Longevity Hacks: 3 Secrets to a Longer, Healthier Life

0:00When we eat too much sugar, okay, and these days the average American is eating a lot of sugar, like a hundred times more than we were like a hundred years ago and through the rest of human history. It's like this massive overload of this substrate. What that does is it causes. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Today's episode is a very powerful one because we've created a top masterclass from the best experts that will break down today's theme to help you improve the quality of your life.

0:49Are all bodies the same when it comes to how foods, I guess, are consumed and assimilated through the body and the bloodstream and all these different things? Or is everybody different where some nutritional foods might impact positively, but negatively in other bodies, what should we be knowing about the body? Yeah, it's a great question. And first of all, I'm a scientist. So I will tell you how you can tell that I'm a scientist is that real scientists tell you, we don't know everything. Okay. And it's a kind of humility that we have to start with because so often you think about, you know, scientists being very smart and things, real scientists spend their time talking about what we don't know, not what we do know.

1:29But you're asking me what we do know. All right. So I'll give you that answer. Look, our bodies are hardwired to be healthy. So when we're growing in our mom's womb, our body, as we're forming our bones and our heart and our organs and our limbs inside the form of the human that's being created are these health defenses. So you think about the body like a fortress. You know, you've seen a bit, we've all seen it in a medieval fortress, a castle, right? And basically, like, it's a happy community that lives inside there. You got a king, you got a queen, you got a princess, you got everything else going inside there.

2:09But that fortress has got to protect itself. So it's designed to repel enemies. It's got a moat. It's got a drawbridge. It's got the little slits you throw, you fire arrows out of. It's got sloping walls so enemies can't crawl up. It's got traps. By the way, like in a medieval fort, the thing that I never realized having been to quite a few castles is that when you go into the entrance, there is a hole right above you and it's called a murder hole. And it's basically if people breach the drawbridge, they would just drop rocks, boulders down through that hole. All right. So the body is designed better than a medieval castle.

2:51We've got our own defense systems. And there's five of them that I know about. And I helped to kind of put together this picture, partly because I studied the biotechnology. How do you actually treat diseases using these systems? And when you forget about the disease part and you think about the health part, these are the systems, these five systems that maintain our health. So I'll tell you what they are. First, the health defense system is called angiogenesis. This is what I study. Blood vessels, a 60 ,000 mile channel that delivers oxygen and nutrients everywhere. Got to have enough of them or our body is in trouble.

3:28Second. It's called angiogenesis. This is the channel of blood vessels? Or this is the. This is how the body grows blood vessels. It is a whole system of growth. When we have just the right amount of blood vessels, our body is healthy. Now, when you're going to go to work out, you're going to pump some iron. Your muscles got to grow. Now you need a few more blood vessels. If you skin your knee and fall off a bike, got to heal that wound. Underneath that scab, you've got new blood vessels growing to heal. Now, the body never lets too many blood vessels to grow or causes problems. For example, cancers are forming in all of our bodies because we're filled with these dividing cells and some of them make mistakes.

4:15But a microscopic cancer is completely harmless because it doesn't have a blood supply. And so our body prevents cancers from growing naturally by controlling the angiogenesis. So we just got enough for our good cells, not enough for the bad cells. So that's one of our health defenses. And there are treatments, including ones that I helped to develop that can cut off the blood supply to cancer by cutting off it by starving it. So that's called anti-angiogenic therapy. And the same treat, same approach has been used to prevent blindness. All right. So you don't have blood vessels leaking in the eye.

4:51However, it turns out that sometimes your body needs a little help. so now you can actually use foods to actually amp up your body's angiogenesis defenses so that's just one of the defenses okay that's the first one what's the second one all right second one is our stem cells right so our when we were kids uh lewis you know like our grade school teachers told us salamanders can regenerate starfish can regenerate but people can't regenerate right wrong you lose your hand it's not going to grow back well it turns out that people do regenerate. We can't regenerate that quickly, but we, and we regenerate from the inside out.

