 It's like Edith Murray who starts the book that lady was a hundred and five and a half when this picture was taken Wow, and so she was in two-inch wedgies She walks her little Pomeranian and She's smart as a whip and she was one of the women who really changed my life Her name's Edith Murray. She's Michelle in all my books. So anyhow, so you take these people you look at their gut microbiome They have the gut microbiome the Diversity of a 30 year old individual Wow, and if you look normally at people as they age their gut microbiome Becomes less and less diverse you Ultimately have only a few species. So it's this number one. It's this huge diversity that makes a big difference Number two, we now know that there are certain bugs that really make the difference And the longevity paradox is actually teaching people how to Nurture the bugs that are very interested in keeping you alive Another way of looking at this you're you're basically a Condominium for these bugs for bacteria. So how do we attract all these diverse good bugs? I'm so glad you asked So we know that good bugs like to eat certain foods okay, and a lot of this was actually based on there's this fascinating creature called the naked mole rat and Naked mole rats make sure everybody who's listening are watching Google's naked naked mole rats and Here'll be my first controversial statement. Okay Naked mole rats have sometimes been described as a penis with buck teeth Okay, okay, so Google it. Yeah, you'll see it So these are probably one of the ugliest creatures in the world they Naked mole rats live in the Sahara Desert and they live in colonies very much like termites or bees and they live in subterranean tunnels and naked mole rats appear to have no end Mortality in other words naked mole rats live at least 10 to 20 times longer than any other rat Rats live about two years naked mole rats have lived 20 30 years in fact no one has actually Known that you could actually have it End life of a naked mole rat. So they've been the darling of longevity researchers for a very long time and in fact hilariously When I was professor at Loma Linda, which is a blue zone I had behind my desk is in giant iridescent Naked mole rat picture really San Diego zoo and everybody goes what you know What's the deal your famous heart surgeon and what the deal do you got this make a mole rat behind your desk and his bright pink and purple and I've been fascinated with naked mole rats because they're the longest, you know living creatures, so naked mole rats have the same Diverse microbiome as 105 year old people really really and What did what the heck is going on? Well, it turns out naked mole rats unlike any other rat eats roots eats tubers and Each fungi that are growing in the subterranean area So if you think I would like you to eat some roots and tubers and mushrooms You're absolutely right because the evidence is rather Striking that the bugs that like these things are what keeps the naked mole rat living so long unlike any of it it's other rat cousins who eat grains and We can be sure to be talking about that soon. So this is the only rat that eats tubers and mushrooms and roots and They have the microbiome of 105 year old people who are thriving In fact a study published last week out of Singapore showed that humans Who eat two cups of mushrooms per week do not get Alzheimer's disease? And it's because of any type of mushroom any type you want to go to the grocery store Or get some mushrooms turns out button mushrooms are second best of all mushrooms in terms of a compound That we now know is the secret of mushrooms Porcini mushrooms, which of course is the prize mushroom of Italians is number one for these compounds. Now these compounds are polyphenols they're actually cousins of polyphenols that are in green tea and What happens with these compounds is that they're actually eaten by bacteria bacteria love to eat polyphenols and the bacteria then For lack of a better word poop out of these compounds that have been changed a little bit and it's those Compounds that and enter our circulation and a particular compound in mushrooms. That's been manipulated by bacteria protects the brain from the image from Alzheimer's or also Wow, so mushrooms mushrooms each your mushroom every week every week What if there's a diverse of mushrooms or beat the same mushroom all the time doesn't matter It really doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter and again the plain old humble button mushroom will do it for you Just have a couple cups of what I do is, you know, I take a bunch of different mushroom blends and mix it up Yeah, it makes it up nations of mushrooms Yeah, and I take mushroom capsules and I take I have a product That's actually lots of different mushrooms. Just squeeze in your coffee or whatever. There you go Okay, I have a question now. So for people that want to live longer And be healthy while they live longer not having to get surgeries all the time, right? if you had Three to five minutes max to talk to someone who said I just want to live long I want to know the secrets to living longer. I got to figure out the keys and you've got three minutes with them What would you say in three minutes are the