The DIET That's Killing More People Than Cigarettes! I Dr. Michael Greger DSH #476

Diet is the most important thing, right?

Yeah, according to Global Burden of Disease Study, the largest, most systemic analysis of risk factors in human history, diet, that is the number one killer of humanity worldwide and the number one killer here in the United States.

Cigarettes only kill about a half million Americans every year.

Whereas our diet.

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All right guys, very excited today.

We're talking longevity.

This man might be able to add a few years for your life.

Dr.

Michael Greger in the building.

How's it going?

Happy to be here.

You said you're going to almost every state in the country for this tour, right?

Oh, I wish.

Normally I do 200 cities, but

it's brutal.

Damn.

Brutal.

So yeah, no, so I'm only doing 100 cities five months.

Only 100.

Yeah, only 100.

Yeah, yeah, through June.

Yeah, looking forward to coming to a town near you.

Nice.

And that's for the book tour, right?

Yeah, it's for the new book tour.

How Not to Age came out in December.

Premiered number two New York Times bestseller list.

Wow.

I was kind of bummed.

But next time, number one.

Number two is in Brest, man.

Who beat you out?

Oh, good question.

Was it a health book?

I don't remember.

I don't remember.

Just focus on yourself.

No, oh, but, oh,

habits.

Something about habits.

It's called Atomic Habits.

Atomic Habits.

Been on

the list for like 200 weeks or something.

That's an old one.

I was not able to bump it up.

Well, maybe with this podcast tour, we'll get it.

All right, let's do it.

So, you did a bunch of research for that book, right?

Over 13,000 citations.

13,000 citations took me over three years.

I got a team of 22, so it's not just me.

Yeah, yeah, we got a lot of people.

I mean, we're just going through tens of thousands of pages.

Really wanted to be like the most comprehensive guide in terms of evidence-based, you know, methods to extend health and longevity.

Right.

And that's why I like how you teach because it's all evidence-based.

It's not hypothetical.

It's not opinions.

You look at the facts, right?

yeah yeah wherever the facts lead us i mean that's really i mean and i think today

i mean there's just so much nutritional noise and nonsense out there right you know even like an educated person trying to you know answer really basic common sense questions about you know it reminds me of my last book how not to die talking about weight loss like whether you're trying to live you know longer or lighter i mean you're just you're just bombarded yeah by just

especially with social media oh yeah yeah and so i just really wanted to you know even look as a physician you know with years wading neck deep through the medical literature,

it was difficult to kind of separate fact from farce.

And look, if it took me that long, I mean, you know, so the casual observers got no chance whatsoever.

But look, the good news is we have tremendous power over our health, destiny, and longevity.

The vast majority of premature death and disability is preventable with a healthy enough diet and lifestyle.

And that's exciting, because previously it was thought your genetics played a huge role, right?

But you recently found out it's about 25%.

Yeah, based on studies of identical twins, only about 20% of the difference, 25% of the difference in lifespan between individuals is due to genetics.

So it's like, wow, what can we do over the majority of which we have some control?

Right, and diet is the most important thing, right?

Yeah, according to the Global Burden of Disease Study, the largest, most systemic analysis of risk factors in human history found that diet

is the number one killer of humanity worldwide and the number one killer here in the United States.

Cigarettes only kill about a half million Americans every year, whereas our diet kills many more.

And that's not really talked about.

Yeah, no, no, I know.

And there's so much effort, so many resources putting into smoking cessation, but unfortunately, just not hitting number one.

What we put at the end of our fork, the most important decision we make for the health and well-being of our families.

And I think there's just so much information, right?

For every food, there's a good study and a bad study.

So I think people are just kind of confused where to get their information from.

So when you were researching particular foods, that must have been a difficult process, right?

Well, you know, you start out by saying, well, who funded these studies, right?

I mean,

was it, you know, was it the beef jack-off program?

Was it the Egg Council?

Was it the Watermelon Promotion Board?

Who's money going in?

So that helps kind of understand.

But look, it still could be a good study.

You just got a little grain of salt looking in.

And then you really want to look at the best available balance of evidence.

One study is never going to show you anything.

You really got to look at all the studies put together, these meta-analyses where they compile all the top studies.

You really get a sense.

And you look at interventional

studies, these randomized controlled trials, where you can actually put it to the test, not just kind of observational evidence where you track people and their diseases and their diets over time, but you can actually put different foods to the test, randomize people.

In fact, you can do double-blind placebo-controlled trials where you put walnuts in a smoothie or something versus a walnut-flavored smoothie.

One person gets walnuts, the other person doesn't.

Nobody knows who's getting the walnuts, who's not, until you break the code at the end.

You actually see if walnuts actually do anything to you.

Walnuts you speak highly of, right?

Indeed.

The only nuts shown to acutely improve artery function within hours, also the nut with the highest antioxidant content, the highest omega-3 content.

I encourage people to eat a palm full of walnuts every day.

Wow.

The food on a gram-for-gram basis most associated with longevity compared to any other food on the planet.

Dang, I'm going to buy some after this.

But the trick is unsalted, right?

Yeah, unsalted.

Yeah, ideally.

Raw, even would be better.

Yeah, so raw unsalted walnuts is the way to go.

In fact, salt.

Sodium is the number one dietary risk factor for death on planet Earth.

The worst thing about humanity's diet is excess sodium content.

