Transcript #474 The Incredible Secrets to Anti-aging and Longevity with Jason Prall

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1. Find out what’s in store for this Myers Detox Podcast with Jason Prall who joins the show to talk about the incredible secrets to longevity and anti-aging. Jason dives into so many fascinating areas of anti-aging and what anti-aging really is. He covers the way trauma plays a role in aging, why community is so important for longevity, and why stress reduction is a must for anti-aging. He also discusses the way heavy metals and toxins impact oxidative stress, and what you’ll find in his incredible best-selling book Beyond Longevity. Lots of excellent information in this episode so make sure to tune in!
2. Find out what lead Jason to focus so much on longevity.
3. Find out what aging really is, and what’s happening to the body when it ages.
4. Learn about how heavy metals and toxins damage our cell membranes and cause oxidative stress.
5. Find out how heavy metals stored in our body can actually interact with our environment and cause issues on an energetic level.
6. Learn about how our nervous system is such an important factor in approaching health and longevity.
7. Learn about the many factors that play a role in the way we age.
8. Find out how trauma and childhood trauma affect our body and can lead to increased aging.
9. Learn why community, and more importantly connection, is essential for anti-aging and longevity.
10. Find out all of the amazing information that you will find in Jason’s best-selling book Beyond Longevity.
11. Find out where you can learn more about Jason, his work, and his book.

Dr. Wendy Myers:  Hello, everyone. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Myers Detox Podcast. On the show today, we have Jason Prall on the show, and he’s an expert on longevity and anti-aging, and he’ll be talking about so many different aspects of anti-aging, like what aging really is. We’ll talk about how trauma can play a huge role in aging as well, and impacting our longevity and our perception of a community, how it affects our stress levels as well and just in general, how stress affects our nervous system, our limbic system, and what we need to do in regards to stress reduction. We talked about heavy metals and toxins and their impact on oxidative stress and aging and lots of really, really, really good tips on the show today. If you want to live a longer life and a better quality of life as you age, just check this out. Jason’s an absolute expert.

  I know you guys listening to this show are concerned about many aspects of your health, but many people don’t consider their emotional life or how to address their emotional life in how that can dramatically impact your physical health as well. Of course, your mental health as well, and your level of joy and peace and happiness. So I developed a great masterclass called the Emotional Detox Masterclass that you should check out. If you want to learn more about this subject, you can go to emo-detox.com. emo-detox.com. I did about a one-hour masterclass, and it’s fascinating information and fascinating statistics about how emotional trauma happens early in life, and it can be as simple as neglect. It doesn’t have to be outright abuse. It can just be neglect or seemingly innocuous things that dramatically impact us later in life and can dramatically impact our health. 65% of physical health issues are caused by emotional trauma. Just lots of fascinating research in this masterclass, so go check that out at emo-detox.com.

  Our guest today, Jason Prall. He’s a health educator, practitioner, author, and filmmaker, and in 2018, his independent research and experience as a practitioner-led him to create the Human Longevity Project. It’s a nine-part film series that uncovers the true nature of chronic disease in our modern world. He’s currently working on his next film series, which explores ancient methods of healing mind, body, and soul from indigenous cultures around the world. He’s recently released a bestselling new book titled Beyond Longevity: A Proven Plan for Healing Faster, Feeling Better, and Thriving at Any Age. You can learn more about Jason and his book at beyondlongevitybook.com. Jason, thanks so much for coming to the show.

Jason Prall: Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Dr. Wendy Myers: So tell us a little bit about yourself and why you focus so much on longevity.

Jason Prall: It’s an interesting question because the longevity aspect, to be honest, isn’t really a primary interest of mine per se. Where I do have an interest is in the narrative, and the ideas that are being floated around the health sphere and the techno sphere right now about longevity, which is this idea that we can live to 200 or that aging is a disease that needs to be cured. A lot of the technological progress that we’re making in the health world, the bio tracking, and the various sorts of nanotechnology that is on the way, no question, it raises some really interesting moral dilemmas and questions that we, I think, really need to sit with.

So I wanted to put something out with regard to longevity that could basically tell a different story than some of the stuff that we’re finding out of Silicon Valley and in some of these sort of big thinkers, which I think is admirable and I think it’s great, and I think it can miss the boat in so many areas, especially when it comes to the fact that I don’t know anybody, and I’ve talked to the people that are in their 90s, and beyond 100, and of course all of our peers, I don’t really know anybody that has this goal of making it to 150 or 200, to live this really long life as a sole purpose. It’s always the things that are left unsaid, which is this idea of well-being and connection and purpose. There are more meaningful aspects to life than just this number that we put up. It’s really to me about that, how well we’re living, how well I can come into the moment right now, how happy can I be in everything that I do?

I think there are deeper aspects to this idea of longevity, and so that’s kind of the essence of the title of the book that I just wrote called Beyond longevity. This longevity idea is interesting as long as it has some context with it that I think is more important.

