4 Things Killing Your Cells (And 5 Levers That Reverse It)

Hey, are you doing all of the things you're supposed to do? You're eating well, you're walking, you're trying to sleep better, and you still feel older than you should. Maybe your joints are more stiff, you're more tired than you know you should be. You just even feel like you've aged a little faster over the past couple years than you had in recent years. I need you to hear something.

That's not laziness. That's not weakness. What's typically happening is there is something breaking down at a level below anything else you can see. And it's inside your cells. And over the next 25 minutes, I'm going to show you the 4 things aging your cells right now and the 5 levers that are going to reverse them completely with the studies to prove each and every one of them.

And stay tuned till the end because I'm going to show you at the end a trial where people didn't just slow down cellular aging, they measurably turned it backwards in just 5 years. Welcome to the Dr. Axe Show. All right, so let me start with an idea that might reframe everything for you. Aging doesn't happen to your body, it happens to your cells, and then your body catches up.

You have around 30 trillion cells in your body. Every wrinkle, every ache, every foggy afternoon is the visible result of something that went wrong at that level first. Which, by the way, is good news because the cell is a place you can actually reach. Think about how crazy this is. For some people, there could be a 20-year gap in how they look in terms of their age.

There are people right now that are 45 and they look like they're 35. And there are people that are 45 and they might look like they're 45. They have the exact same birthday, yet there is a 20-year gap in their fitness level, their health, the way their mind works. When you look at them, you could think that they are 10 years younger or older than their actual driver's license.

And there's a reason for that, and it has everything to do with how well your cells are aging. And if you're a person that wants to be in your 60s, 70s, 80s, active with your grandkids, like my parents right now are in their mid-70s. My dad moving into his late 70s. They're water skiing, they're walking and jogging, they're working out. They are very physically fit and active.

And there's a reason for that because we focused on reducing their cellular age and keeping them young. And then again, I know there's a lot of people, I actually wanna share with you a story. This happened recently. Last winter we were in Florida. We were down in West Palm Beach.

We went down there 'cause my sister went to school and college down there, and we thought it'd be fun to do a week in the winter with my family as a kind of a family vacation down there, uh, my side of the family. So my mom and dad. And so we were going out to dinner and my dad went to open the door for a man who, who was on a walker. And to my dad, he said, thank you, young man.

And my dad laughed for a minute. He said, well, you know, I might be as old as you. And the crazy part was he goes, well, I doubt that. He goes, I'm 76. And my dad said, well, I just turned 76 here about 9 months ago. And so my dad was actually older than this man by a few months. They ended up talking, they ended up talking for about 5 to 10 minutes because it was very random.

I knew his son from, from school, but overall, I just wanna say, This man at 76 looked more like he was closer to 90, and my dad at 76 looked closer to like he was probably 60 years old. I mean, that it really felt like there was more like a 30-year age gap between those 2 people. But there are very, very specific reasons for that. By the way, I want to say this.

I don't know if I've ever shared this. My dad has always been like a meat and potatoes guy. Okay? So even when everybody was switching to margarine, my dad just kept with butter. He turned out to be right there. But all that being said, when my mom was diagnosed with cancer 20 years ago and beat cancer naturally, my dad adopted the same diet.

And so my dad, ever since then, like my mom, has been eating berries every single morning for breakfast, eating wild-caught salmon, doing grass-fed beef, doing pastured eggs, doing loads of vegetables. That's been part of his diet. And it's a big part of why now in his 70s, he is still so physically young, lifting weights, water skiing, being active with his grandkids.

And the earlier you can start to reverse your cellular age, the better. And here's the reality. Your cells keep the real score. And one of the best ways to look at your current cellular age is to get the right type of blood work done.

In fact, there was a study done in 2018 in the medical journal called Aging, and they looked at 9 biomarkers and they found that if somebody kept these biomarkers intact and, and very young and in, in balance, these people would age very slowly versus if they got outta control. Or they went up at all, the other group would age much more quickly.

Some of those lab markers were things like fasting glucose, right? So you're looking at your blood sugar, CRP, looking at inflammation, looking at your white blood cells. So looking at the health of your immune system, they were looking at these different markers and they found that it actually determined your longevity and your health better than your actual age on your driver's license.

