Everyone from the Buddha to the Stoics have exhorted us to remember that we’re going to die. So what are we to make of Dr. Mark Hyman? He’s a physician and a student of Buddhism who is just out with a new book, called, “Young Forever.” In it, he argues that your biological age can be reversed even as you grow chronologically older. So we decided to have him on, learn about his approach, and gently grill him on some of the things that made us most skeptical.
This is the second part of our new six-part series, Get Fit Sanely series, where we are trying to help you to make sense of the noise around getting fit–and to do so without losing your mind.
A little bit more about Dr. Hyman: He is a practicing family physician, the Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, and a fifteen-time New York Times best-selling author. He also has his own podcast, called The Doctor’s Farmacy.
In this episode we talk about:
- Whether there’s a tension between Mark’s approach and Buddhism
- Whether it’s realistic for people alive today to think that we could make it to 150 or 200 years old
- Mark’s contention that he is in better shape at 63 than he was at 40
- His take on intuitive eating
- His top line recommendations on exercise
- The benefits of cuddling
- His response to critiques of functional medicine
- Whether his longevity routine is something regular people can do
- The research on cold plunges and saunas
- His advice on alcohol
Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/dr-mark-hyman-609
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This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
This is the ten percent happier podcast dan Harris hello. My fellow suffering being set people have been promising eternal life for thousands
years, there's a reason why the myths about the fountain of youth has had such staying power, and so many cultures in so many parts of the world. For so long we all know it's bullshit, but the cat damage is compelling everybody from the buddha to the stone.
Ex have exhorted us to remember, though, that we are going to die that this whole being alive. Business is super short and quite fragile, but we seem to be programmed for denial. So then, what are we to make of doktor mark hymen he's a physician and a student of buddhism whose just how, with a new book,
called young forever in it. He argues that your biological age can be reversed even as you grow crops.
logically older. He also lays out his extraordinary personal longevity regime, which includes the check this out aerobic exercise, strict training, hot yoga mantra, meditation, breastwork, saunas, called plunges red light. Therapy supplements a specific
diet. He calls the pagan diet time restricted eating using a low oxygen mask wally's working at his desk, using blue blocker glasses at night, getting massages ozone there
hyper barrack oxygen therapy and by the way, that's not even the whole list. I should say on top of that he also sometimes experiments with things like peptide therapy access zones, whatever those are stem cells, natural killer, cell infusions and transfer plasma exchange. Ok, at this point you may be thinking this sounds ridiculous. Unreal
stick very expensive and supreme supremely time consuming. However, while mark is by his own admission and you'll, love, hear him cop to this in the course of the interview up a bit controversial in some circles. He's also
a friend of mine who has been on the show before it is a very big deal in the health and well no space. So we d,
to have a mom and dad
about his approach and gently gingerly here in a friend
manner grill him on some of the things that could have made us my
Demon made just a little bit sceptical. I should say a doctor mark handled this all very well. I should also say this is the second part of our six part yet fit sanely series where were actively trying to bring on a set of diverse guests with, in some cases, contradictory viewpoints and then ask them tough questions and help. You make sense of all the noise out there around getting fit and how to act on this
advice without losing your mind, a little bit more about doktor hymen before we dive in here is a practising family physician, the founder and senior advisor for the cleveland clinic centre for functional medicine. At a fifteen time, new york times best selling author. He also has his own podcast, which is called the doctors pharmacy, and I've been on their a couple of times. In this conversation, we talk about whether this tension between marks approach and buddhism, whether its realistic for people alive to day to think that we could make it to a hundred and fifty or two hundred years old marks contention that he's in better shape at sixty three. Then he was at forty he's taken intuitive eating his time.
line. Recommendations on exercise the benefits of cuddling, his response to critiques of functional medicine, whether his longevity routine, is something regular. People could do the research on cold, plunges and saunas at his advice on alcohol before we get started with today's episode, let me talk about
habits for a minute, as you know, we're in the middle of this big series about their health and fitness. But del getting your shit together on this front can be
really aren't, even if you ve found good people to listen to like how to act.
we operationalized the advice. How do you form the necessary habits? It's because habit formation is so hard that we brought together, stanford psychologist kelly, mcgonigal and meditation teacher alexis santos to create a seven day, meditation challenge to help you change your habits.
The healthy habits challenge kicks off over on the ten percent happier app on Monday, jus nineteenth to join just download the
wherever you get your apps or by visiting ten percent doc.
All one word spelled out of europe
the app and you want to do. The challenge is to open up the app and follow the instructions to joint, and, if you not already a subscriber, you can join us by starting a free trial that will give you access to this challenge. Now the abbots challenge and everything else on the yeah. Alright. Now on with the show.
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We aren't just listening right now: you're driving cleaning and even exercising, but what, if he could be saving money by switching to progressive drivers who saved by switching save nearly seven hundred dollars on average and ato customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Multitask right now quote today: a progressive dot com, progressive casualty, insurance company in affiliates national average twelvemonths savings.
six hundred ninety eight dollars by new customer survey to stay with progressive between june twenty, twenty one and may twenty twenty two potential savings will vary discounts not available in all states of situations. Dr mark hyman, welcome to the
yo thanks dan for having me it's great to be back as jack should Joshua said. Welcome back to the show, ha ha ha you and I were texting about this last night. It's so interesting to me, because you studied buddhism in college you're, quite familiar with buddhism
this day, and you know that in buddhism there's this huge emphasis on
being familiar with comfortable with intimate with your mortality that then we are asked to remember that these bodies are of the nature to age and to die, and yet you ve just put out a book. Congratulations under the book very successful book and the book
all young forever, and so I'm wondering is there any conflict there
not really, I mean I think the buddhas are very focused on this idea of impermanence right that everything changes and
death is part of the impermanence. Things are born,
die. So I think, for me, the floor
His on longevity is really not about living longer per se. It's about living better! It's about increasing your health span, not your lifespan and the lifespan. Extension is just a natural consequence of dealing with increasing the quality of your health when you're alive. You know we also want to add more.
I have two years, not just more here's to your life, and so I is definitely not a conflict at all. I don't really think that I
live forever, I think it's a bad idea.
To be young as long as I'm alive, my joke is. I basically would like to die young as late as possible yeah. So the title young forever is more of a poetic turn of phrase, a switching of forever young, as opposed to some sort of advertising promise
Exactly exactly is, as far as I know there are, there are long heavy scientists, dinners talking about longevity escape philosophy, which is ask
so I have trouble with, even if we can scientifically achieve it, which is essentially standing our life each year.
more than the rate at which were dying. So if you can extend you liked by europe,
for every year, you're alive, you perpetually never die.
I can't I don't like that, but I think
getting to a hundred healthy years, is achievable from us.
us, maybe even out in twenty having given what we know with longevity sides. Now this might not be out of reach and and the point
I just, would be a hundred and twenty, but we'll do it you loved to do. In fact, I just want,
with a friend in turkey whose grandfather is over a hundred years old, just flew from paris to Portugal, the visitors grandkids hikes every
three kilometers. He was actually a survivor of auschwitz, which, by the way, is maybe part of
the reason he has lived a long time, which is starvation, actually activates is ancient survival, longevity pathways so,
I think, if enough, I can go visit my grandkids and go right with them
hundred years old, I'm down.