Dr. Wendy Myers: I mean, we want to live a really good quality of life. I don’t want to be someone who’s like 60 years old and unhealthy and on five different medications and not able to exercise. There are a lot of people; that’s their reality. They have a really poor quality of life, and they haven’t really aged that much.

Jason Prall: We have regenerative medicine that’s here now, and it’s only going to be progressing more and more. So with the things like PRP and stem cells and peptides and hydro nerve dissection, and there are all these cool things on the orthopedic side, on the regenerative medicine side, and we’re just scratching the surface. I have no doubt that what’s coming down the pike is going to be more impressive, way cooler, and really, really interesting. I can’t live a disharmonious life internally and externally as it relates to my health and then try to rely on these regenerative medicine therapies to save me. That’s not a good recipe, either. We’re just going to be chasing our tails individually and again. If we’re living harmoniously, if we’re living in a way that is not conducive to our own individual health, then it necessitates that we are living in a way that is not healthy for our environment, our immediate environment, and the collective environment as a whole. That’s a selfish sort of task if we were to live in a way and then try to recoup it with all these amazing technologies that are coming down the pike.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Let’s talk about aging and how we define aging exactly. Where does it begin? Is it programmed into our cells to age and die? What’s going on there?

Jason Prall: I mean, this is what’s funny about aging is that I asked a number of people, a number of colleagues in our space, really brilliant minds in functional medicine, in neurology, in gerontology, all over the map, what aging is and I got a different answer with every person I asked. There actually is no standard definition of aging, which is really fascinating if you think about it because it’s something that we all inherently understand, but we haven’t really thought about what the definition of it is. So for me, that was an important question when I wanted to write a book about aging because we hear these ideas that we can reverse aging, that we can age backward. I think that’s great marketing, and it’s a cool concept, but the reality is aging only goes one way, and it doesn’t stop, and I don’t think there’s any way to stop.

Evidence is on my side on this one. There’s no single life form that we know of that has stopped aging or reversed aging. We can clean up the damage, and we can reverse the damage. The body has inherent mechanisms by which it can do that. There is a regenerative capacity in the body, and that’s brilliant, but that’s not the same as aging. When it comes to aging, there are two categorical theories out there. One is the programmed theories, and the other is the damaged theories. The damage theories, most of them center around mitochondria. Some of them center around telomeres, the genetic end cap, so to speak, and when shortened. But they go so far beyond telomeres because we can have double-strand breaks, and we can have all kinds of excision repair. We can have all kinds of things going on at the DNA level where there’s damage that will impact disease states and eventually death.

But then we have the mitochondria, which are the organelles, and I’m sure your audience knows this fairly well, the organelles inside the cell that are typically thought of as the energy generators. But they do so much more than that. They communicate with the DNA, they produce hormones, they clean up the cell, they detox, they take out the garbage, and they do all kinds of things. They signal for damage. So when mitochondria start to get damaged, then breakdown occurs. Communication is poor, and everything starts to break down. Well, then, we have the cell membranes. Some scientists are thinking, “Well, it’s actually the cell membranes, and once the damage happens to the cell membranes, that’s when things really start to go awry.” That makes a lot of sense, too, because we have a lot of communication, cell-to-cell communication, intercellular communication outside the cell communication, and there are all kinds of things going on at that cell membrane.

Membranes are really, really interesting. That interface is where a lot happens. So that’s interesting. There are all kinds of these sorts of damaged theories, and my take is that they all matter, but ultimately that isn’t what aging is. Aging isn’t the damage that occurs at the cellular, intercellular, and extracellular levels. That’s just the result of disharmony and a result of aging itself. The evidence is actually showing that the programmed theories are actually more correct. In other words, there’s a process throughout evolution, throughout our own evolution, our individual evolution, where we are in development that cannot be separated from aging. This idea of when does aging occur? This is really interesting. Is one-year-old aging? Is a fetus in the womb, is that aging? They’re still developing, so they haven’t even become a full human yet at three years old and five years old, so can we even consider that aging if they’re still in development?

It becomes very murky if you think about this. But the evidence suggests that we are aging. Well, I’ll put it this way. We don’t know what causes aging. Let me put it that way. We don’t know where it begins. We don’t know what the master control is. There are a few Yamanaka factors that I think are becoming really, really popular and really, really interesting, and this is a series of essentially genetic transcripts or transcription factors that regulate methylation and all kinds of things. They’ve been identified as very important in the aging process, and so they’ve modified them with, I think, mice and gotten them to live longer, and that’s great. But again, we still don’t know what’s controlling this progression, this aging process. Every single person I know that is in this longevity sphere, you looked at them 10 years ago, they look younger.

So far as I can tell, nobody has figured out the key to this aging thing. We don’t know where it begins. My guess is probably the pineal gland holds a lot of clues, but again, we don’t know what controls it, and we don’t know essentially what it is. I made an attempt to define aging in the book, and I think the best way I could figure out how to define it is essentially the loss of coherence. It’s a real-time process of loss of coherence such that the regenerative capacity cannot keep up. Whenever you have this loss of coherence and the natural regenerative capacity is unable to keep up, that is really what I would call aging. That can happen at any scale, any time scale, and any size scale. This can happen at the quantum level, so to speak. It could happen inside the cell; it could happen inside the mitochondria.