About 70% of the sodium we get is actually from processed foods.

It's not the salt that we added

at the table or the dining room.

It's these packaged foods that's used as a flavor enhancer.

Yeah, I actually cut frozen foods and packaged foods pretty much completely years ago, and I felt amazing.

Ah, fantastic.

Well, one of those factors may be salt.

People think, well, my blood pressure is fine, I don't have to worry about salt.

No, but salt is pro-inflammatory.

You can randomize asthmatics to a low-salt diet, get significantly decreased in asthma attacks because low-salt diets are anti-inflammatory, have all sorts.

And that's why dietary sodium is such a primary risk factor

as a leading killer because it affects so many different organ systems, not only our blood pressure and our artery function, but our kidneys, our eyes, et cetera, down the list.

So, yeah, cutting down on sodium intake, which is really cutting down on that ultra-processed crap, that processed junk food, primary way to decrease our salt.

We really want to hit a 1500 milligram limit, which is what the American Heart Association recommends.

I love that.

Which grocery store do you personally shop at for the highest quality ingredients?

Well, typically on the road, I'm looking for Whole Foods.

I just came from California.

There's all sorts of kind of indie stores offering the same kind of stuff, but they have a nice hot bar, a nice salad bar.

You can kind of pick and choose your ingredients.

You walk into a restaurant, you don't know what kind of crap they're going to give you.

Right.

Yeah, I try not to eat out, but it's tough in Vegas.

Because all the seed oil is right, and you don't know what they're putting in there.

There's so much, I mean, you know, right.

So you can get Chinese fat oil and salt, or you can get Italian fat oil and salt, or you can get, I mean, you know, on down the list, but you know, you just can't make a lot of money selling people whole foods.

Yeah, when you look at the standard American diet, the food pyramid they recommend to give our kids, I mean, does that irritate you at all?

Well, so I mean, the pyramid's kind of a thing of the past back in the 90s, but now we have the plate

recommending people to include half their plate, be vegetables, a quarter of fruit, a quarter of protein, which can be, you know, legumes, beans, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils, actually encouraging people to drink water.

So certainly things that are improving.

And looking forward to see what the 2026 to 30 guidelines coming out.

I testify every five years

before the committee, and we'll see.

And they tend to get better every year.

In other words, more evidence-based, less influence from big business.

Oh, that's good.

Nice.

Now, you landed on the vegetarian diet as your main diet.

When did you make that switch?

Well, so really, plant-based diets in general.

So primarily plants, not necessarily exclusively plants.

But it really actually all goes back to my grandma.

I was just a kid.

Oh, yeah.

When my grandma was sent home in a wheelchair to die, basically.

She had the end-stage heart disease.

She had so many bypass surgeries, she basically run out of plumbing at some point, confined in a wheelchair, crushing chest pain.

Her life was over at age 65.

Then she heard about this guy, Nathan Pritikin, one of our early lifestyle medicine pioneers.

And what happened next is actually detailed in Pritikin's biography.

It talks about Frances Greger, my grandmother.

They wheeled her in, and she walked out.

Wow.

Though she was given a medical death sentence at age 65, thanks to a healthy diet, was able to enjoy another 31 years on this planet until age 96 to continue to enjoy her six grandkids, including me.

That's why I went into medicine.

That's why I practiced lifestyle medicine, why I started the website NutritionFacts.org, why I wrote the book How Not to Die, why all the proceeds from all my books are all donated directly to charity.

I just want to do for everyone's family what Pritikin did for my family.

That's beautiful, man, because you could be making millions off these books, but you're donating it.

Yeah, well,

I have sold millions of books.

But, you know, there's so much commercial corruption, particularly not only in medicine, but in food in particular.

It is one of the most profitable industries, a trillion-dollar industry processing with so much money in the mix, it's difficult to separate fact from fiction.

And so I want to completely step back from all that and be like, oh, he, you know, I am just, you know, laying down what the evidence says because I care about you and your family enjoying the longest, healthiest life.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It seems like with food, especially in grocery stores, there's more bad than good.

You know, oh my God.

No, in fact, something like the produce all, that's actually a loss leader.

Most grocery stores actually lose money on produce, unless it goes bad if it's perishable, right?

Rots on the shelf.

It's the worst thing to sell, right?

You want a snack cake that sits on the shelf for a few weeks.

That's how you make money.

You sell people brown sugar water in a bottle.

That's how you make money.

And so they're getting you in the store to buy that product, you know,

to buy an apple or something, but then at the checkout aisle, they're just slamming you at all sides with ads for fast food and junk food and on down the list.

That's how they're making their money.

And so look, the incentives are all just

perversely laid out.

The least healthy food is most profitable food.

It's not like the head of some soda companies rubbing their sticky hands together, thinking, how can I contribute to the childhood obesity epidemic?

They're thinking, how do I maximize the earnings for my shareholders in the next quarter?

And should that CEO get a conscience for two seconds, they'll get booted out and replaced by somebody else who will maximize

shareholder earnings for the next quarter, right?

I mean, so, and how do you maximize?

You sell people sugar water.

You sell people, it's dirt cheap ingredients, it's all profit, taxpayer subsidized sugar, right?

Yeah.

Whereas, you know, the healthiest food, it's not even branded.

You're not going to see an ad on the Super Bowl for sweet potatoes.

Because even a sweet potato grower is not going to put an ad.

