Transcript of Episode 82: Anti-Aging Strategies
With Dr. Daniel Pompa
Meredith:
Episode 82, I hope you all are doing well. We have a great topic for you today. We’ve got Dr. Pompa here with us. So how are you doing, Dr. Pompa?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, great. Hello, everybody. We’ve never wished them a happy Friday before. I like that, yeah, happy Friday. Yeah, it’s always Friday when we do this show, but we’ve never wished them a happy Friday. So you might’ve started something.
Meredith:
It was time. It was time. So happy Friday to all, and today, we’re going to be discussing anti-aging solutions and strategies. A topic that I know is important to so many of us as we age, and want to look better, and feel better, and really, live longer. To optimize our health and really enjoy all the time we have here. So it’s a really important topic. I’m really excited to bring you guys some really cutting-edge solutions and strategies that you can start implementing immediately today.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Meredith:
So we thought we would start off with discussing some of the top five things we feel are really aging you. And some of these things may surprise you, maybe not, but we had some really interesting information to back up why these things are aging you. So these top five things, I’ll guess we’ll just—we’ll jump right in. So the first issue that is causing rapid aging in a lot of Americans is, of course, the Standard American Diet. And Dr. Pompa, can you tell everyone why eating this typical diet is causing them to age faster than they actually should be?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Look, I mean, I could pick the Standard American Diet apart in a thousand ways, but the funny thing is is we just lost most of our viewers because nobody thinks they eat the Standard American Diet. I’ve come to that conclusion. However, let’s focus on what I believe is the obvious. I mean, there is something, even healthy people eating healthy diets, even the people if I followed them around Whole Foods and followed them in their life that I would see common in all of them, and that is they’re spiking their glucose and insulin levels. And look, I don’t know, half of the shows I say this. If you want to age faster than anybody, simply elevate or spike your insulin and glucose levels.
No, folks, what I’m saying is is that I don’t think that—I’m not talking to diabetics here. We know diabetics age very rapidly. They die of age related diseases. They die early. We get that. They don’t die of diabetes. It’s the oxidative process that literally ages them, and cause an increase in cancer, heart disease, and strokes, and go down the list. So we get that, but I’m not talking about that.
I’m talking about people that you go to your doctors. You run blood tests. You have normal glucose. What I’m talking about is spikes in glucose and insulin. Meaning it’s up. Then it’s back down. It’s up. Then it’s back down.
So this is the problem. Every time you spike your glucose and, therefore, insulin, both of these are very oxidative. Drive inflammation. And there’s something called AGEs, advanced glycation end-products. And you know what that is? That is basically the rust on the bumper. That’s, basically, when glucose meets certain proteins, it causes oxidation, and therefore, I’ll give you the protein.
Your skin, your skin has collagen, which is a protein, and every time you spike glucose, you’re creating this oxidative process throughout every tissue in your body. The one that we notice is our skin. So again, we see this, these people that are—their skin looks ten years older than they are, they are oxidizes. And I know there is a lot of talk about how sun oxidizes you, and believe me, I mean, too much sun can create oxidation. But let me back up, especially those who already have this AGEs process going on. So they’re the ones who then the extra sun creates even more oxidation. So it’s not just the sun.
Matter of fact, there was a great study showing that also when these people have fatty acids that are not right, they’re in the skin, right? So these fatty acid ratios are reflected in the skin, and then when sun hits that, it creates an oxidative process, same with glucose. So I think the sun has got a really bad wrap. But again, I think we can be in the sun way too many times, way too much, and I think that’s not going to be good. But sun is good for you. And we’re learning now, there was just another study out showing that the cancer rates are higher in areas that have less sun. So I mean, how do we give—there’s no correlation. So that’s a whole other topic for a different day. You better write that one down. Let’s do a whole topic on the sun, the misconceptions about sun and melanoma.
But it’s more to it than just the sun, and that’s the point I’m making. It is this oxidative process that certain other stressors can accelerate. The sun in itself doesn’t cause herpes viruses, right? However, the sun can cause a herpes virus to come out because there is a stress there. There’s some DNA, in our DNA, of a virus, and then that increase in stress brings it out, very similar thing here. So glucose spikes create oxidation of certain proteins. One of which is collagen, and it ages you prematurely.
And real fast, before I leave this topic completely, there’s also the aging of the brain. Glucose and insulin age the brain. Now, there is something called insulin-degrading enzyme, IDE, that we know has to get rid of—insulin is so dangerous to the brain that it has to get rid of it very quickly. It uses this insulin-degrading enzyme to get rid of insulin so it doesn’t age the brain. It doesn’t oxidize the brain. Well, the problem is this. Because people have insulin and glucose spikes so often and what’s happening is is we’re diminishing this IDE, this insulin-degrading enzyme, and here’s the problem. It’s the same enzyme responsible for getting rid of these tau plaques. These protein plaques that build up in the brain that we know are linked to dementia, Alzheimer’s.
So these tau proteins, these type of plaques that are building up in the brain are happening partly because of the insulin degrading this insulin-degrading enzyme or diminishing this enzyme and the same enzyme that gets rid of these plaques. And therefore, they’re building up, and therefore, the brain starts aging. So now we start memory loss. Our brain starts degenerating. These plaques start forming, and our skin is going because of the glucose and insulin. There you go. I’ve talked about aging your skin, and I’ve talked about aging your brain, developing amyloid tau proteins, these types of plaques in the brain. So amyloid plaque tau proteins are linked to Alzheimer’s, and we know it’s also linked to this enzyme in elevation of glucose and insulin.
