The Secrets Of Activating Your Longevity Switches

Lauren:

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Everything you’re doing in real time is speaking to your genes. Every thought you have, every movement you make, every bite of food you eat, every relationship or hug you have, you’re either accelerating your biological clock or you’re reversing it.

Lauren:

Hi, this is Lauren, one of the producers of The Doctor’s Farmacy. Just a note of context before we get into today’s episode, the conversation you are about to hear was recorded on a ship in front of a live audience during Dr. Hyman’s recent travels to Antarctica. A video version of this episode will be made available on Dr. Hyman’s website if you’d like to see the visual slides he references in his presentation.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Welcome to The Doctor’s Farmacy. I’m Dr. Mark Hyman, and that’s Farmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter, and if you care about living longer, loving longer, serving longer, and finding out the secrets to how to age backwards, listen up, because this is the conversation you’re going to want to hear. Because it’s with my colleague, friend, my own doctor, Matt Cook, who has started one of the most remarkable health centers in the world called BioReset Medical in Los Gatos, California. It’s my home away from home.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And he has helped me heal, so many of my patients that get stuck heal, and he’s integrated so many different techniques, technologies, and science in order to regenerate and repair and rebuild people’s health back from the ground up. And it’s an incredible gift, and he’s a selfless, loving, brilliant man, and I am just so lucky that you’re on the podcast today.

Matt Cook:

Thanks so much. You’re too kind. If I’m at all less coherent than normal, I’m struggling with nausea. We’re on Drake’s Passage, halfway through 20-foot seas, but it’s amazing, and it’s been a highlight. It’s been probably the highlight of my life coming on this trip. Yeah, thank you so much. The-

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Matt has not taken a vacation in 10 years. He’s a scientist and doctor dedicated like I’ve never seen anybody. He wakes up. From the minute he wakes up until the minute he goes to bed, he’s on, taking care of patients 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM, and then barely has something to eat. Listens to the Grateful Dead, and goes to bed.

Matt Cook:

Pretty much.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

All right. So let’s get right into it. How do we live longer in order to love longer, in order to serve longer? As a friend asked me other night, “What’s the point of living long?” I think the point of living long is to be able to be fully in contribution to life, and not be sick and old and decrepit. And you don’t have to be, this is my recent test. I’m 62 and my biological age is almost 20 years younger.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And I intend on trying to get that down to about 25. This was me 20 years ago at 40. Not overweight, but over fat, and definitely not as healthy as I was now because I learned more and more and more. Now, Woody Allen basically says, “I don’t want to be achieving mortality through my work. I want to achieve by not dying. I don’t want to live on the hearts of my countrymen. I want to live on in my apartment.”

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Now, I’m just going to take you through, quick through here. This is the blue zones, I spent a bunch of time in Sardinia last summer and it was extremely beautiful. This is Sardinia, there’s shepherds primarily, their animals graze on wild plants. They make fresh cheese and wine, the continental wine. The soils are really rough there, it’s a mountain. They have high levels of antioxidants and maybe contribute to their health benefits. They have the longest lived males in the world, and centenarians, and they make this cheese from milk of sheep and goats that have been eating a whole variety of wild plants.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And it turns out that these compounds that we’ve discovered in there are highly protective. The phytochemicals in the plants end up in the meat and the milk of the animals. This is a mind-blowing idea. So can you get your vegetables by eating meat? Kind of, kind of. You get some of the most important benefits, which is they actually… and these are things where you can’t grow food. These are high, rugged mountainous regions.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

This is Carmine who literally stopped his car in front of us, made us get out and talk to him for like an hour. And then he took us to his farm where he’s 85 years old and runs up and down. I couldn’t keep up with him. He was going up to steps with his sheep and he grows a huge garden, has animals and lives in a community. And he doesn’t even look like he’s 80 anything. This is Julia, she’s 103 and three months, as she made sure she told me. And still working, still working, lives with her nieces and is actually making little doilies for weddings and stuff.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

This is Sylvio, who had a ranch. I mean, a sheep farm, 200 sheep up at the top of the mountain. And they opened a little restaurant, so we went up there for this family altogether. I make Minestrone soup, and I said, “Sylvio, do you have any stress in your life?” And he was like, “Hmm.” He thought, and thought it was a weird question. He says, “Well, yes, sometimes at night, a goat gets out and I have to go get it.”

Dr. Mark Hyman:

That says it all. This is Pietro who’s 95. He just retired from shepherding, where he walked five miles every day up and down the mountains. He had a booming voice. If you go on my Instagram, you can hear him singing. He’s just got a boomy voice, erect back, sharp mind. And he was hanging out with his friends, just chilling. So the question is, how do we get there? The Plains Indians 100 years ago were the longest lived people in the world, most centenarians of any population. And it was bison and buffalo, and the Seventh Day Adventists lived also very long. Loma Linda’s one of the blue zones. So what should you do? Should you be vegetarian or should you eat only meat? Well, we’re going to get into that.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And the truth is no matter where you are in your life, if your body looks like the guy on the left, it can look like the guy on the right with the right application of nutritional science and exercise and activating the longevity switches. This guy was a postal worker, 65, retired in France, and became a biker for the first time at 65. And competed, and was riding at 105… almost 14 miles an hour for an hour. I mean, that does not even… I mean 14 miles an hour, if you bike is not slow, and he’s doing it on[inaudible 00:06:40] track. And then what are the limits of longevity?

Dr. Mark Hyman:

The Bowhead whales we found have hooks in them from the whale hunting days, recently discovered. So at least they can live a couple hundred years. And the Greenland sharks live 400 years. The Galapagos tortoises barely age at all. They don’t really age and they can live to be 200 or more, and the problem is our current medicines, we’re practicing Whac-A-Mole medicine, we’re treating diseases and not getting to the root cause.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So what Matt and I do is root cause medicine. It’s activating the body’s own healing systems. Regular medicine has never actually had any insight into health. If you go to your doctor and say, “Can you please measure my health?” “Well, I can look for tests that will tell you if you’re not healthy, but otherwise, you’re healthy.” But that’s not true. Because there’s so many layers. There’s 37 billion, billion chemical reactions in your body every second. And you’re getting maybe 30 or 40 analytes on a lab test, and most of those are only abnormal if you’re really sick in the hospital. So we really need to get away from the single diagnosis. Just because you know the name of the disease doesn’t mean you know what’s wrong with you.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

You could have depression, but it could be 10 different causes or rheumatoid arthritis, and have 10 different causes. So what we want to do is have our health span equal our lifespan. How many years we’re alive is our lifespan. How many years we’re healthy and active is our healthspan. The average American’s lifespan is 70 something, their healthspan is much less. They have actually 16 or 17 years where their health is poor and declining.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So there’s this concept called compression of morbidity, and this was from James Fries from Stanford, who basically looked at people’s health and longevity. And he found that if they practiced three behaviors, they exercised, they kept their ideal body weight, and they didn’t smoke, they died very late. They died painlessly, cheaply, and quickly. Whereas everybody else who was not doing those behaviors died long, slow, painful, expensive deaths.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So if we learn how to activate healing and health in this population, we can actually create a vibrant, healthy group of elders who can contribute wisdom, knowledge, and be actively enjoying their lives. This is a really exciting concept here, which is longevity escape velocity. Longevity escape velocity is the idea that at some point in the near future, and some scientists are saying 10, 15, I don’t know, 20 years, that accelerations in science is based on exponential changes in what we’re doing and understanding, will literally allow you to escape death.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

You’ll reach a point where every year, we keep making new discoveries that will prolong our lives. And you can’t really understand exponential change very easily. If I said, “I’m going to give you a penny today, it’ll double tomorrow. And at the end of the month, it’ll double every day, you can keep whatever is left over,” or “I’m going to give you a dollar a day for 30 days,” what do you want?

