now you're you're a big fan of nmn and before I read your book I had never even heard of nmn why why is that good well now we're talking about research uh from my lab in the early 2000s we found that the certain longevity genes that we've my team and well I should say my mentors team Lenny guarante uh discovered certain so let me tell you about sirtuins these are seven genes in our body some of us have better versions than others and in general it's it's found that they protect the body against diseases ranging
from um Alzheimer's to diabetes now these genes I'll get Switched Off over time the the main role is to make enzymes that tell the body how to survive during adversity so when you're exercising and dieting and in sauna they come on protect the body but the problem is as we get older they become less active and one of the biggest problems is that for their activity they require a a little molecule in the body a very abundant one called NAD NAD is required for life it's involved in chemical reactions but it's also used as a
sensor for the body of adversity when we have no adversity we're eating a lot and sitting around NAD levels go down that's true as we get older as well so a 50 year old has half the levels of a 20 year old for NAD um and what we like to do is to boost the levels of NAD back up to youthful levels and mimic exercise mimic dieting or even enhance those modalities now we've even got um human clinical trial data I was mentioning one of my companies has done clinical trials already for the last few
years and by raising NAD levels we can actually improve human health and we hope that this will be a drug one day to treat diseases ranging from kidney failure to even covid-19 survival so what about nmn well nmn is a precursor that the body uses to make NAD and by ingesting nmn we've shown in humans that you can raise your NAD Levels by about two to threefold and that's beneficial in humans based on clinical studies um you know when I say I'm a fan you know I'm not selling this stuff a lot of companies claim
that I'm involved with uh selling it that's not true I spend fair amount of legal fees on trying to stop that um but yeah any NAD boosters as they're called seem to be really beneficial I take nmn um and I've been doing so for probably about eight to ten years and uh so far so good I've only seen benefits some people ask about and so basically you're saying the goal is to increase your NAD um one way to do that is through exercise you know you can do that by fasting sauna um but there's this
other way to do is to is to take this nmn um essentially it's a supplement and you and and that can also boost your NAD uh yes that's what the science is saying and others have shown to improve six minute walk so it's being used for performance uh endurance and overall health it's not proving that it extends lifespan in fact we've only just recently founded extensor mouse's lifespan haven't published that yet so it's early days we still have a lot to go on um or to do at least but other side effects for taking it
or their um or does doing one thing make it harder to do something else or doesn't seem to be I mean mice in mice there's a couple of studies in some rare cases of genetically inbred mice that don't have an immune system uh that they there's hints that cancer might spread slightly more frequently in a very small study but these are mice that are in bread and have no immune system so it's still full steam ahead with human clinical trials there's been no Adverse Events in any of the patients that have been tested or the
subjects I should call them um and yeah so I'm I'm not yet ready to say that there's any known uh or at least a tangible provable risks that uh you know I want to be the first person to know if there's a risk because yeah father takes it my friends and family take it I take it um so I'm not I'm not selling it I just want to know the science but I do know that my father is too old to wait till 100 proof that this extends lifespan you and I are getting to that
point where we can't wait um and so that's really what I'm doing is I'm educating the public about the risks and rewards there are a couple of male studies that I want to point out but you know all weight up I think that uh the risk right now for me and my family is it's worth taking that risk until until further notice now you also take Metformin um and um and um like I don't even know how to pronounce it but sorry always virtual where's virtual yeah yeah um and you know uh and often I'll
you know when I talk to my doctor he's like well I I feel like you know maybe you're a bit too young to take metformin and maybe you know I I often encourage my patients who are let's say 60 or over but it has some side effects and that it makes it a little bit less likely to build muscle mass and stuff like that like how do you weigh some of those things uh well let's start with when should you start um I had a a real um heart to heart with my doctor when I
was 29. I had super high cholesterol levels and he said I don't want to put you on a medicine because you're too young and I said dude it I don't want to wait till I get heart disease to go on a medicine put it on put me on it now so I've I've always been of the philosophy that it doesn't matter what age somebody is you treat everybody the same way you know within reason of course 20 year olds are a bit young for this kind of stuff but if you're in your 30s and you
want to uh prevent heart disease prevent diabetes I think that it's perfectly fine uh under Dr supervision taking medicines that will prevent disease especially when does these medicines are extremely safe you do it under doctor Supervision in case there's a problem but with metformin for example and certainly Resveratrol very very very rare that somebody uh gets so sick that it's a problem and it's it's always reversible as well you just stop taking it if you get sick so these are risks I think are worth taking I don't prescribe anything I don't even recommend anything publicly
so I would say talk to your doctor you know it's if they say you're too young I would keep fighting it I would show you the data and if if you want there's always alternative doctors um I just I think that the the argument that when you're young it's too early I you know there's a there's a at least when I heard that there's this trade-off of like okay it's hard to build muscle mass building muscle mass is very important as you get older um and so um and so you know so you have to
