How to Eat to Live Longer in 2024 W/ Dr. Helen Messier | EP #76

[Applause] one of the keys of diet is variety what are your thoughts on sodas I would say don't fruit juices the same thing alcohol there's really no benefit from alcohol okay what should I eat is there a one diet for everybody there is no one right diet for everybody and there's no one right diet for everybody at all stages of their life one of the things that plants have and the only place we can get it is fiber typically the USDA recommends 35 gam a day for people most of us get around five or 10 wow we don't get nearly enough I can't think of anything more valuable than your health and it's no longer something that's just for the wealthy just for the elite it's something that all of us can be thinking about I think it's one of the single most important things that you can do everybody Peter here this episode is sponsored by X prise imagine a future where aging brings more time with your family and friends opportunities for continued learning second or third careers and actually 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healthspan I cannot tell you how pumped I am about this competition you know going to space has been something I wanted to do since a kid xprize has really opened up the doors and living to 120 in a healthful fashion that's what this x prise is going to do now back to the episode everybody Peter D mandis here welcome to moonshots uh the moonshot conversation we're having today is how do you add 20 healthy years onto your life uh I'm joined by an extraordinary brilliant physician and friend Dr Helen Messier Helen good to see you great to see you Peter so excited to be here with you I just love this stuff and I can't wait for a conversation yeah no it's it's amazing uh and for those who who don't know Helen Helen is the chief medical officer and the chief scientific officer of Fountain life uh she is very much a renowned functional medicine thought leader and physician uh she's founded the national chain of coner practices in Canada she's a PhD in molecular immunology and most importantly everybody I speak to about her says oh my God she's amazing uh she's had previous leadership position at human longevity in viome and so thrilled to have you as part of Fountain so everybody let me just start by a disclaimer this is not medical advice this is advice that you should think about uh take to your physician if you want to dive deeper and we're going to be talking about the things you can do today uh to extend your health span not just your lifespan but your health span and it's no longer something that's just for the wealthy just for the elite it's something that all of us can be thinking about and in you know in a postco world uh and in a world where you can do almost anything I can't think of anything more valuable than your health I like the saying your you know your health is your New Wealth so Helen um where are you today I am talking to you out of our headquarters in Lake Nona in Orlando Florida yeah it's uh super proud Fountain has four centers today uh we're going to be growing towards 30 or 4 40 centers around the world but uh Helen and I just had a chance to publish a book um it's uh called uh uh it's called Longevity uh practical Playbook um and uh we're going to talk about the things that you can do um and I I want to go system by System area by area uh this is the stuff that over the last uh decade I've started to completely shift my life uh and one of the things I love about you Helen is you not only understand the understand the general elements but at a molecular level uh what's going on so um let's let's begin with a topic that is one of the easiest I think and lowest cost things people can do to extend their life which is their diet um and we are what we eat uh why don't you kick us off there when when people say okay what should I eat is there diet for everybody um yeah that is a loaded question because people get very uh you know diet becomes a religion for many people and it becomes very challenging and I think the first thing to understand is there is no one right diet for everybody and there's no one right diet for everybody at all stages of their life you know depending on what they're trying to achieve depending on your genetic background I think your dietary needs are going to change over your life time and they're going to be different from your neighbor now having said that there are some certain principles that are I think the same across most people you know getting your phytonutrients from Plants um making sure you get enough of your your basic nutrients vitamins minerals and so on is is critical making sure you get enough protein for muscle mass and muscle synthesis is critical making sure you get enough of the healthy fats because our cell membranes our brain are made up of fat so so everything you're going to hear me say probably many times through our conversation Peter that it's all about balance right there's nothing all good or all bad about most things it's really getting them in the proper proportions and balance and I think that applies really mostly to food um and fatty acids and even the different components of food Omega-3s Omega sixes you know saturated fats nothing's bad if you take it in the right combination in the right amounts you know you said something a minute ago about uh your genetic background and it's it's very true right if you're in Alaskan Eskimo uh the diet your body wants and needs is very different than if you're you know of European descent or Asian descent um and there's interesting fact uh that was studied and I think is well documented that your longevity outcome um and let me take a second just to Define health span versus lifespan for folks going to talk about that right a lifespan is how long your heart is and your brain waves are going it's like are you alive or dead yeah it's a 01 and your health span is how long you feel healthy how long you're able to play with your grandkids go up the stairs walk around feel cognitively alert and I think um its Health span we after first and foremost yeah absolutely you know and um typically if we think of our you know if you think of your grandparents and think of Aging in our society as it is now there tends to be this very long slow decline in terms of our health right we hit a certain age and we we tend to get H you can't do quite as much anymore and over time we start to accumulate these chronic diseases we get some diabetes we get heart disease and and it it happens over time and it happens for a long time and we get less and less able to do what the things that make life worth living and if we look at even health cost the majority of Health Care