You'll just buy their competitor's sweet potatoes.

It's not branded, it's not patentable.

It's just like, it's the worst thing to make money of.

The only people that profit are the people that actually eat these foods.

So we need to kind of take control of our own health, of our own family's health.

We can't wait until society catches up to the science.

These companies don't necessarily have our best interests at hand, so we really have to really take personal responsibility because it's a matter of life and death.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense from a business point of view, but there is this debate that eating healthy is expensive.

Well, if you think of the cheapest food, I mean, the healthiest foods are some of the cheapest foods, like, you know, dried beans, apples, cabbage.

I mean, come on.

I mean, this is, you know, like a dollar per pound of food.

Right.

Well, the only way you get is like on like a per-calorie basis, like if you're starving to death, yes, having a pound of sugar, you get more calories or drinking a quart of oil or something.

Yes, you know, and if you only had a few dollars, you're trying to live on a desert island, not starve to death.

But really, it's only people that buy these like fancy, you know, healthy junk food where you're really paying a premium.

But really, the basic foods for which there's no advertising budget, these are some of the healthiest foods and the best for our budget.

Yeah, I think we just have to shift the narrative, the programming, because I have friends that are on minimum minimum wage, making low income, and they all eat fast food.

They think they can't afford eating healthy, but they're not, you know, they don't have the right information, I think.

Yeah, yeah, no, it's you know, buy a sweep potato, throw it and nuke it in the microwave for a few minutes.

And people like also have this sense that it's not convenient.

Like fast food, that's convenient, right?

Convenience foods, junk food, that's convenient.

What could be more convenient than an apple?

It's already like pre-packaged.

You can eat the package, right?

I mean, it's literally no prep necessary, right?

I mean, there's just no excuse not to eat healthy other than we've just been bombarded by these bad messages our whole lives.

And it's really, it can be cheap, convenient, delicious.

And, you know, it's, it's, you know, you can love food that loves you back.

Oh, man, a fresh apple.

I grew up in Jersey with apple trees.

I would go to apple tree pickings.

Oh, man.

What's your favorite kind?

The honey one, I think it's called.

Honey crisp.

Yeah.

Honey crisp is good.

So have you ever had a sweet tango apple?

No.

Oh, dude.

Dude.

No, that's my favorite.

No, no, it's hard to find.

But if you can get some, yeah, that's the one to go, man.

Check it out, man.

I can't go back.

Now, when it comes to apples, fruits, vegetables, there's also a debate about organic versus non-organic with the pesticides.

Where do you stand on that debate?

Yeah, so in How Not to Die, I talk about this modeling study that suggests that if half of Americans eat a single more serving of fruits or vegetables, we would prevent every year 20,000 cases of cancer.

That's how powerful produce is.

Wow.

But because they're talking about conventional produce, pesticide-laden produce, the additional pesticide burden on the American public would cause 10 cases of cancer.

So, overall, we would just prevent 19,900 cases of cancer, right?

So, that gives you a sense of the tremendous benefit of eating fruits and vegetables versus the tiny bump in risk.

And you say, wait a second, why accept any risk at all?

Why not get all benefits, no risk, by choosing organic?

Great, but we should never let concern over pesticides prevent us from stuffing our face with as many fruits and vegetables as possible.

Yeah, that must have been a scare tactic, then.

I mean, look, well, no, it's a legitimate concern.

Look, there's a legitimate concern, but the benefits far outweigh the risks.

Got it, got it.

Now, when it comes to plant-based diets and longevity, is it true people on that diet live longer than people that eat meat?

Yeah, in fact, you look at the blue zones, right?

So these are areas of exceptional longevity around the world, have up to 10 times the rate of centenarians, those that live triple digits, over 100 years old.

They all center their diets around whole plant foods.

The primary protein source is some kind of legume, bean, split pee, chickpea, lentil.

So they're centering their diets, they're decreasing their intake of meat, dairy, eggs, sugar, salt, maximizing their intake of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and seeds, herbs and spices, legumes, mushrooms, basically real food that grows out of the ground.

These are our healthiest choices.

That's what all of the blue zones, these longest, healthiest populations, center their diets around.

And you can do

interventional trials where you randomize people to eat a diet centered around plant foods.

There was one randomized hundreds versus exercise versus neither, and found that sadly, though exercise alone did not slow the rate of aging, those randomized to the plant-based dietary intervention group had a significant slowing of biological aging.

So no wonder there's lower rates of age-related diseases among those who eat plant-based.

So up to three times less likely to become demented later in life, lower rates of heart disease, cancer, diabetes.

In fact, the only diet ever proven to reverse the course of our number one killer, heart disease, number one killer of men and women, is a plant-based diet, shown first by Dr.

Dean Nornish in in 1990, publishing the Lancet in the summer, showing for the first time that we could open up arteries without drugs, without surgery, just a plant-based diet and lifestyle program.

I mean, if that's all a plant-based diet could do, reverse the number one killer of men and women, shouldn't that kind of be the default diet until proven otherwise?

And the fact that it can also be so effective for preventing, arresting, reversing other leading killers like high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes, would seem to make the case for plant-based eating simply really overwhelming at this point.

I love that.

I actually want to go to a blue zone.

There's one in Cali, right?

In fact, the only remaining blue zone to this day, most blue zones are actually historical.

There's only one left, and it's the red-white blue zone.

