2021-12-31 - Interview Dr. David Sinclair - mindbodygreen - How to look & feel 15 years younger

Length: 35:38
Interviewee: Dr. David Sinclair
Interviewer: Jason Wachob

Transcript

democratizing longevity

0:00	david welcome hey jason it's great to see you great to have you back on the show and
0:06	it was so awesome to see you mentioned in our wellness trends specifically
0:11	around longevity and something we're particularly excited about and you're excited about is this
0:18	idea of democracization you know when people tend to think of longevity
0:23	they tend to think of really expensive tests and potential potentially pharmaceuticals and
0:29	supplements and so on they think of silicon valley and billionaires and all that crazy stuff you read
0:35	but let's take a step back and and talk about democratizing longevity and i'm curious you know what is democratizing
0:42	longevity mean to you yeah well you're right that there is a group of
0:48	individuals that i meet more and more often that have the means and the wealth and
0:54	the connections to extend their lifespan i think by 20 30 years
1:00	but it's a small group of people and what we need to do is to give that that information
1:06	to everybody and that involves not just making it available but truly being educational
1:12	and interesting and so what i've decided to do with my career as this harvard professor from a lab
1:19	is to use hopefully decent abilities at storytelling to educate people and make
1:25	it interesting i have a podcast coming out early next year january 5th where
1:30	hopefully it's an interesting uh journey through the longevity world of
1:35	science and nutrition and and exercise but also supplements and
1:40	some of the more far out things that these billionaires are into and so it's about education primarily but the second
1:48	part of that that i'm very into and driven by is to make the
1:53	medicines that will come out of this field of aging research available to everybody
1:58	uh because if it's just for the rich and it's cost a hundred thousand dollars treatment then that's really not going
2:04	to help me achieve my goal in life which is to really make millions hopefully billions of people live
2:10	healthier lives and in doing so lengthen their life as well and so the science that we do and the
2:16	drug developments on i've started about a dozen companies now the companies are very focused on making those drugs
2:23	are cheaply and widely available and the kind of technologies for the most part
2:28	are drugs that could be just a few cents a day once they
2:34	eventually uh get widely used what do you think was the biggest update

whats been interesting to you

2:39	that impacted our understanding of longevity in the last year you're on top of everything
2:44	what's been interesting to you over the course of the last year yeah well
2:50	what's actually happening in society is super interesting i used to be uh the pariah of biology i'm so sure harvard
2:57	wanted to kick me out a few times but there's been a real shift both in mentality of doctors and researchers and
3:03	the public that aging is something that is more akin to a medical condition
3:08	a disease and that it's treatable so there's this zeitgeist mega trend if you want to call it in society that's
3:15	changed but in terms of research and breakthroughs a really big one and forgive me for focusing on myself for
3:21	one second my lab and the research team and our collaborators a year ago exactly
3:27	to the day almost that we could reset the body in terms of age go back by about 80
3:34	and do a permanent reset of the body now this is in animals but these are mice that are very similar biologically to us
3:40	and we've done it now in human cells and human tissue so we're optimistic that the same
3:47	principles that i'm going to tell you about in mice apply to humans and that is that we have a backup copy of youth
3:53	in our bodies that can be accessed we're now using gene therapy because that's what we know works but we're hoping
4:01	uh to find natural molecules that will achieve the same result to not just slow down the aging process which we know we
4:08	can do by eating well at a training kind of diet and exercising lose your breath a few times a week at least
4:14	but by actually taking a supplement that would reset the body within a matter of a few months to go back
4:21	not just by six months but many many years and i truly believe that's going to be
4:27	possible in the next five to 10 years and our goal now is as a society is to
4:33	stay alive until these discoveries become mainstream and so you you think we're five or so

