BY PETER BOWES | Sunday January 19, 2025 | @peterbowes

Dr. Terry Wahls is a courageous advocate for health transformation. Her journey is not just a personal battle against multiple sclerosis; it’s a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. With a unique approach that intertwines nutrition, movement, and a positive mindset, Wahls has developed a protocol for thriving, against the odds. Suffering the debilitating effects of MS, with physical and mental decline, she decided to focus on the health of her mitochondria.

Based on the principles of functional medicine, the University of Iowa professor of medicine developed a diet rich in nutrient-dense foods – colorful fruits and vegetables, leafy greens, organ meats, and fish. Her lifestyle incorporates vigorous exercise, stress management, and avoidance of environmental toxins. It evolved into a blueprint for life that Wahls now shares with others and credits for her continuing health and vitality, as she lives with MS.

This is the latest in a series of interviews with leading female health practitioners, where we explore the critical role of mitochondria in cellular health and the significant impact of hormones – for both women and men – on longevity.  

In this interview, with Peter Bowes, Dr. Wahls discusses her remarkable journey and shares her optimism for the future.

This episode, recorded at the 2024 Longevity Fest meeting of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, in Las Vegas, is a co-production with Time-line, the Swiss longevity biotech company which is pioneering a new category of clinically validated dietary supplements called mitoceuticals, to support healthy aging. Mitopure deliverers Urolithin A which has been shown to enhance cellular energy, muscle strength and the health of our skin.

CHAPTERS (time stamps go to YouTube)

• 00:00 Introduction
• 01:52 The personal story behind Dr. Wahls’ approach
• 04:18 Moments of despair and discovery
• 09:25 Redefining medical possibilities with multiple sclerosis
• 11:58 The foundational shift in food and diet
• 14:50 Muscle strength: the backbone of aging well
• 23:27 Debunking common dietary myths
• 31:45 Exercise as a pivotal component of longevity

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Connect with Dr. Wahls: Bio | Website | Facebook | X | YouTube

Read: The Wahls Protocol: A Radical New Way to Treat All Chronic Autoimmune Conditions Using Paleo Principles

Related episodes:

Take a deep dive into the science behind mitochondrial health; the unique power of plants, such as pomegranates, to enhance our wellbeing.

• Dr. Felice Gersh: Hormones and mitochondria drive healthy aging
• Jen Scheinman, RD: Why we love our mitochondria
• Dr. Anurag Singh: Boosting strength, stamina and skin health
• Dr. Davide D’Amico: Harnessing nature for better human health
• Dr. Chris Rinsch: Unlocking the power of advanced nutrition
• Prof. David Marcinek: Improving muscle endurance to age better
• Prof. Louise Burke: Optimizing big muscle health in athletes
• Dr. Julie Andersen: Could better gut health help prevent Alzheimer’s?
• Dr. David Katz: Robust health beyond the pandemic
• Prof. Stuart Phillips: Boosting physical strength as we age
• Dr. Stephanie Blum: Embracing and marketing the science of wellbeing
• Prof. Johan Auwerx: Enjoying youthful vitality as we age
• Dr. Navindra Seeram: The rejuvenating power of plants
• Prof. Patrick Aebischer: A novel molecule to promote longevity
• Dr. Anurag Singh: Pomegranates, muscle mass and healthy aging

Future conversations in this series include:

• Stephanie Estima, a doctor of chiropractic with a special interest in metabolism, body composition, functional neurology, and female physiology.
• Cynthia Thurlow, a nurse practitioner and leading metabolic health expert dedicated to empowering women to take charge of their health.

DISCLOSURE: This site includes affiliate links from which we derive a small commission. It helps support the podcast and allows us to continue sharing conversations about human longevity. LLAMA is available, free of charge, via multiple podcasting platforms. Our mission is to explore the science and lifestyle interventions that could help us live longer and better. Thank you for the support!

▸ Time-line is offering LLAMA podcast listeners a 10% discount on its Mitopure products – Mitopure Powder, Softgels, Mitopure + Protein and skin creams – which support improvements in mitochondrial function and muscle strength. Mitopure – which is generally regarded as safe by the US Food and Drug Administration – boosts the health of our mitochondria – the battery packs of our cells – and improves our muscle strength.  Use the code LLAMA at checkout

TRANSCRIPT: This interview with Dr. Terry Wahls was recorded in Las Vegas on December 13th, 2024.

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[00:00:00] Dr. Terry Wahls: There is an epidemic of chronic disease. There’s also a growing epidemic of people understanding that there are things I can do to make my circumstances a bit better, and I’m willing to do that, and I’m willing to do that work. So I’m very hopeful.
 
