A Personal Note From Orion

When you picture yourself at 85 years old, do you see yourself going for a swim, taking a long jog on the beach, or dancing the night away? Or do you see yourself hunched over in a wheelchair, sitting in the dark corner of a nursing home, unable to do much for yourself and completely reliant on others? It’s not enough to live longer, what also matters is the quality of life you are able to live as you age. 

As technology continues to advance rapidly each day, your 85, even 125-year-old self could soon very well be enjoying Salsa night every week. And not only that, but actually feel thirty or forty years younger than you really are. We are getting closer and closer to finding the fountain of youth, to not only live longer but live healthier. 

Dr. Terry Grossman has been at the forefront of the conversations in extending our lifespan in a healthy manner. It’s easy to get caught up in focusing on how we look, but in reality, while we can alter our appearance to look younger, what is important is that we feel younger too. If you are also looking for the fountain of youth, then tune in to this amazing conversation with Dr. Grossman. You’ll be amazed at what you can start doing now to live a longer and stronger life.

 

 

About Today’s Show

From the dawn of history, people are searching for the fountain of youth, and there are many legends that we’re told about how to become and grow younger. It’s almost like a desire that is within our DNA. We all want to feel stronger, look younger, live longer, live forever because life is beautiful and there is so much to do. And from the experts I spoke with in person or heard from, it seems like it’s closer than you think. With all the new technologies and innovations, you will be able to live longer while being healthy and looking younger. Yes, I know it sounds crazy, but it is happening. Probably not through mainstream medicine, but a lot of alternative treatments like stem cells and such. 

My guest today is Terry Grossman. He’s a leading medical authority in the field of anti-aging, longevity, medicine, and life extension therapies. He has co-authored two best-selling books with world-famous futurist and innovator, Ray Kurzweil. And if you haven’t heard of him, go Google him because this guy predicted stuff in the 80s that are happening now. And most of his predictions, around 80% have come true. So the book’s title is Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. So you do need to live long enough to live forever because, for every year that you’re living, you’re going to get more technologies that can extend your lifetime by a few more years. So stay alive, my dear. It’s worth it. This show is really interesting and we talked about all those therapies. So without further ado, on to the show.

Hey Dr. Terry and welcome to Stellar Life Podcast, it’s lovely having you here.

Thank you, Orion. It’s my pleasure to be with you today.

I’m so excited. This topic is one of my favorite topics in the whole world. But before we start, can you share a little bit about yourself and passion? What brought you into the whole area of longevity?

I got very interested in the idea of anti-aging medicine. I’ve been a medical doctor for about 40 years. In the first 15 years of my practice life, I was a small-town doctor in the mountains of Colorado, west of Denver. I was practicing medicine as I’ve learned in medical school, using eventual medications, doing surgical procedures and things like that. Towards the end of that time, I started to use some nutritional supplements.

Supplementation and diet was something that I had never learned anything about in medical school. I’ve never been on a diet in my life. I got very interested in it through a couple of my patients. I started to look at using nutritional medicine. In other words, if a patient had high blood pressure, instead of writing them a prescription for blood pressure medicine, I made some advice about what they could do with their lifestyle, in terms of weight loss, exercise, stress management, and certain supplements.

I found that their blood pressure went down in most cases just as well as when they were taking a prescription medication. The patients were a lot happier because they didn’t have any side effects to speak of. The same thing applies to heart disease, and then it can be applied in many cases, to neurological problems, and even as an adjunct to help patients with cancer. So, I changed the scope of my practice towards nutritional medicine.

In 1994, I happened to see in one of the medical journals that there was a meeting in Las Vegas for an organization called The American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. In 1994, anti-aging medicine did not exist, the whole idea that anything could be done about the aging process. It was a brand new concept so I just decided I’m going to Las Vegas and see what I can find out about that, mostly for personal interest because I have reached the point in my life where I was starting to feel some of the effects of the aging process.

Before that, I used to always had a reason for things hurting and then after that, I could just wake up my back hurt, or my knee hurt, without any known reasons. I didn’t like the aging process. I went to this meeting and I learned a number of things that could conceivably measure how well people were aging, both myself and my patients and began to implement those interventions in my own life and for my patients.

Quite honestly, I never looked back. I was so excited about it that it became my passion. I ended up writing three books about that. So here I am as a longevity physician and anti-aging doctor. I’ve been doing it for almost 25 years now.

You mentioned blood pressure, I have somebody in my family who’s very dear to me, and right now the doctor is just adding more and more blood pressure medication. I talked to that person and offered whatever I could find online—diet suggestions or stuff like that—but I don’t know if they will be willing to change their lifestyle. I have two questions, one is what do you suggest for high blood pressure and two, how can you get somebody to take action?

