David Sinclair Interview - World Leading Longevity and Harvard Genetics Expert | Lisnic

[Music] hi i'm lisa i'm nick and welcome to under the covers with lisa and nick so our guest today is author of new york times best-selling book lifespan why we age and why we don't have to he is referred to as a superstar of the science world he's the co-director of the paul f glenn center for the biology of aging at harvard medical school now i like to start our interviews with some interesting facts and i don't know if these are myths or not about our guests so these ones are that he eats one meal a day predominantly stressed out plants we definitely need to talk about that later and i actually was listening to a joe rogan episode where he says he exercises once a week for three hours he also sleeps with no blankets i don't know how he does that because i definitely need to be wrapped up at least 10 donors he's the world's leading longevity expert and fellow australian welcome to the show david sinclair lisa nick thanks for having me on david mate as i mentioned earlier thank you for existing um i've got friends and myself who have been looking for someone like yourself for many many years and as i mentioned earlier i came across your book lifespan and absolute game changer so you're you must be one of the most wanted men in the world people want to know what you have how do you find time to run all these businesses and do what you do well it's a bit nuts i'm trying to cut back uh spend more time with family especially during this time but i don't do anything for myself really i don't uh go on vacations with friends i don't go out that much that's uh that's my sacrifice but i love what i do so much and i'm in a position where i can i think i can help the world so it's all it's all good but uh these days i'm cooking more dinners for for the kids and that kind of thing i'm trying to slow down a little bit what does a typical day look like for you well uh you know in 2019 a typical day would have been uh start in bed reading uh news and emails and scientific papers uh get out go go into the lab i've got about 20 students and post-doctoral researchers that are doing amazing things see how they're doing look at their data head downtown to maybe a couple of the companies that i work with and you know sometimes fly around the world uh giving talks but also trying to uh raise awareness about what i do because a lot of people haven't ever heard that aging itself should be considered a disease david my my mum tells me i should age gracefully and just let nature take its course i say stuff that what can i you what what signs can i use to to beat nature or at least increase my longevity now i'm a massive fan of using supplements and i'm trying to convince lisa to jump on uh metformin and some other supplements but just kidding here your thoughts around this because should we age gracefully or just get another stuff there and just go what can we do to increase our longevity well gracefully uh rarely happens unfortunately you know that old age is if we're honest it's filled with pain and misery it's uh yeah if you're lucky enough to avoid cancer and heart disease you know you'll get dementia there's nothing graceful well there are you know there are some lucky few that have good genes and and good luck uh and look after themselves but you know we've all had family members that despite what they did the end wasn't pretty and it was fairly drawn out i can speak for my mother's on my mother's uh behalf she spent 20 years suffering so this is i was saying oh let's just let nature take its course i think is is craziness to say that we don't say that about cancer and heart disease though we used to right before we had any tools or medicines but now as we understand aging more and more and we have some ways to slow to slow it down and even potentially reverse this process you know why wouldn't we use that technology to make people healthier for longer and age even more gracefully that leads me to my next question what what type of technology can we utilize ourselves to increase our longevity apart from using say supplements maybe maybe it's just supplements but other things we can do to increase uh well so as as i wrote as i wrote in my book often people ask me what's one thing you can recommend people do and so if there is one thing i'm allowed to say it's it's eat less and we'll actually eat less often is more to the point there are some excellent studies uh both in animals mostly mice rats and humans who don't eat the three square meals a day and snacks in between that we've been raised on those of us mostly and developed the developed world particularly western countries you know we're told i'll get up in the morning and eat a big breakfast for the day and then and then we're into lunch and having a perhaps a business lunch and then dinner is a big meal that's really bad and so we're struggling some of us go to the gym others don't have time or don't have the will and this has led to the world that we live in where you know soon half of the world's population will be overweight or obese now on the flip side what you can do is what i think is healthier a lot healthier based on the sciences i don't eat three meals a day and try not to snack in between now i'm not talking about kids i'm not talking about malnutrition or starvation you know that's the last thing we want but for people who are you know over 30 especially for people who are middle-aged and older three meals is a lot of food yeah it is a lot of food and if we struggle to keep the weight down and you get used to not eating three meals a day i these days i'm a little bit more generous with myself i eat probably two meals a day um but what i used to do before i spent my time at home uh was i was so busy i didn't even notice that i wasn't eating so i would skip breakfast i would skip lunch