Meredith:
Hmm, wow, and they even called Alzheimer’s Type 3 diabetes so diabetes of the brain. So just, another reason to prevent Alzheimer’s is to control your blood sugar.
Dr. Pompa:
Right.
Meredith:
And what are some of the worst offenders? I know most people know, okay, sugar. I’m going to avoid sugar, but grains cause a huge problem as well. And we’ve talked about this a lot, but just another reminder too.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely.
Meredith:
And those whole grains cause massive spikes in blood sugar.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, Bill Davis did it right in his book. He did us all a good thing. Not a disservice, a good service. Because he said, look, two pieces of whole grain bread are equal, as far as how much it raises blood glucose—and that’s what we’re talking about here, these glucose spikes, right? Two pieces of whole grain is the same as you drinking your soda, the Pepsi, the Coke, whatever it is, the soda. So it’s virtually the same as what it does to blood glucose. I’ll say it the same way. How about your bowl of oatmeal in the morning that you think is lowering your cholesterol about four points? How laughable is that. So we just, as a society, as a country, as a planet, we have evolved into a high-carbohydrate diet.
You know what’s so funny is when I do research on low-carbohydrate diets, that’s a high-carbohydrate diet when I look at it. I mean, they’re literally looking at 200 to above, often times, carbohydrates a day. I mean, come on. That’s a low-carbohydrate diet? So the studies that they’re doing on low-carbohydrate diets to me are a high-carbohydrate diet. So there’s one problem. I mean, it’s funny what we think is high-carb, low-carb in this country.
Look, we are a grain society. Everybody eats grains with every meal, and if this true, what Bill Davis says, that if two pieces of whole grain bread are equal to drinking a Coke, we’re all in deep trouble. And I have news for you. It’s true. I’ve tested it myself. You could pull up glycemic charts yourself and look in that bowl of oatmeal, in that—forget it. I’m not talking about white bread here or white pasta. I’m talking about whole grains raising glucose, causing glucose spikes. Do I believe that healthy humans can eat some whole grains in their diets and think—and get away—absolutely. But it’s what people are doing in day in, day out, every meal, glucose spike after glucose spike, and then let’s load them up with more toxins and other stressors that we’re going to talk about.
But look, we’re not as humans meant to eat the amount of carbohydrates that we’re eating. It’s just—it’s not just about processed food. It’s not just about fast food. This isn’t just about eating pasta. This is about the carbohydrate intake. All the drinks, come on. People coming out of Starbucks, I mean, we could ticket every one of them for massive amount—I guarantee you one of those things have more glucose, more carbohydrate in it, those coffee drinks that people are drinking in the morning, than I eat all dang day, right? It’s like—and they’re coming out of there. These are healthy people.
I would love to police Whole Foods, or Starbucks, or these places where healthy people go. I don’t know. And just watch how much glucose, how much carbohydrates these people are consuming in a day, how many glucose spikes. It’s remarkable, and I’m talking to healthy people. People who think they’re health right now that really are still violating what humans can do, how many glucose spikes they can tolerate before they start aging prematurely at the cellular level, so there.
Meredith:
-inaudible-.
Dr. Pompa:
This is a topic. Remember the seminar that I did? And this was with my doctor seminar. I said that the sugar glucose, increased carbohydrates in the human diet, is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. And remember Travis dressed up like a gorilla?
Meredith:
I do.
Dr. Pompa:
And he was in the back of the room. Yeah, so Travis, I don’t know if he’s anywhere in earshot right now, but that was probably one of his favorite moments and mine.
Meredith:
It’s true. It’s true. Something we do not think about, but it is aging us on a daily basis, all right, awesome, first one, Standard American Diet. Next we have overtraining. Now can you explain that, how that ages us?
Dr. Pompa:
But now that I’m picking on healthy people, I’m going for it, right? Let’s go for it.
Meredith:
Yeah, okay.
Dr. Pompa:
You chose that one next. I didn’t tell you to do that, but that’s perfect timing. Because I live in a place, a very unique place in Park City, Utah, that people are either three exercise people a day, two, or one. Okay? So, I mean, I look like nothing to them. I’m the average Joe here, right? I mean, this is the exercise capitol, the healthy capitol. I mean, really, there is a very healthy population here. You don’t see many people overweight.
It’s so funny because when I leave my little island up here in the mountain and I—in a different airport or somewhere, I am stunned. I keep thinking what’s happened in the last three years? People have gotten so much fatter. What is going on? And it’s because I moved to Park City. I just don’t see that here as much, so it is a healthier community. So I want to hold my community up and applaud them.
However, I see people constantly overaged-looking, thin, fit-looking, kind of, maybe, and yet, over—I can tell they’re overtraining. I can look at their hair, their face, their eyes, their nails. I can see overtraining a mile away. I’m telling you, it’s more common than you think. People do not rest. I am raising my children to understand that rest is best. That it’s you don’t get stronger in the workout. No, you get stronger how you recover. And people are constantly, constantly overtraining themselves.
The new thing, CrossFit, now, look, I think CrossFit can be done right if you’re not doing this high-intensity constantly. I just read a great article from one of the greatest cyclist trainers. And he said the average person, at best—now this is—I’m talking about someone who’s trained, right? The average trained person can do one high-intensity day a week and recover without having a diminishing return. Okay, now he wasn’t talking about anti-aging. He was talking about a diminishing return on performance, right?