[00:00:21] Peter Bowes: Hello again. Welcome to the Live Long podcast, I’m Peter Bowes. This is where we explore the science and stories behind human longevity. The goal is to optimize our health span and master the aging process.
 
[00:00:35] TIMELINE: This episode is a co-production with the Swiss longevity biotech company Timeline. We’re in Las Vegas at A4M, the annual Longevity Fest meeting of the American Academy of Anti-Aging medicine.
 
[00:00:46] Peter Bowes: Doctor Terry Wahls is best known for her work using diet and lifestyle interventions to manage MS, multiple sclerosis, a condition she’s been diagnosed with herself. As a clinical professor of internal medicine at the University of Iowa, an author and a speaker. She educates the public and medical community about the healing power of certain foods and the therapeutic lifestyle changes that improve the health and vitality of autoimmune, neurologic, and chronically diseased patients. She conducts clinical trials and has developed the Wahls Protocol, a diet and lifestyle program emphasizing nutrient rich foods and functional medicine. Doctor Wahls, it’s great to see you.
 
[00:01:31] Dr. Terry Wahls: Hey, thanks for having me.
 
[00:01:33] Peter Bowes: So a lot of what you do now is based on your own personal story, your own experiences, as I say, with with ill health and MS in particular. So I think we should start there in terms of you just telling us what’s happened to you and how it’s influenced your career from that point.
 
[00:01:52] Dr. Terry Wahls: Yeah. So I’m a internal medicine physician, and in 2000, I developed weakness in my in my left leg and ultimately went to see a neurologist who said, you know, Terry, 13 years earlier you had an episode of dim vision. He ordered an MRI of my brain, my spinal cord. We ended up with a spinal tap, and three weeks later I heard I had relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis. Now I did my research, found the best MS center in the country, took the newest drugs. Three years later, at age 48, I’m in a tilt recline wheelchair an d I’m taking my Mitoxantrone, a form of chemotherapy – does not help. I take TYSABRI the new biologic drug. Does not help. Then I’m placed on CellCept. And that’s when I decided to start reading the basic science. And I decided that mitochondria are what’s driving disability. And I create a supplement cocktail for my mitochondria. And I can tell that that helps my severe fatigue just a little bit, but I’m super grateful. And I discovered the Institute for Functional Medicine. I take their course on neuroprotection. I have a longer list of supplements which I’m happy to add. And then I have this really big aha! Like, what if I redesigned the paleo diet that I’ve already been following for five years based on this long list of nutrients? So a little more research to figure out where they are in the food supply. I start this new way of eating on December 26th. Now, for your listeners, what I want you to know is that at that point, I’m so weak I cannot sit up anymore. I can take a few steps using two walking sticks. I have trigeminal neuralgia, so bouts of really horrific pain that are difficult to turn off. And I’m beginning to have brain fog, which is why my chief of staff had told me that he was reassigning me to the traumatic brain injury clinic that I have to start in January without any residents, As he described the job, I knew I physically wouldn’t be able to do that. It was very clear to me I was destined to become bedridden by my illness because I was already very, very close, possibly demented by my illness, because I began to have brain fog and dying with intractable, horrific pain. So, you know, a grim future.
 
[00:04:18] Peter Bowes: You mentioned an aha moment, there must, I guess, during that journey that you’ve been on have been several moments. Well, maybe just to talk about the you just described the really bleakest of times and the bleakest of outlooks.
 
[00:04:31] Dr. Terry Wahls: Yeah.
 
[00:04:32] Peter Bowes: How did you feel at that point? Did you have hope? Any hope?
 
