Health Experts on How to Live Longer and Reverse Your Age | Clip Show

if you want to lift to 100 it basically means you have to delay the onset by about two decades of every major chronic disease because i had this biomarker i started to kind of believe that i might have cancer doctor wants to put me on a statin medication an ldl and blah blah blah and i'm like okay that was the science 50 years ago so it doesn't mean you can't get cancer you better figure out a way to get them 20 years after the average person the only reason we age is that our repair systems become complacent but in a world where we typically would die from starvation or from war we were at the middle of the food chain you know give us another 5 million years of evolution we could evolve 200-year lifespans that's what should happen i don't really care as much as what you eat and how much i want you eating at the same time every day whatever that is it's not just what you eat it's when you eat it's important i'd be fasting three days a month seven days every three months 14 days once a year there's no amount of money that would make it worth you know not knowing the answer to that question the instructions to be young are still in the cell somewhere so anyone who says we've reached our maximum limit doesn't know what they're talking about i would rather be poor but know how to you know live longer and have all the money in the world and lose my health so aging actually has been worked on for about 5 000 years or more and just in the last 20 years we've come up with a set of hallmarks of aging there are about eight of them and i think many of your viewers will know that there's telomere attrition the ends of chromosomes get shorter mitochondria the power packs will run out of energy as we get older there's a list a long laundry list and most of the people in in my field have said okay we've we've figured out aging we've got this list we put in a nice pie chart and that's it but what i'm saying is that why does all that stuff happen it's not enough just to tick off what happens you have to understand is there an upstream cause of all of that and so in my book and in scientific papers we are now putting out for the scientific community to read as well what we think is going on is that our bodies are losing essential information as we get older that drives many if not all of those hallmarks that we know exist so what in what way is the epigenome involved in this how are we losing the information give people a quick little diatribe about the difference between genetics which i think they get and then the epigenome and epigenetics and and how that plays out yeah yeah for sure it's not that complicated there's really just two main types of information in our body that we get from our parents the first is genetic we all know about dna and the four letters atcg uh it's a long molecule in cell and it's a string of letters that's digital that's like the music that's on on a dvd those things we used to use uh to store movies but there's another level of information that's above that in cells which is the reader of the information that's called the epigenome and that really is different because it's analog information in the same way that records and cassette tapes they sucked they were terrible at storing information but the problem is we have an analog version of information the epi genome which controls which genes in the string of dna are turned on and off so dna isn't just flailing around like a string it's actually packaged up around proteins we call histones and it's it's like if you spool your hose in the garden you loop it around and then you can put those loops into bigger structures then you get a chromosome which you can see any high school student can see under a microscope that's that chromatin structure as we call it is the epigenome and so when when the hose is looped tightly and spooled up that's stopping genes from being red so genes are off when they're compacted but also if the cell needs to read certain genes and a nerve cell needs to read the nerve cell genes and the liver cell needs to read specifically the liver cell genes and so they open those ones up and now the cell can get access and read those that's an analog system because it it's varying all the time it changes when you wake up what you eat so it is literally the amount that the um the dna is unspooled and the place in which it is unspooled so that it can be read right and that's what determines the cell's function and identity which we you know when we're born where 26 billion cells each one of those cells knows what it is and what it has to be 80 years later it and its descendants and over time what i'm saying is aging is caused because cells lose their packaging and then eventually cells lose their identity disease ensure ensues cells check out they become zombie-like and they're now senescence right senescence and then our organs fail and we die you know if you had grandkids or great-grandkids and you couldn't play with them you couldn't tie your shoe i mean we actually used tying a shoe as one of the metrics to evaluate sort of flexibility and certain physical performance so most people our age don't think of tying their shoe as a physical performance and yet when you would start to lose those things i think you'd have a radically different view of you know what am i doing but how do you get there and and look perform and feel like the way we imagine a 60 year old today a fit six-year-old because i know some six-year-olds that are just amazing right what we've discovered over the last 20 years is there are certain types of enzymes that help package the dna and help with the dna repair these are the ones that doing the ping pong game and without those we're screwed we basically will will age more rapidly conversely what's really exciting is is we've discovered that you can make them more active to make sure the dna is packaged correctly and the repair is very efficient and there are ways you can do that exercise dieting being hungry they allow these enzymes that control our body and make us healthier they make those enzymes much more active so instead of a pacman doing this you exercise your diet take them take a molecule that we work on and it'll go around and fix everything much more efficiently and keep you younger for longer we think how do you make the body feel like it's under threat adversity so one is run a lot or at least become out of breath you know a few times a week your body will say oh man we had we had to outpace one of those saber-toothed cats again gotta go to build up the body um the other is to be hungry either a couple of times a week or every day you know skip a meal or two and then your body will turn on these sirtuins make more of that fuel nad for the enzymes and we think that's what's in part responsible for the health benefits of those uh lifestyle choices the only reason we age is that our repair systems become complacent you mentioned that what what is beneficial for you when you're young come backs to bite you when you're old what we think is that these repair systems are very good when we're young so the idea is it's called antagonistic pleiotropy and i think it's right and that is that we evolved to stay healthy and alive and fit till we're 40 and then the forces of natural selection decline after that because we've essentially bred we've often had children but we don't need to stick around beyond that and building a body that will last a thousand years is pointless at that you know so most species only live as long as they need to to reproduce and then a little bit more if you're a mouse that could die within