How to live longer? Harvard expert Dr. Sinclair explains at #HTLS2020

[Music] welcome to the session dr sinclair it's been a very busy week for you as we know dr sinclair was on the cover of nature this week nature is one of the leading scientific journals in the world and he was there for his seminal work that demonstrated that reversing the biological clock can restore vision and mice with age-related blindness now this approach is going to have profound implications for other age-related diseases and dr sinclair is going to tell us more about it during the session and apart from that of course he's going to talk about why we age and why we don't have to now that's really interesting because none of us want to age anymore and dr sinclair has answered some of these questions in his best-selling book lifespan but we all going to go away with life hacks at the end of the session so even if you've read the book do stay around uh and listen to him so i'm going to start by inviting dr sinclair to make a presentation and talk about his several breakthroughs around aging and at the end of it we'll follow uh with questions dr sinclair over to you thank you very much for having me uh on today uh hopefully you can you can see some slides i'm going to give a short presentation for the next half an hour or so and then we're going to have some questions i'm happy to uh to answer those so we all know what aging looks like uh it's essentially our body deteriorates over time leading to a variety of diseases and we've been looking at aging for thousands of years trying to understand is there something we can do about this because the end of life for many of us is not a pleasant thing and it's certainly not something you would want your children to have to worry about if you didn't have to and so it's been my quest for the last of 25 years at least professionally to try and understand some the answers to some really big questions why do we age is there something we can do to slow it down if you slow it down will you live a longer and importantly healthier life it's all about health um and finally a question that we hoped answered just yesterday which we published in nature magazine which i'll talk about today is is aging even reversible now it's a very important time for the entire planet to understand aging and the reason is that in 2018 for the first time ever in our species history the number of older people over 65 outnumbered the number of people who are less than five years old and that trend will continue uh to go in that direction and we're already seeing in many countries across the world that the burden both socially and economically of of looking after older people who are no longer productive um is an economic burden that is really crippling and the older the population gets as a percentage the harder it is for young people to be able to cope to look after their grandparents and their parents and so what we're trying to do in my lab and i also speak on behalf of 100 or so labs around the world who do similar research we're trying to understand can we compress the last few years of life that are sick into a very short period we've been working actually in animal studies in the lab for at least the last 20 years showing that we can quite easily extend the lifespan of mice and rats and even dogs um and make them live healthier right up to the very end until they die quickly so that's the goal it's really not to keep us in nursing homes and being sick for longer we're not extending old age we're doing the opposite our goal is to extend youthfulness so that we can perhaps live to 90 or 100 and towards the very end still be productive members of society and playing whatever sport you want with your rug with your grandkids and great grandkids and this talk of living forever is really not something that i'm worried about or even working on it's more about how do we address the problems that we face right now and the money that we could save is in the trillions of dollars each year across the planet in the u.s it's estimated that just reducing one major disease by 10 would save in the coming decade at least three trillion dollars so this is real money that we could save that could be put to addressing other problems that we have improving education combating climate change and other things and in terms of population growth most countries are already stabilizing in their population and ultimately the goal would be for population to stabilize um and be replaced at normal levels and you might be thinking well david if you if you slow down aging we're going to be overwhelmed with people that's actually not the case the number of older people is not that many um if you do the math so really let's talk about medicine and what the future may look like in in the near future and also um estrada said i'll talk about what we can each do in our daily lives to give us the best possible healthy lifespan uh so i work on aging and the problem is that there are a lot of companies on the internet a lot of people who really don't have a degree in this field who claim that they've quote unquote solved aging drink this eat this antioxidant and the problem is that it's very hard to know what is real science and what isn't and there's such a big difference between 99 of what is out there which is mostly wrong or exaggerated greatly versus what we do in my lab and my colleagues do which is as i mentioned on the cover of leading scientific magazines and there have even been two nobel prizes awarded for research that is relevant or based on aging studies so let's talk about what actually is real and what might actually work and cut through all of uh the other noise um so this is an interesting graph that i wanted to share with you often we think that we've reached our maximum lifespan as as a society this graph shows that that's not true what is plotted here is the the country with the maximum uh the longest lifespan expectancy okay so it started off there was australia in there