[00:04:37] Dr. Terry Wahls: Well, I knew that I have secondary progressive MS. That when you’re certainly that profoundly disabled, there is no recovery, no recovery function. That’s not going to happen. But everything that I was doing from the time I ended up in the wheelchair chair was to slow my decline because I knew recovery was not possible. And I know my first Aha was its mitochondria. So I really focused on mitochondria and my supplement cocktail was very helpful. It made my fatigue a little less, and so very, very grateful. And it was slowing the speed of my decline. Very grateful. and I had adopted the paleo diet. I didn’t mention, but I should add, I discovered a study using electrical stimulation of muscles. I talked to my physical therapist, convinced him to give me a test session. He said, you know, it’s for athletes. I know I can grow bigger muscles, Terry, but I don’t know. Your brain can talk to those muscles that might be putting more weight on your legs. And I could be actually making it harder for you to take the few steps that you can. So he gave me a test session. I did hurt really bad, by the way, but I felt great afterwards, he said. It’s probably the endorphins. So he added my electrical stimulation muscles to my little tiny mat exercises that I did before going to work. And by tiny, I meant tiny. I did this little tiny ten minute mat exercises. If I did more, I couldn’t function and go to work. So that’s December 26th, 2007. I start my regimen and the first two weeks. Then January comes. I have to go to this new clinic. The first two weeks, I’m watching my partners in the clinic, and then the third week I have to, you know, examine the veterans, write the notes, and I come home that first day and I’m like, well, you know, that wasn’t too bad. And by the way, honey, could I sit in a regular chair for supper? Because up until then, I’d been in a zero gravity chair with my knees higher than my nose, you know? And that’s how I, you know, staffed …at the hospital, and I had that kind of chair for meals and time with my family. So I sat in a regular chair. First time in years in that. Yeah, that was a pretty big deal. And at the end of the week on Friday, you know, I come home and I tell Jackie, you know, honey, I think I can do this. And then the next week I’m back in with physical therapy again. My therapist says, you know, Terry, you’re stronger. And he advances my exercises so I can do my ten minutes twice a day. And then, you know, 15, twice a day, 20 minutes, twice a day. And then I start walking with walking sticks at the hospital. And then with one walking stick and then with none. You know, and then I began walking around the block with my family. And then, you know, I tell my family it’s Mother’s Day. You know, I tell Jackie that I really want to try riding my bike, which I haven’t done in about six years. So we have this emergency family meeting. My kids don’t don’t want me to ride my bike because they’re afraid I might fall. But Jack says, yeah. Let’s try. So we all get into position, and she tells my 16 year old son, who’s six foot five, Zach, you run alongside to the left, and Zebby, who’s 13, my daughter, you run alongside on the right and she’ll follow. You know, we get into position and I bike around the block, you know, and my 16 year old boy, he’s crying. my 13 year old girl, Zebby. She’s crying. Jackie’s crying. And as you can tell, I’m still crying. But I relive that moment because that is when I understood that the current understanding of secondary progressive multiple sclerosis is incomplete, and who knows how much recovery might be possible. So every day I biked a little further. And then in October, Jackie comes home and says, honey, I signed us up for the Courage ride. It’s 18.5 miles. However far you go, it’s going to be a triumph. And at that point it only biked as far as eight miles. So this was a big, a big leap. But I did it. 18.5 miles. So once again, you know, we’re all crying. And that really transforms how I think about disease and health.
 
[00:09:25] Peter Bowes: You described it as a big deal a moment ago, which is maybe an understatement. And it’s a big deal at different levels as well. It’s a very big deal, and I can see it’s still very emotional about it. It’s a big deal at a personal level because I guess what you can see, you’ve got a future, but it’s also a big deal from a medical perspective because what you’ve achieved or what you achieved then wasn’t expected.
 
[00:09:50] Dr. Terry Wahls: Absolutely.
 
[00:09:51] Peter Bowes: Against the grain. So there’s a personal achievement and a future that you can think about. But it’s got you thinking about medicine as well.
 
[00:09:58] Dr. Terry Wahls: Well, it certainly changed. It would ultimately change the way I practice medicine. In my traumatic brain injury clinic, I started talking to these vets who had been before I came, like, okay, you’ll recover or not. You just have to wait and see. And I come in and say, wait a minute. There’s a lot we can do. I can help you fix your diet. We’re going to get a step counter. I will teach you how to meditate. And you could tell the people I saw in the clinic did much, much better. And then I also changed how I practice in my primary care clinic with the vets. And that became quite controversial. My partners complained that I was not practicing the standard of care I and so my chief of staff called me into the office. Say, hey, what’s going on? People are complaining. Unfortunately, I had brought. I knew this would ultimately happen. And so I printed out a big stack of scientific papers that were explaining the rationale of what I was doing. And so I met with John and I said, you know, I’ll just cover a couple of these papers, but I’ll leave all of them here with you. Unfortunately, I did eventually win him over. He became very supportive. And he and the chief of medicine at the university would ultimately ask me to do start doing clinical trials. And at the time, I said, well, I’ve not been trained in doing clinical trials. And they said, we’ll get you the mentors. This is what we want you to do. So they sort of shifted my responsibilities and I began doing clinical trials, uh, we started in 2010, and I’ve been doing that ever since.
 
