Anti-Aging: The Secret To Aging In Reverse

Hello Health Champions. Most people want to live for a really long time

but nobody wants to get old. How do we resolve this apparent conflict? Well

today we're going to talk about the secret to Aging in Reverse coming right up.

hey I'm Dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former

Olympic decathlete and if you want to truly master health by understanding how

the body really works make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell

so you don't miss anything how old do you want to get well it's not really a

good question it's sort of unfair because most people don't have the

knowledge to put that question into a good context and why is that because we

rationalize about age we think we have to accept a certain age and we base that

on life expectancy we see how long have people lived how long do people

typically live in our culture in our society but the other problem is that we

look at the old people and we see that a lot of them are sick and we say I do

want to live a long time but I don't want to suffer I don't want to be sick

for a long time so then we justify we rationalize our answer based on that and

we come up with with a number maybe but let's try to not rationalize for a

moment and let's just play the what-if game

what if instead of being 90 years old and looking and feeling like this you

are 90 years old and you look and feel like that would that change anything

would you say oh look at that I'm 90 years old

I was only supposed to live to 80 that's what I expected that's what I said so I

guess I'm gonna have to go kill myself tomorrow of course not

because as long as you feel good as long as you enjoy life you want to keep

living so the only reason we put a limit on it is that we don't think that we can

keep it up we don't think that we can keep

feeling good and enjoy life and be productive but if we could that would

change everything what if you could feel the way you do today you wouldn't want

to stop living anytime soon you would think hey maybe a hundred and

twenty maybe a hundred and fifty maybe way way beyond that. One of the leading

researchers on aging and rejuvenation reversing aging has suggested that aging

is a disease and the reason he says that and I would tend to agree is that we

classified diseases if they affect less than 50% of people if it affects more

than 50% like almost everybody then it's not considered a disease now it's just a

condition it's just the inevitable something that happens to everybody

so diseases or things like arthritis and high blood pressure and cancer diabetes

dementia because they affect less than 50% of the population at least less than

50% of the young population if you average it out but if you look at

someone who's 20 years old and you look at the likelihood of finding arthritis

and blood pressure and cancer and so on in a 20 year old it is very very small

very very low probability whereas if you look in an 80 90 year old there are

hundreds or thousands of times more likely to have that disease so rather

than looking at these conditions as individual diseases he says we need to

look at them as a result of aging because they don't go up with a few

percent they go up thousandfold and therefore aging is the main disease is

the principal disease that is causing all of that so let's stop looking at

these and let's just start looking at solving aging and if you've been

watching this channel for a while you know we talk about the same things that

these are not individual conditions if we handle the root cause which is a lack

health lack of function then all of these problems go away

what is aging then if it's a disease what causes it right so there's been all

these different theories over the years and these are all very well researched

there's been Nobel Prize awarded for some of them and they include DNA damage

and telomere shortening and mitochondrial dysfunction and the list

goes on and on but these are not the mechanisms these are not the causes

these are things that we observe as aging progresses as aging progresses

these things progress but there is a unified principle just like in physics

they look for the unified field theory the one idea that explains all other

rules all other laws of physics well if these are not the causes then what is

the cause what is the one thing that unites these theories and according to

David Sinclair it is the loss of information and when it comes to

information and loss of information there are two kinds genetic information

made up of DNA accounts for 20% of aging and DNA is a code made up of four

letters A, T, C and G. Adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine and because there's

four distinct letters we consider this digital information because it's either

on or off just like in a computer it's a 1 or a 0 it's not anything in between so

