Why Women Live Longer But Spend More Years Unhealthy?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Florence Comite** (0:30)
Consider your DNA like a rough draft, that you can maneuver and you can have switches that can turn on and off.

**Faye Bate** (0:35)
Do your genes actually determine how long you live, or is that just a story we have been told?

**Florence Comite** (0:41)
We women do live longer, but not in good health. Peptides, generally, are f*****.

**Faye Bate** (0:46)
I'm honored today to be joined by Dr Florence Comite, the founder of the first Women's Health Clinic, a Yale-trained endocrinologist, and the author of her new book, Invincible.

**Florence Comite** (0:57)
The LP1s are the new antibiotics of the 21st century. We're all born with the tendency to have a disorder of carbohydrate metabolism. 80% of diabetics are diagnosed in the emergency room. It's actually not good for the body to get NAD itself. If you know what's going on, you can actually change the way genes work.

**Faye Bate** (1:15)
If you want to understand how to actually take control of your health, then this episode is for you. What would you say are the biggest dietary mistakes you've seen women making?

**Florence Comite** (1:24)
So that's a complex answer.

**Faye Bate** (1:27)
Before we get into the conversation, if you could do me a favor that literally takes you two seconds, hit the subscribe button or leave a five-star review depending on what platform you're listening on. It really helps us to continue to grow the podcast and bring you guests to help you live a happier, healthier life.
Thank you, Florence. We have had so many questions in from our community about how to live forever. But before I come on to that, whenever we have someone who is a woman in STEM on this podcast, I think it's very important to talk about your journey to where you are. And as a true pioneer with a phenomenal career, I would love to hear a bit of a synopsis about your journey to today.

**Florence Comite** (2:10)
Yeah, I'd love to. So I started out, I always wanted to be in medicine from a very young age. My parents were immigrants and they had a tough time prior to coming to the States. And I remember overhearing them thinking, you know, what could I do to contribute? You know, even as a very young child, I remember thinking, one of these days, you know, my grandchildren are going to ask me, what value did you add to the world? And I think being a doctor with a stethoscope, to me, sounded like you could go anywhere and help people.
And so when I started my journey into medicine, I fast-tracked a bit to medical school. And then in medical school, I loved the whole area of hormones, metabolism, and how it affects the whole body. So I ended up studying both children, men and women, and trained in both, in all fields of hormones, of endocrinology, it's what we call it, reproductive, which has to do with how the brain and pituitary gland affects ovaries and testicles, and women and men, men and women.
And then in children, growth and development. So I kind of drew a line at geriatrics, thinking it was so complicated, because as you get into your 80s and 90s and over 100, your body's complex but delicate, even more so than children that can get over things. But in the end, now we have people who are in their 90s. So the gamut runs from 10 to 90s. And I ended up at Yale after training as a clinical investigator in our country, the National Institutes of Health. I had a wonderful mentor and I studied specifically peptides, which I know is a very hot topic too. In America it is, I suspect in England as well. And right from the beginning, I actually used peptides in children, one of the first to reverse early puberty. I went on to treat women's health and started Women's Health at Yale in 1992 So this was for women from their 30s to their 60s. And then I went on to incorporate men's health. At first the men, when I got to New York, it got very big for men. And the men would say, because when you looked me up, it looked like I was all women's health or pediatric. And they would say, but you take care of women.