Practical lifestyle changes to become ageless

Dr. Michael Aziz (00:00) You know, I used to stay up till two o’clock in the morning watching CNN, and the news is the same. It doesn’t change. It’s the same news. They keep repeating it. Why am I staying till two o’clock in the morning watching the same news? So it’s all about making simple changes can make a difference in your life. Who doesn’t want to live another 15, 20 years?

Peter Bowes (00:14) The United States has the lowest average lifespan in the Western world, with more people than ever suffering from chronic age-related diseases. You might find that surprising, given the scientific advances we’re making to slow down the aging process. So are we making any progress or not? Hello again. Welcome to the Live Long Podcast. I’m Peter Bowes. This is where we explore the science and stories behind human longevity. Dr. Michael Aziz is a physician in New York City. He is a prolific writer and has a private practice where he focuses on functional medicine. In his recently published book, The Ageless Revolution, Dr. Aziz suggests aging, which he says is a syndrome that puts us at risk for several age-related diseases. Aging is something he says that can be managed. In fact, we have it in us to live an ageless life. Let’s find out what that means.

Dr. Aziz, it’s good to talk to you.

Dr. Michael Aziz (01:15) Thanks so much for having me, Peter.

Peter Bowes (01:17) So you describe aging as a syndrome. Lots of people say aging is the disease itself. Other people say they don’t like to describe aging as a disease. It’s just the progression of time. It’s just the process of growing old. Some people say, but you use the word syndrome, which I found interesting. What do you mean by that?

Dr. Michael Aziz (01:35) Well, the difference between disease and a syndrome, a disease is like diabetes or blood pressure or high cholesterol. But a syndrome is more a multitude of things, multiple diseases that can happen together. And aging is a syndrome because once the cells start to malfunction and they don’t work, we are predisposed to a variety of illnesses from high blood pressure to diabetes to cancer to stroke, dementia, and eventually death. So, yeah, it’s a very, very, how I call it, a syndrome.

Peter Bowes (02:10) And you are a functional medicine doctor. And we’ve had many practitioners on this podcast who practice the same kind of medicine. In terms of your career, what prompted you to progress towards functional medicine, essentially seeing the whole body and adopting a holistic approach?

Dr. Michael Aziz (02:28) Well, at age 35, I discuss this in my book, The Ageless Revolution. I felt I was not making a huge difference in my patient’s life. I was making slight improvement, but everything was working against me from their lifestyle to guidelines that are wrong from the government, even the medical establishment. So you’re managing the disease. You’re just putting a Band-Aid on the disease. You’re not really improving it. And I had to retrain in functional medicine. And once you retrain, you can’t go back because you understand that really you have to go for the root cause of the problem. You have to go to fix the real issue. So, you know, a woman in menopause who has hot flashes and night sweats and gaining weight doesn’t need an antidepressant or Prozac or Valium or hormones from a horse. She needs her hormones that are missing. A man who has erection problem, who is fatigued and tired and depressed doesn’t need an antidepressant or an ED pill. He may need testosterone replacement therapy. And once you do that, you really cannot go back to the old way of practicing medicine.  I do a variety of things. It’s good to be a traditional doctor, but it’s also great to be a functional doctor.

Peter Bowes (03:39) And just coming back to where I started in the introduction, the United States, where we both live, has the lowest average lifespan in the Western world. And the number of people suffering from chronic diseases later in life is actually increasing, which is, you know, considering the science that is happening at the moment, that is quite a depressing thought, isn’t it? And it would suggest that we’re not making much progress.

Dr. Michael Aziz (04:08) Yeah, we’re living a little longer than our parents and grandparents in the 50s and the 60s. But we’re living with more chronic and age-related diseases. And if we take a look around the world, more countries that are in the Western world, we have the lowest lifespan in the Western world. In fact, Bangladesh has a longer lifespan than Mississippi.

I took a look in my book at countries who have the longest lifespan. I took a look at:

1. Monaco – approaching 90.
2. Hong Kong – 88.
3. Switzerland – close to 88 as well.

And the list just goes on and goes on. I don’t have to go to the extreme, like the blue zones where people make it to 100. But definitely we have a definite problem here where not only we are spending  tons of money on health care, but we also have the lowest lifespan. And not only the lowest lifespan, but we’re also living with more age-related diseases: blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, and those diseases are starting at a much younger age. In fact, aging is happening now at a much younger age and a much faster rate in younger generations.