May my kids are going in that rate it might not be
till a hundred that I get it so happens that arrives nobody questions for you, ok, so, as I'm
can in buddhism. There are all these practices where you reflect on the fact that the body, as I said before, is of the nature to age, to get sick to die. I think the buddhist proposition is that gets worth while to get comfortable with their mortality with your affinities, because it may
the present moment, more vibrant gives your life a sense of priority and it aligns you with the non negotiable truth. Do given your
emphasis on longevity. Do you agree with the buddhist approach in that regard,
I mean absolutely. I mean the whole point of life really is to show up. I is to show up at me president a full experience. What is right now and that's worth joy- comes from where happiness comes from, where low comes from and where distracted, disconnected and thinking about the future of the past were not actually in a true moment of life were in some abstraction and the purposes
Buddhism is to be fully present and be fully aware and to be in this state of alertness to the beaumont and that's where white happens, that's the only place. I've happens.
as for the practice of buddhism are all about that and as long as we stay focused on that
then we actually have an opportunity to fully live, and so the problem that I see so much now Dan is that
most of us are not fully living in is part of our distracted life, but also because we're sick
you how ninety three point two,
percent of americans are metabolic. We unhealthy, which means they have some
former pre diabetes them high blood sugar, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, they had a heart attack or stroke are overweight.
And so, if you're walking around, you feel like crap, it's hard to be present in you're time
air and your foggy. Your aching you're dealing with medications and side effects and just basely, not in your phone
health. It's really hard to be present in loving and kind and compassionate in. There is a saying that healthy
and once many things a sick man. Once one thing, I think that's kind of the perspective I have so. How do we stay fully alive and present it
only by taking care of our fears of container and ideas. Not absent in traditional buddhist circles are to bear witness doctors who are very much about creating vitality. There
long, my ceremonies and now they're using to actually
the dalai to be a hundred and ten years old, but she promised so some of them.
to living along healthy life? But you know when you die
at seventy or one hundred or one hundred and ten you're still going to die. So you have to kind of face mortality. So it's not mutually exclusive right right.
I just say I was at a long life ceremony for his holiness a few months ago and yes, and he was right there and he said to me which is yeah. I wasn't the first person who said this too, that he plans to live to one hundred and ten, so there, if
are you correctly and I tend to agree with it. There isn't a fundamental conflict between the notion of getting comfortable with your mortality and being as healthy as possible. While you are alive
absolutely not acknowledge that this has in fact the only way to actually, I think, live a fully robust engaged life where you're happy in trifling yourself and your able to be a service and connected to others is too
He'll get and sole understanding the mechanism by which we get sick and we become decrepit as we age is really more.
cause you know the dialogue, doesn't wanna, be one hundred and ten and not know his name and not know where he is and not be able to teach. He wants, be able to be in service and so
I do that you have to take care of the physical container. You live hint. Would you like a hot? I want attacking
What about the? How of that? But just hang on a high level for a second. How far can we take this idea of longevity? Do you think it's realistic for people alive today to think that we could make it to one hundred and fifty
your hundred, I think, as possible. I mean if the longest than human rights than well documented I was made
Lemme, who lived to be a hundred and twenty two years old,
by the way, smoking and drinking wine and loving chocolate
how to recommend her bad, but it shows the potential limits now
given what we know now about the science of epigenetic reprogramming and I can explain what that is
We now understand how to turn back our biological clocks and it's not through a lot of fancy expensive things, although there are things that are fancy and expensive and our scientific advances that are coming down. The pike, which are
exciting, which may allow us to accelerator epigenetic reprogramming to a younger. You I think most was can reasonably expect to be able to live a hundred healthy years. I think most children to name if
They avoid the ravages of our modern societies, food system and sedentary lifestyle and stressors and toxins which, by the way, is no easy task that they actually could most of them reach. One hundred years
I think getting two hundred twenty the harder I think getting it. One hundred fifty two hundred is definitely
in the realm of sci fi, but I think
What we are now understanding about the underlying mechanisms of aging and these signs of longevity, I'm pretty hopeful, they were gonna, see people living now who we
able to reach one hundred and twenty hundred and fifty I I'm hoping to get two hundred and twenty. Maybe one hundred and fifty we'll see how I'm doing, but now I'll just go to switzerland and call it a day.
switzerland, where you can like freeze your brain, you mean not only
have legal euthanasia eliza got it
you can choose your day of exit. Got it got it got it got it. That's a whole other conversation. Actually we should point that, because I'm interested in that, but just staying on task for a second or a topic for a second one
but more than a second you're saying that somebody like you're europe,
The sixties are my early fifties. If we
in a healthy way, which shouldn't require too many super expensive things, just common sense things, hopefully, that we could reasonably expect to be healthy until a hundred
Yeah, I think it's true, I mean I was in the blue zones and it was amazing to see people whose environments, where naturally organised to activate the longevity pathways right their diet, their mandatory activity, herding, sheep, five miles a day, a rocky terrain, their deep social networking connection, their lack of exposure. Toxins are
lack of stress, chronic stress, and they were people over a hundred years old, ninety five years old, who were run.
Up and down the mountain, and I was like holy cow like I- can keep up with this guys, ninety five years old and that's because he's been hurting his sheep of rocky slopes for said
Many are more here, her scrape just for the
initiated we're doing a whole series on getting fed and stay healthy and the blue zones of come up a lot. This concept was.
Pioneered eared in large measure by a guy named Dan beautiful, actually met recently and may have him on the show at some point in Dan was working with national geographic and
travel around the world as a kind of professional adventure and found these areas of the world where people are living longer and they ve come to be known as the blue zone and he's written books about what you
learn from them and end there's some overlap for sure in your work,
you say, you're, healthier and in better shape at sixty three than you were at forty at I'm curious. Is that really true? And if so,
did. You swing that why I actually thing is true, because not only do I look better, but my biological age
based on the escalation tests which we can talk about is forty three, even though sixty three
and when I was younger, I followed the prevailing diet,
three recommendations, which was to eat a lot of starch right, our dietary guidelines or food pyramid and nineteen. Ninety two said: eat six to eleven servings of bread, rice or pasta. Every day
and fat sparingly. We now we know that the biggest driver of aging is a high starch and sugar diet, and so that drives cancer drives heart disease prevention. Obviously, diabetes inflammation through.
the body. And so I switch my diet to be quite different
much higher in good fats, too much higher in high quality protein and hire and fire
but they re vegetables, and that has changed my physiology and I have greater muscle mass. I read your strength and also started resistance. Training which things
Important I was running and I was doing yoga, which I thought was enough, but it really wasn't so I basically put together a strategy based on
the merging size of longevity, of how to activate my bodies, own helium repair mechanisms iciness over and over people, basically can transform themselves at any age whether you're, forty fifty sixty seventy eighty, it's not too late to start. So, if you're diet, spin off and you are
fifty here, I am asking for a friend clearly still turn things around. If you're forty thirty fifty sixty get to a hundred with a health span,
in tat. Absolutely I just I sunk restoring a patient, I had a cleveland clinic who was sixty six years old in front and some purpose
She was on her way to her heart and kidney transplant. She had heart. Failure should had type on in some for ten years she had high blood pressure, she had really poorly control diabetes or a once. He was eleven witches,
your factory hospitalized levels- and I was on a pile of medication and massively overweight, her body mass index was forty, three normals twenty five over thirties obese. So it's just huge and within three days she was off her insulin, just using food as medicine. In three months she was off
medications are aliens who went from eleven to five and a half which is normal. Her heart failure reversed, but you never see in medicine, her kidney is normalized for liver normalized, she had fatty liver and she lost one hundred and sixteen pounds over the course
four year. There is a drug on the planet that can do that in no combination of drugs. That can do that. They can manage things better by. They can actually reverse these conditions and that's the power of it. Activating is ancient survival pathways that we have, that are,
built in we have three thousand genes out of our twenty thousand, which is a lot that are
designed to adapt to scarcity and starvation and survival not to deal with the abundance of food and sugar and cowardly
So when we start to learn how to properly turn on what I call the longevity switches, we can see radical transformations in any age. So, let's talk about the house of this in your book, you lay out at least three big lever is that we can pull eating exercise and what you call lifestyle practices there's more, but those are the three biggest from what I can tell. Let's start with
getting very basic level. What are your recommendations for those of us want to increase our health fair. Well, I think the first thing is what not to eat and then is what to eat right. So what not to eat is what we were told to eat for the last. Basically, fifty years by our
melbourne, which is elisa starch and often a lot of sugar also which were eating. They weren't recommending that but they're basically saying it's. Okay to add ten percent of your calories of sugar. It's really not in that high
is driving all the age related diseases and increasing mortality. So if you look at the process at that occurs by his called insulin, resistance, which is your body, becomes resistant to the effects of insulin
You make more and more insolent to make your blood sugar, normal and then insulin causes fast order on your organs.
