Longevity Hacks: 3 Secrets to a Longer, Healthier Life

For as many problems that still exist in today’s world, in the past, there were a whole lot more question marks than there are now – especially in the field of nutrition and physiology. The biggest reason for this is the science behind how our bodies work and function becoming more sophisticated year after year. Nowadays, we’re able to zero in on how each of our bodies react to certain foods and lifestyle choices, allowing us to personalize our diets and other areas of our lives accordingly. I’m always on the lookout for ways to take my nutrition and the overall performance of my body to the next level. That’s why, for this special episode, I wanted to bring together some of my all-time favorite SOG moments when it comes to this topic. We’ll be hearing from the great Dr. William Li, Dr. David Sinclair, and Dr. Casey Means. Please help me welcome all three of them back to The School of Greatness! In this episode you will learn,The top three foods to boost your immune system. The keys to regulating your blood sugar levels. The importance of taking a blood test to get to know your body chemistry better. How diet and lifestyle is influenced by modern western culture. Why humans are consuming more sugar than we ever have. For more information go to www.lewishowes.com/1510For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960Want to explore more ways to live longer and healthier? Dr. Sten Ekberg – https://link.chtbl.com/1345-podDr. Mark Hyman – https://link.chtbl.com/1345-podDr. Kyle Gillet – https://link.chtbl.com/1315-guestDr. Jason Fung – https://link.chtbl.com/1030-guest Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Casey Means?

  When we eat too much sugar, okay, and these days, the average American

• 0:04Lewis Howes?

  Is eating a lot of sugar.

• 0:05Casey Means?

  Like 100 times more than we were like 100 years ago and through the rest of human history. It's like this massive overload of this substrate. What that does is it causes

• 0:15Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Today's episode is a very powerful one because we've created a top masterclass from the best experts that will break down today's theme to help you improve the quality of your life.

• 0:49Lewis Howes?

  Are all bodies the same when it comes to how foods, I guess, are consumed and assimilated through the body and the bloodstream and all these different things? Or is everybody different where some nutritional foods might impact positively but negatively in other bodies? What should we be knowing about the body?

• 1:06Dr. William Li?

  Yeah, it's a great question. And first of all, I'm a scientist. So I will tell you how you can tell that I'm a scientist is that real scientists tell you, we don't know everything. Okay. And it's the kind of humility that we have to start with because so often you think about, you know, scientists being very smart in things. Real scientists spend their time talking about what we what we don't know, not what we do know. So but you're asking me what we do know. All right. So I'll give you that. So I'll give you that answer. Look, um, our bodies are hardwired to be healthy. So when we're growing in our mom's womb, our body, as we're forming our bones and our heart and our organs and our

• 1:48Dr. William Li?

  limbs, inside the form of the human that's being created, are these health defenses. So you think about the body like a fortress. You know, you've seen a bit, we all seen a medieval fortress, a castle, right? And basically, like, it's a happy community that lives inside there. You got a king, you got a queen, you got a princess, you got everything else going inside there. But that fortress has got to protect itself. So it's designed to repel enemies. It's got a moat, it's got a drawbridge, it's got the little slits you throw, you fire arrows out of. It's got sloping walls, so enemies can't crawl up. It's got traps. And by the way, you know, like in a medieval fort.

• 2:28Dr. William Li?

  Um, the thing that I never realized, having been to quite a few castles, is that when you go into the entrance, there is a hole right above you, and it's called a murder hole. And it's basically if the, if people breached the, the drawbridge, they would just drop rocks, boulders down through that hole. All right. So the body is designed better than a medieval castle. We've got our own defense systems, and there's five of them that I know about, and I helped to kind of put together this picture, partly because I studied the biotechnology. How do you actually treat diseases using these systems? And when you forget about the disease part and you think about the health part, these are the systems, the five systems that maintain our health. So I'll tell you what they are.

• 3:14Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 3:14Dr. William Li?

  First, the health defense system is called angiogenesis, is what I study. Blood vessels, a sixty thousand mile channel that delivers oxygen and nutrients everywhere. Got to have enough of them. Um, uh, or your, our body is in trouble.

• 3:28Lewis Howes?

  So called angiogenesis. This is, this is the channel of blood vessels, or this is the?

• 3:33Dr. William Li?

  This is how, this, this is how the body grows blood vessels.

• 3:36Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 3:37Dr. William Li?

  It is a whole system of growth.

• 3:39Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 3:39Dr. William Li?

  When we have just the right amount of blood vessels, our body is healthy. Now, are you gonna go to work out? All right. You're gonna pump some iron?

• 3:47Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 3:48Dr. William Li?

  Your, your muscles got to grow? Now you need a few more blood vessels. All right. Um, if you skin your knee and fall off a bike, got to heal that wound underneath that scab. You got new blood vessels growing to heal. Now, the body never lets too many blood vessels to grow or causes problems. For example, cancers are forming in all of our bodies because we're filled with these dividing cells and some of them make mistakes. But a microscopic cancer is completely harmless. Because it doesn't have a blood supply. And so our body prevents cancers from growing naturally. By controlling the angiogenesis. So we just got enough for our good cells, not enough for the bad cells. So that's one of our health defenses.

• 4:33Dr. William Li?

  And there are treatments, including ones that I helped to develop, that can cut off the blood supply to cancer by cutting off it by starving it. So that's called anti-angiogenic therapy and the same treat, same approach has been used to prevent blindness. All right. So you don't have blood vessels leaking in the eye. However, turns out that sometimes your body needs a little help. So now you can actually use foods to actually amp up your body's angiogenesis defenses. So that's just one of the defenses.

• 5:02Lewis Howes?

  Okay, that's the first one. What's the second one?

• 5:04Dr. William Li?

  All right. Second one is our stem cells, right? So our, when we were kids, uh, Louis, you know, like our grade school teachers told us, salamanders can regenerate, starfish can regenerate. But people can't regenerate, right?

• 5:19Lewis Howes?

  Wrong. You lose your hand, it's not going to grow back.

• 5:22Dr. William Li?

  Well, it turns out that people do regenerate. We can regenerate that quickly. But we, and we regenerate from the inside out, like a lizard can regenerate like a limb or a tail. But we regenerate our organs continuously, our lung regenerates, our liver regenerates. Okay, uh, the lining of our mouth regenerates. If you've ever eaten a chip, all right, and scratched the inside of your mouth and it hurts. Next day, all fixed, right? Because of regeneration. All right. Now, here's the thing. Uh, um, turns out that the way we naturally regenerate is through stem cells. Not the kind you go to a strip mall to have injected into your knee. But this is the kind that we're born with.

• 6:06Dr. William Li?

