Welcome to the lifespan podcast by we discussed the science of aging and how to be healthier at any stage of life.
I'm David Sinclair. I'm a professor at Harvard Medical School who researches the biology of aging and I'm co-director of the center for the biology of aging and I'm joined by my co-host and co-author Matthew Laplante.
Hey, we're back. Hey, welcome. Good to see you. Again. It's good to see you again, too.
This is episode 2. We're going to be covering when to eat and also, what to eat within 24-hour periods as well as over a year. Not just to maximize your Wellness.
And how you feel and look but how to maximize your overall, longevity. I'm going to talk about some of my protocols as well that I've developed over the last 20 years, being a researcher in this area and what works for me and what might work for you as well if you mr. Prasad one, don't worry. We're going to cover the basics here, but you might want to go back and listen to episode 1 because we cover some of the fundamental biology that may help. You understand what we're going to talk about today. Even in more detail. So mad have you been man?
No,
I'm good. I'm good. Before we get started, we gotta we gotta thank the sponsors
we do. Let's go straight into that. Yeah, it's important. That we thank the sponsors because this podcast comes to you free. And we also get a chance to highlight some of the products that we love and have been using. Now for many years. Our first sponsor is levels, levels is an app that syncs with A continuous glucose monitor, which they provide an interpreter glucose data for you. I've been so impressed by levels that I've recently joined the company as an advisor by monitoring.
Your blood glucose levels, allows you to see how different foods impact you. I've had fun running tests of my own seeing how different foods impact, my blood sugar levels. For example, I've learned that white rice and grapes, really spiked my blood sugar. Whereas potatoes don't. As we've discussed on this podcast, having stable, blood glucose is really important. Not only for your Deli mental and physical energy, but also for long-term health,
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I've been drinking athletic greens for a number of years, now, as a way to cover all my nutritional basis. I'm often traveling and sometimes my diet just isn't the best. So by drinking athletic greens every morning. I know, I'm getting all the vitamins and minerals that I need to stay healthy. If you'd like to try athletic greens. You should go to athletic greens.com Sinclair and you can claim a special offer. They're giving five free travel packs, plus a year's supply of vitamin D3 and K2.
Vitamin D3 is important for the immune system. And vitamin K2 is really important for keeping the calcium out of your arteries and putting it into your bones where it belongs. So again, go to athletic greens.com Sinclair and claim this special offer. Today's podcast is also brought To Us by inside tracker inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and your DNA to help you better understand your body. And to reach your health goals. I've been using inside tracker for over a decade.
Now, and I'm the chair of their scientific Advisory Board. The reason I have long used inside tracker. It's because they provide the best blood and DNA analysis that I'm aware of that. Make it easy to get your blood drawn. You can either go to a local clinic or it like I do have someone come to your home. It only takes 10 or 15 minutes. It's really easy. And from there inside tracker presents, your blood analysis, in an easy to understand way there are graphs and they give you diet and lifestyle recommendations that help you improve your blood biomarkers.
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Okay. So David when we say
Down together three. Four years ago. We started mapping out this book and I said, look, I need you to give me one starting place when we're talking about health advice. Like this is so much and there's so much health information out there and you give me one starting place. And you said immediately, Joe Gatto. I know the one thing, the one thing. So let's start there right today, because it relates to this episode. The one starting place
is wait for it. Drum roll, drum, roll
for lunch for longevity. The one starting place is
Is
eight less often. Those three words eight less often? That is the one thing that will have the biggest impact on your longevity. Based on all the science will talk about today.
Okay, and and this means this doesn't mean eat fewer calories. It necessarily a Canon doesn't highlight. Yes, that's good. But a lot of people struggle to do that to eat fewer
calories. Well, it comes naturally, if you're down to one meal a day, which I am now you shed weight and then you, you, you get your 20 year old body back.
A nice bonus, but then you, you maintain that weight. You have a larger dinner, which is what I do to make sure. I'm not becoming malnourished clearly. We're not talking about malnutrition or starvation here. It's about packing your calories into a shorter period of
time. That's because packing your meals and do a shorter period. Almost inevitably means less calories, but it's not, that's not really what's happening. You're right. It's not just about less calories. It's about what
Eating less often does inside of our
bodies, right? And we'll get to that. But really, it's not just about the period of eating. It's the period of not eating. That's so important for boosting, the body's defenses against aging to maximize longevity and what we'll talk about, what how that actually works in a minute, but you can still have a large body and fast and get the benefits. We've in my lab. We've looked at mice that are obese and trick them into thinking that they're fasted and they live just as long as a skinny mouse.
So really, it's about getting your body into this state of Defense at any weight though, I would say that there are certain optimal body weights that it's clear that if you're carrying excess weight, you're going to accelerate your aging
clock. What? We don't want people to do is get the idea though that, oh, good, this works, even if you're overweight and so, I can stay overweight and then as long as I fast a little, it's going to be fine. That's that's not what you're saying. Also,
right there are certain body.
Yates waste to hide ratios that are optimal for humans is about 0.5. But yeah, losing weight is helpful when we don't not fat, shaming anybody, but we're going through the science. This podcast is about what the science says, not. What's socially acceptable? And it is true that if you're a leaner you will live longer. That is a fact it's not necessary to get benefits by doing what we're going to say, but also interestingly, as a side effect of eating less often you will lose weight. I did. I've said about
Pounds of since the beginning of the pandemic and I look better. I feel better and it's a nice side effect. But ultimately, what we're going to do here is we're going to say these are the kind of things, you should consider and your lifestyle, we can help you get there. We're going to ease you into it. There are some tricks that make it easier and ultimately you're going to end up with a lifestyle and hopefully a body that allows you to live decades longer.
We made the promise on this program to really stick to the science. Let people know when the science is coming.
In from studies involving animals when the science is coming from studies involving human beings. The caveat here is really important. Most fasting research has been conducted so far on model organisms, but what we're seeing in those model organisms is fairly Universal.
Well, it is. And the most reliable way to extend lifespan of any animal or even a yeast cell is to restrict its
calories. Well, let's start there because you you started your career.
You're in d.c. Still study yeast. And one of the really big breakthroughs in understanding how to extend the yeasts lifespan came in your lab. When you were studying, what happens when yeast are calorie
restricted, right? And that was the goal. The reason I went into aging research in part and while II was so optimistic about being able to have a big impact, is that we know that restricting calories works on everything from her.
Least with spider a fish, a worm, Labrador pet, Labradors, and 2002, there was a great study that showed you could lengthen life span of the Labradors from what was it 12 years to
14. There's a one point, eight years and the only difference really was a 25% reduction in calories. And I
study, that's remarkable. So, I went to MIT in the 90s saying, I want to figure out how the heck, this stuff works. How does this diet work? Because then we can bottle it and we're basically at that point now. But to your point just taking a pill.
