there is even some evidence that we can reverse aging in some degree especially in cells meet Dr Morgan LaVine a former Yale professor and currently a founding principal investigator at Alto Labs Alto Labs is a new $3 billion anti-aging biotech startup whose funders are said to include Jeff Bezos Dr Morgan is an expert in molecular mechanisms that drive biological aging hi I'm Dr Morgan LaVine I'm a professor who specializes in biology of Aging biological age we actually think is Mal we know that aging can be slowed we see this when comparing across species species don't
decline all at the same rate some of them actually do this at such a slow rate what we call negligible senescence that we actually can't observe Aging in those systems so chronological age is what it says on your driver's license however this is different from what we call biological age which is really measuring the state of the organism we might say that even though you're chronologically 50 years old you have a biolog logical state that actually resembles someone who's more like a 60-year-old and what that means is we can actually slow the rate at which
these changes accumulate or maybe even reverse them and go back to a better functioning State and with that we would actually give people more years of life without the painful parts of Aging we actually think that only about 10 to maybe 20% of your lifespan is dictated by your genes and this is good news because it actually means we have a lot more control over how fast we're aging there is even some evidence that we can reverse aging in some degree especially in cells biological age is the age at which our body is functioning which
can be affected by our lifestyle choices biological age is more informative than chronological age for predicting risk of disease or death that's because it is not chronological time that drives the development of disease but rather the biological changes taking place among the molecules and cells in our bodies most people's biological age will be within plus or minus 5 years of their chronological age but you can have outliers of up to 10 or more years the wonderful thing compared with chronological age is that biological age is modifiable we don't yet know exactly how to modify it
to the greatest extent but the clock can be made to tick slower or even possibly go backwards in response to our behaviors though it can also speed up the first step is getting a valid and reliable measure of it which Dr Morgan's lab has been working on can we measure biological age if you have already visited your doctor and you've got an annual blood test you probably can get your phenotypic age test for free so there are online calculators that list the nine biomarkers that you actually need to calculate your phenotypic age these are freely
available on the web so all you would need to do is go and find your most recent lab test input the values and the algorithm will actually produce a phenotypic age measure for you so can we reverse aging one notable thing she emphasized is that lifestyle change such as eating habits can help us maintain mainin Health span lifestyle right now our best ticket in terms of slowing our aging process so you can actually boost things like resilience through different lifestyle behaviors in this video Dr Morgan will delve into four immediate lifestyle changes that can effectively
decelerate the aging process let's start with the crucial aspect of exercise exercise I think is such a simple thing that so few people you know everyone's waiting for the magic pill exercise is amazing it makes you feel good for me trying to maintain an active lifestyle as much as possible I like to do things that just are fun so hiking or you know any of these classes but probably if I were thinking the most beneficial probably things like hit try to do that as much as I can high-intensity interval training or hit incorporates several rounds
that alternate between several minutes of high-intensity movements to significantly increase the heart rate to at least 80% of one's maximum heart rate followed by short periods of lower intensity movements interval training was first introduced in the 1950s as a higher intens it form called Sprint interval training which reached 100% maximum heart rate and was used to improve the performance of elite Olympic athletes exercise I actually don't think that there's good evidence that exercise is not beneficial there was a study that showed that there was a very limited increase in lifespan for the exercised mice versus
sedentary mice but the important thing in that study is they showed there was an increase in health span which ultimately to me is the more important thing Health span differs from lifespan in that lifespan is the number of years someone lives from birth until death while Health span is the number of years someone is healthy without chronic and debilitating disease what we want is Health span which is described as the maintenance of full function as nearly as possible to the end of life now let's dive into three ways of eating that can help you boost
your health span there are really three components of diet that seem to be impacting aging so the first is how much we eat the second is what we eat and the third is when we eat so in terms of how much we eat a lot of science went into this idea of caloric restriction caloric restriction isn't starvation it's usually just about a 20% reduction in the overall calorie intake people have seen that when animals are chloric restricted they tend to live longer we're actually more prone to overeating so some researchers have figured out that it
might not be the chloric Restriction it's actually The Beneficial thing so even if you can't restrict your calories just moving away from overeating is probably going to have a beneficial effect for most people the other thing that's been studied is this concept of what we eat a lot of research has gone into whether things like a plant-based diet are actually beneficial to aging longevity and there seems to be some evidence that eating less animal products more fruits and veggies more Whole Foods is going to be better overall longevity science says plant-based diet is probably the
best diet there's a lot of evidence from both epidemiological which is the science when you actually look at populations as well as some more emerging clinical trials that suggest that a diet rich in mostly plant-based foods can actually extend your lifespan and prevent disease also minimizing things like refined sugars and the things that we know are bad for our health so what does Dr Morgan LaVine actually eat I eat I would say 90 to 95% plant-based I do eat some fish try to keep kind of like a Japanese type diet the traditional Japanese diet is
considered one of the healthiest diets in the world the Japanese Pride themselves in having one of the lowest rates of obesity in the world as well as low incidences of certain hormon dependent cancers the food would typically consist of rice with plenty of local vegetables and fermented foods such as miso soup and pickled vegetables all particularly good for healthy digestive system if you want more detail on Japanese diet please check out my video on Japan's oldest fitness instructor 92 years old aishi Mikan the third comes down to when we eat and this is really a
new field in aging and Longevity science but what scientists found is actually fasting can mimic some of the benefits that we've seen with choric restriction so if people can perhaps minimize their eating to a small window we think that this can actually recapitulate a lot of the benefits that were seen in the chloric Restriction studies the idea of why things like chloric restriction or fasting might actually improve our aging process is because we think this evokes this idea of hormesis in our bodies What hormesis refers to is a mild stressor that actually makes our bodies
more resilient and robust toess over time so having these short-term mild stressors whether it be fasting or whether it be a small caloric deficit actually makes our bodies more resilient against a lot of the changes we see that increase with aging so in terms of what we eat how and when does Dr Morgan LaVine really eat to maximize the benefit and then I do intermittent fasting where I don't um eat until usually like 1 1:00 um again that I think we don't know for sure whether that's beneficial but for now um just sticking to it
seeing on average only 10 to 30% of our lifespan is estimated to be due to genetics that means how we age will largely be down to our behaviors by implementing exercises to boost heart rate and blood circulation preventing overeating together with mainly plant-based diet with time intervals we may be able to slow down aging which is the root cause of many of the diseases