whats next

4:40	years out from having that smart drug if you will or that
4:45	we can take and that alone will extend health span
4:51	yeah i know it sounds crazy right unfortunately i'm at harvard so people tend to take me a little more seriously
4:57	but the big breakthrough was the discovery that we have this backup copy
5:03	of youthfulness the easy part is figuring out how to reset the system it's similar if you
5:09	want to use the analogy of the wright brothers i know it's used a little too much but it it works the wright brothers
5:15	the hard part was figuring out how to glide around the dunes strapping on the engine flying
5:21	eventually transcontinental flight now global that's just extensions of what they did in kitty hawk
5:28	and we basically in aging we've done that now we know how to fly
5:33	and now we're going to strap on the engine and see how quickly and how cheaply we can do
5:38	this so i'm quite confident that we will find molecules that will do this in fact there was a paper that just came out
5:45	that shows a natural molecule called alpha ketoglutarate that i predicted in my book lifespan
5:52	probably would work was able to reset the age of 40 people i think out of 42 people 40
5:59	people had their biological age reversed by an average of eight years within just
6:05	uh under a year of taking this supplement so akg right and we can take that that is
6:12	currently a supplement that's out there or can it be found in food naturally or where can we find it i think a lot of
6:17	people are going to be very intrigued yeah me too like like most of these molecules
6:23	that plants make in response to stress these molecules are called xenohermetins that we name them that
6:30	they uh you need to a lot of them a lot of plants to get the
6:35	amounts that are medicinal and so i it's better to
6:40	eat a purified source of it you can buy akg or of ketoglutarate on the internet
6:46	i look for trust and supplier very high quality high content of alfie kimku right there are
6:53	some companies that are selling it that are combinations with vitamins in the case of this human study that's what
6:59	they sell but yeah it's widely available and it would be really quite a thing for humanity to have a safe molecule that's
7:07	similar to an amino acid that we could just pop and if it's true take our years our age back by half a decade or a
7:14	decade now i'm quite skeptical because it sounds way too good to be true
7:19	but then again some things are true so we're going to repeat the experiment and see what happens but i will say that
7:25	the reason i think it's it's plausible is that if you give alpha ketoglutarate to yeast cells that make beer and bread
7:33	to fruit flies and to mice they also live longer so there's something really important going on here

resveratrol

7:39	building off of akg resveratrol you've always been a fan of resveratrol in many ways i feel like you
7:46	put resveratrol on the map are you still a fan of resveratrol in terms of supplementation and in terms of some of
7:53	the magic can do in terms of our longevity well i i am since we first made this
7:58	discovery in 2003 or there are something like 5 000 papers showing that it's beneficial to cells
8:05	human cells and animal studies and and even now there's about a dozen
8:10	positive human studies with resveratrol now the downside of resveratrol is that you cannot get it from red wine you'd
8:17	need to drink 200 glasses a day and that even when you buy it purified it's it's insoluble so if you put a
8:24	spoonful of resveratrol which i did take every morning into water it'll sink to
8:29	the bottom so you need to mix it with something i i have a low-fat yogurt i recently am
8:35	doing vegan yogurts which work well coconut base or with a bit of olive oil which itself is a
8:41	xeno-hermetin product but not too much because i like to fast until about late afternoon or dinner but then it gets
8:47	absorbed in the body we know that from human studies as well and unfortunately most people don't know that and they just swallow whereas resveratrol peeled
8:53	with water and they think that'll work and it doesn't so keep that in mind now in terms of red wine i did raise the
9:00	the sales of red wine by 30 by our discoveries uh and it stayed up and i'm known as the red wine guy but my
9:07	my good friend um and colleague serena poon who's a nutritionist among other skills and a chef had
9:14	looked at my diet and said there's too much dairy there's too much meat and there's also too much alcohol so i'm a
9:21	kind of binary guy i don't like making decisions so i just said okay i'm cutting it all out and we'll see what
9:26	happens and i've done that i'm currently vegan uh no alcohol and i feel great i think i can continue
9:34	doing this i'm grateful to serena actually for making those recommendations but not everybody can do
9:39	it and a little bit of red wine really doesn't hurt unless um you've got a medical condition well on the subjective

