I AVOID 5 FOODS & my body is 30 YEARS YOUNGER! Harvard Genetics Professor David Sinclair

I'm better than a 20-year-old in terms of health. I think a lot of that's due to my new diet that I've adopted because I can just see things getting better and better over time. Meet Dr David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.

This is Dr Sinclair in 2013, and this is him now. He was 44 years old, and now he is 54, but to me, he kind of looks younger. Over the years, the professor has changed the way he eats and changed his lifestyle.

Scientifically, he says that his body is younger. I've looked at my blood chemistry, and I'm actually now younger and healthier than I've ever been—testosterone, glucose, inflammation, blood cell composition; for most of those markers, I'm better than a 20-year-old in terms of health. In this video, we will get straight into his scientific discovery in five parts: first, the exercise rules for longevity; second, the most important eating habit for longevity; third, the foods he eats for longevity; fourth, the supplements he takes daily; and lastly, the foods he avoids for longevity.

By living a healthy life, you can slow the rate of aging and prevent the corruption of the body's software, and even reboot it. Dr Sinclair's advice on exercise is simple: exercise three times a week and lose your breath. You want to be moving so fast that you cannot carry out a conversation easily.

That's when you know you're becoming hypoxic, low in oxygen, and this low oxygen, we think, is a very good stimulator of stress on the body. Your body responds positively to build muscle, improve blood flow, and your tissues will release chemicals that slow aging. So really, if you can just lose your breath for 10 minutes three times a week, that can provide remarkable health benefits, lowering the rates of disease by 30 percent.

The most important eating habit for longevity is to eat less often. It's not just what you eat; it's also when you eat. This constant eating—three meals a day plus snacks—is making us age faster than we need to.

I like to eat within a period of about six hours a day. Over time, I've learned to skip meals. I'm not always successful; sometimes, I have breakfast in beautiful places, but my goal is to not eat a large meal until dinner, and then I eat a very healthy vegan meal.

So what's the science behind the benefit of time-restricted feeding? If you're down to one meal a day, which I am now, you should wait, and then you get your 20-year-old body back—that's a nice bonus. It's the period of not eating that's so important for boosting the body's defenses against aging to maximize longevity.

These long, extended periods are doing a real deep cleanse of the body and turning on that autophagy, the process of recycling proteins very deeply. There is a set of genes that I wrote about in my book, *Lifespan*, called the sirtuins, and they get turned on when there's not enough energy in the body. So if you don't have a lot of sugar in your bloodstream or a lot of protein, they will get activated, and they defend the body against the damage that causes aging.

Certain diseases, like type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and even cancer, seem to also benefit from fasting—especially when you combine chemotherapy with fasting, as you get this double benefit for many types of cancers. Here is a practical tip from Dr Sinclair for anyone who wants to start intermittent fasting: the trick is that you want to fill your body with fluids. For me, constant coffee, tea, and hot water all day long—being hydrated and filled with liquid—takes away any feeling of hunger.

Also, nuts can help; if you really need to eat something, a bit of protein is known to rapidly alleviate hunger. You want to have at least 16 hours of not eating or not eating very much, and then you can have an 8-hour window. So typically, that means having a late lunch if you skip breakfast, or if you prefer to skip dinner, skip that.

But that gives my body this long window—more than 20 hours of not having glucose circulating from the external world. Now, what happens when you do that—and it takes a few weeks for your body to adapt—is that your liver will learn how to compensate for a lack of food. It's called gluconeogenesis, the generation of glucose from your liver.

It actually overcomes the feeling of hunger. Do it for at least two weeks because, after two weeks—especially by the three-week mark—your liver has learned that you're not going to have breakfast or lunch, and it will start making glucose at a steady level. That's really important because it's known that if you have these spikes of glucose, it leads to hunger when it crashes after a big meal.

So during the six-hour eating window, what does Dr Sinclair eat? I went almost completely to plants, and my body has responded. I look better, I think my skin is better, and I feel better.

My memory is certainly better. If you just look at those populations and people that live a long time, they are generally smaller women who don't eat much and who eat vegetarian—that's a fact. So is it any plant he eats?

