The 12 Most Important Health Metrics That Predict Longevity (What Actually Matters Beyond Weight)

The 2026 Chevy Equinox is more than an SUV. It's your Sunday tailgate and your parking lot snack bar. Your lucky jersey, your chairs, and your big cooler fit perfectly in your even bigger cargo space. And when it's go time, your 11.3-inch diagonal touchscreen's got the playbook, the playlist, and the tech to stay a step ahead. It's more than an SUV. It's your Equinox. Chevrolet.

Together, let's drive.

REI has ultralight backpacking gear. So for you gram counters and ounce shavers, we made this ad ultralight with a base weight of just 13 seconds. The next 17 seconds? Pure trail. Find more with less in store and at rei.com.

Here's something that might surprise you. Some of the most important numbers predicting your future health aren't even the numbers your doctor is testing for. And that's not even the scary part. You can have normal labs and still be quietly developing metabolic disease, infertility, brain fog, heart disease, even cancer.

And today I'm going to help you build your very own biological dashboard by giving you the 12 numbers that actually predict your long-term health. Health and longevity. And I wanna share why this is such a personal thing for me. I had my, one of my best friends in the world, my father-in-law, and I was going to the gym with him.

He looked incredibly healthy, 61 years old, and had a heart attack 2 years ago. And I believe if we would've known some of these numbers that he had never been tested for, that he could still be alive today. You can have perfect lab results on Tuesday and a metabolic breakdown on Wednesday, or an even more devastating health condition. Why?

Because Western medicine is geared to spot disease, not measure true health. You know, let me ask you this question. Has your doctor ever tested you for these vitamins and minerals, and do you know your exact numbers right now? Like, what is your level of magnesium in your body, or vitamin B12, or B9, or selenium, or zinc? Do you know your magnesium and zinc numbers right now?

Those are some of the most crucial nutrients in your body, And most doctors have never tested for those. And so today I'm going to be tearing up the playbook that most doctors go by and giving you the true biological dashboard with the 12 specific markers that actually predict your future health that you have to know to be healthy. Welcome to the Dr. Josh Axe Show.

Start your day with Quaker Protein Instant Oatmeal. The instant oatmeal ready to help you tackle whatever your day brings. Like wrangling your toddler into their car seat. That was fun. Coaching your 6th grader's soccer team.

Go girls!

And carrying all the groceries in one trip. Try Quaker Protein Instant Oatmeal, Granola, and Bars. Great taste and a good source of protein. Quaker, bring out the good.

Hey guys, Dr. Axe here. Before we dive into the full episode, I want to encourage you to subscribe so you don't miss a thing in the future. By the way, we've got so many incredible new guests coming on. We've got so many new episodes coming out that I think are going to just blow your mind and add so much value to you and your health and your life.

The best way to keep up with things is to subscribe and follow the show. Thanks so much for doing so. All right, let's dive in. Into the content. And so right now, something strange is happening. Millions of people with normal labs are struggling with heart disease, diabetes, infertility, hypothyroidism, fatigue, brain fog, and rapid aging.

And here's the shocking statistic: over 90% of adults today have metabolic dysfunction. And many of these people look perfectly healthy on the outside. And so I want to give you an example of this as well. I had a patient, actually a friend of mine who is a doctor of chiropractic and functional medicine doctor. His wife had struggled with infertility for 5 years.

She had gone and got multiple things of blood work done every single 6 months, and her lab work was still completely normal. All of it completely normal, yet infertility for 5 years. And she was following a paleo diet. She was taking loads of supplements. She was exercising, doing all of those things, still struggling with infertility.

And finally, I went and ran very different labs on her, and I started to discover she had certain vitamin mineral deficiencies. Here's another thing. She was under-consuming carbs. She— carbs— she was going paleo, eating all of these almonds and nuts and protein. She was getting almost no carbs, and so it was negatively affecting her thyroid and some of her hormones.

Well, I changed her diet, dialed in those nutrients she was deficient in on her blood work, and everything changed. 6 Months later was pregnant. Uh, they had twins and they now have, I wanna say, 4 kids at home and just thriving. But listen, isn't it incredible what identifying the right metrics can do?

It could be the difference between, between you having incredible health or, or not having health or having a child or not, or having energy or not, or overcoming a medical condition or not. And if you have a similar story, by the way, drop it in the comments to encourage others.

I'd love to hear from you if you ever struggled with a chronic health issue and you discovered one thing that was keeping you from getting there, what did you do and what did you overcome? Drop that in the comments. I'd love to hear your story. So the moral of the story isn't I got blood work done or I think I'm healthy. The real question is, am I measuring for the right things?

