The 3 Daily Supplements Everyone Should Be Taking For Longevity | Mark Hyman

90 plus percent of americans are deficient in something nutrients are such a critical part of our biology and if we don't have enough our health degrades what are the top three supplements that we could consider taking when it comes to longevity if you had three yeah that would be out there well i mean this is the worst possible question you could ever ask me drew it's like saying what are the three favorite foods you could want to eat and that's it i'm like uh i know what are the three favorite fruits lamb chops sweet potatoes uh and chunky monkey ice cream i could live forever on that um so i always say you know the obvious question is why do we need supplements right we evolved for the last 200 000 years and you know you couldn't there was no whole foods or gnc or supplement store or we couldn't buy vitamin d or vitamin c or any of this stuff we didn't even know what it was and yet somehow we managed to survive so from an evolutionary point of view supplements are kind of irrelevant but right now we're living so out of sync with our evolutionary biology that we need to really look at the facts about what's happening with our food supply with our nutrient levels both in our food and in our bodies and the consequences that for our health so i always say you know i don't think anybody needs supplements but only under certain conditions one you have to hunt and gather your own wild food two you have to drink pure clean water three you have to have no chronic stress before you have to exercise all the time as part of your lifestyle five you have to sleep nine hours a night going to bed with the sun and waking with the sun and six you have to be exposed to no environmental toxins or external insults now if that's you no you don't need any supplements but the rest of us we should pay attention because after almost 30 years of vigorously testing nutritional status on all my patients i'm beyond shocked at the level of nutritional deficiencies and i have a clientele that's generally well-off that understands health and nutrition it's trying to do the right thing i don't see a lot of people now i used to but don't see a lot of people now who you know eat junk food and fast food and process food i've had a few of those i call them dr hyman virgins where they don't know anything about health or nutrition and i do their blood work and it's terrifying like it's terrifying the level of massive nutritional deficiencies i mean one little kid i had i'll just i'll just share a story he had severe atd he uh had behavioral issues uh was kicked out of kindergarten but also all these other health issues asthma allergies acne stomach aches irritability muscle cramps uh you know anal itching i mean the list goes on and on and he was seeing seven different doctors and tons of medication and he he just was a mess and all he ate was junk food processed food processed meats never saw vegetables life and i could pretty much predict from his dietary history what he was going to be deficient he didn't eat fish so he's omega-3 deficient he didn't eat any seeds or grains or anything so he was zinc he didn't eat um anything with b vitamins in it green was folate deficient he was magnesium deficient because he didn't eat greens or beans or or nuts or seeds so he had all these deficiencies that were so common in the general population but his were so magnified so what i see typically and this is not my opinion this is a and haines study which is a large national governmental survey every year where they look at the health and population and they don't just ask questions they actually go in and they find people they're testing they see what their numbers look like and based on these really robust data of tens of thousands of people 90 plus percent of americans probably 99 of americans are deficient in something and and and the major deficiencies about 90 or deficient or more omega-3 fats uh 50 magnesium probably you know 20 in iron zinc is 40 deficient so we've got these major deficiencies of of these key nutrients um that are are really essential for biology and and what people don't understand about nutrition is and nutrients is that they're pleiomorphic and that means in english that they have a lot of functions so if you take a drug let's say a statin it it basically has one action it blocks this enzyme that produces cholesterol hmg and choleductase and it also has some other we call pleiaotrophic effects it also actually induces something called nitric oxide synthase which is good for producing nitric oxide which may reduce inflammation it also but also has other side effects it kind of blocks coq10 production is because it's also the same enzyme and it may cause muscle injury so but there's generally few very few pathways nutrients on your hand like magnesium has 300 different enzymes that it regulates zinc same thing 200 enzymes so so they have multiple functions throughout multiple parts of our cellular physiology that if we don't have them it's like our cellular machinery can't do what it's supposed to do and this is this was on mind-blowing when i first heard about it drew bruce ames one of the leading researchers in nutrition and science there's something a test called after the ames test to look for cancer inducing compounds and he's like probably in his late 80s now he's still around and and he he wrote an article uh um years ago which basically mapped out that one-third of our whole dna our entire dna codes for enzymes enzymes are basically catalysts that change one chemical to another chemical in your body to do what it's supposed to do well if one third of your entire dna codes for enzymes that that's important so what enzymes need to work they need coenzymes or cofactors which are usually vitamins and minerals but also phytonutrients so how does your enzymes work well there's a little key that goes in the enzyme it turns it on and that key is usually a nutrient vitamin c b6 folate in other words for example to make tryptophan into serotonin which is your happy mood chemical you take the amino acid you're eating from tryptophan which comes from food like protein uh turkey everybody knows turkey and tryptophan that has to get converted to serotonin well that requires vitamin b6 there's an enzyme or your your thyroid you know in order to make the thyroid that your thyroid gland makes into the active thyroid hormone t3 you have an enzyme there which actually requires selenium so if you don't have selenium it can't work or if you want to see the thyroid action on the nucleus where it actually does all its work to control your metabolism you need vitamin d as a cofactor to help it function at the nuclear level to create the downstream effects which is to turn on different genes and do different things they regulate metabolism and so many other things so nutrients are such a critical part of our biology and if we don't have enough of the required nutrients our health degrades and years ago and i know there's a long answer to your question but i'm on a roll here it's all great knowledge there's a there's a um a scientist named robert heaney who recently died who wrote an article called long latency deficiency diseases so we all learned about vitamins i mean the vitamins we learned about um only about 120 years ago they're the the term comes from vital amine it's a it's a thing that's needed for your health for a vitality basically and and when they were first discovered because they started refining grains in the 1800s because the the grain mill came up and it was a great discovery you could refine grains and what happened was they took out all the nutrients that are in the husk and the fiber and the and the ectosperm where all the vitamins and vitamin e and the everything is in there and all they left was the starch and so they started feeding um this refined grains to chickens and the chickens all got really sick and they started feeding into prisoners and the prisoners all got really sick they got like beriberian pelagra and all these horrible vitamin deficiency diseases and they're terrible like they're really terrible diseases scurvy you know obviously there's something people know about and these will kill you or make you demented or turn your skin into like this whole raw mess just from little vitamin deficiency and and and so that's what discovery of vitamins and they realize that these were sort of things needed in very little amounts that have profound effects i mean imagine if there was a drug that cost pennies that had no side effects that literally worked in days to cure illness i mean that would be pretty amazing but that's what vitamins do if you take someone's vitamin deficient and you give them a vitamin like vitamin c to someone's got scurvy it's like within a few days they're better and everything's gone so i mean vitamin c think oh vitamin c everybody's got vitamin c but 10 of americans are deficient in vitamin c at the level that would cause scurvy there's no joke so long long story short you know one our food supply has been hybridized to breed out nutrition it's bred for starch and maybe a little protein but not for nutrients it's also grown in soils that have very little organic matter they can't extract the nutrients from the soil for the plant so there are nutrients in the soil but the the plants need the microorganism the soil to actually as symbiotic helpers to extract the nutrients from the soil to go into the plant so then it's in the plant then you can eat it but now maybe your broccoli today is 50 less nutritious than it was 50 years ago so that's another problem and then we have increased nutrient needs because we're under chronic stress because we're exposed to environmental toxins i mean there are 80 000 new chemicals introduced into the marketplace since the 1900s i mean our bodies have to deal with all that stuff and there's chemical reactions and detoxification and they all require nutrients and we are also under a a tremendous amount of of psychological stress even in the society and you know magnesium your body wastes magnesium when you're under psychological stress so there's so many things that are happening in our omega-3 fats we don't get those because we don't really eat wild food anymore maybe some fish but that's got mercury so there's all these problems that happen because of our nutritional environment and so more than ever now people need foundational nutritional support i believe that and i and i and i say this not from a uh you know sort