is spent in those last years of a person's life when they're really sick I me you can spend you can spend a ton of money at the last few years of your life and I just point out if you spend it earlier and spend your time differently earlier it makes you know you want to make that correction as early in your life as you can you do you absolutely do and and the idea is to square off that mortality curve you know instead of having this long slow decline over the end of your life you want to live fully and healthily right to the end and then kind of drop off you know Square I want to extend and I want to extend that it out a little further as I like to say life life is short until you extend it you know one interesting stat that you know I think most people um we'll talk about this when we get to mindset most people have an age in their minds by which they expect to die and you've gotten it from their mom or their dad's uh their grandparents or societ as a whole and uh we have to remember that you know if you had had that image in your mind a hundred years ago it might have been you'd expect to get to 50 versus 80 that that line keeps on moving and your mindset is a lot to do but your genetics have some to do but not as much as people would think right so how much does how much of your lifespan your health span is a function of Lifestyle versus genetics yeah the vast majority is a function of our environment in our lifestyle you know under 10% probably some estimates around 7% of our actual longevity is due to genetics the rest is really due to what we do and and this really brings in the whole concept of epigenetics right Epi just meaning on top of genetics so we're all familiar with our genetic sequence you know the color of our eyes that we inherit from our parents the predisposition even certain diseases we understand or genetic like cystic fibrosis but the vast majority of chronic diseases that we're really familiar with that really lead to that long decline as we get older remember aging is the biggest risk factor for all chronic disease so cardiovascular disease cognitive disease diabetes metabolic disease those yes there are certain genetic predispositions but you do not by any means have to get it so your your genetics your DNA is not your destiny it's what you do with that genetics and and what environment you put it in so the food you eat the thoughts you think how you move actually affects how how that DNA is expressed you know and that's the that's the epigenetics and we can get dive into that a little you know a lot more if you like uh but understand that the really the key is your health and who you are is really a a function of your environment and your genetics interacting for sure um and I think that's a lot of Hope for people because they say oh my God my grandparents my parents died at this age and am I uh you know yes they did it doesn't mean you have to you can catch and and change a disease early and I think you have to come to it with that mindset a belief that um I'm not going to succumb I'm going to overcome that situation and going back to our subject at hand which is Diet I think uh diet is one of the places you can make one of the biggest easiest changes I want say it's easy changing one's diet is not easy but it's not expensive and it is doable um and like you said there's no absolutes there are a couple of absolutes as far as I'm concerned uh let me let's dive into those I would say the first absolute and I've been on Tik Tok and Twitter and and getting more of a reputation as a no sugar guy uh than I want because I don't want to be the guy who's who's just that's the only thing I'm speaking about but sugar is a poison let's talk about about sugar one second Helen yeah so sugar is a poison now we need sugar let's put that first and foremost if we don't have sugar our cell we can't say alive stay alive if our sugar drops to zero in our bloodstream we will die so we need sugar and this is again it's about balance but too much sugar becomes very problematic and when we have sugar floating around in our bloodstream so that happens when we eat things that get absorbed very quickly so simple carbohydrates what that right yeah so so anything like basic sugar um and then things like rice and white bread things that don't have fiber in them when we eat those those get absorbed very quickly by our body and it goes directly into sugar in our bloodstream now when that happens that's really dangerous because when we have sugar it starts to bind to all the different proteins now some of you may understand one of the proteins it binds to is hemoglobin that's why we can kind of get a measurement of how much sugar the average sugar in your bloodstream by measuring your hemoglobin A1c that's just a measurement of how much sugar has attached to your hemoglobin molecules or your red blood cells but sugar also attaches to a lot of other proteins now when that happens and that's what we call a glycation reaction so when sugar binds to proteins it's a glycation it happens without enzymes it's just it's called again an amidor reaction and it it will happen on its own when sugar is in contact with the proteins and then what happens is our immune system goes oo that looks foreign right our immune systems used to seeing our own proteins but it's not used to seeing the proteins with sugar molecules attached to it and so it will actually mount an immune response to it so we call these you know proteins that have all the sugars attached to them we call those ages and I think that's a really appropriate name Advanced glycation end products right and it does it ages us and that those ages attach we actually have receptors for them specifically to get rid of them in our body because they're so dangerous and those are called receptors of advanced glycation end products or rages and raes are you know I think they're really welln named um and and it does it causes a full body wide uh inflammatory reaction and we can get into what inflammation is as well but inflammation that's the the pain in your joints the redness in your your skin and over we do know that inflammation that doesn't shut off um can cause a lot of damage it's one of the underlying factors of a lot of chronic diseases let's take this a step further because um again you need glucose in your bloodstream your brain works on glucose and and and ketones and but it's when the levels get too high and uh you can wear a a simple uh you know glucose monitor which I which I do a CGM a continuous glucose monitor to look at the glucose levels in your bloodstream and if you have pure sugar or white bread you'll see this Spike and then insulin gets pumped into your body and it it drops down we'll talk