The Longevity Expert: The Truth About Ozempic, The Magic Weight Loss Drug & The Link Between Milk & Cancer!

24:05So I used to drink milk like crazy, straight from the carton. Just as many gulps as I could take from the fridge. Did it work? Did you grow? I have no idea. I'm still shorter than they are, so I guess not. But that's one of the big myths that I think a lot of families still believe, that milk is great for our bones and to help us grow. What's your thoughts on milk? Yeah, so... It's a controversial topic as well, the subject of milk. Yes, I mean, the dairy industry is big. Our current Secretary of Agriculture worked for the dairy industry. It's problematic because the science isn't there. There was a paper called Milk and Health that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, top medical journal in the world, arguably, maybe The Lancet if you're from the UK.

24:47but it basically was written by two Harvard scientists that dissected all of the scientific evidence around milk and whether the claims were right or not. And just maybe for the audience in Europe, you might not know this, but in the States, you'll remember this. There were all these got milk ads. So there were famous people, celebrities, you know, sports athletes, politicians, all wearing a white milk mustache. And they're like, got milk as a promotion. And in those ads, it would say, it's going to build better bones, it's going to do this, it's going to do that. And the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, actually, or I think it was the Federal Trade Commission, you can't do that because it's not true.

25:31Like you have to take those ads out. So those ads went away. And it was the government promoting those ads with the Dairy Council. So there's something called checkout programs that the government has where it's supposed to support agriculture. Well, the government was paying in part for these ads with taxpayer dollars, and the science wasn't there. And the Dietary Guidelines for Americans says that the average American should have three glasses of milk a day, and kids should have two glasses of milk a day to be healthy. You cannot get money in funding for school lunches in America without having milk on the menu.

26:04Now, there is no evidence to support this. In fact, there's opposite evidence, that skim milk causes weight gain because it doesn't satisfy your appetite. that milk can cause cancer, prostate cancer, that it doesn't create strong bones. In fact, there's higher risk of fracture with high milk drinkers, that it creates a lot of digestive issues for people. It can create autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes. It has common allergies or food sensitivities that people get. And I remember I was in the emergency room once and when I was working in the ER and this mother comes in with this kid with like, I had like this 10th ear infection.

26:42I was like, what happened? Like, when did this start? Oh, it started when he was like 12 months old. I said, what changed? Well, I stopped breastfeeding and I started giving him milk. And all of a sudden he started getting his ear infections. I'm like, oh, this is before I even knew about all this. It was just kind of an interesting footnote. But we really have to look at the data and be science-driven. And the problem is we have corporate capture in America, where the food industry has captured our food agencies, our political system from the FDA to the USDA. They spend, for example, half a billion dollars just on the farm bill, which has, for example, food stamps and other food programs, child infant nutrition.

27:20So it's really unfortunate, but milk is not nature's perfect food. It's only nature's perfect food if you're a calf. Is there health benefits to milk? Yes. So that's the other side of it. Now, what milk should we be drinking, right? If we're drinking modern milk, modern milk is from Holstein cows that are almost homogenous, not homogenized milk, but homogenous breed. They have very few bulls inseminating them. They have a massive insemination program from very few bulls that have a limited genetic stock. And they're what we call A1 cows. So most heirloom cows, most sort of historical dairy had something called A2 casein, which is less inflammatory, less likely to cause gut issues, less problematic for the body.

28:06So sheep and goat milk have A2. Certain cows like Jersey or Guernsey cows have A2 in them. And you can get A2 milk, you can get A2 ice cream now. And so this A1 casein is potentially very problematic. So I think the current dairy is not great. And then we pasteurize it and homogenize it and then we, you know, So we add growth hormone to the cows that goes in there. We have estrogen that we add into the cows. It's in the milk. We have 60 different hormones in the milk, some of them naturally occurring. But we milk pregnant cows and that milk has a lot more hormonal effects. So I think current dairy is not something we should consume.

28:47Now, if you have a chance to get sheep milk or goat milk or A2 milks from a cow, that may be okay. Yogurt may be okay. And it depends on your genetics too. 75 % of the world is lactose intolerant. Many people have dairy sensitivities. But I think if it's from the right source, it's okay. For example, I use goat whey as my morning protein shake. So goat whey is from goats, obviously. There's very little casein in it, but it's A2 casein if there's any. And I don't react to it. But if I have regular whey, I do have a reaction. I get congested, I'll get pimples, or I get regular stuff. So I don't think dairy is something we should be consuming in large amounts unless it's certain kinds of dairy.

29:23What do you think of this conversation at the moment around a Zenpec? It seems like it's just exploded in culture. I mean, the share price of the company that makes Zenpec has gone through the roof in a way that I've just never seen in biotech before. Yeah. It appears that there's no apparent side effects. If you ask people, they struggle to take any side effects. But I actually think I saw you make a video about it. Yeah, yeah. I have a lot to say about it. What are your thoughts on a Zenpec? you crossed your arms you're gonna get yourself in trouble like i just like well i'm trying not to bang the table okay but first of all we have a massive obesity problem and we don't have any good solutions and so something comes along that's an injection you can take once a week that makes you not hungry and bypasses your normal biological mechanisms and you lose weight, that's a huge attractive thing.

30:23And that's why Nova Nordisk is the biggest company now in Denmark. It's the biggest part of the GDP of Denmark. I don't know if they even allow it in Denmark. They're the people that make a Zempick. Yeah, people that make a Zempick. And recently, the CEO of Nova Nordisk, who makes a Zempick, publicly said he was getting calls from processed food manufacturers very concerned because their market share was dropping and they were very concerned that it was going to affect their business. Think about that. So I think Ozempic is effective. It works with a natural part of your biology called GLP-1, which is something your body makes.

31:01And we can make more of it by doing lots of different things from certain probiotics and bacteria in our gut to certain foods, just certain ways of eating. but the effect of the drug is very strong just for context for anyone that doesn't know what a zen pec is yeah let's give them some context well it's it's a drug that was first used for diabetes and then it works by acting on a pathway called glp1 glucagon-like peptide one which is just a pathway and it and it regulates insulin function it regulates weight uh and appetite and so it really works to help with blood sugar but the side effect was weight loss so it was like we studied viagra for blood pressure but the side effect was it helped men with the rations so it was like well it's like kind of like that right it was like wasn't designed for this but it actually had the side effect and you know since obesity affects so many people there's now two billion people on the planet who are overweight so you take this injection yeah and you basically your appetite drops out so you don't you don't feel as hungry you don't feel as hungry you can feel nauseous you can throw up you can not want to eat and and people stop it because of the side effects so those are short-term side effects um what it the so the plus side is that it works uh it it's uh it's effective it has some metabolic benefits when you lose weight which can help your health benefits i don't think it's the drug that's having the health benefits it's the weight loss but there's a lot of downsides one uh it costs a not a lot of money so if you were to put everybody who's overweight in the country on it it would be 5.1 trillion dollars so it's an enormous enormously costful how much does it cost like 13 to 1700 a month 13 to 1700 a month a month which is like you know probably you know 1500 pounds or something it's a lot it's a lot of money every month forever, right?

32:53When you stop it, the weight gain comes back unless you really rigorously change your lifestyle. So it's not a lifestyle change program. It doesn't help you change your behaviors or habits. It's a pharmacological appetite straitjacket. And that can be effective if some people really need it, they need it. If some people are massively overweight and they don't want to get a gastric bypass, I think it may be okay. But here's the rub. One, you have to take it forever. Two, it's expensive. Three, most of people are not aware that not only do you lose fat, but you lose muscle. So about 50 % of the weight you lose is muscle.

