The Science Behind Why We Age | Episode 1

Having high levels of blood sugar, we know, predisposes you to other diseases—heart disease, frailty, dementia. You don't want to have a lot of sugar in your blood. It's one of the reasons... I believe everybody should try to keep their blood sugar levels reasonably low—because the higher levels are toxic.

There's one thing that we've been ignoring for centuries. Modern medicine, doesn't even think of it. And that is that aging itself is a medical condition. Aging is a disease, and as we've been talking about today and we'll talk about in later episodes, it's increasingly a treatable medical condition.

We want to activate AMPK. So, how do you do that? You actually eat less, you fast, and that'll turn on AMPK. It'll do a few things. It'll make your body more sensitive to insulin, suck the sugar out of your bloodstream, which can be toxic if it stays high. It also ramps up the energy-producing centers of the body, these membrane-filled bags, which are actually ancient bacteria living in our bodies called mitochondria.

Aging is now controllable. We have the technology to control how fast we age. We can measure that, slow it down, and even reverse it. This has never happened in human history before ... It's going to fundamentally change the course of human history.

Type 2 diabetics that go on metformin, on average, live longer than people that don't have type 2 diabetes.

That's part of the problem with aging, we think, is that that beautiful packaging of the DNA that allows a cell to remain a skin cell forever or brain cell, essentially forever, is lost. You start to get this unspooling of the DNA, and genes that shouldn't be on start to come on.

We, finally, as a species, understand how to control our biology, how to optimize our bodies, during early-life, midlife, and certainly late-life to lead lives that can be decades longer and healthier.

What you want is to have mTOR levels low, to inhibit the mTOR. And when you have low mTOR activity, that's when you get the longest lifespan.

What's important here is that we can improve our health and our long-term survival at any age.

Aging is one of these universal things. And what really is remarkable that we've learned in my lab over the last 20 years is that the same genes that control aging in yeast work in worms, flies, mice, and even humans.