welcome to moonshots and mindsets I recently had a conversation with two extraordinary leaders in the Health and Longevity Arena Markman is best known as a functional medicine physician uh the bestselling author most recently of young forever and other books including the blood sugar solution food what the heck should I eat he’s appeared on the Dr a show and CBS This Morning he’s a dear friend an extraordinary thinker on health and our future in health uh with him I paired Dr Doris Taylor Dr Taylor is really out of the pages of science fiction novels uh she is a regenerative medicine researcher previously at the Texas Heart Institute now at the advanced regener manufacturing Institute with Dean Cayman and she is building pediatric Hearts small hearts for children who need them so you’re going to join a conversation that comes from my private Summit AT abundance 360
[00:01:00] uh that took place in March of 2023 and we’re going to talk about everything from understanding how to combat chronic disease with the food you eat how you take care of yourself to what should we expect in the future do we have an extra set of spare organs we truly are living during the most extraordinary time and I think health is the you wealth enjoy this episode let’s dive in let’s kick it off Babs hey good morning thank you very much both of you from the opposite ends of the spectrum right um the question right we need replacement parts too if we screw up so it’s okay yeah anyway um the we need there is a point of clarification for Doris that we we ghost heart what what’s the ghost heart and what part does it play so the ghost heart is basically the scaffold that that we on which we put your stem cells
[00:02:02] to pig heart from which we’ve removed every cell and as we remove every cell what’s left is what we call the extracellular Matrix okay and it’s basically hundreds of proteins and sugars and molecules that tell every single cell how to grow up and how to behave okay and then it basically the the stem cell human heart after that the St human stem cells grow onto it differentiate appropriately got it okay thank you amazing and if you if you come to the Platinum event you’ll see that happening in real life we will be coming yeah BS you’ll be there in August yes with absolutely yeah awesome would miss it we’ve been to last two just keep getting more and uh love it yeah thank you thank you Annie um I’m so blown away by by our panel today and
[00:03:01] uh Doris I was working in biotech around the time that you started on this amazing journey so thank you for this I was blown away back when I entered the industry um I left thereafter um for a number of reasons but um when I look at you creating a solution that can help save the number one killer in the world and that we can accelerate that solution with the right resources within 5 years at only $300 million to me that’s shocking one and and and number two with the resources um I’m part of a new fund out of the EU for biotech and Innovation and the EU has agreed to match that fund and my question here for most of us here in the US where’s the matching dollars and where is our industry um and I also want to talk to you afterwards by the way
[00:04:00] fantastic uh you’ll meet each other at the uh Patron lunch for sure sit next to each other great thank you Annie let’s go to Jordy terrific question from Mark uh a couple years ago I went almost entirely carnivore so I eat uh steak and eggs almost exclusively uh I feel terrific best I’ve ever felt um but my cholesterol levels are through the roof and my doctor put me on a Statin which I’m reluctantly taking uh so that was question number one question number two running or weightlifting which is better well first I can’t give you personal medical advice cuz I go to jail I license in California but in general I I think the the uh extremes of diet are interesting you know being a vegan or being a full carnivore and I think they both have real limitations I think you know for some people with a lot of inflammatory issues a lot of gut issues who are eating a lot of processed food gluten sugar dairy it’s not
[00:05:00] necessarily the meat that’s fixing it it’s what you’re not eating and I think you can include uh and I think there’s a whole the whole conversation about antinutrients and plant Foods is I think a little bit misguided there’s a whole framework of what we call phyto hormesis phyto hormesis means when you eat stressed plants wild plants regener raised Plants organic plants better than obviously conventional plants they have more of these powerful defense molecules in them and we use those to regulate our biology from an evolutionary perspective and so mtor for example is is positively affected by the polyphenols and coffee and inhibits it aurine in olive oil the curcumin and turmeric the the r veratrol in red grapes these all actually are Inhibitors of mtor just like rap ayin or fasting or other inputs like exercise or hormesis therapies so I I I think you know for a long term I do worry about a carnivore diet but I do know it it can create remarkable Chang in health but I think it’s because of the elimination not because of just the meat although I
[00:06:00] think meat is not a problem we do need to have good quality meat as part of our muscle building strategy and preservation as we age Emma Morano was 117 years old when she died her doctor told her in her 90s because she was dly need 150 grams of meat a day and she did Soh I think it’s important second in terms of longevity I think both uh cardio and resistance training are important but I do think resistance training becomes more important as we get older because what happens is entropy and muscle loss if you don’t do that and and muscle loss is conserved with growth hormone and other hormones when you’re younger when you’re older it takes actual resistance training and adequate protein so that’s probably a far more important intervention and I think 20 30 minutes three four times a week is a powerful intervention for longevity to maintain muscle mass to build muscle mass to enhance mitochondrial function and to also induce a lot of these longevity switches that we talked about hey everybody it’s Peter I want to take a break from our episode to talk about a health product