You can have aging and regeneration happening in the same cell. You can have these sorts of multiple things happening, and it is through that definition that I think it is important to recognize that we can have a heart that is, let’s say, aged more than a kidney, for example. In other words, aging doesn’t happen equally distributed throughout the body and so how do we understand this? This is one of the problems when we get into measuring telomeres because a lot of the telomere measuring comes down to white blood cells. They’re measuring the telomeres of white blood cells, and that’s a pretty good proxy, but at the end of the day, there’s tons of research that have shown that that is just a proxy, that your telomeres can be shorter in the kidneys and longer in the liver and a different length than the white blood cells.

What we find is that when that’s the case, when those are all measured, and then we intervene in a positive way, and we see regrowth of telomeres, telomerase enzyme kicks in, damage reduces, and we get some regeneration, what happens is the shorter telomeres are the ones that grow, but the ones that are sort of the medium and the longer telomeres, we don’t see a lot of change in those. The body’s sort of selectively targeting the shorter telomeres, shoring up the weak spots, so to speak, and that’s great. That’s what we would want. That’s why they’re sort of measuring telomeres. Again, unless you’re measuring telomeres from all tissues of the body, we don’t actually know the age of a person because nobody dies when everything fails all at once. There’s something that happens that generally leads to probably some kind of infection, and then we get taken down.

It’s a very complex thing when it comes to aging. But I think it’s important to define it in a way that allows for this real-time process to occur whereby we can regenerate and also sort of age, but it’s not being confused with damage itself. Damage is just a result of aging, and damage can be a result of living out of balance, out of harmony, and out of alignment with one’s constitution and with the universal concepts of what health is.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Can you talk about how heavy metals and toxins can damage our cell membranes and cause oxidative stress that results in aging?

Jason Prall: Yeah, I mean, it’d be shorter if I tried to discuss how they didn’t because once you get heavy metals into the picture, everything can start going awry. Well, let me back up and say that there are three main aspects, three main genetic aspects to a human. We have the microbiota, which is composed of all kinds of different microbes, whether it’s parasites or bacteria and all kinds of organisms. We have their collective genome that’s at play. Then we have the human genome, and then we have the mitochondrial genome. We have three sets of genetic information that are all sort of working to their own advantage, but they have to work together. We’re one collective walking, talking rainforest of genetic material that is in constant communication. This is why the microbiota and the gut are so important. When that starts to break down, when we lose diversity, then we are unable to adapt to our environment.

We’re unable to communicate to our mitochondria, to our DNA about the environment, about the foods, and the things that we’re taking in through the gut. That is one of the key factors is that when we eat foods, our microbiota communicate via these secondary metabolites, whether it’s hydrogen sulfide or reactive oxygen species or butyrate, or whatever the case is. There are all kinds of these secondary metabolites that literally talk to our cells, our mitochondria, and our human DNA that let those genetic codes determine what they need to do. As they express their genes, then the microbes also sense that and adjust and modify their behavior. We have this constant dialogue going on, so when you throw something like heavy metals into the picture, you’re disrupting the microbiota directly. You’re destroying micro microbial populations; you’re increasing other microbial populations, partly because they need to break some of those down.

This is one of the things that fungi and candida and microbes do is that they help break down dead material, this sort of putrid morbid material. They are the recyclers of the earth. When we get these things like chemicals and metals into the system, one of their jobs is going to be to metabolize that stuff for us and try to get rid of that, try to recycle that into something that is organic. That is one of the things they do, and in that process, you’re going to see microbial populations and fungi populations and candida of all kinds start to grow in heavy amounts to try to clean up the body. While they are commensal at some degrees, once they start getting to higher levels, they’re going to start causing all kinds of problems just by way of their metabolisms.

They can create all kinds of polysaccharides, all kinds of inflammation in the gut level alone, and then as those metals start to migrate through the potty, they’re going to get into the liver and cause disruption at the liver level. They’re going to disrupt mitochondria function. They can displace some of the natural metals inside the little proteins in mitochondria. They’re still going to kick out some of these things with copper. We’re going to have all kinds of problems, and all kinds of reactive oxygen species are going to increase, which is going to not only increase damage just by their inherent nature, but the communication mechanisms are going to start to break down.

The body actually starts to lose intelligence as we increase the load of metals, then they can get shuttled around in the body, into the joints, into the brain, the nervous system, and then we’re talking about real trouble. Once we get these metals into that level, cerebral spinal fluid all throughout the body, then it’s a real challenge to move those from the peripheral tissues back into the GI tract and hopefully out of the system. I mean, they disrupt in so many ways. They break down the enzymatic function, even the enzymes that we rely on to detox these heavy metals. They can get disrupted, so now we have a buildup of accumulated toxic metals that are now shutting down our natural ability to detox and metabolize these things. We get ourselves into a huge, huge mess, and again, once we get to that point of disrupted communication, I mean, honestly, it’s anybody’s guess as to what’s next; it just becomes this downward spiral of function and dysfunction.

