 Cancer, heart disease, frailty, Alzheimer's, their chance of getting those diseases went down as well, which is what you'd expect from a true longevity or what some would call an anti-aging drug. I want to start with a big picture question. Then you and I have talked about this. Come on. Is aging a disease? Well, it can be whatever the world wants to call it. It does seem strange at first when you hear aging as a disease, but when you look up the definition of what a disease is, it's a condition that reduces function, eventually many diseases causing death. That's exactly what aging does. It turns out the difference between disease and aging is simply that a disease happens to less than half the population and aging happens to more than half of the population. That's an arbitrary cutoff. I argue in my book that because we don't regard aging as a disease, we've neglected it at least for the last 200 years. That's led to a lot of problems in our healthcare system and in our lives where we're spending more and more time in a state where not all of our body is kept young for longer, our brains in particular. I think with this new approach, if we were to define aging at least as a medical condition, it would change the way we research and develop drugs for most age-related diseases. Many of us hear about or know people who practice geriatric medicine, for an example. Are you saying that I should have a code in my office for aging as a disease and get paid for preventing aging or modifying aging? Yes, I'm absolutely saying that, Steve. Actually the World Health Organization agrees with me. They have a disease code book, ICD-11, the International Disease Code, and MG2A is now old age. You can now, according to them, report back to them that how many of your citizens have old age. It's becoming more and more common amongst my doctor colleagues, particularly in Britain, to write on the death certificate old age. A lot of doctors say, well, that doesn't prove the actual cause of death. True, we die from organ failure and other things. What I also want to argue here is that we've been focused for the last 200 years on why people metaphorically fall off a cliff. But it's just as important, if not more important, to understand what drove them to the cliff in the first place. Yeah, I think that's a great point. I make the point in the longevity paradox, and you do too, that in years past the time that we spent in our lives in senescence and literally going downhill, going off that cliff was remarkably short. And now, particularly in America and Western society, we spent an extended period of time in senescence and really getting old. So what's happening in your opinion? Well, it's what I call whack-a-mole medicine, that most doctors are not all, but most doctors treat diseases. And if you take diabetes as an example, most people will have increased blood sugar levels the older they get. And that's actually a very good sign of aging and how long they will live. But if you were to go to a typical doctor in most Western countries, they would say, well, you need to pass a certain threshold to be a diabetic and only when you have a disease I will treat you. Go home and don't eat so many potato chips and get off the couch, but I'm not going to help you with the medicine until you actually have a disease. Whereas we know that a drug like Metformin, which is as far as drugs go relatively safe, will delay type 2 diabetes if you prescribe it earlier. It's a very cheap drug as drugs go. And so I'm encouraging people, doctors, to think about prescribing Metformin before diabetes actually occurs. And it's a lot easier to prevent a disease than to try to reverse it. Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And I want to, I think we'll come back and talk about Metformin a little bit later because it has, as you and I both know, a number of pluses. And there are some people who feel it does have some minuses, particularly in mitochondrial function. And you're one of the world's experts on how to make your mitochondrial function better. So I'm interested in that take. In fact, what the heck? I was going to talk about it later, but let's talk about it right now. You I know take Metformin, yes. And I don't. And I maybe should convince me, come on, David, you and I are sitting around having a cough. Right. Well, you know, I don't want you to live a day longer than you want to, Steve. But so I'm not going to try my hardest to literally convince you. But scientifically, I'll tell you what I think and why I chose to. And that is that I looked at the data in let's start with with animal studies. It's not always the best. But with animal studies, I was on a paper with Rafa DeCavo down at NIH, the National Institutes of Health. And we showed that Metformin delays many diseases in those animals, and they do live slightly longer. That's good. It's obviously not doing them a lot of harm. And then when I looked at the literature of other people who did studies on one study was over 10,000 patients, veterans that took Metformin, others now 100,000 plus patients who have taken Metformin. When they look at the risk factors and actually the incidence of diseases of aging, not just diabetes, but other diseases, cancer, heart disease, frailty, Alzheimer's, their chance of getting those diseases went down as well, which is what you'd expect from a true longevity or what some would call an anti-aging drug, cancer, heart disease, frailty, Alzheimer's. Their chance of getting those diseases went down as well, which is what you'd expect from a true longevity or what some would call an anti-aging drug, diabetes, I think. It should be even more effective than those people who have been studied. Now the other thing is I'm doing a risk-reward ratio always with myself. What's the risk of not doing anything? Pretty high, right? I know what I'm going to be doing 20 years from now. It's not going to be fun. I'm 50, I'll be 70 in 20 years. But what's the risk of taking Metformin? Well, it does have side effects that can be severe, but for most people the most dual experience is an upset stomach, which I'm prepared to tolerate and mitigate with the benefit of potentially having a much healthier older age. You and I are probably both aware of recent placebo-controlled trial in older adults. Using Metformin to see if it would actually improve exercise building more muscle mass. And I think the theory behind it was excellent. And I think it was a well-designed study, and yet Metformin failed to improve muscle mass generation to exercise. Any thoughts on that subject? Yeah, a lot. I get asked about it every day, and I talk to the people who ran that study. And so I'm pretty qualified now to speak about it. What the study showed, there are now two studies, and if I were to summarize, it would be this, that the patients, the elderly patients that exercised whether they had a drug or not, Metformin or not, all gained muscle mass and strength. There was a slight difference in the muscle mass of those who took Metformin. They were generally had smaller muscles. But they were just as strong as the other group that didn't take Metformin. And