The Longevity Code: How Purpose, Connection, and Science Are Rewriting Aging

Longevity isn’t just about adding years to life—it’s about adding life to those years. At the heart of lasting vitality are the often-overlooked essentials: deep social connection, a clear sense of purpose, and a mindset filled with optimism. These emotional and relational foundations are just as critical as what’s happening inside the body. Thanks to emerging diagnostics and the growing field of functional and longevity medicine, we now have the ability to detect subtle shifts in biology—long before symptoms arise—giving us the chance to course-correct with personalized strategies. By combining cutting-edge science with time-tested lifestyle practices like nourishing food, regular movement, restful sleep, and meaningful relationships, we can not only slow the aging process but begin to reverse it—unlocking a future where growing older means growing stronger, wiser, and more vibrant. In this episode, I explore, along with Peter Diamandis and Dr. Jeffrey Bland the keys to living a longer, healthier life by combining cutting-edge longevity science with the power of mindset, purpose, and meaningful connection. Peter Diamandis is the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions. He was recently named by Fortune as one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders.” He is also the executive founder of Singularity University, a graduate-level Silicon Valley institution that counsels the world's leaders on exponentially growing technologies. Dr. Jeff Bland is the founder of Big Bold Health, a company on a mission to transform the way people think about one of nature’s greatest innovations—the immune system. Through Big Bold Health, Dr. Bland is advocating for the power of Immuno-Rejuvenation to enhance immunity at a global level, often through the rediscovery of ancient food crops and superfoods. To get there, he is building a network of small farms and suppliers throughout the US that take a clear stance on regenerative agriculture, environmental stewardship, and planetary health. Dr. Bland’s career in health spans more than 40 years. A nutritional biochemist by training, he began in academia as a university professor. He then spent three decades in the natural products industry, working alongside other pioneers. A lifelong educator, Dr. Bland has traveled the world many times over in his role as the “father of functional medicine.” In 1991, he and his wife, Susan, founded The Institute for Functional Medicine. In 2012, he founded another educational nonprofit called the Personalized Lifestyle Medicine Institute. Dr. Bland is the author of The Disease Delusion: Conquering the Causes of Chronic Illness for a Healthier, Longer, and Happier Life, as well as countless additional books and research papers. This episode is brought to you by BIOptimizers. Head to bioptimizers.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10 to save 10%. Full-length episodes can be found here: The Emerging Science Of LongevityThe Surprising Key To LongevityThe Science Of Eating For Longevity

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Coming up on this episode of the Dr. Hyman Show.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  One of the biggest factors in terms of your risk for premature death is loneliness. Being lonely and socially isolated is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. That's really serious.

• 0:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Before we jump into today's episode, I want to share a few ways you can go deeper on your health journey. While I wish I could work with everyone one-on-one, there just isn't enough time in the day. So I built several tools to help you take control of your health. If you're looking for guidance, education, and community, check out my private membership, The Hyman Hive, for live Q and As, exclusive content, and direct connection. For real-time lab testing and personalized insights into your biology, visit Function Health. You can also explore my curated doctor-trusted supplements and health products at drhyman.com. And if you prefer to listen without any breaks, don't forget you can enjoy every episode of this podcast ad-free with Hyman Plus. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap "Try Free" to start your seven-day free trial.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Mindset and attitude is probably one of the most important things. You know, it's, if you think you're going to die, you can will yourself to death. Who do you hang out with, right? Are you hanging out with people at the very end of their life? Or you hang out with people who are youthful? Your mindset is so fundamentally important. And do you have a vision? Is the vision for the years ahead of you bigger than the vision for the years behind you? You know, I mean, that's fundamental. Fundamental, right? I'm more excited to be alive now than I ever have. And the projects I have are going to keep me going for the next few hundred years. So I'm super pumped about that.

• 1:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, no, you're right. You know, it's really true. When you look at meaning and purpose, it actually directly correlates with longevity. And optimists live longer, even if they're wrong. And I actually spent a lot of time this last week with a 99-year-old man who is brilliant, still working. I said, "So what are your interests?" He says, "Well, I'm interested in longevity."

• 2:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And he was ninety nine years old. He's talking about the projects he's working on, the movies, the films he's making. The, I mean, he's just, it's really stunning to me to see someone that age be so engaged in life and joyful and committed to his friends and his community and his family, active. I mean, I was like, wow, that is just really remarkable. You know, you probably know him, Norman Lear. He's just an amazing guy.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Oh, I love Norman Lear.

