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

Mark Hyman, MD

Dr. Mark Hyman is leading a health revolution—one focused on using food as medicine to support longevity, energy, mental clarity, happiness, and so much more. Mark Hyman, MD is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a fifteen-time New York Times best-selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy.

He is a co-founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Function Health. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Dr. Hyman Show with 150+ million downloads. Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, Fox, and CNN.

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Full Transcript

Automatically generated. Please forgive any typos or errors in the following transcript. It was generated by a third party and has not been subsequently reviewed by our team.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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.

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 a's 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 doctorhyman.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.

Peter Diamandis
Mindset and attitude is probably one of the most important things. You know, it's if you think you're gonna 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?

Are you hanging 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.

Yeah. Fundamental, right? More excited to be alive now than I ever have. The projects I have gonna keep me going for the next few hundred years. I'm super Yeah, pumped about

Dr. Mark Hyman
no, you're right. It's really true. When you look at meaning and purpose, it actually directly correlates with longevity. Optimists live longer, even if they're wrong. 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 said, Well, I'm interested in longevity. And he was 99 years old. He's talking about the projects he's working on, the movies, the film he's making. I mean, 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 really remarkable. You probably know him, Norman Lear. He's just an amazing guy.

Peter Diamandis
Oh, I love Norman Lear.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm 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. That's pretty exciting to me.

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

Dr. Mark Hyman
There you go.

Peter Diamandis
But it's really important. I call it how

Dr. Mark Hyman
to die young as late as possible.

Peter Diamandis
Okay. So 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 with a pain in your side in the hospital and the doctor says, Listen, 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 Fountain Life in the book. But it's the notion that every year I go for a digital upload. 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 It's the soft plaque that can rupture that you have to worry about.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yes, yes,

Peter Diamandis
It's access scan, my genome, my microbiome, my omics and so forth. And my goal 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. Wow, And it was like, yeah 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 But for we have found in like fourteen, fifteen percent 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. Two and a half percent have an aneurysm they didn't know about. Two percent have cancer they don't know about.

And all in all, I think the number was like fourteen or fifteen percent have something that they need to know about that's going to impact 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Absolutely. I think what you're talking about is really important, Peter, because what you're talking about is sort of a host of diagnostics that often are not something we would get in our traditional doctors. Hopefully the prices are gonna come down so we can get them. But 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. I see this all the time with people who are coming to see me for functional medicine.

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 the 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 mitochondrion functions.

Peter Diamandis
Exactly.

Dr. 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. What's, I think, emerging and what you're finding, Peter, is that there's this emerging field of omics revolution, which is, when you think about the number of data points that we get when you go to the doctor, you get like twenty, thirty, forty, fifty lab tests maybe. There's literally tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of things you could measure, most of which we're ignoring.

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 they're things you never heard of before, the things your doctor never tests for that aren't a lab requisition, but are the most important things that we can be measuring to look at long term inflammation and aging. 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 can see the changes in biology that happen.

And I've noticed in myself, I've literally kind of changed my biology in how I 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. Was eating more carbohydrates. I wasn't overweight, but I didn't really have much muscle. And you know, you look at me now, look like twenty years younger, but I was twenty years younger than that picture than I am now.

So it's like really quite staggering what you can do when you begin to understand these things.

Peter Diamandis
Yeah. And there are two reasons we haven't done this in the past, maybe three. One, we couldn't measure it, we didn't even know 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.

No. And it's really the use of machine learning algorithms that are helping us understand the patterns, understand what it means. And 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-

Dr. Mark Hyman
Absolutely.

Peter Diamandis
Yeah. No, I mean,

Dr. Mark Hyman
it's like, I've seen literally millions and millions of data points on tens of thousands of patients, but I'm one guy and I've seen pattern 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 sort of the tip of the iceberg of what's really going on when we're meeting a look at these things. So that's what's exciting was we get 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 variations from optimal function and health.