The causes information causes damage
Your brain in dementia eight increases cancer growth and risk, so it just it accelerates every single pathway. You do not want to accelerate if you want to live a long time, and so the first step is to cut down on the one hundred and fifty two pounds of sugar,
In hundred and thirty three pounds of flower that the average american is eating every year,
was a pound per person per day? That's just a farmer, a pharmacologic dose of sugar and starch and that's driving so many problems that are related to
aging and aging fast and all the disease of aging. So that's the first step and the second is just ultra processed food, which is sixty percent of our calories because they make you eat more than make you hungrier they're designed to be addictive and we just should not be eating those foods which are really not food.
You're. What I call food like substances and the sixty percent of our diet of sixty seven percent of kids die and then the question is what,
do you eat if you're, not even bad wishes, majority were diet, which should you eat well, your dies should include a lot of a fight or chemicals, and those are plant compounds that are found in fruits and vegetables that are
highly bio, active and regulators of many of the ancient survival pathways. So you might have heard about course, attend tender. Longevity which reverses biological age was fair trial which might have heard about from renoir.
other, don't you frequent? Wine is a way to get it, but it has shown to extend life
dramatically animal models, but David Sinclair, Lenny, courtly from mit. There are other chemicals I green tea or pomegranate extracts or
fight or chemicals from broccoli and other a whole host of these compounds have been found to regulate these ancient longevity switches. Let's call them
I am happy to explain what those are trying to get into it, but basically it turns on all the beneficial pathways that reduce inflammation. That increase your antioxidants that help,
increasing mitochondrial function, mitochondrial andrey factories that make energy from food and oxygen and that's critical longevity in Hell.
Your micro work better
and every aspect of your help. These are critical, some good quality fruits and vegetables. The second is good fats. Fats are really import
come on germany, especially omega three fats. Olive oil avocado does not seem just good fats and lastly, protein in protein is the big kind of controversial question in terms of health, among
because there's a camp, the says we should all be region to live a long time and there's a camps has no. We need to eat more meat so whose right
I think when you look at the data, it's quite interesting muscle is the key to longevity. If you want to stay functional, you want people to hike up that mountain. You want to be able to get up off the floor,
If all down you wanna go my tie, your shoe less shoelaces, you gotta have muscle, but do it and what happens to us, as we age is the second law of thermodynamics, which is entropy. We fall apart unless we have inputs that private,
from falling part, and so we need to understand how do we design a way of living in eating that activates muscle protein synthesis? In other words, how do we build muscle, as we know
and it turns out that the best way to build muscle is to eat muscle, meaning animal protein. Me fish chicken, Sarah now
few at lahti. Me all the time. That's not good either because there's an ancient mechanism, that's designed to build muscle, called him tore, but it also has to be turned off at important rates of time, because if you don't
give it a break your costly building, muscle you can grow cancer and many other things, and when you inhibit mtr torn by fasting, for example like an overnight fast, which is usually should be at least twelve hours. That's called breakfast.
Or fourteen sixteen hours that inhibits this path they call em torn and when you and him
his pathway. It actually is the thing that extends life was called out yourself cleaning so at night or when you fast, you have this process self cleaning and self repair. The basic
activates everything you want to activate. If you want to live a long time, it repairs your dna, it improves your mitochondrial function, energy production areas, inflammation areas to increase and Amy oxen systems. It helps to make you more
sensitive, it has all the beneficial things you want to. Actually
long time, and so you need to give yourself
break from eating beef
I need to then when you do actually break the fast? Let's say after a sixteen hour fourteen hour overnight fast, you need to re feed with the right substances and not what we eat in america, which is sugar for breaks.
We basically have dessert for breakfast in america right we have cereal, we have pancakes, we have bagels muffins. We have sweetened tea, sweetened coffees, it's the worse, so it turns out.
Science is very clear on this, and this is from a large review of all the literature by the world's leading protein scientists called the protein study.
found founded ass. We get older, we tend to get well call anabolic resistance mean.
hard a bill. Muscle
and so we need more protein and we need more resistance, exercise, otherwise known as string training. So
When you re feed you wanna have about thirty or forty grams of protein.
and you wanted then do that within two hours of exercising our weight training,
and depending on your size and if you're five foot tall hundred pound person is different than if you're six foot six two hundred fifty pound person you're going to need diff amount of protein, but you need more protein than we typically think
You need protein that has a very important amino acid called loosing. Loosing is basically the switch the turns on muscle pro
in synthesis. If you have low leucine in your protein, which is basically most plant proteins, you will not be able to turn on
muscle sensus and that's why we protein or eating protein from a muscle like be for chicken or fish actually as the best way to activate this. So you have to actually
creature protein and take out you get older, but you
so need to have these breaks from eating, which aren't overnight, fast or longer fast.
Or take a joint compromise in that mimics collar restriction.
actually turn on this proper clean up system. Sweeney both build up
and making muscle but also clean up, prepare unregeneration wishes basely what happens overnight. So it's a little bit complicated, but
the ideas we need more protein and we need more animal protein ass. We get older if you want to be a vague and you can do it, but you have to add amino acid.
and lucy and other things to your diet. Supplementary, maybe said a lot there,
While the idea is very interesting, though that was not meant to be a criticism. Let me see if I could date a team in super short form. I think what you're saying is the traditional american diet or the standard american diet, which is acronym eyes. That sad is something we should avoid and instead we should be eating whole foods, vegetables and protein. Animal protein has a lot of benefits. If you want to stay away from animal proteins, you need to supplement
we should be doing some daily fasting in the form of you, no stopping eating at a certain time and then eating breakfast with twelve to fourteen hours. Later,
About it, if you dvd dinner at six o clock at night in your finnish unity, breakfasts at six o clock in the morning, I like
it's not a hardship. You want to get a fourteen hour fast. You can eat at eight in the morning if you want, he was sixteen hour fast. As you know ten o'clock in the morning, so most people can do that.