33:33And muscle is where your metabolism is. It burns seven times the calories as fat and you need it for longevity and health. And so when you lose muscle, your whole health declines. It's the center of your health. And it's very tough to get that back. So you have to really increase protein and you have to hit the gym hard with weights if you're going to be on a drug like Ozympic. Longer term, and that can be managed, but most people don't, right? That can be managed and you need to be tracked with DEXA scans and body composition testing and really know what you're doing because it can really mess you up.

34:06And then you lose the weight, but then your metabolism is slower at the end of that process than it was before you started because you've lost your metabolic engine, which is your muscle. The other thing that happens, and we're now seeing this because it's not been around that long, right? There was an article in the New England Journal years ago that said, be sure to use new drugs as soon as they come out before the side effects develop, right? And so now we're seeing two, three years out, serious side effects. So, you know, in medicine, when we see an effect of 20 or 30 % on a study, we go, that's a great thing.

34:39You know, statins lower heart disease by 20 % to 30%. Great. Number one drug in the world. The side effect profile on this is scary because bowel obstruction, which is not a trivial thing, essentially where your bowels stop moving and you need surgery to release them, is increased by 450%. Pancreatitis, which is not a fun condition, which is where your pancreas becomes inflamed, that affects your digestion, it affects your insulin, it affects everything, and you can die from it, is increased by 900%. So these are not trivial things. There's other side effects, kidney and so forth. So I think the longer this is out there, we're going to see more and more consequences of this drug.

35:22And I think it misses the real issue, which is how do we fix the problem causing this? It's not an ozempic deficiency, right? Weight gain and obesity is not ozempic deficiency is because of our toxic environment, lifestyle, food system, lack of exercise, environmental toxins. It's complicated. And it's not an easy fix. And it requires policy change. It requires us to rethink our agricultural system, our food processing and manufacturing system. It requires massive education for people to know what to eat. It requires us really to make wide-scale change in our society, which is going to cause significant loss for a lot of companies.

36:02I mean, like I said, the food industry is the biggest industry in the world. It's a$16 to$17 trillion a year industry. That's bigger than the GDP of most countries. Or I think of like, I mean, the entire United States is, I think,$16 trillion. So it's a big industry with a lot to lose. And so there's a lot of pushback about changing the things that have to change for us to become healthy. So taking this drug seems great. and I think it's got benefits, but it's not just a risk-free solution. It's funny because it feels like it's a window into the future of how we're going to treat things like obesity because the price...

36:43I hope not. Play this forward. The price is going to come down because more companies are going to release very similar iterations that cause the same effect on GLP-1. The price will come down so quickly. There'll be this kind of price race. I imagine a Zenpec got ahead of the pack because they ran the clinical trials, so they invested all that money, which means they got approved first. That window's going to close, and then the price comes down. And then, I don't know, do they prescribe it here? Can doctors prescribe it? Oh, sure. Anybody can prescribe it, yeah. Oh, really? Okay. Oh, yeah. So it can be subsidized by your insurance or something?

37:15No. Oh, it can't be? I mean, most insurance don't pay for it. They might pay for it if you're diabetic, but for non-approved indications, they typically don't pay for it. Now, this Rogovi, which is the approved version, and some insurance will pay, some insurance won't. But it's not something they're excited to pay about. Interesting. Do you know this with those side effects that you named linked with Zempec? What is it about the drug that's causing that? Because I was wondering as you were saying it, is that because people start eating less, or is it the chemical itself? No, no, no. It's the effect of the drug.

37:48It thickens the bowel wall. It has an effect on the gut. So it's working on the gut in a lot of the hormones and the metabolic functions of the gut are affected by Ozempic in ways that change its function and slow the emptying and do a lot of things. So eventually it seems to cause problems for a lot of people. Interesting, because the narrative out there is very positive at the moment. These drugs come along and it's like there's no side effects. Millions of dollars of advertising and billions of dollars of revenue at stake. So, you know, nobody's talking about the bad side. Interesting. And by the way, they're thinking of giving it to five-year-old kids, which is just terrifying to me for life.

38:32I do think with these things, there's no such thing as a free lunch as there in life. So I think we'll eventually figure out what the trade-off is. Yeah. And then people can decide for themselves if the trade-off is worth it based on their own circumstances. Yeah, I mean, listen, people are like, I want to lose five pounds. And I don't think that's a good idea. If you're a severely obese person, you have severe health conditions, you're really struggling to get going, you know, can it be a helpful aid? Absolutely. You know, should it be given to everybody who wants to look good for a party or a wedding?

39:00Absolutely not. What's your position on fruit? I love fruit. How much fruit? I think it depends, right? So if you're a diabetic and you're metabolically completely out of whack and you don't have any metabolic resilience, eating a plum might be a problem for you. And now we have continuous glucose monitors. You can track your blood sugar and see. And I've had patients like this, gee, I ate a plum and my sugar goes through the roof. But if I ate an apple, it doesn't. So I think different fruits have different effects on you. But for the most part, fruit is full of phytochemicals, fiber, phytonutrients.

39:39It does have a little bit of sugar in it. I would say no fruit juice. I think fruit juice is definitely linked to obesity and kids and other things. But if you want to have an apple or a peach or a plum, it's fine. I think you shouldn't have it first thing in the morning. I think protein and fat in the morning is important because it activates your metabolism and your protein synthesis. If you eat sugar in the morning, which is essentially what we eat in the world today, cereal, pancakes, waffles, muffins, bagels, sweetened yogurt, sweetened coffees, I mean, it's the worst possible thing we can do for our biology.

40:10It jacks up our blood sugar and insulin and ends up causing us to gain weight and be hungry and you know be craving more stuff so having having um fruit for example you have frozen berries in your so i had frozen cherries for example in my whey protein that's okay there's protein in there and it mitigates the effect so what about eating times when to eat yeah have you got any thoughts around when we should and shouldn't be eating yeah for sure i think you know you know we had something called breakfast before which was breaking the fast and now people eat all night, they eat until they go to bed, and as soon as they wake up, they eat or have something, sugary stuff in the morning, like a sugary coffee, and they don't give themselves a window of fasting, which is critical for our biology.

40:52And I wrote about this in my book, Young Forever, where we talked about how do we have our own repair, renewal system kick in? Because the body, think about it, Stephen, your body, when you cut yourself, heals. The skin closes. It heals. How Go smart. It's got your bones break. It heals, right? I broke my arm a few years ago. It just healed, right? What's going on? I'm not going, would you please heal in there? It knows what to do. It recruits stem cells. It recruits repair factors and growth factors. And it knows what to do. So the body has this innate healing, repair, renewal, and regeneration system.

41:27And we need to learn how to activate it. And most of us do the opposite. We do everything in our power to deactivate it. And that causes a disease. So food is the most important thing we do to interact with these regenerative renewal repair systems. It's one of the things we call the hallmarks of aging. And there's one called deregulated nutrient sensing. And it really relates to how our bodies relate to food, how our nutrient sensing systems are dysregulated by our highly processed diet, by high sugar and starch, and not enough of the right foods. So in the long answer to your question, And, you know, it's important to give yourself a break of 12 hours.

42:05So if you eat at 6 at night, you could eat 6 in the morning minimum. But best probably 14. So if you eat dinner at 6, you eat breakfast at 8, that's okay. That's a 14-hour fast. And in that time, your body is doing its cleanup, recycling, and repair. Is there an evolutionary story here? For sure, absolutely. You know, we didn't have grocery stores. We didn't have, you know, Whole Foods. We didn't have restaurants. We didn't have takeout. We didn't have convenience stores. So we had to go out and find food. And I just came back from Tanzania and visited the hunter-gatherers there, the kadza, which is one of the last few tribes that hunt and gather.

42:39And we went hunting and gathering. And I was like, man, it's a lot of work to go, you know, dig up some roots and kill a bird in the tree. And like, it was a project. We ran around for hours. And so we don't know where we're getting our next meal. And so the body has had to deal with periods of feast and famine before. And so what it's got built into it is a system of conservation and repair when we don't eat. And so the system gets activated that improves our blood sugar control, that recruits new mitochondria and builds new mitochondria, that reduces inflammation, that activates cellular cleanup and repair processes.