We have a saying in medicine. It sounds a little bit cynical but it’s actually true. It’s basically the patient is the one with the disease. If the patient wants to take an aggressive approach, a proactive approach themselves, and treat their disease by doing the things that can help that process to go way, then a nutritional doctor, or nutritionist, or naturopathic people like that, can give them a lot of advice. It’s actually very simple to go to a conventional allopathic doctor who writes prescriptions and get a prescription for blood pressure medicine, and the blood pressure goes down.

The patient really has to decide, “Do I just want to get the prescription and be done with it? Or do I want to actually make myself healthier so that my body no longer has high blood pressure?” When you look at the muscle it’s red and when you look at fat it’s white with almost no red in it. That’s because there’s almost no blood supply to fat and there’s a lot of blood supply to the muscles.

When the blood goes through muscle, it passes very easily because there are lots of blood vessels. When blood passes through fat—if the body has a lot of fat on it—it gets backed up because it can’t get through those little tiny blood vessels in the fat, and the blood pressure goes up. One of the first things that a patient should do is if they’re not at a good weight—which 2/3 of American adults are not, they’re overweight—then they should do the things that are necessary to lose some weight.

It’s also been found that getting regular aerobic exercise as well as strength training exercise can lower blood pressure. Those are a couple of lifestyle things. Some people are salt-sensitive in terms of their blood pressure. To some people, if they cut out the salty foods, blood pressure comes down. To some people, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference. Then there are some supplements that have been found to be valuable.

One supplement that I like a lot for people with blood pressure, the one I probably use is some type of magnesium. One of the most common blood pressure medicines is called a calcium channel blocker. These calcium channel blockers are prescription medications and by blocking these calcium channels in the blood vessels, the arteries relax, they dilate, and the blood pressure comes down.

Magnesium is nature’s calcium channel blocker and it causes the blood vessels to relax on their own. We will often put people on magnesium and that can help to lower blood pressure. There are a number of herbs, things like Hawthorn, also another supplement called Coenzyme Q10. There are many things that a person can take with respect to lifestyle and supplements that can help them to lower blood pressure. But it all has to begin with the patient wanting to do that.

You were talking about diet because the fat is blocking the blood flow. Then you talk about salt intake, maybe can be beneficial for some but not others. Then you talked about magnesium, CoQ10, and Hawthorn. I guess you can take magnesium and CoQ10 in correlation with blood pressure medicine, right?

Yeah, there’s no reason in general that you can’t take them together because magnesium relaxes the blood pressure and relaxes the blood vessels. Maybe the person if they’re on two or three blood pressure medicines, maybe they could drop one of them, or maybe they could reduce the dozes or things like that. They can be taken together without any problem.

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It just seems like everything happens in correlation, especially with the elderly, where the blood pressure, diabetes or sugar sensitivity, and then the thyroid. It just seems like those three happen together. Is this just my hallucination?

No, you’re actually right about that but the question is, is it supposed to happen? Is that a normal consequence of the aging process? Actually, it’s not. We see it all the time but we see it so commonly because so many people are not following optimal lifestyles. When you go to certain cultures where people have a lot of longevity like—what’s it’s called—the blue zones where many people live past 100 years…

Okinawa.

The people in their 80s, their blood pressure is really no higher than people in their 30s. People in their 80s don’t have diabetes than much younger people. But in the United States and many other parts of the world, it is almost a given that the older you are, the higher your blood pressure. The older you are, the greater your chance at diabetes and things along those lines. Thyroid disease as well but that’s a little separate issue. It really is a lifestyle matter and not an aging matter.

I’m Israeli. When I just came here and I saw the portions people serve and what people eat. I live in LA, a lot of people are vegan, vegetarian, and these are organic—this is all a bubble when it comes to, maybe Colorado is the same. But when it comes to the rest of the US and even here, a lot of people have really terrible eating habits. Everything is fried, saturated, and processed. I’m like, “How can people eat this? This is not even food.”

You’re absolutely right. One of the things that I noticed when I travel and I do travel a lot. I’ve been to Israel a couple of times. When I was in Israel, my favorite meal was their breakfast.

That is a good breakfast.

It starts with cucumbers, and tomatoes, and olives, and all of these wonderful fresh fruits, vegetables and things along those lines. Instead of eggs, bacon, potatoes, and things along those lines that are so unhealthy. Personally, I’m vegan, so an Israeli breakfast for me was the ideal thing to begin with.

But it does usually include eggs.

It does. Shakshouka is such a wonderful thing.

I make the best shakshouka you should come over.

I’m vegan and I wouldn’t be able to eat it but it’s where they take the eggs and bake them with tomatoes around them, tomato sauce. It’s so wonderful.

You can make it vegan version.

