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

24:01The food industry's fighting back to the nail. Right. So we're fighting big forces. Food industry is the biggest industry on the planet. When I was growing up, and I was trying to be healthy, one of the things I used to do was chug milk. Yeah. Because I got told that it would make me tall like my brothers. So I used to do like crazy. Yeah. Straight from the carton. Just as many gops as I could take from the fridge. 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.

24:39What's your thoughts on milk? Yeah. So it's a controversial topic as well. Yeah. I mean, 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. But it basically was written by two Harvard scientists that dissected all 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 who remember this, there were all these got milk ads.

25:17So there were famous people, celebrities, 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, I don't yet say that you can't do that because it's not true. Like 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.

25:57Well, 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 glass of milk a day and kids should have two glass of milk a day to be healthy. You cannot get money in funding for school lunches in America without having milk on the menu. Now, 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. It's the prostate cancer. Prostate cancer. That it doesn't create strong bones.

26:34In fact, there's a 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 when I was working in the ER and this mother comes in with this kid with like, you know, I had like this 10th year infection. A few examples. I was like, what happened? Like when did this start? Oh, it started when he was like 12 months old. That's what changed. Well, I stopped breastfeeding and I started giving him milk and obviously started getting his year infections.

27:05I'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. The problem is we're we have corporate capture in America. We're the food industry has captured our food agencies, our political system from the FDA to the USDA. We've they spend for example, half a billion dollars just on the farm bill, which has, for example, food stamps and other food programs, child infantry nutrition. So it's really unfortunate, but milk is not nature's perfect food. It's only nature's perfect food if you're a calf.

27:43Is that health benefits to milk? Yes. So that's the other side of it. Now, what milk should we be drinking? If we're drinking modern milk, modern milk is from hosting cows that are almost homogeneous and the same, not homogenized milk, but homogenous breed. They have very few bulls and disseminating. They have like massive dissemination 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 casing, which is less inflammatory, less likely to cause gut issues, less problematic for the body.

28:21So sheep and goat milk have A2. Certain cows like Jersey or Gernsey cows have A2 in them. And you can get A2 milk. You can get A2 ice cream now. And so this A1 casing is potentially very problematic. So I think the current dairy is not great. And then we pasteurize it and homogenize it. And then we add growth hormone to the cows, that goes in there. We have estrogen that we add into the cows, send them 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 the current dairy is not something we should consume.

29:02Now if you have a chance to get sheep milk or goat milk or A2 milk from a cow, that may be okay, yogurt's maybe okay. And it depends on your genetics too. 75 % of the world's 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 casing in it, but it's A2 casing if there's any. And I don't react to it. But if I have regular whey, I do have a reaction to get congested. I'll get pimples or I get regular stuff. So I don't think dairy is something we should be consuming in larger amounts unless it's certain kinds of dairy.

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31:31If you ask people, they struggle to take any side effects. I actually think I saw you make a video about it. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm just saying about it. What's your thoughts on a ZemPec? You cross your arms, you're going to get yourself in trouble.

31:49Well, 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. And that's why, you know, when Nordisk is the biggest company now in Denmark, it's the biggest part of the GDP of Denmark. I don't know if they'll even allow it in Denmark. They have people that make a ZemPec. Yeah. People that make a ZemPec. And recently, the CEO of NoVanordisk, who makes a ZemPec, publicly said he was getting calls from processed food manufacturers.

32:37He's very concerned because their market share was dropping. And they were very concerned that it was going to affect your business. Think about that. So I think a ZemPec is effective. It works with a natural part of your biology, called GLP1, which is something your body makes. And we can make more of it by doing lots of different things from certain probiotics, or bacteria in our gut, just 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 ZemPec is. Let's give them some context. Well, it's a drug that was first used for diabetes.

33:12And then it works by acting on a path they call GLP1, Glucugun -like peptide -1, which is just a pathway. And it regulates insulin function, it regulates weight and appetite. And so it really works to help with blood sugar. But the side effect was weight loss. So we studied the aggra for blood pressure, but the side effect was helping them with the wreckage. So it was like, well, it's like kind of like that. It wasn't designed for this, but it actually had the side effect. And since obesity affects so many people, there's now 2 billion people on the planet who are overweight. So you take this injection, and you basically your appetite drops out.

33:53So you don't feel as hungry. You don't feel as hungry. So you feel nauseous. You can throw up. You can not want to eat. And people stop it because of the side effect. So those are short -term side effects. So the plus side is that it works. 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, it costs 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. So it's an enormously costful.

34:30How much does it cost? Like $13 to $1 ,700 a month. $13 to $1 ,700 a month. A month, which is probably 1 ,500 pounds or something. It's a lot of money every month forever. When 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. It's a pharmacological appetite straight jacket. And that can be effective. If some people really need it, they need it. If some people are 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.

35:11Two, it's expensive. Three, most of people are not aware that not only you lose that, but you lose muscle. So about 50 % of the weight you lose is muscle. And 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 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 ozempic. Longer term, that can be managed, but it's most people don't, right?

