 Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Resiliency Radio with Dr. Jill. Today I have a special guest, a longtime friend, Dr. Kara Fitzgerald. I will introduce her in just a moment, but as you well know, if you've been a fan or listener to the podcast, you can find all of our episodes on iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, wherever you listen or watch podcast. If you do like this podcast, please share with a friend or leave a review. That really helps us reach more people and just love having you as an audience. So as always, you can leave your comments or feedback about future episodes or topics that you want to hear. So today we are going to talk about aging in reverse. You might think this is science fiction, but now we have so much science to back up not only testing and determining what is our biological age, but also the practical interventions, some very, very practical things we're going to dive into what can you actually do based on the science. And what I love about Dr. Fitzgerald is she is all about the science and the research we're going to nerd out today. So stay tuned and hang on. Let me just introduce her and we'll jump right in. Dr. Kara Fitzgerald received her Doctor of naturopathic medicine degree at the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon. She completed the first console on naturopathic medicine accredited post doctorate position in nutritional, biochemistry and laboratory science at Metametrics clinical laboratory. Now you and I both know that was years ago, right? I remember your first lab book, which is one of your first or second publications. There was all those case studies, Kara, and you did such a great job because way back in the beginning of functional medicine, all of us were trying to pave a new road and you published these case studies. It was called, well, you were part of the case studies in integrative and functional medicine as a contributing author and then the lab evaluations for integrative and functional medicine. Both of those were on my book shelves in the beginning. So, as I said, we've known each other a long time and we've had such a great respect. You publish a lot of different things. You've been a research clinician for the Institute of Therapeutic Discovery. You've been on faculty for IFM and I can go on and on. Your website is DrKaraFitzgerald.com and at the end and in the show notes, we'll leave all the links to where to find you, but welcome to the show. Thank you. Yeah, it's going way back. I appreciate the shout out for that case studies book. I mean, it really, it was a pretty intense journey, but it was so awesome to write it, write down what we do. You know, really, how do we practice this systems medicine called functional medicine? And so, yeah, I still appreciate it, even though now it's over 10 years old. I do too. So relevant, because like you said, the things that you and I have been doing it so long, it starts to come natural, but when someone's first learning, there's no textbook for what we do. As I'm even training in my clinic nurse practitioners, oftentimes she's like, well, where do I find this information? I'm like, well, I can tell you, but I don't know that there's a reference, you know, in a textbook about how to exactly approach. And of course, we are all creating more and more pathways and case studies. And I think now, 10, 20 years later, there's so much more out there. But still, it's really interesting when like someone would observe you in clinical practice or observe me, because it's not, there's not a, you know, 20 textbooks out there that document it. So I really, really do appreciate that. Well, first of all, let's start out with just a little bit of story about Dr. Cara. How did you get into functional medicine? Had you always wanted to be a doctor? Tell us more about your journey into where you're at now. I knew that I was, so I was, I was thinking about medicine, actually conventional MD, and I was thinking about psychology. And take these together, you know, as I was getting ready for my next, you know, move, my, you know, doing my, my various graduate entrance exams. I was sitting with it. I was working in a health food store at the time in the supplement section. And I also developed chronic fatigue. So I had a lot, a lot going on. I was really kind of burning the candle at both ends and ended up developing kind of a classic chronic fatigue. But all of these, these balls were happening in my life. I, my landlady at the time, sent me to her physician who turned out to be a naturopathic doctor. So I went to, so I had fatigue. I went to the, I went to all sorts of standard medical doctors. One guy was sophisticated enough to actually prescribe B vitamins, I remember, that being really interesting to me to get a B vitamins in a, in a medical bottle, you know, in that classic kind of orange bottle. But nothing got me better and they didn't find anything. So I, so she sent me to her doctor who turned out to be a naturopathic physician and he got me better, you know, really quickly and pretty simply with some basic botanicals. He didn't, he didn't strong arm me with diet. Like I was young at the time and I don't know how much I would have done but he made some suggestions to improve it, gave me some CoQ10, gave me, yeah, a handful of combination botanicals and, you know, before long, I was, I was absolutely better and I was pretty blown away by that. So that experience with my first naturopath, being in a health food store and being exposed to supplements, I found myself getting excited about the mechanisms, you know, we would get white papers all the time. I remember Udo Erasmus had a, there was a popular book, Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill