Inflammaging And The Mind/Body Approach

What Is Inflammaging? 0:00

- I hope you're enjoying day 1 of the reverse Inflammaging summit as much as Steve and I did in helping to create it. We were very fortunate to have some incredible guests who have very important messages. So hopefully you'll be able to stick around to the very end in this segment. I want to share with you some of the teaching points about what inflammaging actually is and some of the lifestyle tools that I use in my coaching programs to reverse inflammaging. Later on, I'm going to be inviting Steve to discuss our motivation for combining mind body approaches in doing this summit.

So first of all, exactly what is inflammaging? It's made up of two words, the first of which is inflammation. So let's start with inflammation. Inflammation is our body's healthy, normal response to help heal an attack from basically any foreign material. An example could be a thorn into our skin or if you think about it even food, which is a foreign material that enters our body. So, inflammation is healthy, especially when it occurs over a short time. And when it's over a short time, we call that acute inflammation.

In other words, it does its job and then it turns off think about an invasion or even an emergency when that happens. Maybe we call in the National Guard or some other military force to help. That's a good thing. It helps out in a difficult short term situation. The idea of inflammation is not new. In fact, it's one of the oldest concepts of medicine. It goes back a couple 1000 years in how our body defends itself from attack from the outside world. It was actually described by a Roman 2000 years ago who described the four hallmarks of inflammaging, inflammation, which are the Latin words, calor which is like heat. Calor dolo is pain, rubor is redness and tumor which means swelling.

And these, these are the hallmarks of the normal healthy response for inflammaging, inflammation, this acute effect. But what hasn't been appreciated until recently and is still not appreciated by many physicians. I mean, I didn't even know it and I'm a medical school professor and that is when this healthy acute inflammation response is turned on all the time. And this is what we call chronic inflammation. If something is on for a long time, it's called chronic versus acute for a short time. Well, this chronic inflammation is not healthy and bad things happen,

Why We Created the Summit 2:50

you know, think of sort of the National Guard being there, not just for the emergency but deciding to stick around all the time or, or even continuous martial law. As we, we're gonna find out this chronic inflammation drives many of the chronic diseases that we face. Things like obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis, heart disease, stroke cancer. Alzheimer's disease. I can go on and on some mental illness, but it also drives aging itself. And that's why this chronic inflammation which drives aging is increasingly referred to as inflammation.

And now I'm gonna turn the microphone over to my co-host. Dr. Stephen Sideroff, who's gonna start the discussion of our motivation, why we felt it was so important to combine the mind body approaches when we did this summit. - Welcome to the first episode of our summit. I'm your host, Dr. Stephen Sideroff and I'm joined by my partner, Dr. Robert Lufkin. Rob - Hey, Steve, it's great to be here. I'm so excited about this summit and the, the great interviews we're gonna be hearing. - Yes, me too, Rob. And let me begin by explaining to everybody how this came about.

Rob and I have been really marveling at how the field of longevity has been exponentially expanding. And the importance for individuals is huge. The idea that we can not only live our lives longer but increase what we refer to as health span. And that means living healthy up until the very end. It's also a very important field for society as well because every year that we can add to our lives really saves huge amounts of capital for our society in terms of medical costs. So this is a very important field.

But as we talked about this, we realized that there was a big piece that was missing and that's the interface between the mind and the body. There's been some discussion about lifestyle, but that's really been limited pretty much to sleep, exercise and diet. And then some conversations about stress management. We want to get more deeply into this notion of how physical symptoms, physical condition actually affects cognitive, emotional mental health.

Mind-Body Connection and Stress 5:40

And then on the other side, how mental health, psychological factors really play a huge part in physical symptoms. And so that's why we came upon the notion of joining mind and body, Rob. - Thanks Steve. That's a very important point. Another factor of great importance that we know is that in this new area of longevity, it's basically the wild West where information is being expressed and sold as if it's already been fully tested, in fact, but it hasn't been and much of it is not what is verified and what is simply believed to be true, what is fact and what is fiction, what is presented by reliable and trustworthy sources and what is just not accurate at all.

And here too, we felt that while we want the public to benefit from the new research and findings, we also wanted to make sure that a distinction is drawn between theory, belief and the real thing. And most importantly, what's safe. That's why Steve and I decided to create the Reverse Inflammaging Summit body and mind longevity, medicine. We wanted to bring attention to how the mind and body interact to create either resilience or faster aging. What is the actual mechanism by which thinking and emotions impact the aging process and how we can use this information to have the body function better and slow aging and increase.

