Mastering Longevity: Strategies For Lifelong Youth

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

Thank you, Jen. It’s great to be here. Thanks.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

You have an interesting story. Not everyone hangs out with an interventional cardiologist or talks to them daily like I would in the emergency room. But that’s a specialty that takes a lot of work to get into and a lot of time. You left it. Tell us a little bit about how that went.

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

I trained in interventional cardiology, and then I did that in Denver. I did my internal medicine case in Western Ohio; Then I went to medical school in Temple. But when I finished my cardiology, I came to Texas in 1988, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven because there were a lot of chicken-fried, steak-eating, and tobacco-eating people here. I thought, well, this is a target-rich environment for an interventional cardiologist. I ended up practicing interventional cardiology for about 25 years. and I did a lot of things in that space. I ended up founding my heart group, Advanced Heart Care, and I ended up with ten offices, 12 doctors, and a Texas approach to medicine.

We flew around in a little plane, a little A36 Bonanza, to outlying areas. So I started outlining hospitals. I started there cardiac rehab programs or Stemi programs for acute heart attack care, the cath labs, interventional angioplasty programs, A-Fib programs, CHF programs, and things like that. My passion was trying to bring high-quality care to communities that couldn’t access it readily, and then I had the opportunity to also co-found a heart hospital here in Dallas with another cardiology colleague and the people at Baylor, which was turned into a nationally recognized heart hospital. That’s a wonderful place if you need it. But I decided that it was better not to have to ever go there.

I was also involved with medical device companies. I still sat on the board of one, and so I have lots of things going on in that area. But what happened to me in my 50s was that I got sick, I was putting on weight, and I was exhausted all the time. and I was developing brain fog. When I would come under higher levels of stress, I would feel myself go over a cliff of depression. And so I went in, got tested, and was old. Hey, everything checks out for your, quote, unquote age. You’re just getting older. Why don’t you take an antidepressant? It was such an existential moment for me that I’ll never forget a quote on sites like, I can’t believe that it’s all going to be downhill from here. I refused to accept that. I think it’s a similar story for many people. But I went out and I threw myself into age management medicine, functional medicine, and integrative medicine, and it took me two and a half years to crack the code for myself. But now we could do it in six weeks. But it took me two and a half years to figure out that I had subclinical hypothyroidism, that I was hormonally depleted, that I didn’t methylate well, that my neurotransmitters were off, and that I didn’t convert inactive to active thyroid in my brain efficiently. Once I got the right combination of supplements, hormone replacement, thyroid replacement, and everything like that, I lost 20 pounds of fat and put on 10 pounds of muscle. I could not worry about keeping up with my kids anymore.

It was like they couldn’t keep up with me again. I thought, this is medicine; this is health care. I decided to leave sick care. so it was a little bit like base jumping. I knew how to make a living as an interventional cardiologist. You got a base jump into something, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t have those conversations with people, realizing that there was so much more out there to help people. I leaped in 2012 and never looked back.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

I love that story. It makes sense from a cardiology standpoint. You’re sitting there knowing that there’s a better way because you mentioned thyroid and hormones being suboptimal. If those aren’t optimal, the heart is not going to be optimal. It’s not just how you feel. I think that’s the most frustrating thing: people are out there, and they feel like garbage. They go to their doctor, and they’re told to take an antidepressant. They’re told it’s all in their heads; that’s not it. To be fair, there is stress. Stress is a big problem with longevity. It shortens telomeres. It ages us. At least everyone should be walking away from their doctor, not with a script for a depressant, but with a script for an adaptogen, or so do mindfulness and stuff, and it’s very frustrating. When I still work in the ER, I go through those things with patients to see if they’re willing to hear them. But it’s such a broken system, and it’s such a bummer that happened to you. But what a gift! How amazing that is!

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

It is a gift. To your point about thyroid, we saw a lot of people with congestive heart failure and things like that. It turns out that being hypothyroid is a bigger risk factor for death in a congestive heart failure patient than their ejection fraction. That’s how important it is. We think of a weakened heart as being the biggest determinant of survival. But you superimpose hypothyroidism on that. It’s a much bigger predictor. It just goes to show you to your point how critical the thyroid is and how often it’s missed. We’re all trained to look at TSH and T4 and whatever, and it wasn’t until I did biometric testing, that I did reflex testing to show that I had slowed reflexes. Now we do resting metabolic rates on everyone, so we can see what’s happening at a cellular level. I took the idea of all the precision that I loved in interventional cardiology and applied it to the longevity space. How precise and deep can the understanding go?

