Do These 5 Things If You're Over 40+ For Overall Health & Longevity | Dr. William Li

Today we're going to talk about five things you can do for longevity if you are over 40 years old. Exercise, avoiding smoking, easing up or avoiding alcohol, lowering stress, ditching ultra processed foods, and adding plant-based foods to your diet. Let's dive in. First of all, let's talk about longevity. Longevity is a duration of an individual's life. And of course, we're all different. We've got different genetics, we've got different backgrounds, we've got different life exposures. As a doctor, I can tell you when I actually see a patient, one of the things that I try to do the first time I meet them is to give a little bit of an assessment of what their life has been like, what their parents' survival was, and what kind of conditions they have and their relatives have. It gives me a little bit of a big picture view on what their overall risks are. But the idea of living as long as you can. Longevity has been around for tens of thousands of years. In fact, it's as old as mankind. You know, that quest for longevity is a stuff of legends. You've heard of Ponce de Leon, the explorer, the Spanish explorer who discovered Florida and Puerto Rico. The Fountain of Youth, Ponce de Leon, right? Fu Manchu, that mythical character in China, who was always looking for the little vial of longevity. And of course, the Holy Grail, also associated with this quest for immortality. So here's the good news. We are indeed living longer as human beings. Let me give you some numbers. In 1900, right? So over a hundred years ago, the average life expectancy was, for men, wait for it, only 46 years old. That was the average, okay? Average life expectancy for women in 1900 was only 48 years old. Women have always lived a little bit longer on average than men. But check it out, under 50 years old, more than a hundred years ago, that was it. That was the average life expectancy. Today, we've improved that number a lot. So as of 2022, these are the numbers that you've got to collect over a long period of time. Men and women born in 2022 can expect to live to 75 years old, if you're a man, and 80 years old, if you are a woman, all right? 75 to 80, from 46 to 48 years old. That's a big jump over the course of a hundred years. Now, why has life expectancy or longevity increased? This is long before people were actually biohacking and trying to look for supplements that could actually do this. Let me tell you, basically, life expectancy has improved because our conditions around us have actually improved as well. We've got better nutrition, less poverty. Now, obviously, some places still have extreme poverty, but compared to what it was like in 1900, we've got a lot less poverty. We've got better public health. Governments are organized. Communities are better organized to be able to actually have better sanitation, cleaner water. We've got antibiotics. 100 years ago, a little bit more, didn't have antibiotics. You got a cold, you got a flu, you got an infection. That was pretty much all you wrote, all right? Maybe not a cold, but definitely a serious infection, appendicitis. We also have vaccines. I know the current controversy around vaccines, but I can tell you it was a medical breakthrough that contributed to our longevity, all right? Why we live longer, better maternal and neonatal care. A third of moms and babies actually died at childbirth way back then didn't even have hand-washing as a basic concept for reducing the risk of infection. So moms actually wound up dying of infection, all right? We have better healthcare in general, all right? These are some of the reasons that we're actually living longer than before. But we still want to live longer than we are now, right? So this is where science comes into play. And the first thing I want to say is like, so what's holding us back from even doing better? Well, now, even though we are living a lot longer than we did in 1900, we are dealing with chronic diseases that take us out. What am I talking about? I'm talking about cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, lung diseases are a big problem, and mental health issues like depression all actually overall shorten our longevity. And of course, as we're living longer, we're beginning to see neurodegenerative diseases that are associated with older age, right? Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia, that's when the small blood vessels in your brain get narrow and hard and don't allow good blood flow, not enough blood flow to the brain. Parkinson's disease, these are common in the aging population, all right? And of course, then there are health inequities between, you know, the economic discrepancies make it even harder for some people to optimize their lifespan. So we still have a long ways to go to be able to actually optimize where we are. And what about genetics? Your genetics can make a difference. In fact, it's been estimated that about 25% in the variation of longevity are due to genes, the genes you've inherited from your parents. Now, we don't actually know exactly which genes yet lead you to live longer and which genes lead you to live shorter on the whole. Obviously, there's some trends and patterns and for some diseases, of course, but this is an area of active research. I'm a researcher, so I'm happy to tell you what we don't know for sure yet. And we're not really, we haven't nailed down, pinpointed, what are the genes? Of course, some really interesting research show that centenarians, people who live to 100, they've got some unique genetic features, but some people who live can live an awful long time without those genetics as well. Obviously, the role of diet and lifestyle and the environment are huge as well. Here's an example of diet. Eating ultra-processed foods shortens your lifespan while eating whole plant-based foods and seafoods increases longevity. And part of the reason is they lower the risk of chronic diseases. You don't have a chronic disease, you're more likely to live longer. Another factor in our diet are artificial chemicals that are found in our food. We're just beginning to unpack what they're actually doing. Now, we've known, we suspected for a long time that artificial preservatives and colorings and flavorings aren't good for us. Now, the data is coming out what they actually do. And one of the things they do is they harm our gut microbiome. The healthy gut bacteria that live inside our gut, total about 39 trillion of these bacteria. These bacteria control inflammation, they lower inflammation, so when you hurt them, inflammation goes up. Inflammation goes up, chronic diseases start to appear. These healthy gut bacteria also boost our immune system. They actually raise our immune shields. You harm the gut bacteria, our immunity goes down. Our immune system's not so strong, we wind up getting infected, we wind up getting sicker. And cancer is kept at bay by a good, strong immune system, so when the immune system goes down, the risk for developing a cancer goes up as well. All right, so our gut microbiome is very exquisitely sensitive to what we're eating. And our food is also less healthy for us today because of the soil that our plants are grown in, right? Our plant-based foods come from plants that grow in soil. Compared to how things were decades or maybe hundreds of years ago, our soil has been contaminated by synthetic chemicals as pesticides. The soil microbiome is depleted, so the soil also contains a microbiome, and because that's compromised, our food becomes compromised as well, all right? Then the other thing that matters in our diet is microplastics. This is something that we've known about for a long time, that plastic's everywhere, right? Your water container, your food storage containers, your plastic silverware at a picnic, the plastic plates everywhere, right? Plastic cups, drinking straws. We've always known that little bits of plastics would get everywhere, but only until the last few years have we been discovering these microplastic particles, tiny little particles are actually floating around in our bloodstream. They can get into our brain, they can get into our organs, they've actually been found in testicles and semen. They've actually found even the plastic embedded in a study of men in the penis, all right? And it's also been shown that these microplastics embed themselves in the plaques that narrow arteries in the neck and probably elsewhere as well, and that the connection between plastics and health outcome is that if you had microplastics in the carotid plaque, this is a study from Italy that was published recently, the presence of plastics increased your chances of having a heart attack or stroke by fourfold, all right? Now we're not thinking it's so harmless anymore, we know that microplastics are around. So microplastics is another factor that can actually affect our longevity, our overall health and how long we're actually going to live. Lifestyle, let's talk about lifestyle factors that can actually impede longevity. Don't worry, I'm going to talk about foods, I'm going to get there, okay? I wanted to actually set the stage for you to say why it's so important to take action. Our lifestyle has changed over the last century, we've become more and more sedentary. You know that term couch potato? It's a little derogatory, right? Like nobody's like a couch potato, right? Sounds so bad. Actually, we're winding up sitting a lot. Think about it, you got a laptop, you're working remotely, you're probably doing it sitting on a chair as opposed to moving around. And being sedentary, sitting down, actually removes physical activity from our lives, right? Less walking, more driving, more sitting, more surfing, more screen time, you get it. We're spending less time outdoors moving like the human body is supposed to move, all right? I mean, think about it, if we were evolved to actually just sit and look at a screen, we'd have two arms with fingers and no feet, and we'd just be like a with two arms and hands. That's it, that's not how we're, we need to