HARVARD SCIENTIST REVEALS The Surprising Secrets To AGE IN REVERSE | David Sinclair & Lewis Howes

there's a clock in the body that we can measure we can predict how long you're going to live based on that clock and what we found is we have a new gene therapy but hopefully one day it could be a pill that resets the clock and cells go back to acting and being young again i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness really yeah please welcome welcome back everyone to the school of greatness podcast i'm super excited because my guest today is david sinclair he's been on the show before it's been a massive hit and i wanted to have him back on he's a professor in the department of genetics he's also at the center for biology of aging at harvard medical school and he is best known for his work on understanding why we age and how to slow its effects and the last interview we had with you blew up the internet so i wanted to dive in with a challenging question an interesting question i think people are really curious about that we touched on a little bit but we didn't dive in fully last time is do you think human beings will ever be able to become immortal oh yeah that that's a tough question here's the honest answer uh no i don't think so never in a thousand years 10 000 years never well never is is pretty hard statement i would say that with the technology that that i can envisage even the best technology give it a thousand years of development i think we can live many hundreds of years really well let's get into that later i i think we've got some new technology coming out of the aging field that that makes the old stuff even things just two years ago look primitive but immortality is so hard i mean we're fighting entropy we're fighting the second law of thermodynamics which is a very powerful law of nature and really what what we've discovered in my lab and some others around the world is that it's hard to preserve adult living things for a long long time you can keep them together and functioning for longer we've got some species on the planet particularly plants that can live thousands of years and many hundreds of years for some mammals bowhead whale for example but going you know immortality you're fighting what turns out to be a loss of information um you know we all understand the importance of information our computers get corrupted our uh you know we used to have things like compact discs and dvds that got scratched these are examples of of the problems with trying to store information forever you know how how long would an iphone last it's not going to last for a thousand years that's for sure but if the information's in the cloud then it can't be scratched maybe digitally scratched but well that that's the saving grace maybe if we are able to upload ourselves somehow or rebuild ourselves from scratch that's immortality that's beyond anything that i'm seeing right now um i think a lot of people who say oh let's just download our brains into the internet are underestimating the complexity of the human brain it's not like just wires contacting each other every one of those wires is extremely complex more complex than anything in the known universe and so you put a few trillion of those together into one thing and it's very hard to map it without damaging it um and let alone rebuild it so the brain wiring is more complex than anything in the universe our brains are the most complex uh thing in the universe do you think it's more complex than than the understanding of god or source or the creator i i think that's pretty simple you believe it or you don't we've inherited brains from our ancestors that have consciousness and then we're able to ask these questions where do we come from is there a force beyond what we understand that gave rise to everything around us or are we just an accident of nature in your opinion what do you think is an ideal lifespan for humans then with the technology we have today and the technology we're going to have over the next two decades what do you think is the ideal lifespan where we'll be functioning healthy human beings that have memory and not just blobs that just last longer yeah that's a really good question and i i don't recall ever having been asked that one right now the maximum human lifespan that's recorded at least and even that is debatable is 122 years old like the french woman john coleman the thing about living that long uh is that and we often forget is that that means she was still very active i'm sure she was riding her bicycle around uh her village when she was 105. so if you live that long you have this period of health where you don't have diseases aging brings on those diseases and so when you think about extending lifespan the important thing is to realize that you don't live longer in old age you live longer in a youthful state what do you mean by that well we do have technology in in animals let's say nice to make them live 20 longer they don't live 20 longer at the end of life they actually live 20 longer uh in midlife so that they don't get diseases they stay younger longer earlier right so that you can compare these animals you can actually do this pretty easily actually anybody could do it you take a a mouse and and another mouse and you give a lot less food to one of them or feed them every other day and yeah they'll be hungry i think they eventually can get used to it uh but what happens is you can compare those two mice or you know 50 mice in one group and 50 in the other this is what has been done for now 80 years and the ones that have spent some time in hunger or not always satisfied they are remarkably different their coats look all shiny they have very little cancer or evidence of cancer they're running around the cage and the mice that have been eating as much as they ever wanted which is kind of how we live now um most people uh they are decrepit they are you know not moving they've lost a lot of their ability to remember things they don't bother making a nest it's dramatic and this has been done for monkeys as well it's been done for labrador dogs it's a really universal thing in life so to get to your question lewis actually what's the optimal life if you had the chance to stay young why would you want to die i don't think anybody who's healthy and has friends and is enjoying their life says i want to die tomorrow i haven't ever met anybody like that you know there's there's pain there's suffering there's depression but if you don't have those why would you want to die i mean maybe boredom but you know there are ways right you always want to live you'd always if you had a purpose if you had community if you were pain-free you'd want to keep living i would assume if you were enjoying your life