And by the way, one of the things I start to hear over time, sometimes people say is, well, like, hey, I got bad genetics. Like my mom had this issue or my dad had this issue. Tissue, and I have these bad genes. You know, there was actually a study done on this, okay? And here's a number that changes some of this conversation. All right.

What they found is they did a study on twins, and here's what they found. So research on twins and long-lived families suggests only about a quarter of how you age is written into your genetics, which a lot of those genetics you can turn on and off, but the majority, 75 to 80%, okay, of the way you age is due to your lifestyle. Are you exercising? Are you eating well?

Are you supplementing correctly? Are you keeping stress low? Are you sleeping well? These are the things that truly determine how you age because of how they impact your cells. Now, before I dive deeper, I wanna ask you for a quick favor. If you are getting value already, hit subscribe. It's free.

It takes 2 seconds, and it's the single biggest thing that helps this show Reach the people who need it the most. Also, it allows it to show up in your feed so you never miss a piece of incredibly valuable health content that you and your family need. All right, now let's take a look inside your cells. So let's talk about what's aging your cells.

Our new book, Heal Your Cells, is now available for preorder. And if you've gotten value from this podcast, we would be so grateful for you grabbing your copy directly through our own channels at healyourcellsbook.com.

When you preorder with us, you're also going to get The Cellular Peptide Guide, the Cellular Supplement Guide, the Heal Your Cells Masterclass, and 40 longevity recipes, plus an at-home blood work kit for only $79, our lowest price ever, with a 1-hour consultation. Again, that's healyourselvesbook.com, and that offer won't last long.

I want to encourage you to take advantage of the offer because we're only going to do that for the next few days. So there are 4 places that aging is happening in your cells the most. Okay. Your mitochondria. Okay. That's a big one. They stop making good energy. Another area is called your telomeres. All right. Those start to fray and shorten. Your cleanup crew slows down. That's another one.

Those are called your lysosomes. Those are responsible for something called autophagy. And then the other area is broken cells stop dying when they should, and that's related to something called Senescent cells or zombie cells that cause you to age. So let's dive into driver number 1. Your power plants are failing. Inside almost every cell, you've got hundreds, if not thousands, of mitochondria.

These are the power plants that turn food and oxygen into energy. As they get damaged, they make less energy and more oxidative exhaust, damaging cells further. And some of the symptoms around this that you might have this issue is you are fatigued. And sleep doesn't fix it. And you get crash in the afternoon, you wake up early, but, but basically poor sleep.

And even when you do sleep, you're still tired. This is also why your muscles, your brain, and your heart start to have problems. Those are the most energy-hungry tissues that are highest in mitochondria. And so they're the first place you'll start to feel aging when you have mitochondrial damage. The number 2 thing that's causing your cells to age too quickly is your DNA caps.

They're starting to fray and wear down. Okay. At the end of every chromosome sits a protective cap. It's called your telomeres. By the way, the first tests that were done to be able to really determine between your chronological and biological age were really done on telomere length. So if you think about it like this, you know, you've got these plastic tips at the end of your shoelaces. Okay.

Every time a cell divides, that cap, that plastic cap gets shorter and shorter. Now, let me ask you this. What happens? Have you ever had one of those plastic tips on the end of your shoelace come off or break? Now, I haven't had this happen in years, but I remember as a kid this happening. When that finally broke, my entire shoelace started to fray and I needed to get a new shoelace.

That's what happens in your body when these telomeres, when these caps start to wear down. It's like your cells start to break down and fray. This is why you need to have these longer telomeres, and the longer they are, Typically, it means the younger you are physiologically and at the cellular level. And the thing that actually wears down your telomeres the fastest is emotional stress.

If you are really emotionally stressed out, if you're not sleeping well, those will really wear down those telomeres very, very quickly. Number 3 thing that is causing your cells to age too quickly is your cleanup crew is slowed down. These lysosomes, these areas of your cell are no longer recycling well. And this is actually a process called autophagy. It literally means self-eating.

So what happens is you have these lysosomes in your cell, they hunt down damaged parts, okay? They then break them down. So think about, you got a car that's like, you know, the engine's broken down, part of it's junk. Well, these lysosomes will go and take the parts of the car that are still good.

It'll get rid of the bad parts, it'll throw 'em in the dumpster, and it will take the parts that are still usable and use it to create new parts of the body, like new mitochondria. As you age, that system gets worse and worse and worse. By the way, the number one way to activate this type of autophagy is via fasting.