And unless you're you're really frailer fan- or you have no certain health conditions, you may not want to do it, but most people think we all the metabolic. The unhealthy people actually should proceed. Use that coming at mark talks about his take on intuitive eating his top line, recommendations on exercise, his advice on,
styled practices, the benefits of cuddling and has taken supplements, which is a big, crowded and unregulated market.
let me just say a little bit about my own experience with this stuff. I will have you know for listeners of the show. You've heard me say some of this and in many of the episodes running in the series, but I'm just gonna say cause. I want to get your response to it. Personally, you know at fifty one I've gone through
many food religions. I am now a devout non combatants in the food
exercising diet for europe
sing non violence in terms of food, exactly half embracing that in a big way. I don't want anybody to hate me. I think we'll get so worked up about this, and I understand it. That's true I'll just say what happened with me, which is that I've done through periods of time where I was aggressively following some sort of diet
here, I was vague in for a long time. I still am pretty light on animal protein and I've tried my calories. I've embraced all sorts of hard
or exercise regimes- and then I found some-
sure you are familiar with intuitive eating, which has its critics. But it's been very helpful to me personally. The basic idea is now, rather than declaring certain foods off limits or
in full to eat what you want when you want, with the caviar together et cetera, important at least one is. You should be listening to your body about when you're wondering, when your full and also you should have a background of gentle nutrition and understanding of what the nutrition guidelines are, and I found that for me this has
turn the dial down in a very dramatic way on what is sometimes called orthorexia, which is which is, as you know it it's it's an unhealthy obsession with eating or being healthy and
We saw a paradox it all, but his try now I know, but it's a big problem, and so I guess what I'm wondering. Having said, all of that is a what do you think of where I've landed in b
do you worried all about your recommendations based in though they may be, teaching people up for authors sexier
Maybe I think you know people can come overly obsessed with anything. I said I wrote a book called the pig and diet, which was an attempt to no point kind of a comical finger at the incredible diet: wars that are going on paleo, weak and everything in between and sing. Look I'm not that hard we use needed.
Real food, not crap, and you will ok
and here is a general guidelines on this is better for you. The man is as pretty simple, so I agree.
People are overly obsessed and crazy about their food. Part of the problem is in due to meeting
a great idea unless your biological hardware and software are completely corrupted now. I, for example, just got back from turkey and was very jet lag and my intuition was to eat a pint of chunky monkey ice cream.
Cause, I was exhausted and so, whether your stress or fatigue or sleep deprivation or whatever,
driving you're desires. You have to be very aware of, like what's truly self regulation based on your biological signals and one is disrupted regulation and most people eating the typical american diet. Alter process diet, which is high in starch and sugar, have disarray
waited brain chemistry and hormones which interrupt their normal biological self regulation signals. So its import understand that you know you have the kind of reset to a healthy, biochemistry metabolism. In order to actually listen to your sick.
Because often the signals are wrong, which is why people can go from like a hundred fifty pounds to three to fifty pounds: rain,
because all their biologists whack and it's not by accident and by design
commerce has written a lot about this from your times: sugar, salt fat, about the incredible deliberate.
and I would say, somebody's criminal application of science to creating highly addictive foods that are driving our behavior. That aside, yes, I agree. Intuitive eating is great. I think. Listen to your body is really important, but you have to actually get your body straight in order to be able to listen to what it says.
point taken and for me just to say that intuitive eating, as happened in overnight process, I still am working out. It's it's been one of the most challenging things I've ever taken on because we get so much programming from the culture either through messages or through the food we eat that it's just hard too hard to counter programme against those, but but
Let me ask you: you are one of the things that I've found liberating, and maybe you disagree with this- is that I don't need to get overly and if I could take my kid to the movies and we want to eat some starburst like
I do it and if I'm at a restaurant and there's beautiful fresh made sour dough, I eat it. You know this isn't every day,
I'm not walking around of tight in a way that takes me out of the moment in those moments.
Great, I may I agree- I got what I always say to people who don't let your ideology trample over your biology
Can we get so ideological about food? They are actually listen, other body, so they did
We are being analysed and they start feeling bad other periods go away or their muscle mass.
goes down or they have this or that problem. But I want to be vegan, you know so like they. They don't actually listen to their body, but I do think it's okay to go off the reservation. I called ninety ten yeah. I was in sardinia at one of the blue zones and it was a restaurant in the midst, incredible sourdough bread and, of course, I
tough, so I'm not not going to eat that, but it's not something that I do every day or it's a staple, and it's really the you know under
also. How do you create a finely tuned system?
so there you are met about very resilient, and this is what you would understand. If you are
about resilient. You can handle, allow more stress, for example, if you're, tired, exhausted.
When the littlest thing will be upsetting and exhausting and tiring. Like I, I was so tired from jetlag. I couldn't even answer one email right I wake up in the morning and I can go through a hundred emails same person, but I was not resilient in that moment and I think we forget to understand that metabolic rate,
this- is something you can achieve and that when you have met about resilience, you have more degrees of freedom. So, for him of your attack to diabetic new, probably can't eat ice cream
me if I'm running five miles a day or biking twenty miles with thirty miles a day and wanted to have some ice, my feet
I know I can handle it and my blood sugar doesn't go crazy and my insulin doesn't spike because even the same foods can create profoundly different responses depending on who's eating them right. If you're diabetic and you eat drink a coke
One thing is going to happen here, biology if you're not in euro marathon runner,
not going to do anything serious and you'd, probably when you that our long term but having a coke here- and there is not going to tell you so it's really about
You're standing, how to create metabolic rate
yes, and I'm more robust physiology, while you, you brought up exercise there with your references to running in biking, so there's another big lever in your view when it comes to increasing lifespan and hell span. So what's your top line recommendation one
must exercise its really fascinating idea, and when you look at the science of longevity and you look at the mechanism has been exercise, activates in your body is literally every single thing. You'd want to do to live a long time right. It turns off inflammation aid, improves your mitochondrial function in number.
you're in some sensitivity it helps repair your dna and helps kills. Zombie cells. I mean every single thing: you'd want to do. Exercise is the magic pill, so if there is one thing that you would commit to for the rest, your life that can make it
and actually mitigate a lot of other city stuff. You might do yourself, it's exercise and there's really I say three pillars of exercise. One is cardio and conditioning saw, rewrote fitness to as your strength, and you must-
as in three is your flexibility and you need to maintain all those as you get older, and it's just the fact that, like if you're twenty five and you know used to running five miles a day and you take three months off, you can probably run five miles when you want to get back.
Three months later. If you do that when you're seventy good luck in your body needs much more attention to regular habits of activity, as you get older, because its less driven by hormone,
like growth, hormone and sex hormones in our driving health when you're younger they decline as you get older is wasted,
I use them, but you need a new, more exercise as you get older, not less and and it's the key to longevity so cardio would be. You know thirty minutes of some type of exercise that raises your heart rate and, ideally kinds of exercise. It boosts your mood of vo two max se. Your metabolic efficiency, so is how much oxygen you can burn per minute, which relates to how many calories you burn per minute. How efficient and fast is your engine right and if you do sprints or some type variation of sprint's right, we call interval training that actual
if they meet the pathways that increase your vo two max and that's correlated in a direct way with longevity, the higher your beard to match the longer you live, and it doesn't take that much to do at thirty minutes three times a week of doing cycles of like one minute, sprinting thirty, three minutes of walking that'll do it. The second is strength, training and that's so important because, as I said, the second law of thermodynamics, which is entropy, will cause you to lose muscle. If you do nothing, so you can be the same weight as sixty five, that you were twenty five and be twice as fat and so you're, not objectively overweight, but you're over fat and under lean, and this is what we call skinny fat and that leads to all the same adverse metabolic consequences as being overweight, such as heart, disease, cancer, dementia and diabetes.
and the only way to stave off is by a combination of string training which could be resistance, bans, body, weight, waits different machines like tone all his lot of mid lot. Theory mid orange, where we where we like, but you have to
that along with the right amount of protein, which is the raw materials to bill muscle, so there's other tricks to it by creating and some other things like europe with an aid from pomegranate that can help, but basically resistance excise combined with their I protein
is key. Unless it's flexibility, you want to tire shoelaces cut your toenails, a lot of reasons,
a nursing homes as to the get together shoes or
Their toenails anymore, I'm not kidding it's his basic activities of daily living and peter achior talks about the centenary in the catalogue of essentially ireland
Now one of the ten these legal adieu when you're your hundred years, all that you want to do pick up your grandkids get up off the floor.
