Chapter 1: What is the relationship between stress and hair graying?
What's the deal? Can people reverse the graying of their hair by reducing their stress? Can people accelerate the graying of their hair by stressing more? Likely both are true, yes.
Okay. And I think what we discovered is that hair graying, at least temporarily, is reversible. This was surprising because it goes against this notion that aging is a linear process that... Just happens over time, no matter what you do. And here we should know, actually, a hallmark of aging, which is, you know, depigmentation, losing color in your beard and your hair.
It's something that happens to almost everyone, but at different, you know, stages of life and so on. And then on the same person, and the reason we got into this was that this felt like the perfect experiment. Every hair has the same genome. They're all genetically identical twins, right?
Chapter 2: How can mitochondrial function be enhanced beyond traditional advice?
And they're all exposed to the same exercise regime, the same food, the same stress levels, yet some hairs go gray when you're like late 30s, and then some hairs go gray when you're like in your 80s. What the hell's happening? If we could figure this out, maybe we can understand why different people age at different rates.
Because it's very clear that there's no more than 10% of how long you live that's genetically driven. Like the best studies put this at around 7%. 7% of longevity is genetically inherited maybe, and then about 90% is not. Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Martin Picard. Dr. Martin Picard is a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University.
He is also a leading expert on how your daily behaviors and your mode of thinking, meaning your psychology, change energy production in your cells and can accelerate or reverse biological aging. Most people have heard of mitochondria as the energy producing organelles within their cells. And of course, that's linked to what we call metabolism and metabolic health.
And of course, most people understand that eating properly, exercising and sleep are critical for metabolic health. But it turns out that's only part of the story. As Dr. Picard explains, mitochondria don't just make energy.
They act as sort of antennas to link your psychological experiences to your organ health, your rate of aging and your sense of vigor, meaning your mental and physical readiness. He explains that how well your mitochondria work in different organs and brain areas reflects what specific forms of exercise you do, as well as how you think and how you manage stress.
Today, he explains the things that you can do to enhance mitochondrial function that go beyond the typical get sleep, eat right and exercise advice. His lab has shown that aging is not linear. It's not just a progression from youth to death. where your mitochondria decline over that time.
At different ages and stages, mitochondrial health drops off like a cliff, but there are critical things that you can do in terms of how you eat, your mindset and exercise that can offset those changes.
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Chapter 3: What role do lifestyle choices play in mitochondrial health?
His lab also famously showed that graying of hair is indeed related to stress and is also fortunately reversible.
By the end of today's episode, you will not only have had a masterclass in mitochondria, he explains mitochondria with immense clarity so that you really will understand how these incredible organelles work to produce energy and as the sort of antennas to direct that energy from outside you and by the things you do.
And by the end of today's episode, you'll also have a lot of actionable items that you can apply toward your health and to offset aging. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Martin Picard. Dr. Martin Picard, welcome. Thank you. Your work is so relevant nowadays. I suppose it was relevant always, but
These days we hear so much about mitochondria. Most people have perhaps heard of mitochondria. They think the powerhouse of the cell, but you're going to tell us that it's a lot more than that.
And I should say right off the bat that if people think that perhaps a discussion about these little organelles we call mitochondria is not for them, keep in mind Martin's Laboratory was the one that discovered that you can indeed reverse the graying of your hair, that graying of hair is not a prerequisite. of aging. There's some other ways that hair grays. So we'll get to that later.
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Chapter 4: How does energy flow relate to emotional experiences?
Super interesting work. I have a million questions for you. Let's start off with the most important and most basic question, which is what is this thing that we call energy? There's electrical energy. We know the sun gives us energy, et cetera. But when we're talking about the energy of life,
Physical and mental vigor, the feeling that we want to do something as opposed to have to force ourselves to do it. What is this at the organism and cellular level?
I mean, even physicists don't agree on what energy is. And there's been debates, you know, Richard Feynman, who was like this amazing science communicator, physicist, said like, we don't even know what energy is and what's the best way to define it. Because there are all of these forms, thermal energy, heat, right? Light energy, electromagnetic, kinetic energy, movement, speed, right?
Potential energy. So energy kind of manifests in all of these different ways. So in a nutshell, I think the best definition I've heard from my wife, Narosha, who's a biophysicist, energy is the potential for change. And that applies to any kind of form, any form of energy you can think about. It's the potential for change, for changing something in the system.
And that's, I think, an accurate description of thermal energy. If something is frozen solid, there's no potential for moving something. We need to be at 37 Celsius, the human body. It gives us the potential to move and muscles to contract and our biology to progress. to function. So this is just one example where there's like a sweet spot of energy or there needs to be some thermal energy.
You need to be a little warm to be alive. So the potential for change, and then it manifests in all these beautiful ways. And it's something that flows. A key property of energy is something that has the ability to flow and to transform. You can never create nor destroy energy, right? That's like a fundamental law of thermodynamics, but energy always transforms.