• 2:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And just like, to be able to be that up close and personal with him and hear him talk about his life and his story, but also talking about what he's dreaming about for the future, you know, he's dreaming about the future. And that's pretty exciting to me.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  There's, there's another category of what you can do right now that's important. And I jokingly call it not dying from something stupid.

• 2:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There you go.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  But it's really important.

• 2:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I call, I call it how to die young as late as possible.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  So here's, here's the realization. All of us are optimists about our life, about what's going on inside our body. We think we're fine. We're great, moving along. We're rushing to work and to vacation and spending time with our families. And that's all awesome. But we actually have no idea what's going on inside our bodies until you end up in the pain in your side in the hospital and the doctor says, listen, I hate to tell you this, but whatever it is. And so this is the work that I had done early on in human longevity. And really, we've taken it to the next level with a platform called Fountain Life. We talk about

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Fountain Life in the book. But it's the notion that every year I go for a digital upload. I go to, I go to HLI, Human Longevity, Inc., or Fountain Life. And I am, I do a full body MRI, head to toe, brain, brain vasculature, a clearly coronary CTA that uses AI to look for soft plaque versus calcified plaque. Calcified plaque is safe. It's the soft plaque that can rupture that you have to worry about.

• 4:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yes, yes.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  My Texas scan, my genome, my microbiome, my, my omics and so forth. And my goal.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Is two things. Has anything changed in the last year I need to know about? And is there anything, you know, so first of all, it's given me a baseline of this is where my body is. Like originally, when I first did it, I saw I had a large aortic root where the aorta enters the heart. And it was like, is that like, is that dangerous? Should I be concerned? But then after doing it four or five times, it didn't change. That's just me. That's just normal for me. But we have found in like 14, 15% of people who've come through it, and these are all relatively wealthy. Who can get the, any healthcare they want, who are typically in their 50s, 60s, 70s.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Two and a half percent have an aneurysm they didn't know about. 2% of cancer they didn't know about. And all in all, I think the number was like 14 or 15% have something that they need to know about. That's going to impact their, their health. And so that's my, you know, wear your seatbelt, get yourself uploaded every year. And if you find something, take action. People say, I don't want to know. And I call bullshit. Of course you want to know because you can do a lot about things right now.

• 5:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Absolutely. I think what you're talking about is really important, Peter, because what you're talking about is a host of diagnostics. That are often are not something we would get our traditional doctors. Hopefully the price are going to come down so we can get them. But, you know, there's a lot of imaging, a lot of diagnostics that are great. But then there's a whole layer of things that doctors aren't looking at. And I, and I see this all the time, you know, with people who are coming to see me for functional medicine. There, there's subclinical changes that happen and you can detect changes in your biology and physiology decades before you ever get a symptom. Or before you get diagnosed with a disease, whether it's insulin resistance that you can see early on by raising, looking at insulin levels after a meal. Or fasting insulin, which is the first thing you go up way before your blood sugar goes up. Or whether there's low grade autoimmune disease, whether your microbiome's off, or you have nutritional deficiencies, your mitochondria are in function.

• 6:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You can start to see these things and it's really just like a tune up. They're not quite diseases yet. And then traditional medicine just hasn't. Had a way of thinking about this because it's really complex. And what's I think emerging and what you're what you're finding, Peter, is that there's this emerging field of omics revolution, which is, you know, when you think about the the number of data points that we get when you go to the doctor, you get like 20, 30, 40, 50 lab tests, maybe. There's like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of things you could measure, most of which we're ignoring, you know, like, like David Furman at Stanford has looked at the throughput analysis of thousands and thousands of molecules around inflammation, which are those ones that relate to aging and chronic disease. And there are things you never heard of before, the things your doctor never tests for that are in a lab requisition, but are the most important things that we can be measuring to look at long term inflammation and aging.

