Ingredients:

Roasted Eggplant

• 2 medium eggplants, cut lengthwise into 1-inch slices, then cut slices in half
• 2 tablespoons avocado oil
• ½ teaspoon sea salt

Roasted Chickpeas

• 1 (13-ounce) can chickpeas, drained and rinsed, then dried with a kitchen towel
• 1 teaspoon avocado oil
• 1 teaspoon whole cumin seeds

Sumac Onions

• ½ medium or 1 small red onion, thinly sliced
• 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
• 1 teaspoon sumac

Soft Boiled Eggs

• 12 large pasture-raised eggs

Tahini

• 2 minced garlic cloves
• 1 ½ tablespoons lemon juice
• ¼ teaspoon sea salt
• ⅓ cup tahini paste
• ⅓ cup ice water

Salad

• 1 large tomato, finely chopped
• 2 Persian cucumbers, finely chopped
• 1 small serrano pepper, thinly sliced
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice

Garnish (optional)

• 1 finely chopped preserved lemon
• 1 tablespoon hemp seeds
• Parsley leaves

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 425°F, and prepare 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. While the oven is preheating, prepare the eggplants. Place them onto the baking sheet, drizzle with oil on both sides, and sprinkle with salt.

2 .Prepare the chickpeas by mixing them in a bowl along with the avocado oil and cumin seeds and spread them onto the baking sheet in an even layer.

3. Transfer the eggplant and chickpeas into the oven and bake for 30 minutes, then remove the chickpeas and set them aside. Turn the eggplant and bake them for another 15 minutes.

4. While the eggplant and chickpeas are baking, make the remaining recipe components. Place the onions in a bowl and cover with ice water, letting them soak for 10 minutes to remove bitterness. Then drain the water and mix the onions with the vinegar and sumac. Set aside.

5. While the onions are soaking in ice water, bring a large pot of water to a boil. Once boiling, lower the heat to medium-low and gently add the eggs. Cook for 6 minutes, then transfer the eggs to a bowl with ice water. Set aside.

6. Make the tahini by combining all of the ingredients in a mixing bowl, slowly drizzling the ice water in while stirring. Set aside.

7. Prepare the salad by adding all of the ingredients into a bowl and tossing to combine.

8. Peel the eggs and cut them in half. Assemble the bowls by dividing the tahini on the bottom of each bowl, followed by the eggplant segments, roasted chickpeas, eggs, salad, sumac onions, preserved lemons, hemp seeds, and parsley leaves (if using). Enjoy!

Nutritional analysis per serving: Calories: 601, Total Fat: 37g, Saturated Fat: 7g, Cholesterol: 555mg, Fiber: 15g, Protein: 31g, Carbohydrates: 44g, Sodium: 737mg, Sugars: 17g, Net Carbs: 29g

