How Fasting Can Fight Aging with David Sinclair

Date: September 23rd, 2022
Author: Billie Bradshaw

When our body is well fed, it relaxes. Naturally, we want to shy away from danger, stress, pain, and especially from hunger, but this puts us in a constant state of relaxation, and our body isn't doing what it needs to in order to keep everything functioning at its peak.

David tells Joe about how our ancestors lived and how important it was for them to be hungry from time to time in order to look out for long-term survival needs. When we're hungry (but not malnourished or starving) we are able to think more clearly and perform at a higher level physically as well.

Fasting is a great way to help take care of our bodies and prevent the effects of aging. Watch the full video to learn more.

The joe rogan experience and what is going on with eating so if you have one meal and say this meal comprises uh you know 2 000 calories or whatever and you have this meal at 6 p.m and you fast for 24 hours until you eat again at 6 pm if you have this one meal a day why is it better to do that than to have say you know smaller meals of like 500 calories multiple times per day little snacks well because going back six million years back you know we're in the trees and then in the savannah our bodies were designed well or evolved to respond to adversity and we've removed that from our lives because it feels good but we need adversity to be resilient and to fight disease so what i'm saying is that period of hunger and it's not even hungry these days i don't even feel it i feel great if if i don't eat and it takes a few weeks so anyone wants to start make give it some time give it a couple weeks but what's happening in the body is you're turning on these adversity hormesis response genes we call them longevity genes and they make the body fight aging and diseases and so by by eating through the day the traditional oh you gotta have breakfast best meal of the day blah blah first of all it's not true that you need to be full or fed to think clearly it's it's very clear that people who are fasting have as good if not better mental acuity okay that's one so i think that that needs to be throughout the window kids are different we're not saying that kids are talking about adults and we're not talking about malnutrition or starvation too let's be clear but we are talking about lengthening that window of not eating so if you always are satiated fed your body says hey i've just killed an you know a mammoth no problem don't need to worry about survival i'm just going to go forth and multiply and screw my long-term survival so this is all about long-term survival by making the body freak out that there's tough times and that's running away like running away from a cat like the savannah and being hungry or you know there's molecular reasons that all this works but you know trust me that the data is very clear that this is the way to go if you want to be healthy in your 80s and 90s well it it actually does make sense when you put in that way that your body when you're fed relaxes and so if you're just doing that all day long and i know for a fact that when i am um not fed and i go and do things whether it's perform one of the things that i've been doing um is i don't eat before shows like i take many uh many hours before a comedy show and i used to just like eat whenever i just see and and then i would do shows and i would have a meal like an hour before the show and i really trying to wake up i'm really trying to come on come on come on but i've now recognized actually i saw a video where kat williams was talking about this do you know kat williams hilarious comedian uh i do know well you're slipping if you don't uh he's he's hilarious when he was doing this interview and he's saying they were what's your process before a show and one of the things is i don't eat i make sure i don't eat and i was like that's wise that's really smart and i'm like i needed to hear that even though i kind of knew it but i never written it down i never like associated it absolutely but now i have like now i do not eat before shows i won't do it unless i know i have three hours so what what's your average day look like it depends entirely on whether or not i'm doing podcasts if i'm doing podcasts generally i'm up early i get my workouts in i usually have something to eat after the workout so i'm talking about like i eat around 11 11 a.m that's my first meal of the day and then i go and do my stuff and i generally feel like my workouts are so strenuous that i need some sort of nutrition afterwards some sort of uh fruit to pump the mussels back up and give them some sugar and some protein so usually i'm eating meat and maybe like an apple or something like that that's like a normal meal for me and then i don't eat again until nighttime great and you're not snacking no yeah maybe sometimes after our podcast i'll have like we have these uh on it warrior bars that are just buffalo meat and some cranberries and stuff i like those i'll eat one of those good well at least you're going till 11. you got that sleep yeah so you're probably not eating late yeah it's just the str strenuous activity me like my workouts are very hard so after them i feel like i need something you know i just i don't like that feeling of like a brutal workout and then being starving for four or five hours because then it becomes a distraction so i i listen to my body but if i don't work out i don't eat until dinner like say a day like today i didn't work out today so i woke up hung out with the dog had some coffee sat out you know like just got went over some emails did some [ __ ] just a relaxed morning and then rolled into here no food i won't eat until we're going to dinner tonight right until then yeah with likes that's gonna be fun and john donahue yeah of course looking forward to meeting yes uh yeah so you're doing the right things uh certainly better than most people but what i'm trying to build make are molecules that mimic fasting as well so if you cannot fast like i do then you can just take a pill and what we've shown in in mice at least is that if you give them this molecule that i'm taking nmn nicotinamide mononucleotide which as i mentioned um speeds up metabolisms all that stuff those mice could run 50 further these old mice we gave it to them for three weeks put them back on a treadmill and those that had the anime in their water around 50 for they had better blood flow better oxygenation better energy and that is literally exercising a pill that's crazy so we're in late stage human clinical trials now when do you think it's going to be released to the public well it depends on what the fda does and if it was mobile [ __ ] oh don't get me in trouble i love the fda um fair enough they protect us yes but yeah we're going through the procedure that has been around since as i mentioned early 20th century but we've done hundreds of people now um certainly dozens over the last few years and we know at least that this molecule is apparently safe and raises the levels of the molecule we want to build up the molecules called nad do you want me to talk a little bit yes please so nad is what might those mitochondria little uh mike and i little uh energy producing things use to make energy so you need there are two molecules in the body that are really great you need both for life and without them as i said you're dead atp is the energy and nad makes that and as we get older the levels of nad go down our body makes less and actually also degrades it more you have so i if you take my skin or in the study that they took people's skin when you're 50 you've got half the levels of this nad that you did then you did when you were 20. which is scary because this is this molecules required for life without it we're dead in 30 seconds so what we're doing with our clinical trials is giving a precursor a smaller version of this that the body will turn into nad and bring those levels back up from where they are when you're old to where you are when you're young and we see at least in animals and hopefully in people that it revs up their metabolism and makes them fight aging and disease like we do when we're young i mean there's a reason we don't get a lot of heart disease when we're young or alzheimer's because our bodies fight against disease as we get older and especially if we sit around or smoke and don't exercise our bodies just give up catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch back catalog jre videos on spotify including clips seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on spotify you can listen to the jre in the background by using other apps and can download 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