things they must do? Every day or as often as they can for the rest of their life to extend their life The first thing they must do is realize that the only purpose of food is to get olive oil into your mouth the only purpose of food and Preferably it'd be mushrooms that you pour the olive oil on. That's number one the evidence that the polyphenols in olive oil if You really, you know wanted to live well for a very long time Olive oil is the key Two of the blue zones actually three if you count the at your oldies use a liter of olive oil per week Now that's a lot of olive oil. It's like 10 to 12 tablespoons a day So there's a beautiful study out of Spain that I talked about where you took 65 year old people And we'll dumb it down real quick two groups one group had to use a liter of olive oil per week for five years Then they changed their olive oil once a week at the clinic The other group had to eat a low-fat Mediterranean diet both Mediterranean diets of Spain at the end of five years the olive oil group had better memory had improved memory than when they started the Low-fat group lost memory the women in the olive oil group had a 67% less incidence of breast cancer than the low-fat group People in both groups who had coronary artery disease the group that got the olive oil had a 30% less incidence of new events versus the group that had the low-fat diet And so if you know three blue zones and this study doesn't convince you that you better get olive oil into you Olive oil Grows brain cells and it's not the oil per se. It's actually the polyphenols and olive oil Olive oil the polyphenols literally make your blood vessels slippery and I've actually published that on this that your blood vessels You cannot stick cholesterol to blood vessels if you have olive oil in your system. Oh, yeah So, you know drink the dumb stuff. Do you drink it? Yeah, I do wow I take a shot of Craig's always talking about yeah, I could drink as much as possible but what I would urge people to do is So you can cook an olive oil this myth that olive oil Oxidizes when you cook it is is one of the worst internet myths there is really it turns out that olive oil is the least Oxidizable oil. It's even better than avocado oil or coconut oil. It does not oxidize oxidize meaning like evaporate No, I mean gets damaged damaged. Okay It turns out everybody sees olive oil smoking and they figure that's damaged It's not so you can burn it as much as you want, you know Culture is a bit cultures have been using olive oil to cook with for 5,000 years And you know, there's not a lot of a dead Italians from looking at all Okay, so you gotta get number one number one number two you got to take vitamin D3. You got to vitamin D3 Not D. Yeah. Well, there's there's D2. There's D1. What's vitamin D3 and why is it important? So D3 is the active form of vitamin D that we use You will be shocked that people who have the highest levels of vitamin D in their bloodstream Live the longest and live well Compared to people with the lowest levels of vitamin D3 It turns out that you have to have vitamin D3 to activate stem cells activation And we can vitamin D is also through the Sun is that correct? It's nearly impossible to get enough vitamin D through the Sun really nearly impossible 80% of Southern Californians are vitamin D Deficient because we're slathering sunscreen on us and we're wearing long sleeves shirt inside a lot still inside a lot You know, I live in Palm Springs. It's pretty hot in the summer I tend not to go out a lot in the summer So we don't have enough vitamin D And so you have to swallow vitamin D the University of California, San Diego Published a study that the average human being to have an adequate level of vitamin D3 should be taking 9600 international units a day So basically 10,000 internationalians. They found no one who had vitamin D toxicity at 40,000 international units a day. You can't overdose on vitamin. I have yet to see vitamin D toxicity And I've been measuring vitamin D levels for 20 years and patients every three months I personally run my vitamin D level greater than 120 nanograms from a milliliter for the last 12 years to prove I'm not dead So far so good, right? And Here's you know, just wow tell you how crazy this is if I feel I'm getting something if I'm coming down with a scratchy-throat or something I'll take 250,000 international units of vitamin D3 how many capsules three days. Well, so you can get five thousands, right? So, okay ten capsules three times a day for three days So I'm basically taking a half a million international units of vitamin D to ward off a virus Everyone always says you should take vitamin C when you start to feel like a scratch Yeah, it really doesn't work vitamin D is probably one of the best antivirals that's ever been discovered so vitamin C really doesn't help that much or really doesn't help that much We can get into vitamin C and I think everybody should take a time release vitamin C twice a day and it's actually for a different purpose What's the perfect? All right a quick version. All right quick version So you and I are one of the few animals that don't manufacture our own vitamin C us monkeys and guinea pigs and we have actually all the Jeans