Narrator:
Coming up on this episode of the Doctor’s Pharmacy,

Dr. Mark Hyman:
It’s not part of your routine lab test and it needs to be everybody should get their vitamin D tested.
Welcome to the Doctor’s Pharmacy. I’m Dr. Mark Hyman and this is a place for conversations that matter and I want to welcome you to my new podcast series called Know Your Numbers designed to help you understand your health through the lens of your own biology and your lab tests. Looking particularly through the lens of functional medicine. Now for too long, healthcare is required you to go to your doctor to access your own blood tests and your biology and then rely on your doctor to guide you. We are now entering an era where each of us can access and understand our own biological data and become the CEO of our own health. Know your numbers will help you understand what lab tests are the most important to get and what traditional medicine often misses. You will learn what the results mean, the optimal ranges, how to relate to other important lab biomarkers and how to optimize your health based on your own lab data.
And you’ll learn when it’s important to see your doctor for further testing and treatment because not everything is something you can deal with on your own. Now, in a perfect world, I’d have the chance to see millions of patients, but the truth is I’m just one doctor. But in over 30 years of seeing millions of biomarkers and tens of thousands of patients, I’ve come to understand that much is being missed by conventional healthcare. We often wait until we have symptoms or diseases and then get tested, but the transition from wellness to illness can often be detected decades before any symptom or diagnosis. Now, I want people to have access to their own health data and the ability to engage in self-care and in lifestyle practices that can optimize health and reverse the trajectory of chronic disease that now affects six in 10 Americans and accounts for over $4 trillion a year in healthcare costs.
And that is why I recently co-founded Function Health, a revolutionary new way to understand and manage your health through lab testing and lab tests that you’re not necessarily getting through your own healthcare system. All the results are delivered to you in an easy to use dashboard that tracks your numbers over time and gives you actionable insights for every biomarker. We’re building function to democratize much of what I do to give you the keys to your health and to put control of your health firmly back into your hands. Now this podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, the podcast represents my opinions and my guest opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for general information purposes only. It does not establish a doctor patient relationship and because everyone has unique life circumstances, the content in this podcast should not be taken as personal medical advice, consult with a qualified healthcare professional with any medical questions or concerns.
Keeping this podcast free is part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the general public. And in keeping with that theme, I’d like to thank those sponsors that made today’s podcast possible. And now let’s get started with Know Your Numbers. We’re starting first with vitamin D, which is a massive problem both in terms of its impact on our health. Its lack of understanding by traditional medicine, the lack of proper testing, diagnosis and treatment. It’s just a mess out there and this is one of the most important biomarkers you should know about yourself. So why does it matter? Well, vitamin D deficiency is a big problem. It affects over a billion people worldwide. In the US alone, 70% of Americans have either insufficient or deficient or suboptimal levels of vitamin D, increasing the risk for cancer, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, depression, fibromyalgia, chronic muscle pain, bone loss, autoimmune diseases like MS and lots more.
And the truth is it’s probably one of the most important biological compounds in your body because it affects so much. So what is vitamin D and what does it do in the body? Well, it’s a fat-soluble vitamin, meaning you have to eat it with fat to be absorbed, but it’s more like a hormone than a vitamin. It regulates over a thousand genes, so it affects the gene expression of over a thousand genes that affect almost everything in your body. Now you can get it from your diet and you can get it from the sunshine because your skin converts the UV radiation into vitamin D in your skin, but there’s some problems with that. One, it’s really hard to get enough from your diet and two, unless you’re running around half naked south of the Atlanta latitude between 10 and two in the afternoon for half an hour every day, you’re probably not going to get enough vitamin D.
Now, what does vitamin D do? It regulates a lot of things. It regulates calcium in your body and phospho levels. It supports the functioning of your immune system, and we’re going to talk about specifically how it affects your risk cancer and your risk of infections, particularly covid. It protects against getting sick all the time from things like colds and flus and other infections. I mean the data from covid is quite striking. We’re going to cover that in a little bit and it’s so important to keep your vitamin D levels up to prevent serious complications from covid and even prevent getting covid. Obviously vitamin is good for your bones. Now, just so you know, people say drink milk to get your vitamin D. There ain’t no vitamin D in milk Naturally it’s added as a supplement to vitamin D, and it was done so because rickets was so rampant and people thought that people drink vitamin DA lot, so the public health officials added it to milk, but it’s not naturally in milk.
It’s also supports healthy hormone health, including sex hormone production. It supports your muscle strength and function. Really important for muscle health supports your brain health, your mood, cognitive function, neurotransmitter like serotonin, dopamine, cognitive function in terms of neuroprotection against things like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It also helps your oral health, your dental health, obviously your gut health. It prevents chronic disease, almost every kind of chronic disease you can imagine because it’s one of the most important regulators of your biology. Now, where does conventional medicine miss the mark here? Well, first of all, it’s not part of your routine lab test and it needs to be, it should be everybody should get their vitamin D tested. Often we wait until things are bad and then test, oh, you have osteoporosis. Let’s check your vitamin E level. Well, that’s kind of too late. I believe in testing, not guessing.
So I test I don’t guess. And what we look at is the reference ranges when we test the vitamin D levels, but it’s important to understand that most reference ranges are based on the average in a population. I just want to give you a background a little bit on optimal ranges. When we look at a lab reference range, it’s based on the average in a population. So for example, it looks at what is the reference range based on the levels in the current population. Now, if you were an American, your average weight is high because 75% of us are overweight. If you landed on the earth from Mars, you would think it’s normal, normal to be overweight because 75% of Americans are overweight. That doesn’t mean it’s optimal. So because we have such a rampant level of vitamin D deficiency or insufficiency, the current reference ranges are far too low.
On the bottom level they’re about 30, some are even 20, that’s a disaster. Your reference range really should be what’s optimal, not normal. And what’s optimal is probably 45 nanogram per deciliter, not 30 or less. Most of traditional medicine also focused on disease treatment, not prevention. Now there’s a great article I read by one of the scientists who really was a pioneer in vitamin D who wrote a paper called long latency deficiency diseases, and what he was talking about was the difference between a deficiency disease of a vitamin that it causes acute effect versus a long-term effect. For example, if your level of vitamin D is acutely low, you can get rickets, but if it’s kind of marginally insufficient, it may not cause rickets, but it actually can cause osteoporosis later in life. So what we want to focus on is preventing these long latency deficiency diseases and the dose you need, for example, to prevent Ricketts, it might be 30 units a day, which is not very much the amount you might need to prevent osteoporosis might be two to 5,000 units a day.
Also, most doctors are not up to date on the latest research. It takes about 17 years for the average scientific discovery to be implemented in medical practice. And also there’s a bias against prevention. There’s a bias against testing. Testing is how we’re trained. Don’t test, just make sure you do your diagnosis by history and then test it. Confirm, but you should not be using testing to screen people. Also, most doctors don’t even know how to diagnose vitamin D deficiency clinically and what the symptoms are. There’s an action easy home at-home test. If you take your thumb and you push it against your shin, the bony part of your leg at the lower part of your leg and you push the bone in, it shouldn’t be tender. If it’s tender, it’s because you have some level of vitamin D insufficiency or deficiency. It’s called osteomalacia. It means softening of the bones and that hurts.
So you can just do that test at home, then you should definitely go get your test done. Also, there’s often lack of clear guidelines in medicine for what the optimal levels of nutrients are and what the optimal levels of supplementation are, and it also requires personalization because we’re all different and we’re all genetically different. Some people might need a thousand units a day. Some people might need 4,000 units or 5,000 or even 10,000 units a day, and we’ll talk about that. Also. People say, oh, it’s going to cost so much to do this, but what is the cost of these untreated diseases like cancer or heart disease or diabetes or autoimmune diseases or chronic infections or covid for god’s sake? How many people end up in the hospital from covid because they were vitamin B deficient? It was hugely expensive. Also, one of the things that drives me crazy is this whole kind of mantra of evidence-based medicine.
Well, clearly we need to use evidence in medicine, but often the evidence is not looked at carefully. Often it’s not interpreted properly. Often the science is misunderstood and it can be from poorly designed trials. And for example, I always say if you take an aspirin and if you don’t have a headache, it doesn’t do anything. So for example, one of the vitamin D studies that was considered a landmark trial in 2022, the vital trial by Manson was published in New England Journal Medicine said that well, giving 2000 units a day of vitamin D had no effect on fracture risk in healthy people 50 years and older. Well, that is not the right way to do the study. You have to look at who’s deficient. If you give vitamin D to people whose vitamin D levels are good, of course it’s not going to reduce fracture risk because they already are protected.
But if you give it just to the people who are deficient, you can see a big change. So the participants in this study, which was a very important study, were not selected based on vitamin D deficiency or low bone mass or osteoporosis. So it’s kind of crazy. It’s the same thing as I said. If you have an aspirin trial and you give it to people to see if it will cure headaches, well, if nobody has a headache in the population you’re giving the aspirin to, you’re not going to see the effect and what the results showed in the study. There was really no difference in frac risk after five years, but it didn’t actually look at vitamin E supplement patient in those with vitamin D deficiency. And so it questioned the justification for widespread testing and treatment to certain levels, but I think it was really a poorly designed study and it actually didn’t answer the question to which it was focused on.
What about functional medicine? How do we look at things differently? We take a much more proactive approach, a much more personalized approach and approach that actually digs into what’s going on with your biology and it’s an individual, so we test, we don’t guess we want to test vitamin D in every patient. Now maybe if you’re a lifeguard and you can all the time, I know your vitamin D level is probably okay, and I have a friend who’s a surfer who lives in Mexico and his vitamin D level is optimal, but I almost never see people with optimal levels unless they’re supplementing particularly in our modern world. So you want to make sure you detect this early because the longer you let it go, the longer it goes on in your life, the worse health outcomes you’re going to have. And I’ll get into some of the complications of long-term vitamin D deficiency or insufficiency, but you also have to personalize it, right?
So not everybody gets the same amount, everybody’s different. Age is different, sex is different. Where you live is different, your genetics are different. For example, there’s a whole bunch of vitamin D receptors that are regulated by genetics, and if you have vitamin D receptors that may not work as well. You might not be able to absorb as much or actually have the best function for vitamin D, so you may need a higher dose where somebody else might have different genetics. That means they’ll do really well on a lower dose. So the dose ranges really probably should be between 1000 to 5,000 a day. The safe levels according to the government that died to reference intake is 4,000. So up to 4,000 the government says is safe. Now what are most recommendations for about 400 as you get older, maybe 800 units a day, not real ideal, and they don’t even recommend the right vitamin D form.
It should be vitamin D three, which is the active form, not vitamin D two, and there’s often poor conversion. The optimal reference range is probably 45 to 75, up to a hundred is fine as well. In fact, levels up to two 50 have been shown to be very safe. Now if you look at one study they did of healthy young adults who took 10,000 units a day for three months, there were no adverse effects on these people. Lifeguards have levels of over 200 nanograms through deciliter, so I like to get my patients probably around 50 or so, 50 to 75, and that usually is a good optimal level or a blood level, but you can’t know based on supplementation. You have to actually test your blood level to know where you’re at. Also important to look at your kidney liver function in which influence vitamin D effects.
Also, vitamin D deficiency can often be missed because people think they have a parathyroid problem, which is a hormonal condition that can occur where you get bone loss and muscle cramps and all kinds of symptoms and osteoporosis, but it’s actually because you have low vitamin D levels and it’s called secondary hyperparathyroidism. If you take too much, it’s not good either, so you got to be careful. It is a fat soluble vitamin. It does get absorbed in tissues and you can get high calcium levels for example, if you’re taking too much and that could cause kidney stones, kidney damage and other things, but I’ve never seen that personally. The other thing to note though is if you’re overweight, you have much higher body mass and you need a lot more vitamin D to fill up the tank. So people who are obese are often very vitamin D deficient.
So what are the root causes of abnormal levels or low levels of vitamin D? Lack of sunlight. We all live and work inside. Americans spend 94% of their time inside. We use sunscreen. If you use S pf 15, it reduces the absorption of vitamin D by 95%. This is study by Hoek, and by the way, all the things that I’m talking about, all the scientific references are going to be in the show notes. You can look it up yourself. I’m not making this stuff up. So this is a very well-researched topic and I’m just giving you the highlights, but I want you to know that if you want to go deeper, there’s a lot more in the show notes that can help you go deeper on this topic. Also, people use clothing or covered from head to toe. I remember one study that found that Muslim women who lived in Scandinavia were fully covered head to toe and they had severe seasonal effect disorder and fibromyalgia and muscle aches and muscle pains, and that was because they were all vitamin D deficient.
If you live in cities, in urban areas, you don’t get as much sun. There’s poor air quality might affect vitamin D absorption. If you live in northern latitudes, you might not get good sun exposure, particularly at certain times of the year, like in the winter if you live in Portland, Seattle, London, and a lot more low vitamin D levels there. If you look at MS for example, people who live in northern latitudes have much higher risk multiple sclerosis, and that’s been linked to vitamin D deficiency. Other things can affect your vitamin D status. For example, you have chronic kidney disease or liver failure that can impair the activation and conversion of vitamin E, so you have to be paying attention a little more carefully. Medications can interfere with your vitamin D absorption and utilization. So a big study showed that us and US kids and adults that were taking oral steroids which are used for autoimmune disease, all kinds of different conditions were two times as likely to have severe vitamin D deficiency than non-steroid users.
If you use long-term antibiotics, if you’re on chemo, if you seizure preventing drugs, if you use certain kind of drugs that lower cholesterol that bind your bile, certain blood pressure pills, antacids all affect your ability to absorb vitamin D so they can cause vitamin D deficiency. We talked about the obesity issue. If you have a big body and a lot of body mass and fat, you actually just, it’s a fat soluble vitamin, so a stored fat, so you basically have a big reservoir and your levels tend to be lower, so you need more vitamin D. Also, if you had weight loss surgery gastric bypass, it reduces absorption of nutrients across the board, particularly vitamin D, not a good thing as you get older. Also, older people tend to have thinner skin, IT elasticity and your skin actually can make vitamin D when exposed to sunlight, but as you get older it just doesn’t work as well.
So as you get older, you get more vitamin D deficiency and you actually need more D. It’s more important as you get older for preventing infections and immunity and cancer and things we’ll share in a minute. If you have chronic kidney disease also that affects vitamin D status. Also, as you get older, we lose stomach acid so your stomach acid is low. That can reduce vitamin D absorption as well, so it can reduce both from food or supplements, so you just might need more. Now people with gut issues also have trouble with absorption. People with, for example, celiac or Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis or Errol bowel syndrome often have inflamed guts and that affects your vitamin D absorption. Also our diet, most of us, why think, why did we need vitamin D? Why did we need supplements? We all were out there living for hundreds of thousands of years as human beings, we didn’t need vitamin D supplementation.
What’s the big deal? Why do we need it? Why can’t we get it from food? And when you look at the data on this is really interesting. First of all, most of us lived in EQU trail regions and we were out in clinic most areas. I was just out in Africa and was visiting the Hadza tribe, which was one of the last Hunter gather tribes out there in Africa, and they basically had no clothing. They were out there basically with a little bunch of leather covering their private parts and otherwise they were naked and so they were running around outside all day naked and an equator region and they’re getting enough vitamin D. Those populations that lived, for example in northern latitudes, they lived on the coastal areas and one of the best sources of vitamin D is fatty fish, and that was a big part of our diet.
In fact, fatty fish in the northwest in the Pacific, Northwest in the United States. I forget the name of the actual fish, but it’s tiny little fish that it was so valuable because it was so oily and fatty that it was used as currency, in other words, to trade as money. So it’s such a valuable commodity. And mackerel, herring, sardines, cod, liver oil, co liver oil is a great source of vitamin D, egg yolks, beef liver, mushrooms, things that we eat also, it was interesting when we visited the hadza, it was so interesting as part of their tribal initiations. Again, this is one of the last hunter gather tribes. They actually get to eat. If you are become a man and you go through the rituals of becoming a man and kill a big animal, then you get the privilege of eating. The organ meets first, the liver, the heart, the kidneys, the testicles.
So all these things have much higher levels of nutrients and most people don’t eat this stuff. Also wild mushrooms, porcini mushrooms are the highest. So we see a lot of forage food, wild food, coastal areas with fatty fish. So we did get a fair bit of vitamin D even if we lived in northern latitudes, but for the most part today we don’t eat those things and people don’t run around half naked most of the year in equator regions anymore. There are fortified foods, but they’re mostly fortified with vitamin D two milk, OJ cereals, plant-based milks. But you want to eat a food that’s naturally nutrient dense, not something that’s nutrient poor that you have to add stuff to enrich it. And they don’t actually don’t use the right vitamin D, they use vitamin D two when not vitamin D three, which is the one that actually works for you.
So vitamin D three fortified products tend to work better. Vitamin D two fortified products and the studies are in the shown us, we can share what those are so you can learn about it. Most people are not meeting the minimum amount. Now when you understand what the RDAs are, these were developed, this was a recommended dietary allowance or they call ’em the dietary reference index. Now, these were levels that were established in an era where there was massive nutritional deficiencies, lots of vitamin deficiencies, mineral deficiencies and diseases that were resulting from those like rickets or scurvy. So they establish these levels to be the minimum amount you need to prevent a deficiency disease. So not how much is for optimal health, how much of vitamin need do you need to not get rickets 30 units? How much vitamin D do you need to not get osteoporosis?
Probably four or 5,000 units, right? How much vitamin D do you need to not get the flu and covid and cancer probably three to 5,000 units. So it’s literally 10 times the dose. So the RDA is like 600 for adults, 800 if you’re over 70 years old, but that’s for preventing Rick’s not for optimal health. And I think we talked about the long latency concept, very important concept. Also, people just aren’t aware, right? People don’t know they haven’t been tested by their doctor. Their doctor never checked it. It’s not in the regular annual lab panel. They don’t think about it and the winter people go, oh, I’m depressed in the winter. Why? Well, it’s not just because cold out, I love the winter. Actually, if you get adequate vitamin D, you’re not going to get what we call a seasonal effect disorder. You’re not going to feel better.
