Forever Young: Anti-Aging Tips To Look & Feel Younger

Mark Hyman, MD

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Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Farmacy, this constant exposure to toxic bad stuff. Without enough of the immune supporting anti inflammatory good stuff, throws our whole immune system out of balance leading to low grade systemic inflammation that accelerates aging. We call this inflammation. Now before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice. There's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale, and that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand Well, you, if you're looking for data about your biology, check out function health for real time lab insights.

And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, well, check out my membership community, doctor hyman Plus. And if you're looking for curated trusted supplements and health products, for your health journey, visit my website, doctor hyman.com for my website store and a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. Welcome to The Doctor's Farmacy and another edition of health bites. I'm doctor Mark Hyman. Now, you've probably heard a lot about living longer about increasing your lifespan, but what about increasing your health span?

That's the quality of life you enjoy during those years. It's not just about adding years to your life, but life to your years. Let's face it. Who doesn't wanna feel young and vibrant for as long as possible? I certainly do.

Now some of you might be thinking, aging, yeah, that's decades away from me or, chronic diseases, something older people worry about. But here's the truth. The signs of aging and chronic diseases can begin much earlier than most of us expect, and the foundation you built with your health today sets the stage for how you age tomorrow. In functional medicine, we view the body not as separate parts, but as a connected whole, a network of systems where each one impacts the others. Now conventional medicine breaks the body into more than a 135 specialties.

But here, we focus on the big picture. It's about systems medicine, about network medicine. Your body is a system or a network. About understanding and optimizing the 7 core systems that your body has that require are required to work in harmony so you don't just age well. You can actually reverse aging.

Now here's a fun fact. I'm gonna brag a little bit. In the last few years, I've been working on my health span because I can't work on my chronological age. I can work on my biological age. And I did a number of things to up level my health based on what I've learned in my research for Young forever in my book, about longevity and I actually got 4 years younger biologically while I got 2 years older proteologically.

So that's what we can actually do. So I demonstrated myself, which made me very excited, but I wanna have you learn how to do it too? And that's what we're gonna talk about today. So many of the steps we're gonna discuss today are interconnected. So what benefits one system tends to benefit all of them?

From steering clear of ultra processed foods to embracing nutrient dense, whole foods. These strategies are about making smarter choices that impact your entire body Your body is an ecosystem. It's one system. It's not a bunch of different parts. All divided into specialties all requiring a different doctor for every inch of your body.

Is just ridiculous. You are 1 integrated organism, and that's what we're gonna talk about today. Unlocking the secrets of functional medicine to help you feel and look younger. So let's get started. So what's the first system we look at in functional medicine?

It's your gut. We call this the assimilation system. It's assimilating nutrients. It's digestion. It's to get microbiome.

And our gut is intimately connected to our overall health and longevity. We used to think of the gut as just an isolated digestive I'm a 2 from our mouth tour, but that food passed through on its way, and we, I absorbed what nutrients we needed and got rid of the rest. Well, it's way more than that. Today, and we understand they got extensive influence on overall health, inflammation, on aging, chronic disease like cancer, heart disease, autoimmunity, dementia. Yeah.

Even dementia is affected by your gut microbiome. You know, The gut is home to about 30,000,000,000,000 bacterial cells, about the same number of human cells, but it houses about 5000 different bacterial species. And there's about 2 to 7,000,000 bacterial genes in there, which are way more than your 20,000 genes. So there's all kinds of stuff going on in there that affecting your health. Now, this whole ecosystem is called the microbiome.

Now, a balance got microbiome supports optimal health, but an imbalance got microbiome causes disease. And an imbalance microbiome is called dysbiosis. That's when you got too many weeds and none good guys. Right? This biosis is the opposite of symbiosis, right, where everything works together.

This is where things don't work together. So good. It's like too many weeds thrown in the garden. And that's what harmful bacteria take over and that leads to a weakened gut barrier also known as a leaky gut, which lets food and bacterial toxins and food particles leak into your bloodstream causing an immune reaction. And that leads to something we call endototalk semia.

That's leaking a bad bacterial toxins and other inflammatory things into the body, and that creates something called systemic inflammation. And that systemic inflammation drives up the risk of all chronic diseases, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, You name it. It's driven up by a leaky gut and inflammation driving system that also leads to autoimmune diseases, allergies, asthma, skin issues, all kinds of stuff. So you feed your garden every day. With everybody food, you feed the good bugs or maybe a eat crop and feed the bad bugs.