of a a sort of a general opinion but actually from really hard scientific data and they go well all the vitamin studies they show that don't that don't they don't prevent heart attacks they don't prevent cancer they don't do this they don't do that or they may have side effects and and the truth is the studies are just all poorly designed i mean it's like think about think about michael jordan like arguably the best basketball player in history if you put him on a court by himself he could not win a single game right against another team that had a full team yeah right so nutrients work as a team and if you don't have all of them your biochemistry kind of gets gummed up and it can actually cause worse problems so for example they did this large study called the carrot study where they gave smokers who were at high risk for lung cancer beta carotene because it seemed like people ate fruits and vegetables with lots of beta-carotene actually did better but when they actually gave the beta-carotene as a supplement what happened was there was more cancer now the science was like oh this is terrible supplements don't work i'm like one this is a perfect example of what what michael pond calls nutritionism which is reductionism and nutrients where you basically see oh it's maybe this single thing we're going to replace that it doesn't work like this which is how they think about drugs drugs right so basically the carrot study gave high dose of beta-carotene now if you actually understand basic biology and how antioxidants work in the system they work as a team so if you give one of them the way they work is they donate an electron to some damaged tissue or free radical like an oxidized compound in the body so an antioxidant will actually help deal with oxidative stress or rusting in the body but the way it does it is it donates one of its electrons then it becomes a radical so for example vitamin c is a great antioxidant but it'll donate one it's electron then it becomes a scorable radical which is highly dangerous but don't worry then you've got vitamin e to help take that electron from vitamin e and give it to the vitamin c and it becomes a tocopherol radical and then that has to be dealt with by all these systems like police acid and that has to be dealt with by glutathione so you've got a whole system if you don't have you know all the antioxidants and you don't have the final pathways of glutathione you're going to get in trouble and so you actually create more oxidative stress and more damage if you just give a high dose of a single nutrient like that all to say that it's another reason why that even if we have a good idea about a cocktail that would be supplemental this just is another reminder why the base foundation of your diet is so key because there could be cofactors and coenzymes and other aspects that are all related to this that we can't even begin to understand so having a really incredible diet even if you do choose to dabble into supplements here and there to be a bonus a supplemental to your diet is such a key reminder it's key and so you know i believe everybody needs a good multivitamin fish oil yeah so let's divide this and let's go through this instead of the three let's divide this into like foundational items that are there and then let's get into really the topic of today's episode which is kind of these bonus ones that are really being highlighted for their specific role in longevity so take us through the supplemental foundational ones i mean so so basically everybody should be on a good multivitamin with the right forms of nutrients in the right balance and when i say the right forms and about bioavailable because for example you can go to the drugstore and buy magnesium oxide but it's the cheapest form of magnesium but it's poorly absorbed uh and you if you or you could buy folic acid but maybe your genetics don't allow you to convert it to the effective form of folic acid called methylfolate so you need to buy methylfolate so you don't it's really important to know what your body needs so but a basic good multivitamin from a company that focuses on therapeutic products that are mostly doctor-related companies but you can still get these products that's a good place to start then fish oil really important and there's many different kinds of fish oil there's you know you kind of worry about where it comes from was it distilled does all the oral toxins and mercury out of it is it oxidized how what's it preserved with what kind of animal is it from like there's a whole bunch of questions right but but like there's also also ways of processing that preserve a lot of the benefits of fish oil like big bold health has a product called dutch harbor omega and just transparently we're involved with big pull health it's my mentor jeffrey blinds company and uh and it's very impressive he's basically found a process by which they extract the fish oil in alaska from you know wild salmon and other fish that that preserves uh something that is really important in fish oil called prosolving mediators so so you can get epa dha which is fish oil but then they're also what's so amazing about eating fish and fish is that there's these compounds that have been recently discovered that are like the break on your immune system so we we have an accelerator on an immune system breakout immune system so you our immune systems are so over active inflammation so these prosolven mediators which have been extensively studied at harvard are amazing and they they're contained in this particular fish soil dutch harbor omega because it it actually processes in a way that doesn't destroy it the third key supplement is and by the way like i said 90 plus percent of people are deficient omega-3 fats so it's just a no-brainer and there was a big study that came out last year showing that uh uh individuals who were at the right omega index had an extra uh three to five years of their life yeah no doubt no doubt so if you're talking about longevity even though it's foundational like this is one of those things to really look at those these are called essential fatty acids that means they're essential for life they're like a vitamin if you don't have them you're screwed and they every cell membrane in your body is made out of them your brain is 60 made out of them your skin your hair your nails all your body functions it regulates inflammation prostaglandins i mean it's just really really important so it regulates metabolism blood sugar so it's really critical to have the right one the the next one that i think in addition to multi and fish oil is vitamin d uh 80 of us are deficient or insufficient vitamin d it's uh it's so important cobit has kind of highlighted the the consequences of this because when you look at the data around covet if you're low in vitamin d you're 70 more likely to end up in the hospital on the icu and die if your vitamin d level is higher your you know it's actually you're 97 protected from ending up in the hospital or dying and if you are vitamin d almost over 50 which is where i like to see it nanograms per deciliter there's a there was zero deaths zero deaths which is better than any vaccine out there you know i think so that's and people are sort of ignoring that for the most part but the data is very clear so multi-facial vitamin d and then if i had to add a couple others around the margins it would be magnesium or really magnesium-rich foods and then maybe a probiotic because our guts are also messed up so that's sort of the stack that i like to sit on with everything else and with the d do you think how important do you think it is the k2 and you always hear that conversation yeah so you need vitamin d3 which is different than a lot of doctors prescribe and vitamin k2 is also a fat soluble vitamin it should be made by your gut bacteria it's often not because our guts are messed up but it works in conjunction with vitamin d and helps with the improvement cardiovascular health bone health and it's it's actually also an important supplement so i often prescribe them combined okay mark so that's the foundational area of supplementation let's get into the next one which are these targeted supplements that are out there again built on top of incredible lifestyle foundational diet sleep movement all the things you shared community get into some of the really interesting ones that are showing up now in the longevity space the bonus supplements yeah i i just before we do i just want to address a couple of things that we didn't touch on when we we talked about the general research around supplements and i think it's confusing for people because you look at these big studies and they often don't show a result and it doesn't mean that it's not effective or important i don't want people to understand that because we don't rely on just studies like that because often they're poorly designed or they they don't take into account the biology of the nutrients or or if i for example if i give vitamin e to a bunch of smoking overweight non-exercising junk food eating people it's not going to do anything right right and what's the timeline of the study yeah so they're looking at it's complicated yeah it's not going to replace a healthy diet and lifestyle the second is you know how does conventional medicine view supplements and i think this is a really important note because you know many times doctors will say oh supplements say just create expensive urine it's a waste of time you'll get everything you need from food and i'm like well gee if that philosophy were true then you shouldn't drink any water because it just comes out as pee so why bother drinking any water your body takes in what it needs and let's go with the rest which is exactly what it's supposed to do uh the other thing is that that in the closet and this was this was shocking to me drew at cleveland clinic which is arguably you know one of the best health um establishments in the world mayo and cleveland clinic are like one and two um the doctors are very smart they're very well educated they're they're up on the latest research and you know i thought they'd be more conservative and so we did a survey when i got there of one who who was using supplements for themselves who was recommending to their patients and you know what was the percentage and i was just shocked 70 of the doctors at cleveland clinic were recommending supplements to the patient whether it was an ob with a multivitamin for prenatal or whether it was a you know endocrine doctor for osteoporosis or whether there's a