6-Step Protocol To Stop Decline, Stay Young & Reverse Aging After 40+

Mark Hyman
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And again, the young forever cookbook comes out on Tuesday, June 4. Pre order yours today. Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's pharmacy. All right, so what is a functional medicine approach to reversing your biological age? Well, you got to get to the root cause of disease, the root cause of aging.

So what is the root cause of the imbalances that drive aging? What do we need to get rid of that's causing our bodies to be unhappy? That's basically toxins, allergens, microbes and so forth. And what do we need more of to restore balance and function? So we basically have to get rid of the bad stuff, and we have to add in the good stuff.

And this is a simple principle of functional medicine, and it works across all diseases. Before we get into today's episode, I'd like to take a minute to remind you some exciting news. My new cookbook, the Young Forever Cookbook, will be released on Tuesday, June 4 nationwide. In my new cookbook, the Cooking Companion to my book Young Forever, you'll find over 100 mouth watering anti inflammatory recipes that are going to help you live a longer, healthier life. You can pre order the young Forever cookbook at young forevercookbook.com dot just click on the pre order button at the top right.

I'm so excited to share these recipes with you and so much more. And again, the young Forever cookbook comes out on Tuesday, June 4. Pre order yours today. I know there are a ton of functional medicine practitioners who listen to this podcast, and I want to ask you a question. Are you tired of wasting valuable time on complex lab ordering procedures?

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Mark Hyman
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Mark Hyman
I'm Doctor Mark Hyman. Every year we celebrate our birthdays. It's another year of getting older and hopefully wiser. But what about a world where we focus on the reverse, celebrating getting younger instead? Well, thanks to new advances in science and longevity and technology that could be possible with the right tools and diet and lifestyle and supplement regimen, we can throw our biological clock in reverse.

And Im telling you it works. Ive done it. The science is there. And how do I know this isnt some new age pseudoscience? Well, ive been using myself as a test subject and my patients and its working.

The last time I assessed my biological age, I was over 20 years younger than my chronological age. So even though Im in my early sixties, internal biological systems function similarly to that of a 40 year old. Now look, aging is inevitable, but the speed at which we age is not what kills people today isn't getting older, but instead it's the bioaccumulation of stressors of what we call our exposome, which are all the factors that we've been exposed to throughout our life that age us. This can be everything from psychological stress to lack of sleep, poor diet, our sedentary lifestyle, inflammation from any cause, the bioaccumulation of toxins, loneliness, disconnection. All these things affect our biology and affect our rate of aging.

Now, all these things will fuel inflammation. Theyll fuel oxidative stress. Theyll damage your DNA, those shorten our telomeres, all the things we do not want to happen if we want to stay younger as we get older. But theres a lot we can actually do to reverse our biological age and feel better for longer. So today, I'm sharing the science behind what ages us, how to reverse this aging, using six simple steps.

So let's get into it. What's the difference between chronological age versus biological age? Well, there's nothing we can do about our chronological age or the number of years we've lived on the planet. But our biological age, our inner age, it tells a different story. Our biological age refers to the age of our biological systems.

And unlike our chronological age, our biological age is modifiable. Now, its influenced by genetics, by environmental exposures, by diet and lifestyle choices, by stress, good or bad. And well learned that there are actually good kinds of stress. It can be influenced by exercise, sleep, and lots more. Now, we can reverse, or we can accelerate biological aging by pulling on these levers, right, for good or bad.

So lets talk about a concept called epigenetics and how that influences our biological age. Now, biological age is how slowly or rapidly our bodies are aging on a cellular and a functional level. Biological age is measured based on biological factors such as DNA methylation, telomere length and inflammation. There's things that we can measure in science to look at the rate of aging, and we can see the impact they have on the expression of our genes, or what we call our epigenome, which is essentially what regulates our genes. So what is epigenetics?