about that in a minute but um what's interesting is that the impact of this glyc glycosilation this this uh this attachment of the glucose it when I think about this and if you can expand on this is It's a cardio vascular inflammatory a neuroinflammatory um it feeds cancers I mean there's like nothing good about it yeah the the rages was just one thing it causes inflammation in your blood vessels absolutely in your brain uh you know there is nothing good about it and uh one of the Hallmarks of cancer to your point Peter is the fact that the cells the cancer cells now uh all the cells in our body other than our brain cells typically they they burn fat so at rest and when our mitochondria the little power plants of our cell that take the food that we eat and turn it into energy to fuel our muscles to fuel you know our brain everything that we need to do all the the reactions in our body they they love to to take fat and make energy from it now cancer cells can only one of the Hallmarks of cancer is that they burn sugar they can't burn fat so the mitochondria are so damaged in cancer cells that they cannot burn fat and they only burn sugar so the the whole idea that Sugar feeds cancer is absolutely true and you know anyone dealing with cancer the first thing you do is want to limit the sugar I mean we know this because pet scans uh are basically labeled sugar right and that's how we pet scan is a is a positron emission tomography it's it's a kind of scan yeah yeah to look for cancer in the body and and it's rad labeled sugar molecules because that Sugar will go directly to where the cancer is so you know I I just want to make our first point here which is uh the body was never designed to to consume this much sugar right uh this use of sugar cane and sugar in our diet is something recent over the last few hundred years it didn't evolve with us over hundreds of thousands of years and it's not easy in fact sugar is addicting um you know I have two 12y olds and I look at the cereals they're eating and it's like all sugar I mean I I taste it and I go like this is disgusting it's so sweet it brings back memories um but uh you know it's not easy to break a sugar uh addiction yeah it it's difficult I think Peter to your point with Evolution we've actually evolved to have a sweet tooth so if we think of human evolution you know we would have periods of feast kind of in the fall during Harvest when we had an abundance of food and then we would have kind of periods of famine especially over the winter now during the fall is when things sweet things were available you know ripened fruit is sweet right honey that's available from that we would go and get so we have this innate need and and I'd say um we search out sweet things and sugar I think that's in all humans uh and at the time it was very beneficial so what would happen when we ate that Sugar it would induce some insulin resistance okay so remember when we eat sugar it comes into our bloodstream and we then our our body senses it it says Sugar's too high and it will produce insulin our pancreas the beta cells in our pancreas make the insulin and the insulin is like the little door knocker on the cell and it says binds to this the receptor on the cell basically knocks on the door and it says open up Let the sugar inside and so the sugar can now go from the bloodstream inside the cell where it's safe okay so so that's a good thing now over time when we have a lot of sugar around and also you know fat in there as well but think of a lot of sugar what happens is the cell kind of gets tired of opening up that door and the the little door knocker our body has to actually produce more and more insulin for the sugar to get inside for the cell to open up the door almost like the little boy who cried wolf too many times and so and so that's what we call insulin resistance where our cells become start becoming resistant to the action of insulin and it therefore the sugar ends up staying around in our bloodstream much longer and that's the first sign of of course diabetes when it gets to a certain point but if we think back to the evolution we during the fall we would induce by eating a lot of sweets this this sort of state of insulin resistance which what did that do that allowed us to store fat right when we're insulin resistant we store a lot of fat that Sugar gets converted very quickly to fat and those fat stores would then allow us to survive through the winter when there wasn't a lot of food there so you know the people genetically that can do this the people that are much more prone to insulin resistance those are the people that survived right and we're all usually descendants of that so they're really if you think about the fit genes certain C certain traits depending on your environment are very beneficial you take those and you put those in a different environment and they become very detrimental so humans were never meant to be exposed to vast amounts of calories and food and sugar at all times we're meant to go through those periods of feasting and famine yeah so again bottom line is uh uh high glycemic index Foods uh sugar candy all of these things not healthy for you you know my dad used to say in ancient Greek Pon meon aiston which means everything in moderation um and that's that's fine but we are addicted to it um one thing that I do every year uh with dear friend G navarete is as part of abundance 360 in abundance Platinum we do a 22-day no sugar fast and everybody together in a WhatsApp group so it's much easier to do this as a group than on your own is you give up sugar um and we go to really a ketogenic diet uh for 22 days and at the end of that you feel like you have control back right you have control back over that sweet tooth and and you can say no a lot easier and so I did that you know two and a half years ago and I've had uh really um I'm very very careful about when I eat any sugar if I'm going to eat something it's going to be very Mindful and it's going to be a very limited amount um so you'll notice when you actually get rid of that sweet tooth Peter that things just taste Ultra sweet you know when I first cut out sugar in my diet it takes about three months to completely overcome that craving and that addiction to sugar and just so you know sugar is as addictive as cocaine yeah well I haven't I haven't tried cocaine so I wouldn't actually know but I have tried sugar but so it takes about three months and then things like the corn flakes that you know I used to sprinkle sugar on top of corn flakes sweet already exactly all right let's let's move Beyond Sugar um so please consider uh trying a continuous glucose monitor so you can see which foods actually spike your glucose um there's