and you had love and connection and mission then you'd want to live as long as you could so what i'm hearing you say is that it's almost like food becomes the disease if you don't manage it properly it's what is a big cause of death the more you eat well yeah well the food isn't the cause of death we need food and we're not talking about malnutrition or starvation by any means you know that i want that to be clear right about eating disorders here but we are talking about not having three large meals a day and the way to think about it is not that the food is killing you what it's doing is it's turning off your body's protective mechanisms against disease so creating some smaller stresses in the body turns on the immune system to fight against disease yeah well not just the immune system but that is a big part of it it also turns on repair of dna it clears the body of old proteins that are just accumulating and causing issues rejuvenates the mitochondria which are those battery packs the energy parts of the cell a lot of things happen we don't understand everything that's going on when animals or we are hungry but we know that there are at least we know three main pathways that and by pathways i mean biochemical workhorses in our cells proteins that do good things three main pathways that are activated when we're hungry and go to work and tell other parts of the cell to repair the body and clear out the old stuff so in your opinion what's the ideal lifespan well it's personal but i would say i wouldn't mind living for 200 years there's a lot i'd like to see in the future right but i think if i if i reach 200 years i'll still feel young uh i might feel young and then why would i want to die it's all about being healthy now what's the optimal lifespan for seven billion humans that's a different question you know we can't all live a thousand years and expect the planet to do well but what i talk about in my book is that when you do the numbers allowing people to be live longer and healthier adds huge amounts of percentage to the gdp right we're spending at least 17 percent of our gdp in the us on taking care of of people who are sick and most of that is spent in the last few years of life and it turns out the longer that somebody lives they actually are less costly to the health care system because they die quicker and so if you draw a graph and you know like i tend not to draw grass but this this is what i have to so we used to die off as a population like this and people would often get sick and stay alive for a lot longer in a sick state i mean now it's still possible to to get cancer and suffer for 10 years trying to fight that disease heart disease the same but in a world where we can push that out and people tend to live to 100 years we know that's possible there are people that do this all the time then there's the very quick die off and a lot of people get to that point would get to that point and then quickly die die off and and that's a that's a world that i think would be far better than this one where uh from a from an economic standpoint and from an individual and family standpoint um anyone who's had a grandparent or a parent who became chronically ill you know this is just nothing you would wish even on your enemy when it when it's like five years ten years and it keeps extending where it's just uncomfortable suffering pain as opposed to what i'm hearing you say is live a great life and then once you start to feel a little sick die quicker as opposed to die over 10 years of suffering that that's the ultimate goal with this research and it looks feasible based on the work that's been done over the last 20 30 years because essentially what i'm hearing you say is we're not dying effectively we should be dying in a better way that's better for us as individuals it's better for our families it's better for the economy the planet is what i'm hearing you say right now we see that today as well people who don't take care of themselves who never exercise and eat the wrong foods and too much of it you can see that those are the people that develop diseases in their 60s and 70s that are often horrific your diabetes and having limbs cut off from lack of blood yeah this in large part is preventable already we know how to do that it's really sad i know some people at that stage of life where it's just you can't really come back from it once you've gotten to that point you can't really reverse back to a healthy state is that correct maybe you can manage it a little bit but it's not a reversible thing at that point if you asked me that last year i probably would have said it's not possible to come back from that but this new work that i'm hinting at really does look like an age reset is possible in complex tissues and maybe one day an entire body really so someone who's 60s 70s who's got diabetes and it's really slowing them down and they're losing you know function in their their body you're saying that in the future potentially we could reverse that right theoretically now we haven't tested it in the context of diabetes we tested it in the context of a vision loss due to aging or due to damage to the optic nerve but there it was very easy and in three weeks we're able to recover a lot of eyesight from in a blind old mouse by resetting the age of the eye we haven't tested this on humans yet no i'm trying to do that um wow in in hopefully clinical trials will be two three years from now that's amazing so i remember you saying in our last interview that you wouldn't want to live forever but as you say in with research things change and last year you would have said something and this year's different now uh and you might want to live 200 but if you were still healthy at 200 would you want to say hey let's keep doing this another century or would you say i'm healthy uh i have love in my life ah but i want to call it quits is there ever a time if you were healthy still you'd want to call it quits i don't think so yeah i really don't i haven't met a happy healthy person who wants to die have you no so it only becomes when it's a time of like suffering pain immobility to to function at life at a normal level yeah or depression or let's face it there are a lot of people on the planet that are not living great lives you know countries that are not as well off as these ones are that we right so i can understand there may be situations where you wouldn't want to live longer if if you're doing a profession that every day is painful or you know just way too much work um you know you and i have the privilege that we can we can do jobs from an armchair but not everybody so i just want to you know realize maybe that um not everybody's in our situation but hopefully if you have an extended