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

That’s amazing. Do you find the longevity treatments that you do? How young are the people coming to you now? They’re probably getting younger and younger. 

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

It runs on a spectrum. We have people in their 30s up through their 80s who work with us. And then we see some people in their 20s who are the children of some of the clients who want to get them tested and do some things like that. Typically it happens for people when they start to feel their mortality. They may not look like they can’t do what they want to or feel like they would like to. In most cases, they’ve leveraged their health for the sake of building their business, building their family, engaging with their community, or whatever. They get to a point where they don’t have anything left to leverage. There’s nothing left in the bank to pull from to do those things and then they come in. I think longevity is becoming so common and so popular that many people in their 20s now don’t want to go down that path. I don’t want to go down the same path of aging. I saw my parents and grandparents go down, etc. People are like, I don’t want to end up like my dad, who’s in his 50s or 60s. I don’t want to end up with that. They’re starting sooner. I think that’s fantastic, quite honestly.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

I do, too. Now, how would you define longevity?

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

That’s a great question. Longevity to some extent, is an abstract term. What does it mean for an individual? Does it mean you’re going to live a long time, and then what does that look like? It’s a question of understanding. What’s the target? When I think about longevity, the way I define it is that when I’m 100 years old, I want to have a 30-year-old body and a 300-year-old mind. That’s my concept of longevity because if you’re going to be healthy for a long time, the idea is to expand into the full expression of yourself and bring all of your gifts forward. Become unencumbered by all the traumas and psychological traumas and things that have held us back and all stresses and expand into like the best life that you can imagine, and probably even better than that, and still have the youthfulness of your physique and your biochemistry to support that, and to me, that’s great longevity, because now you keep expanding into the future, not hanging on to play a little more golf and go fishing while you plan where you’re going to go to your retirement home and then your nursing home. That to me is not longevity. That’s how I think about it.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

I love that. That’s why it’s hard to explain that to people. It’s going to give; sometimes. The young kids, it’s hard to give them a grasp on aging because they think they’re invincible.

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

That’s right.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

Especially with this trend with all these sugary coffee drinks and everything. It’s funny, my daughter came to me and said she wanted to wear a continuous glucose monitor. I was explaining to her about blood sugar and fertility, and a lot of her friends are having problems with PCOS and stuff. If we think about all of these problems, they’re all causing inflammation. Inflammation is a good way to age yourself. That’s anti-longevity.

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

One of the things that I learned as a parent, I have four kids, is that there’s a spell between about age 12 and about age 26 or seven where they don’t listen to anything you have to say. They know better, their peers know better, and somebody else knows. But somebody on the internet knows better. You don’t know anything. But at the same time, they are watching everything that you do. So parenting at that point is a function of setting a good example as much as any conversations that you have with them, is what I learned. and they circle back around to that. Now it’s like, Dad, what do you think about this? Or is this a good choice? Is that a good choice? It’s not because I try to beat it into them. It’s just because they knew I was living this lifestyle. Then they get to a point where they wake up and it’s like, I’m not immortal. I can see a wrinkle on my cheek, and I see that this is for real. I think that’s the way I approach it. I don’t try to force anybody into thinking about longevity. Let them come to it on their own.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

It’s their idea. I love that advice, though. and I think I try to explain that to my husband. I’m like, if we keep modeling good eating, eventually they will. But if they see us feeling like crap drinking. That’s great advice. I need that because I’ve got four kids, and they’re going to be going through that phase.

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

Exactly.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

Would you be able to define the exponential nature of aging and how that works?

