things in. So metformin is being touted as a longevity drug now. I, I have a huge problem with it.
- [25:55]
B
Okay, you and me both, we gotta, let's like, slam on Mel. I, I, I, yeah, I really unmet for a minute, a little bit.
- [26:01]
A
I wrote about this, and I tried to create a balanced conversation in the book. I said, okay, here's what the data show. Here's why I think it's problematic. There's a large trial coming out called the TAME trial, which will help answer some of these questions. And recently, Dave, there was a new study came out that kind of put a little bit of warning signs on the metformin craze.
- [26:20]
B
Another study that does that. You mean?
- [26:22]
A
Well, so metformin is a drug that is beneficial towards ampk. So it optimizes AMPK function, which is good, which is all we just talked about. So you think, okay, that's good. But it also has some side effects. It has some mitochondrial side effects, which I really worry about, because mitochondria are key to healthy aging, can cause digestive upset in some people, improves insulin sensitivity, and I think it's fine. But when you look at, like a large trial, it was very, it's very hard to do randomized controlled trials in nutrition. Very, very hard, because you got like, you know, you need thousands of people. You got to give them the same program and you got to have control groups. So what they did was this very, very famous study called the Diabetes Prevention Trial. And what they did was they took diet pre diabetics, and they gave them three different interventions. One was nothing, one was metformin, and one was lifestyle change. The metformin reduced the progression to type 2 diabetes by 31%. Okay. Benefit compared to the control group lifestyle was 58% reduction. There's that, but it was a shitty diet. And I know people who are in this study, so I had patients who were in. I was like, wow, this is really nuts. But it worked because people, you know, cut out all the crap in their diet. They exercise, they support each other, they were accountable. A lot of reasons for it. But my point is this. If, if, if metformin doesn't work half as well as a crappy drug, I mean, as a crappy diet and lifestyle intervention, what if you put people on a ketogenic diet and measured that against.
- [27:52]
B
Metformin, it then what dominates.
- [27:54]
A
Yes.
- [27:55]
B
Completely changes everything.
- [27:56]
A
And so I kind of. I'm not a big metformin fan at this point. I'm more of a rapamycin fan. Okay. But I think, I think metformin recently was. Was reviewed in another large study, and they found that the original results that seemed to show that type 2 diabetics who were on metformin died at, you know, less rates than people were not on metformin. I think has been sort of challenged. So I, I think it's still an open question, but is definitely not on my list of things to take for, for aging at this point. That patient who I just mentioned was an advanced type 2 diabetic on insulin every day. And within three days, she's off her insulin, she's off all her medications. Her A1C is normal. Her insulin sensitivity is high because of the food. There's no more powerful drug. So I'm just saying, like.
- [28:45]
B
So they put her on like, beyond burger and impossible burgers and all that. Right? Is that what she was.
- [28:48]
A
Definitely not. But think about it.
- [28:50]
B
It's like, those are highly processed foods.
- [28:53]
A
If I can give you like a thousand milligrams of aspirin for your headache, it's going to work better than if I give you 2 milligrams of aspirin, which probably won't work. So I think of, like, these drugs as like 2 to 5 milligram doses compared to a thousand milligram doses, which is lifestyle. Like, that's how big the order of magnitude difference is in terms of the effect you just can't get. You can give every diabetic every drug, every treatment that is conventional for diabetes. You will never reverse it. You will never. With every single drug piled on, you will never see the disease go away. But with food, you can go away in three days. So how is that not such a headline news on every major news outlet?
- [29:34]
B
I love what you're saying, and it's one of the reasons with upgrade labs and since we last talked, we're franchises, we're opening dozens of locations all over the country. And, and it's a non medical facility. Like if any, if any disease is reversed, that's a side effect of lifestyle. Like all we're doing is saying what's the lowest dose of lifestyle that will get you there? Because I'm a little disturbed by the pharmaceutical sales engine right now trying to sell you these things.
- [30:00]
A
Ozempic. Yeah, let's do that. Okay.
- [30:02]
B
Well, I actually kind of think Ozempic is exciting. Isn't there an anti aging angle for.
- [30:08]
A
GLP agonists because of its effect on, on body weight or on insulin sensitivity?
- [30:15]
B
On insulin sensitivity, yeah. It seems like Ozempic might not be a bad thing if you're obese compared to the alternatives.
- [30:20]
A
Okay. You show me a single patient who took OIC and reversed their diabetes. I have no, it doesn't exist.
- [30:27]
B
It's just, I will, I will tell you, I did do one injection of OIC because I interviewed one of the lead researchers in the trial. So I always try everything I can and I felt like I had morning sickness for a week and I didn't want to eat right. And then I lost muscle mass because I didn't want to eat.
