Dr. Mark Hyman: How Entrepreneurs Can Reverse Aging and Unlock Peak Health | Mental Health | E349

20:52I feel like it's really needed because to your point, the rest of the medical world is kind of stuck in this traditional process that this really isn't working. And the other thing is that's not working is actually treating aging's symptoms and not the root cause. And one of the other big principles that you talk about is treating aging like an actual disease. So why is that important? Well, I think, you know, you come to sort of accept that as you get older, you have cancer, you get heart disease, you get diabetes, you lose muscle, your brain function declines. You lose your ability to do things.

21:23These are not normal consequences of aging. Frailty is not a normal consequence of aging. It's a consequence, a phenomenon that happens as we get older if we don't do something about it. And all of us have seen those, you know, nine-year-old ladies doing like gymnastics and like the hundred-year-old people running the hundred-yard dash. You know, it's kind of crazy stuff like that, right? And what is it about those people? Well, they have understood by accident or by studying that there are certain behaviors that foster optimal health. It's eating whole foods, unprocessed diet. It's low sugar and low starch and full of phytochemicals and fiber and got it with amounts of protein, especially more animal protein as you get older because it's harder to assimilate and build.

22:05You need to make sure you exercise and do strength training and you need flexibility. You need cardiovascular training and stability training. They understand you need good sleep. They understand they have managed their stress and their own emotional regulation. And they also have deep social connections and relationships that foster a sense of belonging, which all are ingredients for optimal health. And when you look at people like in the blue zones, that's basically what they have. It's not that they were vegans or not vegan. It was that they had these other factors and that they were profoundly impacted just by default by these situations that they found themselves born into, which we totally in the West don't have.

22:41We're the opposite. that we have dysregulated sleep schedules. We have tremendous amounts of stress. We eat crappy food. You know, we don't exercise enough. My R-ring told me I didn't exercise enough yesterday. I was a busy day. So, you know, there's all these things that we're doing to impede our ability to actually live a vibrant, long, healthy life. Well, you seem to be doing a good job because your biological age is 43, but you're in your 60s. Is that right? Yeah, well, I got my biological age done when I was 62 and I was 43. Then I implemented more of the things that I learned and some other strategies.

23:14I've got two years older, I was 64, and I redid my biological age, it was 39. Even though I got two years older chronologically, I got four years younger biologically. So that's the power we have in epigenetic reprogramming. Now, I mentioned earlier the Aminaka factors and so forth. These are sort of part of the sky things that have to be tested in humans and make sure they're safe and effective. But right now, even with what we know by optimizing and tweaking, you can actually still reverse your epigenetic biological age at any point in your life. It can go backwards or forwards. If you kind of go on a bender or whatever, you don't sleep and you party and you eat crappy food, you'll get older biologically.

23:54And then you can change that and reprogram and go back. So give us concrete things. What did you do to reverse your age 20 years? Well, I've been doing this my whole life. So it wasn't like I was 64 biologically. And then in five years, I reversed that to 40. So I have been eating whole foods my whole life. I've been not eating processed foods. I don't remember the last time I had a Zoda. I mean, I probably was a kid. I exercised my entire life for the last 50 years. I have made sure I prioritize community, connection, sleep, and manage stress. And all those things play a role. And then I've done things to optimize my microbiome, my mitochondria, my immune system.

24:33And those will all really help. So all those things kind of nudge you back into a healthier state. And there's some supplements and things that I've taken that I think have made a difference. I've taken neural DNA. I take amino acids that should help be assimilated. I also take something that's called NMN, which is a precursor of NAD that helps also revitalize your cells. I do a number of different things that I think are important from a supplement perspective, but I think most of it's like the 10%. The rest of it is the 80 to 90%. And that's what, if we were to use Function, the platform, it would help us figure out, okay, what's our biological age?

25:09And these are the things you need to do related to functional medicine and to health. That's what it does. Yeah, we do a calculation based on your biomarkers of what your biological age is based on scientific data that shows certain blood biomarkers correlate with your epigenetic biological age. And you can see it go backwards or forwards. Now, if you do different tests, you're gonna get different numbers, right? Some tests will be like five years younger or 10 years younger. You may not be able to compare apples to apples by switching tests. But if you stay with the same tests consistently, you'll see the changes.