Peter Bowes (05:13) So why is that? Are we getting better at just keeping people alive with those chronic conditions, or is there a much deeper societal problem, especially in the United States? Is it related to diet? Is it related to fast food and lifestyle and advertising possibly even coming into that, just the way that we live? How do you identify or what do you identify as the problem?

Dr. Michael Aziz (05:36) In my book, The Ageless Revolution, I dissect everything, why we have reached that poor status where we are now. And for us to fix what’s going on, we have to know what went wrong. Like you said, it’s a variety of things that led to the status where we are. One is:

We are eating a lot of processed food, a lot of sugar and refined carbohydrates. That’s bad.

The guidelines, even from the medical establishment, were wrong for decades. They were telling us to eat seed oils. Now all the news are talking about how seed oils, how bad it is, it’s for inflammation, it causes heart attack, it causes strokes.

So even the guidelines from the American Heart Association, even prestigious institutions, Harvard, they told us, oh, you know, cut the animal fat and cook your chicken and fish in vegetable oil.

So we’re eating a lot of processed oils. That’s fast food, basically.

We also have a lot of stress.

We are deficient in vitamins.lll

We are also, the fertilizers, the pesticides, the amount of pesticide that they are using in our vegetables, the plastic bottles, the synthetic hormones, the stress, and all those things lead to where we are now.

Peter Bowes (06:52) The seed oil issue, which you mentioned, is hugely controversial, isn’t it? Where do you come down on that? And essentially, what is the research that persuades you either way?

Dr. Michael Aziz (07:03) So I came to this idea that how vegetable oils are very bad for us a very long time ago. In fact, I wrote a book about 14 years ago called The Perfect 10 Diet. And I was on TV talking about how we should eat natural fats, butter, coconut, and I was like one of the first. And because I did not know that I was misled as a physician by the soybean lobby who told us that we should not eat natural fat and we should use fake fats. And I believed them because I really believed in the guidelines. I believed like they know better than me. I know that Harvard knows more than me, but that’s not true when the research is influenced by the soybean lobby who influenced the guidelines. And before you know it, we’re eating a lot of fake food. So they convinced us that eggs are no good. We have to eat cereal with a lot of chemicals and high fructose corn syrup. We’re eating the vegetable oil, soybean oil. I mean, if you take a look of just how soybean oil, the vegetable oil, the Mazola, Crisco, how it’s made, there’s nothing wrong with the plant, the corn or the soybean. But then it goes through a process of chemical alteration. They put hexane, which is really a petroleum. It goes through heat. It goes through extraction process. They put a thousand chemicals on them that create free radical, which promotes heart disease. It promotes cancer. Finally, the oil could be rancid. It’s not ready. You cannot even buy it in the supermarket. So now it goes another process called hydrogenation. And the process of hydrogenation changed the oil to make it more stable. And that leads to the formation of trans fats. And trans fats are really plastic fat. So we started to eat more margarine, not to mention the fast food oils or the French fries. The labels are wrong. I talk about this in my first book. So let’s say you go to a fast food and you say, screw it, I’m going to have some French fries. And if you read the label on the French fries from the fast food, it will say those small French fries you just got have 10 grams of saturated fat. But are they really saturated fat? Are they really cooked? Those French fries are cooked in coconut or butter or they’re cooked in hydrogenated soybean oil that has been boiled a thousand times, had tons of free radical, has trans fats. So now you’re eating 10 grams of trans fats. And then before you know it, you have ethical studies coming from Harvard. Oh, saturated fat. They cause heart disease and cancer. So before we know it, without eating butter and we’re eating more of those vegetable oils. So the labels are wrong. The FDA is wrong. The guidelines are wrong. It’s just the list goes on and goes on. And that’s where we are.

Peter Bowes (09:30) But what is the root of the problem?

Dr. Michael AzizDr. Michael Aziz (09:33) Well, the practice of medicine in the United States has changed a lot in the last 100 years. We went away from functional medicine, and we’re going to putting a Band-Aid on many issues. And much of the research done in medical school and residencies and medical institutions is sponsored by the drug companies, is sponsored by some kind… Like all the research we learned about saturated fat, about how butter is bad for us, how coconut is bad for us, was sponsored by the soybean lobby, Mazola, Crisco, Fleischmann, the producer of margarine. And before you know it, I grew up on that junk for years. If I get a heart attack tomorrow, that’s all from the fake fats that I ate all my life, believing that that fake fat are good for me because they said it’s good for my heart, but it’s not. So I’m probably like I’m the only one in Starbucks line asking for a cappuccino with regular milk. Everybody else is asking for skim milk, 1%. I wish I could scream. I could tell them that it’s so wrong, but I can only make a difference with my books.

