Dr. David Agus
Appearances
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Yeah, dolphins are pretty interesting because they're the only creature that we know of that has what is an equivalent to human Alzheimer's disease. And what we see in the dolphins is it correlates to insulin signaling. And we know that's also true in adults and humans, is that when insulin signaling is off, type two diabetes happens, it's very hard to modulate sugar.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
And when your sugar goes up in your blood, you have to maintain what we call the same osmolality. So fluid goes in to dilute out the sugar and your blood vessels get stressed and it affects your brain and other parts of your body. Dolphins can actually modulate their insulin signaling, and they do so through a connectivity with others. And they do throw as part of their daily life.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
They do with exercise, they do it with social connections. And we certainly have to learn with that, right? You see, when people have very few social connections, they actually tend to be higher body mass index, they tend to eat more, they don't have the controls that they do when they're with other people. They actually normally exercise less and do less.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Obviously, these are generalizations, but it's something we concern. Get a load of this. Totally an aside with Alzheimer's, what we just learned from AI was that the shingles vaccine, which is a vaccine to prevent shingles that we classically do in our country after age 50, looks like it may reduce Alzheimer's by almost 50%. We knew Alzheimer's was plaques in the brain.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Now we're learning that it's an infection of a neuron, in this case caused by the virus shingles, the chickenpox virus, that can lead to the plaques. Pretty powerful observation.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
So the way these studies are done is your electronic health records are bags of words. And with AI now and these large language models, we can convert that to structured data and do analysis. So in three separate studies, this was observed. So nobody could ever do a randomized trial over 30 years and say,
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
get shingles vaccine i'll give you placebo see what happens we had to pull data and say who got the shingles vaccine who didn't let's make sure they're equal in terms of their weight where they live how old they are etc and see the observations and it certainly was a very important observation it didn't necessarily prove causality but it was a hell of an association from something that's already on the market already reckon or recommended for everybody over the age of 50
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
And it's certainly something that I acted on and I hope others do also.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
All right, so the pig. The pig is something, obviously, we make fun of all the time. You live in a pig pen, et cetera. So they studied the pig. And what was really interesting is they studied their pain response. And so when pigs had pain, they would squeal and they would run away from it.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
But what they showed is when a pig had altruism, when it was able to share its food with others, the pain threshold went up dramatically. And it was a staggering observation that altruism, sharing things, being kind to others actually changed our pain threshold and how we responded to pain. Pretty wild if you think about it. And then get a load of this.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
The queen ant, which is the same genetics, she gives birth to all the worker ants. Well, she lives 42 years. The worker ant lives six months, same genetics, dramatically different lifestyle. That queen ant doesn't go out into the wild, doesn't get exposed to bacteria, viruses, doesn't do manual labor to get inflammation, harm things, and she lives much longer.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
The ants, if you get sick and you're an ant, you stay outside the colony for three days. And if you get better, you go back. If you don't, you die outside the colony and you don't spread that virus or that bacteria to others. Well, look what happened during the pandemic, right?
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Your behavior, if you had a virus, if you had COVID-19 and you came home and hugged your kids, you could spread it to them. If you stayed away from them, you didn't. So the notion that the behavior of one affects all is really something that we should have and could have observed in the ants and learned from very strongly.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
What was amazing to me of sitting there in Africa on safari, which was a privilege to be there, is that every creature is looking over its shoulder and worried. That lion is worried that somebody will eat its cub. The elephant is worried that its baby will be taken by somebody else. That antelope is worried about the lion. They're all worried about something.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
You know, we as humans have basically built ourselves a zoo, right? We live in our house. We have our security system. We've tried to take away that worry, that stress from our life by living in a zoo. And it's a really amazing observation. Never used to be like that. But we've evolved as humans to create our own zoo in a sense. And that's a good thing? It's hard to tell.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
When you look at one of the correlates to living long with your brain intact, so slowing cognitive decline, it's getting uncomfortable. Every year you delay retirement, you reduce the incidence of Alzheimer's by 3%. Over several decades, that's an enormous percentage reduction. You don't use it, you lose it. You need to be uncomfortable, but you need to control it. We worry about things.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
if your dog you know something happened to it doesn't worry animals don't necessarily carry that worry forward and stress them they worry in the moment but they don't carry it forward like we do we don't have the ability of disconnecting like they do and so our worry can cause stress you're worried all the time Basically, you lose that stress response. Michael Jordan played well in practice.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