where i come from for a while but right now it's japan who has the the longest average lifespan and what you can see with this graph is that over the 20th century and continuing to today there's a very linear and predictable increase in human longevity and every time these groups which you can see on the right have said that okay we've reached the maximum we blow through that that uh that glass ceiling and we keep adding years to life but they're not all healthy years we're very good at preventing heart disease we can lower blood pressure cholesterol drugs have been largely successful we have heart surgery so we tend not to die as much as we used to from cardiac reasons but the brain still ages at a normal rate and we don't do much about that and so what we're ending up with is an increase in dementia um and one of those is alzheimer's disease so our approach is to treat the entire body with medicines and lifestyles that will keep every part of the body healthier and more youthful so today most developed countries have a lifespan around seven mid seventies to eighty which is great certainly better than it was a hundred years ago and none of us would go back to those days before uh antibiotics and average lifespan was you know 65 70 and we would retire and die a few years later we're on a path to having a couple of scenarios one is that we'll live longer but we'll still spend a large percentage of our life in decline and sick with many diseases and being frail the other alternative which is on the bottom here if we're successful with this research is that we will live longer and healthier and that sick part of our lives will be much shorter so whenever i talk to politicians or business leaders or even people i meet i won't say on the street because we're we're in a pandemic but most people think of aging as something very different than cancer and heart disease and and alzheimer's but actually that's not the case aging is not nothing special in fact aging is the by far the largest cause of all the diseases um that well not all but most of the major diseases on the planet and because we've we've gotten rid of all the easy stuff we've largely improved child survival in middle age we tend to do quite well but it's the end of life where we haven't been successful and as i mentioned the main reason is that we've only been addressing one disease at a time and to live substantially healthier and longer you need to address aging itself which drives these diseases just last year the world health organization uh approved or announced that they would declare aging as a disease a treatable medical condition so why is that important well one is that perhaps federal agencies governments will change the law so that aging can be treated by your doctor right now if there is a medicine and we think that there might be some medicines already approved for other diseases they could lengthen lifespan right now your doctor can but but typically does not prescribe these medicines for your long-term health unless you are already sick an example of that drug is metformin the frontline often the first medicine to be given to a type 2 diabetic with high blood sugar but there's a lot of evidence from looking at tens of thousands of people who have taken metformin that they also are protected against frailty cancer and alzheimer's disease among other things and but your doctor cannot uh typically prescribe metformin now there are some countries where metformin is available over the counter uh which i think is a good thing because it's a very safe drug um but here in the united states for example uh it's largely inaccessible unless you already have type 2 diabetes the other reason for declaring aging a disease that's important is that it would lead to more investment in research and drug development to treat and prevent these diseases i mean if you are biologically 30 even though you have 50 birthday candles you're much less likely to get cancer or die from a heart attack and you might say well how would i know if i've got my 50th birthday how old i am i'll tell you in a minute that we can now very accurately measure within just less than five percent error how old you actually are not by how many times this the earth has gone around the sun so what i'm going to do in the next 20 minutes or so is tell you uh really what is going on during aging we think can we slow it down and can we reverse it now about 10 years ago uh well seven if if you go by this paper i'm showing you the figure off we as a field of aging researchers declared that we'd uncovered what we thought were the most important causes of aging itself and there are about eight or nine of these things that happen to us as we get older and uh hopefully you can read them but there are things such as dna damage the loss of the ends of chromosomes here uh called telomeres uh there's uh deregulated nutrient sensing so you get diabetes mitochondrial dysfunction mitochondria are often referred to as the battery packs of our cells they give us energy without mitochondria we'd all be dead in about 30 seconds or less it's like taking cyanide cellular senescence here showing with this this leaf really what that means is that there are cells in our body that act like zombies and the older we get the more they accumulate in our body and they seem to drive cancer as well as diabetes and other problems during aging and there are a lot of scientists who are working on this in the hopes that one day we could kill those cells and so that the body could be healthier other things include stem cell exhaustion and we lose the ability for parts of our body to communicate to each other the brain is telling the body to be young and some organs will such as the liver will also tell the rest of the body to be young and we lose that communication as well but what i want to talk about today uh is a new area that's well really emerging as a major cause of aging and the reason it's exciting is that it seems like it could be reversible and