Mark Hyman: meet the doctor who says he can make us live to 120

Evening Standard

Best-selling author and physician Dr Mark Hyman believes he has the secrets to wellness and longevity. He talks about Big Sugar lobbies and why we need to change how we think about cancer.

Transcript

00:00David Sinclair did a macroeconomic analysis of the benefit to society of increasing one

00:06year of healthy life as we get older, and that would be $37 trillion.

00:11If we extended 10 years of healthy life, that would be over $360 trillion of benefit to

00:18the economy.

00:19And the truth is, Evgeny, is that 20% of most of people's lives is spent in poor health,

00:25the last 20%.

00:27So of their whole life, 20% is not with a good health span.

00:32And the goal here is to get your health span to equal your lifespan.

00:36Imagine being one of those that'll go out at 95 years old, do a nice hike up a mountain,

00:40come home, have a nice meal, go to bed, and go to sleep, or maybe at 100 or 120.

00:45And I think given what we know now around the science of longevity and aging, which

00:48has basically been neglected, we didn't think we could do anything about aging.

00:53We just focused on the diseases of aging, not the fundamental process of aging.

00:57And that's where the longevity science has really exploded in the last decade or two,

01:01because there's been a lot of investment.

01:03Before there was no research, there was no investment.

01:04It was like $10 million, $20 million, a couple hundred million dollars a year by the government.

01:09We need billions just to really understand this.

01:12And thankfully, a lot of very wealthy entrepreneurs have started innovation labs around studying

01:18longevity and have spent billions of dollars trying to look at the mechanisms.

01:21And what they've come up with is, you know, if you, for example, were to cure heart disease

01:25and cancer from the face of the planet, these are two diseases that are the number one and

01:30two killers, we would extend life by maybe five to seven years.

01:34If we address the fundamental mechanisms of aging, we call the hallmarks of aging, we

01:39can extend life by 20 to 30 years, which means someone could be living to be 110 or 120.

01:45So we may see, by the innovations around this space, our life span increasing, but

01:52also our health span increasing.

01:54And so, if I may, I'll just talk a little bit about this concept of hallmarks of aging,

01:59which I wrote about in my book, Young Forever.

02:01But essentially, there's underlying processes, and this maps exactly against functional medicine,

02:07that have to be regulated in order for us to be healthy.

02:09And there's things that degrade reliably if we don't do anything to prevent them from

02:15degrading as we get older.

02:17And part of the problem of traditional approaches to longevity is they're focused on, what can

02:21we do for this hallmark or that hallmark?

02:22Is there a drug to fix, you know, mitochondria, or a drug to fix inflammation, or a drug to

02:27fix the microbiome?

02:29And it's really the wrong thinking, because we need to go, what are the causes of the

02:32hallmarks?

02:33If the hallmarks are the causes of the disease of aging, and these common things are included

02:39in all these diseases, whether you have heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, the

02:42list goes on, it's all caused by these basic dysfunctions in the hallmarks of aging.

02:47Then the question is, what causes the hallmarks of aging?

02:50And this is where I think we need to think differently about this.

02:54And this is what I wrote about in my book, that it's pretty really simple from a practical

02:58application of systems medicine or functional medicine, you figure out what is the thing

03:03that's causing the damage to the hallmarks of aging?

03:05It's either too much of something, or not enough of something, right?

03:08Too much bad stuff, not enough good stuff.

03:11So many of these are regulated, these hallmarks of aging are regulated by a nutrition and

03:16what we do, and what I call the four longevity switches.

03:20And these are very practically understood.

03:23And there are four basic embedded, ancestrally evolutionary conserved pathways in the body

03:30that are designed to activate our renewal, repair, regenerative, and healing systems.

03:34And when those pathways are dysregulated because of what we're doing, because of what

03:40we're eating, processed food, sugar, starch, because of lack of exercise, because of lack

03:47of intake of protective nutrients that regulate these, or what we call phytochemicals, because

03:53of the lack of certain hormetic practices, which are things like stresses, like hot and

03:57cold therapy, these pathways don't get properly activated.

04:01And they were evolutionary conserved when things went wrong to actually get us healthier.

04:06So these are the four longevity switches that I call that sort of the master regulators

04:12of aging.

04:13And they're all dynamically related, and they all cross-interact, but we can kind of understand

04:17them as this nutrient-sensing system that detects what we eat and then regulates our

04:22physiology based on that.

04:24And when it's going right, we're going to reduce inflammation, reduce oxidative stress,

04:30increase our mitochondrial function, improve our microbiome.

04:33We're going to have better sugar responses and regulating our blood sugar.

04:37We're going to have reduction in cancer gene expression.

04:40We're going to have all sorts of benefits that are fundamental to the process of healthy

04:44aging.

04:45And so these four pathways, two of them sense too much nutrients, and two of them sense

04:50not enough nutrients.

04:51So the first two are our insulin signaling pathway.

04:55Now this is probably the one that's getting the most stress in the wrong way by eating

05:00too much starch and sugar.

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