two years they only build a body that lasts two years if you're a whale that has no predators you can live for a couple of hundred years that makes more sense the reason is that we were not at the apex of the food chain until recently but in a world where we typically would die from starvation or from war a lot of men didn't make it to 40 because of that we were at the middle of the food chain only now we we actually barely have a chance of dying before 70 or 80 unless we're unlucky give us another 5 million years of evolution we could evolve 200 year life spans that's what should happen well there are different levels to resetting aging there are three levels that we know of the first is pretty easy to reset or to to manipulate these are the proteins that turn genes on and off very quickly we call them transcription factors and they they basically read a gene and make a protein that's what they do that's level one that's easy go a little bit hungry that'll change level two is a little bit harder the level two is not just changing which genes are quickly turned on and off but actually silencing genes for for a long time and this is where my enzymes that we work on the sirtuins come into play let's go back to the pacman they clip off acetyls off these packing proteins you spool up the hose and it becomes becomes locked in that gene gets silenced for a long time so to do that you can exercise you can diet but you also i think you need a little bit of help as well what gets really interesting and this is something most scientists don't even know about yet is level three the deep layer of aging there's actually a dna clock that tells our bodies how old we are we i could take your blood and read it and i could tell you roughly when you're gonna die what yeah we can do that what are you looking for we're looking for chemical groups that get added and subtracted to our dna mole the long string in the cell you get chemical modifications in predictable ways as you get older starting from conception so even in the womb even as a kid even as a teenager you're aging based on this clock that goes up linearly and where you fit on that line it's very accurate that tells you your biological age but how do you know when the person's gonna die is that just based on actual straight lines is it actuarial tables though the human average human lifespan is 86 and is that what you mean or is there could you see something specific in my line that would say you're headed for 68 sorry uh no it's not not specific but what it's based on is machine learning based on thousands of people's um code of methylation on the genome and comparing that to their health and their date of death oh [ __ ] that's so interesting so if you were to take my blood right now what would you look for exactly we would read the methylation the camp these are chemicals hydrogen and oxygen bound to the dna chemically physically bound and those accumulate as you get older in very predictable ways in fact they're so predictable that we can use the same clock to measure the dog's age and a human's age whoa all based on methylation right okay what causes methylation well there are two classes of enzymes the ones that add the methyl chemicals and those that subtract it okay how do i take a boatload of ones that subtract it ah that's what we're working on now here's the key level two aging reset which we can do by some of the things that i'm doing in my life yeah probably you are too those aren't permanent changes you can't just do that and expect that take take one treatment and you go on living for another 10 years okay because level two isn't as permanent it's somewhat permanent than level one but level three is truly permanent it you could reset yourself ten years and then go back and then wait another ten years and potentially reset the clock again if you know how to do that and we're just starting to figure out how to do that there are three main pathways that regulate aging in animals and probably in ourselves there are the sirtuins that i've talked about a lot today there's one called mtor which responds to how much amino acids or how many amino acids are in your body it will hunker down and protect the body the fewer amino acids it has access to okay okay then the third is called ampk and this is the energy sensor when your body has low levels of energy it will allow the body to hunker down and protect itself from diseases but why ampk is worth mentioning is this is one of the targets as we call it of the drug metformin metformin will activate this ampk pathway and make the body think that it's hungry when often it's not and also keep your blood sugar levels more steady why would i uh hungry at a cellular level or i actually experience hunger at a cereal level okay but it also has an interesting side effect is from for a lot of people myself included it's a bit harsh on the stomach so it also reduces my appetite but what's great about metformin is that it's been in millions of people for a few decades so we know the side effects they're relatively i'm sorry really fast so metformin is creating at a cellular level the sense that i'm hungry and you're saying that from a hormesis perspective of a little bit of bad it's like stressing the system and that's why we think it works it is it's exactly doing that and so that it actually helps the body respond in a way to boost the energy supply so one thing it does that's that's undeniable is it boosts the level the numbers of mitochondria it actually creates additional mitochondria so your cells are getting more efficient or more able to generate energy right over the long run but in the short run what it does is it actually poisons part of the mitochondria so it's it's a little bit of poison that leads to benefits down the line what part is poisoned uh it's called complex one so that there are protons that are in one part of the area of the mitochondria in a in a membrane region and you the cell builds up protons it becomes really acidic in that region but they the cell wants to release them so what they do is they put little pores in between the membranes so they can leak from the high concentrated zone to the low concentration in the middle and as they pass through that pore it spins the pore around and that's spinning physical spinning of that protein will generate chemical energy called atp that's how atp is created and without atp we're dead in about 10 seconds the cells in our body also think that they need to become more sensitive to insulin yeah which keeps our glucose and sugar levels more steady okay yeah that's key because that's what helps the diet type 2 diabetics recover and you know prevents the disease from getting worse yes the second is that it's just been discovered in humans that if you take metformin a lot of it and exercise it can blunt the effects of exercise on building mitochondria what we think is going on is that you don't want to always have metformin in your system or your body won't have a chance to recover from that slight poison people should try various diets and see what works for them and i think a lot of people get stuck in this regimented thing where and it can backfire on them too they're carnivore so then when berries come in season when people might watch this towards the end of summer blueberries gonna be in full swing does that mean you totally avoid blueberries because there's i believe i'm not one of these people that think plants are bad i think blueberries the anthocyanins and the various and you know antioxidants have a lot of benefit to your microbiome into your body in general but then when you start to identify that you're a carnivore or a keto