⚡️MINI-SODE: Simple hacks for energy + optimal aging - Dr. Anthony Balduzzi

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Welcome to this on air with Ella Minisode, a little bite sized boost to your day.

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Always quick, always thought provoking, and always under 10 minutes.

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Let's go.

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One phrase I refuse to use anymore, Dr.

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Anthony, is anti aging.

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Like, I am not here for the anti aging conversation.

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Drives me insane because we're literally all aging all the time, every day, if we have the privilege of being here.

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To me, longevity is about living as powerfully and vitally as you can for as long as you can.

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And it's so much more for me personally about healthspan than lifespan.

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Tell me your point of view.

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Well, I totally agree with you.

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I think the way to live a long life is actually to align your habits and your actions with natural law.

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Everything in nature, you know, has there's a law and a cycle.

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There's the sun and the moon.

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It governs these kinds of things.

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And so when it comes to the body, we need to have good food inputs, we need to have good circadian rhythm, we need to move our bodies, we need proper hydration.

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We need to understand also the trajectory that the body naturally goes through, specifically in the fourth and fifth decades of life with hormonal changes and how to kind of ride that wave.

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And when people deviate from this, they're eating the processed foods, as you know, they're not sleeping enough, they're stressed, too much caffeine, not enough movement.

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This is where, you know, health span and lifespan and like the downward decline start to kind of diverge, if you will.

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And we can fix this with some simple lifestyle stuff.

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What do you consider the key aspects of health that people over 40, let's say, must absolutely non negotiables, must prioritize for longevity.

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Believe it or not, one of the main longevity hormones that not enough people are talking about is melatonin.

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Melatonin is like one of the main governors of how good your immune system is as you age, how healthy your skin is, your brain health, how your brain actually cleans itself as night.

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All of this is governed by melatonin.

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And it's fascinating because we've only had like a couple hundred years with artificial light, let alone the cell phones that we now have blasting all of us.

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And it's actually one of the things that's aging people faster than anything because melatonin naturally declines as we age.

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And this is why a lot of people have slee disturbances.

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And pretty much if you're not getting good sleep and you're blasting too much light at night, it is totally messing up your whole longevity Game, and it needs to be optimized.

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So I start there because when we get older, the immune system ages too.

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And the process of that, medically speaking, is called immunosenescence, or basically your white blood cells that are tasked to clean up and repair from exercise, to fight defenders, to detect cancer cells, and just to keep inflammation levels in check.

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All of those blood cells, they get older and they're driven by vitamin D and melatonin are the two receptors on those blood cells that keeps them health.

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So how do you get vitamin D?

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Well, having proper circadian rhythm and sunshine is one thing.

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And how do you get melatonin?

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Well, having proper nighttime, you know, not getting as much light, and also making sure you might be taking melatonin supplements.

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And I bring this up because the circadian rhythm component of optimizing that is so much more important for longevity than people want to believe.

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Because we want to focus on the different exercises, the collagen creams, like these fancy things.

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But truly, this whole biological mechanism is entrained to the sun and the light.

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And we need to actually get more morning sunshine and less sun at night.

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And to optimize those two factors or you're not going to live a long, healthy life.

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What does it mean to you when you say we need to optimize our circadian rhythms?

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I'll put it this way.

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Biologically speaking, depending on the season, we are meant to get morning sunshine.

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If you can catch some of that morning sunshine when the sun is still low, that is the time where there's actually low UV exposure, but you get high infrared exposure.

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And that infrared actually is so massively beneficial for your mitochondria and your skin.

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So I think we're meant to get sunshine in the morning as well as get out in the middle of the day and get some UV exposure breaks.

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And so circadian rhythm to me means getting the getting light during the day, and when the light goes down at night, I'm not saying you need to go to bed, but you do need to change your ambient environment to have more lamp light and certainly get all these filters on your devices, your phones, your screens to cut out the blue light, because it is literally going to suppress your main anti aging hormone, melatonin, that I'm talking about.

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It's sensitive to light and it starts getting secreted when it's dark outside.

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So I think people can entrain themselves a little bit more to lessen nighttime light, more daytime light.

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The way to live a long life is to stay primarily in a parasympathetic state.

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So your nervous system has these two gears, the sympathetic, the more stressed and activated.

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Parasympathetic rest and relaxation.

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So the, the creatures that live the longest, including humans, keep a parasympathetic tone.

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And so we can do this in many ways.

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And the sleep in the circadian rhythm is one main driver of that, as.

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Someone'S making baby steps toward improving their sleep.

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If we're on that journey and our melatonin is not sorted, and we've been doing an enormous amount to kind beat it up over the years, talk to me about melatonin supplementation, do's and don'ts.

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And what's actually cool, particularly for women, is they show that women who follow healthy diets and exercise in conjunction with melatonin supplementation lose more weight and body fat too.

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So it has an effect on metabolism and hormone parameters as well.

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So that is beneficial.

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My take is, as you're optimizing melatonin, especially if you're in a season of your life right now where you're a little busy and stressed and you have a higher level of stress, it's a good idea to supplement with melatonin at night.

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And that could be anywhere from 1 to 10 milligrams.

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I say it's always a better idea to start lower.

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But one of the cool things about melatonin versus taking other external hormones is it does not shut down your own natural production.

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So that's beneficial.

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So you can just pop a 1 to 5 milligram melatonin tablet at night and that's beneficial.

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But I would say if you're doing that and you're still not wearing any kind of those blue blocking glasses, I do recommend those.

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I mean, they don't look super cool, so maybe they're making them cooler.

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Maybe the holiday gift guide around the corner someone will give you a cool melatonin glasses.

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But I think those are pretty important, especially if you tend to watch your iPad or a phone or something like TV at night.

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You need to really protect that kind of stuff.

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And then also do understand that the way to make more melatonin is actually get morning sunshine in response to getting sun in the morning.

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And I'm talking about sun from sunrise till about 10am your brain actually releases serotonin, which makes us feel great.

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And then the serotonin later in the day is converted to melatonin.

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So this is the whole cycle starts with getting the right sunshine input.

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And it's kind of like artful and beautiful how it's all connected, right?

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Duh.

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We're connected as organisms to this light cycle.

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So when we get in sync with that would feel so much better.

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What's also cool is that morning sunshine in your eyes, which means no glasses.

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Actually, kind of getting some of that into your eyes, in your face, also smooths out that morning cortisol spike.

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That's very natural.

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It lowers that down.

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So it's helpful just basically keeping your body less stressed.

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So that's a couple ways you can supplement.

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But also make sure that morning sunshine is feeding that melatonin cycle, and you actually make more melatonin in your gut and your digestive tract than you actually do in your pineal gland in your brain.

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So having a healthy GI tract, good probiotics, good healthy prebiotic fiber, these kinds of things also will help with that whole scenario.

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It's almost like we were designed for optimization.

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Yes.

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In.

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In relation to light.

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Light is a huge input, for sure.

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Thanks for joining me for this mini episode of On Air with Ella.

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Tune in for our full episodes once a week.

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See you next time.