AGING is a disease we can REVERSE: David Sinclair, Ph.D. | mbg Podcast

[Music] David welcome thanks for having me on it is an honor to have you here I'm a big fan of your work and congrats on the new book lifespan so what you say in the book is so there's so many interesting things I'm going to start the highest level where you say aging is a disease let's talk about that well so aging is a disease is a shock to most people because we thought we knew what aging was but what I'm saying is that we should look at aging as we do a disease definition of of a disease is that over time you lose function you become disabled and eventually if it's a bad disease you die from it that sounds a lot like aging right and if you go to the medical dictionary the only difference between aging and a disease is that a disease affects less than half the population so if aging affected 51 we as we do we separate it from disease if it was affecting 49 percent we'd be studying this and putting billions and billions of dollars into trying trying to solve it and that 50 cut off is completely arbitrary the problem with having aging separate from disease and remember it's just a word definition it's not a biological difference they're actually totally intertwined aging is the major cause of all major diseases on the planet but we put into a separate category partly because of History because we didn't understand it it seemed natural whereas cancer was unnatural but it's all natural and we've always fought against diseases like cancer and heart disease we didn't know how to until recently same with aging but we're at a point now like we were with cancer 30 40 years ago we Now understand we think what drives the process and we're having some really great success in the lab and in some clinical trials with people of being able to at least slow down and some evidence that even reversing aging is possible and when you can do that then I think we should start taking aging as a disease very seriously so in your opinion we're at that point where we can slow aging and it is reversible in mice it's pretty easy it was it was shockingly easy but we're not mice so we have a bit of work to do but there are a number of studies that already published that you can reverse aspect of Aging in people boost their immune system improve endurance improve metabolism in fact there's a drug on the market called metformin which we may delve into yes uh which is our our best guess is it's a longevity molecule it actually slows down aging because diabetics you take this molecule are relatively resistant to heart disease and cancer and Alzheimer's and Frailty even though they have diabetes and we think that if healthy people or pre-diabetics take this drug they'll also be protected um but yeah it's here right now that's what I'm trying to say in my book and that there are things we can do with our lives today and there are things that are coming down the pike just a few years from now so let's stay on Metformin for a minute I think it's so interesting because essentially it's refined our real medicine it's French lilac but it's a drug and so let's just talk about what it is and you mentioned diabetes that's where it originated from but there was a recent study where it was a combination of Metformin DHEA and growth hormone that took it was a small study I think it was like nine or ten people but took two and a half years off of the biological clock so let's just yeah talk about that for a second right well until recently we didn't really know how to measure aging telomeres are a bit wishy-washy they move around it's not super accurate these are the ends of chromosomes that shorten um there are blood biomarkers which a company that I work with called inside tracker measures so I've been estimating my biological age using five different measures in blood but recently we've developed What's called the epigenetic clock and Stephen Horvath a colleague of mine gives his name to it so why is that important now we can take a DNA sample from any part of your body typically it's blood because that's easy to get and I can I could tell you how old you are exactly within a few percent biologically I don't have to see you I don't need to measure you I don't need to see birthday candles and then I can predict accurately when you're going to die as well wow so where can I do this test if you show up at your lab it's right on the cusp of being commercially available I'm working on something with Steve there are a couple of others it's almost ready for prime time so this time next year you should be able to fairly cheaply figure out when you're going to die have you figured out your bio I'm sure what's your biological age well I haven't done this test yet okay um I want to I've Been Working on mice and getting that to work also and we're working really hard to bring the test down from 300 bucks down to three three bucks so that that'll really change things but yeah your your point is what HMI well the best estimate came from that inside tracker company and uh it's an independent thing even though I'm a small time investor they didn't know it was my blood right so but they I was actually at 58. aged 58 biologically when I was 48 which freaked me out I didn't want to be 10 years older I wasn't exercising I wasn't eating the right things I wasn't taking nmn which I do now we'll talk about that later um and I wasn't on Metformin so I added a few things step wise and had a look at what happened to my body and pretty quickly it was in less than six months as I added things and got better and better uh looking at my blood biochemistry the algorithm independently determined that I went down to 31.4 wow now people look at me and say David that's not science and it's true that's not a clinical trial uh but if nothing else I improved a lot of the parameters that go up with age and I brought them back down and that that's if nothing more it makes me feel good about myself and it was motivational and what I've learned from that experience is that the more you can know about your body like a dashboard the better you can respond um if you go for a run or if you change your life if you eat a certain new diet you exercise too much or too little how do you know it's working you have to measure things to really be able to a know if it's working and B just be cognizant of of what you're putting in your mouth and what you're doing with your body so you think we're a year away from this okay so the clock yeah getting back to the clock yeah it's it's really interesting you take the DNA out and you just treat it with a chemical and run it through a sequencing machine and determine the DNA code and what we're measuring is not just the code but there are chemicals that bind to the letter c you know how DNA is actg on the C's we get what's called a methyl chemical that's six there binds to it and doesn't come off and they accumulate essentially in different places as we get older and we can read that sequence and that pattern is very predictable between people in fact the same pattern can predict the age of a dog as well so that there's this common what we call epigenetic basis for the Aging clock between all mammals and seemingly all the way back to