lifestyle

9:46	diet you know if we're gonna have to wait five years we've got a lot of work to do between now and then in terms of
9:52	lifestyle so in terms of you know working on feeling good
9:58	working on you know our health span for the next five years because a lot can happen between now and then
10:06	what does the latest science say about lifestyle in general in terms of nutrition how i know it's highly
10:12	personalized but if you were to generalize you know still plant-based for longevity still
10:19	high-intensity interval training still some hot cold therapy i'll just stop there like what in terms of lifestyle
10:26	what should we what should we all be focusing on right now yeah well the science is really strong
10:31	on those areas it's not really up for debate and i say that because some people don't
10:37	bother changing their lifestyle because they think oh next year there's going to be something new but that's not true
10:43	when it comes to the benefits of plant-focused diets
10:49	um and exercise there's nothing no science that i could see ever coming along saying
10:55	the opposite of that now there are a lot of people who are excited about
11:01	meat-based diets there are the carnivores as they call themselves if you look at the science and that's what i do you know i love me i wish meat was
11:08	going to make me live to 200. that would be my dream but the science says that a
11:15	plant-focused plant-based diet is associated with longevity and meat-based diets are not that's just
11:22	a fact and we even know the molecular mechanisms that likely promote longevity amino acid ratios in plants turn on the
11:30	body's defenses against aging and meat amino acid ratios do not and you know the other issues with meat
11:36	as well but those are the main things and so the the longest lived people
11:42	are either on a mediterranean diet which as you'll is mostly plant-based there's a little bit of fish a little
11:49	bit of meat not a lot of olive oil and unsaturated fats and monounsaturated fatty acids
11:54	um as well as a little bit of wine preferably red wine that's your mediterranean diet now those people live
12:00	the longest on the planet there's a variant in asia called the okinawan diet which is also mostly plant-based and not
12:06	a lot of calories and then it's the opposite for red meat it's inflammatory and you'll end up with high levels of
12:12	cholesterol among other issues but if you want to build up muscle and you want to temporarily feel great you
12:18	know by only all means eat eat a lot of steak but i wouldn't do it for a long period of time over your lifespan it
12:23	won't have a lot of benefits and the way to think of this jason is that there are adversity mimetics that mimics
12:31	that that mimic adversity and the body hunkers down and builds a stronger longer lasting body that's the lifestyle i've chosen
12:39	so by eating these plants and by exercising and being a bit hot and get
12:44	cold the body thinks heck i could die next week i better build a stronger body
12:50	that's what i do then there's the abundance memetics which is i'm going to take growth hormone i'm going to eat a
12:55	ton of meat i'm going to burn the candle at both ends which will make things brighter for a while but you'll burn out
13:01	but both lifestyles can make you feel great and i can vouch for that with my lifestyle and

exercise

13:07	in terms of exercise what have we learned about high
13:14	intensity interval training recently you know there's lots of debate around you know it's five minutes or it's ten minutes or
13:19	it's this percentage of your this is what you need to get your heart rate up on like is there consensus on high intensity interval trading in terms of
13:27	benefits for longevity uh yeah uh some is good
13:33	that's what it is it really is don't sit around so that the the worst
13:40	for you is don't move okay sit in a chair all day and then go home and or stay at home watch movies okay that's
13:47	the baseline that'll probably take 15 years off your life the next thing that's good is you you can have a standing desk i'm standing
13:53	here pretty much all day and behind me you can see gym so when i have a break i go do a bit of working out that's what it
14:00	says the next level minimum a lot of people like walking minimum seven thousand steps twelve thousand some
14:06	people do above that doesn't give you benefit but you asked me about interval training i i looked at the science i
14:12	think three times a week losing your breath for at least ten minutes is a good thing above that doesn't hurt unless you're
14:18	really over doing it but it's hard to overdo it rowing watch out for your back it's good
14:23	cycling even better but yeah just move and maintain flexibility maintain muscle
14:28	mass as well because it'll help with your hormones and if you fall over you won't break a bone

push yourself

14:34	and what about those who push themselves probably
14:41	a little too much who maybe run a little too far
14:46	who you know look we have a lot of people in our audience who love being well love feeling great and they
14:54	go to the gym every day or they run every day or they do yoga what how do you think about the line that's crossed where potentially too
15:00	much is detrimental for longevity yeah well so the clients that i work
15:07	with are often for whatever better term fitness fanatics
15:12	and many of them exercise every day and what we see in response is a spike
15:19	in cortisol and that will age you there's no doubt about that
15:24	and so to you can overdo it you can overstress the body and so my
15:30	recommendation or advice is every other day exercise let your body rest and that's also true for some
15:37	of these supplements i occasionally skip a day and let my body recover and you know that's i think the recipe
15:43	for for success is that just going full bore the whole time
15:49	is is not going to be optimal you do need those recipes and then what about hot cold therapy and