35:51That can be managed. And you need to be tracked with dexascans and body composition testing and really know what you're doing. Because it can really mess you up. And then you lose the weight, but then your metabolism is slower. At the end of that process, then 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? It 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.

36:19Right? So now we're seeing two, three years out, that's serious side effects. So, you know, we, in medicine, when we see an effect of 20 or 30 percent on a study, we go, that's a great thing. Let's, you know, stands lower, hard to see is by 20 or 30 percent. Great. Number one drug in the world. The side effect profile in this is scary, because bowel obstruction, which is not a trivial thing, essentially where your bowel stop moving and you need surgery to release them, is increased by 450 percent. Pancreatitis, which is not a fun condition, which is where your pancreas becomes inflamed, that affects your digestion and effects, your insulin effects, everything, and you can die from it, is increased by 900 percent.

37:06So 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. And I think it misses the real issue, which is how do we fix the problem causing this? It's not an ozemic deficiency, right? Like this is, wait, wait, wait, gain obesity is not an ozemic 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.

37:43It requires massive education, Brumel and 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. I mean, like I said, the food industry is the biggest industry in the world. It's a $7 ,000 to $17 trillion a year industry. That's bigger than the GDP of most countries. Or I think I'm 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.

38:21And 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... I'll play this forward. The price is going to come down, because more companies are going to release very similar iterations that goes to the same effect on GLP1. The price will come down so quickly. There'll be this kind of price risk. I'm sure I imagine a Zempec got ahead of the pack because they ran the clinical trials, so they invested all that money, which is they got a proof first. That window's going to close.

38:57And then the price comes down. And then I do know if... Do they prescribe it here? And do conductors prescribe it? Oh, sure. Anybody prescribe it? Oh, really? Okay. Oh, yeah. So it can be subsidized by your insurance. No. No, it can't be. I mean, the most insurance will 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 will go with you, 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. Why do you know this with those side effects that you named for linked to a Zempec?

39:30What is it about the drug that's causing that? Because I was wondering as you were saying it. So it's like, is that because people start eating less or is it coming to themselves? It's the effect of the drug. It thickens the bowel wall. It has effect on the gut. So it is working on the gut in a lot of the hormones and the metabolic functions of the gut are affected by a Zempec 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 quite, is very positive at the moment.

40:06These drugs come along in it. It's like there's no side effects. And they're super millions of dollars of advertising and billions of dollars of revenue at stake. So nobody's talking about the bad side. And by the way, they're thinking of giving it to five -year -old kids, which is just terrifying to me or life. I do think with these things, there's no such thing as a free lunch as they're 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 income status. I mean, listen, people are like, I want all those five pounds and I don't think that's a good idea.

40:37If you're severely obese person, and you have severe health conditions, you're really struggling to get going. You know, it can't be a helpful aid. Absolutely. You know, should it be given to everybody who wants to look good for a party or a wedding? Absolutely not. What's your position on fruit? I love fruit. How much fruit? I think it depends, right? So if you're diabetic and you're metabolically completely out of whack and you don't have any metabolic resilience, you know, eating a plum might be a problem for you. And now we have continuous glucose monitors. You can track your blood sugar and see.

41:16And I've had patients like this. And gee, I ate a plum and my sugar goes to the roof. So, but if I ate an apple, it doesn't. So I think different fruits have different effects on you. But for most part, fruit is full of phytochemicals, fiber, phytonutrients. It does have a little bit of sugar in it. I would say no fruit juice. I think fruit juice is definitely cobe city 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.

41:50If you eat sugar in the morning, which is essentially what we eat in the world today, cereal, pancakes, waffles, muffins, bagels, sweetened yogurt, sweetened coffee, I mean, it's the worst possible thing we can do for our biology. It jacks up our blood sugar and insulin and ends up causing us to gain weight and be hungry. Be craving more stuff. So having food, for example, you have frozen berries in your side frozen cherries, for example, in my way protein. That's okay because there's protein in there and it mitigates the effect. What about eating times when to eat? Yeah. Have you got any thoughts around when we shouldn't be to eat?

42:25Yeah, for sure. I think we had something called breakfast before, which was breaking the fast. And now people eat all night, they eat till they go to bed and they say they wake up, they eat or have something, a sugary stuff in the morning, get sugary coffee, and they don't get this dose of window of fasting, which is critical for our biology. 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. Steven, your body, when you cut yourself, heals the skin closes and heals. How does it not do that?

43:00It's so smart. It's got your bones break and heals. I broke one of our reviews ago. It does heal, right? What's going on? I'm not going, would you please heal in there? It knows what to do. I recruit stem cells, I recruit repair factors and growth factors, and it knows what to do. So the body has this innate healing repair, renewal and regeneration system. And 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.

43:32It'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 body 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. In the long answer to your question, it's important to give yourself a break of 12 hours. So if you eat at six o 'clock at night, you can eat six in the morning, minimum. But best probably 14. So if you eat dinner at six, you breakfast at eight, that's okay. That's a 14 hour fast. And in that time, your body is doing its cleanup recycling repair.