And you heal or you harm the gut lining based on what you're eating. You see bad bacteria thrive on bad stuff, starchy, sugars, ultra processed foods, And the good bacteria feed on the 3 ps, prebiotic fiber, things like avocados, artichokes, asparagus, green bananas, chia seeds, pistachas, and there's a whole list of them. And I've written a lot about this, and we'll put more in the show notes. Probiotics, things like fermented foods, sour crowd pickles, Tempe, miso, natto, and kimchi. Polyphenols, that's the 3rd p.

That's colorful plant compounds, things like olive oil, turmeric, green tea, pomegranate, cranberry. Those are amazing, and they feed the good bugs, and they love to eat that stuff. So you can also, you know, obviously take a probiotic supplement. So those all are really key for your gut. Now I I actually had ulcerative colitis.

I had a horrible gut issue after taking the antibiotic. I'm you might have heard me talking about this. And ended up with C. Diff and C. Diff, colitis, and then colitis, and the C.

Diff went away, but I still have colitis, and that was a mess. And I developed the product that I actually used to cure myself, which included all the three piece. Prebiotics, probiotics, and polyphenols, and it's called gut food. And I've used it for myself and my patients with great success. Now certain bacteria have anti aging effects.

They produce postbiotics. Now what's a postbiotic? A postbiotic is essentially something that bacteria makes, and it's then released into the gut or absorbed in the body that has an influence on your health. And and there's a really important one called butyrate that keeps inflammation low, and it also protects again cancer and chronic diseases, and it's basically the fuel for the intestinal lining. Longevity is is also, I think, best to achieve from the inside out.

It's it's not putting stuff on your skin and getting face lifts and laser and plastic surgery because that's a losing game. You wanna get healthy and young from the inside out. And that's really what we do in functional medicine. So once we fix our gut, meaning the inside, we fix everything else too. Our skin, our mood, our brain health, technician, joint pain, and inflammation.

So tending your inner garden, fixing your gut, learning how to take care of your gut, what causes it to be messed up and what caused it to heal is really important. So that's a core life skill, like anything else like driving your car, using your iPhone, basically making your bed. It's just one of those things you have to learn how to do, and it's not that hard. The next system we have to think about, and these are by the way, these are 7 systems and functional medicine. We talked about these these biological networks or interrelated systems that all influence on each other.

They're not really separate. They're dynamic and they're like a web. So like I said, you know, 60% of your immune system is in your gut, right, but it's your gut. Well, what about your immune system? Well, It's all connected.

Right? So the second system, we we just talk about these as separate things that are just to discuss them and help you differentiate what's going on, but they're not really separate. The next one is defense and repair. This is our immune system, our inflammatory system, And inflammation is important. Like, we wanna get inflamed if we have a sore throat or we sprint our ankles so we can bring in white blood cells and heal and repair and all that stuff is great.

But when it's out of control, that's not good. So inflammation is a really important function of the immune system. It helps protect us against infections, viruses, bacteria, heal injuries. The problem is that inflammation in our modern lifestyle has gone rampant. We're overloaded with all sorts of inflammatory triggers.

Ultra as diets, which is the worst. They're high in starch, sugar. Those spike are blood sugar. They spike insulin levels. And high insulin levels drive insulin resistance, and that drives more inflammation.

It's a vicious cycle. The next thing that drives inflammation is environmental toxins. Things like heavy metals, like mercury or lead, lots of plastics in petrochemicals, PCBs, phthalates, BPA, all kinds of PFAS chemicals that are in pretty much everything that forever chemicals. Those are all driving inflammation. Microbiome is out of balance is a huge ever inflammation.

We just discussed that. So bad gut bugs and even stress is an inflammatory trigger. Now stress includes fig physical trauma, like accidents or ultraviolet radiation. It includes, electromagnetic frequencies and even psychological trauma, obviously. And that can really be the result of abuse or neglect.

And that has a physiological effect on your body that drives inflammation. So we have so many things that cause inflammation, and we don't have enough of the things in our life that protect us against inflammation. So we wanna start to eat an anti inflammatory, whole foods, vital nutrient rich diet. We want optimal levels of vitamins and minerals, exercise, sleep, relaxation, love, community, meaning, and purpose. This constant exposure to toxic bad stuff without enough of the immune supporting and inflammatory good stuff throws our whole immune system out of balance leading to low grade systemic inflammation that accelerates aging.