so I've jokingly said that it's a question of vanity versus longevity. But really what I mean is that we're trying to eke out the differences, but the benefits were still there even in the Metformin group. Now, because we don't know really what's going on and there might be some negative effects on the muscle, even though they were just as strong, I have decided to see what happens if I don't take Metformin on the days that I exercise and recover from exercise, which is generally Sunday, Monday, Tuesday for me. And that's my little experiment. It's not a clinical trial by any means. But I think in the absence of more information, I think that's a reasonable approach. That sounds like a fun thing to do. You and I have an N of 1 at all times, and you, of course, have added your father to the N of 1. And we've talked about your dad, and you talk about your dad in the book. Talk about your dad and tell me the effects of some of your crazy ideas on your father. Yeah, right. So yeah, full disclosure, full disclaimer here. This again is not a clinical trial, and it's not going to be published in a journal anytime soon. But my family are a bunch of scientists. My wife's a scientist from MIT. My father's a biochemist. And we can read scientific papers. My father, believe it or not, at age 80, is an independent individual. And he has chosen to take my research seriously and has been convinced by himself, but by me, to try things, because he knows what the odds are in his old age of things going wrong. By age 80, most people have at least two or three major diseases that are being treated. He started taking resveratrol early, one of the first people in the world. This is now going back 13 years ago, and so far so good. He takes a gram or so a day. The reason I say, Steve, or so is in my family, a powder, we just spoon it into yogurt and mix it around. It's important to dissolve it in something for it to be absorbed. We know that from human studies. And just to dwell on resveratrol for a little bit, people go back and forth on resveratrol. I can tell you in my lab, we've definitely proven how it works. We have new results that I haven't published, but we have had a science paper that was very positive and showed that it's working through the sort of two-in-pathway that we work on. And we have new results that really nail it. I very rarely say we've proved anything, but this experiment that we've done has proven that it works the way we said it did. But also what's really encouraging is that there are human studies that are now showing that resveratrol does many of the things that we saw in mice many years ago, protects people from a high-fat diet and reduces blood sugar levels, which is great. Part of the reason that there were negative results, I think, in people is that the researchers didn't realize that you need to dissolve resveratrol into something that allows it to be absorbed. And when you do that, you get five-fold higher levels in the blood. So getting back to my father, he's been on resveratrol. He's now on Metformin. He's been on Metformin for probably six years now because he had high blood sugar. Everyone in my family dies early from diabetes-related complications or heart disease. And he's now the longest-lived person in our family, at least on the male side. And then he started adding NMN, which is an NAD boosting molecule, the same one I take. He started that about three years ago. And those are the main things. Now, if people want to learn exactly what we do, and it's a long list, page 304, you can skip to that in my book, but you'll miss all the goods in here. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Steve. But also in part two of the book, the middle section, it's about things you can do with your daily life, about what to eat, when to eat, what to do with exercise, the signs backs up. And Steve, you and I have a lot in common in how we approach our daily lives and what we think will improve health. Anyway, I'll just finish to say that my father is 80. He has no illnesses. He has no aches or pains. He's got as much energy as he did when he was in his 20s and 30s. And mentally and physically, he can outpace me. And so, yeah, so far so good. He's a beacon of hope for all of us. Now you bring up Resveratrol, and I can't leave that without talking about Hormesis, because one of the theories of how Resveratrol works is Hormesis. So what the heck is Hormesis, and why is it so important? Right. Well, Hormesis is essentially what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. You could possibly say what doesn't kill you makes you live longer as well, because what we discovered, first in yeast cells that you can make beer and bread out of, and eventually in animals and now in humans, we found that these enzymes that I mentioned earlier called the Sertuans, these are protectors in the body, and they do a lot of good things. They protect cell identity, they repair DNA, they boost energy in the mitochondria, which you mentioned earlier. So we discovered that, but then what we realized in the 2000s was that these genes and the enzymes that are produced from them are turned on by Hormesis. And what that means is anything that puts the body in a state of perceived adversity. You don't want to actually damage the body to be able to live longer and be healthy. You want to give the impression that times are going to be tough. So being hungry during the day, exercising, these are all things that tell the Sertuans genes to come on and to protect the body. There are some other things that I do, such as go to the sauna and jump in cold water baths to try and stimulate and get my body out of its complacency. When we sit around all day, I'm at a standing desk, by the way, for that reason. If we sit around all day and we don't exercise and we eat constantly, our defenses don't get turned on. We don't have Hormesis. And Resveratrol, which we talked about, I've called a xenochromatic molecule, which means Hormesis that you get from other species, such as plants. So when plants are stressed, they make Resveratrol and other molecules like it. And I have this theory and some evidence that when we eat those stressed plants, our body thinks that our food supply is running out, and it will also have the benefits of dieting and exercise as well. I love that. So the more stressed plants I eat, the less exercise I have to do. Is that what I'm hearing here today? Right. Let your food be stressed so you don't have to be. Well, yeah, an interesting aside, this is not to talk about, I happen to have an olive oil that has 30 times more polyphenols than any olive oil. And the person who developed it is in the Moroccan desert. And he knew that great wines come from vines that are stressed. They're planted in rocks, they're underwatered, horrible conditions. And he says, you know, I bet you could do that with olives. So he found a rocky part of the Moroccan desert, underwatered them, and planted the vines right next to the trees right next to each other so they had to compete. And when he finally made the olive oil, the French government found it had 30 times more polyphenols than any olive oil they