A vegan version would be wonderful. I haven’t seen that so that would be great. In other parts of the world, it seems like almost everywhere that I travel, whether it’s in the Middle East, or in Asia, or even in Europe, or South America, Mexico, wherever. The food is fresher, it’s more healthy. What you said originally, the portions are not so crazy. I live in Colorado and the portions here are usually enough for two people.

When I travel to the midwest, to Chicago, to Michigan or places like that, the portions are enough for three people. There’s so much food that’s being given, but actually the taste, the quality is not as good as it is elsewhere. It’s not so fresh, I mean so much of our food is raised on factory farms. Our health will be much improved if we’d get back to a much more healthful, organic, vegetable, plant-based diet.

Yes. I tried to do a plant-based diet and it just didn’t work. I need to get some animal products every once in a while because I don’t feel strong if I don’t get it. Also, I have slight anemia, maybe that’s a part of it, but if I get beef or chicken it will be grass-fed and organic. I tried to eat organic 80% of the time, sometimes I go out and I can’t control it. I have the 80/20 rule.

That’s very prudent. When I talk to patients I do promote a whole foods plant-based diet. A vegan diet is very helpful if it’s done properly. Skittles and Diet Coke are also vegan, so it’s possible to eat a vegan diet and be very unhealthy and overweight. If you’re going to be a vegan, you need to pay attention. I don’t even call it vegan. I just called it whole foods plant-based. Even if one eats animal products, you just need to do more whole foods plant-based.

I also like the Mediterranean diet, where people in the Mediterranean, Greece, Italy and places like that, they eat a lot of fresh salads and fruits. They do eat meat, chicken, fish, and a lot of seafood but not in large quantities. They have a little bit of red wine, olive oil, and all of those things. Even though they’re not vegan per se, it seems to contribute to a very healthy diet.

I used to be gluten-free and dairy-free in the past. I go in cycles, where I’m like, “Oh, I’m tired of it.” I’m not one of the gluten-full and dairy-full but I started baking my own bread with organic flour and I just find it so much better because I know exactly what goes into it. It still got gluten and maybe glyphosates but it’s organic so maybe less. I think it’s a better option.

I’ve talked to some people and they don’t have celiac disease where you really have a reaction to gluten even in tiny amounts. They’re more gluten-sensitive and it upsets their stomach and causes some headaches or whatever the case may be. But interestingly, even when people have this gluten sensitivity if they eat wheat products that are made as you say with an organic source of wheat that is not GMO, many times they don’t have these problems.

A lot of the reason that people are “allergic to wheat,” or, “allergic to dairy,” or, “allergic to soy” they’re not really an allergy as more of a sensitivity to the fact that these are, in so many cases, genetically modified foods and they’re recognized as foreign invaders by the body. The body attacks them with antibodies and this can lead to a host of problems.

They’re full of herbicides, pesticides, preservatives, and some chemicals to enhance flavor. When you get the product, it smells good and looks good but it’s not good for you.

You’re absolutely right. There’s often a big difference between how the food looks and whether or not it’s good for you. Let’s face it. A pecan pie with ice cream on it looks very delicious, so does an ice cream sundae, but think about what it’s doing to your arteries.

You have a lot of longevity therapies in your practice. What are some of your favorite ones that you would recommend everybody will do?

I liked to begin with the basics that we’ve started to talk about things like diet and exercise. You’ve mentioned some dietary suggestions and as long as you get away with what we call standard American diet which is a sad diet—avoid that—keep your weight down. I like high interval exercise training, a burst of high interval where you get your heart rate very fast, can produce many health benefits without spending hours and hours in the gym.

There are few supplements that everybody should take, and those include things like a healthy essential fatty acid like krill oil maybe or fish oil, things along those lines. Most people are well served by multiple vitamin-mineral. Virtually 90% of the population when you measure their blood levels of vitamin D they’re low. All of us are afraid to go into the bright sunlight because the dermatologist tells us that it will cause skin cancer, make our skin wrinkle, give us age spots and things like this.

Even if you live above the 40th parallel—a line that runs between San Francisco, Denver, and Washington DC—if you’re north to that, six months of the year there’s virtually no vitamin D conversion from sunlight at all. Many people in the United States and Canada don’t make much conversion, even so, so taking those supplements make sense.

What does vitamin D do to your body?

We used to think it was helpful mostly for the bones and it helped prevent rickets. That was a disease of children where they got bowed legs from soft bones. They began to fortify milk with vitamin D and rickets essentially went away when they started to do that. But over the years we found that vitamin D is more like a hormone than a vitamin.

It actually lowers blood pressure and helps patients to avoid cancer. It has just a host of beneficial effects. I regard vitamin D as essential and it’s the one vitamin that we like to measure in the bloodstream. A doctor or a nutritionist may recommend taking some B6 or B12 but, as a general rule, we don’t measure the level of vitamin C, or B vitamins, or vitamin E or things like that. But vitamin D is one that we want to measure because since it’s a fat-soluble vitamin, you can get too much of it, it can build up in your fat tissues and creates some toxicity at very high levels.

