Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life (The Dr. Mark Hyman Library Book 11)

by Mark Hyman

health span (how many years you live in great health) and your life span (how many years you actually live).

James Fries’ landmark study, “Aging, Natural Death, and the Compression of Morbidity,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980,1 he made it very clear that if people maintained their ideal weight, didn’t smoke, and exercised regularly, they would live long, healthy, vigorous lives. And when it came time to die, they would go quickly, painlessly, and cheaply. Those who were overweight, smoked, and didn’t exercise died long, painful, expensive deaths. The healthy group dramatically lengthened their years of disease-free life, that is, their health span (how long they maintained their health) and their life span (how many years they lived), while the unhealthy group often spent decades in various states of disease and dysfunction, resulting in a dramatic loss in quality of life and a burden for themselves, their families, and the health care system. Sadly,

Treat the cause or causes, and the symptoms and diseases disappear.

root cause (etiology).

Functional medicine is the science of creating health. When you create health, disease disappears. The body comprises seven dynamically interconnected, networked systems that underlie all disease—155,000 diseases, in fact. What are these systems? 1. Assimilating nutrients, digestion, and the microbiome 2. Defense and repair (immune and inflammatory system) 3. Energy production (mitochondria) 4. Detoxification 5. Transportation (circulation and lymphatic system) 6. Communication (hormones, neurotransmitters, etc.) 7. The body’s structure (from cellular structures to the musculoskeletal system) When these systems are in dynamic balance, health and longevity are the natural consequences.

Yamanaka factors (known formally as Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4, c-Myc). Shinya Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize for his discovery that these factors control which genes in a cell are turned on or off, ensuring that embryonic cells differentiate into the cells they were meant to become. A brain cell knows to be a brain cell.

The current health care model (truthfully a sick care model) focuses on naming diseases and suppressing symptoms.

Elizabeth Blackburn won a Nobel Prize for her discovery of telomerase, the enzyme that helps lengthen telomeres. She also discovered that telomerase activity increases through a healthy diet and lifestyle, lengthening telomeres and your life.

measure biological age by measuring the epigenetic clock, also known as the Horvath clock, which reflects how your gene expression changes and interacts with your environment throughout your life.

Your book of life is written with four compounds called nucleotides, represented by the letters A (adenine), G (guanine), C (cytosine), and T (thymine). The average human has 6 billion of these nucleotides with combinations of AGCT that are unique to you.

What is the exposome? It is everything that has happened to you over your lifetime and even what has happened to you in utero or to your ancestors that is imprinted in your epigenome.

They used resveratrol, the phytochemical in red wine, to activate the sirtuin pathway; sirtuins are proteins that regulate several essential biological repair processes.

We have four key nutrient-sensing systems that work together, with overlapping redundancies designed to beautifully protect us from disease and abnormal aging: insulin and insulin signaling, mTOR, AMPK, and sirtuins.

Low levels of glucose and amino acids in the blood signal danger or scarcity and inhibit this key longevity switch called the mammalian/mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR).

Autophagy, which literally means “self-eating,” is a recycling system that is essential to our biology. It is a built-in ancient survival mechanism. It cleans out old proteins, damaged cells, and other gunk that we don’t want accumulating in our bodies.

AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) is a critical enzyme found in every mammalian cell. It’s activated during times of “good” stress, called hormesis (discussed in Chapter 10), like when you are exercising, fasting, or engaging in caloric restriction.

It improves your cells’ ability to produce energy, reverses insulin resistance and improves blood sugar control, enhances stress resistance, and improves your cells’ housekeeping functions.

Sirtuins are a family of signaling proteins that regulate gene transcription (the making of new proteins), lower inflammation and oxidative stress, and improve metabolism and cellular energy production.12 They are key players in the health of our mitochondria. In short, our energy production depends on sirtuins. They are also essential for fixing DNA damage throughout the body and protecting our telomeres.

First, our immune system itself ages and our ability to fight infections and cancer declines. This is called immunosenescence.

cytokines are molecules produced by our immune system to fight infection and cancer.