25:37So I want to get really nerdy because I'm sure people have been listening and they're like, I have no idea what epigenetics is. And so there's two terms I want you to break down, epigenomes and exposome. So one is about how our genes are expressed. One is our environmental exposure. So break those down. Yeah. So basically the concept that I think is really important called the exposome. We all have been taught that our genes control who we are. They're our destiny, whatever we got, we got, we can't change it. Our parents got diabetes, our parents got cancer, our parents got whatever, heart disease.

26:09It's just in our future. Your genes are not your destiny. They may provide you with a roadmap of what your predispositions are, but not your destiny. So what controls your destiny? It's something called the expozo. That is a sum total of everything that you're exposed to throughout your life that washes over your biology, including your genes, and reprograms them based on what you're doing. If you're eating, to years, you're going to be biologically younger. Your epigenetics are going to track as if you're younger. And I'll talk about what epigenetics are. So the exposome is what you eat. It's your exercise, your nutrient levels, it's stress management, it's community, it's sleep.

26:50It's all the things we've just talked about, light, air, water, all those things. I went on bright sunlight this morning for 20 minutes. All those things matter. That influences how your biology is regulated. We're biological organisms and we're controlled in the same way by our external factors. So the exposome is literally everything from toxins to your gut microbiome, to your diet, to sleep, everything that your body is exposed to. That's why we call it the exposome. Your epigenome is how the exposome regulates your biology. Now, what is the epigenome? Epi means above. So you've got your genes, you've got about 20 ,000 genes.

27:24Your epigenome, you think about like the keyboards on a piano, right? You got 88 keys, they ain't changing. You know, I got 20 ,000 genes, they ain't changing unless I do gene editing or splicing or some other weird thing that's coming around the corner. They're not changing. What can change is how those genes are expressed, how they're turned on or off, whether they're up-regulated or down-regulated, whether they drive inflammation or stop inflammation, whether they accelerate aging or slow aging. And they are basically the control mechanisms to turn on or off genes. So I think of them like switches or knobs, and you can dial them up or down based on what you're doing.

27:58And that's how almost all of the impacts of a lot of the lung practices we talked about have their effect. That's how the exposome regulates your health and lung severity, your biology, and your risk of disease is through your epigenome, then translates into the expression of genes and proteins and biological functions. And you want to have a healthy epigenome. There was a great example, for example, a brand new journal who discovered this phenomenon was these mice that are bred to be obese. so they're yellow they're fat basically yellow fat mice he gave a series of the females who are pregnant certain nutrients called methylating nutrients that regulate the epigenome it's a little complicated but there's something called methylation which is a chemical process that regulates your genes and involves b6 folate b12 so vitamins and minerals are extremely important they run everything in your body every biochemical reaction needs a vitamin or mineral and if you don't have them or they're insufficient you're going to have gummed up biochemistry and gummed up biochemistry, translates into disease.

28:58So he basically gave these pregnant mice some B vitamins and a few other amino acids and things to help to support this process. The offspring were perfect. They were thin, they were healthy, they were gray, they were not yellow fat mice, even though genetically they were bred to be yellow fat mice. And this was a massive discovery. And I think this is what really has led to our understanding of this whole process of how we can modify our epigenome and the outcomes. So when your mother's eating, when she's pregnant with you, you know, the stresses you experience in utero that your mother might have experienced or all your early childhood experiences, all those imprint on your epigenome and can affect you, toxins you're exposed to.

29:40So this is why we have to sort of pay attention to how we live, because if we want to feel good and do good and engage in life and do the work we want to do and be successful in our work and have great relationships and enjoy life and be happy, if you feel like crap it's not that much fun right so true and so from what i read 90 percent of disease and aging risk has to do with our environment our exposome right yeah so the earlier that we start the better is what you were just saying right we can even start from in the womb if our mothers are smart enough yeah you know i've seen women wanting to be pregnant i measure their toxin load i'm like whoa we got to do something about this we got to reduce your exposures, the toxins, you've got to get these heavy metals down because you want a healthy baby.