• 7:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So I think there's a whole host of things that we can start to look at. And from a functional medicine perspective, that's what excites me because I see these things and I can then see the changes that happen. I could see the change in biology that happened. And I've noticed in myself, I've literally kind of changed my biology and how I posted a picture recently of when I was 40 and when I was 60 in my body and it's totally different. I was sort of like skinny fat back then. I was eating more carbohydrates. I wasn't overweight, but I didn't really have much muscle. And, you know, look at me now, I look like 20 years younger, but I was, I was 20 years younger than than that picture than I am now. So it's like really quite, it's quite staggering what you can do and should begin to understand these things.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and there are two reasons we haven't done this in the past, maybe three. One, we couldn't before. We couldn't measure it. We didn't even know it was it was there or measurable, but we now do. And second, it's getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. But the third is that no human physician could ever deal with the amount of data we're talking about. It's a massive amount of data.

• 8:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  And it's really the use of machine learning algorithms that are helping us understand the patterns, understand what it means. And, you know, I think it's going to become in the next five years malpractice not to do a diagnosis without AI in the loop, just because.

• 8:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Absolutely.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  No, I mean, I mean, it's like, I, I, you know, Seen literally millions and millions of data points on tens of thousands of patients. But I'm one guy and I've I've seen patterned correlations on things that no one has described before. And yet I know are true because I see them over and over again. But nobody's really kind of described in the literature. And I think that's just a sort of the tip of the iceberg of what's really going on when we're beginning to look at these things. So that's what's sort of exciting was we begin to look at the longevity perspective. We get to look at how do we start to do diagnostics differently? Not looking for disease per se, but looking for sort of variations from optimal function and health.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  So that's what we've done at Fountain Life. We have, you know, by the end of 2022, we'll have a dozen centers set up

• 9:07Speaker 01

  in Dubai, in India, in UK, in Toronto, and about 10 in the US. We're about, anyway, we're doubling in the 2022 timeframe. And we basically digitize you and upload you into the system where we can understand what changes have occurred since last time. And that's part of what Fountain Life does. The other part is performance and recovery. It's how do we use, how do we actually, what are your goals? Is it muscle? Is it obesity? Is it, you know, energy levels? And we help direct you in our programs that way. But then there's a regenerative medicine side.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  That is important because the regenerative medicine arena is growing tremendously. But we've built something called Fountain OS, which is an app that allows you to upload the data into your app. But it allows you to provision these things wherever you are. So if you don't live in the city where there's a fountain center, we have identified the imaging centers and facilities in Schenectady or in Des Moines, where you can get all of the tests put together and uploaded to the system, independent of where you live. And then the fun part is we have something called Fountain Health, which is a life insurance, I'm sorry, health insurance business. So you know, health insurance.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  It pays you after you have disease and after

• 10:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right, right, right.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  You get treatment. But what if instead, health insurance was the opposite, which is, we're going to, we're going to provide you all of the imaging that Fountain Life does for free every year to catch disease at the very beginning and prevent it in the first place. So it's a, it's a insurance that's going to be for self insured companies initially. But it's about giving all of your employees, all of this extensive testing as part of the insurance package for free to prevent the disease in the long run. So, you know, Fountain Life is, is doing, is doing great and super pumped about it.

• 11:25Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So basically, these clinics, where you can go and get a range of different assessments and therapies that assess where you are now, where you are in the deviations in your sort of longevity track, and how to actually change those back to a younger biological age using a combination of lifestyle supportive therapies, functional medicine, regenerative therapies that are all out there now, and, and be able to incorporate as, in real time, as new therapies come online, that when we hit longevity escape velocity, we'll be able to actually all, you know, get to take advantage of that, which is pretty exciting.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. We also have a very limited, we call our edge program. So as you all know, there's a lot of open investigational new drugs out there on the cutting edge, like rapamycin, like total plasma exchange and so forth. So we give a, a small number of our Fountain Life members the ability to participate in these research protocols.

• 12:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  We're seeing life expectancy go down, particularly in this last year of COVID, where we saw it go down for the average person, probably one plus years. And if you're African American, Hispanic, it's up to three years of decrease in life expectancy. And at the same time, we're seeing an explosion of longevity science that's helping us understand the causes of aging, how to extend life, how to improve quality of life, how to stop the ravages of aging. And we're learning all kinds of new tools, techniques and technologies, but there's a big mismatch there. So can you talk about, you know, one, why we're seeing this increase in, in, in, in earlier, earlier and earlier deaths, or a decrease in life expectancy, and why, at the same time, we're so optimistic and hopeful about the future of longevity science?