Well, epigenetics is the idea that our genes, which are fixed and a sight at birth, not changeable, are not our fate. Now, we dont have control over which genes we have, but we do have control over which genes are expressed or turned on or off through our environment. And things like our diet, our lifestyle, exercise, stress, sleep, or nutrient levels, toxins, all these things affect our epigenetic expression and regulate which genes are turned on or off. Now, there are chemical compounds and proteins that attach to DNA and modify its function. Things like methyl groups, histones, cytokines.

So dont worry about too much about all that, but it doesnt alter the DNA sequence, but basically it is controlling the gene expression. And this is called the epigenome. Epi means above the genome. So harnessing the power of epigenetics is crucial for both measuring and assessing and reversing our biological age. Now, the science behind what ages us is pretty clear.

Lets discuss a few of the main reasons we age. The mechanisms. The first and one of the most important is inflammation, or as some like to call it, inflammaging. Now inflammaging is one of the key features, or what we call hallmarks of aging. Now, the immune system declines as we age.

That happens. It's called immunosenescence. It leads to reduced immune surveillance, so immune cell populations are not tracked as well. Now with immunosup senescence, our immune system doesn't work as well. It doesn't work as well to fight infection or cancer.

And it, and it doesn't actually keep our bodies working properly. It leads to chronic sterile inflammation, which is not caused by an infection, but by low grade exposure to bad diet, toxins, stress and so forth. And we also see an uptick in autoimmunity and other things like allergies. So what factors drive inflammation and what accelerates the aging process? Well my friends, you guessed it, it's the exposome what we've been talking about.

It's everything that washes over our genes from our poor diet, nutrient deficiencies, the lack of anti inflammatory nutrients like omega three fats, zinc, magnesium, environmental toxins affect it, heavy metals, our microbiome, leaky gut, low grade infections, bacterial or viral, and our sedentary lifestyle. All will make us age faster now and all will make us inflamed. Right. So what are the signs? Were inflamed.

Well, we dont recover from health challenges as well. We might have mental health issues. We know that most mental health challenges are because of an inflamed brain. We might have brain fog, we might have joint pain, fatigue, lethargy, skin issues, maybe eczema, acne, rosacea, gut issues start to develop. I mean we get sick more often, like the cold and flu.

So all this is so sort of clues that were having more inflammation. So why do we get sick more as we get older? Well, theres a gland we have called the thymus gland. Its the seat of your immune system, its a site of t cell maturation, which is your t cells are your basically white blood cells that fight infections and cancer and that shrinks as we age. Shrinks about 3% a year until middle age.

And after that it slows down to about 1% a year. Now, Covid-19 is a perfect example of how this all works and how older people are at higher risk. See, when you look at the population, you know, 60% of the COVID hospitalizations and nearly 90% of the Covid-19 deaths in 2023 were in people who were elderly whose immune systems were not working properly. So who else was at risk for Covid? Well, those with any chronic disease comorbidities, things like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease.

If you had one or two of these, you had 70% higher risk of death. If you had three or more of these, you had 130% higher risk of death. And by the way, four out of ten americans have two or more. Okay? There's 40% of us.

Six and ten Americans have one or more of these diseases. So what do these things have in common? Well, low grade chronic systemic inflammation. Now there are a lot of lab tests. You can tell if you're inflamed.

White blood count, something called c reactive proteins, sedimentation rate, ana, antinuclear antibodies, rheumatoid antibodies, thyroid antibodies, food sensitivity testing. We can test for tick borne infections, viruses, bacteria and function. Health, a company I co founded to make lab testing more accessible and affordable to so many, allows you to test almost all these things. So you go to functionalhealth.com mark to sign up and skip the waitlist, which is like 150,000 people. And for $4.99 a year membership, you can get most of these tests and learn what's really going on under the hood and see what's happening with your immune system and inflammation.