lifespan you'll be able to change professions you don't like and have a possibility of three four five different careers right is it in your opinion more important to extend life or reverse aging or live better with the years that we currently have huh well yeah obviously you want to do both and actually turns out if you if you live better during the years that quote-unquote you have uh you will live longer if you're making the most of life you're enjoying your life your have a career that you you love getting out in the outdoors you know that will lead to longer life we know that so a good life actually leads to a longer life what's your what's your thoughts on uh the difference between humans and artificial beings or some other species that uh the more we alter our bodies in non-natural ways like what's the difference between natural humans and kind of altered bodies with artificial beings yeah well we're already there i mean what about our surroundings right now is natural or maybe even the air is different thanks to humans so you know we're we're i'm wearing a computer on my wrist right cyborg yeah where we have a cell phone that has access to all the information in the world at our fingertips it's probably eventually going to be embedded in our brain in some way in hundreds of years sure for sure that's coming but even things that we don't think about the vaccines that hopefully we'll have soon that's artificial that's partly biologically cyborg but these are early steps you know eventually our grandkids will have things integrated more into their bodies i don't see anything wrong with that it's just an extension of what we've been doing for the last probably few hundred thousand years as humans yeah you mentioned vaccines i did i had a doctor on a few months ago and i asked him what's the misconception about the the medical world that you feel like people have that they that they should believe in more and he said it's really sad when people don't i'm paraphrasing this but he said something like it's really sad when people don't believe in vaccines because especially with kids because they don't have the choice and a lot of kids get sick and die without and they can just take a vaccine that way that could save their life and i got a lot of heat for even allowing that to be said on my show from parents and mothers who are completely against vaccines because of the side effects that they believe it had or whether it's true or not i don't know because i'm not the researcher what are your thoughts on vaccines in general i mean should we be taking vaccines is this you know there's there's a lot of angry people that say don't listen to the vaccine people but what is science saying you want some more hate mail i don't know if i want more hate mail i'm always trying to find the truth i'm trying to find answers and i i don't want people to hate on you or me or anything i just like okay what's the information and i always want everyone to do their own research and figure out what works for them and make their own choices but i'm just curious based on your research well my research is really just reading the scientific literature when it comes to vaccines there have been a number of scientific papers that have been retracted that showed that vaccines were for example causing autism so in the scientific literature you know this isn't me saying it this is published work uh in journals and other scientists have done other work and looked at that work and tried to repeat it and it's come to the point within the scientific community that some of the original work that gave rise to these fears was unfounded and was not scientifically valid so in normal layman's terms there were some research that said vaccines are bad or can cause side effects like autism there was research that said that and now what i mean you say is there's other research out there that says that was not true right and when a paper turns out not to be correct the journal or the author or both decide to retract the paper so it's no longer in the literature that has happened to those original papers now you said scientists are always trying to prove themselves wrong every couple of years so all this all the signs could be wrong still we just don't know but what we found so far is that it's doesn't cause autism based on these scientific studies well yeah i think if you if you ask a thousand scientists 998 roughly would say what i'm saying which is based on scientific literature now please don't you know everyone listening don't attack me i'm not right you're not saying this but i can read scientific papers uh and uh that's just i'm stating in fact makes sense i'm always trying to find the answers and the truth and i feel like it's always evolving and you know we're always trying to learn more stuff i'm curious with all this artificialness in us right now it sounds like none of us are real like whole complete human beings anymore if you take a vaccine if you're wearing a digital watch you know using cell phones the air is different the environment is different it's almost like there's not a real human being anymore what makes a human human and as medicine improves how will we know if we're no longer human uh well i found out last night uh i took one of those little tests online and uh it said i'm not a robot which was good news right didn't it came as a surprise um beyond those little robo i'm not a robot test we will we'll always be human unless it's life synthesized from scratch or it's it's some other life form or computer intelligence i don't think we'll lose our humanity you know augmenting the brain i think is still we're going to retain our humanity so i'm not so worried about that i think more interesting is the debate about will artificial intelligence ever be close enough to be called human thought and i think one day we may actually get there um yeah as soon as computers uh develop their own type of consciousness um and model it based on the way we think it's quite possible that you think it's possible that computers could have human thought yeah sure they could um it's it probably is going to be different than human because they we're not mimicking the human brain currently right but you know let's say in a thousand years there are some researchers even now that are modeling the human brain in a way that's different than your typical neural net that say google is working on the idea is to mimic nerve cells rather than mimic just computer connections and these nerve cells as i mentioned are very complex they they have inner workings and they're actually analog devices meaning they're not just ones and zeros they have these waves that pass through chemical waves that pass through by mimicking an actual human neuron