Longevity Isn’t a Pill—It’s a Lifestyle

Introduction to Longevity and Toxic Load 0:00

that there's a very toxic world that we're living in, and that if you don't address this foundational element, you're never gonna live long and healthy, right? You could get as many stem cells as you want, exosomes, peptides. You could do the tissue regenerative therapy, red light, all of that, and those will help you, but you're never going to live a long, healthy life if you don't address the underlying issues that are plaguing us in the 21st century. Would you agree? 100%. It's like the peptides or stem cells and things like that, they need a better foundation upon to work with.

So it's like if your body is spending a lot of its cellular energy on trying to just deal with toxins and viruses and pathogens, it's not looking to optimize and really help you excel. It's fighting for its life basically just to give you enough energy to function every day. This is Doctor Talks, real talk from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most. Hey, Dr. Isaac Jones here, and I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Ashley Beckman. Thank you for being with me, Ashley, and I'm looking forward to having this conversation with you.

Of course, it's always a pleasure. Some of my favorite topics I know we're going to be diving into. Yeah, absolutely. You've developed into an amazing longevity expert over the years and you got your PhD or your doctorate in longevity epigenetics and all of that. And it's just amazing to just see what you've been able to do with patients. You've worked with thousands of patients in Beverly Hills and now in Malibu, California. And it's an exciting time in history in that I believe the longevity space is probably the best and most exciting space in healthcare to be a part of.

But really this episode is about how we can get into explaining what longevity is and then what the future of longevity actually looks like and what we're excited about. Yeah, it's a really exciting topic. And again, we've been in this field a long time and it keeps changing. And I think that it's so critical for people to see and be optimistic about the future because we really want to extend our lifespan and how healthy we feel and really optimize our life and experience here on earth because it is a beautiful place and we have a lot of tools at our disposal.

Absolutely.

Childhood Disease and Rising Health Concerns 2:44

It's like, you know, there's so many people right now that are going to be living like short lives because of the diseases, because of the disorders that are happening in the 21st century. I mean, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, autism rates were at one of 10,000 kids. And now it's like one in 25 kids in California, one in 29 in the rest of the country. It's devastating. some of the disease statistics in children and, you know, what are some of the most challenging and shocking things that you're seeing right now that you're like, whoa, you know, we need longevity medicine to rise to the top of healthcare and why this is such an important topic?

Sure, so you actually touched on something that is the saddest thing that I'm seeing is all of the sick children, right? So again, I work in a practice and I have, that is a kind of family base. So I see a wide range of people in all ages and little kids and the amount of kids in the last even five years that have neurological issues. And then again, just things like, you know, nutritional and pre-diabetes and things like that. These are lifestyle factors that are really impacting them and we do have a lot that we can do and it's hard or it's easy to see all of our toxins in our world is creating these huge impacts and they are, but we have so many tools that we can use and really shift this so this doesn't need to be our future or the future for our kids, right?

But a lot of people are stuck because what they've been doing their last 30 years is now catching up with them. And in longevity, you know, we are focusing on optimization, but we do have to get this kind of foundation in place to get rid of these toxins and things. And it is a piece of the puzzle, but we also have a lot of, you know, a bright future ahead and a lot that we could turn around and shift for ourselves, you know, as practitioners and for our clients. Yeah. I mean, you hit the nail on the head with that.

I mean, there's so many sad things that are happening right now. And there's reasons why it's happening. There's clear reasons that we will talk about in detail in the Longevity Leaders podcast. We'll interview the top experts in the world on these underlying reasons why people are dealing with what they're dealing with. And the reason why we know that there's underlying causes that are driving this is because We've seen a lot of these challenges that we're seeing get reversed in our own clinical care with the people that we're serving and the people that we're helping.

But the network of doctors that we're around, they're all reversing some unbelievable challenges and conditions. Like you said, diabetes for children in the 60s, the 70s, and 80s, that didn't exist. It wasn't really until the 90s that diabetes was a challenge. There was one or two kids out of 1,000 that would be struggling with diabetes. But now it's like one in what? Is it one in every three children have metabolic syndrome? Is that it? I don't actually know the current statistic, but it's alarming.