So how do you actually measure the impact of inflammation and aging? Well, there's actually a work of a scientist at Stanford called doctor David Fuhrman, who developed a tool called I age or the Immune age. Now his team screened more than 1000 people who aged or aged from eight to 96 for the presence of something called pro inflammatory cytokines. You heard about the cytokine storm. So they're looking for inflammatory cytokines, these markers of inflammation or chronic sterile inflammation, and they call this the immuno.

And then they use artificial intelligence to correlate the specific inflammatory biomarkers in the blood test that can be used to assess inflammation levels and the age of the immune system. Now the good news is that these biomarkers, these cytokines, can be reversed through simple diet and lifestyle and supplement protocols. So even if you find your immune system is aging faster and you have inflammaging, you can actually reverse it. We're going to get more into what that is exactly as we talk about how to reverse the biological age in the practical part of the podcast. But, but stay tuned, we're getting that soon.

Now I want to talk about something else which is really important, which is this concept of how our epigenome is regulated. And it's a little technical, but stay with me. There's something called DNA methylation. This is basically a chemical process using methyl groups which are regulated by b six, folate and b twelve. And it's a biochemical process that adds these chemical groups which is carbon and three hydrogens, to DNA to kind of tag them.

And essentially what that does is it regulates which genes are turned on or off. So what impacts DNA methylation and whether or not these are functioning properly? Well, theres key nutrients. Theyre called epi nutrients and theyre basically co factors for the DNA methylation activity that you need and the expression of the enzymes. And these come from your food, but you can also take them as supplements like b twelve, folate and b six which are all methylating B vitamins.

Now in addition to diet, a lot of other factors will affect your epigenome. Things like exercise, sleep, sleep quality, stress management, all can positively or negatively affect DNA methylation. Now one of my colleagues and friends, Doctor caravan steroids, showed that it was a groundbreaking study. Looked at 43 healthy adult men age 50 to 72, and the treatment group. They wanted to see if they could reverse biological age.

The treatment group adopted a plant rich, not plant based, more keto leaning diet, healthy habits like regular exercise, getting enough sleep, relaxing and a limited amount of supplements for just eight weeks. The control group didn't have any of those interventions. Now what was amazing is the treatment group showed an average reversal of biological age by 3.23 years in eight weeks. They also had improvements in cholesterol, triglycerides, serum folate levels because they had a lot of methylating foods, which underscores the positive and powerful impact of diet and lifestyle and aging. So thats super cool.

Think about it. You can reverse your biological age by three years in eight weeks. Thats good math. Now how do they measure this? Well, there are a number of different DNA clocks out there and theyre still being developed and modified and improved and were going to get better and better at it.

But theres something called the Horvath DNA age clock and theres other methylation tests, pheno age, Grimage, dunedin pace of aging, all of them have, you know, plus and minuses. But anyway, in the study they showed that diet and lifestyle changes affected DNA methylation and influence this beautiful intersection between your genes, gene expression and biological aging. So really important now were going to talk about what are the nutrients you need actually to optimize your DNA methylation and what lifestyle habits you should follow to optimize your biological aging. I mean, so you can slow it down. Now, the other thing that happens as we get older is something called telomere shortening.

Now, telomeres are these little protective end caps at the end of our chromosomes that prevent our DNA from unraveling, kind of like the thing at the end of your shoelaces. Now, telomeres shortened every time a cell divides or replicates. So telomere length gives us sort of a clue about how much time we have left until our cells can no longer replicate. And many things will shorten our telomeres. Inflammation, poor diet, sedentary lifestyle, smoking, stress, toxins, like the usual stuff, right?

It's not like rocket science here. What makes us age faster? In a study by doctor Elissa Epel from UCSF and Elizabeth Blackburn, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology medicine for discovering the molecular nature of telomeres and telomerase, the enzyme that's responsible for keeping your telomerians good, they found that women exposed to stress every day had increased oxidative stress. They reduced the telomerase activity, which is you need to rebuild your telomeres and led to shorter telomeres. The highest levels of perceived stress had a difference in telomere length equivalent to ten years.