And there are certain foods, like especially vegetables and certain fruits, that will turn it on as well. But really, you need this self-cleaning and self-recycling system working, or you will age much, much more quickly. And the number 4 driver of cellular aging is this: you have cells that actually won't die. They're called zombie cells or senescent cells.

And normally a damaged cell either repairs itself or it dies on purpose, and then your body gets rid of it. But some of them get stuck in between. They're somewhat alive, but they're unable to divide. They're unable to function properly. And so they just sort of take up space.

Imagine you've got a big city and there are broken down cars everywhere, and so you can't even get to where you want to go. That's what senescent cells are. They're like zombies. And they don't just sit there, by the way, as well. They leak inflammatory signals that damage healthy cells around them. Have you ever been around a really negative person? Okay.

Some of those sort of a leech that sucked out your energy. It's like that. You've got all these other healthy cells doing their thing, trying to, you know, change the world, do something good. And you have the one negative person dragging everyone else down. That's what a senescent cell is, and it's doing it inside your body right now.

So one of the greatest things you can do is follow a diet and lifestyle that helps your body get rid of these senescent cells. And again, an anti-inflammatory diet is probably one of the single greatest things you could do to start to eliminate the senescent cells out of your body. And as I mentioned, a few bad cells age the entire neighborhood.

In one study done on animals, here's what they found. Removing senescent cells extended the lifespan of the other healthy cells and of the animal By 24 to 27%. They also noticed that the heart, the kidneys, and the fat tissue of the animal were younger when the senescent cells were removed. And so now let me walk you through exactly how to start to reverse your cellular age.

Number 1, lift something heavy. By the way, I feel like this is one that not everybody loves or wants to do. And let me share this with my own mother. Okay. My mom, again, I think she's 74, uh, very healthy, very fit. My mom does not like lifting weights. My mom likes walking. My mom doesn't mind a little bit of light cardio. She doesn't like weight training, but we make her do it.

My dad and her, we really, and, and she's like, what's the minimum I can get away with? We're like, 2 days a week. Okay. You can do upper body or lower body or a push or pull day, but you know, 30, 45 minutes doing some weights for your bone density, for your mitochondria, for your immune system. It makes such a big difference. Yeah. Lifting weights.

Here's the reason why it is so impactful at reversing the aging process and keeping you young. Resistance training builds new mitochondria more than anything else could. I'd mentioned this before. Mitochondria are found in the highest levels in your brain, in your heart. You might know this, your heart's primarily a muscle, and your other muscles. Okay? They're very, very mitochondrial dense.

And so the fastest way to add more mitochondria is to add more muscle and strength to your body. The fastest way to add more mitochondria. This is gonna give you energy. Your muscle also acts like an organ. It balances your blood sugar. It does so many things for your health. It makes you less frail. Your muscle is a longevity organ.

So lifting weights, doing any type of resistance training, it's the number one way to build your mitochondrial health. Now, I do wanna say this. You, you also don't wanna injure yourself. But you do want to move weight and add on muscle.

Listen, if you have never had anybody walk you through this, do your best, even if it's just one time or a handful of times, or maybe it's once a week, but get a personal trainer. Have somebody walk you through a program of weightlifting that's gonna be best for you.

And listen, I don't care if you're using dumbbells at home or you're using machines or you're using resistance bands, any of those things, resistance training to build muscle the fastest way, maybe the single best way. In order to add more mitochondria to your body. The number 2 thing that makes a big difference is give yourselves a break from food and eat more fruits and vegetables.

Autophagy— this is your body's cleanup crew. It turns on when you stop eating. If you are eating from 7:00 AM in the morning to 10:00 PM at night, you're never giving your body a window to rest. And so you can cut that window down and generally eat more fruits and vegetables, which have some autophagy-acting properties. Now, listen, fasting isn't for everybody.

If you're pregnant, if you are underweight, if you've got really cold extremities and severe hypothyroidism or chronic fatigue syndrome, or even diabetic, you got to be careful with this or you don't want to do it. But a lot of times, you know, eating breakfast closer to 8 or 9 and eating an early dinner around 5, and then just loading up on the fruits and vegetables, that can make a difference.

Number 3 way to start to reverse your cellular age. Is feed the repair, not the damage. So remember this, you are what you eat. And this is especially true when you're eating healthy fat. Okay?