a a free Libre 3 now there's a levels um uh you know yeah the Dexcom freestyle Libra they they're really uh very easy you just stick them on the back of your arm you monitor the readout with your iPhone you know you just download the app very easy and very very informative and I think when you start using a continuous glucose monitor I I can't recommend it enough because not only are you going to find which foods actually spike your blood sugar I think that's important and you will notice that that's not the same food for everybody some foods it might not Spike one person's blood sugar and another food will spike a different person's blood sugar very high and so that's number one and then the other thing you're going to get insights in is all the the other things that you do and we're going to jump into this more I know later but how sleep and how stress and how all of those other things have an effect on your blood sugar so if you don't sleep very well the night before the same food can spike your blood sugar more you'll also notice how at different times of day you're going to be more or and less insulin sensitive so in the morning typically we have these basically the circadian rhythms and we have clock genes that control those circadian rhythms in the morning you're much more insulin sensitive meaning the same food will not spike your blood sugar as much as eating that same food in the evening when we're much more insulin resistant so from a diet perspective you know what you eat is critical when you eat is also critical so the whole you know the old adage of breakfast like a king and lunch like a prince and dinner like a popper is actually very true when you take your circadian rhythm into account and then you know how you eat which we're going to get into in a bit I'm sure you know in the next three four years we're going to all have an AI system that is advising you um all the time 247 but until then I've got Helen okay so um everybody I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love company is called Fountain life and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and and a group of very talented Physicians you know most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body we're all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side you go to the physician or the emergency room and they say listen I'm sorry to tell you this but you have this stage three or four going on and you know it didn't start that morning it probably was a problem that's been going on for some time but because we never look we don't find out so what we built at Fountain life was the world's most advanced diagnostic Centers we have four across the us today and we're building 20 around the world these centers give you a full body MRI a brain a brain vasculature an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque a dexa scan a Grail blood cancer test a full executive blood workup it's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive 150 GB of data that then go to our AIS and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable you're going to find out eventually you might as well find out when you can take action Fountain life also has an entire side of Therapeutics we look around the world for the most Advanced Therapeutics that can add 10 20 healthy years to your life and we provide them to you at our centers so if this is of interest to you please go and check it out go to Fountain life.com back/ Peter where when Tony and I wrote Our New York Times bestseller life force we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain life memberships if you go to fountainlife decomp will'll put you to the top of the list really it's something that is um for me one of the most important things I offer my entire family the CEOs of my companies my friends it's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans go to fountainlife decom back/ Peter it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners all right let's go back to our episode let's jump in Beyond so I was saying what are the absolutes the absolutes are listen Sugar's Sugar's a poison minimize your sugar measure what's going on uh try yourself going through a 22-day sugar fast do it with a group of people that's one piece of advice um the other sort of I think uh absolute piece of advice is the idea of a whole plant diet that I think everybody can can benefit from a whole plant diet so what is a whole plant diet yeah I mean a whole plant diet is really just what it says is is eat plants uh you know they eat uh everything in as close to its natural state as possible right uh for they um uh you want to um not too much and again uh mostly plants is really the the how you want to think about diet but um whole plant food diet is plant forward doesn't mean that you have to be vegan doesn't mean you have to be vegetarian it just means that you should eat really focus on getting plants first and um making sure that you uh get all of the phytonutrients all of the so why why plants Helen um you know uh I I've been a vegan I've I've gone a whole keto diet I've I've done everything I'm back to sort of Mediterranean diet but when I see literally when I see plants on my plate I attack them um I I'm like okay the Brussels sprouts the asparagus the spinach it's like you know I'm like I've learned to love uh my plants but why is that important yeah why is that important so plants have so many important things so one of the things that plants have and the only place we can get it is fiber now fiber is not only does it fill you up not only does it control how fast sugar is absorbed into your bloodstream so it controls your blood sugar but fiber feeds our microbiome and our microbiome as you know there all of the trillions of microorganisms that live it lives everywhere in our body and our skin and our you know everywhere but the vast majority of them live in our GI tract or in our gut and those microbes turns out do so many important things for us you know we the list could go on I think every day there's hundreds of papers published on how important the microbiome is for our overall health and what plants do is that fiber feeds the beneficial microbes that's absolutely critical we do not get nearly enough fiber in our diet uh you know if we look at a lot of times I this is only my own um kind of hypothesis but I think you know we talk a lot about the paleo diet being you know all meat and the the the animal that our your caveman ancestors would kill but if you think if you look at what our ancestors ate in terms of fiber it would be in the 100 gram per day range you know even if you look at traditional populations now it's around that typically the USDA recommends 35 grams a day