And that indicated that the women under high stress were at a significantly higher risk for age related diseases. There are other biological aging tests. We use different calculators to figure this out. At Function Health, a company I co founded, you can actually measure your biological age to various epigenetic markers that are tracked and correlate with blood biomarkers. And that gives you a good sense of your biological age.

You can learn more and you go to functionhealth.com mark to learn more and check your biological age and then you can see what happens. I mean, if you make changes, I made changes over a period of six months and I reversed my biological age by a year. So if you basically do certain things, you can change the trajectory of the rate of aging. The good news is theres lots of interventions we can make to lengthen our telomeres and in doing so probably extend our lifespan. Although telomeres turned out not to be probably the most predictive marker, but its one of the things we look at now were going to get into this protocol.

All right, so what is a functional medicine approach to reversing your biological age? Well, you got to get to the root cause of disease, the root cause of aging. So what is the root cause of the imbalances that drive aging? What do we need to get rid of that's causing our bodies to be unhappy? That's basically toxins, allergens, microbes, and so forth.

And what do we need more of to restore balance and function? So we basically have to get rid of the bad stuff, and we have to add in the good stuff. And this is a simple principle of functional medicine, and it works across all diseases. So how is your exposome, in other words, helping or harming your body and either accelerating or reversing your biological age?

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Biological aging is driven by things we know about. Too much of the bad stuff, ultra processed food, sugar, refined flowers, hydrogenated oils, refined oils, environmental toxins from both heavy metals and petrochemical toxins, latent infections, things like tick borne illnesses, viruses, long Covid biological age. And it's one of the actual hallmarks of aging. And we have a lot of microbiome challenges in our society. We take a lot of gut busting drugs like antibiotics and anti inflammatory drugs, acid blockers, and we don't eat food with enough fiber.

And so our guts are really a problem, especially as we get older. The other thing that affects it is stress. So stress will for sure accelerate biological aging and make our exposome worse. Environmental allergens can, food sensitivities can, lack of exercise, social isolation, loneliness, all of that is really significant. So we want to get rid of those things as much as possible or fix those things and that will help us a lot.

And then there's things we need to add in to actually help ourselves reverse the biological aging process. Putting in the good stuff. And of course it's the usual stuff I've talked about. It's not surprising. It's real whole unprocessed food.

Its ideally regeneratively raised, grass fed or finished pasture raised meats, eggs, paddy fish, its the right amount of fiber, phytochemicals, polyphenols from all the colorful fruits and vegetables. Enough micronutrients to optimize our levels, not just a normal amount you need to prevent deficiency but actually whats your optimal level like vitamin D and zinc and magnesium and the b vitamins and omega three fats. All of which are important. And by the way, all of which we test for on function health. And whats amazing everybody is, we're seeing about 67% of people, and this is a health forward group, who are deficient in one or more nutrients at the minimum level.

Not to optimize health but to prevent a deficiency disease. So we're way way low guys. Also you need the adequate balance of hormones, you know, thyroid hormone, adrenal hormone, sex hormones. And those can be modified through lifestyle and other things, diet. We need the right kind of light exposure at the right time of day.

We need good hydration, exercise, good sleep, active relaxation, getting our parasympathetic, nervous system activated, meditation, things like that. We need community, love, meaning, purpose. Those are all the ingredients for health. So what is in more detail functional medicine approach to reversing biological age. We take out the bad stuff, put in the good stuff.

Lets get more specific. So first we need to focus on our diet. And that is important because we need to increase the intake of methylation supporting nutrients and this was shown in doctor care Fitzgerald study. Right. They include all kinds of nutrient dense organic foods, which has specific nutrients that support methylation.

So what are those? Well, betine, which is in beets, quinoa, spinach, regeneratively raised beef and turkey. Folate, which comes from pasture raised eggs and dark green leafy veggies. Vitamin B, six in twelve, which are in pasture raised eggs and regenerated beef and liver. I love liver, actually, liver pate.