had ever tested. And so you're right, a stressed plant gives more polyphenols and resveratrol is certainly one of those polyphenols. So I think you're absolutely right on this. So yeah, so we're all going to go out and eat stressed plants or stressed plant byproducts. And that includes really good red wine. Is that true or is that French paradox a total myth? I don't think it's a total myth. But the amounts of resveratrol that we find we have to give people would be the equivalent of hundreds of glasses of red wine every day. Work, work, work, work, work. Yeah, the news just keeps getting better and better, right? But please don't over drink. The alcohol is, of course, not helpful and there's a lot of calories. That said, I'm happy to entertain the possibility. And there's some evidence from looking at populations that drinking a glass or two of red wine over 40 years can be beneficial. And there's not just resveratrol in red wine. There's Crositin and other things as you know, Steve. And so that cocktail with a bit of alcohol may be responsible for some of those health benefits that we call the French paradox where the French can eat a lot of cheese and fat and they don't have high rates of heart disease. No, I think that's very true. And like you say, and I say in all my books, look, if you don't drink, don't start. It's rule number one, I think. What's one thing that my listeners can do to stimulate hormesis for themselves? You've mentioned several of them. Come on, give us an easy one. All right. Well, so having read tens of thousands of papers and read your books and studied this for my whole life, if there's one thing that I could say that everybody needs to do, it's eat less often. So that's not malnutrition, not starvation. Please, nobody become underweight. But what this means is the three big meals a day with snacks in between, in my view, is ludicrous and has led us into a world of obesity. So I've recently, well, actually, most of my life I've skipped breakfast, but more recently tried to even skip lunch and then have a normal dinner. And it's been great for me. And we know in mice, if you, here's something that I'll leave everyone with before we take the break. I mentioned Rafa de Cabo down at NIH, my good colleague down in Bethesda. He did a study that I think is a landmark. He mixed different types of different amounts of protein, fat, carbohydrate and gave 10,000 mice different versions of a diet. And they all lived the same lifespan. The group that lived the longest was the group that gave, that had access to the food only two hours a day, which argues that it's not just what you eat, but when you eat that's important. Yeah, I think that's so important. And whether we call it intermittent fasted or I like time restricted feeding, which is kind of what you and I do, you're, you know, you're an expert in this field. Would you please tell people why breakfast is not the most important meal of the day? Well, so I found, at least for myself, and I assume I'm an average person, when I measure my blood sugar. So Steve, I've started measuring my blood sugar with a patch you can buy. It's prescription only, but still I've managed to convince one of my friends to let me try it. What I found is that I and I've heard many others, their blood sugar goes up in the morning and people like me are not hungry at all when we wake up and so it's really force feeding for many of us. And I can do quite well without breakfast and I don't need it. I'm actually I do much better physically and psychologically mentally without breakfast. So I think for many people, having a breakfast is not just a waste of money. It's actually it's dangerous because it's it adds up. The calories adds up fast. Yeah, that's a really good point. You know, both our cortisol and our adrenaline levels rise in the morning. And that, of course, both kick up blood sugar. And I take care of a large number of diabetics, many of whom have been on insulin. And one of the things they don't quite get is they always wake up with an elevated blood sugar and they think it's because of what they ate the night before. And most of them, unfortunately, then say, oh, my gosh, you know, I've got to eat some food and that will bring my blood sugar down. Well, in fact, when they measured again at 11, their blood sugar is down and they make this connection that the food brought it down. Well, it didn't. Their cortisol and adrenaline fell normally. Yeah. And as you know, for the last now, this will be my 18th year from January through June. I not only don't eat breakfast, but I don't eat lunch. So I I'm a mouse at the NIH. I eat all my calories in a two hour window. And so far, so good. You know, as I say, I'll let you know when I'm one hundred and fifty, if the experiment worked. Right. But I got to catch Dave Asprey, who we both know and respect. He's going to be 180. So we got to do something to catch him. So talk to me about the benefit of a low protein diet as part of this. Any thoughts on that subject? Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts. It's controversial because there are a lot of people who some of our friends, Steve, are carnivores. But I've looked at the data and I've chosen to become mostly vegetarian. And what I'm trying to do is to to not overload my body with excess protein. You know, we all need protein to live and make, you know, the amino acids are essential. There's no doubt. But overloading it by eating huge amounts of steak, I think, is a mistake. And one of the reasons for that is there's a longevity mechanism in all of our cells that responds to how many amino acids we eat, particularly the branched chain amino acids, leucine, isoleucine, and valine. And if we eat a lot of those, what happens is this longevity mechanism in the body called mTOR doesn't do its job. It becomes lazy. It says, we've got enough food. Let's not worry about surviving any longer. We're going to put our effort into actually growing muscle rather than surviving. And that's why it's good for body builders to bulk up on these amino acids because it puts the body in a state of growth. But it's probably at the long term expense of health and longevity. I imagine there are a lot of studies that show that lowering the activity of this pathway is beneficial, both in animals and in people. There are even drugs that are being developed right now to mimic low amounts of amino acids without actually having to just to actually avoid a lot of meat. But until those drugs are available and there's one on the market that's kind of dangerous, it's used as an immunosuppressant. So I'm not taking that one. But so long story short, I mean, either low amounts of amino acids and not overload my body. And I'll eat a bit of fish occasionally, but I'm not a big steak guy anyway. Yeah, you know, I coined the term to describe my diet of veg aquarium. And, you know, my wife and I eat mostly vegan during the week. And then on the weekends, we'll either have some wild shellfish or some wild fish for for the meal. But but that's about it. I enjoy talking with the carnivores. And I've even had one on my podcast. First of all, you and I have studied