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and I think there's nothing that's more valuable to all of us and our families than healthy years. And let's define longevity in the first place. You know, the average age of hominids back 100,000 years ago was probably in their late 20s, right? And then it expanded during the, you know, Middle Ages into the early 30s. And then 100 years ago, it was in your 40s. Today, it's, you know, in their late 70s. And I like to think about the fact that I don't believe humans were, on the whole, designed to live past age 30. We would have

• 13:52Speaker 01

  a baby by age 13, before there was birth control. I mean, seriously, before, you know, you'd go puberty and you have a baby. And by the time you were, you know, 27 or 28, your baby was having a baby. And before McDonald's and Whole Foods, before food was abundant, the worst thing you wanted to do to perpetuate the species was take food out of your grandchildren's mouths. And so, so that was very much a reality for, it's the, what we evolved during. And, and then all the diseases of older age, cancer, heart disease, dementia, even when, when

• 14:32Speaker 01

  aneurysms take people, the wear and tear of the body, all of those diseases were never selected against if you didn't get it past age 30. So, we're in optimal health in our 20s and 30s. And then, and then we start the ravages of old age. And what's interesting, and I think you know this as much or more than I, that the conversation around longevity, and I'm going to define it more as age reversal, like, how do we slow aging, stop aging, even reverse aging, which would have been a really crazy conversation to have had even five years

• 15:12Speaker 01

  ago, is now become the conversation de jour in the medical community and in the venture community. And there's more people thinking about and working on it. And, and so, I think, I personally believe, and I hopefully at the end of this conversation,

• 15:33Speaker 01

  You'll you'll believe, or others will, that we're about to go into a renaissance of of health. We're about to massively disrupt the health industry, reinvent it, and start to add. Amen. Amen to that, right? Of course, you and I are both on carrying our carrying the signs around, you know, vive la révolution, let's reinvent this crazy insane system, which is so moribund. Anyway, but I think this decade, we're going to start to have new tools to slow, stop, and reverse aging. And I'm convinced myself, from the people I've spoken to, you

• 16:15Speaker 01

  know, I don't know, when I was in medical school, I didn't get a chance to watch much TV, but I remember watching, you know, I would watch Star Trek once in a while. That was sort of like my, if I had a little bit of time, I'd watch a Star Trek episode. And that was like, you know, the way the world should be. Doctor Spock with the spy quarter, right? Yes. Tri-quarter. Yes, exactly. The, but I remember watching one television show on long-lived sea life, that that species of like bowhead whales could live 200 plus years, and the Greenland shark could live four or 500 years, and sea turtles could live equal. And I was like, you know, if they can live that long, why can't we? I mean, I was really, I was like,

• 16:57Speaker 01

  kind of pissed and perplexed at the same time. And I made the decision, it was either a hardware problem or a software problem. And that we were going to start to understand, how do we, how do we change our software, or how do we change our hardware? So that's the frame that I have. Yes, we've had some recent decreases, and and a lot of the increase, as you well know, in in average, and the word average here is the key part, average life expectancy was, has been the massive reduction in childhood mortality, and the ability to deal with diseases early. Clean water. Clean water. Oh, my God. Sanitation. Half the disease burden of the planet is due to unclean drinking water. It's crazy. Knock that domino over.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  So I don't think the recent gains in longevity are really the kinds of gains in longevity that I'm working towards.

• 17:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It was the first hurdle we had to overcome, which was deal with the bad water and infectious disease. And we did a good job at that.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Access to food.

• 18:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But now we're looking at the aging process. And as I began to look at it over the decades, it's really clear to me that what we most of us see as aging in this country is abnormal aging. It's biological processes that have gone awry that are really dysfunctional states of biology. And then if we learn how to work with biology to optimize those states, whether it's inflammation, oxidative stress, or changes to the microbiome, or hormones, or brain chemistry, or your structural system, tissues, you can really stop and even reverse the phenomena that we see as aging in this country.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  For sure. But even doing that, the question becomes, can we all get to 100 healthy? Can we get to 120 healthy? And what's beyond that, right?

• 18:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  And I'm working on both sides of the equation. A number of the companies I have and the work that I'm doing, this book that Tony and I have worked three years on, Life Force, is really around increasing your vitality, your energy, avoiding the ravages of obesity and diabetes and heart disease and so forth. And there's incredible new technologies on the horizon.

• 19:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  How to do that.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  We looked at all of the stuff in phase one, phase two, phase three clinical trials. And then there's the basics: diet, sleeping, and exercise, which we so don't want to spend our time doing. But we must.