44:11Is there an evolutionary story? For sure, absolutely. When we didn't have grocery stores, we didn't have 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. Now, I just came back from Tanzania and visited the hunter -gatherers there, the Kodza, which is one of the last few tribes that hunt and gather. And we went hunting and gathering. And it's like, man, it's a lot of work to go dig up some roots and kill a bird in the tree. And it was like, it was a project. We ran around for hours. And so we don't know where we're getting our next meal.

44:44And so the body has had to deal with periods of feast and famine before. 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 pneumatic hydrogen, builds pneumatic hydrogen, that reduces inflammation, that activates cellular cleanup and repair processes. So you have all these old cells and damaged proteins. Your body has a little like digester, almost like a little vacuum cleaner that goes as succus all up and then digest it and then uses the parts. It's almost like a recycling system in the body.

45:24We 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 camps 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 from many animal studies that starvation and fasting will extend your life by a third. If you eat a third less calories, you'll live a third longer. No, it's not fun. Right? But you don't have to do that. So timing and beating 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.

46:03How do we know in the animal studies, it wasn't just the calorie restriction that caused the sort of longevity effect. It was. It was the kind of thing. So what if I just restrict my calories instead of fasting? Well, you could do that. I met a guy who was from the calorie restriction society. Is it kind of a restriction to science? Yeah, but just based on these research and animals, where think about if you eat a third less, you'll 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.

46:39I'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 have to. So he was starving. And there are a lot of downsides starving. You lose muscle, which is necessary. There's certain things that go wrong. And so it's not really the optimal strategy. You want to do things in mimic starvation. So how do you mimic this period of starvation that causes something called autophagy, which basically means to eat yourself, basically clean up yourself. It's like self -cleaning or self -repair, right? And so there's a lot of ways to hack that.

47:17You can do it by this longer term overnight fast. You can do it by certain supplements and certain medications. Like Rapa Micens 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. It 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 in mimic starvation, and then you get this benefit.

47:57Or drugs like midformin 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 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. There's a large trial going on now. I'm still agnostic about it. I'm not their pro or against it. I think the data's 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.

48:30Let's call them. This innovation is good for us. Yes, I mean, yes. I would say, be careful, because people go really to the extreme. I'm going to not activate mTOR, because activating mTOR caused 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. So 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. You know, that's about it.

49:08Your heart needs to beat. It needs to relax. It's just how the body works. Difficult conversation as well, because it can provoke disordered eating. Yeah. Various eating disorders. Yeah. Obviously, extremely bad in terms of health outcomes. Blue zones. You visited some blue zones, haven't you? What are blue zones? And what did they teach you about the nature of being healthy? Well, my friend Dan Buder basically came up with this concept of the blue zones after visiting these areas in the world where people had extremely long lives. And somebody on the map circled them in blue ink, which is why they're called blue zones.

49:51And I visited Icaria and also Sardinia. How many of them are there? There's five. There's Okinawa, Japan, Loma, Linda, California, and the Koei 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 were we talking? Well, I mean, one couple there was like collectively 210 years old. So they looked to be 100, 105, 109, 110. I mean, Emma Marano was 117 when she died.

50:30So the question is, what is different about these areas? And what's different is that they're very isolated and remote. So they haven't been burdened with all the modernization of our food system. They still grow their own food. I mean, I visited Miss Kupal. He was I think 90, Benicotus. He was like 97. His wife was a young 87. And they had land in the farm. They lived on. He was more chill, but she was out there showing us around on all the fruit trees, the olive trees, the garden she planted. I mean, it's massive. Many farm that she managed herself on the side of a hill, which she was running up faster than I could get to her at 87 years old, cooking everything from scratch.

51:14It wasn't like organic, but it was because that's just what they did. They used all heirloom animals like sheep and goats, so they had heirloom, sheep and goat with what's adding sheep and goat. Meaning it's not like some industrialized hybridized cow. It's producing this nasty milk, which we shouldn't be drinking. It's they're having goat milk and goat cheese, but their goats are eating wild plants that have phytochemicals. Some of those, you know, 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.

51:53They're also active. Petraeo was like 95 years old. And he was in Sardinian. He had to hike five miles a day up this extremely rocky mountainous terrain to hurt his sheep at 95 years old. I mean, what most 95 years old aren't hiking the mountains, right? Then he was booming voice, stood up straight, ice clear, not hunched over, funniest hack, 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, he was making, milking the goats and we're making goat cheese together.

52:42And he, you know, he gives me this tea. I'm like, what is this? He's like, oh, this is wild sage tea. And I looked at, he said, what is it? I said, what is the plant? I looked it up and then I looked up the plant and I analyzed, you know, what it was and turned out it's an extremely phytochemical rich plant that has a lot of these same longevity compounds and it's called catechants that, you know, we don't drink a lot of green tea, has it, you can get from Japan, for example. And then, you know, we just basically see that not only do they have good food, they have the activity, they have very low levels of stress.

53:16There was one guy, Silvio, I'm almost having dinner with him. He had this mountainous area that his whole family 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 from the farm. And I said, Silvio, if you're, I said Silvio, do you only stress like in your life? And he looked at me like, stress like, like he didn't know, almost I didn't understand the word. I'm like, you know, when things are difficult and no hard, things are hard and and get you feel stressed and he's like, oh, oh, yeah, well, sometimes at night a goat will get out and I'll have to go get it.