Speaker 4:

Pennies for sure.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Well, you guys are all smart. A penny, so a penny will turn into $10 million. 30 exponential steps aren’t 100 yards, 30 exponential steps are I think 24 times around the Earth. So that’s the rate of change happening now.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Functional medicine for those of you who hadn’t heard about essentially is a system of thinking. It’s a theory. It’s not a treatment, a test, anything. It’s simply a framework, an operating system for filtering data based on system biology and how things actually work in the body. And there are five converging trends that are going to change everything we think about medicine and health, but first is what we call network medicine, systems medicine, functional medicine. It’s understanding the body’s an ecosystem, that everything connects to everything else. It’s all one. It’s like, Einstein said this, he said, “I’m not interested in the spectrum of this or that element. I’m interested in the thoughts of God. The rest are details.”

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So what are the thoughts of God and how we were designed, or what we believe? And it’s really an ecological system that we have. It’s just like a rainforest, but the amazing thing is we are the Earth and the Earth is us. There’s no difference. We are intersecting at every level, every minute, with every thing that’s going on around us and even what’s going on in the Earth, whether you like it or not, even if we live in an apartment city building.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

The second trend is the omics revolution. We really unpack the human genome and microbiome, our proteome, our transcriptome, all the omes, right? Our sociogenome, which is the effect of our social interactions and community on our genes. And then that also is added to by quantified self-data, these continuous glucose monitors, the Oura Ring, a sleep mat, they’re coming. And all this data is going to be providing millions of data points in real time about us and how we feel and what’s going on with our biology.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And that is going to inform through machine learning and big data and AI with all the other omics data and the frameworks of network of medicine a whole new way of thinking about everything. Now, most of us think that our genes, we got bad genes and truth is not that. The truth is 90% of chronic disease comes from the environment. It’s what washes over your genes, your diet, your lifestyle, toxins, stress, microbes, all of it. So this whole field is called systems medicine, network medicine. This is from Harvard Network Medicine, like [inaudible 00:12:08].

Dr. Mark Hyman:

This is just functional medicine, so aging now is finally being considered a disease. So the reason I started with a functional medicine framework and all that is because you need a way of filtering data and making sense of it in order to tell a story and a narrative. It’s not random. Like Einstein said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe.” It’s not random how things work in our body. We’re not just a bunch of separate organ systems for this specialist and that specialist and this body part has every specialist in the world.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So it’s not that. It’s how do you look at the body as a whole integrated dynamic system, and understand where to push on that system to create the maximum change and shift. So aging is finally being talked about, not officially, not according to the governments or the world coding of diseases, is being considered a disease. Alzheimer’s, dementia, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, we’re trying to treat all these as independent diseases. It’s completely wrong.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

We’re never going to find the cure for cancer. We’re never going to find the cure for Alzheimer’s. There’s been $2 billion plus, over 400 studies on Alzheimer’s. And they came up with bupkus. And basically, if you get three more months at home, that’s a win. So what really are the hallmarks of aging? There are other things, there are things that we now begin to understand about epigenetic changes, which is the epigenome is the uber genome, for example, your genes are your book of life. You have 20,000 genes and every cell of your body, or all the genes in your entire body, so in your muscle cell, there’s your brain or your eye or whatever, but those genes are silent.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So the body knows how to regulate all that. But what happens is as we get older, and the epigenome is like the piano player, if the genes are the keys, the epigenome’s like the piano player that then determines which song gets played and determines the actual outcome of what’s going on with your health. So those changes to the epigenome are influenced by our lifestyle, by what we do, and what we think, what we feel, by our nutrient status. And those epigenetic changes, those marks, is what causes aging in us over time.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And that’s how we measure our biological age. Telomeres shorten. We have poor communication with cells. Proteostasis goes wrong. We have glycation, which means sugars and proteins gum up like crème brulee in your body. Mitochondrial, the energy center doesn’t work. We got zombie cells that just don’t die and create inflammation, this whole inflammatory cascade. And we have genes that become more injured and unstable, and get more hits, and stem cells get exhausted. So, these are the problems that aging scientists are working on now, but what they’re missing is that underneath those, these are just upstream from the diseases. What’s upstream from the hallmarks of aging?

Dr. Mark Hyman:

What are the real causes? What are the root causes of aging if you can consider disease? So this is what we call the functional medicine matrix. And these are the systems we look at in order to identify how to address a patient. We look at all the predisposing factors. We look at all the underlying lifestyle factors. We look at their genetics and we see how do those influence these seven basic biological networks? Assimilation, which is your gut, defense and repair, your immune system, energy, your mitochondria, and detoxification, how you get rid of waste, internal/external transport, lymph circulation, and then communication, which is hormones or transmitters, cytokines, and your structural system from subcellular structures and membranes.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

I mean, if your cell membranes are made up of Crisco instead of fish oil, they’re going to work very differently and they’re going to have very different functions. And that’s really why we call it functional medicine, because it’s about how your body functions, and how to get it functioning better and understanding why it doesn’t function. And then it’s also to your biomechanical structure, which is what Matt is so amazing at. So people go, “It’s my genes, I got bad genes. My grandmother’s got this, my grandfather’s got that.” Not so, and this is the Pima Indians 100 years ago, thin, fit, healthy, in simply 100 years, they’ve consumed our culture and they’re obese. And we call this commod bod on reservations, because of the government commodities, basically a second genocide. We’ve given them white flour, white sugar, white flour as government surplus commodities, which they eat because they’re poor.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And they end up looking like this and having a life expectancy of 46. And everybody’s got diabetes by the time they’re 30 and it’s pretty bad. But this is what’s really remarkable about the science of aging. This is one of the first studies done on epigenetics, which Randy Jirtle, we basically took identical agouti mice, they’re both supposed to look like the yellow guy, fat, diabetic, hypertensive, super unhealthy.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And he decided for the mother, they were genetically identical, but he was going to give them some special things called methylation nutrients. Methylation is essentially a carbon and three hydrogens. It’s like the change of currency, the coin of the realm of our biology, and getting exchanged millions of times a second. But it’s really important in DNA regulation and DNA methylation and making energy and neurotransmitter, I mean, it’s really important.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So he gave them basically B vitamins and some other methylating supporting nutrients, and then instead of the most looking like the big fat one, it was the skinny brown one. Same genes. And this is just remarkable. And this is the beginning of the field of epigenetics, and this is a little more technical than I want to get into right now. But essentially, there’s many ways that our epigenome can be influenced from all the influences in our life. So everything you’re doing in real time is speaking to your genes.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Every thought you have, every movement you make, every bite of food you eat, every relationship or hug you have, all of it. All of it is influencing your DNA methylation patterns and your epigenome, and is either creating health or disease. You’re either accelerating your biological clock or you’re reversing it. So we can reverse our biological clock. I just showed you my biological clock was 43. I’m 62.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And I’ve been through (beep), I’ve been through mercury poisoning, Lyme disease, Babesia, autoimmune diseases, and mold toxicity, everything, and I was surprised when I got that result, but I’ve been rebuilding my health. And that’s what’s so amazing about the body. It has its own innate healing system that if we learn how to activate, the body knows what to do. That’s what Matt and I do. We learn how to activate the body’s own healing system. We don’t use a ton of drugs.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

We use all these modalities that trick the body into waking up to healing, and we literally can reverse the biological age. So why do we have all these hallmarks of aging? What are the reasons? Well, it’s more ultra-processed food, which is killing people. It’s 60% of our diet. For every 10% of your diet that’s ultra-processed food, your risk of death goes up by 14%. It’s all the toxins. There’s 80,000 toxins that have been introduced in the environment and they’re everywhere. I just checked my labwork and I have cadmium and mercury and lead. I’m like, “Oh, fine. Okay.”

