David Sinclair: Revealing the Biggest Myths About Diet, Stress, and Death

well of course we can there is no law that says we have to age uh right now there's a limit because that's what we've seen happens but the people that live over 100 typically don't take care of themselves a lot of them smoke and some of them smoke and drink and don't eat good food [Music] marcus aurelius said death smiles at us all all we can do is smile back and i feel like you sort of get up in the morning and you look at the god of death and you simply say not today i do that actually i do bounce out of bed thinking every day is a miracle to be a functioning living organism and i know that time is short we we live for not even a blink of an eye in geological time and so uh i live my life like that carpe diem is another motto that i would say to myself many times a day actually and working on aging and for stalling ill health and death certainly does uh act as a motivating force not so much for myself um honestly you know i'm not really afraid of dying but i am aware that every day over 100 000 people die from aging itself and it's something that uh i'd like to alleviate if not extend lifespan by a century what i would like to do is to at least have people live another 10 20 years in good health what is aging biologically speaking and why is it a problem it's one of the largest costs in to our economy globally it's more sick care than health care there's a huge amount of suffering for the individual and of families anyone who's seen someone die understands that it's often not a pleasant process and it can take many years and the final moments are extremely stressful for everybody and and often painful so you know that that's in itself enough motivation um but you know the economic reasons are are really important though we just calculated with i have colleagues in london who are economists and they calculated that the us alone just by slowing down aging by one year and making people productive more productive for one year would save over the next three decades 86 trillion dollars which we waste now on just keeping people alive in a sick state um and they're not productive of course and so if you do it for 10 years it's 365 trillion dollars that's a lot of money that can be used for education uh additional research healthcare and even combating things like uh global warming climate change so you know again i can't think of a more important thing to be tackling right now as a species on this planet what happens in our body as we age yeah so that there's a growing consensus that what happens is we lose information that we got in the womb now part of it was from uh genetics right we're we're carrying one copy in every cell of our mother and father's chromosomes but we're also in fact largely determined by what's called not the genome which is the dna but the epigenome and the epigenome are the control systems that tell the cell which genes to turn on and off and there's 20 something thousand genes but they only use a few thousand to to specify how to be a nerve cell versus skin cell and this all gets laid down as where embryos and eventually born and this epigenomic information that tells cells how to behave we think breaks down over time and that results in diseases tissue dysfunction so you know you start to look older you can't clear toxins you can't think well your nerve cells don't work well you become less able to see at night eventually you get diseases that kill you and that's really the major cause of suffering on this planet and what we've done as a medical community um is to look at the end stage of this process and we call these things diseases and try to treat them with drugs and you're basically putting band-aids on the problem forgetting what got us to that point in the first place which is aging itself which i have proposed and is increasingly thought to be the case that it's disruption of that epigenetic control system that tells the cells which genes to turn on and off and that's sort of the information loss and i think one of the analogies you've used before is like a dvd player and a dvd getting scratched for those of us over 40 i guess yeah uh i didn't realize you're over 40 you look young yourself so whatever you're doing keep doing that the um yeah so the dvd or the cd analogy works well to older with older people but anyone who doesn't remember these were plastic discs with um foil that had little pits uh that represented zeros and ones and this is digital information and that digital information in the cell is dna and it's not zeros and ones it's atcg chemicals and they're strung out about six feet long of dna in every cell and that's about the same amount of information that you can fit on a dvd okay so our cells are dvd but what aging is i've proposed is that it's like scratches that disrupt the ability of the machine the laser beam to read the right songs at the right time or the movie and you get a horrible cacophony of music and what we've discovered is that there are ways to well we discovered one of the main causes of scratches that's broken chromosomes which happens all the time in our bodies extreme cell damage also does that if we crush nerves but we've also figured out and recently published that there's a way we think to polish those scratches so that we can play that beautiful music of youth again let's talk a little bit about sort of like reducing our biological age and i think we're all interested to some extent some people more than others and living a long time but we all want that time to be full of vitality and productivity and not just living longer for the sake of living longer and i think that's where the biological age versus your chronological age sort of becomes important one of the ways that i've heard you talk about before is fasting and it's super interesting because fasting isn't new i mean it used to be a necessity for us but now we're starting to learn about why it's helpful can you talk a little bit about the benefits of fasting and how it relates to slowing down or even reversing aging yeah well these systems that tell cells how to read the genes at the right time this epigenome there are gene there are factors that control that and so a little very little bit of biology here uh dna isn't just floating around the cell it's actually looped into big loops that tell genes to be switched on uh and genes that should be switched off are bundled up tightly um and we call this stuff chromatin and those those loops of genes that are on and bundles of genes that are off are controlled in part by a set of genes called the sirtuins and those genes make proteins that cause these loops and bundles particularly they create these bundles to keep genes switched off because you don't want a liver liver gene or a skin gene coming on in the brain but that's what happens with aging we find and so one way to make sure this process goes slower is to turn on these sertuan epigenetic regulators to use a more technical term and there are seven of these uh epigenetic regulators the the things that prevent the scratches and we can turn them on with gene therapy uh in mice we do this and if you do it in the brain of a mouse they'll live longer do it in the body they can live longer but we can't genetically modify ourselves so what we can we've also found is that these genes get turned on by adversity adversity or at least perceived adversity if our body thinks we're going to run out of food or we need to run away from a sabretooth tiger or we're chasing a mastodon then our body says oh you know times might be tough don't put all our energy and resources into growing bigger muscles in fact put that some of that energy into surviving hunkering down and defending the body against toxins against damage and that we know leads to longer life it slows down this clock of epigenetic changes uh which we can measure uh and we also know that um the ways to mimic adversity include skipping meals uh eating less protein in general being hot and cold um and then the big one um is eating the right types of food that uh we all know a healthy mediterranean type diet and there are actually chemicals within those foods of a mediterranean diet in olive oil and red wine that we found in my lab to activate these sirtuins and probably also slow down the clock but they certainly improve health and then the last thing i think is really important is what i'm working on is not about keeping people older at the end of life and alive for longer it's the opposite we're keeping animals and increasingly we're showing with people that you can keep them younger for longer so that when you're 80 you can actually be 60. is there are there's so many different directions i want to go in here but is there a point where fasting becomes i mean there is a point unhelpful right like if you don't eat you will die eventually is it sort of like you skip one meal is good do you skip two meals is great you skip six and you're back to good again or is there sort of like some sort of limit that we should think about in terms of maximizing the benefit if we are going to pass yeah well there's some real key points to hear here one is we're not talking about malnutrition or starvation that would not be beneficial and in fact when you know 10 000 years ago or more people were not living a long time from fasting because they were not getting enough nutrition but in our world now we can have any not energy drinks but drinks that contain enough nutrients we can make sure that we're not deficient we can measure things with blood tests and we can make sure that we're not deficient but the optimal the second point is that the optimum is different for everybody in part because we have different tolerances for not eating but also because we have different micro microbiomes with different genders and we just are genetically different and we know from studies in mice that you can take regular lab mice and mix up their like breed them in a way that you get a little bit of diversity in these lab mice and give them caloric restrictions so you don't feed them more than i think it was 40 what they would normally eat and some mice breeds strains we call them lived a lot longer some of them died earlier so you then practically what should you do well it seems to be a rule that if you fast at at least 14 hours you'll have a lot of health benefits better metabolic stability lower blood sugar levels better cholesterol these kind of things kick in a popular one is the um what 16 8 go for 16 hours so you skip one meal a day and have a late lunch or an early lunch depending on which one you're skipping and that uses the period of sleep as a fasting state and