Is Aging Reversible? Stanford Study Reveals How

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0:43Listen to the free audiobook now. Ultra running shoes are all about space. The space to go further, to feel better, to do something you never thought possible. And this space starts with Ultra Fit. Unlike traditional running shoes, UltraFit gives toes more room to move naturally, so every step is strong, balanced, and comfortable. Whatever you're lacing up for, stay out there with Ultra. Shop now at ultrarunning.com. That's A-L-T-R-A running dot com. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Josh Axe, and today I'm going to be bringing you something really powerful. Recently, I had the honor of speaking at the Health Optimization Summit.

1:26This is one of the largest summits in the entire country where I shared my personal story of how to heal from everything from cancer to autoimmune disease and promote longevity. And I talked about the miraculous way God healed my body and can help heal your body. This talk goes beyond other things you've heard me talk about. I go really in-depth on the most healing diet ever created, on the top nutrients and herbals and therapies to help reverse disease at a cellular level. If you want to heal your cells and reverse any condition and optimize your health and longevity, I believe this is one of the most important messages I've ever shared.

2:06So whether you're struggling with fatigue or chronic illness or just want to live with more energy and purpose, I hope this bonus episode encourages you and equips you with real tools to reclaim health. And I want to mention, this was an event that people paid a lot of money to go to, but I did want to offer it for free for you right now while this video is still up. Take a listen to this right now. All right. Well, it's great to be here, everybody. Super excited to talk about cellular longevity and healing today. And I feel like it's, you know, I think I tried to fit a two-hour presentation to 40 minutes, but I'm going to do my absolute best today.

2:46All right. So the focus here is healing your cells. And this picture on the right is me two years ago. Many of you know this. Not everybody knows this. But I went from being a triathlete in really good shape to having a spinal infection. and almost dying two years ago. I went to visit a doctor, and I, actually, let me go back a little bit further. I ended up having a little bit of back pain, and I went and got stem cell therapy and saw amazing results in it helping heal my back. Well, I thought, I'm gonna get it done again, and something went wrong during the procedure. This is a natural therapy in stem cells, and my disc got infected, and my bone, and I ended up one day after getting this, this is three months later, I woke up one morning, I just couldn't move.

3:40My back was in so much pain. Days went by, I still couldn't move. I had to call an ambulance. They came and picked me up and I was in Puerto Rico at the time. I had to take a medical flight to Florida and I met with an infectious disease doctor there and he said, Josh, listen, here's what we found. There's a major infection that's spread throughout your spine and he said, your best case scenario is you're going to have chronic pain the rest of your life. He said, worst case, it could kill you, but more than likely you're going to have to have your spine fused, rods put in your spine. This was just a little over two years ago.

4:15And I went from doing triathlons, squatting, lifting weights, throwing my two-year-old daughter in the air in the pool, to being told what I felt like was my life was over. And I had always been the physician for so many people, my mom, my family, tens of thousands of patients, but I really needed a healing miracle. And I spent some time in prayer, and I had about 48 hours where I felt like my life was over. Felt hopeless, felt despair, and finally, I just felt God saying to me, you know, you're going to be okay. And so I decided to stop focusing on where I was at and start focusing on my future and start focusing on how to heal my body and how to heal at the cellular level.

4:57Because one thing I believe is that God is bigger than any diagnosis. And so I decided through prayer and through really focusing on cellular medicine, I was going to heal. And so I started reading every study possible on how do you heal an unhealable disease? Because I thought, okay, I'm going to go and do research online and probably be encouraged. Because this doctor, maybe he's just giving me the worst case ever scenario. Then I read online and I wasn't any more encouraged. Because I know someone else who had what I had. and they had to have rods put in their spine and have their spine fused.

5:33And so I started doing research and I came across articles on hyperbaric chambers and that those can help oxygen get very deep into the cells and body. I started doing IVs of methylene blue and ozone and very high dose nutrients. I followed a very specific diet of pretty much berries and organ meats and certain vegetables very high protein and very high collagen. And so I went through this very specific protocol. And you can actually see my spine here. If you look at the white part, that's not the back white, but that front white part, that's where the infection was spread into my bone. So I actually had, if you imagine, like yellow pus, like infection in the bone, eating away at it.