Dr. Mark Hyman:

I’m just exposed and I try to keep getting rid of it. The microbiome is one of the most important influences on our health, because it’s almost like we’re only there for them. We have 20,000 genes, they may have two or three million genes and their genes are making proteins. And if you did a blood test, up to a third to a half of all the analytes you’d find in your blood come from the metabolites of the microbiome, which is amazing.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

We’re just beginning to understand and map this, and we can’t really understand this. When you think about the thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands of molecules floating around in your blood and you get a lab test with three things on it or 15 or 100 things on it, it doesn’t really tell you what’s going on. So with big data and quantum computing, we’ll be able to figure this out. Also food, food sensitivities, we all have leaky gut because of the processed food and the diet and the stress, the antibiotics.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So often, that leads to chronic inflammation, which really can be fixed, and also it’s not enough of the protective nutrients. It’s not just what you’re eating that’s bad. It’s what you’re not eating that’s good. So I believe we evolved, co-evolved, in symbiotic phyto-adaptation with plants, to use their intelligence, their molecules to do things for us that our bodies are lazy and don’t want to do. So for example, if you eat broccoli, it activates an enzyme, glutathione peroxidase, that increase glutathione, which is one of the most important molecules in your body for detoxification, for healthy aging, for inflammation. It’s the most powerful antioxidant you have, and it needs to be constantly recreated, and eating these protective foods like broccoli will do that.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Or if you have catechins, which are in green tea, it activates other detoxification enzymes that maybe explains by Japanese aren’t all mercury poisoned, because they drink a ton of green tea and eat fish. One of the other major causes and probably if not top of the list is loneliness and isolation and disconnection, and on this journey to Antarctica that we’re on, I think that we’ve all recognized that that is part of the solution, is really finding a way for humans to connect to humans and reclaim their innate community.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And I think I’m really impressed by some of the key leaders here, like Randall Mays, who’s devoting his life to actually making this happen. So these again, are the hallmarks. What do they cause? Well, they cause things like [diabecity 00:21:34], which is basically belly fat and all the consequences of insulin resistance and too much sugar and processed food. It basically creates this prediabetes state, which ends up being the driver of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s. They call it Type 3 diabetes. So it’s not a bunch of separate problems.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Like the blind man and the elephant in medicine, chronic inflammation also is one of the big drivers and inflammation is one of the biomarkers of hallmarks of aging. But inflammation can be caused by many, many things. By your diet, lifestyle, your thoughts, your toxins, allergens, microbes. So it’s important to really understand inflammation.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Oxidative stress is part of the key, but oxidative stress is not necessarily a bad thing. We need it to activate certain healing things. We have a process called hormesis, which I’ll go through in a minute. And we’ll talk about how that works to use oxidative stress as a healing power. Mitochondria are really these little energy factories that are really turning out to be the key to understanding aging and a lot of the aging researchers focus on how do we heal mitochondria? How do we activate them? How do we turn on the longevity switches embedded in the mitochondria? If there are longevity switches embedded in the mitochondria, that if we learn how to activate, we’ll extend our life by up to a third or more. And this is really what’s so exciting and they’re not that crazy things to do, and we’ll talk about what those are.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Telomeres, they’re the little endcaps like at the shoelaces, the little plastic thing at the end of your shoelaces, an aglet, thank you. So the aglet at the end of your shoelace, it gets frayed and comes off and then what happens is all your DNA is frayed, and then it becomes danger. And that’s when the chromosomes start replicating, they can become zombie cells which fool around in your body, creating a whole cascade of inflammation. They never die. They just cause more mess. And they shorten as we age, but there’s many things they can link to them.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Exercise, meditation, love, healthy diet, a multivitamin, so they’re not static. Anyway, these epigenetic changes are really key to understanding the way in which we can regulate our health long term, and how to influence our genes through epigenome. There’s lots of ways to do it. There’s mitochondrial therapies, there’s hormetic therapies. There’s ways to switch on the longevity switches, which we’re going to get into called AMPK and mTOR and sirtuin genes. So how did we extend life? Well, this is the first data we first got on anything that really worked, which was calorie restriction.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Now, I met a guy once who did calorie restriction and I said, “What do you eat for breakfast?” He says, “Well, I eat five pounds of celery.” I’m like, “No, thanks. I’ll going to die soon.” So you’re hungry the time, you’re starving all the time. But what they found was that they by calorie restriction, which is adversity, the body starts to kick in repair healing mechanisms that allow us to actually function at a much better rate. So we never had all the abundance we do now. We never had a buffet. We had to go hunt and gather and scrounge around and maybe we didn’t have food. Maybe we did.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So we have 200 or more genes that help us deal with starvation and almost none that help us deal with abundance. So when you calorie restrict, all these longevity switches get turned on, because it’s a sign of, “Oh, I better go into survival mode,” which is great. And it activates this process called autophagy. Who here has heard of autophagy? So autophagy is a very simple process of recycling. Your body has own recycling plant and essentially, it envelopes old cells and parts and puts them in a little bubble called a lysosome. And then, they transport to another part of their body, another component of your cells called lysosomes, which are full of enzymes, degrading enzymes. So basically, it’s like recycling where they break things apart into its component parts, and then you get to use those parts again. And that’s really called autophagy.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And it’s so important because think about if you just cook and cook and cook in your kitchen, you never cleaned up, it’s going to be a real problem. So you’ve got to go through phases of both autophagy and building. The key to understanding aging is not just, “Oh, you should be vegan because meat activates mTOR, and if you activate mTOR, you’re going to die sooner.” No. You need both mitophagy and the cleanup and autophagy, so repair, which is a catabolic state. And you need protein synthesis. You need to build new tissue and protein.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So it’s really about the dance of how to activate those switches in a way, those adversity switches, not too much, it’s like the Goldilocks effect. The worst thing is sugar. Sugar is the worst thing and has the most adverse effects on all the longevity switches, whether it’s mTOR or CMDK or sirtuins. And it is the central driver of aging, period. So I know there’s a lot of desserts out there, but just think about if they’re worth it. And the body as we age particularly becomes more and more [inaudible 00:26:34].

Matt Cook:

For people who are listening to this, Mark is single-handedly doing acupressure on me, because I’ve got a little nausea. We’re on 20-foot seas. He’s moving the slides forward, but I’m doing good.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

You’re not nauseous anymore? I mean, are you-

Matt Cook:

It’s about half of what it was, so it’s about a five out of 10.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Okay. Good. So I saw the barf bag go down on the floor. So, that’s good news. Okay. So, sugar, sugar, sugar, any form. Sugar, flour, I’ve written dozens of books on this. You can read The 10-Day Detox Diet, which talks about sugar a lot, or [inaudible 00:27:12] Solution. But it’s really the driver of so much. We now eat about 152 pounds a year per person. We used to have 22 teaspoons a year as hunter-gatherers. But what about protein? Should we not be eating meat, because meat’s bad for the planet, it’s bad for the animals, it’s bad for humans, right?

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Not necessarily. Depends on what meat and how it was raised, and so forth. So a gently raised cow is very different than a feedlot cow. And one study, for example, they found that kangaroo meat, which is available in Australia, they were able to do a study where they compared it to feedlot meat, and the feedlot meat raised inflammation and the kangaroo meat lowered inflammation the same amount exactly, gram per gram of protein.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So it’s the information in food that matters. This is such a key concept. If you learn nothing else today, learn that food is not just calories, that it’s information, it’s code, it’s instructions. And it’s literally programming every cell, every biochemical reaction in your body every day in real time. And it’s talking to your microbiome too, and it’s so important to think about your food as a farmacy with an F.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So one little geeky minute here, and then we’re going to move onto some fun stuff. So these are the longevity switches, and I don’t try to explain all of it. Read my book, it’s coming out in February. But basically, scientists have discovered that there are these longevity switches that can be turned on and off by different inputs or outputs. So dietary restriction is one of the most powerful ones. So if you [inaudible 00:28:45] in my studies, you extend life by a third, and yeast, they can do it by 1,000 years.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

They put them 1,000 years, and we’d be 120. So mTOR, which we’ll talk about in a minute is important because it really raises protein synthesis, which is great. But if it’s too much, it’s not good. So in order to initiate autophagy, which is a self-eating recycling system, you need to shut it off. And the best way to shut off is just don’t eat overnight. Just take a 12, 14, 16-hour fast, which is not that hard.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