Also, your race matters because melanin in the skin blocks absorption of ultraviolet light, right? So if you’re African-American or we were in Africa, I mean they had very dark skin, Asian, native American, you tend to actually absorb less vitamin D and produce less vitamin T for your skin because of the blockage of the ultraviolet light by melanin, which is a good thing because it prevents cancer and other things, but it’s a bad thing if you’re living in a modern world and you’re not living your traditional life that you evolve to live. Genetics play a role as well. As I mentioned, there’s a gene that metabolizes vitamin D. It converts the inactive form to the active form of vitamin D three. It helps break down excess vitamin D. It may actually cause increased metabolism called a gene called CYP two, four A one. Doesn’t really matter.
But the point is that there’s genes that regulate metabolism, vitamin D, absorption, vitamin D, and often we use gene testing to customize our prescriptions depending on what we see in the patients. A lot of other things also affect vitamin D levels, like your calcium level, magnesium level, which you’re often part of the function. Health testing, vitamin K, zinc, vitamin A, phosphorus, all really important and conventional medicine just doesn’t check it. I see a lot of people getting their doctor checking vitamin D two. Well, that’s not even worth checking. You want to check 25 hydroxy vitamin D three. That’s the test you want. 25 hydroxy vitamin D three, and again, that’s in the show notes. We’re going to write all down. It’s part of the function panel. You don’t even think about it if you get that test. Okay, so we’ve got through all the background on this.
What symptoms will you get if you are low, are deficient or insufficient in vitamin D? You’ll get inflammation because it’s important in regulating immunity, you’ll get more suppression of your immune system. My niece, for example, was constantly getting sick with colds and flus and having to leave work 25 years old. She’s an artist. She spent a lot of time inside or works inside and I checked her vitamin D and she was very vitamin D deficient and I gave her high dose vitamin D, and now she’s not getting sick at all. So it can very effective. If you look at, for example, the data on flus, if your vitamin D level is adequate, it creates a 75% reduction in your risk of getting the flu. So you really want to sure you’re getting that for immunity, particularly the ear of covid and so forth, and we’ll talk about that more.
Also, bone and joint pain and achiness and fractures all linked to often low vitamin D mood. If you’re depressed, if you have seasonal effect disorder in the winter, you could have vitamin D deficiency, hair loss, nobody wants to lose their hair, but it’s another symptom of low vitamin D, lack of appetite, fatigue, fibromyalgia, muscle cramps, weakness, spasms, twitches, tremors, all can be related to low vitamin D. Now, what are the diseases that you might get if you don’t have adequate levels of vitamin D? Now this is where it gets a little scary, but the good news is it’s such an easy fix. I mean vitamin D, supplementation’s safe, it’s effective and it costs literally pennies a day. So we’re not talking about some super expensive intervention. This is one of the most important things that I do in my practice is get people’s vitamin D levels up to an optimal level.
So what kind of diseases are we seeing correlated with or associated with or proven to be caused by low vitamin D? The first is cancer. Now what’s the mechanism? Well, vitamin D is anti-inflammatory, which cancer is an inflammatory disease. Vitamin D is anti-angiogenic, which means that it prevents the growth of new blood vessels, which is exactly how cancer grows. And a lot of the new cancer therapies are anti-angiogenesis therapies. It also affects your cell cycle regulation, so it inhibits tumor growth, it inhibits tumor cell division. All good. Also, you have these things called natural killer cells, which are super important and just like what they sound, they’re like special forces of your immune system. They go around and they find and seek and destroy cancer cells, and they’re critical in what we call immunosurveillance, which is recognizing and getting rid of cancer cells. So you want to make sure you have great natural cell function, and in fact, vitamin D boosts your natural killer cell function.
Let’s look at specific cancers. Now what about breast cancer? Well, if you’re looking at people who have higher vitamin E levels, in one 2008 analysis published in plus one, there was a lower risk of breast cancer in those who had higher levels of vitamin D. There was an 82% lower risk of breast cancer in women with vitamin D levels. There were over 60 nanograms per deciliter compared with women who had levels of less than 20 nanograms per deciliter, which is very, very low. Now, sufficient levels also affects your treatment outcomes. So if you are getting breast cancer, if you have breast cancer, you better get your vitamin D level up. Why? So in a 2021 prospective cohort study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, women who had invasive breast cancer whose vitamin E levels were over 30 nanogram per deciliter had a 27% lower risk of death compared to women with vitamin E levels that were really low, like under 20.
In another study, a 2014 meta-analysis that was published in anti-cancer research, it showed that higher vitamin D levels over 30 upon diagnosis of breast cancer. If you, in other words, we had higher good levels of vitamin D when you got diagnosed, there was a 44% reduction in the risk of breast cancer related death than those who had the lowest vitamin D levels, which were let’s say under 17. What about other cancers? Well, prostate, lung, colorectal cancer, ovarian cancer, a big study in 2022 published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute showed a 17% lower cancer mortality among men and women in the highest category of vitamin D versus the lowest category. Now, there’s a lot of research outcomes that are variable and not all studies show the same thing and we can cherry pick studies, but the weight of the evidence is overwhelming that vitamin D is a good idea and not every study shows a benefit.
There’s differences in study design and the dose of supplementation, the cancer type, the progression, the vitamin D level at baseline, the effects on different sexts, male or female, the failure to control for genetics, diet, lifestyle factors. These are all things that really are often not looked at properly in studies. So there’s a lot of mixed variables, but on the whole having higher levels of vitamin D is a good idea to prevent cancer and if you get cancer to prevent dying from cancer. What else is important to think about in terms of vitamin D? Well, autoimmunity and infectious disease, because cancer is one part of your immune system, but also autoimmunity and infections are another part of your immune function and how we regulate that. So when you look at vitamin D, what it does, it helps basically regulate your immune system. It helps balance your immune system.
It activates what we call T cells and B cells, which are your immune cells that fight cancer and infection. It also boosts another category of your white blood cells called macrophages, which are like Pac-Man that hunt and destroy. So these identify and neutralize viruses, bacteria, other pathogens, and it basically enhances our ability to fight infection. It also regulates something really important because yes, we want to be able to fight infection, but we don’t over activate our immune system and actually fight ourselves, which is called autoimmune disease, where we’re attacking our own tissues and there’s something called T regulatory cells, which basically regulate your T cells, your lymphocytes, your white blood cells, and it allows tolerance to yourself. So you don’t want to be attacking yourself, and what we find is that it prevents your immune system from attacking its own tissue. So low vitamin D levels is a big risk factor for autoimmune disease including multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, fibromyalgia, psoriasis, and type one diabetes.
And basically studies show that there’s an inverse relationship between vitamin E levels and clinical biomarkers of autoimmune disease. In other words, a higher vitamin E level lower the biomarkers of autoimmunity and vice versa. Let’s look at multiple sclerosis and a few other things just specifically because that’s really important. In 2020, in frontier of neurology, patients who had relapsing remitting MS with a baseline vitamin E status that was greater than 30 had far lower lesions in their brain we call white matter lesions. They basically damaged from inflammation in the brain and lower disability scores than people who had lower levels of vitamin D. And another study in 2021, they showed that if you had higher levels of vitamin D who had lower risk for rheumatoid arthritis and lower likelihood of having a positive biomarker or rheumatoid factor, another study showed, for example, at a birth study looking in Lancet, one of the top journals in the world showed that just giving kids 2000 units of vitamin D from age one years old was associated with an 80% decreased risk of type one diabetes.
That’s amazing, right? This is a very serious disease if you get it, and just simply giving kids vitamin D can reduce the risk of getting type one diabetes by 80%. Now, let’s talk about covid, and this is the one that I think is really important. When you look at the data, it was really compelling. If you were vitamin D deficient, you are more likely to get severe CO, you’re more likely to get complications, you’re more likely to be in the hospital, you’re more likely to have bad outcomes and death. In a 2020 study, they found that in 200 covid patients that were hospitalized, vitamin D was reported to be deficient in 80% of those patients. And when people had very significant vitamin D deficiency, which was very low levels, they had higher levels of heart damage, more inflammation, they were in the hospital longer, they had more risk of heart effects, and those who had levels of over 20 had lower risk of these problems, and men typically had lower levels than women.
In another 2022 study in nature of over 450 adults with covid, if your levels were very low under 10, you had a 50% higher risk of severe covid. Another study in 2022 that looked at a large population of US veterans that they found that vitamin D supplementation, so giving vitamin D was associated with a 33% reduction in death within 30 days of your covid infection. So if you get covid and you then start taking vitamin D, your risk of death is a lot lower. There was another large study that showed in Israel that there were no deaths. If your vitamin D level was over 50, another study showed if you had low level vitamin D, your risk of ending on the hospital having severe covid and dying was 70% higher than if your levels were good. So covid is another good reason to take vitamin D.
What about your brain? Your brain also is very influenced by vitamin D and your vitamin D status. So mood disorders are a big factor. I mean, we see rampant depression mood disorders in our country, and maybe some of it is due to vitamin D deficiency or I would say insufficiency because when you look at deficiency, it depends on the cutoff level, right? So I think the probably optimal levels are 45 to 50 or more normal cutoff levels are 30 or even 20 on some labs. But if you look at what the role of vitamin D is, it plays a big role in the production of the feelgood neurotransmitters like serotonin and low levels of vitamin D have been linked to depression, to anxiety, to bipolar disease, to schizophrenia, and even obviously seasonal affective disorder. Also, people who tend to be sicker with things like diabetes or ulcerative colitis, they actually actually see a lot benefit when they take vitamin D, particularly in terms of mood.
Postpartum depression is a big issue as depression after women give birth, we know that postpartum depression has been linked with very low levels of vitamin D. What about other functions of your brain, like your cognitive function? Well, the studies on Alzheimer’s and dementia show that vitamin D may help reduce neuroinflammation, and we know that Alzheimer’s and dementia are diseases of inflammation in the brain. It may help clear the amyloid plaques that clog up the brain. It helps promote new brain cell growth like neurogenesis. It protects against octave stress and it even helps make new connections between brain cells. In 2022 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, they looked at over 427,000 white European participants and you had a 54% higher risk of dementia with vitamin D levels of under 25, which is 10 in our units in the US versus levels of 20. Now, I think your levels should be much higher, obviously, but I think that’s a very impressive result.
I wonder what the data has showed if your level was not 10 or less or 20 or less, but maybe 50 or more. So it probably would’ve been even a bigger effect. Also, sex hormone function also is regulated by vitamin D. Infertility is a big issue and so are menstrual issues, and it turns out that if you give vitamin D to women who have infertility often caused a buy-in from resistance or PCOS and they had vitamin D deficiency, you’ll significantly improve the rate of in vitro fertilization outcomes and clinical pregnancy rates and embryo quality. So basically if you’re having trouble getting pregnant, you need vitamin D because it helps with getting pregnant and keeping your quality of your embryos and doing all the things you need to do if you want to have a baby. Also, bone issues as we know, we probably are aware of that.
It’s one of the things most people know that vitamin D is important for your bones, but bone issues are huge. Women get osteoporosis, men get osteoporosis, and if your vitamin levels are low, you don’t absorb calcium as well. It’s one of its main functions. So if you have low vitamin D, it reproduces your bone density, increase your risk of bone fractures. Obviously if you’re very, very low, you get rickets, but even if you’re not very, very low, you get osteo ation, as I mentioned before, the softening of your bones and you get osteoporosis. So we see that there’s real benefit in those who take vitamin D, calcium actually really be as effective as we once thought, but it really works if you’re low in vitamin D, it’s one of those long latency deficiency diseases. Now, if you get too much vitamin D, it’s not good either.
So it’s really finding that nice balance. What about your heart and your metabolic health? Again, another big factor to consider when you’re looking at vitamin D. If you have type two diabetes, you’re likely to be vitamin D deficient. And vitamin D deficiency is linked to higher levels of insulin resistance, higher blood sugar levels, and giving vitamin D supplements actually helps show improvement in the markers of insulin resistance, pre-diabetes and diabetes. So high dose of vitamin D two, for example, 50,000 units a week for eight weeks in those with diabetes, improve their passing blood sugar, improve their insulin, improve their insulin resistance markers after treatment of the vitamin D. Another study looked from NHANES data, which is a huge government database, found that insulin resistance was dropped by 18% for each additional unit of vitamin D three intake, which is pretty amazing. Also, obesity. A new study in 2023 just published in November 7th, 2023, showed that poor vitamin D status was associated with increased total and appendicular body fat.
That means arms and legs and so forth. So really the lower vitamin D level you have the higher risk you have of being overweight. So forget about ozempic, tri vitamin D, cardiovascular disease. Also, another big factor, if your level was less than 15, you had a 62% greater risk of heart attacks compared to your level was higher than that. Also, if your levels were really low, like less than 10, you had an 80% increased risk of bad cardiac events. Also, high blood pressure. High blood pressure is controlled by something called the renin angiotensin aldosterone system, and a deficiency in vitamin D can lead to an overactive system leading to hypertension. So if you have high blood pressure, again, another reason to take vitamin D, also cardiovascular disease, if you have low levels of vitamin D, it leads to inflammation and vascular dysfunction and may cause the progression of hardening in the arteries, atherosclerosis and damage to arteries.
It also seems to cause more calcium deposition in the arteries, and if you have low vitamin D levels also, what about gums? Another part of your bone health, but gum disease really is rampant and it leads linked to heart disease. It’s linked to Alzheimer’s and many other things. So you want to make sure you get the anti-inflammatory properties of vitamin D that helps promote oral immunity. If you tend to have gum disease we call periodontitis, you have lower level vitamin D typically, and if you take vitamin D, if you have gum disease, it actually improves your outcomes. So good idea. Also, it’s important to remember you want to probably take vitamin D with some vitamin K two, which also helps bone health as well as heart health helps prevents cavities as well. So really important also helps with antimicrobial properties. So that’s a lot, right?
A lot of things that can go on with your health that can be linked to low vitamin D levels. Everything from cancer to autoimmunity to increase infections, dementia, hormonal disorders, infertility, heart disease, gum disease. I mean the list goes on and on. So it’s such an easy thing to fix, but you have to know your level. You can’t just guess because some people are okay and some people aren’t. And some people need a thousand units a day. Some people need 10,000 units a day, and the only way to know is to check and recheck and see your levels and what they show over time. So what can you do to optimize your vitamin D levels? Well, you can eat vitamin D, rich foods, right? Fatty fish, herring, macros, sardines, all the stuff people love, right? Cod liver oil, not so many people are eating that stuff personally, I love that stuff, but fatty fish is a great source of vitamin D, but you’re not going to get that much egg yolks, beef liver and mushrooms, particularly porcini mushrooms.
Again, you can’t even barely get porcini mushrooms. When I go to Italy, I love to eat those. Now there are fortified milks, but I don’t really recommend that both regular and plant milks, but there’s a lot of what somebody calls ’em, nut juices. I mean, they’re not really the best things to be consuming on a regular basis, but they’re really not enough to optimize your levels or to prevent deficiency. Now, you could also say, well, I don’t want to take supplements. I want to be in the sun. Well, you should probably be careful of your face because you don’t want to get wrinkles, but sun exposure on your skin can be helpful probably between 10 and two in the afternoon when the UV index is the highest. But you have to be at a latitude below Atlanta, and if you’re in the north during the winter, forget about it.
You’ll say, oh, I’m taking, I don’t need vitamin D in this summer. Well, actually often, unless you’re out there as a lifeguard or surfing all day, you’re likely to need like vitamin D supplementation. But generally about 20 minutes of sun exposure every day without clothing, without sunscreen is enough to get your vitamin levels up. If you’re below the latitude of Atlanta and it’s in the summertime, which most of us can’t do now, you can use light box therapy, a 10,000 lux light therapy, 30 minutes a day. That also helps. But the easiest way is just take vitamin D. It’s cheap, it’s easy to take. It’s no side effects and it’s easily available. The range I usually recommend is two to 5,000 units a day. Higher doses you can take, if you’re very low, you can take, it’s like filling up your gas tank. You can just go full bore, take 10,000 a day, 20,000 a day, and do that for a month or two, and you’ll be okay.
You want to fill up the tanks. It’s a fat-soluble vitamin, but you want to be careful to check, and it takes about three to six months to correct deficiencies. Make sure you take it with food, particularly fat, which helps absorption. Also, you want to take it with other supplements. Magnesium, which is important for vitamin D three, activation K two also important, which activates something called osteocalcin. So it makes sure the calcium gets absorbed and stored in your bones and your teeth, but you should check it initially every three months if you’re low, once you’re at a baseline level, probably twice a year is a good amount to check and see where you’re at. And then you can fine tune your dose, fine tune your levels, and make sure you’re in the optimal range, which I think is probably about 50 to 75, and then you adjust accordingly.
So that was vitamin D guys. I know it was a lot, but all the references, all the signs from the show notes was a transcript there as well. If you want to dig in with what I said. But this is an example of why knowing your numbers is so important. It’s one of the most important tests I do, and it’s really a critical number to know. Now, as I said, if I could, I would see millions and billions of patients, but I can’t. This is one me, but with function health or aiming to democratize much of what I do, offering you the keys to your own health, we’re in a new era of medicine. It’s a democratized data-driven system that gives each of us the access to our own health data, and it’s informed by the latest science and the science of functional medicine. There is nothing more important than taking ownership of your health.
And it starts with, instead of over a hundred lab tests ranging full heart mode testing to deep cardiometabolic testing, to nutritional assessment, including vitamin D three, heavy metals and lots more. Now, many of these essential tests are not measured in your typical annual blood panel, and there’s no more navigating burdensome insurance. There’s no more having to wait for a doctor’s appointment. There’s no more need to consult Dr. Google to figure out what they mean. Function offers clear actionable results that are tracked over time, empowering you to be the CEO of your own health. And the wait lister function is now open function is live across the United States. We’re inviting new members to join our wait list every day. And if you’re interested in taking control of your health, make sure you secure your spot on the wait list by visiting function health.com right away. And all this is available for just $499 a year and includes the cost of over a hundred lab tests and actually twice a year testing. So to transform your health, visit function health.com right now to secure your spot on the wait list. And thank you for tuning in to know your numbers, and we’ll see you next week on The Doctor’s Pharmacy.