It shouldn't be even on a kid's radar. And it's directly linked to the ingredients that kids are consuming. And some people, again, it is what obviously they're choosing to eat. But the other big part that's so bad is it's all these hidden ingredients that people don't realize are causing so many problems. You know, and we're always focusing right on looking at sugar and those things, but people still think that it's actually sugar in the products when it's high fructose corn syrup and ingredients that are extremely detrimental to kids and adults.

100%. So. Why don't we, before we get into longevity, talk quickly about the underlying issues, just a few of them that are stealing longevity from people. Like what are the longevity thieves that you've seen that we need to address in today's 21st century?

Everyday Longevity Thieves 7:01

Sure, so just a couple right off the bat would be screen time, right? This has exploded exponentially, and it's not just with kids. Adults are on their phones, you know, we're on social media, either for work or for pleasure, right? Or people are just on it as a distraction from the world, and that is a huge problem in many ways. There's a lack of exercise and movement, right? But, you know, we used to exercise a lot more. So again, you're going to have kind of two different groups, like kind of the general public, and then you have people who are out there like really exercising a ton or really into their health.

So we are focusing a lot, you know, longevity often helps the people that are already optimizing. But we have to have these foundations in place and that's for everybody, right? And so again, the movement, screen time, stress levels are really impacting people. You know, that is one of the things with epigenetics, right? It's not all the genes, it's how our genes are expressed and stress is a major impactor for genetic expression in an unfavorable way. If you're a medical doctor, nurse practitioner, chiropractor, or other health expert that's stuck in a broken system, there's a better way.

The Freedom Webinar shows you a proven five-step system to build a seven-figure virtual health practice or how to modernize your current brick and mortar practice without the burnout. Learn to create high ticket programs, automated income, residual revenue, and attract clients ready to work with you. Book your million dollar strategy session today by clicking the link in the description. Yeah, absolutely. It's so true. And you know that it's so crazy that even the statistics are on screen time before bed and how it destroys sleep, right?

Because it gets your body into sympathetic states, creates cortisol. It obviously inhibits the melatonin secretion so you're not getting into that deep rejuvenating sleep at night. And oftentimes you're dreaming about the things that you're watching before bed or you're looking at before bed. So, you know, sleep is a big issue. These lifestyle factors, obviously people are not eating very well. They're not eating powerful foods. My kids and I went out blueberry picking. Um, and I hadn't been blueberry picking in a long time, but over the weekend we went out blueberry picking before they flew out to Florida to spend time with their grand grandparents.

The house is so quiet. It's crazy. Um, a little eerie actually, but, um, What was interesting is, um, you know, we're, we're picking from this organic blueberry patch. There's hundreds of bushes and there's other families there as well. And it's just the, the blueberries, when you eat the blueberries from a tree that have ripened in the sun, it is explosive, the flavor. And you know that other, like other sugars form, there's like nine different sugars that are, and a lot of those types of sugars are extremely healthy

Toxins, Mold, and Environmental Exposures 10:20

for our immune system, for Health for cancer prevention for heart disease reversal and prevention and so a lot of times the fruits they don't have and contain those sugars they just contain fructose. Because they're not right being in the sun and so I was just like it just brought me back to my childhood of blueberry picking with my parents. and strawberry picking. And it's like that they're just so packed with like really healthy nutrients. And I was nice because I had my flip flops on and I was kind of like in the dirt and picking, you know, the berries and I just felt like, wow, this is so amazing.

And because they don't spray with pesticides, there's like, you know, some bugs, they had to, you know, they had to like, rope off an area that had like a wasp nest. But the bottom line is, it's like, we need to get back to nature. We need to get back to like the core elements of like the way that we were intended to live. I ate that blueberry and I was like, whole foods blueberries suck. Like I hate whole foods sprouts, you know, Trader Joe's, your blueberries suck. And I mean, this is part of longevity.

Like, oh, where do you shop? you know, I shop at these organic food stores or whatever, you can't get better than getting out in nature and engaging with nature, listening to birds. And, you know, so there's that element as well. And then, you know, I'll just talk quickly about, well, I'll let you talk about this because you're an expert in it as well. Talk about like environmental toxins, inert toxins, you know, which are, which are nonliving toxins, biotoxins, Talk about the preservatives in foods that now Robert F.