Insufficient. If you add the pills plus the diet, you get an additive doubling effect. So we're going to go through supplements in another episode today. It's all about how to maximize when to eat and what to
eat and that's really important because look, not everybody can take supplements. Not every Candy Buddy can access to supplement. What we're going to talk about. A lot of things including things that you can do with, you know, ten dollars in your pocket things. You can do in a hundred dollars in your pocket, but this is something you could do with whatever your
Paying right now for food. Well, it saves money. You actually live it. Yeah, you eat. It. Just say very likely spend less on
food, right? And the kinds of food. We're going to recommend, it are fairly cheap foods, but getting back to yeast. I went to MIT to study this little fungus. It's a yeast. Yeast cell, you used to make bread and beer. Its microscopic foot ten of them together. You might see them as Little Dot. That's how small they are. But I used to love yeast. Literally. I would name them either a little pets under the microscope. I'd follow them through their lives alone ball. Yeah, I would get really
Sad when they would die after about a week because I got to know them. I would spend 14 actually more, probably 16 hours a day, helping them along in their life, taking away their daughters, which is how we count them.
He's a David. If you love something, you really shouldn't take its children away. Yeah, pretty messed up.
That's true. We know if you leave the daughters, unfortunately, there's about five million of them by the end of the experiment and you can't find the original mother. That's the way
things are they divided, the expand and expand, and
expand exponentially, right? So,
Got to get rid of those daughters. You don't kill the daughters, just move them away. But what we found was that when you reduce the amount of sugar in the plate, so they eat glucose is what we gave them, two percent glucose, makes them live about twenty five divisions, daughters. If you restrict that down 2.5 glucose. So now down to 25% of that concentration, they will live over 30 and that's really cool, right? That you can just by changing the glucose levels and we'll get to how that works in humans very similar. You can extend lifespan and what we showed was that
A set of genes that controls that process, this isn't just just glucose holding cell. There's a genetic pathway that gets triggered by low energy and these genes we talked about in last episode they called sirtuins. And there are five of these genes in yeast and 7 in our bodies and they respond to low energy. They respond to other stresses as well. Such as high heat, low amino acids, high salt, the sort of to ins will get activated by these what we call.
All hormetic effects. What doesn't kill them, makes them stronger? And in this case low-energy led to the activate activation of these enzymes called sirtuins, and then they took care of the DNA repair and also stabilization of the epigenome. Now,
there's a lot there. Let's we got a bag of look like, let's slow this down and paste this out. Let's start with sirtuins. What's actually happening when in the case of yeast or any organism in this case because it's very similar mechanisms, right was a
They happening with the sirtuins when yeast or any other model organism is calorie-restricted is
faceted. Yeah. Well their role is to extend the lifespan. So what they're doing down at the at the very minute part of the cell. Is there protecting DNA and making sure jeans stay on when they should be on. But what's happening to boost their activity during caloric restriction? This low glucose level. We managed to figure out in the first couple of years. When I move my lab to Harvard, Medical School will start in my lab at Harvard Medical School.
Cool, we found that low energy. Activates a certain Gene. It has a name. It's called PN c 1. We have an equivalent Gene in our bodies called MPT and turning on that PNC, one gene in yeast was able to activate the sirtuins because that Gene makes a fuel for the sort of to one's called NAD. And so in our bodies as well, when we're hungry, these genes come on, that make more NAD. This very small molecule that the sort.
His need for fuel and then they do the protection. They repair DNA and they stabilize the
epigenome and this is sort of the beginning place that led to NAD boosters where we started going. Oh, well if we can boost NAD in other ways. And that's not what we'll talk about boosters in another episode, but just to sort of put that in the chronology of how how this Revelation came about and why so many people are now taking and our and
mmin. Yeah, that came out of our lab. We found two ways.
Is to activate the sirtuins synthetically. One was to use the red wine molecule Resveratrol. Plus some other plant molecules that are now used on the in supplement market. And that was a big craze in the 2000s from our lab. And then the second one, which is now probably an even bigger. Craze, is the NAD boost, or a lot of people are shooting themselves up with NAD or taking NAD, precursor supplements, you mention nrn, and then we'll get to those in another episode but you can mimic low glucose in these yeast cells by giving them these NAD.
Sisters or you can turn on this PN c 1 Gene artificial in they live longer in all cases and we found that if we deleted that sirtuin Gene in the yeast, either one of them or multiple ones, then caloric restriction in the yeast didn't work anymore, which showed us told us that this wasn't just glucose being bad for you. It does glucose doesn't hurt you. It's that the low glucose is activating the natural defense state of that cell which we inherit have inherited over.
The billions of years, since we
separated, people are just going to cut out that little part where you just said, glucose isn't bad for you and you can play that on the loop and it's going to be great.
All right, well, glucose is bad for you but not for the reason that you might
think. So, we have a little better understanding. Now of how sirtuins are are turned on by fasting. We talked about two other classes of longevity genes in the first episode, mtor and ampk. Do you want to go really briefly through how these genes are?
Are impacted when we restrict calories when we
fast. The first one is mtor, which stands for mammalian Target of rapamycin, the drug rapamycin. We talked a little bit about it in the last episode. But let's refresh everybody's memory. This is a protein complex in the cell that registers amino acids. When you have a lot of protein, eat a big steak. It's going to activate. This mtor protein complex, that allows the cell causes the cell to build things. It's one of the reasons eating steak allows you to build more muscle.
Well, but that's not a recipe for longevity. What we know from many animal studies even in yeast. If you down regulate, the activity of this mtor protein complex, you get longer life. Why? Because it's activating a process called autophagy which recycles proteins. So, when you're hungry, this ought offered, you will get all the old proteins, put them in the recycling bin and then bring them out as fresh proteins. And that seems to be really important for longevity. In fact, even if you just inhibit mtor and stimulate or toffee.
That's sufficient to extend the lifespan of flies. And even my Spike dramatic amounts even
30%. So an mtor, we start with fasting. We get longevity and sirtuins. We start with fasting. We would longevity in ampk same thing, same thing, but in this, but in a different
process exactly it's doing something else, right? And in this case you when you're hungry, aim, PK will go up ampk. If you're wondering, it stands for a MP activated kinase and that's just an enzyme that response to low energy. So when you're hungry, you'll make
More of it. And one of the main things that it does is it makes more mitochondria. We lose mitochondria, as we get older, when we exercise we get more. And this is a way of artificially stimulating that production. Why do we need more mitochondria? Well, they're important for metabolizing things that you eat. But one of the main things that they are used for is to make energy chemical energy. So when you activate a mpk, you'll feel better. You'll have more energy and you also fight aging
and you're using the words you'll alight here.