and it was really introducing me to, you remember the book, it was super famous, it was a long time ago but it was famous, you know, just learning about omega-3 fatty acids and ecosinoids and all of this and I was really excited about it and that, that really, that informed my decision, you know, when it came time to decide on medical schools, it was, it just made sense for me to become an naturopathic physician, you know, as I just did my research and I, my training was extraordinary, you know, it was just, all of it was inspirational and satisfying, I did have a penchant for biochemistry, I was in the Pacific Northwest, I was able to see Jeff Bland lecture routinely, he was lecturing a lot at that time in the specifically in the Pacific Northwest and I ended up getting a postdoc position in a lab, as you know, that's probably around the time that we met when I was there under the direction of Richard Lord who's a, you know, really highly regarded nutritional biochemist and it was just, it was just like a dream after dream after dream come true and I started to speak actually so I had, I had opportunities to do really heavy, heavy drill down into the research, writing laboratory evaluations in integrative and functional medicine as you mentioned, so our laboratory textbook was a huge part of my postdoctorate work and then after that was the case studies book and the case studies book, since we were writing in the functional medicine model, we were using the matrix timeline, etc., since we were using actually matrix antecedents, triggers and mediators at the time, that's what they had, that was the tool, they hadn't brought the timeline out. David Jones who was the chief medical officer, you know, the co-founder of IFM started to mentor me and he didn't know who I was, I mean I was just a young upstart at the time writing the book, but he wanted to keep an eye on this person who was going to be publishing something using the functional medicine structure and it was this incredible, again, I just consider myself so blessed to have these weekly meetings, it, you know, we get in a week out with with David Jones and we would talk a little bit about what I was doing in the book and really mostly he would just, I don't know, give me sort of this like zen, you know, transmission of information in functional medicine and it was just extraordinary and at the end of that he asked me to join the faculty at IFM so that was, I think that was my proving ground, but what a, you know, what a blessed career to, you know, just really start in that juicy way that felt, you know, designed beyond anything I could have, you know, beyond my wildest dreams really. Right, I love it and yet in that I see like your brilliance is that curiosity that is a mark of genius that I want to know more with the mechanism what's that and one thing I love about what you brought to our field is I remember so well that lab textbook once again there's nothing, even on my shelves now, there's still nothing out there like that. I love to dive in and look at the pathways and figure out what the testing might show and really at the core those of us who really, really love functional medicine, we have to love biochemistry because it's all about going back to what we were taught peripherally in medical school but most of us forgot and never really used that and now we're going back to really, really diving in and I think those of us like you and I who really, really love what we do, it's we get fascinated by these pathways, right? Yes, I mean they have so much more meaning when you look at them through the lens of functional medicine, through you know nutrition, it's just they become so much more meaningful than just, you know, memorizing pathways because you have to spit it out on your exam, yeah. And I always have such a just a deep respect for naturopathic medicine because you have paved the way with basically nutritional biochemistry in your field compared to us allopathic nutrition poor physicians who really have very little training literally I'm sure you know this Kara but my training in medical school was about six weeks of TPN which is IV nutrition after surgery and that was almost it and so everything else has been much, much on my own and any allopathic doctor hopefully now they're starting to incorporate a little bit more but it's amazing how little nutrition the average doctor is it understands. So I know it's astonishing and I do think the field is changing I mean I think that it's expanding but yeah absolutely mind-blowing that that it was right not important not relevant. So let's talk about this new thing first of all for those who aren't aware I want to kind of pave the groundwork what is this but you have a new article and you have lots of stuff you published or you know on your website and podcasts and things about studies and information using epigenetic modeling for biological clocks now what does that mean yeah I was a little bit about that. Yeah sure and just to kind of bridge it with my background I think you know being in an early sort of omics lab where we were doing these broad investigations into fatty acids and amino acids and organic acids that I think it was a good foundation for me to you know eventually in my career I really want to do this deep dive into epigenetics and just make it possible for me to kind of think about it. So epi above genetics or genes and this is really studying what turns the biochemical marks that influence what genes are on and what genes are off you know and just a little bit of background is we thought that we were going to have the resettosadone for all chronic disease out all diseases when we mapped the genome out in the early 2000s we thought