for people most of us get around five or 10 wow we don't get nearly enough wow you know by the way one thing um that we said about microbiome we we'll talk about that more I mean every day the research is showing how it's connected to every aspect of your health uh your Alzheimer's uh brain Clarity Cancers and so forth and then one of the things I just you know you and I talked about this for me a little a little bit ago um a few months ago which was I had to take some antibiotics uh for uh some after my some dental work and um I tried to avoid it but I took it in the final result because of a sinus infection but oh my God I hate antibiotics it's like they've saved Our Lives they've added decades onto your but keeping your microbiome in good state of health is so important we'll get to that but I just want to put that note in for folks to think about do not take antibiotics if you have a viral infection um there's so many reasons not to do it uh so please please please think about antibiotics not only do the antibiotics and yeah with the caveat if you need them definitely take them but if there's any doubt you know like you said a viral infection antibiotics don't kill viruses they kill bacteria not only do they kill the bad bacteria they also kill all of the good bacteria in your gut that we those beneficial microbes we talked about and we'll talk later about your mitochondria are in fact uh bacteria that were incorporated into cells and uh antibiotics can actually damage your mitochondria I don't want to dive in the rabbit hole right now I want to get back to food so whole plant diets so one of the things that I recently learned and I found it really an important tidbit which is the order in which you eat your food can have a massive benefit so um uh let me lay it out uh when you're looking at your plate uh eat your veggies first eat that fiber first then eat your protein and then if you still have hunger you can eat your rice or your bread or your your carbs so why is that yeah absolutely so the order that you eat will it will fill your stomach up and it will slow the absorption of the sugar from those rice and carbs if you have the fiber and the protein in your digestive system first you have much lower glycemic response to those Foods so that's that's a big reason another reason is you get filled up with the good stuff and then less room for you to eat the the stuff that's not so good sort of that Cal you know the nutrient poor food you want to eat the nutrient dense food first and you know the other thing that's in the plants we talked about fiber but all of phytonutrients so phyto just means from plants and nutrients being you know all of the such important components that why do we eat we eat to get building blocks for our body the protein and to get energy and also to give co-actors for all of the biochemical reactions that we need to stay alive all of those enzymes that carry out those biochemical reactions those are uh required co-actor s and that's what vitamins and minerals are they're co-actors for these enzymes we can't carry out any of these reactions without those so that's really important as well that and that comes from the plants it's uh I think that's really critical um and and the other thing plants give us is antioxidants you know we will get into um the whole oxidative stress and free radicals we can go down that rabbit hole if you like but free radicals damage in the process of making energy you know taking in oxygen in the food we eat those mitochondria which you're going to hear over and over again because we're talking about longevity so they're so important they have they they have smoke essentially think them think of them as a power plant that produces a by something they're burning something and that smoke is reactive oxygen species or what we call free radicals and those free radicals cause oxidative damage so you know think of uh when a metal piece of metal rust that's free radical damage or oxidative damage of the metal rusting so think of the rusting inside our body it will damage a lot of our proteins and cell or cell membranes get damaged quite significantly with those free radicals so in order to deal with that if we didn't have antioxidants again we would all die we make antioxidants but we also need to get them from our diet a couple of key points here as takeaways again um please think about this tonight when you're eating dinner or lunch attack your veggies first get that fiber in you know I like to pour extra virgin olive oil on all my veggies and really consume olive oil in that in that capacity so that's the first thing and then your protein um we can talk about protein from legumes protein from Beans protein from fish chicken I don't take in red meat but and then the final thing and I typically skip it because I fill myself on the veggies and the and the protein can be your your carbohydrates one of the challenges is you go to a beautiful French or Italian restaurant and what's the very first thing they do they feed you a giant bowl of bread and a glass of wine and it's like so uh you know Pro tip here when they bring it to the table say can you please bring this back with the main course because if it's sitting in front of you um you're going to eat it or if you need to make sure that you soak your bread in the extra virgin olive oil to blunt the gemic response of the of the of the bread but better yet to eat it on the back end of your meal exactly there's another thing you taught me um which is eat the rainbow and that doesn't mean Froot Loops or Skittles so what does eat the rainbow mean people try to make it be fro loops and Skittles but um yeah eating the rainbow just means eating all of the colors of the rainbow because the phyton nutrients the densest nutrition in these plants are come from the colors so think of the green mean and kale and beans and peas think of the red and tomatoes and strawberries think of the orange oranges and carrots and the blue and blueberries and blackberries that's like so you want to get what I tell people is try to get one at least one food of every color every day that's going to give you because the key one of the keys of diet is variety you know it's great to and you know how much I love broccoli Peter I love broccoli too but the key is you can eat a big plate of broccoli which is great but you want to get variety you want to get lots of different types so really go for those colors and when my kids were little I used to have them check off the colors of the rainbow make sure they got one of each so so that's another thing that I attack ferociously it's like you know we were at our longevity Platinum dinner and and my team's amazing they feed us uh great