or you're vegan then you close yourself down a little bit so i think in your case you don't have any major health issues that i'm aware of you know that you've talked about so i would just continue what you're doing but maybe in the winter probably the best time to go carnivore i'm gonna say [ __ ] you and here's i don't have i have one health issue and that is i'm dying so the only real question i care about in every health theory episode i do is how do i live forever like if you're steering by how you feel which is essentially what i do i just don't know what its impact is on longevity um if a carnivore diet like if somebody could tell me no no a thousand percent if you do a carnivore diet you're gonna live to 150. i'd be all over the carnivore diet all day every day i wouldn't even think about it i'd never touch another [ __ ] blueberry in my life like i would just eat it um but it's it's that big [ __ ] question mark about longevity that winds me up well let me pose this question to you how could a diet be negatively affecting your longevity if it makes you feel better that makes your sleep better if it improves your heart rate variability if it makes you stronger if it makes you recover better how could it slow down your longevity i mean or affect longevity in a negative way i don't know maybe i'm not thinking about this through properly but it doesn't make sense to me this video was brought to you by our very own impact theory university for more information be sure to check out the description below so if you look at this umbrella of intermittent fasting within that are different protocols alternate day fasting the 5 2 16 8 where you're fasting like you fast for 24 basically yeah 20 hours a day within that is this time-restricted feeding bubble and they are having subjects eat earlier in the day so they started eating at 8 and cutting off at two and that was it and what they showed is there was a dramatic increase in autophagy just by doing that changes in hormones changes in glucose insulin but we always think well if a tophage is good more is better but if we think at overweight people their fat cells have higher levels of autophagy occurring it's a compensatory mechanism because if you were to it sounds weird but if you were to biopsy someone who's morbidly obese and you look at their fat tissue there's a lot of necrosis and like literally tissues are dying there's a lot of immune cells so if you didn't know anything about autophagy and you looked at adipocytes in obesity you would think autophagy is bad because it's upregulated and so i just want people to understand and certain cancers utilize autophagy up regulation to avert the immune system to help it so it's interesting so it's not this clear some it's good or bad it's contextualized and tissue specific and sometimes more is not better so that a lot of people are doing hey i did a 24 hour fast let's just roll it out to 96 hours 72 hours what are your goals why are you doing this sometimes more is not better and when isn't it better because so if i knew for instance that um fasting 100 would keep you cancer-free but you have to do let's say a 14-day fast i would do it i would do it every year so when is when is too much too much you know i think when is too much is when it affects your sleep when it affects your recovery your muscle performance when you start seeing negative side effects when is it ideal when you feel good you know i'm not sure what the ideal situation is that really true so when i think okay so now let's make it real practical for me i'll just be selfish for a minute so uh i hate doing a five-day fast because my productivity falls through the [ __ ] roof or floor um after 72 hours 72 hours is very doable i can stay focused i still have energy all that but the last two days are gnarly and i i start feeling sick and and i'm just slowing down and i don't have my energy and i find myself zoning out so if it isn't advantageous i want to stop doing it but i know that my motives aren't pure so i'm gonna need some compelling evidence here here's my thought is autophagy you know is influenced by circadian rhythms by epigenetics or whatever just like exercise why not make it more consistent and shorter so every week do a 24-hour fast does everyone need to do that no but if you're looking for longevity like you are and then every quarter do a little bit of the longer one like three days or two days or whatever right so there's a little bit more consistency because if you i did the math if you look at over the course of a year you fast every monday for 24 hours if you don't do any other prolonged fast besides that you're fasting for 16 of the entire calorie year that gets you pretty close to that 20 calorie restriction that's well known and it's a good proxy for longevity enhancement at least in animals and other humans without having to really restrict yourself anything else above that in my eyes is just bonus so if you do a three day fast or a four day fast every six months that's just icing on the cake and that can get you closer to that 20 let's be clear nobody knows what the perfect diet is even when it comes to fasting it's all largely based on rodent studies so what i can tell you about the rodent studies which i'm very familiar with is that if you take a rodent and reduce its calories by 25 for its whole life it will live longer 30 percent but it'll be really miserable and aggressive and that's true for us as well i've tried calorie restriction for about a week and i gave up i was pretty angry it's not just what you eat it's when you eat that's important and what's been found is that if as long as you have that period of hunger in a mouth so you can feed them every other day then they can gorge themselves as much as they want and they do they eat about 90 of what a mouse having free access to food would eat they have the same longevity benefit as a mouse that's always been hungry and if that's true what that means is for us is that we can enjoy life as long as we have that period of hunger once a day or maybe twice a week get the body to fear adversity and the future but not enough to cause lasting damage or the unspooling of the dna that'll lead to disease and eventually death so you you don't want to overdo it you want to be a little bit puffed you want to be a little bit hungry but of course starvation malnutrition is not going to make you live longer so it's a fine line in what we've learned from many animal studies and increasing numbers of clinical trials in humans is that you want to pulse it let the body recover not constant we used to make animals go hungry all their lives and it worked but it actually works better if you let them recover and i think that's that's the secret short-term discomfort of not eating for five days once twice four or five times a year going through a cycle like that i think that the short-term inconvenience of that is trivial compared to the potential benefit of a true fast you know water only fast for some period of time and i still don't know what that minimum is i think it's probably a minimum of three days or necessary to start to get some of the real benefits of autophagy mitophagy and things like that but what's the difference between autophagy and my topic um autophagy is the cell eating itself and mitophagy specifically is the recycling of the mitochondria okay um so i think when someone says and i have many patients or friends or family members who have said like yeah that's just there's no way i'm ever gonna i could never give up food even transiently i think that's that's an ace it comes from like not not even being willing to give it a shot like what's the