In the game, he was amazing and very different because he had an adrenaline response that he can respond to. That lion has a basal level of fear, but when something happens, it goes up and they perform. You hear about the people lifting the car off the baby when their adrenaline went up. Well, if you're always stressed at a very high level, you don't have that adrenaline push.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Many of the new devices, the Apple Watch, the Oura Rings and others measure something like heart rate variability, which is actually a surrogate for that. You can measure, do you have that adrenaline response or not? Very important for athletes or anybody who wants to perform.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
So talking to some of the experts in those, they talked to me about child rearing. There are three types of gorillas, right? There's one who says to their kid, hey, do whatever you want, fall out of the tree, get beaten up. I'm just going to go about my daily life. Those kids have a relatively short life expectancy. Then there are the parents who don't let the kids get into any fights.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
When they start to climb the tree, they pull them down. Those kids are always followers and never leaders. Then there's the kids who the mother looks at them with the corner of their eye, and once they get to a certain level in the tree, they bring them down. They let them start to get in the fight, but when it gets too aggressive, then they intervene.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Those are the kids who know how to deal with conflict, know how to take some risk and become the leaders. So what's amazing is, is that Jane Goodall can look at a pack and identify who will be the next leader by the parenting behaviors.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Yeah, but if you look at the mummies in the Egyptian time, most of them died of cancer or they died of heart disease. And so they're dying of the same things and they died at a much earlier timeframe. We're living longer. We're still dying of heart disease and cancer, but you're right, we portend for longer. But the key is, right? I really think we can stop most disease at an early age.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
So all of us can go to our ninth or 10th decade and die of something. Until the 1950s, you could die of, but it was made illegal after that, something called old age. Ever since the mid 1950s, a death certificate needs a cause of death and old age isn't a cause of death anymore. I want to go back to dying of old age, right? You don't want to die at age 50 of pancreatic cancer.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
What we just learned from AI was that the shingles vaccine, which is a vaccine to prevent shingles that we classically do in our country after age 50, looks like it may reduce Alzheimer's by almost 50%. Pretty powerful observation.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
You don't want to have a heart attack at age 53. What you want to do is live till there's general engineering failure until your quality of life at that point starts to go down, which is normally the end of the ninth or 10th decade and live quality until you get there. And I believe you can, if you do the preventive strategies, many of which we can learn from the animal kingdom.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
You know, very simply is that our goal today, every single person on this planet wants to live better, longer, healthier. The way we could take shortcuts is learning from other species. We've all been on the earth a million years, us and the other species. There are things they've adapted to in ways they've done it to hack their own system that we can learn from and benefit to ours.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
So I'm walking with my family on a safari in Africa, coolest trip ever. And an elephant walks by and I say to the guide, hey, they must get lots of cancer. They're 40 to 50 times bigger than us, 40 to 50 times more cells. They're in the sun all day. And he looks at me and say, elephants don't get cancer. And when you look, elephants have 20 copies of a gene called P53, the guardian of the genome.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
We have one copy. And what that gene does is it corrects error in DNA from inflammation. So here's a remarkable clue for us. First of all, we can recapitulate that. We can prevent all cancer. But in the short run, we have to take ways to downregulate inflammation. Elephants never get cancer? Elephants rarely get cancer.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
So you would think that with so many cells and so many divisions, they have much more cancer than us and they don't. And it's really interesting. Part of the reason is, is that, you know, we have children in their 20s and 30s. And then actually evolution said, I don't care about you because I care about who has good kids. In fact, if you die of cancer, heart disease, etc.,
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
It brings more food and housing to the next generation. Well, elephant females give birth until their sixth decade. Dominant males protect the herd until the day they die. And so they couldn't afford to get cancer. And we can't, right? Cancer rarely happens in kids, but it happens as we enter our later years. And here's a way that we could potentially prevent it.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Well, first is you do all the research about P53 and that's ongoing. But today we say, hey, listen, what it's doing is correcting errors in DNA that came about from inflammation. So how can we downregulate inflammation in our lives today? Well, there's a simple way, the class of drugs called statins. That's the Lipitor, the cresters of the world.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
While they do lower cholesterol, the real mechanism is downmodulating inflammation. And if you look at the studies, it actually reduces cancer. And then you look for sources of inflammation in your life and you want to avoid them. And so it sounds simple. It's actually more complex, but it's doable today. You know, take another crazy example. Do you have a dog? Yeah, I do.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Your dog sleeps all day. And the reason is your dog doesn't get deep sleep. If it got deep sleep, you could walk right by it and do something to the herd or whatever they were bred to protect. Your first night in a hotel, you sleep like a dog because you don't recognize the surroundings.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
