I AVOID 5 FOODS & my body is 30 YEARS YOUNGER! Harvard Genetics Professor David Sinclair

I'm better than a 20 year old for health. I think a lot of that's due to my new diet that I've adopted, because I can just see things getting better and better over time. Meet Dr David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. Show more

This is Dr Sinclair in 2013 and this is him now. He was 44 years old and now he is 54, but to me he kind of looks younger. Over the years, the professor has changed the way he eats and changed his lifestyle. Scientifically, he says that his body is younger. I've looked at my blood by chemistry and I'm actually now younger and healthier than I've ever been. Testosterone, glucose, inflammation, blood cell composition- but most of those markers I'm better than a 20 year old for for health. In this video, we will get straight into his scientific discovery in five parts. First, the exercise rules to longevity. Second, most important eating Habit to longevity. Third, the foods he eats for longevity. Fourth, the supplements he takes daily. Lastly, the foods he avoids for longevity. By living a healthy life, you can slow that rate of aging and prevent this- this Corruption of the body software, and even reboot it. Show more

Dr Sinclair's advice on exercise is simple: to exercise three times a week and Lose My Breath. You want to be able to be moving so fast that you cannot carry out a conversation easily. That's when you know you're becoming hypoxic, low in oxygen, and this low oxygen, we think, is a very good stimulator of this stress on the body and it. Your body responds in a positive way to build muscle, get better blood flow and also your tissues will put out chemicals that slow aging. Show more

So really, if you can just lose your breath for 10 minutes three times a week, that can give Remarkable Health benefits, lowering the rates of disease by 30 percent. The most important eating habit for longevity is: eat less often. It's not just what you eat, it's also when you eat, and this constant eating three meals a day plus snacks, is making us age faster than we need to. I like to eat within a period of about six hours a day. Over time learned to do is Skip meals. I'm not always successful. Sometimes I have breakfast in in beautiful places, but my goal is to not eat a large meal until dinner and then I eat a very healthy vegan meal. Show more

So what's the science behind the benefit of the time restricted feeding? If you're down to one meal a day, which I am now, you should wait and then you get your 20 year old body back. That's a nice bonus. It's the period of not eating that's so important for boosting the body's defenses against aging, to maximize longevity. But these long, extended periods are doing a real deep cleanse on the body and turning on that autophagy, that process of recycling proteins, very deeply. There is a set of genes that I wrote about in in my book lifespan. That's called the serotuins and they get turned on when there's not enough energy in the body. So if you don't have a lot of sugar in your bloodstream or a lot of protein, they will get turned on and they defend the body against the damage that causes the Aging. Certain diseases- type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, even cancer- those diseases seem to also benefit from fasting, including when you combine chemotherapy with fasting, you get this double benefit for many types of cancers. Here is a practical tip from Dr Sinclair for anyone who wants to start intermittent fasting. The trick is that you want to fill your body with fluids. For me, constant coffee, tea, hot water all the way through the day- being hydrated and filled with liquid- takes away any feeling of hunger. Also nuts, if you really are. Really you need to eat something. A bit of protein is known to take away the feeling of hunger rapidly. You want to have at least 16 hours of not eating or not eating very much, and then you can have eight hours. Show more

So typically that means having a late lunch. If you skip breakfast or if you prefer to skip dinner, skip that. But that gives my body this long window, more than 20 hours of not having glucose circulating from the external world. Show more

Now what happens when you do that- and it takes a few weeks for your body to adapt- is that your liver will learn how to compensate for a lack of food. It's called gluconeogenesis, the generation of glucose from your liver. It actually overcomes the feeling of hunger. Do it for at least two weeks because after the two week, especially by the three week Mark, your liver has now learned that you're not going to have breakfast or lunch and it will start making glucose at a steady level. That's really important because it's known that if you have these spikes of glucose, it leads to hunger when it crashes after a big meal. So during the six hour span of eating window, what does Dr Sinclair eat? I went almost completely to plants and my body has responded. I look better, I think, my skin is better, I feel better. My memory is certainly better. You just look at those populations and people that live a long time. They are generally smaller women who don't eat much, who eat vegetarian. I mean, that's the fact. So is it any plant he eats? No, he focuses on what he calls stress plants. This evolves around the concept called xenophormesis. It's a hypothesis that posits that certain molecules, such as plant polyphenols, which indicate stress in the plants, can have benefits of another organism which consumes it. Show more