and have a really nice dinner and that was good uh these days you know if you're if you're at home and you're next to a fridge it's it's a little harder i'm only human i'm not not perfect uh but i do find that for me no breakfast works and for some people no dinner works but try to skip one meal if you can so are you saying that bodybuilders will actually have a shorter life as a result because they have to eat six seven meals a day potentially well you know i don't want to make anyone panic but i would say as a scientist i haven't seen any evidence that bodybuilders live longer or are protected against diseases of aging it's typical this the smaller literally smaller and leaner human beings that that live a long time just if you go to a nursing home okay it's mostly women smaller skinny women right you don't see big muscly tall men it's just a fact it's yeah i'm not really saying anything that isn't factual uh but you know what would i worry about weightlifting absolutely not i do weight lifting myself and it's very important to maintain muscle mass as we get older in part because if you fall over and break a bone over the age of 80 you you may not ever recover and this happened to my grandmother so maintain flexibility and strength is really important for surviving maybe not in the way you you might think uh but accidents are real killers yeah so what exercise do you do because i was listening to that joe rogan podcast where you said you exercise once a week for three hours but then you take other supplements where your body i guess feels like it is working out um i would love to do that in fact i would love to not have to exercise at all if possible but still be thin right yeah yeah i'm with you i don't enjoy being exhausted or out of breath though the science says that if you lose your breath for 15 minutes every day or every other day it's really helpful for your long-term health uh you know i used to work out once for three hours a week now i do three times one hour every week uh it's a good time spent with uh our son benjamin but yeah you gotta you've gotta move um you gotta be out of breath a little bit because what you're doing is you're telling your body that times could be tough uh you know we used to be chased by saber-toothed tigers or wolves we used to be hungry a lot and we adapted to that and in fact our bodies learnt to protect themselves against well adversity and it turns out if you do this a lot protect against diseases of aging um and you know just sitting around all day you know watching tv or reading a book and not going for a walk and eating three meals a day is a signal to your body hey times are great i have no reason to protect myself against any adversity that might come and our inbuilt defenses against aging and disease just switch off david thanks to you on social media metformin has exploded online like it's actually exploded and people are now taking me in post because they saw me talking about it because of you obviously now i've been taking medical performance i've not been up metformin for about a year i haven't noticed a difference do you notice any results is it just you just take it and hope for the best and do blood work well i do blood work and it's helped me i was heading towards having reasonably high blood sugar which is a path to to shorter life for sure um and in fact probably the biggest indicator of long life is having stable and lowish blood sugar for your age uh so that's what metformin will do it's not going to likely make you feel suddenly younger and run a marathon if anything it might actually slightly reduce your ability to run further distances and work out that's one of the potential downsides in some small studies in people but in a couple of notable studies that looked at over 10 000 people who were given metformin for type 2 diabetes which is high blood sugar of course uh they generally on average did a lot better in old age and so you might expect they have less type 2 diabetes than someone that didn't take the drug which is true but they also were relatively protected against cancer heart disease alzheimer's and frailty so based on those you know epidemiological studies i think there's a pretty good case to be made that if you take metformin it will certainly keep your glucose under control and might protect you against cancer and heart disease and other things like that now it's always a risk if you take a drug metformin is actually a prescribed drug in many countries not all you can if you want to go to thailand you can just buy it out of chemist because it's it's it's considered one of the safest drugs out there but there's still risks you can have some side effects one's called lactic acidosis uh your stomach can have a lot of i don't know if you nick you notice but it can be tough on the stomach if it's not a slow release pill yeah i have noticed [Laughter] and i'd actually i a week because of i heard it impacts weight training and exercising so i take it on my off days as you mentioned that that's right yeah if i take it it's it's it's with a meal to protect my stomach um a preferably slow release and yeah not days that i'm exercising uh but yeah that's one of the medicines that stands out in the field this isn't just my research there's a lot of other scientists who say the same but there's a there's a growing number of molecules that are either sold as drugs available supplements or in development for both um that allow us that now live in the 21st century to make calculated risks as to what we're going to do about that you know nick you've obviously weighed up is it worth a very tiny risk to you for your health going south versus the long-term benefits um and i can tell you i think i'm way older than either of you the older you get the more risks you're willing to take [Music] so let's just one more question so that leads into my next question a