actually keep moving. So having said all that, these are all the reasons that we don't optimize our longevity. What can we do? What are the five things you can do if you're over 40 to improve your chances of living as long as possible, optimizing your longevity, all right? Pretty simple. Step number one, exercise and stay physically active. Now exercise is good for one simple reason, there's many reasons, but one that everyone can understand is that it gets your circulation, your blood flowing. We need blood flowing to be able to bring oxygen and nutrients to every single cell and organ in our body. And when we have better circulation, we're actually doing more for our organs. Secondly, when we're actually exercising, you know what we're actually doing? We are recruiting stem cells from our bone marrow, it's one of our health defenses, and these stem cells come out like bees out of a hive, and they circulate in our bloodstream, and they're repairing things, we're getting fixed from the inside out. And because I study this field of angiogenesis, how the body grows blood vessels, stem cells coming out, not rebuild damaged blood vessels, damaged blood vessels, cardiovascular disease, you get it. We want stem cells to repair them and exercise contributes to that. Exercise also helps to build our immune defenses. Now overly exercising, like, you know, if you actually run a marathon or do ultra sports, that can compromise your immune system. But for most of us, actually, regular exercise builds our immunity. Exercise also improves our gut microbiome, and we talked about that healthy gut microbiome, that community in our gut that lowers inflammation, builds immunity, and also contributes to our brain health, which is also very important if you want to live long and prosper, as they say, building exercise builds gut health. These are all absolutely important. So my first tip for you, if you're over 40, you want to live for as long as you possibly can, is exercise and stay physically active. All right. Tip number two, avoid smoking of any kind. Cigarettes, cigars, pipes, vaping. And in fact, vaping actually in some ways is worse because of the flavoring that you put in the vape fumes, so then tobacco, but all are bad. All right. Primary smoking, meaning if you're the smoker, you're the doer, and you breathe a lot of stuff into your lungs, what do you think actually happens? Those chemicals damage your cells, and damaged cells can have mutated DNA. And when you mutate the DNA, okay, that's your genetic code in your lung by chemicals in smoke, hot, toxic smoke. All right. You ever stand behind like a bus when it lets off a big puff of diesel exhaust? Stinks, right? Now you're inhaling that kind of a stuff, fumes right into your lungs. It causes damage to your cells. Now, if you do it once or twice, you're probably going to be just fine. But you know, people that are smoking a pack a day, two packs a day. I remember when I was training in medical school, we'd have people that are smoking five, six packs a day of cigarettes. I'm telling you, that repeated damage to the lung over the course of years. In fact, doctors ask patients when they smoke, how many packs you smoke per day, and multiply that by years. And now you get the number of pack years that people are smoking. That gives you a sense of the amount of damage that's accumulated. That's a setup for lung cancer. Makes total sense, right? You're damaging your DNA. Why would you want to do that? So if you want to live long, and please don't smoke, stay away from it. Stay away from primary smoking, but also be very careful about secondary smoke, all right? And if you're not a smoker, you know what I'm talking about. You're standing next to somebody in a subway station or a bus stop, and the person next to you is smoking, and they're just blowing it out. It's all over you, right? This is what used to happen, believe it or not, in a restaurant before most restaurants stopped smoking, or in a bar, all right, or in a club, that air was thick with cigarette smoke. So even if you didn't smoke, you were breathing in secondhand smoke. It's not you that's smoking, but it's you breathing it in. Same deal, less of a dose of the toxins, but you're still breathing it in, right? You're in a bar at night for a few hours. Every breath you take, you're breathing in these toxins. What do you think happens to the DNA in your lung? It's a setup for lung cancer, lung damage, emphysema, all right? By the way, let me just tell you how bad secondhand smoke is. Studies have been done looking at cats, kitty cats, all right, whose owners are smoking. And so there's the owner smoking in the house, the cat's sitting on the couch, right? Cat's not smoking, but guess what the cat actually does? The cat licks its fur. So the person who's smoking, smokes everywhere, settles on the couch, settles on the carpet. You know what it's like in a hotel room when somebody used to smoke in there, all right? But it settles on the cat's fur. What does the cat do? It licks its paws, it cleans itself. And when