That is in Loma Linda, California, the Seven-Day Adventists,

who eat these plant-based diets and also have other healthy lifestyle behaviors, not smoking,

tend to have regular exercise, social connections, a whole long list of lifestyle factors, but their plant-based diet appears to be the principal component for their longevity.

Wow, I thought there was five left.

There's only one left left.

Ah, there were were five, but these are historical.

So the longest-lived population in human history formerly studied are these Seven-Day Adventist vegetarian

in Lumalinda, California.

Second longest-living population were Okinawa, Japanese, but that was in the 1950s.

Now, Okinawa, Japan, is the most obese area of Japan.

They have the most KFCs.

There's been a real push for the Okinawans to eat the Okinawan diet, too.

They used to get 70% of their calories from sweet potatoes.

They ate a vegetable-based diet.

And now, of course, they're eating the kind of westernized fast food that the rest of the world.

We are exporting this diet around the world and impinging on public health everywhere.

Got it.

Now, you mentioned cancer earlier, which is on the rise, right?

I was talking to a dog health expert, actually.

He's saying one in two dogs will have cancer in the next 10 to 15 years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is scary.

Look, one in two men, one in three women are going to get cancer sometime in their life.

And so, critically important to prevent cancer.

And people don't realize there's a latency period of cancer.

Most of these so-called epithelial cancers, like the common cancers, breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, these cancers can take decades to develop.

The latency period for colorectal cancer is like 50 years, meaning

the first mutation that started that cancer 50 years before you're diagnosed.

So it's what you're eating in like your teenage years, right?

So, really, much of cancer quote-unquote prevention, you're actually just slowing down the rate of the cancer that you don't know you have when you do autopsy studies of accident victims, you find that a remarkably high percentage of people have cancers, hidden cancers, tiny cancers growing inside them.

So, really, the strategy is to slow them down.

You want to die with your cancer, not from your cancer.

Interesting.

So, it's already in a lot of people's bodies, and they have no idea.

Yeah, no, essentially, everybody gets cancer.

We have this remarkable immune system that's able to target budding cancer tumors.

So, there's this constant battle to repair DNA damage, prevent cancer tumor formation, and to slow down the growth and slow down the spread of cancers.

And so we can facilitate that, or we can go against it.

We can smoke cigarettes and undercut our body's natural ability

to slow down the rate of cancer and die from the number one cancer killer, lung cancer, which is just a horrible

disease to drown in.

Yeah, I know someone.

Yeah, it was rough, man.

And it seems like with diet, actually, some people have been able to treat some of their cancer just from eating the right things.

Indeed.

So Dr.

Dean Ornish, after conquering killer number two, heart disease, moved on to killer number two cancer and was the first to show you can actually reverse the course of early stage prostate cancer with the same kind of plant-based diet and lifestyle that reversed

that reversed heart disease.

And now he's working on Alzheimer's disease.

He's just finishing up.

In fact, the study's finished.

He's just writing it up.

I was hoping it was published by now, but he claims to remarkable results.

We won't know until it's actually published in peer-reviewed medical literature.

But oh my god, the thought that we can actually reverse the course of early stage Alzheimer's, that's fascinating.

I have the gene.

I took the 23Me.

Oh, so ApoE4?

Yeah.

Okay, no, no, but...

Genes load the gun, but lifestyle pulls the trigger.

So, for example, there's something called the Nigerian paradox, where they have among the highest rates of the Alzheimer's gene, but among the lowest rates of Alzheimer's disease.

How is that possible?

Ah, well, what is ApoE?

What does this gene code for?

It codes for the primary cholesterol carrier inside the brain.

So if we bring our cholesterol levels low enough, we can actually undercut.

So diet trumps genetics, and because they eat these,

Nigerians eat these diets low in animal fat, they have low LDL cholesterol.

And so

we can,

so

regardless of what kind of

genetic cards we've been dealt, we can reshuffle the deck with diet.

Those with a blood cholesterol of 225 or more have nearly 25 times the odds of ending up with amyloid plaques in the brains 10 to 15 years later.

What's good for our hearts is good for our heads because the clogging of our brain arteries, our cerebral arteries with atherosclerotic plaque, is involved in the development of Alzheimer's disease.

It closes off blood flow to these critical memory centers in the brain.

And so that's good news, right?

So although Alzheimer's may be incurable, at least it is preventable.

We really do have the power of whether or not we're going to become demented or not.

That's cool.

So I got to keep taking those omega-3s.

So omega-3 fatty acid is critically important for cognitive function, particularly later in life.

Yeah.

What other supplements, you've probably studied thousands of them at this point.

Is there any that really stood out to you?

Well, so certainly, you know, there's individual circumstances.

You know, if you're an alcoholic or you're pregnant, or there's a, you know, individual.

But in terms of kind of general population,

typically we're not getting enough vitamin D, vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin.

People getting inadequate sun exposures should consider supplementing their diet with 2,000 international units of vitamin D3 every day.

You know, we just weren't meant to wear clothes, we weren't meant to be inside, we weren't meant to be at these crazy latitudes during the winter.

You know, we evolved running around naked in equatorial Africa, and so we're just baked in the sun all day.

And now,

you know, regardless of where you live, if you're got a desk job inside or something, you're probably not getting enough vitamin D.

You can get tested, or just go for that supplementation regimen.