hot cold therapy

15:55	how you view that right now well covert makes a little tough unless you have these in your in your house
16:01	which i i don't but i used to do cold plungers i used to do cycles of four degrees celsius which it will you
16:08	know almost shivering cold water up to my neck stay in there for as long as i could bear which was about five minutes
16:15	jump out go in a sauna for 20 minutes feels great and then repeat that a few times and i i never
16:23	felt better after that you know so it may not make you live longer but you certainly feel invigorated but the science is really getting
16:30	stronger on that i would say that five years ago we didn't know but now we
16:35	do know that sauna protects you against heart disease if you do it regularly i would say at least do it once a week and
16:42	cold plungers are increasingly thought to be helpful for a reason that's interesting what it does is it activates
16:47	the production of brown fat which exists mostly in your back and brown fat is super healthy it puts
16:53	out signals that increase your metabolism and also again this adversity
16:58	signal that your body will defend itself better and i think we're just going to learn more and more that keeping your
17:04	body or getting your body out of the comfort zone in temperature wise and oxygen wise and nutrition wise is
17:11	the trick so in the spirit of democratization what does that practice look like in the

hot shower therapy

17:17	shower can we hack it in the shower with temperature well of course you can uh just
17:22	don't turn on the hot water and get under there for a few minutes but for some reason i can't do that myself
17:28	but if you can i think it'd be great i instead like to turn it up to almost scolding hot hope
17:34	that's mimicking a sauna but yeah all of that i i totally would do that if if i
17:41	could manage it but i just love warm showers in the morning so it's not for me so so do i

intermittent fasting

17:46	that's that's the one i i i pretty much will try and practice everything with that one i'm having part of it's made me
17:52	psychosomatic because back in college when i played basketball you know i lived and i i used to hate that sitting
17:59	in that tub after practice you still want to go back there at cold tub another one which is
18:04	emerging but you know so many people are excited about myself included intermittent fasting what's your take on
18:11	intermittent fasting these days and what does the science say so adopting intermittent fasting in my
18:17	life has been the single biggest change to how i feel and also how i look
18:22	and i've taken off i've been getting younger past decade and the biggest impact has been this change in my eating
18:30	habits and so what the science says let's leave me aside for a minute what the
18:36	sign says is that it's not just about what you eat it's when you eat and
18:42	the body should not always be fed so what actually happens in the typical american western is
18:49	you eat you wake up you have some food for breakfast your blood sugar will spike up to about 120 130 megs per
18:55	deciliter you'll feel great a lot of energy sugar and then the body produces insulin and
19:01	sends the glucose way down now you're in a deficit and they go way down below like a roller coaster now you're you're
19:06	feeling like you need a snack it's eleven o'clock i gotta be hungry i just had breakfast so you start snacking then
19:11	you have lunch and you're up again and then you shoot down again in deficit now it's the the middle of the day and
19:17	you've got low glucose you're tired you've got the brain fog i can't wait till dinner and
19:23	then you snack and you eat and you repeat this cycle every day so i don't eat breakfast
19:30	i have tiny bit of yogurt or olive oil but that's nothing for fasting and then i don't eat if i'm
19:35	on a good day i don't eat until 7 o'clock at night now there are stressful days where i might grab a handful of
19:41	nuts or something that's healthy and you can't always you know be perfect and i'm not but most
19:48	days i try my best to get through the day with hot teas and vitamin drinks and
19:53	this kind of stuff just fill up my stomach with liquids now what that's done to me is that now my liver after just three weeks of doing
20:00	this and now it's been many months is well close to a year is it's now putting out
20:06	its own sugar my liver is way smarter than my mouth in my brain
20:12	and i wake up in the morning and you know you can measure these things i use levels health device but there's a bunch
20:19	and i can see that my liver is smart it builds up my blood glucose as i'm waking up even before i actually wake up
20:25	and then it's leveled throughout the whole day steady like that a few little blips so i have a nut or i exercise or something
20:31	and then at dinner it'll go up but not a lot and then i sleep through the night so that's
20:36	optimal for longevity we know that that it's very healthy to have relatively low blood sugar levels and steady ones so
20:43	i'm hugely in favor of intermittent fasting and i've had i've got my 20 year old body back as
20:49	well i never thought i could i had love handles for most of my life and they're gone finally you mentioned levels and glucose