CMPK, a lot of this research around it, four minutes about this is regulating the blood sugar and insulin. Sirtuins are massive DNA repair systems and anti-inflammatory systems. And they’re very much activated by I mean, inhibited by sugar. You heard the red wine story, resveratrol. This was that story where they were able to extend life, and found the rats and mice could drink all this wine and still be fat. But all their biomarkers were really healthy, and they were more fit. They had better health, even though they drank the equivalent of 1,500 bottles of wine. But unfortunately, it wasn’t wine. It was the capsules. So don’t try to do this at home.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Muscle building and muscle, as an organ, is one of the most important things to think about as you age. Because if you don’t have that, you’re in trouble because it’s what drives people into frailty. The reason people end up in nursing homes is not because they have an illness, it’s because they can’t get up out of a chair. Just a simple test, where you get up like this without holding on, they’re going to have to go like this. And you see these people do that. This is the beginning of the end, and when they fall, it’s a disaster, and body composition we can measure now with a Nexus scan.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

This is probably one of the most important tests. Look at where your visceral fat, and the organ fat. That’s what causes all the problems. So, exercise is the key to that. And then sleep is really important, but we won’t talk about that on this ship. Meditation is again, a key lifestyle factor to reset community, which we’re all experiencing, which is really feeding our souls and helping us. Joy and happiness is so important and altruism. Altruism is actually a drug. It literally binds to receptors in your nucleus accumbens and activates the pleasure centers the same as cocaine or heroin.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So serving others, loving others is actually medicine for you. Now, supporting healthy aging, adversity. I’m going to frame the things that can be done, that are coming down the tracks, because there’s a lot of them and they can get confusing in the context of adversity and abundance. So adversity and abundance, so adversity are things that stress your system, basically, whatever doesn’t kill you is good. So it makes you healthier, and abundance are things that activate abundant pathways for good repair. So let’s talk a little bit about adversity.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

This is the Himalayas and in the Himalayas, there’s a plant called Himalaya Tartary buckwheat, which is not a grain. It’s a flower, grown under the most adverse conditions you can imagine. Poor soil, bad light, high altitudes, cold temperatures, drought. I mean, just rough. And in order to survive, they have to produce many, many defense chemicals. These molecules, these phytonutrients are not there for us, but they’re there for them, and they are their communication systems, their defense systems, and Himalayan Tartary buckwheat has basically more phytonutrients than anything on the planet.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

It’s the world’s best superfood, and you can make pancakes out of it. You can make soba noodles out of it. And it’s delicious and amazing, and it also has many, many things that help the microbiome. It has very low glycemic load, high in protein, high in minerals, and has it has unique phytochemicals like [tuhoba 00:32:40], which doesn’t exist in any other plant that we’ve discovered yet.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And why that’s important is that we have these zombie cells that never die. And this actually helps these zombie cells get killed. So by using plants and using these foods in this way, we can actually help deal with some of the hallmarks of aging using other strategies. Also, just the phytochemical pharmacy has to be part of your diet. All these are a little xenohormetic. People say, “Oh, don’t eat vegetables because they’ve got poisons in them.” Yes. But in little doses, it actually stimulates you to do the right thing.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So intermittent fasting again is a technique. Strength training is a technique. This is called hormesis. What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. And it’s a really important concept. Adversity, hormesis, same idea. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. [inaudible 00:33:33], ice baths, polar plunges, right like we did here, hiking around the top deck naked like I did the other day, or almost naked, saunas, which we’ve been doing a lot of here on the boat to Antarctica, and there are things that really happen in here biologically.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

I mean, for example, you produce heat shock proteins, which help refold misfolded proteins, which is big hallmark of aging. It increases your innate immune system and the cold activates your sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system the right way and has so many benefits. And brown fat gets activated, which increases your metabolism. So there’s just so many techniques, they’ve been around forever. Ice plunges and hot therapies, this is a cell gym. This is essentially a hypoxy machine. So another hormetic therapy where you go up to Mount Everest, find some, stick it on your face, and then you come down and your blood saturation drops way down in the 70s, then it comes up, goes down.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And your mitochondria go, “Damn, something’s happening here. I got to get in gear and get myself in shape, and make some new ones, and clean out the old ones and get more efficient.” So it’s actually a way to really, really radically upgrade your mitochondria. And then there’s hyperbaric oxygen, which also does the same thing. And there studies out of Israel where they’re actually seeing the benefits of longevity from this. And essentially, it’s putting you in a tank that’s used for divers for the Bends, but essentially it puts you under one or two atmospheres or more pressure and then pumps in 100% oxygen. So it hyperoxiginates your system. We use this for wounds that won’t heal, for stroke victims. For example, you have a stroke, part of the brain isn’t dead, it’s numb and the hyperoxygenation and hyperbaric pressure, you literally can wake up dead areas of the brain.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

I’ve seen CP kids walk out of these things. It’s pretty impressive. There’s ozone, that’s another hormetic therapy, and we heard about the ozone layer over the Antarctic being destroyed because of fluorocarbons. But ozone is not bad. There’s a lot of bad press, ozone’s going to kill you, don’t use it. You go to the FDA website, this is dangerous, it’s not a medical treatment, and yes, if you inhale ozone, it’s very dangerous. But also if you inhale water, it’s very dangerous. It’s called drowning.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So it all matters where you put it, and ozone is one of the most powerful hormetic therapies. It really saved my life when I was really sick. Matt used it all the time. He’s going to get talking about it a little more. I’ll let him go talk more about it. There are abundance hormetics too, things that help turn on good switches like resveratrol turns on sirtuins or fisetin, which is from strawberries also helps with longevity switches.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Pomegranate, for example, has a compound that’s turned into urolithin A if you have the right microbiome. Urolithin A then goes up into mitochondria, and helps do mytophagy and clean up the mitochondria and also protein synthesis, so it builds muscle. But the thing is, if you just eat pomegranate, your microbiome’s so screwed, there’s a company that’s actually derived this and then made Urolithin A, it’s something I take every day. Spermidine, which exactly comes where you think it comes from, but another abundance memetic, vitamin D, fish oil, all the quercetin and bioflavonoid plants are also abundance memetics. And then turmeric as well, which is really clear.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And then it’s really all about getting autophagy, cleaning up your cells, recycling. So it’s basically the dynamic between breakdown and buildup, between adversity and abundance. So if you just have for example, certain longevity switches turned off all the time, you’re going to die. If you turn off mTOR all the time, if you’re a vegan, let’s say you never touch any protein, it will be silenced, but then you won’t make protein enough to survive. And you’ll end up with sarcopenia and all kinds of other issues.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So NAD is one of the key components that Matt uses and I use basically to help regulate sirtuins and these longevity switches, and it does so many things involved with energy. It goes out and repairs DNA. It helps transmitter function and it lengthens your telomeres, it improves your immune system. And it works in your cells and your mitochondria.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And this whole autophagy thing we talked about. Hormones again are another big part of aging and how do we deal with optimizing our hormones? Long conversation. But our sex hormones really need to be balanced as we age, as menopause, as andropause, and often we have high insulin levels. We have thyroid levels that aren’t right. We have adrenal hormones that are over-taxed with stress, and all these affect us. And one of the key ones is insulin, which is driven by a harsh sugar carb diet. And that’s why a lot of people in the longevity space are taking Metformin, which is a cheap diabetes drug.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

It has side effects, but I’m still on the fence. By the time I get done with my book, I’ll have an opinion about it, but right now, I’m not really excited about it because I think most of the gains that you can have from that, you can have with lifestyle. And they’ve done the diabetes prevention trial over 10,000 people years ago, where they found that lifestyle, Metformin was better than the control group, but lifestyle was 58% better than Metformin. And then there’s really, really cool stuff coming down the pike called rapalogs.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So we talked about those longevity switches. Imagine if you can switch them on without causing a problem, without causing bad side effects. So in the 60s, a bunch of scientists went down, not anthropologists, but scientists went down to look at what kind of compounds were in Rapa Nui, and they scratched the back on one of these statues, and they found a compound they called rapamycin, which they thought was going to be an antifungal drug. It’s currently being used as an immune suppressant in transplant cases, but it’s not really its real role. And in fact, the receptor on which it works is called the mammalian target of rapamycin.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