tie. Your shoes, your basic stuff, and you need to have a level of flexibility as well as strength to do that. So those are the real pillars of exercise. You mentioned Peter attia. We had him on recently as part of this series. We're doing, and one of the things that I talked to him about was
how much time does it mean he? This is a guy and you may be in this camp or exercising out I dunno well, over ten hours a week, maybe some fourteen sixteen hours. You talked about these three kinds of exercise, a cardiovascular or aerobic strength.
and flexibility. How long should be dedicated to this may large, this mix
with the minimal viable dose gas,
it's not as much as you think you know, I would say thirty minutes of strength, training three times a week, I would say probably thirty minutes of cardio three to four times a week, so you're up to three hours now a week and if you do fifteen minutes of stretching three or four times a week, another hour. So let's say four hours a week
if you can't find forest and weak two men feel better live longer, is probably good any examined. Your lifestyle, he thought- and I personally
I would love to do more. I like to go for a two hour by cries. I like to do yoga for hot yoga for an hour every day. If I could, I do strength ring for five times a week. I often candy
That's because I got a lot nor on, but
the minimum viable does, though, is not as much as people think and and it's something that's achieved by most people to relief. I do want to take a dive into your daily routine in a minute, but let me let me just ask-
about lifestyle practices. What do you mean by that? What does that include
It turns out that the missing ingredient in longevity for most people is community. Is your social network and I don't mean their facebook follower, sir, have how on earth I mean they're friends, so many people in this country in particular, who can't pick up the phone to call one person to confide in about something challenging the life loneliness is an epidemic that is as dangerous as
the two packs of cigarettes a day eyes worse than obesity, for your health and in the blues owns one of the defining features is profound sense of committee,
me and belonging connection, meaning and purpose of you cured all cancer and heart disease from the face of the planet. You'd extend sunlight
seven years if you have meaning and purpose in your life, you have in your life by seven years, if you're a tennis player, you stand you liked by seven years. So there's a lot to be said about the social connections and fabric and community and belonging
and it is really important to do that. I was actually very sad. I got an email from somebody who works the washington post and soon,
in article loneliness, and I realise that on seven years old- and I know I'm a friend to call again
I felt really sad when I read that needs writing an article about the epidemic of loneliness in america. So I think that is such a huge factor when it comes to
germany and health I had a friend who sell my grandma. She was like lived to be almost a hundred, but she was really ever way she candy all day and she never exercise, but she had the most.
credible group of friends and community and belonging made- you can imagine
I don't want to underestimate that stress is another big one and I think community and friends actually mitigate stress a lot
but we all are subjected to huge amounts of stressors, whether it's the stress of our food, which causes lillian biological stress response. When you reach sugary, causes quarters all go up and internal
go up whether it's the stress of living in a world that were costly,
my body with bad news and where there's a worn, ukraine and climate change,
in a recession and crypto claps enemies has pretty much everything they can make. You depressed there's stresses of family and work and all the things we have today
and that's. Why, then, when you do is so important, as you teach people a tool, a meditation to help mitigate
that stress and there's a lot of other reasons to meditate, but actually that's a critical part of sting healthy cause stress in itself will cause so many harmful things in the body
and then sleep is another one. American sleep an hour to less than they did a hundred years ago, and then I have significant consequences. Could sleep is one or body prepare he or renew our brains clean up and it's a critical part of our life? In often we under sleep and we over eat and we under exercise and we overstretched so giving those things under control meet a huge difference in your rural health, a mantle of those community meditation, as a stress, reduce your added sleep. Let me go back to the first in that list. I get so strongly agree and often overlooked power of so
your connection, so many of us optimize in many ways we optimize for sleep were meditating were exercising world freaking out about our diet. We are working on our instagram feed.
Work in our hearts are in terror, design a resume all of this shit, which is super important. The one the lever that seems to be the most powerful, perhaps to pull in terms of health and happiness, is the queen
You have your relationships and obsolete was crazy that we overlook this. I think for so many of us. So my question for you after that rant is what are the practices? What can we do to get better in this area?
Yeah, it's a great question, and you know it really came home to me when I went to haiti after the earthquake in two thousand and ten, and I met Paul farmer who essentially helped eradicate tb and aids in the poorest country in the western hemisphere. You know where they had the worst conditions of tb and aids that were given up on by the
it helped me, and he did it not through better medication are surgery, but through the power we call the company meant and the company mom was the french, were they use where this there was actually community health workers neighbours who help their neighbors get help.
and make sure they took their meds on time and so forth, and they begin to realize that you know the social threads that connect us are more important than the genetic friends. Our health is so much determined by our social network. Christakis of harvard has done a lot of work on this. He wrote a book called connected, essentially about the fact that if you're overweight, what's the cause and-
I found that if your friends are overweight, you're, a hundred and seventy one percent, more likely to be overweight than if a family members or your forty percent more likely for weight. So how does that? Work was because
It also connects us determine our behavior and out of that, I sort of came up with this concept of socio genomics, which is this idea that our social connections and networks influence our gene expression and it turns out that
it actually is a thing and there's a whole field of social economics. If you're going to pubmed the national library of medicine type, it and you'll see there's paper after paper of how our genes are influenced by our social connections. If you're in a conflict you'll,
relationship ship with someone you turning on inflammatory genes genes. Internal loving, connected relationship is the opposite. Even cuddling, for example, causes epigenetic reprogramming forces amazing and can turn back the biological clock. So how do you do it? Well depends what you're into right. So there's a lot of wasting economically socially,
maybe it's reaching out to all friends and starting a little zoom group like I did during cobra. We shut to my six closest male friends from forty plus
some who see each other once in a while. I said why don't we meet every week on zoom unless you have deep conversations about where we're at with our lives and we've been doing that for three years now and it's it's amazing that can be joining a bowling group or a knitting circle
or becoming part of a yoga studio or becoming art about faith based wellness programmer church, there's a lot of ways to do it, but it's it's about being intentional about cultivating and develop
in deep social connections and it doesn't have to be that many, even I one or two close friends can make a huge difference is standing by
and I talk about a lot- as you know- and I think a lot of the listeners to the show know I retired- from a b c news almost two years ago and around that same time turned fifty, and I recognize that as much as I loved a b c news, I loved being a journalist, I love being anchorman. It came at a huge
I was working seven days a week early morning and the weekends late nights during the week, fur nightline and one of the big costs was that I slash we were not as connected to our friend group as
we had historically been, and so we really made this decision to start saying: yes, not only to start saying yes to invitations, but to even ridiculous invitations. I'll give you an example in a second, but also to being more proactive in reaching out to people and organizing events at our house and my favorite day to day. I think this is so much higher as a consequence. I ll just give you an example of. Yes, I got a call recently from a friend of mine.
this hilarious thing. He said I have an offer for you: that's both incredible and very rude pack using buffer, edible because he runs a company and they were doing a corporate boondoggle at the kentucky derby and he said
you can come and will sit in the front row it at their rude, because the invitation was for literally the next day.