jellyfish so I want to talk about the what we can do in terms of Lifestyle because metformin it's a drug we're talking about we're going to talk about NAD and nmn and R and all the other things we can kind of do there but for for many listening they're going to say okay I have this information maybe a year from now or today or I want to do there are things I can do in terms of Lifestyle yeah in your opinion as always our friend Rich Roll says you uh you know hell begins on the plate for a lot of people so if we start with nutrition in your opinion what's the optimal diet for longevity yeah well so the the good news is that that clock will tell us if we're doing the right thing and we didn't know that until now so what are the things to do uh well the first thing that I started to do based on all the evidence was to eat less often and I have propensity to diabetes and obesity in my family and in my genome so I have to be extra careful if I didn't watch what I ate I would be probably over 200 200 something pounds you were far from it uh yeah what am I a 135 or something um but I have to work at it and so that means I cannot eat and I shouldn't eat three meals a day um I try to eat one meal a day if I can sometimes it's a bit hard with all of the work and brain activity that's going on but yeah that's one thing is the three meals a day with snacks in between never get hungry I think that's the worst for people it's it's I know it's against what your mother said uh probably um and the old idea was that you don't want to stress out your system you don't want to have big spikes in ups and downs in glucose because that'll stress out your pancreas and that'll lead to diabetes but what we've learned is that yeah overeating is bad but under eating is not so bad as long as you're not malnourished you know we're not talking about malnutrition here we don't want particularly young uh kids thinking that they should be too little but we're talking about adults here who are clearly given too much food in their lives and have access to too much food um which leads not just to obesity but even those who are healthy always being satisfied and never feeling hungry it puts the body into a state of complacency we've worked in my lab on a set of genes called the sirtuins for the last 30 years we found them first in baker's yeast and they're in our bodies these are very ancient genes that evolve to to survive when times were tough and we think that's why diet or healthy diets and being hungry and even exercise give us health benefits that's why we live longer if we exercise it's not because blood flows around the body it's because you're turning on these ancient defenses to survive and if we're sitting around and we're eating as as much food as we want and we're always in a thermo neutral zones we're always just perfectly air conditioned and heated throughout the year our bodies just say hey great no need to fight disease I'm good and so fasting I'm going to stay there for a minute a lot of people have different definitions of fasting whether it's over a night or 16 8 or 18 6 or and then people will debate well what what is autophagy kick in and the power of autophagus so let's talk in your opinion what what is the optimal way too fast for longevity right well let's get one thing clear because there's a lot of debate about this uh we don't know what's best for the average human because there is no average human and that's why I say when when you come to me and ask me for advice I'll say well I know what works for me because I've been doing this for 15 years very fair point all right but let I'm not judging the question I think that that what I do is good for me in part because it fits my lifestyle but if I could just do whatever I wanted to I would try to skip food for three days in a row at least once a month um our friend Peter otia does does that he goes for even a week once a quarter now I can't do that I just find it really tough but I think it's good because after three days we know that a different type of autophagy kicks in to scrape the barrel and recycle proteins and it's called chaperone mediated autophagyin do you say that again it was a mouthful so chaperone okay we've got that uh mediated autophagy okay and it's really what it means is there are proteins called chaperones that hold on to proteins and guide them where to go and in this case they push them into the garbage can to be recycled and that takes a lot of hunger uh I would say starvation but a lot of uh yeah three days is no joke pretty close to starvation right and so your body will say okay now it's time I've run out of all my fat or uh run out of my certainly my liver stores I'm gonna start chewing up the protein to make energy and that's what's going on and that's when you get rid of the really bad misfolded proteins in the body which accumulate cause diseases like Alzheimer's and other things so that's all good and so I think that being able to do that would be wonderful um there are other ways to do it there's there's that drug that's fairly toxic called rapamycin that stimulates a lot low amino acids I haven't gone there yet because it's it's got some side effects but it has been shown in humans to to boost their immune system so it does have some problems the other good thing to know is that there's a clinical trial about to read out the results really soon phase three which means that's the final result um and there might be a new drug that's safe and effective to boost this pathway this protein sensing pathway but in the in the absence of that drug which is still many years away for the average person the best thing to do is to go hungry for three or more days so for the average person yeah probably not going to happen what's more likely is 14 hours 16 hours 18 hours and in your opinion is one I know we're all Unique Individuals I'm six seven 200 plus pounds I'm very different from you and our average listener what and it's hard to generalize but is is there sort of a minimum in your opinion to get the benefits of fasting for longevity yes specifically autophagy too yeah there is and you can also look at look at um places on Earth where people live a long time now there are plenty of places where people don't eat breakfast but they don't live a long time most people not most but a lot of people skip breakfast anyway before this whole intermittent fasting periodic feeding uh thing came into the mainstream so I think it's got to be more than just skipping breakfast so that's why I try to skip lunch too um so I think if you can't skip breakfast do it and if you don't then try to skip another meal dinner perhaps have a very early dinner or not at all my metabolism by the way is the type where my my blood sugar goes up as I wake up and therefore I'm full with sugar and I don't need any more and that explains why I'm not hungry in the morning so if you're not hungry in the morning you're probably like me you don't need breakfast so don't don't have it um and we actually just as an aside we have a son uh Benjamin who has my metabolism and my wife as old parents thought it was essential that he goes to school with a full stomach so he can concentrate um and he developed obesity as a result so he gets