43:18So you have all these old cells and damaged proteins. Your body has a little like digester, almost like a little vacuum cleaner that goes and sucks this all up and then digests it and then uses the parts. It's almost like a recycling system in the body. We need to activate that. And so that fasting period is a time to do that. And we've seen even, for example, we know, for example, concentration camp survivors who live really long, like they live 90, 100 plus years old, many of them. And it's because they had this period of deep starvation that had an effect on their biology. And we know this, We know this from many animal studies that starvation and fasting will extend your life by a third.

43:57If you eat a third less calories, you'll live a third longer. Now, it's not fun, right? But you don't have to do that. So timing of eating is important. So give yourself three hours before bed for no food and give yourself at least 12 to 14 hours between dinner and breakfast. How do we know in the animal studies it wasn't just the calorie restriction that caused the sort of longevity effect? It was. Oh, it was the calorie. It was. So what if I just restrict my calories instead of fasting? Well, you can do that. I met a guy who was from the Calorie Restriction Society. There's a Calorie Restriction Society?

44:31Yeah, which is based on this research in animals where, think about it, if you eat a third less, you live a third longer. So for a human, that would be 120 years old. And I said, what do you have for breakfast? He said, well, I had five pounds of celery. And I'm like, okay, you go do that. I'm going to figure out another way. So you have to eat enormous amounts of like low calorie food just to feel full, right? That's why you don't have food. So he was starving. And there are a lot of downsides to starving. You lose muscle, which is necessary. There are certain things that go wrong. And so it's not really the optimal strategy.

45:07You want to do things that mimic starvation. So how do you mimic this period of starvation that causes something called autophagy, which basically means to eat yourself, to basically clean up your cells. It's like self-cleaning or self-repair, right? And so there's a lot of ways to hack that. You can do it by this longer-term overnight fast. You can do it by certain supplements and certain medications, like rapamycin is being studied for longevity, which is a drug that's used for cancer and for other immune-suppressing treatments, but it works on this pathway called mTOR, which essentially is the activation of cellular buildup.

45:49It causes muscle synthesis. So if you want to build muscle, you want to activate mTOR with protein, which is good, but you don't want to activate it all the time. So this drug inhibits mTOR, which is what happens when you starve yourself. So it mimics starvation, and then you get this kind of benefit. Or drugs like metformin are being studied, which is another drug that's looking at how do we activate this longevity switch called AMPK, another pathway that's regulating your nutrient sensing. So when you don't have enough nutrients, this activates. But if we're running around eating, well, you can actually take this drug and it may have an effect.

46:23There's a large trial going on now. I'm still agnostic about it. I'm neither pro or against it. I think the data is not in it for me to start taking it or for my patients to start taking it. But it works on some of these sort of starvation mimicking hacks, let's call them. So starvation is good for us. Yeah, I mean, yes, yes. I would say you have to be careful because, you know, people go really to the extreme. They go like, I'm going to not activate mTOR because activating mTOR causes me to age faster and it prevents autophagy and it builds cancer and it's bad. So I'm going to become a vegan, and I'm going to eat less calories, and eventually what happens is you lose muscle.

47:05So it's like Goldilocks. You need both mTOR activation and mTOR ambition. You need to take a breath in, you need to take a breath out. You need to be awake, you need to go to sleep. Your heart needs to beat, it needs to relax. It's just how the body works. It's a difficult conversation as well because it can provoke disordered eating. Yeah. various eating disorders which are obviously extremely bad in terms of health outcomes. Blue zones. You visited some blue zones, haven't you? I have. What are blue zones and what did they teach you about the nature of being healthy? Well, my friend Dan Budner basically came up with this concept of the blue zones after visiting these areas in the world where people had extremely long lives.

47:51and somebody on the map circled them in blue ink, which is why they're called blue zones.

48:00And I visited Icaria and also Sardinia. How many of them are there? There's five. There's Okinawa, Japan, Loma Linda, California, and the Koya Peninsula in Costa Rica. But there are many more. I mean, I was in Turkey and I saw villages where people were very, very old. And so those are the ones that have been studied. How old are we talking? Well, I mean, one couple there was like collectively 210 years old. So they lived to be 100, 105, 109, 110. I mean, Emma Morano was 117 when she died. You know, she, and so the question is, you know, what is different about these areas? And what's different is that, you know, they're very isolated and remote.

48:46so they haven't been burdened with all the modernization of our food system they still grow their own food i mean i visited this couple he was i think uh 90 benicontis he was like 97 his wife was a young 87 and they had land in the farm they lived on uh he was more chill but she was out there showing us around all the fruit trees the olive trees the garden she planted i I mean, this massive mini farm that she managed herself on the side of a hill where she was running up faster than I could get to her at 87 years old, cooking everything from scratch. It wasn't like organic, but it was because that's just what they did.

49:28They used all heirloom animals like sheep and goats. So they had heirloom sheep and goat. What's heirloom? Meaning it's not like some industrialized, hybridized cow that's producing this nasty milk, which we shouldn't be drinking. They're having goat milk and goat cheese, but their goats are eating wild plants that have phytochemicals. Some of those cheeses and goat milks have actually higher phytochemicals even than green tea, which has a lot that comes from, for example, catechins that you can get from the goat milk, which is from the goats that are eating the plants that have these compounds that benefit their health.

50:01They're also active. Petreo is like 95 years old, and he was in Sardinia and he had to hike five miles a day up this extremely rocky mountainous terrain to hurt his sheep at 95 years old. I mean, most 95 years old aren't hiking the mountains, right? He was booming voice, stood up straight, eyes clear, not hunched over, funny as heck, sang me a song, you know. And then, you know, so they move naturally. They have amazing food, phytochemical-rich food, food that's rich in all these plant compounds that are found to connect to longevity. For example, in Icaria, I was sitting with this guy who was milking the goats and we were making goat cheese together.

50:50And he gives me this tea. I'm like, what is this? He said, oh, this is wild sage tea. And I looked at it. I said, what is a plant? I looked it up. And then I looked up the plant and I analyzed what it was. and turned out it's an extremely phytochemical rich plant that has a lot of these same longevity compounds in it called catechins that we don't drink a lot of. Green tea has it, you can get it from Japan, for example. And then we just basically see that not only do they have good food, they have the activity, they have very low levels of stress. There was one guy, Silvio, I was having dinner with him.

51:27I mean, he had this mountainous kind of area that his whole family had had for years. And they had about 200 sheep and goats. And they had a little kind of restaurant they started for people to come. And so they basically had the family cooked. And you had everything from the farm. And I said, Sylvia, after doing it, I said, Sylvia, do you have any stress in your life? And he looked at me like, stress? Like he almost didn't understand the word. Like, you know, when things are difficult and things are hard and you feel stressed. And he's like, oh. Yeah, well, sometimes at night a goat will get out and I'll have to go get it.

52:04And I'm like, and sometimes, you know, when the goats are giving birth, I have to go get up early. So they have very low levels of stress. And then they also have something which is really important, which is community. So they have a sense of belonging and connection. You know, I met Julia, who was 100 years old. Sorry, 103 months, she told me. I'm 103. I guess it's like when you're five. I'm a five and three quarters. She's like, I'm 103 months, you count on the months. And she was still working. She was still making stuff for weddings and doilies and all things. And she didn't have any kids.

