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.

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Welcome back, everyone, to the school of greatness. Very excited about our guests. We have the inspiring Dr. Michael Greger in the house. Good to see you, sir.

So glad to be exciting.

This is exciting. Your research has been really out there in the mainstream a lot lately. A lot of documentaries, your books have been blowing up, and the most recent one, how not to age. The scientific approach to getting healthier as you get older, I'm really fascinated by. Because most people don't think they can actually get and improve their health. The older they get, they just feel like they have to deal with chronic pain, illness, disease. They have to take medications to just maintain a level of so is it actually possible to stop aging or even reverse aging with foods as we get older?

Dying appears to be the most critical element, and that's really that. The book is about this kind of good news, that we have tremendous power over our health, destiny and longevity. The vast majority of premature death and disability is preventable with a healthy enough diet and lifestyle. Really only about 25%. Based on studies of identical twins, only about 25% of the difference in lifespan between people is due to genetics, really. So for what we can do over the majority of which we have some control, we can look to, for example, these blue zones these areas around the world with exceptional longevity. And kind of look at the Ven diagram and what they're all doing. According to the global Burden of Disease study, the largest systemic analysis of risk factors in history, the number one cause of death in these United States. Is the american diet. Really bumping tobacco smoking to number two? Cigarettes now only kill about a half million Americans every year. Worse, our diet kills many more.

Come on.

But that's good news, because that means we have the power, right? It's never too late to start eating healthier, to stop smoking, to start moving. So, I mean, it's really a positive message that I was excited to learn when I finished the book.

So when we change our lifestyle, when we change our eating habits and our nutritional habits, we can actually reverse our aging or age better, is what I'm hearing you say.

We can age slower. Age slower.

Okay.

And because aging is a significant risk factor for most of our leading killers. So my first book in the series, how not to die, was first half of the books, just 15 chapters each of the 15 leading causes of death. Talking about the role diet may play in preventing, arresting, reversing. Each of our top 15 killers say, wait a second, death is from disease. Why isn't how not to die kind of all the longevity book anybody needs? But it's because aging is risk factor for multiple different diseases. So, for example, if all cancer were cured tomorrow, it would only add about three years to the average lifespan. Wait a second. Why is that? It's like our second leading killer. It's because if you don't die of one age related diseases, you'll just die of another one. So the only reason you didn't die of a heart attack because you died of cancer the month before, but you were going to die anyway from something else. So by slowing down the aging process, then we can reduce the risk of many different diseases at the same time to stroke and the dementia and cancer. Heart disease, which rise exponentially with age.

Really?

So something like having a high cholesterol can increase your odds of having a heart attack or number one killer of men and women by as much as 20 fold. But an 80 year old has 500 times the risk of having heart attack compared to a 20 year old. But I mean, of course, the reason we focus on things like cholesterol is because it's a modifiable risk factor. But what if the rate of aging were modifiable, too? And so that's what I really cover in the book.

So what would the five main keys be to aging?

Better.

Yeah.

So diet number one. And so if you look at these blue zones, they all center their diets around whole plant foods. So they're minimizing the intake of meat, dairy, sugar, eggs, junk, maximizing the intake of fruits, vegetables, legumes, beans, split peas, chickpeas, lentils, nuts and seeds, herbs and spices. Basically real food that grows out of the ground. These are really our healthiest choices. That would be number one.

Number one diet.

So, number one diet. So that accounts alone for about half of the difference that I spent between blue zones and the rest of the world.

What is the average blue zone? Age at death versus the average age of death of non blue zones.

Right. It's about twelve to 14 years.

Twelveteen 14 years. Difference.

Difference. So women, 14, men, twelve years longer. And so have up to ten times the rate of so called centenarians. Those that get triple digits live to be 100 or older. And it's not just about adding years to your life, but life to your years. These people are active, so they're at 100, and they're enjoying their lives or participating in life. And so what's the point of living longer if you can't do it with vibrancy, with vitality. Right. And so in this country, I mean, even our lifespan is going down. So actually, the peak of life expectancy, 2014 in the United States, started going down every year since. Even before COVID shaved a few years off our life.

Now, there are certain pockets that are blues down pockets. Right.

But that general. And it's because primarily the obesity epidemic. So we are raising the first generation of Americans set to live shorter average lives than their parents. And this was before COVID and continues to drop down. We are 39th in life expectancy around the world. So, like, Slovenians live longer than Americans, so we've got a lot of work to do. But the good news is, again, we have power over how we live. Wow. And what we eat.

So diet would be the main thing. What would be the second or third thing, would you think?

Okay, and so then smoking cessation, critically important.

Now, what about smoking versus vaping?

Well, the primary concern about vaping is the nicotine addiction will lead people to smoke, and so it's safer than smoking, but because people who vape tend to smoke that, unfortunately, these kids getting addicted to nicotine can face a lifetime of cigarette addiction and then dramatically cut their life short. Wow. From something like lung cancer. Okay.

Smoking.

Remarkably, 80% of the way. There is these simple, basic, common sense lifestyle behaviors. I know it's a big book and I go into all the details, don't want people to get kind of lost in this or intimidated. It's really the basic. So a decade of life is possible just through not smoking, not being obese, exercising, even, like 20 minutes a day, five servings of fruits and vegetables. Really basic stuff. Now, you want to go beyond that. You want to tweak those 20%. I've got hundreds of cool things to do in the book, but let's not lose sight of the real core tenets. So you could imagine some smoker was like, oh, look at this fancy supplement I'm going to take. I'm like, no, let's back up.

I got to minimize the smoking.

Right. That's important to emphasize, in fact, the conclusion of the book. I'm like, all right, let's touch back. Let's put this all in context again. It's really the core, basic tenets. And then, yeah, there's all sorts of cool new science out there that you can tweak around the edges, but I don't want people to get lost, really.

Okay. And what about fasting? Because you mentioned fasting briefly, and I know you have a section in the book about intermittent fasting and fasting, but also, I think there was a quote in your book that's fasting can have benefits, but if you fast too long, you die.

Right. It's the ultimate in unsustainable diet. Right. Meaning guaranteed to kill you if you do it long enough. You can't say that about any diet, right. So there's all sorts of interesting intermittent fasting regimens. So one thing that fasting does is it boosts something called autophagy, which is kind of this house cleaning process within.

The cells, killing the zombie cells.

That's cellular senescence. That's a whole separate thing. But this is more inside the cell, the accumulation of debris that contributes to the aging process. And we can boost autophagy with exercise or with fasting. We can fast or go fast. Unfortunately, it doesn't really ramp up till 36 to 48 hours of fasting, which really is too long to go unsupervised. Normally, your kidneys dive into something called sodium conservation mode, such that people can fast literally for months on water only. But if that response breaks down, then you can suffer a serious electrolyte abnormality, which only manifest with vague symptoms like dizziness or fatigue that could go unnoticed until it's too late.

Really?

So that's why one really should only fast. If you're fasting over a day, it really should be done under medical supervision. They can do urine tests, they can do blood tests just to make sure everything's going to plan. Otherwise you can run to really serious stress.

Do you feel like doing a 24 hours fast is okay for people to do on their own?

So although we're not going to get that boost in autophagy in that short of a time, and you often hear, like, even a few hours, like time restricted feeding, decreasing the feeding window daily, we can improve autophagy. That's in rodents. Unfortunately, rodents have this really high metabolisms such that they can lose massive amounts of their body weight, literally within a day or two and a few days it can be fatal. But unfortunately, that doesn't translate into humans really only get this boosting after really kind of, yeah, two days. And then we're concerned about that being done outside of kind of medical.

Interesting. Is there a benefit to doing intermittent fasting?

Okay, but there is some. Certainly. There's so many different types. I'm talking about the pros and cons of each. So there's alternate day fasting and five, two fasting, 25, five fasting.

Mimic, mimic fasting.

Right? There's all sorts of. And there's pros and cons of each. I think the best kind of the bottom line, the best evidence is around early time restrictive feeding, meaning collapsing one's feeding daily feeding window to at least 12 hours or less. But critically important, that window is early rather than late. So if anything, we're skipping supper, not breakfast. And in fact, we're trying to cram as many calories earlier in the day as possible. The exact same food eaten in the morning is less fattening than the exact same food. Same number of calories eaten in the evening. Come on. Causes less of a blood sugar spike, causes less triglyceride. If you're going to eat junk, right, if you're going to eat a donut or something, do it in the morning. Actually, your body, because of our circadian rhythms, is better able to handle it. Ideally, we should not be eating when it's dark, should not be eating after 07:00 p.m. Our bodies just has these exaggerated responses to it. Or in very least, we should be eating really healthy food. Ideally, breakfast or lunch would be the biggest meal of the day and may actually help explain the longevity of the final remaining blue zone.

Today, there's only one left.

We think of these blue zones, right?

Right. But these are historic blue zones. Now they're eating kfc like anybody else, right? But there's one left, and it's the red, white and blue zone. It's Loma Linda, California, an hour away, seven day adventist. And one of the things that may be attributing to their longevity, in fact, they're the longest formally studied population, longest living in history, living longer than the okinawan Japanese. Even during the 50s, when they were.

At the peak, the Sardinians, all of.

Them, they beat them all, and they're the only ones continuing to go. And one of the things they may be doing is because they tend to eat lunches, their biggest meal of the day.