53:56And sometimes, you know, when the goats are, you know, giving birth, I have to go get up early. So they 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 100. I guess it's like when you're five, I'm a five and three quarter, she's like, I'm 103 months, you got in 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. But her niece and her nephew invited her to come stay with them.

54:35And so she was living with them. Or another guy, Carmine had lost his wife, but he was living with family members. And it was running this big garden and 86 and animals and chiefs and rabbits. So they all a 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 increasing around the globe. And it's lethal. It's like smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. How do we know? How do we know that it's dangerous?

55:06Yeah. There's so much science around this. The evidence of this is in demands. 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 are we so lonely? What is it? That's happening. Do you think it's what is it the internet? Yeah. I mean, think about it. We used to rely on each other in communities to live. Like they do, for example. I said, you know, how did it work, Silvio, when you have all these sheep out of your management? Well, you know, I have like all my friends.

55:37They come over and it's time for you to shoot the sheep. They come over and they help. Life is just naturally connected. And you go to some's house. You walk on the street. You know, you have a neighborhood. You have a family. We've lost that. We're all mobile. We're all moving around. We are all disconnect 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? It's better than the MSNC. And it's something we've lost. And we've lost the value of relationships and our culture of achievement and success.

56:12And it's just sort of disconnected us from a really matters, which is the human community. Is there any way back for that? Do you think? Because I was thinking about this in the day. Listen, I've talked about this once or twice now, but I tried the vision probably the other day. Oh, you did. Yeah. And incredible in terms of the technology, but terrifying in terms of the potential implications over the long term. Yeah, you just go, we're a lot of 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.

56:47You can see when you play it forward that this is going to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and more accessible the apps are going to get better. And then we think about what that's going to mean for loneliness. Yeah. When I could go hang out 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 that. Are you hopeful for us being able to turn around the loneliness and isolation epidemic? I mean, it's a tough one.

57:17I think we have to rethink how we live and what we do in the communities we build. And I think there are efforts to 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. And so there's a lot of these communities that I'm involved with that are happening. And I know I'm in the board of things called the Belong Center, which is really about addressing loneliness and creating ways and mechanisms for people that connect and be with each other in real time. I think it needs to be a systemic thing.

57:44I 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 centers and all these kinds of things. Yeah. That seems to, you know, I did a, I realized this was a problem a long time ago and I went to Haiti after the earthquake. And I went helping there when it was just as a disaster, one of the first medical teams on the ground. And 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.

58:28And he then went out to build a network of community health workers over 11 ,000 globally. It was a model for the Clinton 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, it was a lack of people being able to do the basic things that they needed to do, like a clean water or have a watch, no 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.

59:00Then I realized that chronic disease was also an issue that that chronic disease wasn't infectious, but it was contagious. You're more likely to be overweight if your friends overweight than if your family members overweight. Your social networks are more important than your genetic network networks and determining your health. You're basically, you look around at your five closest friends. It's probably kind of the way you are too. And so I realized that we need to use the power of community to transform our health and our behavior. And I can tell you what to need, what to do. But if all your friends are doing the opposite, it's going to be hard.

59:36Right? So I created a program with Rick Warren called the Daniel Plan, Faith Based Wellness Program, where we got 15 ,000 people to sign up in the first week at quarter million pounds or lost in the first year. We created a book called The Daniel Plan about how to do this in community. So it was, it was, we call it the five Fs for getting healthy, right? It's Faith, Friends, Food, Fitness and Focus, which is your mindset. So and it was amazingly effective. We scaled into a thousand shirts 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, it was just no mean, another doctor.

1:00:15And 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, I believe in 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? Because I'm in purpose. Yeah. From reading your work, I came to learn that purpose is a sort of longevity fact.

1:00:50100 % to what extent? I mean, the data is really clear. I was a recent paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association show that those who had meaning in purpose lived seven years longer. And what do they mean by meaning in purpose in that context? It's whatever your meaning in purpose is, it could be, you want to be there for your grandchild. It could be your a scientist and want to make a discovery. It could be that you, you're a novelist, you want to write your next novel or you're not a job. No, it doesn't have to be. I mean, for me, you know, my purpose is ending needle suffering for millions of people through the power of this new thinking and model.

1:01:26And, and 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 copilot 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 happening in your annual physical. You're not getting the latest science and medicine. So how do we accelerate that change?

1:01:56So for me, that, that, that drives me every day. It gets me excited to wake up and I'm very passionate. But of course, you know, I'm also passionate about my friends and my community. I'm passionate about my health. I'm passionate about having fun, you know, like, 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?

1:02:27Alia. I mean, you see it all the time, Steven. I mean, you look at, you know, people retire literally in the retirement age here at 65, which I'm going to be this year, which is a little scary to say that. You know, I'm just getting started. And if people think, oh, you know, you look at people who retire, 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 this starts to support that?