When we first start exercising, you can do high-intensity every day, and you just get better, and then you hit this plateau, and then you get a return. And that’s what he was talking about. So we’re talking about—and that’s why people think high-intensity keeps working. Because in the beginning, they just keep getting stronger, and then it doesn’t work, and then they start going down. And he said one day a week for the average Joe. He says on somebody who’s very physically fit and, I would say, someone who does a lot more training, probably speaking to someone like myself, two, two train—high-intensity days a week. And that’s someone who’s really trained, really fit, eating well, sleeping at least eight or nine hours, two. And he says these high, high intense trained athletes, and probably most of them taking a lot of things that we don’t take that possibly are illegal, can do three at best, but they can’t do three for long. They have to do three in small blocks of training when they’re at their core—tip of their fitness.
So that just shows you how over trained people are with all the CrossFit, high-intensity, three days a week, four days a week even. It’s not happening. In the beginning it works, so you think it’s still working. But meanwhile, you’re aging yourself prematurely.
Meredith:
And how are we doing that? How does overtraining express that rapidly accelerating aging at the cellular level? How does that work?
Dr. Pompa:
Well, look, when we talked about even high-intensity training, right, we like burst training for anti-aging and here’s why. Because when you do high-intensity training, okay, then—and again, let’s talk about that. Because what’s happened now is, when you do high-intensity training, all the research shows that it raises up growth hormone, okay, which is really good. These are anabolic hormones that age us slowly. When we do endurance training, keeping our fat burning zone and burning fat like we’ve been taught for so many years, actually, growth hormones and anabolic hormones go down, and cortisol and other stress type of hormones rise. So we know that marathon runners age faster than sprinters.
Here’s the difference. We’ve talked about doing burst training, high-intensity three days a week, right? But we talk about doing it for ten minutes. You see the difference? So you get the growth hormone out, ten minutes, fifteen minutes at the most. Yes, you can do that three days a week, but we’re talking about people who are doing high-intensity training for an hour or more at a very, very high intensity, the body doesn’t recover from that. So the length of high-intensity training matters. You can get that growth hormone spike with a very short high-intensity spurt and recover. It’s a lot easier to recover from 15 minutes than an hour, an hour and a half, so it’s just you have to know when to go slow.
So that doesn’t mean you can’t do CrossFit four days a week, five days a week. You just have to go different intensities. You can’t go all out with that type of intensity every workout. So go, but just go at different intensities. Don’t go to where you’re completely exhausted every time. So at the cellular level, hormones with high-intensity rise, and with low-intensity in the heartrate, you get a drop in those. So we do want high-intensity, shorter times, less times. Make sure you recover in between. That’s key.
Meredith:
Yeah, and I love the example you give of visualizing a marathon runner versus a sprinter, totally different bodies. And often times, the sprinter does look a lot younger because, as you said, just the shift in hormones so really, really interesting and a good visual there too.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and again, sprinters, a short sprint and those types of bursts you can recover from much easier than when your heartrate’s just up for that whole time in an hour class like it is in CrossFit. And again, there’s a difference of 90% of your maximum heartrate in70%. Seventy percent is still high-intensity, but it’s easier to recover from. And the gentleman wrote that in his article, how with these athletes, they have to vary the intensity. One thing when I cycled I always said is the mistake that most people made is they went out and rode the same intensity every time. Varying intensities is really important. Even when you’re up in the high intensity range, to get that growth hormone spike, vary your intensities, so that’s really, really important. But most often, rest. I always—I taught my son riding slower. Exercising slower actually makes you faster in the cycling world, so it just helps recovery.
Meredith:
Awesome, awesome, all right, so we’ve got the Standard American Diet, overtraining, and the next thing that is aging most people rapidly is toxins, a huge topic. Something we talk about a lot here, but how are toxins aging us rapidly? Talk about that.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, look, I mean, toxins make their way to the cell. We’ve talked about this in multiple shows. And then what happens at the cell is an oxidative process, and this oxidation creates a toxic cell. A toxic cell lowers cellular energy. A toxic cell starts to affect something in the cell that is our only biological clock that we know of. Matter of fact, I should probably draw this, but it’s called a telomere. So telomeres are in our cells, and they protect our chromosomes. Now, it’s the only biological clock that we know of, meaning that we can measure these telomeres. The shorter they get, they basically—the closer we are to death.
So here’s the point. Now let me—I should draw this because if I don’t draw it and I explain this, it’s very—kind of confusing. So let’s see if I can get over here with my board, which I threw in here at the last minute. Tell me if I need to move something because you have a better visual than I do. Am I in the shot? I guess…
Meredith:
You’re in the shot.
Dr. Pompa:
All right, now I’m not great at drawing telomeres. I’m just going to say that, all right. I’m not. I’m pretty darn good at drawing cells, but I go in the cell and start drawing these little nuances of the cell, look out. But I’m going to make this attempt anyway. Let’s see here. Already I’m pretty wonky on this. Uh-huh, wow, okay, that’s a telomere or that’s a chromosome. So it’s kind of butterfly-ish, but we’re going to run with this because we have it.
All right, so at the end of every chromosome, we have these things called telomeres. Okay? So this is where your DNA lives. Let’s talk about that. When they measure this, these chromosomes, they measure in something called bases. So that means that we draw these little lines across here, and these things would be called bases. So let’s just say that this is 100,000 bases across. I mean, we can make up different numbers. I’ve read different things, 100,000 to 300,000 bases in measurement across a chromosome, okay?