longevity for most of our lives. And I am not aware of a long live society that is a carnivore based diet. And I'm sure you're not aware of one. Right. That's true. I mean, look at the Okinawans in Japan on that island. They eat a little bit of fish, but mostly it's it's it's plant based. And they don't have a lot of food either. So yeah, I think that's right. You've got to look to where people live the longest and try to mimic their diets. And I think, you know, a lot of the carnivores that I know of or who write on Twitter, most of these people are definitely time restricted feeding. And they don't talk about that, but it's very clear from their physique that they are. What about the argument that if we eat, if we use a lot of bone broth or we have a lot of the cartilaginous parts, tail, the nose, eating that will have so much glycine that we will block mTOR from being turned on. Can you go down that pathway for a second? Yeah, there's a school of thought that, you know, glycine has a number of benefits. We we haven't studied that in my life. So I can't say that I can speak with any authority. But I think it's possible that that's true. The one downside of eating a lot of branched chain amino acids from meat, which just came out in a publication a few days ago by studying animals. It was a study from Sydney, Australia, was that these branched amino acids unfortunately stimulate the hunger response in your brain, or at least in the animal's brain. And so it actually caused those animals to eat too much and they became obese and died prematurely. And so maybe what our friends are doing, the carnivores, by restricting their feeding is actually counteracting the negative effects of their high branched chain amino acid diet. But that would be something that we'd need to really study to say for sure. All right, we'll leave them alone for now. The the Adkins diet resurfaces every 50 years. And I actually do think it's a it's a useful elimination diet because it does get rid of every plant compound known to mankind, at least for a while. And as you know, some plants hate us. But I get back to I agree with you that Xenohormesis is probably a really good thing in the long run. But let's move on. Tell me about vitamin D. As you know, I am a huge fan for vitamin D and longevity. What say you? I agree. So actually, I co-developed a blood test that predicts your biological age, the best that we had until recently. And vitamin D was one of five things we measured that are correlated very nicely with longevity. And so I'm a big fan. I take vitamin D every day, along with vitamin K2 for my blood vessels. And I give it to my kids, too, because especially in a place like Boston, you can become deficient. But I also I don't want to go anywhere near being deficient. The vitamin D receptor is very important. My wife, who I mentioned earlier, the scientist, she studied vitamin D for the skin and the health benefits of activating these receptors. And it's critical for bone and for skin health. And so I totally agree with you, Steve, you've got to keep those levels up. Yeah, and I'm glad to see that actually there's several labs in the country now that have raised their safe limit of vitamin D to 120 nanograms from earlier. And I actually think it's probably safe to be higher than that. I've for the last 18 years, I've been running my vitamin D levels greater than 120 to prove I'm not dead. And so far so far it's working well. And I'll tell you a funny story that I think I've said before. Many, many years ago in my clinic, I met two husband and wife in their late 70s. And at that time, we were actually measuring the actual number of vitamin D. Most labs kind of cut off after about 150 and say greater than 150. These people both had vitamin D levels of about 280. And I was flabbergasted because here were two, you know, quite healthy looking individuals. And, you know, I thought, you know, why aren't they dead? Number one. And number two, you know, have they had kidney stones? No. Do they have neuropathy? No. And I said, you guys take a lot of vitamin D, don't you? And they said, oh, yeah, it's a longevity hormone. And we've been taken, you know, and I said, it was actually the first time I, you know, I have traditional MD saying these people aren't dead. And, you know, they have this humongous high vitamin D level. And that's when I actually started experimenting on myself with these two individuals, because as I have talked about in my books, I owe most of what I've learned from an individual or patient going, you know, look at this, I've got a vitamin D level of 280. Now, that's not to say that everybody should have a vitamin D level of 280. And I don't think you'd say that either. But I think we're woefully under vitamin D in this country. Yeah, absolutely. Tell me, tell me about NMN and everybody thinks we're talking about M&M as the candy. What is that? And why is it so important in your opinion? Yeah. Well, I think most people would agree with me these days that. So NMN is a molecule that we also refer to as an NAD booster. And this is one of the things that my father and my wife and I and our dogs take, actually, I brought a vial here to show you. They just I take them in pill form. So what is NAD? So NAD, everybody learned about it in high school biology and then promptly forgot about it. It may have been the reason why people left science or became disinterested because it is the most boring molecule in biology. It's used for about 500 chemical reactions. It's essential for life. Without NAD, we'd all be dead in about 30 seconds. But, you know, we were forced to learn these chemical pathways. It's not that interesting. Things got really interesting when we realized that the body was sensing the levels of NAD to determine how it was doing and what the environment was like. So we now know when you exercise and when you are hungry, your NAD levels go up. And it turns out that as you get older, your NAD levels go down. And that that's just a correlation. But what we've shown from numerous animal studies, rodent studies, an increasing number of studies in people is that what's going on is the NAD is turning on the body's defenses against aging through a group of enzymes that we worked on and have essentially spent 25 years figuring out. They require NAD as well. So the hormesis mediators, the enzymes that we think provide the health benefits of diet and exercise are responsible for the longevity that you get when you lead a healthy lifestyle. Now, it's interesting to pause on this because we used to think that just running would make your blood flow better. And being hungry, you lost weight and that's why you lived longer. But actually what I believe and more and more people also believe is that NAD and these other things that raise NAD are working. And I also raise virtual are working because they're they're actively turning on the body's defenses against aging. And it's not it's not a passive effect. It's not a coincidence. It's really just telling your body times are going to be tough. Fight against this onslaught. And yeah, NAD is one of the best things that I know to turn on these sort of