then what i do is i skip breakfast and often i skip skip lunch as well and so i'm getting actually more like 20 hours of fasting on a good day i will say that today i had a little bit of avocado for breakfast because i had to get up really early so i'm not perfect and i don't think anyone should strive to be perfect but you do what you can now there are other people that do uh a week long fast now now that's the other extreme i wouldn't go further than a week actually uh given what i know but once you've gone more than three days there's a special type of uh recycling of proteins that's very beneficial called autophagy or autophagy and that takes about three days now i've never done that myself i'm pretty wimpy when it comes to uh to these kind of things i'm a hedonist by nature and very lazy but i think that if you can go three days or four days that would be occasionally not it not of course not every week but you could do that every few weeks and if you do a week-long fast um you want to do that maybe four times a year and those are the the rough guidelines and if we if we like if we fast for two meals and then on the third meal we eat as many calories as we would have eaten during the rest of the day normally are we still getting benefits of fasting yes or does it sort of yes yes yes we are that's the great news that so take me for example i have big dinners um because i'm making up for the lack of food during the day and so i'm not losing weight once you've hit a set point and you've got your your body weight and during covert i dropped from 150 pounds to 132 i'm now steady at that 132 feeling great eating tons of food that i always wanted but it's packed into an hour or two of feeding now how do we know that works well we know from blood tests in humans that it looks like it's beneficial you get the kind of changes that are seen in younger people things like i mentioned blood glucose and then there's hormone levels and stress levels which i've been measuring in myself for a decade so i can tell you for me it works um but the the other thing that's important is that from animal studies that have been done over the last 100 years in mice and rats and dogs it's very clear that it's not just what you eat it's when you eat and there's a very famous study that was done by a colleague of mine rafael de cabo at the nih in bethesda and he made three different types of diets for mice one that had a lot of protein the other had carbs the other had fat and he thought he would find the optimal diet for the mice turns out it didn't make any difference what mattered was when he gave the food and if he gave it to them just within this short hour-long window every day they live dramatically longer thirty percent longer that's that's fascinating where does the notion that we should even eat three meals a day come from i suspect and i want to research this for my next book it's i think it's the the uh the food producers that they want that uh it become you know a saying that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and and then you've got the the the bars the uh the food the snacks that we now eat in between meals for some reason doctors nutritionists were either educated or misinformed or both that the body is best when it's never hungry and we know that is not the case and uh just one point on the hunger i typically am not hungry now if if you start fasting and you've never done it before you will feel hungry there's a hormone called ghrelin which will cause that of course it's not real hunger is just mental state but after three weeks you find i found that the state of hunger goes away so during the day i'm not not peckish you know i might eat some nuts or whatever just to suppress a little bit of twang but i'm not starving by any means and i actually really really enjoy my dinner as a result but you know i tell you this shane and your listeners because if you try to do what i do tomorrow you will fail you need to slowly work up to it and learn the tricks like drinking water drinking tea fill your stomach with hot or cold water and uh fluids and that will help i i found when i used to eat out a lot before kobe because i used to travel a lot and i was always found myself in a restaurant i always found that i'd eat more in a restaurant for whatever reason than i would at home so i i've always used this thing where i have two glasses of water before a meal and that was a way to slow down or sort of at least reduce how much i was eating in the restaurant yeah well that's a that's a trick you can use every day i do it i'm drinking for those that are listening i'm drinking uh some water here right now actually it's a it's a supplement drink but yeah that's a really good trick and also you want to eat your carbs after you have protein because that'll prevent your glucose from shooting up too high and glucose i wouldn't say it's poison we need glucose to survive but this typical western diet of spiking glucose after breakfast and then it shoots back down and becomes now your hypoglycemic as it's called you start to get the jitters brain fog now you eat again and this cycle throughout the day which is a typical western diet is really not very enjoyable once you realize that when you do what i do your liver is making glucose throughout the day at a perfect level and it doesn't go up and down much and you can focus and you're not worried about where your next meal is and your brain's really optimal and that to me i wish i'd started 20 years ago um eating less often because it you don't just look better you actually can perform better as well i like that a lot and it's not just physical performance it's also mental performance right 100 you know i'm not a physical guy right i'm sitting and typing mostly and using my brain and i i'm way i wouldn't say smarter but i'm way more focused than i was i don't get distracted i don't have memory loss and i'm also not wasting money and time on meals during the day either but yeah it's it's fascinating and it's been shown in mice to be true as well and i think what's also likely is that my brain activity and health will be maintained for a decade or more longer by adopting this kind of diet so let's talk a little bit about what we eat in terms of reducing aging or sort of reducing that that biological clock what what are the best things to eat um we sort of yeah what are the best things to eat yeah well i know it sounds a little bit repetitive but it is individual but you can make some generalizations so first of all the individual differences are obvious there's um your body type but also your gender and i think just as important your physique if you are into bodybuilding or you're an athlete professionally that's very different than someone like me who's just using their brain and their fingers to make a living so that there's that consideration and there are there are hacks that i'm helping develop that allows you to be in the adversity state which is what we're describing eating less consuming less protein and that's the adversity state that's longevity but then have periods where you can have an abundance state and so perhaps i would suggest trying on days that you work out assuming you're not a professional athlete um having some extra protein eat a little bit of fish for example but mostly for that adversity state you want to be focused on plants why is that because plants have less available amino acids your body has to work harder to get them out but they also have a ratio of amino acids that turns on some of these defenses that i'm talking about a very important one is called mtor little m capital t or and it's there to sense how much protein you're taking in and if it's always sensing that you're eating protein it will not turn on the survival pathway that leads to longevity so you'll look good if you're always eating protein because your body is yeah i got plenty of energy let's go for it let's grow but if you never have that state of want that adversity um i'm convinced and the data shows it from population studies that a carnivorous diet isn't longevity uh isn't a longevity producing diet in the in the long run right but in the short run of course you'll feel better uh and a lot of people argue with me saying i feel great how could this be wrong but you know remember life is long you want to look look at ways that will extend your lifespan two three four decades from now but i think you can have both i think that it's all about pulsing it doing adversity and then occasionally having the abundance as well and you mentioned a mediterranean diet earlier is there anything that we've learned about what we know about what we eat and like high fat versus low carb versus all of the stuff that to maximize our longevity yeah so the the amazing thing about the state of knowledge of humanity right now is that over the last few thousand years humans have figured out to eat less often there are states of fasting most religions do that but also the types of foods mediterranean diet is a good example there's a okinawan diet which is a japanese island that has mostly plants and a little bit of uh of fish but mostly it's not overeating and there's not huge amounts of animal fat and animal products and dairy in a typical long-lived population uh that i just described so that we've known for a long time and you know it's crazy that we're debating this mediterranean diet is just known to be healthy and vegetarian and vegan diets are also conducive to longevity um but the other thing that's amazing about our state of knowledge is that people like me have discovered genes that control aging sortuns are the ones that we work on this mtor gene that i mentioned those diets are turning on those defenses that we discovered not because we were studying diets because we were starting yeast cells and worms and fruit flies but now we understand in this unified theory of aging that by eating these types of foods you're making the body think that times are tough turning on the defenses that for the long run will be conducive to longevity and fostol these diseases that will kill us and in the short run you'll actually feel better um and in the term in terms of um body composition will actually look better too now now assuming we're eating like let's say a green pepper or red pepper is there a difference between organic and inorganic or ones that have undergone stress and ones that haven't undergone stress in terms of how our body processes that yeah for sure the other reason to be focusing more on plants is that they make molecules that are very healthy for us and again we scientists have figured out that those molecules aren't just being antioxidants you know that's the theory