We call this inflammation. Now this results in DNA damage, including shortening of the telomeres and cellular damage. And that forms senescent cells or we call zombie cells, half alive, half dead cells that secrete all these prone inflammatory cytokines. And that leads to more inflammation and faster aging of our organs and tissues. And it shows up as damage to our skin wrinkles, it damages our muscles, causing sarcopenia, our joints, leading arthritis, and joint pain, our blood vessel lining called our endothelium, which leads to after necrosis or hardening the arteries or plaque in your arteries, leads to heart attacks, neuroinflammation, which can cause dementia, Alzheimer's, and depression, in some resistance, which lead to diabetes and cancer.

All this is affected by all of these triggers. And so we're kind of in this vicious cycle of inflammation. It's accelerating our rate of aging. In fact, the whole process of aging is sometimes call called inflammation. Now here's something that might shock you.

I've measured biological ages and people who are in their thirties and forties who are biologically a decade or 2 older inside their bodies than their chronological age. And it's for sure an eye opener. And I mentioned I'm 39 biologically, even though I'm 64 chronologically, Well, that's good for me, but not for everybody else who's, aging faster. So the good news is if you know what to do, you can get a handle on it. Now you can get your inflammation level checked by your doctor or you can put the data in your own hands using full service testing platform like the one I co founded called function health.

It's a modern health care company that give you access to the first ever 100 plus lab test for less than 500 bucks a year with insights from top specialists and myself, obviously, And there's no docs appointments. There's no health interest needed. Just you completely in charge of your own health and the knowledge to help avoid disease and vastly improve the quality and length of your life. Now I help build function health to make low cost comprehensive testing available to everybody. We're very mission oriented with a very long term perspective.

A 100 years to be exact. Want everybody to live a 100 healthy years. So you can check it out. We can sign up and jump the wait list by going to function health.com forward slash mark. Now what are the strategies to reduce inflammation?

Well, first, get rid of the bad stuff. Right? Eliminate sources of chronic inflammation like ultra food, sugar, starch, often gluten, conventional dairy, alcohol, refined oils, and excessive snacking all bad for you. Try to reduce your exposure in remnant toxins like heavy metals, BPA, phthalates, parabens. Make sure you don't have any mold exposure in your house.

Folks on eating good stuff, right, eat a whole foods pig and diet. I wrote a book about it and check it out. We'll put in the show notes, but it's basically joke between pale and vegan. But it's just real food, whole food, low glycemic food, lots of colorful plant foods for gut and immune support, vital chemicals that are great for your immune system like turmeric, ginger, leafy greens, like the bra broccoli family, cauliflower cabbage, bok choy, brussels sprouts, all those are incredibly helpful at anti inflammatory detoxifying. Good fats.

Right? Olive oil, avocados, nuts, and seeds, omega 3 fats, wild caught, low mercury, fatty fish is really important, like sardines, macro anchovies, and herring, flax seeds are great. Pastorade eggs can be great source of omega threes. What's the next system? Well, the next system is about bio transformation and elimination, also known as detoxification.

Now this is a normal process in your body. Now the term detox often brings up all sorts of stupid things like fad diets or maybe rehab from alcohol. But the biological detoxification system that each of us have is sophisticated and it's crucial for removing internal waste and environmental toxins. Now what are detox organs? Well, there are liver, which processes toxins and excretes them through the bile in the gut, are kidneys which filter waste from the blood and urine.

And lungs, which we breathe out the toxins, our skin, which excretes them by a sweat and our gut, which removes food waste, ingested toxins and hormone metabolites by the colon and also the lymphatic system, which cleans the metabolic waste and the environmental toxins. Then the problem is our modern environments are often overloaded, and Our detox systems are overloaded. We're exposed detoxes everywhere we go. Heavy metals like lead, mercury, cadmium, pesticides, PCBs, air pollution, food additives. I mean, the average person who eats an ultra processed diet has £22 of food additives.

A year. Many chronic conditions that make us die young and age faster, including Parkinson's, for example, are related to environmental toxins. For example, try chlorathaline is commonly used in dry cleaning, degreasing, decaffeinated coffee. That's linked to increased risk of Parkinson's. So how do you support your detox system.

