Anti-Aging: The Secret To Aging In Reverse

Hello Health Champions. Most people want to live for a really long time but nobody wants to get old. How do we resolve this apparent conflict? Well today we're going to talk about the secret to Aging in Reverse coming right up. hey I'm Dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss anything how old do you want to get well it's not really a good question it's sort of unfair because most people don't have the knowledge to put that question into a good context and why is that because we rationalize about age we think we have to accept a certain age and we base that on life expectancy we see how long have people lived how long do people typically live in our culture in our society but the other problem is that we look at the old people and we see that a lot of them are sick and we say I do want to live a long time but I don't want to suffer I don't want to be sick for a long time so then we justify we rationalize our answer based on that and we come up with with a number maybe but let's try to not rationalize for a moment and let's just play the what-if game what if instead of being 90 years old and looking and feeling like this you are 90 years old and you look and feel like that would that change anything would you say oh look at that I'm 90 years old I was only supposed to live to 80 that's what I expected that's what I said so I guess I'm gonna have to go kill myself tomorrow of course not because as long as you feel good as long as you enjoy life you want to keep living so the only reason we put a limit on it is that we don't think that we can keep it up we don't think that we can keep feeling good and enjoy life and be productive but if we could that would change everything what if you could feel the way you do today you wouldn't want to stop living anytime soon you would think hey maybe a hundred and twenty maybe a hundred and fifty maybe way way beyond that. One of the leading researchers on aging and rejuvenation reversing aging has suggested that aging is a disease and the reason he says that and I would tend to agree is that we classified diseases if they affect less than 50% of people if it affects more than 50% like almost everybody then it's not considered a disease now it's just a condition it's just the inevitable something that happens to everybody so diseases or things like arthritis and high blood pressure and cancer diabetes dementia because they affect less than 50% of the population at least less than 50% of the young population if you average it out but if you look at someone who's 20 years old and you look at the likelihood of finding arthritis and blood pressure and cancer and so on in a 20 year old it is very very small very very low probability whereas if you look in an 80 90 year old there are hundreds or thousands of times more likely to have that disease so rather than looking at these conditions as individual diseases he says we need to look at them as a result of aging because they don't go up with a few percent they go up thousandfold and therefore aging is the main disease is the principal disease that is causing all of that so let's stop looking at these and let's just start looking at solving aging and if you've been watching this channel for a while you know we talk about the same things that these are not individual conditions if we handle the root cause which is a lack health lack of function then all of these problems go away what is aging then if it's a disease what causes it right so there's been all these different theories over the years and these are all very well researched there's been Nobel Prize awarded for some of them and they include DNA damage and telomere shortening and mitochondrial dysfunction and the list goes on and on but these are not the mechanisms these are not the causes these are things that we observe as aging progresses as aging progresses these things progress but there is a unified principle just like in physics they look for the unified field theory the one idea that explains all other rules all other laws of physics well if these are not the causes then what is the cause what is the one thing that unites these theories and according to David Sinclair it is the loss of information and when it comes to information and loss of information there are two kinds genetic information made up of DNA accounts for 20% of aging and DNA is a code made up of four letters A, T, C and G. Adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine and because there's four distinct letters we consider this digital information because it's either on or off just like in a computer it's a 1 or a 0 it's not anything in between so just like these letters they're not a little bit a and a little bit C or some other letter there these are the only four options the other type of information is epigenetic and that accounts for 80% of aging and how aging functions in the body and the epigenetic is the DNA packaging and what does that mean well think of DNA as a blueprint that blueprint contains information but the blueprint doesn't make decisions you can think of it also as a cookbook that the DNA that's the written recipes inside the pages but the DNA that's the whole wrapper the whole package so you can't look at the recipe you can't read the recipe until you open the book and the cookbook is not going to decide what's for dinner right you decide and there's lots of variables that are involved with deciding so that makes the epigenetic more analogue okay they're more variables they can be expressed a little bit or more or all the way they're not just on or off so we could have different things for dinner depending on what we're in the mood for depending on what we had yesterday depending on what ingredients we have at home so you decide the epigenetic information decides not the cookbook and because DNA is so stable and because DNA of four distinct letters and it can be repaired then when we're talking about loss of information and aging we're talking about the loss of analog information now DNA is packaged in chromosomes if you open up a cell and you look in a microscope you can actually see this structure but if you unravel it you see that it's a enormous Lea long strand made up of chromatin and these this DNA double helix it's coiled up and it's wrapped around protein and whenever it's wrapped around these protein then it's packaged it's packaged tightly and you can't express you can't open up and read the portion of the DNA that is coiled up it's it's like the book is closed you can't read it then how do you read it well there's environmental influences these are the epigenetic factors things in our environment that affect the chemical messengers that attach and influence these proteins these histone tails and then these proteins will uncoil the DNA strands so that we can open up and read it and when we're young then this process works very very well everything is properly packaged every cell has an accurate identity because only the correct proteins are produced at the right time however as we age then this packaging can degrade right the we have a loss of identity because the coiling and uncoiling because the communication doesn't function as accurately and now there's some confusion as to when to turn these genes on and off and as a result the correct proteins are not necessarily produced at the correct time in the correct tissue so now we start having confusion between the liver isn't really sure if it's supposed to be a liver or a kidney or a brain and there's some overlap of the proteins being produced when there's less precision then we have less health and then there's three different levels of epigenetic expressions three different levels that we can affect this and the first one is the simplest but also the most short-term and that's simply that we have transcription factors that's how we just turn the genes on and off it's things that very quickly can open up and express different genes the second one is a little harder but it also lasts a little longer it's kind of medium term and that's silencing genes this is done by proteins called sirtuins that have been identified there's seven of them in humans and the SI R stands for silent information regulators so these are