a tiny breakfast now but that's a consequence of our genetics but yeah anyway the the point being more you can skip the better and I don't think breakfast is enough got it so you're I'd say 60 from what I'm 16 18 at the minimum if you go longer I go longer so with regards to diet so what what do I eat so we've established of what we're when we're not eating how often you know but during the eating window what is what is the optimal diet in your opinion how do you eat yeah well so I've always been of the opinion that you can learn from other cultures uh and we we know that what we eat in the U.S or at least served up when you're at airports is the worst you can it feels good it tastes good but that doesn't mean it's good for you in fact it's similar to the the point that you have to get your body out of a state of complacency if you're eating a lot of sugar and fat uh you're you've got complacency in your your mind and your body just is thanks for that I'm not going to try hard so how do you trick your body into feeling like times are about to be tough uh so one way is to have fewer calories in General so the best way I've found to do that is not to eat High caloric food which is for me is a very tasty vegetarian meal and uh and salads and actually I think many of the listeners will know that once you get used to that the idea of eating a giant steak fatty steak is is not that appealing occasionally I'll still eat meat um in part because it's it's often the only only thing you can eat on a menu and and I don't mind some social social life but I also exercise and if I'm exercising a bit of meat I think it's not going to hurt me but generally I try to be more of a uh a guinea pig than a than a lion I look for particularly uh plants that are highly colored deep colored plants and you might ask why that would be well I'm curious why and what what well so things like um so leafy vegetables that are really deep green or deep red and uh those are the particularly the good ones and I also look for organic foods not because I'm scared as much of the pesticides though that's important it's because organic foods aren't held with you know with gloves they're they're a little bit more stressed out usually and the more stressed out your food is first of all the brighter colors they'll have because they're producing these colors as a defense and those colors are actually an indicator of other molecules that plants produce to try and survive when they're stressed we call these xenor Xeno hermetic molecules now that's a mouthful so I'll break it down Xeno just means between species and hormesis hermetic means what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and you're getting the theme here right we need to trick our bodies into thinking that times are tough even though we live in Utopia compared to our ancestors and so the the plant molecules that are produced such as I could list a bunch of them so Resveratrol comes on quercetin butene um so the the green tea and turmeric and curcumin we've all heard about this but has anyone ever really thought why are they so helpful how come they tweak the right Pathways in the body in just the right way and my best explanation is that we have evolved to sense when our plants are running out of uh their own food or their own water and that's important because you've got to know when you're going to run out of food and get ready for that and that puts your body in a state of Defense and we can trick our bodies into thinking we're running out of food even though we can always just go down to the supermarket by eating foods that have been stressed themselves and those chemicals like Resveratrol which we've studied for decades turns on those sirtuin defenses mimicking exercise mimicking fasting without actually having to do those things though before you ask me I know you can ask me it's not an excuse to take these molecules in high doses and not lead a healthy lifestyle because when we add them together what we see at least in the lab is that they are doubly beneficial when done together right so if you had to put together your list of Dr David Sinclair's superfoods I'm walking in the Whole Foods what what's on that is it broccoli I'm just guessing you're you're like what are your what are your top five superfoods everyone's got to get out their pen and paper put their note this is what I must I must eat all right well the first thing I I do is not in the supermarket it's a yogurt Farm Farmers Market thank you um yeah so the the first thing is I actually order online sachets of of a yogurt that I make religiously and it lasts for about three or four weeks in the fridge so it's not not a lot of work it takes me five minutes and I'm gonna I have a newsletter on my website that I'm gonna put out the recipe but it's wonderful and I haven't been sick since I started two years ago taking this stuff gotta share a little bit what's in the yogurt I'm dying to know well there's a blend of about 15 different bacteria that are normally in the human gut in small amounts and the doctor that makes this says that they're highly anti-inflammatory and I was skeptical I bought this stuff for my son who I thought maybe we could reduce his obesity issue and we all we both started taking eating it and found we were transformed in terms of our health including not getting sick anymore so it's it's you know not a clinical trial again but I used to get sick every few weeks because I fly a lot sure we'll talk about flying later yeah you got to get this yogurt on the market well it's it's it is on the market I have no connection to it so I think I'm free to to say what it is do you mind sure um on if you just um type into your browser uh Bravo yogurt bravo bravo yogurt and uh I'll put out the full recipe but essentially you don't need to follow their recipe there's a quick and easy way to do it um they suggest boiling the milk and sterilizing everything and then lowering temperature blah blah blah so I'm a microbiologist I figured out a way to do this without apparently any risk a bit of hot Clean Water Rinse out a big mason jar about you know a bit bigger than the ones we've got here on this table mix that with whole milk um you know if you're lactose intolerant then I guess you could try your own brand but whole milk grass-fed pour it in mix it up shake it put it in the oven on defrost at 95 degrees overnight and then you've got two weeks worth of yogurt wow and uh it it tastes like the best yogurt I can buy or better actually there's there's no sugar in it of course and uh so it's yeah I don't like the taste of really sweet anything anymore after my diet anyway so that's my first one let's go to the farmers market I'll give everyone the full recipe later but the um first thing I would go for would be uh so a dark green leafy vegetable so that would be unfortunately kale I say unfortunately because a lot of people don't like cake that's just Dave raspberry yeah well that part yeah I like kale yeah kale or anything I think baby um broccoli is good all that uh good leafy stuff I'd also would do brussels sprouts um I would avoid grapes actually uh grapes so Rhonda Patrick and I agree that grapes are overrated there's huge amounts of sugar and you eat