Cardiovascular Health and Longevity

Cardiovascular health is vitally important in the aging process.  In this episode of ALIve, CEO and Co-Founder of the Asher Longevity Institute interviews Dr. Jeffrey Boone, named one of the top cardiovascular doctors in America.  Dr. Boone is the Founder and Director of the Boone Heart Institute in Denver and also the Chief Medical Officer of the Asher Longevity Institute.  John explains how the two met and began to cooperate and Dr. Boone explains the intricacies of heart health in layman's terms, plus new drugs that can restore heart health.

How do changes in the cardiovascular system affect aging?  Why is cholesterol in the bloodstream so dangerous?  What treatments are available to reduce plaque in arteries?  Can the stages of deterioration be reversed?  How does this improve overall heart health?  And are there also improvements in brain function with these treatments?  Where can you go to learn more?

John Asher

John is an experienced international speaker on living a longer, healthy life and key founder of Asher Longevity. In his late 70s, John is vibrant and active, delivering sales training and life longevity information in the USA, Canada, and China. John’s mantra is always “making the complex simple”. He first applied that to growing a highly successful sales training company. Now he has applied it to the principles of living a long and active life. He has taken mountains of information on supplements, new innovative treatments, and lifestyle habits and combined them into a simple system that is constantly updated and refined by the Asher Longevity Institute.

Dr. Jeffrey Boone

Dr. Boone has been a pioneer in the prevention of heart disease and stroke for over three decades. He is an expert in cardiovascular disease prevention with treatments ranging from mental stress reduction to the use of the latest cardiac imaging techniques. Located in Denver, the Boone Heart Institute provides corporate wellness and executive health programs. Most other clinics treat heart patients after they have a stroke or heart issue. The Boone Heart Institute sets itself apart by treating the major risk factors of heart disease and working to roll-back the damage and reduce your “arterial age”. The proof is in the results, they have never once had any patient under their care suffer a heart attack or stroke!

Gut Microbiome - Simple Steps to Turn Your Diet and Health Around

Eating a diet tuned for a healthy gut microbiome is needed in order to preclude 11 diseases and three conditions. Let's talk about what we eat. John gives us two sample daily menus and 12 steps that won't overwhelm you as you create a healthy gut microbiome. John gives us two examples of his own menus.

"This is actually a typical day for me. Breakfast, I'm going to eat a closed fistful each of walnuts, pistachios and macadamia nuts and a cup of mixed berries, including about half of them will be raspberries because of their prebiotic nature and high fiber content. For lunch, I almost always have a smoothie and the reason is if you try to eat a great big salad, it could take 15-20 minutes, you can drink a smoothie in about three minutes. So I'll make 6 smoothies at once in a big blender, I'll put in eight leafy green vegetables, half of an avocado, a green banana, low sugar content, 6 ounces of goat yogurt, a teaspoon each of hemp hearts and flax seed, sauerkraut, olive oil and coconut milk unsweetened as a liquid, and then seven different hermetic spices that we'll talk about in step 6.

And then for dinner, I'll add 4 ounces of fish, poultry or red meat once a week, cook with low heat, steamed or roasted vegetables and mushrooms with olive oil. And then for dessert, say two figs, either fresh or dried. And now when you buy dried fruit, you have one or two choices, it'll have sugar and oil added, or it'll be just the fruit. So if you're going to eat dried fruit, which I like, then make sure it's just the fruit and organic. Here's another typical day when you're following this routine, breakfast might be two eggs cooked in olive oil with low heat and a cup of fruit and a cup of fruit with those great vegetables with all that fiber in them, orange, apple, tart cherries. Lunch might be a large salad with mushrooms, mobile leafy greens and other low-glycemic vegetables with olive oil and vinegar dressing, and then dinner again for us is a fish, poultry or red meat cooked with low heat, steamed broccoli, cauliflower, and fennel, and then a coconut milk ice cream bar.

There's just a ton of opportunity to buy, other than ice cream, which is a highly processed food, there's lots of non-dairy ice cream. The one John likes is the So Delicious brand and it's got about 150 calories per ice cream bar with all the good ingredients."

This sounds like an awful lot and so, what we've come up with that's on our website, you can take a look at is if you are going to transfer from eating a Western diet and having a bad microbiome full of bad bacteria and you wanted to shift, doing everything John suggested in this podcast is a lot of stuff to do. We've cut it to 12 steps. So if you and your partner said, "Okay, we want to shift, but we can't be crazy about this and we just took one step a month, what would that look like?"