defenses. Yeah, you you and I take the approach that supplementation is a very important component of successful aging. And that's controversial. Leave me. I was the original anti-supplement guy when I got into this. I did think they made expensive urine. Are you saying that you could take these NAD boosters and achieve all the effects that you would need without fasting, without exercising, without doing any other trick? Is it a genie in a bottle? No, there's no magic bullet here. And turn. Oh, come on, help me. There's no easy way out of this. First of all, you know, I don't know if these pills are going to make me live a lot longer. So far, like you say, my father and I are not dead, so that's good. Right. And our blood biochemistry looks great. So, you know, we we do this under doctor supervision. It's not just random stuff. And I wouldn't ever talk about it unless I knew a lot more about it than the average person. But it's it's not a substitute for a healthy lifestyle by any means. And that's the reason I do these these other healthy things. And one of the best bits of evidence I can give you is that we we treat a lot of mice in my lab to make them live longer and or or healthier or stronger or fitter. And what we see is that if we combine resveratrol with restricted feeding, or if we combine NMN with exercise, we get a greater benefit than either of those things alone. Well, I think that's a great takeaway to kind of finish this up. I'll tell you what, you and I have both been on Dave Asprey's podcast, so we both known Dave for a long time as well. Give me your take. Are we going to make it to 180? Is that Dave's pipe dream? What what do you see coming down the pipeline? Yeah. Well, I think diet and exercise will can get us beyond 80 for sure, on average. You know, most people I know that have looked after their bodies live into their 90s in a healthy way, unless they've got really bad genes or they're unlucky. So that that's the minimum I think we can expect. Can we reach 150? I think that's that's not going to be for everybody, certainly. And we're going to need some major breakthrough in science to get there. But there are major breakthroughs being made in the field all the time. The one that gives me a lot of excitement and hope is our ability now in my lab to reprogram cells to be young again. We have a what's now a gene therapy. But eventually will presumably be a pill that literally turns back the age of cells. What we call epigenetic reprogramming, and that could be a treatment one day that literally turns the clock back. Wow. And on that note, I think that's a great place to end. Where can people find the book? Where can they learn more about you? Of course, they can type anywhere in PubMed and find you all over the place. But tell us about Lifespan. Yeah, sure. So Lifespan has tips on how to live longer and what I do. But it also talks about the future. All right. So like I talked about, we got we got just into this reprogramming, but it's all in there. You can buy the book at where all good books are sold around the world. It became a New York Times bestseller. So thank you. Congratulations. You can get it. You can also learn more at Lifespanbook.com and even sign up for a newsletter that I put out every month on the latest musings and what's going on in my brain. Other than that. Oh, man, I don't get your newsletter. Well, of course, I can call you up anytime I want. That is true. You have it on speed dial. But yeah, you know, I'm the book is cutting edge, but there's always new stuff coming out. And I'm among social media, wherever good social media is to be found. So yeah. But also publications. So those of you who are doctors or scientists or just very curious, we have a number of papers, three in fact, that are now put online that will be published, but you can read them before they're even published. So if you Google myself either at Cell Press or what's called Bio Archive, B I O R X I V B I O R X I V, you can read this research that is written about in the book. There's something you are likely eating every day that can negatively affect your waistline, complexion and overall health. And even worse, your immune system to I'm talking about sugar. Unfortunately, the sweet stuff can lower your body's ability to fight off illness. As a matter of fact, researchers have found that eating any kind of sugar has the potential to reduce your body's defenses by 70 percent for up to six hours after you ingest it. So during the current crisis, limiting your sugar intake is more important than ever. On this episode of the Dr. Gundry podcast, I'll talk more about the effects sugar has on your body's ability to fight off harmful viruses. I'll also share tips for conquering sugar addiction once and for all and how you can enjoy sweet foods without eating the enemy. So tune in. This is not an episode you want to miss. OK, so let's start with the basics. What is sugar? Well, sugar comes in so many forms that it's actually incredibly difficult to figure out what you're eating has any sugar. So, for instance, sugar is a carbohydrate and a carbohydrate is just a collection of carbon atoms. And depending on how those carbon atoms are arranged, it's one of the main sources of finding glucose. And glucose is a simple sugar molecule that is the primary fuel that we use to fuel the mitochondria, those little organelles that live in all of ourselves. But unfortunately, glucose is actually not readily available. It's usually combined with other forms of sugars. So let me give you an example. sucrose, which most people think is plain old sugar, is half glucose and half fructose. So that white sugar, cane sugar, for instance, sucrose is half glucose and half fructose. Most fruit sugars are primarily fructose, which isn't glucose at all. And in fact, we'll talk about how fructose is incredibly damaging to almost everything in your body. There are absolutely other forms of sugars. For instance, the sugar in milk is called lactose. And some people, particularly of non-European descent, are unable to digest lactose because we no longer have the enzymes that we had as a child. So these are all forms of sugar. But the important thing to realize is modern food processing has taken the sugars that have been bound together with chemical bonds in nature to make starches. And starches are simply sugar molecules that have been bonded together in long chains. The importance of that is normally starches because of all these chemical bonds take quite a while to during digestion break these chemical bonds. Now, why is that important? Because long ago, you could eat a starch, such as, for instance, a whole grain like rice or a whole grain like wheat. And it would actually take a long time to break those individual starches down into glucose. But modern manufacturing has now been able to break these starch molecules into individual sugar molecules and still disguise them as starches. So what that means is a piece of bread, a plain old everyday piece of white bread, whole wheat bread, actually has the equivalent of four teaspoons of sugar in it, even though it doesn't taste sweet. In fact, there's so much sugar