figure the trade well it's frustrating to me as a scientist that when somebody says something in public or someone a podcaster says it's a problem it becomes locked into the Public's Consciousness and unfortunately nobody ever goes back and reads the actual paper that this came from and that that was also true for the women's health initiative and breast cancer people still believe that HRT causes breast cancer and uh that turns out it doesn't same for metformin and exercise when you look at the data uh and it's really easy to see it's not difficult you can
look at it the graph that says there's a difference uh first of all is being manipulated in a way that is deceiving they cut off the y-axis so that you're just seeing the very tippy top of the bars and the actual difference is about five percent um and it turns out that that five percent is almost certainly due to people just not doing the extra couple of reps in the exercise because they feel a bit more tired so what's the solution well if you don't mind having muscles that are five percent smaller then no big
deal those muscles are just as strong and healthier um and have less inflammation I don't care if my muscles are still 95 there I'm not trying to win any contests for bodybuilding but I can also I can avoid metformin on days I work out no big deal or force myself to do a couple more reps when I feel tired that's all it is I wouldn't say that that's a reason not to take Metformin there are other reasons such as gastric uh gastrointestinal issues that's more of a an issue but I think it the point here
that I want to make is make sure that the science is true and the data that you're getting is true don't just believe pundits or even uh you know doctors who are saying this stuff try to go to the paper read it or listen to scientists who do read papers and also just measure yourself do it under Dr supervision make sure that it's not harming you make sure you feel fine and then by all means in my view it's worth starting in your 40s to maximize your lifespan because we're aging every day it doesn't just
begin after the age of 50 or 60. now initially I was actually kind of skeptical to the idea that like big subsets of the population would adopt any of these anti-aging Lifestyles but then I saw a couple of studies that say 10 of Americans are already intermittent fasting every single day over 25 percent have already tried it maybe intermittent fasting is is not the best one to measure because it's kind of easy to do you just kind of skip breakfast and so it's kind of a simple relatively simple thing to do but how optimistic that
you actually will see widespread Behavior changes well we are in in the midst of a revolution in people's wellness and how active they are in their own health pandemic was a major wake-up call to people who stared in the mirror and saw their own mortality and then there was a boom in home testing because people didn't want to go into doctor's offices for obvious reasons and so it's becoming also easier for people to take home tests now we don't want people you know going rogue and testing themselves and trying to interpret themselves with chat gpt4
and Beyond I don't think that's the only solution I think there's a risk that uh we won't have enough doctor supervision and some people overdo it there's always that risk so there's a caution here I do think though that there's a place for people taking their own health into their own hands you can't always be supervised by your doctor when you're at a restaurant people do need to realize that most of what affects their health in the future is up to them not their doctor and what you do every day in your life Echoes for
decades and that changing a lifestyle is as important if not more important than the medicines you will take and that's why I think that this revolution that we're seeing in the population not just in the US but around the world is a great thing and will only become more prevalent and in 20 years it'll be the majority of people will will be on board with monitoring on health it's going to get easier and easier with devices as well uh cheaper and cheaper and we'll look back at two years ago when almost nobody did this and
think that going to your doctor once a year for an annual checkup and having the doctor banging your knees and cough uh will will seem medieval in fact even to us today it seems medieval yeah it's in intermittent fasting one it's while it's you know maybe uh 10 of the population it seems like it's it's probably closer to 40 percent of my friends oh yeah and um and one I think one of the reasons is well besides the fact that it's relatively easy to do um it's it's maybe one of the easiest ones to to
to to to do of of all the of all the things that people prescribe um it's also also pretty easy to to at least for people to believe that has low harm um and because if you say to somebody stop eating meat or something like that first of all I think that's hard for people to do because they they love they might love their meat and second they may they may show you 40 studies of how that actually could do harm to them um whereas and so so it's it's kind of like this both things
that come in of why people may change behaviors yeah absolutely and everybody's different some people like hot and cold therapy some people don't um yeah exercises for some it's not for me although I know it's important to do um and the same goes for fasting I do agree that there's a real uh I don't know if it's fashion or a permanent trend for people to not eat the three meals a day that we were told to eat and snack in between I think that's very 2010 we're beyond that now uh most people realize that we're
eating too much obviously you can see it in people's waistlines and I think that that 10 is an underestimate that certainly people who are taking notice of what's out the information that's out there um yeah in in my Circles of course it's it's 95 but I think I meet enough people from the general public that it's way more than 10 that people are interested in their health and I think that's also largely driven by the pandemic people worried about getting sick and dying I mean what 30 or 40 year old ever had to worry about
that before yeah and so after that in in the aftermath people are just more interested in seeing what they can do now and fasting is a pretty easy way to go to start skipping breakfast a lot of people do that anyway trying to have a very small lunch or skip lunch is another way to go I like to eat within a six hour window at night I'll have dinner I often uh as I said snack a little bit during the day but that's my goal at least and I compensate by drinking a lot of liquids
that don't have sugar in them and that helps yeah you know it's it's an amazing thing to see how just in in my career working on aging and talking about aging and talking about longevity and fasting went from Total Fringe in science to now mainstream in not just science but in the General Public