So these telomeres, when you are born—or no, back up. Upon conception, okay, these telomeres measure about 15,000 bases, okay, 15,000 bases. Okay? So that’s how—that’s their measurement from here to here. Now, when you’re born, these telomeres come out. When you come out of the womb, you’re down to 10,000. So what happens is is these telomeres get shorter every time cells divide. It’s a biological clock. It’s meant to happen that way. Does that make sense so far?
Meredith:
Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
Every time the cells divide, they get shorter. Well, that’s a pretty big jump, especially considering we die at around 5,000 telomeres. So when your telomeres get around 5,000 in length, you’re close to death, and we die right around that. So wait a minute. We lost 5,000 before we entered the gate or left the gate. Why is that? Because so much cell division happens, right, in utero. So this is the magic zone that we live our lives in, between 10,000 and 5,000. So we can literally measure these telomeres and see how close you are.
So we call this your biological age. So you have your actual age, right? My actual age is 50, but my biological age is younger than that. So that’s a pretty neat thing to say, oh, I’m 20 years old, the biological cellular age versus my actual age. And we’ve done these tests on people. And the opposite, unfortunately, is true is they’re age 50, and yet, they have a 70-year-old telomere length, or cellular age is 70 years old.
So one of the things that we know of according to study is that when toxins enter the cell—so I’m going to draw the actual cell up here now. Of course, this telomere is very large. But when we go in the cell, in the nucleus, we have our nucleus. This is where our DNA is, our telomeres, the mitochondria, where we make energy, right? Well, when this cell, toxins enter into the cell, they start attaching to this inner mitochondrial membrane. Your ATP goes down, which is your cell energy. It causes brain fog. It causes us to not have enough energy. When the toxins come in and attach to this DNA, they start altering these telomeres, and you start getting a premature shortening of the telomere life because of the toxins entering this part of the cell. Well, also, glucose and insulin, which we’ve talked about is—also affects these telomere lines because of the oxidative process. So we know that toxins and glucose have a major effect on how short these telomeres get.
So this, we want to reverse this. So detoxing the cell is critical. I’m not talking about a colon cleanse here. I’m not talking about a liver cleanse. I’m not talking about the ten-day cleanse in your health food store. I’m talking about true cellular detox. Read the stinking article. Go to my articles. Go to my resources, and put in true cellular detox, and find that article and read it. Because the point is you have to get to the cell. That’s where true detox takes place. Everything else is downstream or doesn’t work.
So we have three components to true cellular detox. Number one is we’ve got to fix the cell. This is where my 5R’s comes into place. We start upregulating cell function via the 5R’s. Now we get a cell that can start clearing its own toxins. That’s key. The second component, though, is when that starts to happen, we want to make sure the downstream detox pathways are prepared for that, and that’s where things like colon cleanses and different things can—coffee enemas, that can help do that. But also, we have a strategy there as well as far as preparing those pathways like the gut, the liver, the kidneys, the lymph, etc.
The third component of true cellular detox is utilizing true binders. We’ve talked about cellular detox. There’s a product that—and I’ll put the whole word there. There’s a product that really truly grabs on as a binder and pulls things from the cell all the way out of the body. And it’s strong enough to do even a heavy metal. True binders are not Chlorella. True binders are not cilantro. True binders are not that package of little herbal pills that clear your colon, and give you what I call poopers.
True binders go into cell. Cyto actually crosses into the cell as well as clearing outside the cell to help assist these toxins getting out of the body. And then we even use true binders in the gut. So those three components make up true cellular detox. And there’s three phases. There’s a prep phase, body phase, brain phase. It’s all in the article.
But the point is this. We want to age slower. You’ve got to detox that cell. Toxins play a role, and toxins play a major role in aging us in many ways just because they slow down that cellular function. When you draw up ATP, you’re now aging and driving inflammation of your cell very rapidly, and your brain and how your brain works. So when we talked about aging brains, glucose and toxins, top of the list, right, top of the list, so that’s key. And when we talk about things that drive inflammation, Meredith, what do we talk about, toxins, right, elevated glucose, and bad fats. We could add bad fats to that list too. So there you have it. Toxins age you, bottom line. It affects your telomeres, the biological clock.
Meredith:
Mm-hmm, huge. And I think so many people don’t think about detoxing when they’re thinking about anti-aging. A lot of people just want to put on a cream. It’s not that simple, and you have to start at the cellular level to—and really clean out from the inside out so really, really important topic. I was just thinking too. If someone is interested in telomere testing, how would you go about that, or what type of test would you recommend?
Dr. Pompa:
There’s a few of them out there now. There’s one from SpectraCell that they do, and it’s become more popular and more accurate. So, yeah, I mean, it’s not a cheap test. I think it’s about $300 for the one that I mentioned there, but really neat because you can watch your telomeres also get better. And it’s not that you can—you can’t really—there’s a drug out there now called TA-65, and TA-65 has been shown to actually help telomere life. Because there’s something called telomerase. Telomerase is that little angel that flies in and replaces some of the telomere. But it supposedly increases telomerase.
Yeah, I think it’s a little early on the TA-65. Whether it’s good, whether it’s bad, I mean, I’ve read things, concerns, bad, good. So I’m going to stay neutral on this TA-65 conversation right now. But the things that we’re talking about on this show, look, it works. It slows down this rapid, basically, erosion of our telomeres. And that’s all we have to do. If we slow that down, the body can heal itself, so slows down aging.