We'll talk about like you, presumably the people watching and listening to this or human beings, but we should note that again, much of this research got done in model organisms. Human studies are a lot tougher
but we have them for human.
We do have them for human but there are fewer of them and they're like, most of most of the the sample sizes are much smaller.
Yeah, but there's enough known about both mtor and APK to make pretty strong.
Conclusions that these are beneficial to human health as well. For example with this
is I guess what I'm getting at here though is is the reason why I think a lot of people that would hear. Well, there's the all these animal studies were making all these conclusions on the animal studies and you don't have that many human studies, but human studies. Are they take a really long time. They're really expensive.
Well sure. And until this is 100% proven many of us will be dead. So the point is we're going
Give people the information in this podcast name, the notes were going to provide references. They can read more to make informed decisions about whether they're going to try certain diets Lifestyles and even medicines and supplements.
So what we know from studies of em, Tory and PK sirtuins is tells ourselves. The times are tough. This triggers. This metabolic shift into a different form of energy and all of that. Not all of that, but much of that.
We know from animal Studies have mentioned before the majority of the research on Li spandex. Been extension. Comes from model, organisms comes from animals that aren't us, but we're not just entering we're in a world right now where we're doing this research on human beings as well.
We are, it's a fascinating time because we've got two worlds and I walk in both worlds. One is there's clinical studies being done, some of which I'm involved in with NAD boosters at Harvard.
Testing two years of those Inhumans placebo-controlled, double-blind
trial, the gold standard stuff, right?
Yeah. And those go to Scientific Publications. But because people can read the literature and, and hear about things. There's the self-experimentation world as well. A lot of it on the west coast of the USA, and and you hear stuff and these are anecdotal, but they also are interesting. Anecdotes that guide the the clinical trials and it's this very interesting time where we're in where there are parts of the population. Let's
All it one percent of the u.s. That is not waiting for the proof that this works. But I do want to say, before we move on that, there is pretty good evidence that modulating these defenses in the body in humans. Also works, and should extend longevity. We're not just blind and got, you know, I'm not crazy experimenting on myself. And my father, what we know actually, is that drugs that inhibit mtor rapamycin in low-dose intermittent does mimic fasting
And does Boost immunity and does give by chemical changes that mimic fasting and predict longevity. And there are people that are taking rapamycin. Again. We'll talk about that in episode 5 but there's also metformin, which is a diabetes drug and that activates a k. And that's also by looking at, tens of thousands of people who take Metformin for type 2 diabetes. Been shown to slow down the currents. Not just of diabetes, but other diseases of Aging together.
Just those facts that I've told you make me convinced that fasting and the drugs that mimic fasting are going to be important for long-term Health, but also Wellness in your body
today. This is other way of knowing this other form of evidence for this that we haven't talked about yet that I think is important to bring up here. You know, there are there's the double-blind placebo-controlled studies that are ongoing right now that are showing, you know, impact and fasting all longevity. There's
You say the experimental like really interesting. Like, wow, that guy's looking really good and he's been fasting sort of thing. Right? But then there's these large populations and subgroups of populations all across the world who have fasted as a part of tradition and culture for hundreds, thousands of years, and there's there's pretty good evidence from from these groups as
well. Right? Well, let's name some of them, the
jeans, the jeans in India, in
India. That probably the
Most, well, studied group. And that there's scientific evidence that they have the most number of people over 70 in good health than any other
religion than any other group in India. Yeah, right. I love you want to go. Oh, well, the James are often are also vegetarian, but lots of people in India, vegetarian and the jains are even doing better right than them.
Yes, and we'll get to the vegetarian diet and what the science says about that versus a meat-based diet, but there are other religions of Christians fast. There's Ramadan for Muslims. These are
These are not just coincidence as these aren't just religious practices. It's clear that humanity is figured out that you get, you feel better. You look better. You ultimately are disease-resistant. You made, it might even help cure diseases by going through these periods of being hungry or at least not having food in your tummy. Why? Because it activates these three longevity defenses that we just
mentioned. Now, let's get into these really interesting, like, sort of gold standard studies. There is one out of the Baylor College of
of medicine. It was run by Isom into Co glue. This was published just last year and it showed that fasting from dawn to Sunset for four weeks improved blood pressure reduced BMI decreased weight, circumference. And and this is the important part. I mean, not all important, but it up regulated. DNA repair, proteins. This is what we saw in all these model organisms as well.
Yeah, there are dozens of studies showing that
Fast period of fasting event is beneficial to people who are obese. Not just because they lose weight, but they turn on their body's defenses, they become more insulin sensitive and their glucose levels come down. Also showing that people have regular weight like me can benefit from from fasting. There's a number of studies there and these are all in the show notes, if somebody wants to go and check them out, but what's really interesting is that certain diseases, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis even cancer, those diseases seem to also benefit.
It from fasting, including when you combine chemotherapy with fasting, you get this double benefit for many types of cancers. And then the final point that I think is really interesting is you can mimic fasting save metformin a number of doctors prescribe metformin to patients with prostate cancer because it more studies are showing that these mimicry these molecules that mimic fasting or fasting or combinations. Of both will help you beat cancer
and to you when you see a bunch of different
Disease States being affected. You don't think that what's happening is the each of these individual diseases is being played upon, you think the thing Upstream the Aging is being affected,
right? Yeah. Well most specifically those three defense components in the cell. They take care of the body. Not just for aging, but to fight diseases in young people, middle-aged genetic diseases. Even something you might not think of like macular degeneration has been shown to be slow down and even reverse.
Just by fasting.
Okay. So so far we've been really sort of broadly talking about fasting calorie restriction, but we haven't sort of talked about like what that actually means. Let's talk about because there's a lot of minutes if somebody goes online right now because they like, how should I fast? They're going to get a thousand different recommendation. It's confusing for sure. Really confusing. Do you want to do want to just talk about like with some of these fasting regimens
are
Short, let's do that. And we talk about them in a book. So that that's also a resource. I get questions every day from people. How should I fast? And my first answer is, well, you're an individual, you've got a different lifestyle, different tolerance for for pain and hunger. You're a female or a male. You've got different microbiome. I mean, these are really important things to take into consideration when we recommend things.