glucose monitoring

20:56	monitoring [Music] it is how should we be thinking about that in
21:02	terms of you know it you said it's optimal to to have i guess a baseline
21:07	that's relatively consistent you know i found the experience fascinating when i
21:14	did my trial just understand which foods had an impact on me and which didn't you
21:19	know for example i love black coffee i love espresso coffee negligible it actually lowered my
21:26	glucose slightly you know i would have fun i would do these experiments i'd say like all right i'll have an impossible
21:32	burger and some fries and a frozen margarita and then i'll have a doughnut after this was like at a weekend you
21:39	know weekend i eat more literally let's see how high this thing can go it's like you know i was like a kid like
21:45	a teenager in like a sports car like let's see let's get this on the freeway and let's see how fast we can go
21:51	and sure i got it pretty high it was a double spike it came down and then you know during the week i'm
21:56	pretty healthy i do my thing you know what did i learn you know when i have my my my beans my refried beans less of an
22:03	impact when i had a healthy fat you know some avocados in there versus just the beans and so forth but i'm curious like
22:10	if in terms of longevity you know look life happens cake happens
22:16	donuts happen and and that's also part of the the beauty of life living a long
22:21	healthy joyful life is also about celebration every once in a while so how
22:26	do you think about the fine line between all right i'm going to keep this thing low and forever or or
22:33	90 of the time versus all right i'm going to enjoy this street over here and there and it's going to go up with
22:39	it but it's going to come down and it's how do you think about balancing that well that's key you know there's no point me saying you cannot eat during
22:45	the day or you can never have dessert or never have wine or beer
22:50	that's really not the point you know if you live a life like that and you're not enjoying it life may not be longer
22:57	but it'll certainly feel that way and you don't want that and you know sometimes people see me eat
23:04	a sorbet or you know i'll have a lunch a salad or whatever and they say oh david
23:09	you said you don't eat lunch well i never said that i just said i try my best not to
23:14	and that's what it's all about and you should be able to indulge yourself but you know try to focus on certain
23:21	types of diets mediterranean you know that can include dessert but i'd like to have some rules in my life because i'm
23:27	i'm not that good at being ambiguous and so my rule that i set for myself when i was 40
23:32	was no more desserts at dinner but i've modified it i'm allowed to steal tastes
23:38	of other people's desserts and that's worked really well and i think that's the key to success is don't be too hard
23:44	on yourself and if you fail at something or you eat something that you probably shouldn't have don't be hard on yourself
23:50	everybody needs a treat once in a while and otherwise life's not worth living anyway 100 agreed
23:57	so yeah we've talked about nutrition we've talked about intermittent fasting we've talked about
24:04	exercise i think everyone understands sleep you need sleep you can't run on is that true just uh something you you
24:10	can't run on no sleep well you can but you'll crash plus it's going to accelerate aging as well the genes that
24:17	we work on called the sertums that control aging they also control the sleep wake cycle
24:22	and so those two things are totally connected and if you disrupt your biological age get older you'll disrupt
24:27	sleep and sleep will disrupt longevity so you just got to keep both of those in check in parallel because they're going
24:33	to affect you and so the last one i'll i'll touch on