- [30:40]
A
Well, that's the another thing that. Well, that's the thing even. Yeah, that's the other thing what concerns me about Ozempic and this is, this speaks to really one of the key central features of healthy aging is muscle. You've got to maintain, keep, build muscle as you get older. It's harder to do as you get older, but you can. And when you take ozempic, 40% of the weight loss is muscle. Wow. Which means if you're lifting, you have to. Yes, you, you can, you can avert some of it by aggressive strength training.
- [31:08]
B
And, and a whole bunch of testosterone.
- [31:10]
A
And a whole bunch of supplements and testosterone. Y.
- [31:14]
B
Like but if I weighed 100 pounds, I would take Ozempic though, just to be really clear, you wait, what If I weighed 100 pounds more than I do now? Like, so if, If I weighed 300 pounds like I did, I would have taken Ozempic and not regretted a minute of it, lost the weight and then worked my ass off and made sure my hormones.
- [31:28]
A
That's fine, that's fine. But people have to understand, like the minute you get off it, your metabolism is slower than when you started it.
- [31:37]
B
Because of caloric restriction.
- [31:38]
A
Yeah, because. Because of the muscle loss that happens. And unless you really are aggressive while you're taking it, in strength training, you will see that. And even if you don't you'll see that. And also I would say that 65% of the weight that you lose gets regained for the average person if you stop it. So this is a lifelong drug unless you radically change everything in your life. So I think, like you said, would I, would I, would I say if you were 100 pounds overweight, instead of a gastric bypass, to take Ozempic for a year, lose the weight, and then be aggressive in the taking of it, changing your lifestyle and after. Yes, okay, I can understand that, but not as a solution. I mean, think about it. New England Journal just came out of an article, and it was about Medicare Part D. Now Medicare Part D, for those who are listening, don't know, is basically the drug benefit. The entire budget for the drug benefit, the entire budget is $145 billion. If just the people in Medicare who are obese, not the overweight ones, okay, just the obese ones, took Ozempic, the entire bill would be $268 billion, which means it would be almost 85% more than we currently spend on all drugs for all Medicare patients. Bottom line is that, you know, when we think of interventions that, you know, have orders of magnitude of benefit more than medication. There are so many of them.
- [33:05]
B
You're totally right.
- [33:06]
A
And I think diet, exercise, certain sort of lifestyle practices and certain supplements and even certain medication can be useful. Like, I think rapamycin works on mtor, which is interesting because that.
- [33:20]
B
Yeah, let's talk about rapamycin.
- [33:21]
A
Yeah. So, you know, I. I fascinated by this because when you start to see, like, I don't know, I can see pattern recognition. So I've been doing this so long. So I see when I read this stuff, like, oh, oh, yeah. This is how everything connects. This is how it works. The body's like a system. It's like a network. And you start to see, like a ecosystem. It's sort of like tripping on mushrooms. You see how everything is connected, you know, so it's like, whoa. And I begin to kind of have this excitement and epiphany as I began to unpack this science around this. And MTOR is a very important pathway because we need it to build muscle. If you shut off MTOR all the time, you're going to not be able to build stuff and make proteins because you need MTOR to activate protein synthesis. But if you do it all the time, you're going to build too much proteins, you're going to get cancer and all kinds of other stuff. So it's overstimulation. Is not good. And inhibition of MTOR in a cyclic way is so critical to longevity because it's the way we activate this pathway of autophagy or self cleaning up. So when you think about what, why is this all there? Why do we have these pathways? Because historically, you know, we didn't have, you know, Whole foods or grocery store or 711 on every corner. We didn't have an abundant sea of kind of food carnival around us to eat every kind of crap at every minute of every day.
- [34:39]
B
No skittles.
- [34:40]
A
No Skittles. So. So we basically had to kind of go through periods of starvation where, oh God, I can't find anything to eat or I can't kill that. I was watching some Instagram feed of like a puma chasing a ganaco in Chile and which ganaco is like a llama. And, and the poor, the poor puma was like jumping on in the gnoco. Throw it off, jumping on, throw it off like that. Finally it was like they couldn't. He couldn't get a meal right. Like, God, you know, it's tough out there. So somebody just can't catch that buffalo, you know, and so you go hungry. And we have these ancient systems to make sure we don't die when we're not eating and that we not only don't we die, but we start to really fix everything. Oh, geez, I'm like in trouble. So the body kicks into gear and has these ancient systems to repair, clean, rejuvenate, use all proteins. Old proteins build new things. You don't stop making proteins when you're not eating. Right. Your body uses the body's proteins to start to fix it. And so that's what MTOR inhibition does. It activates this process of repair and cleanup. So what's so fascinating to me is like in the pathway is named mtor, which means mammalian target of rapamycin. Rapamycin is the drug. So why would you name a pathway to this drug? Well, that's how kind of they discovered it. And this rapamycin is named after Rapa Nui or Easter island, which is where they found this compound. These scientists in the 60s were scraping the soil and trying to find cool compounds. I don't know, maybe the aliens, they thought, dropped some good medicines in the soil. And so they basically got this compound they put in a lab, they tested it for antifungal purposes. Didn't really work that well. The guy's boss said, just throw it out, it's garbage. And he didn't. So the scientist, the Lab guy was like, I'm keeping this stuff.