What we're saying is you can try this, if it doesn't work for you, try something else, but also just to talk about is one of our sponsors inside tracker. I use inside tracker because it's not just how I feel better today. We actually have to measure things get a dashboard on your body to know if the what you're doing, whether it's exercise or in this case, your diet and when you eat is working for you, and that's why I've been able to optimize my diet over the last 20. In fact, 30 years. I'm
Just guessing I'm actually measuring. Yeah,
imagine. It's a little insane that the way that we sort of like wind about testing out whether or not these different eating regimens, were working for us. Is like, do I feel better? Do I not feel better? It's, it's so vague. It's really
nebulous when you wouldn't drive a car without a dashboard. So why do we do that for our bodies? Which are even more
important? Yeah, bad habits. Yeah. That's what we do. Right? That's it. We've always done. I feel but I don't feel
it. Yeah. Well, this is why I've ordered
Pilot I drive a little crazy. I do that with my body as well. It's all an experiment, but let's go through the diets. Okay. So the fact that there's a fasting mimicking diet v a longer colleague of mine. From UCLA is a proponent of that. That's as a diet that lowers mtor activity. It's low in these branched chain amino acids that I've mentioned.
Okay. And is that is that a diet that mimics fasting or does that include periods of actually not taking in any calories?
It's both. But you don't have to be as rigorous about the period, the food itself will
mainly food itself is being processed. But your body in such a way that the body is like, I could really use a little bit more. It could really like a little bit
more. Yeah, you want them to the body to be in a state of perceived adversity. Oh my goodness. I'm running out of food. I'm not eating meat anymore because plants have less of these amino acid. So it it responds to that low amino acid input voltage.
Some great work over the last few years he and his group have shown that on this fasting mimicking diet, which they can send to your home that actually helps cancer patients survive and get get over chemotherapy quicker again. More evidence. That fasting is good, not just for longevity, but for diseases, so, that's one. The next one. Let's talk about which a lot of people call intermittent fasting will just call it fasting. This is period, if you go longer than a day, some people do three.
Days, some people go for a week. I wouldn't go longer than that because then you'll start chewing up your muscle which you don't want to do. But these long extended periods are doing a real deep cleanse on the body and turning on that or toffee G that process of recycling proteins very deeply, especially once you get beyond the three-day Mark when your metabolism switches into, what's called chaperone mediated or taji that deep cleanse, so that's fasting. And then there's time restricted feeding, which is what I do, because I'm not very good at going Beyond 24
hours. Well, I've been most people
Really, really struggle to get there.
Yeah. Time restricted fading, which is what I do, which is try not to eat till dinner. That's hard enough. I'm my hats off to people like Peter, Tia, the doctor and podcaster. Many of our audience will have heard of he can go for a week and he's he's got a lot of willpower. If you've ever met the guy, he's different than me. I'm more of a hedonist. But
he is, he grumpier at the end of the week. Do you think then he is at the beginning of the week, though. I mean, like, after all of that
time. He's always
Serious, that's that's what I can tell you, but brilliant, but let's get back to the this time. Restricted feeding. You want to have at least 16 hours of not eating, or not eating very much and then you can have eight hours. So typically, that means having a late lunch, if you skip breakfast or if you prefer to skip dinner, skip that
because we go to remember here, is that with there's a period of sleep in which you are not eating and so easy part. What you're really doing is tacking on hours to the front of that and tacking on hours to the back of that.
That's right. So when people say I'm skipping lunch, that's not as helpful. And so what I've done in my life, let's just use me as an as an example of an average human being because I'm I'm pretty lazy and I'm not that driven. I prefer to take a pill which is not the right thing. The what I started out in my life was not eat breakfast and that pretty, pretty much been doing that since I was a teenager and that for me works because I'm not really hungry in the morning. I have a cup of tea or a cup of coffee and
I still do that, a little bit of yogurt to mix my supplements with to dissolve them, but that should not
to you're not doing the yogurt. And I've actually seen you do this, the like the amount of yogurt that you put into your little bowl is really minimal. Is basically just to mix up. Come over
spoon. Yeah, that's that's it. And that's burnt off in 15 minutes. That's not going to be a big deal for the rest of the day and I try not to eat at all until dinner. And then I have a really enjoyable large-ish dinner, but it's certain type of food will talk about the types of food later, but that gives my
Body this long window, more than 20 hours of not having glucose circulating from the external world. Now, what happens when you do that and it takes a few weeks for your body to adapt is that your liver will learn how to compensate for a lack of food. It's called gluconeogenesis, the generation of glucose from your liver and it actually overcomes the feeling of hunger. When you first get breakfast and lunch. You're going to be hungry. You're going to be nervous. You can say, I can't do this.
Sinclair's and
videos. This is why people fail at this is because they run into that, and they think this is how life is going to be for the rest of the time that I'm on this diet. I can't do this diet,
right? But do it for, at least two weeks, because after the two week, especially by the three week, Mark your liver has now learned that you're not going to breakfast or lunch and it will start making glucose at a steady level. That's really important because the it's known that if you have these spikes of glucose that leads to hunger when it crashes after a big meal, but also,
When you get hungry, you eat, so you're in this wave of hunger, eating waiver hungry knee.
Do you think people should ramp up? I mean, usage said like do no breakfast and lunch for two weeks, but should they ramp up? I like breakfast first and let their liver get used to compensating for no breakfast and then add lunch.
Well, I would skip one meal and then go for two. You can't do the whole thing. You. Most people will fail, but you're trying to avoid this. This thing. I was just talking about called reactive hypoglycemia. Is that if you eat a piece,
Toast for breakfast and or heaven forbid, a giant glass of orange juice. You'll have this spike in sugar and you'll feel great, but then your body will put out too much insulin and suck that glucose out of your bloodstream and put you into a glucose deficit and that's hypoglycemia. And then you're hungry. You got Grell and coming out into your body and you feel hungry and you need to eat something. I met a state though now where I don't get those risers and crashes. My liver is putting out glucose from when I wake up till dinner, and I've
Ever been so focused. I've never been so brain fog free because these crashes, what they do is they make you feel shaky or tired and brain fog and I wish I'd done this in my 20s and done it my whole life because I've really never felt better because of it.
Well actually measure this now, with continuous glucose
monitors, right? And this is a Shameless plug to our one of our
sponsor. It is not over those not intentionally creating this moment for a Shameless plug, but we
Yeah, well, let's mention them because it makes this podcast free so levels provides glucose monitors that you stick them on your arm, and they measure the glucose levels and I've used one of them. And what I found was that there are certain foods that Spike my sugar really high, and then I get the crash and it's very clear that when I'm feeling jittery and hungry. I am in that hypoglycemic state. That comes after a big meal, or even a piece of toast for me or a bagel. That's really important because then you'll learn what your microbiome in your body responds to well and not
Not for me. I was surprised that white rice toast grapes were really bad and potatoes weren't that bad. And so now I've optimize my diet to not have these periods even after dinner or I feel
crappy and not everybody's going to respond the same way. Like you said earlier, you know, we all have different Lifestyles. We've got different genes. Jim Nelson's Works been sort of informative and in
this. Yeah, so Jim did it in important study in mice. Again, not humans, but it tells us.
