Longevity Toolkit: An Effective Way To Fix Metabolic Health & Stay Young | Dr. Mark Hyman: Full Transcript

Transcript sourced from the original YouTube captions. Timestamps link directly to the video.

0:01

this is the most powerful approach to health I've seen in my career as a doctor and it's the most crucial step you can take for your health today the biggest problem facing America today is poor metabolic Health it's essentially a condition that affects 93. 2% of Americans and most of them have no freaking clue in fact if I said do you have good or bad metabolic Health you might not even know what I'm talking about or you might go yeah I'm overweight maybe my metabolism not so good but the truth is that 93. 2% of Americans are in metabolic Health meaning what meaning they have some degree of insulin resistance and are somewhere in the Spectrum from pre-diabetes or pre pre-diabetes to type two diabetes right and and that means they have either high blood sugar high blood pressure high cholesterol have had a heart attack or stroke or overweight so that's only 6. 8% of us that are healthy and won't have abnormal test and that's what we're finding by the way people have already gone through and and measured their biomarkers and we're seeing overwhelmingly even in younger age groups uh real abnormalities in metabolic health and most doctors are not looking at health proactively or preventively they're waiting till something happens basically wait till the problem goes wrong then try to figure out what it is then give a drug and if that drug doesn't work you give another drug and if that doesn't work or causes side effects you know hopefully uh they just sort of figure out another thing but it's kind of a mess and so the key is how do we create a proactive strategy around our healths now in this new podcast series around KN your numbers um I'm I'm excited to share with

1:33

numbers um I'm I'm excited to share with you what really should be looked at and what's really going on under the hood and I in order to actually get people access to their own biology and I believe we need to democratize People's Health Care we need to give people agency and sovereignty over their health so that they know what's going on it's not just a doctor's job and you're smart enough I believe to know exactly what to do when you find out what's going on with your body now we have wearables that give us everything from our temperature to our oxygen saturation our heart varability our sleep metrics I mean pretty much everything you'd want to know from our wearables why should stop there at our skin why don't we go inside our bodies and find out what's really going on and so I recently co-founded a company called function Health it's a revolutionary new way to understand and manage your health that starts with a comprehensive set of labs that I do repeatedly to help figure out what's going on and get a really big road map of what's going on with their biology and it's it's basically over a hundred biomarkers that you get checked every year all the results are delivered in an easy to use dashboard that tracks your numbers over time and can show you insights about how you're changing for good or bad what what your biomarkers mean so what are the things we look at when we look at things that your doctor may already look at like blood sugar that's great but by the time your blood sugar goes up your your horse is way out of the barn I mean the problem is that by the time you see elevations in blood sugar you've already probably been in poor metabolic health for a decade or two and your body has compensated for it and your blood sugar only goes up when you stop compensating

3:04

only goes up when you stop compensating for it so what else should you measure to know what's going on with your metabolic Health well the single most important test I think that you need to know about your health and particularly for longevity and your rate of Aging is something called insulin now sadly uh even though I've been measuring this for 30 years and it's very inexpensive but for the most part people don't look at insulin yet when you look at the scientific literature elevated insulin levels are EX extraordinarily predictive of bad Health outcomes diabetes heart attack Strokes cancer dementia you name it pretty much everything related to aging so high insulin levels are easy to measure but almost never measured so I'm gonna ask you to think about uh all your doctor's visits and when was the last time your doctor said I measured your insulin and here's the problem and in fact unless you're going to a functional medicine doctor or someone who already sort of does what I do you're probably not going to get that test and yet it's so essential because your insulin starts going up before your blood sugar goes up and it keeps your blood sugar down for a long time so by the time your blood sugar starts going up you're in trouble so that's really important and and it's an easy test and it's important to understand to how to interpret it because you know when you look at for example blood sugar the reference ranges are screwed up right it says if you're under a 100 you're okay if you're 100 to 126 you have pre-diabetes and if you have over 126 you're type two diabetic okay fine that's fine but like what if your blood sugars 95 is that okay or 99 or 97 or 91 probably not in fact when