[00:11:43] Peter Bowes: So let’s talk about food and diet, and how your attitudes changed, what you learned from your own condition and what you teach now. Where did you start? Where was the aha moment that you could change things for the better?
 
[00:11:58] Dr. Terry Wahls: You know. During medical school it was started in 1978, graduated in 1982. Fat was evil. Butter was evil. Eggs were evil. I went on a very, very low fat vegetarian diet. So plenty of vegetables, whole grains, whole grain wheat, skim milk, beans and legumes. Certainly very heart healthy, very much like a mediterranean diet. And then my neurologist in 2002, while I was still walking yet. I had mentioned the work of Loren Cordain and the paleo diet. So after I read his books, his papers, I decided that I would reintroduce meat. That was a really big deal. But I continued to decline. But it’s like, okay, I don’t know how long it would take to stop everything. At least I’m doing something. And then I discovered Institute for Functional Medicine, a longer list of supplements I’m doing electrical stimulation of muscles. And then I’m thinking, you know, I wonder if I redesign my paleo diet sort of around these lists of nutrients that I’ve identified that are really important for the mitochondria. That’s when the magic happened. That is really when the magic was just so remarkable.
 
[00:13:21] Peter Bowes: So taking away the labels, paleo, whatever people want to call the diet in terms of what you actually eat and what a meal looks like, and indeed, what does a day of meals look like for you?
 
[00:13:33] Dr. Terry Wahls: Well, you know, it evolves over time. So I’ll start with the original iteration. Lots of green leafy vegetables. Kale, Swiss chard, spinach, lots of pestos, lots of the what I call the sulfur rich vegetables cabbage family, onion family, mushroom family, and then the deeply colored beets, carrots, berries, things that, you know, have a deep dark pigment, some nuts and seeds, fermented foods, sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, beet kebabs, meat, fish, organ, meats, tongue, heart, liver, gizzards and plenty of olive oil. But have that cold because when you heat the olive oil, you damage the hydroxytyrosol some of the great polyphenols. So you want to have your olive oils cold. And now, over time, I realized that being ketogenic for me was a little bit better. So I went more ketogenic. And now I also add in periodic fast. So I’ll go 24 hours without without food I may go 36 hours without food. Never more than 36 hours because I’m old enough. I don’t want to be losing my muscles. So, you know, more often I might do a 24 hour fast.
 
[00:14:54] Peter Bowes: Well, there’s there’s strong science, isn’t there? That as we get older and especially over 60, that the protein element 
 
[00:15:01] Dr. Terry Wahls: You gotta have gotta have plenty of protein. You want to be sure you have plenty of protein. So I’m having somewhat fewer vegetables, more protein. And I incorporate some element of fasting.
 
[00:15:10] Peter Bowes: Now this diet has been a healing process for you, but you see it as more than just a process to get better. This is a lifestyle now that you teach?
 
[00:15:21] Dr. Terry Wahls: Correct. And this is a longevity. So even if you’re healthy, I’m guessing all of your listeners, you guys want to be healthy and vital into your 50s or 60s or 70 or 80 or 90s. I have a grandson now. Just popped out. He’s a whopping eight months. And I’m thinking like, well, I’d like to see him grow up. I’d like to see who he finds for his romantic partner, assuming they’ll have one. So that means I want to have a rich, vital life for another 20 or 30 years. And I also tell my medical students and postdocs and my lab that I still want to be teaching and doing research when I’m 120. I want to be like Linus Pauling, still giving lectures to standing room only scientists in my 90s in 100s and beyond.
 
[00:16:16] Peter Bowes: You’ve touched on an area that I do lots of interviews like this and ask people what their inspiration, what their motivation is to aspire to a great age and a long healthspan in other words, what encourages them to do what they do. And you’ve already talked about your children and your grandchildren, and that seems to be a leading light for the vast majority of people, that it’s not just about you, but it’s about other people in your life.
 
[00:16:42] Dr. Terry Wahls: You know, you want to be able to give back. And if you can give back, you know, to your family, very important to the people you love. So I just mentioned my grandson, my spouse, my son, my daughter, vitally important. If you’re able to give back to your community, it’s an even higher level of altruism, so to speak. And, I mean, I want everyone to know if I can come back from such profound disability, whatever their medical issues are, there’s hope for them, you know? And for your listeners, you know, every, every, every week, every month I get people reaching out to me to say, ‘I have had condition XYZ or my son or daughter has had condition XYZ. My physician said nothing. I can’t do anything more for you. And somebody sent me your book and told me to read it. And I read it. And I began implementing what I learned in. My life’s been transformed.’ There is hope.
 