heart doctor for coq10 or folate or fish oil you know it was so prevalent and i was shocked so i think i think if you go into a a conference and you ask doctors you know who's who's actually you know supporting patients getting supplements and very fuel rinse their hands you say how many of you are actually taking supplements most of the doctors it's also funny that sometimes i come across physicians again well-intentioned everything who would be so strong to recommend a prenatal but then are like oh no the patient doesn't need to take everything if they're not pregnant or trying to have a baby or whatever it's like well let's just think about that you want a woman to be taking a prenatal vitamin uh and now there's actually companies that are out there that have prenatal vitamins that are also for men because their sperm is a big part of that we have a former employee that you know started a company called uh we natal so there's like supplements for the mom supplements for the dad and their process of trying to conceive but anyways going back to the mom so you want a mother to take a prenatal vitamin to help grow a healthy baby in a healthy baby brain and take this thing and that yeah but then you're not recommending anything for her afterwards that seems kind of like a little crazy yeah it's a bit crazy so so we going to your question about you know what's happening in the space of longevity it's fascinating i'm i'm really deep in that science right now and i think you know the question is what are you trying to achieve with supplements in the space of longevity what what pathways are you activating what are the important longevity switches in the body and how do you regulate those so i think aside from the foundational stuff which has a lot to do with extending life you mentioned the fish oil study vitamin d i mean there's just so much data on this that's really impressive but in terms of specific thinking about which product supplements are effective for longevity and aging there's there's a number that really come to mind and you know just to kind of um kind of back up a little bit and then i'm going to get a little geeky here if it's okay uh because it's a master class please do there there are a number of things called the hallmarks of aging which are these fundamental dysfunctions that happen as we age if we age abnormally so so aging should be considered a disease it's not normal the way we see aging in this culture is is a sign of abnormal aging and we think it's normal because it pretty much happens to everybody which they get all diseases and decrepit you know if you're 65 years old it's like you're gonna have three or more uh chronic illnesses just how it goes right but it's not inevitable and and so one of the hallmarks of aging is as a dysfunction of these nutrient-sensing pathways so we have exquisite systems in our biology that sense either abundance or scarcity oh there's too much of a food we just we want to start to build and grow and make stuff in our body but if there's scarcity it activates all these repair and healing and general mechanisms and we need both we need we need both a demolition team and we need a a construction team to actually continue to renew and rebuild our bodies and a lot of these supplements that are we're talking about are working on some of these key pathways so one one of them is really important is called nad now nad you've probably heard about it's uh it's an important compound that's part of your cellular metabolism helps produce energy but it turns out it has a lot broader effects and one of the key nutrient sensing pathways is something called sirtuins these compounds these pathways were discovered in 1991 by lenny guarte and his colleagues at mit and it was a real breakthrough because they were able to stimulate the certain sortuans in yeast models and mice models and extend life dramatically double it sometimes even up to a thousand years equivalent in a worm or you know 120 or 140 in a human how they were doing it with some of the my studies so what turns out is nad is a sirtuin activator so when nad levels are good which means you have energy it turns on the sirtuins which then creates a whole downstream series of effects that creates longevity so it sends out a massive dna repair team which is awesome because we get a hundred thousand hits to our dna every minute basically from various insults from food from oxidation oxidation from metabolizing food from environmental toxins from all sorts of things second it actually inhibits uh one of the key hallmarks of aging which is inflammation we talked a lot about inflammation on the podcast but it does so through a particularly important mechanism that is the mast one of the master inflammation switches in the body which is called nf kappa b or nuclear factor kappa b and essentially this is a transcription factor transcription factors are what tell your gene what to transcribe so how does your dna what to do what to do well it's listening for messages all the time from signals from your body and nf b is a signaling molecule that tells your dna to make more cytokines to make more inflammation so when you activate sartunes it shuts that off it also increases your metabolism increases your insulin sensitivity which we've talked about a lot in the podcast if you want to be healthy you have to be insulin sensitive so it's through a whole series of different mechanisms nad is is his multiple actions through sirtuins in addition to just powering up cellular energy and in some of the studies from david sinclair are just mind-boggling he he uses derivatives so nr nicotinamide riboside is made into nmn which is then made into nad in the body so this is the normal consequence of like cellular reactions uh so you can give any d as a shot or as an iv but you want to take it as a pill you have to take it as nr or nmn and david gave nmn to these mice now these old mice now they have these mice treadmill which i'm not a researcher so i don't really know about it but they have these mice treadmill that they have an upper limit because no mouse has ever run more than two kilometers like young old any mice right and so they had this mouse treadmill it was like two kilometers and then it would just kind of turn off it was like overheat and stop and they gave this old mice nmn and the mouse ran three kilometers and broke the treadmill so it's pretty amazing and even in some studies it regulates all sorts of stuff like hormones and fertility in some studies they've literally been able to reverse mausopos so take menopausal mice and give them nmn and they start menstruating and get fertile again wow it's really trippy so that's just one example of one compound another one i think that's really important is um is is something that actually and i think curcumin or this product i think are really important which is regulating inflammation through again these very variety of effects but there's a common called um htb a himalayan tartary buckwheat derivative that has like 132 phytochemicals including quercetin and root and which course it also has a longevity supplement so it contains a lot of these things but it also contains a compound only found in this ancient grain which isn't really grains of flower called himalayan tartary buckwheat which has only been recently been re-cultivated after thousands of years of being sort of out and it goes in the himalayas and it's uh it's called jojoba and it actually in is regulating some of the inflammatory systems that are involved in senescent cells and chip cells so as we age some of our cells just get older and they don't really die they're kind of like zombie cells but they're not just inert they're actually creating a whole inflammatory cascade and then they're causing other cells to become senescent zombie cells it's like it's terrible so you get this kind of wave of inflammation and so this can help to kill that and there's something called chip cells which are you know cells that are from the bone marrow from damaged damaged stem cells that produce white blood cell and you get these funky white blood cells in your body that are just generating tons of inflammation so some of these compounds really help to regulate this inflammatory senescent thing so one of the hallmarks of aging is cellular senescence which means the aging of your cells and how does that happen these zombie cells is essentially what happens and and we can go into how they're created but but it's really fascinating how these natural plant compounds combat this and what's also exciting to is there are so many other compounds it's in addition just three that are super powerful like green tea extracts epi galactic catechins resveratrol you might have heard about resveratrol was the thing that was first sort of discovered which is from red wine that helps to activate sirtuins to extend life by a third so if you actually take resveratrol from red wine you give it to mice they'll live a third longer which is equivalent to humans being 120 right which is kind of cool but then how much resveratrol did they get they got a lot they got the equivalent studies are like 1500 bottles of bread well they got the 1500 bottles of red wine so don't try this at home okay but what was it interesting is that there was spiritual and this was fascinating and it's kind of wild these pathways these conserved longevity pathways that are really survival pathways when they're activated they're so powerful that they have so many beneficial effects so even though the mice kept eating junk food and not exercising their metabolism got faster their their exercise capacity increased what we call vo2 max they reversed their diabetes and insulin resistance and high blood pressure and even while eating crap so i'm like wow what if you actually ate well and exercise and then use this as a booster amazing so that's that's the thing and there's also incredible compounds that are now looking at how we can actually help to extend life called fist fistine which is f-i-s-t-i-n which from strawberries is a compound from strawberries but turns out to be an incredible longevity supplement sulforaphane which comes from broccoli broccoli sprouts are the highest concentration of these so this is a hugely detoxifying molecule anti-cancer it improves glutathione and really and helps with some of the key longevity pathways so i think you know you've got these incredible compounds and there's more obviously there's comments from persimmon this comes from lychees there's berries there's there's compounds in