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

When you think about the aging process, many things put us at a disadvantage in living young for a lifetime. That’s part of my definition of aging, which is to say that longevity is to live young for a lifetime. It’s not about just living a long time. When you think about that, we tend to think of aging as a linear process. Every year, it’s another birthday. I don’t feel that much different. It’s linear. The other thing about it is that, even though we know that people age a lot more between 70 and 80 or 80 and 90 than they do between 20 and 30 and 30 and 40, or 40 and 50, for that matter, we deny it. It’s like we’re not going to happen to me. I don’t feel that way. If I were to ask the audience, if the audience was to ask themselves, What are you going to be like 15 years from now? What are you going to be like 20 years from now? Just take a second. Think about what you are going to be like ten or 20 years from now. It’s almost impossible to feel like you’re going to be any different than you are right now. We have a hard time imagining that. We’re handicapped in this exponential game that we’re playing because aging is an exponential decline. It’s not linear. We feel like it’s linear, and we can’t even anticipate or feel what it might be like to go into exponential decline. We live in this false bubble that everything is okay. That’s one of the biggest hurdles to get over is for people to realize that they are playing an exponential game. To win that exponential game—to live young for a lifetime—it takes an exponential strategy. Many of the strategies out there with regards to, quote, unquote, living healthier, longevity, or whatever else are linear strategies. They’re not exponential strategies. That’s part of it.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

I love that. You see yourself in 20 years maybe aging a little bit in the face, but you don’t think your body, which you don’t know, is going to change. It’s important to be proactive. What are some examples of longevity medicine nowadays that you would say have a more linear approach than normal?

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

I think I just recorded a segment for a biohacking film, and I think biohacking can be a great thing. I love the idea of people taking responsibility and control and stepping into optimizing their health. But I can tell you that many of the biohacking approaches, combined with the get-healthy strategy if I’m going to eat better, sleep better, lower stress, and exercise, are still a linear response to an exponential problem. The reason for that is that it’s not that they’re not well-intended, and it’s not even that they’re not effective to some extent. It’s just that they don’t go after the actual drivers of aging. We’re up to about 16 hallmarks of aging now. and those are both the phenotypic expressions of aging. In other words, the demonstration of the physical manifestation of aging.

But they’re also the drivers of aging. They accelerate the process. It’s like a tornado spinning up. It’s slow, but then it spins faster and faster. That’s the aging process. Being able to go straight at the drivers of aging, rather than just the simple biometrics of sleep and heart rate variability and thyroid and hormones and things like that, that’s all critical. I’m not minimizing that at all. It’s just not enough. You have to be able to look right at the drivers of aging itself. I think to crack the code, you need all of it together. You also need to construct an environment around yourself that supports the mission to make it as effortless as possible to drink clean water, breathe clean air, and have access to nutrient-dense, clean food. Things like that. I think that it’s critical. The last piece is that, in the book that I wrote, 100 Is The New 30. I talk about four circles: the life energy circle, the longevity circle, which is the hallmarks, and the health circle, which is all the organ systems and performance, which is being fast, agile, strong, quick, and balanced with great cardiovascular reserve, great cardiovascular endurance, recovery, and flexibility.

If you’re going to do that right, you need to do that. If you’re going to be that 100, you need to do it now. On top of that is another circle, which is the life energy circle. That has to do with having a growth mindset, taking care of mental health issues, feeling self-love, having great relationships, feeling joy, and feeling worthy. being wise and then feeling safe. I think most stress comes from not feeling safe ultimately and then having what I call this energetic resonance with the universe, where you have this greater sense of purpose. I think when you get that life energy circle dialed in, your comments earlier in the podcast about stress are such a major driver of aging. It is, if you solve that circle in addition to addressing the drivers of aging, in addition to driving, forward on the health process, and then working on your performance to where you can be fast, agile, strong, quick balance, etc., then that starts to be and you have the environment to support it. That starts to become an exponential response to an exponential problem.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

Love it. It is important, like you said, to feel safe. A lot of patients I see have that trauma, and we’re doing all the things that I’m like, look, like, this is hard, but you have to deal with that part. All the parts to get better. I think that’s a hard pill to swallow for people. Sometimes they get it. Sometimes they don’t.

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

I think that most of us end up living in reaction to old traumas. I’ve never met anybody who hasn’t experienced trauma, whether in childhood, adolescence, or whatever. We’ve all dealt with traumas, and our brains are wired in a way that we recognize that trauma, and then we live in reaction to it, which puts us on tilt. I’m afraid of this. I’m not going to do that. I will never go there again. I wouldn’t do this. I wouldn’t get into that relationship again. Who would do this? You’re living on tilt, living in reaction to these traumas. On the mental health side, it’s important to work with somebody who can help you identify what those are, how they happened, and what you experienced there. You understand it. From there, you can heal it. Then the final step is to transcend it to where you look at it and become grateful for everything that happened. When you get to that point where you are grateful because everything has enabled you to have this innate wisdom and you now have this innate sense of purpose, you become grateful for all of that. You forgive the people that were involved, and there’s just love for everyone there. Then, all of a sudden, your psyche is in a space where you can optimize health and expand into the true, full expression of who you are. I think that’s what’s living right there.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

Yes, I agree. It is so beautiful. As you said, feeling safe, so many people, especially with the pandemic, which sent a lot of people back. Everyone can feel can feel safe again.  Now, are you using any peptides in your exponential?