• 19:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The biggest, one of the biggest factors in, in terms of your risk for premature death is loneliness. Being lonely and socially isolated is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. That's really serious. So biological aging is a result of all of our stressors and, and our psychological stressors and relational stressors, our lack of connection is really important. Lack of physical touch, lack of intimacy plays a huge role, not lack of being understood and seen and witnessed, plays a huge role in, in so much of the ailments that we're suffering, not just mental illness, but also physical illness and our longevity. So this whole idea of socio-genomics, I actually came up with this term years ago when I was in Haiti and then it became part of

• 20:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  medical literature, not, not because of me, but because other people also started glomming onto it. And it was the idea that our social relationships and our social networks may be more important than our genetic connections in determining our health and our health outcomes. And that, that our lifestyle certainly influences our genes, but so does our social connections, our relationships influence our gene expression. And it's really not an abstract theory or notion. It literally is biology. Our thoughts, our beliefs, our relationships, all drive real changes that we can measure in our gene expression, that can cause inflammation, stress hormones. For example, you're having a conversation with somebody, if it's a loving, connected, intimate conversation, your anti-inflammatory genes will turn on, your healing and repair genes will turn

• 21:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  on. Whereas if you're in a conflictual relationship or a conversation with somebody, you're going to have your stress hormones increase, you're going to have inflammation increase, you're going to increase all sorts of bad things in your body that are produced by your body that cause harm. So we have huge, huge, huge motivation, I think, to focus as a, as a key part of our health strategy and just life happiness strategy, a, a, a, a deep sense of community and making sure we build that. So our social connections, our community, our relationships, all are associated with long lifespan, with a better mental health, with improved physical health, in things like blood pressure, waist circumference, body mass, inflammation. Now, I was in Ikaria in Sardinia, which are two of the blue zones

• 21:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  in the Kuwait Peninsula. And one of the things these communities have in common, where people live to be longer than anywhere else, and I wrote a lot about this in Young Forever, my new book. Was the power of community. They all were part of this fabric and they all had their place. They all had their role. They all had a meaning and purpose, even if you're a hundred years old. I remember Julia was a hundred and three months, she said, and she basically was still working at a hundred years old, making all sorts of wedding accoutrements, like doilies and little lace things. I don't know what they do originally, but it was kind of cool to see her. She was constantly working and making stuff for all these weddings and was still involved in the community life. So I want to share a little bit about a study that is kind of reflects the power of this. And it was an 80 year study called the Harvard

• 22:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Study of Adult Development, and it had been producing data on so many different things, on who lives longer, happier, healthier lives. And they wanted to understand not what makes people sick, but what makes people thrive, what makes them well. So what were the lessons from this study was 84 year study, right? Long study. They were tracking the same people and over generations, asking thousands of questions, hundreds of measurements to find out what really makes people healthy and happy. And they were giving, these people are giving regular updates on their life, their health, their income, their employment, their marital status. They filled out questionnaires and were part of interviews where they revealed their fears and their hopes, their disappointments,

• 23:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  their accomplishments, their regrets, life satisfaction and lots more. And this had a really incredible impact by providing lots of data. Then researchers use this data to assess how people's lives, their experiences, their attitudes affect their well being. And one of the things that was so powerful from this study was sort of surprising. It wasn't career achievement. It wasn't exercise. It wasn't a healthy diet that determined the quality and happiness of your life. It was good relationships. Good relationships keeps us healthier and happier. That was powerful. And the study's leaders that are, I mean, obviously the people started the study are dead. The current leader

• 24:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  of the study, Robert Waldinger from Harvard and Mark Schultz have a new book. It's called The Good Life: Lessons From The World's Longest Scientific Study Of Happiness.

• 24:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And it's a great book. I actually had Robert Waldinger on the podcast, The Doctor's Pharmacy, and you can learn more about the book and things there. But what are the, what are the things that we can do? What are the lessons learned from the study? But how do we improve the quality of our relationships? First, we have to look at ourselves, right? Who are we? What is our life like? What are the choices we're making? How are we not prioritizing relationships? So we can get really busy. We can do all sorts of stuff that we think is helping us get ahead. We can spend too much time on social media. But we often don't really think about building and investing in the quality and the number of our relationships. And for me, I know as personally that my relationships, my friendships, my community