So they don't have a big dinner.

So they don't have a big dinner, or they skip dinner all entirely. I mean, they have lots of other things going.

Maybe they have. Maybe here and there, but not right.

So their body is. They consider their body a temple. It's kind of a biblical teaching. So they have low smoking rates, they exercise, tend to have plant based diets. So they're doing a lot of things right.

Immunity, all the things right.

But that may actually be one of the factors, even though it's never been kind of put to the test in an interventional trial, based on the studies.

They'Re not eating a lot of dinners is what I'm hearing.

They're eating either light dinners or they're not eating dinner at all.

Or they're doing it before, or they're before four.

Really? Before four? Yeah.

What would be the optimal time to stop eating every single day?

Well, so before seven, we want to get before seven. And so that's what I mean. The intermittent fasting literature around time restricted feeding was so confusing because some studies showed it was actually bad for you, caused metabolic issues. Others found it had these remarkable benefits. And it's all in the timing of the window. The ones that were late, restricting skipping breakfast and not eating till late, then they had actually problems associated and said that higher cholesterol at the end of.

A few weeks, because if you're skipping breakfast and you're say you're eating at one or 02:00 but then you're like, you're hungry and so you're eating more later in the evening, that's until 910.

O'Clock, maybe that's it that we want.

To be doing, but you're still getting that maybe 16 hours window of not eating right. But you're saying that the time you eat is more important than how much time you don't eat.

There's benefits to both. Yes. Just by time restricting feeding, even if you do it kind of in the middle, there's benefits from not time restricting, but there's additional benefits. Swishing, skipping dinner. Yeah. And that was actually the US military did these experiments. The army did the first experiments where they actually took people and gave people 2000 calorie meals, a single 2000 calorie meal, the exact same meal either as breakfast and fasting the rest of the day or as supper. And they found these remarkable differences. The exact same food, exact same calories, different amount of body fat, different amount of metabolic implications of just that single tweak. It's because of chronobiology, the remarkable impact that our circadian rhythms have on our biology. We typically only think of our circadian rhythms when we're jet lagged. Like, that's the only time we're even thinking about our bodies. But that's just kind of a symptom of this really deep underlying most of our biological processes, our biochemistry, our enzymes actually go on this clock. And so it really matters. There's this really devastating literature about pesticide suicides in India. That's a common way for people to commit suicide. But it matters whether they survive, whether they do it in the morning or in the evening, because their body is better able to handle it in the morning, better able to detoxify.

Because of our circadian rhythms, you're much more likely to survive a poisoning attempt. And this just how powerful, it just suggests the power of our circadian rhythms. Really fascinating. I dived deep in that, in my how not to diet book where I was talking about weight loss and that entire field. Fascinating. Never learned about it in medical school. Wow.

Now, for those that don't know, what is the circadian rhythm and what do we need to know about it to optimize our life?

Yeah. So our circadian rhythm is the kind of daily rhythm, almost 24 hours rhythm that. So even if you're put in a bunker with constant lighting, your body will still, you'll have this cycle as if, even though you have no cues from the outside, you have no watch, you have no idea what time it is. You'll start getting sleepy at kind of the same time you normally get sleepy. You'd wake up about the same time you normally sleep. But in that kind of environment, you can do these laboratory experiments on people where it's like, okay, what if we put you on a 27 hours cycle? So we put the lights on, right? But then we just stretch it a little bit and it totally messes people up.

Wow.

It really undercuts our biology. We were so meant because then all of a sudden, it's chopping it through. And so it's these kind of experiments that really show the power. And so what we see is we see these shift workers who are working late nights, right? Well, if you're only working late nights, that's a problem in and of itself, but it's the people that are shifting, so they're doing the late nights. So, like people in postgraduate medical education, these residents who, they'll do nights in the hospital and then they'll do a day, and that is really difficult, like a double shift. Double shift. So there could be many reasons why people that do that kind of work live significantly shortened lives. Wow. I mean, there's. Who is forced into those kind of jobs? What kind of health care do they.

Have and social economic status.

There's so many other things that can go into that, but they really do think that that disruption of circadian rhythm has a serious implications.

If you could design the perfect day and the perfect amount of protein, calories, consumption, sleep, intermittent fasting window, et cetera. For someone like me, I'm 230 pounds. I'm 40 years old. As a former athlete, I train really hard. I'm at the gym lifting four or five days a week, doing cardio. I'm doing some running.

I'm walking a lot.

But I also have a busy lifestyle. I travel sometimes. What would be the optimal, if I could, for me to live longer, still be athletic and strong and healthy and feel great.

So that was, I talked about this how not to die book, the first half of the book, but I didn't want it to just kind of be a reference book. I wanted this to be a practical day to day kind of grocery store guide to make these kind of practical decisions. And that became the second half of the book, which centers my recommendations around a daily dozen checklist of all that kind of healthiest of healthy foods and habits. I encourage people to fit into their daily routine, so it's available on a free app. All my work is free at Dr. Gregor's daily dozen iPhone Android. And it's just basically these kind of to inspire people to include.

So twelve things that we should be doing.

Twelve things every day, 90 minutes of modern intensity exercise or 45 minutes of vigorous exercise every single day. How much to drink? So I want people to eat dark green, leafy vegetables every day, the healthiest kind of vegetables. I want people to eat berries every day, the healthiest kinds of fruits, a tablespoon of grown flaxseed, a quarter teaspoon of turmeric. Kind of on down the list. Again, just to kind of inspire people to kind of think and they can kind of track their progress, kind of make a game out of it and look on the road. I'm not even hitting. I'm lucky if I hit half. But it's, again, kind of an aspirational kind of. If you really did have control over your environment, this is really the kind of things we want to include in one's daily routine.

So what would be the top five foods that you should eat every day to age longer?

Yeah. In terms of anti aging foods, this global burden of disease study, which I mentioned before, again, the largest systemic analysis funded by the Bill London Gates foundation, found that the food associated with the largest expected life expectancy gains are legumes. These beans really split bees, chickpeas, lentils and flags. One thing we can do is boost your intake of beans or lentil soup or hummus. And we think it's because they're the most concentrated sources of prebiotics. The resistant starch and dietary fiber that feeds the good bacteria in our gut and that has implications, serves on decreasing inflammation, improving our immunity, improving muscle strength, muscle quality, muscle mass and frail individuals all but just by changing our microbiome. In fact, you can do these so called fecal transplant studies where you take.

A sick, healthy poop and put them in a sick person. That's crazy, right?

Actually change their biology. That makes crazy. It's absolutely crazy. But that's how we can prove cause and effect. Because, like, well, yeah, you feed someone a healthy diet, how do we know their gut bugs have anything to do with it? Well, we can control for that. And you can do it, right. So you can make mice more fit, less fit by giving them healthy poop. Healthy poop from an exercising mouse, or from marathon mouse or a mighty mouse versus the frail mouse. So you can actually change. They're eating the same, they're doing the exact same, but they just have a different stool composition. And how do you get those good gut bugs? You feed them the right food and that's the prebiotics. What are good gut bacteria eat? A lot of people are thinking probiotics. They're thinking the actual bacteria themselves, the acidophilus abifidobacteria, those are the good gut bugs. But if you just take those pills, the reason you don't have those good gut bugs in the first place is because you're not feeding them very well. So you can try to populate your gut with as many good bugs as you want. They're going to die off if you continue to starve them, continue to starve your microbial self.

Whereas if you just ate the right foods, these are the good gut bugs or fiber feeders. If you eat the right foods, then your good bugs will be fruitful and multiply all on their own and do all the work for you. And that work is creating these so called postbiotics, which are their byproducts of microbial metabolism of these good foods like butyrate and essay. They could absorb through the colon wall into our bloodstream, circulate throughout our bodies, even cross the blood brain barrier, have effects on our mental health, of our immunity, so dramatically decrease inflammation. You can prevent asthma attacks just by feeding people some beans. I mean, it's absolutely remarkable.

So legumes have prebiotics.

They have the prebiotics. So that's why we think the food, in fact, legumes are the primary protein source of every single blue zone ever documented. Right? That's where they get most of their protein from some sort of leg gum, whether it's brown peas or something, or black beans in Costa rica or with soy foods in Okinawa. But it was always centered around not just plant based in general, but a plant based source of protein. Legumes. So beans. And so we should be thinking like bean burrito chili. Like, how can I fit beans in my daily diet? And that's part of the daily does is like, can I have any beans today? Can I put beans on my salad or throw some beans on this pasta dish? Or it's like simple. Get a can of unsalted, no salt added beans. Open in 2 seconds. Always keep a can of beans in the fridge. You can just throw a spoonful onto anything. Basically, yeah. In fact, someone at a talk was like, I just take white beans, mash into my oatmeal. I'm like, never heard of that. But he's like, can't even taste it. I'm like, okay, yeah, great.

Look, what's nice about a healthy breakfast is that regardless of what you do the rest of the day, God knows what bowl of candy is on your coworker's desk or what donut shop you're walking by or God knows what, stress is going to take you down the wrong path. At least you have a good foundation. You got food in you, you feed your good gum bugs.

Well, anyway, so that's number one, legumes.

Okay? They identified the top five foods that associate with the longest lifespan. Now, legumes rule the roost on a per serving basis, but actually on an ounce per ounce basis. Nuts are associated with the longest lifespan compared to any other type of food out there.