6:17And via following this process of cellular healing, which I'm gonna share with you how to heal unhealable conditions today, how to reverse hypothyroidism, how to reduce autoimmune disease, how to reverse infertility in so many other conditions. But I went from this to this. Clear MRI. Now, I didn't walk for nearly an entire year. So this time, two years ago, I wasn't walking yet. And I was able to fully heal and regenerate my tissues, as you can see here. In fact, the doctors that saw this have said, we've never seen a spine heal like this before. We've never seen this sort of cellular healing and regeneration.

6:55And so this is what I'm gonna go through today is how to do this very same thing in your organ systems and your cells. And so I went from this, by the way, I lost 40 pounds in that picture on the left to back being fit and healthy. Again, it's a picture with my four-year-old daughter, Arwen, there in the pool. And so grateful to God for healing. And you know, oftentimes we go through these things so we can help others heal. And that's what I'm gonna go through today. Okay, so one of the big things we're going to see in the future is the future of medicine is cellular medicine and focusing on healing organ systems.

7:31Oftentimes our medical, conventional medicine today creates all of this separation. Well, we're going to treat your thyroid, or we're going to treat your ovaries, or we're going to treat your liver. And the reality, these organs don't function individually. They tend to function with other organs. and if you want to get to the, if you want to, well, let me jump into this study and this will explain it. So there's a recent study done at Stanford and this was done on over 5 ,000 participants and they found that our organs age at different rates, okay? So the study found that about 20 % of the adults over 50 had at least one organ aging much faster than expected.

8:15Now, everybody has one organ aging faster than others. But they found this very extreme, like 20 years difference between some organs and others. And so, for instance, they found that somebody that had an older heart had a 250 % greater risk of dying of heart disease, where if somebody had an older brain based on their testing, they had 180 % increased risk of dementia. and so what we really want to focus on is finding what organ in you is aging faster than others and reverse that age and we can do that you know I had something tragic happen about this time last year and my father-in-law passed away and he was my best friend he was living with my wife and I at the time him and my mother-in-law and just out of the blue died of a heart attack and we were going every moment together pretty much.

9:15And it was devastating. And one of the things that we discovered with him is that he had had high blood pressure. He thought it was just white coat cinder, but had it for years. He had psoriasis, so he took steroids for 25 years. And there's all these things that started up looking at his heart was probably 20, 30, 40 years older than his muscles and his brain and the rest of his body. And if we would have knew ahead of time, we could have helped. And so we're going to start seeing a lot more medical testing. I have a close friend of mine who runs a blood work company called True Diagnostics. And what they're doing now is they're testing the age of your organs or organ system.

9:57So you can see, you can test your metabolic age, the age of your immune system, your musculoskeletal system. And it goes beyond this even, but just as an example, you can look at the age of various organs. And so for this person, you can see, you know, you might look at, they have a pace greater than one has an associated 56 % increased risk of death in an area. So you can look at a very specific organ system and see if it's aging too fast via blood work today. And we've all seen this, right? Even without blood work, we know, we've all seen somebody that was in their 60s and we thought they were in their 40s, right?

10:35And we've also seen people in their 40s and we thought they were in their 60s. So how is it possible that their chronological age could be 20 years greater or less than what their chronological age is? Well, it has to do with your biological age. And here's the reality. I believe that the Bible talks about this and it says we are, we have the capacity of living to 120 years with great health. It says that Moses, when he died, His eyes were strong, which means he had full health in his body. But if you think about it like this, the average life expectancy is around 77.8 years. We are doing about 40 years plus of damage to our bodies, taking those years off.

11:22And that can be toxicity, nutritional deficiencies, stress, lack of sleep. All of these start taking years off our body. But here's the good news. Your body can regenerate. You know, Gary Brecka, who spoke right before me, was sharing some of this. But your body is about 50 % new every year. Every seven years, it's at the very least 70 % new. And for some people, it could nearly be 100 % new. So your body is regenerating and healing. But why is it then, if that's true, if you have 300 billion new cells a day, why is it that you still have hypothyroidism or Hashimoto's? Why are you still struggling with infertility?