chinese medicine there's there's all these wonderful compounds that actually help to activate these longevity pathways we're talking about ampk and before but you know quercetin resveratrol catechins curcumin all these things from the plant com kingdom all regulate these pathways so do i think we should take three yeah there's probably a lot more that are gonna be coming around the pike and i think a basic longevity stack of supplements would be nad hdb rejuvenate and i think vitamin d is up there for sure but and i would like to sort of see a polyphenol blend like a polyhusional blend and if i could put it on a pill i would put in catechins i'd put in resveratrol i put in quercetin i'd put in uh festine i'd put in um curcumin i put in a lot of these very important compounds that come from plants as a cocktail of various phytochemicals that all have very different effects but that's what i would do it's great i love it hey everybody it's dr mark hyman i want to tell you about a gadget that's completely changed my life and helped me dial in on what i need to eat to feel great stay lean and 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gadget of its kind that's available to anyone not just if you're diabetic so when you buy the level system you get two 14-day continuous glucose monitors the levels app where you track your food activities and your blood sugar levels you get weekly detailed reports on which foods are the best and worst for you and you get monthly breakdowns of your daily foods and your activities and how your blood sugar responded you will also get access to detailed reports to help guide you through your own unique dietary needs this device is so simple to use all you need to revolutionize your health is your smartphone and the levels device so if you're interested in taking your health to the next level and yes pun intended sign up for levels today at levels dot link forward slash mark hyman that's levels dot link forward slash mark hyman there's a lot of uh ones that you covered there mark just a few questions on some of them individually so in the case of nad because there's you mentioned nad and then before that you have nmn and nr so there's a few different supplements that are out on the market you know a lot of different people who are involved with different one i think you recently had like tony robbins on the podcast and i think he has a new company that you're an advisor to so which form do you take and is there a difference between uh you know what you would recommend you most of your communications i mean so so lenny guarte from mit um has really focused in on nr nicotinamide riboside and he sells it through his company's involvement called elysium and the product is called basis and i think you know that's a legitimate well-researched product david sinclair is thinks that nmn is a better precursor molecule to give and is studying that extensively and not as widely available and there's sources in china but harder to get for now but i think his research is really coming along and third you can do it those are oral third you can do it as a sub q injection a pure nad or an intravenous drip of nad now if entering the strip is hard but the subconjunction's just like a diabetic needle and i i i tend to use that one but i also take the oral too and is that typically something like an iv drip so it's administered by like a nervous doctor yeah yeah that'd be you going to like a wellness center for sure where they regularly do those things yeah but you could do you could do sub q every day uh which is basically a diabetic syringe you just do it yourself and you just buy the bottle you dilute it and i i use that on a regular basis and i and i'm sort of experimenting because i want to see what what if i do all these things and i recheck my biological age i'm going to get younger so i'm using myself as a guinea pig right but i'm doing things that are safe and i know are potentially effective and the side effect profile's low and the cost isn't exorbitant yeah so i would probably say for most people an easier thing would be either to supplement with like any nad as like a pill form or like nmn and you know if you google n n l n r or n n r n m n i think nad is harder it's not really available i don't want to be recommending that everybody's out there grow starts injecting no no no no no but but you know there's trunagin there's bases there's all these companies out there yeah there's a lot of really great companies uh thorn research has a whole bunch of so you believe in it strongly enough that you'd say like if somebody was serious and had a good foundation yeah that this is an area that they could explore probably in the number one thing i would say uh to get your nad levels up and uh when my book comes out young forever and 2023 in february you'll be able to understand more why i'm saying this but it's it's it's regulates some of the key pathways for longevity that that are so important and as we age our nad levels drop so restoring those nad levels restores so many of our cellular processes to a youthful phase so let's talk about resveratrol and still there's a lot of people that think like uh great i'm gonna get it from wine and again wine doesn't have as much resveratrol as we would need to hit yeah comparatively for the clinical trials and studies that are out there on the research on resveratrol so would you put supplemental resveratrol in in your list of things yes i did mention it so it's in part of like the the i would do a polyphenol cocktail right and it would include a fair chalk or cumin epi galacto and gallate from green tea and quercetin and festine and all these things that are now being studied because the beautiful thing about these is they're you know in if you don't like od on them um and i'm going to talk about that in a minute and you get a reasonable dose they they aren't pretty safe and they're they're well researched and they're cost effective and do we have enough data to say they're going to extend your life by a third no but do we know the mechanism of action do we know how they work do we know the biological effects of them in real time yes i mean it's hard to say i'm going to give you drew um these supplements at 40 years old and now i'm going to wait 80 years and see if you get 120. it's like sure it's a hard study to do so we have to go by intermediate things and so the hierarchy is you know is there science is it safe is it cost effective now a lot of these molecules are are not meant for us right they're they're plant molecules that the plant uses to defend themselves they're their own immune system their defenses right and and they're there can be a little um toxic in a way right because they are trying to deter pests or they're trying to protect against uv radiation or they're trying to you know do something that is protecting them from some harsh environment that's why this himalayan buckwheat has so many of these compounds because it it it's grown in really harsh conditions in the himalayas and and it turns out that there's this com concept called xenohormesis xeno means foreign hormesis means a stress that makes you stronger so exercise is hormetic in other words exercise will cause you to tear muscles to push yourself but then you repair faster or hypoxia short bursts of hypoxia of low oxygen states will actually cause your mitochondria to kick in even more and you'll you'll get a souped-up energy system by that or a cold plunge you know i just came back from antarctica we did a polar plunge and and it was cold jumping in in the south bowl with the icebergs floating around but that that activates brown fat increase your metabolism resets your autonomic nervous system has so many benefits you know um saunus and i just did a song in coleman this morning a sauna increases heat shock proteins activate which helps refold proteins that are deformed that are a key part of the aging process this this whole phenomena proteostasis which is keeping our proteins properly folded so they can do the right action well there's a lot of insults that happen and that that kind of gets screwed up but when you take a sauna it helps to fix that or it activates your innate immune system to help protect against infections or activate healing response in your body so there's all these these hormetic therapies so the plant compounds are kind of a little bit of a poison almost it's a little a little dose is good a little more maybe not good so it's kind of finding the goldilocks level of all these things but they basically are little stresses to your system that make your body go oh i better get my head together and figure out what to do to stay safe and and it activates various pathways that are involved in repair and healing and reducing inflammation increasing metabolism so your body's really smart and i think you know i always say disease is your body's best way of dealing with a bad set of circumstances it's doing its best so the beautiful thing that if and this is really such a core principle of the foundational functional medicine is your body has an innate desire to be healthy its default state is healthy it's not sick you know andrew wild talked about this in spontaneous healing how do we activate our body's healing system i mean you cut your skin you don't go oh i need you to close up and do this and recruit white blood cells and like get stem cells there and make new skin your body just knows what to do right and and not just on your skin but all the way through so the question is how do you activate that if you're nutritionally deficient if you have no zinc if you're a low protein if you're low in vitamin c and deficient your skin won't heal right your skin will help cause you don't have the raw materials you don't have the the right messages and the same way with all these other mechanisms we need the right ingredients and so this is really what's fasting in the longevity research is we're now learning about what are the ingredients that we need for longevity and what are the things that actually are really critical and essential and a lot of them are these compounds from plants and a lot of them are these things that our body naturally makes that diminish over time with age but can be replenished and restored restoring youthful levels of function activity like the three like the mouse that you know ran three kilometers and broke the treadmill so outside of people like piecemealing their own stack of all these things that you had mentioned are there any formulas or things that are out there on