that would be our answer and it turned out that it wasn't of course right our genes are in our destiny at all and that really leapfrogged us into the era of epigenetics what influences what genes are on and off and that's the environment that's our there is a heritable portion that we can talk about but really by and large it's our choices day in and day out what we're eating what we're doing what we're you know saying and being and breathing and like all of this interconnection experience of of you know being in the environment or the expose on that's what dictates whether you know we age well and live long or we succumb to the plethora of chronic diseases and so this is the field of epigenetics and it's just getting bigger and bolder and brighter all of the time we can really look at gene expression and I I mean do you want me to give you a little background on how I got into it should I yeah um so it was probably around 2013 14 15 that the that the papers on epigenetics were just really kind of crossing my desk and at that time the bulk of the research was on cancer and still a lot of it is because cancer very efficiently you know takes over gene expression from us the tumor micro environment will turn genes on that it wants on for survival and turn genes off that it wants off very predictably very reliably we can test reliably for cancer by looking at these different patterns of epigenetic um marks I mean it's just really powerful really predictive uh so I it's funny I you know I was in clinic practice at the time I think I had a journal club I was I was I found myself this is ironic it's so ironic of like you know oh god you know I need to do this I knew that it was important but I was a little bit reluctant to do the drill down in the complete sort of rebuilding of my brain to dive into it and understand that if believe it or not there was a little bit of reluctance from this person who's so eager for mechanisms I think these these these papers were just were in a language just sufficiently different yeah from where I had been so deeply trained even though it was an extension from where I came I I just I remember that little that little bit of inertia that I experienced sometimes I wonder if it's because I knew that at some level I knew it was going to completely change my career it's gonna yeah like hide back everything yes it's gonna just like take me over um so but as I as I as I really dug into the science it became the overarching question for me was what are we doing in functional medicine there's no there was no doubt in my mind that we were changing gene expression was it all good what I mean was is was there a possibility that we might be with our with our heavy focus on methylation with our heavy reliance on methyl donors and so forth could we be doing something we won't we don't want to do because we're not you know we haven't had these tools to look that carefully yet so it was it was potent enough for me to decide you know with my strong nutrition team here that we should we could design a diet and lifestyle program and it started just as a diet we there's no doubt methyl donors are important b12 folate, choline, butane, etc we need to be bathed in them and as we get older we need more there's some suggestion that when we take them in isolation so as vitamins there could there could be in certain situations that I that I talk about in the book that we can talk about more that we want to be a little bit more nuanced or careful diet however is all beneficial there's some neutral papers but really by and large eating loads of greens never a bad thing you know eating some liver having eggs like by and large consuming lots of methyl donors in a diet is nothing but beneficial so that was our first piece of information let's build this really methyl donor dense diet and then the second really kind of cool understanding from the literature was that these beautiful polyphenol compounds that we use every day day in and day out all of us we know they're healthy they've been they have they have you know long-time use histories in traditional medicine around the world things like green tea like curcumin and turmeric like resveratrol like gliolin you know on and on quercetin these guys seem to influence DNA methylation hotently but not by moving not by making methyl donors in the methylation cycle not by producing sami but by directing how methylation is happening on the genome and most of the research at the time of of my first read in this was in cell studies and there were some in animals sulforaphane actually was a really cool one but all but these polyphenols these phytochemicals had very important roles to play and and plus we you know we know that they're anti-inflammatory that they're anti-cancer that they're antioxidant and on and on and so we wanted to combine the dietary pattern with these two components and then have it be you know low lower keto leaning we had good fats in it you know we just layered everything into it that we knew would be smart and then we looked at the literature on exercise on sleep on meditation and so forth and we saw that all of them really act similarly when we look at a gene expression when we look at epigenetics and you know DNA methylation in particular all of them behave like food you know like kale they all can help shape gene expression in this optimal way so we put together our diet and lifestyle program it was very exciting and then we started to use it here in clinic we wanted to research it immediately but at the time of development there were no epigenetic tests like we have available now at all you know outside of the research setting and so it was you know we were blessed with a with an unrestricted plan in the beginning right