30:25And so we really proactively do preconception work. I had a whole podcast about that on the doctor's pharmacy, and now it's called the Dr. Hyman Show. We dove deep into what you need to know preparing for a baby, what happens when you're pregnant, how do you take care of yourself, what are the things that matter scientifically to optimize the chance of having a healthy baby. On the flip side, is there any time that's too late to get started on this? Oh, God, no. What's really amazing, in one of the animal studies, they've given rapamycin, which is something that is a drug discovered in Rapa Nui that inhibits this pathway called one of the longevity switches, I call it the longevity switches, that they control so much.

31:01So mTOR is one of these. And mTOR essentially is a pathway that is going to help you build muscle, but also when it's activated and when it's inactivated or inhibited in some way, it's going to allow the cells to replenish and repair through this process called autophagy, which basically means you're eating your old cells and you're reusing the parts. It's recycling. So it's cleaning up the mess that we make all the time in our bodies. Where does that garbage go, right? Somebody has to fix it. So rapamycin inhibits that and accelerates the autophagy process and then given in the right ways, it extends life and extends health in animal models consistently and reliably.

31:38And so there are interesting ways that we can sort of activate these longevity switches and pathways. And I've talked about that a lot in my book, Young Forever. And how do we understand how these work, what we can do? And it's not complicated. There's a few simple practices, sometimes a few supplements that can really help modulate some of these pathways to activate the longevity switches. Okay. So one more really nerdy question, and that's about mitochondria. So you say the difference between a three-year-old and a nine-year-old is a number and the state of their mitochondria. So help us understand what mitochondrial dysfunction has to do with aging.

32:09So this is one of the hallmarks of aging is mitochondrial dysfunction. It's key to so many diseases. Your mitochondria, I think of them as like the powerhouse of your cell, the little energy factories, they take food and oxygen, turn it into energy that your body uses. And we use gasoline or carb and it can bus and create energy. We run something called ATP. It's just a molecule produced from food and oxygen. And the waste products are carbon dioxide, which we breathe out, and water, which we pee out, and some free radicals, which we have antioxidant mechanisms to control. And what happens is, They're your energy, right?

32:40So if you have poor functioning mitochondria, you're gonna have low energy. You're gonna be weaker, you're gonna have lower muscle mass. So the key to longevity is keeping your mitochondria healthy and keeping them strong and actually having better, more mitochondria. And so the way to do that is by exercise. So resistance training builds muscle in mitochondria. Sprint training or kit training does that as well. Exercise with oxygen therapy. Hypoxia training does that. There's a lot of ways to do it. There's supplements like urolithin A, which has caused mitophagy and mitochondrial renewal. Their mitochondrial support supplements sometimes that you need.

33:13So there are a lot of ways to optimize your mitochondria, but they're injured by too much food, too much sugar and starch, too many environmental toxins. All those things from the microbiome that are bad, all those things can damage your mitochondria. So learning about your mitochondria, how to take care of them is really important. And again, it's one of the things we can look at as we start to test things and see what's going on in our bodies.

33:36Hello, Yap Gang. I know my young and profiting listeners want bigger businesses and a better life. And the new year is the perfect moment to reset and commit to your growth. But let's be real, you can't build an empire if your finances are all over the place. That's why getting into it QuickBooks is one of the best first moves you can make this year. They've got powerful money management tools built right into their platform, and they have them for every stage of your business, whether you're a solopreneur or a small business. And I love that QuickBooks helps you get paid faster, pay bills smarter, and even gives you access to funding when opportunity pops up.

34:10So QuickBooks can help you with bookkeeping, can help you with getting paid, can even help you with projections and understanding where your business is at financially. Plus, QuickBooks Money Solutions reduces manual work by half and keeps your money and your books perfectly synced. That means less time staring at spreadsheets and more time actually building the vision that you started with. That's the upgrade that every profiting entrepreneur needs. Start the new year strong, take control of your cashflow with QuickBooks Money Tools. Learn more at quickbooks.com slash money. Again, that's quickbooks.com slash money.

34:41Terms apply. Money movement services are provided by Intuit Payments Incorporated, licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services.