  Cause you know, like, when, when we were, when you and I were, but were like sperm and egg, meeting in our mom's womb and dividing. That's what we were. These are stem cells. We were all formed from these primitive cells. That could be anything. It could be an eye, it could be a nose, it could be a heart. And they, and they formed our whole body and, and there's always some overage. Okay. And so you have more than you need to form your, in, into a person. And when we're born, about seven hundred and fifty million stem cells are left over. And they are packed up in a suitcase and stuffed into our bone marrow. All right. And so when we're born, even a little baby, inside their bone marrow, in this hollow of their bones,

• 6:48Dr. William Li?

  are 750 million stem cells, and they are stored there like a, like bullets in a bandolier, waiting for when they're needed, so that when we grow up and we need to be regenerated, you know, you have too many, too much to drink. Now your liver needs to be regenerated. You cut yourself. Now you need to actually heal that wound. These stem cells come flying out of our bone marrow like beans out of a hive.

• 7:13Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 7:13Dr. William Li?

  Who regenerates, renew us from the inside out. And there are biotech efforts that I've been a part of to try to grow new heart, grow new brain, regenerate nerves. Not ready for prime time yet, but it turns out that foods can coax these stem cells out of our bone marrow, so we regenerate faster.

• 7:33Lewis Howes?

  Huh. Which, which foods? This is the second one, but I'm curious which foods can help us?

• 7:37Dr. William Li?

  There, there are, there are a number of them. I'll, I'll give you one, uh, right from the get go is dark chocolate.

• 7:44Lewis Howes?

  Oh, you're speaking my language now. Okay. So dark. Yeah. Can you eat too much dark chocolate? That's the question.

• 7:52Dr. William Li?

  You know, I, I have never seen anything about an overdose of cacao, but I will tell you that cacao has been shown to actually double the number of stem cells flowing in your bloodstream, just by having two cups of hot chocolate made with 80% high flavanol chocolate, dark chocolate.

• 8:11Lewis Howes?

  Come on.

• 8:12Dr. William Li?

  Yeah, it's been done in people, 60 year olds with heart disease.

• 8:16Lewis Howes?

  So wait, what happens when you, when you drink or you, you eat this dark chocolate?

• 8:21Dr. William Li?

  Okay.

• 8:21Lewis Howes?

  What happens?

• 8:22Dr. William Li?

  Yeah. The polyphenols in this dark chocolate that we, we know what they are. They're called proanthocyanidins. So I'm a scientist. So my job is to actually know what are, what the inside chemicals actually are. These are natural chemicals. All right. Most people don't need to know that, but you drink it and it tastes good. That's all you need to know. But, but I'll tell you, these, these natural chemicals found in cacao actually trigger.

• 8:47Dr. William Li?

  A reaction in your body so that they call out the stem cells. So it is literally like bees flying out of a hive can double the number of stem cells. And what's the, what's the practical impact? Well, there was a study done at UCSF in San Francisco that looked at 60 year old men with heart disease. So these are people whose blood vessels were already not doing so well. And their blood flow wasn't going so well either, and their blood vessels were kind of sick. That's kind of the definition of heart disease. By having the stem cells coming out, they were able to actually double the resiliency, the function of their blood vessels. So they, they got better rebound, they're better agility.

• 9:31Dr. William Li?

  Their, their blood vessels are in better shape because their stem cells are regenerating their circulation.

• 9:37Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 9:38Dr. William Li?

  So this is human studies, right? Like most, most of the time you hear about scientists talking about rats or mice or cells. I'm talking about human studies. And that's kind of where we are with food is medicine. It's not the kind of like the guesswork, like we can do serious research to get down to exactly what's actually happening at the human level. So that's the second health defense systems.

• 10:00Lewis Howes?

  Okay, third one?

• 10:02Dr. William Li?

  Third one is our gut microbiome. Now, people have been talking about gut health and microbiome. It's almost like a buzzword these days. And people are saying, well, we can actually scoop your poop and we can actually measure your microbiome. And we could tell you what you need to eat and what you don't need to eat. Again, I'm a scientist, so I will tell you that there are 39 trillion bacteria in our, in the typical body. That's more to stars than in a night sky. All right.

• 10:32Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 10:32Dr. William Li?

  So we barely understand the gut bacteria. But what we do know is that this gut bacteria actually controls our metabolism, communicates with our brain, actually can help us heal from the inside out. And very importantly, our gut bacteria basically lives, if you think of your gut like a garden hose, it's a tube.

• 10:58Dr. William Li?

  And you were to cut a garden hose in half and you look inside it, there's a lining. Okay, uh, the bacteria is inside the hose, but inside the wall of the garden hose. That's where your immune system, seventy percent of our immune system lives inside our gut. So our gut bacteria.

• 11:15Lewis Howes?

  Seventy percent. So yeah. So if you're feeding your gut, a lot of bad foods.

• 11:20Dr. William Li?

  It's probably. Poison, you're poisoning your immune system, you're preventing your gut bacteria. Now, I'll tell you what's interesting about the gut bacteria. Your gut bacteria talks to the immune system right through the walls of the, of your gut. Immune system's in there seventy percent, right? Like a jelly roll, like a, like the jelly in a jelly roll and the gut bacteria is inside. So think about like a college student in a freshman dorm, they are talking to their roommate by pounding on the wall, right? What do you want? What kind of pizza do you want? All right. And they can answer you. And that's basically what our gut bacteria says to our, uh, our immune system. So we gotta keep that gut healthy. By the way, interestingly, uh, and I've done research on this.

• 12:01Dr. William Li?

  Um, certain gut bacteria, uh, can actually signal to your brain. It's a gut-brain axis and, uh, cause your brain to release social hormones. Okay. And can affect your mood. So, you know, when you've got a crappy gut and you feel crummy in your gut, I guarantee you, like, it's not just because you're irritated. It's affecting your brain as well. So.

• 12:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, we had, uh, we had Dr. Emmer and, uh, Mayer on, who has got the gut, I think it's the gut. Brain connection or the gut immune connection or something like that. So he's, he's got a lot of great research on that.

• 12:39Dr. William Li?

  Yeah. So, well, the key thing though is that foods can actually help. Right-size your gut health. Think about like an ecosystem, the Great Barrier Reef. So certain foods can support the ecology, the ecosystem, the Great Barrier Reef, and certain ones actually kill the coral. All right. And so our continuously want to keep it in good shape. All the way through our lives. And by the way, even, uh, conditions like autism, Alzheimer's and schizophrenia. Are all now seemingly connected to our gut bacteria.

• 13:14Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 13:15Dr. William Li?

  Yeah.

• 13:15Lewis Howes?

  Now, is there a way if someone? Has those, are they pretty easy to reverse though, or is that hard?

• 13:22Dr. William Li?

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

• 14:01Dr. William Li?