12:06Why are you still struggling with a fatty liver? The reason is that your body is dealing with toxicities or deficiencies. And if we can correct those specific to that organ, we can reverse disease and heal the body in a profound way. You can see here the regeneration capacity of different organ systems here. The liver regenerates. In fact, if you have a damaged liver, if you have, if we would cut part of your liver off today, almost the entire thing would grow back in eight weeks. It's amazing. You know, looking at this with a lot of errors, your stomach lining, your intestines, your muscles. We know you break a bone.

12:46That can heal in about eight weeks. So we know that the body has an incredible capacity to heal. But in order to heal, we need to start reversing the age of the organ and the cells. And we're going to get into how to do that right now. So how do we do it? Well, what I'm bringing together is ancient medicine with the cellular medicine of today. And in ancient Asia, they had longevity medicine, and they called it the three treasures. And with that, it was really focusing on healing. they would call it, they would call it Shen, Xi, and Jing, which basically means we need to focus on supporting your cellular intelligence, your cellular energy, which is really tied to your mitochondria, and your cellular structure, which has to do with your cell membrane.

13:38And so if we can focus on healing those three parts of the cell in Chinese medicine, you can reverse disease. Now, in mainstream longevity medicine, I shouldn't say mainstream, in longevity medicine today, they have something called the nine hallmarks of aging. Now, that number has been recently increased to 12 and 15. They just keep adding. Eventually, it'll be 100 hallmarks. But if we focus on the nine, you can see, well, let me hit on this first. You can see here cellular intelligence. What's that? Cellular intelligence are the, think about your spiritual health. It's the architect of your cells.

14:17It's your cellular nucleus. And this is connected to your cellular communication, the health of your gut microbiome, which is your second brain, and even your hormones. And if we can focus on supporting really your brain and your gut, that's a very important part of longevity. The next part here is cellular energy. This is really tied to your adrenal glands as an organ system and your mitochondria, which is the power plants that give energy to your cells, and then cellular structure. This is the fatty acids, the aminos that make up the cell membrane that allow things to get into your cell and things out of your cell.

15:03And so we're going to focus on these things. And then the 12 hallmarks or nine hallmarks of aging we see in functional medicine today you can see right here. Things like stem cell exhaustion, chronic inflammation, dysbiosis of the gut microbiome, mitochondrial dysfunction as a few examples. And this is a pathway that I put together as an example of how aging occurs. For most people, it starts with poor diet, lack of exercise, chronic stress, sleep deprivation, toxin exposure, and loneliness. And the biggest thing those things impact, and the other thing I would throw out there is just lack of connection to nature.

15:49The first thing that does is disrupt your circadian rhythms. So if your body, your body likes to be in rhythm. And when your body gets off of rhythm, for instance, if you don't get sunlight during the day, or you're wearing, or you're exposing yourself to a lot of blue light in the evening, that's going to disrupt that circadian rhythm. That's going to start the aging pathway. That will then disrupt your gut microbiome. So it's really affecting your brain, then your gut, then it affects your methylation and epigenetic cycles. Gary talked about that quite a bit. He really focused on in that one component there of that methylation cycle, okay, of that pathway of aging.

16:34And then that creates oxidative stress and damages the mitochondria. That's going to cause inflammation, affect autophagy, which is your body's ability to detoxify itself. And then that's going to cause something called cellular senescence, where your body starts building up something called zombie cells, which are like, imagine a city full of just waste and trash and broken down cars. Things are not operating properly. What autophagy is, is this waste management system and recycling that get rid of all of the things you don't need and then use the spare parts to rebuild new and healthy cars, buildings, all the things you need for a thriving city.

17:15And then the last one is stem cell exhaustion.