- [36:30]
B
And.
- [36:30]
A
And then they found it actually modulates immune function, so they use it in transplant medicine. And then they found out that it actually inhibits this pathway called mtor, which can extend life dramatically in animals and reverse a lot of the biological aging phenomena. So when you look at the one thing, the one thing that almost all scientists agree can reverse aging and actually extend life. So we don't really have many interventions that can extend life by a third. I mean, if you're, you live to 80, instead you live to 120. That's impressive, right? So it's not like you're getting a couple extra years, you're getting like a massive increase. If, if you eat a third less calories, you live a third longer. Now that's pretty miserable. And I met a guy once who was in the calorie restriction society and said, what'd you have for breakfast? He's like, oh, I had five pounds of celery. I'm like, you must have very strong.
- [37:23]
B
And I'm chewing muscle and I'm still trying to get a date.
- [37:28]
A
I'm like, what'd you have for lunch? I had 12 pounds of tomatoes. I'm like, okay, it's, it's not, it's.
- [37:33]
B
Not sustainable, so it's just not gonna happen.
- [37:35]
A
So, so anyway, but in animals, they can do it because the animals can't complain. And so they find it really works. And so what we're trying to find. You, you hinted this. What are the things that mimic calorie restriction? One of the things that can kind of make your body pretend. And so fasting is actually calorie restriction. So time restricted eating is a form of calorie restriction. Great. Ketogenic diets, another form of sort of calorie restriction in the sense of how the body perceives it. Right, because, because of the insulin effect. Well, it's like, it's basically what happens when you don't eat. You go into ketosis. Right. So the body, it's actually doing the same things, fasting, mimicking diets, where you have low calorie diets for five days periodically. All these things work in a very similar way. And, and, and they, and they actively.
- [38:20]
B
Even soluble fiber when you think about, or sorry, insoluble fiber that it's calories that you can't absorb. So that's calorie restriction even though there's calories. Right, right, right. Tad, your list. Keep going.
- [38:30]
A
Yeah. So many. Basically you, you basically can through many different doorways turn on these ancient starvation systems, these ancient survival systems. And, and when you do that you actually can, can really have a dramatic impact. So rapamycin seems to do all these things. It inhibits mtor, which then turns off inflammation, it activates mitochondrial biogenesis, it increases antioxidant systems, it increases autophagy, increases DNA repair, it has impacts on all the other things. So it may activate sirtuin activity. And so they're all like kind of interacting. They're not like separate things. And so it's kind of a cool thing to say, oh, I'm going to take this drug once a week, which is kind of the protocol 6 milligrams a week or some people are taking it 2 milligrams, you know, three times a week for eight weeks or five weeks off or eight weeks on. It's like everybody's kind of guessing, honestly, but, but the data is really fascinating and I, I'm kind of optimistic about it. I started taking it.
- [39:21]
B
How often do you take it?
- [39:22]
A
I take it once a week. And do you fast on the day? Take it? I, I take it at night. Okay. And which I do a overnight fast, so 16 hour fast. So it's not like too fast, I'm too skinny. If I fast, I. Yeah, yeah, it.
- [39:35]
B
Can be a problem and I'm the last guy who would ever be saying it's a problem. But I did get too thin even without taking that stuff. But if I over fast and all, it's to the point that having that metabolic control is incredible. But you've always been thin, right?
- [39:49]
A
Yeah, yeah, I've always been, I've always been like this. I mean I've always exercised. But basically I was 40 and I was running, I was eating healthy, I was, you know, doing functional medicine. But it was an era where we thought, you know, more carbohydrates, less fat, less protein was better.
- [40:05]
B
Ashes you.
- [40:06]
A
Yeah, so I was eating whole grains, I was eating beans, I was, you know, I wasn't like eating junk food and I was eating a lot of sugar, but I definitely was. Didn't have the muscle mass. And I was sort of shocked when I was going through pictures and I saw this old picture of me when I was 40, when I was thin, but I just looked kind of like nothing. And then I look at this picture of me when I'm 62 and you're ripped and it's like what? And so, you know, the body has that amazing ability to do this at any age. So it's never too late to start.
- [40:39]
B
Okay, I've got to ask you the MTOR elephant in the room question, given that elephants are made out of meat. Not that I would eat one.
- [40:47]
A
Oh, meat, yeah, meat is definitely bad because meat causes MTOR to turn on and that's really bad. So we should never eat any meat.
- [40:54]
B
I mean, Dr. Gundry was just on. And Dr. Gundry is a friend and I respect him greatly. You know, we talked about it and he's, you know, all these plant based proteins and all for that reason. And I, you know, that's an area we don't agree. We agree on many things. But what is, what is your take, Dr. Hyman? Meat or no meat and mtor?
