Aging is not the normal and natural consequence that we all will suffer, but rather aging is a disease that can be slowed or halted.

Dr. Sinclair's work is focused on why we age and how to slow or reverse the effects of aging.

You will have in-depth knowledge about the biology of aging and practical tools that you can apply in your everyday life.

Why is it that having elevated blood sugar, glucose, and insulin ages us more quickly?

And or why is it that having periods of time each day or perhaps longer can extend our lifespan?

Let's start with what I think was a big mistake was the idea that people should never be hungry.

We live in a world now where there's at least three meals a day.

So the feeling of hunger, some people never experience hunger in their whole lives.

It's really, really bad for them.

What we actually found, my colleagues and I, when you look at, first of all, 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.

The group of genes that I work on are called sirtuins.

There's seven of them.

And we showed in 2005 in a science paper that if you have low levels of insulin and another molecule called insulin-like growth factor, those low levels turn on the longevity genes.

But by having high levels of insulin all day, being fed means your longevity genes are not switched on.

So you're falling apart, your epigenome, your information that keeps your cells functioning over time just degrades quicker.

Your clock is ticking faster by always being fed.

It's not as important what you eat, it's when you eat during the day.

What is the protocol that people can extrapolate from that?

Well, if there's one thing I could say, definitely try to skip a meal a day.

That's the best thing.

Does it matter which meal?

Or are they essentially equivalent?

Well, as long as it's at the end or the beginning of the day.

I'll tell you what I do.

I skip breakfast.

I have a tiny bit of yogurt or olive oil because the supplements I have need to be dissolved in it.

And then I go throughout the whole day as I'm doing right now here with this glass of water here.

I'm just keeping myself filled with liquids.

And so I don't feel hungry.

Beware that the first two to three weeks when you try that, you will feel hungry.

And you also have a habit of wanting to chew on something.

But try to make it through the first three weeks and do without breakfast or do without dinner.

You'll get through it.

And I did that for most of my life actually, mainly because I wasn't hungry in the morning.

Some people are very hungry in the morning and they may wanna consider skipping dinner instead.

But I will go throughout the whole day.

I don't get the crashes of the high glucose and the low glucose.

Anyone who goes, oh man, it's three o'clock,

I'm gonna need a sleep.

If you do what I do, you will not experience that anymore.

So you reminded me of something that I meant to ask earlier, that obesity reduces NAD levels and accelerates aging.

Yeah, why would being fat make people age faster?

We don't know, but I'll give you my best answer, which is that obesity comes along with a lot of problems that include a lot of senescent cells in fat.

If you stain old fat for senescent cells, it lights up.

And when you kill off those cells, at least in mice and maybe in humans it looks like, the fat is less toxic to the body because those senescent cells in the fat are secreting these inflammatory molecules that will accelerate aging as we now know.

You talk about the sirtuins in NAD, the sirtuins only like to come on or get activated when the body is under adversity.

And if a cell is surrounded by fat or contains a lot of fat, it's gonna think times are good, doesn't need to switch on.

What you wanna do is to get the cells to be perceiving adversity.

Because our modern life, we're sitting around, we're eating too much, we're not exercising.

Our cells respond.

They go, hey, everything's cool, no problem.

And they become relaxed and they don't turn on their defenses and we age rapidly.

We can see it in the clock.

People who exercise and eat less have a slower ticking clock, it's a fact.

What I found in my research was that if we gave resveratrol, this red wine molecule that became well-known in the 2000s, if we gave it to mice their whole lifespan, they were protected against a high fat diet, they had lean organs, they lived slightly longer, but not a lot.

And if we gave them a high fat diet without resveratrol, they actually lived a lot shorter.

So resveratrol protected them against the high fat diet.

We gave it to them on a normal diet, they just ate it when they wanted and there wasn't much effect.

The mice that were given resveratrol every second day on a normal diet lived dramatically longer than any other group.

We had mice living over three years.