When we do this blood test we find that 9 out of 10 people are low on vitamin D and then we can recommend both going in the sunlight and getting some sunshine not to the point that it causes a burn or any damage to your skin but sunlight for natural vitamin D and supplementation as well.

Detoxification as an anti-aging strategy is very critical because the fact is, the world we live in is filled with toxins and our genetic code was really written in the stone age 50,000 years ago. This was at the time that they’re really was not in the air pollution, there was no heavy metal toxicity.

Cellular exposure.

Exactly. The atmosphere was not degraded by the fluorinated hydrocarbons. We didn’t need to worry about getting skin cancer from sunlight because the atmosphere protected us from things. One of the best ways to detoxify is just to sweat. If you do a good exercise that gets you sweating, in the sweat will come out heavy metals and many toxins like that. For other people, I often recommend that they use saunas, particularly infrared light saunas, it penetrates deeper and they loosen up the toxins from the bath. Those are important things.

We can’t forget about hormones. Our hormones essentially peak at around 30 years of age and then they go down after that. In women, they abruptly go down at around 50 and menopause. In men, they just gradually go down after 30. When your hormone levels are high, there’s a direct correlation between youthfulness and vigor and vitality the things we associate with young people. A lot of that I think, is a result of the higher hormone levels that young people have. Testosterone in men, and estrogen and progesterone in women.

Is this mostly because they’re young or because they eat McDonalds?

No. You can eat McDonald’s when you’re young and it’s not really going to destroy your health and it’s not going to make hormones go down.

For young people in Japan, since they’re having more of this American junk food they grow way taller than they used to. They get so many hormones from those meat products.

Yes, absolutely and the hormones would have these effects. I mean, they give bovine growth hormone to cows to help them to grow bigger. So when you eat these fast-food hamburgers, you are going to get some of these growth hormones in your body and it’s going to make you grow taller. Many of these foods, they’re loaded with calories, things like french fries and soft drinks that they sell, so you grow taller and wider. That’s not a healthy thing to do, and they do give them hormones and artificial things like that.

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It goes back again to the fact that our genetic code was written in the stone age and we were designed to live basically until age 30. It was very specific that it’s 30. Most people in the stone age didn’t even make it to 30. Basically, we were given about 15 years to grow and to be able to have our own families. Then we had the next 15 years to take care of our children, our offspring to help them to grow up and learn to take care of themselves.

Then at 30, we were simply another mouth to feed and it wasn’t like there was a lot of extra calories to go around on those days. It was a very hand to mouth survival so it made sense for our genetic code to begin to destroy our health. So we couldn’t see as well, we couldn’t hear as well, our lungs weren’t as strong, our heart wasn’t as strong. We couldn’t run as fast.

That’s so sad. But you know what, I know people like Dave Asprey or Dan Sullivan. Dan Sullivan is expecting to live till 180. I forgot exactly what he said but he talks about whales that could live until—I don’t know—800 years old. He said that if we can understand what makes them live longer, we can live a very long time as well.

There are things we can learn from whales and sharks and other long-lived species. But currently, the human body has these end caps at the end of our chromosomes called telomeres. Our telomeres currently cap our lifespan at 124 and as long as we don’t change the length of our telomeres, that’s really our upper limit of life expectancy. The longest-lived documented person was a woman from France and she lived to be about 122 ½.

Yes, but there are new technologies that will help you with the length of your telomeres and it will get you live longer. I think that in the next 20, 30, 40 years, the technology is going to be so far out that I do see the possibility of living beyond that with technology, or medical advancement, and new kinds of supplements.

You’re actually right. There are a number of supplements that are designed to activate an enzyme called telomerase. It keeps your telomeres from shortening. There are studies that show certain stem cell therapies can link in telomeres. I think that you’re absolutely right and in the next couple of decades we will break through that glass ceiling of 124 years and it may very well be possible that people will live far longer than that and their life expectancies may well be measured in centuries rather than in decades.

I would like that. But doing it the right way, where you still look young and feel young about yourself.

That’s what everybody wants. We don’t merely want to extend lifespan, we want to extend our health span so that we’re able to be healthy as we get older.

I have a lot to do on this planet. I want to live long.

Well good. You know they say, most of us think about you’re 100 years old, you’re decrepit, you’re in a wheelchair, and in a nursing home. The question that’s asked is who wants to live to be 100 anyway? The answer to that is, just ask someone who’s 99.

I did an interesting experiment in my office. I asked patients who are 65 years old whether they were happier at 65 compared to when they were 35. A hundred percent of the cases, the 65-year-olds said they were happier than they were when they were 35 as long as their health was good. The longer you live, the more you figure things out and the easier life becomes. As your younger, life can be a little bit of a struggle, you don’t exactly know how to do things.