That’s where it’s tough. I know that the people that you and I both see they’re often in that place, and it’s a whole process to unwind that situation because it can get quite tricky.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yes, absolutely. Then also, as far as an exchange with our environment, human beings are open, energetic systems that maintain this continuous kind of information exchange and energy exchange with our environment. Can you talk about that and how that can factor into longevity and aging?

Jason Prall: Piggybacking on our previous discussion here with heavy metals, if you’ve ever thrown a CD into a microwave, you’re going to see all kinds of sparks fly. We actually have evidence now to suggest that this buildup of these metals in our body, the aluminum and the mercury and all these cadmium and lead and all these things, they’re going to interact with these unseen energies, this electromagnetic radiation that we see that is pervasive in our environment. The more severe that gets and the more metals that we accumulate in the body, there is interaction going on, even though we might not be able to pick it up until we’re basically taken out. When we’re very, very weak and we have a certain level of dysfunction, this is where you start to see the electromagnetic sensitivities that are high levels. There’s always some kind of issue going on there, but this is why it’s important to recognize that we are open, energetic systems so that we can at least conceptually understand that everything matters.

It’s not just these sorts of billiard ball-style Newtonian mechanics at play that chemistry is affecting everything. No, it’s actually a level deeper. It’s the energies, it’s the sunlight, it’s the energy coming from the sun that’s going to impact biology in a tremendous way when it comes to circadian rhythm and chronobiology; when it comes to hormonal production, the sun is fundamental to our being. Then we have other things like music and light therapies. We can start to interject some of these things into our world that can really produce profound healing effects. Then, of course, beyond that, we have belief systems and thoughts, and emotions. This is where if you get into this world long enough, you find that there are sort of these main levers. I would say one is the sort of toxins, the metals, the chemicals, the wifi, and the radiation.

That level is massive. Then you have this sort of trauma piece where you have the emotions and these stuck experiences that don’t get processed. That becomes a huge driver of health or dysfunction. It’s really important to recognize that the thoughts that we have, the belief systems, and the conditioned behaviors that are unconscious are affecting us not only in how we behave and how we walk through the world but it’s having a tremendous impact at the nervous system level. It’s impacting us at the epigenetic level and how our body expresses it because there’s an underlying threat that the body may be detecting based on past experiences that we are just not even aware of, that we’ve adapted to. We’re so brilliant in the sense that we can adapt to so many environments, and that adaptation can cause this rut that we can get stuck in. We can get patterns locked into a way of operation, both walking in the world and at the body level.

That’s what can get us into trouble because we don’t even recognize that our body system isn’t at rest. We’re constantly on, and this sort of sympathetic drive is so significant, but we’ve been used to it for so long that what feels like rest is actually hypervigilance, and only until we finally process some of these things, these what we might call traumas but these conditions that we’ve lived with for many, many years, then we can find a new level of rest at the nervous system level. Again, going back to the toxins, once our body can get into that parasympathetic, once it can get into that rest and digest, once that vagus nerve starts to get activated and starts to really kick on throughout the GI tract and throughout the detox systems, now we can actually finally let go of these things that are building up in the system that we’ve been working so hard to move out the body.

Dr. Wendy Myers: I mean, our nervous system is that interface that translates our mental, emotional, and spiritual experiences to our internal biology, and so many people are stressed today. That’s the number one killer, and of course, it promotes aging and reduces our lifespan. Can you talk about that?

Jason Prall: I mean, this is everything. One of my favorite quotes from Ayurveda is that we don’t experience reality as it is. We only experience our nervous system. This is a critical factor. What was that thing? There was an audio clip that was being shared for a while. It went fairly viral, and there was an argument between each person, whether they heard Laurel or Yanny, and you can listen to this on YouTube and Laurel or Yanny, and so what’s the truth? The reality is that both are actually being played simultaneously, but you, based on certain characteristics, are really geared to hear one or the other. Then we had the other one with the dress, the blue,  was it blue, and gold or whatever it was, the colored dress, and everybody saw different colors. We have a unique expression, and we have a unique constitution that is based on our fundamental essence, how we come in, as well as the dysfunctions that are showing up.

This is a really important factor, and it should guide your decision when it comes to how you approach health, which food you should eat, how much sun you should get, and how much sleep you need. Do you sleep earlier in the night, or are you more of a night owl? These are all individual aspects of our expression. This is all operating at the nervous system level, and so this is what guides a lot of the healing path for each one of us and what’s needed. We’re all exposed to all kinds of toxins. Why is it that two people can be exposed to virtually the same amount of the same metal or the same chemical, and one person has a ton of symptoms, and the other doesn’t? There’s something going on at that nervous system level. There’s something going on at that individual level that creates that difference.

