Essentials: The Biology of Slowing & Reversing Aging | Dr. David Sinclair

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now, my conversation with Dr. David Sinclair. Thanks for being here. I have a ton of questions for you about aging, longevity, lifespan, actionable protocols to increase how long we live, et cetera. And I just want to start off with a very simple question: What is the difference between longevity, anti-aging, and aging as a disease? Because I associate you with this statement, "Aging is a disease."

Right. Well, so longevity is the more academic way we describe what we research. Anti-aging is kind of the same thing, but it's got a bad rap because it's been used by a whole bunch of people that don't know what they're talking about. So I really don't like that term, anti-aging. But aging as a disease and longevity are perfectly valid ways to talk about this subject. Uh, so let's talk about aging as a disease. Uh, when I started my research, disease, here at Harvard Medical School, it was considered if, if there's something that's wrong with you, um, and it's a rare thing, has to be less than 50% of the population, that's definitely a disease. And then, people work their whole lives to try and cure that condition. And so I looked up what's the definition of aging, and it says, well, it's a deterioration in health and sickness, and you can die from it, typically you do, um, something that sounds pretty much like a disease. But the caveat is that if more than half the population gets this condition, aging, uh, it's put in a different bucket, which is... First of all, that's outrageous 'cause it, it's just a, a totally arbitrary cutoff. But think about this, that we're ignoring the major cause of all these diseases. Aging is 80 to 90% the cause of heart disease, Alzheimer's. If we didn't get old and our bodies stayed youthful, we would not get those diseases. And actually, what we're showing in my lab is if you turn the clock back in tissues, those diseases go away. So aging is the problem, and instead, through most of the last 200 years, we've been sticking Band-Aids on diseases that have already occurred because of aging, and then it's too late. Um, so there are a couple of things. One is we want to slow aging down, so we don't get those diseases, and when they do occur, don't just stick a Band-Aid on. Reverse the age of the body, and then the diseases will go away.

That clarifies a lot for me. Thank you. Can we point to one specific general phenomenon in the body that underlies aging?

Fortunately, during the 2000s, we settled on eight or nine major causes of aging. These eight or nine causes, uh, at least for the first time, allowed us to come around and talk together. We put, put them on a, on a pizza, so everyone got equal slices, but I think that there's one slice of the pizza that is way larger than the others. Uh, and we can get to that, but that's the information in the cell that I call, we call the epigenome.