There is already a dropped out of the group and a guy sloppy secondary exactly so, I prefer my wife. We are actually in a lay for something else, and I said: do you want to do this? We are like yes, so we flew home. We grabbed our son
we cannot all of our appointments and we went to the kentucky derby, where this amazing time with our old friends and met a bunch of new people and our son
I had a great time and my friend shout out to tommy d. He sent me a text afterwards and he cause you know we're old friends, and we don't see each other that often he said we need to do this. More often,
played the whistle meaning, let's see each other until this game is over. I found that very moving and he had some suggestions still like create structures so that we continue to see each other
I just you know all that comes to mind and out of my mouth in listening to you, that this is so important and it is doable, doesn't have to be fancy at the kentucky derby. It can just meeting you
the friend for a coffee it can. It can be really easy at night I have a a very close friend, my best friend from when I, when I was eighteen and we've stayed really close to our lives, but he works really hard. My joke is knowing,
in billy come out and play again. You know that my friend belly yeah, so I I keep pressuring I'm so like you know
we're intentional about it where, where we try every year to take a trip for a week somewhere, I'm going to go biking in greece this summer, and just it's like what do you have to do to maintain and develop and keep enriching these friendships and relationships?
and maybe it's just like I said, you're having a regular weekly call with a friend or having a regular weekly zoom. Hang with a bunch of close friends is quite amazing how powerful it is and it works not in an abstract in a way but acts in a physiological way to change
biology and one of the key, exciting things about our understanding of longevity sides. Is this idea of ebby genetics, which is not our genes but the control mechanisms that determines which jean are turned on or off, and how these basic physiological price
These get regulate in your body and, what's exciting, now is that we know to following we talked about through foods. We exercise through social connections through meditation through sleep through cuddling for simple. We can re programme, are ebby genome to turn on health genes, verses disease genes-
and that's really. What's so exciting is a lot of doorways into doing this, but then we had the ability to do this and a lot of it has to do with which symbol practices that don't cost a lot. If my wife's gotta love hearing this because she's been
on me about cuddling for awhile and more calling. I am litter,
starting literally last night, we had this conversation and I'm starting to crack. I'm historically love them
affectionate
Try it you'll like it. You know I did last night I started. I was like I got into it and now I feel even more enthusiastic after I have talked to you now you can say it's a it's. Just going to wind up, reprogramming, be genome
I get in bed for a minute yeah. This isn't so much about my affection for you. It's just about epigenetics baby yeah cause. I need to do this. Alright, there are a couple more things. Do you talk about in your book that I want to hit on? One is supplements. My hesitation about supplements is
it's my understanding. It's a pretty unregulated market, it's confusing to me at the very least. So how do we know what to take, and should we be doing this in conjunction with our doctor yeah great question, so, first of all, the whole industry is unregulated, so you're kind of at the mercy of the manual
factor about whether the product is properly made, whether the dose says on the labels, actually the dose in the bottle whether it's got contaminants, whether whether by available, whether there's other additives additives, it problematic, like dies in color like just a mess,
and then when actually works. What does and what is assigned show and then the researches very confusing for people when they officials good one day, it's bad in her, like everybody's kind of a little bit,
used. Without said, you know, I've been practicing functional medicine in doing diagnostic testing, on nutritional status, on thousands and thousands of patients for almost
three decades- and I can tell you, my population is a select population of relatively health, conscious people and I still find really significant amounts of nutritional deficiencies, and these are across the board in our society: omega threes, vitamin d, magnesium, z
and some of the bee by ms, like foley iron. These are really common interests and efficiencies, and what nutrients do is they actually regulate your bout chemistry, every chemical reactions that happens
there are thirty seven billion billion chinese. Every second in your body requires an
since I am. Every enzyme requires a helper and those helpers are vitamins and minerals. So you do need a
a multi, vitamin and a vitamin d- and I would say official for most people- that's just kind of a basic maintenance and that can be really inexpensive less than a dollar a day. And then the question is like:
what is the other cool stuff it's coming out around longevity in what am I taking in was interesting, and I think it is all a host of compounds letter from plants that are hardly yet, but the show real promise for longevity, like corsican, which has from onions and
You know apples and things like that, but that's shown to reverse biological age. Also pomegranate extracts called your lytham a which is actually one called post biotic that it comes from your bacteria metabolizing, something and pomegranate turning something good that you absorb and then improves your fitness and mitochondrial function or could be green tea and all it's benefits or the broccoli extract.
I take a combination of these vital chemicals, cause it's hard to be consistent every day and then there's other compounds like a man.
or an are or any d which really showing some promising
when germany and I think are activated muslim charity pathways, setting a very exciting. So I think there's a few things that I
are worth looking at in trying to have as basic foundational things and then go for
the longevity enthusiasts there's a whole menu of things that I talk about in the book that are worth exploring and it's always kind of like a cost benefit analysis. You know once the research is ravenous for it. What's the cost, you know, are there side effects? Is it safe
and I can go to that analysis and you know taking vitamin d. The downside is pretty much zero unless you're overdosing and it's the upside is high. So it really is looking at that calculus and figuring out what makes the most sense in the book. You talk about all of these sort of exotic, not only supplements but other kinds of longevity treatments that you're exploring that don't necessarily have an evidence base behind them. Yet a solid one.
right where there's some, but not it's not as extensively like yeah exactly an end. Some of these may be super expensive, but you you're saying of europe.
germany, nerd and you ve got the cash. Some of this stuff might be worth looking beyond. The island
a couple of things in that category. One is hyperbaric oxygen, which is a really hard thing to get
Is there not a lot of chambers out there? There's not a lotta chambers them do stuff that are off label. Maybe
if the hospital has a hyperbaric chamber for wound healing and things, but you can't really go in and get it for longevity, but a large study out of Israel showed that they actually were able to do a lot of things that promote longevity through about sixty sessions in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, where they put you under two atmospheres of pressure at one hundred percent oxygen for an hour
or so, and that kills zombie cells and makes your telomeres longer more than any other treatment. Thing is a lot of benefits. To that. I think also. Plasma for recess is an interesting thing that I think
We see more research on and you might have heard about peter Theo and how he gets. The blood of young people and youth is all
So what are they gonna silicon valley about a cop blood boy?
The idea was that if you get the blood of young people, you can make yourself younger, and our chairman mounted ass. He got
blood red army soldiers back in the day. But it's got a gruesome
Is there another way to achieve this? Well, it turns out based on some animal studies, what they did was they say to try to replicate. These studies were these to sew up.
An old mouse of young mouse together, their speculation and the old mouse become yeah, like all that's kind of cool. It's
magical me. Young Mouse, its causing the old mouse to get younger is the young mouse filtering out the old mouse s blood?
now, and so they did a study where they did a cleaning up. The blood it's basic, an oil change. You basically take out your red cells and your white cells in your platelets, and you separate them from the plasma which is a soup that your blood cells float around in and then you throw out the plasma which is full of all kinds of stuff from inflammatory molecules, damage proteins,
zombie cells, you're, all the kind of crap you want to not have you throw that out and you either reconstitute with albumin, which is a protein in the blood or just if you don't take out all the plasma you just put in some sailing
and it turns out that it has a lot of longevity benefits. So I think that's kind of exciting thing, and I I personally I found a great in all kinds of things from people long
innovate to autoimmune diseases and other problems. So I think that's a promising thing. Stem cells are another very promising area of research. I think we're still at the infancy of that, but I think that's going to get
or more popular and prevalent and there's ways to do it that are not having a second.
bone marrow or your fat cells, but that's expensive, so this
I cool therapies out there that are, I think, are in the kind of leading edge, maybe the bleeding edge, but I think for those for those people who want to try everything again. It's a cost benefit risk benefit analysis. You know a positive reason to safe hyperbaric oxygen safe for most people, so these are the things that are maybe costly but generally have evidence for them and are very low and side effects,
Coming up mark talks about his response to the critiques, a functional medicine, his own longevity routine, and whether he thinks it's something the rest of us could actually do. The science on cold plunges insiders and his advice on alcohol. You mentioned functional medicine, I'm glad you brought this up and I'm glad that we're talking today, because
out of a sheer coincidence, I was actually asked recently to moderate a panel on functional medicine at a conference would jump land. I saw the yes doctor, Jeffrey bled, whose coffins referred to as the father of functional medicine and my wife is a physician was with me and we walked away pretty.