[00:17:52] Peter Bowes: And you mentioned your son Zach. Yes. And I know that you you’ve talked about this before, but you draw a lot of inspiration from what he’s achieved and the work that he does as well.
 
[00:18:03] Dr. Terry Wahls: I’m very grateful to my kids, Zach and Zeb, who, you know, they were eight and five when I was diagnosed. Life was so difficult. I’m getting more and more disabled, but I still wanted to parent, and I wanted to show them that I’m going to do the best that I can, even though life is difficult because I know they’re going to face really difficult times. And, that’s how I made it forward. And, you know, I’m immensely grateful. Both Zach and Zeb tell me that, they look back and really treasure the fact that they saw that I was doing my little tiny workouts every day, even though, you know, it was really hard for me to walk.
 
[00:18:51] TIMELINE: This episode is brought to you by Timeline, the Swiss longevity biotech company, which is pioneering a new category of clinically validated dietary supplements called mitoceuticals to support healthy aging. Mitopure delivers Urolithin A, which has been shown to enhance cellular energy, muscle strength, and the health of our skin. To find out more, go to the show notes for this episode.
 
[00:19:13] Peter Bowes: I want to return to mitochondria and muscle strength, which has, I think, increasingly, hopefully, most of us are beginning to understand the vital importance of of muscle strength and vital mitochondria and mitochondrial health, especially as we grow older. But it’s important as we’re young as well. But what have been the changes that you have seen in terms of the science and our understanding of what we can do to nurture the health of our mitochondria.
 
[00:19:43] Dr. Terry Wahls: Well. There’s certainly more recognition in the multiple sclerosis space that mitochondria drive disability. Mitochondria drive whether or not you can repair your myelin. Mitochondria drive, whether or not the myelin is being damaged. And that’s true for.
 
[00:20:04] Peter Bowes: Just explain myelin for anyone who doesn’t understand. 
 
[00:20:08] Dr. Terry Wahls: Sure. So we have two brain cells. And there’s a nerve root c`alled an axon connecting them. And so you can have a fast transmission if there’s a fatty insulation that wraps the mitochondria. And part of the reason you have damage in multiple sclerosis is the immune cells create damage to that myelin. And if the mitochondria can’t generate enough energy, then the ability to repair that damage is compromised. And we also know as we get older in our mitochondria aren’t working as well. We have myelin loss as part of aging. And we have myelin loss with anxiety with depression and severe mental health problems as well.
 
[00:20:57] Peter Bowes: So in terms of nurturing the health of our mitochondria, there are several avenues that we can go down. And perhaps ideally all of them in terms of extra weight training is crucial, I think as we get older. But this supplementation is as well.
 
[00:21:12] Dr. Terry Wahls: Yeah, right. So you want to exercise your mitochondria. So strength training is super helpful if you can do it. High intensity interval training very helpful as some temperature training. So slowly expand the temperature that you can tolerate a little more warmth a little more coldness. If you have MS you have to do that very very gradually. And then there are supplements, a variety of supplements that can be very helpful. You know, I talk about B vitamins that can be helpful. Coenzyme Q can be helpful. Minerals like magnesium, zinc can be helpful. Lipoic acid, carnitine can be helpful. Bruce Ames, who is a really brilliant nutritional biochemist. He was one of the guys that I was following when I was making my supplement cocktail. He had a list of 40 different vitamins, minerals, antioxidants that he used. And that was very, very, very helpful.
 
[00:22:08] Peter Bowes: For people listening to what you’ve got to say who have no significant problems in terms of their health, but they feel maybe lethargic. They feel as they’re getting older that they don’t have the energy that they used to have.  Are the kind of protocols that you teach, and the changes in the diet that you recommend are those that healthy people should be considering as well.
 
[00:22:34] Dr. Terry Wahls: You know, what is shocking is that people are beginning to experience this decline, like I’m getting older as early as early as 35 and 40. The sense of brain fog. This needing a lot of caffeine throughout the day. That shouldn’t happen. We should be alert, brilliant, and plenty of energy. And so if we could improve our nutrition, improve our lifestyle, our self-care, we can go back to having plenty of energy at age 40. We don’t have to have this early, accelerated aging.
 
[00:23:11] Peter Bowes: And what are some of the myths, some of the things that people believe in, maybe they’ve seen advertising, maybe they’ve grown up with a way of eating, a way of shopping for their food. What are people mostly doing wrong, do you think?
 