34:52Young and profiters. I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their workday wondering why certain tasks take forever, why they're procrastinating certain things, why they don't feel confident in their work, why they feel drained and frustrated and unfulfilled. But here's the thing you need to know. It's not a character flaw that you're feeling this way. It's actually your natural wiring. And here's the thing. When it comes to burnout, it's really about the type of work that you're doing. Some work gives you energy and some work simply drains you. So it's key to understand your six types of working genius.

35:27The working genius assessment or the six types of working genius framework was created by Patrick Lencioni. And he's a business influencer and author. And the working genius framework helps you identify what you're actually built for and the work that you're not. Now, let me tell you a story. Before I uncovered my working genius, which is galvanizing and invention, so I like to rally people and I like to invent new things, I used to be really shameful and had a lot of guilt around the fact that I didn't like enablement, which is one of my working frustrations. So I actually don't like to support people one-on-one.

35:59I don't like it when people slow me down. I don't like hand-holding. I like to move fast, invent, rally people, inspire. But what I do need to do is ensure that somebody else can fill the enablement role, which I do have, Kate, on my team. So Working Genius helps you uncover these genius gaps, helps you work better with your team, helps you reduce friction, helps you collaborate better, understand why people are the way that they are. It's helped me restructure my team, put people in the spots that they're going to really excel. And it's also helped me in hiring. Working Genius is absolutely amazing.

36:28I'm obsessed with this model. So if you guys want to take the Working Genius assessment and get 20 % off, you can use Code profiting, go to workinggenius.com. Again, that's workinggenius.com. Stop guessing. Start working in your genius.

36:43Hello, young and profiters. Running my own business has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, but I won't lie to you. In those early days of setting it up, I feel like I was jumping on a cliff with no parachute. I'm not really good at that kind of stuff. I'm really good at marketing, sales, growing a business, offers, but I had so many questions and zero idea where to find the answers when it came to starting an official business. I wish I had known about Northwest Registered Agent back when I was starting Yap Media. And if you're an entrepreneur, you need to know what Northwest Registered Agent is.

37:14They've been helping small business owners launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They literally make life easy for entrepreneurs. They don't just help you form your business. They give you the free tools you need after you form it, like operating agreements and thousands of how-to guides that explain the complicated ins and outs of running a business. And guys, it can get really complicated, but Northwest Registered Agent just makes it all easy and breaks it down for you. So when you want more for your business, more privacy, more guidance, more free resources, Northwest Registered Agent is where you should go.

37:46Don't wait and protect your privacy. Build your brand and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash yap free and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com slash yapfree. I wanna talk about your drive of wanting to live so long because one of the factors that you mentioned is having a purpose and feeling like you've got a way to contribute to the world. So why do you actually wanna live so long? Well, I love life. And as long as I can enjoy life and be with my friends and do the things I love and ride my bike and hike and enjoy what I'm doing and have meaning and purpose and contribute to the world and add value.

38:33I'm 65. I kind of figured a few things out by now. And wisdom always doesn't come with age, but I've had a bunch of hard knocks and that's really taught me a lot. And so I kind of feel happy and content and satisfied and like, I want to keep going. I mean, I don't really care if I get to 120 or 100 or 99 or 95 or 90. I just want to feel good and do good. I'm really excited for this generation of 60 year olds, because I just feel like in the past, in your 60s, it's all about retirement. And I feel like a lot of people right now are actually like taking on second careers and realizing that they really have a lot more time to live.

39:11And people are taking advantage of that. So like, what are your thoughts in terms of people around your age, who like want to take on a new career? Yeah. Tell me about that. I'm 65. And two years ago, I co-founded a company that's a big startup company right now. So who does startups in their 60s? Most people are like looking at golf courses and not startups. I mean, I want to contribute to the world. I want to do things. I get excited. We're building, we're creating, we're dreaming, we're imagining a different future for healthcare and medicine. We're adding value to people's lives. It's something to get up for every morning and be excited about and take all the things that I know that are almost impossible for any single doctor to synthesize and to sort through and make sense of and provide each individual with a personalized approach to their health that's going to actually optimize how they feel.