just like these letters they're not a little bit a and a little bit C or some

other letter there these are the only four options the other type of

information is epigenetic and that accounts for 80% of aging and how aging

functions in the body and the epigenetic is the DNA packaging

and what does that mean well think of DNA as a blueprint that blueprint

contains information but the blueprint doesn't

make decisions you can think of it also as a cookbook that the DNA that's the

written recipes inside the pages but the DNA that's the whole wrapper the whole

package so you can't look at the recipe you can't read the recipe until you open

the book and the cookbook is not going to decide what's for dinner right you

decide and there's lots of variables that are involved with deciding so that

makes the epigenetic more analogue okay they're more variables they can be

expressed a little bit or more or all the way they're not just on or off so we

could have different things for dinner depending on what we're in the mood for

depending on what we had yesterday depending on what ingredients we have at

home so you decide the epigenetic information decides not the cookbook and

because DNA is so stable and because DNA of four distinct letters and it can be

repaired then when we're talking about loss of information and aging we're

talking about the loss of analog information now DNA is packaged in

chromosomes if you open up a cell and you look in a microscope you can

actually see this structure but if you unravel it you see that it's a enormous

Lea long strand made up of chromatin and these this DNA double helix it's coiled

up and it's wrapped around protein and whenever it's wrapped around these

protein then it's packaged it's packaged tightly and you can't express you can't

open up and read the portion of the DNA that is coiled up it's it's like the

book is closed you can't read it then how do you read it

well there's environmental influences these are the epigenetic factors things

in our environment that affect the chemical

messengers that attach and influence these proteins these histone tails and

then these proteins will uncoil the DNA strands so that we can open up and read

it and when we're young then this process works very very well everything

is properly packaged every cell has an accurate identity because only the

correct proteins are produced at the right time however as we age then this

packaging can degrade right the we have a loss of identity because the coiling

and uncoiling because the communication doesn't function as accurately and now

there's some confusion as to when to turn these genes on and off and as a

result the correct proteins are not necessarily produced at the correct time

in the correct tissue so now we start having confusion between the liver isn't

really sure if it's supposed to be a liver or a kidney or a brain and there's

some overlap of the proteins being produced when there's less precision

then we have less health and then there's three different levels of

epigenetic expressions three different levels that we can affect this and the

first one is the simplest but also the most short-term and that's simply that

we have transcription factors that's how we just turn the genes on and off it's

things that very quickly can open up and express different genes the second one

is a little harder but it also lasts a little longer it's kind of medium term

and that's silencing genes this is done by proteins called sirtuins that have

been identified there's seven of them in humans and the SI R stands for silent

information regulators so these are things that can affect the bundling and

the expression of genes long-term so when we

can activate the sirtuins now we can have more long-term effect and the third

and the most profound way is what they're doing research on now and this

is what's called a DNA methylation clock or the horvath clock and if you look

here then there's something called a methyl group which is basically just a

carbon with three hydrogen's they're present in the body everywhere but they

mean different things depending on where they happen and where they were they're

used but when they stick to a DNA then that's like the DNA gets rusty it's like

we get plaquing on the DNA but the thing to realize is that there are enzymes

that put it there and there are enzymes that can remove it and when they realize

that that was quite the revolutionary discovery because then that meant that

not only can you slow down aging but you could actually reverse it and then what

they also found is that all of the information all of the information that

made your body do certain things when it was young that had a youthful behavior

all that information is still there it's like a hard drive back up and it's

really just more a question of how and when do we complete these processes when

do we make this a reality as opposed to if so now as it relates to aging time

doesn't just flow in one direction anymore it's actually possible to go

backwards in time and get younger to reverse aging if we look closer at this

third step the DNA methylation and we realize that we can remove these methyl

groups then it really truly is like turning back time so the technique is

there it has been done in certain portions of mouse tissue they can't do

it in a whole mouse and they certainly can't do it in a human

within our lifetime it's very possible that this will be a reality that we can

reset that we go back ten years and then every 10 years we do another reset and

we go back and do it again so that we can repeat this process many many times

so in the body we have something called stem cells and those are at conception

