Dr. David Sinclair: The Biology of Slowing & Reversing Aging | Episode 52

If you have low levels of insulin and another molecule called insulin-like growth factor, those low levels turn on the longevity genes ... By having high levels of insulin all day being fed, it means your longevity genes are not switched on.

If I was to put a number on it, I would say if eating a high-sugar meal or drinking a sugar-filled soda—what is that, 30 grams of sugar—let's say that's a 10/10 bad for you, a Diet Coke might be a 1.

When you look at animals, whether it's a dog or a mouse or a monkey, the ones that live the longest by far, 30% longer, and stay healthy are the ones that don't eat all the time.

We're ignoring the major cause of all these diseases. Aging is 80-90% the cause of heart disease, Alzheimer's. If we didn't get old and our body stayed youthful, we would not get those diseases. And, actually, what we're showing in my lab is if you turn the clock back in tissues, those diseases go away.

Excess iron will increase the number of senescent cells in the body. And senescent cells are these zombie cells that accumulate as you get older, and they sit there, and they cause inflammation mainly and also can cause cancer.

Our friend Peter Attia brought to my attention recently a new study that I think definitively said that dietary cholesterol has almost zero impact on blood cholesterol levels.

I know from measuring dozens of human beings that if you take NMN... for about two weeks, you'll double, on average, your NAD levels in the blood.

I actually ended up boiling aging down to an equation, which is the the loss of information due to entropy.

You look at who lives the longest; it's the really small people. This is a bit anecdotal, but it sounds like it might be true: The people who played the munchkins in 'The Wizard of Oz,' many of them went on to live to into their 90s and beyond.

Let's start with what I think was a big mistake—the idea that people should never be hungry. We live in a world now where there's at least three meals a day, and then we've got company selling bars and snacks in between ... Some people never experience hunger in their whole lives. It's really, really bad for them.

Now it's become a myth that metformin greatly inhibits your ability to exercise, which is not true. But, in an abundance of caution, I skip my metformin on days I'm going to exercise.

There are studies that show that the slower you take to develop, it also is predictive of having a longer, healthier life.

There are a lot of people selling resveratrol. If it's not light gray or white in color, throw it away. The brown stuff has gone bad or is contaminated.

I don't take a multivitamin. I don't want to have the excess iron in my body.