one and you can see actually if you monitor your blood like we do she sends it through the roof so that's just one thing I'd walk past and then the next aisle so we've got two three items already I think um if you include the yogurt then then I would go and I'd get I get fruit I'm not a verse to fruit it's a nice snack in between if I need it so I'm pretty good on on apples but I don't go for a really sugar Laden fruit you know I don't want another sweet um banana I think things like um oranges uh stink you know they're fine with the the pulp but still I'd rather keep I'd save my glucose intake for something that is really really great the other thing that I noticed actually on this diet and having monitored myself is food special now it's a treat and so if I stick something in my mouth that isn't great I've been known to go spit it out not religiously and not at a restaurant but if it tastes like crap I'm not going to swallow it because that's that's something else I can't eat later sure it's a good way you know I don't eat a lot of meat anymore and what I do it's gonna be a damn good piece of meat yeah yeah I'm not gonna do it it's like I don't want a burger just for a burger when I'm like I do it it's going to be amazing and do it once a quarter or whatever yeah so I I also ate beans and things um I'm not okay with electives I'm not sure what about about Dr gundry's uh thing I have to be convinced about that okay that's good so you're okay with beans too yeah I am I'm a little bit more cautious now that I've read his book um but I've been eating that stuff my whole life I think people struggle with autoimmune and could have issues but if you you'd know if there was a problem that's my take at least my my uh my I don't have a medical opinion but that's my personal opinion well it's all personal here's the thing that like you say what what works for someone's microbiome and Physiology and immune system might not work for another and so you can feel what works for you and you can monitor uh not just how you feel and how how many times you get sick but you if you want you can do a blood test at one of these questions but also what you can do is um uh you can measure things like blood sugar and see that it's working or it isn't the other thing that's important is that um it's taken me about 15 years to to optimize things for myself wow it's not just I'll just switch to one diet and hope that it works and that's often a misunderstood because my colleagues who are scientists they say well you know David's doing this doing that how does he know anything this is you know and they say n of one n of one that's the criticism well it's an end of one but you know over 15 years every day you'll you do learn a lot and you can repeat the experiment over and over again give you a quick example I had cacao a big thick chocolate drink as part of a ceremony uh we uh I was just out in San Diego and I drank it and it had a bit of sugar in it which is not going to kill me but I expected my blood sugar levels to go up which they did because I've got a monitor here uh but then what happened was really weird my blood sugar went way down as I went to bed and through the night stayed Baseline couldn't even go lower according to the sensor when I woke up it came back up I've never seen that happen and I'm curious if I try it again will it happen again is there something in chocolate that particular type that that really made my insulin sensitivity go up which would be great and those are it's an example of the kind of experiments that I can do on my body I was going to ask you I think for someone who does a lot of experiments on their body and so when it sounds like who also listens to their body do you mostly find when you when you've feel good after eating something and then you look at the lab results that they're in line and vice versa when you when you feel like crap and then you look at the Bloods or whatever Mark you're looking at marker's not good do you find that mostly to be true I do and that's been a surprise I've only been monitoring my glucose for a couple of months now but now I know what what it feels like to have good blood glucose and what it doesn't and that's a surprising thing about it besides great seeing bad and potatoes not being as bad as I thought and white rice being horrendously bad unfortunately I ate sushi for 10 years so that was a mistake but but here's what I also learned is that if I overdo it let's say well maybe I'll tell you for sure last week I I ate a lot of food and I drank a fair amount of alcohol regrettably I felt bad I slept poorly and that's to be expected but what I didn't expect was the next three days my metabolism was out of whack my I couldn't get my blood sugar down I I saw it was just massively high and I thought this has never happened this is weird what I think has happened is that my liver then filled up with fat and is releasing it into my bloodstream even though I'm hungry and actually felt hungry while my blood sugar was still high so I'd really messed up my system and I think that's how most people exist because they're not uh well not most people but a lot of people who eat a lot of food are still hungry even though they've got a lot of blood sugar in their body and then it took three days to go away the other thing that I was I was fascinated was that I jumped on a treadmill to try and get that blood sugar to go down thinking wow this is crazy I got to get it down let's see what happens so I ran on a treadmill for about 10 minutes pretty fast and I got it to come down as soon as I stopped running it just went straight back up again oh and so that has taught me very clearly in the past week don't overdo it because it's not just that it's one day your body suffers for many days after that so two things that you mentioned I want to touch on one is fat specifically healthy fats and what's your take on healthy fats and then two we're gonna go to working out exercise yeah high intensity real training what does that look like well let's go go to fat fat is very with keto and fat and lots of different opinions what what's your take on on fat yeah I I don't think fat is is evil I just think fat is calorific and you just have to eat less of it otherwise you will build up um adiposity and adiposity is the killer I've found is that it's not the fat that's so bad it's what the fat signals to the body um in terms of inflammation and other things and the fatter you are and if you're a fat mouse or a fat rat you'll you'll be suppressing the activity of your longevity genes your Saturns and these other genes um and that's really bad that means that you might be healthy you think you're healthy but if you've got adiposity a large amount you know it's healthy I've I've got some fat on me I'm not too skinny but I see with my body if it gets over a certain amount let's say a BMI goes up to I'm probably a BMI of 23. if I go up to 25 26 I immediately start to see problems um including evidence that my longevity genes are being shut down so getting back to what to eat though I think it's fine eating fat in fact I used to avoid fat like the plague because of recommendations from nutritionists sure in the nine remember slack Wells and all the