anxiety loneliness

24:39	anxiety loneliness we're experiencing a mental health epidemic you know there's obviously a
24:45	big trauma but the big t and then little trauma with little t and and you know being in this pandemic you know there's
24:51	definitely collective trauma for some it's the little t for others it's the big team i think it's safe to say it's been difficult for most everyone
24:58	and so how do you think about anxiety stress mental health in general
25:03	and the role plays and longevity yeah well it's really important getting
25:09	back to the cortisol levels um your brain controls your longevity you know this uh
25:15	in my lab we've manipulated mouse brains uh to make them turn on longevity genes and then the whole mouse
25:22	is healthy so we just know that the brain is putting out factors that will either accelerate aging or slow it down
25:28	so your mental state's important it's also important for immunity a beautiful paper was published last week in one of the world's top journals
25:34	that showed that if you change a few neurons in the center of the brain again in a mouse but
25:40	pretty interesting that you'll change the amount of circulating
25:46	immune cells in the body and those immune cells can pick off cancer cells and viruses
25:52	and so you know i used to i believed that the mind could control
25:57	the body but now we just have proof that's actually working and which neurons are doing that so what does this
26:02	all mean it means that you should keep your stress levels down if you can up meditate i now meditate as often as i
26:10	have time for again serena poon has been a good influence on me in that regard
26:16	but if you have the big stress the big t then you do need some help and
26:21	increasingly you can go online and speak with a therapist and i've seen some really great results from
26:27	particularly young people who become anxious you know in this day and age with social media
26:32	with school and college and the stresses of all of that and code 19 on top of it
26:39	it's really it's hard to be a young person without the coding skills that we had also to want agreed it's

top 5 longevity foods

26:45	tough out there it really is and you know i'm an optimist i like to think
26:50	there's a silver lining here but we shall see going into 22. so just rounding out lifestyle we kind of
26:56	covered everything but i'll bring it back to food since we all love going grocery shopping
27:02	i'll put you on the spot if you had to pick you know your top five longevity foods that
27:08	everyone would be better off consuming as frequently as possible what's on david sinclair's longevity food grocery
27:16	list oh food lots of yeah okay so good food so as a as a
27:22	guide i try to choose foods that have been grown under stressful conditions
27:27	so these would be organic for a start a locally grown
27:33	and not in a just a regular hot house with lots of nutrients and water so
27:38	if i can go to a local farm i'll do that and but the other way you can do it is you
27:44	can look for foods that have a lot of color the purples the reds the very deep greens
27:50	these are signs that the plants are making healthy molecules for you these xenohormetans as i mentioned so that the
27:56	top foods would be if i could only eat one food it would probably be avocados the next one i do
28:03	like very high quality fresh very tasty you know with maybe a little bit of bread or gluten-free bread
28:09	dipped in there but not a lot i've tried to avoid carbs like that so we've got two the third one would be a roasted brussels
28:16	sprouts pan fried bit of garlic and salt pepper that's three but the next would be um
28:24	cantaloupe or rockmelon as i would call it as a fruit that's the most nutritious
28:30	you can get and if i could pick another one in that category i'd say blueberries
28:35	as well i snack on those pretty often and then the fourth category our fifth category that's important would be the
28:41	nuts and so cashews are my favorite but i also have brazil nuts basil and just a whole variety of nuts during the day so
28:48	if i'm peckish i'll take a few and the protein in the nuts suppresses appetite

avocado

28:53	i love it everyone get out their pencils go on their instacart or amazon prime or go to their local farmer's market
28:59	wherever you go shopping you got your list personally i think you made me very happy with avocados
29:06	taking the number one spot i'll never forget there was a moment on the podcast where we had walter longo
29:12	the famous walter longo on the show this was like two years ago and we were talking about avocados and
29:19	he said i'm not sure we don't have the data if if all this avocado consumption is good
29:25	for us and i was like hold on you just said like there's no santa claus to everyone
29:33	so i'm very happy to hear avocados well well i'm i'm a good friend and colleague of falters we've known each
29:39	other since we were kids actually in our 20s and we like to debate but where i would disagree about that is
29:45	that we know that avocados have high levels of oleic acid as well as sodas olive oil and oleic
29:52	acid will activate cert-1 which is an enzyme that controls longevity in our bodies and so we know at least some of
29:58	the components such as oleic acid are extremely beneficial as well as those unsaturated fats that come along