Meredith:
Yeah, it’s so cool to have control over that. It’s really empowering. Awesome, all right, so we had diet overtraining, toxins, and next thing that is rapidly aging people is lack of sleep. Now probably not too surprising, but can you talk a little bit more about just how it’s not missing a night of sleep here and there, but just something that is more chronic which effects so many people, insomnia, and how that really, really ages and just the dangers of that, if you can talk about that.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, sleep is underrated. I mean, I should say this. Eight or nine hours of sleep is underrated. People think that they’re doing okay with their six, seven hours. Look, I mean, it’s not my opinion. I mean, there’s strong, strong evidence showing that those people who sleep even seven hours a night are aging prematurely compared to those that sleep eight or nine.
Meredith:
Really?
Dr. Pompa:
Yep, absolutely.
Meredith:
I am surprised to hear that.
Dr. Pompa:
Yep, so we talk about even that one hour. What does that mean? How about people sleeping six hours a night? What’s happening to those people? They’re missing recovery. It’s just like the overtraining concept. Everything is about recovery, and everything’s about sleep because sleep is where you go into your greatest recovery. That’s why people wake up inflamed in the morning because healing is occurring, right? So they wake up going, oh, I’m so stiff. Well, that was the healing that was occurring at night with the inflammation, so that’s where the magic happens. And of course, some people might be in bed for eight or nine hours, but the problem is are they getting into the deep sleep.
I wrote an article, Anxiety & Sleep. Read it. I give some advice in there on what to do to help your sleep, sleep deeper, some different combinations. It’s in the article, Anxiety & Sleep, so you don’t have to go over it here. But sleeping deeper is key, controlling cortisol, and in the article I talked about something that people can take before bed to try to load their cortisol and adrenaline so they do go into those deeper levels of sleep without having cortisol rises. A lot of people who can’t get to sleep, it’s because of elevated cortisol. They’re basically inverted, and that’s a hormonal thing, an adrenal thing. So you have to read the article there.
But some people wake up in the middle of the night because of an adrenal spike. And remember, that happened to me because of toxic issues. A lot of that is driven from the pituitary hypothalamus in the center of the brain, which it holds toxins. So most people that have chronic sleep problems, that’s a toxic brain issue. And that’s why they’re not sleeping deep enough, or they wake up and can’t get back to sleep or can’t get to sleep. So detox once again, but more specifically, brain detox.
So if you read the article, Anxiety & Sleep, you’ll see I lead it back to fixing the brain. How many clients do I deal with who had sleep problems, but it’s a few years after detoxing the brain, they’re sleeping solid. That’s the key. So you have to get upstream to the cell. But you have to get into the cell, the brain cells, and particularly the pituitary hypothalamus which controls your adrenal glands and your thyroid. That access controls cortisol levels.
Also, the pineal gland that sits outside of the blood brain barrier, that is affected by toxins. On autopsies, we find it loaded up with heavy metals. People that have heavy metals, their pineal gland is very affected by that. And therefore, that too, obviously, controls your sleep pattern so toxins with sleep, big deal, but we’ve got to get into deeper levels of sleep. We want to—we can give tips as far as making the room very dark. That helps with that pineal gland, getting that solid rhythm, reading before bed.
Meredith:
-inaudible-.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, not watching TV that can get you going, and some people can get away that. Other people can’t. But if you have a sleep problem, doing things that bring your body down, relaxing things, is obviously very important.
Meredith:
Mm-hmm, what about some of those bio hackers out there who claim to be able sleep for four or five hours a night, and stating that they’re going to have quality sleep versus someone that would need longer amounts of sleep? Do you think it’s possible to get quality sleep in four or five hours a night and for the body to have adequate recovery and rest in that amount of time?
Dr. Pompa:
No. I don’t. I don’t. I think that, no matter what, it’s going to catch up with you at the cellular level. I mean, again, when we look at the research on telomeres, we know sleep plays a big role there. Do I think that someone could sleep six hours and get better recovery than someone doing nine or ten because they’re not going into—absolutely. I mean, so there’s people who sleep nine or ten hours that literally wake up exhausted because they’re never hitting the deeper level of sleep, and that’s a toxic issue. It is. That’s a toxic issue.
So take that off the plate, and just talk about hours of sleep. No. I mean, we know that athletes need more. When we look at great athletes, Lance Armstrong used to take naps in the middle of the day, and they try to sleep at least nine or ten hours. Why? Why do they do that? Because of recovery, it’s all about recovery. Exercise is all about recovery. I’ll say it again. If you’re not recovering, you’re not getting better, or if you’re not recovering, you’re not getting stronger.
Meredith:
Mm-hmm, a really important concept, awesome. All right, so we’ve had diet, overtraining, toxins, and lack of sleep, or lack of good quality sleep. And the last one here is stress. Now you are referring to emotional stress in this case, right, for one of the factors that’s aging us?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but we talk about—remember the body doesn’t know the difference of stress, physical, chemical, or emotional. And ironically, we talked about all of them. Didn’t we? We talked about exercising too much. The body doesn’t know the difference of stress. That can be a stressor. Exercise is a good stress if you adapt, if you recover, right? It’s a bad stress when you don’t, so it might as well be toxic, and then we talked about chemical stress, shortening telomeres, driving inflammation, right, so same as exercise.
And then, thirdly, is emotional stress. But let me back up and say it a different way. We all have stress. You can’t do anything about it, right? The key is is how you adapt to stress. As we just exited a conversation about the pituitary gland, how it controls your thyroid and your adrenals, that whole loop has to do with how you adapt.