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

Yes. We’ve been using peptides for, I don’t know, probably eight years or so. and I did peptide training with Dr. Seeds years ago. I think I was the first class to go through a forum on the peptide training modules that they had. I immediately became enamored with them because, unlike pharma, where you’re putting a drug in the interrupted biochemical pathway, which then may decrease the pain or may decrease the inflammation, it’s causing side effects elsewhere. Peptides work by setting off a cascade of healing activities. We became very enamored with that. We use them, on a daily basis:  BPC 157, CJC with ipamorelin for growth hormone released BPC with KPV for the gut, BPC orally BPC subcutaneously with GHK-cu for wound healing and helping out with knees and things like that, and then doing things for the brain with Semax, Selank that Increase brain-derived neurotrophic factor can calm the brain down, particularly with Selank and things like that. We use peptides regularly. Now the FDA is making it tougher and tougher to get peptides. We have a peptide safety study that was being submitted to the IRB here in the next week so that we can study the peptides under safety. Because if you read the FDA papers on this, they’re criticizing peptides for safety concerns. So let’s do a safety study. Now we’ll have all the peptides and we’ll put them in the safety trials. We’ll be able to have access to them, and people can get access to them. then they’ll be part of the research trial. 

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

That’s exciting. Are you submitting that soon?

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

Next week, it’s already been built out. We’re just about ready to submit it.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

Great. That’s exciting. A lot of those peptides can be game-changers when it comes to longevity. Especially, you mentioned BPC 157, if you were hard on your body when your body was younger, it can help repair that.

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

It’s great for recovery. If I’m going to go snowboarding or something and you have a hard day of snowboarding or whatever you’re doing, you come back, you inject BPC 157, maybe some GHK-cu with it. and then you do some CJC with ipamorelin for the growth hormone released. When you wake up the next morning, it’s like you didn’t even go snowboarding yesterday. You just feel like perfection again. It’s like it’s magic. It’s incredible how powerful they are and how cool they are to use.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

Those are your favorites for longevity.  Do you recommend that people include peptides in their longevity quest?

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

I think you should include peptides. I’ll tell you another angle on it. That is, we screen everybody that we see for circulating tumor cells for cancer. because if you’re going to do hormone replacement, you want to know if somebody has any circulating tumor cells. So we’re working with a company called Neo7. We’re doing this for quite a few people that we’ve discovered had cancer that either they didn’t know had cancer or people come to us with cancer.  There’s a way to use peptides there, where we do metabolomic and RNA analysis and DNA analysis on the tumor, and then develop peptides that go in and modulate the genetic expression of the cancer to shut down its ability to divide and do things like that. Peptides, just so the audience understands can be used to accelerate health, or they can be used to decrease disease as well, like cancer. They run a full gamut of activities.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

That’s awesome. You’re using that specific testing site because I’ve heard of it, like the Galleri test. Is this something different?

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

Yes. Very different. We’re not, quite honestly, huge fans of Galleri. We think there’s sensitivity, but specificity isn’t where it needs to be. If a test is, let’s say, 85% sensitive and 85% specific and it comes back positive, where are you? Or if it comes back negative. Where are you? You don’t know for sure. What we like to do is look for circulating tumor cells. Because if you find them, you can still have malignancy in your body and not have circulating tumor cells, so it’s not 100% sensitive. But if it comes back with cells, you have malignant cells. The DNA of those cells can be sequenced. You can see what’s going on with these tumor cells. That enables you to develop an exponential strategy and how are you going to deal with it. So we’re big fans of that approach. We do other kinds of screening. People talk about doing MRI scans to screen for cancer, and, if it came back clear, then you’re clear. That couldn’t be further from the truth, because you and I both know that the resolution of an MRI scan is about two millimeters. You can have a whole bunch of cancer cells inside of one millimeter. People must understand that cancer screening needs to be done meticulously, particularly if you’re going to use hormone replacement or other things. 