Peter Bowes (10:30) Well, I understand. That is what you’re trying to do in your latest book. Describe to me what you mean by ageless, the ageless revolution.

Dr. Michael Aziz (10:38) So after COVID, a lot of people are interested. There’s two things that happened. Some people are really interested in anti-aging, and they became involved in biohacking. They want to improve their health. But a lot of Americans were left behind. They kind of neglected their health. They became more overweight. They don’t go to the doctor anymore, and with remote work, they just let it go, which is not a good thing. And I wanted to bring this book to the public to get us back on track that you can become ageless. It doesn’t matter how old you are. You can be young and old at the same time. And there are 12 hallmarks of aging. It’s the reasons why our cells deteriorate, why we get old, why we get sick, and why we eventually die. And there’s a lot of books on the market that talks about the hallmarks of aging, but no book was comprehensive enough. And I figured I have to bring this information to the public. So I wanted a book that is quite comprehensive. You don’t have to buy 10 books on anti-aging. I wanted to make it very simple to target the reasons why our cells deteriorate. But most importantly, I wanted the book to be the biohacking and all the information available to be very affordable for the average person. Because a lot of the people who are doing those things I’m discussing in the book are the super rich. And that is something not available for the average person. So I wanted to make anti-aging available for everyone. And I called it the ageless because it doesn’t matter how old you are. You could be 60, but you could be really 30 if you’re doing everything correctly. And you could be also 20, but you’re doing everything wrong and you’re at a much higher age than where you are. So ageless revolution is all the advances we have that can make you ageless at any age.

Peter Bowes (12:22) You just use the expression, in fact, several times, anti-aging coming from the UK. I would say anti-aging, but we, I think, mean the same thing. It’s not a phrase that I particularly like, and I prefer pro-aging, a more sort of positive looking forward attitude than anti-aging. Where do you come down on that? And specifically, what do you mean by anti-aging?

Dr. Michael Aziz (10:38) Well, there are two terms really, all right. Anti-aging is just doing things to stop the aging process. And that could be very simple stuff that doesn’t affect your biological age. So if you do some Botox or fillers, that’s anti-aging, but it’s not going to change your biological age at all. But doing ageless stuff that is more progressive, we’re going into things that really can reverse your cell’s age. And you’re right. So I should make a difference on how I call it. So yeah, I’m more for pro-aging, not only reverse aging, but anti-aging and going steps forward by also fighting aging on the cellular level.

Peter Bowes (13:25) And you just made another valid point that is something I talk about a lot, and that is that some of the interventions that we hear a lot about are aimed at the very rich. These are the, yes, there might be scientifically proven interventions to slow the aging process or maybe even just to make you feel good for 24 hours, but they come at a price. And quite honestly, the vast majority of us can’t afford a lot of those interventions. So where does someone on a modest income start when they begin to think about the aging process and maybe not relying on so many drugs and maybe trying to improve their diet and their exercise regime? Where should they start?

Dr. Michael Aziz (14:07) You know, Peter, I say in the Ageless Revolution that the biggest obstacles for our health is the obstacle we place on ourselves,not the hallmarks of aging. There are always people who always say, I’m too busy to work out. It’s too expensive to eat organic food. I don’t have the time. And those obstacles are harder to conquer than the whole box of aging. Because the whole box of aging, I have solutions for them. I have in the book, I made the book very simple. The first 150 pages is the things that you could do to improve your health. Starting with your diet, eating a clean diet, switching from all the chemicals. People are following low-fat, which is high in sugar. Sugar is bad for a gene called the FOXO gene that works against the aging process. It depletes the body of a molecule called NAD. And that’s not good. So low-fat diet is very bad. And people went to low-carb. And low-carb is full of other chemicals, artificial sweeteners, nitrite, nitrite, salinity, cancer. So I start with the diet. I go a step further by addressing sleep and stress and so on.

