How to Stop Aging and Look 15 Years Younger: Master Checklist
Ameer Rosic ◌֬ Tuesday April 15th 2014 Read Full Article
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Transcript (listen to the full podcast here):
Ameer: Hey Dr. Cates, thank you for joining me on the Optimal Health Show. How you doing? Trevor: Great, how are you? Ameer: I’m good. I’m good. I think I heard about you from my good friend Sean Croxton, you’re on a show, and I’m like “wow, she’s one smart cookie. She has a lot to say.” So that’s why I brought you on board here today, and we’re going to be talking about anti-aging. What causes you to age faster and simple tips you can do on an everyday scale to actually decrease your aging. So why don’t we just quickly jump into it and tell all the Optimal Health Warriors out there, in your own words, what do you think are the top three or five things that’s actually causing everybody to really rapidly age today? Trevor: A lot of aging is from oxidative damage that occurs and it can happen from different reasons. It has a lot to do with lifestyle, so how we eat, how much sun exposure we get, and those are the sort of things. And also just how we show up in life, how we deal with stress. All these kinds of lifestyle factors really make an impact on how quickly we age, and we’re all getting older. There’s no way to stop time, but there are certainly things that we could do to prevent premature aging. Ameer: Yeah. Besides Father Time coming down and saying “Hey, time for you to get old,” is there anything in our nutrition or environment that you think is contributing to our advanced aging, because a lot of people are getting sick fast. There are people who are in their 40s, they look like they’re in their 80s and they can barely walk. What are the main things happening today that may be contributing to our high-rising diseases and aging? Trevor: Certainly, things like smoking cigarettes ages people very quickly. Exposure to a lot of sun, getting on the sun without any protection is going to
cause increase in aging really quickly. Those are two big things a lot of people talk about. What some people don’t talk about though is our exposure to environmental toxins in our environment. It’s not just cigarette smoke, but the things in our air, in our water, in our food, and what we’re exposed to on a regular basis, that we’re all exposed to regardless of where we live. Some of us have more exposures than others, but that certainly has a huge impact, and that our genetic makeup causes some of us to be more likely to age more quickly as a result of those exposures. And then also food, of course, the food we eat. Are we eating a lot of processed? Hydrogenated oils, fried foods, a lot of sugar, caffeine, alcohol, those sorts of things. They’re definitely going to cause us to age a lot more quickly as well. Ameer: Now you mentioned foods. Any foods in particular today that everyone should stay the hell away from? Trevor: Yeah, in my 21-day healthy habits challenge that I have on my website, one of the challenges I give people is to look in their pantry and see what’s lurking there, because we get in the habit of buying the same foods over and over again, and ordering the same foods in restaurants, so we just get this habit of eating the same foods, and we don’t really take a minute to stop and look what’s in food. Unfortunately, there are a lot of hidden harmful ingredients in our food that we eat. Of course, we want to eat more whole foods and that’s a big part of it. I know that’s something that you talked about and your guests talk about often, is the importance of eating whole foods right? Ameer: It’s all about eating whole foods, but is there any specific ingredient? I know a lot of people say sugars but beside sugars, processed sugars, there’s a big difference between natural sugars and processed sugars, but is there any certain ingredient or certain foods that people are eating on a daily basis that they should just stop right away. Trevor: Yeah. Well, there are actually quite a few. If you take out of your pantry some of the common things that we eat like breads and crackers and pastries, those are full of, often times have hydrogenated oils, and hyperdosed corn syrup, they have refined processed grains, and when we have the white flours and the processed grains, not only are we taking out important nutrients like B vitamins and calcium, magnesium, things like that, but we’re also, with the bleaching process of white flours, it leaves behind some harmful by-products. And that over time, that and along with the other environmental toxins we’re exposed to, create health problems. Those are some of the things. So, hydrogenated oils,