Another critical important vitamin B12 at age 50, according to the National Academies of Sciences, this is the most prestigious medical institution in the United States.

It recommends every single person age 50 starting taking vitamin B12, either a supplement or vitamin B12 fortified foods, because our ability to absorb B12 declines with age.

Those eating healthy diets, plant-based diets, really should start taking B12 throughout their lifespan,

since this is a vitamin that is not made by plants, not made by animals either, made by little microbes that blanket the earth.

So we used to get B12 drinking out of a mountain stream or well water or something, but now we chlorinate the water supply to kill off any bacteria.

So we don't get a lot of B12 anymore.

Don't get a lot of cholera either.

It's a good thing that we live in a nice sanitary world, but you know, our fellow great apes get all the B12 they need eating bugs, dirt, and feces.

I prefer supplements.

So again, 2,000 micrograms once a week, all the B12 you need, though, starting at age 65.

Really should bump it up to 1,000 micrograms once a day.

Cyanoclobalma is the most shelf-stable form.

That's the one I recommend.

Got it.

Nice.

Pretty simple.

Not as long as Brian Johnson's list.

That's amazing.

I don't know where.

I mean, look, it's great that he's experimenting and stuff, but yeah, we just don't have good data to support.

There's other things I talk about.

Are you interested in coming on the Digital Social Hour podcast as a guest?

Well, click the application link below in the description of this video.

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Click the application link below, and here's the episode, guys.

The usefulness of creatine, a supplementation for building muscle mass,

along with resistance training, particularly for older men and women.

So, and there's all sorts of

different foods out there.

So, something like, you know, people treat things like, you know, powdered ginger or turmeric and things as if they're supplements, but they're really just whole foods, just kind of powdered into a supplements.

You can take it in a pill or not.

Yeah, I take turmeric for inflammation.

Ah, fantastic.

How much do you take every day?

Just a pill.

I don't know how much is in use.

Oh, yeah.

So I encourage people to take a quarter teaspoon a day.

That's actually part of my daily dozen checklist of all the healthiest of healthy foods.

I encourage people to fit in their daily routine.

Available as a free app.

iPhone, Android, Dr.

Gregor's Daily Dozen.

So quarter teaspoon, turmeric, tablespoon of ground flash seeds, darker and leafy vegetables every day, the healthiest kind of vegetables, berries every day, the healthiest kind of fruits, kind of on down the list of best beverages, best foodeners, how much exercise to get, et cetera.

Love it.

Encourage people to do it.

And again, just kind of aspirational, trying to, you know, just encourage people to just think about it and try to get some healthy foods.

Hopefully we'll crowd out some of the less healthy patients.

Now, I heard you talk really highly about green tea, right?

Oh, now you're talking about language.

I have one kickback.

Okay.

So have you seen that study on the microplastics in some of the tea bags?

Oh, yeah.

What did you think about?

Well, you don't use tea bags.

So how do you drink yours?

So you can get bulk tea, right?

Okay.

And you can make it your own.

Or you can take tea leaves, throw it in your smoothie.

You don't actually have to drink tea.

You don't actually have to brew tea.

In fact, you can actually get more nutrition, right?

I mean, so the way we make tea, we take dark green leafy vegetables, these green tea leaves, put them in water, then throw them away, right?

It's like taking collard grains, right?

Boiling some collard grains, and then throwing the collard greens away and just drinking the water.

Now, some of the nutrition does leach into the water.

It turns green, you can smell a little bit.

And indeed, there's nutrients that leach out of the tea leaves and get into the water.

But hey, why not

get it all by, for example, drinking matcha tea, which is powdered green tea leaves.

It's actually a whole food.

Now, the concern, though, is lead contamination.

So, in China, unfortunately, only recently got rid of lead and gasoline, and so depending on how far the tea plantations are away from the highway, they have high levels of lead in their soil.

Thankfully, the lead does not leach out of the tea.

So, you take

tea from China, China, put it in water, hot water, throw away the tea bag, drink the tea.

It's fine.

But if you're actually drinking matcha tea, actually eating the tea leaves or throwing leaves into your smoothie, I encourage people to get Japan-sourced tea because they just don't have the lead-contamination symptoms.

I'm a coffee guy, but I might have to make the switch to matcha.

Oh, well, no, no, no, no, both.

Both.

So drinking coffee, three cups of coffee a day, associated with 13% lower risk of all-cause mortality because of chlorogenic acid, the primary antioxidant in coffee, is an autophagy activator.

This house cleaning process inside the body that is boosted by fasting, boosted by exercise, and drinking coffee every day.

Decaf is fine, instant coffee is fine, you actually get more from brewed than espresso because of the greater contact time.

I encourage people to drink filtered coffee because the paper filter traps some of the cholesterol-raising compounds in coffee.

So, people drinking filtered coffee live even longer than those drinking unfiltered coffee, but they both live longer than those not drinking coffee at all.

Wow.

13% lower risk of dying prematurely, three cups of coffee a day.

Now, tea, drink three cups of tea every day, 24% lower risk of dying.

So green tea, but, so you say, well, green tea is better, right?

Every cup of coffee is a lost opportunity to drink green tea, but they work through entirely different mechanisms.

So we would expect it to be an additive effect.

So

green tea has nothing to do with autophagy.

What it does is actually boosts our DNA repair enzymes,

and so increases longevity through an entirely different mechanism.