and then after that you got to yes then we got to research it yeah so we started to use it here in our practice all the time and we saw great outcomes with it we saw like homocysteine drops so a classic marker of methylation we saw that we could change it with this diet and lifestyle intervention we saw that we could move drop inflammation we saw people would feel better so we we saw that it was providing benefit to our patients but are we actually changing gene expression are we changing epigenetics which is our hypothesis this is what we think we're doing we released it in a white paper actually you know just made it available to you guys to our colleagues um and is that on your website just so it's not it's well now it's the book so now you can get younger you and the and the book is much more is an involved conversation but back in the day as you know yes we had that we had our our white paper that we released um your listening stay tuned we'll have links to that younger you i just want to make sure everybody who's listening like where can we get this information yes it's in your yeah yes and it and the book is plain language it's easy to read um so we used it here but we wanted to research it and then it was just you know sort of again this um you can this just really cool uh you know turn of events where we were given an unrestricted grant to study this by um metagenics so i was i was friends with the CEO the then CEO Brent Eck and he and i were talking about you know the power of methyl donors in the era of being able to see gene expression and um i remember very vividly Jill we were sitting on the floor at the IFM conference when it was in San Diego at the annual conference we were sitting on the floor out by the registration you know just kind of very homely just deep in conversation on this and he you know and he offered um to to let us embark in researching it at the time i was like well geez maybe it'll be ten thousand dollars you know six figures later we we we did it um so our when we embarked on this biological age was reversing biological age was not thought possible so we started our IRB we started the research back in 2017 we launched our study our study ran through 2018 and 2019 at that time biological age reversal was really believed not to be possible in fact the guy who developed really arguably the most important who started this whole biological age conversation who developed the first clock steve Horvath then out of UCLA now he's at altos lab actually i think he's still at both but altos you know the Jeff Bezos lab um he developed the first clock yeah he was but he's on record saying many times that he did not think that we could reverse biological age as measured by you know dna methylation patterns um when we were in our study so we were midway into our study the first publication came out they actually were two one looking at vitamin low vitamin d in obese african americans when they repleted vitamin t levels biological age reverse so they had the biological age measurement and they were able to turn it back by almost two years over 16 week study i think and then there was the trim study which was a year-long study using growth hormone dha vitamin d uh metformin and that intervention which steve Horvath the clock developer was a was an author on turned back biological age by over two and a half years so when we were in our i mean i remember when that came out it was such a huge deal you know i was paying very comfortable attention to epigenetics at the time and that study came out and it was like time sort of stood still in the scientific okay it's possible yeah it was a big deal so we knew we had the tool we knew we had the information we measured the dna methylome um to look and so you know that was one of our first things that we wanted to look at we're actually still mining our data but um you know i again i remember the day that our biostatistician you know told me conclusively that we were that as compared to controls our our study subjects got over three years younger like it was it was big yeah it was really it was a it was a big moment hey everybody i just stopped by to let you know that my new book unexpected finding resilience through functional medicine science and faith is now available for order wherever you purchase books in this book i share my own journey of overcoming life-threatening illness and the tools and tips and tricks and hope and resilience i found along the way this book includes practical advice for things like cancer and crone's disease and other autoimmune conditions infections like lime or epstein bar and mold and biotoxin related illness what i really hope is that as you read this book you find transformational wisdom for health and healing if you want to get your own copy stop by readunexpected.com there you can also collect your free bonuses so grab your copy today and begin your own transformational journey through functional medicine in finding resilience and younger you you outline this and we don't have to go into all that but give us just a little bit of a glimpse of what is this when you talk about diet what are kind of core principles of diet and then what would you say at the top three four or five things maybe sleep maybe that really really do move the needle what are what's kind of the outline of someone who's out there such a yeah it's such a good question so i think you know i think we want every fork full of food should be packed with happy nutrients period like we should always be eating methyl donors and these and what we call methylation adaptogens these those polyphenols i mentioned earlier vital chemicals like we all that information taken together is incredibly important and i i believe that we want