And you go, oh, my gosh, your body says, hey, I don't want to have deep sleep because I don't recognize the surroundings. And it's dangerous. Something could happen to me. So when I travel, I bring my pillowcase from home. So I have my sensory, my smell and my feel from home. I use my iPhone as my clock from home. So I have a visual cue also, and I get more deep sleep.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
So I've kind of learned from the dog how to do the opposite in a sense when I travel, because I don't want to sleep like a dog when I go to a hotel.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Well, there was an amazing study in Europe, in the UK, where they actually took a talent and they took everybody and they divided them in half. They did no blood draws and they put them on a baby aspirin and a statin, two ways to downregulate inflammation.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
And what they showed is the people on placebo who got a pill, they didn't know what it was, lived shorter than the people on the statin and the aspirin who lived much longer. So all of a sudden there's real data there. You know, we're in health. If I tell you to go on a pill where you're not going to feel differently and it's going to help you in 10 or 20 years, you roll your eyes at me.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
We don't have a near-term readout. And so it's been very difficult to get compliance and to get people to do them. There's a new generation of statin equivalents, drugs that lower inflammation and cholesterol that came out that literally are a shot once a year. It's a technology called siRNA. They're FDA approved, and they could downregulate the pathways to lower cholesterol a year at a time.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Obviously, dramatically helps with the compliance, but that's been part of the problem.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Well, listen, aspirin's 2000 years old. In three large randomized studies with over 100,000 people, what it did was reduce the overall death rate, not the incidence, the death rate of cancer by 30%, heart disease by 22%, and stroke by 17%.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
and obviously there was a benefit there there's been newer data out showing that if you take aspirin for four years starting at a later age that there was no benefit in increased fleets and there's no question there's increased please but you need to take it
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
for six years to see the benefit on cancer and people who don't start aspirin to really late there's normally a reason for that and so if you look at the ground data it's very powerful not everybody should be on it but it's discussion to have with your doctor hey listen if you have a family history of pancreatic cancer or colon cancer you get about a 50 reduction in those cancers by taking a baby aspirin every day but you got to take it earlier in life you can't wait till you're 80.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Yeah, you got to start earlier, and that's where the real benefit is, and the risk of bleeding is much slower. Listen, an 89-year-old, they fall a lot, so risk of bleeding is high. A 40-, 50-, 60-year-old don't, and it's different. That being said, if aspirin is 2,000 years old, why don't we have a Gen 2.0 of aspirin that has the anti-inflammatory parts but doesn't have the bleeding parts?
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Unfortunately, there's no patent on aspirin, so there's been no pharma working on this. I wish they would.
Something You Should Know
Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
You know, there's a hormone called oxytocin. It's the love hormone. When you look in your dog's eye, your oxytocin goes up and so does theirs. And when oxytocin goes up, your blood pressure goes down, you feel more relaxed, you get a sense of calm, anxiety goes away. And so we all need these bursts of oxytocin in our life and dogs can provide it.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
And then there are the little things they do to our schedule, right? Dogs like to eat the same time every day, which by the way, is what we as humans were made to do and is much healthier for us. So you get up in the morning, you walk the dog. Walking is good. The regular times a day, hopefully that tends to your own mealtime. And you have companionship.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
What you look at in every study of health outcomes, longevity, is people with companionship do better. Dogs with their oxytocin bursts are an amazing form of companionship.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Oh, first of all, that was a big assumption. Some people have connections to rhinoceri or rhinoceroses. I'm not even sure which one it is. Um, but you know, he, The rhinoceroses were unfortunately captured much for their horns because there was this notion that it can affect sexual potency and other things, even though it's not true. They were endangered.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
Several zoos tried to breed rhinoceros in captivity, and it didn't work. Everyone was getting very nervous that this species, which literally looks and acts like a dinosaur, would be extinct. Then they noticed that, you know, renaturas are big. They eat a lot of food. So zoos don't have a lot of resources. They were feeding them basically soy protein.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
and soy has estrogenic components it acts like the hormone estrogen is what we call a phytoestrogen a plant source of estrogen so when they change the source of protein to a different source of protein that didn't have the estrogenic parts all of a sudden they were able to breed rhinos in captivity and what we clearly see is that you know eating natural food is tremendously important
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
But too much of anything can have unintended consequences. And in this case, phytoestrogens, if you feed a child soy milk, they will develop breast buds. The breast will be slightly enlarged compared to a child who's not because of the estrogenic components. So it really begs to look at what we eat. And we were made to eat a varied diet. We're made to eat real food, so not processed food.
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Lessons on Health from the Animal Kingdom & How to Manage Your Emotions
And we're made to eat either two or three meals a day, you choose, with nothing at all in between.