5:29Like a lizard can regenerate like a limb or a tail, but we regenerate our organs continuously. Our lung regenerates, our liver regenerates. Okay. Uh, the lining of our mouth regenerates. If you've ever eaten a chip, all right. And scratch the inside of your mouth and it hurts next day, all fixed, right. Because of regeneration. All right. Now here's the thing. it turns out that the way we naturally regenerate is through stem cells, not the kind you go to a strip mall to have injected into your knee, but this is the kind that we're born with. Because when you and I were like sperm and egg meeting in our mom's womb and dividing, that's what we were.

6:16These are stem cells. We were all formed from these primitive cells that could be anything. It could be an eye, it could be a nose, it could be a heart. And they formed our whole body. And there's always some overage. And so you have more than you need to form into a person. And when we're born, about 750 million stem cells are left over, and they are packed up in a suitcase and stuffed into our bone marrow. And so when we're born, even a little baby inside their bone marrow in this hollow of their bones are 750 million stem cells and they are stored there like a uh like bullets in a bandolier waiting for when they're needed so that when we grow up and we need to be regenerated you know you have too many too much to drink now your liver needs to be regenerated you cut yourself now you need to actually heal that wound these stem cells come flying out of our bone marrow like beans out of a hive who regenerates, renew us from the inside out.

7:16And there are biotech efforts that I've been a part of to try to grow new heart, grow new brain, regenerate nerves. Not ready for prime time yet, but it turns out that foods can coax these stem cells out of our bone marrow. So we regenerate faster. Huh, which foods? This is the second one, but I'm curious, which foods can help us? There are a number of them. I'll give you one right from the get-go is dark chocolate. Oh, you're speaking my language now. Okay. Can you eat too much dark chocolate? That's the question. You know, I have never seen anything about an overdose of cacao, but I will tell you that cacao has been shown to actually double the number of stem cells flowing in your bloodstream just by having two cups of hot chocolate made with 80 % high flavanol chocolate dark come on yeah it's been done in people 60 year olds with heart disease so wait what happens when you when you drink or you you eat this dark chocolate okay what happens yeah the polyphenols in this dark chocolate that we we know what they are they're called pro-enthosianity so i'm a scientist so my job is to actually know what are what the inside chemicals actually are these are natural chemicals all right most people don't need to know that but you drink it and tastes good.

8:39That's all you need to know. But, but I'll tell you these, these natural chemicals found in cacao actually trigger a reaction in your body so that they call out the stem cells. So it is literally like bees flying out of a hive can double the number of stem cells. And what's the, what's the practical impact? Well, there was a study done at UCSF in San Francisco that looked at 60 year old men with heart disease. So these are people whose blood vessels were already not doing so well and their blood flow wasn't going so well either and their blood vessels were kind of sick that's kind of the definition of heart disease by having the stem cells coming out they were able to actually double the resiliency the function of their blood vessels so they they got better rebound their better agility um their their blood vessels are in better shape because their stem cells are regenerating their circulation Wow.

9:38So this is human studies, right? Like most, most of the time you hear about scientists talking about rats or mice or cells. I'm talking about human studies. And that's kind of where we are with food is medicine. It's not the kind of like the guesswork, like we can do serious research to get down to exactly what's actually happening at the human level. So that's the second health defense systems. Okay. Third one. Third one is our gut microbiome. Now people have been talking about gut health and microbiome. It's almost like a buzzword these days. And people are saying, well, we can actually scoop your poop and we can actually measure your microbiome and we can tell you what you need to eat and what you don't need to eat.

10:19Again, I'm a scientist, so I will tell you that there are 39 trillion bacteria in the typical body. That's more to stars than in a night sky. All right. So we barely understand the gut bacteria. But what we do know is that this gut bacteria actually controls our metabolism, communicates with our brain, actually can help us heal from the inside out. And very importantly, our gut bacteria basically lives. If you think of your gut like a garden hose, it's a tube. And you were to cut a garden hose in half and you look inside it, there's a lining. Okay. The bacteria is inside the hose, but inside the wall of the garden hose, that's where your immune system, 70 % of our immune system lives inside our gut.