Article o and in doing the research- I don't know how important a data point this is, but I was just struck the wikipedia page
internal medicine. Oh god is my earnest who, in his quackery like in the court, ends so, and I
didn't find many of the people on the panel as nice, as I found them to be damned pewter from blues Andrews on the pale, and I am very interested in his work, but some of the other
I was not convinced, and neither was my wife and so I'm just curious when people say this is too far out their untested unproven. How do you push back against that well
He gets a fair criticism. There has not been enough funding for the research on functional medicine, Toby cosgrove, and
me and my way I ve been doing this. For thirty years. Toby cosgrove go goose. A former ceo claiming clinic invited me almost ten years ago to come to cleveland clinic and start a centre for functional medicine as a way of addressing the burden of chronic disease differently than we do now, which is primarily through medications and surgery and is using functional medicine. It using lifestyle and through this medicine, primarily exercise and looks at root causes, is based on the paradigm shift
copying in medicine costs systems, biology or systems medicine. This is not directly related to functional medicine is happening in academic centers at harbor. There's an old textbook called network medicine. This is the future of how we are going to think about.
biology. The way we think about diseases today is going to be, as we now think, about bloodletting or trephanation drilling holes in people's head to get out evil. Humours I mean, I think the future of medicine is understanding the body as a biological system as an ecosystem as a network of networks, and it's also going to be looking at one of the root causes of all the chronic diseases that we have so far
if medicine is the clinical application of this thinking? Now is your data or not data? Well, there's not enough! Clearly and at cleveland clinic we raised about twenty million dollars to do research, but it's mostly from philanthropists or people. Who've had positive experience with it
wanna help and support it, and we do a number of studies which show that compared to cleaving, clinic family medicine centres and terms of patient outcome data, we do better in terms of autoimmune diseases, and this is data there was done, was extracted from our clinic and compared to the room. Italian
when a clean clinic, which is one of the best in the world analyzed by dermatologist, not by us, shall we did better across every metric, a pain, inflammation and pay.
how comes it, nor many. What other studies also that they show this data now
do we need more absolutely, but the finance,
the idea that the body is an ecosystem that we need to treat and optimize our health through optimizing. Our biological networks is really the future of healthcare and in fact, the longevity paradigm that is merging based on this idea of the hallmarks of aging, exactly mirrors functional medicine. So
with that framework says. Basically, you said: there's nine or ten or thirteen are constantly parsing them differently, but there are these underlying things that tend to go wrong, that explain all disease. So scientists say that if we address the hallmarks of aging, we wouldn't extend life by five to seven years, like we would make getting rid of cancer and heart disease, but maybe by twenty or thirty or forty years, because we're dealing with the
the main cause of all. Does he know what are those there's problems with regulating our nutritional pathways? There is mitochondrial damage to change their micro biome. Those dna damage ebby genetic changes, inflammation damage proteins. These are all things that are mirrored in the framework of functional medicine. So as a physician whose praxis and training conventional medicine has been doing this for the last thirty years, I can tell you that this is something that not affair
and it's not kind of fringe amid the fact that there's a Wikipedia page that doesn't mean a whole lot, I mean you're in the news. You know that a lot of the news is not really true,
if you google me or find em on clack watch
all kinds, a horrible articles about Bobby on science based medicine. But there's no, you look at whose funding this stuff, you know
There is also a money behind keeping the status quo, so you know
I think we will get there, but it's it's one of those areas where you know when you actually look at what is happening in the field and what people are doing and the results are there getting by applying a science is really profound, whether its
people reversing autoimmune disease, reversing diabetes. Like the first patient, I told you about the others, there's no medical treatment, that can reverse heart failure, diabetes or
blood pressure, orf, daddy, liver or real failure? And yet it all happened. Now was it's just a set of a random spontaneous permission. No is based on a scientific process of actually applying food medicine and applying the science of functional medicine to help people
optimized or health. So is you? I get the criticism, but I
have to hear your your reason: you're skeptical. I think that would be interesting to hear. Well. First of all, I appreciate that answer. Let me see if I can reflect back to just a little bit functional medicine which holds that we need to stop looking at health as just disease treatment, but instead disease prevention
that one probably amateurish way to describe it. I'd say it's actually the science of creating health as a poke at the size of treating disease. Now we need both, but if we create health, often disease goes away. The side effect right. Okay, well, that
sounds great. The criticism is, there's not enough evidence and that proponents rely too much on anecdote rather than large. Well, vetted peer reviewed science:
It sounds to me, like you're, saying that we need more evidence, but we are seeing really
interesting results in our work, and both things can be true at the same time and that this trend toward looking at the body holistically is happening in medicine writ large, not just in functional medicine. Yeah. Absolutely, that's absolutely true! You know what I think are the hallmarks of aging framework.
it's kind of fasting makes it exactly mirrors function, medicine, so, whether you people, who were now if you'll know it or not there talking about concepts, are we talking about forever, like insulin resistance, like mine, a candle? This function like information like the micro biome. These are all part of the hallmarks right when you call a functional medicine or just medicine. It's where
we're all going now in terms of the evidence issue. I find that kind of funny, because multiple who say where's the abbot
it is, they haven't, read the efforts or if there is no evidence of a man and woman
evidence, there's nine million research papers on pub mad. Have they read them all and we,
the data on nutrition. On exercise on various intervention,
for example, with certain vitamins and nutritional supplements for never conditions. If you look at the research on the micro biome on treating inflammation,
on the role of mitochondrial health and chronic disease on the role of environmental toxins and our health, all the data is there
now are there large, placebo, controlled randomized trials,
doing multi modal interventions for chronic disease using functional medicine, the scale we need no- and why is that, is because the entire research infrastructure is based on a farmer collage of all research model, which is a single drug for a single pathway for a single disease. That's what randomized trials are good at
the truth, is there not good at looking at all? What should we do as a whole like? If you want to grow a garden, you don't see what
im just going to give my plants sunlight, but no soil or water or I'm just gonna, get my plant water, but no sunlight or soil. When this absurd right, you know. Well, we don't know, what's gonna work, if you give people better exercise and better diet and
that's reduction in social connections. Well, how do we know what works? We have to study them all individually? Well, no, you need all of those things to create a healthy human. You know it's just unfortunate. We don't have a systems model for research, that's very effective right yeah! I don't want to spend too much time. Litigating, functional medicine, just a very quickly answer your question: why was I
wife and I why were we skeptical? I think that, really in my memory of how the panel went down, I can post a link to it in the show notes, I think, there's a video of it. I was
This vienna payment by the way- but I was in europe
well, you know it would have been helpful if you were because I didn't see you base
lee- were saying: yeah. Here's where I think the deficiencies are. We need more studies, we don't have
this evidence you. I didn't hear that kind of humility in the answers- and maybe I miss something. So maybe I can go back and listen to it in here, something that I miss in real time. But you were tackling my skeptical questions head on and I felt like
There was some bobbing and weaving going on in the idea on the panel and anyway
I've got my own the clock here again, there's a big error I wanna hit before I let you go, which is your routine, because your team is incredible.
In rural areas on the day, ok well LISA described in the book. It's a pretty incredible. So I'd love to hear you just describe it in brief and that I have some questions.
accept. My tried try this morning and I got a five hour asleep. I woke up and meditated for twenty minutes. Then I have coffee which I like to do.
and I worked out. I did a thirty minute rubber band,
resistance ban training programme, which I love. It's like tom, Brady's training programme superseded, do there's an app for it really speak inexpensive.