With that, this idea of the nervous system is that the interface is the thing that’s going to guide the decisions that we make, and it’s an important thing to follow because there are so many health experts out there, and they’re all saying different stuff. Eat a vegan diet, eat a red meat, carnivore diet, eat somewhere in between, and there’s truth in all of it. There actually is truth in all of it, but it’s contextualized. Most of these therapeutic diets, and I’ve tried pretty much everything. I haven’t tried the dire carnivore diet yet, but I’m curious. But these are all therapeutic diets, and yet they do work for certain people. Depending on what you need is really going to guide your therapies, and that nervous system is the interface by which all this tends to come into this reality for us.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Now, can you talk about when it comes to longevity, what’s the most important period in our life that can predict our longevity, that can predict the health of our biology, et cetera?

Jason Prall: I mean, it’s funny because a lot of the work that’s done in longevity, in aging, in gerontology is looking at the people that are in their 80s, 90s, and beyond 100. What are they doing, and how are they living? While I think that’s great, it fundamentally doesn’t get to the core of what’s happening because in order to get to 80 or 90 or 100, you have been doing something right for a long period of time. When we’re born, we’re not all born starting at the same place. I hate to break it to us, but we’re not born starting at 100, and then it’s just all downhill from there. What our parents did, what our grandparents did, what their parents did, and what their parents actually impacted us at the moment of conception. Even at the moment of conception, we all have, let’s say, a unique starting position.

We all have the health potential, but maybe some of us are starting off a little bit behind, so to speak, because of what happened generationally and, one could argue, karmically that we come in with. But even in that womb, we get exposed to different things. I mean, the environmental working group, I think it was 288 chemicals that they found in cord blood when they looked at 10 babies, and then there’s been numerous studies beyond that have shown all kinds of crap that are found in fetal tissue. That’s impacting the development, and this is key. Because humans are so malleable, we are open, energetic systems that are constantly reading and responding to the environment, and our biology is going to read and respond to the environment in a way that tries to provide some stability, that tries to provide homeostasis in a given environment, which is why we can live in arctic conditions as well as equatorial conditions.

We can live in so many different ways because biology can actually adapt. That means that everything that we’re being exposed to throughout our life is causing some micro or macro adaptation in us, and so when we’re exposed to something for long enough, eventually, we’ll actually develop a way to deal with it. But in the short term, this hyper-novel environment that we find ourselves in modern humanity is actually a lot for our biology to try to adjust to. It’s not like these things are necessarily even bad or good, to be honest. Even the metals and chemicals. Eventually, our biology would find a way to live harmoniously with these things. I don’t know how, but it’s just what life does. In the short term, though, these things can be horrific because our biology hasn’t figured out a way to adapt, and it takes resources to adapt.

That’s the thing. When we’re in development for six months in one year and three years and four years, and five years, our nervous system hasn’t even developed. We are really, really in an early stage of human evolution in our own lifetime, and so all the things that we’re being inundated with are going to impact how our thoughts, our conditions, and our reality plays itself out. We become the person based on these conditions. And our biology expresses based on the conditions that it finds itself in. Those first 10 years of life, which are critical for development and how our biology is going to express, the microbiome for each individual forms within that first year and whether you have a C-section or vaginal birth, whether you’re breastfed, that all matters. This is all impacting the long-term expression.

What happens in that first year is so critical to the development and what happens at 30 and 50, and 70. If we are vaginally birthed, if we are breastfed for hopefully at least a year, if not two or three, which is what’s happened in most of the world, if we have a close family connection, if we feel safe and connected and supported and we’re given enough freedom in our childhood development, these are all things that are going to lead to a nervous system that feels safe, a nervous system that feels connected, a nervous system that feels secure in a relationship with my surroundings, with individuals, with people all around me. That is going to make a huge difference on an expression level. It is those first 10 years that are going to matter when it comes to longevity.

Then we can re-pattern some of that stuff. In a huge way, we can re-pattern that stuff, but as we get into adulthood, as our nervous system is sort of formed around these experiences that we’ve had in early life, in order to re-pattern that, it takes a little bit of work. Neuroplasticity is a real thing, and we can do things like limbic system retraining through DNRS. There are all kinds of different things that we can do. EMDR is a great therapy. There are family constellations. We can rework some of these things that were missed or that we’re out of balance or out of alignment, but that’s going to take some work, and usually, we don’t figure those things out until we’re 18, 30, for some of us 40 and beyond. I’m still figuring out new stuff that I can rework in my system so that it finds new ease and new rest.

When it comes to longevity, it really is about how well are we sleeping? How well are we at rest? How much of our time are we spent in parasympathetic? Can we get into sympathetic and parasympathetic easily to switch back and forth? Can I fully express myself and work out and push my body through the day and then rest and sleep really, really well at night? It is the ability to get back into that parasympathetic, that rest mode, and if we’re unable to do that because there’s this underlying sense of lack of safety, which we all have, by the way, no matter how much work you do, you’ll find that there’s more work to do to find a new level of safety in the system, but that’s really where I think if we can limit the, let’s say, damage or the implications of some of that early in childhood, then we’re going to stand a really good chance as we get older.