4:35

or 97 or 91 probably not in fact when you look at the literature your risk goes up in a linear fashion starting at a blood sugar of 85 fasting and this is from a large Israeli cohort where they looked at at basically rising blood sugars and increased risk of heart attack strokes and death and it was just a perfect straight line so like you know what is the optimal range so when you look at it just to kind of give you a little background on knowing your numbers when you look at reference ranges on lab that you get from your doctor it'll say you know here's the you know low end and the high end of the range how do they come up with that number based on on statistics and what they use is something called the standard deviation so basically when you look at a number it's two standard deviations from the mean is sort of the the middle range of the population but it's basically includes about 96% of the population right so 2% on either end is you know out side the two standard deviations from the mean and everybody else is quote normal but let's just take America for example if you landed in America and you were a martian you would basically conclude that it's normal for people to be overweight because 75% of people are overweight well it's normal quote normal but it's not optimal and so the question is what is the optimal ranges in which you have vibrant Health not do you not have some terrible disease right by the time your your blood sugar starts going over 100 you're already in trouble but maybe it should be 70 to 85 you know how

6:05

maybe it should be 70 to 85 you know how about your insulin if you look at a blood reference range on insulin it'll say you know five to 15 or 20 well that's ridiculous your ideal insulin should be less than five if it's 5 to 10 you're borderline if you're over 10 you're in trouble and I see this over and over as a easy test to measure the doctors are missing that is going to give them a clue about what is really going on metabolically with their health so insulin is so important you heard me talk about insulin probably till you're sick of me talking about insulin on the podcast and my books but it is one of the most important things and it's a simple biomarker that's almost always missed by your traditional doctor so what else should you be looking at well you should be looking at your A1C now most doctors look at hemoglobin A1c after someone's already diabetic in order to track therapy now A1C is basically a measurement of sugars and proteins glaming together to form these damaged things basically these hemog damage hemoglobin uh basically it's called glycation it's it's like a uh chemical reaction that occurs between sugars and proteins and you'll see it for example on on the crust of a bread or crispy chicken skin or creme brulee that's not good and that's fine if you're eating it but you don't really want to eat too much of that anyway it's called the advanced glycation end products or ages ages they bind to rages R AES so aging causes raging which causes aging so you get the picture uh these guys come up acrms they're very funny but anyway the the whole point here is that hemoglobin A1c is an indicator that your blood sugar is on average too high and

7:36

blood sugar is on average too high and so it should be a level of of under five and a half now it used to be that we used to say six was diabetes uh and then they moved it to six and a half but the the range between 5. 5 and six that's kind of in the pre-diabetic range now is it better to be lower yes it's probably better to be around five or 5. 1 or around that most people aren't that because their blood sugars are just too high but it's if it starts to go up it's a sign that there's a problem now like I said you can have perfectly normal blood sugar perfectly normal A1C and still be in really bad shape and I'll just give you an example of a patient I had years ago she was very overweight and I I checked her numbers and I was like wow you know I think you're going to be diabetic and I said let's do a glucose tolerance test and measure insulin and glucose and now by the way most people who who are doctors do not measure glucose tolerance test unless you're pregnant at 28 weeks or if they think you have diabetes which is silly we should be all doing that test if there's any indication of any overweight problem or metabolic health issues there's indirect ways to figure out what's going on but I think if you're concerned it's really the gold standard and and what you do is you give yourself the equivalent of two coca-colas with the GL glucose and then you measure glucose at fasting one and two hours or you can do it at 30 minutes one and two hours and and fasting but most doctors when they do that test will never do an insulin test but that's the most important so this patient basically had perfectly

9:07

this patient basically had perfectly normal fasting glucose a perfect 1hour glucose and a perfect 2hour glucose never went high at all never went over 120 and her A1C was perfect but her insulin was like 50 fasting and it went up to 200 and 400 after the sugar drink so her insulin was just working over time to keep her blood sugar normal so you got to kind of check insulin A1C and gluc but you got to look at the whole picture now what else can you use to determine your your risk and what's going on metabolically well often an overlooked in a very important test is called uric acid now people might have heard about this if you have high uric acid you can get gout uh and that's what people know about it you can also get uric acid kidney stones but uric acid is a compound that's produced in the body in the course of metabolism particularly in the course of metabolism of fructose now fructose is fine if you're eating it in Fruit but but most of the fructose we consume in this country is in the form of high fructose corn syrup so maybe between 55 to 75% fructose and it's free fructose it's not bound like in sugar if you have table sugar it's fructose and glucose but they have a a chemical bond well in high fructose corn syrup it's free fructose and that creates a huge load in the liver which doesn't raise your blood sugar but it actually causes fatty liver insulin resistance and diabetes through another mechanism and it increases uric acid so if you have high uric acid Aid it's a sign of inflammation it's a sign of of metabolic poor health and it's an easy test to measure another test is leptin leptin is a very important test because leptin is