longevity diets and I remember in front of the group was these plates of like you know every color out there and I was like I was just grabbing uh grabbing at them and uh so you know the order which you eat your food the color of the food uh putting off the uh the high glycemic index let's talk about one second um uh you know nuts beans legumes and then how many calories to consume per day because that is like all over the place so how much protein do you consume uh where do you get your protein from and how many calories that's an important part of our diet conversation yeah yeah I think you know honestly calories I I think it is important you want don't want to overc consume calories but if to your point if you eat the right Foods first I think it's really hard to get too many calories when you eat plants um that becomes very difficult you'll be you'll be full before you can have too many calories right and so so really go with that first and the calories tend to really take care of themselves if you do that um you know I used to calorie count I used to you know I don't think I think from a kind of an ease perspective just focus on the good foods and then you know don't stuff yourself stop when you're about 80% full um before you go for those seconds you want to wait about 15 minutes it takes about 15 minutes for the food to register from your stomach to your brain that you've had something to eat that's so that's so important right do you ever have that feel like oh my God I ate too much like it sneaks up on you because there is that delay and that's right chewing your food and waiting and having a conversation and then there's vitamin o talk about vitamin o here people are going hey hold wait what's up vitamin o I don't remember that from medical school yeah that's I love it the vitamin o and that came from Mark David who's just a fantastic I wrote the slow down diet it's oxygen make sure you breathe so how and we we talked about you know taking a deep breath now when you eat but how you eat right so everyone let's do this together take a deep breath and then let it out out breath longer than your in breath and suddenly I think you can feel how your nervous system switches right it switches from that sympathetic nervous system or the the fight or flight nervous system and it switches to your parasympathetic nervous system which is your rest and digest nervous system so all of our bodily functions whether it's you know urinating or uh salivating you know how you're stressed your your mouth dries up clenching yeah all of those things uh happen only when we're in a parasympathetic State and the key is that they can one or the other can be active at one time they both cannot be active at the same time so you're either sympathetic or you're parasympathetic and so when you eat in that parasympathetic State you actually make make the best use of your food you're going to digest your food you're going to absorb the nutrients you're going to utilize them properly if you eat in a stress State you tend to just take it all and store it away as fat for a later date you don't you don't I remember just of your food shoveling the food in my mouth just to have to get it done and then get back to my work and the worst thing and you said this the other day and I agree with you is sitting there watching crisis News Network watching CNN and having dinner as bombs are flying and people it's it's like that's the worst state to have had you know toat yeah over the years I've experimented with many intermittent fasting programs uh the truth is I've given up on intermittent fasting as I've seen no real benefit when it comes to longevity but this changed when I discovered something called prolon 5day fasting nutrition program it harnesses the process of autophagy this is a cellular recycling process that revitalizes your body at a molecular level and just one cycle of the 5-day prolong fasting nutrition program can support healthy aging fat focused weight loss improved energy levels and more it's a painless process and I've been doing it twice a year for the last year you can get a 15% off on your order when you go to my special URL go to prolon life.com p r o l n l.com back/ moonshot get started on your longevity Journey with prolon today now back back to the episode it is if you think about how we tend to eat in our society right in our culture we eat when we're driving right we'll go through the drive-thru and eat when we go through and that's you know obviously stressful we eat at our desk when we're trying to do work we eat we read we can never think of how many times you actually sit and pay attention to your food and don't do anything else other than maybe good conversation with a friend uh how many times in our week think about that that we actually pay attention taste our food chew our food pay attention to it versus just kind of shoveling it in because you have to get some calories in you know my sister made a good point is this is part of from cultures around the world this is why they say a prayer in the beginning or gratitude Grace it's slowing you down and it's getting you into a conversation it's preparing your body to absorb the food so yeah really really important stuff um Pro so and and intermittent fasting a lot of conversations here a lot of of depth on on diet um so I'm focused this year on building muscle mass which comes from you know lifting weights and and creatine and and other supplements we'll talk about that later but it's also getting enough protein in my diet but then you hear conversations around well too much protein is not good for longevity so help me dissect the the situation around protein um how much should we get yeah and I think you know a lot of it does we do need protein number one we do for sure uh protein makes up the building blocks our muscles our you our body is really made up of protein collagen and our skin our bones so protein is essential and we also know that um the our muscle mass is a key determiner of our longevity right so if we get weaker one of the the best predictors of mortality and Longevity is just grip strength right so overall strength and muscle mass is very important for longevity so that's really critical if you think of the elderly frail people that not only do risk falling and and all of those things but and we'll get to this conversation in depth when we talk about exercise yeah so so how much protein should a person get yeah so you need prot protein in order to build muscle mass and you know and I think part of it depends on how active you are you want to like with exercise you definitely want to be able to lift weight you know weight or some kind of resistance training is really important to build and