yeah I just eat sugar instead low fat low-fat muffin in the morning to start your day it's a nightmare so I've changed my mind and and actually I would love to get my childhood back but for about 20 years I didn't eat eggs very little milk almost never ate milk or yogurt thinking that any form of fat was gonna hurt me and now I lead a wonderful life I eat cheese and I eat yogurt and I think I'm healthier than I ever was but it's you can't eat the same quantity of cheese as you do plant food you just gain too much weight in terms of healthy fats now clearly cheese is not the healthiest my healthy fats that I like are um if I eat meat I eat fish if I have a choice and then I take my omega-3s so do you how do you rank your fish do you go by the river of Smash salmon mackerel anchovy sardines and herring them accordingly I I try to rate them based on taste that's a good way to rate them but in terms of longevity I'm just curious well Salmon's good I know that um but I I don't break it down that finally okay and in terms of your healthy fats other than fish a lot of people here love avocados olive oil good by you oh yeah yeah okay sure so plant fats I'm I'm I always have a couple of avocados in the fridge that or on the table um now I'm trying to figure out should I be putting it on toast that's how I usually eat it but maybe I don't want the toast the good Australian in you avocado toast yeah yep so avocado fantastic for sure olive oil I'm becoming more and more convinced olive oil is the thing to do so I've always put liberal amounts on bread and on um on on salads but there's more and more evidence that just taking a spoonful of this stuff is good for you and uh it was Dave asprey who put me on no no it wasn't it was country country loves olive oil gandry was the one who was saying it's got 10 000 times whatever yeah um that makes sense and some of my colleagues are also uh real devotees of the olive oil which is great it's one of those foods that not only tastes good is good for you well he'll joke I'll have a side of bread with the olive oil um so let's go I want to go back to exercise sounds like you're a fan of high intensity interval training hit um I'm a big fan it's mostly a spectator sport unfortunately for me um I would love to do more I'm mostly on airplanes or in behind a computer um so I only once a week do I always do high intensity exercise it's terrible it should be three times a week at least occasionally I'll go to our home gym but usually I'm just naked um so I go because it's only once a week I spend three hours in the gym everybody said that I broke and he was like what are you doing for three hours making up for the rest of the week so we spend an hour so my son and I do this and it's the best thing I I probably wouldn't do it as much if it wasn't for my son being there um I took him to the gym for his benefit which turned out to be the best thing we've ever done as a family but so we spent an hour with a trainer who really works us hard uh we were doing deadlifts and uh wow yeah my son is in the top one percent for his age now because wow how old is he he's 12 okay almost as much as me wow uh he's very proud of that and then um then we do you know a lot of muscle strength training and then a lot of stretching and then we do boxing and uh he's getting to the point where where he can actually cause some damage on on me to me uh and he recently got his his own set of boxing gloves so he's very happy about that so that's all that's fairly aerobic if you do that right and then we'll do some treadmill and some StairMaster and some stretching and then we did then we go that's that's about an hour and a half to two hours then we go downstairs to our steam room the sauna and the hot tub and then the cold bath and we cycle through those for an hour and uh I hate getting cold I'm from Australia I hate the Boston Winters but my son grew up in New England so he he's up to 15 minutes in the cold bath wow every time he's breaking his record um whereas a minute for me is is painful but anyway what I I believe is that these sirtuin genes are activated by a cold and probably by heat we don't know for sure but there's enough evidence from both of these that if you look at groups of people who do these things they tend to be protected against heart disease among some other things now you can argue all day that that's just a correlation and that people go to the sauna are probably not the same ones who are in hospital fair enough but at a minimum I'm feeling pretty good and we know that in mice if you make them cold they develop what's called Brown fat and we have brown fat we've discovered the last 15 years and branford's very good for us it burns energy and it puts out these proteins that help the rest of the body so for someone who also hates the cold and I'll try anything I I am not I think the last time I did like an ice bath was in college for basketball like and that was it I swear once I'm done I'm done like what's the bare minimum for someone to get the health benefit of going from extraordinarily cold to heat and back and forth can't do the hour or 15 minutes like what's the bare minimum if I'm at home and I got the shower what can I do well it's a guess because no one studied it um so what I what I'm thinking scientifically is the shock is the biggest part always with this hormesis effect it's you want the shock get your body out of that state so that's why I think for a minute up to my neck is is enough okay once your body starts to get used to it the effects gone right so that's with most things um that's why I don't eat all the time and you don't want to always be running all the time either you need to recover and then you hit your body again and cycle it that way so a minute cold then hot then change it well I love what you said because I I found personally everything works until it doesn't to some degree and it's listening well yeah the other thing about it is so we know what's going to happen to us if we don't do anything okay we've seen what that happens all of our ancestors who didn't look after themselves it's not pretty and many in my family don't live beyond about 70. uh so like you say it if it doesn't work I'm not gonna cry it's a lot of fun I feel great I'm with my son um a minute of cold is really you know it gives me a little bit more mental strength as well I just I need that and uh at the at best I'm gonna give myself another 10 20 years of healthy life so that's a calculation that I think is pretty easy to do and with regards to exercise seems like a there there's a lot of interesting research lately that less is more with regards to interval training exactly yeah so in my book I've got a fair amount of um references yes it's like half the book if I remember I got the book like all the footnotes in here wow yeah I had to hire somebody just to format the fitness but I'm a scientist so everything that I say is backed up by science it had to be this isn't a self-help made-up book um it's it's really is scientifically valid as I could make it but in in the book I talk about um what you were saying which is that we used to think you had to be a marathon runner to live a long time that's actually not true you you can actually