of the 1980s what we've realized is that in addition to be being antioxidants they actually turn on those longevity pathways the sirtuins they work on mtor there's another one called ampk which senses blood sugar and energy and by eating plants that in general make these molecules and especially plants that are stressed themselves or have adversity which heightens the amount of these molecules we can ingest them and trick our bodies into thinking that there is adversity right we've evolved i believe this is my theory with conrad howard's is that we're sensing the plant world and when our food supply might run out we need to defend our bodies against the environment and that leads to longer life and the theory came from our discovery that resveratrol from red wine and 19 other plant molecules that are produced by plants when they're stressed turn on these sertuan defenses and we're trying to figure out how is that possible is it just a coincidence and then we came up with this theory that we've evolved to sense our food supply i want to come back to resveratrol later but just for people listening don't run out and grab a glass of red wine i think you'd need like a hundred glasses of red wine to get the the amount that you would you would we'll come back to supplements in a second is it our organic plants stressed more than inorganic plants or unorganic i don't even know what the opposite of organic is i suppose it's non-organic but um plants are definitely organic but yeah they're grown organically so they're they're under more stress they wouldn't have as many uh purpose uh well pesticides on there they're not grown in perfect conditions the best ones are locally grown ones that are in a local garden where the environment the temperatures the there's diseases uh there's caterpillars that's the best kind of environment to get your food from and if they don't look pretty that's not a bad thing often the other thing you should look for is bright colors nutritionists have known this for years that they're very healthy if you eat those bright orange dark green red fruits and vegetables the reason that i think colors are good is that they're indicators of of stress if you stress a fruit or a leaf you've probably seen it changes color gets brighter and those are chemicals that protect the plant but also are produced in combination with what these these um health promoting molecules um uh are involved in uh you know i wanted to mention a word that may be foreign to to your audience which is xenohormesis and this is a coin a term that conrad and i coined xeno means across species and hormesis is this idea that what doesn't kill you makes you live longer and i mentioned that word because if you can remember it you'll you'll live that lifestyle you want to induce hormesis which is a state of want adversity and you can also get that from other species as well as do it yourself by like doing what we said don't eat as much eat plants that don't have as much uh protein which is being sensed and then other things that you can do like temperature changes uh and exercise these all put the body in that state i like the idea of adversity and i want to explore that in different paths including exercise and some other ways that we cause adversity there's two things i want to i want to go into on food before we move to a new topic one is is there a notion to eating things in season like i go to the grocery store apples are there 365 days a year but they're not ripe on a tree 365 days a year they have a season they have a time should we be eating with that season or is that a good thing that these plants and fruits are available 24 7 365 now yeah well so the it's knowing that if the plants are in season um and um otherwise healthy they're they're actually they have the energy to produce these molecules um so yeah in season but but grown under conditions that are not perfect okay um the offseason apples the the the ones that are a little bit flowery i would avoid those they don't have the abundance of nutrients and chemicals that we want but yeah it's um so organic in season vegetables and fruits is is the way to go and that's what i have turned to in my lifestyle increasingly so as i get older and then increasingly regretful that i didn't do it earlier um shane for those of you who are not watching this on on video i'm now drinking a cup of hot matcha tea the green tea the very concentrated green tea those leaves that are grown often in japan they come from green tea plants that are put in shade conditions before they're picked and it's that lack of light that causes it to become bright green but also produces molecules that are healthy there's one called for short ecgc which is known to be a xenohermetic molecule to turn on the body's defenses and pretty much every morning i start my day with one of these and it's a great way to start because there's of course no sugar in here it's boosting uh my body's defenses but it's also filling up my stomach so i don't feel the need to eat breakfast though i as i admitted i ate a little bit of avocado today just because i felt like but usually i don't when you say boosting defenses you mean from the antioxidants no actually so ecgc is slightly antioxidant but it's actually it inhibits and turns on the right enzymes that are known to invoke longevity in animals and probably in ourselves as well it's another one of these xeno-hermetic molecules in the same class as resveratrol olive oil or components of olive oil and there's a whole bunch of them and you know we can talk more about these when you want to get to the supplementation let's talk about sugar before we get into some other adversity states what do we know about sugar and its effect on our biological age not that much so the biological age right now is measured a number of ways you can do a panel of 40 blood tests inside trackers is just one that i use the so that's one way the other more more [Music] epigenetic related so back to the scratches on the cd you can measure those scratches it's called the dna methylation clock or the horvath clock named after stephen horvath a scientist at ucla and these are the the chemicals that get added or subtracted from the dna molecule that tell genes to be on or off and the sirtuins that i work on help control that process and you can read these with a dna sequencing machine and dna sequences you know we're using all the time now in the lab and by reading those chemicals where they are and how they've changed over time for instance chain i could take your blood or a cheek swab and tell you biologically how old you are relative to others your age and so your birthdays don't matter as much for your health as your actual dna methylation age or your scratches now we can measure that but to your point we haven't known about the clock long enough to know if glucose or sugar directly impacts that clock what i can say is that people that eat a mediterranean diet have a slower ticking clock and people that exercise and do the kind of things that i'm telling everybody today to do in general have a lower biological age than those who do all the terrible things don't exercise smoke become obese these are ways to greatly accelerate the rate of aging how would a listener go about testing their biological age uh well it's there are some companies that have just started up that measure this from a blood sample uh uh it's fairly expensive it's a few hundred dollars at least my student one of my students at harvard has developed a technology where we can measure this clock very cheaply for at least 10 times less than that and we're about to release a product uh in this sometime this year that would be a cheek swab which is far easier than a blood test of course and so just for a lot less money and hopefully more more often you can look at your biological age and say well is my new diet affecting my age have i slowed it down am i reversing my age which is increasingly doable um and so that um there's a website if people want to sign up i hope it's okay if i've mentioned that people often want to know so that the company is called tally health t-a-l-l-y health dot com and there's a wait list but get on that because we're also looking for people to help us try and figure out through experimentation what happens when you eat certain things or take certain supplements and so we'll guide you through that we'll give you your credit score for your body and then the goal is to use science to slow down and reverse the ticking of everybody's individual clock so that you know getting 14 15 years extra life is not that difficult just by doing the things that i'm talking about today you'll get an extra 14 15 years on average but then i want to help people get 20 years 30 years beyond what they would have otherwise had you mentioned exercise and i know some people love exercise i'm not one of those people i sort of um do it but i don't love it i don't look forward to it i um is there any hope for me like is there a point at which i can maximize the advantages of exercise but not not anymore like declining utility yeah well i feel for you i'm the same um i'm lazy as i mentioned so let's see so so what what's recommended by doctors who know what they're talking about it's you want to have two types of exercise at least three if you can so what are they there's there's yoga pilates that's you know for joint stretch that's the basics important for longevity you don't want to break bones if you fall over the other is weight lifting you want to exert your muscles grow muscles at least maintain your muscles by the time you're my age you know i'm 52 now i'm losing more than one percent of my muscle mass every year if i don't exercise so lifting weights that's important then the third type is aerobic and the minimum amount to have benefits um pretty substantial benefits though would be to lose your breath at least once a week preferably three times a week for 10 minutes so that's not a lot but even that i'll admit is hard for people like you and me to do but it's not as though you have to go running for an hour or cycling for 100 miles it just a little bit goes a long way and what's happening when you exercise is that again it's turning on these defenses that your body uh thinks is needed to survive but you know i'll tell you something more personal and this is this is not medical advice it's not science but i do everything really well except two things sleep and exercise those are my advices i try to sleep but i work a lot i travel a lot um but i know i'd be better if i could sleep seven hours a night i'm more like five to six the other thing that i don't do that i prescribe or recommend is exercise and i rarely