 Here's what's so interesting about making collagen. Collagen has to be locked together. I like to think of collagen as the rebar in our blood vessels, in our skin. And we actually knit molecules of collagen together with a very essential vitamin that most of us are absolutely not getting enough of, and that's good old vitamin C. Vitamin C is essential for knitting collagen together. Now let me give you the perfect example of that. Almost everybody notices smokers have far more wrinkles than non-smokers. And that's because smoking actually produces huge amounts of what's called oxidative stress. And the way we handle oxidative stress is the antioxidant vitamin C. In smokers, what little vitamin C there is in us is completely used up. So what does that have to do with wrinkles? Well vitamin C actually re-nits the collagen rebar back together after it's been damaged by sunlight. If you don't have any vitamin C, that collagen doesn't get re-mixed together and you get those wrinkles and crevices. So you could have all the collagen in the world. You could take bone broth 27 times a day. If you don't have vitamin C, you're not going to complete the process of linking collagen together. So how do you do that? I really recommend that you take an extended time release vitamin C twice a day. Vitamin C is a water soluble vitamin. After you take a vitamin C tablet, it's gone in about two or three hours. There's other interesting evidence that the more vitamin C you make, the less you absorb. In fact, if anybody's tried to take a lot of vitamin C when they have a cold, you'll notice that vitamin C in high doses actually gives you diarrhea. So get yourself a time to release vitamin C. Take a thousand milligrams twice a day. If that's a pain in the neck, buy the little 500 milligram chewable vitamin C's. Please get the sugar-free variety. Throw a few in your pocket and four times a day chew a vitamin C. And you'll actually be shocked with the differences that you'll see over the coming months as your collagen begins to re-knit each other. There's also really interesting studies in animals who have genetically blocked vitamin C production. Those animals live half as long as their brothers and sisters who make vitamin C continuously. And it may be one of the secrets of longevity that I talk about in the longevity paradox. So vitamin C may be one of the great keys to great-looking skin, particularly this summer. And if you don't like wrinkles, number one, don't smoke. And number two, take your vitamin C. Give me one thing in your area of expertise for a longer, healthier life. Well, I'm going to say breathe, which is going to sound really obvious, but I mean breathe deeply. When I submitted my own body to science and found that my heart and my brain were going to resonance, the way I was doing that was that I was regulating my autonomic nervous system with my breath. And I was creating what in biofeedback they call heart rate variability. The ability of my heart to recover really quickly from stress and be variable. And we think of a heartbeat as being regular, but as you know, Dr. Gundry, a healthy heartbeat is adaptable. And so I realized I'd done that accidentally with my breath. But with my patients, what I teach them is to breathe regularly and deeply, particularly at moments of stress, so that they aren't taking their fight-or-flight response with them throughout the rest of the day. Yeah, I think that's very good advice. I wear a heart rate variability tracker and aura ring. Years ago, I was one of the principal investigators in a study of who needed to get an automatic defibrillator implanted to prevent a sudden cardiac arrest. And we actually looked at heart rate variability as a determinant of predicting dying from basically your heart stopping. And what we found was the less heart rate variability, the less beat-to-beat variation, the closer you are to dying, quite frankly. And the more wild swings in heart rate variability, the actual healthier you are and the farther you are from dying. So, you know, obviously, I'm looking at this thing on my phone every three seconds going, oh, how am I doing? And I don't mean we're going to live and die by watching this. But you're right, there's actually very good scientific data that shows heart rate variability is one of those things we really need to impact. And the good news is, like you're saying, we can impact with simple breathing techniques, among other things. What's the one thing listeners can do today to help them live a longer, healthier life? Drink chlorophyll every single day. So that's my number one tip for everyone always. And that's something that I've continued to do now every single day for the last decade after I healed. I thought, why not consume chlorophyll every day? It just makes me feel so alive, so energized. It helps purify the blood, helps put oxygen into the blood. And chlorophyll