Dr. Eric Topol

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954 appearances 18 recordings 4 series first heard May 2025 last heard 14 May

Dr. Eric Topol’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 16 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 13.

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The Excerpt · SPECIAL | Dr. Eric Topol shares a new vision for living longer and better · 8 May 2025 podcast

Then the next, of course, is the problem with microplastics that are getting to every part of our body and especially our heart arteries and our brain and implicated in conditions like heart attacks, strokes, and higher risk of dementia. So how do we get rid of plastics? That's hard. We can certainly reduce the intake of things that are in plastics.

Don't microwave things that are in plastic containers. Don't use plastic any way we can avoid it. And that, of course, also applies to forever chemicals that are pervasive in so many things where we unfortunately, Dana, don't have

the national priority like they do in some parts of Europe and other parts of the world to reduce the toll of these major environmental risks that are unfortunately mitigating the progress that we're making. So we can do some things at the individual and family level, but we also need things to occur at the national level.

So we don't know yet whether that will take hold, but it's a really intriguing prospect. And the point is we each metabolize the food that we eat, the things that we drink totally differently. So if you and I had the exact same food, the amount, the exact same timing, one of us would have potentially a glucose spike and the other one would have no increase in glucose at all.

And the same would be with other things like lipids. So the point being is that if we can understand what is the uniqueness of each of us, And we can do that starting now with sensors and other ways, like our gut microbiome, which turns out to be very important.

Then perhaps we'll get to a point where we can say, these foods are not good for you because they're potentially going to increase your progression from prediabetes to diabetes. On the other hand, these foods might help you reduce your risk of cancer. And so each of us has propensity for either benefit or potential hazard from foods. And so a lot of work is being done to decode all that.

And the NIH has a very big study that's ongoing. And hopefully over the years ahead, we might be able to crack the case. But it's still something that's a prospect and not a reality yet.

Yeah, I'm so glad you asked about that because now we have to consider the blue zones as a real myth. The more it's been looked into very carefully, the absence of evidence for the healthy aging longevity in these zones of the world has never been confirmed.

poor records and inability to confirm the data about these people that were thought to be these special, exceptional, healthy agers is a real problem. There's no question that we, as I present in the book, 98-year-old people who are completely healthy, never had an age-related chronic disease, But there doesn't appear to be any zone in the world that is special.

There may be a cluster of people here and there, like in Okinawa or Italy, as was presented in Blue Zones. But it's been hyped up, unfortunately, to the nth degree, and it just lacks the substantial evidence to support it.

What excites me and what I think is very different is from this science of aging, That is, we have all these clocks now we didn't have before. And so the near term, one of those things we just talked about may click eventually, but none of them are there yet. And it may take years before any are shown to be safe and effective.

But on the other hand, we can now predict a person's arc of age-related diseases now, unlike ever before, and it's just going to keep getting better. And that's why I think the science of aging brings us today to a lot of exciting potential.

Because if we can suppress the three age-related big diseases, the big killers, that's accomplishing a huge amount that doesn't necessitate one of these elegant approaches to reverse aging. Instead of reversing aging, it's preventing the age-related diseases.

Thanks so much for having me, Dana.

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