- [41:12]
A
Well, I've written about this a lot in food. What the heck should I eat? I did, I basically locked myself. I was in Austin actually, when I wrote that chapter. I locked myself in a room in a hotel with like a pile of papers this big next to a barbecue. I am not going to listen to every stupid, blah, blah, blah, you know, guy, influencer, doctor, scientist. I want to know what the data show. I, I want to, I'm like, I'm a doctor, I can read papers. I understand this works. I can evaluate, you know, how this is. I'm like started in case you go. Because the one thing is to read the headline. Nothing is to read the abstract. Another thing to read the methods and then to read the supplementary material which has all. Exactly what they ate and what they did and what the other factors were. And basically my conclusion was that, you know, meat is not bad for you. That, yes, we should not be eating feedlot meat for many reasons.
- [42:02]
B
And lunch meat and hot dogs are not meat.
- [42:05]
A
Oh my God, Dave. I'm like, I was down in Florida, I had to do this show, TV show. My flight was delayed, I got in late, I didn't have dinner. I woke up, had had a bunch of stuff to do. Didn't really have breakfast, didn't really have lunch, had a little, few snacky things. And I finally got to the airport on the way home and I was really hungry. I'm like, I'm gonna try to find something to eat. And it was like an airport. Fort Myers, Florida, right? I'm like, oh God. Okay. Well, I looked around, I found, okay, this place looks good. It had like, it said carved turkey, black eyed peas, you know, collard greens. Okay, that's, I can go for that. So I get the turkey. I'm thinking carved turkey. It means it's carved from a turkey. No, no. And it was like turkey like substance.
- [42:51]
B
Carved from a loaf.
- [42:52]
A
I don't know what the hell this was, but it was like some weird, like soggy sponge.
- [42:57]
B
Like, did you eat it?
- [42:58]
A
I was so hungry I ate it. Kind of tried some turkey in it. But you know, sometimes you just got to deal with it. What do you got to deal with? So I, it was fine. And, and so basically the, the, the, the meat question is, is really around aging has to do with mtor.
- [43:16]
B
Yes, it does.
- [43:17]
A
So the idea that if you overstimulate mtor, you're going to age faster is true. So logically, if you eat anything that stimulates mtor, that's bad. Well, that's wrong, right? It's like, it's like Goldilocks. You need just the right amount at the right way. It's like, do you need to sleep and you need to be awake? You need both, right?
- [43:38]
B
Yeah.
- [43:38]
A
So basically the body has a need to build protein. So you need to have a construction crew and a building crew and you also need a demolition crew and a cleanup crew. And so you need both of them. And if you just like, can I made dinner in your kitchen and never cleaned it up, it'd be a freaking mess. That's what happens when you overstimulate mtor. But if you didn't ever cook, you'd serve it. So, you know, I think, I think it's really about how to properly activate and inhibit mtor. So let's talk about how do you turn on protein synthesis? Because this is really key and has to do with the quality of the protein.
- [44:17]
B
It does.
- [44:17]
A
So when you look at the protage study and look, I'm not a protein expert, but I had read what protein experts have written and there was a group of protein experts, the world's protein experts got together and they wrote a paper to review all the science about muscle protein aging called the Protege study. And it was a really in depth study that looked at, you know, kind of review of all the data and they came up with a number of conclusions. One, you know, you need two and a half grams of leucine to activate mtor. If you don't have that in a meal, MTOR will not turn on to simulate muscle synthesis. The idea basically is that is that if you, if you don't have enough of the high quality protein, then you can't turn on mtor, you can't build muscle. So you either have to eat meat or chicken or fish and turn ON MTOR with 30 grams of high quality protein, with 2 1/2 grams of MTOR in it or you have to have some highly processed plant protein with jacked up amino acids. And I don't like that.
- [45:20]
B
I wouldn't sound like an ultra processed food product to me.
- [45:23]
A
It absolutely is. And I met these guys who are like the game changer guys. And these guys are super jacked. They're ripped and they're like strong. I'm like, what is going on? So I met some of these guys, I'm like, so what do you do? Like, how do you, how do you do this? Oh, well, I have like, you know, 12, you know, vegan protein shakes with branch amino acids and extra leucine. And I'm like, okay. So you basically kind of cheat the system by actually having highly processed food. Because if you want to get this from eating greens and beans, good luck. I mean, you're going to get 30 grams of protein, of usable protein. With a piece of chicken or meat, it's like 4 ounces, which is like not very much. It's like a small amount. If you want to get that from brown rice, it's six cups, or from beans, it's two cups. Good luck eating that and don't be in the room when you're doing that.
- [46:17]
B
There's something else that raises mtor more than leucine, more than tryptophan, more than methionine.
- [46:24]
A
Sugar.
