Episode 374: Dr. Anthony Youn: How Fasting Makes You Look Younger + Recommended Anti-Aging Supplements
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Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits & Hustle. Crush it! Hey friends, you're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits & Hustle podcast, where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled up.

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When you're looking at anti-aging overall, the key is going to be starting with the basis. It's like building a house and like these invasive procedures like the spire on top of the house and the foundation of the house is the food that you eat. So if I were to tell you, you know, the number one thing to overall improve your skin, I would say reduce the amount of sugar you eat because that really is inflammatory to your body. It's inflammatory to your skin and it will show in your skin.

Now, reduce the amount of sugar is going to make wrinkles go away? No, it's not going to make wrinkles go away. But once again, it's kind of that basis that you have to do because it's constantly attacking the collagen of your skin if you're having too much sugar. Now, if you're looking at, okay, I truly want to look 10 years younger, what should I do in like a short span of time? Then yes, I would combine IPL treatments for a lot of people, probably with Morpheus 8.

And then if I had one other thing that I would combine that with, probably more for a long term, I would say add a retinol or a bakuchiol to that just to kind of keep those results.

How about supplementation? And what would you say, what's your belief on supplements? What do you think work? Tell me what you would do. So yeah, I mean, traditional medicine is not fond of supplements. I was not taught anything about supplementation in my residency. And it really didn't come to, it came down to a point when I had kind of this kind of come to Jesus moment of like, oh my gosh, like what have I, what was I taught? And there's

I realized in my career that there is so much that I don't know that I didn't know. Right. Okay. Cause there's a lot of doctors out there and, and the big, one of them, the big one is collagen. So like I will post about collagen supplements and people will comment, my family doctor says it doesn't work. Well, I,

I mean, the big question then is your family doctor may say it doesn't work, but do they know what they don't know? And the answer is probably not. You know, when I had patients come to see me early in my practice and they're on a bunch of supplements, they would ask me, Dr. Yoon, I'm going to have surgery soon. What should I do with my supplements? And I say, oh, just go off all of them because I didn't know anything about them. Right.

And I had never taken the time to learn it. And my mentors all in plastic surgery, that's what they would say. So then I would basically mimic them. And when I realized that, oh my gosh, there's so much I don't know, I really started studying this. And I spent, I mean, probably thousands of hours

comparing the studies that were in our surgical literature on patients who were, let's say, trauma patients who had pressure sores, burn patients, people with chronic wounds and how they gave them different nutrition, arginine, glutamine, amino acids and all that to help with the wound healing. And I combined that with the teachings of alternative health experts, gut health experts, nutritionists. And I created at that time a surgical supplement protocol that I put my patients on both before and after surgery.

And I found that the patients did great with it, that not only did I find that my complication rate reduced, but I also found patients coming back and saying, what did you put me on? Because my hair's getting thicker or geez, my joints feel a lot better, you know, or my bowels are moving much more regularly. I mean, so many of these stories.

Now, I never marketed this surgical supplement system because I was afraid that somebody, a patient from a different doctor would take it. They would get, let's say, a hematoma, a bleeding complication after surgery, and now I'm their easy scapegoat. Oh, you got that bleeding complication because of his darn supplements, even though they're

I test them to be fine. So I never put them out there. But now there are companies who are creating their own pre and post-surgical supplement systems. And they're almost exactly the same stuff that I had in mind, even though I never actually put it out there. The fact is, is that they're doing their own research and they're coming up with the same conclusions, which makes me feel good. So I do believe in supplements. The big one that people talk about is collagen. And so big question is, do collagen supplements work? And

The answer is yes. And if a doctor tells you they don't work, they just have not looked at the literature. There are so many studies that show that taking a hydrolyzed collagen peptide supplement can improve your skin, can improve your nails. No studies I know of, they'll say it improves your hair, but it does make sense that it should. There was a meta-analysis in 2021,

Over 1,100 people, they took hydrolyzed collagen peptides for 90 days and found a statistically significant improvement in the hydration, in wrinkles, skin hydration, wrinkles, and elasticity of their skin. And there have been prospective placebo-controlled randomized trials where they would put somebody on collagen supplementation for a couple of months and then actually biopsy their skin later and find an increased amount of collagen in their skin.

So it works. But the key is you got to get the right collagen supplement. And you want to get hydrolyzed collagen peptides. Because the argument that people will make who are naysayers will say, oh, the collagen is a large protein and your body is just going to break it down. How do you know it's going to get to your skin? Well, and how do you even know it's going to actually get absorbed? Well, that's why these companies will...

make hydrolyzed collagen peptides because you take that large protein and you break it down into its individual amino acids or peptides, which are a combination of a small number of amino acids, making it much smaller so that you can actually absorb it. And that's where you want to look for is hydrolyzed collagen peptides. That's how you know it's good. What's a brand that I should try?