What are the three best nuts?

There's really only one. There's really only one that pulls ahead, and that's walnuts.

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Now, see, normally when I say, like, eat cruciferous vegetables or something, and they're like, which one's best? I'm like, whichever one you'll eat. You like broccoli? Eat broccoli. You like bach choy, eat broccoli. Look, whatever one, you'll get into your face. But with nuts, walnuts really do pull ahead. And that's because they have more omega three s than other nuts. They have more antioxidants than other nuts, and they're the only nuts shown to acutely improve artery function within a matter of hours. In fact, in the predimed study, which is this large, randomized controlled trial over years of thousands of individuals, although mixed nuts certainly did lower cardiovascular disease rates, it was the walnuts that appeared to be the most critical part. And we do want to get unsalted nuts. I know that's not as delicious salted. Why unsalted? In terms of dietary risk factor for death, excess sodium intake is the word. So I've been talking about the.

All this salted.

I know. Good.

It's so good.

I know. Look, so in terms of things we're missing out on, right? It's the lego. But in terms of stuff, we're getting too much salt. There's lots of horrible things in our diet. There's sugar, there's trans fat, there's stretch. Okay, but sodium salt intake is the number one dietary risk factor for death on planet Earth is the single worst thing about humanity's diet. But there's good news.

What about, like, there's good news? Himalayan salt or something different? They're all salted the same.

I know. Yeah, but this is pink. This is from the Himalayas. This is rainbow color. This has got a few minerals in it or something. No, it's all bad. Can you have a little bit? Well, so we want to stick under 1500 milligrams a day. That's the American Heart association recommendation. And to do that, and most of it, and people are like, I don't add a lot of salt. Most of our sodium intake comes from processed foods. 70% of sodium intake is not the salt we add in the kitchen or the dining room. It's in these processed foods. Anything in a box, in a package, in anything. They add salt because it's flavor enhanced. Right? In fact, that's why they add it to a lot of beans. It's not a preservative. It's in a can. It's sterile. It's because they want to make things taste good. It's the cheap way to make things, so you can't just eat one. But the problem is that sodium increases risk, not just of high blood pressure, but so many different lead in killers like kidney disease and eyesight. Kind of on down the list. Okay, there's two ways we can go.

So there's lots of salt free seasonings out there and encourage people to explore all sorts of new people. Often there's all sorts of spices that haven't heard of, like saffron. So explore the whole world out there and find some delicious taste. And then the easy fix is switching to the salt substitute, potassium salt. Instead of sodium salt, sodium chloride. Switch to potassium salt. It's potassium chloride. It's just a natural mineral mined out of the ground, just like sodium chloride is. And there are interventional studies. I talk about one in the book, where they took these five kitchens at a veteran retirement home and randomized their kitchens into either continuing to salt with regular salt in the kitchen, or switching to a 50 50 blend of regular salt and regular sodium chloride and potassium chloride. And there was a traumatic 40% drop in cardiovascular disease death rates within a matter of years in the reduced sodium group. In fact, their life expectancy at age 70 between two groups was 14 years. Come on. Meaning that just by switching to half potassium salt, for which you wouldn't even be able to taste a difference, they effectively made themselves ten years younger when it came to the risk of premature death.

There's no downside. Okay, now, if you go with. I'm encouraging people to actually try to switch to full potassium salt rather than the 150 50 blend, but then you do actually taste the difference. There is this bitterness to potassium salt that you don't get otherwise. It's more apparent in some foods than others. Some foods, you really can't taste the difference, but any amount that we can cut down. And the only other caveat is you need to have kidneys, good enough to get rid of the excess potassium. And so if you have kidney disease or if you have diabetes, just because diabetes is such an increased risk of kidney disease, it's so damaging to the kidneys. Even if you don't know you have kidney disease, if you have diabetes, you should first get your kidneys tested before switching to potassium salt. And if you're over 70, our kidney function does tend to decline over time. So even if, as far as you know, your kidneys are fine, if you're over 70, I would go, it's super simple test. You can just simple blood test, get your kidney function tested, and just make sure your kidneys can handle the extra potassium.

But then if you give them the all clear, your kidneys are good, then you can get all the saltiness you want. You could add extra. Right. You can make your pop guard as crazy. Right. Tears to your eyes, salty and with no harm. Wow. No harm. So that's really one of the simplest tweaks in the book. And it's, like, the leading cause of dietary risk factor for death. Like, the worst thing we could possibly eat. And there's a simple fix to it. I'm too bad there wasn't, like, a potassium donut or something. We just switch over and totally fine. But that is one of the rare things that is, like, super easy to do.

So explain that one more time. So if we have more potassium salt first, then we can have salt.

No. So we're swapping out. So instead of shaking on sodium, sodium chloride, thinking on potassium chloride. There's a bunch of different brands, and.

You can have as much as you.

Want, and you can have as much as long as your kidney function. Kidneys are okay. Got you. Right. You have as much as you want, and so you can go any grocery store. Wow. In the salt aisle, there's all these salt substances, and it says potassium chloride, and there's some 50 50 blends. If you want to start there and move. It's certainly better than adding pure c.

I'm going to try that.

Yeah, I'm going to try that.

And the studies show, right.

And not just it's associated with, but these interventional trials, these randomized control trials, blinded. They don't know who's in which group until they break the code at the end. And they say, oh, my God. Significantly less death and disability in the group. Just cutting down on the salt, eating the same things, eating the same exact same things with one single tweak, just switching over what kind of salt they're using. Amazing.

That's incredible.

Now, why haven't we heard about this? Why isn't this on, like, blaring? Because no one makes any money on it. It's like dirt cheap, right? I think it's more expensive than regular saw, but no one's making money. I mean, there's just not a lot of money made, because it's just like a simple. You probably dig it up your own somehow, and so there's just not a lot of profit to be made. And so, unfortunately, we don't hear a lot about it.

That is fascinating. Okay, so we've heard about legumes number one.

Yeah.

Nuts, specifically.

Walnuts.

Walnuts number two, palm full a day is my recommendation.

1Oz.

What if you want to have more?

Oh, look, you can have more. They're calorie, but the longevity benefits plateau out at one, so you don't get more additional benefit. And they're kind of pricey. And they're calorie dense, right? They're calorie dense. So if you're really active, it's not going to matter.

So ten to 15 a day, maybe.

Ten halves.

Ten halves.

Ten halves comes out to be 30 grams or one.

Okay, got you.

Look, you're not counting.

Just grab a handful.

And every day, or at least three times a week, the benefits are that great? Are that great. In the adventist cohort. In the Lomaland Adventist cohort, they think it accounts for two years of extra life. Come on. It is one of the only foods, there's only two foods that have ever been associated with increase in literally years, plural. A single food, and nuts is one of them.

How do they measure this? That know that nuts and beans are going to make you live longer?

Okay? So what you do is you take hundreds of thousands of people, you follow them, their diseases and their diets over time. So you keep doing these dietary surveys. Exactly. What are you eating? You can do these random call you up, okay, what do you eat over the last 24 hours? Go through? Sometimes you make them take pictures, and so you fall with it. And then, you know, their doctors, and so, you know, what have they been diagnosed? What are they dying of? What do their autopsies show? And so you can follow them over time. That's what's called observational research, or epidemiological research. Now, you cannot prove cause and effect with that kind of research because there's confounding factors. Maybe the people who are eating nuts are health nuts, and maybe they're working out. All eaters are working out more. Maybe they have other eating other healthy stuff. Maybe instead of instead, what's the other thing you're eating instead of nuts? Maybe you're snacking on some really potato chips. Right. And so maybe it's the benefit. It's not so much the nuts, but you're not eating potato chips. Right. So there's all these confounding facts.

Now, there are statistical methods that you can use to try to control for that. So you're basically comparing nut eaters who aren't smoking and exercise, blah, blah, blah, to nut eaters that the non nut eaters that also don't smoke don't be. And that's why you need this big number, right? And so, like the Niharp study, the largest study in history, we're talking over a half million people. And so with that much data, you can crunch the numbers and really kind of tease out, wait a second, with all these other factors controlled for the people who are eating this many nuts are living this much longer. That's pretty crazy. And then you can turn to the most powerful evidence we have, which are interventional trust, where you randomize people to two groups and you give them a smoothie, one with nuts and one flavored with nuts, but no actual nuts in it. So you make people a walnut flavored smoothie versus an actual walnut smoothie. And neither the researcher nor the experimental subject actually knows which is which. And you've tested beforehand, so you really can't tell. Right. And then you can measure acute reactions. You can measure their artery function literally within hours of consumption.

Crazy. And you can see what's happening in their cholesterol. What's happening. These are called surrogate endpoints. So what we'd like to know is, let's randomize people to these smoothies for ten years and see who actually dies, doesn't it?

Right.

Okay. You can see how, logistically, that's difficult to do, but what we can do is we know that the amount of cholesterol in our blood, it's really good indicator of risk factor for heart disease. And so anything that lowers cholesterol. Okay, so we have the observational evidence showing decreased risk of heart disease among nut eaters, and then we have this short term data showing, look, it improves artery function, decreases cholesterol. No wonder we're seeing these endpoints in the abs. So you put all the evidence together and you're like, wow, nuts really appear to be healthy foods, right? That's how you do this kind of research. So this is fascinating.