- [46:25]
B
Oh, wait a minute. We're supposed to quit eating animal protein because it raises mtor, but sugar raises mtor more than animal protein. How about I eat the highest quality animal protein out there because it works best and eat less sugar and I'll still have less mtor. So anyone who tells you to go vegan, who doesn't tell you to also eat no sugar and no starch, by the way, there's no food left on a vegan diet after that.
- [46:47]
A
Tofu.
- [46:48]
B
That's a fair point. Jesus Christ. Oh my God, kill me now, right? But this is an impossible thing. Literally, if you're restricting animal protein because cancer and you're having any sugar at all, you're doing it wrong. Because sugar is way stronger than animal protein at raising mtor. This is why bodybuilders you lift hard. If you're not doing this stuff in my new book in Smarter, not harder, which is a lot better than lifting. But let's say that you lift really hard. What do old school bodybuilders, you know what they're doing do? They take maltodextrin, which is to spike their blood sugar and a ton of protein. So they get insulin, which Acts just like insulin, like growth factor. And they get a huge MTOR effect from the carbs and then the protein.
- [47:32]
A
Right.
- [47:32]
B
You have to have both.
- [47:33]
A
But also, I had eyes of shocking discoveries when I was practicing at Kenya Ranch because we had a DEXA machine. So everybody got a DEXA scan. I love those machines. Because if you're looking at a biomarker for healthy aging, you've got to look at your dexa. This is a way of measuring your body composition, amount of muscle, amount of fat, where the fat is. Because you can do a total body comp thing with those bioimpedance things, and you're not gonna know. Like, I had a guy, you know, I had a guy yesterday was 12% body fat in his arms and 30% his gut. The DEXA was interesting, but this guy was a bodybuilder. He had, like, super high body fat, but it was all, like, marbleized meat. It was like all marbleized meat. His muscles were just marble. And because he ate a lot of these kind of carbs and protein together, like what you're saying.
- [48:17]
B
Yeah, you don't want to do that all the time.
- [48:19]
A
Hmm.
- [48:20]
B
It's interesting. Charles Poliquin was on the show. I would call him one of the OG biohackers before biohacking had a name. He taught me that when you see someone with a ton of fat in the front, like the Buddha belly, that that's usually a cortisol issue. And he's still. Doctors get mad at that. He said, look, you can look at the pattern of fat deposition in a body and it'll tell you the hormone status of the body.
- [48:44]
A
Well, that's true. I mean, with Cushing's disease, which is a cortisol producing tumor, you get certain fat distribution.
- [48:53]
B
You're like a moon phase, right?
- [48:54]
A
You get a moon phase, you get a hump on, like a buffalo hump on your back, you get big, big tummy. You waste muscle, you get skinny arms and legs.
- [49:01]
B
What I wanted to say for your friend there, the bodybuilders. Yeah. If you're always eating a ton of high glycemic carbs and protein together, it's not a good idea. High glycemic carbs and fat together, not a great idea all the time. But if you wanted to have the croissants and you're not gluten sensitive and you're in Europe where there's no glyphosate on the grains, and you did that every now and then, it's not going to harm you at all. If your metabolism is healthy, well that's it.
- [49:26]
A
I think the whole point here is this idea and it's central to functional medicine is that health is about metabolic flexibility and resilience. Most of us are metabolically inflexible and metabolically not resilient. So for example, if I have a can of coke, my insulin might go up a little bit. If you know some Sally over there who's been chowing down on, you know, 2 liter bottle of soda for 20 years, her insulin is going to go through the roof. Same, same input, very different biological response. And I think people don't understand this, that you can eat the same thing and have profoundly different effects depending on your own sort of biological software and how well you're functioning. If you want to maximize muscle synthesis, is load up protein on a fasted state. So what do we have for breakfast in America? Bagels, muffins, sweetened coffees, pancakes, French toast. You know, bottom line is, is if you, if you eat the typical American breakfast, you're killing yourself. And most of us, unless we have eggs and bacon for breakfast, don't have protein. So having protein in the morning and a load of protein, probably 40 grams and depends on your weight. If you're like a, you know, five foot tall, 100 pound little lady, it's different than if you're a six foot five, you know, 250 pound, you know, football player. Right. So it's different. So, but, but you need, you need to look at, you know, the recommendations around protein. I want to get into that minute. But you need a big load of protein in a fasted state so that you actually activate MTOR in that way after fasting. That's the best way to build muscle is so, you know, that's a, that's a huge thing to understand. And I think, you know, if you, if you're looking at what the recommendations are for protein, this is what a lot of people talk about is 0.8 grams per kilo is what the RDA is the recommended dietary Allowance. Now what those are, are minimum amounts that if you don't have, you will get a deficiency disease. So how much vitamin D do you need to not get scurvy? 30 units. How much vitamin D do you need to not get infections and flus and Covid and everything else? Maybe 5,000 units. So it doesn't mean.