No, he focuses on what he calls "stress plants. " This revolves around the concept called xenohormesis; it's a hypothesis that posits that certain molecules, such as plant polyphenols, which indicate stress in the plants, can have benefits for another organism that consumes them. The expected benefits include improved lifespan and fitness.

By activating the animal's cellular stress response, the xenohormesis concept (Conrad Howitz and I coined this term in the mid-2000s) tries to explain why so many plant molecules are beneficial for us. It just cannot be a coincidence. We came up with this idea, really prompted by a 2003 Nature paper that we co-published, which found that there were at least 20 plant molecules called polyphenols that activate the sirtuin enzyme called SIRT1.

When I looked into it, these polyphenols do remarkable things to the body. The one that got the most media attention, because it's in red wine, is resveratrol, but there's posatinol, phys Eden, and quercetin. These are supplements that people are just getting excited about now, but when you look into it, they activate and inhibit pathways or proteins in the body that are known to be important for health and longevity.

So, how do we know if a food has been stressed? Well, you can start with the generalization that if they're grown out in a field organically, without pesticides, they're probably more stressed, right? Just remember: if your food is stressed, then you get the benefits.

Stress your food so you don’t have to. What we focus on are plants that are full of color, so try to eat bright red, purple, and dark green colored vegetables because those are the ones that have these polyphenols that can turn on the body's defenses. In my lab, if we give polyphenols to mice, they actually get healthier and run further, as if they've been exercising.

You may be wondering what some of the specific stressed plants that Dr Sinclair eats in the mornings are. Dr Sinclair enjoys green tea, which is a stress food and full of polyphenols. I drink matcha tea most mornings, which is the very thick, dark green, creamy green tea.

EGCG from green tea has great anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties. While he enjoys all kinds of different leafy greens, he specifically mentioned spinach. Eating a diet that's definitely full of leafy greens, particularly spinach, is great because it’s got the iron that we need, along with plenty of vitamins.

Cooking with olive oil is good; it's often used in Mediterranean cuisine. A lot of olive oil contains oleic acid, which activates your sirtuins as well. The Mediterranean diet is one that I think is the easiest to follow in the Western world and can offer the biggest bang for the buck for those who might find a completely vegetarian diet difficult to adopt.

Dr Sinclair mentions that the Mediterranean diet or Okinawan diet is a good alternative, which he has practiced for decades before turning to an exclusively plant-based diet. "You were on the Okinawan diet for quite some time, right? " "Yeah, I was.

It’s mostly carbohydrates, so there’s a fair amount of rice, but I probably could have done better with a bit of brown rice. White rice sends your glucose through the roof! But mostly, what I was eating were Chinese and/or Japanese vegetables that I could get at the local market.

They were organic, fresh, green, full of vitamins, and mostly plant-based soy; it was a soy-based diet with a little bit of fish. " There are three supplements that Dr Sinclair is often quoted as taking. Before we look at them in detail, please note that Dr Sinclair does not recommend or endorse any brand; he does not sell any supplements.

Speaking of which, we have a new theory of aging. We used to think that antioxidants were the cure for aging; however, antioxidants have been really unsuccessful at lengthening the lifespan of anything, even a worm. It doesn’t work that well.

One of three things that you want to take consistently: I would take resveratrol; I take a gram with a bit of yogurt, mixing them in. Then, there’s metformin. I don’t sell any supplements, by the way; gotcha, I'm not making any money.

Well, I don’t recommend anything; I'm just a PhD. The one chemical that I take every day is resveratrol, which is the red wine chemical, and that comes from grapes. So, that one gets sprinkled into some yogurt in the morning.

NMN is a version of vitamin B3 that makes a chemical in the body that we need for life, and that’s called NAD. As we get older, we make less and less of this. Without NAD, these sirtuins that we discovered—remember the genes we discovered—they don’t work without a lot of NAD.

So, as we get older, our defenses decline. By taking this supplement, we know that it doubles the levels of NAD back to when I was age 20. There are now clinical trials that my colleagues at Harvard have done that indicate that NMN has some health benefits in early studies, such as lowering cholesterol and blood pressure, so I take that one every day as well.

The third one is metformin. Metformin is a little bit more controversial because it’s classified as a drug; that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily dangerous. In fact, it’s one of the world’s safest drugs—it's used for type 2 diabetes to control blood sugar.