Peter Diamandis
So that's what we've done at Fountain Life. We have, you know, by the end of twenty twenty two, we'll have a dozen centers set up in Dubai, in India, in UK, in Toronto, and about 10 in The US. We're about 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 energy levels?

And we help direct you in our programs that way. But then there's a regenerative medicine side 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 the fun part is we have something called Fountain Health, which is a life insurance I'm sorry, health insurance business.

So, know, health insurance, it pays you after you have disease and after you But get what if instead health insurance was the opposite, which is 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. It's a insurance that's going 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 Fountain Life is doing great and super pumped about it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So 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 be able to incorporate as in real time as new therapies come online, when we hit longevity escape velocity, we'll be able to actually all get to take advantage of that, which is pretty exciting.

Peter Diamandis
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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We

Peter Diamandis
give a small number of our Fountain Life members the ability to participate in these research protocols.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We're seeing life expectancy go down, particularly 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, one, why we're seeing this increase in 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.

Peter Diamandis
Absolutely. And I think there's nothing that's more viable to all of us and our families than healthy years. And let's define longevity in the first place. The average age of hominids back 100,000 ago was probably in their late 20s, right? And then it expanded during the middle ages into the early 30s.

And then one hundred years ago it was in your 40s. Today it's 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 a baby by age 13 before birth control. I mean seriously, before you know you go Yeah.

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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And so

Peter Diamandis
that was very much reality for, it's the what we evolved during. And then all the diseases of older age, cancer, heart disease, dementia, when 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. We're in optimal health in our 20s and 30s. 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 ago.

It's now become the conversation du jour in the medical community and in the venture community. And there's more people thinking about and working on it. So I think, I personally believe, and hopefully at the end of

Dr. Mark Hyman
this

Peter Diamandis
conversation you'll believe or others will, that we're about to go into a renaissance of health. We're about to massively disrupt the health industry, reinvent it, start to- Amen. Amen to that, right? You and I are both carrying the signs around, know, revolution, let's reinvent this crazy insane system which is so moribund. Anyway, but I think this decade we're gonna start to have new tools to slow stop and reverse aging.

And I'm convinced myself from the people I've spoken to. You 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 yeah, I would watch Star Trek once a while. That was sort of like my you know, I had a little bit of time, I'd watch a Star Trek episode and that was like, you know, the way the world

Dr. Mark Hyman
should Doctor. Spock with a spy quarter, right? Trig quarter.

Peter Diamandis
Yes, exactly. But I remember watching one television show on long lived sea life that species of like bowhead whales could live two hundred plus years and the Greenland shark live four or five hundred years and sea turtles could live equal. I was like, you know, if they can live that long, why can't we? I mean, I was really I was like 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 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 a lot of the increase, as you well know, in average, and the word average here is the key part, average life expectancy has been the massive reduction in childhood mortality. The ability to deal with diseases early.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Clean water.

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

Dr. Mark Hyman
It was the first hurdle we had to overcome, which was deal with the bad water and infectious disease. We did a good job at that. But now we're looking at the aging process. 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 or 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.

Peter Diamandis
For sure. But even doing that, the question becomes, you know, can we all get to 100 healthy? Can we get to 120 And what's beyond that, right? 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 We the looked at all of the stuff in phase one, phase two, 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 but we must.

Dr. 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 as a result of all of our stressors 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. There's a huge role 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 sociogenomics, I actually came up with this term years ago when I was in Haiti, and then it became part of medical literature, not because of me, but because other people also started glomming onto it. And it was this 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 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 turn 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 on. Whereas if you're in a conflictual relationship or a conversation with somebody, you're gonna have your stress hormones increase. You're gonna have inflammation increase. You're gonna 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 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, things like blood pressure, waist circumference, body mass, inflammation. Now I was in Ikaria and Sardinia, which are two of the blue zones in the 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 100 years old. I remember Julia was 100 in three months, she said. And she basically was still working at a 100 years old, making all sorts of wedding accoutrements, like doilies and little lace things. I don't know what they do ordinarily, but they it was kinda cool to see her.