52:39But her niece and her nephew invited her to come stay with them. And so she was living with them. or another guy, Carmine, had lost his wife, but he was living with family members and was running this big garden in 86 and animals and sheeps and rabbits. So they all are part of community. They have gatherings. They celebrate together. There's a sense of belonging. There's no nursing homes. There's no loneliness. Loneliness is the new smoking, really. I mean, we have an epidemic of isolation and loneliness in America and increasingly around the globe. And it's lethal. It's like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

53:11How do we know? How do we know that it's dangerous? yeah there's so much science around this the evidence of of this is is immense in fact the surgeon general of america just released a statement about this and an initiative to redress loneliness because it's such a driver of not just unhappiness but actual disease and death why why are we so lonely what is it that's happening do you think it's what is it the internet or is it yeah i mean think about it we used to you know rely on each other in communities to to live like like they do for example like i said you know how did it work silvio when you have all these sheep, how do you manage?

53:44Well, you know, I have like all my friends, they come over and when it's time for the sheep, they come over and they help. And it's just, life is just naturally connected. And you go to someone's house, you walk down the street, you know, you sit in the cafe, just, you have a neighborhood, you have a family. We've lost that. We're all mobile. We're all moving around. We are all disconnected from our families. We're, you know, online most of the time, you know, we have face, we have Facebook instead of actually face, real face-to-face time. I mean, it's great to sit here with you in person, right?

54:11It's better than the end of a Zoom call. And it's something we've lost. And we've lost the value of relationships and our culture of achievement and success. And it's just kind of disconnected us from what really matters, which is the human community. Is there any way back for that? Do you think? Because I was thinking about this the other day. Listen, I've talked about this once or twice now, but I tried the Vision Pro the other day. Oh, you did? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And incredible in terms of the technology technology yeah but terrifying in terms of the potential implications over the long term yeah you just wear that all the time and forget about it exactly it was incredible like the fact that i can i can just sit there and just the things i do with my hands that are on my lap impact all of these massive screens in front of me you can see when again when you play it forward that this is going to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper more accessible the apps are going to get better and then now we think about what that's going to mean for loneliness yeah when i could go hang out you know with my friends in a virtual world and do my work in a virtual world and date in a virtual world watch pornography in a virtual world and all of these things i still like hugging and holding hands how do you do that you can't do that in there are you like are you hopeful for us being able to turn around the loneliness and isolation epidemic i mean it's a tough one i think we have to you know rethink how we live and what we do and the communities we build and i think there are efforts of that happening all around so just at the same time we're seeing this epidemic loneliness, we're also seeing a lot of initiatives of community building and connection and belonging.

55:39And so there's a lot of these communities that I'm involved with that are happening. And I know I'm on the board of something called the Belong Center, which is really about addressing loneliness and creating ways and mechanisms for people to connect and be with each other in real time. I think it needs to be a systemic thing. I think with a lot of the issues we've talked about relating to longevity and diet, the best answers are probably going to be the really truly systemic ones that come from how we design societies yeah like regulation and policy and just how we design cities and green spaces and libraries and community community centers and all these kinds of things yeah that seems to you know i i did a um i realized this was a problem a long time ago and i i went to haiti after the earthquake and i i went helping there when it was just a disaster one of the first medical teams on the ground and uh in that process i met paul farmer who was an incredible visionary doctor from Harvard who went to Haiti and helped solve the problem of TB and AIDS by building community health workers.

56:36And he then went out to build a network of community health workers of over 11 ,000 globally. It was a model for the Clinton and Gates Foundation. And what he realized was that we didn't have a lack of the right science or the right medicines to heal these problems. We know what to do with TB and AIDS. It was a lack of people being able to do the basic things that they needed to do, like get clean water or have a watch, know what time it was. And so he built this network of community health workers and realized that community was medicine. And so he was their neighbors. And so I came back from that very move.

57:08Then I realized that chronic disease was also an issue, that chronic disease wasn't infectious, but it was contagious, right? You're more likely to be overweight if your friends are overweight than if your family members are overweight, right? That your social networks are more important than your genetic networks in determining your health, right? You're basically, you look around at your five closest friends, it's probably kind of the way you are too, right? And so I realized that we needed to use the power of community to transform our health and our behavior. And I can tell you what to eat and what to do, but if all your friends are doing the opposite, it's going to be hard, right?

57:44So I created a program with Rick Warren called the Daniel Plan, a faith-based wellness program, where we got 15 ,000 people to sign up in the first week. got a quarter million pounds were lost in the first year. We created a book called The Daniel Plan of how to do this in community. So it was, we call it the five F's for getting healthy, right? It's faith, friends. food, fitness, and focus, which is your mindset. it. So, and it was amazingly effective. We scaled it to a thousand churches around the world. And it really was helping people in small groups do this together. So there was no health coach, there was no nutritionist, there was just me and another doctor.

58:24And we basically created this program, which could be delivered in a curriculum that people did in small groups together. And this church, the Saddleback Church with Rick Warren, had an infrastructure already of groups meeting every week. So we just hijacked that and put the curriculum in there and people did it. And it was really powerful. And we've seen that now at Cleveland Clinic where I work, and we've done that with groups there as well. That last F, focus, do you, is that an umbrella word also for purpose? Purpose, meaning and purpose, yeah. Yeah, from reading your work, I came to learn that purpose is a sort of longevity factor.

58:59100%. To what extent? I mean, the data is really clear. A recent paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that those who had meaning and purpose lived seven years longer. And what do they mean by meaning and purpose in that context? It's whatever your meaning and purpose is. It could be you want to be there for your grandchild. It could be you're a scientist and want to make a discovery. It could be that you're a novelist and you want to write your next novel. So it's not a job necessarily. No, it doesn't have to be. I mean, for me, my purpose is ending needless suffering for millions of people through the power of this new thinking and model.

59:34And the new company that I co-founded, Function Health, is, I think, the tip of the spear that's going to be able to do that at scale by empowering people with their own health data, giving them an AI co-pilot to up-level their health, and to help them understand what's going on in real time. and to me, building that, creating that, scaling that, getting people access to things that are really hard to get for people, that it's not happening in your doctor's office or your healthcare system, that's not happening in your annual physical, you're not getting the latest science and medicine. So how do we accelerate that change?

1:00:04So for me, that drives me every day, it gets me excited to wake up and I'm very passionate. But of course, I'm also passionate about my friends and my community, I'm passionate about my health, I'm passionate about having fun and doing things that I love. so I think you know it's really important to design your life and in terms of your values what do you care about what matters to you what makes you come alive what gives you energy what takes away your energy and and focus on those things that take you to where you want to go why would not having a purpose make us die earlier I mean you see it all the time Stephen I mean you look at you know people retire literally in the retirement age here is 65 which I'm going to be this year which is a little scary to say that but you know i'm just getting started and uh people think well you know if you look at people who retire that the death rate happens so fast like people who retire die die like they there's a much higher death rate if if for example you're married and your spouse dies and you've been together your life whole life you're likely to die very quickly after that is there stats to support that a hundred percent a hundred percent that's crazy yeah why what happens you know you stop moving you get depressed yeah you get depressed you stop moving i had a patient who had the most beautiful relationship i i it was such a deep love and they were together for like 40 years and his wife got breast cancer and she just didn't make it and when he died and he was healthy guy he was fit healthy ate well he went into heart failure Like literally heart failure.

1:01:40His heart couldn't pump and he had a true medical condition that showed up on scans and imaging. He was in trouble. And I was like, wow, you know, I looked it up and there's actually evidence for emotional shock and loss, heartbreak. Literally his heart broke. And that caused his heart to literally break physically, not just emotionally. and we were able to get him back and fix it by dealing with that emotional heartbreak and by using energy healing and a lot of other things with him that helped him overcome it but that's when I was like wow you know the mind the biggest and most powerful pharmacy in the world is between your ears you know and it can do all kinds of stuff trauma does trauma play a role in our longevity?

