In May 2021, as part of the Unite to Prevent, fifth International Vatican Conference, Professor Nir Barzilai, MD, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Professor David Sinclair, PhD, of the Harvard Medical School discussed how to live healthily to the age of 120 and beyond.
In may 2021 as part of the unite to prevent fifth international vatican conference professor nia basilai md of the albert einstein college of medicine and professor david sinclair phd of the harvard medical school discussed how to live healthily to the age of 120 and beyond and there’s a link in the description below to the full conference all the difference
Is that david’s book is lifespan and my book is healthspan but you cannot really actually distinguish between them because what we have found as gyroscientist is that we can target aging and if we target aging then we delay diseases and we live healthier and so if we delay disease and live healthier we’ll also live longer so in fact we’re talking about the same
Mechanism and if there’s any difference it’s just because for many people a longevity somehow is a curse they think that they live they don’t think that they live healthy as they live longer and and and and that’s the thing that we kind of have to change we can live healthier and the side effect is living longer what’s better well like all good scientists
We do debate things that’s our job but fortunately over the last decade we uh longevity researchers we call ourselves have come upon a list of about eight major causes of aging that we all agree on um and so some of these are well known these are shortening of the ends of chromosomes the telomeres the loss of stem cells uh cellular senescence are these cell
These cells are like zombie cells that accumulate in the body the loss of mitochondria which are the power packs of the cell and the list goes on there’s one called epigenetic alterations that may be a major part of that but science is always dynamic and we’re discovering new things all the time but what we’re really i think looking for here which would be super
Exciting is are there one or two major causes that lead to these other bad things that happen to our body and in that way we could theoretically intervene slow down the aging process and stay much healthier for longer as near mentioned and therefore we live longer as a result the the major question is if you get to 100 do you get your disease when you’re 60 like
Everyone and all you do is live longer with disease and the answer is not health spending life span in this population goes together they live 20 30 years healthier than than than a control group and that’s not what’s most exciting what’s most exciting is that they have what we call a contraction of morbidity they spend very little time at the end of their life
Sick thirty percent of them just don’t wake up in the morning so so we can achieve that we are built in to achieve it there are lots of genetic component to exceptional longevity genetic component that slows aging and one of the major one in our centenarian is the fact that all the growth hormone mechanisms are impaired a lot of genes of growth are impaired
Because we need the growth hormone when we are young to build the body but then when our with aging our body starts to break down we have to shift the energy from grow growth to protection and we can find it in our centenarians among other genes recommend or suggest to live longer it would be eat less often we live in a world of abundance now with three meals
And snacks uh this is what it’s actually doing to us besides make us obese is it’s turning off our natural defenses against disease and aging that we have and these are controlled by longevity genes that nier and i and many others in the field have discovered um so you want to put your body in a state of perceived adversity run a little move lift weights uh eat
Less often eat the right foods and then your body responds and fights against deterioration unfortunately the world that we have is we love comfort and this is actually accelerating our aging so we need to really just get off our behinds don’t eat so often and and get those longevity genes to work and protect us over the long run uh so first of all david mentions
The hallmarks of aging and he mentioned that when you target one you actually affect some of the others and that’s what happened with metformin actually we published a paper showing that it detects all the hallmarks of aging why is it it’s really simple it happens in the drugs that david developed the the resveratrol kind of drugs and rapamycin which is another
Drug when you take the cell or organ and body and make it the in from old to young you’re going to change all those hallmarks and that’s what happened when you have it through what we call general protection um metformin for us is a tool to get a new indication that is the prevention of age-related diseases something that the fda doesn’t totally grasp nobody
Really grasp this concept yet and that’s why it’s so important that we’re here to show that we can prevent a bunch of age-related disease by just targeting aging more specifically and so metformin is a drug that safe has been used for decades it actually was used first to prevent fluid malaria when it was discovered that it has anti-diabetic properties but people
In metformin have less diabetes have less a heart disease have less alzheimer have less cancer and they even live have their mortality brutality of people with diabetes on metformin is less than people without diabetes so this is an important tool to show that we can target aging and then lots of drugs will be developed in combination and we can really achieve
What we’re trying to so the idea really behind this is is there something controlling the hallmarks of aging is there something that goes wrong over time that could potentially be reset and over 25 years that i’ve been working in this field working on little yeast cells that make bread and beer all the way up to humans what the data is pointing to is that one of