You want to please others, you care about what other people think and all the good stuff. And then you get older and you’re like, “Meh, I don’t care about it. Whatever they think it’s their business.”

That’s why you see the seniors wearing the kind of clothes they wear to the golf course and things like that because they just don’t care anymore. When you reach that point in your life, it’s almost a Zen-like existence. You just don’t care. You let go of all that stuff and people that are older, as long as they can maintain their health are quite a bit healthier.

We used to say 60 is the new 40, now they’re saying 80 is the new 60, soon we’ll be saying 80 is the new 40. People will be living a lot longer and staying a lot healthier longer. With the technologies that are coming online now, this will become more and more the case.

My husband really likes Peter Diamandis and the Abundance 360. He just went to their conference, I watched the live stream from home because I didn’t want to go. But there are so many new things coming. This conference is more about AI, 3D printing and stuff like that but there are some crazy stuff coming in the future as far as nanotechnology and all that. What are some of the most extraordinary things that you know of that are coming our way?

Even today we have things that are available to us that we could do to change the aging process. One of the big things today that people are talking about are these very rogue cells called senescence cells. All cells in the body, when they get to a certain age they become decrepit, dangerous and cancerous, so they have a program written into them that tells them to commit suicide. It’s a process called, in medicine, apoptosis.

Cells are supposed to engage in apoptosis and die so they don’t go on to create damage for the rest of the body. A few cells—the older you get, the more of these you have—somehow manage to escape this apoptotic process, they don’t commit suicide. They just float around in the bloodstream creating a tremendous amount of damage. They create inflammation, they can cause cancer, they’re an absolute disaster. They found that if just 1 in 20,000 cells in your bloodstream was one of the senescence cells, that would create ill health and early death within a matter of months. This is really disastrous.

We now have some therapies that are available to both measure how many of these senescence cells you have in your bloodstream and using different types of supplements and medications, we can kill these senescence cells. This is available today and this is one of the most important things that we can do, is get off these senescence cells.

When you’re younger, when you’re in your teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, you don’t typically have so many of them, but then as you reach, what we refer to as middle-age, 50s, 60s, 70s and then old age 80s, 90s, and beyond, you get more of these senescence cells. It’s very important to try to destroy them and get rid of the majority of them.

How do you destroy them?

There are various methods. You can take certain medications and supplements. There are doctors that specialize in anti-aging medicine that can help you to be able to do that. They do that without destroying the normal cells. This is one of the more important ways of slowing down the aging process and increasing our longevity.

Another way—there’s a couple of popular ways, one is very popular and one is beginning to gain popularity—is the use of a couple of prescription medications. The most common diabetes medicine in the world is called metformin and tens if not hundreds of millions of prescriptions per year are written for metformin in the treatment of diabetes, type 2 diabetes, the most common type. The reason doctors like to use metformin is it’s remarkably free of side effects, it’s a generic medication, it’s inexpensive, it’s safe, and it doesn’t cause low blood sugar or hypoglycemia. But one of the interesting things about metformin is it also helps prevent cancer.

They’ve done experiments where they’ve given metformin to cancer patients and they’ve lived longer. They’ve given metformin to non-cancer patients and they get less cancer. They’ve also done animal experiments where they give mice metformin in the drinking water and the mice lived almost 38% longer. Many on colleges, many conventional doctors, and many patients now, many people are beginning to take metformin as a prescription diabetes drug as a longevity drug. Given the fact that metformin is so safe and so inexpensive, a good way to begin a proactive longevity approach using these cutting edge therapists is to consider taking metformin.

There are no side effects?

There are some side effects, but the side effects are minor and they’re gastrointestinal. If you just began taking the full dose of metformin right from the first day, it can upset your stomach, create diarrhea and things like this, but if you start slowly and ramp up over a period of a month or 6 weeks, you tend to not get those side-effects.

And at what age would you say you should consider taking those?

People above the age of 40 can begin to consider taking this medication. Thirty-five would be probably the lower limit. Below that, I wouldn’t recommend taking it. But people over 40 can consider taking that, people over 50 very much should consider it would be very good.

Is this good if somebody wants to prevent cancer or the unfortunately sick with cancer?

Both. If a patient wants to prevent it, metformin makes sense, and if a patient already has cancer, all of the cancer patients that come into my clinic, I offer them a prescription for metformin and the overwhelming majority of them take it. This is good for both of those purposes.

What do you think about high THC?

You’re talking about cannabis?

Yes.

