Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dr. Mark Hyman: How Entrepreneurs Can Reverse Aging and Unlock Peak Health | Mental Health | E349
Mon, 05 May 2025
Dr. Mark Hyman isn’t just focused on aging; he is committed to thriving throughout life. In his sixties, he co-founded Function Health, a startup dedicated to optimizing biological health and wellness for peak performance. In this episode, Mark discusses the power of functional medicine in unlocking longevity, the secret to aging backwards, and small, daily changes that can improve health, boost productivity, and lead to a longer, more fulfilling life. In this episode, Hala and Mark will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:10) The Science of Aging and Longevity (06:27) How Functional Medicine Optimizes Health (12:02) Functional Medicine vs. Biohacking (14:37) The Secret to Aging Backwards (19:23) The Role of Diet, Sleep, and Toxins in Aging (27:23) Living a Life of Purpose and Career Fulfillment (29:33) Navigating Modern Food Challenges (35:22) Why Your Social Circle Matters for Longevity (40:58) Practical Wellness Strategies for Entrepreneurs Dr. Mark Hyman is a family physician, author, and educator, transforming aging and disease prevention through functional medicine. He is the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Function Health, a platform providing personalized health insights through comprehensive data analysis. Mark is also the founder of the UltraWellness Center and the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify Microsoft Teams - Stop paying for tools. Get everything you need, for free at aka.ms/profiting Mercury - Streamline your banking and finances in one place. Learn more at mercury.com/profiting OpenPhone: Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at openphone.com/profiting Mercury - Streamline your banking and finances in one place. Learn more at mercury.com/profiting Airbnb - Find yourself a co-host at airbnb.com/host Resources Mentioned: Mark’s Website: drhyman.com Mark’s Book, Young Forever: bit.ly/YoungForeverBook Mark’s Podcast, The Dr. Hyman Show: bit.ly/DrHymanShow Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Mental Health, Psychology, Motivation, Mindset, Manifestation, Brain Health, Life Balance, Self Healing, Positivity, Happiness.
Chapter 1: Why does Dr. Mark Hyman want to live to 120 years old?
Today's episode is sponsored in part by Airbnb, Open Phone, Shopify, Mercury, Built, Indeed, and Microsoft Teams. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at youngandprofiting.com slash deals. You want to live to be 120 years old. Why do you actually want to live so long?
I love life. What is the definition of health? It's not the absence of disease. It's something else. How do we unlock the keys to optimal biological performance? I've spent 40 years studying the science of the function of the body. Frailty is not a normal consequence of aging. It's a consequence, a phenomenon that happens as we get older if we don't do something about it.
We have dysregulated sleep schedules. We have tremendous amounts of stress. We eat crappy food. We don't exercise enough. There's all these things that we're doing to impede our ability to actually live a vibrant, long, healthy life.
What did you do to reverse your age 20 years?
I had been eating.
Let's say he gave you a 35-year-old. They're stressed, exhausted, running on coffee. If you had a year to transform their health and performance, what are the things that you would change?
I would immediately have them get it.
Yeah, fam, imagine feeling stronger, sharper, and more energized as you age, not the other way around. Well, today's guest is gonna help teach us how to just do that. Dr. Mark Hyman is a leading functional medicine expert and the best-selling author of books like Young Forever and Eat Fat, Get Thin.
He's going to share some science-backed insights to help you improve your health, extend your lifespan, and defy aging. But first, make sure you follow and subscribe to Young and Profiting Podcast. Whether you are a frequent listener or a brand new listener, make sure you're subscribed to the show. That way, you'll never miss an episode packed with expert insights like this one.
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Chapter 2: What is functional medicine and how does it differ from biohacking?
Oh, if I can do everything I love to do, yes. If I can, no. I'm still riding my bike at 119. I'll keep going.
That would be amazing. I also interviewed Dave Asprey a few times, and he tells me he wants to live to be 180 years old. So there's this trend of biohackers like you guys that want to live to be 120, 180 years old.