And when you track the wrong metrics, diseases can develop quietly for years before anything shows up on a routine blood test. I mean, this happens constantly. With people with heart issues. Like, they're, they're constantly looking at cholesterol. What's my overall cholesterol? What's my LDL?

We should be focused on other things like high-sensitivity C-reactive protein and focusing on reducing inflammation. And we should be focused on oxidative stress and mitochondrial health and, and, and nitric oxide levels. There are so many other things you should be looking for. So if you are looking at the wrong metrics for your health, you're focused on TSH and T4 thyroid hormone.

If those are the things you're focused on, It's typically going to negatively impact your health. So what I'm going to do right now is dive into the 12 numbers that predict longevity, metabolic health, cardiovascular width, hormonal health, and biological aging. And we want to focus on these as 3 systems: your metabolic energy, your cardiovascular flow, and your cellular aging.

So let's first dive into metabolic energy. We're starting with a number most doctors rarely check, But it's one of the earliest warning signs of metabolic dysfunction. It's fasting insulin. The optimal range is 2 to 5 micro international units per milliliter. And here's why this matters, by the way. Fasting insulin.

Fasting insulin is one of the earliest indicators of metabolic dysfunction, so often rising years before blood glucose becomes completely abnormal. And glucose reflects your current state, whereas insulin reveals where your metabolism is heading. So this is sort of like the early warning sign of knowing that your blood sugar's creeping up.

That pre-diabetic state is rising fast, and fasting insulin is your best test. Elevated insulin, by the way, according to multiple clinical studies, is strongly associated with fatty liver, weight gain, type 2 diabetes, and cognitive decline like Alzheimer's disease. And over 80 million Americans, they're estimated to have insulin resistance, Many with completely normal glucose levels.

So if you want to proactively prevent metabolic disease, weight gain, fatigue, and accelerated aging, ask your doctor or provider to include fasting insulin in your routine labs. Number 2, blood sugar control. This is really looking at glucose plus your A1C levels, right? A1C. Over 100 million Americans 1 in 3 have prediabetes.

Blood sugar is not only about diabetes, it's a cornerstone of metabolic health influencing your brain, your hormones, your aging. Remember this as well, by the way, when I use the word insulin, insulin is a hormone, and when insulin gets knocked off, it will impact estrogen and testosterone and thyroid hormone and all these other hormones.

So when glucose is unstable, it drives, by the way, it also drives, it damages your blood vessels, right? So, so I mentioned this earlier with heart disease, most of the time, And we, we, we're running and looking at, hey, what are, uh, what are my cholesterol levels, right?

In terms of my heart health, your A1C levels, knowing your glucose is, is in my opinion, much more important than knowing your overall cholesterol levels, right? Because we need to focus on lowering blood glucose and A1C. And if these A— like, like, let me say this, your fasting insulin is where you're at now and kind of where it's, it's looking at where you're heading.

Those A1C levels are looking at more of a long-term picture of what your insulin levels have been, right? And this is really tied to insulin resistance, fat accumulation, inflammation. And if you have these elevated levels, typically you're going to have energy crashes, right? So if you're feeling like your energy is up and down all the time, there's definitely most likely an insulin issue.

You've got also, though, brain fog, food cravings. Oxidative stress, like your joints and your body feel like they're aging faster than they should, that's a problem. Now, here's the optimal range of your A1C. If you've ever had your A1C level tested, you should be between 4.8 and 5.3. That is ideal.

And if you're above that mark, right, creeping up 5.6 and you're getting higher, those are major issues with your blood sugar. And by the way, there's great value at looking at some of these lab tests together. Like, one of the things that I do in my practice is we look at all of these different, all these different lab units together.

So like at the Longevity Clinic in the Health Institute, like if I'm looking at numbers and looking at blood work, I'm looking at, okay, what's the person's fasting glucose? What's their A1C? And you know what sometimes happens is I've had people with normal A1C, but they were still metabolically unhealthy because their, uh, fasting glucose was off, right? So, so that can happen.

So, And one other test I really like, I want to mention here for metabolic health, is monitoring fasting glucose and A1C together, and sometimes doing a continuous glucose monitor right on the back of your arm, your tricep there, being able to see what foods most impact your blood sugar and insulin. There's a lot of value there as well.

But again, testing blood glucose and insulin is one of the most important markers for your metabolic health and energy. Now, Here's number 3, cortisol and sleep quality. We want to know what these markers are. One of the most overlooked drivers of your health is not just your one-time cortisol level, but your cortisol rhythm. By the way, I want to mention this. Cortisol is not an enemy, right?

You need it for energy. You need it to be alert. It's really important. It's just about timing. You want cortisol high in the morning and low at night. You need balance and you need rhythm. When the rhythm is off, everything feels harder. It's hard to get outta bed in the morning. You're tired in the afternoon. You're just exhausted at night.