1:02:27100 % I mean And, you know, it's amazing how in medical school we just did not learn this. But there's such a link between trauma and everything in your life, but particularly disease. There's a questionnaire we use called the ACE questionnaire, Adverse Childhood Events. And it basically asks you a series of questions. You can look it up online. You can link to it in your show notes. It's free. And it says, well, were your parents divorced? Was there alcoholism in your family? Did your parents fight in front of you? Did anybody hit you? Were you sexually abused? And you just go through this whole list.

1:02:59Is there any family members in prison, you know? And the higher your score, the more likely you are to have health issues, be obese, have autoimmune disease, get cancer, get heart disease, get diabetes. It's really striking. And so trauma is registered in your body. There's a book called The Body Keeps Score and Carolyn Mace, you know, was sort of a mystic said, your biography becomes your biology. And it works the other way too, from up down, right? Your biology can become your biography if you're eating crap and you're nutritionally deficient and you have all these health issues and mercury poisoning.

1:03:36Well, that can kind of affect your mental health too and your story. But we know really clearly that your trauma is influencing your biology. And so we have to deal with this in medicine, whether it's depression or whether it's autoimmune diseases or whether it's other health issues. And we now have an incredible revolution in psychedelics, which is for the first time showing us that we have treatments for things like PTSD, which really were very hard to treat. You can give people a sedative, but that was it. And maybe some therapy, which barely worked, if that. But you start to work with these compounds that change the structure and function of the brain, which is really amazing to me.

1:04:17It's not just like a normal drug where you take the drug and you have to keep taking it. Then you took Ozempic once and you would stay losing weight forever, right? It's like taking these psychedelics once or twice, and it changes your physiological functioning and your brain response. It changes compounds in your brain like BDNF that grow new brain connections and repair and heal things in your brain. And so we're seeing new ways to deal with trauma that I feel really exciting. And MAPS is an organization, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies. You can share that link. but it's sharing all the research about treating depression, anxiety, trauma responses, PTSD, relational issues.

1:04:56What do you think of psychedelics? Have you tried them? Yes, I have. Which ones have you tried? You know. All of them. Which ones haven't you tried? I haven't tried Ibogaine. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's quite strong for addiction, right? Yeah. But, you know, I grew up in the 70s. So psychedelic mushrooms were a big part of my awakening and my personal journey. I've tried LSD, I've tried peyote, I've tried ayahuasca, I've tried bufo, I've tried pretty much all of them because I'm sort of an adventurer in my biology and my mind. And I can tell you that they really helped me. Which one helped you the most?

1:05:38And give me a story of how it helped you. My girlfriend's actually in Costa Rica right now serving ayahuasca. And I spent a year and a half investing in, and we took a psychedelics company public called the Thai Life Sciences. So I worked in partnership with MAPS and Compass Pathways. At a Thai, we invested in Compass Pathways. So I'm quite heavily... You're very into that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I spent about a year and a half, about a year as the creative director of the company, purely because I just was interested. So I invested about seven figures in the business. Then I joined as a creative director to stay close.

1:06:15And then my contract was basically to leave on the day of the IPO. So IPO'd on the NASDAQ, 3.4 billion, and I left the next day. Amazing. But it was because I was interested in mental health. I heard about this epidemic of mental health. There's no good answers. And psychedelics and the clinical research that was coming out around things like psilocybin, which is the active compound of magic mushrooms, were just really interesting. And I didn't need to work, so I just thought... It's fascinating. I mean, you know, there was this... I recently heard a presentation by a Stanford scientist who's studying Ibogaine for trauma, depression, anxiety, but addiction.

1:06:52And it's quite interesting. It's a compound that you take from a bark of a tree from West Africa, the iboga tree, and it somehow shuts off the withdrawal. So we know medically that when you stop narcotics, you go through physiologic withdrawal, which is a medical phenomenon. It just stops that somehow. It's like a mad... With one dose as well. One dose. Now, there is metabolites that stay for a long time, nor Ibogaine, that may mitigate those effects and block those receptors. And we don't really quite understand it yet. But I did have a thought, which is that when you look at the Yale food addiction scale, which is a validated metric for food addiction.

1:07:33Now, different people have various degrees, There are people who can't stop eating sheet cakes and there's people who crave ice cream once in a while. It's not true food addiction. But when you look at the data globally, 14 % of adults and 12 % of kids meet the criteria according to the Yale Food Addiction Scale for food addiction from ultra-processed food, from sugar, refined carbohydrates. So I actually talked to one of the leading rib-begin researchers. I said, wouldn't it be interesting to do a pilot where we took people who had food addiction and we gave them Ibogaine and we saw what happened.

1:08:07I mean, it could be fascinating, you know, it could shut that off. And maybe there's going to be, and I think there will be, a nor Ibogaine, which is a metabolite of Ibogaine that I think may be doing a lot of the effect. That's something you can take on a daily basis instead of Ozempic, for example. What I heard about Ibogaine is that the side effects are quite... Yeah, it can be quite significant. But the main side effect is a heart side effect. It increases something called the QT interval, which can put you into an arrhythmia, which can unfatled heart rhythm. And you have to be monitored when you're taking it.

1:08:36But we found that if you take higher doses and even IV magnesium, which is actually what we use in the emergency room to treat arrhythmia, like if your heart's beating like crazy and you're going to die, we give you intravenous magnesium as the last resort. Well, you can pre-treat with magnesium, and that stops that phenomena. So there's a lot of ways to deal with it. But I do think we're in a psychedelic era, and it's really heartening to me because I think there's so many problems as a doctor I can't solve. You know, if someone has a health issue, but their trauma is controlling their behavior, and unless they deal with the trauma, it's hard to address the things that they need to do to fix their behavior in their life, right?

1:09:16So if you're traumatized because you were raped or had sexual abuse when you were a kid, you know, and I've had my own trauma. I had incest when I was a kid. I had kind of a rough childhood in many ways. Incest when you were a kid. Yeah. Yeah. So I've had to deal with this myself. And doing that has really helped me to kind of recover and repair my own emotional architecture and have a really a sense of security and safety, which I didn't have before. Did you have symptoms of that trauma in your early life or your adult life? 100%. You know, it's highly functional, obviously. I mean, I'm a doctor.

1:09:50I've written many books. I've done a lot in the world. but it was really affecting my way of being in relationships. Your sexual health or your sort of romantic? Not my sexual health, but more my romantic relationships. Okay. And even sometimes work relationships where I really developed a pattern. And it was also a trauma that I had from my mother who was a wonderful woman. She was a child of deaf parents. So she had to become their parent. And she basically was what you call a parentified child. And she was the adult. So she never had a childhood. And then she did the same thing to me. She made me her therapist because she was depressed and in bad marriages and chose men who were broken because she thought love was taking care of broken people.

1:10:29And so I developed this place where I just felt this big hole and emptiness in my heart, and I couldn't really overcome that. And so I did a lot of work, did medicine journeys. I did a lot of different kinds of therapy, and I was able to really break through and release that. And when I did, it was like literally the programming changed. You know, I've got a little voice in your head all the time. Sometimes it's a very annoying voice in your head. And it just says stuff all the time that you just wish it wouldn't. Or it dictates your behavior in certain ways that you wish it wouldn't. I never thought this was possible.

1:11:08But literally that voice changed. And what it said changed and how it was in relationships changed. and it was physiologically different and I didn't have that sense of trauma. And I had another friend who had the same thing and he had a mother who was a yeller and a screamer and it was traumatizing, couldn't tell the truth and wasn't honest because he was afraid he was going to get attacked and hurt. And so he was that little boy and so this part of his brain that wasn't working and we helped him get MDMA therapy, which is, you know, MDMA is a compound that isn't like a psychedelic, but it has effects on PTSD.