hyperdosed corn syrup, those white refined flours, artificial sweeteners is another one. Things like NutraSweet, Sweet’n Low, Splenda, all of those. They trick the body into thinking it’s having something sweet, so we still end up eating sweet foods, and there’s a great link between people that drink those sodas with artificial sweeteners with increase in obesity because people are still eating those sweet foods, they think they’re doing a good thing but they’re actually not. And then there’s also a question about what those ingredients, those artificial sweeteners are really doing in our body, how’s our body processing those things. Ameer: Yeah. It’s always funny though how we get brainwashed to think certain foods are healthy, like NutraSweet or back in the day Aspartame and it’s like “Oh, it’s okay for you,” when in reality that stuff is poisoning. Now you mentioned hydrogenated oils for a second, for anybody listening out there, can you go into more details about that and explain what oils are hydrogenated oils? Trevor: Yeah. So when you’re looking at ingredient labels you can look and see, it has to say on there hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils, and these are trans fats, so these are the worst kinds of oils, the worst kinds of fats that we can have. They’re linked to heart disease, and other chronic diseases. There’d been concerns, it may be linked to diabetes and definitely obesity because our body, the hydrogenation process, our body doesn’t really know how to process those things very well. So, they’re often, and things like pastries, donuts, biscuits, chips, popcorn, those packaged foods. But just look at the ingredient label and it should be on there, partially hydrogenated or hydrogenated. Ameer: And where do you put sugar, and going back to processed sugar, in the mix of all these? Trevor: Well, you know, I think people definitely need to be careful with their sugar intake. When we start to eat sugary foods or foods that our body sees as sweet and sugar, we just get in this vicious cycle of craving more and more and it creates imbalances in our blood sugar which changes our mood and causes us to gain weight and all kinds of problems. It’s better to stick with things that don’t have any added sugar, and even foods that you might think of as natural or healthy, you can even find things at the health food store that are full of sugar, like for example yogurt. If you look at like a Yoplait Yogurt or something along those lines and you look at the sugar content, most people are really going to be really surprised to see how much sugar is in foods like that, or like a smoothie or something that’s already put together, lots of fruit, people think “Oh it’s just full
of fruit.” But if you look at the sugar content, it’s loaded with sugar, and it’s going to sometimes have just as much sugar as a soda if not more. Ameer: What’s your take on fructose? Trevor: High fructose corn syrup is also one of the worst ingredients that you want to look for in food. You see something with high fructose corn syrup, stay away from it. We metabolize high fructose corn syrup very differently than other types of sugar, and it puts us at a great risk for obesity and type 2 diabetes more so than regular sugar, so definitely stay away from that. I believe and a lot of other people believe, that’s probably one of the reasons why we have such high rates of obesity and diabetes in our country is because of the excessive amounts of high fructose corn syrup that you find in foods, and the biggest source is sodas. Sodas contain high fructose corn syrup. Unless it’s a natural soda, all sodas contain it in the US. Other countries don’t use high fructose corn syrup because they know how bad it is for us, but in the United States, it’s used frequently unfortunately and partly because it’s really cheap and I think it has a really long shelf life but certainly because of the cost factor. Ameer: Cost factor make some money. Billions and billions of dollars on high fructose corn syrup, oh my god. Trevor: Yeah. So, yeah, it’s definitely one of those things you want to stay away from. Ameer: Cool and you mentioned earlier environmental pollutants, so let’s go a little bit more detail on that. Trevor: Okay. The environmental pollutants are all around us. Unfortunately, they’re in our air, air inside our homes as well as the air outdoors. Lots of the time people think of the air outdoors in a city where there’s a lot of car exhaust which is certainly a problem and it’s a definitely a problem here in Utah, I live in Park City Utah. I’m up above it but Salt Lake City has some of the worst air quality in the country and sometimes in the world. It’ pretty crazy because it’s stuck in a valley. But a lot of these people think of that but they don’t always think about the air in our homes, and actually, that can be a big problem too because there’s a lot of off-gassing of chemicals from our furniture, from synthetic materials in our furniture, as well as cleaning products, anything we use like pesticides or anything like that that we use in our home, so people want to be careful about what you bring into your home because that’s a place where you have control