Dr. Wendy Myers: That brings me to want to talk about trauma and childhood development trauma because that definitely sets our nervous system up to be in a chronic state of stress or in worry and depression and anxiety and just sets someone up for that for life versus someone who grew up securely attached who’s just more calm and happy and optimistic, et cetera, in general. Can you talk a little bit about how emotional trauma impacts us and impacts longevity, and maybe talk a little bit about limbic rekindling and how that can set the stage and how limbic for training therapy is very underutilized?

Jason Prall: Absolutely. When we think about trauma, I mean it’s common to think about physical abuse or sexual abuse or even significant mental abuse that might happen, and that’s meaningful; that really does have an impact on a developing child. But there are also other things that we might not even consider trauma. There’s conditioning. If a child is conditioned to basically ignore their feelings, some children are very sensitive, and they have big feelings, and that can be a lot for an adult to handle. I’ve got a little infant, a three-year-old, that has some big feelings, and at that age, most of them do, but he tends to over-express some of these things really quickly and flies off the handle quickly. So I’m going to be able to see that and not make it wrong and allow him to express his nature, because these are just energies.

They don’t know what’s happening. They don’t have a rational mind on board yet to understand these feelings. They have to eventually start to get a grasp of what these are. We have to, as parents and caregivers, allow them to express themselves, throw that tantrum, and be held in a loving container while they do that while also setting boundaries for it. This is a very tricky thing for parents and caregivers to try to navigate, but there are a lot of kids that don’t get that luxury. Parents just don’t know. We don’t know what we don’t know. We have this ignorance on how to deal with some of this stuff, and it can be tough, and there are some big things that can happen, and so there’s conditioning that starts to shut down the natural expression, the ability for a child or eventually an adult to even feel into their body.

This is what happens, that we kind of lose track of ourselves. Sometimes we don’t even find ourselves because that is a developmental process in and of itself. A one-year-old can’t distinguish between mama and herself. There is no difference. They haven’t individuated yet. There’s a process of individuation in this idea of me, of I am here, and you are there. That’s a process in and of itself, so if that doesn’t happen correctly or well, then there’s going to be some issues in oversharing or over helping somebody and losing oneself in the process, listening to others, and totally neglecting what’s really here. What’s in my heart? What’s in my gut? What am I feeling? And completely relying on others. There’s a whole developmental sequence that happens for all of us, and most of us have ruptured at certain points in that process that we can either go back and repair or actually get, let’s say, mirrored in a way that we didn’t get when we were young.

So the ideal parent can show up in therapeutic settings in other ways so that we can actually get the mirror when we need it, but we didn’t get it. That plays a huge role in how we show up in the world. There was a study that Kaiser Permanente and the CDC did call the ACEs study. I know you’re familiar with this, Wendy, but this is the adverse childhood events study, and what they were looking at is why these certain people wouldn’t follow through with it . I think it was a weight loss program originally. They couldn’t figure out what was going on, so they looked at some of the lifestyle factors, and they realized that the people that weren’t able to carry through and follow through with this sort of healthy regimen had these sorts of traumatic events that happened.

They only listed 10. They figured out, “Okay, what are these top tens?” A parent getting incarcerated, abuse . There’s a little list of 10, and they’re pretty significant. The more ACEs you would have, the more adverse childhood events or experiences that they would list, and the more they realized all-cause mortality increased. All diseases increased. Autoimmune conditions, cancers, and any disease you can think of would increase. Suicide, of course, alcoholism. They said, “Okay, well, is it the actual behaviors that are contributing to these sorts of chronic conditions increasing? Is it the fact that they drank more alcohol, they’re more likely to smoke, they’re more likely to do illicit drugs, which led to chronic issues?” Then they isolated those out, and so even the people that didn’t drink and smoke and do illicit drugs had high rates of all chronic diseases.

There’s something inherently going on at that nervous system level that is related to trauma, related to this idea of lack of safety, the lack of connection. This is a huge one. In the longevity space, we talk about community as being a central player in leading to long and happy lives. Well, that’s great, but it’s not actually community. The community doesn’t inherently hold any values or anything that we need. It’s the things that we typically think of that the community can provide, which are safety and connection. If I have a community that I feel connected to, that I feel safer in, then that’s going to provide me benefits on the nervous system level. But if I’m in a community and I don’t feel connected to it, I actually might feel isolated from it, but there’s a thought that I should be connected. That can actually create more internal issues.

This sort of disconnect between feeling safe and connected in the community but feeling completely isolated and left out. It is the connection that we’re really looking for, and there are different types of connections. There’s a connection to self, self to self. That’s a connection point. There’s self to others, so one-on-one, and do I feel connected with this individual being? Then there are groups. Can I connect to a group that may be something totally different? Some people can actually connect but can’t connect to a group. That’s threatening. Then there’s a connection to something greater. God, the universe, great spirit, whatever you want to call it, nature. But the ability to connect to something beyond yourself is also a connection point.