Okay, we're still on the five things.

To eat every day.

Legumes, nuts. No salt.

No salt. Salted. Right.

Unsalted.

Oh, yeah. We're keeping our salt intake as low as possible, under 1500 milligrams. That's not. No salt, very minimal. And mostly it's about, if you just avoid processed foods, you're going to go a lot of ways, way less salt.

Fresh foods, number four and five, what would those be?

And so then it's eating more whole grains. So you were having an oatmeal for breakfast, right, instead of bacon and egg.

What about the whole grain brain theory and how grains are bad for brain? What type of grains affect the brain in a healthy way versus a bad way?

Yeah. The kernel of truth was kind of a little of a pun. For whole grains is refined grains. Refined grains are terrible for us. So when you take something like whole wheat and you strip away all the fiber and you're left with white flour, or you do the same with brown rice to white rice, or you kind of strip out the nutrition and you're left with basically kind of sheer carbohydrates. Or you can take something like a sugar bee, where most sugar comes from these days, actually, not from cane. And you basically take all the nutrition where you're left with table sugar. Right. I'm assuming it's like pure calories. And look, you only have no value, 2000 calories in a calorie bank every day. You cannot be wasting your calories on these empty calorie foods. And most grain consumption in the country is, sadly, these refined grains. So going after grains makes total sense because that's what people are eating. But unfortunately, whole grains got caught in a kind of friendly fire.

Right. So what are the grains we should be eating?

Yeah, whole grains. Ideally whole intact grains. So like oat growth or steel cut oats, the more closely to how they kind of grew out of the ground, the better. Or whole grain rye. So we want whole as the first word in any kind of grain.

Steel cut oats or whole cut oats.

Fantastic. Or even oak grotes, which are what steel cut oats are. Oak groats is before you cut it, an oak groat cut two or three times turns into steel cut oats. But that's the original. And if you haven't tried it, they are delicious. Super chewy oat grocery. Oh, my God. Someone turned me on to Oak Roach and I was like, I'm never going back.

Really?

They're so good and they're so much more healthy. And I can't go back to mushy oats, I'm sorry.

Do you cook them?

So you cook them now? They take a long time to cook unless you have a pressure cooker. So if you have one of these, like, electric pressure cookers out of the market now, then it's super quick, 20 minutes, you press a button, they're done, and you can make a whole. But it's like oatmeal, but it's chewer. You're harder, more delicious. And no matter how well you chew, the reason that's so much better for you is because these bits don't get absorbed in our small intestine, end up in our large intestine, and act as this prebiotic bounty for our good gut bugs. But the more you refine it, the more you process it, the more that gets absorbed high up in the small intestine. You're basically leaving your colon bugs to starve down there. And that's why the more whole, the better. That's where the dietary fiber is, that's where the resistant starch is. That's where we can feed our good gut bugs and they feed us right back. Wow.

Okay, so that's number four. What would be the fifth thing?

Okay, the fifth thing are foods they want people to reduce. They want people to reduce meat and soda as the two most important things to cut down in one's diet. But interestingly, the top four were actually things people aren't getting enough of to add those things. Right. It's possible that really the benefits of a plant based diet is less about what you're cutting out and more about just including the healthiest of healthy foods out there. Right.

Yeah. I like that philosophy for people. Because if you can include these things in your system and in your daily routine, you're going to be less hungry for the other sugary, processed things. There you go. So maybe you have a little bit of it every now and then, but it's not 80, 90% of your diet.

Exactly. That's the kind of behind the daily dozen thing. It's like by the end of the day, if you actually check off all those boxes, you are kind of naturally crowding out these less healthy options. And it turns out over 50% of calories in the United States come from ultra processed junk. Most of the food we eat is just junk. And so. Right, we're just kind of crowded. Saving for the special occasion. Right. Doesn't matter what we eat on our holidays, birthdays, special occasions, but on a day to day basis, we really should try to eat healthy. And that is centering our diets around these natural foods from fields, not factories, these kind of unprocessed plant foods.

Now, I'm curious, because we have about 50 50 men and women that watch and listen, right?

Amazing.

But I'm curious about what if you could specifically create a super supplement or a stack of supplements every single day for men that they took first thing in the morning, maybe three to five key ingredients, whether it was in a powder or liquid form. What would be those things? To have men be optimized, healthier, stronger, more vibrant men. What would those ingredients be?

They'd be foods. They wouldn't be supplements. They wouldn't put it in the pill. Now, look, you want to take some berries, freeze dry them, and make them into a powder? Fine. If you want to call that a supplement by just eating a spoonful of freeze dried strawberry powder, fine. Sure. Whatever you want. It really comes down to foods. We just don't know enough about biology and the human organism to be able to tease out what it is about these thousands of different food components. Then we can extract it out and make money in a pill. Now, if people don't, that doesn't keep people from trying.

Sure.

That's how you make money. Unfortunately, the system is set up with these kind of wrong incentives. Right. The worst thing to sell is produce. Right? It goes bad. So the most profitable foods are, unfortunately the least healthy foods. Right. What you want is a snack cake that sits on the shelf for a few weeks. That's how you make money. The produce rots on the shelf. It's like the worst.

It's good for a week.

It's a loss leader for these. It gets people into the store, so they'll buy the stuff that actually makes profit. If you want to make money, you sell brown sugar water in a bottle. It's like pure profit. It's all money. So it's not like the head of these soda companies is sitting around thinking, how can I contribute to the childhood obesity epidemic? Right? They're just like, how do I maximize profit for my shareholders in the next quarter? Sure. And anyone who doesn't think that way gets a conscience. They'll be booted out the next day and replaced by somebody who will. Right. And it's not some diabolical thing. It's literally just. That's how the system works. Sure. And so even a sweet potato grower is not going to put an ad on tv for sweet potatoes because they're not branded. Like, you'll just buy their competitors sweet potato. The system is not set up. You're never going to see an ad for sweet potatoes in the Super bowl because there's just not enough money to be made.

Well, pistachios has done a good job.

Wasn't there an avocado one, too?

The pistachio nuts have like blown up. They branded pistachio nuts somehow. Right?

They're everywhere. Look, I'm all in favor. I want big broccoli to swoop in and start putting up billboards. Exactly.

Right.

Only they had the money. Right.

But you mentioned prebiotics being like a key thing for everyone. If you were to create, someone's going to get three to five supplements, let's say, or the nutrients that they want to have, whether it's through foods or maybe they didn't have access to those foods, but they can get these prebiotics. What would these ingredients be for men to optimize? Their hormones, their muscle growth, their stamina, all these different things.

Yeah. So why not, look, if it's the prebiotics that are good for you, why not take prebiotic pills? Why not just take a prebiotic powder? Right. Problem is that we talk about dietary fiber, but actually that term, dietary fiber, literally covers thousands of different compounds. Right? And so there's actually thousands of different dietary fibers and they each feed the growth of different probiotic good bugs in our gut. And so it's actually this diversity of all these kind of these indigestible plant carbohydrates. That's what dietary fiber is. Indigestible by our small intestine makes it down to our large intestine, so we cannot be replicated. So there's been experiments using something like psyllium, which is a very common fiber supplement. It can help with relaxation, help with.

Releasing the stool regularity.

Right. But does not have all these side benefits because it's not actually digestible, fermentable by a good gut bugs. It just kind of goes through us. And so we have yet to capture the complexity of the natural food matrix in actual kind of pill form.

Interesting.

As much as people have tried. And so, yeah, anytime some new study comes out saying berries are great for you and it's probably these anthocyanin pigments, the bright, colorful pigments in berries, then instantly supplement manufacturers like, boom, there's like anthocyanin supplements at every dose possible, of course, but the food form of these.

Nutrients is the best form to get them.

There have actually been studies that have actually put things head to head. So it's like, oh, I bet tomatoes are good because lycopene that red pigment. That's why people, men who eat more tomato products have lower rates of prostate cancers, probably the lycopene. But when you actually give people lycopene supplements, it doesn't work. Wow. And so it's like, okay, well, there's thousands of other things in tomatoes. Let's try something else. Right. But it doesn't stop people from making lycopene supplements.

It's kind of all the ingredients combined in the tomato or the apple or whatever that gives you the full compounds that helps your body digest.

And in fact, there's actually synergy. So when you take, there's a famous study that was done on pomegranate, and you can fractionate out the pomegranate into different, based on kind of different compound weights. And so when you give you kind of drip one component of pomegranates on cancer cells going, human cancer cells growing at petrogus, it drops your growth like 20% and you do another component. But then you add together and one plus one is greater than two in that they somehow work together and actually have greater drop than all the individual components. So really, the hopeful, I mean, I would like, if there was a supplement, if there was a pill, and there certainly are supplements out there that help people getting united with sunshine and take vitamin d, and alcoholics have a, and pregnant women have certain, I mean, there's absolutely needs for supplements, right. But in terms of longevity, in terms of, like I went through and I went into this book thinking I would be recommending some of these supplements that have made a lot of news just because I'd heard such positive things about them. But when you look in the literature, and I would love to, because it's like, that's such a great hook.

Like, take this one supplement and it's got to do x. I would love to be able to say that, but they fell one by one. Boom, boom, boom.