- [51:36]
B
Why do we still look at RDAs?
- [51:38]
A
Well, it's really was around, it was really around the era when we had massive nutritional deficiencies in this country. But the idea that we need 0.8 grams is basically how much protein do you need to not get protein malnutrition? Yeah. Okay.
- [51:52]
B
But even then, it depends on what protein. Right. Because different levels will still give you protein malnutrition.
- [51:56]
A
So in developing countries, you know, protein malnutrition is a real issue, and so it's a problem. So that's the minimum you need, and that's okay, but it's not the optimal. You need to live to 120 or to build muscle or to do all the things you want to do. So that's probably more like double. Like 1.6 or up to 2, depending on how active you are.
- [52:16]
B
Yeah, that's the real challenge. If you wanted to live a long time, go a while without eating, and then when you do eat, have adequate protein, does that match your perspective?
- [52:27]
A
Totally. Totally. And I would say also I would. I would challenge you on this, this nomenclature of anti aging. Okay, I'm not anti aging. I'm for healthy aging and for optimal aging and for. And for. And for reversing our biological age. So I'm not against chronologically getting older. I don't. Right, yeah, that's going to happen. I can't do anything about this.
- [52:50]
B
This is a branding problem for anti aging. It has been for. So I ran an anti aging nonprofit group. Like, that was started in 1993, and in the late 90s, I ended up being chairman, even though I was the youngest guy there. And I'm like, can we name it anything but anti aging? Because being against something, right.
- [53:05]
A
I'm for something. I'm not. And I'm not. I don't. I think it just kind of. Kind of gives the whole field a little bit of a bad rap.
- [53:12]
B
I've worked for 20 years on finding a better name. There isn't one. Like, I mean, it's healthy.
- [53:17]
A
Young forever.
- [53:18]
B
Okay.
- [53:18]
A
Yeah.
- [53:19]
B
Young forever association.
- [53:21]
A
I mean, no, I think it's, you know, healthy. It's whatever. I don't even want to call it healthy aging, but I think it's for understanding how to optimize our health as we age and to prevent and reverse diseases and to extend our life. Whatever you want to call that.
- [53:36]
B
I want to be time resistant.
- [53:38]
A
Time resistant. Okay, that's good.
- [53:40]
B
I think Young forever, you actually nail the name of your book because that's what we're talking about. The forever part. The time actually doesn't matter and the age doesn't matter. So you're not against it. You're not for it. Like, it's irrelevant because I Get to look and feel and act in the way I choose.
- [53:55]
A
Yeah. I want my physiology and my body's capacity to be kind of getting better as I get older and matching the wisdom and increased understanding of the world that happens as you get older. So like that's a kind of as opposed to having a great mind. But I can't walk up the stairs. Right, right. And I think that's kind of what happens to a lot of us is we can't function. So like I'm doing stuff that I just wouldn't have imagined that would be possible for a 63 year old. Right. I'm skiing like a maniac down super steep mountains. I'm, you know, playing tennis and improving all the time. I'm constantly getting better. I'm, I'm riding my bike and, and being faster than Most of my 30, 40 year old friends and who basically can't keep up with me. And I, you know, the body has that capacity if you understand how to work with it. Most people are just not running things properly. So if you put in diesel fuel in a gas car, it ain't going to run very good. So if you understand what is required to optimize the function of your car, you'll know how to run it better.
- [54:52]
B
Wow. I love that. And it's entirely possible. And what we're working towards is normalizing that.
- [54:59]
A
Exactly. So I agree, I agree. There's things that are sort of, I would say, out of reach for the average person without enormous amount of money, which is, you know, stem cells and exosomes and you know, we're going to.
- [55:11]
B
Make those available by doing them now, in 10 years for sure they will be available for everyone. So we are building a society where just like cell phones came out and they were only for rich people and now the poorest people in remote parts of the world, it's changed their lives.
- [55:25]
A
That's right.
- [55:25]
B
We're doing that with anti aging. Yeah, sorry. With healthy aging. I want to ask you about one thing that's on Your list of 10 Hallmarks of Aging from young forever. And this is a really good book. Marcus, you write about inflammaging, which I did not have as a separate part of the seven pillars in my view on aging. I had that as mitochondrial dysfunction creates inflammation because when mitochondria don't make electrons or proteins, they can make inflammation. So I kind of thought it was mitochondrial dysfunction. But I have new thoughts that I didn't know about when I wrote that book. Tell me what inflammation is. What causes It And I want to go deep with you on inflammaging.
- [56:06]
A
So, you know, this is not actually relatively new idea. This is something that's been in the medical conversation for a long time now around all the diseases of aging. So heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, depression, obviously autoimmune disease, all these are inflammatory diseases.
- [56:22]
B
They're also all mitochondrial diseases though, right?
- [56:24]
A
They are. So they are. But you can have, you know, you can have a mitochondrial dysfunction and that'll drive inflammation, but you can have inflammation that's primary, not driven by mitochondrial dysfunction.