And what that told me is that probably you don't wanna be taking a supplement every day.

You can take it either every other day or give your body a rest.

And I do the same with my meals.

I rest during the day and then I give a nutritious dinner to my body and then give it a rest.

Same with exercise.

And then I try to time it, because there are times when I'm taking the drug metformin, which mimics low energy.

For those of you who don't know, metformin is a drug given to type 2 diabetics to bring down their blood sugar levels.

But it's been found that looking at tens of thousands of veterans, that those two type 2 diabetics live longer than people that don't even get type 2 diabetes.

So it's a longevity drug.

Right now, you have to get it from your doctor in the US.

In most other countries, you can just get it over the counter.

And you protect it, it looks like, based on epidemiological data, cancer, heart disease, frailty, dementia.

So I take metformin along with the resveratrol.

But here's the thing, if I'm going to exercise that day,

I will skip the metformin.

And a lot of people think that they should stop taking metformin because they're never gonna get muscle or it's gonna affect their ability to build up muscle.

But that's not true.

What metformin does to you, it actually just reduces your ability to have stamina because it's inhibiting your body's ability to make energy.

And so what happens is when you're on metformin, you do fewer reps.

But guess what?

Those muscles that you do build up on metformin have the same strength and have much lower inflammation and other markers of aging.

You just won't have that extra 5% size of muscles.

So if you want large muscles, don't take metformin and you'll be fine during your exercise.

But for me, I'm not trying to get giant.

I want strong muscles and I want to live longer and healthier.

What are the behavioral tools that one can start to think about in terms of ways to modulate basically the way that DNA is being expressed and functioning?

In other words, what are the sorts of things that people can do to improve the sirtuin pathway?

Well, we know that aerobic exercise in mice and rats raises their energy levels and their levels of one of the genes goes up.

What we don't know yet is what type of exercise is optimal to get them to change.

We're doing work with the military in the US to try and understand that kind of thing.

But what do I do?

I base my exercise on the scientific literature, which has shown that maintaining muscle mass is very important for a number of reasons.

The two main ones are you want to maintain your hormone levels.

I'm an older male losing my testosterone and muscle mass over time.

And by exercising, I will maintain that and have.

In fact, I probably haven't had a body like this since I was 20.

So that's one of the benefits of having this lifestyle.

Do you regularly do the cold shower thing, ice baths, cold water swims?

Are you into that whole biz?

I don't do them regularly.

I do try to sleep cool.

I sleep better anyway.

I try to dress without a lot of warm clothes.

I'm here in a T-shirt.

It's middle of summer, but in winter, I'll try to wear a T-shirt too.

So you're challenging your system to thermoregulate.

Right.

I've got this hypothesis with Ray Cronus.

We published what's called the metabolic winter hypothesis, which is tens of thousands of years ago, we were either hungry or cold or both.

And we rarely experience that now.

And so we try to give ourselves the metabolic winter.

And part of the problem, I think, with the obesity epidemic is that we're never cold.

And cold, when you're cold, you have to burn energy.

It may be only slightly.

But over the whole night, if you're a little bit cool, you'll actually expend more energy.

So I try to do that.

Recently, I've noticed that you've opened up a sort of an email slash website that people can access to get some information about their own health and rates of aging.

What is this test that you've been working on?

What I want is a credit score for the body to make it easy for people to follow their health.

And there is a number.

There's a biological age that you can measure.

Unfortunately, the test is many hundreds of dollars right now, but in my lab, we've been able to bring that down a lot.

And so I want to democratize this test so that everybody has access to a score for their health that can predict not just their future health and time of death, but to change it.

And I'm building a system that will point people in the right direction that will improve not just their health now, but 10, 20, 30 years into the future.

And we can measure that and very cheaply keep measuring it to know that you're on the right track.

And so this is the biological age test.

We've developed it.

It's a simple mouth swab.

Go to drsinclair.com and you'll be one of the first people in the world to get this test and see what we're doing.