Is that genetics is important because he took very similar Mouse strains strains of some called black sex and then some white ones and he crossed them together to make of genetic diversity. A colony of about 100 different types of mice and put them on the standard caloric restriction protocol, which by regulation was close to 35% of what a mouse would eat given food all the time ad libitum. We call it and about half the strains of mice live longer and then about a third.
Of what the remaining ones lived shorter and that was a shock because we thought caloric. Restriction always works. That's not true. It can depend on your genetics and we've now learned that some strains of mice and probably humans as well. Are much more sensitive to this diet, these types of diets and you probably want to do it a little less than someone else and you only do that know that. If you try it on yourself and measure
things, I like this idea that we're you're all just sort of Lab Rats running around trying things out right
now.
Well, I get criticized by some doctors advocating that you are not supposed to be experimenting on yourself. Even people say you shouldn't be allowed to have continuous glucose monitors. How dare you measure your body? And my view on, that is what we should ban bathroom scales. If we're not allowed to measure our
body. Well, I love the fact that you're doing this because I'm going to let you do it ahead of me. And then I'm just going to wait and see what really works and what doesn't really work and that becomes a starting point, but that is sort of like what you've been doing. I mean what you've been.
Doing for a really long time and you've been pretty open with people about like here's what I'm doing. And here's what I'm doing right now and it hasn't been consistent for 20 or 30 years. Sometimes you start and stop things too because it's working and it stops working or it feels like it might be a good idea and it doesn't, that's what we're all doing. Well, I've
made plenty of mistakes. I don't talk about my mistakes as much as I should probably but I've had times where I ate the wrong things and ate too much and gained weight and my inside tracker results were
horrendous. Did you ever make any mistakes and fast it like
When it comes to fasting itself because you've tried different kinds of fast, which one really really didn't work for you.
Well, they were all beneficial. Skipping. The breakfast was was good. I think what, what got me into trouble is when I tried to do it without preparation. So I said, okay, I'm going to just skip lunch and go to dinner without knowing how to do that or being in the right mindset and I had to quit multiple times. I spent years trying to do this. I could never get rid of my love handles.
And this final time that worked for me work because I found a trick and that trick I'm not going to tell you. I'll tell you know, you have the trick, is that you want to fill your body. With fluids, for me, constant coffee tea, hot water, all the way through the day being hydrated, and filled with liquid takes away any feeling of hunger. Also nuts. If you really are really, you need to eat something. A bit of protein is known to take away the feeling of hunger
rapidly.
That my buddy, the cardiologist, John Day, tells his patients when he's working with them is like, look, if you got it, you just start start with a handful of nuts and and just give me 20 minutes after that. You're not going to be hungry after 20 minutes.
So that there's an interesting story about the role of protein and hunger. And it was first discovered by a friend of mine Stephen Simpson in Australia, and he was studying, Locus. And he found out that what turns a locust into a swarm was a lack of protein, and when they get too low in protein,
Oh teen they go, crazy
Locust, get hangry.
And they start eating each other. It's that
bad. And everything else in their sight.
Yeah, and we even see this in the mice that we have on low protein diets. They get super mad and even attack each other. So you don't you don't want to be too low in anything. You don't want to be angry, but getting back to what really works for me is I've trained my to produce enough sugar that I don't feel hungry anymore. And if I do, I'll keep drinking liquids and if I get really hungry, I'll nibble on
Nuts and that for me, has worked really well. I've got my 20 year old body back for the first time in my life. And I'm, you are going to be hung up on
anybody who starts the they're gonna be hungry at first. Of course, they're going to be a hungry.
It's not easy. I'm not saying that it's going to be easy, but it's worth it,
and there is an important point to make here, and we sort of touched on the beginning. But I think we need to Circle back to it because it's so important because we're not talking about starvation. We're talking about intermittent fasting with
Get nutrition that adequate parts are really
important. Yeah, so the acronym would be fun. Alright, trademark that one. I fan. Let's call it the new type of dieting. By the way, intermittent fasting. I learned about a month ago, is the most popular diet in the u.s. We talk about it in the book that might be part of it. But yep, it's important that we add the a n at the end because when we need the adequate nutrition, and there's one sponsor we haven't mentioned, which is athletic greens that he's. But this
True. The reason that I take a drink athletic,
really good at working, these in
well, they're important to us. But the important part is that the adequate nutrition is important is necessary. Otherwise, you're going to be causing more harm than good. So when I take athletic greens, I drink it in the morning. I know I'm getting all those nutrients that I might not get during the day.
So now that we sort of set the stage for when we eat, which is really important.
When we eat, we still have to acknowledge, we have to eat. Sometimes somebody's going to, you know, sometimes you're going to if you intermittently fast, if you're going, you know, 20 hours without food, you're going to have breakfast or you're going to have dinner. So yeah, there's going to be something on your plate. It's really important. Also, what's actually on your plate. That's what this next half of this episode is about is what we should eat when we are eating and maybe the best way to start this really though.
Talk about what definitely shouldn't be or not. Definitely shouldn't. There should be a lot less of on that plate.
Right? Well, the big killer is sugar. Yeah. Glucose particularly, fructose is also pernicious. And if you give animals lots of glucose and especially fructose, they will get fatty liver disease. I'll get diabetes. It's really bad.
And this one is like, absolutely not controversial. Right? Like we're going to talk about meet later and people are going to be like really up in arms. But if you say like the big killer is sugar, there's not
like a group of people that's going to come hunt us down. Like sugars
bad, it is and and why why why? Well, there are two reasons that glucose is bad. When it spikes, three, if you include the brain fog, but let's just talk about physiology here. One is that you're going to have glucose attached to proteins, that makes them glum up think of it, like caramelized body parts. This will ultimately lower your longevity, reduce your longevity give you type type type 2 diabetes and probably cardiovascular disease on top of that.
That's one keep those glucose levels down. But also what glucose is going to be doing two at high levels, is shutting off those protective mechanisms. Remember particularly ampk in the sirtuins. They get Switched Off by Sugar. So by having that up for most of the day, if you're eating three meals plus snacks, your defenses against disease and aging are going to be working at a minimum. So instead keep those glucose levels low and consistent, you won't get the brain fog. You'll get fewer proteins.
I'd that will lead to disease and thirdly, importantly, you'll actually stimulate your body's natural defenses against disease and aging.
So, sort of like the first step sugars. Let's get rid of the sugars.