So you can transform heat into motion, right? And like the steam engine, for example, through pressure, another form of energy. Or you can transform electricity into, you know, a picture on your screen. That's, you know, what your computer does. Transforms your raw energy electricity into, you know, a picture, a sound. So that's what happens all around us.
It's all, you know, energy moving, transforming energy from the sun, right? this nuclear reactor in outer space, beings energy at us. And then what plants do is they take that energy, transform light into biochemistry. And then you get energy, which used to be immaterial, that gets crystallized into biochemistry. And then we, human beings, animals, eat that biochemical energy.
And then in our mitochondria, that energy gets transformed, right? Again, the potential for change. And then that biochemical energy gets transformed into an electrochemical gradient. You charge your little batteries, your mitochondria. And then that's another form of energy, which, again, is a potential for change. And then you can make ATP with this. You can make reactive oxygen species.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of GDF-15 during pregnancy?
So the reason, you know, women, especially hyperemesis gravitarum, HG, which is like terrible women who have this, Many of them want to terminate their pregnancy. It's so horrible. If GDF-15 rises 10,000-fold, there are not many hormones that can increase that much. During pregnancy, the placenta sends out GDF-15 maybe to tell the mother, chill out, reallocate your energy.
You're growing something that is costing a lot of energy. So we know GDF-15 does this.
Chapter 6: How does GDF-15 signaling impact weight loss in patients?
So now what pharmaceutical companies have tried to do is to say, okay, let's block GDF-15 signaling so people don't feel like shit. And so there's this one trial that was published in the New England Journal last year, and they show, as expected, if you block GDF-15 with a monoclonal antibody, people don't feel as terrible. And they eat a little more, and they don't lose as much weight. Right?
So it's basically if you're sick in a hospital, you have cancer, you're getting chemo, you don't want to eat. And energetically, I suspect this is the right thing to do because you're saving 10%, 15% of your energy budget, reallocating it to healing processes, your immune system, whatever the body needs to survive that challenge. Now you're kind of depriving the brain of that signal.
So people actually don't lose as much weight.
Chapter 7: What are the implications of blocking GDF-15 in cancer patients?
So then that trial said success. If you look at the fine print and you look at the table where they report mortality, mortality was double in people who were receiving the drug. That trial was not powered to detect mortality as a primary outcome. It was powered to detect changes in body weight. So that didn't end up being a main finding. But if this is real... right?
You're preventing people from losing weight and they feel a little less nauseous, but there are twice as many people who died during that trial.
Because the body is smart and it knows to not allocate energy to eating under normal conditions.
Chapter 8: Can stress reduction reverse gray hair?
There's nothing normal about chemo conditions, but I think you understand what I mean. That the body's intuition to not eat is smarter than any kind of you know, molecular chicanery to overcome that signal and have you be hungry. And you would think, oh, they're getting more nourishment. I thought you were going to tell me that more of them lived. You're telling me twice as many died. Died.
And recently there's another trial, large-scale trial for heart failure that looked at this, using this antibody to block, because when the heart struggles, dilated cardiomyopathy or congestive heart failure, Energetically, it's really demanding for the heart to be pushing against high blood pressure or to be failing, right? So there's an energetic stress in the heart at that point.
GDF-15 goes through the roof. So now people know in cardiology, GDF-15 is a really good marker of heart failure. And then... The thinking, I think our way of thinking energetically about GDF-15 is a little different than what the rest of, I think, the field thinks. People see GDF-15 as a marker of inflammation. And then maybe that's like immune. I think it's a marker of energetic stress.
The heart is calling out for help and trying to kind of calm down the rest of the system, right? And by signaling onto the brain. Turns out many more people developed heart failure and like adverse events under the drug. So they stopped the trial. Where you block GD15. Yes.
So if you block- This is the danger of molecular thinking of everything in terms of receptors and ligands, like the things that plug in, people might not know. Ligands are things that plug into receptors and activate them. I mean, I love modern biology and medicine.
There's a lot of beautiful things.
But the systemic effects are impossible to predict. I guess that's why you run these trials. I do have a question as it relates to this, which is a big theme of your work, which is about stress. Well, I'm sure people are wondering by now, tell us about the gray hair reversal. So let's start with that. Let's just get that out of our systems.
I will say, despite some theories, not that anyone cares that much, I've never dyed the hair on my head. I do have some grays, but the number of them waxes and wanes with how much sleep I'm getting. It's kind of interesting. perhaps, but my beard's gray, right? And I'll tell you, I'm not sure that all gray can be reversed by just reducing stress. But I don't dye either my hair or my beard.
So I'm a natural experiment in this. What's the deal? Can people reverse the graying of their hair by reducing their stress? Can people accelerate the graying of their hair by stressing more?
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