1:03:01100%. 100%. That's crazy. Yeah. Why? What happens? You know, I mean, when you start moving, you get depressed. Yeah, you get depressed. You start moving. I had a patient who had this most beautiful relationship. 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 a bit healthy. He ate well. He went into heart failure. Like literally heart failure. His heart couldn't pump. And he had a true medical condition that showed up on scans and imaging. He was in trouble. And it was like, wow, you know, I looked it up and there's actually evidence for emotional shock and loss.

1:03:47Heartbreak. Literally, he's 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, you know, listen, even the biggest and most powerful pharmacy in the world is between your ears. And they can do all kinds of stuff. Truma. Yeah. This trauma play a role in all I'm 200%. I mean, you know, it's amazing how in medical school, we just did not learn this.

1:04:25But 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 free. And it says, well, your parents divorced. Was there alcohol in your family? Did your parents fight in front of you? Did anybody hit you? Were you sexually abused? And you just go to this whole list of them? Any family members in prison, you know? And the higher your score, the more likely you are to have health issues.

1:04:58B .O .Bs have autoimmune disease, get cancer, get heart disease, get diabetes. It's really striking. And so trauma is registered in your body. And the book called The Body Keep Score and Carolyn Mase, you know, it was sort of a mystic said in 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 efficient and you have all these health issues and mercury poisoning. Well, that can kind of affect your mental health too in your story. But we know really clearly that your trauma is influencing your biology.

1:05:37And 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 and give people a sedative, you know, 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. It's not just like our normal drug where you take the drug and you have to keep taking it.

1:06:14Men, you took ozampic ones and you would stay losing weight forever. It's like taking these psychedelics, you don't want them 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 can share that link. But it's sharing all the research about treating depression, anxiety, trauma responses, PTSD, relational issues.

1:06:48What do you think of psychedelics? Have you tried them? Yes. Which ones have you tried? You know, I haven't tried I've a game. Okay. It's quite strong addiction. Yeah. But you know, I grew up in the 70s. So mushrooms were psychedelic mushrooms were a big part of my my awakening in my personal journey. I've tried LSD, I've tried POD, I've tried Iwasca, I've tried Bufo, I've tried pretty much all of them because I've just I've sort of an adventure in my biology and in my mind. And I can tell you that they really helped me. Which one helped you the most? And give me a story of how I helped you. My girlfriend's actually in Costa Rica right now serving Iwasca and I spent a year and a half investing in and we took a psychedelics company public with the tie life sciences.

1:07:46So I was in partnership with maps and Compass pathways. We are at a tie we invested in Compass pathways. Which is so I'm quite heavily a year very into that. Yeah. Yeah. I've spent a bad a year as a year and a half bad 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. And then I my contract was basically to leave on the day of the IPO. So IPOed on the NASDAQ 3 .4 billion and I left the next day. Amazing. Yeah. Amazing. But it was so it was just because I was interested in mental health.

1:08:20Yeah. I heard about this epidemic of mental health. There's no good answers. Yeah. And psychedelics and the clinical research that was coming out around things like psilocybin which is the active compound and magic mushrooms were just really interesting. Yeah. And I didn't need to work. So I just. It's fascinating. I mean, you know, there was this recently heard a presentation by Stanford scientists who studying I began for trauma depression anxiety by addiction. And 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.

1:08:56Yeah. We know medically that when you stop narcotics, you go to physiologic withdrawal, which is a medical phenomena. It just stops that somehow. It's like a one dose. One dose. Now there is metabolites that stay for a long time. Nor I began that may mitigate those effects and block those receptors. And we don't really quite understand it yet. But I did I did have a thought, which is that when you look at the Yale food edition scale, which is a validated metric for food addiction. Now different people have various degrees, right? There are people who can't stop eating sheet cakes and there's people who don't crave ice cream once in a while.

1:09:31It's not food addiction. But 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 or carbure fine carbohydrates. So I actually talked to one of the leading ribbing and researchers. I said, wouldn't be interesting to do a pilot where we took people who had food addiction and we gave them I began and we saw what happened. I 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 I began, which is an metabolite of I began.

1:10:07I think maybe doing a lot of the fact that something you can take on a daily basis instead of a ozemic for example. What I had about I began is that the side effects are quite yeah, it couldn't be quite significant. But it's 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 unfatal heart rhythm. And you have to be monitored when you're taking it. But we found that if you take higher, 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.

1:10:42Well, 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 a trauma, it's hard to address the things that they need to do to fix their behavior in their life. Right. So if you're if you're traumatized because you were raped, right, sexual abuse when you were a kid, you know, and I've had my own trauma.

1:11:14I had incest when I was a kid. I had, you know, kind of a rough kid 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 was highly functional, obviously. I mean, I've doctor written many books in a lot in the world, but it was really affecting my way of being in relationships. And sexual health, for you, you know, you were sort of, you know, sexual health, the more my romantic relationships.

1:11:53And even sometimes work relationships where I really developed a pattern and it was also a trauma that I had for 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 a way to call it, a fortified child. And she was the so she never had a child. 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. And so I developed this place where I just felt this big hole and emptiness in my heart.