Narrator:
I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or professional advice or services. If you’re looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you’re looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It’s important you have someone in your corner who’s trained, who’s a licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.

Introduction: Coming up on this week’s episode of the Doctor’s Farmacy,

Dr. Peter Diamandis: 7% to 30%, and there are different studies giving different numbers of your potential. Lifespan is a function of your genetics. The vast majority, 70 to 90% is a function of the choices you make your lifestyle.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Welcome to the Doctor’s Farmacy podcast, a place for conversations that matter. I’m Dr. Mark Hyman, and today we have the privilege of talking to one of the leading thinkers and doers in the world, Dr. Peter Diamandis. If you care about learning the practical steps to increasing your health span and your lifespan, you’re going to love this podcast. Peter is a serial entrepreneur, futurist, technologist, New York Times bestselling author and the founder of over 25 companies. Fortune Magazine has named Peter one of the world’s 50 greatest leaders. He’s the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, which has launched over $300 million of incentive competitions driving more than 3.5 billion in r and d, most recently launching the a hundred million Gigaton carbon XPRIZE to combat climate change. Peter’s Venture Fund, bold Capital Partners, is deploying $600 million into exponential technologies and health biotech. The amount this has written four New York Times bestsellers and his life’s mission is to empower entrepreneurs to create hopeful, compelling, and an abundant future for humanity.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Now, if you’re a regular, listen, this podcast, one of my main interests is applying the latest science and technology in the field of longevity to not only optimize how long we live, but how vibrant and healthy we are as we age. And Peter and I explore the power of mindset for health and longevity. We dive into the concept of longevity, escape velocity, or how the science is advancing so fast that at some point soon we can escape the decline normally associated with getting older. We also explain why foundational health practices that optimizes your lifestyle are more important than ever before so we can be alive when longevity escape velocity is reached. We also bust the myth that how long we live is mostly dictated by our genes, and we dive into how to turn the latest science into actionable steps and habits that you can use now, the best strategies for what to eat, how to exercise, how to optimize sleep for longevity.

Dr. Mark Hyman: We also explore the most important diagnostic tests to track and measure your rate of aging and health, and how do you use personalized medicine to get ahead of the issues and diseases before they fully develop. We also spend some time talking about ozempic and I share my thoughts about the pitfalls and risks of this drug, and we explore the question of whether Ozempic is also a longevity medicine. You’ll hear about Peter’s personal longevity regimen and how the molecule rapamycin and various peptides and supplements in cutting edge technologies like therapeutic plasma exchange are all coming online. Now, Peter also tells us about his $101 million XPRIZE that he launched to revolutionize the way we approach human aging. Peter is literally the author of the Practical Playbook on Longevity and our conversation today, we’ll leave you with actionable and free tips to set yourself up to benefit from the leading research in the field of longevity as well as a look into the next generation of therapeutics. And now let’s dive into my conversation. Peter Diamandis, welcome back to the podcast. Peter, it’s great to have you and great to see you again looking younger than ever.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Thank you. Mark, is that a requirement? When you’re on a longevity podcast, we’re having a longevity conversation. You have to tell a person, look, you look amazing. Fantastic. What are you doing? You

Dr. Mark Hyman: Got to tell me your first calls. I know it was like three hours of makeup before. So for those of you just listening, you can’t see. But Peter looks beautiful. He’s got purple lipstick and red eyeshadow. It’s amazing. Peter, I’m so glad to have you back because you came out with a book called Life Force with Tony Robbins. It was just amazing, but it was 700 pages and not for the faint of heart. I read every word of it and I actually studied it in depth, which was a great book. But you came out with a new Reader’s Digest version called Longevity, your Practical Playbook on Sleep, diet, exercise and mindset Medications, and not dying from something stupid. So that’s a good idea, not dying from something stupid. And I think it’s beautiful because it’s like the news to use. It’s the nuggets of information that we all want to know.

Dr. Mark Hyman: What do we do? How do I do it? What’s important? What’s noise? What’s signal, and how do we figure out what we need to do to optimize our health? And human life expectancy is one of the most incredible breakthroughs in modern medicine. We’ve seen our life expectancy dramatically go up since the turn of the 19 hundreds. And unfortunately now it’s starting to go down. It’s starting to go down. We see a little pop up this year, I think because of the post covid recovery. But basically we’ve more than doubled the global average lifespan in the last a hundred years. But our healthy life years have not increased at the same rate. There’s a lot more sicker people at the end of their life. So their health span doesn’t equal their lifespan. And what’s happening is our world’s population is growing and our aging population is growing even more.

Dr. Mark Hyman: So people over 60 are expected to double from 12 to 22% between 2015 and 2050. So we got to find solutions to not only improve our lifespan, which is I guess important, but what’s more important is how do we improve our health span? How many years of life that we have that are healthy? And for most people, the last 20 years of their life is spent in poor health, which means let’s say you’re live to be 80, I’m 60 years old, you’ve got some chronic disease or another. So you’ve written this important manual and you’re talking about this health span revolution. So why does it matter? What is it and why now?

Dr. Peter Diamandis: So I think what I’m hoping to do is to impact people’s longevity mindset. I think you can will yourself to live and will yourself to die. I think your mindset is so fundamentally important. And my mission here is for people to realize we’re in the middle of a health span revolution. That the convergence of technologies like AI sensors, networks, gene therapies, epigenetic reprogramming, cellular medicines, all of these things are making and will continue to make a massive dent. There’s a topic we’ve about before, and hopefully folks have heard the term of longevity escape velocity that today for every year that you’re alive, if you’re reasonable, socioeconomic and reasonably taking care of yourself, science is the potential to extend your life for somewhere between a quarter to a third of a year. And there’s going to be a point in the future where for every year that you’re alive, science is extending your life for more than a year. And that idea is called longevity escapee velocity. When I interview my dear friend Ray Kurzweil, with whom I’d started Singularity University, it’s raise expectation is that we’re going to hit longevity escape velocity in just 10 to 12 years. Talking to George Church when I was