When I was sick, I couldn’t adapt to even loud noise. That’s how I couldn’t adapt to even the smallest amounts of stress. A crying child would just send me into a flurry. I could not adapt to any stress. So what was it? Yeah, I know my adrenals were shot, but again, it was more upstream into my brain. I had a toxic brain. That’s really why I couldn’t adapt. So it’s not just the stress. It’s how we adapt to the stress.
So yes, people’s adrenals are exhausted from throwing down one stimulant after another all day long. All the physical and chemical stressors that they have in their life add up and become a perfect storm, right? That’s what I always say. How does disease start? It’s the perfect storm. It’s never just the emotional stress. No, it’s the emotional stress with the chronic chemical stressors that filled our buckets. And then we add physical stress to it? Forget about it. It’s this perfect storm of disaster where your body doesn’t adapt to any of it, and then the bottom falls off, or the bucket overflows.
Think about every one of us have a genetically different size bucket that holds stressors: chemical, emotional, physical. And once that bucket overflows, the symptoms start: the lack of sleep, the anxiety, the brain fog, I mean, the inability to lose weight. So that’s your bucket overflowing, your stress bucket. What do we have to do? We have to empty that stress bucket at the cellular level. So think about it. If there’s 50 trillion cells in the body, you have 50 trillion stress buckets. We’ve got to empty those stress buckets.
And now you can adapt to stress better, you see. I can adapt to a whole lot of stress. Warren will always tell you that, right? Pompa can deal with stress, man. He can deal with stress. Why? Because I have very healthy cells, bottom line. My stress bucket is very—it was one time very overflowing. Now my stress bucket is empty.
So it’s like taking two glasses, one half full and the other full, and stress them. The one full starts spilling over. That’s most people watching this, right? My stress bucket’s so full. Your glass is right there. I can shake mine much harder because it’s like this, right, so that it doesn’t spill over. It used to be where if I just breathed on it, it would spill over. We’ve got to empty our stress buckets, physical, chemical or emotional. Some of the emotional stuff you can’t change right now, so you’ve got to empty your toxic load out of those buckets. So that’s a good analogy, I hope, for people.
Meredith:
Mm-hmm, yeah, I love it. All right, so we’ve gone through these top five factors that are aging us rapidly, and since—okay, so we’ve got the issues. Now, of course, we’re going to bring you the solutions. So first one, going back to diet and just constantly spiking our blood sugar and our insulin with the Standard American Diet, what do you suggest as far as an anti-aging diet?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, look, this is going to be real easy. The “Cellular Healing Diet,” right, I mean, get the book. Download the eBook, whatever you got to do. Hey, what about your gut healing smoothies, right? I mean, those help. I mean, those are low glycemic, control glucose and insulin, but yeah, I mean, that one’s an easy one.
Here, make it real simple. Just get grains out of your diet and sugar. Use stevia as a sweetener. There, simple. Let’s move on. Read the article. Read the book.
Meredith:
And I just want to interject too. What about the ketogenic diet and anti-aging? What are your thoughts on that?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No, no doubt. I mean, I use keto-adaptation as a tool. Diet variation, there’s an article everybody should read, right, how to move in and out of different diets. Not being locked in one. And how that actually causes growth hormone spikes, right, which is the anti-aging hormone. So moving from a cellular healing diet to a keto-adaptation diet where you’re forcing your cells to just burn fat. It’s a great point.
Because glucose, your cells can use two things for energy: glucose and fat, right? Well, glucose burns like wood in your fireplace. You need a chimney. It’s very smoky, and we have to chimney it out, right? Vent, ventilate it out. And if it doesn’t happen, everyone in the house dies, bad idea. That’s a toxic cell, right? Think of your house as the cell.
Or the natural gas on your stove. That burns like fat, very clean. You don’t need a chimney, all right? There’s no waste. So when you put someone in a keto-adaptive state, you’re forcing the cell to use fat. It burns cleaner energy; therefore, it drives less oxidative stress. So we use that as a tool to downregulate cellular inflammation.
And there’s actually proof that, when you burn the fat, you make something called ketones, which actually is anti-aging for the brain. It’s been used since the 1920s to fix brain conditions. But also, these ketones are known to turn on genes of longevity, like the Sirtuin-1 gene. So it actually can turn on good genes that make you live longer. So there’s more and more research showing that ketones turn off bad genes and turn on good genes, so there’s some good stuff there, so good call.
Meredith:
Yeah, really cool. Do you have any favorite anti-aging foods? I know you’ve talked a lot about just the importance of antioxidants in the diet, and just to know if you have any kind of foods you like to focus on to really bring a lot of antioxidants into your diet.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, I love the—all the foods that have all the healthy fats, right? I mean, I believe fats are the key to fixing the cell membrane, inner cell membrane, outer cell membrane, the nucleus membrane. I mean, those are key, so I love the fats. So again, you look at all the fats that we talk about, even cholesterol and saturated fat is key for anti-aging because those are key for the cell membrane. So grass-fed meats, grass-fed cheese, I mean, these things are amazing anti-aging foods that really aren’t held up as these anti-aging foods that they really are.
We hear a lot about fish oil, but just taking fish oil alone can actually throw you out of balance in your omega fats. So I’m not a big fish oil component. Eating fish, I’m all for clean fish. Eating grass-fed meat that has all these perfect balance of omega-3, omega-6s, all for it. So yes, we want these good healthy fats. We want them in balance, and that’s probably, I would say, the leading foods that most Americans need. I think there’s a lot about the antioxidant foods. I think about the fruits, berries.