it's doing that, it is swallowing the toxins from the smoke that's settled onto its fur. And you know what that does? It increases the cat's chance of developing cancer in its mouth. That's how bad secondhand smoke is. So if you want to live long, don't smoke, stay away from people that are smoking, stay out of environments where people are smoking as well. Unfortunately, most restaurants, bars, and airplanes, I remember I once took an airplane years ago before airlines banned smoking. I can tell you, I was sitting in economy and everybody around me was smoking. This was actually in Central Europe. And man, I had to take a wet cloth and put it over my mouth, over my nose, so I wouldn't pass out. So don't do it. All right, tip number three, avoid excessive alcohol. Now, I got to tell you, alcohol can shorten your life in a lot of different ways. But before I tell you how, let me just say, I'm not against alcohol. I do believe that drinking alcohol, like wine, is part of our human heritage. We celebrate birthdays and weddings and all kinds of other important events with drinking. So excessive alcohol is really what does you in. And here's some of the way it does you in. When you drink a lot, you can get into an accident, DUI, driving under the influence, you wind up actually having poor judgment, you crash your car, or you run into somebody, head on, you kill them. All right, you can kill yourself as well. Accidents, you don't want to be actually doing any woodwork with a bandsaw if you're drunk. All right, do not operate machinery under the influence of alcohol. No, so an accident can take you out. Too much alcohol also damages your liver. Your liver is your body's ultimate detox machine, system, filter. And if you drink a lot of alcohol, your liver is working in overtime and eventually, alcohol, which is a toxin. I know people talk about red wine being healthy and even beer has some health, but I can tell you it's not due to the alcohol, it's due to the hops in the liquid of the beer or the polyphenols in the liquid of the wine, not due to the alcohol itself. The alcohol is toxic, toxic to your liver. Alcoholic hepatitis used to be one of the most common causes where a liver failure and the need for liver transplant. So it damages your liver. And if you can't detox your liver, guess what? You got all kinds of toxins floating on your body and that cuts down your longevity. Drinking a lot of alcohol also increases the risk of esophageal cancer. That's cancer of the esophagus, a very deadly and difficult to treat type of cancer. And other cancers that are linked to alcohol, including breast cancer and colon cancer and prostate cancer. Look, just don't drink pancreatic cancer. Don't drink too much alcohol. The other way that alcohol can take you out is that alcohol is very, very toxic to the heart. Your heart is just a big muscle that pumps your entire life, all right? Even before you're born, your heart was pumping, all right? And it's going to pump until your very last breath, maybe one or two after that, pumps after that. And I can tell you that that muscle is very sensitive to alcohol. Alcohol poisons your heart muscle, weakens the muscle. And while the heart is like kind of a big muscular pump, with alcoholic cardiomyopathy, this is where the alcohol has damaged the heart. Guess what? Your heart turns into this kind of a loose, weak bag, mushy bag. Normal heart, about this size, mushy bag, alcoholic cardiomyopathy, like this. And you wind up having heart failure because you can't pump anymore. The muscle isn't strong enough. Heart isn't strong enough. And finally, the thing that can take you out is alcohol is toxic to your brain, all right? Any degree of alcohol is toxic to your brain. Fortunately, your brain knows how to do some detox. It actually filters out alcohol. It's very protective. But over time, you'll get alcoholic encephalopathy, which can be made worse by your liver because when your liver also clears out ammonia from your body, and if you wreck the filtering system, the detox system, the ammonia builds up. Ammonia plus alcohol, that's a double whammy on your brain, and you wind up actually having brain damage, all right? So if you want to live long, stay away from, do not consume excess alcohol. Remember, I'm not telling you to cut out all alcohol. I'm saying cut out excessive alcohol. If you drink, be very moderate. If you want to be super, super healthy and optimize your longevity, don't drink at all, all right? So it's a matter of gradation, and it's up to you, all right? Tip number four, if you want to actually live a long life, if you're 40 or over, how do you optimize your longevity? Manage and lower excessive stress. Now look, stress is completely normal in everyday life. I got a lot of stress. You know, you get up in the morning, you got a list of things you're going to be doing. If you've got a schedule, you've got stress. If you've got kids, you've got stress. You know, most people in their relationships have some type of stress. You got a boss, you probably have some stress as