- [56:36]
B
That's important.
- [56:37]
A
So, you know, I think, I think, you know, if you have, for example, your microbiome being a problem, that can drive inflammation and that will also mess up your mitochondria because of lipopolysaccharides. Right. But it's not, it's not the only mechanism. So there's like the body has multiple mechanisms to create the same thing. There's only certain final common pathways in the body that, you know, I always say the body only has some ways, so many ways to say ouch, right. You know, you only get, you have pain, you have inflammation, you have certain things that happen that create all these symptoms. But there are these common routes. So inflammation is this common route that seems to accelerate as we get older. So we can measure biomarkers of inflammation that are highly predictive of mortality. And David Furman at Stanford has done amazing work around this called the Immunomes project, thousand immunomes and took people looked at their 50 different cytokines which are inflammatory or I'm not, not always, but they're immune molecules that are often inflammatory. And he measured, you know, 50 different cytokines across a thousand people from like little kids to very old. And he found that there were four very highly predictive inflammatory markers that none of which you probably anybody, including me, ever heard the name of, that's in some sort of obscure medical textbook somewhere on immunology that are the more, more predictive than the things we do measure like CRP and.
- [58:05]
B
Are you talking about IL6? No, there's nothing.
- [58:08]
A
No, you would not have heard.
- [58:10]
B
I love this.
- [58:11]
A
I can't even remember because it's so weird. It's like CMX 12192 or something like that.
- [58:16]
B
So that you can't get a lab test on anyway.
- [58:18]
A
Right, exactly. But now there are ways to test this and using high throughput testing and, and screening and looking at an AI analysis according, according to how it correlates with all these chronic Diseases, they found that it was the. These four things were the most predictive. So there's, there's going to be ways that we can map inflammation. And everything that that happens as we get older drives inflammation. So they regulated nutrient sensing, you know, MTOR dysfunction, sirtuin dysfunction, MPK dysfunction, mitochondrial dysfunction, microbiome dysfunction, you know, epigenetic changes. All these drive inflammation. So it's kind of like the downstream effect of all these upstream causes. Inflammation can be, we call chronic sterile inflammation. It's not an infection, but it's inflammation. And, and that is super important to track, to measure, to look at, and to understand why. So I always joke, I say, as a functional medicine doctor, what's my specialty? I'm an inflamologist. You know, like, I'm really good at figuring out the root cause of inflammation and reducing inflammation in the body by using all my functional medicine tricks, right? Removing the bad stuff, putting in the good stuff. And so, so when you look at all these different pathways, you know, you end up with accelerated inflammation. One of the, one of the ways that, that really accelerates this is the deformation of zombie cells, which are senescent cells, which you wrote about in your book, which are essentially these cells that when your cells are done doing what they're supposed to be doing, they usually die. We have a whole system for that. It's called apoptosis. They blow up. We recycle the stuff and we, you know, it's great, and we kind of have a recycling plant. But sometimes these don't die, and they basically kind of live forever, but they don't do anything useful except they spread tons of inflammatory stuff all over your body. So they kind of float around your blood and your tissues, and they create inflammation. And then they kind of literally infect other zombie cells, Other cells, make them zombie cells, and you end up with this, like, fleet of zombie cells that just. That creates this inflammatory phenotype that creates just this accelerated inflammation. So it's like putting, you know, fuel on the fire. And you want to make sure you can treat those zombie cells. And there's a lot of ways to do that. One, don't live a shitty lifestyle that makes them form. Two, you can take things like fisetin, which is from strawberries, it's senolytic. So the whole class of compounds now being researched that are senolytics, like quercetin and things you can get from vegetables and plants. And then also there's drugs that might do this. But what really interesting is the hyperbaric oxygen therapy Was more effective at reducing senescent cells or zombie cells than any other treatment.
- [61:04]
B
It's funny. I have a hard, hard shell hyperbaric chamber at home from oxas.
- [61:09]
A
You do?
- [61:10]
B
Absolutely.
- [61:11]
A
Where? Here in Austin? Yeah. No, you don't.
- [61:13]
B
Absolutely.
- [61:14]
A
Okay, I'm coming over.
- [61:14]
B
I'm coming over. Anti ager's got to anti age, as we say.
- [61:19]
A
Oh my God. Okay, I'm coming over next week.
- [61:23]
B
Yeah, it's either that or a Tesla. So I drive a 10 year old Jeep, but I have a hyperbaric.
- [61:30]
A
Is that your black funky looking jeep out there? I'm like, that's got to be Dave's car. He's such a weirdo. It's gotta be his car with kevlar. I'm like, yeah. I'm like, this is weird. This looks like a military vehicle.
- [61:41]
B
I bought it that way.
- [61:42]
A
It's so military vehicle.
- [61:44]
B
So upgraded. It's better than a new jeep. We'll put it that way. I'm all about the upgrades.