What’s cool is that we don’t actually need the community. The community may provide some cool things for us, but with this ability to connect, I can sit here in meditation and feel totally connected to everything and everyone. That’s providing therapeutic value in a huge way. Also, when I’m walking through the world or I’m having Zoom conversations, can I feel connected to the other on the other side even if we’re not in the same room? There are deep aspects here, and this is important because, as I mentioned before, in the attachment system, we may not be able to feel connected because of the wounds that we experience in development, so that becomes a challenge.

Wendy, I’m sure you’ve met people like this where it’s like, man, you can’t get through. It feels like there’s a heart wall. There’s no ability to actually connect. We’re all somewhere on that spectrum, really easy to connect with, or we have a little guarded up, we’re a little guarded, and for the right reasons. It’s not something to be ashamed of or to put the blame on that guarded protection is a result of some of the experiences that we had when we were young, and that’s the adaptation. I’m going to hold people at a distance because if I let them get too close, there’s a lack of safety that happens as I let them in and I’m totally vulnerable now, they can destroy me, they can leave, they can turn on me, and that is heartbreaking. It’s really, really heartbreaking.

That’s what happened to us when we were young on some level because we were these little tiny infant beings without a concept of the world, only internal feelings. We haven’t developed our worldview or our map yet, and so we’re just experiencing the world as it is totally open. So these wounds are very, very real without the cognition, and so we carry those with us and prevent the same things from happening as we get into our older years. Again, we all walk through the world on some level with these wounds. We carry them over our shoulders with us and the adaptive traits that come with them, both on the negative side that is preventing sort of health and well-being and on the positive side. It might be the perfectionist that develops a really keen eye for all these details. Or it might be the one who strived for success because that’s how they felt love and acceptance in school or by their parents or peers.

Then they become this really successful entrepreneur or business person, and that’s wonderful. But that can be an adaptation due to some of those traumas. There are good and bad, and there’s positives and negatives. The cool thing is as we clean up some of these things, as we process some of these experiences and heal some of these wounds, we get to keep the gifts because that’s an adaptive trait that we’ve picked up, and now we can walk through the world more connected, more at ease, safer, and really more aligned with who we really are.

Dr. Wendy Myers: It’s so important to do trauma work. I mean, it’s just such a huge stress reliever, and you can change how you perceive the world and how you connect with people just by doing trauma work, which is really energetic work as well. Tell us about some of the things we’re going to learn in your book Beyond Longevity beyond some of the things you’ve talked about today.

Jason Prall: I mean, the first third of the book really is kind of a philosophy on health and aging. The deeper aspects of the things that when I worked with clients one-on-one more than I do now, there was an aspect of helping them understand and frame what was happening. Whenever somebody’s caught in a disease or dysfunctional process. It’s really just a wake-up call that something’s out of balance, something’s out of alignment. As you figure out what that is and address that, it generally sets you on a path that your soul is really meant to engage upon. That’s the cool part: anybody that overcomes their chronic disease or chronic symptoms, they’ll find themselves in a better place than when they started it. Not just on that health level, although that tends to be the case too, really in their life.

They either meet people along the way, it might be a wife or a husband, it might be business partners, it might be switching careers, it might be finding new passions and purposes, but that’s the end result of resolving something like type two diabetes. That can actually put you on a completely new path in life. If you’re willing and brave enough to tackle those things and figure out the source of what’s out of alignment, what is it that needs to be addressed truly, and as that gets resolved and brought into alignment, then your entire life can shift in a brilliant, brilliant way.

The first third of the book is really about that, and the last two-thirds of the practical aspects of the book. What is it that you can do to elicit and initiate health? Because it’s an inherent aspect of your being. It’s not something you have to achieve, or you have to work out. It is who we are. That healthy expression is there. We don’t need to work for it. We just need to find the things that are blocking that expression, that is preventing that natural flow that is inherent within us. That’s really what the rest of the book is guided to do. We talk about chronobiology and circadian rhythm and how to really set the stage there because that’s critical. The body operates on this sort of cyclical 24-hour day and night cycle, and if we start to mess with that, which we have in our modern world in a tremendous way, then our hormones are tanked, we don’t detox well, we aren’t able to digest food well. We don’t produce the longevity sort of, I guess, expression of the genetic level.

All the signaling that we want to turn on can’t happen appropriately because we’re not synchronized with the sun, as simple as that is. But I mean, I’ve seen people lose weight. I’ve seen eyesight increase, detoxification, and clear skin problems. You name it, I’ve seen things clearly just based on fixing circadian rhythm and addressing chronobiology because the body has a rhythm and a process. That’s one thing we touch on, talk about diet and really how to approach diet because, again, we’ve got all the advice under the sun out there right now, and it can be tricky to figure out what’s right for you and how to even navigate that and what’s important.