  So the key though, is that foods can actually influence our gut bacteria, either good bacteria or bad bacteria. So that's important. Uh, so that's a, that's a third health defense system.

• 14:13Lewis Howes?

  Okay. Okay. So at the first, uh,

• 14:16Dr. William Li?

  Antigenesis, number one.

• 14:17Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 14:18Dr. William Li?

  Stem cells, number two. Gut microbiome, number three.

• 14:22Lewis Howes?

  Okay. The fourth one?

• 14:23Dr. William Li?

  Number four, our DNA. Now, if you watch CSI, DNA is just sort of like a genetic fingerprint, a code that you can find on a crime scene, or if you're actually trying to do ancestry, look for your ancestors, you figure out how, how much of you is Neanderthal, right?

• 14:44Lewis Howes?

  I think I was 1% Neanderthal when I did it, yes.

• 14:47Dr. William Li?

  Uh, so the, the, the key though, is it's DNA is a lot more than our genetic code. It actually protects us from the environment. Now, what am I, what do I mean by that? Well, you know how if we are exposed to, uh, we get sunburn, ultraviolet light, it damages your DNA and what happens? Cancer, skin cancer, right? Um, if you inhale lots of fumes from a chemical plant. It's going to actually damage your DNA in your lungs. You get lung cancer, right? But think about it, if you are in Los Angeles and you're driving on the I-10, or if you're actually just walking on a beach, you are actually getting ultraviolet radiation. So how come we don't get skin cancer all the time?

• 15:31Dr. William Li?

  Because our DNA is hardwired to fix itself from damage. And so the DNA is a protective mechanism from the environment. I always tell people, when you're pumping gas, if you still drive a gas vehicle as opposed to an EV, I always ask people, do you stand upwind or downwind? What do you do? Are you upwind or downwind? Do you know?

• 15:54Lewis Howes?

  Up, up, well, upwind, right? So you're not getting the fumes in. Is that what you mean?

• 15:59Dr. William Li?

  Right, right, right. Well, if you're standing downwind, you can smell the fumes, right? And if you're smelling the fumes, you are poisoning the DNA in your lung. So how come we don't develop lung cancer after pumping gas? Because our DNA is hardwired to fix itself. And so our DNA is sort of like a self-defense mechanism against the environment. Radon from your basement, okay? Offgassing from the, from the new car you just got, or the Uber that you're riding in, you know, or the furniture that you got, right? So like, this is, this is this incredible defense mechanism against our environment. And then, and foods can actually speed up the repair, help fix holes that are in our DNA.

• 16:42Dr. William Li?

  And then the other kind of pièce de résistance for our DNA's defense is that there's something called a telomere. I don't know if you've ever had anybody on your show talk about telomeres.

• 16:51Lewis Howes?

  Telomeres?

• 16:52Dr. William Li?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 16:53Dr. William Li?

  These are, these are-

• 16:55Lewis Howes?

  See if you're, the longer the telomere, the, the, the longer you can live or something, or they can-

• 16:59Dr. William Li?

  Right. Well, well, I'll tell you basically what the, you know, like to, to give a, to remind you, to remind your listeners and viewers. Basically, if your DNA is like a shoelace, the telomere is like the little plastic cap at the end of the shoelace. And over time, that little cap kind of wears down, just like on a shoelace. And you know, when they, when that cap is gone, man, that your shoelace just falls apart. And that's what happens to our DNA. So we need that cap. That's called a telomere, and it burns down like a life fuse. So you know, like Mission Impossible? Like the fuse, right? So this thing is burning down, and when it burns down, that's it. Your cell's done. So what you want to do is to slow down your cellular aging.

• 17:42Dr. William Li?

  Harsh things that you do to your body, smoking cigarettes, being a couch potato, being exposed to damaging oxidative stress, actually just being stressed out like we are now with this frigging pandemic. Those things all shorten our telomeres. They they burn the fuse faster.

• 17:58Lewis Howes?

  Stress.

• 17:59Dr. William Li?

  But yeah, but foods can slow it down and some foods can reverse it and lengthen the telomere. Which is really cool for from an aging perspective, right?

• 18:10Lewis Howes?

  What are those, what are those top three foods that help lengthen the telomeres?

• 18:14Dr. William Li?

  Green tea is one of them. Coffee. I got it. I got it. Yeah, it's amazing. I got, I got a little, I used to live in Italy. And I just got into this habit of drinking espresso. So I got a little cup here. Amazingly, coffee actually lengthens your telomere.

• 18:30Lewis Howes?

  Come on.

• 18:31Dr. William Li?

  I kid you not, it's, it's quite amazing. And leafy greens, some of the polyphenols of leafy greens can also slow down and some of them actually look like they can lengthen the telomeres as well. So the key thing is that we, you know, we are not just hapless pawns of aging. We can actually do something about it. And we can also fight against our environment because look, the, the tax that we pay for being on planet earth is we're exposed to stuff all the time. And we need to, we count on our body's health defenses to fix it. So that's a

• 19:09Dr. William Li?

  fourth defense. And our fifth defense is our immune system, which, you know, after two years, the, over the last two years, we all know how important our immune system is. But what have I told you that your immune system is so powerful that when it's in its best shape, even when you're 80 years old, it is strong enough to fight cancer. In fact, it can even wipe out metastatic cancer that's spread all over your body. That's how strong your immune system is if you give it the chance. And so here's what the immune system does. It's like an army of super soldiers. So Rangers, SEALs, as you know,

• 19:49Dr. William Li?

  Marines, Special Forces, they're all, they've all got, these are all parts of the immune system, all cells of the immune system. And like the Special Forces, they got their own weapons, their own training, their own tactics, but they all work together. For, you know, the collective good. And what happens is that when you've got good, strong defenses, you can fight off invaders from the outside, bacteria and viruses, for example. And but it's not just outside invaders. You got inside invaders as well. And those little microscopic cancers are inside invaders. And so our immune system patrols our body. Okay, cops on a beat. And they're looking for things that don't look right. And you see that microscopic cancer that is, it can't grow because it doesn't have a blood vessel,

• 20:34Dr. William Li?

  but blood vessels feeding it, angiogenesis. Basically, if the immune system goes there and takes them right out. Okay, and takes a sniper shot and it's gone. And so that's why we got to protect our immune system. And there are lots of foods that can actually boost our immunity as well.

• 20:48Lewis Howes?

  What would be those, what would be those top three that boost the immune system?

• 20:52Dr. William Li?

  Uh, blueberries are a food that definitely boosts the immune system. It's in young people as well as older people. Uh, uh, they, they boost the natural killer cells, which is really cool. Um, broccoli sprouts can boost our immune system. Now, these are the three day old, these are like the three day old sprouts, right?

• 21:13Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 21:14Dr. William Li?