wear out your body parts from sport you probably have some friends who are feeling it already so you want to be able to get the maximum bang for the buck and what we're finding we scientists is that just 10 minutes on a treadmill as long as you lose your breath you become hypoxic that means that you're you're unable to carry out a conversation during this one if you do that for 10 minutes a few times a week that seems to be nearly as good as pro athletes so yeah a little bit goes a long way when it comes to exercise but you've got to push yourself you can't just uh you know walk up a flight of stairs and think you're done for the week run up run up like five flights right still walking is good if you're elderly and you can't run clearly walking helps a lot of people who are in you know in their hundreds didn't run a day in their lives and but they did walk a lot but you got to keep moving what about sleep wow sleep is really really important more than I thought which I wish we all knew this when we were in our 20s all right and you came from a red eye talking to two guys didn't sleep last night yeah we should practice what we preach um but I do try more than I used to I especially as I get older it's harder to recover from a night like that on an airplane and again it's this biofeedback really helps me because it makes you more aware of what's going on and so that's why I've got this ring on my finger which is used by now many people to monitor their sleep not just when they sleep but how well they sleep and I learn what causes me not to sleep well of course being on a plane doesn't help but even if I'm at home in my bed if I have a drink late at night or two messes up my sleep and I'll feel it the next day a large meal a big steak late at night yeah nine o'clock won't sleep and I used to wonder why I would feel up I wake up feeling bad and now I've figured out it's it's the Sleep disruption and so you mentioned planes you are not a fan we have to and you're not a fan of TSA either but for different reasons than most of us yeah well so what what I've discovered in our lab is that one of the drivers of Aging we think and again this isn't brand new we've been doing this for now at least 20 years but it is new to most scientists and the public is that aging is driven by this clock that I mentioned and this clock is What's called the epigenome which at a very high level you can think of the epigenome as scratches on a corner CD or a DVD and the digital information is the genome and we what scratches the CD is uh largely its broken DNA because the cell has to reorganize all of your genes to deal with the broken DNA and even when it's put back together it doesn't fully reorganize itself the way it was you know 10 minutes before and if you keep doing that over a lifetime you lose the ability to read the right genes the right time in your cells we think lose their identity so with that said and also I should say that long-lived species have very good capability of repairing broken chromosomes and proteins that or genes that help DNA repair if you put them into animals they live longer there's one called 36 which is one of those or two ones that we work on you can make a mouse live longer if you give it better DNA repair all that to say avoid DNA breaks as best you can because I think that's one of the main drivers of Aging now you can break your DNA by going out in the sun we know that any kid who grew up in Australia myself being one of them will look older because well purpose is a layer there's right uh yeah ozone and uh and the culture um you know I grew up in the 80s when having a tan was if you didn't have a tan people wouldn't talk to you you're a loser so you had to get brown we used to just sit out there with oil on our skin cooking and our places would peel it was horrible especially our backs but yeah um so here's the thing I try to avoid the sun occasionally as long as I don't overwhelm my skin I'm happy to sit in the Sun for 10 minutes 15 minutes it feels great and it's good for vitamin D but beyond that you don't want to overwhelm the system because then you get this aging effect there are other ways to break chromosomes there are toxins in the environment so pcbs will do it microwave food and Plastics will do it even the yellow ink in a an enchant jet printer will do it that's surprisingly toxic I've found and then speaking about the TSA the original scanners that they had at the airport did break DNA and it was they were quite penetrating and they first banned them in Europe and for about a year or two uh I knew that most people didn't and I would say to the people in the US do you know that these abandon Europe because they're dangerous and they'd say oh shut up and go through it and they would force me to go through it and I would say no give me a pat down anyway long story short that they've improved them somewhat but I'm still aware of the dangers of even low-dose radiation and these mice that we've aged in the lab by 50 we don't trash their genomes we just cut them very precisely a little bit stop it after three weeks and 10 months later they look really old compared to their brothers and sisters so you don't need a lot of DNA damage to accelerate this aging clock uh which tells me avoid radiation unless you actually have to so an x-ray or chemotherapy these are ways to break your DNA but you you need those right if your doctor says do that you you listen to them as you should but these avoidable ones I think we should study those more I would love to see a group of animals that have been exposed to those scanners not just for cancer that's just one thing that can happen from broken DNA but go for two years and see what happens to them do they get older or Not by messing up not the DNA but not the genome but the epigenome which is the organization of the DNA so you mentions your two in so when I come back to NAD and for our audience something we've talked about here before but as a primer what is it why should we be paying attention to it to certain NAD NAD yeah well so certains are think of them as the protective enzymes of the body uh they if you we think in Upstream Downstream mode so Downstream of them what are they doing they're repairing DNA as I mentioned they're stabilizing the epigenome so they're packaging the DNA making sure it stays in a youthful package but they have to jump between DNA repair and packaging this is their job they have two two jobs and over time they lose their position similar to if there's another hurricane Katrina the Army Corps of Engineers will go down fix it but some of them won't ever come back or they're distracted by something else some other disaster and we think that's what the certains are doing they're moving back and forth between these two activities um what's good about them is that they sense the environment and the way they do that is they measure how much NAD is in the cell so NAD is the world's most boring molecule it if anyone who remembers biology from high school will remember NAD is used by enzymes to carry out reactions about 500 different ones in the cell and then they made us learn those damn reactions remember the Krebs cycle or TCA cycle and all that stuff you probably don't you put