1:12:26And 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, it was like it was like literally the programming changed. You know, I've got little voice in your head all the time. Sometimes it's very annoying. Voice in your head. And it just says stuff all the time that, you know, 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. But literally that voice changed. And what it said changed and how it was in relationships changed.

1:13:05And it was physiologically different. And I didn't have that sense of trauma. And another friend who had this same thing and he had, you know, mother who was a yellow 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 through this part of his brain that it 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. And he said, it's like that part of his brain just turned off and he stopped having that feeling.

1:13:42And he was able to tell the truth and speak what he felt and, you know, was powerful. And the symptoms that you experienced in your later life with relationships, what was that just like a bit struggling to fight for 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. And so I developed this whole, this emptiness that affected my relationships and it was bad.

1:14:26You partner, for example, I'm just from this partner sheet, she was perfectionist and she really had a hard time opening up and she had an avoid an attachment style. So like one time I had seen in three weeks and she didn't really want to connect or hug or be together and she's like, I can get used to you. And I'm like, it's like I just could feel this like misrel reaction of panic and fear and hurt and like now I don't have any of that. What was it that you fixed it? Do your work earlier? Your life is going to be difficult. I think I wish, you know, it's like when I was sick with chronic illness and I had chronic fatigue syndrome and I had mold issues, Lyme disease and I was so sick, you know, and it was, I didn't have a roadmap in and of a path.

1:15:15You 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 pitched to get patched together this whole approach that have finally allowed me to get well. And I wish I'd known now when I knew that it would have been better in the year or not 10 years that it took me to get better or maybe even shorter. And if I'd done the work on myself when I was 20 and 30 and not wait until I was 50 and 60, I would have, you know, I 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.

1:15:51There'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. I think maybe even this year or the MD, assisted therapy will be FDA approved. So I feel like, you know, everybody's on their own journey, but you don't have to say stuck in the biological or psychological framework that you are now.

1:16:24Like there is a way to heal at any time. Whether you're 65 or 25. I think this is essential to the concern of 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 the health, motivation, our trauma, mind, it's all kind of fixed. This is who I am now. I can maybe act differently or whatever. I 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 in presence us. Yeah. So my, my message is, number one, we now have the science and technology medicine to upgrade your biological software and reverse chronic disease, reverse your biological age.

1:17:06My 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 the 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, so we can measure that now. So that's what it was. So you can upgrade your biological software and you can upgrade your psychospecial software. It's really possible. And I've seen it happen, and I've seen it happen many people. I think the second -hand revolution is probably like ozemic for mental health.

1:17:43But 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 lettering my biological age, I'm 31 now. You're 31? I'm 31. I used to baby. I'd like to be 25 biologically or 21 biologically. So I don't need a brain juzzer on the podcast. If I give you some advice, yeah, he's got to look. Maybe he'd be breakfast and in my 11, go to bed at 8. No, no, when I speak, yeah, speak to Dr.

1:18:23Brian Johnson. I have to buy some like $5 ,000 contraption in strap it to myself in the morning. And I just, yeah, it's it's it's a lot of two blades of grass for lunch. Yeah, but the simple things that have had the biggest impact on your biological age, one of those. I say 80, 20 on this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, I wrote a book about it. Yeah, you'd call it young forever. Yeah. And it's not that hard. As we talked about them, 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.

1:19:00Yeah. So I think, you know, in terms of, and by the way, in any 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 lung jabities. So if you want to live long and be strong and build a do stuff and not, you know, have trouble getting up out of a chair or talking to your shoelaces, you need to build muscle. And 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.

1:19:35So that's, that's pretty great for me. And again, I've written lots of books. I talk about the diet in there, but those are the sort of the main things. In the young forever, longevity diet, you talk about the 75 % of your plates should be vegetables. Yeah. This point about limiting the protein to sort of 25 % of your plate. Is there a risk in having too much meat products? Because this is what I mean, you know, this is a great interesting question. You know, we looked at, for example, the planes Indians, like the Lakota at the turn of the last century in 1900s. They were the longest lieu population on the planet.

1:20:06They were 100 years old plus and all they ate was bison. That was their diet pretty much in few berries and maybe a few things they could dig up from the ground. Well, they 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. There's, 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, you know, dig it or is it not vegan meat?

1:20:46Not meat. Meat's one of the most nutrient -dense 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, bison, and even beef. And you can eat good quality fish, pasta, rice 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 the amount of meat depends on what you're doing and your size and your your your lifestyle.

1:21:28So if you're very active and you want to build muscle and you want to lift weights and you want which you should, you probably need between, you know, you know, I have 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 .8 grams per kilo. I'm talking about double that. Now, .8 grams is the amount that you need to prevent a protein deficiency disease, 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.

1:22:08You also need fast and times not have protein. So your body can heal and repair. But it's like Goldie Knox when I'm not you need both. And so I would say depending on your activity level and how much you're doing, you need more. But, you know, roughly about, you know, 30 grams three times a day, which is not that much. You know, I just had a bag of built -hung, which is a little bag. It's like a beef. Yeah, it says South Africa and like beef jerky. And I was like after I ate it was like 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.