• Month One, just start eating much less processed foods.
• Month Two, start consuming much less sugar and artificial sugar substitutes. Shift to those natural sugars.
• Month Three, eat red meat only once a week and only grass-fed with no antibiotics or hormones.
• Month Four shift how you buy fish and shellfish shift to only wild-caught, again with no antibiotics or hormones.
• Month Five, eat poultry infrequently and again, only pasture-raised with no antibiotics or hormones.
• Month Six, increase consumption of protein from nuts, mushrooms, and leafy green vegetables.
• Month seven, start buying mainly organic food. That's why I always shop at Whole Foods. It's mainly organic foods, meaning no pesticides.
• Month Eight just cut out all grains, legumes unless they're pressure cooked.
• Month Nine, start eating a low glycemic, low sugar content fruits and vegetables frequently.
• Month 10 substitute goat and sheep products for cattle and dairy products, meaning milk, cheese, and yogurt.
• Month 11 cut out all manufactured oils and start using natural oils, coconut, and avocado for high heat and olive oil for low heat.
• Month 12 shift drinking habits to maybe one or two glasses depending on whether you're male or female of red wine per day. And the reason for red wine is white wine has a lot of sugar.

That is a way to organize yourself to go from a bad microbiome to a good microbiome by just taking one step a month.

Gut Microbiome - Protein Tips for Meats, Fish, and Veggies

There are dangers of eating meat. Based on a study of 6,000 people over 18 years who ate a lot of animal protein, four times higher risk of cancer, five times higher risk of diabetes, twice the risk of dying and the study of people who are vegetarians, vegetable protein does not increase the risk of any age relating diseases. Meat, in general, is going to shorten our life if you eat too much. How about the meat substitutes like the Beyond Burger or the Impossible Burger?  John tells this story. "My wife and I, about a year ago when it first came out, we said "Hey, yay, let's try this". So we bought a package of burger meat and a package of sausage. We took them home, cooked them up, actually tasted, frankly, it tasted great! However, my wife took a look at the ingredients on the package after we'd eaten them. I don't know why I didn't look?"

They're an ultra-processed food, meaning in the NOVA Food Classification system, it is the highest, worst processed food you can eat. It has 40 ingredients, including titanium dioxide, which is a whitening agent using paint potato starch, which is essentially candy, methylcellulose, a bulking agent used in laxatives, and 400% more sodium than lean burger meat. And the protein is provided by lagoons, peas, and beans. So it's full of lectin and it contains a ton of manufactured oils, canola, and sunflower, which means it's full of the omega-6 fatty acids.

It could not be worse. It's too bad, but it couldn't be worse for us. Now let's look at the danger of pesticides since we're going to eat a lot of this meat perhaps. So the pesticide Roundup, we've all heard of it, contains an antibiotic. The main ingredient in Roundup is glyphosate, and it's an antibiotic. And 93% of us humans test positive for it because we've been eating the grains that have been sprayed with this pesticide, or eating the animals who have eaten the same grain. And unfortunately, since microbiome biotics, good and bad, antibiotics kill our gut bacteria, both good and bad. So imagine, we're eating animal meat and we're eating the grains that they eat, then essentially we're eating all these antibiotics, which are disrupting our gut bacteria. The bottom line is to stick to organic food.

Don't eat any food that's that is essentially not organic. And essentially organic means no harmful, artificial pesticides. It can mean a whole bunch of different things for different foods, pre-packaged salads, eggs, cow's milk, but basically no artificial pesticides in organic food. Part of the Department of Agriculture called the USDA Environmental Working Group that is has been out for quite some time. Every year it analyzes which foods, typically fruits and vegetables, is it easy to wash off the pesticides and which ones it's essentially impossible. In 2019, they came up with what they refer to as the Dirty Dozen. That is the fruits and vegetables that have so many pesticides on them and the pesticides get into the actual vegetable or fruit. So you can't wash them off. The list is celery, spinach, kale, tomatoes, potatoes, apples, peaches, strawberries, nectarines, grapes, cherries, and pears.