Yeah, on that note, by the way, I gave up dessert at age 40 though. Occasionally, I steal it and it doesn't count if you steal it. Right?
No, I think there's like a special little pocket. It goes into. It doesn't count against individual right inside tracker. Doesn't pick it
up. Right? Well, he's the point.
You can quit something, but you don't have to be Draconian about it. I still like to steal a loop, you know, a few scoops of ice cream. If I see it, but I'm not going to eat a giant bowl of ice cream every night. That's a quick way to just two shorter
lifespan. When I trying to ruin everybody's Joy.
No, not at all often when I give talks at dinners people, skip dessert. After I'm, I've spoke. I feel bad about that.
Will you remember? We were talking about doing an experiment where we would, we would have a conversation around a table with people and then have the server's come with like a birthday cake or
Something just like watch them.
We still should do that. But yeah, so glucose is a bad one. Something else to avoid is super high protein because mtor, it can be activated but you don't want to activate it all the time because it's not going to turn on the autophagy, the defenses to recycle
proteins. And this one is going to piss a lot of people
off. Well, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people who believe that carnivore diets are the best for longevity. And for, for
some people, a lot of aminos.
Are
appropriate. Well, certainly if you're an athlete or you want to bulk up there are short-term gains, you'll feel better. If you eat meat, you'll obviously have the protein to build up that muscle, but we can go through the evidence, when you look at populations of what they eat and how long they live, as well as the short term effects when you eat a high-protein carnivorous red meat, based diet. Those changes are will be good in the short run but long term there's
Evidence fact. I would say there's counter-evidence to that being beneficial for Longevity, if that's your goal.
And that's because of the inhibition of tour
in large part. Yes, the sirtuins also get Switched Off by high protein as well.
The so aminos are important. We have to have them, if we don't have them, we die, but you can get aminos from Plants, as well as from
animals. Yeah. It it's funny when I say, I've gone vegetarian recently, which is a fact, you get your protein way to get protein from a, what do you think?
That's made of, it's also mostly protein. Now, they're not as bioavailable. So you getting like 2/3. The amount as you would from a state, actor to work a little harder for it. Great. I want my body to work harder. It's good for it. It burns energy and also activating these defenses as we mentioned. So I'm now trying out this full vegetarian diet. I'm not yet vegan, but that actually probably works even better for longevity as the science will
tell. How's it working for you? You feeling? Do you miss me?
I do. I love me. I think they taste great. But I'm more and more inclined to enjoy visual as well.
So we're starting to go down and talk about vegetarian diet plant-based diets are we're going to we're going to talk about a lot of those different choices and many here, but I do want to take us back for just a second to to what's happening. Really was actually happening inside our bodies. When like, when I say to Anna, I still eat meat. I haven't followed you down this path yet.
I love the steak when I put a steak on my plate and I eat it. What's happening? What are those
aminos doing?
Well, before you get aminos out of me, you need to digest it. And so the first step is acid in your stomach is going to break down that meat into amino acids, and then you'll microbiomes can utilize a lot of them. And then those amino acids also going to leach into your bloodstream. Not. So now you've got these amino acids circling in your body. So you're leading, and there are three ones that are particularly important to know about its leucine. Isoleucine and valine also known as the branched-chain amino acids, and these
Used by the body to sense, protein intake. And the sensor is this protein, complex. We talked about called mtor, and when there's lots of these three branch chain amino acids, particularly leucine, it will be activated. And this mtor, the role is to say, wow. Got lots of amino acids. Let's build muscle. Let's repair cells. Let's do all good stuff, which is why you feel good. If you eat red meat and your microbiome can handle
it. Yeah, if you'll grab you like a complete, a
lion.
Yeah, you might have to fight a lion to get it. But what actually is going on. That's still a Terrace, is in the long run. Is that mtor can do something. Even better for your longevity. Then build new muscle, it actually can turn on this recycling program called aalto, Fiji or topology. And that is very clear. There's no debate as to whether or toffee is good for you or bad for you. It's definitely good. So what I think people could do is to, if they want to eat meat, go for it, but
Try to focus on plant.
Based food more often so that there are periods during the week when there aren't as many leucine isoleucine valine molecules floating around in your body, so that you have a chance for your mtor down-regulation to recycle proteins. Now, why do you want to recycle proteins? You might say? Well who cares about recycling proteins? Well, Alzheimer's disease is a good example of proteins that get modified and accumulate in your brain. And it happens not just in the brain, but in all tissues, we have these old proteins that linger cause us to get old to malfunction, but it's really
Muscle and it's reversible by fasting. It's reversible. Also by having low levels of these branched chain amino acids, at least part of the week. Let's talk about
these primarily plant-based diets. There's lots. I mean there is vegan diets out there. You said, like probably that's for many people. That's probably going to be the gold standard, but a lot of these plant-based diets, have a little bit of meat in them. There's the Mediterranean diet. There's the Okinawan
diet, like do over
vegetarianism, lacto-ovo, vegetarian diet.
It is. I mean, is there anything you want to say about these or to? Can we talk about them as sort of an umbrella, an umbrella group? We call them like Blue Zone,
Diet? Yeah. Well, what let's talk about blue zones in a minute. I think what's interesting is that there was a really big study by the Adventist Health Group 2013. Yeah, let's talk about that because what they calculated was the chance of dying based on various diets, and these were thousands of people and what they found was that What's called the has
Ratio. Went down the more vegetarian and vegan. You were, what does that mean? Your chance of dying goes down? And the number goes from 0 to 1. Whereas one is, you're pretty hot likely to die tomorrow or as a low number, which is around. 80 means you've got 20%, less chance of dying on any given day with this Hazard ratio. So, the numbers are the following.
Non vegetarians are at one if you call that one compared to that. The next best one was semi-vegetarian 0.92 and octo lovo or lacto-ovo vegetarians .91. Okay. So about almost a 10% reduction in mortality death and then you get into vegans, which point point 85. So as 15 percent reduction in death, and then the best one was Pesco vegetarian, so getting a little bit of me, but
Yeah, a little bit of made from fish probably, the fish oils in there are beneficial and then you're down 2.81. So that's a 19 percent reduction in your chance of death at any given day late in
life. Okay. Now that's all cause mortality, but we can also now see this in biologic aging because we now have clocks that we can use to measure our biological age and there are studies. Now also that are showing that these diets are effectively reducing
Ting biological aging as
well, right? And there are a couple of these, there's a one-year study looking at a diet of mostly vegetarian, but the one that I think's really exciting is one that just came out a couple of months ago, that looked at mostly women on a Mediterranean diet plus exercise over two years and they could now calculate what happens to your biological age over those two years, having switched the diet and they had various recommendations. It's very typical Mediterranean limit alcohol. If you have read.