that information in also you know exposed to good fats we don't want it laden with sugar we want to minimize chemicals our study wasn't we didn't require organic um otherwise we would have had to provide food and we didn't have the income for that so that's it's i'm glad that we didn't because i think that's important information that you can do it if you can't afford organic but we want to minimize the chemicals the exposures we want good fat we don't want sugar we don't want a lot of um you know a lot of foods that are going to just kick in high glycemic cycling um so it was keto leaning i mean it just has all the hallmarks it was anti-inflammatory hypoallergenic all of the hallmarks of a good solid dietary eating pattern probably more strict than all of us need to be all of the time but it was only an eight week intervention some people are like oh my god i can't do this forever and and like well indeed so you can make change in eight weeks so for example likely gluten-free dairy-free mostly sugar-free um and refined carbohydrate-free and then fat-wise are you giving them fish oil are you doing like no canola no processed seed oils is there any specifics on we we gave them we wanted them to the specifics were olive oil you know you could do a little bit some coconut oil if you if you were inclined um we wanted them to eat fatty fish that was a that was a routine requirement um so we we added fats in primarily that we wanted them to consume yeah perfect and then yeah that's a go ahead no i was gonna say yeah you got it you know you know those those dietary principles are really universal and plans for that right like i'm all i use all spectrum of diets but at the core we must have these phytonutrients to influence our genome so what about was there any criteria for hours of sleep or activity or meditation or any sort of yeah that were required yeah and then let's circle back and i want to just sort of give you my thoughts on what i think was the heavy lift or the multiple things that were so we wanted people to move um five days a week so we they need to engage in exercise for at least a half an hour at least five days a week with a perceived exertion of 60 to 80 percent of their maximum so whatever they thought was 60 percent and they thought and it's interesting because that's an accurate tool you know that's actually people tend to know what a 60 percent is for them so that so we we we specifically kept it simple and used to that and they could do whatever they wanted to whatever made them happy um so 60 percent made you you can still talk you can still carry on a conversation so maybe you're walking you're walking with your friends you know where you're on the phone um 80 percent you're still able to talk but you're breathing heavier you're perspiring and so forth so that was the that was the uh criterion there um now we can you know in the book i write about a little more involved exercise pattern and high intensity and resistance training and all of that those things are important but this is the fundamental entry into lifestyle change so let's keep it simple let's do something that you love to do in fact do whatever you want to do as long as you hit these targets um when i love meditation so often people are overwhelmed and so they're like they don't do it right so i just love i just want to pause there and say this is doable right like you made it to be yeah do this and then we can figure out yes details but that was really yes just join the conversation you know let's start the party let's keep it simple my mom is a gardener that's her thing and she walks around her block you know she lives in a really nice neighborhood and she they've got great sidewalks and that's her thing um i love riding my bike and talking on the phone i can get a good workout still like catch up with my girlfriends or sometimes even attend a meeting you know right but yeah whatever works for us um sleep sleep is essential i mean the data on sleep in humans and in animals at the time it was mostly in animals but we could see that insomnia damages gene expression it damages uh uh DNA methylation on you know of neurons of gene expression associated with neuronal development like immediately you know one one poor night of sleep deprivation is has been shown damaging now we can see in humans that not sleeping well is a pro-aging phenomena no great surprise there that you are accelerating your aging and then of course you're at risk when you're not sleeping for all the chronic diseases of aging which are all associated with accelerated aging so sleeping is essential um we wanted people to get at least seven hours uh and to that end part of our program required our participants to meet with a nutritionist once a week um and we would ask them you know about their quality of sleep and if they were in brainstorm with them on sleep hygiene tips making sure they're getting enough runway to get enough sleep if we go to bed too late and you have a time you have to get up you're not getting enough sleep period so we just that like those basic those basic sort of sleep hygiene tips figuring out whatever pattern is you need um we're really we're helpful i think for our participants so sleep exercise yes to your point meditation um i think stress is gasoline on the fire of aging i think it's incredibly potent uh the clock that we used in our study a full 25 percent of it is um associated with glucocorticoid response elements so in other words it's changed by the cortisol response by the stress i was just gonna ask if there was evidence of cortisol's effect on epigenics and clearly because we look back even for the transgenerational epigenetics and like Holocaust survivors and that's where i'm like oh cortisol