lose my breath i try i used to have a treadmill pre-covered and i would do that but because of the pandemic i'm not doing a lot of that so i probably lose my breath maybe two days a week not not as much as i'd like but my biological age is still getting younger so i think it's possible to to hack it some of the molecules that we work on resveratrol there's one called nmn which we can talk about later but it's a nad boosting molecule that also turns on sort of i've been taking that um and so my health has never been better you could argue maybe it would be even better if i exercised more but i'm pretty happy with my biochemistry my blood biochemistry is equivalent to a 20 year old i'm a 52 so i think there is hope for us that's a long answer to uh to your question but wait isn't sleep super important to longevity like as we age okay so here's some notions that i bring to this right like my baggage with sleep is like as we age we tend to sleep less and everything that i know about sleep tends to tell me that sleep is super important for mental functioning for age aging well for all of these like health benefits associated with sleep and you're telling me you get four or five hours and you're 52 and you have a 20 year old biological clock so maybe sleep isn't that important um maybe maybe i i'm i might be 15 years old if i could get more sleep but uh we will never know but i i what i know is that those sort of genes that i talk about all the time and i've been studying for 30 years they control the clock and then the disrupted clock affects them because it's a big cycle and if you get that out of whack in an animal they will if you don't let them sleep they will age prematurely if you stop a rat from sleeping for just two weeks it will develop diabetes it's really important so i don't think there's any argument that sleep is important but can you hack your way around it maybe that's what i'm showing but i don't want to give the impression that i think that that's the best way to live life i mean i got i got up at 5 30 this morning i went to sleep probably at one o'clock um that's not a good way to live i i am tired um i i do find i've got caffeine i've got my nad boosters which do help me get through the day in the morning but ideally i would want more sleep i think i'd have better memory and focus if i did that there are two hacks that i'm doing that allow me to get away with less sleep now um i've included meditation at night into my daily life most days um and that's been very helpful um and the second is that i have a bed that reduces my body temperature in the middle of the night and i get deeper sleep which also seems to help are you using innate sleep i am yeah what's your setting profile on that i use one too what's your what's your do do you do warm cold warm or are you like cool cold warm like how do you set that up depends on the season um i'm in winter now in boston which is my my apartment's very cold but so these days i i started out a bit warmer than usual but what i normally do would say i get into a coolish bed and then the next stage is drop me down lower and lower and then half an hour before waking up it'll shoot up to um as warm as i can handle it but yeah i like to drop the temperature down and i sleep better that way so coming into this conversation one of the notions that i had is one of the reasons that we we tend to age or accelerate aging as we get older is that we tend to sleep less and i guess that's not the case right because i always thought oh like you know i see this with my parents right now right like they're sleeping less than they used to and i just assumed that that was part of aging but also what accelerated our aging yeah i think you're right and and that's the problem once you start like getting less sleep you will age and your age will give you less sleep and that's why it's important to to maintain that that you know sleep health and uh but you know nmn which is this nad boosting molecule that i mentioned earlier that is part of the sleep wake cycle and one of the hacks that i i think is is really beneficial is that by taking nmn in the morning i'm simulating or stimulating the morning response and i get the alertness and the energy that i would have had if i'd had more sleep and i can reset jet lag you know i'm a scientist so people might say david you can't mention anecdotes but i'm going to do it anyway i haven't had jet lag for a decade because i've been able to modulate my own body clock by using these chemicals which as i mentioned are activating sirtuins and controlling the clock now most people don't know that but um i think if if you uh have paid attention to the kind of things that i'm saying out there uh you would know that um it is possible to hack the clock i want to go back to the theory of adversity before we come to supplements and sort of like some of the stuff that you do and with adversity there's other ways that we can introduce stress to our bodies like hot tubs or saunas what do we know about saunas and hot tubs like there seems to be a strong correlation at least with saunas to longevity why is that um well so i'll admit when i started writing uh my book which is um [Music] which was a number of years ago uh the editor said oh you should talk about saunas and hot tubs and i said this is a serious book come on i'm not going to put that fashion in there but i was wrong actually there's now a lot of evidence that being in a sauna is good for heart health at a minimum there's a lot of studies of thousands of mostly men in finland that do sauna bathing as they call it and they are protected dramatically like excess they are exercising but how does that work well you know there's lots of theories it's hard to prove but one theory is that we have what are called heat shock proteins in our body that get turned on when the body's too warm and we know actually if you turn on heat shock proteins in animals they live longer and they do that because they help fold proteins correctly and misfolded proteins and the recycling of proteins is very very important it's one of the reasons that i eat a plant-based diet mainly is to turn over that protein cycle but yeah so that's one cold is different we think it's working through a process that is called browning of fat we have white fat on our back that turns beige or brown by being cold and then that revs up our metabolism and this brown fat also seems to secrete uh little signals that make the rest of the body healthy but it's still early days we only discovered we scientists only discovered that brown fat exists in humans about a decade ago so we're really not sure how this works but i can tell you from having talked to a lot of people that do saunas sauna bathing cold tubs and myself included that it does have benefits on blood by chemistry and even if it doesn't you feel great um and you know these kind of things if they make you feel great you know why not do those with the potential to extend lifespan as well i feel like we've been doing some form of like hot therapy for thousands of years through baths and saunas and you know we're quick to dismiss this stuff but i also feel like there's a reason that it sticks around uh even if we can't even if we don't understand that reason at this point that we still use it i use a sauna like two or three times a week and it it's super helpful for not only my mental health but my sleep and i feel like it has a huge impact on my physical health but feelings aren't scientific right so right right but you know that i would say there's enough data to say yeah you're probably protecting yourself at a minimum against cardiovascular disease by doing that but i also find that that my my lungs benefit from bringing breathing in that really hot air in the sauna and yeah in my case i walk out and it's like minus 30 celsius so i get the hot and the cold right away so i i'm trying to live forever here and if you don't it'll feel that way but yeah it's all about stressing the body and and sometimes it's it's it's the differential that counts there's a therapy called hyperbaric oxygen therapy where you go into high pressure and breathe in oxygen and then they cycle it off often they cycle it not always where you go high pressure and then low and high and what i think is going on is that it's not the high pressure that's important it's the decrease that you're becoming pseudo-hypoxic your body thinks it's running out of oxygen when it's just coming down from a high level and my lab has shown in mice that pseudohypoxia is a real thing and uh and is probably mimicking exercise and the kind of benefits that people are reporting are similar to exercise except you're lying down i've done it a few times it's it's really quite enjoyable you get to watch it i you know you'd appreciate this i watch shit's creek on uh while i'm in one of these tubes uh and you know i'm getting seemingly a workout just by lying down well so physical stress is good what about mental stress does mental stress have a benefit or you know i tend to think it would only be a drawback like this low level of persistent mental stress would be bad for you but maybe if it's intensity and it comes in intensity and then dies to nothing and then comes again it would be good for you how do we think about the relationship between stress mental stress in this case and longevity yeah well it's important not to mix up the two were the two uses of the same word um so stress that i'm talking about hormesis is biological stress making your body and your cells think that there's adversity psychological stresses are just a different beast it's not it shouldn't even be called the same word um but let's focus on that now we know that a little bit of excitement and thrill is very beneficial um but you can have chronic stress depression [Music] you know just the kind of stress that leads to cortisol surging through your body this is not healthy at all and would reduce lifespan we know from animal studies that those that are under social stress will be unhealthy and die sooner so if you are experiencing that try to figure out how to reduce your psychological stress meditate breathing exercises just try to avoid worrying too much this is really important and i can speak again from experience i was a very agitated anxious person in my teens and twenties by my thirties i went to harvard and i thought if i continue worrying like i have been i am going to die young and that's not going to be a good look for someone who works on aging so i've learned to not worry so much i focus on what i can do in the day i focus on the fact that i'm never probably ever going to run out of food because i live in a wealthy country i'm not going