lot of men over 50 are now taking synthetic human growth hormone does that have any benefit to longevity or is it actually just a myth because it's quite common well that there isn't any evidence that it'll extend um lifespan but i don't believe it's been studied in such detail what's generally agreed upon by scientists is uh that it will build muscle strength um and you will feel as though you have more energy these are these are benefits of course uh there are a number of scientists maybe not the majority but there's a there's a handful of of them that would say a minority that would say there's a risk if you take growth hormone it may stimulate a tumor if you have one in your body but i haven't seen any proof of that just yet so i think that the jury's still out so again it's this calculation do i want energy greater muscle strength um greater i guess uh vitality with some risk as well yeah it's actually interesting because like honestly i have not seen a medicine cabinet as um stockful of nicks he has so he vitamins every day and he's always like you gotta try this try this it's like you know look at me i look so much younger i'm like you don't you still i'm just hanging on to what i'm trying to hang on to my youth look he took a lot of damage in his younger younger days clubbing um so he's trying to reverse the signs of aging but i think i'm at the age where like i'm not wanting to take those risks yet so it's really interesting that you say as you get older you're like okay i'll try more things but what vitamins or what's your daily supplement routine because nick was telling me that he has about 20 supplements a day so i imagine that yours might be must be quite interesting uh well it it's not that crazy i i if anyone really wants to know i listed it in my book page 304 so that's the cheap one but please you know read the pages before that because that'll tell you why i made those decisions and why my father did too i i don't take a lot i think vitamin d i put vitamin c in because of the pandemic alpha lipoic acid [Music] a good friend of mine who passed away made it to his mid 19 mid 90s and uh so that didn't seem to do him any harm avalopic acid will help with mitochondrial reactions uh what else do i do so i'm i'm taking the drug um well a drug a statin drug i won't name it but uh i have high cholesterol from my family and i bring that down and so to compensate one of the side effects is you um you lose cocutan so i'm supplementing with that every day as well the one that we work on in my lab in part is some of my lab works on is called nmn and sometimes people confuse those with m ms and so i don't say take m m's it's nmn and it stands for nicotinamide mononucleotide which is just a long way of saying it's a precursor to a molecule that our bodies need for health and we think uh healthy old age and so the molecule that it makes or the body uses it to make is called nad and so just briefly nad is in our bodies we have lots of it's one of the most abundant molecules and as we get older we make less of it and without nad first of all you can have less metabolism slow metabolism but also some of the body's survival pathways that we work on called sirtuins there are seven of those enzymes that protect the body they need nad or they won't work and having less nad makes their works means they work slower so the idea is take in a man raise your energy levels back up to what they were when you're young and when we do that in mice at least we see that the mice run further protected against what was it breast cancer there's a variety of things other labs have shown protection against other diseases kidney disease so we don't know in humans really at all if it will extend lifespan make us healthier but what i know is it it's basically a it's a vitamin related to niacin or vitamin b3 and the risk is very low i've also been involved well at least i'm helping a company that's doing clinical trials with nmn or a molecule just like it and for the last two years there's been no safety questions about it so with all that again nmn low risk maybe some payoff i certainly feel better might be placebo but if there's mice or anything to go by it might be helping with my blood flow and my muscle strength i'm going to pretend that i heard m m's and i'm gonna go out nick's probably gonna stock up on mmms well if you feel great what's your what's your biological age well i haven't measured it recently it's probably not that great but a few years ago i measured it using just an assay that is it's not super accurate but it's it's measuring things like glucose levels testosterone inflammation um so it came back at 31.4 at the time i was in my late 40s so that was it was promising though with all with all the stress and having three kids at home and yeah you know it's it's a stressful time that we live in right now i'm not sure i'm doing that well uh but i'm doing my best i think we all should that's the point you don't have to go crazy you don't have to be hungry um but you know try something you know even a little bit will certainly make you feel better and if you don't want to run by the way uh lisa just walking these days is at least just walk just walk i do i'm sure you do usually take her for a walk which is good that's actually one of the best things about you know listening to your interviews and reading your interviews and and uh reading your book you make because obviously what you do is highly complicated like i'm not even going to pretend like i don't even know where to start with thinking about all the stuff that you must do in the lab but you make it very accessible i think that's one of your real i guess strengths because you know someone like myself and nick like i'm gonna speak on behalf of nick were obviously not the most intellectual people but you really you know i guess make it sound exciting and interesting but in