Kennedy Jr. is having a heyday with and making sure that America is going to be healthy a hundred years from now. But what are your thoughts on those topics? Sure. So that's my favorite topic of all, are the toxins. Because unfortunately, again, most people don't realize that they're in everything or we're surrounded by it every day. So what I at least have seen clinically, and I've run thousands of labs, and I always run, if it's possible, a total toxin test where we're looking at environmental toxins, pesticides, heavy metals, biotoxins of different mycotoxins, so mold toxins.

and then other fungus, candida, things like that. And what I used to see even just five years ago was maybe you would have some clients with one to two mold toxins. You know, lately now I'm seeing people with 12 to 15. So things are just getting worse, right? Again, everyone's kind of that concept of our toxin bucket being full. It's just something that we do need to address. And this is again, why we're seeing kids with all of these chronic illnesses at a young age now or lots of symptoms, or let's say they have eczema, right?

Eczema as a kid isn't that crazy, but every single child that I've had as a patient that was born into a home with mold has very severe chronic eczema. It's usually one of the biggest things. And you know, I'm running labs on kids that are two or three years old and their toxins are off the charts. And this used to be what we saw in adults, right? In your 30s. And now we see this in little kids. So they're coming into this world just their toxic burden is, their bucket's already overflowing. And a lot of women come to this kind of like being healthy once they're pregnant or once they had their baby.

And that's a little late, right? So a lot of us, again, there's like all these healthy moms, crunchy living, almond moms, but they don't realize that everything that they put on their skin when they're pregnant goes directly to the baby, right? So there's no filtration system. the baby gets all these chemicals, and so we're starting off with these very sick kids. So again, people don't realize, they just assume that if a product is on a shelf in any grocery store, mall, store, that it's safe. And this just isn't true.

And we know this because Europe bans over 10,000 chemicals and we ban under 1,000. So we're always allowing things that most other countries would never let be in their products, be food and preservatives and dyes. and then more importantly personal care products. So it's something that they even actually reformulate a very clean EU brand product and then send the same exact version to the U.S. full of the chemicals that are not banned here. And so it's, you know, people just don't realize that, I think.

And this is having a huge impact on our nation as a whole. Oh, absolutely. And I really hope that there's a shift and a transformation in this very soon. But you're right. I think there's an onslaught of toxic exposures from molds to lime exposure and all these tick bites that are happening all across the country. You've got people that are now dealing with various types of parasites that cause and wreak havoc on the body. I won't get into all the details of my story, but when I was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia and put in special needs as a kid, I was on all these medications.

My mom was like, here, let me find some more natural functional medicine kind of expert to help you. And chiropractor, functional medicine expert and naturopath, you know, helped me. And they found out that I was deficient in all these micronutrients. So micronutrient deficiencies is a big problem. It's getting worse now. I remember this just working with one of my patients. I call my patients health participants. She was in Florida and she Her mom was like, I'll do anything for her. Can you please help her?

And I did a micronutrient deficiencies panel. I mean, she's been in and out of the emergency room. She's no longer going to school in her university because she's, you know, so fatigued and all I found. was a couple of deficiencies that were severe deficiencies. I just got her on those products and it was like complete 180. Like she got back to school, she became like a straight A student. And it's like, but doctors are not trained to ask, okay, what are the underlying causes of reasons why people are dealing with what they're dealing with, right?

Yeah, you get a diagnosis, but it doesn't mean anything, right? Like you had your diagnosis, but So much of that was actually deficiencies. Right, exactly. And I had a mercury amalgam fillings in my mouth, and these doctors were like, look, you've got candida overgrowth, you've got dysbiosis of your gut,

Micronutrient Deficiencies and Root Causes 17:28

you've got deficiency of these micronutrients, and you've got a bio-magnification of various environmental toxins in your body, of mercury, of lead, et cetera. And literally when we address these things, it was like the eczema on my skin went away. My brain fog lifted. I started getting straight A's in class. I eventually got an international scholarship to study, to become a wellness physician and longevity doctor like I'm today. And it's like, what the heck? Why aren't there more people that are teaching about this?