Yesterday for lunch, it was organic chicken liver. Vitamin C also is important. It's found in colorful fresh fruits and veggies. And all these phytochemicals also activate anti inflammatory and detoxifying pathways via something called phytohormesis, which is a good thing. Hormesis is essentially a biological phenomena where it's a stress to your body that doesn't kill you.

It's essentially a beneficial effect that results from low doses of an agent that may be considered toxic or lethal when given a higher doses. So in other words, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. So, for example, a cold plunge is good, but if you're staying in too long, you die of hypothermia or a sauna is good, but if you stay in there too long, you're going to die of heatstroke. Right. And some of the chemicals in food are quite amazing because they're the plants defense mechanisms and they're a little bit toxic, but a little dose of them actually stimulates your body to heal.

For example, cruciferous veggies have a lot of things that are helpful with detoxification and inflammation. Glucosinolates, isothiocyanate, sulforaphane, which are all these amazing biochemicals and phytochemicals that promote healthy aging and also have anti cancer properties. What would you eat? Well, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, bok choy, rugola, kale, mustard greens, watercress, rutabaga, kohlrabi, swiss chard, turnips. Well, those aren't actually crucifers, but they're all greens are good for you.

Lots of phytochemicals are important. Turmeric, rosemary, green tea, garlic, really great for, for reducing inflammation. Certain polyphenols are great. Rosemary acid from rosemary green tea extracts like ECGC quercetin, which is in onions, all that can help modulate DNA methylation and activate all these amazing anti inflammatory pathways, which you need to reduce inflammation as you get older. Like for example, NRF two, which is a transcription factor that plays a really critical role in defending your cells against free radicals and toxins.

So you can activate these by what you eat. Its pretty cool actually. Food, literally is medicine. You also want to avoid inflammatory foods. Obviously, we talked about this forever, but refined carbs and sugar, they're super pro aging.

If you want to age fast, eat sugar and carbs. I didn't mean refined sugar and carbs like flour, just it's, it's the single biggest thing you can do to reduce the rate of aging is to cut those things out of your diet. Because they drive inflammation, they drive belly fat, they screw up your gut bacteria, they feed cancer cells, they cause metabolic dysfunction, they cause cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia, you name it. Also, I would probably avoid a conventional dairy. You know, many people are having issues with casein, which is the allergenic protein.

There's a one casein, which is it's in most modern cows, plus they're all raised with antibiotics and hormones. Many people have lactose intolerance and all these things can create inflammation. Even autoimmunity has been linked to dairies such as hashimoto's or type one diabetes. A gluten also is a problem. And it's especially modern gluten wheat.

It's a dwarf wheat that is hybridized. It has much higher amounts of gluten proteins. It's sprayed with herbicides like glyphosate, which have been linked to cancer and leaky gut and skin issues. So you want to get rid of that. If you're going to have gluten products, have more heirloom products or non, non wheat grains, particularly in the US.

Also, protein is important because you need to actually build muscle. And I think one of the things we, we don't realize as we age is we lose a tremendous amount of muscle. So eating high quality protein is critical for preventing muscle loss, which is so common. So you need about a gram per pound of protein, especially as you get older and you want to get pasteurized eggs, you want to have basically a palm sized portion of grass fed, originally raised meat, fish, chicken, so forth. Also, you can do simple things to increase autophagy, which helps with longevity.

You can basically overnight fast for twelve to 14 hours, which sounds like a lot, but it's not. Basically you eat dinner at seven. Sorry, you can eat breakfast at seven in the morning, or nine would be a 14 hours fast. The body basically shifts from digestion when you do that to repair and rejuvenation, which is cool. And it's kind of like a mild form of stress to the body.