If you're eating processed fat, if you're eating processed industrial seed oils, if you're using a lot of, doing a lot of saturated fat, especially found in fast food restaurants, if you're eating that type of fat constantly, your cells become rigid.

And if you eat that sort of fat and then there's a lot of oxidative stress from sugar, So bad fats and sugar together, emotional stress, it will cause your cells to become very brittle and hard. You want your cells, you have this membrane around your cell, it's called your cell membrane. It should be very flexible and buoyant.

Think about like a trampoline or think about, you know, a child, how springy their bodies are, how fast they bounce back. Versus when you get older, you get more stiff, you don't move as well. You want your cells to be pliable, moldable, springy. Like a trampoline. Certain foods allow for that springiness. The top of the top, omega-3 fatty acids.

Along with that, some of the monounsaturates from extra virgin olive oil, phospholipids from egg yolks and sulfur-rich foods. So you want to get a lot of good healthy fats in your diet. That's going to help heal up that cell membrane, but especially omega-3s, right? Salmon, sardines, Mackerel. And then, you know, walnuts, flaxseeds, those are also beneficial as well.

Not quite as beneficial as salmon, but still very, very helpful. But get those good healthy fatty acids. Number 4, protect your sleep, especially your deep sleep. Sleep is when repair actually happens. It's when your growth hormones pulse. It's when damaged proteins get cleared out. It's when your brain runs a rinse cycle. That only opens up when you're unconscious.

Short or broken sleep doesn't make you tired. It cancels the repair shift. You can do everything else right and still lose ground. So getting deep sleep— this is one reason I, I wear an Oura Ring every night when I sleep, and I look at my sleep and see where my deep sleep is. And if it's not good, I go to bed earlier. I change the way I'm eating.

I realize I'm a little too stressed, so I need to take more time off. But getting deep sleep, ideally at least 1 hour. Ideally, over 90 minutes a night will allow your body to fully repair and heal. The biggest myth about inflammation and chronic symptoms is that they're all separate issues. In reality, your symptoms behave more like a chain of falling dominoes.

When one goes down, it triggers several more, and before you know it, everything feels off. This new test completely changes things, and I know exactly what to look for.

I'm currently offering a simple at-home blood test that actually tests for the right things, targeted biomarkers that reveal the very first dominoes impacting your hormones, inflammation, your thyroid, and your metabolism, plus a full hour with one of my senior health advisors to review your results and show you exactly how the Health Institute can help you stop the chain reaction and finally balance your hormones and heal.

If you want to check it out and grab one before they're gone, just go to mybloodwork.com now. And your number 5 lever at reversing cellular age and allowing your body to become younger is take the load off your nerve system. Chronic stress, more than anything, shortens your telomeres, which means calming your nerve system, getting out of a fight or flight state is the cure. Daily prayer.

Breathwork, meditation, deep reading, real time outside, boundaries around your phone, spending time with people you love and that bring you joy. This is where faith carries weight that actually shows up in your biology. By the way, there was a study on this, okay? The most stressed people, when we looked at cellular aging, were anywhere from 9 to 17 years older than other people.

So one of the greatest things you could ever do to slow the aging process and reverse it is have practices in your life that build peace and get you out of a fight or flight state. That means saying no more often, knowing your priorities, spending more time. Again, like for me, I'll just share the thing that allows me to get out of the fight or flight state is one, not overpacking my schedule.

Okay? Saying yes to everything instead saying, you know what? I'm gonna prioritize time with family. Prioritize time with God, spend some time with friends, and I'm going to, you know, work doing the things that move the needle the most. But, but I'm going to protect my time. I'm not gonna overwork. I'm not gonna be working after dinner. I'm not gonna wake up and do that first thing.

I am protecting my time. That is one of the biggest things. And then implementing into my daily routine, I'll just share a couple things here. If I start off first thing, I wake up in the morning, I look at my phone, I dive into work and emails. That stresses me out. And then after dinner, if I spend time working, that stresses me out.

I have found for myself, if I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is not rush, but I open my Bible, I pray, I read, I spend about 30 minutes with God, and then I connect with my family, maybe go on a walk, and then I jump into my day. That keeps stress so low. Or they're, or they're after dinner. Okay. Once dinner hits, same thing. Time with family. We may watch a show.