[00:23:27] Dr. Terry Wahls: Well, we get marketed to have a lot of white flour based foods, breads, cereals, pastas, a lot of sugar sweetened beverages. In fact, over 60% of our calories are coming from sugar sweetened beverages and white flour based products. Terrible. It’s ruining our health, and our children are even worse. They have over 70% of their calories coming from that. Removing all of those foods and replacing them with this radical things known as water, herbal teas and vegetables and sufficient meats. If you’re a vegetarian for spiritual reasons. You know, beans and rice, you know, that’s fine. I’d rather you eat meat so it’s a higher quality protein. So meat, fish. That would be a huge, huge first steps.
 
[00:24:17] Peter Bowes: Do you have a preference? Fish. Red meat, white meat? 
 
[00:24:20] Dr. Terry Wahls: Variety. Yeah a bit of everything.Much much better.
 
[00:24:25] Peter Bowes: What about…there’s a lot of people in this longevity space. We’re at this conference at the moment. Who will swear by a plant based diet, or maybe a pescatarian diet. A little bit of fish along with a vegetarian diet.
 
[00:24:36] Dr. Terry Wahls: So the plant based diet is low in methionine. It’s similar in some ways to a ketogenic diet, which is low in carbs. So that can prolong aging. However, if you don’t supplement very, very carefully, you’re going to wreck your brain and you’re going to create all sorts of health problems. And so I see many folks embrace a plant based diet. Don’t know how to follow that nutritionally. They feel great for the first 1 to 2 years. And then as they’re depleting their mitochondria in their brain of key nutrients, they begin to not feel well. But they don’t realize it’s tied to their nutrition because they felt so great at first.
 
[00:25:19] Peter Bowes: And is that part of the problem that people just don’t understand and that we are bombarded with information these days? From one perspective or another? And the general public are left thinking, well, what do I do?
 
[00:25:33] Dr. Terry Wahls: Yeah, it is confusing. And also look at, you know, our evolutionary history. If you look at primitive societies and how we evolved as a species 250,000 years, There are no hunter gatherer societies that are vegetarians or vegans. they’re all eating a combination of meat and plant products. There are some societies that eat only animal products. The majority of societies have 80g of carbs or less. Probably most common is about 50g of carbs or less.
 
[00:26:07] Peter Bowes: We often hear this phrase the hunter gatherer way of living. What does it mean to you and what have you drawn from that?
 
[00:26:15] Dr. Terry Wahls: We can eat many different kinds of foods, you know, tough, stringy, chewy foods. There are plants from all over the world in rainforest, temperate zones, Arctic zones. And we had great reproductive success. And so again, for the listeners, if there is a person who begins to say there’s only one diet, my diet, all the other diets are wrong, stop following that person because they’re wrong. There are many diets that we can thrive with. There are a few diets that we cannot. An unsupplemented vegetarian or vegan diet. You’ll eventually get into trouble, but carefully structured, you can still thrive. A modern American diet with 60% of your calories coming from white flour and added sugars, you will develop a metabolic syndrome diabetes, obesity, anxiety, depression, autoimmune disease, and all of the chronic diseases that are plaguing westernized societies.
 
[00:27:16] Peter Bowes: And what do you think of the phrase moderation in everything? Some people criticize that as advice because they say it’s just an excuse to do whatever you feel like doing without any consideration as to the dietary consequences.
 
[00:27:30] Dr. Terry Wahls: Would you tell someone to take a moderate amount of poison every day?
 
[00:27:35] Peter Bowes: Probably not.
 
[00:27:35] Dr. Terry Wahls: Probably not.
 
[00:27:37] Peter Bowes: No. Equally, though, and I tend to quite like. I take what you say, but I quite like the term moderation in terms of, well, the variety of what we eat. We don’t want to have excess alcohol, but maybe a glass of wine occasionally is okay. We don’t want to eat maybe beef every day, but beef occasionally is okay.
 
[00:27:57] Dr. Terry Wahls: A concept I prefer is begin improving your diet and self-care routine bit by bit, at a pace that you can manage. I much prefer that concept again to the listeners. Just begin thinking about your nutrition bit by bit, making favorable changes, improving your mindfulness practice, your sleep, your movement. Again, bit by bit, in a way that you and your family can successfully manage.
 
[00:28:25] Peter Bowes: And what is processed food. That’s a huge area of confusion to people.
 