Meredith:
Berries, right.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, blueberries, raspberries, we know there’s things in there, the proanthocyanidins, and these things we know also turn on good genes. And of course, your green vegetables have a lot of qualities to them. That’s why with people…
Meredith:
Glutathione.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely, they raise things like glutathione, which is really important.
Meredith:
Awesome, colorful, high-fat diet, beautiful. All right, just one more question too. Talking about blood sugar, what are some good glucose numbers that someone should be aiming for if they’re measuring their blood sugar and really just want to have it under control for anti-aging purposes?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, 70’s and 80’s are where you want to be. After you eat a meal, no matter what, it should go up for a few hours after you eat the meal and come back down so some spike. But it’s these big spikes that are killing people. But yeah, I mean, when you look at a fasting glucose, we love to see people in the 70’s, low 80’s. HgbA1c, we want people that absolutely are below 5.4, so that’s really good quality numbers. HgbA1c looks at glucose over three months. So again, those are good anti-aging numbers to look at. CRP, C-reactive protein, I like people below .5, so I would say that’s optimal. At least under 1 but .5 on a CRP, that just shows inflammation. So those are just some numbers that you can look at.
Meredith:
Is that just in a typical blood test, or would you need to specifically requests those tests to get those numbers?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, typically you have to request those.
Meredith:
Mm-hmm, okay.
Dr. Pompa:
The glucose is always in a blood test.
Meredith:
Mm-hmm, something else I like to do to control blood sugar too is sometimes just throughout the day, if I’m feeling a little bit of a lull, I like to have some coconut oil with a little bit of cinnamon and some -inaudible-. It’s a snack. I think it’s such a great way to control blood sugar throughout the day without having to reach for a carbohydrate, and it just really keeps my energy steady throughout the day. So it’s another little trick too. I know you like to do it.
Dr. Pompa:
If there’s one person that eats more fat than me, it’s you.
Meredith:
I love fat.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you do, and I applaud you for that. Yeah, I mean, coconut, there’s another great anti-ager, right? Because it’s the medium-chain triglyceride that helps make us a fat burner. Those burn up very quickly. Help us be very efficient. They’re actually great for weight loss. But also, it’s good for your brain so very good, anti-aging fats. Good one. I missed that one. Perfect.
Meredith:
Awesome, great, so we had some—all right, diet suggestions. Next, we went over this exercise too versus the endurance training versus the high intermittent intensity training. Definitely, you promote the burst training for the anti-aging benefits. Anything else you wanted to add to that?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, short bursts are easier to recover from, and it raises growth hormone. So doing burst training three days a week for 10, 15 minutes with short burst, you’re going to recover. When you get into these long intensities drawn out, it takes a lot more to recover. So again, if you’re going to do that, great, once a week for most of you watching this. If you’re highly trained, go for it two times a week. But again, I do two times a week on a high-intensity like that for that length of time, but I often try to just do short bursts or mix up a lower intensity for longer, so mix up your intensities for sure. And we talked about that already.
Meredith:
It’s been up, and we have an article on that. It’s called Strategy #4: For Your Best Health Ever. And that’s on the website too to learn more about the benefits of burst training, so awesome. And we did. We went over some lifestyle factors too, increasing quality sleep and stress management, huge factors. And do you want to say any more about that?
Dr. Pompa:
I mean, I think we covered it. I mean, I think we covered even some solutions there, but read that sleep article, and ultimately, look to the brain. If you’re not a deep sleeper, you’ve got a toxic brain issue. Read True Cellular Detox, for sure.
Meredith:
Yeah, awesome, and finally, we’ll just close out too with some ideas for some products, some supplements. Other things you can add in along with diet and proper exercise, sleep management—or sleep and stress management that you can add in to really slow the aging down and the shortening of your telomeres. So any favorite products and some other kind of things that you would like to add in?
Dr. Pompa:
I pulled some, and you pulled some. So we’ll talk a little bit about it. When we talk about anti-aging, every woman out there wants to know what to put on their skin, so I did pull one. This is the only one that’s ever worked for me, okay, and it did. When I was sick, because of the oxidative stress, I got these age spots. I had one here that was very, very deep. I had a big one here that Warren and I always called Florida. It was like a little shape of Florida. He remembers that one, and I had another one over here.
Well, this product took it away. It’s called RENU, and it is based from this product here called ASEA. And this is redox. Yeah, so you picked that product. We both picked it out. ASEA, I drink orally. I drink this. I drink this to help me recover from exercise, and it’s proven to actually raise VO2 max, which helps you recover from exercise very rapidly and perform at a higher level. I love this stuff for multiple different conditions, and I use it on so many people.
And it’s a network. They put it out in a network, which is kind of a bummer just because it’s a little harder to get. But look, it’s a—the product works, so I use it. Like I said, this is one that I use daily myself. And this product really did. It’s that in the—where you put it on the outside, and it took those blemishes away. They developed it for wrinkling, and if you go to it—as a matter fact, to get the product, call Meredith. It’s the easiest way to do it because you can’t just buy it off our website, so call Meredith. She can tell you how to get both of these products, but I love them.
And redox, when you read the ingredients, you go, oh, sodium chloride. No, no, no. The redox molecules are in the base of sodium chloride, and that’s why it works. Redox molecules you need for cell-to-cell communication. You need for oxidation to control this oxidative process. This is an anti-aging drink. It really is. And this is the best darn—probably the only anti-aging thing—the product for skin that has ever worked for me. So there you go. That’s my two cents on that.