a way that the average person can really consume and i also love that you're not saying everything that you're doing stop it it's really bad don't ever drink alcohol again don't eat chocolate like you you know you say that you are human and so you know i think sometimes when people talk about doing a particular diet or you know living your life like this you can feel kind of guilty when you're listening to them talk about it feel like oh my god i do all these things wrong but you're like no i have like a drink like you know i'll go out i'll go on holiday and i'll have like 10 drinks so i think like good on you for doing that because it is you know i think what you're doing is obviously very amazing but you still enjoy life which i think is still part of you know living of course yeah there's nothing worse there's an adage in our field we scientists have terrible jokes we say uh calorie restricting or intermittent fasting it may not make you live longer but it'll certainly make life feel longer [Laughter] you don't want it to be like that you want to enjoy life um and if it's getting too hard you know you can back off but i appreciate you saying that and it's in my experience i know a fair number of uh health gurus and a fair number of them i won't say any names but you know they're saying do this do that and you know you can see that they're breaking their own rules and i think that's just hypocritical so i'm i i i try to practice what i preach um and do my best and and really go where the science goes you know that's one of the things that i really tried to do in the book is to say not just what you should do but why and here's the explanation in a way that you can understand so that when you're at the fridge or you're at the you can actually think oh i'm activating this longevity mechanism in my body and i think it really helps if you understand why what you're doing is actually helping or might be helping can you actually talk about the stressed out plants because i thought that was really interesting and really random to be honest uh yeah it it's a theory that i came up with um with a colleague conrad howitz and you and maybe some listeners and viewers may recall the story about red wine that came out of our lab what is about 15 years ago that red wine has a molecule called resveratrol that activates so tuans aha nick got it so resveratrol is made by plants that are stressed out and grapes before you harvest them for to make red wine they make a lot of resveratrol um other plants do too but we happen to bottle resveratrol up keep it away from the light and oxygen which is good and so it preserves the molecule and we can drink it and it also happens to taste good and maybe one of the reasons why red wine is good for you but what it led to was the idea that there are a number of plant molecules that work like resveratrol there's one called physin quercetin or cressetin some people call it these are a class of molecules like you could draw them but they basically look a little bit a little bit like chicken wire or barbell they look quite similar and they all activate this enzyme cert one that we work on that helps the body and we were trying to understand oh another one the new one i want to mention is oleic acid that you can get from olive oil so it's interesting that a lot of the foods that we scientists have figured out are good for us have an explanation and that is that the plant molecules that are made by stress plants either they're thirsty or they're hungry plants we want to get the message into our body that our food supply might be running out right remember we weren't always conscious beings we couldn't go oh that plant that i'm harvesting is dying you know usually we were just running around like little uh little mice or before that jellyfish that needed to get the information chemically rather than visually and that that's what i think is going on when we eat these stress plants often they have a lot of color in them so colored foods are good molecules go in our enzymes the sorting sense those chemicals and if there's lots of them then they go to action and protect our bodies so that we can survive the oncoming famine that might might be just around the corner yeah that's really interesting so you so you avoid the big stakes and just have the distressed plants instead uh well i don't a lot of meat i tend to uh you know eat mostly a a plant-based diet if i can but yeah you know i would say if you're a carnivore you know that's great i'm have nothing against that but i haven't seen a lot of evidence that a lot of meat consumption will make you live longer and be healthier because it you know let's be honest if you look at the longest lived populations on the planet and dan buettner wrote a good book on this uh the blue zones these are groups of people that tend to eat a lot of fresh vegetables majority vegetables maybe a bit of fish not so much red meat they drink red wine or have olive oil and they go hungry for part of the time either for religious reasons or economic and they exercise they keep moving they're gardening in their 90s so you know it doesn't take a genius to figure out what's likely to make us live longer yeah one more question for you because i could keep talking for hours with you um are we are we at stage now we can predict our time of death or when we're going to die huh we we kind of are at that point um 10 years ago we didn't know how to do it we'd we'd look at gray hair or glucose levels by the way gray hair never killed anybody that that was like misspoke but basically we were just observing how people were doing and how fast they walked turns out the best predictor right now is how fast you walk is um really exciting yeah yeah you want to keep keep moving i don't know if it's cause or effect but definitely if you're starting to slow down that's a bad sign uh makes sense right you