to run out of shelter i'm going to have friends and family and that's all i need to exist so what's the worst that can happen still not that bad and that's a good way to live life i think yeah i think it was buffett warren buffett who who at one point said something along the lines of the key to his age was the fact that he has no stress in his life and i thought that that was a really interesting yeah when you look at centenarians the people that live over 100 they have that in common they have a good sense of humor they don't worry too much in their lives on average and they also have good partners it's been shown by studying hundreds of people over their lifetimes that one of the most important if not the most important factor is to have a reliable partner a pet can substitute for that if you don't have one of those at the time but yeah you want companionship that really does reduce your stress levels and leads to longevity it's been proven does attitude affect our biological age like would a positive outlook help you live longer than a pessimistic one it does it does well we don't know cause and effect we're looking at associations but people who live a long time tend to have a sense of purpose are driven by mission and so that is great advice is to work towards a goal and you know clearly you and i are like that and i think that also helps focus the mind reduce stress if you're actually working towards something bigger than yourself you'll have that mental state and you won't be so focused in on yourself and anxious i don't want to go too deep on supplements i think you talk at length for over an hour in lifespan which is your podcast on supplements the third episode i think i do want to talk about three in particular that seem to keep coming up across a lot of people i know who are super focused on health you bring up animen resveratrol and athletic greens and you take those every day talk to me about those three and why you take them and what they do to your body in the context of slowing or reversing aging right uh so let's take them one by one resveratrol is a small what's called a polyphenol it's produced by many plants to survive it's produced by grapes and it's concentrated in red wine it should be a white powder it shouldn't be brown if you buy it and it's brown throw it away um i take a gram of it every morning with rare exceptions when i'm traveling i forget it but i mix it with a little bit of yogurt because it just a little bit like a couple of teaspoons or today i had a bit of avocado because resveratrol is insoluble in water and often people take it and it doesn't get absorbed so do that why does it work well we we have shown in many animal studies and people now shown in human studies that it's activating uh one of the main sertuan pathways called sir t1 and it does that like an accelerator pedal the chemical residual will bind to the enzyme and make it work faster now that's the accelerator pedal for t1 the gas or the petrol is nad nad is a molecule that we need for life without it we're dead in 30 seconds and nad isn't something that you can um well you can swallow it but the best bang for the buck is to eat molecules that the body uses to make this nad molecule and the one that i choose to take is called nmn short for nicotinamide mononucleotide but think of it as m ms but just flip the letters around don't eat m m's you won't live longer you can eat m m's but if you want to live longer don't do that but the the nmn is important because it's the immediate precursor to make nad and the body makes nad very rapidly and i know from clinical trials that i've been involved with that taking a gram of nmn which i do every day raises nad levels in whole blood in the cells in the blood probably in the rest of my body as well it's hard to test that without a tissue sample i'm not going to give up my brain anytime soon but the doubling of that nad is important because as we get older we make less of this chemical we have about half the levels of nad in our skin for example as i i have half the levels if i didn't supplement that i would have made when i was 20. um and so i boost those levels back up to being youthful and then the idea is that the sirtuin defenses are activated and that's enhanced by the diet that i have as well as a little bit of exercise now the third one you mentioned is athletic greens because i'm on a vegetarian vegan diet i describe myself as a newbie struggling vegan um i need nutrients and so athletic greens is uh full of vitamins and and plant-based whole foods that ensures that i don't lack those nutrients because if you're just eating a vegan diet and i've also given up dairy you want to make sure that there's adequate nutrition so you know i'm i'm on one meal a day basically oh mad but i want to add another couple of letters which is a n o mad a n i just made that up by the way shane so trademark that madden let's call it adequate nutrition put that on the end and that's what athletic greens does for me um i do take one other drug called metformin which is a type 2 diabetes drug that has been shown to associate with longer life and less diseases in old age by looking at type 2 diabetics and there's a stunning stunning fact that type 2 diabetics that would normally have a short lifespan when they take metformin typically at 2 grams a day i'm on one gram a day by the way they actually have less diseases and live longer than people that don't have type 2 diabetes why did you give up dairy you mentioned that you stopped stop dairy what what caused you to do that and then did that have any impact because you i know you monitor your body quite a bit did that have any impact on you uh seemingly it did yeah and so i change one or two things at a time and have a look how it goes and i'm an experimenter i love dairy i was eating a lot of cheese and red wine my diet two or three days a week was a cheese board and a couple of glasses of red wine maybe more and uh my my partner she was looking at what i uh eat and she actually uh said uh that's not very healthy and uh so i've adopted her lifestyle which is not so much um meat cheese dairy um and i've looked at my blood biochemistry and i'm actually now younger and healthier than i've ever been since i've been measuring it over a decade now it's more like 14 years and i can plot various parameters testosterone glucose the list goes on inflammation blood type blood cell composition and uh for most of those markers i'm better than a 20 year old for for health and and i think a lot of that's due to my new diet that i've adopted because i can just see things getting better and better over time i interviewed alan campbell who was the former personal chef for tom brady and gisele bundchen and we talked at length and sort of about diet and eating for peak mental and physical performance and it's interesting to me that you mentioned cutting out dairy and seeing this go because the three things that he mentioned carry the most bang for the buck for for cutting out were gluten dairy and sugar in terms of your sleep your physical performance your mental performance do you have any thoughts on that yeah i do i really do um so i'm i'm i'm a lazy guy i like me right so i'm an average person uh and so i've i've done this over time i'm not great at it and i i'm just mentioned that because sometimes people say i can never give up alcohol i could never give up meat it's not true and so i at least i found it not to be true first thing i cut out was a lot of carbohydrates i used to eat bread every day i would just put if i ate something it would be on toast okay that's my life i cut that out and i found immediate improvements in my biochemistry levels particularly my glucose levels the next thing i cut out was uh was meat i worked towards a mediterranean diet had fish and eventually now i'm i'm no meat and and that improved my numbers even better cholesterol what do you call it triglycerides all came down and i have a familial history genetics of heart disease i have what's called lp little a high levels lp little a is the worst about 30 of us have this and we're destined if we don't do something to have a short lifespan but though that was very important was the cutting out meat and it's not just the protein it's also the fat that comes along with the steak and whatever that i was eating and then the third change was the the dairy i did that just to see what would happen i figured it wouldn't matter i'm not allergic to dairy i'm not lactose intolerant but it did have an effect it made things even better and what i think is going on shane is that i was eating a large amount of protein not just fat but eggs and all that stuff and and now that i have less protein i think that mtor pathway that's really important for longevity um in animals and probably people is really kicking in in a way that had never done so before that's really interesting and the only other thing i want to mention about alan campbell and just out of uh just so people don't get the wrong idea he's also super plant forward with a little bit of fish so it's mostly plant-based diet and it's just interesting how you you've both sort of like come into the same sphere i guess if you will from very different approaches uh in terms of that and i always find that stuff interesting because it makes me think that there must be something there well i don't like plants um i mean i'm now learning how to enjoy plants but for me they were a side dish but here's the thing there's a lot of debate especially on social media about meat versus plants i would love meat to be lifespan extending that would be heaven but it's not you just look at those populations and people that live a long time they are generally smaller women who don't eat much who eat vegetarian i mean that's the fact we can debate it all day but there are these scientific facts that we have to pay attention to shrink to live that's a good title of a book is it ever too late or too soon to sort of like start to slow the effects of aging if not like how do the how do you stage interventions at different points in your life i would say speaking myself because i'm not a professional nutritionist but i do know the science i would if it was me start doing the meal skipping in my 20s but make sure i've got enough calories coming in i'd start the supplements in my late 20s before that you've got a lot of nad already your body's already defending itself when you're young it's your late 20s 30s things start to kick in um and then but what about your question which is more important which is when is it too late for people um i've never seen it too late there are animal studies you can that i could point to that show that