it out of your memory but but that's that that's what NAD does and it was it was considered the most boring molecule up until the 2000s when it was discovered that these sirtuans are sensing them out of NAD in the cell and protecting us and then we realized that Ned even though it's a very important chemical which you might think therefore you don't want to change the levels always which we need the same level of NAD turns out a few things happen NAD Cycles throughout the day so when you wake up in the morning you're getting more NAD getting ready for the day um and it's cycling it's responsible for our sleep wake Cycles which is one of the reasons why sleep is so important you want to make sure that it's all in sync by the way if you disrupt sleep cycles you get aging that's not in animals so certains control that NAD is cycling but the other thing that's now known is that we lose NAD over time as we get older not so much in our blood but in our tissues it goes down by about half between the ages of 20 and 50. if you just say if you take a skin sample which is really scary because NAD is essential for life uh you're dead at zero you're definitely dead at zero uh if if you if we stop making an ad we would definitely be dead within about 10 seconds it's like taking cyanide in fact that's what cyanide does it blocks the ability to make NAD and energy so NAD is important and you don't want to have half the levels for two reasons right you're not going to have enough energy to make these chemical reactions go but even more important these sort of ones will be weak and not active and not repairing DNA and stabilizing the epigenome so the scratches on the CD get faster and more and more and more it's basically rubbing sandpaper on there and eventually the reader of the CD is playing a cacophony or or rejecting the CD which is what we think is aging and so what can we do to increase NAD well we know you can exercise and you can be hungry that's why those things work we think all right so that I love it that's the place to start that's what um in my book is it's not just how to live but why it works which is important because it helps you tweak your own body uh other ways to raise NAD would be uh so metformin will raise NAD that his take a little setback there are three main categories of longevity genes there's the sirtuins that I work on there are seven of those there's a one that's usually put in the middle called ampk or amp kinase which senses energy in the cell low energy it turns on which is good and then the third one senses amino acids and if you have a lot of branched chain amino acids which are found a lot in meat it will not be as helpful it's one of the reasons why I like to sometimes keep my amino acid intake low to try and get that pathway going that's the pathway that'll stimulate that autophagy that we talked about earlier um so NAD and all of these pathways are talking to each other that's my point and we used to fight as scientists over whose pathway was more important it was pathetic uh you know sort of two ends at the best no M2 is the best no we don't turns out if you tweak mtor you'll affect the other two or vice versa so you can if you tweak the others NAD will go up and if you tweak NAD the others will will go but what we don't understand which is a little confusing especially for the public and also scientists is what's the best way to tweak those three main things in what order when how we don't know that yet we've just figured out that they talk to each other but the optimum isn't known and what's interesting is about is people like myself and thousands of other people now are trying out their various versions of diets and exercise when to eat what to eat to try and optimize that longevity pathway and together we're figuring this out and clinical trials are underway but in a clinical trial you can only change one thing at a time and they cost about 15 million dollars to to complete so it's going to take the rest of our lives to figure this out the traditional way or we can try a few things and see what we can learn which is what I've done in parallel but so you can also boost NAD artificially if you want there are molecules that we make in our bodies that are safe enough we think to take as a supplement so at a hour and then we've talked about people are experimenting with injections and NAD NAD injections but not there and then a man but it's like it's exciting there are lots of things we're trying out right now that can potentially increase NAD and tied to longevity and it's interesting exciting well it's it it is exciting and uh so far there's been no downside that this is the right the potential risk here is that we've got 100 000 people or more trying this out and you know God forbid that there's some downside right we don't know of what what that is yet and I want to be the first to know um and I'll tell the world if we find something don't worry about that I'm not going to hide anything uh because my whole family is now taking and the NAD booster called nmn yeah yeah not to be confused with Eminem's uh but yeah my father my wife even our dogs um not our kids by the way we don't think it's worth the risk and besides young people make a lot of NAD anyway so there's no need probably but yeah we want to know what the toxicity is there doesn't seem to be any I will tell you that unpublished data we've been doing clinical trials with molecules like nmn and uh trying to develop drugs for diseases like friedrich's Ataxia which is a energy deficient disease people end up in wheelchairs midlife uh those studies look good we can raise NAD effectively with an oral pill it's not sublingual it's just a pill swallowed we don't need injections it works just as a pill but um so that whole debate I'm not jumping into because I think there's a lot of not disinterested parties involved sure um can I just say that uh if anyone looks at on the internet they'll see pretty much every company has my name and quotes from me on their website trying to say don't believe them this is Sinclair stuff trust me he works with us I don't work with any of them okay I barely even look at their websites first of all I just get too too upset when I look at them just like we were talking about all the people who have your who have lifespan on Amazon who aren't you they're ripping off my book too yeah I guess it's popular sign of success but it's uh but NAD is is really interesting we don't think there's any issues with it there are a lot of supplements out there I have a newsletter where I talk about what to look for sure so that that's how I'm helping but I have to be very careful because if I start being biased or jump into the supplement world or I start selling something sure then nobody should believe what I say I can only imagine uh so so with regards to longevity where do you think the conversation is going to be a year from now three years you know Dave asperi said he's going to want to do 180 and he'll go through his reasons like what what do you think is attainable for people today and what's going to be attainable for our children yeah well so in in my book lifespan I paint the pictures of what the future looks like in the very near future and and for