39:59And that's really the key here is to end needless suffering. And for me, that's my purpose and that's my mission. And plus having fun, enjoying my life and my wife and everybody around me. It's hard for me to imagine at the same time, I see people living older, but it's also hard for me to imagine, especially in the West, because I feel like things are more unhealthy than ever. The food in the grocery store is terrible. Everything comes in a cardboard box. Our water supply is really scary. And it feels like there's no good water. It's either like you're getting plastic or you're drinking from a dirty faucet, right?

40:34And so for me, it just feels almost impossible to navigate food, which you say is medicine. So talk to us about how we should try to navigate our diets and what changes need to happen in America for us to actually live healthier lives and longer lives. This has been something I've been working on for a long time. And I wrote a book called Food Fix, which lays out from field to fork what's wrong with our food system. And if there's one thing that's killing us, aside from environmental toxins and stress and our same schedule, it's probably 80 % food. And it's something that we can control and do something about.

41:09And unless we actually take it seriously and fix our food system, we're going to mess. And so right now there's a resurgence of interest in health around the country. There's the Make America Healthy Again movement. And so there's that energy happening. And in Washington, working on policies that bring those dangers to the average American. For example, in West Virginia, they got rid of red dyes and other dyes. In California, they did the same thing. These are great steps to start to push the food system to produce healthier food for all of us. And something that's really hot right now is GLPs, right?

41:39I have mixed feelings about them. I'm not a doctor, right? But I think it's good if you have a real problem. But I see normal people who might just need to lose 10, 20 pounds take GLPs. So what are your thoughts around that? For most people, and I literally just got a text from somebody this morning saying, my cousin read your book. They lost 100 pounds. My person who's working with me in Washington around food policy, She lost 112 pounds in the last two years working with me. And then without taking these drugs. Now, some people are really stuck. And if you're stuck and you need help and you have not really addressed the underlying reasons why you eat that, sometimes it's not what you're eating, it's what's eating you.

42:16You got to figure that out. I think it's really important to do that. And I think when people do that, they don't necessarily have to take these drugs, which are helpful. They can be extremely helpful, but they also come with side effects, muscle loss, weight again, if you stop, they can have other issues, you know, like pancreatic issues and pancreatitis, and they can cause bowel obstruction if taken for a long time. So they can be a good tool, but they're just a tool. They're not a panacea. And I think they've helped a lot of people. I'm not against them. I think they're used in ways that sometimes don't make sense to me.

42:49Why give a six-year-old an ozempic shot for the rest of his life? It's not his fault. He's overweight. That's the environment he's in. And I think that can actually get really fixed. So I think it's important for people to understand that they have power in it. The food industry has basically hijacked our brain chemistry, our metabolism, our desires for different foods. And these are things that can actually be changed. You can literally change your brain chemistry and have an incredibly powerful shift in your cravings and your desire for foods. For example, people going keto, they don't really need a was that big because naturally the way they're eating will shut off that craving.

43:29And the food addiction is a real thing. About 14 % of adults and kids are addicted to food, biologically addicted. This is really based on good evidence from the Yale food addiction scale and deep science around the world where we looked at this. This is just horribly sad and horribly unfortunate because we really don't need to do that. We can fix our food supply. We can fix this problem. And it has to be done at a grassroots level. It has It has to be on a state level, it has to be on a federal level. It's going to take time, but we're working with the FDA, working with the USDA, with HHS, the administration as best we can to try to push changes through my nonprofit.

44:07I've also heard that there's food companies already trying to figure out how to circumvent GLPs so that people still crave their food, right? So this is going to figure out how to get around it. That's even crazy when you think of it. Like, wow, they're really just going to go there? They're literally going to just kind of circumvent Ozempic by making food even more addictive. Yeah, that's the state of the world that we're in. So we've got to take control. So let's talk about our ancestors, because when I was listening to your book, I was surprised because we're always thinking about how we live so long now.

44:40And when you think about the past, you might think people died at 30, 40. But there's actually cases in history where people have lived to be a very old age. So talk to us about how our ancestors ate and maybe some examples of people who lived really long back in the day. Well, I think, you know, when you look, for example, at the Native Americans, one of the longest populations in the world at the turn of the 1900s was the Plains Indians. They had most of their diet from bison. And then they had berries and they had probably wild stuff they gathered. But predominantly their diet was meat. And they lived to be well over 100 and highly functional and active.