  Okay, I mean, okay, here's something, here's something most people don't know. The big broccoli that, when we eat broccoli, we really, you know, our moms told us to eat the treetops, right? Those, they're all the same. You go to the freezer section of a grocery store and you buy some frozen broccoli, and they all look the same. They're all the same size. That's not really what broccoli looks like. If you go to the farmer's market and you see a, a real broccoli is this gigantic stem with a little bit of treetop. Okay, so what's in a broccoli? It's called sulforaphane. So that's what gives broccoli that unique taste of broccoli. It's a little sulfurous, okay? So you got to put a little olive oil, a little bit of garlic, you know, and you could saute it up.

• 21:58Dr. William Li?

  Okay, so the sulforaphanes. We've done research now, looking at what, what's in the treetops. And it turns out that these sulforaphanes can starve cancer. Anti-angiogenic, help, help your body, cut off the blood supply to cancer. Broccoli tree tops have it. But guess what? The stalk of the broccoli has twice as much of the good stuff than the tree tops. Eat the stalks. Eat the stalks. So man, like if you don't want to eat, if you don't want to saute the stalks, like a lot of cultures will just cut the stalks and saute them. Stick it in a blender. You can make it into a smoothie or make a soup out of it. You know, and so there's a lot of good things you can do. Put a little broccoli stem, little oregano powder, you know, you can do lighter, light, light it right up, a little turmeric, it'll be really good.

• 22:42Dr. William Li?

  Um, a smoothie or a soup. However, here's the thing. So this matches adult broccoli having these sulforaphanes. Well, it turns out that these big broccoli plants used to be sprouts. And the sprouts pretty much were born or sprouted from the seed with all the sulforaphanes it's ever gonna have. All right. So when it gets bigger, it just gets distributed with the stalk closer to the ground, having more of it, of course. But the broccoli sprouts have 100 times more. Wow. Of the sulforaphanes, a good stuff as a grown up broccoli. So sprouts, broccoli sprouts. Now, studies have been done to show that if you give people a flu shot,

• 23:26Dr. William Li?

  people in the winter should get a flu shot. So you don't get the flu. All right. Uh, just go to your drugstore to get one. Uh, it turns out that if you, uh, people, they did a study looking at, uh, people getting the flu shot and they gave half the people a little shake made with broccoli sprouts. And the other group just got a placebo. And the people who got the broccoli sprout shake and a flu shot, their beneficial response of their immune system is 22 times higher. Huh. Like it totally rocked if they actually had, um, a broccoli sprout shake. So that's not food versus medicine. That is food and medicine, which is really cool.

• 24:08Lewis Howes?

  Blood sugar management or control is one of the key factors of either being healthy or potentially linking to one of these other, I guess, diseases. Is that right?

• 24:19Casey Means?

  That's right. Yeah. And what it really comes down to, which kind of gets at your question of what is metabolism? Metabolism is fundamentally the way that we make energy in the body. So, we eat food and, you know, food has, you know, fat and glucose in it. And either fat or glucose, glucose is sugar, can be used to convert into a type of energy that our cells can use, which is called ATP. So, we take in this substrate, but we have to convert it through our mitochondria in our cells to a form of energy we can use, a currency that our body understands and can use. That process of conversion is metabolism. And this is happening in every single one of the 37 trillion cells in our body. And

• 25:04Casey Means?

  it has to work properly.

• 25:06Lewis Howes?

  So, break it down for me then. Fat or glucose, or I guess carbohydrates, enters the body through the foods we're eating, right? What happens after that? How is it processed in the body? Through the cells, through the mitochondria? How is it processed?

• 25:21Casey Means?

  Yeah. So, looking at carbohydrates, for instance, they go into our digestive tract, they're broken down and absorbed into the bloodstream, broken down into simple sugars like glucose and fructose. These go into the bloodstream. And let's say we're talking about glucose, which is blood sugar. This signals to the body, particularly an organ called the pancreas, to release insulin, which is a hormone. That hormone allows you to take that sugar out of the bloodstream, through the cell membrane, into the cell. Once it's inside the cell, it's broken down even further and then goes into the mitochondria to be, go through a chemical processing that then creates ATP, which is this molecule that

• 26:02Casey Means?

  can be then used to essentially power all the millions of cellular processes that are happening every second.

• 26:09Lewis Howes?

  So, ATP is the power. Is the fuel?

• 26:12Casey Means?

  It's the fuel. It's the battery in our body.

• 26:14Lewis Howes?

  Okay. And so, the way it's processed, is it's based on the foods we eat, whether it be fat or sugar that comes through? Does that determine how, the quality of the energy? Or what does that mean within, is it all equally the same when it converts an ATP? Or?

• 26:31Casey Means?

  Well, I think the way to think about it is to really focus on the mitochondria.

• 26:34Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 26:34Casey Means?

  This is the energy factory of the cell. This is the powerhouse of the cell. And the thing that people really need to understand is that our diet and our lifestyle in the modern Western world, so past 50 to 100 years, so much of it is actually damaging the mitochondria of our cell and creating problems in that conversion process. So for instance, when we eat too much sugar, okay? And these days, the average American-

• 27:00Lewis Howes?

  Is eating a lot of sugar.

• 27:01Casey Means?

  Like 100 times more than we were like 100 years ago and through the rest of human history. It's like this massive overload of this substrate. What that does is it causes stress on the mitochondria and creates damage. And one analogy I sometimes use is like, imagine you had a factory that was making something like, like cheese and like, all of a sudden you get like 100 times more of like the raw product, like milk, delivered to the factory. The, the workers would be like, we don't know where to put this. We can't work. Like they go on strike. There's nowhere to store it. There's no refrigerators. It would all go bad. All of a sudden, you actually produce less cheese, even though you have more substrate, you know?

• 27:39Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 27:39Casey Means?

  And so it's like, we are giving so much of the substrate to the body that it's gumming up the system. It's breaking down the factory and creating problems. And the molecular way this is happening is that each time you have these glucose spikes from eating these refined products or added sugars, your bodies are releasing more of that insulin. It's saying, okay, more glucose in the bloodstream, so we have to produce more insulin to get it out of the bloodstream. And over time, the body sees all this insulin circulating and it's like, we can't bring more of this into the cell. There's too much. And so it actually puts up a block, which is called insulin resistance, which is that cellular process that leads you towards problems like diabetes. And so what's happening now is the body-

• 28:20Lewis Howes?

  And that's why you're storing fat or you're storing other dead cells that you don't need to keep in the body, I guess, right?

• 28:26Casey Means?

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

• 29:10Casey Means?

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

• 29:52Casey Means?