[00:28:30] Dr. Terry Wahls: So processed food. Let’s take an apple. If I take my apple and I slice it, I’ve processed a little bit. If I sauté it and make an apple sauce, I processed it a bit more. If I put it into a blender and I make a smoothie out of it, I processed it even further. So it’s how many things I do to that food before I actually eat it. When we think about processed foods here in America, we also have the addition of generally regarded as safe compounds that the food industry can they themselves classify as generally regarded as safe. There’s no oversight by the FDA or the USDA. And so we have literally tens of thousands of chemicals added to our food that are banned in your banned in Canada. So it’s that processed food that has, in addition to the mechanical changes that we’ve done to the food to make it easier for us to use. We’ve added all these food like chemicals with that have never been shown to be safe.
 
[00:29:42] Peter Bowes: Moving to a slightly different topic, nitric oxide is something that I know you’ve talked about a lot and you’ve written about, and I think, is it fair to say quite little understood in terms of its importance?
 
[00:29:54] Dr. Terry Wahls: We’re just beginning to appreciate how important this is as a signaling molecule. And it’s super interesting that my diet lots and lots of green leafy vegetables, I encourage beets, which are high in nitrates, eat those foods gets into our bloodstream. It’ll come out the saliva into my mouth. And if I have the right bacteria, I will further metabolize those compounds. It will increase the nitric oxide that will be available, which is a very important signaling molecule all throughout my body, through my blood vessels, through my brain, through my muscles.
 
[00:30:31] Peter Bowes: And when you say a signaling molecule, what does it enable us to do?
 
[00:30:35] Dr. Terry Wahls: So we’ll take the blood vessels, for example. If you don’t have these bacteria in your mouth, let’s say you’re using mouthwash every day. You’ve killed off these nitric oxide producing bacteria. Your blood pressure is going to be higher because the nitric oxide helps your blood vessels relax. It improves blood flow to your heart. All of my extremities into my brain. We’re just beginning to understand that in addition to a signaling molecule for my blood vessels, it’s also involved in signaling throughout all of our metabolic pathways. So we’re just beginning to understand the importance of this molecule.
 
[00:31:21] Peter Bowes: So moving to exercise, which I think most people would probably consider as equal to what we eat in terms of those key pillars of human longevity. Obviously, your approach to exercise as you’ve continued to recover will have changed. You’re able to do more, but maybe you could just quantify for me how important exercise and especially vigorous exercise is?
 
[00:31:45] Dr. Terry Wahls: If we are sedentary, our health declines remarkably, being put to bed rest. Rapid decline in health. So movement. Walking ten miles a day. Marvelously good for you. Strength training to maintain muscle mass. Incredibly important, particularly as we age. Because the size of your muscles really predicts how many nerve growth factors I have. The hormones that help nurture maintaining the connections of my brain. Maintaining the health of my brain cells. And then. Flexibility. Stretching. Balance. Ideally, if you want to have an ideal exercise program, you have some elements of all of those things. But it has to be fun. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, you’re not going to do it. So I tell my patients and my tribe do things that are fun. You know, dancing with your partner. That’s marvelous. Going for walks with your friends. That’s marvelous. Doing a body strength workout with your kids. That’s marvelous, but find ways to move more, have fun. And if you can include elements that include aerobic strength, stretching, and balance, that would be ideal.
 
[00:33:08] Peter Bowes: Well, I did an interview recently. Someone said to me that we shouldn’t talk about working out. We should talk about playing out.
 
[00:33:14] Dr. Terry Wahls: Playing? Absolutely. Absolutely. Playing and moving.
 
[00:33:18] Peter Bowes: And that brings us to. And it’s all connected. Everything is connected. But that brings us to social connections. And there are strong elements of of exercise and especially group exercise and the benefits of social connections, which I think we all know that there’s a loneliness epidemic now around the world, especially here in the United States. But just being with other people, but especially being with like minded other people and as you say, sort of playing or enjoying yourselves together, you know.
 
[00:33:48] Dr. Terry Wahls: If you you have other people in your life, you’re going to live 2 to 3 years longer. If you have grandchildren in your life. Those grandparents live 2 to 3 years longer. Being alone and lonely is profoundly inflammatory. So how do we do this? Writing letters, phone calls, video calls, volunteering, going to meetings, going to your religious community, going to your yoga group. There are many ways to be connected with other.
 
[00:34:24] Peter Bowes: Just break that down for me. Say inflammatory is a consequence of loneliness. How does that happen?
 
[00:34:31] Dr. Terry Wahls: You’ll drive up your inflammatory cytokines. You will activate the immune cells. We evolved again over probably millions of years in small groups that required cooperative behaviors to survive. I think it’s hardwired into our genetic makeup. It’s hardwired. And when we don’t have that cooperative behavior, we’re probably having negative epigenetic changes on how we’re running the chemistry of life.
 