45:19and these populations around the world where you see people like i was in turkey and they know it's not a technical blue zone but man they were a lot of really old people who are doing great we're in their 80s 90s still working still thriving still make part of the community and i think it's when you stop you stop like i think retirement is the worst idea ever invented i don't really get it but people don't retire they just shift and change what they're doing and i think these communities and when you see these people living to be very old it's because they found meaning purpose. They've learned how to not sort of internalize the stresses of life.

45:52They've learned how to modulate their own diet and lifestyle to optimize their health. And they just figured it out. Let's stick on community a bit because you say it's also a factor in longevity. You say you're only as healthy as your five closest friends. Tell us about that. Well, think about it. If all your friends are going to McDonald's and drinking beer and two liters of soda today and watching TV all the time, that's what you're going to be probably like. And if you have friends who are healthy and go to yoga and drink green juices and exercise and eat whole foods and get together and share these things, you're more likely going to be healthy.

46:29It's just so clear. Chris Stockis from Harvard did a lot of work on this, wrote a book called Connected. But he published research in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that, for example, from the Framingham data, which is a large study, one of the largest studies, longest going studies in the world, in Framingham, Massachusetts, tracking their population. he found that those people who actually, when they looked at the patterns around obesity, that you were about 40 % likely to be overweight if your parents or siblings were overweight. But you were 171 % more likely to be overweight if your friends are overweight.

46:59So your social connections matter and your relationships matter. If you're somebody who just stays up all night playing video games and you're living in America, your friends are playing video games in Australia. I mean, your sleep-wake cycle, your circadian rhythm, everything's going to be off. So the people in the communities that you have to surround yourself with, make sure that people who are leaning in towards wellness and health as opposed to not that. That's so interesting. Now, I don't want everybody tuning in to like become fat phobic, you know, like, but at the same time, you've got to pay attention to it's the same thing.

47:33If people are doing drugs around you, you're more likely to do drugs. So food can also be as bad as a drug. We've got to think of it that way. So if there was one thing that you could remove from the grocery stores, what would it be? It would be high fructose corn syrup. Like that, you'd cut out most of the in the grocery store. And I think trans fats have been removed for the most part, which is great. But you want to make sure you're getting rid of those two things, trans fats and high fructose corn syrup. Just getting rid of that alone will make a huge difference. Or just even reading the ingredient list.

48:10If there's an ingredient on there that you don't have at home that you wouldn't use in your kitchen, like butylated hydroxy toluene or maltodextrin or mono and diglycerides, you probably shouldn't eat it. I heard something once. If you can't kill it or grow it, you shouldn't eat it. And I always think about that when I'm eating food. Yeah, totally right. Totally right. So a lot of our listeners are entrepreneurs. They have very busy schedules. Sometimes it can get really overwhelming trying to follow different nutrition advice. So in the simplest terms, what should we be eating? Yeah, I've written so many books about this food.

48:49What should I eat? The Pagan Diet, which is sort of a condensed version and with some kind of fun stuff in it. What we agree on is more than what we disagree on. You can get on the margins about vegan or paleo or keto or this or that. But the truth is, we all agree we shouldn't be eating processed food, ultra processed food. We all agree we should be reducing starch and sugar and refined carbohydrates in our diet. We shouldn't be eating things that aren't food, technically, like maltodextrin or butylated hydroxy toluene or red dye number three. We should be eating foods that are high in phytochemicals, that we think of as food as medicine, where it changes everything in our biology in real time.

49:25We should be thinking about having good quality fats from nuts and seeds and avocados and wild fish, small fish. And even though for some people tolerate animal fats very well, especially if it's regeneratively raised, they have very different qualities of fats. So there's a lot of really good things you can do that are available from the diet that you can get even anywhere. I mean, I've worked with people in the worst food deserts in America, and they've actually been able to make a huge impact and change their diet if they actually do the right things. And they will. They'll actually have a huge shift in their diet by actually doing this.