So I start out the day, three cups of coffee, then move over to tea.

Then you go from black tea to green tea, then move to herbal tea after about 4 p.m.

when you don't want the caffeine to interfere with your sleep.

But you mentioned fasting.

When it comes to fasting, do you recommend people look into that, do it maybe on a weekly or yearly basis or something?

Well, so in my last book, How Not to Diet, talking about weight loss, actually the largest chapter was on this intermittent fasting.

There's so many different types.

There's alternate day fasting, 5.2 fasting, 25.5 fasting, mimicking diets, time-restricted feeding.

Bottom line, I talk about the benefits, the pros and cons of each of them, for anyone who wants to do a deep dive, but really the bottom line is early time-restricted feeding is the healthiest.

Thanks to our circadian rhythms, thanks to the chronobiology.

We try to restrict our daily feeding window to 12 hours or less, but critically important, it's earlier rather than later.

If we skip any meal, we're skipping supper, not breakfast.

We should try to shove as many calories earlier in the day as possible.

Ideally, breakfast and lunch would actually be the biggest meal of the day.

The exact same food eaten in the morning

creates less body fat, is less fattening, and the exact same food, exact same number of calories eaten later in the day, cause less of a blood sugar spike, less triglycerides.

So if you're going to eat something crappy, eat it in the morning, your body's better able to handle it.

And so, yeah, so time, and that actually may be one of the reasons why those California Adventists live so long is because they tend to

make kind of lunch the biggest meal of the day, and that helps regardless kind of what you eat.

Interesting.

So I need to adopt, because dinner is my biggest meal.

I usually skip breakfast.

And lunch is bigger.

Everybody does.

I know.

It's the exact opposite of what you should be doing.

And so, if you just switched, if you ate the exact same foods and just switched over, you did labs before and after, you'd be surprised.

It's really, no, seriously.

Same foods, just different time of day.

Yeah, yeah, it's crazy.

I've been looking into the circadian rhythm.

I try to get sunlight in the morning.

I try to ground.

Nice, nice, nice.

Very nice.

Yeah, we want that full sun in the morning.

I mean, the chronobiology literature is just fascinating.

In fact, you know,

there's this epidemic of

pesticide

in the subcontinent of India.

But whether or not they're successful at killing themselves depends when they're drinking the, they're overdosing the pesticides.

If they're doing it in the morning, they tend not to die.

If they do it in the evening, they do die because of our cardobiology.

Same amount of poison eaten at a different time of day, our body's better able to detoxify in the morning.

Wow.

I mean, it's just really remarkable.

We tend to only think about circadian rhythms when, like, jet lag, right?

That's the only time we're thinking about our circadian rhythms.

But no, it's super powerful.

Most of our biological systems are on this quasi-24-hour clock.

And so we ignore it at our peril.

Yeah.

Our bodies are so unique and powerful.

It's crazy.

The more I look into it, it's insane.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's talk about...

All right, so dark chocolate and heavy metals.

That seems to be a debate lately.

I used to eat it all the time thinking it was healthy.

Now there's new studies saying there's heavy metals in them.

What's your take on that?

Yeah, so two recent analyses, one by Consumers Union, publisher Consumer Aparts, a nonprofit organization.

Also, Consumers Lag, which is a kind of a for-profit, third-party testing company, both looked at not only chocolates, but various kinds of cocoa powders and found high levels of heavy metals like cadmium in certain products, but not others.

And so, if you're just eating chocolate once in a while, like most people do, chocolate cake on a birthday or something, then it doesn't matter.

But if you are eating cocoa like I recommend people eat cocoa, a tablespoon a day, I recommend my last book, because it improves muscle mass, muscle performance, all four tests of

physical performance and improves blood flow to the skin 70% within two hours, can reduce wrinkles, all sorts of amazing things.

Just eating natural cocoa powder, making your life a little more chocolatey.

But if you're actually doing that much cocoa, then you really want to choose low metal cocoa.

And so, you know, you can go online, look at those surveys, see if your favorite cocoa powders and favorite chocolates, where they are on the list.

The lowest, it just came out to be Target brand generic cocoa.

Yeah, just like the rest of the cover.

Yeah, yeah.

No, so that's the one, that's the one I get.

Although I just came back from Europe, I was like, so get the Target brand.

They're like, what?

They don't have Target brand.

But they test coconuts from around the world.

So you just find one that

you can get locally.

Wow.

I got to look into that, because I used to love dark chocolate, but that study definitely scared me a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When it comes to herbs and spices, is there any you recommend to put on your food?

Oh, oh, huge, long list.

And so herbs and spices on a gram-for-gram basis have more antitoxins than any other food on the planet, even berries, right?

And part of it because they're dehydrated, they tend to be dehydrated, and so they're really concentrated in nutrition.

But, I mean, there's absolutely remarkable literature there.

So, for example, osteoarthritis, which is the primary cause of physical disability among older men and women,

less than a half teaspoon of ground ginger every day significantly decreases joint pain.

I mean, so literally, it would be pennies a day to get significant benefits.

And the reason we don't hear about these studies is because there's just no profit to be made.

I mean, there's just no money to be made

with these kind of natural approaches.

So,

you know, less than a teaspoon a day of ground black black sesame seeds can decrease systolic blood pressure by eight points.

That alone could cut your risk of stroke by about a quarter and is delicious, right?

