Dr. David Sinclair: “Only 10 Minutes a Week Reverses Aging – Here’s the Proof”

1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:00

   You know, a lot of research shows us that, you know, walking 30 to 45 minutes a day seems to give us all the kind of health and longevity benefits we might want. But I'm wondering, is that through the old lens where we thought aging is inevitable and therefore walking 30 to 40 minutes a day is simply just doing the best that we can within that paradigm? Whereas if you look at it through your lens, that actually aging is not inevitable, sure, you know, maybe walking is helpful, but maybe it's not enough. So what is your perspective on movement, exercise, and how that fits in to your kind of theory and philosophy on aging?

2. DSDr. David Sinclair0:39

   Yeah. Well, probably for me to say don't walk and don't, uh, move. That- that's step one. If you don't walk or move, then you're in big trouble when you get older. Um, so that's a minimum. But if we're talking about what's- what's not maximum but optimal, we don't know that for sure, and it's might be everyone's different. But in general, losing your breath is important. High intensity exercise. You don't need a lot. I just mentioned 10 minutes a few times a week. That appears to be sufficient to give you the- the longer term health benefits. And what's probably going on is, in part, is that we... Well, we discovered, uh, and we published this in 2018 in the journal Cell, if anyone wants to look it up, that old muscle starts to think that it doesn't have enough oxygen even though there is enough oxygen, and it shuts itself down and doesn't make a lot of energy and the blood vessels start to be depleted and it's a just a terrible feed forward process after that. So by making your body hypoxic and giving it a stress, both in the... You can actually do excess oxygen or lack of oxygen, just you just wanna shock the system, then your body gets to reset. Um, and- and one of the- the most popular things to do in the longevity world now is, uh, what is it? High pressure bariatric, uh, oxygen therapy. And that I think is also resetting this, uh, this problem that our bodies have where they are what we call pseudo hypoxic. Um, one of the ways that we could reset that without exercise and without high pressure oxygen chambers was using NMN, this molecule that I take. It actually boosted the- the body's ability to make new blood vessels. It restored the- the ability to measure oxygen in the muscle. Um, and when we gave it to mice, they could run 50% further without having trained. But the good news is, well, no, the important point is that the mice that were young and exercised and got the molecule in their water ran twice as far. So it's, it shouldn't be an excuse to pop a pill and not do anything. Uh, but there are some little changes you can make. I- I lift weights. I have them around my house. I- I'm at a standing desk, which goes up and down here. These are changes that I make that, um, you know, I'm standing most of the day now, and this'll really help. It builds the muscles in your leg and- and your butt and your back. That's important now, especially for a male my age, where I'm losing 1% muscle if I don't do something about it every year. But also the hormones. Testosterone comes, uh, from having those large muscles, uh, signal to the testes. And I've been able to correct and- and raise my testosterone levels just by keeping those large muscles in shape.

3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee3:30

   So much to dive into there. It's incredibly fascinating that potentially to get these longevity benefits that you're talking just maybe 10 minutes of this kind of pulsed exercise where we're out of breath, so high intensity interval training several times a week, which is very achievable even for the busiest person out there. So I- I find recommendations like that really, really inspiring because, you know, eating less, exercising 10 minutes several times a week, you know, a lot of people think health and wellness is the preserve of the wealthy, the middle class, all kinds of things like that. And I, and I know there are certain things which do cost money, but it's also refreshing to know that there are lots of things that actually can be done completely free of charge. You know, eating less is actually saving you money, right? [laughs] Than, uh, than eating three meals a day. But, you know, there- there's a couple of points around exercise which I really wanna dive into. One of them is, as you say, at your age, you're losing 1% muscle mass, uh, each year, uh, if you don't do something about it. I think that starts at the age of 30 for- for most of us. So what's... When I think about that and I think about mTOR and protein, I have this like clash in my head whereby we know that sarcopenia, this loss of muscle mass, is a problem as one gets older. Uh, risk of falling, problems after that, all kinds of things happen when we lose that muscle mass. So a lot of the recommendations around fighting sarcopenia are to do with, yes, resistance training, but also the amount of protein you are consuming to make sure you're limiting how much that happens. Yet at the same time, we're sort of suggesting that to increase our aging we should be limiting our protein intake. Help me, help us see through that apparent contradiction.

4. DSDr. David Sinclair5:29

   Well, yeah, I'm not saying limit protein intake at all. I get plenty of protein, um, just mostly from plant-based sources where there's not a lot of the branched-chain amino acids. Those leucine, isoleucine, valine amino acids are the ones that activate mTOR. Um, and so, yeah, focus on plants. You'll have enough protein to build muscle. I have no, no trouble building muscle.

5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:52

   [laughs]

6. DSDr. David Sinclair5:53

   Um, that, that... It's a fallacy that you need to be eating, you know, these protein shakes and meatTo get stronger and to build muscle. Now, if you wanna professionally build muscle, by all means, go for it. But for most of us who just wanna feel good, look good, live longer, um, what I'm recommending doesn't affect your ability to do those things and, and build up muscle one bit. And there's, it's also a fallacy that older people cannot build up muscle. My father, who's 82, uh, has built up a lot of muscle. He goes to the gym twice a week. He runs, he hikes, and he literally is stronger than me. Um, and he says he hasn't felt this good since he was in his 30s. Though he w- he does say that he probably felt like crap when he was 30.