in white bread that when we calculate a glycemic index, that is, if I eat this, how much does my sugar level go up in my blood? White bread is one hundred. In other words, it's actually the highest rated of anything you can eat. Let me give you another example that I talked about on another podcast. A bagel has about 35 grams of sugar. Even though if you read the label, you'll say you'll see zero sugar. And that's because manufacturers have manipulated the system to hide the sugar content. So starting with the basics. Here's how I want you to look at any package that has a nutrition fact on the back. Take a look at total carbohydrates. That's the total number of sugar molecules in grams. Then you take the fiber. Fiber is that indigestible starch or sugar molecules that we personally can't digest, but our bacteria love. So you take total carbohydrates minus fiber and that will actually give you the grams of sugar per serving. Now, grams mean nothing to most of us. So here's an easy tip. There's four grams of sugar in each teaspoon. So, for instance, that bagel with 33, 35 grams of sugar divide that by four. There's somewhere between eight and nine teaspoons of sugar in that bagel. Now, why is that so important? Because researchers actually many, many years ago found out how detrimental sugar was in any form to our immune systems ability to function. Now, there are actually a number of papers in humans written in the 1970s on the effect of ingestion of very different kinds of sugar. And we'll go through that real quickly. On the ability of white blood cells to actually engulf, that means eat bacteria in this case. So what they did is they took a bunch of healthy volunteers and they gave them different forms of sugar. They gave them glucose, they gave them fructose, they gave them starch, they gave them orange juice. Now, the equivalent amount of sugar that they gave them was about the sugar in two cans of soda. And believe it or not, there's about 12 teaspoons in a can of soda of sugar. Now, that sugar is mostly sucrose, not glucose. What they found was they took blood from these people for six hours every hour after they ingested whatever sugar they gave them. And they found with each passing hour, the ability of white blood cells to eat bacteria and kill them dramatically felt like 70% ineffective after one hour of eating any of these sugars, including orange juice. And that effect lasted for about six hours. It gradually went back to normal. So imagine that that healthy glass of orange juice you're having this morning to ward off the coronavirus is actually impairing the ability of your white blood cells, your defenders, to defend you. It literally paralyzes them. And is that really what we want to do in this time? Same way with a bagel. So a bagel is approaching a can of soda and the amount of sugar. And what's fascinating is that bagel will raise your blood sugar faster than a can of soda. It actually has a higher glycemic index. So in this day and age, the idea of eating healthy is completely perverted in terms of protecting ourselves against viruses. Now it gets even more interesting. It turns out they took then some diabetics and they found that diabetics, their white blood cells at their basic state didn't work half as well as normal people's white blood cells. Why? Again, it was because the elevated sugar in their bloodstream suppressed the white blood cell function. Now here's the best news. If you've listened to other of my podcasts, you know that one of the only good things that came out of World War two in terms of scientific knowledge was that concentration camp survivors fascinatingly were immune literally from infections. They did not get sick. They did not get cold. Now, granted, most of these people, sadly, starved to death or were killed. But the survivors, the fact that they never got sick, prompted scientists to investigate why starvation was good to protect you from harm in terms of bacteria and viruses. And this study was replicated in healthy volunteers and they actually put volunteers on a five day water fast. And they did the same thing. They took blood each day and they looked at the ability of white blood cells to engulf bacteria and kill them. And lo and behold, with every fasting day as blood sugar declined, the ability of white blood cells to kill bacteria increased. So if you've ever heard the expression feed a cold and starve a fever, it turns out there's actually scientific basis for not eating or fasting to protect yourself and to actually increase the function of your immune system. Who knew? Now, I don't want everybody to go on a five day water fast. But the point of all this is even a 12 hour fast in these individuals was shown to improve their white blood cell function. And I got news for you. Any of us can do a 12 hour fast. Hey, you're going to do fasting for seven to eight hours every night. Just add on another four or five hours before you eat breakfast in the morning. Or eat dinner early and you will actually increase your white blood cells ability to defend you. And why wouldn't we want to do that? So sugars are really bad for you and bad for your immune system. And it's hidden in almost everything we eat. Now, I get the question constantly, but what about natural sugar? That's got to be a lot different than cane sugar. Well, sorry, natural sugar is no different than any other sugar. For instance, honey is still sugar. Maple syrup is still sugar. Orange juice is still sugar. So don't make the mistake that just because it's natural means it's better for you. And please don't pick up the can of soda that says all natural cane sugar or organic sugar. Sugar is sugar. This is a white substance. And if we know anything about white substances, white substances are addictive. And speaking of all natural cocaine and heroin are all natural and they're addictive. And it turns out that the white substance sugar is equally addictive. In fact, it's actually more addictive than heroin or cocaine. How do we know? Because we can easily addict rats or mice to heroin or cocaine. And they will press a lever and get their heroin or cocaine. When we introduce them to sugar water within two days, the rats will preferentially hit the button for sugar water instead of heroin or cocaine. And we now know that this actually hits the same pleasure centers in the brain that heroin and cocaine hits, but it hits it even harder. So it's no wonder that we like sugar. And it's no wonder that we're so hard for us to give it up. So think about that the next time you're craving something sweet and think about that the next time you're trying to wean yourself off of sugar. So how about orange juice? Remember, I mentioned orange juice had the exact same effect. One of the things we have to realize and remember, I am not against fruit in season, but season is a very short time normally. But when we take the sugar in fruit and extract all the fiber that was in fruit and we extract all the other polyphenols that are in fruit and just mainline sugar like apple juice or orange juice, we actually take away any of the possible benefits of that fruit and instead are literally mainlining