Dr. Mark Hyman: In, well, that means you can never die. The theoretical aspect of it is that you keep extending your life, and I’m not so sure about that.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Well, so I think the point is not immortality, but everything that is possible is being made available to you to maximize your health span. So one of the things that hit me when I was in medical school, God knows a few decades back, was just a few, you and I both, you actually became a real doctor. I had two companies going my fourth year in medical school, a space university and a rocket company. Not your typical internship anyway, but I remember learning that Bowhead whales lived 200 years and Greenland sharks glued 500 years. And you’ve heard me say this story a thousand times, and if they could live that long, why can’t we? It’s hardware, software. And so this is the decade that we’re making a dent in understanding human hardware and human software. And we are at the end of the day, a large functioning molecular machine or quantum chemistry at an atomic level, but we’re a large machine that can be repaired and can be upgraded.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: And these are the technologies that are coming our way. And if we do have fundamental breakthroughs in these areas, if you love life like you and I both do, wouldn’t you want to be around long enough to intercept these? You don’t want to be the last person before the new nanotech revolution comes around and says, oh my God, we can reverse all these things that aging and reset. So the idea from this book is, listen, we’re in the midst of a health span revolution. There’s more capital flowing in by 10 x over the last 10 years into longevity. There are more tools and technologies. The cost of genome reading, editing is plummeting. And so because those things are coming, you probably should keep yourself as healthy as you can to intercept these technologies. And there are a number of things Ray ksal talks about, a bridge to a bridge, bridge, one to getting to longevity. Escape velocity is doing certain things around sleep, diet, exercise, mindset, not dying from something stupid. Bridge. Two are technologies accessible to us today like stem cells and perhaps exogenous natural killer cells and other things. And stage three or bridge three is going to be those technologies that are a decade or two away. And so that’s what this book is about. I wanted to make it

Dr. Mark Hyman: Very, you want people to get to live long enough to get to that longevity gain velocity.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: It’s like, listen, do these things. I mean, I’ve read hundreds of books. At the end of the day I try and take notes, but there are certain things which are just fundamental and certain things that depend upon what your genetics are, where you were born, your other situations in life. And so I just wanted to make it super easy. My target was a hundred pages. It turned out to be 120 pages, but I think it’s a practical playbook. That was the goal.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. Yeah, it’s really great. And I think I want to get into the nitty gritty and meat of it. I think everybody knows that there’s some basics that we all have to follow and then we’re going to get into in a kind of rapid fire popcorn way, a lot of the cool things that people may or may not have heard about that are on the horizon that you’re using, optimize your own something. I’m actually using myself very similar. I was shocked at how similar our programs were. I was like, wow, we want space. Dude, I learned

Dr. Peter Diamandis: From you. I learned from the best.

Dr. Mark Hyman: I was like, wait a minute, okay,

Dr. Peter Diamandis: I’m paying attention.

Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s so true. And one of the things that people don’t understand is how much of it is under our control? 90 plus percent I think is under our control.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Can we hit that one second? Because people say, well, my parents died early and so forth. When you look at the numbers and it’s somewhere between 7% to 30%, and there are different studies giving different numbers of your potential. Lifespan is a function of your genetics. The vast majority, 70 to 90% is a function of the choices you make your lifestyle, you do have functional control over this. You don’t have an excuse.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. Well, Peter, it was interesting this morning, I actually had a chance to review my own genetics, and I’ve done my whole genome sequencing, but that’s like 30, 20, 30,000 genes. It’s impossible to get your head around. And I did a subset of about 700 SNPs or variations in my genes, and it was with a company that’s doing an incredible job of actually mapping out the most common SNPs that are actionable. In other words, even if you have genetics that predispose things, for example, I discovered that I had this gene that predisposes to B-cell lymphoma, which my sister had, and it makes you much, much higher risk of getting this particular. But it also was so interesting to see how they looked at all the scientific literature and mapped out what are the interventions that affect this gene and change the gene expression. For example, maybe resveratrol affects this pathway and this gene expression.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Or I had another gene that regulated vitamin D, and I noticed a surprise when I was in my fifties. My bone density was low and I was a runner and I wasn’t lifting weights. I was doing yoga and very athletic, and I shouldn’t have had low bone density, particularly as a guy. And I found out I had this gene that affects osteoporosis and vitamin D receptors, and I was able to see, oh, I know I need to take a lot more vitamin D than the average person, so I figured that on my own, but my genes can give me a guide to how to even optimize my genes. So even though it may not be genetically predetermined, you might have control over it a predilection. And so you actually have control over it. And that’s even more interesting is that even if we have genes that are kind of problematic, we can modify the expression of those genes. So it’s super cool and we do it. Do you

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Remember which company that is by the way?

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, it was called telx, DNA. And it’s really driven through a functional medicine practitioner base because it’s very complicated. Most doctors out the patients are time for it, and you can segment the genes based on mental health, a, d, d, inflammation, nutrition, cardiovascular risk and so forth. So it’s really quite fascinating. So I was just looking at it myself and learning about it and seeing what’s always new on the horizon and applicable for my patients. And I was like, wow, this is a different whole different level of looking at the DNA because it wasn’t really just looking at the SNPs. It was actually telling you not only what they meant and what their risk factors were that were maybe you were predisposed to based on these genes, but actually what you could do to modify that gene expression. But the truth is that most of the things that were included were foods, I know I need to eat two ounces of pomegranate juice because it affects this one gene that puts me at risk for cardiovascular disease. I need to take more curcumin. It was really interesting to see how there’s a lot of data on these things.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: This is fantastic. And even though we’ve sequenced the human genome, we’re continuing to learn about your genome, everybody’s genome every single day as different relationships are discovered. And there’s going to be a time sometime in the next, I would say three years, I don’t think it’s much further than that, that your personal AI that knows all your single nucleotide polymorphisms, your SNPs, if you turn on the function, will be guiding you every minute of the day on what to eat, what to do based upon your current genetics, your blood chemistry, your objectives, and it becomes a super hyper personalized if you want that.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, and I think that’s right. And I think they hadn’t even applied AI to this model. I was like, wow, once you do that, you’re going to get a hierarchical set recommendations that you can implement that are actually doable, and then you can measure the results and see how you feel and what’s going on with your biology. But the basics of changing these gene expressions, which is our epigenetics, is really about our lifestyle. And that’s the foundation of the beginning of your book is what we eat, how we exercise, sleep optimization, and then we get into kind of a bunch of other stuff. So let’s start with just the basics of what are the do’s and don’ts for eating, and let’s start with that. We want to live on

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Time. This is like a lowly priest talking to the pope about what to eat. I’m

Dr. Mark Hyman: Not the Pope. I’m Jewish for God’s sake. Okay,

Dr. Peter Diamandis: For God’s sake. Okay, fine. I’m not sure I understand

Dr. Mark Hyman: The rabbi, the rabbi, what’s the highest rabbi out there?

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Listen and tell me where I’m off. But I wanted people to have, it’s 1, 2, 3, 2 many. At the end of the day, if you need to memorize, oh my God, this, that, and the other thing, what are the fundamentals? And the most important fundamental is sugar is a poison, poison, poison. We never evolved to eat as much sugar. And so I really have eliminated not everything but 95, 90 9% of sugar for my diet. I will have a small piece of dark chocolate. If I eat something, I’m going to take the moment in time to actually enjoy it. And I’m not stuffing my face. It’s whole plants as you’ve said so many times. One of the things I wrote about in there that I love is the order in which you eat your food

Dr. Mark Hyman: Can matter. Exactly.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: I mean, so you go out to the restaurant and they bring you a basket of bread and wine and it’s like, oh my God, it’s the worst thing they could possibly do for you. We’ll try to kill you. So ask them to bring it back when the main course comes instead of eating it right then and there and then,

Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, they know that it makes you hungrier and eat more. So they order way more food and dessert to make the request.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: You have to make the request. And I’m at a party and everybody serves dessert and they put the plate in front of you. I have gotten so good at just catching and saying, no, stop. Go away. If it’s sitting in front of me, my willpower will a road going to, if it’s not there, then I’m good. But going back to the order of the food on your plate, you’re going to have veggies, protein and carbs, likely eat your vegetables first, your fiber first. It slows down, digestion your protein next, and then eat your carbs last and your absorption of nutrients and your desire to eat the carbs, everything improves or your lack of desire to eat the carbs. Everything improves when you eat in that order. And then there’s always that glass of water you drink before you consume your meal.

Dr. Mark Hyman: So water, we talked about timing and order of food, cutting out sugar, eating more vegetables and plant food,

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Basic stuffs.

Dr. Mark Hyman: What about protein and fat?

Dr. Peter Diamandis: So this is a conversation I want to ask with you. So I’m on a mission to add, right? And so I am on a high protein diet and I’m targeting weigh 150 pounds. I’m targeting 150 grams a day. And I looked at the studies on intermittent fasting and it didn’t look that intermittent fasting actually made a substantial difference other than reducing your total caloric intake. And so getting enough protein in my diet when I’m eating just between one o’clock and six o’clock was difficult. So I cut out my intermittent fasting and increased by protein intake. What are your thoughts on that

Dr. Mark Hyman: And how do you feel and what’s your body? I feel

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Great. I feel great and more muscle. I’ve added five, six pounds of muscle. I’m trying to get to 10 pushing. I’m increasing my workouts from three a week to five a week. My creatine,

Dr. Mark Hyman: I mean the proof is in the pudding. You feel better, you have more muscle. Your body, I always say that your body’s the smartest doctor in the room. So you could have an ideological view that you should be a vegan or you should eat tons of meat or you should whatever. You have to try it out and see what happens because your body’s going to tell you if you feel better, if you look better, if you’re stronger, if you’re building more muscle, if your biomarkers are better, then that’s your answer. I always say, don’t let your ideology run over your biology.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: It’s easy. I love that. That’s

Dr. Mark Hyman: Great. And we’re all different. And some people, I mean I know if I don’t eat enough carbs like sweet potatoes and things like that, I’ll just drop too much weight. And so I don’t want to do that and I need to eat more fat and more protein. So I think it’s really about listening your body. But conceptually, I think as we age, you need more protein to overcome what we call anabolic resistance, which means it’s harder to build muscle as you get older. So you need more workouts, more protein, and you probably need more high quality protein, mainly animal or whey protein. And you need probably something like creatine to help boost it. And you need to exercise usually within an hour or two, take a protein load about 40 to 50 grams an hour or two after your workout. So that’s a great formula.

Dr. Mark Hyman: And I notice when I’m on the road and I can’t do that, I lose muscle when I’m at home and I’m doing the same workouts when I do that, I gain muscle. So it’s pretty reliably there. And I think people are confused about the autophagy. It was like, well, you should inhibit mTOR. And we’ll talk about some of the things about that in a bit. But I think that that’s kind of a big meme in the longevity space, which is you want to inhibit mTOR to increase autophagy and self-cleaning, the way your body accelerates self-cleaning and repair, which is great for longevity, but it also has a dark side, which if you’re too long and too much, you lose muscle. So

Dr. Peter Diamandis: By the way, I don’t know if you recognize this packaging, it’s

Dr. Mark Hyman: Prolong.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: I’m on day two at my fast. I do a couple times a year.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, that’s great. Okay, so that’s food. What about exercise? We just talked about your muscle mass and when it comes to longevity, I think muscle mass is the unsung hero. It

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Is the numbers, if you’re over 60, the number one thing you can do to maximize your longevity, you can reduce your chance of cancer by threefold. Your overall chance of mortality by twofold is exercise. Get in a couple, at least a couple of days a week of resistant exercise for half an hour if nothing else. For me, I belong to three different gyms. Got there is no excuse, there is zero excuse. You’ve got two different trainers and it’s like I just have everybody just, I pay for all of this. So I don’t give myself the excuses for not working out. And when I’m on the road, I actually have Yani on my team who travels with me. He’s a young PhD and supports me across everything I do. It’s like I’m like, we’re going to the gym at 6:00 AM. He goes, no, I got to get some sleep. I said, no, we’re going to the gym at 6:00 AM get sleep early. And so it’s a priority. I think I have never had exercise this much of a priority in my life than I do at 62 years old. And I feel great. I’ve got two 12-year-old twin boys and they are exercise for me as well. So that’s joyful.