1:22:39That's hard. I could have a 30 or 40 gram of protein shake when I had this morning. That's I'm already at like, you know, 70 grams. So I think the body needs that protein. So I think food is really important. And I talk about how to act to make a longevity switch with food and phytochemicals in the book. The resistance training is really key for longevity. So if you if you if you want to do cardio, that's great. And I think we need to both but but string training three times a week minimum 20 minutes is the key to health and longevity. It will keep your muscle strong. It'll prevent what we call a psychopenia, which is muscle loss.

1:23:12One of the biggest things that happens is you get older. She lose muscle and at least to metabolic issues, inflammation, pre diabetes, you know, just all kinds of health consequences. Sugar. Oh, yeah, I said get rid of sugar. What about artificial sugar? It's like in artificial sweetener. Yeah. I mean, this so much, you know, the debate about this. I was actually reading a couple of papers yesterday, Steven. And I was because I was not related to this with something else I was working on. And there were these two papers that were basically discounting the fact that artificial sweetener had any bad impact on health.

1:23:43You know, they're going to be interesting because you know, I there's some biology around this. And I 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. And the other study was a similar study and said funded by so and so who's funded by Coca Cola and who works for the International Sweetener's Association. So follow the money. You know, 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.

1:24:23So if you're asking one of the things to do for my biological age, how I eat is exercise. It's 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 mean, I like this app called Newcom, which basically is like a binaural beats. And I put it on and just takes you into an altered brainwave state. And you know, having fun, man, having fun is okay. It's longevity, enjoying life. Yeah, it makes life worth living as well, doesn't it? I guess. I mean, we talk about longevity a lot, but you have to shift the life you live.

1:25:01Exactly. Yeah, it has to be fun. Expose them. Expose them. Expose them. Yeah, what is that? I mean, I 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 metabolism, your microbiome, your expose home, 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 a really interesting thing about this, though, that I was particularly interested in was that this includes what's happened to your ancestors. Yeah.

1:25:37Yes. Well, the epigenetics is really fascinating, but the expose, I'm just to quickly define it, and I'll lump back to the ancestor thing in a minute. But the expose 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 expose home, right? So all that influences your expression of your genes. And it turns out that 90 % of disease is related to expose home, 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, and how it affects our biology, right?

1:26:13How it sends them on and off in the 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, think about 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, rock, ragtime, reggae, whatever you want. And it's just 88 keys.

1:26:48The 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 in its dynamic process. So we now know that using different interventions of lifestyle or diet or very 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. And so it's really exciting research. There's even scientists from Japan who went on 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.

1:27:46In 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 it all the way back because you're in it. But we have these systems built in us. And so we now can actually regulate this through epigenetic behavior changes that we know work. And there are drugs that do this too. There are phytochemicals that do this. So it's a new era of study. Do you believe that we inherit the true amount of our ancestors? I don't think it's a belief, Steven. The data is really clear.

1:28:20If you look at Holocaust survivors, their children have way more issues in terms of psychological stress, anxiety, 9 -11. There are 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's experience 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, decreased ability to process the stress hormones. And many other phenomena that happen that are programmed epigenetically. We know that if you take an animal studies, if you take a, for example, glyphosate, which was sprayed on 70 % of all crops, it's a weed killer roundup.

1:29:04We call it in this case. If you give it to, let's say, a grandmother mouse, but not to the daughter and not to the granddaughter or grandmother, whatever, kid, on which call up grand kid mice. Anyway, that there will be changes. Three generations down caused by that toxin that that original ancestor was exposed to. They 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.

1:29:44Yes. 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 change slowly based on environmental pressures. Time they changed their genes. Lamarck basically said you can change genes and her things very quickly. So they were both right in a sense. Lamarck was more talking about epigenetics and Darwin was talking more about genetic evolution and mutations over time, which, right the truth, both are true and neither of them knew about genes, but they were both observing phenomena that are explained by exactly what I'm talking about.

1:30:27What 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 spent so much time 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. There was a lot of just being, you know, and how important slowing down is to actually savor the things that really matter that make life beautiful. Like we were, I was with this through Italian ladies that were taking me around these tour guides and we were driving down out of this little village on the Sattis mountain and look at 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.

1:31:14We're like, okay, well, what's going on? So we got out of the car. This old man, relatively young by Sardinian standards, he was 86 and named Carmine 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 I couldn't keep up with him. He ran up the hill.

1:31:47I was like, so fit. And you know, 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. The values, you know, deep relationships and deep conversations and deep connection. And this is beautiful. You're doing, you're creating a space for deep connections. And, you know, you've got to know me in this last two hours in ways that, you know, 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.

1:32:24And like, you know, I've been said a lot of this stuff about like before. And so it's really something beautiful that can come out of that. And then I feel, oh, somebody sees me. I'm seeing. I'm heard. And that's a powerful medicine. So being seen as 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, I often think, I think I'm developing a disease. Yeah, 100%.

1:32:57A hundred percent. I mean, I just got back from, from pedagonia. And, you know, I do a lot of stuff. I have multiple companies, businesses, I have a clinic, I have patients, I constantly dealing with million things every day.