sugar. And what we found in the last 10 years is that most of the foods that we like, the highly processed foods, the juices, the fructose in those highly processed foods are one of the biggest drivers of obesity. One of the biggest drivers of mitochondrial dysfunction and one of the biggest drivers of a fatty liver and insulin resistance. And in my upcoming book, The Energy Paradox, you're going to find out why fructose in particular is so deadly to our mitochondria and to our health. So fructose in the form of fruit during fruit season, OK, but just be cautious about any fructose as a sweetener in food, as a sweetener in beverages. And remember, high fructose corn syrup is in almost every prepackaged food energy bar. If you see the word corn syrup or all natural syrup or anything like that, brown rice syrup, these are all code words for fructose and just beware. Now, one question I get asked all the time. OK, so we now know in humans that sugar ingestion in any form impairs our white blood cells ability to ingest bacteria and viruses. What happens once they ingest them? Well, this was the work that was done by Dr. Linus Pauling back in the fifties and sixties, the famous vitamin C doctor. And I've done this on other podcasts, but it's worth mentioning again. And it gets a little complicated. Vitamin C is actually manufactured in all other animals, except us, guinea pigs and African monkeys from glucose. There is a five step process. We lack the final enzyme to do that, so we can't manufacture vitamin C. But vitamin C is concentrated in our white blood cells 50 times higher than in our blood. And so there's actually a gradient to bring vitamin C into our white blood cells and concentrate it there. The problem is glucose competes with vitamin C for the same pumps that pump vitamin C into our cells. And what Linus Pauling showed was the higher your blood sugar glucose. The more glucose is in the cell instead of vitamin C and up to 70 percent of the killing ability of white blood cells is lost because you don't have enough vitamin C in your white blood cells. So two reasons not to have sugar. One, it stops white blood cells from eating bacteria and viruses in the first place. And number two, if they eat them, they can't kill them. If your sugar is up, double whammy. OK. I somehow on Twitter, somebody said that I said that sugar feeds viruses. I've never said sugar feeds viruses. There's absolutely viruses don't eat sugar. Number one, what I've said is that sugar impairs your white cells ability. And those are the studies we just went over. So please, let's let's stop the myth that sugar feeds viruses. That's not the problem with sugar. Well, are there good substitutes for sugar? Well, first of all, if you're going to eat fruit, please eat fruit in season. If you're going to eat berries, believe it or not, the modern blueberry has the highest sugar content. They've been bred for sugar. If you can find wild blueberries and you usually have to find the frozen, they're the safest of the blueberries. But interestingly, blackberries followed by raspberries, followed by strawberries have the least sugar content of the berries. One of the best, which is no longer available right now, is not in season is pomegranate seeds. So if you can find pomegranate seeds, it's actually one of your best choices. Not pomegranate juice, pomegranate seeds. You always want the whole fruit. So those are my advice for those kind of products. Now, there are several quite safe sweeteners. One is stevia. The other is monk fruit or lo-hung-go. Those are actually two of the safest. A third is inulin. Now, inulin has a sweet taste. It's available in products like just like sugar. It's also available mixed with stevia in sweet leaf sweeteners. The beauty of inulin is, as I've written about in the plant paradox, inulin feeds good gut bacteria. So you get the sweet taste, but you actually get a benefit in feeding good gut bacteria. Now, what about other artificial sweeteners? Well, if you've read any of my books, you know that most artificial sweeteners, including sucralose, that's and neutrosweet and saccharin, actually kill gut bacteria. In fact, a Duke study showed that one packet of Splenda will kill about half of your gut bacteria. So these are absolute no-nos. The other thing we have to remember from any, we'll call them fake sugar, non-caloric sweeteners, including stevia, including saccharin, including monk fruit, is that we have sweet receptors in our tongue. We don't have sugar receptors. We even have sweet receptors in our gut. We don't have sugar receptors. Those sweet receptors tell our brain, they send a message up to our brain that said, hey, just ate sugar. That's actually the only sweetness we ever knew. And get ready for it. It's coming. Well, when sugar doesn't arrive in your brain, your brain literally says, wait a minute, I know this guy just ate sugar. Where is it he's been cheated? Go back and get some more and try again. And one of the reasons that I was addicted to Diet Cokes ate a day was that every time I drank a Diet Coke that had no sugar, my brain felt cheated and made me go look for more. So this is one of the sad things about non-nutritive sweeteners. Your brain tastes sugar and doesn't understand why any hasn't arrived. So we really have to be cautious, particularly when we're trying to wean ourselves off the real stuff that we don't make the mistake of using even stevia, even monk fruit as a replacement for that sweet taste. As you've heard me say before, the key is to retreat from sweet. Now, the good news is you actually become habituated to the taste of sweetness and you have to retrain your receptors and you do this by, as I wrote about in Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution, I used to put two packets of sweeteners in my coffee. OK, so we're going to cut it in half. We go down to one pack and we do that for a week. And then we tear off half the package and we put in half a packet. And then we do that for a week or two. And then we put in a quarter and we do that for a while. You step down the amount of sweetness you add in. Strikingly, you'll find that the taste of sweetness comes back. In fact, I now primarily 90 percent chocolate cacao and that sweetness and it's not sweet. Normally is just as sweet as when I used to eat milk chocolate. Now, if I started off eating 90 percent chocolate, I go, this stuff is so bitter. So work your way up. Start with 72 percent chocolate and limit yourself to a square. And you'll find over the weeks, you're going to wean yourself off. This is a habit that can be broken, but it's really difficult to go cold turkey. Does it get easier? Yeah, like I say, I drink my coffee black now. I don't use any sweetener and I have 90 percent, even 92, 95 percent cacao chocolate, and I'm delighted with that. But again, I couldn't have done it cold turkey. OK, now, is there such thing as a sugar blocker? Well, there aren't truly any sugar blockers, but there are a number of products that can mitigate against the effect of sugar. Now, one recently I've talked about is selenium. And it turns out that selenium deficiency in humans actually