  So we're thinking about things like pesticides and a lot of the fragrances in our personal care products and a lot of the fragrances and chemicals in our home care products. These things actually go into our bodies, damage our mitochondria, make it difficult to produce energy effectively. Chronic stress can damage our mitochondria through cortisol and through our stress hormones. So it's interesting to think about how all these different aspects of modern life fundamentally feed down into damaging this precious part of our cell that creates energy. And when we have The mitochondria. The mitochondria. And when we have problems creating energy in our body,

• 30:32Casey Means?

  this can happen in any cell type. Again, 37 trillion cells, dozens of organs in the body. Where this is showing up most prominently in the body is where you're going to see symptoms. And this is why metabolic dysfunction and blood sugar dysregulation can look like so many different things. It can masquerade as so many different symptoms. And in the conventional system, we see those all as separate. But when we think about it as, this is actually just where A fundamental core problem is showing up in different cell types. And so if you can address that, you can potentially kind of melt a lot of things away. So just as some concrete examples, if metabolic dysfunction is showing up in the blood vessels, well, if it's sort of most prominently showing up in the penis, that could look like erectile dysfunction.

• 31:17Casey Means?

  If it's happening in the heart, it could look like, you know, heart disease. If it's happening in the liver, it could look like fatty liver disease. If it's happening in the ovaries, it could look like polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is the leading cause of infertility in the United States, which is a metabolic problem. And if it's happening in the brain, it could look like Alzheimer's dementia. And so it's got all these different faces, but fundamentally is rooted in a core dysfunction in how our body is converting food to energy. And, and a lot of that has to do with this chronic overnutrition, overloading our cells with too much to process, gumming up these systems, and then the many other lifestyle factors like toxins, stress, sleep deprivation,

• 32:01Casey Means?

  and sedentary behavior that can also hurt the mitochondria.

• 32:05Lewis Howes?

  Right. So blood sugar management and metabolism management, is that right? So the main things we're just thinking about? How does blood sugar and metabolism work together?

• 32:14Casey Means?

  Yeah. So, so the way that those sort of things link up is that if your blood sugar is quite erratic, like let's say it's going up and down in big spikes and valleys.

• 32:23Lewis Howes?

  Every day, yeah. You're having lots of sugar, you're, yeah, just eating poorly, you're stressed, you're overwhelmed.

• 32:28Casey Means?

  Yeah. And, and the majority of foods on the shelves in our grocery stores now have added sugar, like well over 60%. So it's not unusual for an American to be on that blood sugar roller coaster, up, down, up, down, up, down. And that's called glycemic variability. And that process of glycemic variability is very damaging to our metabolism. Through the, through the mechanisms, you know, we spoke about of causing insulin resistance by stressing the body to make too much insulin over and over. But that, those high blood sugar spikes in their own right can cause damage as well. When your blood sugar acutely goes really high, like after eating a pop tart or eating a pastry or something like that, or a big bowl of pasta,

• 33:13Casey Means?

  that spike can lead to inflammation. It can lead to oxidative stress because of the way that it's overwhelming our systems and creating free radicals. It can also cause a process called glycation, which is where sugar sticks to things in the body. And so if you can imagine, if your concentration of blood sugar is really high, it's kind of going to just stick to things more, like your blood vessels and proteins. And that's not good. That's like a signal for the body that something's wrong. And so all of these things kind of coalesce to just creating problems. So the more that we can minimize our glycemic variability and go from spikes and valleys to more gentle rolling hills, the better we are, the better we're going to basically

• 33:58Casey Means?

  be treating our cells. And it's not just, it's not just the sort of like cellular optimization we're trying to do. It's also the way you feel. I think a lot of us have had that experience where we have a really high carb meal, a big dessert, and we feel like we kind of have a crash afterwards. It's like that post-meal crash. We feel lethargic, like we may need to have another cup of coffee, or even feel jittery after it, like a big, high carb meal. That's, we really understand how that works. The body sees a huge load of glucose from a high carb meal. The body then surges out that insulin, overcompensates, soaks up all that glucose, and you crash.

• 34:39Casey Means?

  And in that crash state is when we feel fatigue, potentially some anxiety, and it's when people usually feel cravings. So by learning- You want more when you crash. You want more to bring yourself back up because you've kind of crashed. It's just up and down. And then you're on the vicious cycle. And I think the majority of American bodies are on that cycle. Because you think about what we eat. It's like breakfast, it's cereal, juice, toast, Pop-Tarts, pastries, you know, sweetened coffee beverages. That's all refined sugar and refined grains. Then you go to lunch, and it's bread, tortillas, wraps, chips, you know, all of that stuff. And then you go to dinner, pasta, potatoes, whatever. And then it's dessert.

• 35:20Casey Means?

  And it's like, if you're not, if you're just going along the normal American cultural treadmill of what's normal to eat, you're on a glucose roller coaster. And that means that your day might be highly labile in terms of the energy, mood, performance, cravings. And so- Learning just simple ways to balance out that glucose roller coaster can be an amazing life hack and really a superpower for essentially getting your day under better control, making you feel better in the moment.

• 35:51Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 35:54Lewis Howes?

  How much does alcohol, smoking, or marijuana, or psychedelics actually affect lifespan? Do we have enough research on this?

• 36:02Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, we do on tobacco smoking. Obviously, it's very clear that's a decade off your life. And what's interesting is that what we're learning about these various things that you can do to hurt yourself or to protect yourself is that what's happening is that your body is aging at a different rate. So smokers, you can measure it, are older biologically than people who've never smoked. And it's why they look older, too.

• 36:26Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 36:26Dr. David Sinclair?

  We can measure that now. In my lab, if I took your blood, I could tell you how old you are biologically, not just your chronological.

• 36:31Lewis Howes?

  I want to do that. I saw you post this on Instagram that you're like 46. Is that right? Or you're 42? Or what is it?

• 36:37Dr. David Sinclair?

  I went down there, what was it, 44, I think, or 42. It bounces around, but it's usually a decade younger than I.

• 36:43Lewis Howes?

  That's cool. So what do you do? You take a blood sample? Like, and then you what? Measure the blood?

• 36:50Dr. David Sinclair?

  There's two ways of doing it. There's one company that I advise called InsideTracker, and that's what I use.

• 36:55Lewis Howes?

  I've had that, too, yeah.

• 36:56Dr. David Sinclair?

  You've done that, yeah? So they come to your home, or you donate, and then you get this readout of, I think it's 40 different parameters, and they use an algorithm and tell you how old you are. So I'm 42 or something like that. I'm in the top 2% of people from my age for youthfulness. So I'm happy with that.

• 37:14Lewis Howes?

  Just dusted off a little brag over there. I like it, yeah.

• 37:16Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, well.

• 37:17Lewis Howes?

  You better be if you're researching this and the top scientists in the world on this.

• 37:21Dr. David Sinclair?

