Welcome to this on-air with Ella minisode, a little bite-sized boost to your day, always quick,

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One phrase I refuse to use anymore, Dr. Anthony, is anti-aging? Like, I am not here for the

anti-aging conversation. It drives me insane because

we're literally all aging all the time every day. If we have the privilege of being here,

okay. To me, longevity is about living as powerfully and vitally as you can for as long as you can.

And it's so much more for me, personally, about health span than lifespan.

Tell me your point of view. Well, I totally agree with you. I think the way to live a long life

is actually to align your habits and your actions with natural law. Everything in nature, you know,

has, there's a law in a cycle. There's the sun and the moon. It governs these kinds of things.

And so when it comes to the body, we need to have good food inputs. We need to have good circadian rhythm. We need to move our bodies. We need proper hydration. We need to understand also the trajectory that the body naturally goes through, particularly in the fourth and fifth decades of life with hormonal changes and how to kind of ride that wave. And when people deviate from this, they're eating the processed foods, as you know, they're not sleeping enough, they're stress, too much caffeine, not enough movement.

This is where, you know, health span and lifespan and like the downward decline start to kind

of diverge, if you will. And we can fix this with some simple lifestyle stuff.

What do you consider the key aspects of health that people over 40, let's say, must absolutely non-negotiables must prioritize for longevity?

Believe it or not, one of the main longevity hormones that not enough people are talking about is melatonin.

Melatonin is like one of the main governors of how good your immune system in as you age, how healthy your skin is, your brain health, how your brain actually cleans itself as night. All of this is governed by melatonin. And it's fascinating because we've only had like a couple hundred years with artificial light, let alone the cell phones that we now have blasting all of us. And it's actually one of the things that's aging people faster than anything because melatonin naturally declines as we age. And that's why a lot of people have sleep disturbances. And pretty much, if you're not getting good sleep and you're blasting too much light at night, it is totally messing up your whole longevity game. And it needs to be optimized. So I start there because when we get older, the immune system ages too. And the process of that medically speaking is called immunosiniscence, where basically your white blood cells that are tasked to clean up and repair from exercise, to fight defenders, to detect cancer cells, and just to keep inflammation levels in check, all of those blood cells, they get older. And they're driven by vitamin D and melatonin, or the two receptors on those blood cells that keeps them healthy and spry. So how do you get vitamin D? Well, having proper circadian rhythm and sunshine

is one thing. And how do you get melatonin? Well, having proper nighttime, you know, not getting

as much light and also making sure you might be taking melatonin supplements. And I bring this up

because the circadian rhythm component of not optimizing that is so much more important

for longevity than people want to believe because we want to focus on the different exercises,

the collagen creams, like these fancy things. But truly this whole biological mechanism is

entrained to the sun and the light. And we need to actually get more morning sunshine and less

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