1:11:45And he said, it's like that part of his brain just turned off and he stopped having that feeling. And he was able to tell the truth and speak what he felt. And, you know, it was powerful. And the symptoms that you experienced in your later life with relationships, what was that? Just like a bit struggling to form attachments? You know, I had what was called an anxious attachment style. So basically, I was anxious about the relationship and wouldn't be honest with how I felt or what I was doing. And it wasn't like I was lying, like I'm lying, but omission. Or if I say how I'm feeling or what I want, then they're going to leave me or they're going to be gone.

1:12:26And so I developed this hole in this emptiness that affected my relationships, and it was bad. So if my partner, for example, I remember this partner, she was a perfectionist and she really had a hard time sort of opening up. and she had an avoidant attachment style. So like one time I had seen her in three weeks and she didn't really want to connect or hug or be together. And she's like, I need to get used to you. And I'm like, and so I just could feel this like visceral reaction of panic and fear and hurt. And like, now I don't have any of that. What was it that you did that fixed it? Do your work earlier.

1:13:05Your life is going to be difficult. Yeah. I think I wish, you know, it's like when I was sick with chronic illness and I had chronic critique syndrome and I had mold issues, Lyme disease, and I was so sick, you know, and it was, I didn't have a roadmap. I didn't have a path. You know, I didn't know what to do. And so I was roping in the dark and finding a crumb here and a crumb there. And I would talk to this person and that person, I would patch together this whole approach that had finally allowed me to get well. And I wish I'd known now when I knew then, it would have been better in a year or not 10 years that it took me to get better or maybe even shorter.

1:13:43And if I'd done the work on myself when I was 20 and 30 and not waited until I was 50 and 60, I would have, you know, not prevented a lot of suffering. And so my advice to people is to, if you are struggling with any of these relational issues with yourself, there's work to be done. There's great, amazing paths out there to help look at things like Byron Katie's, you know, work called The Work, which is a way of looking at your own thoughts and your own perspective. There's so many things that you can do, psychedelic medicine, MDMA-assisted therapy, psilocybin-assisted therapy. It's coming. It's not available to everybody yet, but it's coming fast.

1:14:18I think maybe even this year, the MD-assisted therapy will be FDA approved. So I feel like everybody's on their own journey, but you don't have to stay stuck in the biological or psychological framework that you are now. Like there is a way to heal at any time, whether you're 65 or 25. I think this is central to the concern a lot of people have, but also the resistance is we kind of see ourselves as being fixed. Especially the older you get, you kind of assume both our health, our motivation, our trauma, our mind. It's all kind of fixed. This is just who I am. This is who I am now. I can maybe act differently or whatever.

1:14:53I can learn tips and tricks to like, I don't know, become better at sales or speaking. But fundamentally, my bullshit is my bullshit. It is me. Yeah, exactly. And that holds us, kind of imprisons us. Yeah. So my message is, number one, we now have the science and technology and medicine to upgrade your biological software and reverse chronic disease, reverse your biological age. My biological age is 43, even though I'm 65. How do they know your biological age? Well, it's a kind of fancy technology that looks at something called the epigenome, which is above your genome, the regulator of your gene expression, which changes based on different insults and things in your life, whether it's diet, toxins, lifestyle.

1:15:33So we can measure that now. So that's what it was. So you can upgrade your biological software and you can upgrade your psychoemotional, spiritual software. It's really possible. And I've seen it happen. And I've seen it happen with many people. I think the psychedelic revolution is probably like a zempic for mental health, you know, but with a lot of side effects. I mean, there's really incredible safety profile for these compounds. They're really, really safe and they don't really have side effects and you don't need to use them that often to have the benefit. When you think about biological age, if you were giving me some advice on lowering my biological age, I'm 31 now.

1:16:12You're 31? I'm 31. I'm just a baby. I'd like to be 25 biologically or 21 biologically. I know you had Brian Johnson on the podcast. He probably gave me some advice. Yeah, he's got a lot. You have to eat breakfast at my 11, go to bed at 8. No, no, when I speak to Jack Bryan Johnson, I have to buy some$5 ,000 contraption and strap it to myself in the morning. And I just, it's a lot. You have to have two blades of grass for lunch. Yeah, yeah. But the simple things that have had the biggest impact on your biological age, what are those? What's the 80-20 on this? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I wrote a book about it.

1:16:49Yeah, you did. It's called Young Forever. Yeah. And it's not that hard. you know, as we talked about the blue zones, it's eat real food. I would say eliminate ultra processed food, dramatically reduce or limit sugar and starch from your diet, flour products particularly. Make sure you exercise. So I think, you know, in terms of, and by the way, in terms of eating, just to make a few more points, give yourself 12 to 14 hours overnight from eating. First meal should be protein and it should be 30 to 40 grams of protein that'll help you build muscle, which is the currency of longevity. So if you want to live long and be strong and be able to do stuff and not have trouble getting up out of a chair or tying your shoelaces, you need to build muscle.

1:17:33And that protein is critical in the morning. You need to have a phytochemically rich diet, which means lots of colorful vegetables, lots of good fats, and the right kinds of protein. So that's pretty straightforward. And again, I've written lots of books. I talk about the diet in there, but those are sort of the main things. In the Young Forever Longevity Diet, You talk about the 75 % of your plate should be vegetables. This point about limiting the protein to sort of 25 % of your plate, is there a risk in having too much meat products? I mean, you know, this is an interesting question. You know, we looked at, for example, the Plains Indians, like the Lakota at the turn of the last century in the 1900s.

1:18:12They were the longest-lived population on the planet. They were 100 years old plus, and all they ate was bison. That was their diet, pretty much. And a few berries and maybe a few things they could dig up from the ground. All they ate was bison. Pretty much, yeah. They could eat the liver. They'd eat the organs. They'd have the bone marrow. They would eat the meat. And they would have, I think, some veggies from the berries or roots or things that they would have. But it was very limited. And they had lots of longevity. I mean, meat is a very nutrient-dense food. So I think the challenge with meat, and this is a whole other tangent that would take us an hour to go through, but vegan or not vegan, meat not meat.

1:18:56Meat's one of the most nutritionally densest foods on the planet. It's the best source of protein to build muscle. And we should be eating regeneratively raised meat, which is hard to find, but there's places like Force of Nature where you can get it online. You can get elk, bison, venison, and even beef. and you can eat good quality fish, pasteurized chicken. You know, we need that kind of protein, particularly as we age to build muscle because we get something called anabolic resistance. Our bodies resist building muscle and you need more protein and you need more exercise. And so, you know, the amount of meat depends on what you're doing and your size and your lifestyle.

1:19:37So if you're very active and you want to build muscle and you want to lift weights which you should, you probably need between a half to a gram per pound of protein per day. That's more than people think. So the way we sort of say protein needs is based on deficiency diseases. So the recommended dietary allowance is 0.8 grams per kilo. I'm talking about double that. Now, 0.8 grams is the amount that you need to prevent a protein deficiency disease, is not how much you need for optimal health and functioning. So you need to be able to have the right protein at the right time. You also need fasts and times to not have protein so your body can heal and repair.

1:20:21But it's like Goldie Knox phenomena. You need both. And so I would say depending on your activity level and how much you're doing, you need more. But roughly about 30 grams three times a day, which is not that much. I just had a bag of biltong, which is a little bag. Of beef, right? It's like beef, yeah. It's South African like beef jerky. And I was like, after I ate, I was like, I looked at the package. I was like, oh, it's only, it's 32 grams. So I had 32 grams of protein for lunch, right? That's so hard. I could have a 30 or 40 gram protein shake what I had this morning. That's, I'm already at like, you know, 70 grams.

1:20:54So I think the body needs that protein. So I think food is really important. And I talk about how to activate longevity switches with food and phytochemicals in the book. The resistance training is really key for longevity. So if you want to do cardio, that's great. And I think we need to both. But strength training three times a week, minimum 20 minutes, is the key to health and longevity. It will keep your muscles strong. It'll prevent what we call sarcopenia, which is muscle loss. One of the biggest things that happens as you get older is you lose muscle. And that leads to metabolic issues, to inflammation, pre-diabetes, you know, just all kinds of health consequences.

