Office Hours: 5 Things You Think Are Extending Your Life (That Are Actually Doing Nothing)

Mark Hyman, MD

Dr. Mark Hyman is leading a health revolution—one focused on using food as medicine to support longevity, energy, mental clarity, happiness, and so much more. Mark Hyman, MD is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a sixteen-time New York Times best-selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy.

He is a co-founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Function Health. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Dr. Hyman Show with 150+ million downloads. Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, Fox, and CNN.

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Full Transcript

Automatically generated. Please forgive any typos or errors in the following transcript. It was generated by a third party and has not been subsequently reviewed by our team.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Longevity has become an industry. Cold plunges, supplements, wearables, peptides, hyperbaric chambers, elaborate morning routines. And listen, I'm fascinated by this stuff. I use many of these tools myself. I have a morning routine.

I do cold plunges. I use certain supplements and peptides. I love experimenting with new ways to optimize my health and I'm always interested in where the science is going. But here's the thing, none of these tools can replace the fundamentals. You can have the perfect supplement stack, track every biomarker, spend thousands of dollars on the latest longevity therapies.

But if you're not exercising, you're not building muscle, you're not sleeping well, you're not eating real food, and you're not taking care of your metabolic health, you're optimizing the margins while ignoring the foundation. And I think that's where the longevity conversation can sometimes get off track. So today we're going to cut through some of the noise, what actually matters most if you want to live a longer healthier life, we're going to talk about that. Because you don't need to give up the cold plungers or throw away your supplements, you just need to know what deserves your attention first. This episode was brought to you by Function.

Get access to over 160 lab tests annually at functionhealth.com/mark. Alright, let's dive into the myths. The first myth is the thinner you are, the healthier you'll age. Let's start with the scale. For decades, we've been conditioned to think lower weight equals better health.

And excess body fat, particularly visceral fat is absolutely associated with metabolic disease. But here's the problem, weight doesn't tell you what you're made of. You can lose 20 pounds and celebrate what you see on the scale but what did you lose? Fat, muscle, both? Because as you get older, preserving muscle becomes incredibly important.

Age related loss of muscle and strength can affect your mobility, your balance, your ability to perform everyday tasks. And ultimately, your independence. The National Institute on Aging knows that exercise can help protect against age related loss of muscle mass, strength and function. So I don't want someone who's 65 years old obsessing over getting as thin as possible. I want to know, are you metabolically healthy?

Are you strong? How much muscle do you have? Can you move well? So do this instead, get stronger. Stop making weight the only metric.

Track your strength and your physical function. Can you carry heavy groceries? Can you get up off the floor without using your hands? Try that. Climb several flights of stairs.

Can you maintain your balance on one foot for example? It's important to make resistance training a regular part of your life. Your goal isn't simply to weigh less at 70, it's to be stronger at 70. Muscle is the key organ of longevity. All right, the second myth is the right supplements can slow aging.

Now this may be the most tempting longevity myth because wouldn't it be nice to take the right combination of pills every morning and buy yourself another decade? NAD boosters, resveratrol, antioxidants, multivitamins, there are situations where supplements can be useful. If you're deficient in something, treating the deficiency matters. There are nutrients and compounds with interesting evidence from particular health goals. But this enormous difference between this supplement affects the biological pathway associated with aging and taking this will make you live longer.

We need to stop confusing the two. Now here's a great reality check. The NIH researchers analyzed nearly 400,000 healthy US adults and they followed them for more than twenty years and they found that regular multivitamin use wasn't associated with a lower risk of death. That doesn't mean that multivitamins are useless, it means a supplement isn't a longevity strategy by itself. Instead of more supplements, I want you to master the fundamentals first.

Before you spend $300 a month on supplements ask, am I exercising? Am I sleeping enough? Am I eating mostly whole nutrient dense foods? Am I maintaining my metabolic health? Am I smoking?

How much am I drinking? Am I managing stress? Am I taking care of my gut health? Supplements belong at the top of the pyramid, not the bottom. So use them strategically when there's a reason, but don't supplement your way around the behaviors that have much stronger evidence behind them.

The third myth is longevity is about keeping your body in permanent repair mode. Well here's another longevity idea that's gotten oversimplified. Autophagy is good. More autophagy, less mTOR, longer fast, more cellular cleanup. Sounds good, but biology doesn't work in absolutes and your body actually needs to do two very different jobs if you want to age well.

Yes, it needs to clean up and repair and autophagy is important, but it also needs to rebuild. So think about renovating a house. First you bring in the demolition crew, they clear out what's old, damaged, no longer working, That's essentially what autophagy does in your body. It's your cellular cleanup system and recycling system, breaking down damaged proteins and cellular components so they can be cleared or reused. Things like fasting and simply giving your body a break from eating can help shift your biology toward those repair pathways.

That's important. But eventually the demolition crew has to leave and the construction crew has to come in and that's where mTOR comes in. So what is mTOR? Well it's one of the body's most important nutrient sensing pathways. I call it longevity switch.

When it's activated, particularly by amino acids from protein and from strength training or resistance training, it helps signaling your body to synthesize protein and build and maintain muscle. Now as we get older, that becomes incredibly important because one of the things we're fighting against with aging is the loss of muscle. So if you're constantly fasting or just eating one meal a day, you all do, or you're chronically under eating protein or you're trying to suppress mTOR all the time because you think that's the secret to longevity, you may be working against another important longevity goal, maintaining muscle. I've talked to you about this before, the longevity benefits associated with autophagy can have a downside when taking too far because prolonged or excessive suppression of these growth pathways can contribute to muscle loss. So do this instead.