And so it activates the body's own healing mechanisms. Now, a professor Satyananda Panda and his colleagues at the Salk Institute have shown how time restricted eating impacts gene expression. Now, they published a study in cell metabolism, and they revealed that time restricted eating affects about 70% of the mouse genes, including the adrenal gland, hypothalamus, pancreas, all which are key for regulating hormones. It also impacts cortisol and metabolism, your blood sugar, your microbiome. So it can be really good just to not eat.

I mean, most of us just eat until we go to bed and then we wake up and we eat. We should just take a break. 12 hours, it's called breakfast. 14 hours, maybe a little bit better. And these findings suggest, you know, lots of pathways through which time restricted eating can influence our health and help with issues like diabetes and heart disease, uh, high blood pressure, cancer.

And when you, when you do this, it activates a lot of anti aging genes like sirtuins, Ampk foxo nad inhibits mtor, which activates autophagy, which is cellular cleanup. So you have all these longevity switches and all these longevity pathways that when you time restrict, uh, your eating a little bit. And im talking about long fasting, you start to activate these pathways every day, and that leads to killing up all the bad stuff and cleaning up your body through this process. We call autophagy, which is essentially a cellular cleanup mechanism. It's recycling.

Auto means self and phage means eat. So it's like eating yourself, basically. And that kills a lot of the senescent cells, or zombie cells, which are kind of these in between cells that don't die, don't live, but they cause inflammation throughout the body and are really damaging. So we call these zombie cells, and they resist the immune system's ability to clear them. So they basically, like, protect themselves or kind of never die.

And they accumulate in key organs and tissues and, and make all these diseases worse, like arthritis and heart disease and cataracts and fatty liver and Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and increase your cancer risk. So these just nasty inflammatory molecules, you want to get rid of them. You also want to make sure sleep is a priority. Less than 5 hours of sleep a night is associated with increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, and other age related disorders, even dementia. And why?

Well, the research says a lot about this. In a study of 245 women published in the Journal of Aging Research, the women who were about between 59 and 66 who had poor quality sleep had significantly shorter telomere length. Other studies also link other problems of sleep, like constructive sleep apnea, which is where you kind of snore and don't breathe at night or you get low oxygen states. And men, they found that led to shorter telomere length and damaged DNA. So lack of high quality sleep, difficulty falling asleep, waking up a lot throughout the night, trouble falling back asleep or waking up too early in the morning is more common as we age, but it's associated with a lot more stress in the body, higher cortisol levels, damaged proteins, damaged DNA accumulation.

And so when we don't sleep, we don't clear out the junk from our brain either, because we have this brain cleaning system, it's called the glymphatic system and it turns on when we go to sleep and it clears away all the cellular debris and senescent cells from our brains. But otherwise, if we don't, we get foggy. That's why when you don't sleep, your brain doesn't feel good, right? You feel boggy and not clear. So you're willing want to optimize sleep because if you dont, youre going to have more free radicals, more inflammation, more telomere shortening.

And its not that hard. You just got to make a routine of it, go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. Use your bed for sleep and romance. Make your room totally dark. Eye mask, sound machine or earplugs, I use those.

Dont, dont get exposed to blue light for two or 3 hours before bed. Thats from all your devices. You can get the blue light blocking glasses, you can dim your lights, put the red lights, candles, lamps. Its kind of fun actually. At night, avoid caffeine and alcohol, particularly alcohol, within 3 hours of bed and caffeine afternoon if you're having any.

And you can try my sleep master class, it's free. We're going to put the link in the show notes. All right. What else could you do to reverse your biological age? Well, exercise, right.

If you could package the benefits of exercise into a pill, it probably would be the greatest blockbuster drug of all time. Everybody understands that exercise is associated with extending your lifespan and your overall health, but it's also associated with slowing these age related declines in DNA methylation, which we see with the epigenetic changes. And exercise, which is amazing, positively impacts all of the hallmarks of aging. It helps balance your hormones and insulin sensitivity. It cleans up damaged proteins, which were found in Alzheimer's and diabetes.