There was an interesting conference that was held recently and was called Cancer, Cannabis & Keto. They found that using a combination of a keto diet, Dave Asprey recommended diet, where you’re eating a lot of healthy fats, some proteins, and almost no carbs—very low carb diet. Since cancer cells can only eat carbohydrates—sugar in other words—this is very good for cancer patients to do a keto diet and when you combine it with cannabis. The two main cannabinoids are actually over 120 active chemicals. There are terpenes and cannabinoids and things like that in cannabis. Two main ones that we talked about are THC and CBD.

Historically, people have been interested in THC because it’s the one that creates the euphoria and the intoxication effects. I live in Colorado, and Colorado really planted the flag for recreational sales of cannabis products.

But it’s also known to kill cancer cells. There were some researches done about THC killing cancer cells.

Absolutely, but so with CBD. When patients come to my office in Colorado, whether they’re cancer patients, or Alzheimer’s patients, or neurological or heart disease patients, or chronic fatigue patients, you name it, almost more than 80% of them have already tried some kind of cannabis product.

For most of these people, many of them are older, they’re not particularly interested in the side effects of THC. They’re not looking to get stoned, they’re not looking to get high, and they can get many of the benefits of cannabis just with the CBD alone.

Most of these studies that have been done up until now, using cannabis have been using marijuana which has both THC and relatively little CBD, but more and more, and the wave of the future as far as cannabis medicine goes, is going to lean more towards CBD, just because many of the benefits are available without the intoxicating effects, and also with the Federal government classifies marijuana as a class 1 narcotic and things.

I don’t like the federal government. They’re so corrupt.

Yes. They say it’s hard to fight city hall and as long as we have these long books, they recently passed another bill, called the Farm Bill, that essentially made CBD no longer in the same category.

You could see tons of products lately everywhere.

You could even buy CBD online. But most of this stuff that’s available online is very low potency, it’s not that useful, but I know that if you’re in a state that has the cannabis dispensaries, you can go in the dispensaries and people that worked there are quite knowledgeable at this and they can direct patients, whether they’re cancer patients or other types of patients to get a specific strain of cannabis whether it’s a high THC strain or a high CBD strain or a hybrid strain, and they have differences of indica and sativa and things like that.

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Anyway, the people that work there are very knowledgeable and they can help people to decide what would be best. I mean, people are using it for sleep, they are using it for anxiety, they’re getting creams and just rubbing on their wrist or on their knees to treat pain. There are many many uses for cannabis products, both THC and CBD to treat any diseases including cancer.

My cat, unfortunately, that I love—it’s heartbreaking—she passed away about three months ago and she had cancer. By the time we caught it, cancer had spread, it was terrible. I went through a dispensary for the first time in my life and gathered their Rick Simpson Oil and gave her very low dosages and I could see a difference. She did pass, but I can see the relief and I could see her just getting calmer and it extended her lifespan for a few weeks longer.

People that have pets that get a disease or have a lot of arthritis pain, they can get these very sticky types of intraoral forms of cannabis and they can just put some on their finger and rub it on the animal’s gums and then it’ll be absorbed directly into the bloodstream. That’s a good way to use it for veterinary purposes. There are many things we’re just opening the book on how we can have this amazing cannabis product, help us in not only treating disease, but it may turn out that there are things that will help with longevity as well.

It has so many amazing properties that people haven’t even discovered yet because they’re still in the first phase of research. We think we know a lot about his plant but we don’t yet.

It’s interesting that the doctor who discovered THC was an Israeli.

Yeah, they do a lot of research in Israel around it.

Yes, they do. We’ve been restricted in the United States because it’s been illegal. Like I say, it’s still a class one narcotic but the Federal government has since been giving a hands-off approach, so more and more research is being done now than the last few years and we’re just beginning to discover what the properties of this can be for us in the future.

Dr. Terry, you talked about metformin as an amazing longevity drug to prevent cancer and then you said that there was another one. What was the other one?

There is another prescription medication that’s being repurposed, in other words, we took metformin and we’re using it for a different purpose than is intended, which is completely legal, doctors can do this, as long as patients explain what we’re doing.

There’s another medication, it’s actually an anti-rejection drug. If a patient gets an artificial kidney or things like that, they will be given a drug that helps their body to not reject it, this medicine is called rapamycin. Rapamycin is now being taken by a smaller number of patients than metformin but some people are beginning to take rapamycin in very low doses and they just take it once a week as anti-aging medicine. Some recent studies have been done showing that if you combine metformin with rapamycin, the effects are cumulative.

They’re addictive, they’re synergistic, so people can get even greater longevity by taking these two things together. Rapamycin is a little bit more dangerous and more expensive. You have to have a lot more blood tests done to make sure that it’s not affecting you and there are some side effects associated with it.

It’s not as commonly used but for people that want to do everything that they possibly can. One of the nice things about rapamycin is it’s been found to slow cognitive decline in older people and also in older animals. As people get older, they have more of these what are called senior moments and they become more forgetful.