Fine, that's fine. A little bit of fish. Only use olive oil as your fat and focus mostly on plants. That was their lifestyle. And then exercise was walking and smother weightlifting.
Did that? That's the fury to study. Yeah. Okay. So the interesting thing about this study, at least it made the thing that jumped out at me. Is it came out of Giovanna? Masalas Lab at the Cancer Institute in Italy and like when you go like, well, why do people who has primary responsibility to study Cancer? Care?
About aging. And it comes back to this thing that you've been saying all along, which is that if we can reduce people biological aging, we can cut diseases off where they actually
start. Well, that's exactly right that. These diseases that we think are just diseases are mostly caused by aging itself and that slowing down that clock by fasting, or eating the right Foods. Mediterranean diet is now shown not just to slow down the ticking of the clock, but probably reverses your age as well. And that's a, that's a mind-blowing concept. You have to think about,
That for a minute that is possible by changing your diet to reverse your biological
age. One of the diet that stands to do this. Well, likely that I know you're a big fan of is the Okinawan diet, you were on the wagon down diet for quite some time.
Right? Yeah. I was the Wilcox Brothers. Wrote a book in the 2000s that I loved and it's mostly carbohydrates. So, there's a fair amount of rice, but probably could have done better with a bit of
Brown rice white rice and your glucose through the roof, but mostly what I was eating were Chinese and, or Japanese vegetables that I could get at the local market. So they're organic fresh green, full of vitamins and soy, mostly, it was that it was a plant-based soy based diet with a little bit of fish. And I look great. I felt great. And then my kids came along and we hate pizza for a few years, but it was great while it lasted. And if you look at the okinawans on the island,
And they are arguably the longest-lived people on the planet, but they have other things that are good for them, things like, social structure, and exercise, they work until they're in their 90's or a
hundred of these things happen and
avoid right. But that lifestyle is probably the ultimate for human longevity and we know this because if akhenaten's moved to say Hawaii, which a lot of Japanese did then they don't live long anymore.
Yeah, you talked about lifestyle. This is really big part of. You said you wanted to get back to the blue zones. Idea you go.
Across the world. You look at these communities of long-lived people. They have a lot of things in common, and we've been talking about diet today. So let's just jump into that and there's been criticism of blue zones
to. Yeah. So, dr. Harriet. Hall, is said that those demographic data people's ages, weren't actually correct. But if you dig into it, they did a really good job. So Dan buettner, I think is right in saying that these people tend to live a long time out of hundreds of people.
That they check the records of going back in the City Records. There was one person that was misjudged. What was it that
111? And they were actually 107 or something.
Yeah, big deal. Okay, but, but that, of course, all Studies have caveats. But this I think is really clear that areas of the world that have the right combination of foods. Exercise, social structure. They do live longer. This is no surprise even in yeast when we don't give them social life, but when we modify their diet,
It will give them food in a stricted Time, restrictive, fashion. They also live longer. So I don't understand why even why its controversial.
There's one more idea about how we should eat that. I know you're a big fan of there's less research behind it. But you believe pretty strongly, it's a and there is evidence, but I think it's still emerging and there needs to be more research, but
This idea of Zeno hormesis this idea of eating plants that have not just eating a plant-based diet, but specifically focusing on plants that have experienced stress.
Talk about that and why you are so so focused on on this
idea.
Well, the Zeno hormesis concept Conrad. How it's and I coined this term in the mid-2000s trying to explain why. So many plant molecules are good for us. It just cannot be a coincidence. And we came up with this idea, really, prompted by a 2003 nature paper that we co-published, that found that there were at least 20 plant molecules called polyphenols that activate. The, so, to an enzyme called sirt1 the number one out of the seven family members. And when I looked
To it. These polyphenols do remarkable things to the body. The one that got the most media attention because it's in red wine is Resveratrol, but there's pie, see a tunnel and there's Fizz Eden and quercetin. These are supplements that people are getting excited about only now, but when you look into it, they activate and inhibit Pathways of proteins in the body that are known to be important for Health and Longevity. And in some cases, the same molecule will inhibit one protein and activate. Another one in just the right way to
Promote Health that cannot be a coincidence. There's no way that that could just happen randomly. So the idea is that we've evolved mechanisms to sense. When our food supply, the plants that we eat are
stressed because it's like an early warning system,
right? You know where humans, we can see that the plants are wilting and we know that the crops are dehydrated. We can measure the soil, most organisms on the planet. Don't even have eyes. How would they know if their food supply is going to run out unless they sensed the
Press the fear in those foodstuffs. And so when you stress a plant you get more Resveratrol, you get more core certain post-eternal and if you look
at what kind of plants we should say, I mean, it's not every plant that we're going to get those things out. Of course, it's every place. Every plant what
gets traps or torn jeans and they need to survive just like we do and they make these polyphenols in order to survive when they run out of running out of water and
nutrients. I'll go. Where are we going to carry those or even
preyed upon by caterpillar?
Ella's. Yeah, but in our food supply a lot of plants have very few of these molecules. Why? Because we think that the faster they grow and that the less stress that they have the better. It's actually more profitable for a farmer to grow, plants that grow really quickly and have no stress, but are they better for us? Absolutely not. So how do we know if a food has been stressed? Well, you can start with the generalization that if they're grown out in a field organically without pesticides, probably there's more stress great. But also, there are foods that are intentionally
Just red wine is one. The best red wines are ones where the vines are dehydrated or I have fungus growing on them. There's a good reason for that. We know that they taste better. Why? Because Zeno hermetic molecules are made along with molecules that tastes good, and a filled with color. Just, it's the plant defenses. And so, what I look for our plants that are organic local and colorful because those are the ones that are most likely to
To have those molecules in the case of red wine, choose grape varieties that are stress. Sensitive Pinot Noir is one of the most sensitive, if not the most sensitive great variety, and that's why it has the most Resveratrol of any other type of wine.
Let's
bring this all together. Now. This is a lot of information here, but there's sort of a checklist. And so let's, let's talk about. Like, if we people got to have like four takeaways here, five takeaways.
Eat less often.
You would say start with eating less Often by skipping one meal. A day moving from there.
Yeah, and don't snack, and don't stack. Yep, avoid sugary drinks and
foods. Okay, you left off and when you do eat, kill the
sugar. Yeah, I focus on. I try to eat artificial sweeteners and natural ones. So Stevia is a big one for me and there are some others that are out on the market. There are natural naturally occurring.
Sweetness, okay?
Start working toward reducing your meat intake. If you're, if you're dieting, if your diet is aimed at longevity.
Very likely, you're going to need to drop your your meat intake.