And then what happens somehow, even though you're exhausted, you can't sleep at night, right? Because cortisol is spiking while you're trying to sleep and melatonin won't come up. It's all about getting that cortisol-melatonin back into balance. All right. And again, if your cortisol is too low in the morning, you're going to be sluggish and feel foggy in the morning. Okay?

If it's too high at night, again, it blocks sleep and recovery, right? So, so, so we really want to know what those cortisol levels are for longevity and for health. And if it's off, accelerated aging, hormone imbalance, inflammation. Remember this, cortisol is the master hormone. When it gets knocked off, it'll then impact insulin.

And then estrogen and testosterone and thyroid hormones, and it'll knock off every other hormone in your body. So if there's one hormone you want to fix, it's cortisol. Number 2 is insulin. In fact, almost all hormone conditions come down to fixing cortisol and insulin first. Now, I want to talk about the importance of sleep and how that impacts cortisol. Listen to this.

Just 4 nights of getting 4.5 hours of sleep a night can reduce insulin sensitivity by 30%, even in healthy adults. Okay? So if you aren't getting enough sleep, in the matter of a few days, it will completely destroy and harm your insulin sensitivity, right? And so, so here's what you want to do.

Number one, there's great value in first thing in the morning, getting outside within 30 to 60 minutes of waking up and getting that natural sunlight. When, and by the way, It's about 10 to 50 times brighter outside than even inside when you have lights on in your home. It's way brighter outside.

And so you need that level of brightness and those rays, UV rays hitting your body in order for cortisol to truly turn on at the level it should. So you want to get outside, even if it's for a 20-minute walk, even if you got to get bundled up, ideally get outside first thing in the morning. And then of course, You know this, avoid late night blue light, right?

It's sending signals for cortisol to stay high, and you want to keep those sleep-wake times constant. Do everything you can to support those cortisol-melatonin rhythms. Now, here is a number your doctor has likely never, ever tested for, and it is your waist-to-height ratio, or body fat— body fat percentage is secondary, but not even as important. As your waist-to-height ratio.

Knowing where your body fat is being stored matters more than your weight, much more than your weight. So a lot of you are testing, hey, what's my— what's— how much do I weigh? That is not near as important as where your body fat is being stored. This is the last metric I want to talk about in this metabolic energy section, but it's really important.

Research shows waist-to-height ratio Outperforms BMI in predicting risk of mortality in almost all diseases, according to the University of Pittsburgh, a study out of there. And it reflects— here's what it reflects: when you have weight right in the middle, right on your waist, right around your tummy and belly button, it reflects visceral fat.

And that type of fat, which is the fat that surrounds your organs, like fat around your liver and your digestive organs and pancreas and immune system, When you have visceral fat around your organs, it is much more dangerous than body fat anywhere else in the body, and it drives 24/7 inflammation and insulin resistance.

So the more body fat— listen, if you have some body fat on your arms or some on your legs, or it's distributed kind of throughout your body in different areas, that's not near as harmful as if you are holding onto that body fat.

Yeah.

Right in your midsection. That type of body fat is continually— just think about this visually, what's happening. It is— if you have that type of body fat, it is continually releasing and flooding inflammation and basically damaging and harming your entire body. Okay? Most people don't think of fat as an organ. Your body fat is an organ, like your heart is an organ, like your brain is an organ.

Body fat is an organ that will release these chemicals. Driving constant inflammation. So if you can lose that type of body fat in particular, what it does to your health and longevity is absolutely incredible. It will start to reverse heart disease. You'll start to reverse cancer risk, dementia.

So not only will you lose weight and look better and feel better, but you're reducing your risk of every disease you can think of. And here's something that happens sometimes too. You know, when I have people come into practice, I— sometimes people will have normal body fat percentage. But still carry high visceral fat and a higher mortality risk.

You know, one of the things in my practice, we have this really advanced body fat analyzer that also tests for height-to-weight circumference, but it looks at exactly where your body fat is around exactly what organ. So we kind of know where the risk is, maybe certain supplements to take, what to do there in order to start to reverse the disease. But just know this.

If there's fat in the midsection, you want to be very proactive at losing that fat, right? Because if you have that fat in this midsection, chronic inflammation, fatty liver tendency, cardiovascular disease risk, insulin resistance, those things are all going to happen. So now let's go into part 2, your cardiovascular system markers. All right.

Once metabolic health breaks down, the next system that's affected Is your cardiovascular system. And cardiovascular disease to this day remains the number one cause of death worldwide. So you want to pay close attention to this section for your biological dashboard. Okay? So we talked about this earlier, uh, right? Cholesterol. Cholesterol travels in tiny vehicles, right?