and then putting you know he's got millions of them he can actually mimic what happens in thought and in a in a mouse brain and now he's building a human brain so that's a new approach and i think two months ago maybe three months ago i decided to give myself an experiment and i wasn't happy with the results i was getting with my health i was training hard i was eating well i was intermittent fasting for 16 hours a day i was sleeping well i was taking supplements like i was trying a lot of stuff and i wanted to try to like lose some extra weight but also just kind of feel like there's some little inflammation here from past injuries and sports i was like i just want to get rid of it and i said i've never tried a you know multiple day fast and i remember you mentioning about just hey eating less will help you live longer and help you get less disease which will help you live longer and i said okay i'm gonna try a i did a four days no food essentially four days no food water i had a little bit of juice on some days and i had black coffee and i just drink a lot of water it wasn't until a week after the four day fast when i started to feel the effects sure i like lost some weight because i wasn't eating for four days and i felt like healthier in jenner i felt super focused and clear but it wasn't until like a week two weeks later when i was like huh i just feel better i feel lighter i felt like more flexible less inflammation what is the power of doing a one day fast a two three day pass how often should we be doing these types of fasting and i want to make sure that i don't tell people go not eat for three or four days without talking to a doctor a nutritionist or something but what is the the benefit of not eating for a day or two days what does that do for our body long term well we're still learning right um we've only just finished doing we as a field of scientists have only just finished doing a lot of animal experiments but we're now you know a period where we're actually finally doing these in humans so what do we know uh we know that if you fast for one day you're going to turn on these these three main mechanisms that protect the cell their names by the way that there's one called mtor which senses amino acids that we eat there's one called ampk which it controls and registers how much energy the cell has so if you eat sugar you'll switch it off if you're not eating sugar it'll switch on and then the ones that we work on they're called sirtuins and there are seven of these sirtuin proteins that protect the cell in very different ways um but all all seemingly good the question is how much should you be doing well we know from fasting for one day that you you activate these defenses and that three defenses we want to activate these three things as much as possible or once in a while good question i i think it's better to do it once in a while you don't want to always have them on and the reason i can say that is based on animal studies the best effects we've had and my colleagues have had is when you do things and let the body rest afterwards for example we did a study with resveratrol this molecule from red wine that activates one of these sirtuins that i was telling you about we gave it every day to mice or we gave them this calorie restricted fasting diet but it was when we actually gave them resveratrol every second day that we got the longest lived mice uh in combination with caloric restriction so that's just an example of many that we're finding that it's helpful to to pulse the body and let it let it rest and it it does make sense that you want to have a hunker down period where your body is fixing itself and removing bad stuff but then also a repair phase so when you go back to eating regularly or you're not running marathons every other day which some people tend to do then your body can recover and grow and heal so yeah long answer to your question but i think pulsing it is the right way to go is there a calculated approach to say okay if you're i'm 225 pounds male 37 years old how many calories should i be eating a day like is there a you know perfect system to this of like okay if you eat 1 000 calories a day for three days in a row then you have 2 000 for a day then you fast today have you figured out this process yet with rats no no it's not it's never like that yet that could be interesting yeah the problem that we face in the field is uh we were talking earlier you and i uh before we went on air about funding for science we don't have tens of millions of dollars to run these clinical trials we're always scrounging for money and always worried about what's going to happen when it runs out um so we can do some experiments but consider some of these longevity experiments in even in rats and mice they take about three years um and if you do it in monkeys then your whole career is used up by one experiment and so what what we're trying to now figure out is what's the right combination of what you eat when you eat and what supplements to take and that combination is hundreds of thousands and you can't run hundreds of thousands of these experiments wow so it's it's hard to find the optimum but in general what i would say is that if you fast for one day you get some benefits if you fast for three days something interesting happens you turn on another level of cell cleansing and uh i'll tell you a bit about that so there's this process called autophagy or some people call it autophagy it is what it sounds like auto which itself and phagy is eating so you're self-eating and what that means is that proteins that are not you're eating yourself you're killing it well eating the getting rid of the bad stuff recycling the bad proteins as we get older and also if we have damaged proteins say if we eat a lot of burnt food we will accumulate proteins that have uh oxidation is one for example and these proteins also are very hard to get rid of they tend to clump sticky they're sticky um and alzheimer's is disease is a good example of that of uh proteins that stick together and just accumulate and you can't get rid of them easily but autophagy is this process where the cells can chew these up and recycle the amino acids in those proteins but we our bodies especially as we get older do a pretty crappy job at doing that and at least to things like macular degeneration your degeneration and others now what what one day fasting does is it turns on autophagy and we'll clear out some of the proteins but from my reading if you do three days of fasting something else kicks in it's a different type of autophagy uh it's called chaperone-mediated autophagy or cma and it was discovered by a good friend of mine in new york anna maria uh cuervo and uh she has shown that this cma process is