What’s been found is that people who take metformin tend to live a lot longer, even those who don’t have type 2 diabetes. There’s evidence that they are protected against cardiovascular disease, frailty, and even Alzheimer’s disease. Now, let's turn our heads to what Dr Sinclair cut out of his diet for longevity.

First is sugar. The big killer is sugar; glucose—particularly fructose—is also pernicious. If you give animals lots of glucose, especially fructose, they will get fatty liver disease and diabetes.

It’s really bad. The best predictor of your long-term longevity that we know of is. .

. Your blood sugar, when you've got high blood sugar, attaches to a lot of proteins in your body. You become caramelized.

Cancer cells, by the way, love sugar; they live on sugar, and that's another reason why you should try to keep it low. Try to avoid too much fruit—berries particularly. Fruit juice?

Definitely avoid that. Sugar high, spiking your sugar, is not healthy in the long run. Your body can make its own sugar; your liver makes sugar.

You just need to wait two weeks for it to get used to it. Our liver is pretty lazy, but after two weeks it learns, "Ah, in the morning I have to make some sugar. " What I found is that my liver making sugar is a lot smarter than my eyes and my mouth eating sugar.

There's even an order in which you can eat your meals to reduce the blood sugar spike. You can put sugar at the end of the meal. You can quit something, but you don't have to be Drconian about it.

I still like to steal a little— you know, a few scoops of ice cream if I see it—but I'm not going to eat a giant bowl of ice cream every night. We now understand why cutting down on sugar is important, but if we need to, we can go for healthier alternatives. There are substitutes; for example, monk fruit produces sugar.

Are you alert? Stevia is a big one for me. Under the sugar branch, bread is one of the foods I have cut out of my meals.

The first thing I cut out was a lot of carbohydrates. I used to eat bread every day; I would just put, if I ate something, it would be on toast. Okay, that's my life.

I cut that out and have found immediate improvements in my biochemistry levels, particularly my glucose levels. If you eat a piece of toast for breakfast, or heaven forbid, a giant glass of orange juice, you'll have this spike in sugar, and you'll feel great, but then your body will put out too much insulin and suck that glucose out of your bloodstream and put you into a glucose deficit—and that's hypoglycemia. Then you're hungry; you've got ghrelin coming out into your body, and you feel hungry and need to eat something.

I'm at a stage, though, now where I don't get those rises and crashes. My liver is putting out glucose from when I wake up till dinner, and I've never been so focused. I've never been so brain fog-free because these crashes make you feel shaky or tired and give you brain fog.

I wish I'd done this in my 20s and done it my whole life because I've really never felt better because of it. The next thing I cut out was meat, and that improved my numbers even more. Cholesterol, triglycerides—all came down, and I have a familial history, genetics, of heart disease.

It's not just the protein; it's also the fat that comes along with the steak and whatever I was eating. Well, I love meat; I would love to eat meat. It tastes really good.

It's just that science says plants give you a better bang for the buck for longevity than meat. The protein that's in plants actually has a ratio of amino acids that stimulates these longevity genes, the sirtuins, and another one called mTOR. If you always eat meat every meal, your body's just not fighting aging the way it could if you ate more plants.

You can eat meat occasionally; fish, for example, has a lot of great omega-3 fatty acids. So I'm not against meat; I just think you should try to focus more on plants if you can. The third change was the dairy.

I did that just to see what would happen. I figured it wouldn't matter; I'm not allergic to dairy, I'm not lactose intolerant, but it did have an effect. It made things even better.

What I think is going on, Shane, is that I was eating a large amount of protein—not just fat, but eggs and all that stuff—and now that I have less protein, I think that mTOR pathway, that's really important for longevity in animals and probably people, is really kicking in in a way that it had never done before. The new research, just over the last two years, says that drinking alcohol every day is really not good for you, so I've cut out alcohol, and I've focused on plants. But if you cannot give up your wine, then here is one last clip from Dr Sinclair: in the case of red wine, choose grape varieties that are stress-sensitive.

Pinot Noir is one of the most sensitive, if not the most sensitive, grape varieties, and that's why it has the most resveratrol of any other type of wine.