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

That’s a great point because you want to make sure you don’t have any tumor cells, especially if you are doing something like BPC 137 growth hormone or a specific hormone if they’re hormone-related cancers.

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

That’s right.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

You wrote a book you mentioned on how to feel 30 at age 100. and people are doing this. They feel that good.

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

Yes. I wake up at 27 every day. So one of the key ways to go about this is to have the mindset of being 27. I talk about how people can hear what we’re talking about here, and they can say, that’s not possible. I think it’s going to take time and attention, and it’s going to take resources. I’m going to have to change the way I do things. These are all excuses for not engaging with the process. But I think the most subtle, but the most tragic is when people say, I’m okay for my age. I’m better than most people my age. If you take that idea, it’s important to understand that because it’s an exponential process. You’re in the Niagara River, headed for the falls. So you may feel fine today, but you’re still in that river, headed for the falls. If you don’t have a strategy for how you’re going to build a boat with a motor to go back upstream, you’re going to go over the falls.

To do that, I think a piece of it is claiming a younger age, like I’m 27, and I’ve just completed 70 laps around the sun as of this past February. But I’m 27, and if I wake up and I don’t feel 27 for some reason, it’s like, well, what do I need to do to get back to 27? Sure enough, I got back to 27. and so I can do anything I want. I ran for miles this morning. I mountain biked this weekend. I can do anything I want. That’s how I want to live young for a lifetime. But if you wake up and you say, and I would encourage the audience, pick an age where you’re at your physical peak, pick that age, and live that for the rest of your life, and actually go beyond that and then add to it all the things we talked about in terms of this 300-year-old mind, right, solving the whole life energy circle, then. Now that’s the future. That’s a future to be excited about. As I see it.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

It’s discouraging. I spoke today to an audience of workers. I could tell people didn’t feel good. They looked tired and like they didn’t have energy. I talked about managing blood glucose, and I told them it’s a mindset. You have to have the mindset that you can feel better. In America, I feel like people are just so far gone from feeling good that they just give up or keep drinking their Monster Energy Drinks. I bet you that Monster drinks are not on your longevity plan. 

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

No, it’s not on my plan. 

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

It’s very disappointing. I think you’re right. The problem though is do you ever have people they’re like, I never felt good? Even like these 16-year-olds, they’re drinking Monster drinks. Now they’re all their hormone surges. then just being young and having young mitochondria, I can help a little bit. But what do you do for those people who say that they never felt good?

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

It’s the same thing that we would do for somebody who felt good but now doesn’t feel good. That’s what I call unraveling the knot. In to win this exponential game that we’re all in, whether we believe we’re in it or not, we’re in it. I think it’s important to understand the cards that you’re holding and then where you are in the game. We’re big fans of doing and experiencing genetic testing so that people understand where they are genetically. What cards are you holding? What are you predisposed to? Maybe your low energy is related to the fact that you’re not converting thyroid efficiently, or you’ve got something else going on with your mitochondria that decreases your energy production, or you’ve got other things going on that can be sorted out through a combination of understanding genetics and then doing testing to see where you are.

How are your mitochondria working? What is your VO2 max, and what’s your cardiovascular system? What’s your thyroid? Do you have subclinical hyperthyroidism? What are your hormone levels and things like that? If you put all those pieces together, all of a sudden, many times it becomes clear: Here’s the path forward. So we have many people that come to us who are feeling fatigued and exhausted all the time. Three months later, they’re feeling great, like, I didn’t know I could feel this good again. Or I didn’t know I could feel this good. It’s about taking this comprehensive perspective and wanting to deeply understand this individual before we prescribe. Many practices. It’s like they’ve got a thing. You come to us; we’ll do this for you. We’ll do that for you. That may work, but it may not. Our approach is: Let’s understand you deeply and then give you what you need. That’s the approach we take.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

I love that. How do people get involved in longevity, and what would be the next steps if someone’s like, I want to live longer?