could be the form of eating a big green salad, leafy greens or a smoothie or a juice or even chlorophyll droppers or a greens powder, which I use also that has, it's a dried broccoli sprouts, colored greens, kale, spirulina, and I just mix that into water. Okay, but make sure editorial note that your greens powder doesn't have wheat grass or barley grass. Evil stuff. I've asked all of my guests to give our listeners one thing that they can do today to start having a better, longer life. One thing. I think structurally that's going to affect you, but something to be really simple is just hang each day. There's another just take away easy go-to thing. There's a whole book called Shoulder Pain by a guy called Dr. John Kirsch, who's an orthopedic surgeon, and showed that just through a simple hanging protocol, just simply reaching up, get like a pull-up bar in your doorway. And as you're walking through that doorway, give yourself a little 5 to 10, 15 second hang, and you're going to decompress your shoulder girdle, literally changes the shape of your shoulder girdle. We typically have more of this meter rotation, which is impingement. So you just go up into that position, decompress that shoulder girdle, start to open up the lungs, re-engage that diaphragm, open up your heart, your whole cardiovascular system, and bring you back in a more confident position. If you're in this position all the time, it starts to hijack the way that you think, the way that you feel, and the feedback that you send out to the rest of the world. So a simple act of just hanging each day can have dramatic impact on your whole life. Believe it or not, I wrote about this for my thesis at Yale University. We are a hanging great ape, and we are the only great apes, our break-yaters, they hang. The monkey bar is a misnomer. Human bars are ape bars. Yeah, they are ape bars. And that's actually what differentiates us from all other monkeys, our ability to hang. You're right, we should be hanging. I'm glad you brought that up. It's an important point. Are we to believe that really good choices for our health are having our foods sprayed with glyphosate, with Roundup, eating a lot of sugar, using artificial sweeteners, avoiding dietary fat. Are we to believe that? Well, that's what major forces are at work to try to convince us are the right choices to make, and it's not true. You're right, there's unfortunately most of our information we get from big pharma, big food, big agriculture, and big chemical. And it trickle, it pervades our media, it pervades most of our medical schools, as you and I both know. A lot of it isn't the fault of the individual. It's the messaging that they are getting that is working its way into their decision-making process that diet drinks are better than sugar-sweetened drinks. You shouldn't drink any of them if you want to remain thin and resist having diabetes. Artificial sweeteners increase your risk of obesity and diabetes, not because Dr. Perlmutter is saying it on your show today. That's what the best scientific literature is telling us. A study of over 70,000 women in France demonstrates that. And that sugar is okay in moderation. Well, you know what? That's not in your interest. It's in the interest of people who are trying to sell sugar and genetically modified food. No, it's not good for you. Well, I love your comment about moderation. Dale Bredesen, who wrote The End of Alzheimer's and I were at the Harvard MIT neuroscience conference a year ago. And one of the professors stood up and he says, well, don't you think that we should practice everything in moderation? And I said, well, that's fine. If you want moderate dementia and moderate heart disease and moderate arthritis, please go right ahead because that's what you're going to get. It's true. And again, it's a convenient sound bite that people latch on to that has absolutely no meaning. Again, everything in moderation is okay if you want to still have dramatic risk for these diseases. I mean, face it. Your risk of Alzheimer's is 50-50 if you live to be age 85. That's a flip of a coin. And we can do better. We can absolutely do better. Dr. Bredesen is fond of saying we all know a cancer survivor, but we don't know an Alzheimer's survivor. And I think the best way to be an Alzheimer's survivor is to not even play the game, not even be diagnosed with the disease. In other words, let's focus on prevention as it relates to Alzheimer's. We fully understand what are the risk factors. I think that this is information that is not convenient. It's an inconvenient truth because people don't want to make these dietary changes because people just love in an addictive way their sugar and their high carbohydrate breakfast. So it takes some cognitive engagement to make these changes if you want to increase your odds that you will remain cognitively intact in your 70s, in your 80s, in your 90s.