The expected benefits include improved lifespan and fitness by activating the animal's cellular stress response. Well, the xenoc harmesis concept. Conrad howitz and I coined this term in the mid-2000s trying to explain why so many plant molecules are good for us. It just cannot be a coincidence, and we came up with this idea really prompted by a 2003 nature paper that we co-published that found there were at least 20 plant molecules called polyphenols that activate the sotuin enzyme called cert1, and when I looked into it, these polyphenols do remarkable things to the body. The one that got the most media attention, because it's in red wine, is Resveratrol, but there's positanol and there's phys, Eden and quercetin. These are supplements that people are getting excited about only now, but when you look into it, they activate and inhibit Pathways or proteins in the body that are known to be important for Health and Longevity. Show more

So how do we know if a food has been stressed? Well, you can start with the generalization that if they're grown out in a field, organically, without pesticides, probably they're more stressed. Right, just remember: eat. If you, your food is stressed, then you get the benefits. Stress your food so you don't have to, and so what we focus on are plants that are full of color. So try to eat bright red and purple, dark green colored vegetables, because those are the ones that have these polyphenols that can turn on the body's defenses and actually in my lab, if we give polyphenols to mice, they actually get healthier and run further like they've been exercising. Show more

You may be wondering what are some of the specific stress plants that Dr Sinclair eats. In the mornings Dr Sinclair enjoys green tea, which is a stress food and full of polyphenols. I drink matcha tea most mornings, which is the very thick, dark green, creamy green tea, ecgc from green tea. This ecgc has great anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties. While he enjoys all kinds of different leafy greens- he specifically mentioned spinach- eat a diet that's definitely full of leafy greens. Show more

Particularly spinach, is great because it's got the iron that we need plenty of vitamins for cooking. Olive oil is good, which is often used in the Mediterranean cuisine- a lot of olive oil with oleic acid, which activates your tunes as well. The Mediterranean diet is the one that I think is likely to be the most the easiest to do in the western world and to have the biggest bang for the buck for those who would find the completely vegetarian diet difficult to try. Dr Sinclair mentions that the Mediterranean diet, or Okinawan diet, is a good alternative, which he has practiced for decades. Before turning to exclusively plant-based diet. You were on the organound diet for quite some time, right? Yeah, I was. It's mostly carbohydrate, so there's a fair amount of rice, but probably could have done better with a bit of brown rice, white rice and your glucose through the roof, right. But mostly what I was eating were Chinese and or Japanese vegetables that I could get at the local market. So they're organic, fresh, green, full of vitamins and soy. Mostly it was that it was a plant-based, soy based diet with a little bit of fish. Show more

There are three supplements that Dr Sinclair is often quoted to take. Before we look at it in detail, please note that Dr Sinclair does not recommend any and he is not endorsing any brand. He does not sell any supplements. Speaking of wrong, we have a new Theory of Aging. We used to think that antioxidants were the cure to aging. Antioxidants have been really unsuccessful at lengthening the lifespan of anything, even a worm. It doesn't work that well. One of three things that you want to take consistently, I would take Resveratrol. I take a gram with a bit of yogurt, pin them in and then metformin. I don't sell any supplements, by the way, gotcha, I'm not making any money. Well, I don't recommend anything. I'm not just a PhD. The one chemical that I take every day is Resveratrol, which is the red wine chemical and that comes from grapes, so that one gets sprinkled into some yogurt in the morning. Nmn is a, a version of vitamin B3 that makes chemical in the body that we need for life and that's called NAD. And as we get older we make less and less of this. And without NAD, these sirtuins that we discovered slow aging. Show more

Remember the genes that we discovered. They don't work without a lot of NAD. So as we get older, our defenses Decline, and so by taking this supplement, we know that it doubles the levels of NAD back to when I was age 20.. There's now clinical trials that my colleagues at Harvard have done that says that nmn has some health benefits in early studies, such as lowering cholesterol and blood pressure, and so I take that one every day as well. Show more