It's like a vehicle driving things around in your body, these lipoproteins. And when you're looking at the traditional LDL-C test, it tells you the weight of the cargo. All right, so, so you're looking at— and, and so what LDL cholesterol is looking at is the weight of the cargo that you're— is, is being driven through your blood that's being transported.

Okay, but it does not tell you the number of vehicles on the road, which is way more important. ApoB actually counts the vehicles, and it's the number of vehicles that leads to traffic, or what we call plaque buildup, Actually in your arteries. I mean, think about, for many of you, you likely know your overall cholesterol levels or your LDL levels, or maybe even your triglycerides.

How many of you right now know what your ApoB is? That's what actually matters. It's not how large the trucks are, it's how many are on the road that's causing the traffic jam in your bloodstream. So a few big trucks, okay, with— that's high cholesterol, that's low risk, that's not an issue if you have general high LDL, tons of small cars taking up the roadway, right?

And let's say your cholesterol levels are normal. Let's say you're 160 or something, but you have a lot of this, this high ApoB. You have a very high risk of a heart attack or stroke. ApoB outperforms traditional LDL in predicting heart disease according to the American Heart Association now, because heart disease is driven by Particle damage, not cholesterol alone.

Remember, cholesterol, it's your body's repair substance. If you've got a hole in your wall and you need to plaster up that area to cover the hole, that's what cholesterol is. Your body is laying it down to heal itself. By the way, cholesterol— you have to have cholesterol for vitamin D synthesis. In fact, in order to make vitamin D, sunlight hits your skin.

The sunlight takes the cholesterol in your skin And that's what's turned into vitamin D. Okay? In order for you to create testosterone or other hormones like progesterone, your body uses cholesterol to actually build those hormones. So if you just go and take a statin drug or focus on, oh, I'm going to do everything to get my cholesterol down, that's not fixing the issue.

We don't want to really focus on LDL. We want to focus on minimizing the number of cars on the road, which is ApoB. And that's actually what predicts Heart attack, arterial plaque buildup, atherosclerosis, and potential stroke. You can have normal cholesterol, but ApoB, and so you want to make sure that's what you're testing for if you want to keep your cardiovascular system healthy.

Number 6 thing you want to test for, for longevity, is blood pressure. Over 1.4 billion people worldwide have hypertension, and many are undiagnosed. And I want to share with you, this was my father-in-law. We know now very late that he had very high blood pressure and we didn't realize it. And we believe this is why he had a major heart attack.

And then there were these other markers that we've talked about here that he had never been tested for. He's one of those people that he just didn't want to go to the doctor, didn't like going to the doctor. And I understand that. Listen, No, most people do not like going to the doctor, but looking back, we wish we would've known those numbers.

And so listen, when it comes to blood pressure, it's really important that if yours is high, that you do everything you can to drive it down. And you want to start with trying to do that naturally. Your optimal range of blood pressure is 120 to 180, and some people that are healthier are going to be lower than that, probably in the 110s.

I mean, I want to say I'm typically like 112 or 110 or something like that. I'm in the 110s somewhere typically with my blood pressure. But if yours gets over, especially that 129 marker, anywhere in the 130s, you really want to take action and start doing things for your blood pressure. Because what it's doing is it's constant strain on your blood vessels and organs in your heart. Okay?

So think about it like this. If you're— think about it's blood, it's pressure. Okay? So think about if you're like holding a dumbbell. Okay? If you are just holding up your arm, you can probably do that for a pretty long time. Okay? There's no extra weight there. Okay? There's no extra pressure. Okay? But imagine now we put a 5-pound dumbbell in there. Okay?

Let's say that's— now your blood pressure's 125, and then a 10-pound. And then let's say we put 30 pounds on there and your blood pressure's consistently at 150 or 160. Over time, it just can't handle it. And then your arteries, they give out. There's strain there. Your body tries to lay down more cholesterol to fix it.

And, and, and then there's hardening of the arteries there cuz there's inflammation. My point is this, is that blood pressure, how much pressure is building up on your organs over time, it's a major driver of, by the way, not only heart disease, but that heart disease, that blood pressure is a driver of kidney disease, uh, brain issues, and it often rises silently.

Elevated blood pressure strongly predicts heart disease, stroke, kidney dysfunction, and brain and cognitive decline. So here's the action steps. You want to monitor it regularly and know what yours is and address those elevations through a diet like a biblical diet or a Mediterranean diet, right? You want to really focus on lots of protein. So high protein, high fiber, high nutrient.

You want to do a lot of wild-caught fish like salmon. You want to do a lot of extra virgin olive oil. You want to focus on getting lots of berries, apples, and pomegranates, right?