Yeah, it causes a lot of concern of people who are pro me, but the data is the data. And we've got these references in our show notes that reducing the amount of red meat. And in particular, processed Meats is beneficial for long-term health and even prevention of cancer. One of the things that's not appreciated about red meat. I'll just mention this is that it's not just that they have more of these.
Reprints chain amino acids that prevents mtor from doing. It's good stuff to the body. There's also a molecule called TMA that is in, in the meat that goes into the bloodstream, the liver, turns it into a toxic molecule called tmao. And this tmao is shown, at least in animals, probably in people to enhance accelerate cardiovascular disease. So I would say cancer to right. Yeah, and so what we want to do is to limit the night.
Traits are preserved Meats. If you like a good steak by all means eat one. It's not going to kill you. But if you try to just push yourselves towards a more plant-based plant Focus diet and maybe have some red wine, occasionally, a lot of olive oil with a laic acid which activates or two ins as well. The Mediterranean diet is the one that I think is is likely to be the most the easiest to do in the western world and have the biggest bang for the buck. I'm you can go a little bit further like I have
Don't eat meat and eventually maybe I'll give up everything. That's Dairy and eggs, but the Mediterranean diet is a very enjoyable diet. I lived on it for over a decade and one of the things that's not well known is that there are studies of Mediterranean diet versus Western diet and it's a massive difference. There's one here are the that was published in just 2000. There was a reduction in mortality and 2000, or in 2000 the year 2000.
It's washer US. 20 something years ago, 20, something years ago, but there are a lot of studies. Since there's at least five studies that have backed this up. If you switch to a Mediterranean diet, if you're under 80 and you do that, you reduce your mortality. Chances of death on any given day by
31%. I look, you look. If you're under 18, which means you can still take advantage of this, even if your way deep into your life,
right? And I would say, probably in this study. They just didn't
People over 80 so I don't know for a fact that it wouldn't work on 80 year olds short, right? But yeah, that's the point that's really important. When when often would I give talks to crowds? They are are, are elderly and often. The question comes up. Is it too late for me? The answer is it's never too late. Dietary changes in older, people are can have massive benefits. Some people say, oh, you need to have a carry bit of fat on people. That if you're over 80, you should have a little bit of body. There was there was a
study
that a lot of people latched onto that they go really excited about because it just like, oh if you're older you can be
fat. Yeah. Well it turns out that's not true. When those studies had be reaped have been redone being lean as an as an older person is also beneficial. If you look at go to a nursing home. I don't know how many people listening have been to a nursing home. But when you go there, look around who's alive, they're not giant men who are obese. Their little women who are skinny.
There's an experiment right there. It's obvious Right. In Plain
Sight. Okay, so
eat less.
Start working toward fasting, cut the sugar, cut the meat.
Eat the veggies. Don't cut the meat and respond with like a bunch of carbohydrates, eat the veggies. And if you are going to eat the veggies and you can find ones that have been stressed out.
And are enjoying a little Zeno 4matic. You might you may enjoy a little Zeno hormetic effect from that.
That's great. And there's even an order which you can eat your meals to reduce the blood sugar Spike. You can put the sugar at the end of the meal. So desert is fine. If you would put it at the end, don't start with sugar. Don't start with the carbohydrate because that will immediately spike your
glucose. You are going to be, we go back to that like the second or third point. If you are going to eat sugar, eat it at the end of the meal,
right? What you eat.
The meal and which in which order also makes a difference start with a toe tag during the day, that's just how my goodness eating candy during the day is just going to make you feel. Lethargic when that Sugar goes away
or doing this really horrible thing to children by. I mean like telling them that their lives are, you know, like the sugar is this really great thing that they should have all the time. They should be able to have snacks or Laden with sugar and start breakfast. It starts with sugar
and yeah, well, I blame the food industry for that because they want to sell more food and we've been taught that
children should never go hungry. Breakfast is the best meal of the day. And, you know, we've got an obesity epidemic, an epidemic in kids. No surprise and what parent doesn't feel guilty when their kid feels hunger, but for long-term Health, even programming the epigenome for long-term Health, requires some hunger in individuals. And what we do to kids is we say big breakfast is a snack. Here's a lunch. Terrible lunch. Typically at schools public schools big dinner.
Go to bed full, wake up. Eat some more. We're not just
Causing problems for these kids physiology for the long run, 20. 30 years later because they're epigenome is now set for feast, not famine, right, but we're also setting that for obesity, which shuts off their survival programs, right now. So their bodies are aging quicker than they. Otherwise
would work with her. If that's not a really important sort of frame to put the what we call the Obesity epidemic in to is
It's not just an epidemic of making people bigger. It's an epidemic of making people age
faster. Absolutely. And we're going to see the impact of this in two or three decades, from now with an increase of these diseases, because the clock has been accelerated.
So this is most of our listeners. Most people are listening to this watching. This are going to be adults are going to be making decisions for themselves, but much of this if not, all of
This is really translatable to what parents should be, starting to help their children. Develop the habits of eating in these patterns as well. Right? And inside, participated being hungry. Once
that please. Yeah, and and and not just have food lying around that whenever they want a snack, they can that is is the way that we evolved. We have this metabolic winter, hypothesis that we've published when we were
You know, going back probably 100,000 years ago back to 6 million. What was our lifestyle? We were cold and hungry. These days. We live in a conditioned and heated houses with food always available, which goes against what we evolved to be optimal. And so we've got to go back to those days where occasionally, we were hungry. Occasionally, we were cold, will get too cold therapy later, but basically the concept, if there's nothing else that you remember about this topic, it just remember this that we need to put our bodies in a state of want.
For them to fight diseases and have Ultimate Health in old age and give us longevity.
That's a really good place. I think to stop for now because the next thing we're going to talk about is other ways to put our bodies in two states of stress. That's that's episode 3. Do you want to preview that just a little
bit? Well, there are certain things you can do. We can talk about exercise and cold therapy. And so on, as these are ways of making the body, feel like it's in a state of
adversity and do very much. What what these
What fasting in these diets do, which is activate, these longevity genes,
that's exactly it. And the exciting part about the world. We live in. Now, as we're learning. What is the best combo of those things? And we'll talk about that in next week's episode. Thank you for joining us today. If you're enjoying this podcast and would like to support us, please subscribe on YouTube, on Apple podcasts and on Spotify, on Apple podcast. You have the opportunity to leave us up to a five star review. Also, please support the spot.
As we mentioned at the beginning of the episode, that's probably the best way to help us. We also have a patreon account. It's patreon.com forward, slash David Sinclair. There you can support us at any level you like. Thank you for joining us. And we'll be back next week to discuss, exercise called exposure, heat, exposure, and other acute stressors.