1:21:29Sugar? Oh, yeah, I said get rid of the sugar. What about artificial sugars, like in diet cokes and stuff? Yeah. I mean, there's so much, you know, debate about this. I was actually reading a couple of papers yesterday, Stephen, because I was not related to this, but something else I was working on. And there were these two papers that were basically discounting the fact that artificial sweeteners had any bad impact on health. And I was like, oh, interesting. Because, you know, there's some biology around this. And I said, let me see who funded this study. And it says, this study was entirely funded by the American Beverage Association, formerly known as the American Soda Pop Association.

1:22:07Oh, wow. And the other study was a similar study, said funded by so-and-so who's funded by Coca-Cola and who works for the International Sweeteners Association. So follow the money. Is it better than drinking soda? Yes. Is it better than drinking water? No. Are there potentially untoward consequences? I think so because of its effect on the microbiome and other things. So if you're asking, what are the things to do for my biological age? How I eat. It's exercise. it's community so I'm really focused on community, friends relationships, love it's like medicine, love is medicine and also making sure that I manage stress, I meditate I like this app called New Calm which basically is like binaural beats and I put it on and it just takes you into a altered brainwave state and you know having fun man, having fun is so key, longevity, enjoying life yeah it makes life worth living as well doesn't it I guess We talk about longevity a lot, but I guess you have to like the life you live.

1:23:10Exactly. Yeah, it has to be fun. Exposome. Exposome. Exposome. Yeah, what is that? I mean... You want me to tell you? Yeah, I never heard the word before. So the first time I heard it was researching you. Yeah. So it's a scientific term that, you know, like your genome, right? Your metabolome, your microbiome, your exposome is the sum total of everything that you've been exposed to in your life and how it's impacted your biology in this moment. So it's... The really interesting thing about this, though, that I was particularly interested in was that this includes what's happened to your ancestors.

1:23:45Yeah. Yes. Well, the epigenetics is really fascinating. But the exposome, just to quickly define it, and I'll lump back to the ancestor thing in a minute, but the exposome is what you eat, it's exercise, it's your thoughts, your feelings, your microbiome, environmental toxins, everything, your relationships. all of that is your exposome right so all that influences your expression of your genes and it turns out that 90 of disease is related to the exposome not the genome which is a good news because we have control over that so how the things that happen to us impact the expression of our genes exactly okay and how it affects our biology right how it turns them on and off and yeah turn on and off genes regulates our hormones our brain chemistry our microbiome everything right it's everything you're exposed to determines the quality of your life and your health In terms of ancestral effects, there's a phenomenon called epigenetics, which is how we measure biological age, which is the effect of this.

1:24:41Think of your genes as the keys on a piano. There's 88 keys. And you can create any kind of music from that. Think about that. You can create classical music, rock music, jazz, ragtime, reggae, whatever you want. And it's just 88 keys. The epigenome is the piano player that controls the songs of your life, right? And it is determined by your life experience and what you do and what you eat and how you think and your stress level and your relationships and your gut microbiome. Everything is affecting this in real time and it's a dynamic process. So we now know that using different interventions of lifestyle or diet or various supplements that you can reverse your biological age, that you can turn back the biological clock, that you can get biologically younger as you get chronologically older.

1:25:36And so it's really exciting research. There's even scientists from Japan who won a Nobel Prize finding these transcription factors that regulate our gene expression that can be inserted into us and reprogram our genes and our epigenome to become younger. In other words, can create an original stem cell, what we call a pluripotent stem cell. So it'll take back the clock all the way back to embryonic, like Benjamin Button, all the way back. Now, you don't want to go all the way back. But we have these systems built in us. And so we now can actually regulate this through epigenetic behavior changes that we know work.

1:26:15And there are drugs that do this too. There are pidochemicals that do this. So it's a new era of study. Do you believe that we inherit the trauma of our ancestors? I don't think it's a belief, Stephen. The data is really clear. If you look at Holocaust survivors, their children have way more issues in terms of psychological distress, anxiety. 9-11, there were a lot of women pregnant during 9-11 in New York City. And those offspring have reprogrammed genetics based on the trauma that their mother experienced during that time. And those can be measured. Different genes are expressed, different pathways are expressed that cause, for example, a higher level of anxiety.

1:26:58decreased ability to process the stress hormones and many other phenomena that happen that are programmed epigenetically we know that if you take in animal studies if you take a for example glyphosate which was sprayed on 70 of all crops it's a weed killer roundup we call it in this case if you give it to let's say a grandmother mouse but not to the the daughter and not to the granddaughter or grand whatever kid i don't know what you call grandkid mice anyway that there will be changes three generations down caused by that toxin that that original ancestor was exposed to that will cause increased cancer metabolic issues kidney issues a whole series of phenomena that are caused by epigenetic changes so if you spray the grandmother and then she has one generation of kids and then the next generation of kids are still impacted by spraying the grandmother yeah so you might have heard of lamarck have you heard of darwin darwin okay i heard of Darwin, Darwin basically had the theory of evolution, which is that species evolved through natural selection and they changed slowly based on environmental pressures over time.

1:28:08They changed their genes. Lamarck basically said, you can change genes and inherit things very quickly. And so they were kind of both right in a sense. Lamarck was more talking about epigenetics and Darwin was talking more about genetic evolution and mutations over time, which you know both are true both are true and neither knew about genes but they were both observing phenomena that are explained by exactly what i'm talking about what is the most important thing you've discovered through your years of work as it relates to longevity and health and all of that that we haven't talked about we we spend so much time um being human doings and not being human beings and the thing that i observed in the blue zones was there was a lot of being going on.

1:28:57There was a lot of just being, you know, and, and how important slowing down is to actually savor the things that really matter, that make life beautiful. Like we were, we, I was with this Italian ladies that were taking me around these tour guides and we were driving down out of this little village on the side of this mountain. And look, this car stops in front of us and just like stops and kind of stops us and waves and says, get out of the car. We're like, okay what's going on so we got out of the car it was an old man he was relatively young by sardinian standards he was 86 and named carmine and and he said come and we sat down on the side of the stone wall on the side of the street and we talked for two hours he talked about his life he asked me questions we were talking about philosophy politics religion what it was like when he was younger we went and then he took me on a tour of his farm and showed me his sheep and the olive trees and the fig trees and the vegetables he was growing and and i couldn't keep up with him he ran up the hill i was like so fit and you know he'd tell me the story of his life and you know when was the last time someone did that they might give you the finger if you saw in front of them you know like and we don't have this sort of value system anymore that values you know deep uh relationships and deep conversations and deep connection and that's beautiful what you're doing.

1:30:17You're creating a space for deep connections. And you've gotten to know me in this last two hours in ways that most people don't because you've asked questions and you spend time and you're curious and I've been feeling safe to share it with you. And I haven't said a lot of stuff in public before. And so it's really something beautiful that can come out of that. And then I feel, oh, if somebody sees me, I'm seen, I'm heard. And that that's a powerful medicine so being seen is a powerful medicine love is a powerful medicine connection belonging is powerful medicine i wonder how the lives we live now are really changing our brains as well you know we talk about add and adhd and autism all these kinds of things but you know the pace at which i live my life at i often think like i think i'm developing a disease Yeah, 100%.

1:31:07I just got back from Patagonia. And I do a lot of stuff. I have multiple companies, businesses. I have a clinic. I have patients. I'm constantly dealing with a million things every day. And sometimes I do. I feel like sometimes I have ADD. And I was in there in Patagonia in the middle of nowhere. There's no cell service. There's no Wi-Fi. There's just mountains, nature, and me. and my wife. We hiked for 10, 12 hours a day, sometimes more. And I felt my nervous system completely changed. And I realized I don't have ADD, I have NDD, which is nature deficit disorder. Yeah. You know? And I felt everything calmed down.