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

I would grab a copy of the book. It’s on Amazon. It’s also audible. The Kindle version is down right now. They’re working with some of the diagrams, as I understand them. But if you like audible, it’s there. and it’s such a great introduction to the whole topic and how to think about it. I go through all the different hallmarks of aging I go through. It’s about 450 pages. It’s the people who tell me it’s well-written. It’s very understandable. You make the complex simple. It gives you a great framework to work from in terms of thinking about your longevity. I would probably start there. We also have a podcast. The Glad Longevity podcast was probably about 230 or 240 episodes at this point. There’s a lot of great information there. Then, if somebody wants to work with us, they can always reach out to the website gladdenlongevity.com, and we’d be happy to chat with you. Those would be the ways.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

No. That’s amazing. What can be done for a small investment that someone could make now? They’ll get that large investment later on.

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

The first thing, that somebody can do and it’s the cheapest thing to do is to take a look at your life and what are the things that are poisoning you. Is it too much smoke, too much tobacco, too much alcohol, too much sugar, or whatever? Start there. People want to know, well, what should I do? What should I do? The first thing to address is: What should you take out? What are the things that are sabotaging your health? That’s the cheapest place to start, quite honestly. It can pay in and of itself, and it can pay big dividends. People can feel a whole lot better when they clean up their diet and do things like that. The other thing is to manage your sleep better and go to bed earlier. Going to bed an hour earlier is worth two hours of later sleep. Going about an hour earlier trumps sleeping two hours more in the morning. Sleeping in a dark room in a cool place, lights out, not looking at screens ahead of time.

If you just orchestrate some of these things, you can start on this pathway without spending a nickel. quite honestly. Just organizing that and then claiming your age. I think all progress is made by the questions that we’re asking. The problem with most doctors is that we get trained in a particular way; we have a set of answers, and now we want to apply those answers to people when they show up, so we stop asking the questions. What saved me was when I started asking different questions. So once I felt great again, I started to ask, I wonder how good I can be. So that’s one of the questions that motivates us here. How good can we be? How do we make 130? How do we live well beyond 120? How do we live young for a lifetime? Those are the four questions. If you’re listening go back and claim that age, and then think about the questions that you’re asking. If you were to apply that to yourself, how good could I be? What does that mean to me? Start writing that down. What would that look like? How good can I be? What do I want to do there? then start working on that, answering those questions, and realizing that if you find an answer, it may work for this next decade, but you’re going to need a different answer in the next decade. You have to be willing to adapt. Never get married to your answers. Only be married to your questions. That’s also free. that will also help carry you forward. 

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

I love that because a lot of people just think everything’s expensive—peptides, supplements, all the testing. But like you said, there are so many things that are free or can take little effort, like sleeping. That’s what I need to do. I was just telling my husband that I’m like, I need to go to bed earlier. I need to not care about the PowerPoint deadline I have. I just need to do that. That’s great. Now, why did you specifically pick 27 you said?

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

That’s a good question.  A 100 Is A New 30. When I thought about it initially, I picked 33 or 34. Then I thought, I was in medical school at 27. and I feel like I did when I was 27. I’m so excited to learn things every day. I’m reading like a maniac. I’m absorbing new information. I’m creating new programs, research projects, etc. I feel like I’m 27, so it’s like, No, I think I’ll claim 27. Then there’s a funny reason, which is that I’ll be 27 for the next decade, and then when I have gone 80 times around, the sun will be 28, at 90, I’ll be 29, and then at 100, I’ll be 30. It gives me a chance to have a little headroom to grow into being 30.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

I love it. That’s a good idea. I’m trying to decide now which age I should claim. I don’t know; maybe I’ll start younger, but when I was younger, I had my autoimmune stuff going on, so I don’t even know if I felt that amazing. So also think about the other thing about that. Maybe I should start.

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

When did you feel your best?

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

I feel like I do now, but I don’t agree. I don’t know; it’s hard because, for me, it’s stress. My biggest thing is stress and sleep, and that’s the thing we’re always working on. But the past year I’ve worked on feeling safe and praying, and I feel so good about that. I don’t get as rattled. I had someone tell me, I can’t believe all of these things happened to you in one day, like with my business and with my kids and my other kid. I’m like, It’s all going to work out. It’s supposed to be. That’s helpful but I still feel stressed, and unfortunately, innately, that’s what’s going to ramp up the aging process. Maybe I’ll think back. Maybe my age will be when I have no cares in the world.

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

Like that age, pick that age. What age is that? 12?