really important for extending the health and the lifespan of mice and i'm helping her a little bit with a one of her companies to bring this to humans and hopefully treat diseases uh for example like macular degeneration but anyway long story so three days really starts to kick in the benefits is there a time when fasting too long hurts the body well sure you need nutrition right your body needs to need amino acids to repair itself i can't stress enough that we don't want anybody to lose so much weight that it's bad for them yeah there are a lot especially young people who you can overdo it yeah you always want to have some ad possible fat on your body you need for for lean times and your body needs it for you know energy when you're sleeping for example but so i i think that going for a week is okay i haven't done it myself it's too difficult but what's the longest you've gone personally i'm not that good at it that's about it i tell you what four days was tough but it was also like once i set my mind to it i was just like i'm gonna commit to this i also wasn't that hungry i was just like okay i can go a little farther it was just weird because i'm so used to eating every i don't know four or five hours i was just like is everything okay like but i felt the effects it felt like it was getting better like my body was healing i felt like the pain was starting to go away and i just felt clear and focused that's a common um thing that people report is you'd think that you'd be distracted by hunger but what actually happens once you do it for a longer time or you've done every other day eating for a while or even in my case where i like to skip breakfast and have a late lunch or maybe even go straight to dinner your body gets used to it you don't feel those hunger pains if you drink a cup of tea or even a glass of water it it not numbs any desire that's when you know you're doing it right but also what people report and i i can tell you from my experience it also focuses the mind and you're not distracted at all in fact it's it's it's like a high that you get and i can get a lot of work done when i i'm in that phase that's true do you think we'll ever be able to bring people back from that dead um well we do now but only after a few minutes now i think if you've been dead for like literally decomposing you're not going to but frozen bodies still that's pretty hard because been a lot of damage to those cells that have been when they've been frozen i wouldn't say it's impossible because there are animals that freeze in winter and come back to life some frogs for example crazy and fish so it's it's possible but we need to learn a lot more about how those animals are able to survive they make these special anti-freeze proteins and that protects their cells and i don't think we're at a point yet where we can safely freeze our brains and expect it to thaw out and work again yeah but you know again you can't say never because even two years ago i couldn't have predicted the kind of advances that we're seeing in medicine right now so there are frogs and some fish some frogs and some fish that freeze for a period of time are they still breathing is are they completely heart stops what is the process yeah they're solid as a rock no breathing no heartbeat no they're solid they're dead essentially right and they come back to life yeah they throw it out that's great and then they function they're still like swimming around and how long have they gone for i mean how long have they frozen for us is like a month three months went all winter all winter however long that is wow if we could figure out the process of how those animals do it then potentially in the future we could do it right there are ways to do this and some people are talking about infusing the body with hydrogen sulfide or some other maybe these proteins from frogs and uh allowing us to howl from your perspective as a geneticist why do people have such different physical reactions to viruses like the coronavirus why are some affected and others not is it a genetic thing or do you think it's something else well it seems to be both there are variations in the h2 receptor that seem to be involved but most of it as far as i can tell from my reading uh is actually people's age that that's tenfold worse than anything else further down the list is diabetes heart disease but you know we're literally talking about aging here aging is your biggest risk if you've been healthy your whole life and done the right things that's going to protect you from dying from covert 19 because a lot of things go wrong as you get older that make you susceptible to the disease um one for sure is that your immune system is a lot less resilient you know when when we ex are exposed to a virus our immune cells will multiply well actually as you get older you have a lot less ability to do that um and there are even a lot less variance of your immune cells so you can have a 100 year old person has a lot fewer types of immune cells available to to fight an infection we generally have clones of clones in our bodies we get older whereas when we're young it's a it's like a melange a whole different set so the immune system is screwed up but there's also other issues as you get older you get more and more inflammation in general there's a protein in the body called a complex of proteins called the inflammasome and it controls your inflammation as you get older it's harder and harder to keep that at bay and so older people in general tend to have this hyper immune response um that actually often can do them in and it's not because the virus it's due to the body overreacting to it is there anything that people that are more susceptible currently that they could do to help combat the coronavirus or viruses like that without staying at home all day and not being around it is there things they could do to enhance the immune system and support them oh sure there are i mean if anybody is is out of shape uh or is carrying too much weight those are the the easiest things and most likely to work is to lose some of that excess weight and and get moving um these things are known to greatly improve your uh immune system and including lowering inflammation now not everybody can do that right people who are at an advanced stage you can't expect them to go out on a run or even perhaps to to restrict their food but you know people who are middle-aged you know like myself i've been working out a lot more exercising a lot more to make sure that my body's uh ready uh if i catch it what is what is exercise or shorter moments of bodily stress why does that boost immune system and help us anti-age well there are a lot of answers to that um but in general the summary is that these protective