Cycle between repair and rebuilding. The goal isn't between suppressing mTOR and inducing autophagy or activating mTOR and building muscle, you need both. You want periods when you're not eating overnight, for example when your body has an opportunity to shift toward cleanup and repair. And then you want periods where you're giving your body the raw materials and the stimulus it needs to rebuild. You want to eat adequate high quality protein.

You want to strength train. You want to build and maintain muscle. And then you give your body time when you're not constantly feeding it to rhythm. Clean up, rebuild, clean up, rebuild. That's how your body was designed to work.

So don't fall into the trap of thinking, if some fasting is good, more fasting must be better. Not true. Or if sometimes suppressing mTOR is good, activating mTOR must be bad. Nope. The longevity sweet spot isn't keeping your body permanently in one state.

It's knowing when to repair and when to rebuild. Let me tell you what a typical physical looks like. A few basic lab tests, no imaging unless something's wrong. The function we created a new standard, labs plus an MRI every single year. You get access to 160 plus lab tests to measure signals in your blood, including inflammation, heart disease risk, metabolic health, and lots more.

And you can complete your health baseline with an annual MRI to understand where things are happening. It scans for signs of cancer in the brain, pancreas, kidneys, prostate, and more, plus conditions like strokes, aneurysms of the fatty liver. Two views, one clear picture. Your first year sets your baseline. Every year after shows the trend.

Take control and check your health at functionhealth.com/mark. And if you're one of the first 1,000 people this week, use the code mark twenty twenty six for a $50 credit or your $365 annual membership. Alright. The fourth myth is a glass of red wine every night is good for you. For years, this was practically treated as medical advice.

Have a glass of red wine, it's good for your heart. Maybe you heard of the French paradox, maybe you heard that resveratrol and red wine promotes longevity, but the story has become much less convincing as the research has improved. Here's what we know very clearly today. Alcohol causes cancer. It's an established human carcinogen associated with cancers including breast, colorectal, liver, esophageal, head and neck cancers.

Cancer risk generally increases with greater consumption. Even light drinking though can increase the risk of cancer. So I think we need to separate two completely different statements. I enjoy having a glass of wine occasionally and I'm drinking wine because it's good for me. Those aren't the same thing.

Do this instead, don't confuse pleasure with medicine. If you enjoy an engaging glass of red wine and understand the trade offs, that's a personal decision. But I wouldn't start drinking alcohol because you're trying to live longer. If what you're after is polyphenols, you don't need red wine to get them. Eat colorful vegetables, berries, herbs, spices, nuts, seeds, teas.

The National Cancer Institute specifically knows that despite speculation around red wine, there's no scientific evidence that red wine reduces heart disease risk, but it is a known cause of cancer. Wine can be something you enjoy, just don't mistake it for a longevity strategy. Alright, here we go with myth number five. Longevity is mostly genetic. Well this one can make you feel powerless.

My dad had diabetes, heart disease runs in my family, everyone in my family gets sick in their sixties. Genes absolutely matter, they can influence your susceptibility to certain diseases and aspects of how you age but your genes don't operate in isolation. They're interacting with your environment and your behaviors every single day. What are you eating? Are you exercising?

Are you sleeping? Are you smoking? How much alcohol are you drinking? What's your metabolic health? How connected are you to other people?

Are you getting appropriate preventive health care? All these things can impact gene expression. Now although some factors such as genetics aren't under our control, there are modifiable behaviors that can support living longer and healthier and improve our gene expression. So do this instead, focus on what you can change. You can't choose your parents, but you can choose what you do today.

That means instead of asking what disease am I destined to get, ask, knowing my family history, what can I start doing now to reduce my risk? That's a much more useful longevity question. Okay, so here's the longevity reality check. Let's pull all these five myths together for a longevity reality check. Myth, get thinner, instead get stronger.

Myth, find the perfect supplement stack, instead master the fundamentals first. Myth, keep your body in repair mode, instead cycle between repair and rebuild. Myth, a little red wine is good for you for longevity. Well instead enjoy a glass of red wine if you choose to but don't make it part of your longevity prescription or even any type of framework around health. Myth, your genes determine how you age instead focus relentlessly on the variables you can change.

Here's what I want you to remember. Longevity doesn't start with a biohack. It starts with the things we already know matter. Move your body, build muscle, eat real food, get good sleep, don't smoke, be thoughtful about alcohol, manage your metabolic health, that's a big one. Stay connected to people you love.

Take care of health problems before they become bigger ones. None of that sounds particularly futuristic. And maybe that's the point. The longevity industry is constantly giving us something new to optimize. The fundamentals haven't changed nearly as much.

So before you worry about the newest supplement or the latest longevity technology, ask yourself, am I doing the things we already know work? When the answer is yes, then start incorporating new practices and supplements into your routine. Because the goal isn't to build the world's most complicated longevity routine, it's to reach your seventies, eighties and beyond with strength, with energy, with brain function and independence to actually enjoy those extra years. And that's really what HealthSpan's all about. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one.

Check it out here.