that's this one here in the darker green it's written here as epigenetic alterations essentially epigenetics is the description of how our body turns genes on and off and for each cell we need a different pattern of which of the 25 000 genes are switched on versus off and what we find is in young people cells are beautifully controlled if the genes are a piano they're being played perfectly in a in a concert but as we get older what we see is that the pianist is making mistakes and playing the wrong keys and it's starting to sound like a terrible cacophony of sound and if you're listening to this you probably want to put your fingers in your ears what we're looking at is trying to understand what drives that process what makes the cell read the wrong genes as we get older and is it possible to do a reset can you get the pianist to play the beautiful music of youth and as you'll see i think the answer might be yes so this all started with uh what i call the information theory of aging essentially when we're born or even when we're fertilized as an egg in a sperm there's information there now there are two types of information in our bodies primarily one is the genetic information encoded by our dna we call this the genome and we hear about it quite often in the news and it's led to a revolution in biology of course our ability to read the genome now is quite dramatic a student in my lab could read your genome in just a couple of days on a device that looks about that size so we've gone from a billion dollars to a couple of hundred dollars to read a human genome that's one type of information the other type are the regulators of the dna the genetic regulators what i was just describing that make up the epigenome and these are mostly proteins and chemical modifications of those proteins and also chemical changes to the dna now these are very important because every cell essentially has the same dna so how do we have brain cells how do we have skin cells it's the epigenome the pattern of which genes are on and off that determine which cells will become skin and which cells will become nerves and that pattern has to be maintained in some people for over 100 years the problem is it's not maintained perfectly so a good analogy is a a cd or a dvd uh for those under 20 you know i should explain we used to use these to store music they're a good analogy though because the information that's on these discs lasts for many many years probably a hundred years if you look after it but these things used to get scratched pretty easily and when they're scratched the the player would not work very well and this is similar to what happens to our dna so the dna would be the music and the scratches would be the epi genome the inability to read it and the question that we've had is how does the how do these scratches occur and can you polish those discs to get back the beautiful music this is more similar to what's really going on you this is the nucleus of a cell on the left a young cell the genes are these red dots being read here this is rna coming out of the gene and this line these loops are the chromosomes and you can see the some genes are on the red dot and some genes are kept off by bundling up the dna in these protein bundles we call this chromatin what happens over time that we know for sure is that this beautiful pattern in a young cell that gives the cell identity and and function will be lost over time so that now the old cell is turning on genes that were once off and vice versa and these old cells do not function very well and we think give rise to diseases wouldn't it be something if there was a memory of this pattern that could be reset so you could take a complex tissue such as the eye and reprogram it press a reset switch to turn it into a young tissue again so that it would heal and function as though it was young again and when we're young again now one of the things that we've discovered is dna damage and the the process of repairing that damage drives this epigenetic change this epigenetic noise we can call it and anyone who spent a lot of time in the sun will know that dna damage will cause aging and we think this is the main reason not so much uh the genetic changes not so much the mutations but actually the epigenetic changes which is good news because if we have lots of mutations in our cells and we lose the dna sequence the genetic information it's extremely hard to restore that to find it again in fact once you've lost all the copies of the the genes or two copies in most cells once you've lost that you cannot get it back without very complicated technology but if it's just the regulation of those genes then you could imagine that you can reset it so this is good news so dna of course isn't just flopping around ourselves it's six feet long in every cell it needs to be packaged very tightly but also very accurately and this is uh nylon but it's it's referring to uh dna as this chord and we have these proteins called histones that the dna is wrapped up and where it's wrapped up very tightly in these bundles the genes are switched off and when they loop out those genes become accessible to proteins to read it to read the gene and that's how we our cells control which genes are tightly bundled and off and which ones come on and of course these are happening all the time every time you have a memory or you eat a meal the cells will respond and change which genes are on and off but not so much as you might think because if you change the structure too much the cell could become a cancer cell or could become old mostly what happens is that these bundles stay the same for your whole life until you become old and there are some processes that control that one of these processes is called methylation methyl is just a type of chemical it's a carbon atom with three hydrogens and the cell attaches these methyl chemicals to the dna and to these histone-packing proteins and that helps establish which genes will stay off and which will come on