I’ll say this, so we’re fixated on what we eat, and I think that is the wrong place to start. First, we need to know when do I eat? That’s actually the most important part. When are we eating? Because if we’re eating the best foods ever at the wrong time of the day, we’re going to cause problems, and we’re not going to be able to digest. If we’re eating not very good foods, but at the right time of day, we actually have a better shot at metabolizing those, and they’re not going to be as big of a problem. So when do we eat? How much do I eat? The reason that’s important is not only from a caloric perspective and sort of the standard weight loss type of thinking but actually from a digestive capacity; how much capacity do you have to digest food? Well, that changes throughout the day, depending on your circadian rhythm.

In the middle of the day, we have a better capacity to digest food. You can have more challenging meals to digest, more complex meals, and larger portion sizes in the middle of the day than at 6:00 PM. You don’t want to be eating a large, complex, difficult-to-digest meal late in the day. So how much do you eat? Of course, the most fundamental aspect is the source of the food that you’re getting. Is it organic, processed bars of some kind? I don’t care how organic or how great they are; it’s not the same as eating real whole food. As long as you understand these things, you don’t have to be perfect with this, but really getting the hierarchy of importance when it comes to food, I think, is really, really critical.

We talk a little bit about how to digest and how to improve digestion, which is fundamental. In Ayurveda, digestion is a central theme. This is something that if we’re not digesting our thoughts, we’re not digesting our emotions, and we’re not digesting our food, then we create metabolic waste. We create what they call Ayurveda ama, this morbid substance that actually inhibits communication at the cellular level. We have names for this in western medicine, but essentially it’s the breakdown and the increase in reactive oxygen species at that cellular level. Digestion becomes really, really critical and especially as you get older. When you’re in your 20s, you can pretty much digest everything. You can make all kinds of mistakes, and your body has so much vitality that you can actually get away with it.

I see a little smile on your face, Wendy. It’s like as we get older, these things, we can’t make as many mistakes. We just don’t have that vitality that we used to. When you get to your 70s, 80s, and 90s, you hear the same thing. A lot of the people that I spoke with that are in their 90s stopped eating meat. Not because actually there was anything wrong with it. They realized they weren’t as good at digesting it as they were at digesting fruits and some of the easier warm vegetables or warm carbohydrates. Those are easy to digest compared to meat. Our digestive capacity wanes as we get older. It’s important to know how I digest food properly without having to take all these pills and supplements and things just to digest a meal.

We get into trauma, we get into all kinds of things, basically lifestyle medicine, and then at the end of the book, I talk about regenerative medicine, the cool things that are coming up. High-dose melatonin is a really cool one. Peptides that are now on the market that we can actually take orally. You don’t have to inject them. Then I think what’s cool coming down the pike is stem cells. You can do really amazing work around the world. We’re not quite there yet in the US. Hopefully, our regulations will get us to a point where we’re competitive in the stem cell market. But there are some really, really cool things coming down the pike in regenerative orthopedics. This is what matters. When you get to 85, I think most people want to walk. They don’t want their joints to hurt. They don’t want to have hip replacements. They don’t want their back to be sore. They want good vision. They want to be able to hear, and the other stuff is just going to go.

We’re just going to get wrinkly. We’re going to get gray. This is the reality of getting older, and I’ve seen a lot of people who’re relatively healthy in their 90s and 100s, they’re not 20-year-olds. They’re not 40-year-olds, either. I think to some degree, as far as I can tell, most people are okay with that. It’s when they’re unable to move and unable to hear and unable to see, unable to engage with the world in a meaningful way, then they start going, “Well, what am I doing here?” That’s what matters. I think some of those regenerative orthopedics are going to be really, really beneficial in that regard, keeping us functional later in life so that we can enjoy the world and engage with it in a way that makes us happy.

Dr. Wendy Myers: I mean, there are just so many facets to this. There are so many facets to anti-aging and longevity, and so everyone highly, highly recommends checking out Jason’s book, Beyond Longevity: A Proven Plan for Healing Faster, Feeling Better, and Thriving at Any Age. Because that’s what we all want. We want to have a good quality of life as we age. Thanks so much, Jason. Anything else that you left out that you want to touch on?

Jason Prall: No. If anybody’s interested, they can go to beyondlongevitybook.com. We’re giving away a number of exclusive bonuses really for the people who want to buy the book to help implement some of the things that are in the book. I’m excited to share those as well. Wendy, thanks for having me on. It’s been a real pleasure. Always good to see you.

Dr. Wendy Myers: You too. You did an amazing docu-series or documentary on aging and longevity, and you travel around the world interviewing people all over the planet about their secrets to longevity, and so I’m so happy you wrote this book to just divulge all these secrets that you’ve learned over the past 10 years. Everyone, to highly recommend, go check it out, and everyone, thanks so much for tuning in to the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers, and it’s just really a pleasure every week to do these interviews and help you. Really, my goal is I want to help you, give you a few nuggets of information, something that can just upgrade your health, that will turn things around for you, and so I really thank you for tuning in every week. I will talk to you guys very soon.