potentiates the COVID-19 virus ability to do harm to you. And a study in China showed that people with normal and high selenium levels were far less affected by the COVID-19 virus, whereas people with low selenium levels were very affected. And selenium has actually been shown to affect blood sugar concentration. So how do you get selenium? Well, the easiest way is to eat three Brazil nuts a day. That's it. Don't eat too many. Selenium can be bad for you in too much to excess amount. But three a day will give you actually about 300 micrograms of selenium. And that's all you need every day. Now, I shouldn't tell you that because there's going to be a run on Brazil nuts everywhere and I won't be able to get any. And please don't hoard them. The second thing that you can do is there are carb blockers. Now, what carb blockers do is actually they prevent the absorption of starches or the breakdown of starches. And there are a number of carb blockers on the market, and they actually are effective. The other thing that's very useful is chromium, chromium picolinate. And chromium picolinate is available in supplements. You can actually find a supplement at Costco with chromium in it. It's usually combined with cinnamon. And it turns out that true cinnamon, not the fake cinnamon, actually helps mitigate the effect of sugar and actually helps lower sugar. Now, one more trick. Magnesium is essential for insulin to get sugar out of your bloodstream into your muscle cells where it belongs. And most of us are magnesium deficient. So much so that in surgery, in heart surgery, most of my patients are so deficient in magnesium that we actually have to give them two grams of IV magnesium every six hours for 48 hours during and after heart surgery to get their magnesium levels up. Why do we want to do that? Because quite frankly, magnesium is one of the best ways to calm extra beats of the heart. And for those of you who get cramps in your legs, magnesium and potassium are the ways we prevent cramps in legs. So magnesium supplements are everywhere. Get some magnesium in your system and you can handle sugar. Now, that doesn't mean that, oh, boy, I take selenium. I take magnesium. I take chromium and I take cinnamon and I can have all the sugar I want. That's not what I'm saying, but you need to give yourself the best defense you can because I know you're going to be eating sugar. You can't help it. It's addictive. What about diabetics? Can they take these supplements? Absolutely. Now, let me be clear about this. This is the time for diabetics to take their diabetes seriously. And we know that diabetics are one of the highest risk groups for bad outcomes with the COVID-19 virus. And that's because your immune system doesn't work well. Now, here's the good news. I have actually never ever met a type two diabetic that we couldn't reverse to normal by following the plant paradox program. But you don't have to take it from me. In fact, during World War Two, when there was rationing of food by law, the incidence of diabetes plummeted to almost zero in the United States and Britain and Holland and Norway. The deaths from diabetes plummeted during rationing. Rationing involved rationing sugar and involved rationing flour. And it involved rationing milk and orange juice and meat. Son of a gun, most of these are great sources of sugar. So in four years time, diabetes was pretty much wiped out of all of these countries. Now, here's the bad news. From 1945 back up to 1950, the rates of diabetes went back to their pre-war levels. Once rationing was stopped. So here's the tip. You're at home. There isn't any meat anymore. Here's the best opportunity you have to start the plant paradox program. You're cooking from home, cut back on simple sugars, cut back on processed and ultra processed foods and watch what happens to your diabetes. It's time for us to save our own lives. And this is how we're going to do it. OK, any other benefits of cutting back on sugar? Well, I talk a lot about this in the plant paradox and the longevity paradox. It turns out that there are compounds in all of us called advanced glycation and products and they're nicknamed ages for short. And advanced glycation and products are formed from sugar, protein and heat. For instance, when you're out charring your steak or grilling your hamburger and you see that nice crust that forms, those are advanced glycation and products. Even when you roast your vegetables and it browns, those are advanced glycation and products. So sadly, the more sugar in our diet, the more advanced glycation and products we make and the faster you age. And as I've written about in all my books, if you look down in your hands and you see age spots, those brown spots or liver spots or sunspots, those are advanced glycation and products. And the cool thing is, as I've documented, you can make those disappear by cutting back on sugars and proteins. And by the way, heat. So sugar not only hits your brain with a high, but it kills you and ages you quickly. So this is the time, folks. We're at home. We're trying to protect ourselves. Let's get ourselves off our sugar addiction and just get any of my books and we'll help you out and follow me on YouTube, too, because we got a lot of tips as well. OK, that's it for today on sugar. And it's time for our audience question. Star Hill Studios on YouTube asked, what about eating olives? Is that the equivalent of eating olive oil? What do you think about the high sodium content, healthy or not? So it turns out that the fruit of an olive actually contains a lot of polyphenols and a lot of the beneficial polyphenols that are in olive oil. You're pressing a lot of those polyphenols into olive oil. But the great thing is olives and olive oil go together. In fact, in the Mediterranean, you not only use olive oil, but you eat olives. In fact, olives are snacked on before dinner and almost every meal I've ever eaten in France and Italy in Spain. So eat your olives. Now, there is actually a huge sodium myth in this country about how bad sodium is for you. Sodium in the form of olives is actually not only not bad for you, but actually may be beneficial for you. And in fact, if you're following a fasting diet or a ketogenic diet, there's very strong evidence that made by Dr. Finney years ago that you need to increase your salt intake during these times, particularly if you're fasting or restricting calories, because uric acid builds up in your bloodstream and can actually damage your kidneys and cause kidney stones. And increasing your sodium chloride salt will actually prevent this. But let me give a word of warning for all of you going to get your pink salt or your sea salt. Please, we have an iodine deficiency in this country. So by iodized sea salt, it's readily available now. Even Morton's makes iodized sea salt. And you would be amazed how many of my patients with low thyroid function once we get them on iodized sea salt, their thyroid function improves dramatically. So that's the tip for today. If you found this video helpful, I think you're going to love this one. We know that studies on rats, rats will choose sugar over both heroin and cocaine.