11:14So our gut bacteria. percent so yeah so if you're feeding your gut a lot of bad foods it's probably you're poisoning your immune system you're preventing your gut bacteria now i'll tell you what's interesting about the gut bacteria your gut bacteria talks to the immune system right through the walls of the of your gut immune system's in there 70 right like a jelly roll like a like the jelly in a jelly roll and the gut bacteria is inside so think about like a college student in a freshman dorm they are talking to their roommate by pounding on the wall, right? What do you want? What kind of pizza do you want?

11:49All right. And they can answer you. And that's basically what our gut bacteria says to our immune system. So we got to keep that gut healthy. By the way, interestingly, and I've done research on this, certain gut bacteria can actually signal to your brain. it's a gut brain access and cause your brain to release social hormones okay and can affect your mood so you know when you've got a crappy gut and you feel crummy in your gut i guarantee you like it's not just because you're irritated it's affecting your brain as well so yeah we had uh we had dr emmerin uh mayor on who has got the gut i think it's the gut brain connection or the gut immune connection or something like that.

12:36So he's, he's got a lot of great research on that. Yeah. So, well, the key thing though, is that foods can actually help right size your gut health. Think about like an ecosystem, the Great Barrier Reef. So certain foods can support the ecology, the ecosystem, the Great Barrier Reef, and certain ones actually kill the coral. All right. And so our continuously want to keep it in good shape all the way through our lives. And by the way, even conditions like autism, Alzheimer's, and schizophrenia are all now seemingly connected to our gut bacteria. Really? Yeah. Now, is there a way if someone has those, are they pretty easy to reverse though?

13:21Or is that hard? Well, listen, we're just figuring this out because right now, medically, we prescribe medications to try to treat those things. And a lot of times those medications just blunt the symptoms okay they cover up the symptoms they don't get at the underlying cause now we don't know exactly how the gut bacteria communicates with the brain completely yet but there's one giant nerve called the vagus nerve it's like a giant shoe it's about the thickness of a shoelace and it hangs from our brain all the way down into our gut okay goes right near wraps around our esophagus on the way down and we think the gut bacteria basically sends text messages up to the brain through this big nerve.

14:01Okay. So the key though, is that foods can actually influence our gut bacteria, either good bacteria or bad bacteria. So that's important. So that's a, that's a third health defense system. Okay. Okay. So with the first, the antigenesis, number one, stem cells, number two, gut microbiome, number three. Okay. The fourth one number four our dna now if you watch csi dna is just sort of like a genetic fingerprint a code that you can find on a crime scene or if you're actually trying to do ancestry look for your ancestors you figure out how how much of you is neanderthal right i think i was one percent when i did it yes uh so the the the key though is it's dna is a lot more than our genetic code it actually protects us from the environment now what am i what do i mean by that well you know how if we are exposed to uh we get sunburn ultraviolet light you damage your dna and what happens cancer skin cancer right um if you inhale lots of fumes from a chemical plant it's going to actually damage your DNA and your lungs.

15:16You get lung cancer, right? But think about it. If you are in Los Angeles and you're driving on the I-10, or if you're actually just walking on a beach, you are actually getting ultraviolet radiation. So how come we don't get skin cancer all the time? Because our DNA is hardwired to fix itself from damage. And so the DNA is a protective mechanism from the environment. I always tell people when you're pumping gas, if you still drive a gas vehicle as opposed to an EV, I always ask people, do you stand upwind or downwind? What do you do? Are you upwind or downwind? Do you know? Upwind, right? So you're not getting the fumes in.

15:58Is that what you mean? Right, right, right. Well, if you're standing downwind, you can smell the fumes, right? And if you're smelling the fumes, you are poisoning the DNA in your lung. So how come we don't develop lung cancer after pumping gas? Because our DNA is hardwired to fix itself. And so our DNA is sort of like a self-defense mechanism against the environment, radon from your basement, okay? Off-gassing from the new car you just got, or the Uber that you're riding in, you know, or the furniture that you got, right? So like, this is this incredible defense mechanism against our environment.