It’s literally named after Rapa Nui, and now, they have some side effects, some people are using them. I started trying them, I’m experimenting with them, but you have to be careful. They have some downsides. They’re coming out with new rapalogs that select for better silencing without any of the side effects. So rapamycin is that drug.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So let’s talk about more of now what Matt does, and the frontiers of aging and looking at aging biomarkers. So we do a lot of diagnostic tests and there’s going to be more and more diagnostic tests we’re going to be able to look at. Obviously, your omics revolution, Jonathan and I… Well, Jonathan started it, and I piggybacked on it because it was so good. I fought my way in, and we’re creating a company called Function, which is giving you access to your own biomarker data, your own lab data.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And we’re going to be layering in things that you aren’t going to get at your doctor’s office that are going to help you map out your health and longevity in really important ways. So there are all kinds of functional medicine testings that look at the systems. I’m not looking at whether you have diabetes or whether you have kidney failure. I’m looking at what are the dysfunctions in your system, and we can look at telomeres as a biomarker.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

We can look at… This is my telomeres a few years ago, I was 58 and my telomere year was 39. So I’ve gotten a little bit older. This is True Diagnostic, which is a DNA methylation test. These are home tests you can do. The Gallery Test is a new test, liquid biopsy that essentially looks at 50 different cancers and you can detect them, and then you can get them at an early stage and get cured. Pretty awesome.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

A guy named David [Furman 00:41:06] at Stanford has developed a test where he’s put thousands and thousands of molecules throughput in LSEs, looking at correlations with chronic disease and inflammation. He’s found four to eight biomarkers of inflammation that we’ve never heard of, that exist in our blood, that are highly predictive of aging and rapid aging and chronic disease. And it’s going to be available on the market in the next few months. It’s called iAge, little i, A-G-E.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Also, we’re going to get all the data from the biometric sensors put up into that. And we’re going to have so much information about how our body’s functioning, not looking for disease, not looking for pathology, but looking for what the root cause is, and our whole diagnostic model, it’s so antiquated. We really, really have to move beyond the notion of disease and understand the body as this dynamic web and function.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And yes, sometimes it’s helpful to know if you have rheumatoid arthritis or whatever, but knowing the name of the disease doesn’t tell you what’s wrong with you. You could have 10 people with rheumatoid arthritis, all having very different causes. So when I go to see Matt, he’s the future. Matt’s taken this to the next level and works on a lot of things. And I’m going to hand the mic over to him, or I’m going to give… You go over to your mic and talk about what you do. And what are those things that are involved, for what you do to regenerate people’s health, and his clinic’s called BioReset Medical.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And it really is a reset. I personally just quickly, I personally had back surgery two years ago. Couldn’t walk, bad complication, bled into my spine, was like a 90-year-old man. Couldn’t do anything, went to see Matt and he completely fixed me. It was over a number of sessions, but he completely fixed me. And 30 years of pain, gone. And it’s pretty impressive. And I’ve sent him patients with chronic illnesses, with COVID, with long COVID, autoimmune diseases. And the amalgamation of techniques he uses are all designed to activate the body’s own healing systems and mechanisms in ways that aren’t giving a prescription.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So he uses [inaudible 00:43:13] therapy, he uses exosomes, he uses peptide, he uses ozone dialysis. He uses plasmapheresis, and he uses all kinds of injectable techniques, hydrodissections, stellate ganglian block, ketamine therapy. It’s quite amazing, in addition to all the basic functional medicine stuff. So I’m going to let Matt go, and first slide’s really about IV nutrient therapy and the value of that and why, and then we’re going to go to NAD and I’ll guide you through those steps.

Matt Cook:

We think of IV therapy as a platform of a whole bunch of things that you can do. So you can do antioxidants in an IV, things like vitamin C. You can do NAD in an IV, which has this diversity of a whole bunch of effects. You can do regenerative therapies like exosomes, and you can do regenerative therapies like stem cells. So it’s going to depend on what regulatory environment you’re in terms of what you can do. But I think these are things that are going to become really part of a mainstream way of thinking about care.

Matt Cook:

And that’s going to be something that people are going to adopt all over the world. And I think the cat’s out of the bag, and this can be an exciting time the next 20 years as we start to work with these modalities.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Yeah. And Matt, you don’t just use the regular IVs of [inaudible 00:44:29] cocktail, glutathione, a vitamin C drip. You do a whole array of things that are so extraordinary. You put in plant compounds, olivine from olives, which are antivirals, and quercetin and use NAD-

Matt Cook:

That’s from-

Dr. Mark Hyman:

… resveratrol from grapes. You literally give these plant compounds, direct IV, in addition to using things like NAD IV, and even peptides IV.

Matt Cook:

Peptides, yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So there’s a lot of extra things that can be done. I know when I got COVID, I called Matt like, “What do I do?” He says, “Take an entire vial of thymus and Alpha-1, which is an immune regulator, and stick it in a little 100cc bag and drip it in all at once. And I did, and I was like, “Wow, it worked.”

Matt Cook:

How much better did you feel after that?

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So much better.

Matt Cook:

It’s shocking, so then I get nervous talking about COVID because it’s like people don’t want you to talk about COVID, but these modalities are profoundly helpful for COVID and for immune disregulation. And we’ve been using the diversity of the IV therapies that we used to take care of patients with chronic fatigue, chronic Lyme disease, and what had been the major plagues of our lives before COVID came along.

Matt Cook:

And I think that we were lucky in that sense that it gave us a chance to prepare and learn how to do it. And I think of IV therapy like a meal. I’ve got 80 things that I use, but I’m not going to give you all 80. So it’s going to depend on what’s going on.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Yeah. It’s kind of cool, and I go to his clinic, there’s four bags. I’m like, “What is that? What is that?” So let’s talk about NAD, because NAD is something you know a lot about. It’s the latest rage. Everybody’s talking about it. All these companies are producing pills. Everybody’s saying theirs is the best, people are doing clinics with IV NAD. So what is NAD, and what does it do, and how valuable is it and when do we use it?

Matt Cook:

So, NAD is actually a form of vitamin B3, and it stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. And our body basically is like a battery, so there’s an electrical charge across every cell, and then there’s a lot of biochemical reactions that require energy to happen.

Matt Cook:

And NAD is a high energy molecule that donates an electron, and in the process of donating that electron, it facilitates a biochemical reaction. And it facilitates that reaction, determines what it does. So if NAD is donating an electron, it can help for DNA repair. It can turn on your sirtuin super family. It can help us stimulate the Kreb cycle, which is how we basically make energy. It facilitates reactions in our mitochondria, which you mentioned earlier.

Matt Cook:

So NAD is a pervasively helpful molecule. One thing for people to remember is that for patients with complex illness who are real sick, a lot of times, we like to start very low with the NAD doses. On the other hand, the other side of the spectrum is people with hardcore addiction, they can tolerate a lot because one of the other things that NAD does is it helps break down toxins, including alcohol.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s used in trauma and brain injury, and people with Parkinson’s, I’ve seen dramatic results because it works on the mitochondria to stabilize the mitochondria, which is the source of the Parkinson’s problem. It’s used for energy in athletes.

Matt Cook:

So we started doing a lot of NAD years ago, and we’re focused a lot in the addiction space because that was primarily what NAD was being used for at that time. And now we do a lot of NAD, but we’ll do it in smaller amounts. And we’re pairing that and bundling that with a whole bunch of other things. So then-

Dr. Mark Hyman:

It’s synergistic.