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But what I did find is that these just random foods I had never heard about, like cardamom or strawberries, one example, or mushrooms have these things. And there's just like normal natural foods had these extraordinary effects. It's kind of not as sexy. You can't just take it a little pill, but in one hand, look, it's delicious. I mean, it's not as convenient. Right. But again, it really comes down to the food, and it's just not a lot of money to be made. And so we just don't hear about these studies because there's just no corporate budget driving us. Promotion.

Yeah, this is fascinating, man. This is powerful stuff. I've recently heard more about glucose. This is becoming more popularized online, or at least talked about in the media, more as kind of like, the more your glucose spikes throughout the day, the faster you age as well. I don't know if you've seen anything in the studies around that.

No.

And I've also heard from some experts that either having a little bit of vinegar in the morning or before a meal helps decrease the spike in glucose. Is that an accurate finding that you've seen, too?

I've got a whole chapter on glycation, one of the aging pathways, and recommend two teaspoons of vinegar with every meal. That's one of the. Absolutely. And one of the reasons is because Amps, something called Ampk, because vinegar is acetic acid water by definition. And by metabolizing the acetic acid requires energy, and that energy drain actually bumps up AMPK, which is boosted by exercise, boosted by calorie restriction, is one of the kind of antiaging pathways. And we can get that boost by just simple vinegar. And it decreases our blood sugars, decreases body fat. You can randomize people to get vinegar to get. They did vinegar drinks kind of gross, but they used acetic Acid versus another kind of acid, tasted exactly the same, but it wasn't acetic acid, and saw a significant difference in visceral body fat, which is the most dangerous body fat, coiled around our internal organs, infiltrating our organs. And they did ct scans. Hundreds of people randomized to different kinds of different kinds of. Well, one vinegar or placebo vinegar. And they did this and saw significant loss. Pounds of body fat, different. Same amount of calories. Same amount of calories having vinegar, vinegar, vinegar.

Now, the problem with the vinegar strategy is that it gets cleared from our system within four to 6 hours. That's why you really got to do it at every meal if you want to get that constant every meal. I know. Okay, so how do you do it? How do you do it?

Tell me.

So you can, like, you put it.

In a tall glass of water, put.

In some tea, diluted. In fact, it can be dangerous taking straight. You can burn your esophagus. So very important. Do not drink vinegar straight. Wow. Sprinkle it on a salad. Sprinkle. And there's all these flavored balsamics out there. So with savory, sweet, there's like, dark chocolate balsamic, there's italian seasoning balsamic. So you can get either curry, there's.

Ginger, or you just do apple cider vinegar.

Totally apple cider.

Put it in water, drink it.

In fact, you can get the benefits from white distilled vinegar that they use for cleaning the bathroom floor. Wow. So because it's the acetic acid, but just in terms of making things flavorful, making things fun, there's ways to add it to your meals. It sounds kind of gross to begin with, but you just find creative ways to include vinegar. And it has significant effects on long term blood sugar and on fat loss, too, and on fat loss. And not just any kind of fat loss. Visceral fat loss. I mean, people hate that jiggly, superficial fat, but that actually has very little metabolic implications. You can do massive liposuctions on people, get rid of that. Get literally over a dozen pounds of that superficial fat. No effect on metabolism, no effect on insulin resistance, no effect on triglycerides, no effect. If you lost that many pounds of fat, period, like, if you were doing exercise, you're doing better diet, you would get tons of benefits. But that superficial fat that we hate seeing in the mirror, that's not what we should worry about.

Internal fat.

Right? Look, if you want it for cosmetic purposes, whatever, but it's that internal visceral fat called around our organs under the abdominal musculature, that's kind of bulging out the belly. That's the serious stuff. The good news is your body's smart enough to know that's the most dangerous fat. And when you lose weight, that's the first fat to go. So preference. That's why people lose fat. They're like, why is my arm still jiggly? I've been losing all this weight. It's because your body's smart enough to know. Look, we'll get there. Let's do the important stuff first. Wow.

So what would you say are the main keys of losing fat, visceral fat, and kind of the external fat.

Well, the single intervention that created the greatest loss of body fat, that didn't restrict calories, obviously. You can lock someone to closet.

You can lose, starve someone.

Right. Or you can change someone to a treadmill. Right. Okay. But that no exercise component and no calorie restriction, no portion restriction. Eat as much as you want. The most effective body fat at six months and twelve months was this whole food plant based diet with centering your diets around. And it's really kind of a calorie density factor.

It's not a restriction.

It's not restriction. Eat as much as you want, right? But there's so few calories per pound, per mouthful per plate in these foods because it's like you could eat a leafy green barrel of leafy greens, you couldn't even maintain your weight. I mean, you literally could not fit enough in your stomach. You can only fit about a quart of food in your stomach at a time. And so you can get 2000 calories. You ate two pints of strawberry ice cream that would fill up your stomach, you'd be full and you get over 2000 calories. All the calories you need for the day to do that same thing with strawberries, 44 cups. 44 cups of strawberries to get 2000 calories, that's like filling your stomach to bursting. Eleven times a day. You couldn't even do it physically, right? And that's this concept of calorie density. And so that's why something like oil, people drizzle oil on something.

A lot of calories.

That is the single most calorie dense food on the plate. Even butter has a little water in it, so it doesn't have that much calories. One tablespoon, 120 calories. So you drizle it on, you wouldn't even taste it. I mean, you'd see it'll be a little glistening or something. You just add 120 calories. What are you crazy? For that same 100 calories, you could add like two cups of blackberries or something. That would actually fill you up a little bit, right? And think all the nutrition you'd get with that, right? Instead, oil may have some fat soluble nutrients, a little vitamin e or something, but I mean, the nutrition has really been stripped away, right? Wow. So the caloric density. So by staying away from junk food, which is designed to have maximum calories per bite that can find the fat and the sugar to just absolutely like teeny little, you get 100 calories. Just a teeny little bit. You'd have these massive platefuls of food, eat all you want and not have to worry about it. And then you're just getting mounds of nutrition for actually very few calories. And so you can facilitate weight loss in a healthy way.

The goal of weight loss is not to fit into a skinnier casket. Right. Not to make it lighter for your pall bearers. How about we lose weight in a way that doesn't mortgage our health? Wow. Yeah.

And when you get these calorie dense foods with all the nutritional value, it sounds like there's so much healing properties within these foods that allow your system to self regulate your skin to recover, your gut, to recover, your brain to start functioning better. Isn't that right?

And Calorie dilute foods. Not calorie dense foods.

Calorie dilute foods. Sorry.

Not junk food. Right.

So not calorie dense, but calorie.

We want nutrient dense.

Nutrient dense.

Nutrient dense. Lots of nutrition per calorie. And so what has more nutrition per calorie than anything on planet Earth? These dark green, leafy vegetables. Right? Massive amounts of nutrition, actually, for verde has those nitrates. Those athletic, performance enhancing, ergogenic nitrates, actually help slow our metabolic rate. And the candle that burns half as bright burns twice as long. That's the other food associated with literally living years longer. Dark green leafy vegetables. Nuts. Dark green leafy vegetables. And we think it's because the nitrates, normally, you only get that kind of metabolic slowing with our resting metabolic rate, with severe caloric restriction. But instead of walking around starving all the time, you can just eat a big salad.

This is exciting. This is exciting. So we mentioned intermittent fasting. Eat in the morning, don't skip breakfast if you're going to break.

Most important meal of the day. Really? Most important. Here's the thing.

This is what doctors were saying for many years. Yes, don't skip breakfast. But then, in the last seven years, everyone's saying doctors were wrong.

Yeah.

Skip breakfast. Allow the body to have autophagy.

Allow the cell. I know.

Extend the window where you're not eating as long as you can. And that's been the new science. So the new studies that have been out where skipping breakfast is actually better for you because it's boosting testosterone, it's doing all these other things.

I talk about that backlash and that back and forth, and I actually have videos about it. It's so funny because you start out the video, be like, yeah, breakfast. And they're like, oh, okay, breakfast. And then we're back to the beginning. It's so funny. And so many things in the book, like that, like wheat germ or something, didn't that go away in, like, the. Like, the healthless. And then it's like, oh, then there's this thing called spermidine. It's most concentrated in wheat germ, out of all things, all of a sudden, wheat germ is like back on the menu. But it's just so funny. We had some kind of ancient wisdom even before we knew why that did actually support these foods. So, yeah. No, it turns out now it's true about that feeding window. We do want to try to squeeze it. But critically important is when we're putting.

Lunch, we early time restricted because of circadian rhythm.

That's it. You got it.

So what is the difference between, I guess, bad cells and zombie cells?

This is cellular senescence. So this is one of the aging pathways that cover eleven aging pathways. Kind of our eleven best opportunities for slowing the sands of time. Ending each with kind of impractical takeaways. This is the part one of the book. It is the kind of the nerdy section. It goes really deep into kind of the interesting biology mechanisms, but really do kind of like, okay, but here's the bottom line. You can skip all this. Sure. This is the foods to eat. This is the activity to do, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, in the cellular senescence chapter. Very fascinating. So our cells in our body only divide about 100 times before they stall out the so called hay flick limit. We used to think cells just kind of divided forever, but they only divide 50 times. And this is good because that's a protection against cancer. We want cells to naturally kind of put themselves out to pasture. Being replaced by new cells from the stem cells.

Right.