Dr. Mark Hyman: I think that’s important. I think I always say you can drive a Toyota Camry off the lot and drive it for a hundred thousand miles and never touch it. But if you’ve got a 1959 model, what do you 1961 model

Dr. Peter Diamandis: I

Dr. Mark Hyman: 60, 61. Yeah, I’m a 59 model. I mean, you can’t just drive it around and not take care of it and change the oil more and get it tuned up more and make sure everything’s lined up more. And so it just takes a little more effort as you get older. And I think it’s not impossible, but it requires much more focus and

Dr. Peter Diamandis: You have to want it. You have to love it. You have to have a purpose for it. And for me, it’s interesting. People say, well, how old do you want to live? My friend Dan Sullivan wants 156. When I was in medical school, I learned that certain species of sea life could live 700 years. So I set a ridiculous number of 700 years. By the way, if you can make it an extra 30 years from now, I think you’re going to intercept so many breakthroughs that bias a century if you want it, what my mission is to arrive at that point of longevity, escape velocity and great health whenever that is.

Dr. Mark Hyman: I think that’s true. And it’s also for me, the definition of health is really simple. It’s being able to get up in the morning and do whatever it’s that I want to do. If I’m visiting my daughter and she lives in Salt Lake City and she says, dad, I want to go on a nine mile hike up to 9,000 feet elevation, can we go? I’m like, sure. And we ran up the hill, I got all the way up and it was actually funny. I actually made fine. And then I realized that I had the time zones wrong and I thought I had a call and there was no service. So I ran down the mountain, which at 64, there’s a lot of stability issues and a lot of risk of falls. And if you don’t maintain your stability as well as your strength and flexibility and cardio, and I was able to just go down like a mountain goat. And it’s not because I’m super human, it’s because I’ve been training for doing the thing. I don’t do my band exercise to do my band exercise. I like to listen to music, listen to podcasts. I’ve gotten to like it, but it’s not like my fun thing to do. I want to play tennis. I want to hike up to the Himalayas. I want to go riding across the Mongolia on a horse. I want to do whatever I want to do and not stop. And I do.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: And by the way, the number one thing for you and I to be concerned about more so than someone who’s in their twenties or even early thirties is injury, right? Injury is the biggest issue. Fall break your pelvis or hip end up in the hospital and with a pneumonia and you’re screwed.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Immortality for someone breaking their hip in a year is 50%. So if you break your hip, you’re 50% likely to die in that year after, which is staggering. It’s worse than getting terminal cancer for

Dr. Peter Diamandis: People over 60. I think the number is. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman: So got to exercise. I love your routine and you go through exactly what you do in the book. That’s really

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Great. One other thing is your aerobic exercise, right? So zone two training, and I talk about in this, what you want to do is you want to stimulate mitochondrial growth and you want to stimulate it. And there’s something called a zone two training where your heart rate is at a particular band. For me it’s at about 110 to A1 15. I’ll show you how to calculate that. And so I’ve got a stationary bike, a technic gym bike, and there’s absolutely no excuse to take a board meeting or a phone call sitting on your butt. I’m feeling guilty sitting down. I’m doing this with you right

Dr. Mark Hyman: Now. Now, well, the podcast would look funny if we were both bouncing up this,

Dr. Peter Diamandis: I’d be somewhat out of breath, but I remember tweeting out sitting this thing, you smoking and it really is. I mean, we sit in front of these damn zoom conversations for most of the day and it’s abusive to your body.

Dr. Mark Hyman: So yeah, for sure. Yeah, I just wanted a beautiful hour and a half walk up the mountain this morning and maybe I got a little over zone too, but just keep moving or you, I met this guy who was 95 once Peter, and he was bouncing around like a spry 50-year-old. He had a 20-year-old younger girlfriend. And I’m like, what’s your deal? And he was eating bagels and locks at this thing. I’m like, what’s your story? He’s like, well, whatever I did yesterday, I do today. If I played single tennis yesterday, I do it today. I mean, if you ride your bike 20 miles every day, you’re going to keep being able to ride your bike 20 miles every day as long as you live. So just don’t stop. So now the other thing that’s really important, Peter, you talk about and I think is one of the unappreciated and most important aspects of health is sleep. And a lot of people have sleep issues. There’s 70 million people with sleep issues in America. There’s so many people struggle with falling asleep, staying asleep, waking up early, getting up the middle of the night. What’s your personal story about your transformation of your sleep and your routine?

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Yeah, I love this. So I am lucky to be a reasonably good sleeper. I just came back from Saudi Arabia, so I was 12 time zones away. And so I’m in the middle of shifting myself back. I was up at three 30 this morning, but I went to sleep at eight 30 last night. So it wasn’t too bad. The body needs eight hours of sleep at minimum seven hours of sleep. One of the things I tell people is when you’re sleeping, you’re not reproducing, you’re not hunting for food, you’re not protecting yourself, you’re very vulnerable. If evolution could have done away with that extra hour of sleep, it would have. So the fact that it hasn’t means you need it. And so what do you do? There are certain, I go through the basics here. I’ll tell you the most important things. Number one, it’s going to sleep at the same time every night. It’s consistency of going to bed because typically your body wakes you up at the same time. And so my body, I’m up and awake at five 30 or 6:00 AM in that band, and if I go to sleep at nine 30, I’m good. If I happen to go to sleep at 11 o’clock at night, I’m screwed.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: I can control my go to sleep time. The other things are use a Manta mask. I love this mask. It has foam around the eyes and it’s a beautiful mask. It seals it out. I set the temperature in my room to 63 degrees Fahrenheit, which is pretty damn cold. I use an eight sleep. There’s lots of different cooling mattresses. And then at the end of the day, I also use a mouth guard, which is a mandibular adjustment device. It moves my mandible out a little bit and keeps me from snoring and keeps my open airway and keeps me as a nose breather versus mouth breather.

Dr. Mark Hyman: And you do some other things. You block the light at night, you measure your sleep, you don’t eat before bed, you don’t have caffeine in the afternoon. These are just basic sleep hygiene principles, right?

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Yeah, it is sleep hygiene. I don’t eat two hours before. I’m not drinking water an hour before I am. I’ve given up most all alcohol, maybe a glass of wine every couple of weeks. How about you?

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, well it’s interesting. I wear this aura ring and I track my sleep and I’m like, damn, I drank that wine and my sleep was messed up. My heart rate didn’t go down, my heart plummeted. I’m going to look like I was in some severe stress response. And it’s interesting to get that feedback you wouldn’t have known otherwise. So I really have minimized it. Maybe I’ll have a drink a month if I’m out or a shot of tequila, but that’s about it.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: That’s exactly, exactly the same. And on the sleep, by the way, I use my AAA ring. It doesn’t do anything to get me to sleep or to give me better sleep, but it makes me aware. So if I am deciding whether or not to have something to drink or deciding if I’m going to grab that snack, I am thinking to myself, it’s going to screw with your sleep tonight and you’re going to see it on your data in the morning. So it’s just what you don’t measure, you don’t actually impact. So we measure it that way. I’m curious. My heart rate when I’m sleeping is like 38, 39. It drops down really, really low.

Dr. Mark Hyman: I mean that is low. I mean, what’s your resting heart rate during the day?

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Probably 55.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, that’s good. I mean that’s good. I mean, if your heart rate was 70 and dropped at 30, I would worry about some kind of heart block or something like that. But you probably shouldn’t have an eek G, but I’m sure it’s fine.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: I’ve had so many from Fountain. Yeah, I think cardiovascular, I’m okay. But it was interesting. It was like, okay, don’t go any lower. A certain number of heartbeats in your life. I’m going to keep

Dr. Mark Hyman: Them. Although, although I did a podcast with Deepak Chopper yesterday and he was basically the ancient Hindus and the yogis who live to be like they say 180 or whatever, he said they measure their life not in years, but in heartbeats and breath. So you kind of have to go slow the idea. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds good. Alright, so one of the things that you’re involved in is, and by the way, there’s so much more we’re going to talk about in a minute, but I want to touch base on not dying of something stupid because that’s basically the subtitle of your book and what do you mean by that? And I think you’re referring to basically tracking your biomarkers and your biology and your imaging tests, so where you’re at and that you don’t die of something that’s totally preventable. And we do. I mean, one of the things that shocked me was reading. If you’re 35 and you smoke two packs of cigarettes a day, your risk of getting cancer is far lower than if you’re a 7-year-old and you don’t smoke at all, right? Just age is one of the biggest risks. And same thing with heart attacks. And

Dr. Peter Diamandis: So here’s how I think about not texting something stupid. First of all, wear your seatbelt in the car. Don’t text while you’re driving. Wear a helmet while you’re going skiing. Those are the basics. But here’s the other part, and it really bothers me how few people understand this. Your body is amazing at hiding disease. You don’t feel anything until you have a stage three or stage four cancer. 70% of heart attacks have no precedent, no shortness of breath, nothing on imaging. It’s a soft plaque that uls and kills you. The

Dr. Mark Hyman: First symptom of heart attacks for 50% of people is sudden death.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: And it’s like, that sucks.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: So you don’t have Parkinsonian tremor until 70% of the substantial nigra neurons are gone. So again, your body’s really great at hiding any symptoms of something wrong going on. And so when you ask people, are you in good health? Is there anything you need to worry about? Most people say, yeah, I’m fine. But you don’t actually know until you look. And then people say, well, I don’t want to know. It’s like, of course you want to know. I mean, you’re going to know. Do you want to know when it’s too late to do something? All you wanted to know when you can do something about it. Peter,

Dr. Mark Hyman: Before you go to the next thing, I just want to emphasize something, is what you’re saying is really important in medicine. We are trained in medical school to not look until something’s wrong except for a very few things like screening for cholesterol, screening for breast cancer, mammograms, colonoscopy, pap test, but very few things. And we’re taught we don’t want to over test. We don’t want to over-diagnose, we’re going to pick up things that are going to be red herrings. It’s bad medicine. And you only want to do a test when you want to confirm a diagnosis, which means that you’re not picking stuff up until very late. Like you said, it’s like a glass you’re filling up that doesn’t spill over until the very end. And by the way though, you’re filling it up the whole way. And that’s really what’s happening in medicine. And so there’s a chance really now with our technologies and what you’ve developed with Fountain life to really dig deep and to look at your body in a way that we’ve never

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Heard

Dr. Mark Hyman: Before and not be that. It just reminds me of this one patient who said, Dr. Hyman, I want to get a check. I’m like, okay. And we checked his blood sugar was like 110. I’m like, wow, this is if you talked to your doctor about it. He is like, well, yeah, but he says, come back when it’s higher and I’ll give you some medication. So I think how is found life different than that?