make use of that protein you want to make sure you digest your protein appropriately because undigested protein can get down into the lower reaches of your colon and then your bacteria will start to ferment that that becomes a problem because they produce a lot of harmful substances from that protein fermentation so you definitely want the protein that you eat you want to be able to digest it and absorb it appropriately and you want to make use of it by by exercising having said that you know the estimates are somewhere around 08 to one gram of um protein per pound of body weight um every uh sort of daily um and so that kind of gives you a rough estimate you know people obviously with kidney disease and other things things they have to be a little bit more careful with the protein but that's a general kind of so I weigh roughly 150 pounds and I take in 150 grams a day and one of the things that's interesting is you can't just take in 150 grams at a sitting no it's uh it's spacing it out through the day um which is one important thing yeah yeah and that stimulates muscle building is when you actually space it out during the day so that's really important you don't want to just fast all day and then eat a 20 lb steak you know the the idea is to to definitely space it out to the day and so you stimulate that that muscle um kind of building throughout the day I think that's really important and you know we can get into the whole mtor PK and fasting if if we want to well let's touch Bas on it a little bit CU I used to uh focus on intermittent fasting and I would typically eat dinner at six or 6 done by seven and then I would fast until the next day at about noon 1:00 have a lunch and dinner skip breakfast and I've changed that um and one of the reasons it looks like the data of intermittent fasting uh in terms of during the day doesn't impact uh all cause mortality but it does impact my ability to take in enough protein so I said I'm going to actually take in a protein shake I use a uh kachava uh which I enjoy um as a plant-based protein shake I do every morning um so what what are your thoughts on intermittent fasting yeah so you know there are some there is some evidence out there for intermittent fasting being good for people with metabolic syndrome you know sort of that whole insulin um resistance and that that abdominal weight so if you're you know really overweight or obese and and you need to lose that weight intermittent fast can be helpful U but if we pull back and we look at kind of what are you know what we did in terms of evolution what our humans kind of did remember we talked about the the feast in the famine you know how you feast in the fall and famine through the winter I think that there is a role for going for periods without eating one of the challenges if you go for longer periods without eating is you do lose muscle mass so when people lose weight there is a portion of that weight that you definitely lose body fat but you also lose muscle mass so that's something you really have to be careful of I was say one of the strategies uh for for fasting because you know some people do a four or five day water fast where it's like just water and electrolytes and that's it and that's really hard um there is a product that I love that I write about in uh longevity which is uh the the prolon fasting mimicking diet um which is a little bit different right it's a five-day diet but like day one is like 1,200 calories and day two through five is like 800 calories and it's nutritional and the studies that they've done if I understand correctly and you can amplify is it's actually more beneficial for you than just a water diet yes absolutely absolutely so the fasting mimicking diet um there you get a little bit of food so it's easier to do because you're not completely not eating so you get some olives and other things they also give you something to kind of feed your mitochondria energy without without the sugar uh and that can be helpful and they've done some really good studies on it you know that people lost body weight right they they lost that uh kind of fat Mass their waist circumference their blood pressure went down their cholesterol markers improved so there are you know there's been some good studies around the fasting mimicking diet that have been very beneficial uh you know some sometimes I I use it you know in patients as well um just to kind of Kickstart them um often uh people with autoimmune diseases and that kind of thing that Kickstart using the the fasting mimicking diet is a really great way to kind of really get them started um especially around elimination dietes we can get into that later but um so there is benefit uh I think that you know some people there's still some you know not sort of misunder understanding maybe around fasting and women versus men who does it work better for I think all of that is we're still trying to tease it out but um there's a role for going for periods without eating and a role for eating and um so doing that once in a while can make sense hey everyone I want to take a quick break from this episode to tell you about a health product that I love and that I use every day in fact I use it twice a day it 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enter the code Peter 25 at checkout that's seed.com moonshots and use the code Peter 25 to get your 25% off the first month of seeds daily symbiotic trust me your gut will thank you all right let's go back to the episode let me h a few other uh uh key points on on diet what I eat don't eat what I drink don't drink so um I've eliminated also uh with with full disclosure when I go see an Epic movie I may have a Coke Zero you know once or twice a year but that's it I've gotten rid of of sodas uh I don't want first of all sugary sodas and then I don't want the phosphoric acid um that that comes from that what are your thoughts on sodas I would say don't okay I mean fair enough yeah I mean I can't really think of anything good that comes from drinking a soda whether it's ca-a definitely not going to sponsor this [Laughter] podcast um uh okay so sodas don't uh fruit juices the same thing um fruit juices are really all sugar fruit is different because fruit comes with the fiber the other things that slow down the absorption of the of the sugar but the fruit juices are pretty much all sugar and if you wear that CGM and you monitor your blood sugar when you drink say orange juice you'll probably notice it go really high yeah Spikes all right here's a controversial in it and too much fructose isn't too good either all right alcohol vitamin eoh um so uh I mean let's let's talk about alcohol uh is it eliminate is it partial you know uh there's a lot of people