Many of us have heard an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Well, how about a non-organic apple a day, would that keep the doctor away? No, non-organic apples have 16 chemicals that are hormone disruptors, six chemicals that are known suspected carcinogens, and five neurotoxins. So eat organic. Next, let's look at the dangers of antibiotics that are fed to farm animals. We all kind of know if one of our kids has an ear infection. You go to the doctor, the doctor will prescribe a very specific antibiotic that is tuned to kill the bacteria that caused that infection. If you had another child who got a strep throat, and he went to the doctor, you would get a prescription for a different narrowly focused antibiotic to kill that particular bacteria. So imagine all farm animals, commercial farm animals are administered broad-spectrum antibiotics, meaning kills everything, all biotics.

Listen to the full episode here:

Tune Your Diet to Promote a Healthy Gut Microbiome

Gut Microbiome - All About Cows and Sugar

About 2000 years ago in Northern Europe, there was a genetic mutation that changed the basic protein in cow milk from a casein a2 to casein a1. And the trouble with casein a1 is, it causes an attack on our immune system. And it explains why 65% of Americans are what is called lactose, the sugar in milk, intolerant. Actually, what we really are is intolerant of that protein casein a1. Most breeds of cows in the US are this type. So you can get great cheeses from Switzerland, France, and Italy, and it's fine to eat them, but not the cheeses that are manufactured in the US. You can also get goat milk butter, and clarified butter, ghee, with no dairy. Easy now to get goat milk and goat yogurt.

There's also a brand of milk now called a2. In other words, casein a2. Not the casein a1, or the bad milk. Some of you may have been reading that it was a 60 Minutes special, that over a million small dairy farmers have gone out of business in the last 10 years. And actually, the two largest dairy farmers in the US recently filed for Chapter 11. Most of the public is starting to get onto this now. Cow milk just isn't that great for us, especially the cow milk in the US.

Most of you, I'm sure, know sugar is not a food, and it's just a food additive. there is no biochemical reaction in any animal cell that requires sugar. It is addictive through the same brain pathways that alcohol is addictive. And the trouble with sugar is this, remember the low-fat fad from many years ago, Dr. Alan Keyes, all turned out to be BS, and so the manufacturers started making food that was low fat. Well, the trouble was, when you got rid of fat, the food tasted horrible. So, they added sugar, and typically, salt. Any of these great-sounding foods, low-fat salad dressing, barbecue, pasta sauce, breakfast cereals, fruit juices, soft drinks, baked goods, candy, and cakes, molasses, honey, keep going on down the list, are full of sugar.

John Asher used to love ketchup. Ketchup is actually 25% sugar, which is unbelievable. So I'm not eating too much ketchup anymore. Here's the problem with sugar. The bad bacteria in our microbiome love simple sugar. And in addition to that, sugar and artificial sweeteners kill the good gut bacteria. So sugar is addictive, and so are all these artificial sweeteners. Now the good news is, there are natural sweeteners, monk fruit and Stevia, both approved by the FDA as sugar substitutes, and both are great. Both have zero calories, and they're both much sweeter than sugar, so you only need a little bit.

Listen to this full episode here:

Tune Your Diet to Promote a Healthy Gut Microbiome

Gut Microbiome - Preventable Diseases and Definitions

Our microbiome is so important. And the reason is, if we don't watch what we're eating and eat the wrong things and have a lot of bad bacteria in our gut, we can cause up to 11 diseases. I'm just going to name them off quickly. Celiac disease, Crohn's disease, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, that a third of the people in the country have got, hepatitis, colitis, multiple sclerosis, type 2 diabetes, 30% of the people in the US are prediabetic and 10% actually have it, lupus, irritable bowel disease, and rheumatoid arthritis. And many of them have three other conditions: small intestine bowel overgrowth, small intestine fungi overgrowth, and irritable bowel syndrome. So imagine if we don't have the right healthy gut microbiome, any of these can happen. When you look at the percentages of people who have them, almost everybody has one of them.

Let's start with a couple of definitions. Many people think that the gut is just the stomach. Well, actually our gut is our whole digestive system that goes all the way from when we take food in till all the rest comes out. All of that's called our gut, our entire digestive system. Our microbiome is what's in our entire digestive system or what's in our gut. And our gut is full of trillions of bacteria, viruses, fungi, worms. It's mainly bacteria, and there are five pounds of bacteria in our microbiome. And of course, there are good and bad bacteria. Probiotics is the name of the good bacteria in our gut. Prebiotics is the food our good bacteria like to eat.