  Oh, yeah. I don't like to brag. That's not what Australians and scientists do. But what I do want to say is I use my body as an experiment.

• 37:29Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Dr. David Sinclair?

  And try to be a role model. And I've been optimizing my lifestyle for 20 years now, based on this feedback from InsideTracker for the last 12, 13 years.

• 37:39Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 37:39Dr. David Sinclair?

  And you can see the graphs of things. Going out of the optimal zone and then I make a change based on science and it comes back or even better.

• 37:46Lewis Howes?

  So we know from smokers that their biological age is older when they smoke is what you're saying, right?

• 37:52Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, well, that's one test. The insight tracker test is what I do routinely every few months. But there's a new type of test that my colleagues and in my lab we've developed. It's called the DNA methylation test. It's also known as the Horvath test, named after my friend Stephen Horvath at UCLA. The way to think of this is if you've ever heard of the epigenome.

• 38:12Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh, I've heard of that.

• 38:13Dr. David Sinclair?

  These are the the control systems that control our DNA. It turns out that that system you can measure. It's chemicals on your DNA that change over time predictably. And we've just developed a way to measure that 100 times cheaper than it was before. And I'm gonna bring this test to the public.

• 38:31Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 38:32Dr. David Sinclair?

  So people can test their biological age.

• 38:34Lewis Howes?

  At home or something?

• 38:35Dr. David Sinclair?

  It should be a cheek swab. That's what we're developing.

• 38:37Lewis Howes?

  So you don't have to prick or take blood or anything? You do a cheek swab?

• 38:40Dr. David Sinclair?

  Exactly.

• 38:41Lewis Howes?

  And then you ship it in or something?

• 38:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, you'll post it in and then you get hopefully just a week later or less, here's your credit score for your body.

• 38:47Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 38:48Dr. David Sinclair?

  And then even better, here's how you how you slow it down or reverse it based on everything we know about you.

• 38:54Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that's cool.

• 38:55Dr. David Sinclair?

  And we'll take you on that journey. So do this, eat this, swallow this.

• 38:59Lewis Howes?

  That is cool. I gotta take that test.

• 39:02Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, well, you can get on the waitlist if you want.

• 39:05Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 39:06Dr. David Sinclair?

  There's a website because we are taking names right now. We may do some studies with early adopters too.

• 39:12Lewis Howes?

  That's cool. Where's the waitlist for that?

• 39:14Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's called TALLY.

• 39:15Lewis Howes?

  T A L L Y.

• 39:17Dr. David Sinclair?

  Tallyhealth.com. And the reason I'm excited about it is it's very hard to focus on what works because we have no idea. You exercise, you hope that it's good.

• 39:25Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 39:26Dr. David Sinclair?

  Is it too much, too little? If I eat this, does it help me? We need a dashboard for our bodies and that's what that's what these give you.

• 39:32Lewis Howes?

  That is really cool. Okay, so we know that smoking makes you age biologically. That's why it makes you look older, smoking. What about drinking alcohol? We've talked about wine and the substance in wine that can be supportive, but. Alcohol in general, does that affect biological age and aging?

• 39:54Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, it's all, it all depends on quantity.

• 39:57Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha.

• 39:57Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, one glass a day, most doctors would say, especially if it's red wine, it's fine. And the alcohol actually can help with cut, the cardiovascular system.

• 40:04Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 40:05Dr. David Sinclair?

  Reduces, uh, bad cholesterol and more importantly raises the, the good cholesterol HDL.

• 40:10Lewis Howes?

  This is for red wine?

• 40:11Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, and the alcohol in white wine does a little bit of good too.

• 40:14Lewis Howes?

  Okay, but beer?

• 40:15Dr. David Sinclair?

  So beer will raise the levels of uric acid, which is a breakdown product of, uh, a protein breakdown product that you can pee out.

• 40:27Dr. David Sinclair?

  But if you have too much beer and other types of food that contain a lot of this type of protein, you will raise your uric acid level. So why does that matter? It's being, becoming very clear that if you have high uric acid levels, your body will age faster.

• 40:43Lewis Howes?

  We just had, uh, Dr. David Perlmutter on.

• 40:45Dr. David Sinclair?

  Exactly.

• 40:46Lewis Howes?

  Who has a book about uric acid, talking about like, this is one of the, the root causes of poor health.

• 40:52Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 40:52Lewis Howes?

  And aging faster and things like that, so.

• 40:55Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, I've talked to him a lot.

• 40:56Lewis Howes?

  You talk to him a lot?

• 40:57Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, yeah, I actually was, was, uh, one of the first people to read his book before it came out.

• 41:01Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, it's really good.

• 41:02Dr. David Sinclair?

  It blew my mind.

• 41:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 41:03Dr. David Sinclair?

  I now measure my uric acid levels. You can get little test strips, uh, you can just buy them like usual.

• 41:09Lewis Howes?

  You just pee on it?

• 41:09Dr. David Sinclair?

  No, you spit on it and 10 seconds later you see.

• 41:13Lewis Howes?

  You see your acid levels.

• 41:14Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 41:15Lewis Howes?

  And so the, the lower the level, the better.

• 41:18Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right.

• 41:18Lewis Howes?

  The higher the level means there's risk for what?

• 41:22Dr. David Sinclair?

  Everything, according to David, it's really bad for cancers and heart disease mainly. But, uh, I, I think he's right, that it's a, it's a sign of, of accelerated aging.

• 41:31Lewis Howes?

  The higher the uric level, the faster you're going to be aging.

• 41:35Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 41:36Lewis Howes?

  And a larger amount of consumption of alcohol, specifically beer, I'm hearing, raises that level.

• 41:44Dr. David Sinclair?

  Beer in particular, has a lot of the chemicals in it that will raise uric acid, unfortunately. And that, and that's from David Perlmutter. He gave me a list of foods and I saw beer on there, like, oh, that sucks.

• 41:54Lewis Howes?

  Now, is, is there any benefit to beer in biology, in science? Does it help you improve the quality of your health? Your, is your brain get better? Does your, your body, your system get better? Does it make you younger at all? Or are there no benefits to beer biologically and in your brain?

• 42:14Dr. David Sinclair?

  There are benefits because there's alcohol in there and a little bit of alcohol is good for your cardiovascular system, but.

• 42:21Lewis Howes?

  But there's other things that's good for your cardiovascular system too, right?

• 42:23Dr. David Sinclair?

  For sure.

• 42:24Lewis Howes?

  That you don't, that you don't need.

• 42:25Dr. David Sinclair?

  So beer on the, on the list of alcohols is at the bottom for health.

• 42:29Lewis Howes?

  Got it.

• 42:29Dr. David Sinclair?

  Mostly, unless it's full of sugar, you know, like those very sweet wines, I think would be a problem. But beer does have a lot of vitamin B, B group vitamins, B3, tons of it.