you can have effect this mtor pathway with a drug called rapamycin that extends their lifespan even if they're the equivalent of 70 years old and um no there's a point where you're so frail and so sick you're probably on death's door that it's unlikely you know just that you should start exercising and fasting probably though that's really at the final stages if you're still let's say a relatively healthy 70 80 year old my father is a good example these changes to your lifestyle can have rapid benefits but do it in consultation with a doctor because you might not you know benefit from fasting if you need body weight if you have other existing conditions it's important to take those into consideration as well so talk to me a little bit more about your father is he eating mostly a plant-based diet too yeah yeah so he and i are very similar i'm people think i'm experimenting on my dad but i'm not he's a scientist he reads the science and we've come up with this protocol which is the uh very low glucose we don't eat a lot of sugar we try to avoid desserts low carb um don't eat a lot of meat he would eat meat very occasionally but mostly it's plants um he doesn't eat much during the day he mainly eats dinner and he's he's lean now and what else he does more exercise than i do so he's better at that he does aerobics i goes a couple of times a week to the gym and does rowing and weightlifting what else is he takes the supplement so he's on resveratrol nmn metformin and that's his cocktail he doesn't take athletic greens just yet uh but he's a super healthy 82 year old he was not on that path in his 50s my age he was overweight he had high cholesterol looking at dying in his 70s in his mid 70s he went on this protocol and is now an 82 year old that's fitter than most people that age he has no diseases perfect mental health his eyesight hasn't changed in all that time and so yeah i mean we're looking forward to this experiment being a successful one but if nothing else he's a beacon of hope that you can start late and have big effects you mentioned teenagers is there a link between when we start puberty like that that sounds to me when we think of puberty it sounds like rapid aging almost like a concentrated dose of aging oh no you're like is there a link between when we start how long we live and is that true that puberty is sort of like this rapid dose of aging well i'm gonna speak um as a scientist with an opinion okay um and that opinion is based on all the science that i've read and i read a lot of papers i before i get out of bed i'm reading science science papers so that here's what i believe now i don't want parents to get upset with me i certainly don't want people to worry but here's what i think will turn out to be the case the biological clock this the scratches on the cd that we talked about earlier they start at conception the egg and the sperm come together even an embryo even a fetus and a young baby they're aging we can measure this on this clock and certainly teenagers are aging now we know that obesity and lack of exercise lack of nutrition lack of plants is unhealthy and i would not be surprised if the teenagers are by the time they hit their 20s on average or older biologically than they were 20 30 years ago when i grew up because we are we were moving we were generally not so overweight we were not eating as much sugar and that's probably accelerating our kids aging rate meaning that 20 30 years from now 40 years from now that is still going to echo in their health because the clock unless you do something radical doesn't go backwards you track a lot of your data right with uh you have an aura ring on i think you use an eight sleep uh you're testing your biological age are we starting to think of biological problems almost like engineering problems where we optimize for specific data points in the hope that those data points are correct well absolutely that there's a growing number of people uh you know i was at the forefront i was kind of this biohacking guy scientist interested and i was out on a limb as one of you know maybe 50 people in the world that do what i did now there's millions of people around the world that monitor themselves with rims with beds with apple or you know i shouldn't say brands but you know with watches um there's plenty of fitness trackers you'd be aware of they're all part of this global movement to not fly blind with our health we can track things we can see what works what doesn't and it was crazy that for up until recently we would be driving the equivalent of driving a car without a dashboard who would do that you know you might have a check engine light you could overheat same with our bodies and and going to the doctor once a year for an annual checkup now that we can monitor ourselves every hour soon every every second eventually every thousandth of a second that world that we're entering makes this old world of going to the doctor once a year see medieval and it is what can happen in a year you could get cancer you could have heart disease you could have a heart attack now we have the devices some of us use them increasingly eventually everyone will have them we'll know ahead of time if we have cancer if we have heart disease if we can have a heart attack next week and stave off those things and prevent them from happening and that is a revolution separate from what i'm working on that will extend lifespan i believe by another decade it's super interesting to me because we have all of the tools available to us now we're not using them where i could walk into my doctor's office and i could tell them what i'm feeling or the symptoms that i'm experiencing but then they could pull up on their ipad or whatever like all of my biomarkers to see and to gather more data but we don't we choose not to use that at this point or we're not ready for it i mean privacy concerns aside but how do you think about that like we will get to this point where i have like a device in me i'm sure during our lifetime that i'm showing up at a hospital and instead of filling out paperwork or answering questions they're just looking at it and they're being like okay now we have the data to back up some of these decisions 100 there's no question um you can take that to the bank that that's the world that's coming um and i wrote about it a few years ago and and covert 19 has accelerated that i was predicting telemedicine and um you know wellness at home and this whole revolution i thought that would be 10 years away and and it's here now so why isn't it so common well partly it's education and podcasts like this are helpful but it's also that it's expensive so we tend to forget that these watches and rings are hundreds of dollars and these tests these blood tests are also hundreds of dollars and our doctors are reticent to be doing all these tests because the health care systems want to save money ultimately right forgetting that ultimately they will save money by keeping people alive and healthier for longer but in what's what's fascinating is that i have this collection of data that i can call up on my phone and it's all graphed by this inside tracker group but you can you can do others and my doctor i thought he would say oh i don't want to trust that data i only trust the data that i gather on you but the opposite was true i actually i was zooming with him because we don't tend to go to the doctor as much anymore and i called up my data on the screen and he loved it he was into it he said oh this is so great i wish i had this on every one of my patients but yeah you're right that they the doctors generally don't do that because it's expensive but we can now do that and then show our doctors and they're grateful well it's so interesting because it it it's expensive in the moment but it's super preventative if we go with the assumption that most medical care costs are at the end of life or from chronic diseases that we might be able to avoid that then this these costs tend to be up front and they're massively preventative so they actually would save health care systems lots of money in the long run but we we never look at that because we look like to treat things and so like as a computer scientist i look at this and i'm like not only can we prevent problems before they happen but now we can start to get this amazing quantity of data where i can be like you're showing up with this thing and you feel this way what we know from 20 million other people who've shown up with this thing in this way that it's not what you think and it's something different and then we can save a lot of money and time there as well for sure and those technologies exist i've been wearing what's called a bio button i have no affiliation so if you want to look them up they're called bio intellisense and this is an fda approved device that doctors can send home with their patients after surgery to monitor their heart as well as their movement their vibration their temperature and that data that comes in is actually very informative beyond the heart they can tell if you've got a flu versus a common cold versus depression covert 19 and that's can the world will be you have something stuck on or under your skin that will tell a nurse or a doctor or some sort of ai system that something is wrong and it needs fixing well before you would ever have a problem noticeable by yourself or a doctor a lot of money seems to be going into life extension recently i'm thinking of altos labs with jeff bezos and some others committed about 3 billion which is the biggest seed investment i've ever seen in my life and they hired some of the world's top scientists it it seems like it's set up to commercialize i can't even say this that yema yamakata factors yamanaka how do i say that yamanaka how do i say yamanaka factors for cellular reprogramming for age reversal now that's different than sort of the area that we've been talking about a lot today but the initial results from that those biomarkers seem to indicate that we're on to something with a shoot a few short bursts of these drugs at least in the mice how do you think about that and is that also the future so that we control sort of like part of our aging and then what we don't control we can use drugs to reverse or slow down yeah well so we were working on this for a while based on the idea that we could find genes that would polish the scratches on the dvd um and we came across a set of three genes called o s and k for short which are three of the six or so yamanaka factors um and about a year ago we published that we could reverse the age of an animal and we restored eyesight to a blind old mouse and cured glaucoma in that animal and we are now working towards