[00:07:00] that I love it was a few years ago I went looking for the best nutritional green drink on the market so I went to Whole Foods and I started looking around I found three shelves filled with options I looked at the labels and they really didn’t wow me so I picked the top three that I thought looked decent brought them home tried them and they sucked first of all they tasted awful and then second the nutritional facts actually weren’t very impressive it was then that I found a product called ag1 by athletic greens and without any question athletic greens is the best on the market by a huge margin first of all it actually tastes amazing and second if you look at the ingredients 75 highquality ingredients that deliver nutrient D antioxidants multivitamins pre and probiotics immune support adaptogens I personally utilize ag1 literally every day I travel with an individual packet my backpack sometimes in my back pocket and I count on it for
[00:08:01] you know gut health immunity energy digestion neural support and really healthy aging so if you want to take ownership of your health today is a good day to start athletic greens is giving you a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five of these tribal packs with your first purchase so go to athletic greens.com back/ moonshots that’s athletic greens.com back/ moonshots check it out you’ll thank me without question this is the best green drink product the most nutritious the most flavorful I found all right let’s go back to the episode fantastic let’s go to to uh uh to Bob on mic four hey Mark this question is for you um I’ve followed basically what you suggest for The Last 5 Years um have turned around biological AIDS 25 years in that process amazing in the same in the same token I’ve done the MRI every year and over the last three years I’ve watched my prostate almost double in siide
[00:09:00] and form a tumor and in the your book you make a specific statement about if you have latent prostate cancer don’t take nmn and I’ve started to hear more people say that and I jumped on nmn about four years ago and I wonder if you could expand on that I mean I think you know this is a really important question I think you know there’s always we call pleotropic effects of various molecules NAD plus is a molecule that uh the body makes as part of normal function when energy levels drop NAD goes up and it’s is an activator of C tumans which then has all these Downstream benefits but but you know there’s some animal studies that seem to indicate that it may increase cancer risk but I think they’re really limited and I think you know there’s some real challenges with those those studies that I think don’t to me convince me that n will cause cancer so it may be other things that are going on there it’s hard to say looking at your you know genetics diet lifestyle other things I don’t know if you’re having symptoms prostate disease or if you’re
[00:10:00] having a PSA increasing or you had latent prostate cancer I don’t know but I think those are those are things to explore but I I think I wouldn’t put the weight on the nmn that you took and you could ask David Sinclair about it he’s he’s the expert but he he I think recently wrote a rebuttal to that whole cancer hypothesis thank you let’s go to an on Zoom an what’s your question where are you on the planet um hello my I um the question is for Dr Taylor but I did want to say um Dr Heyman I live in a Blue Zone in the NOOA peninsula in Costa Rica um and I think well I hope you come back and maybe visit me um yeah love Costa Rica what you said about community and love I mean I see that it’s it’s so true that’s the biggest difference that I noticed I lived in Chicago and then London and now in Costa Rica is that connection to family community and just brings this kind of General sense of Joy um that has really changed my life and
[00:11:01] uh it’s something that I really wish I’m sorry I’m so emotional it’s something that I really wish that we had more of in the United States um Dr Taylor I just wanted to say thank you so much hearing your work gave me so much hope because I spent the last year taking care of my mother flying back and forth because she was diagnosed with stage four and then end stage heart failure um and she was so afraid and ignoring the problem and then was really afraid of the only solution she’s 75 so a heart transplant wasn’t a solution and thank goodness a few years ago the portable elad um the left ventricle assist device was approved and so we spent in January days from dying she said yes to having that um surgery and now we’re dealing with the implications of her living
[00:12:01] because of a machine and it’s been so scary as a mother of two young children um her heart failure I don’t remember the term but um they don’t know why and everything else she’s 75 and she’s really healthy low cholesterol low blood pressure and so for me it’s been really scary thinking is this something that’s going to happen to me so I just wanted to say thank you you’ve given me so much hope and if I had $3 million I would give it to you oh can I speak to that yes well first of all thank you and and I want to make the point following up on what Frank Mark said and what you just said you’re building heart too we’re all building heart and the piece that Mark talked about love it it’s it’s really a piece of of the future of all of this so hope matters hope matters so much and