absolutely affects expression and you're saying the truth is the study absolutely show that corticosteroids do affect it negatively if it's too high yes i think so i mean i think so we can see i mean 25 percent of it there's no other variable that influences this particular clock as potently so does that i think that suggests that stress is this extraordinarily huge perhaps underappreciated variable i mean that's such a big deal yeah and i and yeah and talking about it's an interesting conversation around Holocaust survivors so we can see that in the in the world trade center you know offspring of world trade center but these like these massive i mean that was a single event holocaust the holocaust was was longer but you can you can definitely see these hair inherited stress patterns yeah absolutely um so meditation so we prescribed a twice daily breathing exercise just very simple called the relaxation response by a guy named herbert benson who was at harvard you know in the 70s studying meditation but he wanted to he wanted to take the woo-woo out so we called it the relaxation response but it's a better yeah yeah yeah especially in the 70s um we gave two supplements we we did a a probiotic lactobacillus planterum and we chose that one specifically because there's some evidence that it can help produce uh folate so bacterial microbiome derived folate it can help with that in the presence of adequate pava the b vitamin pava so we use lactobacillus planterum and we did by the way gel increase circulating folate in our population significantly as compared to controls without any folate in sight you know just food exactly and this supplement and then we gave an additional greens powder this is sort of evidence of me being very bullish on these important polyphenols we gave them another dose so even though the dietary pattern is about seven to nine cups of veggies a day i mean you're going to be eating a lot of veggies during the eight weeks make no mistake we even we layered some more in so nice yeah i love that because that's so critical now so you've just kind of laid out and and this is all in your book younger you but the all the factors that really add to the positive outcome what about the elephant in the room environmental toxic load i doubt that it was easy in eight weeks to study that but i would just like to you know outside the study your comments on what you see as how does environmental toxic love molds metals pyramids phthalates pesticides all these things how is there any studies out there that show specific aging propensity for these chemicals or things any thoughts on that you know i'm sure that there are i mean i want to say that there has been investigations looking at urban environment versus the suburban environment in fact i think that was a recent publication urban versus suburban so definitely the exposure to the the pollutants in the urban environment certainly we know smoking is going to push biological age forward we know without question that those toxicants disrupt gene expressions and specifically dna methylation but they get in and they mess with epigenetic expression so via a variety of of mechanisms i mean there was a really disturbing study looking at exposure to dbt and other chemicals in generation zero mice and tracking the damage through generations in the in the semen in the of the in the sperm of the of the generations two three four and it went multiple generations out and actually the influence was worse over time so it was like potentiated in this one study but yeah there's there's just more and more evidence you know linking the damage of of these environmental toxicants in fact um moshay sef talks about it moshay sef is a is a is a contributing he was our a mentor on our study he's a really highly regarded epigeneticist of at mergill university um you know and the and the fact that it doesn't take a lot to influence gene expression like we're not looking at uh epa levels right of single compounds of you know like huge occupational exposures when people worked in like you know felt factories smell whatever um just multiple low dose synergistic exposures just really wreaking havoc you know not not necessarily directly damaging the DNA although that obviously happens but really wreaking havoc with gene expression via DNA methylation so yeah i think there's plenty of evidence and and papers coming out uh all the time and especially like in the field of cancer we know these toxicants have a huge effect and that's all about methylation methylation under methylation and everything in between and interestingly i love that you mentioned that so traditional toxicology as you and i know good you know has this nice curve and there's here's the chemical level where 50% or greater of the population is affected but as you and i are talking when we've learned about the research of endocrine disruptors this happens at a very hormetic effect which is actually that so it's almost like two stages of the chemo chemicals where they can have a very very low dose synergistic effect when combined that is more toxic sometimes and probably even i don't know that i can quote the study to prove this but i'm guessing that these maybe synergistic hormetic low levels in combination are probably a lot more damaging to the dna i mean i can we can certainly say that they're influencing the course of all of the diseases i mean that's how we are exposed i mean we're able to control these massive exposures by i mean although actually i will say interestingly i see more really high levels of mercury these days and people attempting to buy really clean fish but not but not i think i think some of our classically clean wild caught fish are no longer so clean so i am seeing some higher