I tried everywhere, then their negative thirty minutes, I'm in and out
I had my healthy idjit shake, which basically was consisting average enemies go way, which is I use, go because its less inflammatory than cow its regenerated raised, and I put in creating into that- and I put in might appear, which is basically this paragraph extract, I put in some adapted genetic mushrooms that there are good for general resilience and health. I put in some probiotics from my
and a product that critical got food, which was like a multi vitamin for the gut, and I throw some strawberries and some macadamia milk unsweetened, and that was my breakfast shake and I took a handful of my supplements:
took and a man which I like, I took to called carcinogenic synergy, which essentially cocktail of things help zombie cells, like knows extracts from strawberries in khartoum and green tea, and I took a multivitamin fish, all vitamin d in a product that has question in it and a few other things kind of forget, but basically my morning supplements that was,
Eighty percent of my lunch eddie routine right there and then this afternoon after you up his pod cas, I'm going to go for a bike reich is a beautiful day and I have some time and then we'll take esteem them. Steam shower and ice plunging. Might ever
a bathtub and his flub of cold water and that's kind of my longevity routine. It's it's! It doesn't take that much time. You know an hour in the morning, probably or maybe a little more an hour and then
I know I'm adding an extra exercise thing in a sauna, but it's really doesn't have to be overwhelming, and then you know I may have a wonderful partner if my fiancee briana and we're going to go biking and spend some time together,
tonight? I actually have my men's group with those guys who I've been friends with for forty five years over about an hour and a half two hours tonight, we're going to gather
Zoom in now go deep together,
and laugh and cry and your stories, and thus my day
by way of
three podcast and a bunch of stuff to do anything about that guy. They leaves out work. Yes,
governor yu that that a person I don't know how we define a regular or normal person, but somebody has
demanding job, maybe two jobs may be kids and doesn't
what kind of money and maybe not be able to afford either the supplements or the ingredients of the ant aging smooth
Did you make how confident are
you that your routine is scalable to the regular person I mean. Listen, food is food, everybody has to eat and honestly, if you look at the data on the cost of healthy food, vs junk food,
it's either the same or nominally higher like fifty cents more a day, there's a great guide from the environmental working group on how to eat well for less called good food on a tight budget. I think there's a mythology around it being hard and difficult to eat, while it's just about education, knowledge and certain skills. Second is exercise.
that's basely free. You know, I mean I exercise my underwear with much rubber man so like it's by his prey.
That really is the agenda. And then you know friends, they don't
if anything, a yeah, I most people have a shower. They can take a cold shower the morning as a way to pay increase will call her, mrs to activate longevity pathways. Take a hot bath into basic supply.
Regimen can be a dollar a day, so either
I have to go on the crazy south and those basic things will get you eighty to ninety percent away
and for those extra you no longer
enthusiastic and want to add these extra things. That's fine, but I think
from the blues owns, were in taking a bunch of supplements. They weren't
jam, made Christ you're doing a lot of fancy stuff.
we're just living their life automatically, because the default conditions in their society actually led them to do that, we need
and those default conditions that the other kinds of we talk about is stress, a good stress, because her harmison, which is decide dia, that it stresses that don't kill you that make you stronger and it's so key to longevity, whether it's the overnight fast, whether it's exercise, which is a stress, your muscles and your body, whether it's a cold plunge or a sauna, whether it's hyperbaric oxygen. These are all stresses that actually activate longevity pathways from your body, so we can incorporate some of the
pretty easily called plunges and he'd like saunas or steam showers. Why? How solid or the data around those as interventions-
there's a bunch of data on Finland and these are observational data for sure they're, not randomized, controlled trials because they're hard to do, I mean you can't take ten thousand people and randomize half of them dishonest for twenty years and half them to knots on us for twenty years and see what happens but in finland, which you know basically saunas in finland for everybody being a san at the same time
May they show that the mid by way to control them, had to be positive once on a week as it was in a control group. It didn't. But
The one song a week, the force on as a week were shown almost forty seven percent reduction in mortality, which is not insignificant, there's a lot of reasons for that, but it also increases cardiovascular, fitness, cardiovascular, health increases, heat shock, proteins, the cleanup all damage proteins, one of the hallmarks of aging. It actually increases your innate immune system
I'm an immune function. So there's a lot of that that called there there's a lot of research being done done, as I did a pot gas woman phds scientists in denmark, where she ran a lot about this and actually show that when you do a coal plants for a minute or two, you active aid, brown fat which increase your mitochondrial function, improves insulin, sensitivity, I'd increases, dopamine and other things that help north happiness and alertness. So there's plenty evidence out there that these are
effective therapies for activating these pathways. How often and for how long? While they were thirty minutes innocent four times a week, was the forty seven percent reduction. I think coal plunges occur,
to her one minute can be enough, and I sometimes say to a few minutes. I turn on the cold water. My matter,
or you can start a cold shower or shower used two minutes a cold shower. That's great! You want to buy a fancy corporate
A friend of mine bought a trough like feeding traffic for thousands. Torso staffing just shows the budget.
there is some water, though yeah am my perfectly
world. I would have all of it. You know, and eventually, when I move again to a new house, I'm going to have my sauna and my cold plunge and all my stuff so at last question alcohol, unsafe.
Any dose or ok and moderation tough question, because in all
You will have heard over the years that red wine is
two among charity and decreases easy
and I think the problem in these studies as their observational studies, they don't actually proved cause and effect, and so
you know, for example, you go to the blue zones, you call these people are like drinking wine regularly and they live to be a long time like maybe
the wine, or maybe it's all the other forty things they do to activate there. Longevity germany pathway,
he's, not them, and I think we look at cancer risk in
brain health and many other things.
The day is increasingly showing that alcohol is really not save in any doubts now again
you're a metabolic they resilient healthy person and we have a shot to keep our dream.
Once in a while about why muslim
once in a while, no problem, but if you're drinking to glass of wine a day, that's a disaster for your long term health. Anything I felt
that I should have asked. I think we covered a lot. I think we didn't talk so much about the hallmarks of aging, but it's a bit technical, but I I touched on them here and there, but I think that's where, on the exciting research is really happening, are, and how do we activate these ancient systems to heal our bodies and and actually create the repair mechanisms? And I think the the key message that I want people to leave with is that we have within us on, like dorothy's, ruby, red slippers, the key to our health, and we have these ancient mechanisms that are designed to repair
renewal, regeneration and optimization of our health, and what we do every day in most of our societies, is to run
shot over those pathways and caused them to be dysfunctional and that we actually can learn how to activate these long. Germany pathways through simple practices of diet, exercise, dress, reduction, sleep a few little praxis for me says, and maybe a few supplements, and that can actually make a huge difference in increasing your hell span and making an equal airline span, in other words, die young as late as possible. Before I let you go, can you please plug your new book?
any of your older books that you want people to know about your podcast. The doktor pharmacy cages give us the whole kit and caboodle sure anybody wants learn more about my work bacon,
I learned a lot about these concepts in my new buck young forever. I have a pike ass, called the doctors pharmacy, which you been
dan and I have a website, doktor, hymen dot com and all my social media service. Doktor Mortimer in
we have trouble finding me? I promise, if you're looking for the past its pharmacies bell with it s ass their doctors, farmers who in us mark great to see you and talk to you as always. Thank you so much for making time for this. They send you the best right back at you, thanks again to mark. Thank you too. You for listening and thanks
Everybody who worked so hard on the show ten percent happier is produced by Gabriel's ackerman, justine davy lawrence smith and terror. Anderson DJ cash,
It is our senior producer, we're recession. Men is our senior editor and can be regular. Is our executive producer scoring and mixing by Peter bonaventure of ultraviolet audio and nick thorburn of one of my favorite in Iraq? Bans islands,
road. Our theme we'll see you all on friday for a bonus, a prime members, you
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Transcript generated on 2023-06-15.