It repairs damaged DNA, it lengthens your telomeres, it boosts energy through nad, uh, it reduces inflammation, it kills your zombie cells, it improves and strengthens your mitochondria, increases your stem cell production. All good things if you want to reverse your biological age. So what should you be doing? Well, about 150 minutes of aerobic exercise. Things like biking, hiking, tennis, swimming every week, plus strength training or using weights or resistance bands to make sure you keep your muscle mass really important.

Muscle mass is key to longevity. All right, what about stress? Well, you have to manage your stress if you want to live a long time. No one can avoid stress, but we have to learn how to handle it and to reduce the effects of it on our biology. So when you and you have chronic stress and it's just unmitigated, it just accelerates cellular aging, it shortens our telomeres, it's implicated as a risk factor for every known chronic disease.

For example, in a study published in the BMJ British Medical Journal, a finnish cohort of about 40,000 people between the ages of 25 and 74 years old reported a nearly three year lower life expectancy in men who found their life almost unbearable due to stress. So basically your lives cut short by three years if you have lots of stress. So what can you do to help regulate your nervous system? Well, gratitude, journaling, breath work, meditation, yoga, hiking, being in nature, all those things help. In fact, the narrative review assessing the clinical benefits of yoga and meditation found that there were lower amounts of pro inflammatory genes that were expressed and there were increased expressions of telomere maintenance and lengthening genes and also better DNA repair just from doing yoga, hanging out with close friends, I think, you know, it's really important.

Building your network of relationships, especially as you age, is important. Loneliness is linked to age related diseases like dementia. So make sure you find ways to create, establish community meaning and purpose. Really important. Alright, what about supplements?

Well, they're not appendacea, they're supplements, but they are important. And I recommend between four or 5000 units a day of vitamin d three. When they did 4000 units of vitamin D three in a population with no other changes, they reduced biological age by 1.85 years in just 16 weeks. That's impressive. Probiotics also can be helpful, particularly ones that contain a certain strain called lactobacillus illus plantarum, 299 volts.

And that's been shown to increase folate production, which also helps support DNA methylation. You want to take b vitamins, particularly the methylation B vitamins we talked about methylfolate methyl b twelve methylated form of b six called p five p all really important have the right form and we'll link to those in the show notes. And that of course will help fill any dietary gaps and support your DNA methylation. Also I like certain things like nmn which helps support nad production. 1000 milligrams a day.

Physetin 500 to 1000 milligrams. It kills the zombie cells. It's from strawberries actually. It's a phytochemical. It stimulates cytophagy, activates sirtuins, ampk, all of good things.

These are the longevity switches. Curcumin, I love that. 500 to 1000 a day green tea extract or EGCG which is great. 500 to 1000 a day. Also I like urolithin a which is great.

It's a postbiotic made from pomegranate in your gut bacteria. But most of us don't have it so we really need to take it. And the form I like is called mito pure. Its made by a company in Switzerland. So I think its.

I take that every day for example. So theres a lot of stuff you can do. Theres also if youre crazy like me and you want to do all kinds of other stuff, you can experiment. I experiment myself. I dont encourage you to do that.

But things like stem cells, things like exosomes which are little packets of healing compounds, peptides particularly can be helpful, like BP 157, thymosin alpha one, which helps immunity. So there's a lot of peptides out there. You need to find someone who can help you navigate that. But some of the regenerative medicine therapies can be really helpful. Also I think more and more research will come out on plasmapheresis.

This is basically a process of cleaning your blood, essentially, where they take out your blood, they separate out the cells and the plasma. They throw the plasma out and they add back a protein called albumin and reconstitute your blood. But essentially it's like getting rid all the old damaged crap. And it seems to have the most impact on reversing biological age in terms of the interventions we can do now. There's some other things that are on the track to potentially be helpful, like drugs like rapamycin, metformin.

We're learning more about those, but we're not quite there yet. So it's a lot. You know, there's a lot of things we know that cause rapid aging and there's a lot of things we know that can actually slow or even reverse biological aging. So that's the good news. It's very empowering.