This is why you and I are on mission to change the world and to educate as many people as we can on this life-saving information. And so what I know is that you're right. in that the heavy metals, the environmental toxins, the pollutants, the chemicals in the food and the beauty care products, the screen time, the electromagnetic frequencies, the Wi-Fi, the off-gassing of volatile organic compounds, the stress levels of people in today's day and age, all of that is like the perfect storm for what's happening today.

And so this is the foundation for longevity healthcare, is we have to address that and then we can start talking about all the fun stuff, right? Even though you said this is the fun stuff for you, because you know this is where the transformation has happened, right? Well, I love finding the missing piece, right? Like, now it's missing pieces. It's almost never just one thing anymore, right? Because again, things are a bit more complex. But it's, you know, I love looking for something that hasn't been found.

And then we can create plans and just really help people. And again, most of us got into this because we were sick and didn't have answers and went from doctor to doctor and were dismissed. Most people in this space are very passionate about it, and then there's a whole group of very passionate moms that even get to become health coaches because they are not finding answers from practitioners and they're just dismissed. You have kids and so you go through this, but you guys know how to help them.

A lot of What people are seeing now is there are all these moms entering this wellness and longevity, wellness space mostly to help their own kids because they're not getting help by doctors. And that's, it's horrible. It's like a movement of moms becoming health professionals just to help their kids. It's crazy. So why don't we shift and talk a little bit about, so this is the foundational longevity. You have to understand that there's a very toxic world that we're living in. And then if you don't address this foundational element, you're never gonna live long and healthy, right?

You could get as many stem cells as you want, exosomes, peptides. You could do the tissue regenerative therapy, red light, all of that. And those will help you. But you're never going to live a long, healthy life if you don't address the underlying issues that are plaguing us in the 21st century. Would you agree? 100%. It's like the peptides or, you know, stem cells and things like that. They need a better foundation upon to work with, right? So it's like if your body is spending a lot of its cellular energy on trying to just deal with toxins and viruses and pathogens, it's not looking to optimize and really help you excel, right?

Like it's fighting for its life basically just to give you enough energy to function every day. Absolutely. So why don't we even define longevity? And the reality is I've been a part of some really amazing longevity groups and I've been blessed to be a part of some very private think tanks in longevity and some of the top scientists and doctors, as I know Dr. Ashley has and Dr. Rudy are other co-hosts. And what we've learned is that a lot of people that are quote unquote in the longevity and wellness space aren't really getting it.

Like they don't really get it. And what I mean by that is they cling to like one thing. They cling to the one synolytic that they think is going to be the end all be all for them being able to live to 300 years of age.

What Longevity Really Means 22:08

Or they think that if you just use this one technology and you wrap it around your wrist and it sends laser beams into your blood to kill all these different things. And trust me, there's powerful technology like that out there. That's the one thing, right? And no, there's a different definition of longevity that we're going to get into in a second. But what do you see as one of the major problems, Ashley, that you're seeing in longevity? Sure. So, you know, there's a lot of experimentation to being done, right, for people who are investing a ton of money in longevity on themselves, kind of like as their own human guinea pig.

And, you know, this to me can be problematic. It's not something that you can replicate on a large scale or that people could really implement in their system. And, you know, longevity is not how many supplement stacks can we take, right? Can I take 100, 200 pills a day for all of these different things? But again, it's kind of that combination of what you were talking about. We have to get back to our basics of the things on Earth that really support us too. But we do have access to these amazing tools.

So it's really a combination of that. And it still has to be very individualized. I know we talk about this. And I'm female, so I talk about this on the side a lot, but you know, cold plunges aren't for everybody. They can be very shocking for women and cause a lot of issues. Same heat therapy isn't great for everybody, right? So you really do need an individualized care and approach to longevity, but our foundation and core really are these things that you just have to have dialed in. And again, we have the sunshine.

We have the ocean. We have access and the trees and nature. So many of those are very regulating. And we have plucked ourselves out of nature so much in this very busy, chaotic world that we all lead. I do too. It's not something that is just unique to certain people that work all the time. But we have to infuse nature into our daily life. Infuse natural rhythms of the day and the morning and the sun. But we also have these amazing tools that we can add in, right? So longevity that I've learned from the Chinese medicine perspective is something they've studied for 5,000 years.