So, I mean, I have my own. Isn't that convenient? I mean, yeah. So, I mean, I have my own. But there are other ones out there that I think are very, very good. You could try the vital proteins. Bulletproof is big with collagen. I would just encourage you, like with anything,

Try it for a couple months. Did you bring me some? I did not because I can't get that through security on TSA. Well, you get a big tub of powder, white powder. That's why you said that. I was going to ask you, what about in the supplement form? Is it okay to take it in a pill form or you just take it as the scoops? The problem with the pills is that they're capsules that have the powder inside of them. It's much easier to just take the scoop, put it in a hot drink, and typically it should be, in general, flavorless.

or you can mix it into a smoothie. Yeah. So you think, and I know a lot of people do this. I think you talk about this too, like putting it in your coffee. Yeah. And you can't taste it? You can't. A lot of them you can, some of them you can't. Like that's one of our things is that you can't taste it. I put it in my coffee. Now, I put it in my coffee for many years, and the last time I went to my dentist, she's like, are you drinking a lot of coffee? And I'm like, yeah. She goes, you got to stop that because your teeth are getting stained. So I'm like, oh. So now I just mix in hot water, and I can taste.

Barely taste it. What about, can you put it in cold, like anything? Oh, I guess you can't even in a smoothie. It's like putting like hot chocolate mix into a cup of cold water. It's not going to mix that well. It doesn't work, right? Not as well, no. See, so you're a big collagen person then. Yeah, I do believe it works. And like I said, I've looked at the studies and the studies are all very positive on collagen.

And okay. And you think fish oil is good too? Yeah. So I'm a fan of fish oil, collagen. In my book, I do recommend certain basic supplements. You know, I think it's good to take a multivitamin every day just because there's so much nutritional deficiencies. I think it's good to take a probiotic every day because-

We don't sell a probiotic. We don't sell, I mean, so I don't have everything. You know, supplements are a very minor part of what we do for us. I know, I'm just teasing you. But definitely a daily probiotic because, you know, as you know, I mean, our diet is completely sterile now. You don't have the fermented foods in so many other countries. Yeah. So I do recommend that as well. Okay. So that's not a crazy list. No. And then usually I do recommend some type of like antioxidant mix,

just because we don't, in general, get enough antioxidants in our food. Okay. Now, what do you believe, what do you think for, in terms of like intermittent fasting for that type of, people say that like, a lot of people say that fasting has been really good for the aging process, for longevity, for like autophagy. What is your take on all of that?

So I think that's huge. And that's a big part of my book as well. So when you look at autojuvenation... I was teeing you up there, doctor. When you look at autojuvenation, it's five things I think are the keys to turning back the clock naturally. What you eat, when you eat, nutritional supplements, supplements.

skincare and non-invasive treatments. And so we've kind of touched on all of them, but the when you eat. And so exactly, the thing that happens basically is the fact that we're alive, our body creates waste products and our cells can have waste products in the cells. They're basically used in organelles and proteins and even kind of discarded mitochondria.

And so our cells can fill up with this intracellular waste essentially, and that's one of the main causes of aging of our skin. So the way that we get rid of this intracellular waste is a process that you mentioned called autophagy. Autophagy means self-eating, or basically it's a intracellular recycling process where your body, your cells will actually clean out and use that intracellular waste for

By doing that, it then cleans itself out of this intracellular waste and it functions more efficiently afterwards, essentially being younger. And so that's one of the ideas of fasting as a way to increase longevity because your cells will actually act younger because of this process of autophagy. But for autophagy to work, you have to stop eating for a period of time.

That's how your body runs out of energy and then it starts using up this autophagy process to get rid of these intracellular organelles using that as energy. And so in general, you want to look at stopping eating for at least 12 hours for that process to work. And in our society, as you have talked about in the podcast before, like we're all just used to eating all the time. And so taking time off of eating is the key to do that. And so what I did in the book is

is that we have a 21-day jumpstart where we started people kind of cleaning up their diet, we started them on supplements and skincare products, and then we had them in weeks two and three, we had them start intermittent fasting just two days a week, okay? Because you want to make sure that they get enough protein because protein, especially as you get older, is super, super important. We started intermittent fasting weeks two and three, just two days a week, and we added one final thing to it. We do know that there are certain foods that can promote the autophagy process

even while you're eating, okay? So when they would intermittent fast, they would stop eating at 8 p.m. all the way up until noon the next day. And then when they would break their fast at noon the next day, we would keep them on a diet that promoted autophagy. And that is healthy fats. So it would be omega-3 fatty acid rich foods like cold water fish and monounsaturated fatty acids like olives, avocados, nuts, and seeds, okay?

and foods that are rich in polyphenols, which essentially are bright or dark colored fruits and vegetables. And so the idea then is even though you break your fast and you're eating, you're eating foods that will still promote the autophagy process, that intracellular renewal. And after this 21-day essentially jumpstart, we had people getting just great results in the quality of their skin.