Matt Cook:

It’s easier to go through. So I like it that way. I have a little Zofran on board for some seasickness that I got from the waves. Some people will use Zofran before NAD. We also like to use trimethyl glycine, and it helps with some of the side effects of taking any.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

It has a lot of beneficial effects in real time, but it also is one of the key activators of sirtuins, which are these master compounds that activate systems in your body that run around and repair your DNA, which is constantly getting hit. You’re getting hundred thousands of hits everyday to your DNA. Your body has to repair them. And even if 0.11011% isn’t fixed, it ends up being a problem. So this is going on so fast, at warp speed, you can’t even imagine what’s happening in your cells, but NAD will help to activate those longevity sirtuin switches, which is so cool.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Let’s talk about ozone. So ozone sounds crazy, right? Ozone layer, all that, ozone’s dangerous, don’t breathe it, but it turns out it’s one of the most powerful hormetic therapies on the planet. And one of the most important medicines, and it’s basically free. So Matt, would you please explain ozone, why we should be using it? What are the indications and how it works?

Matt Cook:

So ozone is an oxidative therapy. So O3 is unstable and it will donate an electron. And it turns out, our blood has an incredible buffering capacity. So you can mix ozone with blood and it tends to be safe. And there’s a fairly wide range of dosing, but I tend to like some of the lower dosing strategies and even microdosing of ozone. By the other hand, our lungs have almost no buffering capacity, and that’s why if you breathe ozone into your lungs, this could be a toxin. But because you can put into the blood, and what we do is we basically mix the blood with ozone outside of the body and put it in.

Matt Cook:

So we’re not actually putting ozone gas in the body, we’re dissolving ozone in the blood, outside of the body, and then putting it back in. And what it does is that when it donates that electron, it will kill single-cell organisms and it will kill viruses.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

It’s the most powerful germicide on the planet.

Matt Cook:

So then, we have been using, and many people have been using around the world ozone for Lyme and mold and complex illness to help people with these chronic infections that are really probably some of the things that are underlying a large percentage of the medical problems that we face, and that in and of itself is worthy of a deep and good conversation.

Matt Cook:

So then ozone is a fantastic way to… You can think of it as an antibiotic. So then suddenly now, you have one antibiotic that you can use as an infection. And now you can begin to combine that with other things that are intravenous.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And it works against viruses, bacteria, yeast, parasites. It’s pretty impressive.

Matt Cook:

It’s quite impressive.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

I mean… yeah.

Matt Cook:

And then you can also inject it, and ozone’s 99% oxygen. So then injecting it, you can inject it into infections and the body can inject it subcutaneously, inject it into joint infection.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

I mean, I had a nasty cellulitis on my foot in Hawaii last year, and I thought I was going to have an abscess and have to take antibiotics. And I got ozone-infused cream gel.

Matt Cook:

Oh, yeah. That’s good.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And I put it on, and the next morning, my foot was not red. And I was, “What happened here?” So ozone was invented, the machine was invented by Nikola Tesla. It was used a lot in World War I for wounds, because they would soak the gauze in the ozone water and then they would wrap it around the wounds to prevent infection. But the way that it works is as a hormetic therapy, so it creates oxidation, which sounds bad, but that causes the body to go into call in the Marines, bring out the Air Force.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So all of a sudden, you increase stem cell production, you activate your anti-inflammatory system. You shut down something called the NL3P inflammasome, you inhibit something called NF-kB, which is the transcription factor that turns on all the inflammation genes. It inhibits all the coagulopathies we see, for example with COVID. And it basically increases your brain chemistry. So there’s so many benefits to it that your body can engage with, because activating the body’s own healing system, it’s like “Danger. Okay. Let’s go.” And that’s what happens. Pretty amazing.

Matt Cook:

So then we do a form of ozone therapy where we run ozone through a dialysis filter, or run blood through a dialysis filter. And at the same time, we mix the blood there with ozone, which can be quite helpful for chronic infections. And we’ve been using it for people with long COVID, and with very good benefits also.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And we’re going to get another kind of dialysis in a little bit, but the next thing I like to talk about is hyperbarics. We can just spend a few minutes on those. So hyperbarics…

Matt Cook:

Oh, yeah, so I’m actually a hyperbaric certified doctor, and the reason I got into it was to help patients with wounds, and also to help people with these chronic infections, people with Lyme disease, chronic mold, long COVID, all generally do quite well with oxygen. And basically, what happens is you get into that chamber and they put the pressure up.

Matt Cook:

And then over the course of the time that you’re in the chamber, because you’re breathing 100% oxygen at pressure, the partial pressure of oxygen goes up in every single compartment in your body. So initially, the amount of oxygen goes up in your blood, but then eventually you get an increased concentration of oxygen in your bones, in your brain, and in every organ.

Matt Cook:

And then that increased concentration of oxygen has a whole bunch of beneficial side effects that are helpful, so that’s why people do well after strokes, for example, because you’re increasing the concentration of oxygen in the brain. And interestingly, I’ve had a lot of great results combining ozone therapy with injections.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Yeah. I mean, it’s basically how I got out of my deep sickness with mold and colitis and autoimmune disease after C. diff, I used IV nutrition. I used ozone, I used hyperbaric and I used stem cells. So stem cells are controversial, confusing. The legislation and regulations around them are all over the place. And you can get them some places here, but you can’t grow them. So people go to Mexico or Panama or Caribbean. So give us a one or two-minute stem cell overview.

Matt Cook:

So stem cells, we have stem cells in every organ. We have stem cells all over our body and what stem cells do is think of a stem cell as a general contractor that rolls up on a construction site that is inflammation. If you bruise your leg or bruise your knee, the result of that bruise is that you release a whole bunch of cytokines. Those cytokines are there and what they do is they call stem cells in, or they activate stem cells that are in the local area.

Matt Cook:

And then what those stem cells do is they take a look, and then they begin to regulate and modulate that inflammation, so they bring the inflammation down and you say, “Well, how do they do that?” And the way they do that is by secreting small vesicles of growth factors called exosomes. So then we’ve actually decided, Dr. Kaplan, who came up with the name Mesenchymal stem cell actually retracted that and now he calls it a medicinal signaling cell, because the stem cell is basically a mobile pharmacy that rolls around and looks for inflammation in your body and then regulates and manages that inflammation, and manages the healing response.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Yeah, I mean, so stem cells are really the original cells that create all the other cells. And that’s when you cut your skin, your skin heals, because it knows what to do. They age, they age out, they get harmed. We have less of them as we age. So people are going, “Should we use umbilical stem cells? Do we use placental stem cells?” And there’s a lot of exploration of that. You can’t use somebody else’s stem cells because your body will react to it as a foreign substance.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

But this technology is emerging and now we can get purified stem cells that can be extremely helpful. And the applications, the uses for orthopedics, for aging, for various diseases is really interesting. But what Matt said was really important, which is that they’re basically little carrier groups for all the good stuff that are in the stem cells. It’s not like the stem cell goes somewhere and becomes something else. It releases other factors and those are exosomes.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And Matt uses exosomes a lot in his practice. I’ve been a huge beneficiary of exomes. And I was really under the weather with COVID and I got sent a bunch of exosomes and I took it, and the next day, I was back to normal. It was pretty remarkable. So exosomes are what?

Matt Cook:

So exosomes are those vesicles that stem cells secrete, so fundamentally, we’re always at some level of inflammation, but generally, we’re able to manage and modulate that. Something can happen that can spin inflammation out of control. An example of that would be like a viral infection that creates inflammation that’s beyond what your body can begin to deal with. So then exosomes is we’re injecting billions and billions of vesicles with growth and healing and modulating factors.

Matt Cook:

And then one of the things that they do, I said that a stem cell will manage inflammation. They manage it with exosomes, and what they do is they regulate and balance immune function, and that regulation is often what’s awry at the end of an infection. So it brings you back into kind of a balanced immune state and the reason they’re helpful for so many chronic infections is that in almost all those chronic infections, we’re in a constant state of inflammation that is beyond what the body can deal with.