What we are referring to as health span that is staying as healthy as long as possible. - With this mission in mind, we identified some of the world leaders in the fields of medicine, psychology and the interface of the two. And we have 50 of the world leaders in every one of these areas. Every interview that you're going to uh listen to and and view is chock full of important information about how the aging process works. But not only that you're also gonna get very important, helpful tips on what you can do immediately to begin slowing the aging process and engage in healing and other helpful ways of feeling better in your lives.

Because there's so much information in each of these talks, we're very happy that we will be able to offer you ways in which you can get these lectures, these interviews for per your permanent library. - There have been different perspectives proposed as to why we age and our summit will look into all of them, including what some refer to as the hallmarks of aging. But what do all these experts that we're gonna hear from have in common is their recognition of the importance of inflammaging as a central mechanism.

This is core that inflammation drives aging and that's why we call it inflammaging. And that's why our summit highlights factors that influence inflammation and how this affects aging as well as factors that can slow down or even reverse inflammaging.

Experts, Safety, and Longevity Research 9:20

And that's why it's even in our title Reverse Inflammaging Summit, - The idea of the mind affecting the body. For many years was a controversial subject when a person had a diagnosis and the physician could not find a functional, not a functional but an or organa organic cause of the problem. They might say it's all in your head and this became a derogatory term. But we now know of the actual mechanisms by which the mind affects the body, the ways that the way we think how our appraisal of situations impact how much stress we experience in our lives. The more stress we experience in our lives.

In fact, the more we have what we refer to as the dysregulation of physiological functions, in particular of the autonomic nervous system, how thinking mind and emotions increase stress, increase emotional reactivity, the stress response and thus various physical symptoms that are the result of result of this. In our talks, we are going to get into how the mind affects the body as well as ways that physical symptoms actually impair cognitive functioning. Here, we will get to speak to some of world leaders in this subject, Bruce Lipton, who will be talking about his biology of belief, Joe Dispenza, who will be talking about the power of the mind through meditation and other practices, breathing and biofeedback to actually enhance the healing process. And Stephen Porges who will talk about his poly vagal theory and about the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system.

Not only are we dealing with these epidemics in metabolic dysregulation, but we are also dealing with an epidemic in our stress and the stress we deal with in life today, no one is immune to this uh really uh increase in stress that we're all experiencing in our lives due to the complexities of life due to the current events. You know, the world has gotten smaller and we are affected by things happening around the world. And it's not just some people, it doesn't matter your gender, it doesn't matter your race. And in fact, it doesn't even matter how much wealth you have.

We are all under the barrage of the stresses in our lives that are continually throwing our systems out of balance and thus increasing inflammation and inflammaging in our lives. It's very important to understand how resilience and the ability to self regulate as well as many of the other techniques that you will be learning during these seven days will positively impact your health and your longevity. You want to know how the body can be most effective, the power of finding safety in your life, the power of being able to self regulate and to find

Applying the Program and Next Steps 13:00

love and acceptance, all of which support healthy function. - This is a constantly unfolding area that Steve and I are following very diligently. Please join us on this exciting journey as we critically examine new findings and what's working, what's safe and what to avoid here. We will ask the world leaders in the field for their perspectives on aging and longevity step by step. You will have a front row seat to our own thought process and how we make these determinations as well as a front row seat and learn from the world renowned experts that share their valuable information with us.

The result will be the best information for you to make good decisions. Now, that's an awful lot of information being presented during these seven full days. Each of our speak speakers is a thought leader, people such as Mark Hyman, Peter Diamandis, Bruce Lipton and Joe Dispenza. We are glad we are able to offer the full array of interviews after the summit for your personal collection. - Also, as you listen to this information and to begin to think about how to implement this into your personal program, you will quickly realize that there are many decisions to be made. We're presenting this information to you over these seven days, but once the program is over, it's up to you how to begin implementing these ideas into your life.

It will require the development of new and healthy thinking and behaviors as well as letting go of old habit patterns, Rob. And I realized that to support your efforts and increase the likelihood of your success, we needed to provide a supportive follow up program. Otherwise it's very easy to get very busy in your lives and lose the focus of the program and the things that need to be done. For this reason to support follow through, we will share with you various options for participating on the path of longevity to ensure your success.

But for now, congratulations on choosing to participate in this invaluable program and summit.