human clinical trials in canada we have um a non-human primate study for safety to see how that goes and within the next 18 months if all goes well we will be reversing aging in a human if all goes well so that's going well and then so that discovery in part you know there are a few other colleagues that are in this but not a lot led to a huge interest in this epigenetic information theory of aging that we started off talking about and the idea is that we can truly reset the age of the body and diseases of aging like alzheimer's and heart disease and even cancer will go away if we become young again and so yeah i have my company is called life biosciences it's here in boston altos has come along three years later and they're working on this too but the goal is is a great one i wish them all the best of luck i hope that they are hugely successful because it could be transformational for our species on the planet the ability to finally control the rate at which we age not just in the forwards direction but in reverse as well i want to switch gears a little bit and talk about lyme disease your daughter had lyme disease i had lyme disease in the summer to the point where i couldn't even get out of bed basically i had full on bell's palsy i like couldn't open my jaw i couldn't stand still for more than 15 seconds without being in massive amounts of pain and to going to the medical system just briefly um we're about preventative care so you show up and it's like oh you have bell's palsy it's on a heart attack here take some pregnancy and like go home and it's like well no i'm a healthy you know 40 something year old male what's causing this like why aren't we going deeper to figure this out and i'm curious as to what research you did and what you learned about lyme um during the process that most people don't know uh my middle child contracted lyme i think it was about seven years ago now and i was exposed to the how the medical system works when you have an infection uh first of all it was very hard to diagnose she had headaches who knows what's causing that right and um i i googled it i searched it and i said it's probably lyme disease uh we took it to emerg the emergency room and uh they said well it might be this might be that could be leukemia or whatever you know but we'll do a lime test okay i think i had to insist but they did a lyme test but the problem with the system was that it took uh three days to get a result that was out that was ambiguous because it's using 1980s molecular biology technology it's primitive it's called a western blot which we don't even use anymore much and then because it was ambiguous the insurance company said no we have to have a definitive result before we start treating your daughter with antibiotics meanwhile natalie is losing her eyesight you know you like you've said you you can't focus and she got to the point where i i've now been told that she had a chance of dying that was pretty high 40 50 at that point it was in her brain and we were not treating her because the test wasn't definitive so that was that was disturbing and i also told the doctors give me a sample of her dna or you know spinal fluid and i've got my lab across the street i'll go sequence the dna and i'll find this organism if it's there and they refuse to give me a sample so you know i'm traumatized at this point as a parent and i when you traumatized you you'd like to do something about it and so i started a company that was a spin out of ai that we were doing in my lab we built our own little mini supercomputer out of gpu uh you know graphic processing units um and we were able to figure out how to find any organism in the blood of a human being and this company now has a product that is being used for example by liver transplant patients that are immunocompromised because of the drugs and we can track the infections that they have like viruses that come out of their liver and rest of the body so that's now a reality it's not mainstream but eventually it will be and when that's possible you know you go to a go to a shop a pharmacy or you go to your doctor or at home you do an immediate test you don't know what's causing the problem it'll say oh we've detected lyme disease and by the way three months ago you had the rhinovirus whatever you know you can see all that stuff now and that's going to be a world that's almost here but when it arrives mainstream the idea of waiting four five six days for a result for something that could kill you i mean that again is medieval science and medicine on the the same whale i mean i had to advocate for a test and it was only actually a friend who gave me a test my family physician wouldn't give me a lyme disease test um despite all the symptoms that i had did your daughter end up taking doxycycline right it was so severe she had to have an iv treatment for many weeks i think it was at least three weeks that were it was delivered at home um by her mom to get rid of it how did you treat yours uh doxycycline yeah so i just did a cycle of that i mean it seemed to instantly not instantly but over a period of maybe two weeks like it went back to you know gradually like i had facial paralysis on half my face and you know so it started with uh i could stand again i could open my jaw a little bit more the last thing to come back was sort of the facial paralysis and it was scary i mean it was really and it was scary that you had to be an advocate of your own health too in a system which you don't know how to navigate which i also thought you know as a parent you feel as somebody who shows up at a merge with like a face that doesn't work you also feel it in a different way um is there any lifespan effect of lyme disease after treatment no one knows don't know um doxycyclin um in my my recollection i have to check on this uh people who listening can search for this in in pubmed.org uh is lifespan extending so maybe it's a short course that you took but um maybe there's some upsides but the problem with lyme is particularly if you don't get it early it can become chronic it it lives in your joints comes out causes a lot of joint pain that would be not a state that would be conducive to longevity any increase in chronic inflammation is anti-longevity i i like the notion you mentioned yoga earlier i'm just circling back to that now but like you sort of mentioned well there's there's exercise in terms of like lifting weights and running and exerting yourself that way but there's also preparing today to live a much longer life that might be well into your hundreds and part of that preparation is you need to stretch and have joint flexibility and because it doesn't like hip surgery correlate to death like you break your hip and it you basically like there's a strong correlation to p people who do that and then their lifespan is is almost over at that point it is uh yeah the chances of dying after you break your hip as an older person uh is about as bad as late stage cancer and every 19 seconds in the u.s at least someone breaks their hip so it's a massively uh untalked about problem a colleague of mine at harvard made i guess unnecessary light of it but his motto is the secret to living longer is hanging onto the handrail and these points well taken really that that it's pretty easy to prevent deaths sometimes my grandmother who i wrote about in my book was really influential in my life died that way she tripped on a little bump in her rug broke her upper femur um went to surgery not enough oxygen in the brain and then the next five years which was basically a vegetable and then died um you know not a very pleasant way so yeah it's avoidable right if you maintain your hip strength if you can muscles flexibility you also want to make sure your household doesn't have ripples in the carpet and don't walk on stairs don't climb ladders that kind of thing can save lives you know and it's not that difficult and and shane this is this is the point i want to make is 80 percent of our longevity and our health in the future is in our own hands only 20 is genetic which we cannot yet do much about and some of these changes are very simple skip breakfast have tea instead work out maintain your muscle strength do yoga flex a little bit touch your toes in the shower if you can these can add years if not decades to your life just by changing things in a small way you don't need high tech to make a big difference yeah it's interesting we always look for that one thing right that that causes somebody that decision the drama the movie moment that you know causes somebody to be successful or get results or live longer and what we you know what we miss is the magic that happens on a daily basis that's this slow incremental progress that is too too little to notice in the moment but by the time you notice it it's so great that you're looking for that one magical moment that one factor that that caused it yeah it is a lot of work i'll admit you know it's been daily since my 30s but it's been worth it it was an experiment i should say but um i didn't know if it was going to work so far so good right i'm 52 i'm not dead yet but it's it's every day making the right decisions or better decisions about what to eat of course what not to eat going to the gym or your you know your home gym when you don't really feel like doing it that's really hard but these are the the decisions every day that need to be made to reap the decades of benefits later in life and there is no instant cure yet we're working on it reset the age with a pill gene therapy working on that but that's not there yet and the other thing that that really is important to know is that their additive there are additive benefits if you eat exercise do hot and cold therapy mental state if you do all of that plus the supplements they're additive it's not that take a supplement and you don't need to do any of the others in the animal studies in my lab if we give let's give you a concrete example when we gave nmn this molecule that i take every day to a mouse that was um sedentary didn't have a wheel didn't run it could run further okay and we actually have human data that's looking really promising in that direction as well but if we exercise the mice and gave them the nmn then they could run double that again and so if you really want to optimize you've got to do more than just take a pill and it's about consistency right most of us try it for a couple weeks and then we're like i haven't seen the results and then we quit and it's sort of like the equivalent of sisyphus like rolling that boulder up a mountain getting halfway there and then you know just like putting your hands up in the air watching it roll down back to the bottom