pathways that we've discovered dampen inflammation when it's too high and they also allow the immune system to attack a virus when it's needed um one possibility and this hasn't been proven but there's there's some evidence in over the last six months of of published work is that as we get older we lose the ability to make a molecule called nad which we work on in my lab and without nad our bodies are not very well equipped to fight diseases including infections this inflammasome which i'm kind of showing as a ball but it's obviously much smaller it is regulated by the levels of nad what does nad stand for oh nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide um it think of nad as a small chemical that we need for life it controls about 500 or so chemical reactions in our body it's needed for those we make less of it and we destroy more of it as we get older um but here's the thing that two of these sertuan proteins that we work on in my lab are controlling inflammation through this inflammasome protein complex and as as we lose nad one possibility in older people is that the inflammasome is now dysregulated and that goes crazy and leads to this cytokine storm that uh can eventually kill people we have drugs that were that people are trying to dampen that down and one of the things that we're trying now in a clinical trial uh is a molecule that the body can use to make more nad an nad precursor we call it wow and there are patients being dosed right now in i think four hospitals or at least going to be four hospitals where uh we'll see if that is one of the ways to give older people resilience so the body stops making nad stops producing it the older we get and it's one of the causes that helps us defend against infections inflammation disease well we think so what we see is when there's an infection the virus actually chews up a lot of nad so cells even if you're not old the virus will deplete cells of nad and we think that that's a problem cells need nad for life if we don't have nad we're dead in about 30 seconds but also without that energy you could easily imagine that the body is unable to fight the infection but also could be an issue late in the viral infection where the the body starts turning on itself at the moment there's no supplements out there that you could buy that have nad to help you replenish any of these right oh well so you know i'm a harvard professor i don't hawk any molecules or recommend any have to be very clear but there there are people uh some companies that are selling nad precursors okay i don't endorse or recommend any of those sure sure testosterone is also something that men lose that stop producing over time as well which helps you does it just look younger or be younger uh well there was a set of very expensive clinical trials done with testosterone and the results from those studies were that there wasn't a change in long-term health the results were they were negative for slowing down aging that said you know testosterone will help you build muscle and having muscle is very important as you get older of course you don't want to be frail uh and if you fall over you want to be able to be resilient and not break a bone every few minutes somebody follows an elderly person falls over breaks a hip and doesn't recover from that oh man so anything that you can do to be more flexible and resilient and have more strength you know that to me sounds like a good thing for elderly people you're in your 50s or 40s i don't know i couldn't say i'm an expert on that i'm gonna ask you another question that might be controversial based on a couple of previous um doctors that i've had on i had dr roger patrick on and i asked her i said hey what are some of the healthy foods that are marketed as healthy that in your opinion aren't as healthy as they claim to be essentially the question i asked and she said grapes have a lot of sugar in them that spike my blood pressure i think she wears like a glucose monitor so she's monitoring all of her food and constantly testing it she said when i was eating grapes like my glucose levels went way up skyrocketed and i realized that that's not good for the body to have you know grapes a lot of grapes and you can transition into having blueberries or something else that might be better for the nutritional benefits i put that online and people slam me for that and then dr gundry said that he doesn't think uh you know modified apples the way they are now how we modify them how they're so big how they're full of so much sugar he's like i don't think that's good to have these big apples that are modified because of the sugar and the fructose in these big apples like a honey crisp or something and he was saying we should be having a lot less fruit because of the fructose levels what's your thoughts on fruit in general uh should we be eating fruits every day is it something we you know i've been hurt in the past like we only used to have fruits right before the winter to kind of store up the fat and in a seasonal thing there's a lot of fruit eaters out there that believe in eating fruits only fruit all day i'm just trying to find the answers i don't know the truth of the matter but what's your thoughts based on research so research we don't research fruits of course but we do research the effects of sugar on the body uh and it's not good so try and is that all sugar or is that fruit sugar or refined sugar what's do we know that well there's glucose and fructose okay so it doesn't really matter where you get it these are just chemicals that's the same chemical wherever you get it from glucose you need glucose right we again we die without glucose but the foods in in our world are so full of sugars that were constantly feeding ourselves more sugar than we ever would have experienced even just 100 years ago or 50 even so where do i come down on this well let me tell you from my own experience it's probably better to give you my example yes and preach to others yes um i i definitely like fruit and i eat fruit and i encourage it with my kids for sure uh but they're it's a it's a balance you want the most nutrition and vitamins uh and and the lower amount of sugar and on a scale of of that ratio i think rhonda patrick's right that grapes have more sugar than nutrition compared to other fruits so the types of fruits that i like to have are ones that have lots of polyphenols colored fruits such as blueberries blackberries those things you don't want to eat too many of them of course because then you you're basically eating tons of sugar in it anyway but yeah blueberries i would have in a yogurt in the morning if i had had some right the other fruit that i think is worth looking at is cantaloupe or rockmelon um that i believe has