Matt Cook:

So if you can support with an anti-inflammatory, a lot of times, that’s enough just to reboot a reset for the immune system, and then it gets back to doing what it’s supposed to do.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Yeah, and they’re much easier to take, because stem cells, you have to suck your bone marrow, suck your fat. You have to go to a foreign country. These come in a little vial, you just defrost them and inject them, and you can get large doses of them and have profound effects. So next, I’d like to talk about peptides, of which you all on the boat are hearing about, thinking about getting. Many of you have been the recipients of Matt Cook’s largess, and helping heal different problems. What are peptides? How do you use them? What are they for, and how do they affect longevity?

Matt Cook:

So, there would be a symphony of different molecules that exist within the body that do things, so exosomes are one of those. Proteins and small molecules are other ones. And then a protein is a sequence of amino acids. A baby protein is called a peptide.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Less than 20 amino acids.

Matt Cook:

Maybe less than 100. So then there are peptides that do all kinds of things. You mentioned hormone replacement, there’s peptides that will tell your pituitary gland to make more growth hormone and to secrete more growth hormone, and since these came out essentially, everybody that was in anti-aging that was giving people growth hormone has quit doing that, because it works so much better to tell your body to make growth hormone.

Matt Cook:

There are peptides that are anti-inflammatory. We think about one like BPC-157, that is really incredible for burns and pain around nerves and even in things like the P-shot.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

The P-shot?

Matt Cook:

You can actually put them in the penis and it’ll help with penile function. There are peptides that will help reset and turn on my mitochondria, peptides that turn on cognitive function, peptides that are immune supporting and the immune supporting peptides have been I think fantastically helpful for people with COVID, as you mentioned. So then there’s this huge diversity of different baby proteins that modulate every aspect of our biology, the assembly line of biology, and they have different inputs and do different things. But-

Dr. Mark Hyman:

We all know about neurotransmitters. We know about hormones. We know about different communication systems like… but peptides are really the body’s super highway of communication systems and signaling.

Matt Cook:

And then as we age, I mean, this is longevity talk, the issue is that our immune peptides really go down as we age. Our thymus, which is the master immune gland starts to involute and do less. And that’s why older people are so much higher risk for chronic infections. And then even at risk for the big viruses that come around. So I think that intermittently supporting the immune system with peptides with the immune peptides is going to be a crucial part of managing aging.

Matt Cook:

You can use peptides to manage senescence. So then, we now have this incredible palette of molecules that we can begin to in a real detailed way, manage how your body responds to healthy living, to infections, to trauma, to toxins, to emotions and PTSD.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Yeah. I mean, the science is advancing so fast and oh, will actually play in the dance of a biology with these molecules intelligently and turn on and off things or help regulate things that degrade is important. I mean, the thymus degrades over time and we now call aging inflammaging, and it is really driven by a whole set of factors that drive ongoing inflammation. So how do you manage that as you get older? What causes it? And yes, there are all the things we talked about, but there’s also ways through peptides to really help support that.

Matt Cook:

This is like a spiritual experience for me, because I’m sitting here with nausea and every time Mark does this, he’s doing this acupuncture point in my hand and it’s makes the nausea totally go away. So interesting.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Okay. Now I want to talk about parabiosis for a minute, which essentially is this discovery that if you hook up the circulation of a young mouse to old mouse, the old mouse gets young. And I think that’s spawned a television show called Blood Boy or something. And I know Mao Tse Tung used to take the blood of young soldiers and put it in him so he could maintain his youth. And maybe this is really an important scientific discovery because it means there’s stuff in the blood of young mice that’s helping to keep healthy and young and to reverse aging, but you don’t have to do that.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

It’s not like I have to find a five-year-old and sew my circulation to him and walk around like that, there are ways to actually do this through plasmapheresis, which is cleaning out the bad stuff in the blood that’s driving inflammation. So talk about the work you do, about transfer plasma exchange, how it works, and when you would use it and what’s going on.

Matt Cook:

Okay. So then this one is just really amazing. So your blood is basically, think of your blood as being about 50% plasma and then 50% cells, and those cells include the white blood cells of your immune system and then red blood cells that are carrying oxygen. So, the blood goes round around and it does what it does. But what we do is we put an IV in one arm and an IV in the other arm, so then we pull blood out and then I’ve got two ways I do it.

Matt Cook:

One is where I run it through a centrifuge system where we spin and we separate the cells from the plasma, and then we send the cells back, and the plasma goes into waste. And then the other way that we do it is we take it-

Dr. Mark Hyman:

You throw out all the bad stuff?

Matt Cook:

We throw away the bad stuff. And the other way we do is we do it through a plasma separator, and then put your cells back in. Either way, basically, we’re taking toxins and inflammation straight out of the blood and then throwing it away and then replacing it with saline. And sometimes with albumin as well.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Now it’s really been effective in autoimmune diseases and all kinds of chronic things like Guillain-Barre. It’s been used in medicine for a long time, but it’s not been used for these applications.

Matt Cook:

Yeah. So it’s used traditionally in extremely severe autoimmune cases, because that plasma, one of the things that’s in plasma is antibodies. So if your immune system is making antibodies to yourself and then you’re attacking yourself, which is what autoimmune disease is, and then we could do something where we could pull all of those antibodies out, but let you keep your cells, it’s like we washed the blood.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Yeah, yeah. So what are those things and why don’t they come back? Obviously, there’s antibodies, there’s cytokines, there’s immune complexes. There’s who knows, bacteria, fungus? Why doesn’t it all just come back?

Matt Cook:

So they will come back. So then, for example, in autoimmune, in the classic cases, people are intermittently doing this all the time, but-

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So, doing it on a regular basis?

Matt Cook:

Doing it on a regular basis. But what we found is when you do a substantial detox and the body, it allows the body to get back on its feet again. And it allows your immune system to re-regulate, because once you’ve taken all of those out, it wipes the deck, and it gives you a fresh start.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Yeah. And I’ve had all these treatments in Matt’s clinic, it’s extremely efficient, well done, highly skillful. And I’ve sent patients to him who’ve really struggled with everything else, and it’s really when they make the breakthroughs. I want to talk about something really cool. So this is all this stuff now, this is now medicine, everything we talked about today, you can get, you can do.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

It may not be accessible to everybody, but it’s there and a lot of the science is there and it’s safe. And the question is, what’s coming down the pike that’s really exciting? Anybody here, Yamanaka factors, who I didn’t tell about today? Yamanaka factors were discovered by Yamanaka, who’s a Japanese scientist. He won the Nobel Prize for this. And essentially, in every cell of your body is the blueprint for your entire body. Now, in your skin cell, you could remake a brain or a liver or a kidney.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Why doesn’t your skin become a brain, or your nose become an eye? It’s because of all the genes you have, many of them are silenced, and only turning on the right ones to do the job that they’re supposed to do. And as we grow, the Yamanaka factors are involved in regulating how far we grow and then they turn off, because we want to grow tissue. We want to build tissue, but then we don’t want to keep doing that because that’d be bad. So they get silenced and they stop for the rest of our lives, but they’re there.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And he discovered them. And there is a few that are problematic, but if out of the five, if you take three of them, this is what David Sinclair did at Harvard, give them to blind mice, totally bind, optic nerve dead, not working. And by the way, I’ve had a limp for 30 years and my nerve doesn’t work, and nerves don’t grow back often if they’re dead. It’s just the way it goes. They were literally able to regrow by injecting Yamanaka factors in the eyes of these blind mice, regrow these optic nerves and give these blind mice full sight.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Now, this is only in animal models, but it’s very soon coming down the pike and imagine the future, I don’t know if it’s five, 10, 15 years away, where you’ll be able to get an adenovirus vector or maybe CRISPR to insert Yamanaka factors, the right ones in your genome with a special molecular switch that when you want, you can turn it on. So let’s say you put them in when you’re 25, but then when you’re 40, you’re like, “Yeah, I’m getting little gray hair, a little chubby, muscle mass lower. Let me turn that on.” So you take that pill for three months, six months, and you reverse age, your skin unwrinkles, your hair turns black, your muscles get stronger. Your metabolism improves.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

That’s coming, and this is one of the greatest advances because it causes the induction of pluripotent stem cells. In other words, you can take any cell in your body and reverse it back to its original state, and then re-differentiate into what you want. It’s just mind-blowing.