to manufacture vitamin C. There's actually five of them. The last gene is turned off. It's called a ghost gene Why do we do that? Well, we manufacture vitamin C from sugar from glucose and it's actually very expensive to manufacture vitamin C So the theory is and I like the theory is we grew up in Africa with lots of vitamin C containing plants in our diet and so it was Unnecessary for us to manufacture vitamin C and the theory goes we'd have some extra glucose left over that we could Store as fat to make it through the winter when times are rough and we're the only fat storing eight so The problem is vitamin C is essential to repair Collagen and everybody collagen. Okay, the reason smokers get wrinkles is Collagen is broken because you actually repair cracks and collagen with vitamin C and smokers use up all their vitamin C with what's called oxidative stress So they don't have any vitamin C. In fact Here's another controversial statement. If I've got a smoker with heart disease I'm willing to trade him his smoking with him taking large amounts of vitamin C While I get the rest of his diet squared away rather than Tell him to stop smoking. Wow. The reason I say that is when I talk about this in the book There's this fascinating island people called the Katavans in New Guinea who smoke like fiends They eat 60% of their diet is taro root. The other part of their diet is coconut oil And they live into their mid 90s with no medical care, but they've been studied Extensively there has never been a case of a heart attack heart disease or a stroke in these smokers What they do do is they eat a lot of vitamin C Containing fruits and vegetables as part of their diet olive oil as well. They don't have any olive oil They have coconut oil. That's their coconut. Yeah, they don't have any olives down So you can do without olive oil and still live a long life. Yeah But you think olive oil will yeah, it's since olive oil is so readily available in my as well might as well might as well Okay, so okay back to vitamin C. Yeah You have to have vitamin C to repair the cracks and blood vessels people remember scurvy Where people would die they bleed to death on long ocean voyages Actually 50% mortality on those old ocean voyages just dying from scurvy and the British Navy The reason they're called lime ease is because the surgeon in the British Navy realized that if he gave them Limes take on the voyage that they wouldn't die of scurvy. That's why the British Navy is still called lime ease Well, so vitamin C Repairs the cracks in collagen and our blood vessels are flexing all the time And so these cracks have to be repaired and if they're not repaired you basically bleed to death We have a system of repairing those cracks and it's called cholesterol and cholesterol will patch those cracks Interesting So if you have plenty of vitamin C throughout the day, you won't you'll be able to repair those cracks And there's a wild study. I mean head down a rabbit hole You can genetically engineer rats to lack that final gene to make vitamin C And they will live half as long Wow as a normal rat if you then put vitamin C in their water They will live as long as a normal rat who can manufacture their vitamin C But they're drinking the water throughout the day. Yeah, so vitamin C. Unfortunately with the manufacturer We have to manufacture it and we've got some interesting tricks to do that coming up Okay, but in the meantime the average person should take like a thousand milligrams of timed release vitamin C twice a day Okay to cover their ass. Wow. Okay. So the first thing I heard you say this three minutes is turning into 20 It's okay. No worries. The first thing I heard is olive oil Oh and olive oil is actually one of the tricks to activate the ghost gene a polyphenol and olive oil Okay, you will actually make vitamin C. Okay. There you go. So there you go another good reason So have olive oil and vitamin D have lots of vitamin D three D three and then what's next to a long life Next is you got to get some form of long chain omega-3 fat better known as fish oil Hmm and vegans have no excuse anymore. There is algae based DHA and EPA, but here's the deal Your brain is about 70% fat So if you want to call me a fat head, you know, I will take it you yeah And I can just see how the internet running lighting up me is a fan So half of the fat in your brain is actually an omega-3 fat called DHA So half basically half of your brain is fish oil Wow, and as I talk about in the longevity paradox you look at people What are called the omega-3 index which basically looks at how much DHA you have in you over the past two months people with the highest omega-3 index have the largest brains and The largest areas of memory the hippocampus People with the lowest levels of DHA have the most shrunken brains and the smallest Merit and memory areas hippocampus So mom was right when she said fish is brain food, you know, she was absolutely She didn't know why it was but we now know it's DHA is really what makes your brain. So sushi is good Sushi is actually not a good idea. Oh, well most of the people I see with high mercury levels are sushi eaters or dentists So and particularly Shishimi grade tuna Just wanna just