Black cumin powder within nine weeks significantly improves memory, cognitive performance.

You can get that kind of Middle Eastern store.

You can buy it online.

I recommend people consume something called papali, which is the long pepper, again, Middle Eastern spice store, has something called piperlongamine, a purported senolytic compound.

We can get rid of these so-called zombie cells throughout our body.

This whole concept of cellular senescence with one of the aging pathways.

Oh, God, down the list.

So turmeric, we already talked about.

Amla, which is dried Indian gooseberry powder.

It is the single most anti-oxidant impact substance on planet Earth, highly prized in kind of Ayurvedic medical tradition.

Wow.

For thousands of years before we realized, we actually have the science to kind of back it up.

It does all sorts of amazing things, decreases blood sugars and diabetics, improves cholesterol levels.

Kind of on down the list of that something else that I encourage people to eat.

So these are just kind of people think of them as supplements because something like amla is totally nasty It's astringent sour bitter gross You can throw it in smoothie or something really highly flavorful and you won't even taste it or you can just take it in a capsule or you can wrap it up in like little

Edible films like potato starch.

You kind of dunk it and just That's exciting.

I haven't heard of a few of those.

Oh my god, so many cool things out there.

And it's just whole food, right?

It's just like amla.

It's just a fruit that's dried and powdered.

Yeah, yeah.

Amazing stuff.

I love that.

Oh, I was listening to you on a podcast on the way here.

You said being overweight is super dangerous.

So you could lose 30 minutes of lifespan if you're 11 pounds overweight.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So

you can,

the equivalent of, so this is considering something called micromorts, which is like kind of one million chance of dying, or you can kind of cut up your adult life into kind of a million little half hours.

And so this is a way to compare

the pros and cons of various kinds of lifestyle behaviors.

It's kind of hard for people to consider something like relative risk or absolute risk or certain percentages of differences.

And so, but you can kind of, you know,

how is jogging compared to, you know, compared to not smoking?

And so using that, you can be like, oh my god, well, drinking this much alcohol is equivalent to, you know, knocking your lifespan down as much as being 11 pound overweight.

Or, you know, eating a burger, for example,

cuts one's life as short as smoking two cigarettes.

So if it wouldn't even occur to us to light up before and after lunch, you know, maybe we should choose the bean burrito instead.

The same thing with eggs: one egg

associated with a lifespan contraction as much as smoking two cigarettes a day.

What?

Eating an egg?

Yeah, eating a single egg.

You know, people don't just eat one egg, right?

They're eating like

a couple eggs.

In fact, so the NIHARP study, the largest prospective study on diet and health in human history, found that

just swapping 3% of egg protein for plant protein associated with more than 20% lower risk of all-cause mortality, right?

I mean, so, and just swapping 3%, right?

And so, again, that's how people, it's not black and white, it's not all or nothing.

Even any movement we can make towards increasing our intake of healthy foods, decreasing our intake of some of these less healthy foods, can have major impacts on our health and longevity.

Yeah.

And now, when it comes to protein, there's this advice, especially in the bodybuilding community, one gram per per weight per body power.

Right.

And that's too much, according to what you've studied.

Yeah, no, no.

So, you know, National Academies of Medicine, again, most prestigious medical bodies, World Health Organization, European Food Safety Authority, all world's authorities are targeting 0.8 grams per healthy kilogram body weight.

So that's per kilogram.

So that's like 0.36 grams per pound.

Wow.

So that's like 45 grams a day for the average height woman, 55 a day for the average height man.

Now, at age 65, we may want to bump that up to 1.0, but that's still like 0.45.

So it's less than a half a gram per pound of ideal body weight in terms of proteins.

You're like, well, you know, what's the problem with taking too much?

Well, there is.

I mean, the entire aging literature is centered around protein restriction down to recommended levels.

That's how you boost the pro-longevity hormone, FGF-21.

That's how you reduce the pro-aging hormone, IGF-1, how you suppress the motor of aging enzyme, m2, all through dietary protein restriction, bringing our levels of protein down to recommended levels, which is this 0.8 gram per healthy kilogram of body weight.

Now, most of that is due to particularly problematic amino acids like methionine.

And so you can even keep your protein intake the same, but just switch sources, going from animal-based sources like meat to plant-based sources like beans.

You can get that drop of methionine, which will have these pro-longevity benefits, even if you keep your protein intake the same.

Right.

And I've seen certain studies now that certain animal proteins could be actually carcinogens.

Well, it's because they boost the levels of IGF-1.

So this insulin growth factor 1 is a pro-aging and cancer-promoting hormone, which is the reason why, for example, men who drink milk are more likely to get prostate cancer, a very consistent effect.

And, you know, you can take prostate cancer cells in Petri, just drip a little, you know, milk on them, and you can, you know, see the enhancement in growth, something that you don't get drinking almond milk, or dripping almond milk, or something like that.

And so,

now, at high enough protein intakes, it doesn't matter, animal or plant protein, they both can boost IGF-1, but at kind of recommended levels, it's really just the animal protein that's boosting your liver's production of this

cancer-promoted growth hormone.

Really want to try to bring that down.

And so there's a reason why

male power lifters have like three times the rate of a premature death.

Three times as likely to die prematurely compared to the general population.

Now, some of that could be anabolic steroid use.

So it's really difficult to kind of tease that out.