• 24:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  is the most important thing for me. It really is what keeps me grounded, keeps me healthy, keeps me happy. And then more and more, as I get older, I focus more on this as opposed to like when you have kids and a career and you try to just kind of get by. And it's like, sometimes friends can fall by the wayside, but it's really important to find, and it even can be just one or two good friends. It makes a huge difference. Now,

• 25:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  when, when these people in the study actually were interviewed, they really actually benefited from this interviews because it helped them realize where they neglected their relationships. And then they considered sort of looking and finding, well, how can we improve that? So maybe look at your own life. What's your social life like? What are the, who are the people in your life that you care most about? That you, that you want to have a relationship? Think about how they support you and how often you spend time together and maybe do a little bit of effort to actually focus on what matters to you most and help you make decisions that actually can enhance the quality and number of your relationships. So maybe spend more time with people who, who make you laugh and who elevate you, and less time

• 26:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  with people who drain you and are, are, you know, energy saps. So I, you know, I, I think it's important to, to find friends and community members that help bring you up and not take you down. You know, sometimes you meet with people, all they want to do is complain and go on and on about everything. And I think there, you know, there are, there are other people who you, when you're around them, you laugh, you have fun, you play, and it's just, that's what you want. You know, prioritize your relationships. We schedule and exercise. We make ourselves maybe time to make a healthy diet. We, we focus on our career and work, but we don't focus on prioritizing those relationships that matter and being showing up and being present for us rather than zoning out on social media, you know, rather than like,

• 26:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  you know, doing a million things at once. Focus on, on your relationships. The phenomenon of aging, a- and as we've learned from you over the years is really an inflammatory process.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So let's kind of start with what causes the immune system to become dysfunctional as we age? What causes the acceleration of inflammation as we age? And, and how does that connect to the aging of our whole body? And then we'll kind of loop back to how to use plants to affect that and what you found in your research.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you said this beautifully in your book, you know, Mark, as you know, if you've read his books, and I'm sure everybody here has read one or more of his books, is a brilliant narrator. He tells a story better than anyone. I, the first time I, I read anything he wrote, I said, this man's on the path because he can make very complicated topics, very engaging and understandable.

• 27:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Because I have logorrhea, which is diarrhea of words.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  You, you do, you do not need to diminish your genius. You're very, very good at this.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  So one of the things that I've learned that Mark picked up beautifully, and he's done elegantly in, in Young Forever, is the discussion about how our body responds to the experience of life and how that's associated with biological aging. So, you know, my, my father used to say to me, you know, Jeff, life is what happens in between your plans. So we got this whole thing about a planned life. I remember my daughter-in-law, when she had her pregnancy plan with her first child. And I said, no woman can live by this plan. Oh yes, Jeff, I am very disciplined. I'm living by this plan. Then of course, stuff happened during her pregnancy. She said, oh, my plan went on, went to hell. I'm not able to do my plan.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Well, that's life, right? Stuff comes up. It happens and we have to be resilient. So what is resilience? Resilience in our body is manifest through principally three different cell types, three different. Tissues that are constantly sampling the outside world 24/7/365. They're the only parts of our body that are constantly sampling the outside world. And what are they? There are nervous system, there are mucosal tissues in our respiratory tract and our gastrointestinal tract, and there are our immune system. And they're all crosstalking all the time, one to the other. And so when we start talking then about what happens with the experience of life as it relates

• 29:17Speaker 02

  to aging, is it this system, this information system picks up bad news? Because everybody's life has trauma along the road, right? Now, the question is, how do you deal with the trauma? Does it stick and stay there irreversibly? And if it does, you just accumulate road tar over life, which then depreciates the function of those cells that are taking the message from this reporter system, this communication system. Some people call this immune scars. We've just had a big episode of immune scars called SARS-CoV-2, haven't we? And there are now people, well, not some people, probably the majority of people are