I would just say I'm not a biohacker. I'm a functional medicine physician. And so I use deep science. Some of the tools are similar, but functional medicine is really the ultimate biohacker.
Yes. And we're going to talk all about functional medicine. And I'm going to try to help my listeners understand what that is if they're not familiar. But you guys are on a quest to live as long as you can, right? So that's the two things that you guys have in common. Maybe it's not biohacking. But when I think about that, I think about frail, old, bedridden. I don't
Really want to live to be 120 years old, at least by today's standards. So I want to understand when you imagine yourself at 120 years old, what do you actually imagine yourself being capable to do? What does 120 year old and thriving look like?
I mean, it means being able to do whatever you love to do. If it's sitting there rocking Jeremy to book, it's that. If it's hiking up a mountain, it's that. If it's making love with your partner, then it's that.
So for me, it's really being able to get up in the morning and do what you love to do and not be encumbered by some of the conditions that are mostly preventable that we seem to think of as normal of parts of aging. They're not really. And what's happening on the science is quite exciting.
We're seeing a lot of research, for example, there's a Washington Post article recently about the aminoc factors, which is Basically, a scientific discovery that won the Nobel Prize that allows you to reprogram your genes back to a younger you. It's called epigenetic reprogramming, and it's being researched by the Altos Lab and Jeff Bezos and also by Sam Altman's lab.
So there's a lot of really amazing research going on in this right now in the longevity space. That's going to be an unlock. For most of us, I think we can expect to get to our 90s or be 100s. you know, vigorous and good health if we know what to do to take care of our bodies. And I saw this all over the place.
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Chapter 3: How can entrepreneurs optimize their health using functional medicine?
And so how do we move towards where medicine is going, which is personalization? We call it precision medicine, personalized medicine, whatever you want to call it. It's where we're going. And so Function Health is the first platform that is able to actually do this for you in an amazing way that helps people revolutionize their health. And we just started, honestly. This is a startup.
And we didn't realize how much success we were going to have. And so we have almost 150,000 members. We have millions, tens of millions of data points on people. We're seeing all kinds of trends in the data.
We see that people actually, when they get their first test, and now we've been going two years, we can see that when they follow up and do the follow-up testing, that their biomarkers get better. Their blood sugar gets better. Their cholesterol gets better. Their inflammation gets better. Their vitamin D gets better. Whatever is off.
And we give them a deep dive into what's going on with their biology, not just from a traditional perspective, traditional sort of Western medical perspective, but also this emerging field of systems network and medicine, which is what functional medicine has been doing. But now the rest of the science is catching up, which is very, very exciting to me.
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Chapter 4: What role does diet and lifestyle play in reversing biological age?
Your epigenome, you think about like the keyboards on a piano, right? You have 88 keys, they ain't changing. You know, I got 20,000 genes, they ain't changing. Unless I do gene editing or splicing or some other weird thing that's coming around the corner, they're not changing.
What can change is how those genes are expressed, how they're turned on or off, whether they're up-regulated or down-regulated, whether they drive inflammation or stop inflammation, whether they accelerate aging or slow aging. And they are basically the control mechanisms to turn on or off genes. So think of them like switches or knobs. And you can dial them up or down based on what you're doing.
And that's how almost all of the impacts of a lot of the practices we talked about are have their effect. That's how the exposome regulates your health and longevity, your biology and your risk of disease is through your epigenome, then translates into the expression of genes and proteins and biological functions, and you want to have a healthy epigenome.
There was a great example, for example, a brand new journal who discovered this phenomena was these mice that are bred to be obese. They're yellow, they're fat, specifically yellow fat mice. He gave a series of the females who are pregnant certain nutrients called methylating nutrients that regulate the epigenome.