• 42:40Lewis Howes?

  But you can get that in other ways too.

• 42:41Dr. David Sinclair?

  You can, so. What can you do? I mean, you've got to live as well.

• 42:45Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 42:46Dr. David Sinclair?

  I don't prescribe a life that's, that's prolonging and feels longer. You've got to live a little.

• 42:52Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. Enjoyment, the enjoyment of the richness of life, yeah.

• 42:55Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right, though I am trying not to drink alcohol these days.

• 42:58Lewis Howes?

  I've never been drunk in my life.

• 43:00Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, amazing.

• 43:00Lewis Howes?

  Never been drunk. I don't find it amazing because I just never found the, the, I never had the desire to do it. I never, I like tasted some when I was 16 and I was like, I don't understand why I would ever drink this. Plus it was also for me, maybe that's one of the reasons in your mind I look younger, I look like I haven't aged more, is because I found it as a, an advantage in sports. When everyone else was drinking, I was like, oh, it's weakening their immune system, it's making them slower. Mentally, this will give me an edge in athletics. They were hungover after games in practice and I was like, I'm going to be sharp. And so I just kept on with it. I was like, this is just going to make me sharper.

• 43:42Lewis Howes?

  Now, I have my other vice, I use, you know, sugar in other ways is my vice, so I'm not perfect, but um, does alcohol make you look older too?

• 43:53Dr. David Sinclair?

  In excess.

• 43:53Lewis Howes?

  In excess, got you.

• 43:54Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, yeah. So a little bit every day is, is okay, a little bit, but most doctors, um, like physicians would say, if you overdo it, you, you will age. And actually what, what you do as a researcher is you look at people who live a long time and compare them to either their twin. Which has been done, or family members.

• 44:12Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 44:12Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, and actually, how you live your life has a massive impact on how long you live. There's a twin study, they took identical twins, genetically identical, uh, in Denmark, and they said, okay, let's look at them through their life. And there were massive differences in how they looked and how they, how long they lived. And when they went back to see what the causes were, they could figure out, first of all, that eighty percent of their lifespan was determined by how they lived, not their genetics.

• 44:42Lewis Howes?

  You mean, the way they felt about themselves, the people they hung out with, their environment, the activities they took on, or what do you mean?

• 44:49Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, mostly their lifestyle, what they ate, did they smoke, did they drink, did they exercise?

• 44:53Lewis Howes?

  Did they sleep well, all that stuff?

• 44:54Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right. And those that did all the good things, the same genetics, twins, born the same day, one could live ten years longer than the other.

• 45:02Lewis Howes?

  Now, this is what I'm curious about, were these twins hanging out all the time? Or were they, because usually when you're hanging out with someone all the time, you pick up the similar habits, right? You pick up a similar lifestyle habit, as your parents, as your partner, and you kind of eat the same things. It's really hard to be like, I'm gonna drink every day, and I'm not gonna drink every day, if you're living together and in the same room, right?

• 45:23Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, yeah, I don't know that. Maybe they, they got separated at birth or something.

• 45:27Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 45:28Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, but it does tell you a lot, that the fact that eighty percent of our future health is in our own hands is, is liberating.

• 45:33Lewis Howes?

  That's really cool.

• 45:34Dr. David Sinclair?

  Because often we think, ah, it's not gonna make a big difference. It really makes a big difference, how you live your life. Every day, focus on that. And one thing that I do is, I look at my future self, and I ask myself, what's that guy saying to me today, if he could speak to me?

• 45:49Lewis Howes?

  What's he saying? Please don't eat that.

• 45:50Dr. David Sinclair?

  Exactly.

• 45:51Lewis Howes?

  Please don't drink that anymore. You had enough, like, you're gonna hurt me in ten years.

• 45:55Dr. David Sinclair?

  That's how you need to think about it.

• 45:56Lewis Howes?

  It's coaching yourself ten, twenty, thirty years out.

• 45:59Dr. David Sinclair?

  Right.

• 46:00Lewis Howes?

  It's interesting, I asked David Perlmutter, I said, what are some things you wish you would have done young, sooner, to improve the quality of your health? And he was like, Flossing. He was like, he's like, I, and I didn't go deeper into that, but I remember him saying that. I was like, there's wisdom in whatever it is. Maybe he had some gum issues or something he had to deal with at one point that was really affecting him for a year or two. I don't know. I'm just making this up. But if he can go back, he'd be like, I wish you would have done this better. So I didn't have to suffer later. Right?

• 46:30Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah.

• 46:31Lewis Howes?

  What are the things you've done or you're doing now that your 10 year old self will be so happy for? Letting he was in front of you right now, he'd just be hugging you and high fiving you nonstop. The things you're doing that he will appreciate in 10 years. And then what are a few things that he's gonna say, man, I really wish you wouldn't do that right now?

• 46:51Dr. David Sinclair?

  Oh, yeah. Okay. All right. So, um, let's see. So I'm, so I measure myself so I can speak scientifically, not just that it makes me feel good. Uh, it's the, the one meal, one main meal a day.

• 47:04Lewis Howes?

  He would be grateful for.

• 47:05Dr. David Sinclair?

  I'm sure of it. And, and as a result, I'm leaner and, uh, you know, more ripped. I hate to say that word.

• 47:13Lewis Howes?

  You look lean.

• 47:14Dr. David Sinclair?

  I am lean.

• 47:15Lewis Howes?

  You look really lean.

• 47:15Dr. David Sinclair?

  I've gone over the last two years from 150 pounds to 133.

• 47:20Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you look leaner even from when I, the first time I had you on. Your face is leaner and chiseled.

• 47:26Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah. I don't think I can lose any, I wanna lose anymore.

• 47:28Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Dr. David Sinclair?

  I need to go back to the gym and do a little bit more.

• 47:32Lewis Howes?

  So the one meal a day, but you weren't doing one meal a day, what, five, 10 years ago?

• 47:36Dr. David Sinclair?

  No, I only started during the pandemic. Um, yeah, this is new for me too. It's hard, actually. When you begin.

• 47:43Lewis Howes?

  Very hard.

• 47:43Dr. David Sinclair?

  You feel hungry because you've got those crashes that make you really hungry and you've got this and, um, hormone called ghrelin that makes you hungry. But once you get through that, it takes about three weeks. So anyone who, who tries it, make sure that you don't give up early. Just power through and then your liver will wake up.

• 47:59Lewis Howes?

  One main meal a day.

• 48:00Dr. David Sinclair?

  So that's one. Um, the other thing I, I think that he will be happy is don't eat sugary foods.

• 48:09Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, don't eat that cake. So at a restaurant, when they said you want dessert, I always say no. But then I'm hoping that someone at the table orders what I want. But that's all you, all I need. I need to taste it. I don't need to fill myself with a cake.

