The Blueprint for a Stronger, Longer Life with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon

**Dr. Drew** (0:10)
Hey, welcome, Dr. Drew Podcast. Check it out, the people that support us. We appreciate you supporting them. And also any suggestions for coming guests, you can send that to contactordottordrew.com. And please do not forget, ask Dr. Drew at the Rumble channel, sign up there, subscribe, and you'll be very interested in that show. Much as you'll be interested in today's show, we welcome Dr. Gabrielle Lyon.
And Dr. Lyon is a board certified family physician. She is a New York Times bestselling author, latest effort is my alarm to remember to introduce Dr. Lyon, the Forever Strong, a new science based strategy for aging well. So Dr. Lyon, welcome to the program.
So this is something I've gotten very interested in lately, not just because I'm old, but I'm sure that helps motivate, but also because I feel like we live in a time where there are things we can really do to improve aging and not just longevity, but aging well. So I'll let you kind of launch into what the book's all about.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:15)
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm a long time fan, and I think that you're doing really good work in the world, and that is incredibly important. I would say that this idea of doing aging well is a really big deal. And quite frankly, we have been focusing on obesity, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease. The list goes on when in reality, I believe that all of these things relate to the health of our skeletal muscle.
So in essence, we are not over fat, but truly we are under-muscled. And these metabolic diseases and these diseases of aging are all signs and symptoms of unhealthy skeletal muscle, which is amazing because it's the one organ system we can actively do something about.

**Dr. Drew** (2:04)
Keep going. How do we do something? I have some ideas and just metabolism, we're going to get into all of this. And I want to sort of frame this as your husband's a Navy SEAL. So he all understands something about training. You, to me, strike me as someone who's very involved in your own fitness and diet practices, I'm sure. And so we're going to talk about some of the weeds on that. But I also want to talk about, I mean, if you practice family medicine, you know how difficult it is for some people to do this. It's not, you know, we're sort of breathe rarefied air. We're lucky. We like doing it. I think I like doing it. And so that's different than people that really, really don't like doing it.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:44)
Yeah, you're absolutely correct. And I want to tell you, I created this concept of medicine called muscle-centric medicine. And ultimately that's why I wrote the book, Forever Strong. And you can appreciate this because we all have this one experience. We have this one experience where there's a single patient that changes everything for us. And I did my fellowship in geriatrics and nutritional sciences at WashU in St. Louis.
And as a fellow, I was-

**Dr. Drew** (3:11)
Hold on a second. So you were a family practice and then geriatrics fellow?

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (3:15)
Yeah, well, and actually I did two years of psychiatry as well.

**Dr. Drew** (3:18)
Oh my God, I'm so jealous because I always was jealous of the people that did medicine psych.
But you even broadened it out further. You did family medicine, which means you were doing surgery and pediatrics in addition to the general medicine, then psychiatry and then geriatrics. And I'm guessing you were in with a bunch of internists that didn't know anything about psychiatry.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (3:37)
Yes, actually, I actually did psychiatry first. I did two years at the University of Louisville. That was probably some of the most profound training that I received. I did two years and then I switched to family medicine, did three years of family medicine. And then I did a postdoc in nutritional sciences and geriatrics at WashU in St. Louis.
My undergraduate, however, was human nutrition, vitamin, mineral metabolism, in which I trained under one of the current world leading experts in protein metabolism to this day.

**Dr. Drew** (4:09)
Where is that?

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (4:09)
University of Illinois, Champaign, Atlanta. And Dr. Drew, one of the reasons I was very excited about coming on here is because you are an example. You are very fit and you have really taken your fitness and your nutrition to what I would consider something that's going to support optimal aging. And when I was doing my fellowship, I had always been interested in nutritional sciences and I begrudgingly went to medical school, but nutrition was always my first love. And when I was in my fellowship, the deal was in order for me to do nutritional sciences, so I'd already done four years, in order for me to continue my education in nutritional sciences, I had to get funding. And the way that I was going to get funding was to be a geriatrician.