[00:35:06] Peter Bowes: And I think that’s that gets to the heart of the matter. That’s crucial to understand, because I think a lot of people will they know what loneliness is, what it’s like to be by themselves, but don’t necessarily join the Join the dots with their physical health. They can’t see the connection.
 
[00:35:21] Dr. Terry Wahls: That our species evolved and we had to have cooperative behavior. We had to figure out that I might be really annoyed with you, but I knew that I had to work it out because when we went on the hunt together, I had to rely on you. And and when I had to go foraging, I had to rely on the other women in the clan to help with that effort. And so we had it hardwired into us that we could work out our disagreements. We could come up with solutions that could work for everybody in the small clan, which might have been 20 to 40 people.
 
[00:36:06] Peter Bowes: Just in concluding, we’re at this longevity conference now, bewildering array of organizations and products and different ways of life that are on show here. You could group them into the description of the longevity industry or the longevity space, which has exploded in the last few years. Just the understanding the the buzzword of longevity. Why? Why now do you think? What’s changing in our lives and our society? Is it just the rapidly evolving science that we’re understanding?
 
[00:36:41] Dr. Terry Wahls: You know. I think part of it is that we’re hearing from the social media, uh, as people like myself tell my story, and we have more people that are recovering from profound illness who are telling their story. And that’s slowly rippling out that there are solutions. Even when my conventional medical team hasn’t been able to solve my problem that friends are sending them books, sending them links saying, why don’t you check this out? Uh, and that is, you know, increasing awareness. You know, my Ted talk you know, back in 2011 has over 4 million views. So the internet can be full of misinformation, some crazy stuff. But it also does help spread stories of hope and possibility.
 
[00:37:37] Peter Bowes: But your TED talk really struck a nerve.
 
[00:37:40] Dr. Terry Wahls: It struck a nerve.
 
[00:37:40] Peter Bowes: That that’s why it took off. That’s why so many people have watched it.
 
[00:37:44] Dr. Terry Wahls: Because it offered hope.
 
[00:37:45] Peter Bowes: Yes. And I think hope is what a lot of people don’t have in this world. We look around the world, we see wars, we see divided nations in terms of politics and people, they may be doing okay themselves, but the bigger picture to some people is actually quite depressing, and that in itself can harm our health.
 
[00:38:08] Dr. Terry Wahls: There is an epidemic of chronic disease is also a growing epidemic of people understanding that there are things I can do to make my circumstances a bit better. And I’m willing to do that, and I’m willing to do that work.
 
[00:38:24] Dr. Terry Wahls: So I’m very hopeful.
 
[00:38:25] Peter Bowes: Well, good. I’m glad you are. And so, on a positive note, what really excites you now about the science, about the research, the clinical trials, looking ahead to the future.
 
[00:38:36] Dr. Terry Wahls: So I have a great clinical trial comparing paleo, keto, usual diet that’ll finish in 2026. I’m writing a new book that will come out in 2026. My little grandson’s getting a new milestone after new milestone. That is super fun. So yep, the world is a scary place and it’s an exhilarating place.
 
[00:38:58] Peter Bowes: And you touched on this a few moments ago, but as far as your own personal longevity is concerned, what, as you are now, and your state of health now. What are your aspirations for the future?
 
[00:39:10] Dr. Terry Wahls: Well, I’d like to be doing chin ups. I have a long ways to go before I can do chin ups. You know, I saw that a 40 year old really carries a 75% of their body weight. So I’d like to carry at least, let’s say 60% of my body weight. So we’ll see. I’m up to 60 pounds, so not quite a half, but I can carry a third of my body weight. So let’s see if I can get that up to 60% of my body weight.
 
[00:39:37] Peter Bowes: When that day comes. Hopefully we can talk again?
 
[00:39:39] Speaker4: Sounds great.
 
[00:39:39] Peter Bowes: Doctor Terry Waltz, thank you very much indeed.
 
[00:39:41] Speaker4: Thank you.
 
[00:39:42] Peter Bowes: The Live Long podcast is a healthspan media production. I’m Peter Bowes. You can contact me through our website, livelong Podcast.com, where you’ll also find show notes for this episode.
 
[00:39:53] Speaker5: This podcast is for informational, educational and entertainment purposes only. We do not offer medical advice. If you have health concerns of any kind or you are considering adopting a new diet or exercise regime, you should first consult your doctor.