the most nutrition versus sugar of any fruit so we try to eat those kind of melons as well you know what watermelon probably isn't in that category but we still eat it in summer the the point in my family and in my life is uh we're not so strict that that we avoid every type of food i'll i'll even eat a hamburger or whatever if i feel like it but most of the time i try to focus on on plants and have meat as something like a reward even though i much prefer the taste of meat than than just leafy vegetables but i think that it's borne out just looking at people who live a long time and cultures that have a lot of elderly people over 100 the type of foods they eat typically have a lot more plant than just pure meat and i'm going to get hate meal as well from the carnivores but it's important people know i'm not saying don't eat meat i'm just saying the kind of balance if you want to focus on types of foods for longevity that's what the data says gotcha do you know if um the people in the the blue zones who are living over 100 are they are they eating i'm hearing you say they eat more plant-based are they eating lots of meat lots of fruit as well or are they limiting intake on some of those areas well they seem to do all the right things so it's don't eat a lot on the island of okinawa they tend to stop eating when they're only 70 full which is a very good idea it's like i i keep eating until i'm 70 percent over full yeah then you can regret then i regret it but you're like yeah but you also you you work out more than i train hard yeah yeah they tend to eat the right types of foods which are packed with these polyphenols these little chemicals that are found in plants when particularly when those plants are stressed out they don't eat a lot of processed foods which kills a lot of these vitamins and polyphenols as well the colored foods which which as i mentioned is is a good thing they tend to have good social life they tend to move a lot they do gardening they do walking as they get older these are all things that just make a lot of sense anyway we we know that exercise and eating these healthy fresh foods are are good for us no matter how old we are in terms of chemicals in in the diet olive oil for example has a lot of oleic acid and a lab just last year showed that oleic acid works just like resveratrol to activate the sort of two-in-one enzyme this protective defense enzyme that so normally you would have to be hungry to turn this on this enzyme on that we work on but now we know that you can probably take some resveratrol or some olive oil to activate it artificially well gundry would say the whole purpose of food is to get as much olive oil in your body as possible he's a big believer in olive oil and how it's like helps you anti-age so this is fascinating stuff again i hope i want to make a note that i hope all the fruity eaters out there don't hate on us i'm just trying to find the answers and uh david is giving some of the research that he's seen from his experience as well i got a couple final questions for you david i always love talking to you i want to talk to you many more times in the future because i feel like every six months you're gonna have new information for us you said that science is driven by the question not the technology what are the biggest questions you have out there right now or science has out there right now well there's a big one that we're chasing right now as i mentioned earlier we found that we can reset the age of a cell and and literally turn its age back there's a clock in the body that we can measure it's uh little chemicals that that bind to our dna as we get older and by measuring the rate of those changes think of it like plaque on your teeth accumulating the older you get you know as long as you don't scrape it off the more you'll have similar to our dna accumulates these chemicals we can measure the clock we can predict how long you're going to live based on that clock and what we found is we have a new currently it's a gene therapy but hopefully one day it could be a pill that resets the clock and cells go back to acting and being young again no way yeah that's how we we restore the vision of those old mice we put therapy into their retina we can reverse reset the clock of time on our cells and our body well in mice yes uh and in human cultured cells in the dish yes we will know in a few years if it's true for humans what would that mean if we could do that well this is why i'm more optimistic than i was even a couple of years ago we know that we can reset the age of cells in complex tissues like the eye at least once and it looks like it's it's going to be a long lasting change but we don't know but i'm optimistic that we can reset multiple times imagine that amazing and uh so the big question that we're trying to understand is similar to how a dvd gets scratched how do you polish that dvd and allow the cell to read the young information again wow and it's quite a big idea that our cells have a backup copy of youthful information how do they know which of these chemicals to get rid of to make the cell young again and not go too young that you become a tumor or or basically an egg cell again we don't understand that yet so we're trying wow our best we've made some breakthroughs we know some of the machinery that allows this to works but ultimately we still don't know what form this information of youth is in for instance it could be a new type of chemical that is added to the dna when we're an embryo or when we're very young and we still have it in our bodies that our cells can recognize and use that as the reset switch it could be another type of molecule could be a protein that binds to our dna so we're looking very hard for where that information is stored and when we figure that out then i think we can really have a good handle on age reversal science is fascinating now i know i love being a scientist is there a way right now to predict like when someone would die based on their current life uh their cells and say okay you're gonna live from 84 to 87 range based on what you keep doing at this stage if you don't change anything yeah yeah really even some company selling these clock tests you can have a either a swab in your mouth or a blood test no way it'll tell you to predict the age you're gonna die uh i don't know about specific companies what they're offering but in the lab we we can do that a good friend of mine steve horvath at ucla does this routinely and he's published work that can predict within a few years when you're going to die if you don't change your your habits and people who smoke people who are overweight have a faster clock there's no there's no doubt that you can control the rate of your aging with how you