I already have them.

Do you already have them? You might want to think about some of these things. In rapamycin, two things have been found useful for, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg, is number one preventing cognitive decline later in life and number two preventing cancer. We have metformin preventing cancer, we have rapamycin preventing cancer.

So will it prevent Alzheimer‘s?

I don’t know any studies have been done with rapamycin and Alzheimer’s. What’s very interesting, I’m not sure about metformin and Alzheimer’s but given the fact that some people refer to Alzheimer’s disease as diabetes of the brain. It would seem as though because metformin improves the way that the body handles sugar then it would be very beneficial in helping both patients with Alzheimer’s and prevent Alzheimer’s, but I’m not up to speed on the literature.

I do know something that’ll take us back a little bit to what we’re just talking about. Believe it or not, the animal experiments using marijuana smoke have been found. They did what they did as they took animals, lab rats, and they gave them the equivalent human Alzheimer’s and then they took marijuana smoke and blew it into their cages and they found that typical plaques that form in the brain dissolved when they were exposed to these things. It’s not something that would make sense when you think about it because most people that have used marijuana don’t think it helped them.

You could get more forgetful.

Yeah, you’d become forgetful, but it seems as though when used medicinally and possible just using this CBD component—we don’t know whether it’s you need THC and CBD both—marijuana seems to have a beneficial effect in helping with Alzheimer’s disease as well.

Wow, amazing.

But people can take the rapamycin, they can take it with the metformin. Another one that works very good combined with these two it’s a supplement called Resveratrol. The experiment showed that when you combine Resveratrol, which comes from red wine, with metformin people will live longer. Also, they have synergistic effects as well. Resveratrol is available over the counter. You could just buy it at the health food stores. People say, “Well, I’d prefer not to take the supplement. I’ll just drink red wine.” Well, you have to drink 20 bottles to get the equivalent of what you need.

Twenty bottles a day keeps the doctor away.

Twenty bottles a day gets very expensive. I’m not sure how good it is for your liver.

I don’t even drink. I’m just joking.

You could take the Resveratrol supplement. Two hundred fifty milligrams of Resveratrol a day combined with the metformin and this can have very beneficial longevity effects as well and then you could consider combining it with the rapamycin. When I wrote a couple of books with a very famous futurist name Ray Kurzweil. Ray and I wrote two books together and then the first book we wrote together was called Fantastic Voyage. That was the title and the subtitle was Live Long Enough to Live Forever. The reason we picked those specific words is we don’t know right now what we need to do to live forever. We just don’t have the technology to live forever, but we’re going to have this technology in the next few decades. It’s almost certain and I’m sure you’ve seen what’s coming in the future.

The idea is, what we need to do is live long enough to be able to take advantage of these technologies coming in the next few decades and then we will be able to live much longer periods of time than have ever been seen in history before.

I love it. I want to talk about stem cell therapies. I have rested my stem cells from my bone marrow and adipose tissue. I went to a clinic in Utah and Dr. Harry Adelson, who was a guest on the show as well, performed the procedure and then I injected it in many places in my body. I had a shoulder injury and now it feels amazing. But today, I got an email from US Stem Cells in Florida where I banked my stem cells. The idea is you bank your stem cells and then they culture and they can use them again in the future. But now, there is a new law and they want to destroy all the stem cell tissues that are stored there and I am so pissed off.

I got the same email from Kristen Camella who is the Medical Director of the Stem Cell Bank and the Stem Cell Clinic down in Florida. I know Kristen. It seems as though those stem cells that you bank are your own stem cells and the idea that they would be destroyed, they’re your own tissues they belong to you.

They’re fighting it. It’s against the evil big pharma that doesn’t want people to live longer in a healthier way and have a lot of money and influence, are close to the pockets of the people and the government, and they go and they will destroy. There are so many freaking amazing innovations in this world and they never take off because they crush them even before they can take off.

It’s an unfortunate situation where the profit motive controls medical knowledge. We don’t see that so much in technology. With technology, where info tech and things like that, we have a doubling time of once a year. Every year, the price-performance of computers doubles every year, Moore’s Law and things like that. We’re beginning to have that hooped into medicine as well. Medicine is now becoming a digital technology as well, so we’re able to discover new drugs in a digital sense and things like that.

But when you put the profit motive in the way where the big pharma companies have a profit motive, bring me new drugs in the market, they may do this, they may wait until the patent on an old drug is ready to expire. They may have a terrific drug, better than the current drugs available and they don’t bring it to market for several years because they’re making money on the older drug and the patent hasn’t expired. Then as soon as the patent is ready to expire on the old drug, they come out with the newer drug. But the population did not have access to this newer drug so money gets in the way of medicine.