the market that are like close or like validated that are kind of some of the things that you're talking about i'm still looking at if you want to drew i kind of very suspicious about what's what and and i think a lot of products have window dressing or they're not the right forms or it's not thoughtfully designed there are a lot of companies that are thinking about doing this so you can buy individual products of these you can buy cocktails thorn thorne has a lot of these uh designs for health has a lot of these there are companies that are looking at the longevity space and starting to design products that that provide a lot of the things that we need yeah and as more of them come on the market i'm sure we'll talk about them over here but you've got to probably do a little bit of investigation but at least some of the basics that you've covered on the foundation piece yeah there's plenty of companies that make really good quality yeah ones there yeah and there's plenty of companies that make really good quality nad nmr uh sorry nmn and nr uh thorn does have a really interesting product called revis vericel that has a few of the ingredients that you mentioned but the dosages are a little low yeah it's resveratrol and phytosteel bean and uh nicotinamide riboside nr and it's fine like it's great cocktail i recommend it but but i think there's more there's more yeah for sure and the doses matter like you probably need like you know more of stuff like a thousand milligrams and they might give you 500 or 100 or 200 you know you need the right dose yeah and of course if you're working with a good practitioner they can help you piece this together and then who knows maybe one day you'll come out with something so that you'll make my life easier and i'll just take that yeah i'm for very very selfish reasons i want to do it because i don't be taking 15 bottles of pills i want everything in one one bottle so mark this is the part of the interview where we're going to go into some questions i feel like you put in a good down yeah this is so much fun i'm just getting started okay fine and go off on any tangent that you want to this is a really good opportunity for us to go into questions and they're right in alignment with some things you've been chatting about so one of our dr hyman plus community members which is your online membership community people can go to your website to learn more about that they ask what is the best vitamin for brain health that you would add into your longevity stack so all these things that you've been mentioning you know is there anything that people are really worried i mean the scariest diseases on the planet are things like dementia and alzheimer's i mean it's do you need anything about a separate supplements just for that or does all this stuff work for those things too i mean there's three things that are come to mind that are the most important which is a you know b complex that regulates methylation which is b6 folate b12 and and they're critically essential for healthy brain function the second is fissile we talked about 60 percent of your brain is fish oil and vitamin d like those so if you get a good multivitamin and a vitamin e and fish oil you're covering those bases that's really important and then and then if you really want to get fancy you can start with with more mitochondrial support because your brain has more mitochondria than any other organ i think your heart and brain are more or less the same the brain actually has more every cell is filled with these energy producing factories and they they need a lot of help and so mitochondrial nutrients are a key part of longevity including lipoic acid carnitine glutathione glutathione i heard recently that melatonin is actually one of the most potent mitochondrial yeah uh nutrients yeah it turns out melatonin is is very helpful for for aging as well and can regulate inflammation and it's pretty interesting i think um you know the the the we sort of think of melatonin for sleep but actually it may be regulated regulating a lot of other really important functions that have to do with longevity i would love to you know we're not affiliated with them but there's a product that i've been taking and i just love to give a shout out because i've tried so many different things it's called herbitonin so it's plant-based melatonin and they have two different versions they have a 0.3 milligrams which is great for like longevity and a lot of people a lot of practitioners were talking about including melatonin in people's stock when it came to helping support their immune system especially for sure and then there is another one that they make that's three milligrams of uh plant-based melatonin instead of the synthetic melatonin and that was for people who struggle with jet lag or sleeplessness or other stuff it's a really great company that's out there you can google it and probably find on amazon and other places and again no affiliation with them amazing i mean basically but it basically just helps with inflammation like you said in it can put a break on inflammation it can do a lot of really important things the cancer and maybe reduce risk of cancer and other things so this next question again from our dr hyman plus community is around the topic of biomarkers and how do you measure your progress so the audience member asks are there easily measurable biomarkers that can be assessed for whether these longevity supplements are doing anything and if you're heading in the right direction in the first place so what are some of the things that you're using to look at all aspects of your life when it comes to knowing are you heading in the right direction i mean i think it's complex drew i think there there's there's both the more traditional testing we do and there's some innovative testing around biological age that's happening it's really kind of emerging from the science so um the typical things that are really important to look at are the things that look at what is your nutritional state right when you're talking inside tracker which uses your regular lab tests but actually interprets them in a different way so look at your 43 different biomarkers that are pretty available on regular blood tests like your vitamin d or your homocysteine or c-reactive protein or your your lipid levels cholesterol blood sugar stuff that's pretty commonly done i mean some of them not all of them and and then they analyze that and they say okay where are you off from the ideal like where are you off from optimum because your homocysteine which is a measure of your bully b12 b6 the lab says 14 is good but ideally it should be six to eight if your level is 14 or over your risk of dementia goes up by 50 so you don't you don't want to go on the regular lab values so there's a lot of those conventional tests which are great then there's you know if i had like two tests probably to actually look at one would be a glucose tolerance test with insulin it's an old test doctors don't measure it properly they use glucose tolerance test for seeing if you're diabetic or for women who are pregnant they don't do it with the average patient and they certainly don't measure insulin fasting or one or two hours after which is probably the most important medical test you could do to figure out how you're aging fasting insulin fasting with also a glucose tolerance so you basically drink the equivalent of two coca-colas of glucose yeah first you take your blood sugar and you take your insulin then you drink two coca-colas of glucose and then you measure your blood sugar and insulin an hour later and two hours later and if your insulin is high that is driving the longevity pathways in the wrong direction unnecessary aging inflammation everything's diabetes weight gain heart disease cancer dementia all the downstream consequences and and and accelerating all the hallmarks of aging so it's really bad um so those are that's a really important test the other the other one just one clarification on that uh fasting insulin very cheap test i think it costs like anywhere from like thirteen dollars you know you can go to your regular doctor and ask them for yeah including your metal medical work yeah if you're gonna go to your doctor and ask them for a glucose tolerance test you probably want to find somebody that's familiar and has maybe they don't know how to interpret it i've had someone i said go do this when you're talking i don't want to do it i don't know how to interpret it oh my god and do you have to look for an image it's like saying i'm not going to listen to your heart because i don't know how to listen your heart sounds so it's irrelevant at least find out figure it out your doctor so then how do you navigate if you're talking about like literally this is one of fasting insulin that's pretty straightforward and again we've written a bunch of newsletters on this topic so we have the updated recommendation for what the optimal ranges are but again you want people to be under five for their fasting insulin right and then ideally even maybe somewhere between um you know three and three yeah i mean my level when i test is often less than two yeah fasting i mean you just don't want to have high insulin because it's just it's it in your resting state it it it prevents all the longevity pathways from being on if your insulin's high your longevity pathways are shut off totally so then how would somebody navigate if they want to go and get this glucose tolerance test is it that okay you just have to get lucky in well here's the thing around or do you go to an integrative doctor i mean you've got a functional medicine doctor an integrated medicine doctor uh there are now companies that you can order stuff you're on your own i'm involved as a medical director of a company that's launching soon called function health which is a company that you can get you know fifteen thousand dollars for the test for a thousand dollars all the things that are well they do this glucose yes yes so all the tests that uh and the i the advisor and medical director i've determined what the tests are what the interpretations are not just what the tests are because if all your interpretation if homocysteine is 14 that's okay not okay right if your insulin's 15 which it says on a lab test that's not okay it should be less than 10 ideally less than five so all that is possible and i think we're going to be democratizing lab tests and and patients own ability to to self-assess and treat themselves and ways that are safe and also when to know to go