Third one is metformin. Metformin is a little bit more controversial because it's a drug. It's just classified as a drug. That doesn't mean it's necessarily dangerous. In fact, it's one of the world's safest drugs. It's used for type 2 diabetes, to control blood sugar, and what's been found is that people who take Metformin tend to live a lot longer, even those who don't have type 2 diabetes. There's evidence that they are protected against cardiovascular disease and Frailty and even Alzheimer's disease. Now let's turn our heads into what Dr Sinclair cut out of his diet for longevity. First is sugar. The big killer is sugar. Glucose, particularly fructose, is also pernicious and if you give animals lots of glucose, especially fructose, they will get fatty liver disease, they'll get diabetes. It's really bad. The best predictor of your long-term longevity that we know of is your blood sugar. When you've got high blood sugar, it attaches to a lot of proteins in your body. You become caramelized cancer cells. By the way love sugar. They live on sugar and that's another reason why you should try to keep it low. Try to avoid too much fruit berries, particularly fruit juice. Definitely avoid that Sugar. High spiking your sugar is not healthy in the long run. Your body can make its own sugar. Your liver makes sugar. You just need to wait two weeks for it to get used to it. Our liver is pretty lazy, but after two weeks it learns. Ah, in the morning I have to make some sugar and what? What I found is that my liver making sugar is low, lot smarter than my eyes and my mouth eating sugar. There's even an order which you can eat your meals to reduce the blood sugar Spike. Show more

You can put the sugar at the end of the meal. You can quit something, but you don't have to be Draconian about it. I still like to steal a little, you know, a few scoops of ice cream if I see it, but I'm not going to eat a giant bowl of ice cream every night. Show more

We Now understand why cutting down on sugar is important, but if we need to, we can go for healthier Alternatives. But there are substitutes. For example, monk fruit produces sugar. Are you alerts? Stevia is a big one for me under the sugar Branch. Bread is one of the foods he has cut out of his meals. First thing I cut out was a lot of carbohydrates. I used to eat bread every day. I would just put, if I ate something, it would be on toast. Show more

Okay, that's my life. I cut that out and have found immediate improvements in my biochemistry levels, particularly my glucose levels. Is that if you eat a piece of toast for breakfast or- heaven forbid- a giant glass of orange juice, you'll have this spike in sugar and you'll feel great, but then your body will put out too much insulin and suck that glucose out of your bloodstream and put you into a glucose deficit, and that's hypoglycemia. And then you're hungry, you've got ghrelin coming out into your body and you, you feel hungry and you need to eat something. I'm at a state, though, now, where I don't get those Rises and crashes. My liver is putting out glucose from when I wake up till dinner, and I've never been so focused. I've never been so brain fog free, because these crashes what they do is they make you feel shaky or tired and brain fog, and I wish I'd done this in my 20s and done it my whole life, because I've really never felt better because of it. Show more

The next thing I cut out was meat and that improved my numbers even better. Cholesterol triglycerides all came down and I have a familial history genetics of heart disease. And it's not just the protein, it's also the fat that comes along with the steak and whatever that I was eating. Well, I love meat. I would love to eat meat. They taste. It tastes really good. It's just the science says plants give you better bang for the buck for longevity than meat. Protein that's in plants is actually has a ratio of amino acids that stimulates these longevity genes- the septuans and another one called mtor. And if you always eat meat every meal, your body's just not fighting aging the way it could if you ate more plants and you can eat meat occasionally. Show more

Fish, for example, has a lot of great omega-3 fatty acids. So I'm not against meat. I just think try to focus more on plants if you can. Third change was the dairy. I did that just to see what would happen. I figured it wouldn't matter. I'm not allergic to Dairy, I'm not lactose intolerant, but it did have an effect. It made things even better, and what I think is going on, Shane, is that I was eating a large amount of protein, not just fat but eggs and all that stuff- and now that I have less Pro protein, I think that mtor pathway- that's really important for longevity in animals and probably people- is really kicking in in a way that had never done so before. The new research just over the last two years says that drinking alcohol every day is really not good for you. So I've cut out alcohol and I've focused on Plants. But if you cannot give up your wine, then here is one last clip from Dr Sinclair: in the case of red wine, choose great varieties that are stress sensitive. Pinot Noir is one of the most sensitive, if not the most sensitive great variety and that's why it has the most Resveratrol of any other type of wine. Show more