1:31:52I felt everything kind of settled. I saw my heart rate variability, which is a metric that we can measure that checks our stress response double. And I'm like, oh God, you know? And I don't think of myself as stressed. but it's like it's just this phenomena from being in our society and it takes a will to stop and pause and breathe and to go slower and to you know smell the roses it's a cliche but it's really it's a thing my friend one of my best friends called dom he we used to roast him a little bit because his heart rate variability was very very low and so we he was being roasted for a couple of weeks on end a couple of months really because we we all have this like heart rate variability league table and and then he went on his honeymoon for a month to australia yeah and his heart rate variability went from like something like 20 or 30 to 140 wow and all that was happening was he was basically just spending his time in nature in the sunshine as well which is an important factor yeah and that and since then he's managed to maintain his heart rate variability predominantly by staying out in nature and i thought god that's so interesting yeah but it like regulates our immune system in such a profound way.

1:32:57It does. Before the conversation started, we were talking very excitedly about your new company called Function. It sounds incredibly exciting. For someone that's curious about Function, what is it and where can they find it? So, you know, most of us don't have access to what's happening under our skin, right? We have to go to the doctor. We have to get an appointment. We have to hope they order the right tests. We have to hope that they know how to interpret the important tests. We hope they've kept up with the science. We hope they are doing all the right things. But the truth is they're not.

1:33:31And medicine is unfortunately delayed in its adoption of new science. And so function is really an attempt to help you get access to your own biology, to be the CEO of your own health, to create a health database of your own data that will take everything eventually. Right now it's your blood test, but eventually your biosensor data, your whole genomics, all your medical records, imaging data, your metabolome, your microbiome, and interpret all that in a way that helps you get a personalized picture of what's going on in real time with your biology. And then through evidence-based science and through the influence of expert opinion that also has value.

1:34:17And through the wisdom that comes from the patterns in your own data, being able to create a personalized roadmap for your health over time. And it's not a one-time test. It's being a member of function allows you twice your testing for$499. You get over 110 biomarkers. You track them over time. You see the changes. And what we're seeing, Stephen, is striking. We're doing tests that are not part of your regular checkup, right? We're We're doing, for example, for cholesterol, we're doing lipoprotein fractionation, which looks at the particle number and size. It's less than 1 % of all cholesterol tests.

1:34:51It was discovered 40 years ago, but 99 % of people don't get it, right? And it tells us that 95 % have problems with that. 89 % have small particles, which shows poor metabolic health. We're seeing 46 % of people have inflammation with a high C-reactive protein. We're seeing 13 % have autoimmune thyroid diseases is undetected. We're finding cancers that nobody found through liquid biopsies. We're finding that 67 % have nutritional deficiencies. And this is a very health-forward population because we're still in beta. And we're seeing that they didn't even know we're affecting their health. So I had a sort of lead athlete, for example, who was great, but he had low iron and he had low vitamin D and he had low B vitamins and it was affecting his performance.

1:35:31So it was like he had a disease. So we're able to map this for people and provide basically an AI co-pilot for your health based on the learnings. And AI is a scary thing for people, but the truth is that in medicine, it's the best use case. Would you rather have a dermatologist who's seen a few thousand lesions, look at your skin and see if it's a cancer or not, or an AI that sees billions of lesions and can actually know what's really going on? So we're gonna be able to do this in a very safe way for you to own your data and you can personalize your approach. You can upgrade your biological health.

1:36:04You can do that biological upgrade that I talked about. and you can share the data with your doctors. And it's going to, I think, transform medicine. And right now, we've just started in beta, but we have almost 30 ,000 members. We've seen over 3 million data points of people's biology. We have this available now at functionhealth.com. If you go to functionhealth.com forward slash mark, you can learn more about it and you can get off the wait list and get to see, because we have 100 ,000 people on the wait list and get to learn about your own biology. and what people are discovering is really life-changing for them.

1:36:37I'm very excited for you. And it's so wonderful to see how AI is creating new opportunities within health and wellness that weren't previously available. So it's all been happening over the last 12 months in the world of AI. And from that, I hope some incredible solutions emerge that bring down the cost and access, the cost to access of healthcare. Well, that's the thing. It's so affordable for most people. It's less than you spend on a cup of coffee every day. It's like$1.30-something a day. you know and for most people you know that that's affordable some people not but when you think about the what's your wealth your health is your wealth like i said earlier in the podcast a healthy man wants many things a sick man wants one thing i think it's a chinese proverb right you have an incredible podcast called the doctor's pharmacy which is one of the top health podcasts where you discuss the sort of intersection between health food and and policy which i recommend everyone to go and check out you've written a lot of books a lot 19, too many.

1:37:32I think I'm done for a minute. I'm going to recommend one and then I'll let you recommend another one. Yeah, yeah. Which one would you recommend? If you had to recommend one. Young Forever is my latest book and it's where I poured my entire knowledge base and tips and ideas and strategies about how to optimize your health. And it's not just for longevity, for any area of health that you have issues with, it's powerful. I was going to recommend that one as well, but I'm going to say Food Fix because that book is fantastic and that's one of the ones. The book about longevity that you released recently, Young Forever is a fantastic book, but the Food Fix book as well is really clarifying for a lot of people that are probably confused about food.

1:38:08We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is interesting because it's a little bit similar to what I asked you earlier, but with a slight variation. What is the most interesting and revealing question Steve should have asked you but didn't? Oh, and this is for the next guest? No, this was left for you, and they didn't know who they were leaving it for. Oh, I see. Okay. I would say, who were the biggest influences in my life, living or dead? So, Mark, who are the biggest influences?

1:38:46You're going to have to answer now. Oh, okay. Because people are wondering. So, I would say, living is a gentleman who's an unsung hero, a man named Jeffrey Bland who's a nutritional biochemist studied with Linus Pauling who won two Nobel Prizes really the father of nutritional science in the modern way who really established this field of functional medicine and he's a nutritional biochemist but he's a genius he's a synthesizer so every time I would see him for decades he would have a pile of scientific papers this thick a foot thick carrying with him all the time and he would hoover those things up.

1:39:25And he synthesizes it. And he's seen patterns in that data for decades that have presaged the revolution we're seeing now in medicine. So most things I talked about today, he basically understood by seeing the intersections across specialties. So he's sort of a polymath in science. And he influenced my work. He saved my life personally by learning about this model. I was able to save my health. He's helped me help millions of people. So he's a huge influence. The other, I think, main influence on my life was Henry Thoreau, who was a transcendentalist, lived in the 1800s, wrote a book called Walden.

1:40:01I don't know if you've heard about it, but it's a profound book. It was basically a guy who— Walden. Walden. How do you spell that? W-A-L-D-E-N. And it's a classic book about this man in the 1800s who went and lived on a lake outside of Boston, Malden Pond and lived there by himself in a cabin with nothing almost and wrote about it. And he had this beautiful way of writing and describing nature and life and philosophy. And it really also included a lot of Eastern philosophy embedded in it, which I didn't realize at the time. And so that book really impacted my childhood profoundly. Dr. Mark Hyman, thank you so much for taking the time today.

1:40:45And thank you for all of your wisdom and honesty and openness. It's incredibly important. And the work you've done over the last couple of decades has changed lives, saved lives, and more so than I think you'd probably ever realize and more so than we could ever count. So thank you for that. Thank you. It's an incredibly noble and worthy course that you've been on but are on as well with Function and all that's going to come with that. So I wish you the very, very best of all. Thank you so much. I thank you so much for your time.

1:41:17Thank you.