Exercise, Heat, Cold & Other Stressors for Longevity | Lifespan with Dr. David Sinclair #3

- Welcome to the Lifespan podcast, where we discuss the science of aging and how to be healthier at any stage of life. I'm David Sinclair. I'm a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research. I'm joined by my lovely co-author and cohost Matthew LaPlante.

Welcome, Matt. - I love that you called me lovely. - I think you are lovely. - Oh, you're nice. You're nice. - You can be nice sometimes. Hey, today in our episode, we're going to be talking about exercise and other... what you call adversity mimetics. But before we get to that today, right after we stopped taping in the last episode you went,

"Oh my God, iron!" and then we had this really great conversation about iron. And so I wanted to bring us back there before we could move forward today. Is that all right? - That'd be great. So the last episode, if anybody missed it, was about the foods that we can eat or not eat-

- Or not eat, right. - To live a long time. And it was remiss of me not to bring up a pernicious element called iron. - [chuckles] Pernicious. - Yeah. It's one of the elements that is turning out to be quite a dangerous element to having too much of in your body. Increasingly we see that people who have high levels of iron

have accelerated aging. - Okay, yeah. But iron is essential, right? We all need iron. In fact, people supplement with iron a lot of times. - Right. Well, we need iron. It's a major component of hemoglobin, which carries oxygen which we need. But the levels don't need to be as high as we once thought.

In fact, people who live a long time and have these diets that are recommended, I typically say they have lower levels of iron and lower levels of hemoglobin. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. Conversely, people who have very high levels, either genetically, hemochromatosis, or take a supplement and end up with high levels of iron,