interestingly these what are called methylation patterns while they're beautifully arranged when we're young they do change in predictable ways as we get older and as i'll show you we can use these patterns as a clock so here's an example of that um well on on the y left axis is biological age in years and on the bottom is the chronological age so your birthday candles and what the field has discovered i i need to give credit to my colleague stephen horobak sometimes we call this the horvath clock what we've seen is that these changes in these methyl groups on the dna can be read by a student very quickly can take you you know it's a couple of days to get the answer some people typically those people who have bad genes or have not looked after their bodies will be older than their actual bio chronological age some people i will be average and some people will actually be 10 20 years younger than the average person at that same age and it's known that those people who are younger biologically are healthier and longer lived than those who are already accelerated so in other words i could take a blood sample from you today and then in a couple of days i could tell you when you're likely to die with quite a high accuracy now that's important because it first of all it can tell you if you need to act and what if you should really pay attention to your lifestyle or to your genes but it also allows us to quickly establish if we can slow down or reverse the aging process both in mice and in humans and there's already some evidence that we can not just slow down this clock uh but reverse it both in mice as i'll show you um and recently stephen horvath published that he was able to give a cocktail of molecules to some people and reverse this clock by a little bit just by two years but it's a good starting point so this is a very important development we can accurately measure age so what about reset wouldn't it be great if we could take a pill or have an injection that would remind our tissues and our organs how to be young again skin would heal wrinkles could go away and diseases might be reversed this is the equivalent of polishing that disc so that we could get back the youthful information so how could we possibly do this basically what i'm saying is that there's a backup copy of the youthful epigenome in the body and that we could perhaps use it to reset the cell now we didn't know until well really just this year in our lab whether this was possible but we were hoping it was possible based on a couple of observations first of all you can take uh a tadpole um it was a typol or i think it was a it was a tadpole um cell and put it into an egg of a frog and regenerate a new organism john gordon discovered that and won the nobel prize for it the other thing that we can do these days is clone animals thoroughly the sheep was the first but now there are many different species that have been cloned and they live though you may not realize it these animals live healthy normal lifespans even though dolly was an aberration what does that say that says it probably there's a reset switch you can start life from scratch but can we do this in a living organism can we take a mouse and reset it can we take a human and reset the body to be young that's what we're working on the equivalent would be to take our dna that's now lost all of its beautiful organization and put it back to this structure so we started working on this really about four or five years ago and we had a breakthrough in the last a couple of years a student of mine found a combination of genes that could actually do this the combination of genes that are normally only switched on in very young embryos and babies so i mentioned already that we can generate new life from nuclear cloning and we can generate new animals what we can also do is take adult cells and turn them into stem cells this is called reprogramming we also know that there are other species such as this marine organism called hydra that can regenerate two individuals from one there are some species salamanders axolotls um you can even cut the tip off a mouse's finger it'll grow back um and in our bodies if you cut out a large part of the liver it will grow back these are all signs that it's really possible to do amazing things with ourselves terms of aging and regeneration so i mentioned john gordon won the the nobel prize for his tadpole experiment the man on the right shinya yamanaka a very famous professor from japan here having just won the nobel prize in sweden um what he won the prize for was showing that you could take skin cells from adults or really any cell type you wanted from an adult and make it into what's called a pluripotent stem cell a cell that could be turned into any other cell type essentially erasing the cell's identity so the cell was no longer a skin cell it could become anything and the way he did that was to take a normal cell and in the dish not in an animal but in a dish put in a combination of four genes that would normally be switched on in embryos in eggs when they're fertilized and he got these stem cells that now are used in medicine put into people trying to improve the brain function in other organs these genes encode what are called transcription factors which are really just gene regulators that bind to genes and turn them on and off so this was certainly worthy of a nobel prize but the question that we had was can you use some of these early young embryonic genes to reverse aging without causing them to become stem cells what the last thing we want is to create stem cells in the body because if a cell doesn't have any identity it'll be a tumor it can grow and in fact if you turn on all four of these genes in a mouse when it's older it will develop cancer and in some cases will kill the animal other labs have shown so we this was a very uh risky experiment but what we did was we looked in cells at turning on some of these genes and found a unique combination that worked to reverse the age of cells