I'm gonna put on my blue blockers, read a book, just connect with family and maybe, maybe read a spiritual book or listen to, um, my Bible before bed for 30 minutes, something like that. I have so much peace. I have so much rest. I'm not in fight or flight state. I can be fairly on and focused from, let's say, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM and get a lot of work done.

But if I start creeping work into the weekends, if I start creeping work into the morning and the evening, that's where it shows up for me. Now, you might be different, but for me, I found it makes all the difference in the world for myself, for my stress levels, when my mornings, my evenings, and at least one day on the weekend is protected as a Sabbath.

Now, here's the good news I really want to share with you. Listen to this. Your cells can get younger. If you're feeling age, if you're feeling it in your joints, if you're seeing it in your skin, you're feeling it in your body, your cells can reverse age. By the way, I cover this in depth in my book, Heal Your Cells. Dr. Will Cole and I wrote a book all about how to reverse your cellular age.

The reviews we've had from the few— from the people that have read it have been immense. You can go and check out the book. It's called Heal Your Cells. But listen to this study. After 5 years, a group that focused on improving their lifestyle found that their telomeres had lengthened by about 10%, and the control groups shortened by 3%. That was a difference in 5 years of age.

So that's equivalent to reversing age by more than 5 years. Think about it. It was a 5-year study, and after 5 years of life, their telomeres got longer. So they reversed it. So they might have reversed their age by 10 years. And I've seen this in patients. I've seen patients come into my clinic exhausted, inflamed, feeling older.

You know, they've had old, you know, old sports injuries from high school, not able to run around with their kids. And after a year of doing all the right things, they're active, they're healthy, they feel 10 to 20 years younger. And you can experience the very same thing. And there are 5 big ways to do that I'm going to share with you now.

But again, if you want to really learn how to do this in depth, check out the book Heal Yourselves. Okay, here's the 5 things. Number 1, Do some weight training, be more active. I would say weight train and walk. That combination, it's powerful. Number 2, you know, you could do some intermittent fasting, but at the very least, more omega-3s, more fruits, more vegetables.

Number 3, more protein, more fiber. That's going to make a big difference in your diet life. Number 4, get deep sleep. And number 5, support your nervous system recovery, right? Get out of the fight or flight state. Daily prayer. Time outside, connect and have fun with people. These will make an immense difference in your health, in your life. You know, I love what 2 Corinthians 4:16 says.

It says this: Therefore, we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. Now, here's the truth. The more you're renewed internally, the more you're going to start to see it on the outside. All right, so try this this week. Do 2 sessions of strength training. All right?

If you don't know how to do that, get a trainer, have a friend who knows about fitness walk you through a simple workout and start going 2 days a week. Next, finish dinner 3 hours before bed and try and add more of these healthy foods into your diet, right? More protein, maybe some salmon, some more vegetables. And last, optimize your sleep and build peace, right?

So try and wake up at the same time, go to bed at the same time, and have those practices right when you wake up and right before bed. Maybe it's just 10 minutes of reading a Bible, listening to the Bible on audio, just to reset your body and your day. It's going to help you heal and it's going to help you reverse your cellular age.

And if you forget everything else from today, remember this: your cells are not a fixed schedule. They're responding every day to how you eat, how you move, how you sleep, and how you carry stress. And you're not just slowing down the clock. Under the right conditions, You can actually reverse your age and look and feel and actually be younger. All right, 2 ways to go deeper here.

First, I created a free PDF for you. Now, this is typically worth $100, but it's free. It's called my Cellular Healing Guide. And so if you want to learn exactly how to optimize the health of your cells and what the diet looks like, what the supplements look like, it's free in the show notes. So you can go to the show notes right now and download this free Cellular Healing Guide in the show notes.

And second, my book Heal Your Cells walks you through how to reverse the irreversible, how to heal anything, and how to promote longevity. Check it out if you are interested in advanced nutrition and health and natural medicine. I think it's going to be one of the best books you've ever read on the topic. You can check it out, Heal Your Cells.

And I also want to say thanks so much for tuning in here to the Dr. Axe Show, where each and every week we're diving deep into the science and principles of how you can heal Physically, mentally, and spiritually. And if this helped you, do 2 things for me. Subscribe so the next episode finds you and send this to one person who's been telling themselves it's just getting older.

It takes 10 seconds and it might just change the next 30 years of their life and yours as well. Thanks for listening.