We the people are the ones who suffer, the patients. It will be good if we’re able to separate those two things from one another where the profit motive is no longer more important than the health of the people.

Oh my gosh, my blood pressure goes up just thinking about that. I need to take a deep breath. It’s all going to be fine.

Stress is really a killer.

What was it? 80% of diseases brought up by stress?

I don’t know any disease that gets better with stress.

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Nothing.

I’ve been a doctor for 40 years and I don’t recall I ever told a patient, “Listen. To get better, you need to be more stressed out.” I don’t know if that will help. For all of us, stress decreases your immune system and does terrible things to us, so whatever we can do to control our stress is good. That’s the problem. It seems as though the world is becoming more and more stressful all the time.

I personally think the world is getting better all the time. There seems to be less violence in the world, even though it looks like there’s more, there’s actually less. There are fewer wars than has ever been before, people are wealthier, there’s less starvation than has ever been before. So many things are getting better in the world, but also things that are getting worse and people are more stressed than they’ve ever been before. If we can look at good ways of reducing our stress whether it’s through meditation or through exercise or other techniques, that would be very beneficial to our health.

Breathe, meditate, have a gratitude practice, don’t watch the news, and ignore Facebook. Every time I go on Facebook, people like sensationalism, the horrible news just pop and I’m like, “I don’t want to see this, I want to see good things, I want to focus on the light.”

We only have a few minutes left and Dr. Terry, I feel like I want to talk to you for another 18-hours at least, but we have a time limit, unfortunately. So before we finish, I have two questions for you. One is where can people find you, work with you, and your team and get your books? Two, what are your three top tips to living a stellar life?

First of all, I have a clinic in the Denver area, I’m in Denver. We have a website, grossmanwellness.com. My full name is Terry Grossman, MD. The phone number of our clinic is 303-233-4247 and the last two books that I’ve written with Ray Kurzweil, Fantastic Voyage and Transcend, are both available at bookstores and through online booksellers and things like that. Thank you for asking, and we would be happy to see any of the people that have listened to this show and answer their questions or see them as patients.

In terms of if I were just to pick three things that people can do to live healthier and to live longer, I would say number one is don’t eat sugar. Sugar, what we call it in our books is the white Satan. Sugar creates a host of horrible problems for everyone, so as much as you can cut out simple sugars from your diet, that is a very good thing.

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Number two, we just talked about it a moment ago, and that is controlling your stress, bring your stress down to a manageable level. And associated with stress is making sure you get enough sleep because sleep is restorative on so many levels.

Number three is a little bit harder because there are so many other possibilities, but I would say I’ll take a lead from the Dalai Lama. When the Dalai Lama was giving an audience—he was speaking to a group of people in Cleveland, Ohio a number of years ago—someone in the back of the audience raised his hand and said, “Your holiness, what advice do you have for the people in Cleveland?” and he answered in two words, “Eat less.” He had a lot to say there. If we engage in caloric restriction, intermittent fasting, eating less, getting our weight down, those three things would be very helpful in terms of having us all a healthier and longer life.

Thank you so much, Dr. Terry, this was a pleasure.

Orion, the pleasure is all mine. Thank you so much. Stay well.

Thank you and thank you, listeners, remember don’t eat sugar, control your stress especially through getting a good night’s sleep, eat less and live a healthier stellar life. This is Orion. Until next time.

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

{✓} As the famous adage goes, “prevention is better than cure.” Aim to live a healthy life and try to not depend on medical drugs to cure diseases. 
{✓} Monitor your salt and fat intake to avoid blockages in blood vessels and aim to keep your blood pressure within the normal range. High blood pressure may lead to more health complications. 
{✓} Take magnesium supplements. Magnesium is nature’s calcium channel blocker and aids in maintaining a healthy blood pressure. 
{✓} Eat organic food rich in fiber to maintain proper metabolism for better digestion and faster cell regeneration. 
{✓} Avoid any form of sugar. Cut out any simple sugar in your diet and stick to natural sweeteners if needed. 
{✓} Learn to manage your stress by meditating, ensuring you get enough sleep, and cultivating a positive mindset in life. 
{✓} Try fasting occasionally. Not only will it help regulate your body’s system, but it is also beneficial for your spiritual well-being as well. 
{✓} Get a good amount of sunlight exposure. Go out during the day time to absorb free vitamin D.
{✓} Get your hormones tested and learn how they affect your overall health. Imbalances in the body may cause complications. 
{✓} Check out www.grossmanwellness.com for more information on scheduling a consultation, more resources, and clinic locations.

Links and Resources

About Dr. Terry Grossman

Dr. Terry Grossman is a leading medical authority in the field of anti-aging, longevity medicine and life extension therapies. He has co-authored two best-selling books with world-famous futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil: TRANSCEND, Nine Steps to Living Well Forever and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever.

 

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