halfway but not all the way the way we did this was we took a virus not a dangerous virus these are domesticated viruses that are used right now for gene therapy in people for example to repair genetic defects in the eye to restore their vision and they're called aavs so we packaged up some genes into this aav and tested if it could reverse the age of cells now we chose neurons in this case in the back of the eye of a mouse's eye we wanted to see could we make those nerves healthier now in a young in a young mouse these nerves will grow back the video unfortunately is not playing but this would be a nerve that grows in the dish and this one doesn't doesn't grow if you damage an adult nerve it will not grow back i think we all know that if you damage your spine or you damage your optic nerve or your brain it's not going to miraculously grow back but it does if it's very young so we thought if we could reprogram these nerves in the eye to be very young we might get improved repair and maybe even vision back again from those mice now this was a an optic nerve where it was uh these nerves are not healthy if they're healthy they glow orange but here you can see that most of these optic nerves in the mouse have died off now if we apply three of the the yamanaka genes that i told you about called o s and k and we turn them on for three weeks those nerves grow back you can see a lot of them are preserved the eye is here the brain is on the left and they grow back this is really never been seen to this extent and certainly not seen when the treatment was given after um cells had already been damaged and we call this epigenetic reprogramming and these nerves when they were damaged they aged prematurely and died perhaps of old age within a matter of weeks and here these nerves were young again so we can also test vision in this experiment we're testing glaucoma uh you might have relatives who have glaucoma it's pressure in the eye it's one of the largest uh causes of blindness on the planet and if you lose your vision because of pressure in the eye you will never get it back there's nothing you can do except some medicines that slightly slow down the progression of the disease but we asked if if we have a mouse that has lost its vision from pressure can we restore that vision and we can test this a number of ways we can look at electrical signals in the eye but another way we do it is to look at vision and here's an experiment where the mouse is looking at moving lines the lines are moving like this and if the mouse cannot see it will just sit there but if it can see it will move its head like this and we can track that with a camera and this experiment here we just need to focus on the the red versus the blue and what you can see is with our reprogramming we get back the youth in the cells and we also get back some vision that's being lost so this is the first time that we've been able to anyone's been able to restore vision in blind or or at least mice that have lost their their vision but then we did something interesting we we teamed up with another lab at harvard that works uh on vision and we took uh just regular old mice that were in the lab and living normally and uh we put them in front of the screen you could you can ignore this is just uh the mouse being a bit nervous on the platform down here but you can see that this mouse is not moving its head this mouse cannot see because it's old it's about one year old and this type of mouse loses its vision rapidly due to our old age what we wanted to do was to deliver our three gene combination with the virus into the eye it's very simple actually it's not difficult doctors do this all the time give a single injection into people's eye who have say macular degeneration and it's painless and it's very quick we did the same for the mouse didn't feel it and three weeks later after we turned on these epigenetic reprogramming factors we got this result we had old mice that could see you can tell that this mouse is now able to see again and in fact these old mice on average could see just as well as the young mice could which to me is really quite incredible that we can now restore vision in blind mice my student at the time juan chen liu is his name he's now a [Music] postdoctoral researcher or a phd adopter uh he took the the cells out of the the back of the eye and measured whether they were younger and in fact it turns out that they they were much younger based on this clock and not only that this uh this symphony i was referring to of which genes are played it came back to be a beautiful youthful symphony of genes um the one the genes that went off with aging came back on to the right level and genes that went on during aging was shut off again in other words we had restored the nerve cells identity the nerve cells woke up from their sleep in the old mice to function as though they were young again in fact literally they were young again and we actually know that this clock is important or at least that methylation those dna changes are important because if we block the the eye from removing those chemicals the vision was not restored so this clock that i'm telling you about those chemicals seem to be important for the aging process and the reset switch which we didn't know until uh you know we discovered this recently um one way to think of this actually is so if you have a clock on the wall you know if you turn the hands of the clock backwards nothing's going to change because the clock is just a clock but what this this experiment is telling us is that this is a very special clock if you move the hands backward time goes backward age goes backwards yes i just want to um talk a little bit about what we can do in our daily lives to give ourselves the maximum possible health in old age and we know that how we live our lives has a big impact on us in fact most of our longevity and health 80 in fact is determined by our epigenome not by our dna and we can change our epigenome by how we live so what