16:35And then, and foods can actually speed up the repair, help fix holes that are in our DNA. And then the other kind of piece de resistance for our DNA's defense is that there's something called a telomere. I don't know if you've ever had anybody on your show talk about telomeres. Telomeres? Yeah. Yes. These are, these are. See if you're at the longer the telomere, the, the, the longer you can live or something. Right. Well, well, I'll tell you basically what the, you know, like to, to give a, to remind you to remind your listeners and viewers basically if your dna is like a shoelace the telomere is like the little plastic cap at the end of the shoelace and over time that little cap kind of wears down just like on a shoelace and you know when they when that cap is gone man that your shoelace just falls apart yeah and that's what happens to our dna so we need that cap that's called the telomere and it burns down like a life fuse so you know like mission impossible like the fuse right so this thing is burning down and when it burns down that's it your cell's done so what you want to do is to slow down your cellular aging and harsh things that you do to your body smoking cigarettes being a couch potato being exposed to damaging oxidative stress actually just being stressed out um like we are now with this freaking pandemic um those things all shorten our telomeres they they burn the fuse faster stress but yeah but foods can slow it down and some foods can reverse it and lengthen the telomere which is really cool for from an aging perspective right what are those what are those top three foods that help uh lengthen the telomeres green tea is one of them coffee i gotta i gotta yeah it's amazing i got i got a little i used to live in Italy and I just got into this habit of drinking espresso.

18:26So I got a little cup here. Amazingly, coffee actually lengthens your telomere. Come on. I kid you not. It's quite amazing. And leafy greens, some of the polyphenols and leafy greens can also slow down. And some of them actually look like they can lengthen the telomeres as well. So the key thing is that we, you know we are not just hapless pawns of aging we can actually do something about it and we can also fight against our environment um because look the the tax that we pay for being on planet earth is we're exposed to stuff all the time and we need to we count on our body's health defenses to fix it so that's a fourth defense and our fifth defense is our immune system which you know after two years, over the last two years, we all know how important our immune system is.

19:18But what have I told you that your immune system is so powerful that when it's in its best shape, even when you're 80 years old, it is strong enough to fight cancer. In fact, it can even wipe out metastatic cancer that's spread all over your body. That's how strong your immune system is, if you give it the chance. And so here's what the immune system does. It's like an army of super soldiers. So Rangers, SEALs, Marines, special forces, they've all got, these are all parts of the immune system, all cells of the immune system. And like the special forces, they've got their own weapons, their own training, their own tactics, but they all work together for the collective good.

20:04And what happens is that when you've got good, strong defenses, you can fight off invaders from the outside, bacteria and viruses, for example. But it's not just outside invaders. You've got inside invaders as well. And those little microscopic cancers are inside invaders. And so our immune system patrols our body, okay? Cops on a beat. And they're looking for things that don't look right. And you see that microscopic cancer that can't grow because it doesn't have a blood vessel, blood vessels feeding it, androgenesis. Basically, the immune system goes there and takes them right out, okay, and takes a sniper shot, and it's gone.

