Unlocking the Secrets of Healthy Longevity with Dr. Cory Goldberg

When we hear the word longevity, it’s not just about living longer—it’s about thriving through the years with good health. Adopting healthy habits can make a difference in our day-to-day life. What are the things we can do to promote healthy longevity? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Cory Goldberg, a distinguished plastic and craniofacial surgeon with a vision for longevity medicine and aesthetic surgery. He discusses how to promote healthy longevity, emphasizing diet, exercise, sleep, and emotional health. He highlights the impact of poor diet and processed food on health and life expectancy. Listen now to explore strategies for a healthier, longer life! --- Listen to the podcast here: Unlocking the Secrets of Healthy Longevity with Dr. Cory Goldberg Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about longevity. Now, we’ve covered this a little bit in some of our podcast episodes that have covered health, fitness, wellness, but we’ve never really talked about longevity specifically. My guest today, Dr Cory Goldberg, is at the forefront and using some innovative techniques to promote longevity and some innovative ideas for the future of this entire subject as well as healthcare in general. --- Dr. Cory Goldberg, welcome to the program. Hi, Stephen. It’s a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. Looking forward to our conversation Where we began here. So you have some innovative ideas about longevity. I know, traditionally, people just talk about stuff like getting regular exercise, eating well, and even we’ve recently talked about some other kind of psychological things people can do, like controlling their thoughts, minimizing stress, and being around the right people and spending good time and good company. Is that part of your program or do you go right to some of these more innovative, less currently mainstream techniques? Well, honestly, what you just hit on are two of the most important pillars of healthy longevity and good diet and exercise are keystone. I mean, you can’t have healthy longevity without that. There’s no quick fix that gets you around those basics. And I would add to that, good healthy sleep and a good emotional state and interpersonal relations so you commented on your episode on thought control and those kinds of things, being present and controlling your thoughts and your emotions and relations with other people really key for healthy longevity. So, no matter what else we add to that now, those four pillars are by far the most important things that anybody can do to make sure that they’re as healthy as possible for as long as possible. And so if you think about the average person, either the average person you encounter or the average person kind of in society today, what do you think is the number one worst thing people are doing for the health on a regular basis? I have to say it’s diet. People follow the diet that their parents taught them, the idea of four main food groups. They follow eating habits that are based mostly on addiction to the foods that we were exposed to on a regular basis in our society. People are eating poison, they don’t even know it, and I think that’s the biggest contributor to poor health. And the reason that in the United States, the past few years, the average life expectancy has actually gone down by a couple years for the first time in over a century and a half and that’s with corrections around the pandemic and COVID. Even with that, the life expectancy is going down and I would say diet is the number one contributing factors to that.Share on X And so what is the biggest mistake people are making in their diet? You talk about the foods that you become addicted to, the foods that you’re trained to eat. What can someone do right now to get out of that? Well, as with any addiction, I would say the first step to correcting it is admitting that you have a problem, and that’s hard for most people. I think the biggest things are the animal proteins and the processed foods. Those two things, and especially combining the two together, those are poison and those are the things that people are addicted to. But if you talk to people about decreasing their animal protein intake, the first thing that they’re going to start saying is, “Yeah, I know it’s not so good for me but I really love it,” and, honestly, when people talk to me about the food they eat, when I hear those kinds of reasonings and the responses, it sounds to me exactly the same as the responses I get from heroin addicts and drug addicts in the emergency room. When you talk to them about their addiction, they will respond back to you, “Yeah, but…” I really think it’s the animal proteins and the processed foods that are the worst things for us and that makes up a large part of our diet these days for most people in North America. So, you’re basically referring to going to McDonald’s, getting a burger and fries, and then snacking on Doritos later, that type of thing. Yeah. You know what, that’s the worst of it. When people go grocery shopping, they spend way too much of their time in the middle aisles, right? It’s the periphery and it’s the produce section that you should really be spending most of your time in. And the animal proteins, the processed stuff, when you go to McDonald’s and that kind of thing, I mean, those things are really harmful, but even healthy animal meats, dairy, eggs, all of it, they all contain the same things. Whether it’s a good quality or poor quality is not a defining factor. It doesn’t matter. What’s in it is it’s a series of amino acids. There are 20 amino acids that make up every protein in our body and in all animals and there are three of those amino acids that happen to be very heavily concentrated in animal proteins of all kinds and those things actually shut down our specific genetic mechanisms that help repair our genes and our epigenetics. It is directly aging us. I mean, it is literally like eating poison and slowly poisoning yourself over decades. And then are other habits, such as drugs and alcohol, are they as big a contributor to what’s aging us? If someone is constantly just drinking a lot, and I think, I’m kind of at this age range where I’m witnessing some people age faster than others. I’m seeing it directly before my eyes. I’ve seen some people who around my age are already pretty much acting like they’re elderly and others that are still acting like they’re young and spry. Yep. You know what, you raise a very good point. So, one thing to note there, among your friends and your peer group that you are watching that differential aging, there is a component of that that’s genetic, there is part of this that we are born with and that can make a big difference for somebody, but really important, when I talk to people about this, I like to drive home the idea that the genetics is a really small minority of what determines your healthy longevity. Most people, if you ask them, would say, “Yeah, my genetics are – my bad genetics. My mom was this, my dad was that and so, of course, I’m unhealthy.” Honestly, the evidence shows very clearly, at most your genetics is 20 percent of your future health. Eighty percent is in your hands and in your control. So your friends that you’re seeing age faster, they’re aging faster because of how they’re behaving, what they’re doing, and absolutely the smoking and the drinking is a big part of that. The drinking thing is a very interesting thing. More and more evidence, especially in the past year or two, has come out showing very clearly, even a small amount of alcohol, it doesn’t have to be a large amount, you don’t have to be blackout drunk, even a small amount actually decreases your brain function severely over time. And this has shown up again and again, study after study, and so it’s not necessarily aging you directly, it’s not making your body older, but alcohol is aging your brain. So if you just stick to alcohol and you skip out on the smoking and the other things, you could live to a long age, be it 90 plus, you would be brain dead when you did it. So, it’s really important when you think about aging not just to think about the whole body but also different organs because certainly things that you do, like drinking or smoking, it affects certain organs and parts of you much more than others. So is it safe to say that your view of longevity is not simply put the number of years you live but it’s actually about the quality of those years, like if you’re 80 years old but you can barely do anything versus some people, I see 80-year-olds still on their bicycles riding up terrain. You hit the nail on the head, man. It’s absolutely true. There is no point in living longer. When you talk to most people about longevity, would you want to live to 100 or 120? Most people, if you ask them that in North America, the first thing they say, “Absolutely not. Why would I want to be old and frail and take medications?” Most people have a very fixed concept of aging and we’ve come to accept that as a natural part of life. But reality, it’s not. I mean, aging is a disease. It’s actually measurable and can be changed, it can be manipulated. So that whole you’re 80 and you’re in a nursing home somewhere incontinent, that is absolutely not the way that it should be. And the point of longevity is not just being alive, it’s healthy longevity. It’s making sure you’re vital. You can still go out on that bike ride, you can still have relations with your partner. That’s what life is about. It’s not just about being on the earth and breathing. And so have you read up on or visited any of these blue zones that people talk about where they’ve mapped out the places where you see the most people live past 100? Yeah,...