Young Forever

by Mark Hyman

The Japanese, who are the longest-lived people in the world, have a concept called ikigai, or “the reason for being.”

The science is clear—those who have more meaning and purpose in their lives live longer, regardless of their lifestyle.

This revolution is called functional medicine (also known as systems medicine or network medicine)—which looks at the body as an ecosystem, a web of complex interconnected networks and systems that regulate our biological functioning; systems that, when out of balance, drive dysfunction and disease.

The Jewish faith has a guiding principle—tikkun olam, or the repair of the world, righting the wrongs, facing and addressing injustice and poverty.

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. —Les Brown

Longevity was common in biblical times. Methuselah died at 969 years old; Noah was 950 years old; Adam was 930 years old.

Ogliastra region of Sardinia, the heart of Sardinia’s Blue Zone, which has the longest-lived men in the world.

Every day the Ikarians, some of the longest-lived humans on the planet, drink tea made from wild herbs, including sage. Turns out it is full of the same phytonutrients that green tea has, epigallocatechins, which are powerful detoxifying and anti-inflammatory antioxidants that act on our longevity switches.

The wild sage tea they drink daily has the same powerful protective longevity phytochemicals as green tea without the caffeine.

Zea is also known as emmer wheat, which is high in dietary fiber, has double the protein content of regular wheat, and has far more magnesium and vitamins A, B, C, and E, while having very low levels of gluten.

toward their family, friends, and community. Science now clearly links nutrient density and the flavor of a food to its phytochemical richness—whether it is a strawberry or goat cheese or prosciutto. This is what makes food medicine; this is the type of food we want washing over our DNA, regulating our epigenome, the system that controls all our gene expression,

In fact, in Dr 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.

It is never too late. In fact, one Journal of the American Medical Association study found that starting seventy-year-old participants on a Mediterranean diet and walking regimen reduced the risk of premature death by 65 percent!3

Obviously, the goal is not to become a shepherd or live in a mountain village. The key is to integrate the habits and behaviors that consistently have been proven to prevent disease and enhance your vitality and quality of life.

Your body is not a set of independent organs. It is a weblike ecosystem.

In the groundbreaking textbook from Harvard scientists called Network Medicine: Complex Systems in Disease and Therapeutics,

Functional medicine suggests that all diseases have a root cause (etiology).

Functional medicine is the science of creating health.

The body has within it instructions for repair. We simply must provide the right conditions to activate the body’s innate healing systems.

The more starch and sugar you eat, the more insulin you produce in order to clear the sugars from your bloodstream. Insulin is the fat-storage hormone. Over time, your cells become resistant to the effects of insulin, requiring more and more to keep your blood sugar normal.

Max Planck famously said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Seventy percent of the immune system is in the gut,

By measuring something called DNA methylation, the chemical tags or bookmarks on your genes that determine which genes are read (turned on) or silenced (turned off), you can determine your biological age.

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. Each gene is comprised of three of these nucleotides linked together in a specific order, such as ACT or GTA.

All your DNA does is code for proteins. Proteins not only make our cells and tissues and organs but also are the chemical messengers that regulate nearly everything in our bodies.

The software that runs our life program is the epigenome, which provides instructions to the hardware on what to do. What is the epigenome? Think of it as the keys on your computer keyboard or the keys of a piano.

Chemical compounds called methyl groups, one carbon and three hydrogen molecules (CH3), wrap around your DNA. These tiny little ubiquitous chemical groups literally control the function of your DNA by telling your body to either activate or silence a gene. The process of DNA methylation is highly influenced by your habits and environment, and it changes throughout your life for better or worse depending on the inputs to your body. It is those changes that help determine your biological age. When methyl groups are added to your DNA, the genes are silenced, or turned off. Similarly, when methyl groups are removed, the genes are turned on.

Even cuddling impacts your DNA methylation!3 Babies who don’t get enough love and affection are known to have developmental delays and lower IQ—all influenced by changes to their epigenome.4

The overarching concept here is simple. Our genes are fixed. But the genes that are expressed in our book of life, which genes are turned on or off, genes of health and vitality or genes of disease and early death, are modifiable.

It turns out that more than 90 percent of chronic disease is determined not by our genome but by our “exposome.”7 Conversely, that means that 90 percent of our health and our potential for longevity results not from our inherited genetic code but from the exposures that influence our genes.

Another study in a typically vitamin D–deficient population found that taking 4,000 IU of vitamin D3 could reduce biological age by 1.85 years in just sixteen weeks.11 Yet one more study on Polish women showed that a Mediterranean diet could lower biological age by 1.47 years over the course of a year.

Health and longevity are our natural states, but only if we understand how our bodies are designed to work best.

sirtuins are proteins that regulate several essential biological repair processes.

On the way to a talk, I asked him the about the causes of aging and how the sirtuins are regulated, and what impairs their life-extending activity. He simply said, “Sugar!”

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.

For example, we evolved in a symbiotic relationship with our diet, which comprised 800 species of wild plants. These are nearly absent in our modern diet, which is comprised of primarily four crops (corn, wheat, soy, and rice), things never consumed by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Our ancestors’ diet was phytochemically rich and contained ten times as much fiber and dramatically higher levels of vitamins, minerals, omega‑3 fats, and phytochemicals.1

Our bodies are elegantly designed not only to navigate the stress of not enough food, but also to build new cells and tissues and structures when food is abundant.

If I were to prescribe one intervention to extend life, to prevent and reverse chronic disease, it would be to dramatically reduce or eliminate sugar and refined starch from your diet.

Dr Jorge Plutzky, the head of preventive cardiology at Harvard, once said that if you could find a group of centenarians with perfectly clean arteries, they would have one thing in common—they would be insulin-sensitive.

mTOR is important for regulating cell growth, protein synthesis, mitochondrial function, cell senescence (programmed cell death), and more.

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).

For example, we want mTOR turned on when we are exercising, building muscle and creating new proteins, but we want it off to enhance auto...

Autophagy, which literally means “self-eating,” is a recycling system that is e...

The data, to be fair, is confusing. A constant influx of nutrients keeps mTOR on. However, when mTOR is silenced for long periods, we can’t create new proteins or build muscle.

Cycling periods of fasting or caloric restriction (which silences mTOR) with periods of adequate high-quality protein (which activates mTOR) to maintain and build new muscle is a powerful strategy for healthy aging.

But not only do amino acids activate mTOR; glucose and sugars activate it too, and not in a good way. Overactivation of mTOR by sugar and starch can cause cancer.2

There are certain phytonutrients that mimic a condition of beneficial stress called hormesis (discussed in Chapter 7), which can activate autophagy too.

These include the polyphenols in coffee, oleuropein in extra virgin olive oil, resveratrol in red grape skin, catechins in green tea, turmeric, berberine, and a gut metabolite from phytochemicals in pomegranate called urolithin A.

The key to health and longevity is balance: activating these pathways enough to rebuild and heal and grow but not too much to cause damage.

AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) is a critical enzyme found in every mammalian cell. It’s activated during times of “good” stress, called hormesis