The major drivers of aging is the loss of what we call epigenetic information and briefly what that means is we have two types of information out in our body we have the genome which is the dna and then we have the control systems which are the epig which is the epigenome um an analogy would be the a compact disc where the music is the genome and the information
In the dna it’s very robust and then the epigenome is the reader to read the right songs at the right time and aging uh i think of as scratches on the cd so you cannot read the right songs at the right time or in the case of the cell you cannot read the right genes at the right time and that that’s what we call epigenetic decay and that might be a root cause of
Aging that leads to many other problems that we’ve talked about and drugs like metformin slow down the accumulation of the scratches and perhaps even erase some of them which is exciting but the most exciting part about this theory if it’s correct is that the music in of ourselves is still there if we polish those scratches we can get back the youthful music of
Our lives and that’s what we’re trying to do now at the forefront of this field uh we and a few other labs work on a molecule that we naturally make a lot of when we’re young it’s called nad for short for long it’s nicotinamide and nucleotide i mean it’s a molecule that keeps us alive without nad we’re dead in 30 seconds it’s required for mitochondria the power
Packs to work among other many reactions and metformin is is playing a role in in that nad is is important also not just for energy but for regulating a set of longevity factors called the sirtuins that we’ve worked on for many years and as we get older we make less of this molecule nad and we think that our defenses get less and less and you can accelerate this
Decline in nad by not exercising and eating too much ultimately what we’re trying to do is make drugs that will raise the levels of nad back up to youthful levels and get the body to fight as though we’d been running marathons and eating perfectly and those drugs are actually in multiple clinical trials across the us there are many others by the there’s rapamycin
Near mention that’s mimics low protein diets which seems to be very effective in animals and seemingly in people as well to rejuvenate and there’s a growing list of molecules that are either in labs or in human clinical trials that look really promising so that metformin and rapamycin won’t be the only ones on the market that we can access shortly but but let me
Take you back to a previous vatican conference where biden and the pope were the keynote speaker and biden came he was vice president then and he came and he had the moonshot cancer initiative and i’ll tell you cancer is so much more complex than aging okay it’s really a problem because every cancer is different than the other cells in your body it’s different
Than any other cancer it’s a huge problem and aging is actually a quite simple thing to do the challenges are not at all except that if you prevent aging you don’t only prevent cancer you prevent many other age-related diseases so it’s clearly the future in fact the pope said after bidenstock he said you know i still hope that there is just a little pill that
Will cure cancer in everyone and i think metformin is as close as it comes it’s already existing so er 20 you know the only thing you know that the unfortunately the the animal that lives almost the longest proportionally is turtle okay and the turtle the problem is very slow and and and and really the the you know the rate is not as as great as it should be
Or we hope it would be but i think that 20 years there’ll be all those drugs that have been repurposed and totally new er mechanisms and new approach that it will extend lifespan very significantly and i’m not sure that 120 needs to be really the limit although this is kind of our maximum lifespan as a specie but you know well uh briefly what we need to do is
Enhance what we’re already doing as a field in the last 10 years we’ve gone from just a bunch of scientists at conferences and really very few people listening and thanks in part to books that are being written by by you guys um the public has woken up not everybody but a lot of people have realized that addressing aging is the biggest impact we can have on
Human health by far if you smoke your chances of lung cancer go up fivefold but aging from 20 to 70 increases at over 100 fold so aging is the major cause of not just cancer but most suffering on the planet so if we can address that it would be a huge economic benefit and also social benefit and we’d have money left over to tackle these other big problems so
This is a really global and important initiative but we need a grassroots effort we need more investment in research there’s very little investment into aging biology compared to cancer and heart disease and tackling one disease at a time has actually led to problems we can keep the heart alive for a long time but the brain still ages and our approach is the
Opposite we want to keep the whole body alive for longer but getting to the developing or uh you know less fortunate world we have to make drugs available and supplements that work uh that are cheap and metformin is a perfect example of a drug that’s a few cents a day if that um and as technologies evolve they will become cheaper and inventions that we make in
Our labs will uh go off patent and eventually become cheap and that’s also the goal of all of my colleagues believe that we’re not trying to make money here we are trying to leave the world a better place and that will happen
Transcribed from video
Cellular Senesce, Rapamycin, Metformin, Life-hacks, the FDA, the Epigenome, NAD, Healthspan/Lifespan By My NMN Experiment