Those drivers that have really good fiber and really high antioxidant intake, because certain types of fiber can actually help get rid of inflammatory compounds in excess, certain types of cholesterol from your body as well. And then lots of steamed vegetables. That's, that's really the ideal diet. Maybe even some nuts and seeds like walnuts and flax.

Yeah.

Right? That's the sort of diet that is going to help heal your heart and lower blood pressure. And there's many supplements that can help there as well, such as hawthorn berry, high-dose omega-3 fatty acids, 2 to 3 grams of EPA/DHA a day, getting more of, uh, you know, fiber supplement. Um, garlic is wonderful. Turmeric and ginger tea is wonderful.

Do everything you can to lower that blood pressure naturally. Magnesium, by the way, Also helps relax those blood vessels, reducing that pressure, doing around 300 to 600 milligrams per day of a magnesium, like a magnesium glycinate or something like that. Number 7 marker you want to know for your own longevity and health is your VO2 max.

Now, this is something rarely people get tested for, but especially if your focus is longevity and you want to be healthy and fit into your 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, this is a metric deeply tied to lifespan, your VO2 max. I want to mention recently Chuck Norris passed away, and I was a big fan of Chuck Norris. I remember growing up, my dad loved Walker, Texas Ranger.

So when I was in junior high and high school, I mean, my dad, my dad and I would watch Chuck Norris. You know, we loved all of the Chuck Norris memes and sayings, and we're a big fan of him. And when he was 85, so just last year, he hiked a— from— he hiked up a, I want to say a volcano or a mountain over up to over 10,000 feet. Feet.

Um, also he was kickboxing at 85 and, and generally really healthy his entire life. And he's one of those people you'd look at and say, this person has a very, very high VO2 max. Uh, and this is why he was able to be very active climbing mountains, kickboxing, you know, doing sports and active with his whole family and grandkids all the way into his mid to late 80s.

And VO2 max is one of the strongest predictors of longevity that's out there. Question for you. Has yours ever been tested? Here's what VO2 max measures, okay? It measures how efficiently your body utilizes oxygen, and this is a direct reflection of your cardio fitness and often predicts your mortality better than your BMI. So overall, it's something you really want to focus on.

By the way, when I was in track in high school, this is something we used to work on, and I used to do triathlons when I was younger. VO2 max was one of those metrics to where it's, it's sort of How fast can you catch your breath if you do something strenuous, or how fast do you get out of breath?

You know, my wife Chelsea and I and our girls, we just did a trip out to Park City, and we started spending a lot of time out there recently. We love the mountains, and we miss the snow because my wife grew up in Minnesota, I grew up in Ohio.

And so we spent a lot of time— like, when we vacation oftentimes throughout our life, like, we've gone to the beach, and Chelsea's always loved the mountains. And so we started going there recently. And one thing we notice is we've gone up this place where we stay in Park City. It's at like 8,200, 8,300, uh, uh, um, feet in the air and, um, at altitude.

And, you know, we'll notice when we'll first get there, you know, we get out of breath a little bit easier doing certain things. And I love it cuz I'm like, okay, this is testing and helping build up my VO2 max. It's always amazing when I get back to Nashville from my Park City trips, like we did, we were out there for 2 or 3 weeks recently, and then my resting heart rate was so low.

And I did a lot of triathlons in the past, so like my resting heart rate sometimes will be like 32. It's really low cuz I did so much cardiovascular fitness when I was younger and still try and maintain that. But after Park City, it's like my, my, my, my VO2 max is even higher with training at altitude. But there are loads of other ways to train your VO2 max.

You don't have to go and stay up in the mountains for a month. There are ways to train it. And I also wanna say this, low VO2 max is associated with Higher all-cause mortality, accelerated aging, and metabolic disease. Okay, so you want to have a high VO2 max. All right. And you tend to train VO2 max with longer interval training. Okay. That tends to be how you train it.

And so, like, for instance, you could go and get on a spin bike. Let's say you're doing a Peloton ride. What it would tend to be is Almost an equal— like, so if you're familiar with HIIT training, that can help VO2 max. So going hard for 30 seconds, easy for 30 seconds. But VO2 max training tends to be a little bit more going hard for 2 to 3 minutes and then easy for 2 to 3 minutes.

It's typically more in that range of a little bit longer interval training tends to be what optimizes your VO2 max. Okay. But it's longer interval training.

Okay.

And then combining that with walking uphill or where you're kind of— you can still talk, but you're slightly out of breath, that can actually help VO2 max. So think about this. If I want to test my VO2 max, I'm going to go on a brisk walk where I can still talk, but I am getting somewhat out of breath. Okay.