who um uh swear by it uh I have personally basically gotten rid of alcohol 99% I will have a half a glass of red wine once every two or three weeks I'll have a shot at tequila on a you know a special occasion um but otherwise uh I minimize my alcohol intake how do you think about alcohol any any benefits for you yeah you know there is a lot of people will say yeah their studies show that there's a protection of cardiovascular disease if you have a glass of red wine a day and it's the Resveratrol but if you really look at the the evidence in the scientific literature there's really no benefit from alcohol um you know as as sad as that makes me to say there's nothing really good that comes from alcohol it doesn't mean that you can't enjoy it once in a while to your point Peter but be aware that alcohol is a poison uh you know it has a lot of damage it kills our brain cells it kills our gut cells cells and causes you know this increased um leaky gut so to speak it uh you know it takes a big tax on our liver to actually detoxify it uh even though it can make you sleepy it doesn't actually improve your sleep um it can actually disrupts your deep sleep and your your different phases of sleep there's really nothing good that comes from alcohol other than you know maybe in a social situation where you can social lubricant yeah yeah EXA unfortunately I mean what I have noted is if you're if you're trying to keep your uh your glycemic index down uh tequila is probably the thing that spikes the your blood glucose the least yeah sometimes you'll see that alcohol will if you're wearing a CGM alcohol can drop your blood sugar uh that's very common but that doesn't mean that you know it's lowering it's not a good way to drop it all right uh one last topic here is water uh water intake um which most people I think don't sufficiently do that's correct we we have to get water you know our body is made up of mostly water um and we need to uh drink that and replenish it we lose water all the time just in evaporation in urination we it's really critical I would say a vast majority of us are walking around dehydrated uh you know so many times we also confuse thirst with hunger and a lot of times when we're thirsty we're going to interpret that as hunger and we'll eat instead of drinking and so one of the things you should do is really anytime you feel hungry number one drink a glass of water do that first if you're still hungry then okay go ahead and have something to eat but absolutely drink the water first because a lot of times it's because you're you feel it because you're thirsty is there any downside to sparkling water to carbonated water yeah so you know I I like it you know I've got my pelino here yeah um I you know there there's certain um soda water for example is quite salty it will make you feel thirstier okay um but if if you like the bubbles you know there's not really a huge downside of and and uh and and uh alkaline water yeah you know there's I lot a lot of conversation around a lot of controversy around that I've yet to see some really good data around the alkaline water um you know body alkalinity fruits and vegetables are going to really help with that more um than the water if we think of our stomach you know our stomach is very acidic and um so you want that hydrochloric acid you want that acid in your stomach and so I I think the alkaline water is you know fine I don't think there's harm but I I think it's more important just to drink water good clean water you know water is filled with toxins so make sure it's clean a lot of the water bottles even you know getting the Plastics is is a CH it's a challenge getting good clean water so uh I'll wrap up on a few other products I use here I use athletic greens as a you know if I'm drinking water out of you know a couple liter bottle just to flavor it and to get a little bit of additional nutrients I'll use atic greens uh one of my favorite products that I introduced this year is neutr 11 which is a hot protein drink in the morning I'm addicted to it bluntly and it's I get 20 I replace coffee with it um we should talk about coffee uh you know I get you know some 20 grams of protein and it's very it's it's flavored with monk fruit has zero sugar zero carbs and again I'm I'm addicted to it uh caffeine um uh I used to you know when I was in medical school you know I would five six seven eight cups you know keep me going it was like I prided myself on being able to down down a few cups and go straight to sleep uh but now I'm like holy cow I can't do that to myself how do you think about coffee yeah now coffee in and of itself is filled with antioxidants and a lot of really beneficial nutrients in coffee so coffee is a good a good thing now some people are more sensitive to caffeine than others right caffeine can increase your heart rate it can cause adrenaline cortisol to be released and some people can handle a lot more than others now genetically we can metab we all have sort of different ability to metabolize coffee it's the Sip 1 A2 Gene if you guys are interested if you're the C in that sip 1 A2 you're you will be a slow metabolizer I'm a slow metabolizer I love my caffeine my coffee and so I used to I used to think I was a fast metabolizer but my genetics came back then I'm a slow metabolizer and you and George were like you know one cup a day Peter that's it and I tried to go to like one or zero a day yeah yeah so the idea is to you know limit it if you're a slow metabolizer just limit kind of maybe stop drinking it by noon um so that it can if you do otherwise you'll have a lot of difficulty falling asleep all right so listen I think we gave diet a pretty good run for its money and hopefully people have taken away some uh some concrete uh things that yet can do immediately uh and it's not expensive to be clear uh these are things that you can do immediately that are um that are available to everybody and a lot of it is the way you change what you eat when you eat the order you eat it in um and I think it's one of the single most important things that you can do I want to take a moment to tell you about about abundance 360 my year-round leadership Mastermind for people who want to go big create wealth and uplift Humanity it's Singularity University's highest level program we are a global community of entrepreneurs CEOs investors philanthropists who have come together based upon a set of shared beliefs I'm going to share with you a few of these 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Channel: Peter H. Diamandis

Views: 8,334

Keywords: peter diamandis, longevity, xprize, abundance

Id: Jbc_fxC6bdw

Length: 62min 52sec (3772 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 07 2023