The first thing is you wanna reduce your exposures. Right? So, and the environmental working group has a really wonderful guide on how to reduce exposures from every source. Right? Skincare products, household cleaning products, food, and so forth.

But you also need to learn how to fix your own detox system. I call it the p 4 system or the 4 p system. Right? It focuses on enhancing the body's natural detoxification systems. The first step is to enhance your liver function and that's how it processes toxins.

That's the first peek. So how do you enhance your liver's detoxification system and help its ability to process toxins? Well, Eat a lot more of the Christopher's Vegetable family. There might go to. That's broccoli, cauliflower, kale cabbage, ruegola, collards, Col Robbie, brussels sprouts, all those foods are rich in something called glucosinolates, which is a precursor to something called Philforaphane, which is a powerful detox fine compound and a boost glutathione.

One of the most powerful foods that does this is broccoli sprouts. And you can get those in some storage. You can make them yourself other thing you can often use is whey protein. I particularly go away because whey protein does increase glutathione and has a lot of amino acids that are needed for detoxification. You also need a lot of nutrients to metabolize your toxins, things like folate, zinc, selenium, magnesium, manganese, You need all the methylating b vitamins, folate, b 12, b 6.

And you need these are all co factors that basically power all those detox enzymes that are processing all the toxins. So eating a whole foods diet, taking a multivitamin mineral, that'll help fill in nutrient caps and get you most of the way there. What about protein? Protein's important because 1 of the major pathways, well, many of the major pathways, in fact, are reliant on amino acids to properly detoxify. Like glycine condensation, root condensation, so forth.

And these are these are basic biochemical steps that require the right amount of amino acids and protein and I encourage you all to generally who are, trying to stay healthy and keep muscle is to eat point 7 to 1 gram per pound of ideal body weight of protein. The beautiful thing about, protein is it's full of other good things like b vitamins, immuno acids, glycine, taurine, cysteine, methionine, all critical, methionine is important for making glutathione. Glutamine also, is important for making, glutathione as well. So it's really important to make sure you're you're taking the right proteins to boost your detoxification pathways. Okay.

What's the next key Chorus system? Well, it's our communication system. This is called a communication system, but it's it's a network of messenger molecules in your body. It's your hormones and your transmitters. It's all your cell signaling molecules or cytokines, and there's all these peptides.

Everything's running around sending message everywhere. And these messenger molecules including what I mentioned, the hormones that are transmitters, peptides, and lots of other cells signaling molecules, they really are required to help us maintain optimum biological function. Now when these messengers are balanced, your health is good. And when they're imbalanced, you get problems with your health, right, aging, typically brings about hormonal changes that are commonly affecting our hormones, like in some resistance or pre diabetes, low thyroid function, higher cortisol levels decreased sex hormones like testosterone, men, and estrogen, progesterone women. Decrease growth hormone and even altered neurotransmitters and more cytokines.

So just because it's common, doesn't mean it's normal. Insulin resistance is the biggest hormonal disorder we face. It probably affects 9 to 10 Americans. The root cause of inflammation is insulin resistance. And it's also the root cause of chronic disease of sexual dysfunction of worsen perimenopause and menopause symptoms.

Hot flashes, mood swings, and too much insulin causes stubborn belly fat. It's just bad. What else can melt your hormones? Exercise. Because it just balances everything.

Alcohol definitely messes up hormones and just drinking alcohol will increase estrogen levels. And it also have negative effects on hormones in many, many ways. So you don't wanna be drinking actively, and it's not good for your health. It's you know, recreational drug occasionally is fine, but it's really quite quite, clear that the data does not support alcohol for any health benefits, just to be clear. Actively managing your stress is important and not with drugs, but things like adaptogens, rhodiola, Ashwagandha, ginseng, Siberian ginseng, all can be helpful.

Theanine is an amino acid that can be helpful. Also sleep, getting your sleep sorted really helps your hormones where you can sleep at the same time every day. Get morning sunlight. Don't get blue light at night. Maybe if you're struggling with hormones, you might need bioidentical hormones for men or women.

Now there's synthetic hormones. There's animal derived hormones, but it those gave hormone replacement therapy a bad rap. Due to its, linked to higher risk of heart attacks, inflammation, stroke, weight gain, and cancer. But bio identical hormones, Topical bio identical estradiol progesterone, even vaginal estradiol or low dose or topical testosterone or men can take us intramuscular or even oral, they're better tolerated. You wanna basically do the lowest dose possible.