But the other 150 pages, I start by simple things:

• Supplements.
• Fish oil is quite cheap. It’s maybe $10, $15. But fish oil, we know research now is linked to longevity. People who have high-level omega-3 fatty acids in their blood live longer by four or five years.
• Vitamin D, if we’re deficient in it. Many of us live in the northern part of the country. Or if we go outdoors, we have sunscreen. So we have to take vitamin D.
• Taurine is linked to longevity. Taurine is an amino acid that is quite cheap. It’s about $10, linked to seven to eight years of longevity. That’s the people in Okinawa, Japan. They have very high levels of taurine. I take two grams a day.

And those are simple things that everybody can afford. You don’t have to be rich to take fish oil or to take taurine or to take vitamin D to address your lifestyle, to address your stress. There are things more expensive, but I also have simple solutions for everybody. You don’t have to go to the extreme.

Peter Bowes (16:09) And you write a lot in your book about fasting and different fasting interventions. How have you learned about fasting? I know it’s something that you practice yourself. What kind of regime do you have and what are the benefits?

Dr. Michael Aziz (16:23) Sure. So the idea of intermittent fasting is not new. It’s been around for over 500 years before the celebrities did it. And the idea is there is one of the hallmarks of aging is we have old cells in our bodies and we have young cells. And the old cells not only do not work, but they disrupt the young cells.

And how can you get rid of the old cells? One way is caloric restriction by skipping a meal. So eating from nine to five. And that’s a very, very effective way to get rid of the old cells. They call them senescent cells or zombie cells because not only they don’t work, but they disrupt the young cells.

Another hallmark of aging that I discuss in the Ageless Revolution is we have protein in our cells that are really kind of foiled and misfolded. They are also not functioning. And that leads to the other cells to work extra hard. And one way to get rid of them is also caloric restriction. So when you skip a meal, which is, you know, they told us, oh, eat every three hours. That was a bad idea that was invented by bodybuilders who are trying to put on muscles.

But when you were skipping a meal, your body is like, oh, my God, what’s happening? Peter is going to starve. So the body starts to eat those dead cells, the old cells, the misfolded protein. It starts to eat cancer cells and you get rid of them. And that doesn’t cost a thing. In fact, you’ll save money on the meal that you skip.

Peter Bowes (17:44) You’re talking there about time-restricted eating, not necessarily fasting. Just skipping a meal isn’t really fasting. It’s time-restricted. Maybe you mentioned nine to five. So having a longer period of not eating in the evening and overnight.

Dr. Michael Aziz (17:59) There are three types of intermittent fasting: One is you eat from a period for between nine to five, eight-hour period in 24 hours. That is the easiest one to do and that is quite doable. There is another type of fasting where you don’t eat for a day or two. I’m against that. That’s linked to longevity, but you end up losing muscle mass. And that’s not a good thing as we get older, because as we get older, we’re losing also muscle mass at the rate of 1% to 2% every two, three years. So you want to have more muscle and skipping meals for two, three days is not an enjoyable way of life for me. I did it once and I just don’t find it to be doable. I don’t find it to be practical. I mean, that’s what early humans did. It is linked to longevity, but you also end up losing muscle mass. And that’s why I don’t like it. There’s a third type of fasting where you just cut your calories on certain days and on certain days you eat normal amount of calories. But the research done on animals show that that’s linked to weight loss, but it’s nothing to any longevity. So I find it just easier on the weekend just to have a little bit of tea in the morning and just have brunch and dinner or just skip breakfast one day and then have like a lunch at 12 o’clock and dinner at five or six. That’s easy and doable. And if you do that two, three days a week, that is a great way to have an effect on the weight and to get rid of the senescent cells. Take antioxidant of the senescent cells

Peter Bowes (19:19) And where do you get your calories from? And you know, I can’t get two longevity scientists or even functional medicine doctors to agree on this, whether a plant-based diet is the best or whether a diet that is some meat eating, some dairy, maybe restricting that a little bit and mostly having a plant-based diet.  What do you believe is the best?