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

Know, probably high school. like you were talking about in high school. That’s when we all think that we are invincible. Not that I ate badly or anything, but you’re just so carefree. Thinking back, it is funny that we were talking about this maybe before all my thyroid stuff happened. maybe age, like 15, 14, 15. Because that’s when my autoimmune disease tipped off. Looking back, it was probably excess antibiotics. A little bit of MTHFR. All of that, but I mean, I do agree with you that every phase of our lives, though, is for a reason. I’m grateful for all of that and more. I would be the same as you. I would not have gone into integrative medicine. I’d set up my health stuff, but my health stuff happened earlier.

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

It’s a great story. When it comes to stress, I will just add this: one of the insights that I’ve had is that there’s nothing external to us that can ever make us feel safe. There’s no amount of work; there’s nothing about the right relationship or your kids doing well. All that stuff can ultimately make you feel safe. Then you realize that loving ourselves unconditionally is an inside job, and then feeling safe is also an inside job. So then you ask the question because it’s all about the question: How is it that I feel safe? Regardless, if everything were taken away, how would I still feel safe? That becomes a spiritual question, to your point. And so then there’s a question of, I’m going to feel safe, and I’m going to give myself safety. I’m going to scoop up my little three-year-old self and give them safety. But I’m also going to connect spiritually and feel the safety that comes from that alignment.

When you have that as your base and you’re not dependent on things going right, things going this way, or things going that way to feel safe, all of a sudden you have a real base to come from, and now things are just representing opportunity. There’s nothing bad out there. There’s just an opportunity. Something changes, something happens, whatever. It’s a new opportunity. So when you start to see everything as an opportunity and not a problem, that lowers stress because, now, you’re safe because, internally, you’ve already got this solid core. That’s how I think about it.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

Yes, I love that. That’s beautiful because it’s all about mindset. I do recommend people keep a gratitude journal. like it’s going to change how you think about things. Like you’re grateful for everything you have. When something bad happens or you can’t compare your life to other people, you’re just going to feel like basking in that gratitude, and that will lower your stress and make you feel safe in a way, too, I guess. But, I would like to ask you what you think about technology with longevity, because some of the technology is good, but some of it, like people being on their phones and having notifications all the time, is terrible.

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

No, I think it’s interesting. We’re coming into the age of AI, and we’re leveraging AI heavily in our practice. We’ve been working with AI for about five years now, and we have some cool things that we’ve developed that are coming forward. But there’s so much pollution right between the phones and computers, the screen times, and all that. It does have an impact on us. I think, quite honestly, that there may be people in the future who say, Enough is enough. I just want to go live on a farm someplace, have my garden, have clean water, and live that way. For the rest of us, it’s going to be about modulating the time that we spend with these devices and then having things that protect us from the EMF, such as altering the screen, wearing glasses to protect our eyes, and things like that, trying to mitigate it. Unfortunately, we live in a toxic world, and we can’t get away from that. Understanding your genetics—how you detox and what you’re susceptible to—and then how to optimize your detox system becomes massively important. Also to deal with it.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

That’s a great point. I do wear an Oura ring and a little bit of EMF, but lots of data, and I do take breaks from it. But it was so awesome. It’s just been so great learning about longevity with you and your expertise. I’m excited to see that like you said, you’re just aging one year at a time now for the next few decades. that’s exciting.

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

That’s right. One year, a decade. That’s the idea. exactly. That’s super fun.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

Yes, I love it. Now, how can people work with you, and do you have any events coming up?

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

If people want to work with us as clients, they can go to gladdenlongevity.com and reach out to us that way. We’ll reach back out to them. We also have a supplement shop to Gladden Longevity Shop. If people were looking for certain supplements, we would have found them to be particularly helpful. and I’m also getting ready to launch a Gladden Longevity Certification Course where we’ll be teaching practitioners: how we go about things, what our methodologies are, etc. We’ve got some very sophisticated approaches to playing this symphony of longevity, and we’ve found that putting certain things together and in the right sequence can make a massive difference. It’s not just about stem cells. It’s about how you clean up the system and prime the system before you put the stem cells in, how you support them after they go in, and things like that. We’re able to do remarkable things with brain health, gut health, heart health, lung health, long-haul COVID, hormone replacement, and most of the other things that people deal with. Then we’re also going right after these drivers of aging. It becomes super interesting. People want to work with us. Those would be the ways.

Jen Pfleghaar, DO, ABOIM

That sounds great. Thank you so much for being here today. I love talking to you.

Jeffrey Gladden, MD, FACC

I appreciate the opportunity. Jen was great talking with you too.