well. If you get deadlines, you got stress. Totally normal. In fact, some people argue that some stress is actually good because it keeps you on your toes and helps you perform and be a little bit sharper. Could even be advantageous, all right? Think about studying for a test. You want to focus, all right? Stress can help you focus. But stress causes your body to release stress hormones, all right? And stress hormones like cortisol actually also over time stresses out your metabolism as well. Your insulin sensitivity drops. Your glucose can rise. Mental stress, emotional stress, physical stress can lead to cardiovascular stress as well, all right? If you're stressed out all the time, your blood pressure is going to rise, all right? This is why, by the way, when you get your blood pressure taken in a doctor's office, you're probably a little bit nervous. If you take it once, you're going to probably have high blood pressure. That's why we take it a couple of times. And sometimes you'll have a doctor or the nurse talking to you to try to distract you and make you feel a little bit more at ease when they measure your blood pressure so your blood pressure comes down. But imagine this, if you actually are just a stressed out person because of your schedule, combat stress, all kinds of different stress, you're probably going to have high blood pressure. Hypertension is a silent killer. In older people, high blood pressure that's untreated can eventually lead to a stroke, all right? Increases your risk of heart disease and stroke. Of course, high stress is also linked to having mental health problems as well. So depression, depression decreases lifespan, all right? Hey, check this out. I've got a guide on the five small daily habits that boost brain health and prevent cognitive decline. And it's free. I share simple, easy to use recommendations that you can add to your routine today. These are habits that I use personally, and it's yours right now for free in the caption below. All you have to do is click on the link below the video. So the other thing about stress, by the way, is that stress ruins your sleep. And sleep is really, really important because when you are sleeping deeply, your brain is actually open up its own sewer system called the glymphatic system. It's like a whole series of channels. It's closed up. The sewer is closed at night. When you're sleeping in deep sleep, the sewer opens up, the grates open up, and you drain out excess toxins. And we even have recently discovered that nerves, neurons in the brain pump. They squeeze and they pump those fluid that have toxin into decontaminate your brain. Just being around every day, just being a normal, ordinary human being, we build up toxins in our brain because our brain is so active. So good sleep actually helps relieve the brain of some of those toxins, all right? The other thing is that if you get good sleep, what happens? You don't detox. And you know what it's like. What do you experience the next day? Do you get a really, really crappy night's of sleep or are you pulling all nighter? Next day, brain fog. We've all experienced it. When you have brain fog, it's because you have those toxins and you haven't slept. You haven't recharged your brain. Bad jet lag also causes brain fog. You're not totally de-stressing. You're not detoxifying your brain. And bad sleep also leads to your gut microbiome getting out of whack. This is called dysbiosis. So people who have chronic insomnia, they're sleep deprived, their gut microbiome changes from a good neighborhood to not so good neighbor to a bad neighborhood. And when you're bad neighborhood, when you've got a bad neighborhood, you've got some real problems in terms of inflammation rising, your metabolism goes off kilter, your blood cholesterol rises. All these things can actually conspire. They kind of gang up to shorten your lifespan longevity. Other thing poor sleep does, lowers your immune system. Lower your shields of your immune system. You're much more likely to get an infection. And lower immunity also increases your cancer risk as well. So you don't want to do that. When you actually are sleep deprived and your immune system is suppressed, think about what happens in patients with AIDS. AIDS used to be a killer because AIDS related cancers. When your immune system is down, cancer rears itself, you get infected. Your immune system could be down if you get an organ transplant, a kidney transplant, liver transplant, heart transplant, even a lung transplant. They give you massive immunosuppressants. When I say they, I'm talking about me, we, doctors, prevent organ rejection. And then what happens? We suppress the immune system, cancers arise, infections arise. This cuts down your longevity. Good sleep counters all of it. That's why you actually want to find ways to get good sleep. And this is, by the way, why it's helpful to invest in a good bed, a comfortable bed, and trying to develop habits and schedules that actually allow you to routinely get good sleep. Check it out. I mean, think about