It's a little complicated, but there's something called methylation, which is a chemical process that regulates your genes. It involves B6, folate, and B12. Vitamins and minerals are extremely important. They run everything in your body. Every biochemical reaction needs a vitamin or mineral. If you don't have them or they're insufficient, you're going to have gummed up biochemistry.
and gummed up biochemistry translates into disease. So he basically gave these pregnant mice some B vitamins and a few other amino acids and things to help to support this process. The offspring were perfect. They were thin. They were healthy. They were gray. They were not yellow fat mice, even though genetically they were bred to be yellow fat mice. And this was a massive discovery.
And I think this is what really has led to our understanding of this whole process of how we can modify our epigenome and the outcomes. So when your mother's eating, when she's pregnant with you, the stresses you experience in utero that your mother might have experienced or all your early childhood experiences, all those imprint on your epigenome and can affect you, toxins you're exposed to.
This is why we have to pay attention to how we live because if we want to feel good and do good and engage in life and do the work we want to do and be successful in our work and have great relationships and enjoy life and be happy, if you feel like crap, it's not that much fun.
So true. And so from what I read, 90% of disease and aging risk has to do with our environment, our exposome, right? And so the earlier that we start, the better is what you were just saying, right? We can even start from in the womb if our mothers are smart enough.
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Chapter 5: How does Dr. Mark Hyman's Function Health platform work?
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card is issued by Patriot Bank member, FDIC, pursuant to a license from MasterCard. Working capital loans provided by Mercury Lending, LLC, NMLS, ID 2606284. I want to talk about your drive of wanting to live so long because one of the factors that you mentioned is having a purpose and feeling like you've got a way to contribute to the world. So why do you actually want to live so long?
Well, I love life. As long as I can enjoy life and be with my friends and do the things I love and ride my bike and hike and enjoy what I'm doing and have meaning and purpose and contribute to the world and add value. I'm 65. I kind of figured a few things out by now and You know, wisdom always doesn't come with age, but I've had a bunch of hard knocks and that's really taught me a lot.
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Chapter 6: What is the exposome and how does it affect aging?
Yeah, I've written so many books about this. Food, what should I eat? The Pegan Diet, which is sort of a condensed version and with some kind of fun stuff in it. What we agree on is more than what we disagree on. You can get on the margins about vegan or paleo or keto or this or that. But the truth is, And we all agree we shouldn't be eating ultra-processed food.
We all agree we should be reducing starch and sugar and refined carbohydrates in our diet. We shouldn't be eating things that aren't food, technically, like maltodextrin or butylated hydroxy toluene or red dye number three. We should be eating foods that are high in phytochemicals that We think of food as medicine where it changes everything in our biology in real time.
We should be thinking about having good quality fats from nuts and seeds and avocados and wild fish, small fish. And even, you know, for some people tolerate animal fats very well, especially if it's regeneratively raised. They have very different qualities of fats. So there's a lot of really good things you can do that are available from the diet that you can get even anywhere.
I mean, I've worked with people in the worst food deserts in America, and they've actually been able to make a huge impact and change their diet if they actually do the right things. And they will. They'll actually have a huge shift in their diet by actually doing this. So I'm pretty thrilled by how simple it is. But when people understand how to do it, then everything changes.
Talk to us about exercise. I feel like there's a lot of mixed advice when it comes to exercise. What's your take on the right amount, too much exercise?
Exercise is critical. Your body needs to move. There's no doubt about it. We were designed to be moving organisms all the time. And that's how we evolved. Now, most of us don't do enough, and that's unfortunate. And I think 8% get the optimal amount, 23% get some moderate amount. But the key is to actually understand what's good for you. And it's different at different times in your life.
But I think you need at least 30 minutes of good cardio four or five times a week, three times a week of strength training, probably a day or two of flexibility and training and stability training. That's kind of bare minimum. If you can do that, you're going to maintain your health and be good for a long time.
You've said in the past that strength training is the best anti-aging medicine. What's so good about it?
Because what you're doing is you're building muscle, you're building mitochondria, you're increasing muscle mass. And what really kills people is frailty. When you get older, you get frail. You're not able to get up out of a chair. You're not able to do what you love to do. Your mobility is decreased. Your function is decreased. That's all totally preventable by strength training.
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