longevity movement

30:05	so in closing there's so much happening in the longevity space
30:10	is there something specific you're just beyond excited about in the movement that you'd
30:17	like to share in the movement this is the movement this is a longevity movement i feel like everyone longevity
30:23	wasn't in the lexicon i feel like a couple years ago right yeah yeah you're right about that it's
30:29	been really a thrill for me to see this movement occur because i was banging my
30:36	head against the wall for 25 years and no one would listen my book helped it's sold close to a
30:42	million copies around the world so that was good but what i'm most excited about is the fact that the younger generation
30:48	has embraced longevity unexpectedly because you know stupid me i thought only old people cared about aging but no it's
30:56	you know gen y and gen z that have realized that humans can achieve anything if they put their minds to it
31:01	and we now realize a lot of young people realized is that aging begins before
31:06	birth and every day is important and the clock is ticking and you can slow that down by living well and eating well and even
31:13	some supplements that i mentioned these will slow the process down and the longer they live the more technology
31:19	they can be exposed to so many people who are born around now in the last 10 years can
31:24	make it to the 22nd century and imagine what's going to be available then if you know the last five years has
31:30	totally changed everything and we can now reverse aging so yeah that's mostly what excites me is
31:36	that every day i'm contacted by young people in their 20s and 30s who are excited about what we do and want to
31:43	join the movement and either get involved in social media or medical research and devote their
31:49	careers to it and for the record again what is your biological age versus your uh

my biological age

31:56	your real age if you will well i'm 52 and uh
32:02	my biological age is in my low 40s depending on the measurement but
32:07	when i'm really good then i can get it down into the low 30s but yeah right now my blood by chemistry if you looked at
32:14	it you'd say and you didn't know me you'd say i'm in my early 40s you know i'm still waiting for that gray hair to
32:20	appear so so far so good the good news is that what i'm i've been
32:25	doing to myself which is listed also in my book page 304 if you want to jump to
32:31	that it doesn't seem to be hurting me which is a good start but also as i get older seems to be benefiting me as well

David Sinclair program

32:37	i gotta get on the david sinclair program i'm getting up there i'm 47 now so you know i gotta do the biological age
32:44	test i i'm somewhat i did you know look i believe
32:50	wellness is a journey and and it doesn't matter how old you are it's
32:55	never too late to start yet there are times when i look back at my 20s and oh man i was just a mess
33:03	right and and we did damage to our uh bodies in those days and we we think we're immortal in when we're 20
33:10	but now that we can measure the biological clock we can take a blood test we're developing in my lab
33:16	this cheek swab which will be a lot cheaper than the current tests
33:21	that can tell us our biological age and we know that even in your 20s you're aging your body if you don't look after
33:27	it and that goes for things you might not think of when you go to a rock concert and you listen to super loud music
33:34	you're aging your ears so that by the time you're our age you'll have less hearing so that actually leads me okay

Whats under the radar

33:40	this this is the real last question so is there something that's really under the radar you know that's a great
33:47	example that is either on on one hand it's
33:52	aging us that we're not aware of like like going to a rock concert or on the other hand the behavior
33:59	that is promoting longevity that we're unaware of like what are we unaware of that is working for us or against us in
34:06	terms of the longevity that'll be i mean it that's the last question yeah well what we have found is that if you break
34:13	dna that accelerates the aging clock dramatically in my lab we can drive aging forward in a mouse and make it get
34:19	old within a few months but the good news is we can now reprogram them to be young again so we're driving aging forwards and backwards but what this
34:26	tells us is that things that break chromosomes are really potent accelerators of aging now
34:32	smoking will do that going in bright sunlight for hours and burning your skin will do that we know that from
34:39	experience we didn't realize it was aging but it really is but there are other things that break dna in our lives there are chemicals
34:46	from plastics even the new car smell is breaking our dna when we fly
34:52	at high altitudes we're breaking dna because the cosmic rays hit us i'm skeptical of these scanners that they're
34:58	neutral on breaking dna and getting an x-ray and a ct scan will break your dna
35:04	now we need ct scans and x-rays for good reason i wouldn't refuse one from your
35:09	doctor but don't get ct scans and x-rays if you don't need them so i've had big arguments with my dentist
35:15	please don't x-ray my mouth every year i don't want it and they say you gotta have it
35:20	and i say why because you need to pay for your machine so i i try to reduce my exposure to radiation
35:27	in general for that reason david always a pleasure thank you so
35:33	much jason it's been great to see you thanks