can you do now well if you're getting sufficient food if you're eating three regular meals a day breakfast lunch and dinner or even eating snacks in between we know that that's not going to give the best chance of longevity um and certainly overeating will be even worse so what i do is i like to skip at least one meal a day we have not enough food in our household and our meals tend to be large to begin with and i try not to snack i like to have tea and coffee if i get a little bit hungry and you do get used to it now you may not want to skip breakfast you may want to skip lunch you may want to skip dinner it's different for for every individual i also just want to point out that if you're young if you're a teenager or in your 20s this probably isn't for you i'm talking more about people who are middle-aged who whose metabolism has slowed down and we certainly don't want to suggest malnutrition or starvation as any way to improve health that's the last thing that we want to uh to talk about or uh or hint that that could be helpful this is more about being um you know at least some part of the day a little bit hungry and we've you know we've known this for thousands of years that this actually is helpful what we didn't realize was that what happens when you're hungry is that these longevity defenses these longevity factors that i'm describing to you and others get turned on if we sit around all day if we are always eating or not feeling hungry our bodies will relax and they won't fight aging so this is one way to turn on those defenses against aging uh do a bit of exercise lose your breath a few times a week if you can if you don't move get up walk at least um do do some weight lifting as well i once a week at least i try to lift something um i do some wrestling with our sun as well that helps i talk about hip hinge exercise this is bending your hips and lifting weights it's very important to particularly keep your hips strong from walking and bending because uh just in the us every 19 seconds somebody falls over and breaks a bone and this is just as bad as getting cancer in terms of survival uh you might want to talk to your doctor and get tested to see what's what's working in your body and try to counteract that you can also have devices on your wrist that can tell you how you're doing and i do that because i mean not i don't take blood tests a lot but i do try to monitor to see how i'm doing to see if things are working sleep well reduce stress this is all important stuff sleep is actually intimately tied to these longevity genes that control the pace of aging and here's one you may not have heard uh you want to eat plants that have been stressed what i mean by that well red wine is an example of a food stuff that's made from grapes that have been stressed you'll probably want to eat plants that have been grown outdoors or dehydrated and we actually farmers actually know that if you stress plants before picking such as orange trees you can put a nail into the stem and it will produce better fruit the reason is that plants produce their own molecules to improve survival and longevity and we believe and we've got a lot of evidence that when you eat those molecules from the food you mimic exercise and you mimic fasting and hunger uh we call this zero hormesis um so i've given you a lot to think about today uh you can read about the new discovery uh online at nature.com it's it's out there right now i've tweeted about it there's a free copy if you want to download it if you don't have a subscription to nature magazine and in my book lifespan i talk about not just why we age but what we can do about it in much more detail than i told you about today including what i do and my family does and my father is 81 years old with no diseases in perfect health and he's literally stronger and fitter and arguably happier than i am so it's not a clinical trial but he is a beacon of hope for all of us uh and i want it in there um we can now take questions and you know thank you again for having me here today thank you dr sinclair and i want to start by asking you are we likely to get a pill or a vaccine that can actually reverse aging in our lifetime when i say lifetime i mean the next 20 to 30 years uh well i certainly hope so um i don't have a crystal ball but we are working here in boston on taking this reprogramming technology the one that i showed for today for the eye and in the next two years we hope to treat the first patient with glaucoma to see if we can restore vision and so yeah i mean that that's just one example of at least 20 companies that are working on medicines that should if it all works out slow and perhaps even reverse aging so if it doesn't happen in the next 30 years something must have gone terribly wrong right this epigenetic programming that you talked about how often can it be done can it just be done once in your lifetime or can you do it repeatedly yeah that that's the big question that we're working on we've only done it once but maybe you can do it ten times maybe a hundred this is a really interesting question i think that we can do it multiple times there's no reason why i could think that it couldn't be done repeatedly so just you know imagine with me for a second that we could find a pill or a gene therapy a virus that would do what we did to the mouse's eye but throughout the whole body and we've engineered this already to be turned on with a pill we use a molecule in those mice called doxycycline which is just an anti-antibiotic it's not the fact that it's an antibiotic that's important it's just a molecule that we can give to the mice as as a drink and uh it turns on the genes so you one day maybe you go to your doctor you have an injection and you get a pill for three weeks you get rejuvenated throughout your body you get better memory better eyesight better healing maybe even look better and then 10 years later you come back and have another course of that drug for three weeks right so this epigenetic again resets