• 29:58Speaker 02

  carrying some legacy of what that virus left on their immune system. These are epigenetic marks of an immune system that's altered from that experience. Now, is that a one-way street? And that's where Mark's book, I think, is so beautiful because it describes, no, nothing in life is a one-way street. Even loss of neuronal reserve, we're now finding there is neuronal plasticity and neurons can be regenerated, maybe not as quickly as skin cells, but they can be regenerated. So there is this other street that goes back the other direction. If there is damage, there's repair. So that's what I call rejuvenation. And our body is capable of rejuvenating.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  And fortunately, what we're starting to learn is that these marks that we carry that are associated then with the principles of aging or the hallmarks of aging that Mark has summarized so beautifully, these are kind of scientific geekisms, these hallmarks of aging, but you've made them accessible in your book. They can be modulated by a reversible set of principles that is in our physiology if we give it the right thing to work from. If we don't give it the right thing to work from, it doesn't have the ability to power up that rejuvenation system and we just take the luck of the draw and we get worse as we grow older. By the way, when I say worse, it's not just physiologically or metabolically worse. It can be behaviorally worse.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  It can be feeling like we're not loved, we're not appreciated, we have no attribution. It's socially deprived. It's a form of deficiency. It's not a vitamin deficiency, it's a social support deficiency. Those leave marks.

• 31:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Vitamin L deficiency.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Yes, vitamin L deficiency, exactly right. So all of these things work together to create who we are and how we see our aging process manifest in our body.

• 31:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So Jeff, what's, you know, take us down into the rabbit hole, a little bit of the science of what's happening to our immune system as we get older? That causes it to generate more of this chronic sterile inflammation that is at the root of what we call inflammaging. And then, and then I want to kind of dive deep into how do we combat that? And how do we change that, reverse that process?

• 32:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm just reviewing now what Mark has already said in his book. So I'm kind of the speaking book for his book. But in his book, he talks about these, these cell types that are, that are associated with biological aging that are called SASP cells. That stands for senescent associated secretary phenotypes. Along when, what does that mean in English? What it means is that these cells-

• 32:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They're called zombie cells in English. They, they don't die and they run around spewing out inflammation, right?

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. So the genes of these cells are the same, but they're communicating a different message because they've been modulated by epigenetic experiences to be shifted into an alarm state. And that alarm state, the body's inflammatory pathways coming from a damaged immune system are there for a purpose, right? To recycle dead tissue, to help defend us against foreign invaders. Inflammation is not like a bad thing. It's a good process. It's when it's uncontrolled simmering, like a burning, like a boiling pot on the stove all the time. That's associated with the development of these- Senesin-associated secretary phenotype-type cells. Zombie cells. Zombie cells.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  So, the question is, once you got a zombie cell, does it zombie that's going to live in your body forever? And the answer is no. We now know that there are processes in the body for which Nobel prizes have been won for the discovery only recently, like the process you talk about, autophagy or mitophagy, that are processes that activate the rejuvenation of cells to give room for new naive cells to come in and replace them. Remember that in our body, our bone marrow is producing on the order of several million new white blood cells every few minutes.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  So, we're constantly remodeling ourselves. So, the question is, those white blood cells that are coming out into our body, are they as good as the ones that were there before? Are they worse or are they better? And rejuvenation is making them better, not making them worse. That's the process that we're really speaking to when we talk about young forever. It doesn't mean that you've completely eradicated aging, because the clock still ticks. But it's removing these accelerants of the process of chronic inflammation that's associated with fibrosis, insulin resistance, cellular proliferation, all the things that we associate with the physiology of aging. And by the way, it's very interesting when the investigators,

• 34:52Speaker 02

  and again, Mark talks about this in the book, investigators that are measuring these age clocks, like Stephen Horvath, who is at UCLA, is one of the world's experts in this area. They're able to actually take photographs of people, and they're able to match the photographs based upon the physiognomy of whether they look old for their age with their biological age clock of their immune system. Right? They're able to show that, yes, there's that. And so you say, well, hold it. Does that mean the inside of my body, if I could take a picture of the inside organs, it'd look not so good, too? Yeah, that's, that's what it's saying, that you're altering the physiognomy, the architecture of your body and its function as a consequence of these processes.

• 35:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  When it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body, the kind with the highest quality, cleanest and most potent ingredients you can get. That's exactly what you'll find at my supplement store, where I've hand-selected each and every product to meet the most rigorous standards for safety, purity and effectiveness. These are the only supplements I recommend to my patients, and they're also what I use myself. Whether you want to optimize longevity or reduce your disease risk, or you're looking to improve your sleep, blood sugar, metabolism, gut health, you name it, drhyman.com has the world's best selection of top-quality, premium supplements, all backed by science and expertly vetted by me, Dr. Mark Hyman. So check out drhyman.com because when it comes to your health, nothing less than the very best will do. That's drhyman.com, D R H Y M A N dot com.

• 36:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical

• 37:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com, and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.