Matt Cook:

And really, the foundation of all this stuff is the work that you’ve done, functional medicine, that’s fundamentally the foundation. So then within that platform, then you have this diversity of things. There’s things that can focus more on infections. There’s things that are somewhat more anti-aging. And then we’re going to have things like the Yamanaka factors and more modules that we can insert into the platform of health, and that’s going to be the future.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Yeah. I mean, it’s basically two things that’s going to happen. One is we’re going to figure out how to repair and clean up all the damage we’ve all done to ourselves. And two, we’re going to learn how to turn on all the longevity switches and actually really extend life, which is amazing. And we’re almost done. I’ll spend a few more minutes.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

This is what Matt does a lot. He uses ultrasound guided injections everywhere you can think of, using technologies that most pain doctors don’t use. For example, Grateful Dead background music. No. He uses things like exosomes and peptides and placental matrix, the placenta’s full of such healing compounds and also exosomes. It’s what he did to me and it’s really what fixed me. So talk a little bit about, and we only have a couple minutes, Matt, talk a little bit about the work around the musculoskeletal regenerative medicine stuff and how it works.

Matt Cook:

So basically what happens in the body is that you have nerves and muscle and ligament and tendon and fascia. And when you look with an ultrasound, you can see where the nerve is. You can see the artery, the blood vessel, and my initial area of interest starting in about 2002, I started doing ultrasound guided nerve blocks, where I would use an ultrasound, look and put a needle right next to the nerve and then put local anesthetic around that nerve and put it to sleep.

Matt Cook:

And then I would give people sedation with ketamine and propofol and they would not know that anything happened during the surgery, and wake up at the end. But when I would do that, I would do the nerve block and they would say, “Hey, you know all that pain that I’ve been having, that just went away.” And they were like, “Do I really have to have the surgery for this?”

Matt Cook:

And I was like, “Yeah, you have to have the surgery.” But then I would tell all my nurses, “Someday, I’m going to have a job where I do ultrasound guided injections and I’m going to fix pain and I’m going to do IV therapy.” And everybody said to me, “Oh, that doesn’t exist.” So then I just kept thinking about that and then I found out that people were putting other things. The first thing we started putting in around nerves was 5% dextrose, because it’s a calming… It’s like Prolo, but it’s lower inflammatory because it’s just 5%.

Matt Cook:

And then I found out about putting growth factors and other things around nerves. And then we would see one person after another that had nerve pain that would start to go away. So then we started putting those same products in joints or probably my favorite thing to do is to work with people with back pain. Just because if you have back pain, it’s almost debilitating. It’s really hard. Back and neck pain. And it’s been a profoundly helpful thing where we treat your facet joints, we put exosomes in the epidural space and-

Dr. Mark Hyman:

What that means in English, and he did it to me, is imagine your tiny little spinal cord like this, he sticks the needle right at the bottom of your spine up that canal and injects 30ccs, which is a lot of fluid into a very narrow space. And it feels like you’re going to explode from the inside. So it sounded nice, but it’s actually a very intensive procedure. So he did it a couple times without any kind of sedation. I’m like, “Matt, put me out, give me some drugs.”

Matt Cook:

But basically, we’re trying to look and see how force moves through the body and see where people have pain. And then basically, where people have pain is often where there’s partial ligament tears at the insertion onto a bone or because a nerve is compressed, because it’s going under a tunnel or over a ridge or often an area that is stuck in chronic pain leads to a whole bunch of physiological changes.

Matt Cook:

So then we stick needles into the fascia, we stick it into muscles, we stick it into joints and we put fluid around tendons, basically anything that we can see that is having a problem, we will treat.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And it’s been amazing for me, and you use not just fluid, but healing fluids like exosomes or peptides.

Matt Cook:

And then directionally, the next 10 years is going to be the decade of the peptide in terms of musculoskeletal medicine, because we’re able to do at an order of magnitude lower price with peptides now that what has worked for me better than anything else is exosomes and placental matrix, and that continues to be the gold standard.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

That’s true.

Matt Cook:

But we’ll have all kinds of people that will begin to see who have not as many resources, and I’m doing a lot of peptide work.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

That’s great.

Matt Cook:

It’s nearly as profound and in some cases, it works.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

I mean, look, Matt, one of the biggest drivers of cost in our healthcare system is back pain and billions, trillions literally of dollars are spent on this. So it makes sense once this gets proven, that this will be covered by insurance. So next thing I want to talk about and we’re almost done is trauma, and I can’t talk about longevity without addressing our soul, and whatever we’ve all been through that’s damaged us in some way, that’s hurt us in some way, that’s made us not whole.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And we know from deep medical research that if you have adverse childhood events and there’s a questionnaire we use called the ACE Questionnaire, that if you have a high score of a lot of adverse childhood events, you’re more likely to have all host of diseases from obesity to autoimmune disease to cancer, everything.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So how do we begin to reimagine the way we deal with trauma? Because talk therapy doesn’t really work. CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy can help a little bit. Psychiatric medication really has been a massive failure. There’s a psychedelic revolution going on. It’s actually looking at how we begin to rethink treating trauma and treating trauma is essential, because if people don’t do that, it’s hard for them to get the hands around anything else. To love, to serve, to live longer, love more, serve better.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

I mean, it’s hard. So whether it’s psilocybin mushrooms or ayahuasca or ketamine or ibogaine, these are all things that are being researched, explored, and soon will be part of our culture and be reimbursed and part of psychiatric care. And I think it’s going to be incredible, so I’m excited about that.

Matt Cook:

And then the other thing is the stellate ganglian block, which is an injection that turns your fight or flight nervous system all the way asleep, and when that happens, it forces you to use different neuronal pathways, which would be the rest and relax pathways. So then we’ve been doing an experimental protocol where we do that and it causes vasodilation of the blood vessels that go to the brain. It causes increased blood flow to the brain.

Matt Cook:

And then when we achieve that with the block, then we’ve done exosomes IV, and that’s probably the most miraculous thing we’ve we’ve ever come up with, up until now in terms of changing trauma. And I don’t know if I had told you, we had this joke in my family that psychology didn’t work, because my father’s a psychologist. So then I went into anesthesia trying to do the thing furthest from psychology and now about a third of what I do is psychology.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

Yeah, for sure.

Matt Cook:

But I’m a psychologist with a needle.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

You’re the best, you’re the best.

Matt Cook:

But then the synergy of that with ketamine, with plant-based medicine, with all of the stuff, I think is the future. And there’s a lot of cases where that are one and done with any one of those modalities. But then for the hard ones, it takes a little bit of all of those. And I’m super interested in working with that over the next couple of years.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

So all those things we just mentioned are available now, but what’s coming down the pike? Well, artificial intelligence will be able to help us interpret the mass amount of data that’s going on in our body. And quantum computing will help us make sense of it. But what’s happening now is just advanced as you can’t imagine. Nanobots being able to deliver, and do surgery and drugs that are just… edit your DNA, 3D printing of organs, gene editing and CRISPR. There’s just massive changes that are going to change everything we do.

Dr. Mark Hyman:

And we may just end up being like Madam [Clamma 01:20:15] who lived to be 122, and was still sexy and smoking, and she had good genes, clearly. But we all have the potential to be 120. The science is there and it may be even much, much longer. If you really love this podcast and you want to hear more, please share with your friends and family. I know they’d love to hear about it. Leave us your comments about what you learned about how to extend your life and get healthy, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we’ll see you next time on The Doctor’s Farmacy.

Lauren:

Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services.

If you’re looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you’re looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit IFM.org and search their Find a Practitioner database. It’s important that you have someone in your corner who’s trained, who’s a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.