can they be used to treat diseases other than glaucoma i mean what would you think what are the projections what is the potential yeah some other colleagues in in my field have shown that you can reverse aging in the brain and my lab is now working on this we're we're actually growing little little brains in the lab you can grow many brains now from cells from from people um these are reprogrammed cells we're not taking brains out of people but we're actually now looking at reversing um the age of the brain perhaps we can treat alzheimer's and dementias that way but they've also shown internal organs can be reversed the the kidney uh the pancreas i mean ultimately any part of the body we think theoretically could be reversed even joints joint pain is a big problem and maybe we could get those joints to heal and regrow like young ones you mentioned in your presentation that there's a lot of dubious science that is there on the internet so there's just so much information you don't know so what does real science say about supplements which are the supplements that work and which are the supplements that don't what would you recommend oh gee well i'm not allowed to recommend anything because i'm i'm okay what would you take yourself yeah well i've always tried to be honest about this um there are a lot of supplements that have not been shown to do anything in people they might have been shown in a mouse to to do something it doesn't mean they don't do anything but often there are claims on the internet that they do or at least that that claim to to work but they don't um well first of all what i would i would say is to go with a company that has good reputation if you want to choose a supplement there's a term at least in the us i'm not sure globally it's called gmp stands for good manufacturing practices practices and that's good that at least means that they're following uh guidelines that are set out by governments to produce good product go for the very pure molecules the ones often supplements are 50 percent this 10 percent that i prefer to get the 98 or more pure supplements um we worked on resveratrol many years ago the molecules from red wine resveratrol it's called uh there are some pure versions of that that you can buy over the counter or on the internet i've been taking resveratrol for oh gee i think 15 years now i'm still doing okay there's been there have been clinical trials some that showed no effect some that showed positive effects um it depends on how it's delivered um if you if you take it you'd want to eat it with some food or some some yogurt for example to get it to absorb so resveratrol is one um there's also something else in the body called nad nad capital nad which is a molecule that we need for life without it we'd be dead very quickly and as we get older what we see is that our bodies make less nad and there are supplements you can obtain in pure form that raise up the thought to raise up the levels of nad now we don't have a lot of information on that in humans yet there are a couple of studies that have shown that they appear to be safe appear to be at least so far um and that there's a disease called als also known as lou gehrig's disease which is a neurological disease where the patients did better with the nad boosting molecules but it's early days for that um in general you know there are things you can do there's vitamin d which of course is very helpful um and and some other supplements for vitamin deficiencies but other than that the really big ones are the the meals and the exercise that until we have these medicines are seem to be the best bet so would you recommend a low carb vegetarian diet or do you eat meat what is the recommendation indians are largely vegetarian so yeah it's it's great over here in the u.s there's way too much meat we have everything deep fried so that doesn't help but anyway all right well that's not great but uh there's also this this carnivore movement over in the u.s where the people are promoting just almost pure meat diets uh there's not a lot of evidence that high levels of meat will be good for you long term in the short term yeah sure you might build up a bit more muscle but long term definitely vegetarian diets are the way to go i personally i eat a fairly healthy regular western diet so there's unfortunately meat in a lot of the meals that we have as a family of course our kids need need meat to grow but yeah i try to focus on salads and vegetables as much as i can so you you do want your your your diet to look more like uh what a rabbit would each eat rather than a lion right it's getting lots of questions there's a question from ananya who wants to know what are the coolest most interesting anti-aging tools or technology or recent discoveries that are that are out there right now yeah well i'm excited about reprogramming to be able to reset the body which i you know obviously that's on the cutting edge but there's also other technologies which are exciting one is the ability to turn to turn on the body's natural defenses against aging so there are the certains that i work on you kindly mentioned them earlier we have seven sirtuins in the body they're found in most of our cells and they need this molecule nad um so the ability to turn on those sirtuins is an exciting area resveratrol seems to do that nad boosters seem to do that so that's one area the other area are called cenolitics these are drugs or molecules in development that delete kill off those senescent cells that i talked about earlier those zombie cells that accumulate and seem to contribute to aging and to cancer um so that's a super exciting relatively new area as well and then lastly a new area that's pretty exciting is to take drugs that are already available such as metformin and there's another one that's not as safe called rapamycin that's used for immune suppression that seems to do wonderful things to to mice um and in looking at people also seem to have effects um on age slowing and even reversal