- [61:48]
A
So.
- [61:49]
B
So hyperbaric works really well. I have a, another, I have a theory for you that I want to run past you. I'm pretty sure that a major portion of inflammaging is actually mast cell activation.
- [62:04]
A
Interesting. So I think what Dave's talking about for those of you non medical people is, you know, you have a lot of different kinds of immune cells. One of them is called mast cells, and when they're activated, they release histamine. Histamine we're familiar with when you get hives or you get a bee sting or you know, you get a rash. That's, that's histamine activation. Allergies, if you have seasonal allergies, they.
- [62:27]
B
Also do heparin and about 100 other inflammatory cytokines, probably including the four nasty ones.
- [62:33]
A
Yeah, so, so, so they're, they're, they're, they're. There's sort of an awareness that there's a subset of humans who are very allergic and who have we call mast cell activation syndrome, which makes you really miserable. And you have to learn how to figure out what's causing it. Remove those things. You have to figure out how to regulate histamine production with various kinds of plant compounds, drugs, whatever, whatever tends to work. And there's a whole treatment, there's a.
- [63:00]
B
Whole huge regimen for them.
- [63:02]
A
So I think mast cells do play a role. And so some people need to be on low histamine diets and people need to be taking anti histamines that are regulating their histamine production.
- [63:13]
B
Not Everyone needs to do that. What I'm seeing is that when people get. Sometimes a car accident, sometimes emotional stress, like from a narcissist or a sociopath or from bullying or toxic mold, environmental bacteria, sewage fumes, these all take the. I like to describe them as landmines in the body. They're sitting there waiting to stop something bad. But once they get programmed to think there's something bad that's not actually bad, they keep setting it off. And that's a major cause of inflammation. It's not the only one. But I feel like if we can learn to reset immune sensitivity.
- [63:51]
A
Yeah. See that.
- [63:52]
B
You're going to age a lot less.
- [63:53]
A
See, this is essential point. And I kind of discovered this as a functional medicine doctor. People are like, oh, I have to eliminate this, I have to eliminate that. Okay, well, yes, you're sensitive to all these things, and all these things trigger an inflammatory or immune response or some other adverse effects. The real question isn't what should you eliminate? Is why are you so sensitive?
- [64:13]
B
Yeah.
- [64:13]
A
And let's fix that. People come in with all these environmental allergies.
- [64:16]
B
Yeah. How do you reprogram And.
- [64:18]
A
And people are so overstimulated by like environmental allergies or food sensitivities or food allergies. And they're mess. And they're a mess. And when I fix their gut, when I reset their immune system, they stop being allergic. Like, I hear this over and over again. Oh, gee, when you did this, all this program, I don't have my seasonal allergies anymore.
- [64:38]
B
That's cool. That's fixing the liver and gallbladder kind of stuff.
- [64:40]
A
Or it's fixing the gut and the usual functional medicine, mumbo jumbo, hocus pocus, magic tricks.
- [64:46]
B
It's funny because we don't exactly always know which pathway caused the allergies to eliminate. Was it the gut or the liver or some sort of spleen thing? I think there's some question marks in it. But we know if we do this, it works. But exactly why it works, we haven't figured it out yet. And that's where science is interesting. Right. And speaking of interesting, I just have to say Young Forever is a great book and it's very actionable, which is something that I. That I really look for in books. It's easy to write a book, especially now with ChatGPT, for God's sake.
- [65:20]
A
Which is. Yeah, that's how.
- [65:21]
B
Which regurgitates nonsense.
- [65:23]
A
That's pretty much how I did. I said, chatgpt, please write a book called Young Forever on longevity. And it was amazing. Like in like five minutes, the book was done. It was the best ever. You're right. My book is very practical. I did it. You know, I'm a doctor, so I'm not like, you can read a lot of longevity books and they're very interesting and they talk a lot about the science and they give you an understanding of the field. But then you go, okay, now what? And so this book is now what?
- [65:47]
B
It's making it usable. That's the hardest part as an author, is saying, okay, what do you do? And it's full of things like, okay, take note of these things, add up your score and then figure it out. And so this is the thing that says, all right, if you're not gonna go, see you at ultra wellness clinics, which not everyone can do. No, no, read the book and you're gonna get 80% of what you need right there. And that'll probably fix it. And if it doesn't, you go find a specialist. So I just think you've done a great service to people for cooking books. So, guys, it's called Young Forever. My friend Mark Hyman, who is definitely a modern master and also knows that plant based protein's a joke. Thanks, Mark. I look forward to having you on when your 16th New York Times bestseller is out.
- [66:39]
A
When I'm 16.
- [66:41]
B
We'll meet when we're 16 and we'll make fart jokes.
- [66:44]
A
It'll be great. All right, buddy. Thank you.
- [66:47]
B
See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast. A Human Upgrade formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.