you have to be consistent over a long period of time and and to that point like growing old seems like a distant event in the future i mean it happens slowly and then all at once we don't seem to think about it until we're really late in the game or we have a loved one or somebody goes through something why is that is there anything that you you've seen effective at bringing that forward for people uh well this is what i what my mission is the reason i'm talking to you today is to wake people up and realize that you shouldn't just wait till something traumatic happens in your life whether you get sick or your parents or your grandparents um and it's important to realize now that you can do things for those people in your lives um your life and and yourself you know typically i we we wait until it's it's it's too late for those people my parents my mother is a good example my mother died young from lung cancer she was a smoker who didn't take care of her body at all and i watched her live the last 20 years of her life in a really painful state she had one of her lungs taken out through her ribs that's not what you want for your mother i wish that i had the knowledge that i have today that i'm applying with my father to her life and she might even be around today if we had done that that's the hope right but you have to want to make the changes too i think that that's that's the key point a lot of people don't right they they they want to for whatever reason they don't want to act on it so to sum up maybe like and get a little more philosophical here a little bit like our average lifespan right now i think he's about 80 if we do the right things in our life like we eat healthy food and not too much of it we get enough sleep and we stress our bodies a bit with exercise or saunas and we don't get too much mental stress we add i think about another 10 to 15 years to our lifespan that's right yeah 14 is the number that was in that harvard study um that i was referring to yeah is there anything that you've seen that says that there's a physical limit on like that we have to actually die like can we ultimately live to 200 250 well of course we can there is no law that says we have to age uh right now there's a limit because that's what we've seen happens but the people that live over 100 typically don't take care of themselves a lot of them smoke and some of them smoke and drink and don't eat good food so what happens when you have great genes which is 20 plus people who do the optimal lifestyle and take the optimal supplements and take the optimal drugs there's no reason why 120 needs to be the maximum human lifespan there is nothing in biology that says that there is a limit and there are many species that live a lot longer than us not just trees that live that thousands of years but warm-blooded mammals take the bowhead whale that can live over 200 years that's very similar to us our genes are almost identical compared to you know a banana and a yeast cell these are living breathing mammals with you know milk and they're they're conscious beings and they live two centuries or more why why can't we we just need to learn how they do it and i think it's all about slowing down these scratches slowing down that clock and we know that by looking at whales and other species that live a long time the ticking of that clock goes very slowly now they they don't you know they don't have supplements they don't have to do the kind of things that we do we're trying to hack our bodies right now to give us some of the benefits that whales naturally have do you think like that we you will see a person live to 150 today oh gosh uh i think the odds are against me but i do think that somebody born today will live that long because the technology is just going so quickly and remember they're going to live into the 22nd century who knows what that's going to be like we can only imagine um i would like to i'm not in any rush to leave this planet i'm having a lot of fun i think i'm helping people doing my best at least but you know realistically and nobody's asked me that question shane but honestly i think the chances of me making it beyond 150 are slim i was born probably one generation too early but our kids and their kids are going to reap these benefits that we're talking about now when you think about it what's your expectation of your age realistically well you know i haven't set a goal i i you must have one though no i don't i mean i'm not worried about my own death i mean i'm not a fan of being a burden on my kids or suffering but i really don't mind if i die tomorrow i'm not going to cry about it obviously but i live my life like every day is a blessing and i'm happy to have every day now if you forced me to give you a number i'd love to live beyond 100 i wouldn't say no to 120 and i wouldn't say no to 150 and i wouldn't say no to a thousand years a thousand years isn't that much actually geologically speaking i'm 50 years old now that's just 20 times my lifetime 50 years went by in a blink of an eye so what's 20 blinks not that much so i i would love to live centuries i don't think it's likely i think eventually people will um but you know i'm a fairly um let's say i i have high levels of the fu gene um and i do like to show the naysayers uh to be wrong and i would love to be able to live to 130 just so i could say hey remember when you said it was impossible too and that you know that's my rebellious gene in me but no that's not why i do this obviously um hello i do i do joke that you know i've had plenty of naysayers and enemies over the years and i do like to joke and it's serious it's it's actually a joke i don't believe this but it is fun to to think about that uh one way of uh getting ahead of your enemies in the naysayers is to outlive them and uh there is a little bit of truth to that that science progresses one funeral at a time and as the old god is dying off we're seeing more rapid progress in the way scientists and doctors think about what we can do for patients well that's an interesting implication of if we all start living longer too because we then we start to hold on to old theories a bit longer and have you thought much about the implications of living longer and like what that means for society and housing and money and fiscal policy and politics and [Music] yeah well lots you know i'm working on a whole bunch of things that i i think are necessary for the world to exist with people living 120 and beyond housing shelter food i work on preserving food right now i have a patent that i just wrote on that but um yeah it's important i think about it a lot and we need to have less impact on the planet i think that technology can solve anything we want we just need to put our minds to it and and that includes being being able to grow food that isn't wasting water using up too much land degrading the soil we can do this we have that knowledge it's just a matter of investment and willpower and incentives and capitalism being you know conducive to to making that happen but yeah we we waste a lot half of the food in the u.s by the way is thrown out so to say that we have a food shortage is is ignorant of that fact but what we want to do is to produce food and not throw it away and that's one of the reasons i've focused recently on shelf life of vegetables but that that's just one small part of a whole load of things that needs to happen one thing that always comes up from a crowd that i would talk to about this is what about overpopulation and if you do the math it turns out that even with slowing down aging and making us live 120 we're not going to overpopulate we're going to level out at about 10 billion people uh whether we live longer or not the big impact is reducing fertility or fertility rates birth rates and that's plummeting across the planet particularly in the developed uh developing world and already in the developed world where you and i shane live us for example replacement rates of children are now negative without immigration that's true for europe uh it's true for australia japan really bad for that bad in for the economy that is and china increasingly worried about replacing their population so staying alive for longer in a productive way not an unproductive unhealthy way but productive people who have wisdom who have knowledge and who can impart that wisdom and be leaders of the community rather than burdens on the community that's a massive change that we will see probably in our lifetimes of people being you know centenarians and still running companies that will come back in trillions of dollars in benefits to the economy and just the u.s economy alone my my hunch is that we're gonna if you could live to 120 like i feel like we're just gonna leap frog things right like we're not gonna go from average lifespan of 80 to 81 to 82 to 83 to 84. i feel like we're going to go from like 80 to 110 to like 150 because technology is also going to progress over all of these years right so if you if you get the the first wave of this you might actually be able to ride the technological boom to over 200. yeah well it's a fact that for every year that you stay alive you get to tack on another three months of life but that's going to change we're gonna get an extra four five six months of life if the age reprogramming work that altos is doing and i'm doing works you could get an extra year of life every birthday and what does that mean that that's a very interesting world um a little out there i want to mention now we can measure the blood clock there are treatments that include stem cells there's some hormones so dhea metformin growth hormone combination and others that i'm aware of not yet published that purport to reverse aging more than a year in a year there was a publication just now of a molecule called uh what alpha ketoglutarate that molecule seems to control the clock that according to this blood clock send people back eight years in age biologically in just seven months now there's a lot of skepticism it needs to be repeated but even if that's partly true we are going to be in a very different world where we can control the age that we are in a way that we only dreamed of that's beautiful thank you so much for your time today david this was a fascinating and insightful conversation it was great to chat and i thought the questions you asked were really spot on and i thought our conversations can be very useful for a lot of people thanks again

Channel: The Knowledge Project Podcast

Views: 499,350

Keywords: Shane Parrish, Farnam Street, The Knowledge Project, Farnam Street Podcast, Mental Models

Id: RRdTfh1_88I

Length: 93min 17sec (5597 seconds)

Published: Tue May 03 2022