Your genes, immune system, microbiome, hormones, and more are listening to and taking instruction from your thoughts and feelings and beliefs. Addressing your stress levels is key to healthy aging.

The brain, for example, has its own detoxification system, the glymphatic system, which cleans up all the metabolic waste and garbage that accumulates during the day.

Immunosenescence, the aging of our immune system,

Thankfully, our bodies are equipped with sophisticated detoxification and cleaning systems—our liver, kidneys, lungs, skin, and digestive and lymph systems. The liver is an extraordinary organ that takes up toxins, transforms them, and excretes them through your bile into your gut to be eliminated. The kidneys filter waste from your blood and turn it into urine. The lungs get rid of carbon dioxide, the metabolic waste made by processing food and oxygen in your mitochondria that must be released from your body. The skin allows you to sweat out toxins. The digestive system removes waste from food and drink, passing the remains out your colon. The lymph system cleans up all the metabolic waste excreted by your cells and toxins produced in the process of living.

and upregulating your detoxification systems. I call it activating the 4-P system: process (liver), poop, pee, perspire.

The science is clear: Combining strength training with the right quality protein can both preserve and build muscle mass at any age. In fact, as we age this is not just a good idea; it is imperative if we want to stay agile, strong, functional, and active well over 100 years old.

Fiber-rich foods help keep the garden healthy: vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, whole grains, and beans. Certain foods have high levels of prebiotic fibers, including avocados, artichokes, asparagus, berries, peas, chia seeds, and pistachios.

Probiotic-rich foods, including traditional fermented foods like sauerkraut, pickles, tempeh, miso, natto, and kimchi, also help support a healthy gut.

If you are using plant proteins, it is important to supplement with leucine, branched-chain amino acids, creatine, and even phytonutrients such as urolithin A, all of which I use in my Healthy Aging Shake (see Chapter 14

The simple rule of exercise is this: You have to move, or you won’t!

HEALING OUR MINDS, HEARTS, AND SPIRIT: THE ANTIDOTE TO THE DANGERS OF CHRONIC STRESS

It might be hard to imagine, but your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, grief, joy, sadness, love, and anger are all transmuted into biological signals that change your gene expression, impacting your immune function, hormones, microbiome, neurotransmitters, neuroplasticity, mitochondria, and more.

Everyone must find their own way to heal their mind, heart, and spirit. Nourishing your spirit includes cultivating a positive mindset (optimists live longer even if they are wrong!), developing self-love and self-worth, prioritizing self-care, cultivating community and meaningful relationships, practicing healthy stress-management techniques, finding support, and practicing religion or spirituality if that speaks to you.

looked at having a sense of purpose and life expectancy. He found that people who have a clear sense of purpose, a reason to get up in the morning, lived up to seven years longer than those who didn’t have a clear purpose.

hormesis. Think of it as small doses of adversity or abundance that kick your body into high gear to protect itself. Hormesis may just be a big key to keeping us healthy and living a long, long time without disease or frailty.

AGEs, the advanced glycation end products formed from too much sugar binding to proteins and creating inflammation bombs.

the iAge test, or inflammatory age test. This new metric predicts multiple chronic diseases and measures the decline of your immune function with aging.

Chapter 14 The Young Forever Longevity Diet: Food as Medicine

Multivitamin and mineral. Getting a complete array of all the micronutrient vitamins and minerals is important to optimizing your metabolic functioning. This should include all the B vitamins in the correct forms for methylation, such as 5 methyl-folate instead of folate, or methylcobalamin instead of hydroxycobalamin, or pyridoxal-5-phosphate instead of B6. I recommend Multi t/d, 2 a day, by Pure Encapsulations or Polyphenol Nutrients by Pure Encapsulations; take 3 per day.

6. If you are still not feeling well or can’t get your score below 10 percent, then it is important to follow up with a functional medicine practitioner (consult the website of the Institute for Functional Medicine, ifm.org).