And I'm I'm a living example of it. I tried everything on myself, and it actually is working. So. And I see my patients, and I encourage you to explore some of this. You don't have to do everything, but do what you can.

You know, the thought of living longer for people who are older can kind of be scary. Cause they're thinking of all the diseases they're gonna get. They know heart disease and diabetes, and they're gonna be frail and they're gonna fall. And, I mean, no one wants to live longer if that means that you're gonna be sicker and more uncomfortable and more in pain. But azing just about how long we live, it's about how well we live.

And this is really a concept that's known as our health Spanish. Our health span is how many years we're healthy. Now, most people spend the last 20% of their life in poor health. You want your health span to equal your lifespan. If you live to be 90, you want, you know, 89.9 years to be healthy, and then maybe last week, you're kind of dwindling, and then you go, right.

And I think most of us, given what I just talked about today, could get to 100 healthy years. It's our mission at Function Health. We help you do that through guidance on. Everybody can see me as a patient, but through function health, we've made this information accessible to all of you and be able to actually track your own biological data over time and see how you can even measure your own biological age and reverse it, just like I did. So you can check that out.

Go to functionhealth.com forward slash mark to learn more and also to skip the waitlist, which is about 150,000 people, so it's never too late to start. You can reverse your biological clock at any age, and you can live your best life. So through our diet and lifestyle choices, through managing sleep, through stress management, the right supplements community, maybe certain advanced therapeutics that were talked about, we can activate these anti aging genes. We can reverse our biological age. We can activate our longevity switches, and we can feel and look younger from the inside out.

And also, the point is, you don't want to just add years to your life. You want to add life to your ears. You want to have vitality, energy, and joy and meaning and purpose. So aging as a decline into discomfort and disease, I see it as an amazing opportunity to redefine our golden years as a time of renewal, a vitality of thriving health. And, you know, with the right tools and the right knowledge and the right commitment.

We can all look forward to celebrating not just another birthday, but another chance of living and feeling truly alive and vibrant. So thanks for joining me on this journey toward a younger you, both inside and out. If you want to learn more, you can go check out my book young forever where I go into all this in more detail in my young forever cookbook. It's come out as well, so check that out and I hope you enjoy learning how your body works and how to work with it to create health for yourself and have more energy, more vitality, and more life. Thanks for listening today.

If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and follow me on all social media channels at drmarchyman and we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy. I'm always getting questions about my favorite books, podcasts, gadgets, supplements, recipes and lots more. And now you can have access to. All of this information by signing up for my free markspicks newsletter@drheiman.com.

markspicks I promise I'll only email you. Once a week on Fridays and I'll. Never share your email address or send. You anything else besides my recommendations. These are things that have helped me on my help journey and I hope.

They'Ll help you too. Again, that's drheiman.com markspix. Thank you again and we'll see you next time. I'm the doctor's pharmacy this podcast is. Separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness center and my work at.

Mark Hyman
Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I'm. The chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my. Guests opinions, and neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only.

This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding. That it does not come constitute medical. Or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for your help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner.

Mark Hyman
You can come see us at the. Ultra Wellness center in Lenox, Massachusetts. Just go to ultrawellnesscenter.com dot. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner near you, you can visit ifn.org and search find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who is trained, who is a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.

Keeping this podcast free, especially part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like. To express gratitude to the sponsors that made today's podcast possible.

Mark Hyman
To express gratitude to the sponsors that made today's podcast possible.

To express gratitude to the sponsors that made today's podcast possible.

6-Step Protocol To Stop Decline, Stay Young & Reverse Aging After 40+

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1: Introduction to Biological Aging

2: Inflammation and Aging

3: Dietary Changes for Longevity

4: The Importance of Sleep and Exercise

5: Practical Steps and Closing Thoughts

Actionable Advice

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Transcript