49:58So I'm pretty thrilled by how simple it is. But when people understand how to do it, then I've made changes. Talk to us about exercise. I feel like there's a lot of mixed advice when it comes to exercise. What's your take on the right amount, too much exercise? Exercise is critical. Your body needs to move. There's no doubt about it. We were designed to be moving organisms all the time. And that's how we evolved. Now, most of us don't do enough. And that's unfortunate. And I think 8 % get the optimal amount. 23 % get some moderate amount. But the key is to actually understand what's good for you.

50:37And it's different at different times of your life. But I think you need at least 30 minutes of good cardio four or five times a week, three times a week of strength training, probably a week or a day or two of flexibility and training and stability training. That's kind of bare minimum. If you can do that, you're going to maintain your health and be good for a long time. You've said in the past that strength training is the best anti-aging medicine. What's so good about it? Because what you're doing is you're building muscle. you're building mitochondria, you're increasing muscle mass. And what really kills people is frailty.

51:06When you get older, you get frail. You're not able to get up out of a chair. You're not able to do anything you love to do. Your mobility is decreased. Your functions decreased. That's all totally preventable by strength training. And you have to work harder as you get older because the body, unfortunately, it doesn't work as well. So you have to do a little more effort to get the same benefit. And I think that's something people have to do, but it's not optional. Exercise is just not optimal. Okay. Last question for you. And then we're going to close out this interview. So the average listener's age on my podcast is 35 years old and they're typically an entrepreneur.

51:39So let's say I gave you a 35 year old, they're stressed, exhausted, running on coffee. If you had a year to transform their health and performance, what are the things that you would change? I would immediately have them get on a whole foods diet that I just talked about. I'd have and just follow the principles of eat real food, eat low sugar starch, good fats, adequate protein for where you are in your life phase and it varies depending on where you are, lots of phytochemicals, lots of fiber, and just start there. And if you're really having any health issues, I'd probably do my 10-day detox program, which is essentially a reset.

52:14It's just 10daydetox.com with a 10-day detox. And what really is amazing about it is that people get a reset. It's like putting your body back to its original factory settings and you can see where food is impacting you. oh, I didn't know that, oh, my rash was caused by food, or I didn't know that my migraines were caused by what I was eating, or I didn't know that my joint pain was caused by everything, or my sleep problem was caused by eating. So you get a really quick reset, and then you can start to have foods back in. So that would be number one, get your food straight. And that's timing, planning, organizing.

52:44It's really important. The amount of time you spend on your business, a fraction of that you spend on your health, you'll get a lot of dividends from that. Get in a regular exercise routine, not that hard. just even if you just want to walk 30 minutes if you walk in phone calls that's good better than nothing uh you can have a walking treadmill you can do fun more fun things i like to bike i like to you know do more mountain biking and road biking and tennis and other things that kind of are fun for me i like to make exercise fun uh strength training i've gotten into more and more and it's it's been profound in terms of effect on my body even as i'm older i think learning how to regulate your nervous system is important self-soothing is something we learn how to do We get activated, reactive, but learning how to practice, whether it's breath work or meditation or some practice where you're resetting your nervous system because we're all in parasympathetic deficit.

53:30We need to be relaxing more. And then I think build community because, you know, as you're building something and going through stuff, you know, when getting isolated is the worst thing you can do for a human being. And so I think having that ability to work with your friends to build a fun community experience is really important. And that's something that, you know, it's been really important to me, especially as I've gotten older, is just invest in your friendships. Because when everything else goes, that's what will be left. Yeah, so that was great advice on an individual level. And a lot of the people tuning in are entrepreneurs, and we help move society forward.

54:04And we have this big shift from traditional to functional medicine. We're trying to combat the food industries. Can you talk to us about some of the opportunities that you see for entrepreneurs to capitalize on all these changes? The health and wellness market is a trillion-dollar market. And there's a lot of ways people are entering that. But if you can figure out what you love and the intersection of what you love and what people need, often businesses are started from people's own needs. Like, I need to fix my own health. So as a physician, I got very sick when I was in my 30s. I got chronic fatigue syndrome from heavy metals.