over your environment. You don’t have control over walking down the street and a diesel truck driving by you and blasting you with a bunch of smoke, but you do have control over your home, and so there are certain things that we can do in our home, just being careful about what kind of cleaning products you use, what kind of furniture and clothing and fabrics and things like that you bring into your home, draperies and all that, just be careful, just think about it before you bring it in because all of that adds up. Ameer: I agree 100%. Now, what can a person then do to protect himself inside of their home? Trevor: Well, in your home, being careful about what you purchase, what you bring into your home. Also, things like air purifiers can be helpful, changing the air filter in your central air system at least once a month can help clear the air out a little bit. Doing things like getting a water filtration system in your home, and we want to drink filtered water because that is another source of exposure of chemicals to us is through our water, and so it’s good to really get water filtration system. But also in showers, if we don’t have a filtration system on the shower, chlorine and other chemicals that are in the water aerosolize, so they go into the air and we actually breathe that in. Same thing with dishwashers. If you’re using chlorine and dishwashing soaps, that also can go into the air and we breathe then into. Ameer: Yeah, I always recommend people, you can go to like Walmart or Home Depot and they have $40 carbon filters for chlorine that anyone can install in the shower filters, and there you go. What type of filters do you recommend for drinking water inside of your home? Trevor: Well, I think that reversed osmosis is the best filtration system to remove everything out, and that will remove solvents and heavy metals and bacteria, all of those sorts of things. It’s basically the Best we have to filter out. The problem with reversed osmosis is that it also takes out minerals, so there are now systems that can add back minerals, create pH balance, and get pretty fancy with these options now. But really, for me, I think that the most important thing is just getting out all the harmful ingredients and you can also get the minerals, the nutrients you need from food and maybe it doesn’t necessarily have to come from your water, but if you want to get the mineral add-back, you can.
Ameer: Cool, now say a person fixes their diet and controls their environment, is there any certain testing people can do to kind of determine the biological age of their body? Trevor: Well, there’s genetic testing. We can look at telomere length and things like that. I don’t like people to get too caught up in testing because with genetic test, it’s a mixed blessing because if you do some genetic testing, it will give you some ideas of predispositions that you may have to disease or to premature aging, but sometimes it’s kind of tough to know that because what do we do with that information? I think that we should all just make smart choices, and certainly, if you really feel like you want to know, have that information, as long as people can take that information and use it proactively rather than fear-based. Does that make sense? Ameer: Of course it makes sense. That’s the thing though. You have numbers in front of you, what do you with these numbers? Like how do you actually apply it in your body. And even with the telomere testing, I think there’s still some debate. They’re like talking about “Is that really your age, the length of telomere,” so now they’re talking about “Oh, the rapid rate of the telomerase enzyme” which is what, they’re still not conclusive of exactly that functioning to prove your biological age. I would say a good mirror test is good. You see yourself in front of a mirror, you look good, and you’re like “Okay.” And obviously, other standard stuff like you can check proper hormone panel, cholesterol density, etc. Trevor: And that’s stuff that we can have control over, and so getting basic blood work done can give a lot of information about how we‘re doing, getting a metabolic panel gives us information about our blood sugar balance, our liver and kidney function. CBC, complete blood count gives us information about our blood cells and making sure they’re in balance. Also certain nutrients we can test for like vitamin D or B12, folate, those that you can run in a standard panel. Our cholesterol level is another indication. And hormones, like you said. Our hormones do change as we age, and most of our hormones decline where as some of our hormones like our stress hormones go up, and so it becomes more challenging for us to balance our hormones but it also becomes more and more important if we want to age gracefully. When we’re exposed to the environmental toxins, one of the concerns about that is that there are endocrinedisrupting effects of some of these chemicals. That means they throw off our hormone balance, and so that’s another big reason to be careful about what we’re exposed to and then also, just because we’re all exposed to things on a