Many of you have heard of probiotic supplements. Their job is to add good, live bacteria to our microbiome. Having a majority of good bacteria in our microbiome will greatly increase lifespan, and having the majority of bad bacteria will lead to all those diseases I mentioned. So there's a lot at stake here with our microbiome. Just to give you some ideas about prebiotics, that is the food, mostly high-fiber food, that our probiotics, the good bacteria, like to eat in certain fruit: raspberries, apples, papaya, avocado, chicory root, which is essentially 68% insoluble fiber. So great, great. The microbiome loves, the prebiotics, love them. And certain vegetables: asparagus, okra, mushrooms, flaxseed, shallots and leeks, seaweed, all leafy green vegetables, yams, parsnips, sweet potatoes. So all those foods are great to eat. They're called prebiotic food because our probiotics, the good bacteria in our gut, love to eat them.

Now our gut, the microbiome in our gut, is connected by the vagus nerve, the biggest nerve in our body, that goes from our stem cell in our brain to the heart, the lungs, and to our gut. And there are eight times as many messages that flow from our gut to the brain as there are from the brain to the gut. So our gut microbiome then influences our thoughts, our actions, our sense of smell, and our cravings. They don't actually come from the brain. They come from the gut going to the brain, so the brain will let us know. So many of the researchers now call our gut the second brain. And it kind of leads to, we were chatting earlier, about the term the gut instinct.

Another great part of the gut is it has a lining. It's a strong lining, but it's very thin. It protects our gut from anything bad coming into the gut. It prevents the bacteria in our gut from getting out to our blood, bloodstream, lymph system, and organs. So once the bacteria will pass through the gut lining, they ignite the immune system causing this widespread chronic inflammation. So a term we've all heard. If you've been listening to the other podcasts, we're talking about chronic inflammation in every single podcast, and that can result in what many of the listeners have heard as a leaky gut syndrome. That's what leads to those 10 diseases and 11 conditions.

Listen to this full episode here:

Tune Your Diet to Promote a Healthy Gut Microbiome

Strengthening Our Immune Systems

In this podcast, John describes the details of Step Eight: the importance of strengthening our immune system with regenerative medicine, the use of stem cells, and exosome therapies.

This is the ninth in a series of ten podcasts by John Asher, one of the five co-founders of the Asher Longevity Institute, committed to the science-based and easy-to-implement lifestyle changes you need in order to live a much longer and much healthier life.

In the first podcast, John described the fundamental reasons we die and many other contributing causes. He then outlined how his team of engineers and doctors re-engineered longevity. First, they started with the assumption that unlimited life is possible. After thorough research, they developed nine steps to achieve that goal. These are easy to understand, simple to execute, and sustainable for the rest of your life.

For a checklist of simple actions to take based on this podcast and to learn more about the Nine-Step Program, go to asherlongevity.com today. Sign up for the information and access you need to live the longevity lifestyle.

The next and last podcast in this series will cover new and emerging protocols and therapies that can greatly extend life.

From now until then, John Asher reminds you that looking after your health today gives you better hope for tomorrow!

New and Emerging Protocols and Therapies to Increase Your Lifespan

In the first podcast, John described the fundamental reasons we die and many other contributing causes. He then outlined how his team of engineers and doctors re-engineered longevity. First they started with the assumption that unlimited life is possible. After thorough research they developed nine steps to achieve that goal. These are easy to understand, simple to execute, and sustainable for the rest of your life.

Read the rest of this entry »

Methodologies to Slow Down the Four Reasons Humans Die

In this podcast, John describes the details of Step Seven: methodologies to slow down the four reasons we die. These include taking specific supplements, calorie restriction, fasting, exercise, and getting fresh air every day.

Read the rest of this entry »

Extend Your Life with Seven Medications and Additional Therapies

In this podcast, John describes the details of Step Six: the rationale for taking seven prescription drugs/medications to ward off cancer and enhance longevity with additional (off-label) benefits.

This is the seventh in a series of ten podcasts by John Asher, one of the five co-founders of the Asher Longevity Institute, committed to the science-based and easy-to-implement lifestyle changes you need in order to live a much longer and much healthier life.

Read the rest of this entry »

Take Appropriate Supplements to Ward Off Disease

In this podcast, John describes the details of Step Five: taking appropriate supplements to ward off disease. For a checklist of simple actions to take based on this podcast and to learn more about the Nine-Step Program, go to asherlongevity.com today. Sign up for the information and access you need to live the longevity lifestyle.

This is the sixth in a series of ten podcasts by John Asher, one of the five co-founders of the Asher Longevity Institute, committed to the science-based and easy-to-implement lifestyle changes you need in order to live a much longer and much healthier life.

Read the rest of this entry »