kind of want to stay away from a sugar fish is amazing though Don't know and it's got the grains too. Yeah, it's got the grains, you know, so so no sushi. Yeah, so once in a while Yeah, once a while, okay, so But yeah, so fish oil is incredibly important. Yeah, and What I try to get people to do and again, I measure this every three months and all my patients and we were talking You know thousands and thousands of patients over the last 20 years You want to get about a thousand milligrams of DHA per day. Now, how do you do that? Well, you Get fish oil. I mean you can go to Costco. All right, right, right and you look on the back And you find serving size and make sure it says one Serving size. They love to fool you They may say to or three and then you look down below and you see DHA and you look to see how much DHA is in a capsule and you add it up and say, oh, okay There's 250 milligrams of DHA in this capsule. So I need to take four. Wow for a day Yeah, that was under day. Okay. We got olive oil. We've got vitamin D3 we have fish oils What else do we need to live longer? So you got to have polyphenols in your diet? So Polyphenol, how do you remember polyphenol think think about polywine a phenol, okay? Phenols are plant compounds polyphenols or plant compounds that plants use Primarily to protect themselves against stress and sunlight Just interesting fact We know that red wine is Beneficial for you because of actually two polyphenols the most famous is resveratrol The other one is kursitin or kursitin The higher the grapes are grown the higher in altitude the grapes are grown The more polyphenols they make because they need more to protect themselves. Yeah, exactly. It's basically Sundan, you know, they they've actually protected themselves against sunburn. Interesting. Also the more the plant is stressed the more polyphenols it makes to protect itself, right? Okay, so Polyphenols are Traditionally in dark colored berries. So for instance blueberries blackberries raspberries interesting fun fact the leaves of these Trees or vines have more polyphenols than the actual fruit does So for instance black raspberry leaves have far more polyphenols than black raspberries And I take black raspberry capsules. Oh, by the way, and it's in the book. There you go so olives for instance are loaded with polyphenols and olives that are stressed Pretty better. They're even better Olive leaves have more polyphenols than olives So olive leaf extract is an easy way of getting the huge amount of benefits without drinking a liter of olive oil So what about like, you know leafy greens? Do you want stressed out looking leafy greens? Or do you want healthy thriving looking excellent question? It turns out that the reason organic vegetables in general are better for you besides the fact that they haven't been sprayed with Pesticides and herbicides and probably roundup and we can get into that is the fact that these Creatures these plants actually have to work harder, huh? And they have to produce more polyphenols to protect themselves against insect predation And so that's actually the reason you want to eat organic So when you're going to the farmers market and the poor little organic vegetables have got pock holes of insects like they're dying And they don't look very good. You know, I want that guy. Yeah, that guy is struggling he is going to just be so loaded with polyphenols and Correlation with that is the more bitter the better because polyphenols in general are very bitter For instance when we were developing, you know, my signature product vital reds It's pure polyphenols primarily and they're bitter So we did lots of taste testing to figure out how the heck we're gonna mask these really bitter compounds So more bitter more better In fact as I talk about it in the book I had the pleasure of knowing Jack LaLaine Who you would know is really the godfather of yeah of fitness and nutrition in the United States And I knew him in his later years and Jack used to have a saying is that if it tastes good spit it out interesting now what he really meant by that is is Bitter things nasty tasting things is actually what is going to give the bugs that are actually going to keep you alive what they want to eat and Don't you know more bitter more better? So, you know the more polyphenols the more bitter greens I can get into you the better Interesting, but you can get that through capsules and other things too. Yeah, you can't And in fact, that's one of the reasons I'm a nut about taking a bunch of supplements because We if you look at even you know really good organic eaters most human beings only eat Maybe 20 different plant species All right, I probably like three. Yeah. Yeah, most people do like five Maybe yeah, you know and you know and ketchup is not a vegetable. It's a tomato and we can't Do that so our Ancestors and even looking at modern hunter-gatherers like the Hunza tribe They go through they eat 250 different plant species on a rotating basis and you think about all those plants are grown organically They're in six feet of loam soil. They got their cool microbiome So they're just replete with all these nutrients and polyphenols and so, you know People think that they can actually