[00:13:04] heart failure in women is often different than heart failure in men and if you want to reach out afterwards we can have a conversation about that because I’d love to talk more about it and we have a biologic that is going to have an impact on heart failure with preserved ejection fraction which is the heart failure that most women get and actually is increasing as men age so thank you thank you an pleasure GMO wow glad to have you thank you Peter yes this is for Dr MK Hyman doct is so exciting to have you here uh your book The e f get thing changed so many life and so many professional Healthcare professional and and nutrition practitioners way of practicing so thank
[00:14:01] you for that but um following one of the questions today how are your thoughts on after doing a high fat diet and a low sugar diet having your cholesterol levels raised how do you see cholesterol being a marker of uh heart disease for the future or not and second if I can do another one uh we all know sugar is the number one cause of disease in the world but what are your thoughts on uh blue light or artificial light cause causing the same um insulin resistance that Sugar can cause in our body oh that’s a great question so I mean I think in terms of um you know the the sugar issue and light I think you know photobiomodulation is a real thing I think blue light at night definitely affects our metabolism in an adverse way but I I don’t think it compares to Sugar honestly I think it’s such as a much bigger effect um and your first in your first question what was that again the
[00:15:01] cholesterol being a maret of disease or cholesterol cholesterol okay so cholesterol is a is a is a real controversial subject because is it is it the cause or is it a biomarker of something else is going on and I think we know that heart disease is an inflammatory State and the cholesterol elevations in the absence of uh inflammation are are not a huge risk now there is huge genetic variability in the population when it comes to lipid metabolism in terms of lipid absor ion of the gut in terms of lipid synthesis in liver and in terms of um the patterns of cholesterol that people form so it’s really got to be an individualized approach I’m not opposed to to pharmacotherapy for lipid disorders but most of the problems with our lipids come from eating sugar and starch not neily fat because it increases triglycerides it lowers HDL it increases the particle number decreases the particle size all these are the most dangerous type of cholesterol pattern so your cholesterol could be 150 but if your hdl’s 30 and your triglycerides 100
[00:16:01] you’re in terrible shape whereas if your cholesterol is 300 and your hdl’s 80 and your triglycerides are 70 I’m not so worried particularly if you have low inflammation so it’s really about a personalized approach and the right Diagnostics and I think Fountain life is such an important company because it’s helping people map out the right Diagnostics both laboratory conventional tests but things that your doctor may not be checking like lipid fractionation which most cardiologists and doctors don’t do uh and it’s the pretty much the only way to look at lipids in terms of saturated fat and high fat diets and lipids again there’s real heterogeneity I’ve had people go on a keto diet with butter and coconut oil which is all saturated fat and their lipids Drop Like a Stone everything improves other people are you know lead athletes will say I want to try keto and their cholesterol goes to hell so I think it’s about understanding that there’s there’s genetic differences um for me for example I’m a we call lean mass hyper responder there’s a phenomena that in certain people when they eat a lot of saturated fat it actually raises uh you know creates
[00:17:01] an adverse cholesterol profile and and we don’t exactly know why there’s some genetics involved but you got to really personalize the approach this episode is brought to you by levels one of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my Peak vitality and Longevity is to monitor my blood glucose more importantly the foods that I eat and how they Peak the glucose levels in my blood now glucose is the fuel that powers your brain it’s really important High prolonged levels of glucose which called called hyperglycemia leads to everything from heart disease to alzheimer’s to sexual dysfunction to diabetes and it’s not good the challenge is all of us are different uh all of us respond to different foods in different ways like for me if I eat bananas it spikes my blood glucose if I eat grapes it doesn’t if I eat bread by itself I get this prolonged spike in my blood glucose levels but if I dip that bread in olive oil it blunts it and these are things that I learned from wearing a continuous
[00:18:00] glucose monitor and using the levels app so levels is a company that helps you in analyzing what’s going on in your body it’s continuous monitoring 24/7 I wear it all the time really helps me to stay on top of the food I eat remain conscious of the food that I eat and to understand which foods affect me based upon my physiology and my genetics you know on this podcast I only recommend products and services that I use that I use not only for myself but my friends and my family that I think are high quality and safe and really impact a person’s life so check it out levels. l/ Peter give you two additional months of membership and it’s something that I think everyone should be doing eventually this stuff is going to be in your body on your body part of our future of medicine today it’s a product that I think uh I’m going to be using for the years ahead and hope you’ll consider as well all all right uh