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Listen, at the end of the day, it is possible to answer two questions. Is there anything going on inside your body that you need to know about it? And the second question is question, what are you likely to come down with? What’s likely to cause you medical problems down the line? And what can you do to slow it down or prevent it? And that’s fundamentally the diagnostic side of fountain life. And then there’s the therapeutic side. So here’s what happens. You come through Fountain Life. We have centers in New York, Orlando, Naples, Dallas, Texas. We’re opening up in LA next year we have 40 centers that were planned around the world. And you come in for a day, typically an overnight stay if you can do it in a day, but we recommend overnight and we’re going to digitize you. We’re going to do a full body, MRIA brain, MRI, brain vasculature, brain blood flow, a coronary CT with an AI overlay, not looking for calcified plaque, but soft plaque.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: If it’s calcified and it’s in the walls of the artery and it’s not blocking your coronaries, you’re fine. If it’s soft plaque, that can just break off in AULs, right? If it’s calcified, it’s like cemented there in place. It’s the soft plaque in the walls. It can uls that can block a coronary artery and then you’re dead. We do dexascan, we do your full genomics, your metabolomics, your microbiome, retinal scans, strength and balance, all of those things, 150 gigabytes of data. It’s the most exhaustive upload we provided. All that data gets uploaded, there’s AI overlays on everything, and then there is a convergence of the data to provide a return and a review of those results. Understand, again, those two questions. What’s going on inside your body that you need to know about and what’s likely to happen? So here’s the data of the first 5,000 members going through it.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: 2% of people have a cancer they don’t know about, which is blows me away. Two and a half percent have an aneurysm they don’t know about. And then 14.4% have either cardiovascular neurodegenerative or metabolic disease or the aneurysm or cancer. And so that’s a significant number of people. And I’ve had in the last month, two friends who’ve gone through Fountain Life and we’ve discovered and we’ve saved their lives. And then we’ve had hundreds of people. One of my friends who we’re doing business with, he’s a massive developer hotel developer, and he was coming through because we’re starting to work together. We discovered two, not one, two aneurysms in his head that were just paper thin. He was in surgery a few days later and now he’s out. The doctor said, you caught it just in time. And these were significant aneurysms. Another friend of mine, 50% occlusions in his LAD and his coronary.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: So we’ve saved hundreds of lives, and I think at the end of the day, if you’re able to afford this, and it’s not cheap, we have a 12 K offering, a 20 K offering it. It is the cheapest money you will spend. And it’s a chance for you to actually feel confidence like I’m actually okay. So every year I go through this, I go through an upload every single, it’s a lifelong long life membership, so to speak. And at the end of the day, I am anxious until I go through my upload and then I feel relief and I’ll find something someday, but I’m going to find it at the very beginning. When’s the best time to catch a fire at the start at Ignition? When’s the best time to find cancer at stage one? So that’s the, yeah. And

Dr. Mark Hyman: You also do liquid biopsies too, not just the imaging, right? We

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Do liquid biopsies. We do 120 blood biomarkers. We do, it is the most exhaust. I mean, Dr. Helen Messier, she like you, is a functional medicine doctor. I

Dr. Mark Hyman: Recommending her to you guys.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: I know you did, and thank you. I knew her from years back from HLI, but she’s now our chief medical and chief scientific officer, and she’s amazing. And it’s the most exhaustive functional medicine upload possible. And that’s half the other half of the business is therapeutics. It’s like you’re on our medical advisory board, thank you. Along with a number of other incredible individuals. And our mission is what is a therapeutic out there that is safe enough but has outsized potential gains? And then we make that available to our members. So like therapeutic plasma exchange, we can talk about that or access to rapamycin or natural killer cells or stem cells. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, let’s talk about that. I think that’s the other thing you talked about in your guide, which is really great. So function health, if you can’t afford it, what do you do? Is there a way to get around it or,

Dr. Peter Diamandis: So first of all, you can go to fountain life.com/peter and you can get the information about it. We will have a lower end digital membership, but the imaging is really important. And we have stood up an insurance company, a health benefits company on the insurance side where self-insured companies can buy this for their employees. And what happens is those employees are getting a series of blood tests and then if the blood test gets to a particular point and triggers the need for a CT or an MRI, so that it’s escalating level of testing. But the problem is most health insurance pays you after you’re sick, after you’ve had the problem. And that’s the problem. It’s not preventative at all. It is basically, I hate this. Fire insurance pays you after house burns down. Life insurance pays your next tokin after you’re dead. Health insurance pays you after you’re sick,

Dr. Mark Hyman: Right? It’s crazy. So some of these other technologies and techniques are things that are kind of on the margin, but that are interesting and that you’re doing that you outline in your wonderful manual. And there are things that are around managing the risk factors, whether it’s prescription medications for managing cholesterol, whether it’s off-label uses of medications and things like rapamycin and peptides. Can you walk us through what you’re doing? And remember, everybody list is personalized for Peter. This is Peter’s map based on Peter’s biology, his tests, his own things. But there are some things that are,

Dr. Peter Diamandis: I put that as a disclosure in the book and also in my PDF that everybody can download for free at dm addis.com/longevity. It’s a 30 page summary of the book is a summary of books out there. The PDF is a summary of the book itself. So it’s a summary of a summary which is available for free for anybody. You need to have the data. You can read all you want. If you’ve got a physician, go over it with them. I’m much more of an experimentalist. Tony Robbins, who’s a co-founder of Fountain along with me, same thing. And in Lifeforce, we talk about a lot of the experimental elements we’re doing. So this is what’s going on right now. We’ve just stood up therapeutic plasma exchange at Fountain, and this is, you’re familiar, you’ve done it

Dr. Mark Hyman: Many times

Dr. Peter Diamandis: And it’s basically getting an oil change for your body, right? It’s basically in one arm come as a intravenous pulling blood out. It goes through basically a separation filtration system. It separates out your red blood cells, your white blood cells, and then the remainder, the plasma, which is mostly albumin or saline, gets thrown away and replaced with fresh oil, fresh albumin and saline mixed backing with your cells and put it back in your body and you accumulate waste products in your bloodstream. And this is a mechanism for getting rid of that. One of the things that we’re standing up under an F-D-A-I-N-D protocol, which I’m excited about, it’s it’s not ready yet. It’ll be available in the first quarter. We’re doing it with cellularity.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: The first thing we do is we give the individual a deep tissue massage and that deep tissue massage liberates stem cells triples number of stem cells in the peripheral blood system. So we then do the TPE, the therapeutic plasma exchange, and we separate out the stem cells for banking purposes. And then when we give you back your albumin and saline, we are going to be introducing umbilical cord plasma. So we’ve all heard about Youngblood. This is the youngest possible growth. Turns out cellularity is the largest storage facility for placentas on the planet, both cord blood and also cell products and tissue products from placenta. And it’s got a large supply of umbilical cord blood. So this will be understudy and it’s for those people who want to be part of experimental protocols. And there are people out there who want it like me, maybe you

Dr. Mark Hyman: Exactly. Yeah, I’ve done it. I think it’s going to come down in price like everything else. But there’s other things you can do that are really helpful that you’re doing, that you’re doing may be cheaper. For example, I’d love to know your thoughts on rapamycin and the peptides you’re using because you talk about those as part of your regimen.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: I’m on a rapamycin protocol, probably the same. It’s a function of your body weight. For me, it’s six milligrams once a week, and it’s basically three months on and a month off. Are you on rapamycin now?

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, I’ve started it based on the literature and looking at it, I think it’s one of the most promising molecules out there from a pharmaceutical perspective. And it’s basically derived from rapanui from the dirt. And it was a molecule they found in there that was on Easter Island. It turned out to have a lot of benefits in moduling, not only immunity, but also mTOR, which is one of the key regulators of autophagy. So it’s sort of a way of mimicking fasting. So instead of fasting, you can take mTOR and it seems to have effect, which is really remarkable because even at later dates in your life when you started, it seemed to have an effect like when

Dr. Peter Diamandis: You sixties.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. If you don’t start exercising until you’re 60, it’s probably not a great thing. But if you start this even when you’re 60, it actually can work in even extend life in animal models. So there’s not a human trials yet, but it’s something that’s used as an FDA approved drug for other indications.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: I agree with you that it’s one of the most promising and most meaningful longevity meds out there. I mean, a lot of stuff is hearsay, but this has the strongest body evidence, and there are studies that have either been funded or will soon be funded to actually demonstrate the efficacy in humans.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, that’s what I’m excited about. So before that, we’re kind of Guinea pigs, but we’re very cute Guinea pigs.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Yeah, I mean, one of the things I’m excited, but that fountain is doing is it’s got a massive amount of data. So we know every single member who’s on rapamycin, and we’re uploading every member every year. So we have a vast amount of data on these individuals. So we’re effectively doing large scale studies with the member’s permission and we’ll publish results as we get them.

Dr. Mark Hyman: So I think tracking the data is important. That’s one of the things I love about Fountain Life is that you have rigorous science behind it. You’re looking at not just doing stuff but tracking the outcomes on your patients, which matters. And I think in a way, this is how we learn. Yes, it’s very expensive and it’s not available to everyone, but it’s giving us insights into what will be effective

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Most. And the prices will come down. The

Dr. Mark Hyman: Prices will come down.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: That’s the case in technology stuff is when in the beginning when it doesn’t work perfectly, it’s expensive. And then as it starts to work better and better, the price comes down and becomes available to everybody.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Like a full body MRI would’ve been 10, $20,000 years ago. Now it’s 2,500. It’s probably coming down to three 400. Our whole genome sequence you could have done for, was it a hundred million

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Million or something when the US government did it for 3 billion? Craig Venture did it for a hundred million, and it’s been dropping at five times. Moore’s Law, and depending on who you talk to, it’s 200 to $500,

Dr. Mark Hyman: Which

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Is crazy. Seven hours.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah. Anyway, so 500 bucks from 3 billion, that’s pretty good. So I think we’ll get there for everybody, but this is how medicine and science works. What about cognitive enhancement? You’re talking about nootropics and modafinil cardio of regimen. Talk to me about that. I most people know about these things

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Was going to ask you about that as well. So

Dr. Mark Hyman: Listen, am I interviewing you? Are you interviewing me?

Dr. Peter Diamandis: But listen, so it’s interesting, right? I think about this cognitive, at the end of the day, people want a few things. They want to be sharp, they want to move well, they want to look good and cognitive enhancement. So it’s interesting, a study done years ago looked at hundreds of molecules to determine what actually increased college students’ performance on exams. And they found two molecules in particular. I know you know what they are. It was sugar, glucose and caffeine,

Dr. Mark Hyman: Caffeine, sugar.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Basically Coca-Cola, no dose. Anyway, for me, the one particular drug I will use, especially if I’m hopping off a jet and need to go on stage and be sharp, is modafinil. And you should look it up. It has had zero side effects for me, and I’ve spoken to a slew of neurologists on it, and it’ll list a number of potential downsides. But it is, when I use provigil or modafinil, I feel like all of a sudden if I had four cylinders firing, all of a sudden it’s eight cylinders firing. It’s the closest thing to, what was that movie? You took a pill and all of a sudden your intelligence increased multifold.