She was constantly working and making stuff for all these weddings and was still involved in in the community life. So I wanna share a little bit about a study that kinda reflects the power of this. And it was an eighty year study called the Harvard study of adult development, and it had been producing data on so many different things on 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?

It was eighty four 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 on on on and and were part of interviews where they revealed their fears and their hopes or disappointments or accomplishments or regrets, life satisfaction, and lots more. And this had a really incredible impact by providing lots of data. The researchers use this data to assess how people's lives, their experiences, their attitudes affect their well-being. And one of the thing that's was so powerful from this study was was sort of surprising. It wasn't career achievement.

It wasn't exercise. It wasn't a healthy diet that determine the quality and happiness of your life. It was good relationships. Good relationships keeps us healthier and happier. That was powerful.

And the studies leaders that are I mean, obviously, the people started the study are dead. The current leader 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. And it's a great book. I actually had Robert Waldinger on the podcast, The Doctors Pharmacy, and 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 about 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 personally that that my relationships, my friendships, my community is the most important thing for me. It really is what keeps me grounded, keeps me healthy, keeps me happy. And 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 kinda get by. And it 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 when when these people in the study actually, were interviewed, they really actually benefit from these 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 took 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 wanna have a relationship with?

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. Less time with people who drain you and are are energy saps. So I think it's important to find friends and community members that help bring you up and not take you down. Sometimes you meet with people, all you wanna do is complain and go on and on about everything.

And I think there are other people who when you're around them, you laugh, you have fun, you play and it's just, that's what you want. Prioritize relationships. We schedule in exercise. We make ourselves maybe time to make a healthy diet. 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, you know, doing a million things at once, focus on your relationships. The phenomena of aging, and as we've learned from you over the years, is really an inflammatory process. Yeah. 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 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.

Dr. Jeff Bland
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. The first time I read anything he wrote, I said, This man's on the path because he can make very complicated topics very engaging and understandable.

Because I have logorrhea, which is

Dr. Mark Hyman
No,

Dr. Jeff Bland
do a diarrhea

Dr. Mark Hyman
of

Dr. Jeff Bland
not need to diminish your genius. You're very, very good at this. So, one of the things that I've learned that Mark picked up beautifully and he's done elegantly 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 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 to hell.

I'm not able to do my plan. 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 20 fourseven, three sixty five. They're the only parts of our body that are constantly sampling the outside world. And what are they? They are our nervous system. They are our mucosal tissues in our respiratory tract and our gastrointestinal tract, and they are our immune system.

And they're all cross talking all the time, one to the other. And so, we start talking then about what happens with the experience of life as it relates 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-two, haven't we? And there are now people, well, not some people, probably the majority of people are 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 that 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 is repair.

So that's what I call rejuvenation. And our body is capable of rejuvenating. 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. 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. Vitamin L deficiency. 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So, Jeff, 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 I want to kind of dive deep into how do we combat that and how do we change that, reverse that process?

Dr. Jeff Bland
Yeah. So I'm just reviewing now what Mark has already said in his book. So I'm kind of the just speaking book for his book. But in his book, he talks about these cell types that are associated with biological aging that are called SASP cells. That stands for senescent associated secretory phenotypes.

What does that mean in English? What it means is that

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

Dr. Jeff Bland
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. In 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 what is uncontrolled simmering, like a burning, like a boiling pot on the stove all the time. That's associated with the development of these senescent associated secretory phenotype type cells.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Zombie cells.

Dr. Jeff Bland
Zombie cells. So, the question is, once you got a zombie cell, does it a 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.

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 and again, Mark talks about this in the book investigators that are measuring these age clocks, like Stephen Horvath, who is at UCLA, 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, Oh, hold up.

Does that mean the inside of my body, if I could take a picture of the inside organs, they look not so good too? Yeah, 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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