[00:19:00] Kimberly hi so my question Dr Markman your book The Food fix was phenomenal and an absolute GameChanger and uh Dr Taylor hear hearing the statistic that $32,000 worth a month for these drugs is yeah is the current status quo and so there’s been a lot of money and profit made from people being sick and overweight so how are you Bridging the Gap what is the the marketing strategy in essence to prove that having a fit healthy Society can actually be more profitable for people who have profited from sick care huh can I I think the first thing we have to do is tell the truth about the status quo and we don’t we don’t currently talk about organ transplant not being a Panacea everyone thinks got a new Oregon got a new lease on life going to go forward life is great that’s not the reality it and I think telling the truth
[00:20:00] about costs and that you have to have access is a first step to because now there’s a whole room of people who know that who didn’t before this conversation and that may impact it the other thing is it’s just it’s no different than smoking if there’s profit to be made it’s going to be marketed it’s going to be promoted and we live in an industry where the addiction is sugar and the poison is sugar and the question is will the government um Step In we also live where people have freedom the question is do they know that it’s not healthy most everybody does they choose to ignore it it’s a quick fix it’s also less expensive it’s also L expensive yes so uh the I think yeah it’s complicated I wrote a whole book on this some in five minutes but I think I think the essential idea here is that you know we’re not facing the biggest National Emergency we have which is from
[00:21:01] our food system that’s driving the majority of age related diseases the majority of cost probably over 80% of our $4.1 trillion do in healthcare costs not to mention the additional indirect costs from disability dysfunction because of the food we’re eating it’s the biggest National Emergency 11 million people die every year globally from poor food I think that’s an underestimate and we’re just not addressing it I actually went on teer Carlson this week talking about this issue because I think we we need to we need to face this as we Face Co or any other National emergency and and deal with it hiton and it requires a huge amount of change in Industry innovation in Regulatory and legislative actions in consumer education Behavior change uh and and it’s it’s it’s a it’s a it’s a work that’s going to take a while and so that’s why I started a nonprofit to change policy in Washington to drive the right changes around food is medicine in our system to to really de incentivize the the wrong things and incentivize the
[00:22:01] right things right now it’s just it’s kind of a mess so I I think I I’m hopeful for the future but we’re way too slow We tend to deal with problems way after they happen rather than before and we’re we’re seeing this Juggernaut coming that that I don’t think policymakers are really have really grappled with clearly hey everybody this is Peter a quick break from the episode you know I’m a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming I don’t watch the crisis News Network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the World by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology how entrepreneurs are solving the world’s Grand challenges what the breakthroughs are in longevity how exponential Technologies are Transforming Our World so twice a week I put out a Blog one blog is looking at the future of longevity age reversal
[00:23:00] biotech increasing your health span the other blog looks at exponential Technologies AI 3D printing synthetic biology AR VR blockchain these Technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do if this is the kind of use you want to learn about and shape your neural Nets with go to Dem andis.com back/ blog and learn more now back to the episode I want to go to two questions on zoom we’re go to Allison first and then Orlando then we’ll go to you Michael um Alison great uh first of all thank you so much it’s a so inspiring and I can’t help thinking what would Mozart have done with an extra 30 years yes I love that deep deep thanks to both of you mark I’d love to hear from you your quick take on uh the microbiome and supplements you hear very different views and then Doris I would love to hear from you caring about Hearts which of all of Mark’s advice you actually take
[00:24:01] fun question Allison well the microbiome is so important and in fact it was not included in the original Hallmarks of Aging I added it in my book because I thought it was so important in the the ER of the microbiome is just emerging there’s an enormous amount of research that needs to be done to categorize classify understand what is going on in there it’s just like a black box and and we’ learned so much in the last 10 years 20 years on this but we still have a lot more to learn what’s really exciting is that we know that as we age our microbiome degrades our microbial diversity degrades and we also know how to change that through um various strategies by limiting things that are gut busting sugar starchy process food diets food additives um and environmental chemicals all damage the gut the glyphosate is one of the worst ones from our food supply it’s on 70% of crops it’s the weed killer that we use uh also the use of antibiotics anti-inflammatory drugs acid blocking drugs I think it’s acid blocking drugs