our future and what that means for the world good and bad and so if you want a view of that it's in there what I think is going to happen and I'm right on The Cutting Edge I see things that most people don't sometimes years ahead so consider that what I see coming is that there are drugs that are in development that could be on the market within the next year or two that look like they would slow down aging the problem is that aging isn't a disease at least based on the regular regulatory authorities anywhere in the world that may change in the next 10 years too there's a lot of push from Grassroots as well as from the top down so that's probably one country starts doing it everyone's going to follow because it's going to be great for that country and something like metformin is only a couple of cents appeal so it's not going to bankrupt donation trying to prevent diseases like heart disease and cancer so I think within 10 years you'll you'll have a blood test you'll have your biological age identified if you're above a certain age let's say it's 50 you can be prescribed Metformin and some of these other things and that'll be quite acceptable just the same way we now have cholesterol drugs to prevent something once you know it's safe enough and it's cheap enough then Things become adopted and I think it'll be quite normal in 10 years for people to be working on slowing their aging whereas now it feels weird because we think of Aging as something that's acceptable but increasingly and I think anyone who reads my book will come to hopefully the same conclusion I have which is we are kidding ourselves if this is something that we should accept right not just because it'll help the Healthcare System but because what we're doing right now is knocking individual diseases on the head and we're playing whack-a-mole and even if we could stop all cancer today we're only going to live on average an extra two years because all the other problems with aging come along right up behind there and so if we're going to have a meaningful impact on our lives we have to start early watch what we eat when we eat exercise if you do supplements you know I think that that's going to augment that we know in animals at least if you take Resveratrol which is one of the other things that my family and I take from red wine if you combine that with every other day feeding in mice you get the longest live mouse in the experiment so you're a fan of red wine uh I am just not late and in abundance it's full of a lot of these Xeno hermetic molecules I was talking about because the grapes are picked when they're stressed they're either covered in fungus or are they dehydrated so people figured out that's what makes a wine taste good what they didn't realize was that that also boosts these molecules that give our body that that extra boost for longevity so as we're on the subject of potentially healthy unhealthy bases red wine good anything else on there or vices well snacking at night is something I'd love to stop doing uh yeah I'm you know I'm trying not to eat but when all the families in bed and I've just got work on my mind it's comfort food for me not every night sometimes I'm good but it's so bad that I've thought about locking up the cupboards what's the what's the cover for the guts yeah demon comes out are anything salty uh nuts hopefully not chips not so good not not that many yeah I'll just eat like a maniac uh it's a it's a real disorder that I have um but it's definitely stressed when I'm feeling good and everything's going well I don't feel the need for it let's close with stress that's a good place to you know we're talking about we we've covered everything we've covered nutrition NAD student metformin let's close with stress something that I think every everyone can relate to and stress and the toll it takes on one's life yeah well there's two types of stress the stress that I talk about is biological stress which is not the same as psychological biological stress is good as long as it doesn't hurt you too badly you recover and you're more resilient psychological stress though is not good to a certain amount you know a bit of adrenaline's not going to hurt you in fact it's probably beneficial I've spent most of my life with adrenaline every day doing things that are out of my comfort zone but chronic stress you you do that to a mouse and it'll age faster you just see that happen anyone who's had a fish tank the the small one in the tank is is not doing too well same same for us we get cortisol we get a whole bunch of immune defects and uh so you want to avoid stress so how do you do that it act it's really hard actually it's taken me about the first 40 years of my life to figure out what works for me uh I'll make it a little bit personal because it it's some people might be like me I'm I'm a fidgeter I'm a warrior I'm a perfectionist and so every day I am saying David you're an idiot why did you say that why did you do that how can I get better or get better get better and that's very stressful when you put that on yourself so I've learned to not take it all so seriously I have reminders including this wristband here I have a a gift from a Maasai tribe in Africa we we visited this year that what I worry about isn't really that problematic it also helped that I watched my mother die and it sounds terrible but that taught me what a bad day really looks like and everything else doesn't matter sure so I used to go home and complain to my wife ah you wouldn't believe it so and so it's fighting someone said this and now I get home and I say it was a great day nobody died right I literally say that just about every day I get home and if you live like that then the stress goes away because you realize what we worry about these are really small things now I've been fortunate that I've gotten to my career where I'm in a good place and I'm not worried about putting food on the table not everybody's at that stage but I do think we over worry about things we're looking at Instagram and what if people posted and all that stuff that's really silly stuff to worry about so try to do meditation if it works for you yoga is good I found for me and yoga I don't know if anyone else feels this but when they say breathe and and detest your body and get untense I I didn't didn't realize how tense I am until somebody says I'll relax you wow I have really been tense every part of my body so that that really helps I think just take the Long View take the realize that we're all here for a short time realize that problems go away and the other thing I've realized is everything that you think is going to be super fantastic never turns out to be that good everything you think is is really really bad never turns out to be that bad and if you remember that it's also less stressful Amen to that David Sinclair thank you so much everyone check out his new book lifespan lifespan I must read thank you thanks for having me

Channel: mindbodygreen

Views: 41,961

Keywords: david sinclair, dr david sinclair, reverse aging, extend lifespan, live longer, biological age, david sinclair podcast, dr david sinclair diet

Id: _mhJ9XElJaA

Length: 61min 52sec (3712 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2023