we only have stem cells they're the original cells they can become different

kinds of cells and they gradually differentiate until they're fully

differentiated and now they are the different final tissues so they are

blood cells and gut lining and muscle and brain cells and so forth but this

typically only flows in one direction from stem cells to final tissue but what

they have discovered is guy called Yamanaka he got the Nobel Prize for this

he found four genes and by combining them properly they can actually turn the

differentiated tissue into stem cells they literally turned back time they

take an old cell and make it young so that it can start all over and become

different tissues again and now it doesn't have that age marker that the

tissue originally had and when they do cloning then the new individual created

the new organism has a normal lifespan so they take an old cell and that means

that once they clone it once they turn it back into a stem cell we use that

technology then it is truly like they have a hard drive back up all that

youthful information is still there now that's almost like the movie The Curious

Case of Benjamin Button where a guy was born as an old man and he lives his life

in Reverse and he dies a young baby so that's obviously a made-up story but

it's kind of interesting that we actually have the technology now and

we have done this in mice tissues where they have regenerated old optic nerves

and they've turned them young so like I said this may or may not happen in our

lifetime the step number three where we turn back time so for now we want to

focus on is what can I do now how can I slow or delay aging and have the best

quality of life not just live longer but to have the health to enjoy it and

something we talked about a lot on this channel is good stress versus bad stress

eustress versus distress and that applies enormously to anti-aging

research so short term intense stress is what humans are made for that's how we

have functioned for as long as we've been around we've been challenged we've

been threatened and whenever that happens the body thinks I gotta get

better I gotta get better so this short term

intense stress it activates survival genes it activates growth hormone and

all that good stuff as well but these longevity genes are actually activated

and this short term intense stress may be the most beneficial thing that you

can do for your health and your hormone balance and your longevity the other

type of stress unfortunately is what humans are mostly exposing themselves to

which is a chronic low-grade stress this is not a challenge that benefits the

body in any way it's a kind of long drawn-out wearing down that doesn't give

the body a chance to recuperate so this is the stuff that kills you whereas this

activates survival gene and it's the most beneficial this may be the most

destructive thing that you can do so even though we call both of them stress

there is an enormous difference between eustress and distress we talked a lot

on this channel about lifestyle changes that you have more

influence than you think and now these same changes come back in the longevity

research so high-intensity interval training and intermittent fasting are

very powerful ways to activate survival genes basically what they mean is you

want to challenge your body you want to threaten its survival a little bit you

want to push it so you want to breathe hard you want to get your heart rate up

for a short period of time on a regular basis same thing with food eating three

meals a day every day with snacks is one of the worst things you can do because

there's never a reason for the body to protect itself and preserve anything and

recycle anything called autophagy but when we do HIIT now if we activate these

survival genes and one of the most important fuels to fuel these survival

genes and the sirtuins involved is something called nad nicotinamide

adenine dinucleotide and guess what one of the best ways to make nad is to do

high-intensity interval training and intermittent fasting another way to fuel

the sirtuins is with a supplement called resveratrol which occurs in red wine but

which has been isolated and you can buy it as a supplement another compound that

has only recently become available is called NMN it's nicotinamide mono

nucleotide so it's very closely related to NAD it's a precursor it's one step

away from being nad so by eating some of the NMN you're actually increasing the

levels of NAD and why is that important because NAD is something that occurs

naturally in the body but it declines with age so a 50 year old probably only

has about half as much as a 20 year old and they believe that this is a critical

component of the aging process that a very big factor in why we age is

that we don't have the NAD that we used to have so you as an individual have a

lot of influence in slowing or delaying the aging process when it comes to

actually reversing age and turning the clock back then you're gonna have to

wait for some help they're gonna have to solve some issues first in that process

but here's how I think about it that for every year that you live they're gonna

have they're going to be closer to a solution they're gonna have more

advances every year and this research is accelerating so the longer you live the

more likely that you're going to be able to live even longer and that you're

gonna do it in perfect health if you enjoyed this video and you'd like to

learn more about health and how the body really works I think you'd really

enjoyed that video next thank you so much for watching I'll see you next time