And doing hills while walking, that's a good VO2 max if that's sort of the level you're at. Again, interval training on a Peloton or swimming, that's really great for your VO2 max. Strength movement, right? Doing, doing things where you're doing supersets and you're kind of doing more full body and getting a little out of breath in the gym, that's also good for VO2 max. So VO2 max is important.

Listen to this statistic: the higher your VO2 max, if you have a high VO2 max, you have a 73% lower risk of early death. That's huge. 73% Lower risk of early death with a high VO2 max. So, and it's really all about how fast can you catch your breath And how early do you get out of breath? That's, that's sort of the thing that you can just maintain yourself.

Okay, am I getting out of breath real easy here? I need to start working on my VO2 max. Number 8, your resting heart rate. When you have an elevated resting heart rate, that typically is indicative of reduced cardiovascular conditioning or physiological stress or poor recovery. Now, I just mentioned this, mine tends to be in the 30s. Okay.

And part of this has to do with I trained doing, you know, I, I've worked out my whole life and I was a soccer player and that's a lot of interval training. And then I was a, I, I was a triathlete and doing more of those interval sprints and I ran track and field. So there was a lot of like VO2 max training in my history, but that also has a big impact on resting heart rate.

Now, my resting heart rate will go up some if I am traveling and I am not recovered well. Or if there's too much of a stress. So again, remember, it's a combination of things. It is your cardiovascular conditioning, but it's cardiovascular conditioning combined with your stress levels, combined with your recovery.

Those are the things that impact your resting heart rate, and it reflects how hard your heart must work while it's resting. Okay? An elevated resting heart rate strongly predicts increased all-cause mortality, reduced metabolic efficiency, and greater stress on your bodies and organs.

And so the way you really lower resting heart rate with— by the way, if you've ever followed Bryan Johnson, and by the way, I don't agree with everything he's done. For instance, when he took his son's blood and used that for his own health, I actually don't agree with that. I don't think that was a good thing for his son.

But I do think it's really interesting following him because there's a lot of things that he has done well and testing himself and seeing what works. And so I do watch some of the things he does and say, okay, what are some things that have impacted his health? For instance, one of the things I saw he's doing is really focusing on lowering his resting heart rate.

And he said he noticed that one of the greatest things that impacted his health positively in his sleep scores was getting better sleep, was getting his resting heart rate lower before bed.

Right.

So what happens with a lot of us is we're kind of going, going, going all night and we eat a late dinner and we're watching shows or we're on our phone, your heart rate stays up because you're kind of doing things and working. Versus to get your resting heart rate down, you're turning off the lights, you're having conversation, you're eating earlier at night because your body has to work.

Heart rate goes up some when it's digesting certain foods like carbohydrates. You're listening to an audiobook, something spiritual. People now are using these vagal nerve stimulators. In order to support their parasympathetic nerve system. Parasympathetic nerve system is all about rest, lower resting heart rate. Okay? So it's going to help all those things.

So in order to optimize your resting heart rate, you want to focus on interval aerobic conditioning, getting good sleep, and stress regulation. Those things are all going to lower that resting heart rate.

And basically, if your resting heart rate is low, it tends to mean your body is more like your battery's plugged in, your body, your mitochondria's recharging, your body is in a more optimized healing state. That, that's how I would think about your resting heart rate.

And I look at my resting heart rate every night cuz I wake up, I wear an Oura Ring at night, and I'll, I'll look at my metrics to see, okay, what was my deep sleep and my REM sleep, my overall sleep? And then I look at my HRV and I look at my resting heart rate. Those are the metrics I look at. Because they're very important for longevity. Hey guys, I'm here with my good friend, Dr. Dave Jockers.

In fact, we've been friends for more than 20 years. He runs the podcast, the Dr. Dave Jockers Functional Nutrition Podcast. Dr. Dave, tell us a little bit about what your podcast is about.

Yeah, absolutely. We dive deep on functional nutrition, really how to personalize your nutrition plan for better energy, mental clarity, better hormone balance. And we talk a lot about cellular health, mitochondrial function, cell membrane, We do a deep dive on every major nutrition topic and natural health topic. So everything you need right there at your fingertips.

Dr. Jocker's Functional Nutrition Podcast.

I wanna encourage you, run out and listen to the Dr. Jocker Show. Again, I'm a big fan of it. I think you will be as well. All right, so now let's talk about cellular aging in this next section. This is the last section we're gonna get into, and this might be the most important section where we look at The health of your cells and the markers.

Now, this isn't one marker, but it's getting a blood test done where you're looking at all of your vitamin and mineral deficiencies and also looking at things like mitochondrial function. Okay? That's what we want to look at. And so you can get tested for your levels of magnesium and zinc and B vitamins and selenium.