burdens of certain toxins especially mercury but i think in general all of us are are experiencing these these basically this this synergistic interaction of low dose multiple compounds and it's like it's just as we're swimming in it right like it's it's yeah yeah one of the cool things so let me just say this really heartening thing and and that is that this diet is by its nature cleaning us up from those compounds so it's dense with cruciferous veggies it's dense with the compounds that can reverse some of the damage i mean we know when i talk about it in the book there's this really cool toxicologist of the University of Kentucky Bernard Henig and i gotta i hope i have him on my podcast one of these days and he his work is looking at how he how you can offset the damage of these toxins through nutrition and you know something comes the PCBs comes to mind it was a study that he looked at PCBs will drive the arachidonic acid ecosynoid cascade so they'll churn up all of the enzymes involved in pushing forward one of the most aggressive forms of inflammation that you know that we really experience in our body and you can turn that off if you're eating adequate you know omega-3 fatty acids or you know if you're having some of the polyphenols that are really important so a healthy diet all of the time is one of our most essential defenses yeah yeah i love you say that because once again it's i always say clean air clean water clean food all these fancy supplements these fancy programs these fancy biohacking things are great but you can do 80% of the work if you really really focus on breathing clean air drinking clean water and eating clean food and that's kind of what you're saying as well yeah that's right absolutely yeah and it is i mean it is i know you covered it's overwhelming right yeah so let's yeah last few minutes here two things i'm gonna talk about one is just there's a lot of tests coming out and now we can actually test our biological age what's your thoughts on testing has it i feels like it's exponentially increased in the companies that are doing it and tell us just a little bit for the person who doesn't know anything about this how do they actually what what do the tests do and tell us a little bit about your thoughts on that yeah i think they're i mean i'm very excited it's a little bit you know it's a little crazy out there right now there's a lot a lot of companies a lot of biological age clocks but you know it's it's really exciting and the winners will kind of rise to the top you know we'll we'll see the the tests that are the best so they're measuring again epigenetic expressions specifically patterns of DNA methylation that are associated with biological aging in some shape or form you know there's clocks that are perhaps looking more at physical fitness and biological aging like they're measuring different aspects of of physiology and and function the clock that we used was a first generation clock so they're now into the third maybe even fourth generation of clocks we used the Steve Horvath the Horvath original multi-tissue clock which i think is still a good solid clock like it's it functions in any specimen so we used saliva we didn't know back then that that there were going to be other clocks we didn't know the biological age i know we didn't know so take off so yeah yeah so we used saliva and that was the the only clock that was reliable for us at the time and i still think it's a good solid workhorse clock sort of measuring general pattern of biological age you know and able to be used in any tissue um i like the pace of aging uh clock i i think that there's some good science so what i would say to people listening is you know whatever lab that you go to i think we want we want to work with a company whose clock has been published in the literature they're using it in research ideally the clock the components of the clock the cpg sites the methylation sites that are measured are known so that other labs can try it and just you know see the reliability of it and that we know how they sort of trained the clock so we know how they developed at the clock i think those things are important the more open people are with that knowledge i think the better i'm a little bit concerned otherwise i think still think there are some good quality clocks that are proprietary i actually do i really do but i would i just i air on the side of keeping science open and so we're using um we're currently using the pace of aging for our research i mean it's a it's a pretty affordable um tool and you know it's it's it's got a bunch of studies behind it amazing and have you i'm assuming you've had your biological age tested yeah yeah for sure you're happy with the outcome yeah yeah yeah i am happy yeah yeah i mean and again it's you know it's it's i mean my in my pace of aging so the the dude in pace of aging if you're aging at a rate of one you're consistent with your chronological age if you're greater than one or over and then if you're under that's better so my pace dude in pace of aging i think is is i would i have to look at it it's been a while but it's like point seven ish or it's greater than points but maybe between point seven and eight i think beautiful i think i'm right there with you on that i was like yay i'm doing the right yeah yeah yeah but you know it does i mean i would anticipate that you know well no i wouldn't anticipate i know that it does change with exposures so i think it's you know it's it's probably a real it's probably a good idea for us those of us who are healthy to do it annually you know and make sure we're reasonably dialed in doing the pace of aging we can still get the whorebath um and some other you know we can get other clocks um but yeah