• 48:24Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. Because you still want to enjoy your life and live a full life, but you don't want to in 10 years be like, why do they eat cake every day?

• 48:33Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's not worth it.

• 48:34Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 48:35Dr. David Sinclair?

  Really. Your future self will thank you for it.

• 48:39Dr. David Sinclair?

  Lifting weights, I know you do that, so I need to do more of that. I got a standing desk. So most of the day I'm standing, which is great. Again, you have to get used to it. You'll feel tired for the first few weeks.

• 48:50Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 48:51Dr. David Sinclair?

  Your legs will.

• 48:54Dr. David Sinclair?

  I'm now mostly focused on eating plants.

• 48:59Lewis Howes?

  When did you start that?

• 49:00Dr. David Sinclair?

  That's recently.

• 49:02Lewis Howes?

  Eating mostly plants?

• 49:03Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, I've switched. I love meat. I wish that I could eat more. But you just got to look at the science. There's some really good studies of thousands of people. You just look at how long people live and what they eat. And I mean, it's not even an argument.

• 49:16Lewis Howes?

  But there's so many people that bring in the argument, well, all these people have cured these diseases or whatever, you know, gotten rid of these things from meat only and. But people make the argument, right? Like you see it online, people making the argument for meat, meat, meat. So how, where are they finding these research studies of people living longer on a only meat diet?

• 49:35Dr. David Sinclair?

  I don't know.

• 49:36Lewis Howes?

  But you're not seeing them. You're not seeing studies of anyone that lives over 100 that all they do is eat meat.

• 49:42Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, there might be one person or two, but when you look at 10,000 people, what they eat. It's, it's the vegan and the pescatarian that win out.

• 49:50Lewis Howes?

  In the blue zones, right?

• 49:52Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, and the numbers are something like that. You drop it down to you've got 88% less chance. Or actually, it's 12% chance for most diseases. So most diseases are protected by these diets.

• 50:04Lewis Howes?

  Really? Wait a minute, 80% less chance of what?

• 50:08Dr. David Sinclair?

  Of dying at any one point in the age range of the study.

• 50:12Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 50:13Dr. David Sinclair?

  Which is.

• 50:15Lewis Howes?

  By being a pescatarian.

• 50:17Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, yeah. So it's vegan pescatarian, those are the best. Then above that would be, actually, pescatarian was better than vegetarian. A little bit of meat seemed to help, but it has to be fish.

• 50:27Lewis Howes?

  With the omega threes in there, right?

• 50:29Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah, and particularly oleic acid's good, which is found in avocados and olive oil. That activates one of the protective enzymes that we study in the lab.

• 50:39Lewis Howes?

  Which acid?

• 50:40Dr. David Sinclair?

  Oleic, O L E I C.

• 50:43Lewis Howes?

  What is some of that, but not a lot of that?

• 50:45Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's a mono unsaturated fatty acid or a MOFA. If you have a bit of olive oil, there's a supplement online that I get that has high levels of oleic acid in it that I take every day.

• 50:55Lewis Howes?

  Okay, cool.

• 50:56Dr. David Sinclair?

  With the DHA and EPA.

• 50:58Lewis Howes?

  All that stuff, yeah.

• 50:59Dr. David Sinclair?

  Good stuff.

• 50:59Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 51:00Dr. David Sinclair?

  So that's my, that's my fish intake as a pill.

• 51:02Lewis Howes?

  You don't eat fish? Or you eat very little?

• 51:04Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, you know, I'm evolving my diet. So I've, I've gone from a Mediterranean diet over the last 10 years to the last two, three months to all plant-based, no dairy, and yeah, no meat. And I'm just seeing what happens to my body. I'm measuring things. It's an experiment.

• 51:23Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 51:23Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's not a philosophy. And if things don't work out biologically, I'll go back. I mean, I'd love to go back to a steak. I'm Australian after all. But you know, I'm driven by science and that's all it is.

• 51:34Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Okay, so you got these four. Was there another thing that your future self would thank you for? One meal a day, don't eat sugary foods. That's gonna be one of the most challenging for me. Lifting weights, eating mostly plants. Was there anything else?

• 51:50Dr. David Sinclair?

  Get control over psychological stress.

• 51:53Lewis Howes?

  Oh, yeah. Why is this so important?

• 51:56Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, the, the main problem is you have high levels of cortisol when you're stressed out psychologically. And it's clear that people who have high levels of, really high levels of stress are chronically ill. And even it accelerates gray hair. That's actually a fact. It's not just a myth. You really are getting older if you have stress.

• 52:17Lewis Howes?

  Really? Is this scientifically proven that if you're stressed out all the time, or more frequently, you're gonna get older biologically?

• 52:25Dr. David Sinclair?

  Correct.

• 52:26Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Can you reverse gray hair without dyes?

• 52:31Dr. David Sinclair?

  Uh, yes.

• 52:33Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 52:34Dr. David Sinclair?

  Well, not routinely, but there are examples of that. There are some drugs that have shown in the clinic that make hair go gray, uh, from gray to brown. The, the, the best example I can tell you is that, that when people are stressed out, let's say they're in, they're in the banking world and they're, they're losing their minds. You can find hairs that start to turn gray. Okay. So you look at them and they're a little bit gray at the bottom. Oh, good, turning gray, okay. Then they get given a vacation and they go away for a couple of weeks. And guess what happens to the hair shaft?

• 53:08Lewis Howes?

  It gets brown.

• 53:09Dr. David Sinclair?

  It's brown again.

• 53:10Lewis Howes?

  Come on.

• 53:11Dr. David Sinclair?

  You can find these gray brown segments of hair.

• 53:14Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 53:15Dr. David Sinclair?

  In people, yeah. And what they, they tracked it down to was that the cells that make the hair pigment start to shut down, but they can be reinvigorated. But I suspect once you've been gray for a number of years, it's really hard.

• 53:27Lewis Howes?

  It's hard to reverse that, yeah.

• 53:29Dr. David Sinclair?

  Yeah. But, but, you know, I'm, I'm the first person to say aging is, is not unidirectional. In my lab, we're driving it forwards and backwards at will. It's not.

• 53:38Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy.

• 53:39Dr. David Sinclair?

  Really difficult anymore, once you figure it out.

• 53:40Lewis Howes?

  I hope today's episode inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a rundown of today's show with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me as well as ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts. If you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend over on social media or text a friend, leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts, and let me know what you learned over on our social media channels at Lewis Howes. I really love hearing the feedback from you. And it helps us continue to make the show better. And if you want more inspiration from our world-class guests and content to learn how to improve the quality of your life, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness Newsletter and get

• 54:24Lewis Howes?

  it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com/newsletter. And if no one has told you today, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.