20:43And so that's why we got to protect our immune system, and there are lots of foods that can actually boost our immunity as well. What would be those top three that boost the immune system? Blueberries are a food that definitely boosts the immune system. it's uh in young people as well as older people uh uh that they boost the natural killer cells which is really cool um broccoli sprouts can boost our immune system now these are the three day these are like the three-day old sprouts right okay um okay i mean okay here's something here's something most people don't know the big broccoli that when we eat broccoli we really you know our mom's told us to eat the treetops right those they're all the same you go to the freezer section of a grocery store and you buy some frozen broccoli and they all look the same they're all the same size that's not really what broccoli looks like if you go to the farmer's market and you see a real broccoli is this gigantic stem with a little bit of treetop okay so what's in a broccoli it's called sulforaphane so that's what gives broccoli that unique taste of broccoli it's a little sulfurous okay so you got to put a little olive oil a little bit of garlic you know and you can saute it up okay so the sulforaphanes we've done research now looking at what what's in the treetops it turns out that these sulforaphanes can starve cancer anti-androgenic help help your body cut off the blood supply to cancer broccoli treetops have it but guess what the stock of the broccoli has twice as much of the good stuff than the treetops eat the stocks eat the stocks so man like if you don't want to eat if you don't want to saute the stocks like a lot of cultures will just cut the stocks and saute them stick it in a blender you can make it into a smoothie or create make a soup out of it you know and so there's a lot of good things you can do put a little broccoli stem little oregano powder you know you can do lighter light it right up a little turmeric there'll be really good um a smoothie or a soup however here's the thing so this imagine this adult broccoli having these sulforaphanes well it turns out that these big broccoli plants used to be sprouts and the sprouts pretty much were born or sprouted from the seed with all the sulforaphanes it's ever gonna have all right so when it gets bigger it just gets distributed with the stock closer to the ground having more of it of course but the broccoli sprouts have 100 times more of the sulforaphates, a good stuff as a grown-up broccoli.

23:19So sprouts, broccoli sprouts. Now, studies have been done to show that if you give people a flu shot, people in the winter should get a flu shot so you don't get the flu, all right? Just go to your drugstore to get one. It turns out that if you, people, they did a study looking at people getting the flu shot and they gave half the people a little shake made with broccoli sprouts and the other group just got a placebo and the people who got the broccoli sprout shake and the flu shot their beneficial response of their immune system is 22 times higher huh like it totally rocked if they actually had um a broccoli sprout shake so that's not food versus medicine that is food and medicine, which is really cool.

24:08Blood sugar management or control is one of the key factors of either being healthy or potentially linking to one of these other, I guess, diseases. Is that right? That's right. Yeah. And what it really comes down to, which kind of gets at your question of what is metabolism? Metabolism is fundamentally the way that we make energy in the body. So we eat food and, you know, food has, you know, fat and glucose in it and either fat or glucose, glucose is sugar, can be used to convert into a type of energy that our cells can use, which is called ATP. So we take in this substrate, but we have to convert it through our mitochondria in our cells to a form of energy we can use, a currency that our body understands and can use.

24:55That process of conversion is metabolism. And this is happening in every single one of the 37 trillion cells in our body. And it has to work properly. So break it down for me then. Fat or glucose, or I guess carbohydrates, enters the body through the foods we're eating, right? What happens after that? How is it processed in the body, through the cells, through the mitochondria? How is it processed? Yeah. So looking at carbohydrates, for instance, they go into our digestive tract. They're broken down and absorbed into the bloodstream, broken down into simple sugars like glucose and fructose. These go into the bloodstream.

25:35And let's say we're talking about glucose, which is blood sugar. This signals to the body, particularly an organ called the pancreas, to release insulin, which is a hormone. That hormone allows you to take that sugar out of the bloodstream through the cell membrane into the cell. Once it's inside the cell, it's broken down even further and then goes into the mitochondria to go through a chemical processing that then creates ATP, which is this molecule that can be then used to essentially power all the millions of cellular processes that are happening every second. So ATP is the power, is the fuel?

26:12It's the fuel, It's the battery in our body. Okay. And so the way it's processed is it's based on the foods we eat, whether it be fat or sugar that comes through. Does that determine how the quality of the energy or what does that mean within, is it all equally the same when it converts an ATP or? Well, I think the way to think about it is to really focus on the mitochondria. This is the energy factory of the cell. This is the powerhouse of the cell. And the thing that people really need to understand is that our diet and our lifestyle in the modern Western world, so past 50 to 100 years, so much of it is actually damaging the mitochondria of our cell and creating problems in that conversion process.

26:54So, for instance, when we eat too much sugar, okay, and these days the average American is eating a lot of sugar, like 100 times more than we were like 100 years ago and through the rest of human history. It's like this massive overload of this substrate. What that does is it causes stress on the mitochondria and creates damage. And one analogy I sometimes use is like, imagine you had a factory that was making something like cheese. And like all of a sudden you get like 100 times more of like the raw product, like milk delivered to the factory. The workers would be like, we don't know where to put this.