Dr. Michael Aziz (19:39) I looked at the blue zones and I looked at what they eat and they mostly eat a plant-based diet. You can be a total vegetarian because vegetarian can lead to more heart attack and stroke. You don’t have enough protein. You end up missing vitamin B12. So I’m in favor of a plant-based diet with some animal products, but I’m against all forms of chemicals, not just sugar, but nitrites, artificial sweeteners, all the fake fats we just talked about, the margarine, the hydrogenated oils. And really, you want to eat enough protein for your body type. So maybe 10%, 15%, maybe a little much more if you lift weights. And yes, people do extreme. We go from low fat, which is like 80% carbohydrate. We go to high protein or keto, which is like 40, 50% protein. And really, I’m not fixated on the amount of protein or carbohydrate because it depends upon you, Peter. So if you’re eating a lot of carbohydrates and you’re going to hit the gym and go on the treadmill and burn that sugar, you’ll be fine. But if you’re going to sit on the sofa, that’s not going to be good because that sugar is going to turn into triglycerides and it’s going to lead to excessive weight. The same thing for excess protein. If you’re going to go lift weights and do anaerobic activity, you’re going to use that excess protein to build muscles. But if you’re not going to do anaerobic activity, that excess protein is not a clean source of energy. It leads to excretion of a metabolite called uric acid. And high levels of uric acid in the blood has been linked to a higher mortality. It can shave off four years of our lives. So I’m in favor of a balanced diet, plant-based with a little bit of animal products, especially seafood, beans, not red meat, not processed meat, not chemicals. And that is the best diet because really I had to look at the blue zones and that’s what they do. So I followed their principles and I think that can lead to a longer life.

Peter Bowes (21:31) You mentioned going to the gym and hitting the treadmill. Clearly, exercise is a crucially important component of our lifestyles, one of the key pillars of human longevity. To what extent is it important in your life?

Dr. Michael Aziz (21:46) There are three types of exercises:

1. Aerobic
2. Anaerobic
3. High-intensity interval training

Anything that you do, any kind of movement is good for us. But I think the most impact on longevity is high-intensity interval training, where you have to lose your breath. But that’s not for everybody. So people have to start slow. I would start by walking around the block, by doing a little bit of aerobic activity after you ask your doctor to make sure your heart is okay. You have to lift weights as we get older because you want to build muscles and you want to eat some protein after working out to build those muscles because, again, we’re losing muscle mass as we get older. But if you’re really fit and you’re in great health, high-intensity interval training has the most impact on longevity. It can lead to an extra eight years of extra years in our lives.

Peter Bowes (22:29) And resistance training, lifting weights, which I think especially as you get older and that problem of losing muscle mass, resistance training is clearly very important there, isn’t it?

Dr. Michael Aziz (22:42) Yes, I would not do it alone if you have an issue like blood pressure, but I do a combination of things. I do aerobic activity, I do anaerobic activity, and once a week I do high-intensity interval training. But like I said, I want to make the Aegis Revolution doable for everybody, so people have to do whatever, any kind of activity that helps them is good, whatever level of tolerance they have.

Peter Bowes (22:05) What do you think about motivation and the reason to do this? Because everything you’re saying makes a lot of common sense, that these interventions, exercise, diet, and scrutinizing especially what we eat, looking at labels, that kind of thing, it’s all very well. But someone has to be motivated to start doing it and then to keep doing it. And that for many people is actually the problem, isn’t it? It’s getting that urge to do something but then to make it into a habit or make it into a routine.

Dr. Michael Aziz (23:27) Yeah, of course, motivation. You have to be motivated. I can’t change someone’s life if they’re not willing to do the effort because it’s not just a doctor, it’s also the person with their lifestyle. But I think the biggest motivation, if we took a look at the COVID test that we took, we all failed that COVID test. Our mortality rate was 10 times higher than Japan and South Korea. We took a test and that showed us how, what the conditionswhere we are. We are in very poor health. Our immune system is weak. We had much more higher mortality. And that is enough to motivate us that we have to do something. So what are we waiting for? Are we waiting to get a heart attack or stroke before we get motivated? The earlier you start, the better off you will be, because the earlier you start, you can reverse your biological age by an extra 10 to 20 years. The older you start, it will be harder to reverse that number of years.

Peter Bowes (24:32) How important is sleep?

Dr. Michael Aziz (24:33) Oh, sleep is very important. Sleep is the best anti-aging someone can do, because during sleep, what we do, we make a hormone called melatonin. And melatonin, people think is just a sleep hormone, but melatonin is responsible for the function of mitochondria. So in our cells, the mitochondria are the battery of our cells. Think of your cell phone, it needs to be charged. The mitochondria are charging the cells. And the one thing that protects the mitochondria the most is melatonin. So we found people who have sleep issues, people who work during the night, and shift workers, have a higher mortality, have more heart attack and more stroke. That’s because the mitochondria are not working.

