How to Eat for Gut Health & Longevity | Lifespan with Dr. David Sinclair - S2, Ep. 8

David Sinclair (0:00)

If you eat a lot of sugar, you will have a faster aging process than if you don't. The body is turning on itself. When there's a lack of inflammation, other aspects of your body come back to life.

Matthew LaPlante (0:09)

Our bodies start to have a harder time as we age in recognizing what nutrients are and how to use them.

David Sinclair (0:19)

Your microbiome, which is the bacteria and the fungi in your gut, actually control your health and your longevity.

Matthew LaPlante (0:26)

You've bought yourself a little more good life.

David Sinclair (0:30)

Welcome to Lifespan, a show where we discuss the cutting edge science of aging and how to live healthier at any stage of life.

I'm David Sinclair, a scientist and professor working on understanding why we age and discovering new ways to slow and even reverse the aging process.

On this show, I share an insider's look at the latest from my lab, the field, and what's just around the corner.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Lifespan show. I'm here again with Dr. Matthew LaPlante, my buddy and co-author. If you caught the first episode of this series on the hallmarks of aging, we talked a lot about mitochondria, what goes wrong with them and why that can leave us with less energy as we get older and also how things like exercise and cold exposure can reinvigorate them. This is part two of three and today we're going to talk about food because what you eat dramatically affects both the signals your cells receive and the microbial community living in your gut. But don't worry if you didn't catch the first episode, you can always go back. You don't need to watch these in order. What I'll also talk about today is what you eat can also affect the proteins in your body. Too much sugar or carbs that turn into glucose in the bloodstream can attach to proteins in a process called glycation. We can actually measure that attachment using a surrogate for the other proteins in the body called HbA1c. This is sugar attached or glucose attached to hemoglobin. It's a test many of you have probably already had. And today you'll hear about inflammation, sugar, your gut and something called nutrient sensing which is how your cells know whether nutrients are abundant or scarce and why that matters if you are to live a very long time. I'm so excited to share that Lifespan magazine is now available along with everything we're building around it to help you live a longer healthier life. You'll get the gorgeous 100 page magazine, early access to Lifespan episodes, my longevity newsletter, clinical trial updates, AMAs, exclusive interviews and a lot more to come. Go to lifespan.com to read the magazine, see what we're building and support medical research too. There's a free version and $8 a month membership and a founder membership with lifetime access to the magazine, bonus material and some personal gifts from me. Life's too short, let's change that together. Okay, let's go.

Matthew LaPlante (3:02)

So let's start with chronic inflammation, something that a lot of people experience and there's actually quite a bit that we can do about. But let's start with what is chronic inflammation.

David Sinclair (3:16)

Well, inflammation is a state that is very helpful when you need to fight infections, okay? We need to be able to detect things that invade us, want to eat us, want to feed off us, and we've got an immune system to address that. The problem is that as we get older, our immune system becomes weaker at addressing and attacking invaders, and it turns on ourselves. And that's called chronic inflammation or inflammation.

And this is a process that is a problem because it erodes joints, it causes cells to accelerate in their aging, and also we get diseases like diabetes, heart disease, even Alzheimer's have a large component that is accelerated, made worse by this inflammatory process that we all get as we get older. There are ways, of course, we now know that you can slow that process down and even reverse it.

Matthew LaPlante (4:04)

How do we know that we have chronic inflammation? I mean, there are tests for inflammation, there are other symptoms of inflammation that people experience as they're getting older.

David Sinclair (4:15)

There are lots of ways to know if you're getting inflammation. Of course, the most accurate way is to do a blood test and look for markers like C-reactive protein, which is a marker for cardiovascular inflammation, IL-6, IL-1-beta, TNF-alpha. Your doctor can test for those or you can order a kit online typically. But if you just want to know daily how you're doing as a human being, it's kind of symptoms that you might see would be your skin might feel inflamed, right? So you're getting itchy, redness, your eyes might look inflamed, your joints might start to feel a little bit stiff or even painful.