daily basis no matter where we live, it’s good to do some sort of cleanse program. I recommend at least once a year to my patients doing a liver cleanse, maybe even a juice fast, just to make sure that the body, your liver, your routes of elimination are all working well so that you’re able to process everything that comes your way, in addition to reducing your overall exposure to things. Ameer: What would a liver cleanse look like? Trevor: I customize different ones for my patients and based upon what their needs are, but the basic one I do is a three-week cleanse program, and it involves taking a lot of foods out of our diet that are challenging for the liver or that create inflammation in the body, and you’re probably aware what those foods are, like sugar, alcohol, caffeine, also things like dairy products and gluten, and so it also help people identify what their food allergies or sensitivities might be and they want to avoid those during this time as well, and then focusing the diet on whole foods that are more anti-inflammatory, that are liver-supportive, and giving the body a break from those inflammatory, liver-toxifying ingredients is a great thing to do. You could do it for a week but I find that when people do it for three weeks, it has an even greater effect of not just helping the body eliminate things, the toxins out of the body, and kind of give the liver and the routes of elimination kind of a kickstart but it also kind of release that stress a little bit, so I find that people don’t have the same kind of food cravings that they normally do, not less of the sugary cravings, the salt cravings, those kinds of things. People want less of those foods if they go a good three weeks without them. Ameer: Don’t you think though like if you’re looking for anti-aging type of modalities, you shouldn’t be eating those foods in the first place? Trevor: Right, and the great thing about doing the three-week cleanse is when my patients come in to see me for this, I’d say “Just do it for three weeks and see how you feel,” and usually at the end of three weeks, people feel so great that they don’t want to eat those foods anymore. So where they start eating them again and they feel bad, so then they realize the connection between their diet, what they’re eating and how they feel, and that’s so powerful. Doesn’t matter how much I tell people what to eat or what not to eat, if they feel it and they notice the difference themselves, that has a huge impact. Ameer: Are you a proponent of IV therapies? Trevor: Of IV nutrient therapy?
Ameer: Yeah. Trevor: Yeah, Moderately. I think IV nutrient therapy can be great because there are so many people that have digestive problems today and aren’t able to absorb the nutrients that they eat through the food or even if they take through supplements, and certainly, I don’t want to downplay the importance of a good diet and certain supplements, but for some people it’s particularly challenging to get that absorption they need, and IV nutrient therapy can be a great way to just get those nutrients directly in the bloodstream out. I have certain practitioners that I recommend for this because you have to be careful with this because you are putting things directly into the bloodstream, so you got to look at purity and what you are putting in there and all of that, so I want people to be careful with that. Ameer: What’s your take on the glutathione IV pushes? Trevor: Glutathione can be fantastic. Glutathione is if we’re trying to take as a supplement, our body doesn’t really recognize it, it isn’t able to use in the same way. Glutathione works better if you use it as a nebulizer or putting it directly in as an IV. If we were to try and increase our glutathione levels through our diet or supplements, we would want to take thing that increase glutathione, that create glutathione like N-acetyl cysteine or vitamin C and taking those things or getting them in our diet, those are going to help increase our glutathione naturally which is great. I’m guessing that your audience knows what glutathione is. Ameer: Oh yeah. Well just to clarify. The reason why some glutathiones aren’t really, they’re not really good at boosting naturals, they’re tripeptide, first you have to break it apart and put it back together, so when you give it a building block such as N-acetyl cysteine or vitamin C which what helps produce a glutathione, you are initially giving it like the building block as I mentioned to actually build up. I’ve seen some really interesting work for glutathione pushes with like Parkinson’s disease. I don’t know the long-term repercussions, but it’s interesting, it’s a really interesting field of work at the moment. Trevor: Yeah. So glutathione really helps with our detoxification pathways. Our liver needs glutathione for detoxification, that’s why it’s so essential. Ameer: Cool. What’s your take on infrared saunas? Trevor: Infrared saunas are also a great way for detoxification and I do recommend those for my patients when they’re doing a cleanse program or just
even periodically to help with detoxification. So what happens is the same sort of thing that happens with exercise too, is when our body heats up, it causes like lipolysis which is the fat cells breaking apart, and that fat cells is where we carry a lot of toxins. So that’s why saunas are so great and also exercises. Infrared saunas are a direct way to get those lipolysis happening. We perspire, we’re letting those toxins out of our body. I do find that some people need to be careful with doing saunas. People that have a really high level of toxins built up in their body will sometimes feel really, if they go to a sauna because they’ve got too much release of toxins all at once and they might get headaches, they might feel nauseous, dizzy, so somebody has a high exposure to toxins, I’d want to be very careful with when I would introduce