7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee6:42

   Even then, even if he did feel like crap when he was in his 30s, that's a pretty powerful thought, isn't it? That someone in their 80s can be quite confident in saying, "Doesn't matter how I felt in my 30s, I'm feeling better in my 80s than my 30s." That is, that's incredible, right? It's, it's not something to be sniffed at. That is something that is not the norm in society. It's not what people expect. People think it's an inevitability that we're gonna get slower, more tired, our memory's gonna go, and I don't buy that first of all. I've seen that there are many things we can do to mean that's not an inevitability. But I think you take it that, you take it even further and, and you're showing very clearly that that does not have to happen to everyone.

8. DSDr. David Sinclair7:25

   It's exactly right. I, I'm not gonna say my father and I are a clinical trial. Um, in fact, we were just doing this c- mainly 'cause we're scientists. We can read the literature, we're researching it. Um, but it's a fun experiment, right? We've now been doing this long enough that something weird is going on. My dad feels like and acts like he's 30, and I, I don't act or, hopefully you can judge, look like I'm 52. He's 82. So that's pretty interesting. We'll see over the next 10, 20 years what happens. But he, he's not a special person when it comes to life. He, he's an average guy. He didn't like exercise. He was not looking forward to the future. Uh, he's not obsessed with his health at all. And look at what happened. You know, he's living a life that he didn't expect at all, and we're already planning going to Africa after COVID. He's looking at life over the next 30 years. I mean, what 80-year-old does that?

9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:25

   An 80-year-old whose son is David Sinclair, that's who. [laughs]

10. DSDr. David Sinclair8:28

    [laughs] Maybe.

11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee8:31

    Um, you mentioned, uh, well, the, the, the- there's this theme, isn't there, always about this hormetic stress, this pulsed stress on the body that you can then recover from. I can see how interval training does that. Um, what about other forms of training? Now, as we have this conversation, I am two and a half weeks away from doing my very first marathon, so I [laughs] I've, I'm, I'm gonna be running the London Marathon in two and a half weeks. When this conversation comes out, hopefully I will have completed it. I'm not doing this for longevity, to be really clear. I'm doing it for other reasons. It's something, it was a challenge that was set to me. I'm enjoying the process of seeing if I can do it. But it's an interesting question since I have you on. You know, clearly running a marathon, and I'm not an endur- You know, typically I've not been an endurance type guy, so I've not done lots of stuff like this at all. This is well outside my comfort zone. Could this be a stressor on my body that has a powerful effect when it comes to what my body then does with respect to thinking it needs to hunker down? Of course, it's gonna be highly, uh, individual based. Or could it be that it's too much of a stress, you've gone past that hormetic sweet spot, and it's gone into the realm of actually, depending on my fitness levels and, and, and how it fits into the rest of my life, that it could actually become problematic? Sorry to interrupt. If you're enjoying this video and want to dive deeper into the topic of nutrition, I have created a free special guide which contains the five most important changes I think we all need to make when it comes to our diet. If you wanna get hold of this free guide, all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below.

12. DSDr. David Sinclair10:29

    Uh, I, I'm, I'm not worried about you. If you look at marathon runners, uh, there's a very clear, uh, correlation with longevity. People who bike or run long distances, uh, do live longer. In fact, in the case of cycling, if you do, I think it was 80 miles a week, your risk of heart attack goes down, uh, 60%, a massive amount. I, I don't know about marathons, but, um, I, I think that you'll be fine based on all the evidence.

13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee11:02

    Yeah. So, um, and then you mentioned with, we've not spoken really in detail about NMN yet, and I would like to, but you did mention when the, the, the mice took it, their endurance got better and, and that, that sort of, uh, rung, uh, uh, uh, a kind of... That really rung in my brain when you said it 'cause I thought, "Oh, I'm doing a marathon in a few weeks." As well as its anti-aging ability, does it also in, in your experience, beyond that trial, have an ability to im- improve and increase our endurance levels?

14. DSDr. David Sinclair11:35

    Well, we don't know in humans yet. Um, there's been very few studies, uh, with NMN and endurance. In fact, I, I'm struggling to think of one. Now, we're doing it myself, um, over at Harvard, and we'll know probably early next year if this is true. But I do have an anecdote. Um, one of my now good friends, Ken Ridout is his name, he was a middle of the road marathon runner, kind of a ho- doing it as a hobby, and I met him a few years ago. And he decided to, to make it his mission to see if he could, uh, use my science to improve, and every few months he got faster and faster and faster. And he's now 50 years old, and he's the world champion for his age, uh, and often just beats the 30-year-olds in marathons. Myrtle Beach was the most recent. He will be in the same marathon as you, uh, so look out for Ken Ridout. If he wins this race, he's the official world fastest 50-year-old in marathons.

15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee12:42

    Oh, wow. Because in-

16. DSDr. David Sinclair12:44

    And, and he, he's, he's on NMN and resveratrol, um, mainly. And, uh, you know, we don't have a twin as a negative control, which is what we should have, and it should be placebo controlled. But absent that, it's pretty interesting what we've seen happen to him.

17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee13:00

    [upbeat music] If you enjoyed that short clip, I think you are really going to enjoy the full conversation, which you can check out here. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 13:21