what it is that you need to do to get a good sleep. Fifth tip, and this is my last one. If you're over 40 and you want to actually improve your longevity, live a long life, ditch ultra processed foods and add more plant-based foods. Ditch this, add that. Ditch ultra processed foods, add more plant-based foods. I'm not telling you to be a vegan. I'm not even telling you to be a vegetarian. What I'm saying is that add more plant-based foods. Delicious. Think about it. You go to Italy, you go to Spain, you go to Japan, you go to China, go to Vietnam or Thailand. Hey, guess what? They have that delicious food there. There's a lot of plant-based foods. Pay attention to that. Add more plant-based foods to your diet and take away, eat less, or actually eliminate all if you can, ultra processed foods. Now why ultra processed foods? Because ultra processed foods have, first of all, takes whole food ingredients and puts them in a factory and manipulates them in a way that you completely change the nature of your food. So it's in a form where our body is not designed to digest in a process and the nutrients are changed as well. All right. The other thing is that it contains artificial preservatives, artificial coloring, artificial flavoring. These are engineered foods. And I'm not going to talk about like big food company conspiracy. I believe that it's important to have lots of different people that can actually help to supply food to everyone in the world. And there's nothing wrong with selling some food that actually tastes really great. It's up to us to decide not to eat it, not to eat it often or not to eat it at all. All right. So think about in the traditional Mediterranean cuisine, traditional Asian cuisine, two of the healthiest cuisines in the world. People are not eating a lot of ultra processed foods. Those are the societies, the cultures where people tend to live longer. So if you're over 40 and you want to actually live longer, cut down or cut out your ultra processed foods and add some of these delicious plant based foods, especially the ones you can find in Mediterranean cuisine or Asian cuisine. And if you don't know what to do with them, where to get them, what you should do. I actually teach a course called Eat to Beat Disease course. I tell all about how to select healthy plant based foods or go to a farmer's market and talk to the people selling fruits and vegetables from their own farms or gardens or just go on YouTube and find a plant. You know, you don't know what to do with Swiss chard, type Swiss chard, type recipe, hit and go to video and watch somebody teach you how to make something absolutely delicious. All right. That's what you should be doing. Adding more plants and removing the ultra processed foods. Now, one last tip I'll tell you about plants. I always tell people this, right? So think about how we are used to constructing our meals. You got to choose a protein and you got to have protein is often meat. You got the beef, you got the pork, you got chicken, you got the turkey, you got or maybe seafood. All right. And seafood actually happens to be very healthy, but you got to get that. That's your main. And then what do you do when you're at a restaurant? Look at the sides. You want a vegetable, you want some mushrooms, you want some spinach, you want some broccoli. It's a second. It's an afterthought almost. Wrong. What you want to do is flip the script on what everything you've been taught and go for the plant based foods first. This is what I do. When I go to a restaurant menu, I'm looking at everything. All right. I want to see what they're offering because I'm curious. I'm that kind of guy. I'm that guy. All right. I like to look at everything. But when I'm actually choosing, I choose what my eye caught are the plants first, the veggies. All right. Sometimes the vegetables are actually baked into the main, but I'm focusing on that. Order that first. Think about what you would have ordered as a main, the meat or the protein, the animal protein or the seafood. Do that as a second. All right. Make that the afterthought or the add on. Make your plant based food the primary. Okay. The centerpiece. And you flip the script and you make the meat or the animal protein or the seafood the side. All right. And don't eat too much of it. All right. So this is actually what I'm actually telling you to do. If you are over 40 and your goal is longevity, which is actually what most people want. They want to live long and you want to live well. That's a whole other area of my research is actually the science of vibrancy. What makes us more vibrant, more alive, having a better quality of life. And after you get that, then go ahead. Let's add on years. All right. Of course, we want to live long, but we don't, we want to live well at the same time. So hope you learned something new. Thanks very much for watching this video and I'll catch you on the next one. Dr. Lee out. Hi there. If you enjoyed watching this video, I know you'll love the next one. Stay here and check it out and I'll see you there.