Peter Bowes (25:17) That makes lifestyle decisions quite difficult, doesn’t it, for some people? Because clearly we live in a 24-hour society. It is difficult to avoid night shift working for many, many people. What is your suggestion for those who really have no choice and they have to turn their lives upside down? What is the best way to cope with that?

Dr. Michael Aziz (25:36) They have to adjust. During residency, I was sleepless for many nights. I used to stay in the hospital three nights a week. I was up for 36 hours. I gained a lot of weight. I discuss this in the book, about 40 pounds or so. I had prediabetes. I was not healthy. The doctor told me I had to lose weight. And I couldn’t change anything. I talk about my experience in the book because here I am. I was going to be in that environment for another four or five years. But I took efforts. So I worked in a Jewish hospital, Long Island Jewish, where they had a Shabbos elevator. So I started taking the elevator every time. I was like, I couldn’t wait for the elevator for 10 more minutes. So I would take the elevator. I bought some dumbbells. But again, that was me motivated by my poor health to change my health around. So people have to make decisions. How long do they want to be sick? Do they want to get a heart attack? Do they want to stay in this world longer? And they have to make changes. They have to make the environment where they sleep very comfortable. It has to be dark. They really have to stay away from their phone, all the magnetic waves and all that stuff. And they can make changes.

Peter Bowes (26:44) What you’ve just said might come as a surprise to many people, that there you were as a practicing doctor, yet still living this unhealthy lifestyle. And perhaps this illustrates the journey that you’ve been on yourself, that learning journey and understanding the human body and understanding nutrition, exercise, the effect of stress. And that perhaps everything that you learned in medical school wasn’t necessarily enough to equip you to be the doctor that you are now.

Dr. Michael Aziz (27:14) No, it took me a very long time. I even talk in the book that I’m 20 years behind the aces revolution, behind my own revolution, because not only I was sleepless, I was stressed. I had to study when I went home after that. My sugar was high. My blood pressure was high. I was only 35. On top of that, my diet was poor. So I was eating all the fake fats that you can eat, thinking, oh, you know, they told us margarine is good for us. I did not have time to exercise. And then before you know it, I was not happy with my health. And I was like so many Americans, young, yet I was sick. And I did not, I was just, it’s very, very, very frightening to be so young and already to have diabetes and to be overweight. And you look at your pictures from four or five years before, it’s like, what happened? And I decided to change my life. That’s when I wrote my first book, The Perfect Ten. It was a clean diet, very different than low fat and low carb because it balances hormone. It does not mess them up. It’s not extreme. It doesn’t have tons of carbohydrate. It doesn’t have the chemicals of low carb diets. And I stayed on track for a long time, but I got involved in the pro-aging movement after COVID. That’s when I realized two of my patients were very young and they died from COVID. And that alerted me why even young people are dying from COVID in the United States while people in South Korea and Japan did not have those extreme number. And that made me realize we have to target the whole marks of aging. And that was my motivation to write the new book where I watched a lot of conferences. I attended a lot of lectures and a lot of conferences to bring all the weapons against aging and to throw it at aging from every angle. For every hallmark, I have a weapon, whether it’s the misfolded protein, the senescent cells, gut health is very important. And I think if you do all those efforts, if you have the motivation to do a few tricks, you can reverse your biological age by a good 10 to 20 years. And you don’t have to be really motivated. You just have to be educated. Because it’s a few tricks:

• It’s eating fermented food.
• It’s working on your sleep.

You know, I used to stay up till 2 o’clock in the morning watching CNN. And the news is the same. It doesn’t change. It’s the same news. They keep repeating it. Why am I staying till 2 o’clock in the morning watching the same news, which I can watch in the morning for five minutes? So it’s all about making simple changes can make a difference in your life long term. And who doesn’t want to live another 15, 20 years?

Peter Bowes (29:46) Well, some people might argue that watching any news is not necessarily a good thing because living through the world that we live in right now, really stressful times, the cost of living crisis for many people is really hurting and probably distracting people away from their own health. Stress is a key issue, isn’t it? You mentioned COVID. Clearly, those were very stressful, difficult years for people. But some families might argue that things haven’t really improved since then. And people like you, in terms of communicating information, it’s a crucially important role to try to persuade people to move away from that stress if they can.