Dr. Mark Hyman: I know. I want that pill. Yeah, so you’re right. I think the compounds out there like drugs, that means people take Adderall or speed or other things. Cocaine. I

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Don’t like Adderall for the other side effects. And modafinil was actually developed for fighter pilots to be awake for long periods of time. If you use it, you don’t want to take alcohol along with it,

Dr. Mark Hyman: And you probably don’t want to take it late in the day. So it can be very effective. But there are other substances that are nootropic, which basically means enhancing cognitive performance, right? Neuro means brain and TRPA means growth. So there are things like lions, Maine, and even things like fish oil or choline or vitamin D, other compounds that you can actually take as supplements. It can be quite effective. I do them all. Yeah, I think they’re important.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: That’s interesting, right? Because a lot of these drugs, these medicine supplements we take, we’re taking them out of faith because some study said something. But I’ll tell you the question is do you have a visceral benefit? Do you actually feel so caffeine? You’ll feel a visceral nicotine is a neurotropic as well, for sure. Not one I want to engage in, but it truly is.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Well, people are taking nicotine things in their cheek or their nicotine sprays only from smoking. So I had a friend who gave me that once. I was like, wow, little much for me, a little much for me. What about your peptide regimen? Because peptides are things that people don’t understand, but they’re essentially these small mini proteins that are used to regulate information signaling through the body, and they’re regulating almost everything. There’s thousands and thousands of them. Not exactly like hormones, but they’re kind of the same concept. They’re little tiny proteins that are messenger molecules that regulate every biological function. And they’ve gotten an increasing use over the last

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Five years, an increasing FDA scrutiny at the same time.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Although FDA tends to want to shut down anything that works, it’s not a drug. Like ozempic is a peptide and they’re like, oh my god, Ozempic, what a gravy train. Let’s lock this all stuff up so nobody else can use it and charge 10 times what it actually costs.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Let me ask you, before we jump into the peptides I have in my longevity practices, let’s talk about GLP one drugs and ozempic, because the evidence is coming out that it looks like it is also a longevity medicine

Dr. Mark Hyman: Really. Well, what are you learning about that? I haven’t seen that. I’ve seen a lot of other things that concern me a lot, but I’d love to hear your perspective.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Just I guess the, it’s triggering reduced appetite and reduced caloric intake, which over, it’s interesting, when you look at what extends life in humans, there are a few things you can become a eunuch,

Dr. Mark Hyman: Not happening,

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Not happening. You can minimize your caloric intake down to a bare minimum, not happening like 1200 calories per day

Dr. Mark Hyman: Next.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: And then you could exercise, you can eat whole plants, you can get rid of sugar and all those other things, right? I’m down. And so caloric reduction is one of the things that causes enhanced health span. You may not enjoy it, those of us who enjoy enjoyable meal. So I think ozempic having a longevity impact, increased health impact because of its caloric, its reduction. People just don’t eat because they get nauseous.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, I mean I think that’s interesting. I don’t think it works mechanistically like rapamycin, which inhibits mTOR, which induces the same phenomenon of caloric restriction. In other words, mTOR is shut down when you’re starving and you can mimic starvation by taking this drug rapamycin. And if you take it properly, and I think the way it’s being studied, it’s going to be very effective. It’s very different than say, taking a drug that makes you nauseous and not want to eat and lowering your appetite. So there was a great study, Peter, where they took people who were obese and they were very obese and diabetic, and one group got a gastric bypass. And the other group, the control group, got the same diet that people who had a gastric bypass had to eat after they had a bypass. There was no difference in the, oh my god,

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Exactly

Dr. Mark Hyman: The same result.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: And I had a friend of mine die during a gastric bypass. It’s a dangerous surgery, especially when you’re morbidly obese.

Dr. Mark Hyman: But the point of that is it’s not the surgery, it wasn’t the drug. I think it’s just not eating the bad food. Now, I do think that I’m concerned about ozempic for other reasons. One, it seems to have a dramatic increase in pancreatitis in small bowel obstruction and things that are quite serious. So normally when we see an increase in a phenomenon in medicine, we said, oh my God, eating processed meat increases your risk of colon cancer by 20%. That means your risk goes up from five to 6% by 20% a relative increase.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: And they use marketing lingo, right?

Dr. Mark Hyman: Okay. But we said that’s a big result. But what we’re seeing with Ozempic is not a 20%, but like a 900% increase in pancreatitis, like a 450% increase in small bowel obstruction. And the longer you take it, the worse it is. So I think there’s some challenges also with muscle loss and weight, muscle muscle

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Wasting. I agree. We’ve seen at Fountain those on ozempic, we’ve seen a reduction in significant, the weight loss comes more from muscle than other parts, which is a problem.

Dr. Mark Hyman: And there maybe we to mitigate that by rigorous strength training and lots of protein, but I don’t think it’s a easy fix. And I literally, I just had a patient email the other day said, I just lost 200 pounds following your program. You don’t need do ozempic. Now, there’s other issues with brain regulation, and I think I’m working on a whole series of articles around how our brain has been hijacked by food and have the addicted properties of food. So that’s another conversation by

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Can we put warning labels on the side of most consumer foods? I mean, I’m working

Dr. Mark Hyman: On it, Peter, nonprofit. I’m working on,

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Oh my God. I mean, it’s like the crap that kids eat and that’s passed off as nutritionist, nutritional food. I mean, cereals. It’s criminal. It is fundamentally criminal.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Yeah, it is. When you go to Europe, you got the cigarette packs and it says, this will kill. You can barely see the brand on it. Literally, this will kill you, but it should be like that other stuff we’re eating

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Here on Cheerios or the Apple jacks or whatever. It’s sugar and sugar on the peptides. I’ll just mention real quick, a peptide I love is in the skin cream I use, it’s called One Skin. It’s a 10 amino acid peptide that’s a lytic, so it’s killing dead cells in your skin. And then others, I list them in detail. CGC 1295, which is for Muscle and BPC 1 57 for reduced inflammation, so forth. I won’t go into it. It’s in, again, if you go to d addis.com/longevity, you get a free download, 30 pages of all of this. Let me mention for your viewing audience, if I could, something that I’m very proud of that we did last week. And I was in Riyadh with a group of longevity scientists announcing the largest prize ever in human history. And so this is called XPRIZE Health Span. It’s $101 million prize, and it’s actually, I raised 141 million. I’m a significant contributor to this. It’s my largest contribution I’ve ever made. 40 million came from Evolution, which is now a foundation in Riyadh in Boston. It’s the largest funder of age and health related research on the planet. And then a quarter of the prize came from Chip Wilson, the founder. Lululemon.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Oh yeah, I know

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Chip. Yeah. He has a muscular dystrophy called FSHD. And in addition to the 101 million, we put a $10 million bonus prize on FSHD. So to win this prize, all you have to do is reverse functional loss in muscle immune and cognition by a minimum of 10 years, a goal of 20 years. So this is a request for teams around the world to run massively parallel experiments. So far, after one week, we have 80 teams registered. I think we’ll get to north of 500 teams around the world in this competition. And we’re going to be, teams have to recruit their own subjects. There’ll probably be cohort sizes of 50 to 200 people when they’re ready. If they’re a serious team, we send our judges there to measure that cohort. We measure their muscular strength, their cognitive ability, their immune function functionally. In other words, I don’t care what your clock says, I care how functionally can you climb those stairs.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Can you remember these numbers? Can you mount an immune reaction to a influenza vaccine? And you get to treat that subject group for up to a year. You can treat them for a day, six months or up to a year. And at the end of that, we’re going to measure function again. And did we bring you back in time? At least 10 years? My goal is 20 or more years, and competition’s going to run for seven years. And so if you want more information, anybody listening wants to put a team together, if you go to xprize.org/, it’s X-P-R-I-Z-E, do org slash and you can register for a team. I’ve had friends of mine like, oh my God, this is amazing. I’m going to register. I’m excited to see what comes out of this competition.

Dr. Mark Hyman: I mean, that’s so important, Peter, because what I want to point out about this that’s so unique is that most of medicine and most of medical science has been focused on the study of diseases, not on the study of health. And it’s a fundamental frame shift that’s going to change everything. If we can really reframe our conception of the body from focusing on just diseases and their origins and their treatments to understanding the biology of health and the laws of nature that govern the biology of health, it’s going to revolutionize everything in medicine. And I think it’s just one of those cataclysmic events. If we can actually do what you’re saying we can do, and I believe it’s going to happen, I think it’s going to change everybody’s mindset. And for functional medicine and what I do, it’s essentially what that is. It’s a science of health, of understanding how to study health, create health, understand deviations from health. It’s not about treating diseases. I never treat disease. I look at what’s going on in the body and where’s out of balance and then tweak it and tune it up. I literally just did a podcast or interview with a guy who’s going to be skiing solo to break the world record to go from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole, carrying a 500 pound sled by himself unsupported. Now, we did testing. He’s 39 years old. He’s incredibly fed. He’s already climbed every

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Major peak. I thought he’s 95 years old. No,

Dr. Mark Hyman: No. He’s climbed every peak on every continent. At the highest peak, he’s rode his boat across the Drake passage, 10 Antarctica. He’s crazy. And I’m like, this guy’s going to be healthy. I’m not going to find a single thing. But I found he had a number of things were really fascinating and significant that nobody really knew that were not diseases, but he had methylation issues, so he wasn’t able to properly detoxify and he wasn’t able to, when he put his body under stress into a thousand mile bike ride, his liver conked out. His B vitamins were low, his vitamin D was low, his iron was low. And I’m like, wow, this is really interesting. So he had a whole bunch of different things that weren’t diseases, but they were just things that weren’t optimally tuned. And so I think by giving him a program to optimize his health, which is really what you’re talking about with this XPRIZE and the moonshot for the health span, is really getting people to think about this problem, to look at this problem, to solve this problem, which has never really been done before. No, I mean, it’s a joke. We have the National Institute of Health. It’s not, it’s the National Institutes of Diseases. Really, it’s not anything to do with health. Yeah,

Dr. Peter Diamandis: You treat a disease at a time, you treat an organ at a time. And the origin of this competition is a few different things. Conversations with Aubrey de Gray and with Sergey Young and George Church, and I’ve spoken to you about this and gotten your advice on this competition over the last four plus years. At the end of the day, our hope is that what an individual develops here is something, a therapeutic that actually targets fundamentals of aging versus just one particular tissue type. And if that’s true, if the therapeutic actually is targeting aging, then not only will you improve cognition, muscle and immune, you’ll improve every organ, every tissue in the body. And that’s the objective here. At the end of the day, can we address aging fundamentally and health fundamentally here? So excited about this. I hope you and I will talk about this over the years to come and follow these teams as they,

Dr. Mark Hyman: Maybe I’m going to work on it. I want to win the a hundred

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Million fight. You’re totally able to register for it. Yeah, it’s interesting. Have some idea, have idea. I’m on the board. So full disclosure, there will be a separate set of judges who judge this, and the judges will have no conflicts, nothing. But I had my company Cellularity, which is up in New Jersey, Bob Ri, doing natural killer cells and stem cells, and he goes, can I register for this? I said, yeah, I guess I’m going. I’m going to win this thing. I had my team at Vicinity, which is doing vaccines against neurocog diseases and muscle loss, and can we register for this? Said yes, well go for it. So we’re going to see a lot of teams, a lot of different approaches.

Dr. Mark Hyman: That’s amazing. Well, it’s so exciting, Peter, what you’re doing, and you’re just sort of tirelessly trying to improve humanity in every aspect. Thank you, buddy. I mean, it’s not just through health, but really all your X prizes. If people don’t know you, Peter, they should find out about you. They can go to xprize healthspan, I think.com. Is that the

Dr. Peter Diamandis: Xprize.org/healthspan for information about the competition, dand.com/longevity. If you want a free download of the PDF or on Amazon Longevity or Practical Playbook. And as always, pal, grateful for you. Love your heart and your spirit.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Thank you. Whenever I go to LA and visit Peter, he’s like, let’s have a meeting. He’s like, okay, how about we meet at five o’clock on Venice speech and we walk for as fast as we can for two hours, and then that’s our meeting. I’m like, okay, well,

Dr. Peter Diamandis: You’re coming to LA so call me.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Let’s do that. Okay. Alright, man. Well have a great rest of the day. I’m so excited to see this xpr come in shape and your book is just phenomenal. It’s just all the nuggets and none of the noise. So everybody get a copy and check it out. And thanks for being on the show, Peter.

Dr. Peter Diamandis: My pleasure, as always. Take care, Al.

Dr. Mark Hyman: Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And follow me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman and we’ll see you next time on The Doctor’s Pharmacy. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I’m the Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only. It’s not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you’re looking for helping in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. Now, if you’re looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It’s important that you have someone in your corner who is trained, who’s a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.