to the doctor because not everybody can do it everything on their own can ask one more question about the glucose challenge test because i know people are going to be curious about this and i'm actually curious because i've never done that test before so when you're going and you're doing this glucose tolerance test you have to be at the clinic yes because you have to take a before and after yeah two hours so you're hanging out there for a little bit yeah so ask around talk to an integrative doctor talk to a functional medicine doctor you know look for somebody open-minded and typically speaking because a lot of uh would it would ob gyn be more likely to be knowing how to navigate because they're working with women with gestational they might but they don't make her insulin and they don't know how to interpret insulin okay got it so this is really looking for somebody who's in the know yeah and i've talked about this before but i had a patient that you know 25 years ago they just kind of turned the lights on for me about this because she was an apple and we've talked about her before uh and she really big you know round tummy skinny arms and legs and i got this woman is diabetic or pre-diabetic or she's in trouble right and i measured her blood sugar perfect and then i gave her a glucose tolerance test blood sugar absolutely perfect like not even a little bit high even after having two coca-colas her insulin on the other hand was off the chart because her insulin was trying to keep her blood sugar down and what happens is it's your insulin keeps going up and up and up the crowd control your blood sugar until your pancreas gets so tired that you can't manage that anymore and then you're and you become more insulin resistant at the cell level and then your blood sugar starts to go up but rising blood sugar is a very late stage phenomena like by the time your blood sugar goes up you're way down the road of pre-diabetic and metabolic bad health the first step is your two hour insulin goes up then your fasting insulin goes up then your two hours sugar goes up then your fasting sugar grows up so it's a fourth thing that happens in the whole process and we're that's the only we're looking so far down the stream we're not we need to go upstream so that's one test the other is a body composition which is a little hard to get but look at your where the fat and muscle isn't distributing your body if you have a lot of visceral belly fat that is that is the number one driver of aging so you got to get rid of that and that's sugar and starch and that's basically what a lot of gyms have these scanners i think they're called they they're a dexa scanner they have body composition scanners that look at your total body composition which is looking at just your total body which aren't as accurate you want to know what the compartments are so for example if you have strong arms and legs but all the fats in your belly you might get an average that looks okay but it's not okay right so somebody want to do that test where would they go you'd have to go to it's like the same test that doctors used to check for osteoporosis it's a different software program and it's called dual energy x-ray absorbed geometry or dexa and essentially it's a way for very very low radiation less than flying across the country seeing what your bone density is and your body composition is and and and where the fat is is important and then then then then there's a few other things and obviously you want to check your your lipids and your vitamin d and all the homocysteine all that stuff inflammation markers but there's a whole new uh tranche of testing that's emerging that's helping us really look at the aging process itself and the two the two that are really important is is well there's maybe two three four the the the turns out there's something called your biological clock and uh stephen horvath uh discovered that the patterns of um little tags on your dna in the epi genome the epigenome is basically the control mechanism that controls which genes get read so your genes are like the piano keys your epi genome is like the piano player they can play jazz rock blues whatever right classical just with 88 keys so in the same way the epigenome determines which genes are silenced which genes are turned on and and so it turns out that this pattern of dna methylation we call it this epigenetic tags like bookmarks in your book of life determined uh when you look at them in the ways you looked at them actually determine your biological age so i just did a test to look at my dna methylation i'm 62 but biologically i'm 43. so my biological age is so you and i are almost the same age almost same age i'm gonna i'm gonna get younger than you soon so watch out so i'm working to get to 25. i'm still 39 so [Laughter] and and then i did my telomeres years ago and i was 58 and they were 39. so i'm about 20 years younger biologically than i am chronologically uh and then there's you know telomere testing which you know there's controversy about but your telomeres are a good indicator of your lung your biological age and then there's other testers are not directly measuring your biological age but are measuring things that are so important that indicate your aging fast around inflammation and there's a guy at stanford david furman who's looked at you know thousands and thousands of blood analytes compounds that you know when you go to the doctor they do like 20 tests 30 tests 50 tests 100 times you look at thousands you've got you've got tens of thousands of molecules floating around your blood that most of we which we just ignore we don't check for and he's been agnostically just looking for what was the correlations between these abnormal inflammatory markers and chronic disease and death and it was this huge ai machine learning very sophisticated science technology but at the end of days like there's these four inflammation tests that are extremely predictive of your rate of aging and disease and so you can actually check it and then intervene and then check it again and see what's happening so it's called i age and it's going to be out probably in the next few months and there's these are all emerging and then there's there's tests that look for cancer which is kind of a interesting thing because you can have latent cancers that are out there that you might not notice and before you kind of had to wait till you had a subtle tumor had a symptom i mean there's screening tests for colonoscopy pap tests breast mammograms but it's pretty pretty bad in terms of the rest of cancers for screening i mean my father died of lung cancer my sister died of she had no lymphoma and she died of bile duct cancer so it's really hard to get those early it turns out that now there's something called a liquid biopsy what does that mean rather than take a tissue sample with a knife right you literally just get a blood sample and you can find the proteins from over 50 different cancers in your blood if they're there so if you have some really small cancer i mean solid tumors typically been going for 20 or 30 years before you can see it on an mri like that's right but with this test you can actually pick up early signs of cancer and then 90 to 95 percent of cancers that picked up earlier cured so it's a way of doing a sort of a it's not really a longevity test but it's a way of actually hacking a little bit of longevity so you don't end up getting something that you wouldn't be able to find otherwise and i know we covered a lot of different things but just a couple takeaways from that from what you shared is you know for those that are not getting their fasting insulin on their normal metabolic health labs that come back that's like one test that's like a no-brainer no brain right that's a no-brainer the glucose tolerance test at the two-hour level with the fat with the insulin response that might be a little bit more tricky it might be harder to navigate but if there's doctors that are out there that are doing this test regularly you know reach out to us and we'll maybe put up a little website to make a listing of people that can follow that area yeah and there's a surrogate test for insulin resistance that i really like which is a special kind of cholesterol test which you can get at lab core you can get a quest it's not very expensive it's really the 21st century cholesterol test and most doctors still don't do it the one from labcorp is called nmr which essentially puts your cholesterol in an mri machine and sees the particle number and the size and looks at all your triglycerides and your hdl and the sizes and that gives you an indirect indication of insulin resistance because if your particles are small you have a lot of particles if your triglycerides are small of your hdls if your triglycerides are large but your hdl and ldl is small you know there's a problem and it gives you an insulin resistance score out of zero to a hundred um the ligament helpful and the one from quest is called cardio iq which is very similar yeah especially important for those people we have a news that are coming out on the topic of ldl if you have if you think that you eat like a really clean diet and you're you know your your hdl is going to be a little higher and people have natural variation with sometimes their ldl and your doctor sometimes gets worried and they're like wanting to put you on a statin but in that instance that'd be a good opportunity for somebody if they want to go deeper to find somebody who will run one of these tests on you so that you can know is that higher ldl really a problem exactly or is it is it okay i mean honestly drew this should just be standard of care at this point there's no it's been around forever the data's so clear on this there's no ambiguity i mean it's just doctors have habits their lab test requisitions have the same thing on its head for 20 years they don't change it i mean it's the interpretation thing if you're not as familiar with this yes that test yes yes but that's like that's like the worst rationale i ever hear from doctors like well i don't know how to interpret it well learn you're you've got to keep learning as a doctor it's not just what you learn in residency things change like i'm constantly learning i mean i spent you know six eight hours yesterday just studying scientific papers and learning all kinds of new stuff that is certainly new not stuff that i ever heard about medical school and it's really new discoveries since i graduated you know it's like science and medicine are not static