And if you have any number, any one of those that's very low for a long period of time, It's going to negatively impact organ function and your cellular health. You know, I myself have noticed this, that if I'm ever deficient in a single nutrient on a blood panel and I start to supplement with it, I will notice a big difference. I mean, vitamin D is one example of that.

Like, do you know your vitamin D levels and your magnesium levels? And there are ways of testing for these in the blood, and it is so, so powerful. So that's the first thing I would say is Getting a blood test done to look at cellular markers, that would be my number one thing in terms of testing you could do to optimize your cellular health. Okay?

And you can get that done at the Health Institute, the Longevity Clinic. And I'll talk about that here in a minute, at least getting on the waiting list for that really advanced blood work. Number 10 is this: high sensitivity CRP. Hs-CRP tracks internal inflammation. This is kind of, you know, that slow-burning fire behind modern disease today. And you want your levels to be less than 1.

That's ideal. And many people feel fine but have elevated inflammation beneath the surface. And you might notice this too. Maybe you're just— joints don't feel as young as they used to. You feel like you're aging a little more quickly.

Typically, there's elevated CRP signals, and these are immune signals as well that cause persistent activation, can increase your risk of also things like autoimmune disease. And this Low-grade inflammation damages your blood vessels, disrupts your hormones, impairs brain function, and overall accelerates biological aging.

An elevated CRP, according to medical studies, is a very strong indicator of cardiovascular disease risk, metabolic dysfunction, and insulin resistance. And so I mentioned earlier, you want to be below 1 milligram, right, per liter. Um, if you're above 2 milligrams, you have a significantly higher risk of a heart attack, even with normal cholesterol. Now, here's the good news.

Inflammation is highly responsive to lifestyle. If you can get on an anti-inflammatory diet like I talked about earlier, high in wild-caught fish like salmon, organic meat, so high protein, steamed vegetables, extra virgin olive oil, eating some walnuts, avocado, Doing, you know, the berries and the apples and the pomegranate. If you can do that, you're going to reduce inflammation quickly.

It's going to make a big difference, right? Getting sleep and stress management under control, gut health support, those things make the biggest difference on those CRP levels. Next up, HRV, your heart rate variability. Higher HRV reflects stronger physiological flexibility and stress tolerance. If your HRV is, is, is low, Okay. Um, that means that your body is under a lot of stress. Okay.

And it really measures nervous system balance and your recovery capacity. Chronically low HRV means the body is stuck in a stress state. Okay. And it's a good predictor of your body's overall resilience, um, how well your body recovers, uh, your inflammation, a number of things there, but you want your HRV to be high or trending higher.

And sometimes I want to mention trends matter more than isolated readings. For instance, like looking at my Oura Ring over time, I'm able to see, okay, is my HRV getting better and better? Are my sleep scores getting better and better? You want to be looking for those improvements, right? And my HRV is very closely tied. For me, I noticed the biggest thing, it's stress.

That's the single biggest thing that impacts it. The second biggest thing after stress is sleep. Okay. And then balanced training. Training, but not overtraining. That balance of working out hard, but also playing and resting well. Okay? But really, sleep and stress, sleep and stress, sleep and stress. Biggest things that impact HRV. And then that balance in training.

If you can do that, your HRV is going to go up. It's a major predictor of longevity. And then number 12, muscle and strength score. Okay? One of the most overlooked predictors of longevity is your muscle mass, and it declines drastically after 40 if you're not maintaining it. Think about muscle like this. Muscle is your retirement account for aging. Every workout is a deposit.

And let me mention this, when you are adding on muscle mass, though, one important thing as well is that you're doing it in a way to where you're not going to get injured with right movement.

I see a lot of people when I go and work out at the gym, and there's a lot of those guys in there, I can tell they're probably taking testosterone, they're working out hard, they're doing a lot, but they are—.

Injured.

Working out in a way to where I can tell they're probably injuring their shoulders or their backs. And I see this in young people too right now. So there's a number of people— like, I saw someone in there this morning, and there's this guy in his 30s doing really heavy deadlifts, but his form was poor.

And I thought, you know what, like, he's putting on muscle right now, but he's also injuring his low back every time he lifts. And it's just a matter of time before he has facet syndrome or blows or damages a disc or Has an injury. And so here's the thing, you want to put on muscle while at the same time doing it with correct form to where you're not causing any damage to your joints or muscles.

Okay? But as I mentioned, you do want to add on muscle mass or maintain it as you age. Muscle provides built-in metabolic stability. Remember I said this earlier, your body fat's an organ, your muscle's an organ too, where body fat is releasing chemicals that cause inflammation. Your muscles are allowing your body to keep insulin more balanced. It's like longevity insurance, okay?