And it's crucial for everybody. That's the goal is how can you live the most fulfilling life as healthy as you can, both emotionally, physically, and mentally? So there are a lot of practices to that, but I love blending nature with kind of current biohacking and then these wise traditions that we do have access to. Wow, what an amazing, just amazing points there. And it's perfect transition to the definition of longevity. If you look at the definition of longevity, just in the kind of like traditional sense of the word, a lot of people, and this isn't how they would define longevity, but it is truly how they define longevity with the way that they speak.

And this is what we found just working with a lot of these top, quote unquote, longevity gurus over time, is that the factors that are mechanistically utilized to help one extend years of life. And again, it's like, what is the medication that can help? Metformin, rapamycin, what is the one, you know, suppository of NAD plus that I can use? No, I'm serious. Some people were like, oh, man, the only way to take it is suppository. I'm like, bro, that's not what I'm doing. But the definition is what you were talking about.

Everybody is different. It's personalized to each person. It's holistic, it's vitalistic, and it's not mechanistic. And so longevity truly is the holistic strategies and lifestyles aimed at maximizing healthspan and lifespan while minimizing the risk of age-related diseases. You could stop there. That's a great definition. If you wanted to shorten it even more, you could just say it's the strategies, the holistic strategies and lifestyles to maximize healthspan and lifespan period, right? But we go on a little bit just because I think there's a little more to say.

So it's not just about extending one's years in their life, but also their life in their years. And then what you said was beautiful, like where you're talking about like being more present with your family and having more joy and happiness and peace in the world and, and really truly living life and having true wealth, not just financial wealth, but wealth in the way that we live and breathe and, and have our being. And so. vitalistically elevating the human possibility for one to experience more heaven on earth.

And the way that I define heaven on earth is for, and this is what I want for everyone in every culture around the world, is to be able to experience more love, to experience more health, to experience more laughter, to experience more freedom, to experience more connectivity with loved ones and community, right? Those are, you know, this is kind of the definition I created based off of the years of me being in there. Is there anything that you would challenge about this definition? No, I love it.

That's the thing. It's, you know, again, we're always seeing these little snippets of, oh, this changes your genetic expression. This does, this does, right? But, you know, the examples are yoga, you know, just sitting with a loved one. So it's not all about taking supplements, right? It's breathing. Yeah, everything, meditation, all these things. We're always so focused, which I understand on kind of the toxins or things that are the negative influence, but we have so much power and control to reverse these and, you know, implement these things that are all up regulating good positive genetic expression.

So people get really bogged down into, well, I have this because my dad has it. I know I'm going to have heart disease. And that's a piece, but it's time for people to take their control back. Luckily, it's awesome. We have all this amazing testing so we can kind of see what some of your pitfalls and barriers are going to be. But it's our job to change that and we can. Wow. Wow. Yeah, absolutely. Well, this was a great episode. We got into some really important kind of elements of what is the foundation for longevity?

You can't ignore the things that are literally destroying people's lives and expect that spraying on some exosomes on your face and injecting your butt

Healthspan, Optimization, and Closing Thoughts 29:28

with stem cells is going to help you live any longer than you would have lived before, right? It's, it's like, that's so important. And then, you know, we'll talk about some more fun stuff in the next episode. Um, but, but it is important to understand the definition of longevity and how everyone's got it wrong, right? Longevity is, um, you know, this pill, this lotion, this potion. It's not that it's it's literally a holistic vitalistic approach of different strategies and lifestyle solutions that will help you Maximize your lifespan and your health span and we didn't define health span.

Why don't you define health span before we end here? Yeah, so I mean, again, with the health span, it's you really want to be living optimally. No one wants to live a long time, but be sick, right? And that's what we're seeing all the time. So with a longer health span, you're enjoying a fruitful, healthy, energetic life, again, both mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically. And we're enjoying the years we have here, not trying to just mitigate disease that just keeps happening and happening, which is kind of the traditional course for most people in the world currently.

So again, there's so much we can do. And again, there's a lot of really fun stuff. There's some boring things. But it all works together really beautifully and has really impacting change. And we can see it quite quickly, actually. That's what's really cool. Amazing. Dr. Ashley, thank you for this amazing conversation. You truly are a longevity leader and look forward to, you know, bantering back and forth with you even more in the future. Of course. My pleasure. Thank you. Talk soon. Thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks.

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