saunas. So they’re not for everybody. Also people that are very sensitive to temperature, to heat, they might not tolerate a sauna very well. Ameer: Going back to the IV for a second. Do you use in your practice chelation therapy for anti-aging? Trevor: I personally don’t do any IV nutrients or IV chelation. I do have but I refer to for those things. For me, I find that oral chelation works really well, and sometimes it doesn’t so then I’ll refer patients to someone for IV chelation. Again, it’s one of those things you have to be really careful with and find the right practitioner. So when I’m talking about oral chelation, I always test people first if I’m going to do oral chelation, and I use a urine toxic metals test. I’ll do a pre and post challenge test. I give them two different kits, one of them they just do a random urine collection just to see if they have any current exposure to heavy metals in their diet and their environment, because sometimes it’s a current exposure, but most of the time, it’s a history exposure, so people have it built up in their tissues. They have heavy metals, lead, mercury, arsenic, uranium, there are so many different ones, but lead and mercury are the ones that get most attention. They’re built up in people’s bodies and with a typical blood work or urine test, you’re not going to get the levels, you’re not going to detect those levels in the test. That’s why I give a chelating agent and I’m sure you have talked about this, this might be a review for you… Ameer: Reviews are always good. Trevor: But you know, it’s good to hear it again I guess. Then what the chelating agent does is it binds to the heavy metals and pulls it out of the body, and that’s when you do the urine collection, is after taking the chelating agent. I usually use DMSA or EDTA or maybe a combination. So then they do a urine collection after
that and then that gives us information of what’s actually stored up in the body which is where the biggest problem is. We want both, we want that pre and post challenge so that I get information for that. And then if a person’s levels are high for the post challenge for what’s stored up in their body, then I’m going to want to do a similar type of treatment for them using the chelating agent to help continue to pull the heavy metals out of their body in addition to, and I do it phased, so they’ll do the chelating agent and then I’ll also do add-back so people are getting the nutrients they need, because when you do chelation, often times it pulls out the minerals in addition to the heavy metals, so you got a replenished chelating too. Ameer: How often do you do the re-tracking of the heavy metals? Trevor: Every three to six months generally, and apart of people’s symptoms. Usually, when I do the test, people are having symptoms, and so if I find that their symptoms are getting less, then that’s a great sign. If they’re still having symptoms, I might wait until their symptoms improve more before I do the test. Sometimes, I have to slow down the chelation because people start to have symptoms, headaches and things like that, so I just cut back on the chelation and phase it a little bit differently. Ameer: Cool, so we’re closing in on the end portion, I always ask my guests this one question. If you have to summarize, what is your number one optimal tip you’d like to give somebody? Trevor: Oh, number one, there’s so many. Ameer: I know. Trevor: I think the power of positive thinking is so big for us. In fact I went back and did a master’s degree in spiritual psychology a few years ago through the University of Santa Monica because I found that psychology, why people choose to do things and how they react to things is really important. I would say that if we have a positive attitude towards life and towards our body and who we are, our self-image, then it can make a lot of these things a lot easier. It makes eating healthier easier and it makes exercising easier, and things tend to fall into place better for people. So I guess that would be the one thing and that’s also why I did the 21-day healthy habits challenge, why I created that. It’s online on my website. People go through 21 days of incorporating 21 different really essential healthy habits, and I incorporate a lot of those positive thinking as part of that.
Ameer: Dr. Cates, I want to thank you so much for coming on the Optimal Health Show. Where can people find more information about you, and better yet, where can they get that 21-day detox program? Trevor: Yeah, so my website has all that information and it’s DrTrevorCates.com and they can also go directly to 21dayhealthyhabitschallenge.com. Ameer: Cool, awesome! Well thank you Dr. Cates. Until next time, have a great day. Trevor: Okay, thank you.
Ameer Rosic
Ameer Rosic is obsessed with health. A Registered Holistic Nutritionist, Functional Diagnostic Practitioner and Functional Medicine Practitioner, Ameer has spent years empowering himself with knowledge about optimal health, and now his passion is to share that with you! From interviews with top health experts to fitness and nutritional advice and more, Ameer Rosic can help you live a life of optimal health!
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