And the cells can become damaged along the way. Okay. At the end of those about 50 doublings, what the cells do is they release these inflammatory mediators, which signals the immune system to come and kill them, basically come and wipe them out. This is basically their kind of little suicide way. Be like, okay. So they release these inflammatory compounds, signal the immune system, and it comes and clears out these so called zombie cells that are no longer participating in the body, actively spewing this, what's called senescence associated Sasp. Okay. The problem is this works great when we're young. Unfortunately, our immune system starts to decline with age. And so what happens is our immune system's ability to clear out these cells decline such that our body's tissues get littered with these senescent cells spewing out inflammation. And one of the reasons why levels of inflammation climb with age, so that you can do these kind of blood tests of systemic inflammation like creactive protein and tumor necrosis factor il six, et cetera. And they all go up term inflammaging. And a big part of this is these cells, which our body shouldn't get rid of.

But unfortunately, our ability to do that declines with age. And so two pronged approach. First, we prevent cells from going prematurely senescent, so they should make it to 50. But if they suffer damage to their dna from free radicals, from oxidative damage to their dna as a protective mechanism, because it could cause mutations or something, they kind of go out to pasture, really. And so we can decrease oxidative stress by flooding our body with antioxidant rich foods, like the berries and greens and really healthy foods. Okay. So we prevent the premature senescence. That's the first thing. And the second is we look for phenolytic compounds, ways to clear these zombie cells from our bodies. There's been a number of drugs that have been put to the test. Unfortunately, these drugs have kind of some severe side effects. And so there are certain medical conditions in which senescent cells play a key role, in which case, the benefit risk analysis might actually support use of some of these toxic drugs. But for kind of the general public, we're really left with senolytic compounds in natural foods. There are three of them that have been shown to clear senescent cells in the body.

One is facetin, which is really only found one place in concentrated form, and that's the strawberries. So that's why I end up in the book, in that chapter, recommending fresh frozen or freeze dried strawberries into your daily diet. Now, normally, I would have put, like, if you're putting some on your oatmeal or something, I would have put, like, blackberries. Blackberries have five times the antioxidants of strawberries. So, look, if you like them both, why not? But I didn't know about facetin, which is really only found in strawberries. So if you're not eating strawberries, you're really not getting into your daily diet. So I've been eating a lot more strawberries. Wow. Okay. The second some, called quercetin corsetin, is found in onions, kale, tea, and capers, and may actually play a role in mediterranean diet help. And that helps explain these remarkable studies where they give people onions and see remarkable benefits. Literally within an hour, you can randomize people. Done eating onions. In fact, you can randomize people to eat high quercetin onions versus bread to be low corset and onions and show that it does appear to be this one compound. And so, of course, there's corset and supplements everywhere.

It's not clear. We don't what's the best onion well, so it's actually lowest in the sweet onions, of course, like the tastiest onions, just low amount. Okay. But so yellow onions have more. Red onions have the most.

So red onions are better than white.

Red onions really are the best. And look, you can basically, anything you can do with a red onion, a white onion, you can do with red onion. So it's like, this is no excuse. Same thing with cabbage. If you're making some with cabbage, don't go for green cabbage, go for red. Or purple cabbage has these anthocyanin berry pigments. One of the cheapest sources of these berry pigments is in red. Purple cabbage. Right. Super cheap. And you get those benefits for brain function, eyesight, artery function, inflammation, blood sugar, cholesterol. You get those berry benefits in this kind of savory form.

Is raw or cooked red onions.

Either way. Either way, either way, you eat too much, stable your breath, might, your partner may. In fact, you need to have onion. I mean, your entire, your sweat can start, you can really start smelling, like on.

But has there become, like, too much like, if you have a half an.

Onion, there's only a concern in supplement form where it's like, you could not eat this many onions, and then we're playing with fire. But, yeah, there's never been any. In fact, some of these benefits, some of these remarkable clinical benefits were seen after eating, like one to two onions a day. I don't know how one does that without. Wow. I mean, that's a lot. But you can get benefit even from literally a teaspoon of chopped onions. You can get put on your food and just eat it, sprinkle it on you. Right. And this is all the allium family of vegetables. So it can be like green onions, like scallions or onions, garlic. It's all in this kind of same family. And they have this beneficial compound. The third compound, it's a tough one to get. It's called pepper longumine, only found really in one place, which is something called papali or long pepper. It's in the black pepper family you get in middle eastern spice stores. And it's basically kind of tastes like black pepper with a little kind of sezuan heat to it. But it's a seniletic compound you really can't find anywhere else.

So I encourage people to put some of that in their pepper grinder to add that to their daily diet. Yeah, that's amazing.

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Now, you went to medical school, right?

Yeah.

In medical school, they don't teach you this stuff.

They don't even teach you the basics, right?

They don't teach you about nutrition, they don't teach you about foods, none of that, right. Maybe there's like 1 hour class on this stuff I hear from other doctors. So how did you get into this world of nutritional science as well? When most people today look at doctors skeptically when they're speaking about this because they think, oh, they're not a nutritionist, they're not a scientist around foods. So how did you get into this world?

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, having an MD after your name is basically advertising the world that you know nothing about nutrition, that you are completely ignorant about the entire field of nutrition. So the average doctor these days gets 4 hours of nutrition training out of thousands of hours of preclinical structure. I actually chose the medical school with the largest nutrition training in the country. They actually have a nutrition school at tufts, 19 hours. But that's the most out of thousands of hours, right. And most of it is basic biochemistry of vitamins and, like, scurvy pellagra, stuff we don't even see anymore. And it's like curb cycle. So it's not actually clinical. Using nutrition diet to actually prevent arrest, reverse disease that's missing in even those few hours that people get. Okay. And so then doctors graduate without this powerful tool in their medical toolbox to actually heal, to actually help people. Instead, for about 80% that walks into the primary care doctor's office are these chronic diseases, lifestyle diseases, like the high blood pressure, type two diabetes, and the obesity and the heart disease. And yes, we have drugs that can slow down the rate at which our diabetics go blind and lose their kidney function and lose their lower limbs.

Reversing it, but not actually make our patients better. That's why we went to medical school, right? We want to actually heal people, but instead, it's just so frustrating because unless you treat the cause, the underlying cause, you're not actually going to reverse the disease. Right. The root cause. But that's the exciting thing about lifestyle medicine. Okay, so how did I get into this whole lifestyle medicine thing? Proud to be a founder of a co founder of American College of Lifestyle Medicine, now the fastest growing medical specialty in the country. Very exciting. Okay. It all started with my grandmother. I was just a kid when my grandma was sent home in a wheelchair, basically to die with end stage heart disease. She already had so many bypass surgeries, she basically kind of run out of plumbing at some point. So confined to wheelchair crushing chest pain, her life was over at age 65.

Oh, man.

And then she heard about this guy, Nathan Pritikin, one of our early lifestyle medicine pioneers. And what happened next is actually detailed in prittikin's biography. It talks about Francis Gregor, my grandmother. They wheeled her in, and she walked out. Though she was given her medical death sentence at age 65, thanks to a healthy diet, she was able to enjoy another 31 years on this planet till age 96, to continue to enjoy her six grandkids, including me. That's why I went into medicine. That's why I practiced lifestyle medicine, why I started the website nutritionfacts.org, why I wrote the book, how not to die, why all the proceeds from all my books are donated directly to charity. I just want to do for everyone's family what Prittikin did for my family. Wow.

Now, did you think about that going into medical school?

Absolutely. So you knew going into medical school.

They'Re not teaching me the things I still need to know.

Yeah.

When did you learn all this stuff about lifestyle, nutrition, diet, foods? Was it all after medical school?

No. The big pivot was in 1990, before medical school even started. And that was the publication of the lifestyle heart trial from Dean Ornish and colleagues. So what Pritkin was doing, he was reversing heart disease by the thousands. But back then, we did not have the technology to actually look inside people's arteries. So it was a clinical diagnosis. You have chest pain when you walk upstairs, you got heart disease. Okay? And so we put you on drugs, and we cut your chest open. We do bypass, we stents, whatever. Okay? Then Pritikin would take these people and then put them on his diet and lifestyle program, and all of a sudden, chest pain goes away. And so he reversed heart disease. Now, the medical profession was, no, no. Heart disease gets worse, worse, worse till you die. That's what the thinking at the time. And so if your patient is fine, he never had heart disease in the first. It must have been something else. And so that was. So he was kind of remained on the fringe until Dr. Dean Ornish came along. He used something called quantitative angiography, where you inject a radio pig dye into the arteries.

You do these x rays, you can actually see the inside of the arteries. And so for the first time, was able to prove the reversal of heart disease, opening up arteries without drugs, without surgery, just a healthy plant based diet and exercise. And it was published in the most prestigious medical journal in the world. So it was like unassailable science. Randomized controlled trials. Of course, the people in the control group who were told to continue to eat whatever their doctors told them to eat continue to get worse. That's what happens normally. Whereas you got this reversal on average in those. And so it's the only diet ever been proven to reverse the progression of heart disease in the majority of patients. So it's like, look, if that's all a plant based guy could do, reverse the number one killer of men and women. Like, shouldn't that be kind of the default diet until proven otherwise? And the fact that can also be so effective in preventing, arresting, reversing other leading killers like high blood pressure and type two diabetes, which silly make the case for plant based eating really kind of unassailable at this point.