10:38

a very important test because leptin is the hormone that actually tells you you're full now sometimes it doesn't work like just like you have insulin resistance where you end up with you know higher higher levels of insulin to try to get your blood sugar normal because your cells become resistant the effect of insulin because you're eating too much sugar and starch kind of like the boy who kide Wolf the same thing happens with Le you can get leptin resistance and so often you'll see high leptin levels and people are overweight not because their appetite systems working great and it's making them feel full but it's because they are inflamed and their brain is not responding properly and they're having to produce more and more leptin it's not working though so that's another clue so the these are all really simple tests another really important test is a measure of your cholesterol now not the typical cholesterol that you get at your annual checkup most people get that it's pretty standard but that's like you know kind of I would say what the analogy would be Newtonian physics to quantum physics it's just it's old school it describes things in sort of a way that's useful but it doesn't really give you the full picture and recently I had Ron Krauss on the podcast who was a scientist and lipidologist who basically discovered that cholesterol wasn't just HDL LDL total cholesterol triglycerides but the quality of the cholesterol matter those numbers that you get on your annual test are just the weight like basically how much if you weighed it how much would it weigh uh how many milligrams per deciliter in other words how many milligrams in a deciliter of blood of cholesterol do you have it's like 200 or

12:08

cholesterol do you have it's like 200 or 300 right but the the it doesn't tell you whether it's like if you have a box you know that's a certain weight you could it could have you know 10 big beach balls or a thousand golf balls and and those have a very profoundly different effect on your health now why is this important in terms of your metabolism because the size and the number of your particles is an indirect indicator of your metabolic Health when you have insulin resistance pre-diabetes metabolic syndrome it's all the same thing and and by the way what does that even mean it means you know people who have belly fat it means people who have high blood pressure it means people who have high fasting blood sugar but not uh 126 it means they have a low HDL high triglycerides increased waste size that's all what we call metabolic syndrome but this test is so important because you can do through a simple cholesterol test that can look at other markers of your lipid quality that really matter like lipid particle size whether your LDL small or large whether htl small or large whether you have large or small triglycerides how many particles you have and that gives you a really good sense of your overall state of metabolic health and whether you're insulin resistant so you could have a totally normal cholesterol like 150 but you could you know it could be made up of all these small particles and be far more dangerous for you than if your cholesterol was 250 so it's really to look at these measures and sadly Dr Ron Krauss discovered this over 40 years ago I think and and still it there's very little uptake in the Healthcare

13:38

very little uptake in the Healthcare System I think even though it's not really much more than a normal cholesterol panel and uh and I think he said maybe 1% of the tests uh done in America are this maybe less I would guess but it is the gold standard in my mind for how to look at cardiac health and for how to look at metabolic Health there's also other markers that are included in function Health which also indicate risk so we're building function to democratize much of what I do to give you the keys to your own health and to put control back in your hands this is the most powerful approach to health I've seen in my career as a doctor and it's the most crucial step you can take for your health today so it's really important that you have to realize that you're the CEO of your own health that you are the one in charge most of health does not happen at the doctor's office it happens where we live work eat play and prey so the waight list for function now is open uh and function is live across United States we're inviting new members to join our weight list every day and if you're interested in taking control of your health make sure you secure your spot on the weight list right now by visiting function health. com and by the way there's not like one number that you look at that's the right number it's the profile it's the pattern in the data that's going to give you a sense of what's really going on so I look at not just one biomarker but I look at patterns of biomarkers and what they tell me about People's Health so apob is another type of cholesterol particle that we don't typically look at that often but it also is a direct measure of the type and quality of your cholesterol particles so if you have more insulin resistance if you have poor metabolic Health if you have higher