and and unfortunately you know doctors it takes over 17 years to get look discovered in science into practice on average uh and and often people getting their little ruts and habits and totally so much compassion for them especially after a crazy year of covid and trying to help all these patients and everything that's there but shout out to all the doctors that listen and yeah and another thing is work with your doctor in a way that you know you can find a colleague who's going to collaborate with you right and and be a partner as opposed to the you know the guy in the white coat who tells you what to do and doesn't give you a lab test results right totally uh one more thing about that in testing and again how this came up is that somebody from the dr hyman plus community was asking how can you measure the progress would you also throw in how important do you think it is for people to get like a nutritional screening and are there a couple labs that you want to shout out that people could look at as i mean honestly i do most of my nutritional testing through lab core or quest you know and you do so these are advanced ones that are looking at all the deeper panels and advanced nutrient testing yeah i mean my favorite my favorite is from genova called the ion panel in individual optimized nutritional panel and for me and they would create some learning curve to learn how to interpret this right i look at all the amino acids i look at all the fatty acids so i can tell someone's omega-3 deficient so i'm not guessing i look at all the antioxidant levels i look at oxidative stress levels i look at vitamin d levels in this test i look at magnesium and all the mineral levels i look at heavy metals i look at something called organic acids which is basically urine test it looks at all these metabolites of different pathways that relate to nutrients so you can tell if you're deficient in carnitine or b2 or coq10 or if you have b vitamin issues or your lone biotin or your low in magnesium or your lung glutathione and i can tell a lot from looking at these different tests so that that's my go-to but i think for the average person do an omega check from your omega is all through regular labs and your regular doctor omega check test which is omega-3s and all the fatty acids get your 25 hydroxy vitamin d3 that's vitamin d test check your homocysteine level which is relates to folate b12 check your methylonic acid a more sensitive indicator b12 and doctors just check b12 they don't check this check your red cell magnesium if you want to see if you're low magnesium because typical serum magnesium is is really a very poor indicator and even red cell is not as good um but you can get a good idea what's going on there so those are just foundational things that you can easily you can do plasma zinc levels you can do iron levels in your blood and you can do ferritin levels you can do a lot of the common nutritional factors you can test easily through regular lab tests it's not expensive yeah just got to ask your doctor to run those um this is a really great question what should i take if i'm on a budget tell me what i should absolutely not sacrifice and i think that one of the things that that just brings up is that look if you're really on a budget sticking to the foundations of the things that are the normal things that you do that's going to be the one of the peop there's so many people don't even get that right there's so many people that don't work out on the basis that they need to work out to support muscle health and avoid muscle loss as they get older right there's some people that don't get the sleep that they need so if you're truly on a budget which supplements often are a splurge that are there focus on the basics what else do you want i mean i mean i think about you know like like uh exercise is the poor man's nad why because exercise works through activating sirtuins which are these master regulators of longevity and metabolism and insulin resistance and dna repair and inflammation control right so just by exercising you're activating this whole cascade of longevity effects without taking nad right so there's there's a lot of uh ways to do it dietary restriction right basically time restricted eating uh eating within a you know eight to ten hour window you know 14 hour 16 hour fast every day activates the same pathways and more certain cold exposures i'm talking about you've done a bunch of classes you can take a hot bath and a cold shower you know like are going a cold bath these don't have to be expensive and these are things that are available to all of us just focusing on your diet and the quality of your diet is hugely important and yes it can be expensive if you want to eat only regenerative organic you know grass-fed blah blah blah but if you focus on just eating real whole foods alone and increasing your plant intake even if it's not the greatest you know soil even if it's still good and and focusing on a phytochemically rich diet is super important focusing on a diet that's rich in the right amino acids and the right types of carbohydrate the right types of fat so diet is hugely important i've written about that with a pegan diet and then if you're you know you want the extra extra um you know i think there's a lot of data on this i mean first of all the cost benefit of what you're going to save in terms of your good health and lack of having to deal with pay for disease later is important to consider right so you're not just it's like why do you change the oil in your car so your engine doesn't blow up right so you don't want to pay for the for a whole new engine so you put the oil in your car every every whatever 100 50 000 or 30 thousand miles so in the same way um there there are some basic supplements that don't cost a lot that that are on the 80 20 rule way more maybe like the 95 5. um so multi-fiscal vitamin d that really can be had for pennies a day yeah pennies a day uh and you think about what you spend money on it's you know one cup of coffee at starbucks you know is probably a week worth of supplements right so i think it's just look at your priorities look where you spend your money there's a really wonderful book i read when i was younger that really influenced my thinking called your money or your life it's really about like really quantifying the the work and the energy it takes to make money and the hours you spend with the value you get when you spend it right so how are you spending your money and doesn't equate to your values if you care about health if you care about but if you're spending you know tons of money on i don't know like uh you know drinking tons of alcohol or wine maybe that's not your best strategy right or maybe you're spending tons of money on on uh video games or i don't know whatever like where do you put your your time and your money and your value so so we always can look at even if we don't make that much money we can look at how do we spend our money where where is the value creation in our lives and how do we be more strategic about it here's another great question that we have which is somebody asking i take a lot of supplements and i'm a little bit worried about you know can one impact the other the timing of these and i know it's a big picture question but any resources or places that you would guide people to who are concerned about that if they're taking a lot of supplements and you know does one counteract another does this yeah i love this question is that i love this question i mean first of all first of all um do you have any idea the amount of compounds medicinal compounds and nutrients in an average meal that's healthy like not your processed food but like it like i eat last night i had mushrooms garlic bok choy grass-fed steak and a japanese sweet potato which was a cornucopia of compounds that are extremely active biologically in my body and i i could wear everybody go through it but essentially you're eating like tons and tons and tons of stuff so your body is so smart and knows what to do now there's certain things you shouldn't do together right if you're taking charcoal capsules because you have gas or because you're taking it for some mold treatment that can absorb all the nutrients so you don't want to take them together and there's certain things you need to take an empty stomach to do better think tank take with food do better like for example the fat soluble vitamins vitamin k d e uh the vitamin e they they require fat to be absorbed so you need to have it with a meal but you know my view is when is when is the right time to take supplements when you remember you know and and you know i what do i do personally i just take mine when i take you know probably a handful of stuff every morning and i i might take some stuff later in the in the day too but i i try i don't know am i always worried about when and what no i don't i just like my body knows what to do it's going to handle it all they don't counter act each other for the most part right if you're on prescription medications obviously there might be some considerations that you have to think about well that's important true because you know there's there's there's two things you know doctors often talk about oh don't take this supplement don't take fish oil if you're on coumadin don't take vitamin e if you're on a blood thinner right because they're talking about um nutrient drug interactions but what about drug nutrient interaction a lot of drugs deplete nutrients right so you take a diuretic for blood pressure it caused you to lose magnesium well what's the cause of low blood pressure high blood pressure low magnesium or they say you know uh take this acid blocking pill because you got heartburn well that blocks the absorption of b12 and zinc and magnesium and calcium leads to osteoporosis and all kinds of problems right so it leads to depression and b12 deficiency and cognitive impairment and neuropathy and so yes the the drugs often interfere with your nutrition so it's not it's not just the one way around it's both ways yeah there was a really innovative company i forgot their name that was working on trying to address this for some of the most common drugs they uh reached over to you on email i forgot their name but we put them in the show notes yeah yeah yeah they're basically the company that's actually focused on the science of how to mitigate the effects of drugs for example if you take a statin for cholesterol it blocks the enzyme that makes coq10 coca-10 is necessary for your mitochondrial function for energy