emotional hang up because you were you used to be literally the epitome of the robotic eater just insanely strict and you said about three years ago you were like nope not doing that anymore and i think to quote you exactly i no longer have the intestinal fortitude to eat like a robot so there was something in you that it no longer was worth it yeah that became much harder than what i do today which is so so back then i wasn't doing any time restricted feeding i wasn't doing any fasting it was a pure form of dietary restriction so my my sort of mental model for nutrition is everybody is starting out on one side eating the standard american diet abbreviated as sad which is an appropriate abbreviation and the thing i always tell patients on day one is like look the good news is you can't get any worse than this the only thing if you're starting at the sad the only thing you can do to make it worse is eat more of this ad right but it's like the standard american diet and i don't believe this was deliberate right i don't think there's a conspiracy theory here but just through a lot of bad luck uh has arrived at the absolute worst combination of macronutrients you could possibly imagine like you couldn't come up with a way to confuse someone's metabolism than to combine fats and carbohydrates in the ratios that they are combined in most of the foods that we would eat by default if we were left to our druthers so from there i say look there's kind of two introductory moves which are not mutually exclusive but you can pick one or the other the first is time restricted feeding where now you don't limit what you eat you just limit when you eat it and then the second is dietary restriction you don't restrict when you eat you don't restrict how much you eat which you also don't restrict in time or feeding but you restrict certain elements of what you eat so for those three years that i was on a ketogenic diet which is i mean probably one of the most demanding subsets of dietary restriction um you know i'd pulled that lever as hard as it could be pulled then you move into diets that sort of mimic fasting which is basically just another way of saying hypocaloric diets for transient uh periods of time and then ultimately even beyond that is fasting just you know water only also for limited periods of time nowhere in there do i include constant caloric restriction so you know reducing by 20 30 your energy intake indefinitely i i think the data are pretty clear that that is not a winning strategy there's something about the cycling into and out of catabolic versus anabolic state you're basically clearing house right you're sort of getting the cells that are themselves defective and hopefully the ones with the most effective mitochondria we'd love to target those the most for other reasons what you want to see is the regrowth you want to when you refeed you want to see the selective repopulation of the better cells the most robust experiments done on this in primates did not really suggest that as the diet got better the benefits of caloric restriction got better in other words the worse the diet the better the benefit of caloric restriction which points us to this idea that dietary restriction should still always be some component of a healthy nutrition strategy my interests are not remotely commercial my interest is in just knowing what to do it's like i want this test to tell me exactly what the right fasting protocol needs to be should i be fasting three days a month seven days every three months 14 days once a year like i want to know that and there's no amount of money that would make it worth you know not knowing the answer to that question um wow that's a bold statement well think about it i'm not to suggest that like money doesn't matter and money you can't do great things with money like i want money just as much as the next person but never at the expense like i don't want anything to get in the way of the knowledge that can drive living longer that to me is such a priority that i would rather be poor but know how to you know live longer and have all the money in the world and lose my health with fasting have you had pushback from people that um they don't think you should or they seem to have almost a religious aversion to it yeah there's still people that think it's starving yourself which very quickly starving is you have no food and you can't eat food fasting is you have food you choose not to eat for a period of time for a specific purpose two totally different things and so when you explain it in that way you're in total control if at any point during a fast you need to eat guess what eat jason and i both say to do that in our book if you're fasting and you're not just not feeling right eat but we also explain the the back end of it if you're just kind of okay i've got head hunger and i just don't know if i can get through it okay that's a different issue we'll help you with that you know do some salt and electrolytes and different things kind of calm things down and usually people can get through it and get to a one week fast very easy now i find that a lot of people don't really understand what a fast is right walk people through the difference between intermittent fasting and then a full extended fasting here's the easiest way to intermittent fast it's gonna make it so easy for everybody watching right now so you eat your last meal today at six right six pm wake up the next morning yeah i'm not really hungry you just skip breakfast and keep in mind that term breakfast literally means break the fast doesn't mean you have to eat at eight o'clock in the morning it just means you're breaking the fast so why don't we push that break fast to knew so if you do that you go from six o'clock the night before to noon the next day you just intermittent fasted for 18 hours and all you missed was one meal are you really gonna miss that one meal most people not once your keto adapted very easily you will not you know a lot of us have this ball and chain when it comes to food right we're just you know we eat at breakfast we eat lunch and we work we take up so much of our mental bandwidth it can be used for productivity for relationships for self-development but when i do interviews when i interview other people or when i'm being interviewed i like to do it in a fasted state now i didn't start doing that it took me a while to get to the point where my ketone levels get to a point where i'm not feeling hypoglycemic and the symptoms of like low blood sugar affect me but i don't really worry about is because once you're fasted for me personally i don't start to get negative symptoms in terms of sleep issues and maybe constipation or whatever until day three so i'm cool going to 36 hours and not knowing am i going to have food or not so it's just a way to clear the cobwebs not have to worry about meal prep on sunday but the reason why i do it is i actually have a tumor biomarker that's elevated called alpha fetal protein interesting that's why you started doing it well that's why i'm fasting pro more on a more prolonged basis every two tell people why why do you think that it and then tell us the exact protocol yeah um give people a little bit of the background on the potential anti-cancer properties what you've read i'm super interested in this so you can go as crazy as you want well you know there's a lot of research people talk about fasting first of all lowering glucose and insulin and so obviously there's many different cancer subtypes and cancer cells metastasize and they they mutate and and so forth but a lot of research shows that cancer cells can utilize glucose and insulin to thrive so getting