15:10

metabolic Health if you have higher triglycerides more small particles you'll see more apob particles and that's dangerous and this is also something you can do something about we also look at hscrp which is C reactive protein now one of the things you should know is that if you're obese or overweight or at poor metabolic Health by definition you're inflamed and we know that inflammation is is the real driver of all age related diseases heart disease cancer diabetes dementia so when you look at a at CRP it gives you an indicator of whether or not you are having this smoldering silent killer of inflammation and you may not feel it's not like a sore throat or a sprain ankle but it's really dangerous and uh and when you combine High CRP with poor metabolic Health with bad cholesterol it's kind of a deadly combo so getting your CRP checked is is really important that's also part of it we also looked at other markers for cardiac and metabolic Health like lipoprotein little a so it's really important that you understand how how to correct these things and the beautiful thing about function is that we provide you with a road map based on your particular biomarkers for example with insulin resistance we know that things can be very helpful things like berberine or green tea or or other nutrients like like poic acid or magnesium or chromium or uh biotin all can be very helpful in regulating blood sugar and then you know if you do need more aggressive help we'll say gee your A1C is like 12 you better get in to see the doctor today because you're in trouble and you could end up in keto acidosis if you don't get this treated but for most people this is something

16:40

but for most people this is something that can be managed it's a slow smoldering problem and then you can recheck your biomarkers and actually see what happens so uh it's really important to understand that that metabolic health is the biggest threat for poor metabolic health is the biggest threat facing America today and increasingly globally is primarily caused by our Ultra processed high sugar starch diet and sedentary lifestyle and I've seen this over and over in my patients and it's not about taking a pill or getting a shot it's about understanding the root cause and fixing that which is what functional medicine is all about it's what function is about and and why it's so important so this is a a really short snippet of why it's important to know your numbers particularly these numbers because I think most people don't know these numbers about themselves uh and I it's shocking to me that given the science we have that we don't do this and you know what I'm saying is not all alternative medicine it's not integrative medicine it's just good medicine it's what all doctors should be doing and it's based on the existing scientific evidence now what happens is that we have scientific evidence but it takes decades and decades for it to translate into clinical practice like I said Ron Krauss figured out this stuff about lipid particles 40 years ago and still uh it's it's not being done this stuff about insulin is not new news Gerald Ren discovered this again 30 40 years ago more I think think now and I mean he's dead already he discovered when he was a young man and this this is really what's facing uh us today in America which is This Disaster of poor metabolic health

18:11

This Disaster of poor metabolic health so it's important to know these numbers and you're not going to typically get them at your doctor so like I said before if I could see millions of patients I would but I can't so with function Health we're hoping to democratize much of what I do offering you the keys to your own health and for my career as a doctor this is really the most powerful approach I've seen it's the most impactful thing you can do for your health which is take ownership of it which is understand what's going on inside which is knowing your biomarkers not just the wearables which are great but let's go under the skin we're looking at over a 100 data points on a repeated basis that help you figure out what's going on now a function fills gaps in our really strained healthcare system because you know doctors are busy they're putting out fires we we're I think we have 130, 000 doctor shortage we have nursing shortages we just don't have enough Physicians and practitioners to deal with the incredible degree of chronic disease we have in America Six out of 10 of us have a chronic illness 75% overweight one and two have diabetes 93% are metabolic unhealthy I mean we don't have enough Healthcare Providers to go around so we need a different model and this is really why I helped co-found function health and and it provides you with an all-in - one set of over a 100 lab tests that cover everything from hormones to Heart testing to thyroid to nutritional testing to heavy metals and lots more and now many of the test doctors just don't do and they should be doing them but they're just kind of trying to deal with the reality of what they have to deal with which is just putting out fires so you don't have to deal with burdensome Insurance you don't have to get lost in complicated medical records

19:43

get lost in complicated medical records you don't have to Google your results to find out what it means function offers clear understandable results that are tracked over time that give you actionable advice that enable you to see how your body's changing and make informed decisions about how to optimize your health and get what guess what you can get all for just $ 499 in for a year and that covers the cost of over 100 lab tests you know so many people have already joined function we have lots of people on the weight list ready to take control of their health and we're inviting new members on every day so to transform your health visit function health. com right now to get your spot on the weight list if you love that last video you're going to love the next one check it out here so one of the most important principles of functional medicine is food is information it's it's instructions and and yes all calories are the same in EV vacuum so people say oh Dr Heyman you know you can't go against the laws of physics