all the things we'd be talking about around longevity switches all have to do with the mitochondria so you're kind of gumming up your mitochondria and you can't produce energy which is why your muscles hurt it's like after running up a mountain your muscles hurt why because you just depleted all the energy in your muscles right but when your muscles hurt without exercising because of a drug it's because you're depleting the energy in the cell with a drug that blocks a key compound coq10 that is necessary to make energy right so and i can just go on all day about examples but you get the idea all right mark we have a few more hit minutes here let's try to do a rapid fire i don't know if that's possible but uh metformin was in the news recently and somebody here is asking about that because they're saying what about metformin for longevity and uh have you seen some of the new stuff that was there absolutely in fact yesterday i was literally working on this part of my book around the effects of metformin and and again i earlier talked about these nutrient-sensing pathways that regulate um our ability to actually um build and grow new tissue and or to clean up and you know recycle and get old parts out so you need both of those so you need the demolition crew and the construction crew well metformin acts on one of these nutrients and some pathways called ampk and it turns it on which helps improve blood sugar control but has all these other effects of ampk ampk inhibits mtor which is good because it increases autophagy so cellular cleanup it activates sirtuins which then improves dna repair and inflammation and so there's all these wonderful benefits of activating ampk right and metformin does that but is that the best way the only way well it's again looking for the silver bullet i think there's a lot of ways to activate mpk just by time-restricted eating for example simple uh and and we should we should really pay attention to the the science of actually how we can regulate these pathways without necessarily medication now that's not to say that there might not be a use for metformin that might be okay but it actually has side effects it's not completely side effect free it's generally well-tolerant it's very cheap there's all these new classes of drugs also being developed called centalytics that help with the senescent cells of zombie cells there's drugs called rapologs which are uh imitating rapamycin an ancient compound found in rapa nui on easter island that in actually inhibits this pathway or silences mtor which allows your body to clean up all the garbage through this recycling process called autophagy so there's all these ways to do this but and i think there's going to be drugs that are going to be part of the longevity suite of treatments but i think the basic foundational stuff of lifestyle and the right supplements can get you probably 90 of the way there yeah and when i was saying metformin was in the news uh having a chance to drill down into this study but you know headlines from cnn men's use of diabetic drugs just before conception is linked to 40 increase in birth defects uh was on metformin yeah specifically so more birth defects taking the drug what's that taking the drug taking the drug yeah exactly more birth defects taking the drug so there's a lot that we don't know every prescription medication has to be sort of drilled into and is going to have other aspects so we just need to look at that and we have to look at also naturally when we're doing a lot of these studies that are there the biggest uh i actually wrote a newsletter on this we'll link it to the show notes but the biggest study showing uh compliance and results for diabetes like the largest trial that was done publicly funded trial not funded by the drug companies it looked at uh metformin versus like placebo versus um uh people who just had like really strong coaching uh and were given lifestyle recommendations and exercise and like taught how to cook and the group that did the best was the group that wasn't on anything right at all right so you never really think about drug companies don't necessarily do trials against compared to what compared there's always great research around metformin and there's a big reason why it's a darling drug in the longevity industry if you're including a lot of other lifestyle basics you may not necessarily need it and you can hedge against the risk by not taking it and here's the thing drew that people need to understand is that these pathways that these drugs act on are not drug receptor pathways they're they're our bodies listening basically like a satellite dish listening to the communications from our lifestyle and our environment and so you can activate all these pathways through things that have activated them for hundreds of thousands of years the phytochemicals in food exercise restricting calories for periods of time all these things that our bodies naturally did as part of evolution were so adapted to and it and it's beautiful it's like so that's what i'm really interested in how do we teach people these these fundamental pathways so they can learn how to regulate them through the most natural and often cheapest pathways two more questions here and we'll wrap up any overrated supplements you know just something that you want to get a chance to talk you know it's maybe getting a lot of attention or like people put a lot of interest in it but it's like uh you know maybe we should hold back a little bit in our exploration is there anything that you feel like people are either overusing or putting too much weight in great question i've never really thought of that naturally any time marketing gets involved you know there's always somebody that's out there that i mean yeah i've everybody's promising this is this fountain of youth there is no there is no foundation there's there's dozens not only does there's hundreds of different pathways mechanisms and systems that all have to be functioning and they require a broad array of interventions it's not going to be like a longevity pill that's it so there's a lot of this stuff and the same with supplements there's no perfect pill or thing that's going to work i think if there's anything that in my mind and i'm still i'm still agnostic but but based on everything i know i think metformin probably works but i think other things will work better that we can do that are non-pharmacological on the topic of ldl this is one from our live audience right now from the dr hyman plus community are there any supplements that can help with lowering cholesterol specifically the small particle ldl and i guess this also just comes back to do you need a supplement for that or is lifestyle going to make me listen if you have if you have really small particles um you know no if you could take any anything in the world if you're not going to change your diet and get rid of starch and sugar it's not going to get fixed right i mean you know you can take you know tons of niacin there's a drug you can take statins you can take uh the the repatha drugs the peak pcks inhibitors that's going to help but you know the reason your particles are small is because you have pre-diabetes so fix the pre-diabetes and reverse it with lifestyle and exercise it's going to work way better minimize sugar refined grains those are going to be the biggest contributors yeah 10-day detox diet and uh exercise and you'll be amazed what happens yeah as somebody who had even though i thought i was really looking at like the sugar in my diet and the included sugar the amount of prior to wearing like a continuous glucose monitor the amount of uh you know oat milk or almond milk yeah right liquid calories and also the quantity of i used to have like i love sweet potatoes but like i used to literally base like an entire meal full of sweet potatoes on its own and again nothing nothing wrong with having sweet potatoes and other things but there are certain uh vegetables in high quantities that essentially it's like eating a lot of sugar right exactly and uh i was doing a lot of uh because this was the trend of a lot of like the flowers that are made out of tapioca cassava cereal i was eating a clean diet but it was a clean diet of packaged foods yeah and my ldl small particle size shot up yeah as soon as i cut those things out it started to radically become exactly a friend of mine found this like you know healthy vegetables snacks and she was showing me this thing and i was like look is this healthy and i'm like let me look at it it's like oh it's tapioca and cassava oh my god these are fine but they're super starchy and that's gonna high glycemic it's gonna drive up your sugar one other thing on the top of ldl you recently had max on your podcast a mutual friend of ours max lugavir cookbook love max he has uh he has a little hack that he put out there now i don't know if it affects small particle size ldl but he reduced his ldl by 33 by using switching from a french press to using now a paper filter like an unbleached paper filter because the paper filter removes out cafe stall and cafe stall is one of the compounds inside of coffee specifically you get it from french press if you're making it that way and if you're not using like a filter that uh has a dramatic effect on your ldl levels and there's tons of scientific research around this like i went through all the papers of the day with our our writer taylor and it's pretty mind-blowing so you can't use the gold filters they have now you got to use paper it seems to be that paper filter in particular yeah is the thing that ended up working yeah i don't know about the mesh filters if they're too porous yeah it's unfortunate because you know paper is kind of right but you can find unbleached paper unbleached bamboo paper filters and if you go on amazon you go to your natural health food store you can find uh unbleached right because a lot of those paper filters have toxins inside them other stuff so there's a lot of eco-friendly and cleaner paper filters if you love that last video you're gonna love the next one check it out here we have muffins bagels you know bread pasta right i mean it's just we have so much flour and that drives your body to think that there's um high levels of sugar because this flour is actually worse than sugar for your blood sugar

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 947,280

Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation

Id: 6w0uvlWwEOk

Length: 78min 38sec (4718 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2022