might have arthritis you might have lack of energy but that that's um that's another way the other way you can tell before i get into the rest of it is uh can you stand up without touching the floor uh and that's uh that's a pretty good test of your overall health so you're on the floor and you you basically push it without using your hands to touch the floor so a really young person can just cross their legs and stand up oh he's my hands all the time each person needs one hand to get up and an older person has to get on their knee wow that's like nick he's really ah he's home it's all over [Laughter] just give up now um we have time for one more question and this is um look it's not the most scientific question but i have to say like i'm a skin care fanatic so i wear probably about eight moisturizers a day i don't even know really what i'm putting on my face i'm just trying to look as young as possible especially with all these video conferences where you see your skin you're like oh my god i'm saying look really old please tell me what your skin care routine is because you look very young you look younger than nick and i no that's also not true but i did get roasted in the australian sun uh so i'm i'm happy that i'm not totally wrinkled yet uh so if anyone's looking at me right now you can judge you might want to know how old i am i'm 51. but um [Laughter] so what do i what do i do well i take these molecules that hopefully slow aging in my skin just as much as my liver and my heart that's mainly it i i do put a moisturizer on that we developed for a cosmetic company boosts nad we hope and that might be part of it i don't know um i haven't got any gray hair which is surprising you know gray hair that's very surprising at 51 well done yeah um so there's that oh at least i also wanted to to mention that we can accurately measure the clock in the body we can do a blood test or a skin test sometimes it's called the horvath clock or the dna methylation clock how'd you talk about that's very accurate uh it's within five percent and you can actually predict uh when somebody's going to die and the good news is that you can alter the trajectory of the point by doing these things uh and we're finally learning actually at least in animals that that you cannot just slow the trajectory you can send it backwards and in fact just tonight i'm going to attend the first conference on reprogramming the body to be young again that's insane so have you done it on yourself yes that was my last question no no it's it's a viral delivery of gene therapy and it could go horribly wrong but we've given it to mice for over a year we've injected the gene therapy into the eye of old mice and they've been able they were blind and then able to see like they're young again wow it's pretty cool technology and if it works in the rest of the body like it works in the eye we have something really interesting uh in our hands now the the conference is a number of world leaders gathering because we think that this could be a turning point in the field of aging that's insane and well done to you like you're obviously one of the pioneers of it and i was actually listening to i think you talking about that clock and you were injecting or you did it in a two-year-old um mouse and then it was taken back to being three months old i think the muscle the muscle muscle yeah the muscle was with nmn um the difference with this new technology is it seems to be a permanent reset it actually doesn't just make the body feel younger but in the mouse's case it's literally younger that the clock goes back and the cells think that they're young again and we don't know how many times we can reset the clock but it'd be interesting if we could do it five ten hundred times david i'm running out of time we can work with phenology well we're developing it for eye diseases first and that'll hopefully be in a couple of years we'll know if that works but you know you you can say you heard it here first the the world is about to explode with excitement around this area and scientists are starting to really pay attention to this so it won't just be myself and a couple of my friends doing this it's going to be a global rush to to find medicines that can be used to treat diseases not just the eye but hopefully every organ that's insane well if you need a sponsor for your research i can 100 tell you that nick is um card ready because honestly he's one of your biggest fans and i have to thank him because he got me onto your research and you know it's it's actually incredible what you've achieved so far and it sounds like you're on track to be doing this for many many many years to come so big congratulations thank you so much for your time david and all the best with your research well thank you i appreciate all the kind words and keep doing what you're doing um bringing science and business to the world directly which is it's really a great great time for a podcast like yours ah thank you and actually i did hear you say that you're on um dax shepard's podcast and you're saying that you actually prefer now to do podcast interviews rather than go to the media because as we all know the media can uh twist things really really easily so thank you so much for making the time to come on now thank you you're welcome thank you

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Keywords: david sinclair, david sinclair aging, david sinclair interview, aging, self help, podcast, self improvement, how to live longer, longevity, longevity expert, david sinclair interview 2020, interview, anti aging interview, aging interview, longevity interview, dr david sinclair, harvard genetics, harvard, professor, genetics, health theory, anti-aging, long life, longevity tips, sinclair, sinclair david interview

Id: 1y9nFR8HyPI

Length: 31min 33sec (1893 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020