rid of those growth insulin i've not heard that so the cancer cell can actually use insulin as what a growth factor is a growth factor to kind of pivot their metabolism to a more glycolytic so they're burning sugar instead of fats and we'll get into autophagy in a minute but insulin is involved in kind of amplifying mtor mechanistic target of rapamycin i know you had peter atiya on and he talked at length about this but this is really the gas pedal for cellular growth and so it's and i like to just pause right here and let people know it's it i describe mtor like a light switch in your home right it's not good or bad it's the context that matters your light switch is great when you want to find something in the dark but it can be bad if you're sleeping and someone turns it on so that's where you know every time we eat even if it's a vegan meal or a animal-based meal we're going to stimulate mtor so just wanted to throw that out there it's not good or bad it just is in its context but getting back to your question about insulin that could be the purported mechanism through which insulin may affect cancer growth is uh through mtor activation which just kind of fuels pro-growth pathways yeah so so getting back to it glucose inhibition or lowering glucose down lowering insulin enhancing mitochondrial function so a lot of people i'm sure you've talked about this you know if we envision our home being a cell our home has different appliances right we have the refrigerator the the stove top the furnace inside each one of our cells we have different appliances they're called organelles so they're little cells within cells really and our mitochondria play a key role in helping us burn fat for fuel helping us think clearly helping us move our muscles and it seems that mitochondrial dysfunction is you know an upstream event leading to various diseases from mild cognitive impairment to blood sugar issues in low energy fatigue things like that but certainly cancer as well so we got the mitochondrial function and then for me enhancing autophagy so as i said um i do lab work i've been doing lab work like you know comprehensive metabolic panels twice a year and i started to have this gi pain and i could not figure out where it was coming from and it was just like persistent so after three months this was back in 2015. i started to do some research on the internet i'm like you know maybe i could have cancer maybe i could have something and i started to look and since it was in this region i was looking for gastrointestinal biomarkers so i measured those and there was this one test called alpha fetal protein which is high in people that have hepatitis or hepatocellular carcinoma which is a metastasis of the liver so i ran it and the normal range is zero to eight and mine was 80. whoa so anytime you have a weird biomarker just retest because it could just be part of the lab so i retested it and it was 79 and then i was freaking out like dude because i have a little girl at home so i'm i was nervous right you're nervous because that's indicative of having this liver cancer exactly okay so because i had this biomarker i started to kind of believe that i might have cancer and then i started like on one hand it was great because i was more present with my daughter enjoying the moment putting down the phone at night things like that but on the other side i was like i can't have this mindset that i have something i and this is common in western medicine you have autoimmune disease you have hashimoto's so people start saying i have ms i have this and i i think we need to realize that certainly our body can have perturbations but it doesn't mean you're always going to manifest symptoms of that if you you can the body and the mind and the diet and lifestyle are so powerful so far my my exploration to this topic has has suggested a couple of things so one is we do tend to disproportionately load joints over muscles so in an ideal world you would want to figure out a way to exercise where you can maximally load the muscle while minimally loading the joint so there is a lot of joint failure that becomes problematic i mean and i'm separating the obvious which is there's just too many people who aren't exercising enough or correctly at all and so they're just sort of withering away but if you come at this through the lens of okay well what if we're dealing with a subset of people who are committed to figuring out how can they exercise best in many ways it's just a lack of specificity right so most people who exercise can't actually tell you why they're doing what they're doing the 99.9 percent of us who don't get paid to play a sport and who aren't even really competing at a serious level outside of professional ranks i don't think we know what our sport is and i think the sport should be being the most kick-ass 100 year old that ever lived so what would that look like like what does it mean to be the most kick-ass 100 year old and i think you have to then reverse engineer all of the things one should be able to do so a kick-ass 100 year old should be able to i don't know i'm making this up because i haven't fully codified this yet but they should certainly be able to carry two 25-pound bags from a grocery store they should be able to lift a 30 or 40 pound bag over their head to put it in a you know compartment of an airport or of an airplane they should be able to have a you know 25 pound little terror run at them you know by either great grandchild or dip down into a squat and grab them and pick them up they should be able to jump down on the floor and play with cars or dolls and stand up without assistance and if you start to map out the 25 or 35 things that becomes a new decathlon so instead of saying the decathlon is running this distance jumping this far swimming this far it's like great those are kind of arbitrary now we're going to come up with like real world things that you have to be able to do when you're 100 if you want to live what i would describe as potentially a more fulfilling physical life to enjoy the fruits of having not died by that point in your life the model i have in my mind is that of sort of bruce lee bruce lee sort of looked at each and every discipline of martial arts including boxing and wrestling and things like that and said let me extract from each of these disciplines that which i believe is useful discard those that i think are useless and create a perfect fighting form that is truly geared towards self-defense so it is not a sport there is no tournament there is no rank there is no belt there is no sensei it is can you handle yourself in a life or death situation if i go to a yoga class or if i do a pilates class invariably there's something in there that i think is really valuable and truthfully there's a bunch of stuff that i'm like i don't need this this is just if i had infinite time this would be fine to do but i don't have infinite time so now you apply a constraint to the problem which is not only do you want to be sort of the best 100 year old imaginable what if you're only willing to spend 10 to 12 hours a week preparing for that and so you say okay well so there's a new sport which we defined some of the parameters of that's your new olympics and that olympics is 50 years from now how will you train for it if you're only willing to spend 10 to 12 hours a week training for it well my guess is you will take a lot of things from various disciplines discard a lot of things and sort of have to build a very bespoke routine around it that will involve the maintenance of muscle mass joint integrity flexibility functional movement balance things that we don't even really think