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How Lifestyle Medicine Can Reverse Aging & Stress | Dr. Kirk Parsley DSH #1153
31 Jan 2025
Chapter 1: How does lifestyle medicine reverse aging?
It's a total mess. Oh my gosh. We do some good things, but mainly it's a mess. It saved my life. I had pneumonia once. I can say Western medicine did save my life. They're great for that. We're great at infectious disease, like severe infectious, great at trauma, but everything else, you probably want to take care of yourself.
All right, guys, Dr. Kirk Parsley here today. We're going to talk Navy SEALs, talk peptides, and a bunch of fun health stuff. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, man. Absolutely. We were talking out there. I was just so fascinated that the SEALs are dealing with some major issues.
Yeah, a lot of people A lot of people just think military guys are young and indestructible and they can just keep going forever. It's like any other organization. It takes years to get really good at it, to be proficient, to be a leader, to be able to...
you know, plan and lead missions and things, you know, you're looking at a decade or more to be in there, which is a lot of training and a lot of deployments and a lot of battle and a lot of injuries and a lot of sleep deprivation and, you know, a lot of, you know, psychological trauma, you know, for lack of a better word, and all that stuff.
And it pays, you know, it costs, you know, it weighs on the individual. And they are very strong, very resilient, very capable men, but they're not indestructible. And they do start breaking down and their performance does start to decline for reasons that are by and large repairable.
But you want to talk about a stilted, overly conservative medical organization, nothing towards the military medicine. I mean, they're just, they're very, staunchy old school kind of, you know, anything that our troops have to have disqualifies them. Because if they have to have a medication, well then you can't deploy them because what if they don't have their medication? So it's a tough battle.
And there's a lot of political stuff in there that upsets people too because like technically when somebody wants to do transgender, whatever, and they need hormones, those people are considered OK and they're still deployable. But if a SEAL needs hormones to be not above normal, but just to be high in the high reference range of what his age group should be, the upper, say, 25% of that range,
If you need, you know, or if you just want to take them out of the tank, like I see a lot of guys who, you know, they're only in the normal range by one point out of like a 800 point range, right? So they're one point into it, but you can't, but that's normal. And you can't, you can't give them, you can't give them hormones, even though.
You know, it's much different than what people think of when they think of cheating in sports. Like cheating in sports, like a high end of normal would be $1,100. Somebody who's cheating in sports is probably going to be like $1,500 or $2,000 or something. They're going outside to be superhuman. Yeah. Like, no, we just want to get them up to the $900 range, right?
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Chapter 2: What challenges do Navy SEALs face with health and performance?
And so I just, the good thing was the SEALs, like when I was a SEAL, nobody knew what a SEAL was. So it wouldn't have been helpful. Movies hadn't come out yet.
Yeah, the movies and Bin Laden and all that stuff. Like none of that happened. But when I was treating these guys, they already kind of had this celebrity status. And so- If I saw somebody's TED talk or heard them lecture or read their book, I'd call them and be, hey, I'm the doctor for the West Coast Seals. Can I consult with you, run patients by you? Can I, whatever, come train with you?
And every single guy that I talked to was like, sure, I'd love to help. Nobody ever charged me for mentorship, and I just got to learn a whole new way of treating people. It took me out of sick disease care into, this performance optimization role is what I call it.
It's like taking people who are relatively healthy compared to the general population, and still is, of course, exceptionally healthy compared to the general population. But there's a delta between what you're capable of, what you know you're capable of, and what you can actually do at this moment. And how do we close that delta? And it's a lot of the same stuff that a longevity doctor would do.
I don't know how long you're going to live, so I can't really promise you longevity. You could work with me and die tomorrow. You could work with me and not die till you're 90, but maybe you're going to live to 95. If you didn't work with me, I don't know. So I'm not comfortable with saying longevity, but it's a lot of the same stuff. You're basically improving their numbers.
Yeah, I mean, the way I look at it is if I can make my goal is basically as I take your lab, but everything that I know how to measure And now there's all kinds of wearables and there's all sorts of stuff that we, genetics, epigenetics, there's all kinds of things we can test now that I couldn't do then. But everything that I know how to measure and everything I know how to have impact on,
I know what a 25-year-old healthy athletic man looks like, right? If we use that as the baseline and we say, hey, I want all your metrics to look like, if I gave your packet to a colleague of mine and said, who do you think this is? They'd say, a fit 25-year-old athletic man, right? which means you have the most potential at that point, right? You're the most resilient.
As far as what we can measure, your capability of being strong, your capability of being enduring, your capability of handling injury and recovering from disease, which is essentially youth, right? What's the difference between a kid who falls down the stairs and an 80-year-old who falls down the stairs? What resources do you have to recover from that? Well, when you're 80, not many.
And that's why a lot of people die, right? When you're a kid, just like, oh, you're metabolically healthy, strong. Your hormones are up. Your healing is super fast and all. And you're just more pliable, more athletic, whatever. And so a little kid can recover from something that an older person can't.
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