i would just i i think it's a useful tool to do i do too and again more information in your book um younger you but one comment i'd love to make is that i mean i had cancer at 25 massive chemotherapy massive exposure so i was like really i mean i've done a lot of work right and do a lot of things i want to say that a lot because even though my biological age is a little bit you know better than the average potentially i feel like it gives hope to those who are in crisis maybe have had mold exposure maybe have had cancer like myself because if i can do it the average person and i got a lot of hits to my genome and to my epigenetic question and i thought that was really encouraging because i would expect with all that my body has been through in my life and all the chemicals and all the chemo and everything that it might not be that way and it's it's in a good place which is encouraging that's awesome yeah for and i'm sure you've seen that too because i feel like there is power even after 30 40 50 as we make those changes a lot of the stuff really can transform our health right oh hundred percent in fact there's there's cool research on exercise that i love to put out there that shows we do better epigenetically the older we are yeah so there's really no time you know like the present is too late to start okay before we ask or let people know where they can find you is there are so many things on the horizon like peptides and like biohacking um vagal nerve stimulators i could just name a hundred different things what would be one or two things that you see as potential um maybe bigger uh you know versus diet that could be on the potential horizon for epigenetic aging i think that probably you know some of the probably rapamycin is going to um you know i think the research in animals is pretty solid on rapamycin being beneficial and you know in a lower a lower dose than we use in in transplant patients um what else so i think that's just nearing prime time for us it'll be interesting to see with nears nearby zoli his work on on on metformin and what the you know what that says and who's appropriate we know that metformin is is is a is is damaging to mitochondrial health in some of us but then for some of us it may actually extend life i mean if there's definitely there's a there is a population for whom metformin is probably bioh reversal of reversing and we just need to kind of tease that out there are i mean i guess the biggest a friend and colleague of mine sirga young talks about the longevity bridge so right now we know it's you know all of the things that we advocate in functional medicine probably there's a place for stem cells um exposomes you know some of the we know actually we know plasma exchange is probably important so these are some radical expensive but interventions that we can do we could do right now um that are gaining some you know some some evidence behind them but the diet and lifestyle clean living everything that we advocate foundational essential absolutely some of these other ones rapamycin etc but we are reversing biological age aggressively in cell models and tissue models and animal models like pretty extraordinarily you know over in altos lab i um vittorio sebastiano is a stanford scientist who's actually nearing FDA approval for a phase one study in humans using um yamanaka factors these transcription factors that will significantly change epigenetics towards a younger more youthful pattern um it does look i think i i do believe that um probably root cause or foundational the foundational aging phenomena is happening in the epigenome and so putting our attention there at least a chunk of our attention i think when we address all of the various hallmarks inflammation you know mitochondrial health cell eosin essence etc all of them are essential the microbiome um but it does seem like the business end of the aging phenomena is right there in epigenetics so i think that we need to be putting attention there um but they're doing some pretty wild stuff in animal models and cell models and you know 10 20 years time i mean we will be we'll be playing around with aging in a you know in a way that when we started our journeys we never thought possible it was totally science fiction but we are sitting on the precipice of some pretty extraordinary changes i think well we'll stay tuned and i'm sure what's great about you is you always put out great articles blogs podcasts where can people find if they want to stay tuned with this where can they get your book where can they find you yeah so younger you is available wherever books are sold um that bright yellow one over there um let me see doctor care of his sharel.com is my website i have a podcast also you can find that on any any place where podcasts are um yeah we've got blogs we've got newsletters all sorts of stuff coming out and um yeah you know we're thinking about these having we're having these more these kind of cutting-edge conversations on um on my podcast more and more i'm just really excited about them so if you want to kind of go on this journey with me that that would be the place to go yeah shout out to her podcast because you really do bring great uh people on great experts and the level of uh science is phenomenal so keep up the great work doctor care oh you know what let me just say let me say one more thing i'm at we have groups so people who want to join us and do the program with us and contribute to the research you know again doctor care of his sharel.com perfect awesome and anywhere you're listening you can find this in the show it's doctor care thank you for all the work you've done over the years thank you for coming on today we've really appreciate it yeah it was great to see you jill