27:29We can't work. Like they go on strike. There's nowhere to store it. There's no refrigerators. It would all go bad. All of a sudden, you actually produce less cheese, even though you have more substrate. Very interesting. And so it's like we are giving so much of the substrate to the body that it's gumming up the system. It's breaking down the factory and creating problems. And the molecular way this is happening is that each time you have these glucose spikes from eating these refined products or added sugars, your body's releasing more of that insulin. It's saying, okay, more glucose in the bloodstream, so we have to produce more insulin to get it out of the bloodstream.

28:02And over time, the body sees all this insulin circulating, and it's like, we can't bring more of this into the cell. There's too much. And so it actually puts up a block, which is called insulin resistance, which is that cellular process that leads you towards problems like diabetes. And so what's happening now is the body - And that's why you're storing fat or you're storing other dead cells that you don't need to keep in the body, I guess, right? Right, because insulin is the signal saying tons of glucose around for energy, so we don't need to burn fat for energy. So insulin is also a block on fat burning.

28:34So it's this chemical signal saying too much glucose around, blocking it from getting into the cell, and also telling the body not to burn fat. So of course, for people who are dealing with trouble losing weight, insulin is the hormone we really, really need to be thinking about. And so we reduce our insulin sensitivity. Now we have lots of glucose circulating in the bloodstream, but it's not able to efficiently get into the cell. And then you've got all these other things that can hurt our mitochondria. And really a mitochondria energy-centric view of health can really help us. Some other things that can hurt the mitochondria are oxidative stress.

29:13So I know you talked about this a little bit on the podcast with David Perlmutter, but aside from glucose, eating too much fructose, so this comes with like sodas or fruit juice or things that have really high concentration of fructose, it's not going to actually stimulate insulin in the way that glucose does, but what it does is it goes into the cell and it's converted into something called uric acid. And that uric acid creates oxidative stress, which is sort of this sort of damaging reactive molecule in the mitochondria and creates mitochondrial damage. So now again, you've got more trouble processing energy to the mitochondria.

29:46Environmental toxins are actually a huge problem as well. They can directly damage the machine or the mitochondria. So we're thinking about things like pesticides and a lot of the fragrances in our personal care products and a lot of the fragrances and chemicals in our home care products, these things actually go into our bodies, damage our mitochondria, make it difficult to produce energy effectively. Chronic stress can damage our mitochondria through cortisol and through our stress hormones. So it's interesting to think about how all these different aspects of modern life fundamentally feed down into damaging this precious part of our cell that creates energy.

30:24And when we have the mitochondria, and when we have problems creating energy in our body, this can happen in any cell type. Again, 37 trillion cells, you know, dozens of organs in the body. Where this is showing up most prominently in the body is where you're going to see symptoms. And this is why metabolic dysfunction and blood sugar dysregulation can look like so many different things. It can masquerade as so many different symptoms. And in the conventional system, we see those all as separate. But when we think about it as this is actually just where a fundamental core problem is showing up in different cell types.

31:02And so if you can address that, you can potentially kind of melt a lot of things away. So just as some concrete examples, if metabolic dysfunction is showing up in the blood vessels, well, if it's sort of most prominently showing up in the penis, that could look like erectile dysfunction. If it's happening in the heart, it could look like, you know, heart disease. If it's happening in the liver, it could look like fatty liver disease. If it's happening in the ovaries, it could look like polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is the leading cause of infertility in the United States, which is a metabolic problem.

31:32And if it's happening in the brain, it could look like Alzheimer's dementia. And so it's got all these different faces, but fundamentally is rooted in a core dysfunction in how our body is converting food to energy. and a lot of that has to do with this chronic over nutrition, overloading ourselves with too much to process, gumming up these systems, and then the many other lifestyle factors like toxins, stress, sleep deprivation, and sedentary behavior that can also hurt the mitochondria. Right. So blood sugar management and metabolism management, is that right? So the main things we've been thinking about, how does blood sugar and metabolism work together?