so that's also promising when when you ask me how soon until we have a drug for aging it's possible that we already have one or two available we just need to have more evidence that they actually work the way we're hoping i use a combination of drugs that can probably work together to address different aspects of aging i have a question from amman who says in your book you state that there's no biological law that says we must age what do you mean by that i mean all of us grew up you know being told aging is inevitable and we'll all grow old so you're challenging that well yeah why should we uh just say something's inevitable 100 years ago dying from cancer was was inevitable if you if you had a tumor very little you could do and we decided we're going to fight against cancer and heart disease and alzheimer's disease so what why is aging which is the driver of most of these diseases why is aging something that we should accept it's the the opposite because it's a common thing and just because something's natural doesn't mean we should accept it there's nothing about the natural world that we accept it that we accept we've been ever since we picked up a rock as a tool and lit a fire to cook food we essentially have been changing the world around us and aging should be no exception now i agree with you that that aging is going to happen we're not going to live forever but can we and should we try to live another 5 or 10 or 20 years longer healthily absolutely the same way we did this for lifespan in the 20th century um how long could we live well there are species on our planet that live for thousands of years there are even mammals whales that can live hundreds of years so it's doable there's no law that says that we couldn't live longer and we're finally being understand being able to understand how these other animals are able to live so much longer than we can it's like what you said earlier it's not just about living longer it's also about living a healthy life because increasingly we have several studies that have shown that though people are living longer they are disabled and it's not healthy life that they are spending the additional 20 to 30 years so i have a question from deepika who wants to know when would one start with anti-aging intervention is there an optional age at which one should begin so of course this is entrance intrinsic forensics so both well so so i'm extrapolating from the hundreds of animal studies that have been done are everything from fruit flies to little worms mice uh even dogs and some some monkey studies so we have a big database to pull information but we don't know about humans i would say that in my scientific opinion around the age of 30 aging starts to kick in and actually make your system not work very well you start to slow down with healing in sports um so i myself started taking resveratrol when i was 34 and i'm still doing okay i'm still alive doesn't seem to be hurting and it's not very expensive so the trade-off is such that in my 30s it was worth trying and certainly now that i'm in my 50s it's definitely worth trying something think about this we know what's going to happen to all of us if we don't do anything so as long as it's safe and it's not going to break your budget i think especially the older you get the more uh worth it it is to try some things but it's all individual i would say if you're in your 20s or teens there's very little reason to do things other than eat healthy and exercise um but that's best advice would a couple of glasses of wine work as well well that's debated i think it any any doctor would say in moderation a glass a day of red wine will probably do do you some good um you don't want to overdo it of course alcohol will will wreck your liver long term but um there are many healthy molecules in red wine resveratrol is one but there are many others from from the grapes that are preserved in the wine and i think that's one of the main reasons that red wine is actually so healthy but how long do you have to take or drink red wine to have an effect probably a decade or so would be in would be a minimum the reason is that red wine doesn't have much resveratrol in it maybe a milligram and in our studies we give the mice the equivalent of a hundred to two hundred glasses a day very drunk so yeah fortunately it's in a pill or in in their food but uh yeah i don't recommend drinking that much i have a question from justwant who wants to know what exactly is the information theory of aging could you elaborate a bit on that yeah yeah so this is the theory that's largely come out of my lab and that is that we lose both genetic and epigenetic information in the form of dna and the three-dimensional structures of of the dna the genome and the epigenome and if if any of you are into information whether it's computer information or radio signals or photographs you know that digital information is the best form of information storage and dna the genome is digital instead of ones and zeros it's a c t g the chemicals that make up the dna code and for that reason dna is very stable and robust you can boil dna in the lab and it's fine and mostly our genome is intact even when we're 70 or 80. but the epigenome is not digital it's analog it's as the equivalent of a cassette tape and it will degrade over time and it's the loss of the analog information the epigenetic information that we believe and are showing in in papers like this one that we published yesterday in nature that it's the epigenetic inflammation loss that is a major cause of aging thank you so much i think we're running out of time the future looks very young thanks to scientists like you and thank you for joining us [Music]

Channel: Mint

Views: 20,398

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Keywords: HTLS 2020, Dr David Andrew Sinclair, ageing, Harvard expert, long life, health Harvard expert, health living

Id: XAYdMneMtKE

Length: 59min 40sec (3580 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020