17:20If you have hypothyroidism and you need new thyroid tissue, stem cells are what your body create via your bone marrow to become that new tissue, that new healthy thriving tissue that's younger and has better longevity. And then of course, if you don't fix these things, this cascade effect that happens, it leads to chronic illness and premature death and organ age ultimately. So I'm going to go through some of these slides pretty quickly just to show you, though. Here's an example of this circadian rhythms and cellular communication issues. You know, this is very much tied to melatonin and cortisol, okay?

17:58Your body has a clock. Did you know that certain organs are operating at a higher level at certain parts of the day than others? So for instance, your digestive system is the strongest in the morning right when you wake up. It's when you're going to have the highest absorption of nutrients. That's why I recommend most people take supplements first thing in the morning. Now, some of the ones that are higher in fats might actually be better absorbed in the evening. But most supplements are best in the morning. And there are certain nutrients critical to your circadian rhythms. Magnesium is at the absolute top of that list along with vitamin D.

18:34But magnesium is absolutely key. And then other herbs that help lower cortisol. That is key here for their circadian rhythms to help your body heal. And warning signs that this is your issue as part of your aging pathway, insomnia is number one. If you are not sleeping well, this is the thing that's being affected most. Number two, microbiome dysbiosis. If you have too much bad bacteria, not enough good microbes in your gut. Of course, any sort of gas, bloating, even an autoimmune disease, this is a warning sign that this is off. There are very specific nutrients you need for this, which I'll get into more later.

19:19But key disruptors here, antibiotics, contraceptive drugs, poor diet, stress and toxins start to alter and damage this area of the body. And then we have epigenetic changes. Now, many of you saw Gary's really big chart, right? Let's hone in on one of the key elements of that chart, and that is the methylfolate pathway. So anyone here who struggles with the MTHFR gene variant to where you know you are not methylating properly via this process. Well, I want to mention, by the way, that doesn't mean you can't methylate at all. it means you're just not methylating as well. I think sometimes people think, well, I can't do it, like I'm totally broken here.

20:10No, and by the way, that really needs to partly be turned on as well. So if your gut microbiome, remember, especially the two slides before this, if your gut and your cell communication or the circadian rhythms are very operating at a very high level, your methylation will work just fine. And it really has to do with two things. cortisol and insulin. If you can fix cortisol and insulin, you will methylate at a much, much higher level. But you can see here there are key nutrients you have to have to methylate properly. Folate, vitamin B6. Vitamin B2 probably isn't talked about enough. It's probably the most essential outside of B9 for this cycle.

20:56And then we also have B12. We have choline there as well that's important for this methylfolate cycle. But there are, I would say, I think a lot of people are recommending a methylated B complex if you're struggling with the methylfolate cycle. And that would be one of the supplements you wanna take. But in addition, I would very much recommend glanulars. Glanulars, like liver, thymus gland, and a multi-glanular supplement, they have the most components, including peptides, that support methylation. and it is the number one thing people are missing in their diet. Now, I've talked for years about the number one missing food is bone broth, and that's partly true because one-third of your entire body's protein is made up of collagen.

21:43So that is very important, but equally up there with bone broth, organ meats and glandulars are the single greatest food we're missing in our diet. Now, here's the thing. You may not love to taste the liver, but that's okay. You can get it as a capsule or a tablet. You can get it in those forms. But if you have methylation issues, here's the first three things you should take. A methylated B-complex, a multi-organ glandular supplement, and high-dose probiotics. Now, Gary also mentioned doing, you know, things like sauerkraut. Yeah, I would do that as well. I would do sauerkraut. I would do kimchi.

22:20I would do kefir, whether it be a coconut or a A2 raw milk-based fermented dairy. but I would go very, very high in your good bacteria and also prebiotic fiber. Anything you can do to heal the gut microbiome will help methylation, along with the B complex and glandulars. Next up, oxidative stress. Now, this is where you really start to see somebody aging. And if you ever take a bite of an apple, a little bit later it will start to turn brown. That's oxidation. When you start to get skin spots, when your skin starts to get thin, when you start to notice you're looking older, that's oxidative stress accumulating in your cells, which then starts to show up on your skin.