It regulates glucose, it improves insulin sensitivity, it reduces inflammation. Muscle does all of those things, and the earlier you invest, the more it compounds. Now, here's the problem with low muscle mass. Low muscle mass strongly predicts frailty and loss of independence. Okay. And we see this a lot, especially women.

I see this, like, they get into their 70s or 80s and they become so frail that that impacts their longevity and their overall life quality, right? So women, just as important or more important than men that you're doing things to build muscle mass. Again, we talked about higher risk of fall, slower recovery from stress or illness, increased all-cause mortality for people with low muscle mass.

You want to have more muscle mass. Based on you also being able to move functionally. And it's not just muscle mass, it's also strength, right? You wanna have more muscle mass, you wanna have more strength. These are great predictors of health and longevity. And muscle, by the way, is highly adaptable at any age.

Resistance training improves strength and bone density and metabolic health no matter what age or gender you are. And so you wanna engage in strength building. And here's, here's, here's one study, multiple studies have looked at, One of the greatest predictors of strength is your grip strength and also being able to do functional movements.

So say, can you do a squat where you sit back down and stand back up, right? Can you do a hip hinge? Can you hold onto a pull-up bar, hold onto heavier dumbbells, right? You want to increase your grip strength and then your ability to do functional movement. A functional movement is like sitting down, right? You want to be able to sit down and stand up at all ages.

Can you get from being on the floor all the way up to standing? So the more you can do those things sort of in a functional movement way, the better, right? So really, for most people, it's really optimizing the strength of your butt and your legs and your hips, and those sort of movements is a big thing that you do want to focus on. So let me recap some of these practical targets for you, right?

You want to aim for a blood pressure of 120 over 80. You want to aim for A1C score of 5.0 to about 5.4, a high sensitivity CRP less than 1, waist-to-hip ratio less than 0.5, resting heart rate ideally in the 40s or 50s, but really 50s to 60s at the very least. You want to see your HRV trending upward and your blood work, you want to see those in the optimal range, not normal, Right?

So like vitamin D, you don't want that in the teens or 20s. You want that in the 50s to 80s. You want those in the optimal when it comes to your blood work. And some of the metrics, again, you can do at home, others are wearables, or others you may need to see a doctor. But I wanted to do my due diligence in covering all of these things in depth. By the way, I want to mention this.

The Health Institute currently offers cellular blood work analyzing your ApoB, your high-sensitivity CRP, and your glucose. And so if you want to get that blood work done, you could reach out and go to thehealthinstitute.com and get that initial blood work done. And thousands have used our protocols with incredible results. Or actually, the best place you go to is mybloodwork.com.

So if you just go to mybloodwork.com today, you can get that cellular blood work analysis. And by the way, At that website, we're doing the basic cellular blood panel now. We're working on expanding markers to include all of these things that we talked about. And if you want to keep up to date with that full panel, just sign up for the newsletter.

The link is in the description to be the first to know about the really advanced intracellular blood panel that not only looks at what are the markers at in your blood, but what are they in the cell. So remember this. Test, don't guess, right? You can't improve what you don't measure. So I wanna encourage you, you know, keep track of this on your phone or somewhere.

Have your own dashboard that where you're keeping track of your resting heart rate and your sleep scores. And again, like I'm doing this right now, many of these with an Oura Ring, but I also get my annual blood work done where I'm keeping track of all this and then have a plan to continually Prove it week after week, regularly throughout the year.

And these metrics can be improved with lifestyle, nutrition, and natural interventions. So here's this week's challenge. Pick one of those markers we talked about and start to monitor where you are in at least one. If you could do all of them, that would be amazing, but at least one. Or maybe you think, hey, I could do 2 or 3.

Figure out some of those markers that you can start to test and start to look at them. Every single month and see where you're at to see if you're improving. And what I'm gonna do on this show is we're gonna continue to dive into more of these markers as the years go on and do everything I can to teach you how to improve your longevity metrics.

I wanna say thanks so much for tuning in here to the Dr. Josh Axe Show, where each and every week we dive deep on how to heal physically, mentally, spiritually. Now, I wanna mention one of the greatest things you can do to support the show is subscribe.

So thank you, all of you that are subscribed, that are on mission with me, that are looking to change the health of the world, including your own health and your family's health. And I know you subscribers are the most likely to do that. I know you are doing that. Thanks so much for that. Also, think about one person.

Who's one person that needs to know this, who needs to know these metrics that you could share this with? I want to encourage you, send them a text, post on social, but let's share the truth of health and healing. And thank you, all of you in advance who are willing to share. I can't wait to see you on the next episode.