But then here I am. So now, I had already know about this from my grandma, right? But here it was in black and white, published in the most prestigious medical journal. You just imagine all of medicine changing. Here we are, decades later. That was 1990s. Over three decades later, hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to die from heart disease, a preventable, arrestable, sometimes even reversible condition, which we've known about for decades, just because this has yet to really penetrate into the medical field. And that's because of the incentives are wrong, actually. Hospitals, money cutting people open. And these are the golden goof for big pharma lifestyle drugs, where instead of ten days on an antibiotic to save your life, it's take a drug every single day for the rest of your life. That's how you make money, right? But the only drug you need that for is these lifestyle diseases where if you continue to treat yourself like this, well, of course you need something. And look, if you refuse to improve your life, then these drugs can be life saving. But even better, why not try to reverse the disease by treating the underlying cause in the first place?

So when you finished medical school, did you start going right into this nutritional side of learning as well?

Yeah. So I started out in clinical practice, but then I realized, even though I don't know how many people you could pack into a day, how many people am I reaching? Right. So people were dying everywhere. And so then. So I started giving lectures and going around to medical schools and trying to train the kind of next generation of doctors. But even then, how many people can you reach? You can reach hundreds. Right? So then I started. This was actually so long ago, it was like a VHS series I started making. Well, why don't I tape these lectures, right? And then send out these vhs tapes we turned into dvds until finally was able to put it online.

Yeah, of course.

And then can reach millions with that same kind of medicine. So now I had to give up the clinical practice. So I feel like I'm still practicing medicine, but just on a kind of broader scale. Writing, research, speaking, all that, just getting this information out there, it's like, in a certain sense, we really don't need any more research. We have enough to save so many lives, and there's always unanswered questions. I love the research, but we have enough now to really reverse the course of the way our country is headed.

So was a lot of your learning then based on just studying research papers and clinical trials and then kind of assimilating the research and saying, hey, this is the findings. Why don't we start trying these things with patients and see the results?

Yeah. So it's all really the gold standard of what we know in medicine comes from the so called peer reviewed medical literature, right? So these are the studies in these peer reviewed medical journals where at least this is kind of bar to entry, like on the Internet. You can say, right, earth is flat, whatever, right? And look, you can say there's crazy things published in the peer reviewed literature as well, but at least there's kind of a bar to entry where fellow scientists actually look at your work with kind of a skeptical eye and make sure you're just, like, not totally making stuff out of whole cloth, right? And so that's where we look to. And so there's been decades, decades of this mountain of research building up, but it just hasn't kind of gotten over to the general public again just because there's not money to be made, right? So new blockbuster drug. Oh, my God, there is a press release, there is ads, marshall. Everybody knows about the new drug, which could have even a fraction of the benefit. And so I feel like we were in a very similar situation to kind of smoking in the.

We had already looked doctor recommended cigarettes.

Decades of research starting in the 30s linking lung cancer and smoking. And so yet the average per capita cigarette consumption in the 1950s, 4000 cigarettes a year, meaning the average person walking around smoked half pack a day. Average person. Most doctors smoked. The media was telling people to smoke. The American Medical association said smoking in moderation, that was fine. Right? And so by the time 1964, when this first surgeon general's report came out and smoking rates went up, up till 1964, then, in one of the most remarkable public health victories of all time, basically smoking rates have come down every year since. And down this tumbling lung cancer rates. It's just the most beautiful graphs in all public health. And what happened in 1964, the first surgeon general's report, just this acknowledgment by the powers that be that, okay, yeah. Smoking isn't good for you. And they cited 7000 studies, right? So you'd think maybe after the first 6000 studies could give people a little heads up or something, right? I feel like we're in the same situation today where there's this absolute mount of evidence. It just has yet to kind of make it into the public consciousness, make it kind of bypass these barriers.

And so that was really like, that's my role is I'm going to take. Right. It's not me saying this, right. It's just like, this is what the established science is already there, but there's just kind of no sexy money to be made, and it doesn't make those headlines. No one wants to see broccoli on the COVID Sure. Right. It has everything working against it, except who profits? The people profit, your family profits, longevity profits. It's just crossing that gap, getting that information out to the public.

I mean, you mentioned that 1964 was when they came out and said smoke is essentially bad for you.

Right?

60 years ago, is that right? 60 years ago. It seems to me like 80% of Americans know that sugar and processed foods are not healthy for you. It seems to me by now there's enough information out there that people at least have that awareness, but they haven't.

Stopped consumption, the behavior. Right.

What do you think it's going to take for people to change the behavior and the habits to consume healthier foods so they can actually live longer as opposed to suck to the addiction of feeling and tasting good.

Right? Well, towards the end there, with the smoking, in the smoking crisis, most smokers had an inkling that smoking is not good for you. But what the industry's tact was, was just to muddy the waters they knew they were going to lose. In the end, they're going to confuse you. Right. And so, in fact, there's this famous memo which was uncovered in the tobacco trials. This internal memo called doubt is our product. So this is a pr company that worked with Phil Morse to, we don't have to convince people smoking is good for you. We lost it, okay? All we have to do is introduce doubt. Yeah, maybe it causes lung cancer, maybe it doesn't. Right? And that's all you need for someone who's addicted to smoking to be like, well, look, they say it's okay, right? And so now the same thing, right? It's like we are bombarded by ads for fast food, for junk food, for candy, for soda, right? At the same time, the science is so clear, but we're getting these mixed messages. And, you know, when you're. Everybody wants to hear good news about their bad habits, right? And so when there's like, well, this person says, alcohol is good for you, even if all these people are.

And so that's all you need. And then you just kind of continue down your path, right? And so that's what the 1964 did was. It's like, okay, there's scientific consensus now. Anyone who's telling you that smoking is not bad for you is a paid shill of the industry. And it's like, this is the established science. Although it's hard to imagine that even happening these days. What if the CDC, the government came out and said, you know, yeah, it turns out that processed meat, bacon and hot dogs, lunch meat, we determined that they increase the risk of colorectal cancer. In fact, it's a known human carcinogen. It's true. Group one carcinogen, meaning we're as sure that processed meat causes colorectal cancer as we are, that plutonium caused cancer and tobacco cause cancer, asbestos cause cancer. We are sure it causes cancer. Yet we're sending kids to school with a bologna sandwich or something. Right? We wouldn't maybe smoke around our kids now, but we're sending. And colorectal cancer is the single deadliest cancer among non smokers. That's our number one cancer. If you don't smoke, your number one cancer nemesis in terms of dying, colorectal science has been established, has not yet.

But what if the CDC, the government finally came out, put it on their website? Okay, yeah, process me. We probably shouldn't be feeding this to people in today's media world back mean, certainly me. I like to think of the Internet as this democratizing force. We all this idealistic view of, like, now the truth is going to float to the surface, right? If everybody in a free marketplace of ideas, right? And so back in the 1950s, tobacco could absolutely control the message, they can pay off the doctors. In fact, the American Medical association, even after 1964, tobacco, even after the surgeon general report came out, they refused to endorse it. And it turns out later they got a $10 million check for the tobacco industry. Wow. Which they didn't disclose anyway. Okay, so, look, you could pay off the doctors. You could control the message, you control the media right now, which is, in part, good. There's no longer that kind of monopolistic control of the message. Right.

But there's confusion.

But what you is replaced with, with confusion. So even if these days we had the, quote, unquote, authorities, the experts that came out and said, xYz, a lot of people wouldn't believe them now for a good reason, in many cases, because there's been so many terrible crises with drugs that were promoted and then turned out to be terrible and pulled from the market. And look, all the authorities were telling people to use these drugs anyway. So it's hard to imagine a similar kind of aha. Moment with diet that we saw with this kind of clear surge in general thing.

Right?

And so there's always going to be the sugar pushers, and there's always going to be these people that are muddying the waters just enough to introduce enough doubt that people will kind of throw up their hands and eat whatever crap's put in front of them, which is how the industry makes money.

I've got a few questions for you left, but I'm excited for people to check out your book. How not to age. The scientific approach to getting healthier as you get older. I think a lot of people think about, how do I make my biological age. Right. Reverse, essentially, you can't reverse chronological age.

Right.

But how do we make our cells younger? How do we make our body our cells younger? Is that the difference between the chronological and biological age?

Exactly right. There's a calendar age. It just keeps going forward until we get a DeLorean or something. But then there's the. Right, but just because we happen to have this many birthdays doesn't necessarily mean our body is functioning as if it could be worse. We get to have accelerated aging and that we really should have the heart and the kidneys and the liver of a 50 year old, but they're actually functioning like a 60 year old. Wow. Right? We actually have the muscle mass of a 60 year old. Or alternately, we take care of ourselves and we have tremendous power over this leeway. Or, yeah, I've had 50 birthdays, but I have the aerobic capacity of a 40 year old. And so that's this difference. And so there's lots of different ways to measure biological aging. It's just a fascinating field of science. But the bottom line is that we really have tremendous control over that leeway. That's cool. And literally just. And it's never too late.