about anymore how many times does someone who's 90 fall because they've lost their balance and it's that fall that ultimately leads to their demise i basically haven't had more than 155 pounds on my back in six weeks and but by changing the form of what i'm doing and making everything a single leg movement so a lot of curtsy squats lateral lunges incredibly strict lunges where you are so specifically loading the front leg glute i got to tell you like i'm not and then doing a lot of single leg body weight squats but with meticulous form so that i'm fully loading the glute not overloading the quad which is my absolute common mistake by doing these things i don't feel like i've lost a step but i absolutely know i'm loading myself less now the question is does that matter and i don't think i know the answer yet so unfortunately i feel like i'm still too early in this process to know what the finish line looks like and there's other problems that we haven't even touched on right like what vo2 max and what aerobic base are necessary as a minimum threshold yeah talk to me about that because i hate cardio but it's one of those if i have to to have the kind of longevity then so be it and and the term cardio is itself so confusing right because even if you think of what is vo2 max i mean most people think well that's really a heart lung issue it's actually not it's more of a muscle issue interesting because that's where the bottleneck is not in how much oxygen can you get in your lungs the bottleneck is how much can your muscles utilize so when you look at you know the winner of the tour de france or you know the gold medalist in you know cross-country skiing or the person who wins the boston marathon like when you when you look at the most extreme endurance athletes who have these very high vo2 maxes what's unique about these people is their muscles which is counterintuitive because they're usually very slender individuals but their muscles are so efficient at aerobic metabolism that they are able to extract so much oxygen out of blood when you and i you know are at our maximum capacity we're still breathing out you know 80 percent of the oxygen we breathed in so it's really not a gas exchange problem it's a muscle problem that said vo2 max is a very specific energy system that probably gets a little more credit than it deserves that's really only training one energy system and i think you if you ignore these other energy systems you're you're sort of not fully optimizing around your performance translating that to this new sport this 100 year old kick-ass sport i think it's just going to require a little more thought i'm talking to orthopedic surgeons and saying okay talk to me about the injuries that are killing people because there's two types of orthopedic injuries that kill people there's fast death and slow death so fast death is patient falls and you know within a day or so is dead from whatever the injury was so they you know break their femur they have a fat embolism they're dead or they fall and they hit their head and they you know have a cerebral vascular accident they're dead um but then there's also the slow deaths right and these ones are to me [Music] far less talked about but in many ways more tragic so so one of my closest friends his father died recently 89 years old complications of alzheimer's disease he'd been diagnosed eight months before he died so in some senses you could say well the good news is he was spared he and his family were spared a lot of suffering because you know he was diagnosed in january he died in august but when i went home for the funeral i was sort of struck by how difficult it had been for him since he was 81. the two things he loved most in life which were golf and tending to his yard he couldn't do because of more chronic orthopedic injuries so he spent the last decade of his life kind of watching tv and to me that's the thing we have to be able to avoid and you know for me i don't know what it's going to be when i'm 100 but i know that today if i had to start saying if someone said well you can't drive a race car and you can't shoot a bow and arrow and you can't lift weights it doesn't doesn't matter how heavy it is right but you can't do these movements or you can't lay on the floor to play if i start if i had to give those things up i'm not sure how much i'd want to kick around and so talking to these orthopedic surgeons is giving me a real insight into where those failures are coming from and the single most important insight i've gained from them is something you alluded to at the outset which is just joint overload you know so much of what we do is even while trying to be good meaning trying to exercise know these things is just disproportionately taking on rest so i'll give you one silly example right a military press is there a time and a place for military press absolutely does it have any role in my life absolutely not right why not first of all i don't need to load my spine in that way and if i could get 80 of the benefit that i get out of a military press by doing loaded activities below my shoulder line below my neck and using more static loaded movements above and that gives me 80 percent of the benefit at 20 of the risk that's exactly the kind of compromise i'm willing to make um i actually spent a lot of my 30s and 40s not exercising at all it's crazy right someone like me but i've become better at it now that i'm you know i was approaching 50 now i'm 50. uh so i spend uh about four hours in the gym on the weekend with my son benjamin do like two hours a day no four hours straight but it's not all exercise okay so it's an hour with my trainer sean who does mostly a combination of weights and stretching then it's another hour on my own with my son we do some treadmill some more stretching and essentially just muck around doing stuff that's fun for him and then we also then we do some some yoga downstairs in the gym a little bit of relaxation but the best fun part that i really love is at the end we do a sauna hot tub cold bath sauna hot tub cold bath for about an hour and i feel fantastic after talk to me about that so in your book you go into cold exposure you said you moved to boston it sucked coming from australia and you bundled up and now you wish you hadn't um why cold exposure is cold and hot both necessary what's the difference well there are a few reasons one is the high level view is that anything that stresses your body puts it into a state of shock is good in the long run but a little bit of perceived adversity being a little bit too hot a little bit too cold and especially the gradient between those two which is why we jump from one to the other the next point is that i've looked at the literature and at first when uh i was prompted by my publisher to look into this scientifically they said you know what about this cryotherapy what do you think and a couple of years ago i had no idea that this was real it sounded like [ __ ] to me but i looked into it and there were there are two important things one is cryotherapy or cold exposure we'll build up what's called brown fat we didn't know brown fat existed in humans until about five years ago typically it's across your back and in other reasons you can see with a pet scan but otherwise it's pretty invisible just looks like fat but brown fat is particularly healthy because it it has a lot of mitochondria and we think it also secretes little proteins that tell the rest of the body to be healthy in what way to be healthy uh we're not sure yet we're not sure interesting oh man i want the answer to that question but it certainly revs up your metabolism and will burn energy if