things that can affect the bundling and the expression of genes long-term so when we can activate the sirtuins now we can have more long-term effect and the third and the most profound way is what they're doing research on now and this is what's called a DNA methylation clock or the horvath clock and if you look here then there's something called a methyl group which is basically just a carbon with three hydrogen's they're present in the body everywhere but they mean different things depending on where they happen and where they were they're used but when they stick to a DNA then that's like the DNA gets rusty it's like we get plaquing on the DNA but the thing to realize is that there are enzymes that put it there and there are enzymes that can remove it and when they realize that that was quite the revolutionary discovery because then that meant that not only can you slow down aging but you could actually reverse it and then what they also found is that all of the information all of the information that made your body do certain things when it was young that had a youthful behavior all that information is still there it's like a hard drive back up and it's really just more a question of how and when do we complete these processes when do we make this a reality as opposed to if so now as it relates to aging time doesn't just flow in one direction anymore it's actually possible to go backwards in time and get younger to reverse aging if we look closer at this third step the DNA methylation and we realize that we can remove these methyl groups then it really truly is like turning back time so the technique is there it has been done in certain portions of mouse tissue they can't do it in a whole mouse and they certainly can't do it in a human within our lifetime it's very possible that this will be a reality that we can reset that we go back ten years and then every 10 years we do another reset and we go back and do it again so that we can repeat this process many many times so in the body we have something called stem cells and those are at conception we only have stem cells they're the original cells they can become different kinds of cells and they gradually differentiate until they're fully differentiated and now they are the different final tissues so they are blood cells and gut lining and muscle and brain cells and so forth but this typically only flows in one direction from stem cells to final tissue but what they have discovered is guy called Yamanaka he got the Nobel Prize for this he found four genes and by combining them properly they can actually turn the differentiated tissue into stem cells they literally turned back time they take an old cell and make it young so that it can start all over and become different tissues again and now it doesn't have that age marker that the tissue originally had and when they do cloning then the new individual created the new organism has a normal lifespan so they take an old cell and that means that once they clone it once they turn it back into a stem cell we use that technology then it is truly like they have a hard drive back up all that youthful information is still there now that's almost like the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button where a guy was born as an old man and he lives his life in Reverse and he dies a young baby so that's obviously a made-up story but it's kind of interesting that we actually have the technology now and we have done this in mice tissues where they have regenerated old optic nerves and they've turned them young so like I said this may or may not happen in our lifetime the step number three where we turn back time so for now we want to focus on is what can I do now how can I slow or delay aging and have the best quality of life not just live longer but to have the health to enjoy it and something we talked about a lot on this channel is good stress versus bad stress eustress versus distress and that applies enormously to anti-aging research so short term intense stress is what humans are made for that's how we have functioned for as long as we've been around we've been challenged we've been threatened and whenever that happens the body thinks I gotta get better I gotta get better so this short term intense stress it activates survival genes it activates growth hormone and all that good stuff as well but these longevity genes are actually activated and this short term intense stress may be the most beneficial thing that you can do for your health and your hormone balance and your longevity the other type of stress unfortunately is what humans are mostly exposing themselves to which is a chronic low-grade stress this is not a challenge that benefits the body in any way it's a kind of long drawn-out wearing down that doesn't give the body a chance to recuperate so this is the stuff that kills you whereas this activates survival gene and it's the most beneficial this may be the most destructive thing that you can do so even though we call both of them stress there is an enormous difference between eustress and distress we talked a lot on this channel about lifestyle changes that you have more influence than you think and now these same changes come back in the longevity research so high-intensity interval training and intermittent fasting are very powerful ways to activate survival genes basically what they mean is you want to challenge your body you want to threaten its survival a little bit you want to push it so you want to breathe hard you want to get your heart rate up for a short period of time on a regular basis same thing with food eating three meals a day every day with snacks is one of the worst things you can do because there's never a reason for the body to protect itself and preserve anything and recycle anything called autophagy but when we do HIIT now if we activate these survival genes and one of the most important fuels to fuel these survival genes and the sirtuins involved is something called nad nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide and guess what one of the best ways to make nad is to do high-intensity interval training and intermittent fasting another way to fuel the sirtuins is with a supplement called resveratrol which occurs in red wine but which has been isolated and you can buy it as a supplement another compound that has only recently become available is called NMN it's nicotinamide mono nucleotide so it's very closely related to NAD it's a precursor it's one step away from being nad so by eating some of the NMN you're actually increasing the levels of NAD and why is that important because NAD is something that occurs naturally in the body but it declines with age so a 50 year old probably only has about half as much as a 20 year old and they believe that this is a critical component of the aging process that a very big factor in why we age is that we don't have the NAD that we used to have so you as an individual have a lot of influence in slowing or delaying the aging process when it comes to actually reversing age and turning the clock back then you're gonna have to wait for some help they're gonna have to solve some issues first in that process but here's how I think about it that for every year that you live they're gonna have they're going to be closer to a solution they're gonna have more advances every year and this research is accelerating so the longer you live the more likely that you're going to be able to live even longer and that you're gonna do it in perfect health if you enjoyed this video and you'd like to learn more about health and how the body really works I think you'd really enjoyed that video next thank you so much for watching I'll see you next time

Channel: Dr. Sten Ekberg

Views: 382,040

Rating: 4.9145646 out of 5

Keywords: anti-aging, science, aging, epigenetics, longevity, dna, live longer, natural anti aging, anti aging, anti aging tips, anti aging secrets, antiaging, long life, how to be healthy, how to live longer, ways to live longer, life extension, reverse aging, how to stop aging, science of aging, look younger, live forever, david sinclair, dr ekberg, dr eckberg, dr eckbert, wellness for life, dr david sinclair

Id: AXaJuM5VjGU

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 03 2020