We talked about telomeres. MoRS, methylation is shown in studies to protect the telomeres. That’s the biological clock. MoRS is a methylation product. The most balanced methylation product on the planet that I know of. And how can you talk about anti-aging without talking about MoRS?
Meredith:
Well, and what is methylation for someone watching that doesn’t know what it is. Maybe you’ve never heard that word.
Dr. Pompa:
Well, read my R5 articles because R5 is reestablishing methylation. And you need methyl groups to turn on your stress adaptation mechanisms. You need these carbon and three I-beams to turn on that adaptation. Here’s the key. You also need them to turn them off. So a lot of people who have anxiety and they feel like they can’t come down, it’s because they’re lacking so much methylation because you need it to adapt to stress. Physical, chemical, or emotional stress depletes methylation, and once you become depleted, now you don’t detox the cell normally. You don’t adapt to stress normally, and you age prematurely, and you don’t get rid of toxic hormones. So it creates hormonal problems.
Read the article, very, very important. Toxic people deplete methylation and age prematurely. So that brings that why, again, do toxins cause aging, premature aging? It depletes methylation. So if you read R5 article, you’ll understand that more. But MoRS plays a big, big role in how to reestablish methylation.
Meredith:
Mm, huge, awesome. All right and speaking of the skin too, I pulled another little few other products here. I like these collagen products here because we hear a lot about collagen and its importance in our skin to maintain elasticity and to look young, and so we actually have it in a powdered form here. So can you talk a little bit about this and how it -inaudible-?
Dr. Pompa:
I take those. I take those to help me recover. So I add those to my smoothies and my drinks. And I alternate between those two products, and there’s even another one that I have. But, yeah, so it’s collagen. Collagen, we’re emulating what we get in bone stock. We’ve talked a lot about bone stock, right? There’s Type II collagen in there.
Well, there’s a simple way to just get some good collagen in your diet every day, and that collagen is what is that make up or the matrix of our skin, that protein that makes our skin look good and stay taunt, without wrinkles. So it’s very important, and when it oxidizes, that’s a really bad thing. But those are the building blocks that we need to make new collagen so very important. Good call.
Meredith:
Yeah, and I love to put them in my smoothies too. And if you get time, check out the eBook, “The Guide to Healing” eBook on drpompa.com. But all of these recipes include collagen and gelatin powder in the smoothies as well, which is not only a benefit to your gut but to your skin too. And one other product I pulled, which I know you really like for anti-aging is called ROX here. And can you talk about how this is helpful for anti-aging?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, ROX has resveratrol, right? I mean, resveratrol is known to turn on that certain one longevity gene that we talked about and others.
Meredith:
In fact, there’s resveratrol in the red wine, so that’s why I’m familiar.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, but that has a very active dose of it, which is key. But we know this about antioxidants. They work better in synergy with others. And that product has an amazing balance of perfect antioxidants that really target the cell, and that’s why I love that particular anti-aging product. I said anti-aging product. That particular cellular inflammation product, if you will. It’s an antioxidant. It’s groups of antioxidants that really have an effect on the cell. So yeah, I love that product.
Meredith:
Awesome, awesome, so some tools there. You can give me a call if you’re interested in learning more about those.
Dr. Pompa:
We have the anti-aging kit that has a lot of these things in it.
Meredith:
Oh, yes. And I did pull that here.
Dr. Pompa:
Exactly, and you’ll see there’s MoRS in there. Flip the body. There’s the kit, and then flip—yeah, there’s ROX. There’s MoRS, Vista. Vista is the cell membrane. That’s the fats that we were talking about. eNRG, I talked about how important ATP is with anti-aging and how toxins affect it. That’s why that’s in there.
And Spectra, over there on the right, that’s just the nutrients. That’s the cellular nutrients. That’s basically—it’s a multi-vitamin, if you will, of the cell. Those vitamins and minerals that are in Spectra are extracted from eight organic fruits and vegetables, so it’s really a whole food product. So really, yeah, it’s a great kit, awesome.
Meredith:
All right, awesome. Yeah, so if you’re interested in any of those, you can give us a call at 888-600-0642 or logon to revelationhealth.com, and you can check them out. And just looking at my notes, I did forget to bring up one thing, Dr. Pompa, for anti-aging, which I know you find to be so important, is fasting. And I do just want to mention that—if you can just talk a little about that. I know we’ve shared a lot about it, but it just too huge to not include in this show.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, how could you not talk about daily intermittent fasting? I mean, talk about growth hormone. Studies show men, a 2,000% increase. I mean, women, 1,300% increase in growth hormone, the anti-aging hormone. So I practice it, I mean, intermittent fast daily. I have for some years, and I’ll tell you, you’re going to have to read the article. We have an article on intermittent fasting. It’s in the five strategies, right?
Meredith:
Strategy #3.
Dr. Pompa:
Strategy #3, so if you put in it the Search bar, if you put intermittent fasting, strategy 3, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know how to find it.
Meredith:
Go to Articles. It’ll pop up as a recent article, so yes.
Dr. Pompa:
All right, so read the article. I’m telling you, it’s like a miracle for anti-aging. I mean, it really works. I mean, again, you can look at the studies. You can read all about it, but when you experience it yourself, it’s pretty remarkable. So there you go. There’s the shell. It’s been an hour, so we better wrap it up. We could talk about it all day.
Meredith:
We could. All right, thanks, everyone. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I hope you got a lot value out of this show. I know I sure did. So thanks, Dr. Pompa, and we’ll see you guys next week. Take care.
Dr. Pompa:
Bye-bye.