live your life what are the effects on a lot of people moving from smoking cigarettes to vaping i feel like vaping is taking over the world right now and a lot of teens and smokers who are saying okay well this is better for me i'm going to vape now and it's not going to be as bad for me how bad is vaping on the body and the body's lifespan yeah we don't know like somebody needs to test that i think that's gonna be a big issue in the next five ten years yeah yeah well so my personal view having a mother who died of lung cancer from from smoking is that our lungs are pristine organs they need to be free of of particles free of foreign material to work well they're very fragile and and putting anything foreign into your belongs to me doesn't make any sense vaping smoking any type of inhalation of a toxin right right i mean there are fewer toxins i understand it with vaping and um but still we're learning that it's not risk-free okay i got one final question for you from your study of biology do you think aliens exist uh yes there is a calculation a formula that you you plug the variables in and the the one thing that we tend to underestimate are the number of stars in the universe and they're actually it's not infinite but it but it's it's close to it there are so many possibilities that there has to be life out there it's a certainty with certainty yeah wow why is it a certainty we'll ever get to know them is another thing you know some some of these life forms are going to be so far away that we can never communicate with them unfortunately but yeah the science says they're out there they've just got to be the the odds of them not being there is infinitesimal now the problem that comes up is that just like we're learning as uh as human beings uh we tend to evolve destructive capabilities right the reason that we are survivors is that our ancestors wiped out the neighboring village plundered and raped you know pretty routinely we are not necessarily good animals at this point we've got laws which prevent people from going uh you know too rebellious but you know deep down we do have an evil side as a species not everybody individually and it's probably true for aliens as well that they've come up the same way we have and have a bad side as well uh and that leads to destruction and it could be that every civilization eventually wipes itself out after uh 20 000 years yeah i mean because if a foreign thing came here we probably wouldn't be welcoming something new foreign with welcome arms we would be worried living in fear stress anxiety and to want to protect ourselves kind of like whatever anytime someone settled into a new place there's probably already there was some type of worry fear or stress right exactly whenever i see a human trait my mind goes to why does it exist and whether or not it's being altruistic and kind or evil and a liar or someone who uh commits adultery these are all traits that have in at one point in our history been advantageous and we are descended from those people but you know we shouldn't we shouldn't be slaves to our dna this is why we have a big brain we should be able to choose a path of survival and kindness where we can all live on this world and enjoy you know the freedoms and the luxuries of not having to worry about food david you're one of the the smartest and nicest uh scientists out there my man i really appreciate you and acknowledge you for constantly doing the research and constantly putting yourself on the line based on things you discovered 10 years ago two years ago where you're constantly learning new things and sharing that wisdom with us you're doing great work and i really acknowledge you for that you've got a you got a great book out there called lifespan if people want to learn more about how they can really live longer live healthier you're on social media david sinclair on twitter david sinclair phd on instagram we gotta have you come back every you know six to twelve months for sure because i have so many questions that i want answered and i know your information is really helpful and uh in the last interview i asked you about your three truths and the definition of greatness so if people want to hear that which was an amazing interview go back and listen to that episode you can hear about david's three truths which the third truth was the most inspiring for me i'm not sure if you remember i'm not gonna say it but the third one was the most inspiring and is there any final thoughts you have david uh before we let you go today uh well thank you phil for what you do lewis it's um it's actually great to be able to have a platform uh to be able to speak to people directly rather than through other types of media where scientists words just get misconstrued and hyped so this is i i want to you know appreciate and say uh to everybody listening this is a fantastic world we live in where we can through folks like you talk directly to the public for sure and your your podcast has been one of the best uh that i've been on some of the questions you've asked me no one's ever conceived of asking me those so thank you for that final thought what's on my mind these days is is the word kindness i brought it up earlier uh we're in a in a world where there's there's too much arguing partisanship um and we're we're facing an enemy right now um we're trying to get through this uh period of our history and things are going to get tough things are tough from for many people already and i i just want everybody to remember you know it's easy to say we're all in this together but what i really want to say is that you know let's be the best people we can be and kindness is is what comes to mind and uh if we can just do that i think we're all going to get through this okay my man david sinclair thanks so much for being here man i appreciate you appreciate you too thanks you want to learn about the key foods you need to eat to master your health make sure to watch this video right here humans who eat two cups of mushrooms per week do not get alzheimer's disease and it's be two cups or any type of mushroom any type you want to go to the grocery store mushrooms

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 477,088

Rating: 4.8727398 out of 5

Keywords: Davis Sinclair, David sinclair interview, david sincliar speech, lewis howes, lewis howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation, motivational video, inspirational video, how to be healthy, how to age in reverse, david sinclair ed mylett, david sinclair impact theory, health theory, aging is a disease, how to look younger, how to live longer, foods you need to eat, how to get in shape

Id: 8ZqAKNPxaxc

Length: 57min 58sec (3478 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020