Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. The weekly podcast where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.

Dr. Gundry here and I'm back again with an info packed episode full of quick tips to help you live long and well until a ripe old age.

This week you'll learn what types of meat age you the fastest, the seemingly innocent daily habits that are cutting years off your life, and my dietary tips for improving your health and lifespan.

It's all about longevity today, one of my favorite topics. So stay right there, we'll be right back.

The types of meat that might speed up aging, hold on, the truth is all meat speeds up aging. Yes, you heard me right, all meat speeds up aging.

And there's actually three reasons for that, and I want to go through that for you today.

First of all, animal protein has an amino acid called methionine that is much more common in animal protein than in plant protein.

Methionine is one of the triggers for a receptor that causes aging in us called mTOR, the mammalian target of rapamycin.

mTOR senses energy availability, and one of the things an mTOR looks for is methionine.

So if there's lots of methionine, mTOR tells ourselves, hey, it's time to grow, it's time to make babies, it's time to do all sorts of things, including age.

If mTOR doesn't sense methionine, it says, ooh, times appear to be rough, this is not a good time to grow.

This is a good time to look at every one of our cells and decide who's pulling their weight and who isn't.

And the cells that aren't pulling their weight, we tell them to die, it's called autophagy, and we kind of clean up the mess.

So as a general rule, a low methionine diet has been shown to extend lifespan dramatically in every animal tested, including pigs.

Now there's one interesting little caveat, and I don't want you to focus on this, but there's another amino acid called glycine.

And glycine appears to give a benefit of tolerating methionine in not activating mTOR, but adding several grams of glycine a day to your diet may help protect against a high methionine diet from animal protein.

But that's number one, methionine in animal protein.

Number two, you've heard me write and talk about a compound called TMAO, which is produced by bacteria from animal protein and animal fats in our diet.

And according to research, particularly from the Cleveland Clinic, TMAO can damage blood vessels, can damage kidneys, and now there's evidence that it can damage the brain.

We know that vegetarians and vegans have very little TMAO in their bloodstream, and I measure TMAO in all my patients.

Interestingly, there are some species of fish and shellfish that have pre-formed TMAO in their flesh.

And so TMAO from animal protein and fat can also be from fish, can in fact damage blood vessels.

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