54:39And I was struggling a lot. And I had to figure it out. I had to actually figure it out. And that forced me to learn about what I learned about. It forced me to study the way I studied, to actually find this field of functional medicine, to use it in myself, to heal and repair. And so that's what I encourage people to do is figure out that intersection of what you love. That's just driven me because it's not like a choice. I don't have a choice. It's not like I'm making widgets or something that it's fine to make widgets. We all need widgets. But I think the key is really to kind of figure out how you can do this in a way that it syncs with what you love, because otherwise you won't really do it.

55:18Great advice. Okay. So I end my show with two questions. I ask all my guests. It could be totally different from what we talked about today. Just answer from your heart. So what is one actionable thing our young and profiter's can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? What your success is really determined by the quality of how you feel. So if you're able to function on a high level and do the things you want to do and not be held back by illness or struggles, you're going to be able to function at a much higher level and do whatever you want to do, whether it's just buzz off and go kind of get early retirement or whether it's you want to build a company or whatever you want to do, you know, you have the capacity to be highly functional when you feel better.

55:59And then so investing in your health is such an important thing. From my perspective, you know, I see a lot of people who have great businesses and companies and they build these things, they're rich, they have all this stuff and they're lonely, they're isolated, they're unhealthy, they're sick, They don't feel good. I mean, that's the last thing you want, right? Totally. And your book, Young Forever, really is a blueprint for how to do that. What would you say your secret to profiting in life is? And this can go beyond business. The secret to profiting in life, again, is to focus on the things you love and to do what you're passionate about.

56:33Because if you try to force something in your life, you know, the best things that happen are often serendipitous. they're often come to their ideas or people, their experiences. I feel like there's sort of an underlying current where we can kind of jump into it. And if we're present, we're able to see actually what pulls us in. And when we do that, you become more profitable. I've never sought to make money in my life. I've never tried to make money. I've never said, I'm going to do a business to make money. I'm going to do this to make money. I'm doing what I'm doing because I feel like it's critical for myself and for the people who I care about and for the population at large.

57:09It's like, I just can't help myself. So I think when you do that and you have a mission and you're driven, then it's not about the money. And Mark, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? I know you're so easily found, but where do you want to point people to? Well, you can go to drhyman.com. If you want to try the 10-day detox, you can go to drhyman.com. Everybody's got a 10-day detox diet. I'm on social media, Dr. Mark Hyman, and I have a podcast That's the Dr. Hyman Show, top 200 podcasts out there. So it's doing well. Awesome. Cool. Thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast.

57:42My pleasure.

57:47Well, guys, that's a wrap on my conversation with Dr. Mark Hyman. What stood out for me today is that longevity isn't just about adding years to your life. It's also about adding life to your years. And as corny as that may sound, if you want to be as strong and as vibrant at 60 as you are at 30, then it won't simply be because of genetic luck or new technologies, but rather because of your intentional living. There's so many exciting developments in the health and longevity space, from epigenetic reprogramming to AI-informed personalized medicine, advances that will no doubt inform and accelerate our lifespans in the years ahead.

58:29But like Mark reminds us, we already have the tools and knowledge at our fingertips that we need to optimize our health right now. And what it really comes down to is simply getting rid of the bad stuff and adding in the good stuff. By improving our diet, exercising more, getting enough sleep and avoiding stress, you have it within your own power to age more slowly and even turn back the physiological clock. Aging is not a simple decline in many ways. It's a choice, even a skill. Look at those people living in the blue zones like Sardinia, aging slowly and gracefully because they've created a healthy environment in which their bodies can completely thrive.

59:08It's a lot easier said than done, but believe me, I know. Like Mark said, it's also never too late to get started at leading your best and hopefully longest life. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast. If this episode resonated with you, share it with somebody who wants to feel better, live longer, and thrive at any age. And if you enjoyed today's episode and found something valuable in it, we'd love it if you'd left us a five-star review on Apple, Spotify, CastBox, wherever you listen to the show. It means the world to us. I read your reviews every single day. I love to get your feedback.

59:43It's one of the best ways to help us grow and reach more listeners. Prefer to watch your conversations than head over to YouTube and search Young and Profiting to catch the full episodes on there. You can also connect with me directly on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn. Just search for Halataha. And as always, I got to shout out my incredible Yap team. I have such an amazing team at Yap Media. I couldn't do this without you guys. This is your host, Halataha, aka the Podcast Princess, signing off.