you're looking to stay lean having a bit of brown fat is is all good so my my friend ray cronus and i have written on this and andrew bremer and at the nih we call it the metabolic winter hypothesis and essentially it's saying that in our lifestyles these days we're always warm i'm wearing this jacket we sleep with the covers on we turn up the heat we never get exposed to cold unless we we force ourselves to and we think that that's possibly largely responsible if not you know maybe partly perhaps largely responsible for the diabetic problem we have what okay so if if you're cold at night you're going to burn a lot more energy staying warm yes turn on your brown fat now that's going to keep people lean if we bundle up and and we eat the kind of diets that that we see in the supermarket that's going to be doubly bad for our bodies yeah we're warm we're not losing energy and we're eating a lot more i'm going to put you to the test for a second so hiding behind the screen door number one is somebody i'm not going to tell you anything about them i'm not going to tell you if they're a man or woman overweight ripped whatever but you have to tell them how to eat for longevity and feeling good how should they eat i would say sally or joe look i don't know what your health issues are i don't know what you're experiencing but we're going to get you off anything that comes in a box bag or a can so no processed food no processed food i want you to go to a farmer that's within a 50 mile radius of you ask them what you can buy that's in season and and buy the animal products that you feel comfortable consuming i don't really care so much as what you eat and how much i want you eating at the same time every day whatever that is so influencing the circadian rhythm so there's a lot of new research studies where they're controlling how many calories people are eating the same amount of calories but if they force it into a confined window it changes this mtor expression and not just a defined window but the same defined window every day you hit on the head exactly so if you're if you're going to intermittent fast great then eat from say you know noon to six or two to eight it doesn't matter but just try to be consistent just like we should try to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time you know we hear a lot about toxic blue light well when we eat and food in general affects our circadian biology we have molecular clocks in our gut and our muscle and our brain and our pancreas everywhere food entrains that clock too what blood markers are you watching um sleep sleep scores heart rate variability body temperature blood glucose and ketones my hemoglobin a1c increased by five tenths of a point so it went from freeze which is surprising to me yeah 4.8 to 5.3 but everything else i mean iron ferritin increased which i was probably expecting eating more red meat things like that are you worried at all about cholesterol no because my triglycerides are historically low um that's the only one you worry about well i worry about cholesterol when triglycerides and glucose and liver enzymes are out of whack so your liver tends to take the brunt of metabolic burden first it's a key metabolic signaling hub and so if your liver enzymes start to rise your glucose is rising or hemoglobin a1c is rising then in your triglycerides increase then i'm i'm more concerned about what's going on with your ldl cholesterol you know and your low hgl but without that context i'm not totally worried about it and the thing that people don't really realize is like your body can convert protein via gluconeogenesis to glucose there's certain cells and tissues red blood cells the neuron various central nervous system cells within our brain that need absolutely need glucose they can't use fats or ketones protein can be back converted as can liberating stored body fat the body fat is you know you have your triglycerides and on you know your triglyceride on top of that is glycerol and when you liberate that for free fatty acids to make ketones that glycerol gets converted to make glucose so a lot of people think you need to have carbs to raise glucose for obligate glucose utilizing cells but that glycerol backbone gets shunted right into that cycle so yeah it's interesting tom i don't know what the solution is for people should they go carnivores should they not i think if you have digestive issues it's worth a shot and it sounds so polarizing controversial but you know in functional medicine we've been talking about this for a while we you know people like jeff bland and sid baker mark hyman an elimination diet which was essentially just basically plain old white rice and lamb that was it like that's almost carnivore in the sense obviously if you overdo the white rice you're going to negate some of that but it was really eliminating all the variables that could affect the immune system you've talked really eloquently about that you can't just look at whether somebody is skinny or not you've really got to look at biomarkers so what are biomarkers that you really pay attention to that you think all of us should pay attention to in terms of actually determining our health yeah and thank you for that question because i do get criticized online because i still have weight on the body but at the end of the day you're right health markers are what matters and for me i want to see very specific things so inflammation because without inflammation in the body there is no chronic disease fasting insulin is another one that is a key and so insulin is uh the kind of master hormone in the body and so if you control insulin levels and don't allow it to go out of whack then again your body is in a pretty good state of health and then triglyceride the hdl ratio everybody's like oh my total cholesterol is out of whack and my doctor wants to put me on a statin medication and ldl and blah blah blah and i'm like okay that was the science 50 years ago would you like to know what it is in 2018 so in 2018 it's triglyceride-based scale ratio triglycerides are that really true bad fat in the blood and so people are like oh okay well triglycerides are fat in the blood it must come from the fat in the diet no no it comes from the carbs and so the more carbs you eat the higher the triglycerides go my wife christine she had a 300 triglycerides normal with conventional medicine is under 150 you'll find out here in a minute that's high but 300 is what she had all we did was cut out her skittles m m's and dr pepper this was many years ago just those three things all sugary things and she dropped in six weeks from 300 to 130. and what i do is i spend about 15 minutes at 150 degrees fahrenheit well that's reasonably intense but you get used to it then we go into the steam room um you know we're sitting there chatting it's great uh temperatures lower in the steam room because the humidity is saturated the roof's dripping on you hot water uh but that that i i don't know if the steam helps but i certainly love the feeling of being in there and my skin starts to be healthier because of course it's cleaning itself out and then the final thing i do is hot tub pretty hot hot water and then and then i go and dunk below the water a couple of times in water that's less than four degrees celsius i take a blood test from a company called inside tracker which in full disclosure i invested in years ago and they look at about 30 parameters in your blood and give you feedback it's doctor supervised so it's it's legit and it's based on a lot of science and that at least gives you some feedback about your body about what's actually happening if you change your lifestyle or you