23:08And the greatest way to start to turn this around is via reducing oxidative stress. Now, Gary focuses in on, he likes hydrogen for this. And I think that's one great thing to add in. I think hydrogen can be gray. There's a lot of other things dietarily, though, that also act to reduce oxidative stress. Of course, we hear of antioxidants. Selenium and zinc and vitamin E are going to be critical. Coenzyme Q10. Herbs like turmeric are going to be great for this as well. And then things that help detoxify the body because a lot of those toxins are what create the oxidative stress in the first place.

23:44And then, of course, getting rid of seed oils and sugar and environmental toxins is going to be key to helping reverse this aging pathway. And then mitochondrial dysfunction, this is huge. You know, our mitochondria are what produce energy for our entire body. You know, I remember going into an acupuncturist years ago, and I was overworking, working 60 hours a week, and I was eating perfectly, but I developed some gut issues. And he said, he goes, Dr. Axe, he goes, your battery should be here, it's here. And, you know, if you've ever driven a golf cart or used any sort of electrical equipment and the battery gets low and it kind of putting along my daughter, she's got this, you know, this power wheel, it's like a car, you know, they used to be called power wheels when I was a kid, now they're called something else.

24:33But they, you know, you drive those and the battery's low and it's like, okay, now as dad, I'm like having to push the thing, you know, half a mile back to the house. So, but that's what's happened in a lot of your bodies. Your body doesn't have cellular energy. So if you, and one of the biggest symptoms of mitochondrial weakness is hypothyroidism. Think about this. Your body temperature starts to drop with hypothyroidism because your cells don't have enough energy to heat your own body up. It's predominantly a mitochondrial issue from a cellular standpoint. and then an adrenal issue, and if it's Hashimoto's combined with a microbiome issue from an organ standpoint.

25:16But if you can do things to really charge up those mitochondria, that's how you reverse hypothyroidism. I've helped thousands of women reverse hypothyroidism in Hashimoto's and get completely off their medication, focusing on healing the mitochondria. That's the key. B vitamins, doing a lot of the adaptogenic herbs. I really like ashwagandha, rhodiola, cordyceps, pinnix, ginseng, and organ meats, things like that, especially adrenal and thymus, to help heal the mitochondria. And then inflammation, you know, we want to be able to reduce inflammation or reduce the things causing inflammation. This is a lot of processed foods, sugar, stress.

25:59This is where turmeric and omega-3 fatty acids and ginger and boswellia really help. autophagy I talked about this earlier this is the cleanup crew detoxifying your body this is where fasting or intermittent fasting can be beneficial now I do want to say I am not a fan of intermittent fasting for everybody and women tend to have a not be as ideal candidates as men when it comes to intermittent fasting in most cases because of just the way your cycle works it's just not ideal for most women. Now, I think you can close your eating window down to maybe 10 hours. Maybe eat a late breakfast at 9, eat again at 1, eat an early dinner at 5, and if you want to close that eating window, that's fine.

26:38But for most people, if you need to heal, intermittent fasting every day or doing just a 6 or 4-hour window is not optimal for most people who need to heal. But cutting down your eating window, and the other big thing is exercise. Walking a lot, doing actual physical exercise is very good for supporting autophagy. Cellular senescence, this is these zombie cells that start to take up your body. This really happens if you have chronic infections. If you have Lyme disease, mold issues, Epstein-Var, CMV, long COVID, those tend to be connected to cellular senescence combined with mitochondrial dysfunction.

27:23so we want to be able to clean this up in a pretty significant way this is where quercetin bromelain a lot of the proteolytic enzymes can help with this doing a little bit of fasting can help there as well clean up these senescent cells and the last one here stem cell exhaustion this is really how your body regenerates and heals we want to optimize your cellular healing and regeneration. And this is where bone broth is really powerful. Astragalus, NAD plus is probably one of the most regenerative nutrients you can take. And zinc. So many people are deficient in zinc. If you have a skin or gut issue, it's almost a guarantee or an immune deficiency, it's almost guaranteed you have a zinc deficiency.