But part of it because they're pounding these protein powders.

Yeah, a lot of them die young.

You see it in the news at least a few times a year.

It's crazy.

It's really sad.

It's really sad.

Yeah.

You've You've done a lot of studies on sleep.

Oh, yeah.

Sleep is interesting.

Yeah, I'm very curious what you kind of contribute to.

Well, you know, that was actually one of the more surprising parts

on longevity.

Sleep has, I don't want to minimize the importance of sleep.

So there's remarkable studies in terms of boosting your immune function, particularly this time of the year with lots of respiratory viruses hanging around.

You do these remarkable studies where you drip the cold virus, rhinovirus, into people's noses, and those who get less than five hours of sleep, three times more likely to come down with a cold compared to those getting seven or more hours of sleep at night.

And now everyone was infected, 100% infection.

They literally dripped the virus through their nose, but most of the people who were getting enough sleep didn't even sniffle.

Nothing.

Their immune system was able to knock the virus down before they even experienced a single symptom.

Dang.

And we are constantly bombarded by viruses all the time.

That's what we learned from the AIDS epidemic.

We are surrounded by microbes trying to kill us at all times.

The only reason we don't die from PCP pneumonia or all these just crazy pathogens everywhere is because our immune system is fighting the good fight every single day.

And we can boost it, we can improve our ability to fight out both cancer and viruses and bacteria and other pathogens by getting enough exercise, regular exercise, and getting enough sleep.

So I don't want to minimize the importance of sleep, but for longevity, it's really controversial over whether getting sufficient sleep actually makes any difference in terms of your lifespan.

In fact, if you look at the observational data, you know, where you track large numbers of people over time and track how much sleep they're getting and when they die, actually longer sleep, sleeping more than nine hours, is associated with dying with a shorter lifespan compared to those getting too little sleep,

less than five hours a night.

And now, there's lots of confounding factors.

Who sleeps late?

People who don't have a job.

So maybe socioeconomic factors.

Who sleeps late?

People who are depressed.

Or maybe people who are already sick, don't want to get out of bed, whatever.

But long sleepers, I mean, the data shows long sleepers actually live shorter lives than short sleepers.

We don't know if it's cause and effect,

but

yeah, surprising.

So, for people who, for whatever reason, whatever life circumstances, they're not getting enough sleep, well, you may be at risk of some of the, you know, getting the sniffles,

but you should not be stressed out that you are significantly cutting your life short because that's not what the data's showing at this point.

Interesting.

Wow, that's exciting news for me because I slept four hours a day in high school.

Oh, well, there you go.

Well, I mean, yeah, yeah.

But I definitely would get sick a lot more.

So that makes sense to me.

Yeah, now I try to sleep seven to eight.

Awesome.

That is the target.

Seven to eight.

That's why I recommended the book.

Absolutely.

Nailed it.

All right, apple cider vinegar.

Oh, does it actually cause weight loss?

It's crazy.

So, two teaspoons with every meal is what I recommend.

It's one of my 21 tweaks in my How Not to Diet book with 21 things that have been shown, proven in randomized controlled trials to accelerate the loss of body fat, regardless of what you eat all the time.

So if you're just like eating donuts all the time, not that I recommend it, but adding vinegar will significantly not only improve blood sugars, but significantly increase

the accelerate the loss of body fat, particularly visceral body fat, which is the most dangerous body fat.

That's the deep belly fat coiled around infiltrating your organs like your liver.

So they do these studies, where you can randomize people to a vinegar drink with real vinegar, acetic acid, versus a fake vinegar drink with a different kind of acid, like acetic, like citric acid or something, no actual vinegar.

Tastes exactly the same, though, so you don't know which is which.

Even the researchers don't know until you break the code at the end and you find out, oh my god, those that had been drinking the real vinegar actually had significant loss of this internal visceral fat based on CT scans.

Very expensive study, but showed this remarkable contraction.

They were eating the same number of calories.

We're not talking about cutting out meat, cutting out donuts, anything.

Just the kind of acid in their drink,

because

in that particular study, it was apple cider vinegar, but it's the acetic acid, which is the common vinegar.

So even distilled white, nasty vinegar used to like clean your bathroom would have the same effect because of the acetic acid, which is metabolizing our body,

boosting something called AMPK, which is also boosted by exercise and fasting, some other things, and is one of the anti-aging pathways,

as well as accelerating the loss of body fat.

So, yeah, just a caveat: never drink vinegar straight.

You can burn your esophagus, sprinkle it on a salad.

You can even just put it in some water, in like hot water, drink it like tea or something, you know, put it in tea,

sprinkle it on your food, whatever you want to do.

There's some wonderful balsamics now, flavored balsamics, there's chocolate balsamic, savory balsamics, like

Curry or whatever.

And so, yeah, I encourage people to incorporate vinegar in their daily diet.

It has all these benefits, even if you're not overweight.

I love it, Dr.

Dreger.

It's been fun, man.

Can't wait to add some of these to my lifestyle.

Where can people find you and find out the book?

They can go to nutritionfacts.org.

All my work is available free.

There are no ads, no corporate sponsorship, strictly non-commercial, not selling anything.

Just put it up as a public service, as a labor of love, as a tribute to my grandmother, nutritionfacts.org.

I love that.

We'll link it below.

Thanks for watching, guys.

As always, see you tomorrow.