do a great job eating healthy Without supplementation and I got oceanfront property in Palm Springs. I'm happy to sell them Okay, so I want to get one more thing. I've heard that in order to extend your life you need to I Can't remember the name to extend something at the end of your till the mirrors to the mirrors What is that? Tell them here so anyway, so how do we is that true? You have to extend this So that is one theory of longevity. Yeah, and it is a it's a good theory. I like the theory. It's controversial Vitamin D turns out that people with the highest levels of vitamin D have the longest teal embers there you go So why wouldn't you do that right if you like that theory? Mm-hmm? There you go So that's vitamin D is vitamin D. It's if anybody is if anybody takes away. It's vitamin D So you've given four things so far. Let's give me one final thing that can extend our life and That the quality of our life as well great So the last thing we want to do is we want to turn off as much as we can the sensor called M tour Originally called the mammalian target of rapamycin It's subsequently been discovered in all organisms besides mammals and so now it's called the mechanistic target of rapamycin and so M tour is an energy sensor and it's in all of ourselves and basically we come from a circadian rhythm system of plentiful food at one time of the year and Very little food right another time of year right fruit sometimes not exactly and We use fruit to gain weight for the winter and that's a whole another subject so M tour senses energy availability and it senses sugar molecules and it also Senses amino acids protein Now it turns out that it's very sensitive to particular amino acids rather than all amino acids The ones it's most sensitive to are amino acids contained in animal protein and animals include fish animal Protein includes eggs and includes cheeses and besides you know meat so Beautiful work that's been done a lot of it done by now my friend Walter Longo from USC from the longevity center. It's at the mimicking. Yeah, that's the fasting mimicking diet I've taken that a couple of times and I am that he got a patent for pro long. Yeah pro long. Yeah Yeah, you got a patent for so long. Yeah, so pro long is a vegan Low amino acid diet that you do for five days. Yeah, it's tough the first time it is for me Now in the book I wrote about in the plant paradox actually before he made problem But I write about it again and he and I and he's even given me a nice shout out on the back If you the idea is you want to reduce M tour as much as you can and the longer the more you suppress it The longer you live and here's the reason you if times are rough and You sense that times are rough your body your immune system Actually goes around and looks at all the cells in your body and says Who's pulling their weight? Who is really you know contributing to this effort and who's a slacker who looks a little weird Who's not not doing and it actually instructs cells to commit suicide and it's called autophagy and It tells cells. Sorry, you know, you're not you're out here. You die And so it gets the fittest of the fittest to survive makes you stronger and you have to have these periods of time You have to call the herd as we say So unless you do that you have all of these cells that just kind of build up the debris They're called senescent cells and some people call them zombie cells And it's the amount of these zombie cells that is actually going to make you deteriorate long before you should So sick and exactly so you got to call the herd. So how you do that? Five days in a row once a month once a month you do this once a month five days in a row five days in a row you follow a Vegan diet of about 900 calories and I got some great recipes. It's easy to do and you do it five days in a row Yeah, it's as if you did calorie restriction every day and what this does is Not only call the herd But it activates stem cells now everybody says oh stem cells, you know, it's a future you've got Oodles of stem cells in you already. Where do you think we get the stem cells? We you know take a lipo suction and suck out your fat and then we spin it around we get your stem cells and inject You right back in They're already there. You just have to call them into action So when someone does that when they pull it out of you They're essentially just killing off the dead cells and then putting the good ones back No, they're actually you know, they're centrifuging out the stem cells it stem cells are in fat. They're everywhere actually So you but you got to activate the great crazy thing So you activate them by this modified fast or you do intermittent fasting or time-restricted fasting For instance for the last 12 years during the winter from January through June Monday through Friday, I don't eat breakfast I don't eat lunch and I eat all my calories in a two-hour window from six to eight o'clock at night So 22 out of 24 hours. I'm fasting for how long for six months six months. You do that. Yeah. Oh my gosh No, I do that because way back when I'm just drinking olive oil and vitamin D all day. No during the night Yeah, just drink it. Okay. Wow. Yeah, but that's why you look so young. I don't know