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The first studies that came out, it's like, okay, well, if you start at age 20 and you do the x, Y, and z, by age 50, you'll have all these benefits. And it's like, yeah, that's great, but you should have told me that 30 years ago. Right? But then they found, wait a second. Even in the 80s, this is the latest that's been done. But even in people's 80s, there's still literally years left on the table, healthy years left on the table, just by simple, basic lifestyle changes. And so those few things I mentioned before, not being obese, not smoking, regular aerobic exercise, and more fruits and vegetables can, over the subsequent four years, if you're between the ages of 45 and 64, decrease your risk of all cause mortality by 40%, meaning your risk of dying by anything over the next four years. By 2028, you want to risk, reduce your risk by 40%, just do those four things. We have tremendous power over. Look, you still get hit by a bus. I mean, there's lots of things. Wear a seatbelt, smoke alarms, all that. Right. But in terms of what's the most common cause of death, actually, we have so much control, and unfortunately, we just don't hear that message.

What are the four main things?

Okay, so not smoking, not being obese, regular exercise, which really comes out to, like, 22 minutes a day, which was what the cutoff point was, and five daily servings of fruits and vegetables, minimum. Right. So that's not a lot. And we're not talking about cutting out meat. We're not talking about any of these dramatic changes, not all or nothing. Just like these really core kind of. Yeah, we heard about five fruits of rice, but it's like, wow, that makes this massive amount of difference. Now you want to go beyond that and tweak even further. Yeah, we got all said there's certain fruits and vegetables that are even better than other fruits and vegetables. But let's not get lost in the weeds. Let's do the simple things. That'll get us most of the way there. Wow.

This is fascinating, Michael. I'm so grateful for your excitement and passion around this and your wisdom and knowledge. A couple final questions. This one is something I ask everyone towards the end of our conversations. It's called the three truths. So I'd like you to imagine a hypothetical scenario. You get to live as long as.

You want to live.

You get to continue to write all the books and speak 200 times a year like you do a lot of the times, to spread this message, and you experience life the way you want to. All your dreams come true, but it's the last day for you, far in the distance. And in this hypothetical scenario, on your last day, you have to take all of your work with you. No one has access to this book or this conversation or anything you've ever written or said, ever.

Oh, you're killing me.

It's gone to another place.

Okay.

But before you die, you get to leave three things behind. Three lessons, three truths. It could be about your work. It could be about personal life. It could be about whatever you believe that you would want to leave behind these three lessons to the world. What would be those three truths for you?

Well, I mean, certainly a truth for me. It's always hard to give advice to other people, right? Obviously. But what's certainly been true for me is what I've dedicated my life to. This kind of reducing unnecessary suffering in the world that has given me, having that motivation, having that vision, having that base truth in my life has, like. So even if all my good works were to nothing, it would have benefited me to have woke up every day and been able to look myself in the mirror and be like, there's just so many horrible things happening in the world. But I did my part, and so that would be the message, if you can configure your life to not just do what you're good at and not just to, but to do something meaningful for others and to kind of look outside yourself, if you can. Look, there's so many people struggling with basic. I had this privileged ability to be able to look outside because I had my basic needs met. So that would definitely be one of the truths, is to incorporate some kind of selfless acts. Look, and that could be philanthropy, right?

I mean, it doesn't have to mean devoting your career to that, sure. But, like, tithing even 10% to.

Yes.

There's so much we could do with bed nets for malaria and stuff. You can literally save people's lives for small amounts of money, right? If you actually saved someone's life, if you went into a burning building and you pulled out some kid, that would be the biggest day of your life. You would remember that. That would be like your crowning achievement. You would never.

Life would have been worth it, right?

You can do that with a check these days because now we have a system where we can get money anywhere in the world to places that really needed, and we have preventable diseases, and we have tremendous poverty that can be alleviated. And it's like that's this amazing. We have this amazing power that we never really had in our species before to help. We have this tendency, obviously, to help people around us. People are close to us, we see something and we want to reach out to something local. I totally understand that. But poverty here is nothing like poverty some places in the world, and you willing dollar can go so much far. And so that's another thing that I really learned, is that you can be that crazy hero that actually saves somebody's life.

Amazing.

Regardless of what you do in your life, by giving just a little bit, we really have tremendous control. I know we don't like to think about these horrible things, but you know how you don't think about these little horrible things is you actually do something about it, right? We don't want to think about it because we have this guilt. And so you don't have the guilt when you feel like I am part of the solution, taking action. Yeah, I am taking action, and I'm actually, in fact, I'm helping. And even if I could help more, and I'm not helping as much as I possibly could. Look, I'm helping more than like 90% of the people. Even given 10%, how many people actually give 10% of their income, right? Particularly people who are make enough that they wouldn't really even notice the 10% in the end of the day. And so the fact that there's really this beautiful culture of giving in this culture in this society. I just came back from Europe and there just really isn't this thing of donating to nonprofits. And there's just not that kind of like the billionaires there are just keeping all the money themselves, whereas billionaires here are doing these massive projects.

And I know we love to hate.

On the billionaires, I know we hate.

On them, but they actually do some good things they could do. And we should be like applauding them when they do it. And not just like you should give more. Exactly. Oh, yeah. Okay, well, and they should.

But of course. Okay, so that's your first one.

Okay. So first through, live to your values. The second way, we want to separate that out, to actually act on those values, even if it's not in a career, you can do it with money, with resources. Another core truth.

Third truth could give me a truth.

That in all that otherworldly thinking, you need to hold a place for love, self love. And not only self love, but surrounding your people and surrounding yourself. And we're these social beings. We just evolved to be able to have. To have that. And as much as I'm just, like, workaholic for the. Whatever, I've really learned too late in life, I'm afraid.

Really.

And that you put on your own mask before you help others. And it's not because you're selfish, it's because you can't help others if you're not taking care of yourself. And so really cultivating love in your life. Wow. Is something that I wish I would have emphasized earlier, and it almost seemed like selfish to me. Right? It's like, what do you mean? But there's so many people out there that I could be helping, right? To put all my energies into one person or into. It seems almost like, well, of course I want to help because I'm close to them, but it's like, that almost seems, like, unfair. But the wisdom I've learned later, the truth that I would pass on to my earlier self, would be to really, that has to be a priority. Wow. Because that's. So much of that is life from kind of a lifelong perspective. It's the feeling of the work I've done, but kind of on a day to day happiness, literally, like, how are you feeling right now? On a day to day, it's the loving relationships in our life.

Those are great truths. Those are beautiful. Do you have love in your life right now?

I don't have enough love in my life, unfortunately.

What action are you going to take this year? Cultivate more love?

I'm a tough person to love just because I'm so kind of your time. I'm so neglectful of my relationships with friends and family as much as I love them, because there's just, like, the world's on fire that I can do something about it. And I feel myself and the more uniquely positioned I am to help, like before, when I was a kid, I'm like, bulk mailing envelopes for the local homeless, whatever, right? But if I wasn't doing it, somebody else could do it. But the more I get, like, well, if I'm not doing specialize, right, it's like, well, if I don't get this done, it's not like somebody else is just going to swoop in and do it. And so I feel this additional burden to do it. Speaking to her, this is your third truth.

If you go three things to do in the world.

I know I'm going to meet a lot of people on this speaking tour, and hopefully I will find the love of my life on the road.

So you're setting that intention.

I'm sending that intention out into the world.

Okay, great.

All right.

There you go. But you could also do that with friends and family. I can also be a little more intentional.

Right? It's true.

It's true. When we get so obsessed into our mission, it's hard to remember to text or call.

Absolutely.

I understand that feeling.

I love you.

Good. Give her a call.

Right? That's right.

I want to acknowledge you, Michael, for your commitment to your mission, your commitment to wanting to put together great work, where you're finding all the best research you can find and packaging it so we can understand it, and sharing your findings so that we can hopefully live healthier, longer, better lives, so that we can enjoy the fruits of connection and love with people around us. And I want to acknowledge you for acknowledging that as well, that it's something you get to work on in your own life.

Right.

I think saying that truth and owning it is a great thing to say. And so having that intention this year, I think I'm excited. Hopefully by the end of this year, you send me a photo, I'm reporting back.

Absolutely.

Love in your life, whether it's one person or friends or family, just more love in general.

You get invite to the wedding.

Let's go. People can get the book. How not to age. The scientific approach to getting healthier as you get older. Make sure you guys grab a copy. You've got a few other great books as well. Where can we follow you, support you, and learn more about your work as well?

So all my work is available free@nutritionfacts.org. There's no ads, no corporate sponsorships, strictly not commercial, not selling anything. Just put up as a public service, as a labor of love, as a tribute to my grandmother.

That's beautiful. That's so nice, man. I love it. Final question for you. What's your definition of greatness?

Is living true to your values, living true to your values, whatever those values are, you know, you should do the right thing. But are you actually doing what, you know, you're not, like, being convinced otherwise? No, you know what's right. And are you actually doing, in the back of your mind, you know, you could be a little bit. A little more true to your inner self, but are you actually doing it? Are you going all in on it? Right. That's greatness. It's like being your own superhero, basically, and no one knows what you're capable of, but you. And people could be like, patting you on the back, oh my God, you did awesome. But, you know, you could have studied a little more. You could have done this a little more. Okay, now it's that feeling that, like, no, I put in the work and I did. Absolutely. Look, I could have done better, but I don't have the capacity to do better, but I did the absolute best I could. And look, it doesn't matter what the outcome is. Did you really do what you know it was possible? That's greatness.

Michael, thanks so much for being here. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you, and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you, if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy and you matter, and now it's time to go out there and do something great.

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