And for the shortest amount of time possible, but bioidentical hormones can be an important part of a optimal health regimen. The next system is optimizing circulation and blood flow. We call this transportation. Our body contains about a hundred thousand miles of blood vessels enough, to go around, the earth about two and a half times. The lining of the vessels is called the endothelium.

Now the endothelium makes something called nitric oxide, which you probably heard about from Vanguard because it's what increases blood flow, but it's a gaseous substance that dilates our blood vessels and keeps the blood flowing. Now when you don't have a healthy levels of nitric oxide or you have problems with your endothelium, your arteries get stiff and that can result in blood, high blood pressure, you can have more cholesterol deposits in there, causes oxidative stress, plaque buildup, clogs or arteries, and cause, heartening the arteries. When our blood vessels get dysfunctional, then our arteries get stiff, that causes high blood pressure. Cholesterol gets clogged up in there and you get oxidative stress. You get plaque buildup.

And this basically caused atherosclerosis and this caused a heart disease. Right? It's the number one killer worldwide. Now, why should you care? Well, the rate of heart disease in young people, 25 to 44 is increasing.

Now I've seen thirty year olds having heart attacks, which is terrifying. Now becoming way more common, rising by about 2% each year for the last 10 years. That's kind of scary. Now one of the signs of having blood vessel issues, well, sexual dysfunction erectile dysfunction is a big one in some resistance, weight gain, high blood pressure, All those are clues. There's about 700,000 people who die every year from heart disease.

And half of these cases have no prior symptoms before the event. In fact, in 50% of the cases of heart disease, the first symptom is sudden death. So you don't wanna be that. Right? So the key is prevention.

You gotta know your numbers. You gotta have the right testing, and you need comprehensive lipid testing, including total cholesterol, triglycerides, HDL, LDL, and also APO B, which most people don't get checked, and something called lipoprotein fractionation, which is a measure of how the sizes and the and the, number of particles are. This is a much He just measures the size, the density, and the number of the LDL particles. There's another big risk factor that often doesn't get a check called life approaching the lay. Which is more genetic, but it's important and can be managed.

Now most cholesterol panels just don't include these. Now they don't give you a full picture, so you wanna get the right test So how do you protect your endothelium? Well, clean up your diet. Same as always. Poor diet is the number one cause of heart disease.

So heart disease and insulin resistance are pretty much two peas in a pod. People with type 2 diabetes are 2 to 4 times more likely to get heart disease or heart attacks. So you gotta fix the insulin resistance. How do you do that? Well, you know, by now, need ultra processed foods.

Don't eat bad fats. Mhmm. Ranch and Omega's succeed oils, which are bad. Focus on low glycemic whole foods, fruits, veggies, healthy fats, fiber, non starchy veggies, non starchy fruit that are, like, no berries, for example, not like a lot of pineapple, hard healthy fats, like olive oil, avocados, you know, macadamia, that's, polyphenols, really important, green tea, ginger, turmeric, oregano, rosemary, all full of antioxidants. Obviously, you don't smoke.

Obviously, learn how to regulate stress, limit your alcohol intake. Like, max one drink three times a week, and a drink is, you know, an ounce of liquor, 5 ounce of wine or 10 ounce of beer, but that's really even too much. It should be just basically the healthiest dose is none. Now certain supplements may be helpful with people within some resistance. And I use the memory practice, like lipoic acid, magnesium, chromium, Vurbine, vitamin d, omega threes all really helpful.

We'll put all this in the show notes. So don't worry. Now these 7 biological systems are basically descriptions of how your body works. It's not perfect. It obviously will be modified and improved as we begin to understand things more.

But these basic systems are all a network. They're all connected. They're all dynamically influenced one another. So you have to understand all of them and work to optimize all of them by taking out the bad stuff and the good stuff. And that's essentially what functional medicine is all about.

So I really appreciate your tuning into this episode. Remember, the journey today to feeling younger and looking younger starts with understanding and nurturing how your body is 1 integrated ecosystem. There's just so much we can do without a doctor to optimize our environment and our diet and our lifestyle to improve our gene expression and to slow and even reverse biological aging. Now what we talked about today, if you do those things, you're on your way to a healthier, more vibrant Thanks again for joining me today, and I'll see you next Friday for another juicy episode of health bites. Thanks for listening today.

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