Dr. Michael Aziz (30:21) Yeah, I talk about stress also in the book because it’s a small part, but I talk about how cortisol, when we are stressed, the body secretes a hormone called cortisol. And cortisol affects insulin and it can lead to diabetes. So just by being stressed, you can develop diabetes. But cortisol does something else. It does affect negatively another hallmark of aging, which is shortened telomeres. At the end cap of our chromosomes are called telomeres. And every time the cell divides, the telomeres get shorter and shorter till eventually the cells can no longer divide and they die. And you want to have longer telomeres. You don’t want to have shorter telomeres. The longer your telomeres, the longer you’re going to live. The shorter the telomere, the shorter life you’re going to live. So stress shortens your telomeres. So you want to deal with your stress level. And you want to take things that to lengthen your telomeres, like fish oil, like vitamin D, astragalus root, all the things lengthen telomeres. So yeah, you have to deal with the stress. You can’t be stressed and think you’re going to have a long life.

Peter Bowes (31:21) Talking more personally, what are your own longevity aspirations? What motivates you? You’ve described the sometimes difficult times that you’ve been through in terms of your own health. But do you have, looking ahead to the decades in the future, do you have specific goals in mind?

Dr. Michael Aziz (31:38) Well, I’m much older now, but I don’t feel my age at all. So I turned 60, which is frightening, but I’m in great health. I take about 20 supplements a day. I do exercise. My blood pressure is perfect. I try to do my best when it comes to diet. I try to go to a juice store and have all the superfoods I talk about in my book, whether from ginger to turmeric to vegetable juice, because I don’t live in the blue zones. I try to incorporate food that makes us live longer. So I take some supplements, not only fish oil, but I take seabuckthorn. I take the skin of lemons and oranges has a compound called hesperidin that we tend to throw away, but hesperidin acts like metformin. So I do a few tricks from my book to make me feel better and to know that I’m affecting the hallmarks in a positive way.

Peter Bowes (32:28) And how important is it to associate with people that think the same way as you? A lot is said about social connections and the importance of being with people, but especially the importance of being with a like-minded community. Is that something that you found and that you practice?

Dr. Michael Aziz (32:48) Yes, I find in the Ageist Revolution, I talk about having a purpose, to have a much bigger purpose than you are. We find all the people in the blue zone, they have a purpose. And the reason I think that purpose gives you longevity is because you’re less stressed. So that’s probably how people have a purpose, who have a family, who have friends. They’re more relaxed. They don’t have high cortisol level. And that’s probably how they live longer. So my purpose is much bigger than just writing a book and affecting people’s life. I want to make a huge difference. In fact, after I wrote the book, I decided to give the proceeds to charity, to Susan G. Komen Foundation for breast cancer.

So it’s a combination of things:

• It’s your lifestyle.
• It’s your diet.
• It’s the exercise.
• It’s the sleep.
• It’s the supplements.
• It’s medications that you have to take too also.
• And finding the right doctor who understands that aging is a syndrome and a disease.

Because you don’t want to go to the doctor and he just gives you a Band-Aid for whatever disease you have. So he has to understand what nutrients you’re missing, what you’re doing wrong. If you’re eating the wrong diet, if you’re eating seed oils, if you’re using vegetable oils, if you’re using margarine, you have to address everything. And that’s why this book is very comprehensive.

Peter Bowes (33:56) It is indeed comprehensive. I’ve read the book. It covers many of the issues that we’ve talked about just now and many, many more. And I think the thing I would say about it is… many more. And I think the thing I would say about it is that it is an easy read. And by that, I mean it isn’t too full of jargon, medical jargon, which I think is oftentimes a barrier to that level of communication that people like yourself need to achieve to get across to people some of the basic principles of healthy living.

Dr. Michael Aziz (34:22) Yeah, I wanted to make the book very simple because, again, I wanted to make being ageless affordable and doable and practical. And it’s a lot of medical terminology and the whole book can really be complicated to explain to people the telomeres and biological age and chronological age and epigenic alteration. And I had to come up. It took me a long time. It took me four years to write the book. I had a lot of help, a lot of editors. I had to give it to many people to read to make sure that it’s really easy to understand. And thank God I have a lot of positive reviews for it. So I think I did it. I think I delivered my message loud and clear. People just have to follow and they have to be motivated, like you said.

Peter Bowes (35:02)  Well, Dr. Michael Aziz, this has been a great conversation. It’s a great book. I wish you all the best with it.

Dr. Michael Aziz (35:09)

Thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much for having me.