1:33:17And, I was in there in pedagonia in the middle of nowhere. There's no cell service. There's no wifi. There's just mountains, nature in me and my wife. We hike to 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. And I felt everything calm down. I felt everything kind of settle. I saw my heart rate variability, which is a metric that we can measure that checks our stress response double. I'm like, Oh, God, you know, I don't think of myself as stress. But it's like, it's just this phenomena from being in our society.

1:33:59And it takes a will to stop and pause and breathe and to go slower and to, you know, smell roses. It's a cliche, but it's really, it's a thing. Not my friend. One of my best friends called Dom. We used to roast him a little bit because his heart rate variability was very, very low. And so he was being roasted for a couple of weeks on end, a couple of months really, because we all have this like heart rate variability, league table. And then he went on his honeymoon from month to Australia. And his heart rate variability went from like something like 20 or 30 to 140. 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.

1:34:38And now, and since then is he's managed to maintain his heart 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. It does. Before the conversation started, we were talking very excitedly about your new company, new function. Yeah. 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.

1:35:14We 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, you know, doing all the right things. But the truth is, they're not. And medicine is, is, is, and unfortunately, delayed and it's an 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 metabolism, 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.

1:36:01And then through evidence -based science and through the influence of expert opinion that also has value and 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, it's being a member of function allows you twice your testing for like $409 .00, you get over 110 biomarkers, you track them over time, you see the changes, and what we're seeing is even striking. We're seeing, we're doing, we're doing tests that are not part of your regular checkup, right? We're doing, for example, for cholesterol, we're doing lipoprotein fractionation, which looks at the particle number in size.

1:36:41It's less than 1 % of all cholesterol tests. It 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 -rectar protein. We're seeing 13 % have auto -mythioresis 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.

1:37:16So I had, sort of, a lean athlete, for example, who's great, but he had low iron, and he had low vitamin D, and he had low B vitamins, and it was affecting his performance. So it was like he had a disease. So we're able to map this for people and provide a, basically, AI copilot for your health based on the learnings. And, you know, 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?

1:37:46So we're going to be able to do this in a very safe way for you to, to, you own your data, and you can personalize your approach. You can upgrade your biological health. You can do that biological upgrade that I talked about. And, and you can share the data with your doctors. And it's going to, I think, transform medicine. And right now, we know we've just started in beta, but we have almost 30 ,000 members. We've had seen over 3 million data points of people's biology. We have this available now at functionhealth .com. If you go to functionhealth .com, 4 -mark, you can, to learn more about it and you can get off the wait list and get to see, because we have a hundred thousand people on the wait list and get to learn about your own biology.

1:38:27And what people are discovering is really life -changing for them. I'm very excited for you. And it's so wonderful to see how AI is creating new opportunities within health and, and wellness that one previously available. So, you know, it's, we'll be in happening over the last sort of 12 months in the world of AI and from our, who some incredible solutions emerge that bring down the cost and access, the cost of access of health care. Well, that's the thing is, it's so affordable for most people. It's like, the less than you spend on a cup of coffee every day. It's like a dollar, 30 -something day.

1:38:55You know, and for most people, you know, 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. You have an incredible podcast called The Doctors Pharmacy, which is one of the top health podcasts where you discuss this sort of intersection between health food and, in policy, which I recommend everyone to go and check out. You've written a lot of books. A lot. 19 too many. I'm going to read it. I'm going to recommend one and then I'll let you recommend another one.

1:39:27Yeah, yeah. Which one would you recommend? If you had to recommend one. Yeah, 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 fantastic, but the food fix book as well is really clarifying for a lot of people that is probably confused about food.

1:40:00We have a closing tradition on this podcast with 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 questions Steve should have asked you, but didn't? Oh, and this is for the next guest. Yeah, this was left for you and they didn't know who they were leaving it for. Oh, I say, okay. I would say, who are the biggest influences in my life, living or dead? Simok, who are the biggest influences?

1:40:40So I would say living is a gentleman who's an unsung hero, a man named Jeffrey Blant who's a nutritional biochemist, studied with Linus Pauling who went to normal 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 thing, like, you know, a foot that carrying with them all the time. And he would who were those things up? And he synthesizes it and he's seen patterns in that data for decades that have pre -saged the revolution we're seeing now in medicine.

1:41:25So most things I talked about today, he he basically understood by seeing the intersections across specialty. 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 say my help. 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. I don't know if you've heard about it, but it's profound book. It was basically a guy who, Walden, who was a great scholar, W -A -L -D -E -N.

1:42:02And it's a classic book about this man in the 1800s who went and lived on a lake outside of Boston, Walden pond, and lived there by himself in a cabin with nothing, almost and wrote about, wrote about it. And he had New Year's 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 Heimann, thank you so much for taking the time today. And thank you for all of your wisdom and honesty and openness. It's incredibly important.

1:42:41And 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 have accounts. So thank you for that. It's incredibly a noble and worthy cause that you're, 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 for your time.

1:43:08Oh Mama, Papa, my body grows a rhythm to the armament and the clothes that I bought now will stay very small, very soon. But its wallet does not have to suffer for the fashion, with the bottom of the gelatin up the sea, Though we were lucky.