take a supplement or even a new drug for that matter so you've got to have you've got to be monitoring because you don't you don't want to fly blind you don't know if for you you're doing harm or doing good um so do do a blood test at least go to your doctor and have a blood test for for a good goodness sake you could have your genome sequenced or do something that looks at the the variance in your genome for relatively little cost i think it's 99 now the ability to manipulate mtor has been very excited so we kind of talked about mtors kind of the gas pedal on our cells to grow and you know one of the reasons that you fast one of the main benefits of fasting prolongedly is affecting glucose insulin mitochondria function that we introduced the show on but it it drops empty towards to the floor and we know that chronic mtor overexpression is linked with premature aging diseases so i think the ability through drugs through exercise and through fasting protocols to manipulate this critical energy sensor called mtor is super fascinating so i think you know right now in 2019 a lot of people are microdosing psilocybin and lsd i personally experiment with that fairly often i think in two years people are going to be microdosing rapamycin people are going to be microdosing various mtor inhibitors to to like they're like called calorie restriction memetics so we're kind of manipulating the physiological effects people are already [ __ ] with rapamycin it's a very few you mentioned the other one i'm blanking on it right now like metformin does it take metformin i don't i take berberine interesting so the one thing like when the camera stop rolling yeah the one thing a lot of people are like yeah i [ __ ] with it is is that 1000 i'm talking about doctors yeah where i'm like all right then like it's one of those it is only my fear of the unknown where it's like if something seems too good to be true it probably is and i don't know what kind because they've been giving it to diabetics and cancer patients for a long time a long time so i don't know what kind of studies have come out based on that but metformin is probably one of the safest drugs you could take um it it's actually very poorly absorbed here's what's really good so i'm you know studied the microbiome forever i'm very curious about how these drugs work like it's only 33 or something like that is absorbed how is it working it's affecting your microbiome it's affecting the gut hormones and your bugs so very safe the only thing you might need to add more of would be b12 and folate because it purportedly does affect methylation and or absorption but that's a very safe drug i i i'm not i wouldn't be ashamed to take say that i take it i don't i take berberine so i do that 500 milligrams of berberine hydrochloride three same thing meant to slow mtor yeah well it affects am i i don't wanna get complex into the biochemistry but you have kind of a yin yang you have mtors growth ampk is breakdown okay you know one's either good nor bad they just are uh berberine and metformin increase ampk ampk is a switch just like em towards a switch they're different knobs so it's breaking down what crap inside ourselves okay so this is a little bit like autophagy ampk and mtor are the key cellular switches that ultimately guide autophagy and govern whether or not we're going to tear down break down you know advert proteins dysfunctional proteins aggregated proteins dysfunctional organelles we kind of talked about how our cells are like little homes inside our appliances those appliances become dysfunctional and that's where autophagy self-digest comes in and so you have a bad furnace autophagy and will help to clear that a bad furnace in your cell would be a mitochondria golgi apparate endoplasmic reticulum there's all these different compartments it's even speculated that the ability to break down fat and glycogen store glucose is autophagy mediated even recovering from exercise this is what's so cool so when we feel sore after workout how do you think our body recovers from that it's via autophagy and breaking down those damaged proteins so that we can rebuild them so that they're stronger for our next workout so i like to throw that in there because when people hear autophagy they think fasting but that's just one knob on the cytophagy wheel exercise there's a ton of data showing that exercise enhances autophagy because you're causing your body to dig deep and break down glycogen for that workout we've been working for 10 years as i said accelerating the clock we can drive that hand of the clock forwards now we we cut the dna of the animal let it heal and in doing so we distract those proteins from where they come from so we're disturbing this survival circuit so much that we disrupt the spooling of the dna and what we got was an old mouse by every account based on histology which is looking at the tissues based on their physiology they got gray they got arthritis they got heart disease even and when we look at the molecular clock that methylation clock they were 50 percent older communications they had more like clumps everywhere uh those methyl groups were added to the dna right right okay so we had given them heart disease and alzheimer's or dementia we'd given them all these diseases but by measuring the clock what we had actually done is give them aging but that that was the first step that took 10 years the last year we've been asking how do you get the hands to go backwards that's a lot harder but we were fortunate that the 2012 nobel prize was one for the ability to reverse that clock in cells it's called was the prize awarded to shinya yamanaka a japanese fellow very smart guy and he found at least four genes that when you put into say skin cells of an adult if you gave me your skin cells i could go back to laven basically clone you i could take your cells make a stem cell pool and i could grow you into a new little liver or a new little kidney that's all easy not easy but it's doable it's doable um what that tells us is that those four yamanaka genes can reset age if i can take someone who's in like you who's in their early 40s and make a new you as we've done now for many species dogs cats sheep monkeys those animals we can reset the clock hundred percent and those animals actually live a normal lifespan that tells us that the instructions to be young are still in the cell somewhere as though there's a backup hard drive that tells the epigenome those spools how to go back to be young again and get those methyl groups back to being young again not up here but back there for example we are treating aging of the eye in mice so we can take an old mouse we deliver a virus the av into the eye tiny little prick it's the same virus that that's used to correct genetic deficiencies in the eye right now fda approved drugs so this isn't science fiction this is out there in in the world right now we give it give it to the old mice we give them an answer about it antibiotic called doxycycline okay same thing you might take if you got lyme disease and that turns on these reprogramming factors measure what happens to the eye and those mice can see again like they were young imagine one day you could have every cell in your body able to be rejuvenated like that you cut yourself you break a bone you lose your your mind you have a dementia you take a course of doxycycline for a few weeks and then stop switch it off again and you you heal thank you guys so much for watching and being a part of this community if you haven't already be sure to subscribe you're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset cultivating grit and unlocking your full potential you