[00:25:00] are the third leading cause of of uh of drug use in this country or third leading uh third leading category I mean and and so we need to stop all the gut busting stuff and then we need to add prebiotics probiotics and and um and polyphenols which are the plant compounds that help fertilize the gut bugs and then there’s you know Precision probiotic therapy so not all probiotics are the same they have different uses for different things so it’s really important to try to restore our guts and I think one of the most important exciting discoveries is the importance of bifidobacterium INF fantis in children and a lot of us are have taken antibiotics most women have and their their population of this particular Keystone bacteria is either absent or very low so when babies are born they don’t get it when they born through csection they for sure don’t get it when their antibiotics are used in pregnancy or in early life kills it all so giving babies bifidobacterium infantis can can actually colonize the gut with a really important keystone species that then regulates all the inflammatory diseases um obviously all the allergy autoimmune
[00:26:01] asthma but also like the late stage autoimmune diseases like heart disease cancer and diabetes so we really kind of need to learn how to restore our microbiome and I have a whole section of my book about how to do that but it’s really important to track it to measure it to optimize it and to constantly iterate on how to do that we’re going to go to Michael and then to Orlando on Zoom but I hope that uh helped your answer your question Michael please so the topic of um regrowing the heart is very close to me because my mom’s heart disease for many years so I’ve always fantasized whether we can grow for de PR construct something like that so I wanted to ask um what are kind of the steps remaining in a process because I know there might be challenges around hemodynamics the details of how cells are you know differentiated to be exactly like a human heart I imagine there’s animal trials or not like like what is the rough road map you have over
[00:27:01] we talked about we talked about doing an X prise in in that area at one point we did Michael’s one of the uh founders of oculus yes so the our steps in the process obtain blood from an individual Bank their C our rate limiting step for 10 years was how to grow billions of heart cells Because by the way heart cells don’t divide right so what we had to do was figure out and and the Advent of human IPS cells changed this it let us begin to think about personalized cells so we grow we grow 350 billion of your cells we differentiate those to cardiac mesoderm the cells that during development are going to give rise to the heart then we actually treat about 70% of those and make them become the different heart muscle cells but not very M they’re very
[00:28:00] immature they’re not even as mature as fetal heart cells and then we take the other 30% we put it all in our heart after we’ve built the vasculature which we do first and then we train it so we have to train it electrically and we have to train it against the blood pressure and we have to dial that up over time and every heart’s a little bit different because everybody’s cells are a little but there that’s amazing um and and please get a chance to connect here uh while you’re here together let’s hear it for Doris I love the engineering mind here Orlando we have just a minute and a half left Orlando a short question so yes yeah hello I’m make simple so I think one of our biggest concern as parents is how do we teach this to our children uh how do we make it simple in a place where we have sh all over and processed foods so what do you think about I think we need really um face the
[00:29:00] fact that you know a foreign country we’re doing what we’re doing to our children we go to war to protect them uh and somehow uh the the narrative in this Society right now from the American Academy of Pediatrics is treat kids aggressively with obesity with bariatric surgery and OIC which is just mind-blowing to me as opposed to why don’t we fix the problem which is our food system so it requires regulatory changes around food labeling around marketing junk food to kids around um school lunches uh dietary guidelines all of this really needs to change and that’s what we’re working on in Washington but it’s not an easy fix and there are many forces that are not interested in having this change uh and and unfortunately big food and I wrote about this in food fix is is very focused on manipulating public opinion manipulating policy and influencing professional organizations like the American Academy Pediatrics or Academy nutrition dietetics the Ada aha American Cancer Society all the things that you
[00:30:00] know we think of as a trustworthy organizations are all co-opted and manipulated and then they fund you know billions of dollars of research 12 times what the ni funds on quote nutrition studies so the data is flooded with a lot of misinformation so we we have to you know as a society stand up for our children and I think we have to sort of make a stand that this is really important and address the fact that 40% of our kids are overweight almost 20 or obese one in four Teenage boys has pre-diabetes or type two diabetes something I never saw in medical school I think Peter and I went to medical school it just didn’t exist um and we have we have increasing metabolic disease in kids kids are now facing liver transplants and as teenagers from fatty liver from soda barric surgery at 15 years old just doesn’t make sense so I think I think we have to kind of face this and it requires uh you know kind of an uprising I think most people understand that this is a a fixable problem you know we can’t and climate change overnight we can’t you know end War but this is one of those problems that we can solve guys I apologize at we
[00:31:02] at of time but please give it up for Doris Taylor Mark [Music] [Applause] [Music] Hyman