If you think that you're only going to live until you're 50 and you're 49 years old, your lifestyle and the choices you make are going to be really a whole lot different than if you think you might live to be 100.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the personal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you.

By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN robotic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD.

Hi, I'm Dr. Crockett. Welcome to The Dr. Crockett Show. Thanks for tuning in. We are a show that airs every Tuesday. Although I am a minimally invasive GYN surgeon, a robotic surgeon in San Antonio, Texas, we go, here we go where the scalpel doesn't reach. We are especially doing that on today's show because today's show is a very special show called How Not to Die. That's right. Here's a book. We're going to talk about books. I got lots of books today. But I can't take credit for that title.

I'm not going to speak just about the book today. This episode is actually part one of a series that I'm going to do about longevity medicine. So it's not just about avoiding death as long as we can. What we're looking at is teaching you how to live a happier, healthier life, longer if you want to. That fits really well into the wellness topics that we talk about.

We're going to integrate a little bit of what we've talked about in previous wellness shows. If you haven't checked any of those out, I would recommend that you go back and watch some of the episodes I did with Dr. Miloy. Maybe one of my first episodes was with this lovely lady and her husband, Deborah Kesten, on whole food integrative eating that was way back at the beginning and still is valid as it is today.

My cohost is saying hi. Did you want to say hi to everybody? This is one of the ways to live a healthy, happy, healthier life, right? Our doggies, our pets. Yeah, that's right. Pets are one of the things in our lifestyle that help us lead happier, longer lives. This is Ollie. He is a bichon for those of you who think he's a poodle, and he's my costar. Yeah. You just want to say hi. Okay. All right, you're going to help me with the show? Oh, that was a little wink. That was really good. Okay. All right. So sit down. Be a good dog.

So I'm going to break today's talk into three different sections. The first section are things that are readily available to us all right now. They're lifestyle modifications. So those are things that you don't have to have a lot of money to do. They are things that you can easily do in your environment and change in your environment. They are things you can talk with your doctor about. That's the first type of longevity medicine we're going to talk about.

The second part is about current medical breakthroughs. So we're going to talk about things that you get through a doctor's office. They either need to be paid for most of the time, or they're available to you via insurance or will be close to in the future. So we're going to talk about some early advances in cancer screening, and it’s super fun, super exciting to me to see where all of this has gone over the length of my career. So I'm excited to talk about that.

Then the third section is we're going to talk about what is coming in the future, what is developing, and I'm going to give you all kinds of resources. We're going to use my little computer board a little differently today. We're going to try it out a little differently. I've got some things loaded up. This is actually a computer with a touchscreen, and we're going to use it like that at the end. So let's begin. Where should we begin?

So here's the deal. I am kind of doing a longevity experiment with myself. I have this idea that I just want to kind of do a little experiment and see what it would be like if I wanted to live to be 120. The reason I think that mindset is super important is because we live differently now when we think the finish line is further away or closer.

So a good example of this would be if you were to run a 5k race, and you're like 100 yards away from the finish line and it keeps moving and then it keeps moving a little bit more and it keeps moving until you've already run half a marathon. How would you feel about that? How would you feel today if you thought you were going to retire at the age of 65? Then, you know, you'd have so much life to live on a fixed income. Then that finish line, because you had adopted healthier lifestyle, that moved further and further down the road. You could run into some problems.

The point about the race is I want you to think about your mindset. If you think that you're only going to live until you're 50, and you're 49 years old, your lifestyle and the choices you make are going to be really a whole lot different than if you think you might live to be 100. That you need to take care of yourself and your body. So that machine, that God given machine that you have, can run as efficiently and as healthily, is that a word? As healthily as long as possible so that you can really enjoy the totality of your life.

Think of how much more life you have to live in your geriatric years if you can figure out how to maximize those years. That starts now. It just starts with taking care of our bodies. So let's start with talking about lifestyle things. This is what we've talked about on the show quite a bit before.

So that's starting with our healthy diet. We teach mostly a whole food plant based diet. Mostly. We had some salmon with our salad. We had amazing mango salsa salad with grilled salmon tonight. It was super good.

This was one of the first books that I ever picked up. This was by Michael Greger, and it is literally called How Not to Die. It is about the foods that have been scientifically proven to prevent and reverse disease. This was one of the first books that I ever saw that actually, as a physician, surprised me because that I'd never been taught before that cardiovascular disease could be reversed by food.

If you want some resources, a really good place to go would be to my website at drcrockett.com. There's an opt in when you first get there that shows me holding like, it's at a table with food. That little opt in is a really cool little five or six page PDF that I made. It's really pretty. It goes through how to remake spaghetti at different levels of healthy eating and different choices.

But the thing that's really cool about that little PDF file is it's got all the Netflix videos that I watched to start learning about the studies and evidence behind reversing the two major causes of medical mortality in the United States, which are cardiovascular disease and cancers. So this is really important book, really cool.

Then I wanted to mention, again, Deborah Kesten’s book. She wrote it with her husband Larry Scherwitz. This is about integrative whole food eating. This is about how we eat a lot of fun things about integrating healthy lifestyle into our eating, eating with other people, eating healthy foods, enjoying our food. A really cool, interesting book because it's very rigorously scientifically researched and scientifically based, and it's a really great read too. Plus they're friends. We'll put links to that episode and to all of these books in our show links down below.

So one of the first documentaries that I watched was Forks Over Knives. This was one of the first ones that came out that actually started showing us the data about a whole food plant based diet, and we say whole foods plant based instead of vegan because vegan includes processed foods like processed sugars and flours, which just are not as healthy for us as whole food plants.

So this book, Forks Over Knives, is a really cool book. It's a book with a four week plan. So if you're looking for somewhere to start, this has recipes, and they even have a website where you can go on. There's whole communities, all that kind of stuff. Speaking of, Esselstyn is a big name at the beginning of that research.

This book is written specifically for women, and I'm an OBGYN and a woman myself. So I'm going to talk to women as my primary audience. Although men thank you for being here and glad you're listening in, and this can be healthy for you too, just as healthy for you.

So this is written by Jane Esselstyn and this is specific about how to be a plant based woman warrior. It's called Live Fierce, Stay Bold, and Eat Delicious. I just love this book. It's so inspiring, and it's all the things that I want to be and what I hope for you is to be fierce, bold, and eat delicious.

The other one that I really love is this one. This one's a little different because it's not whole food plant based. It's whole foods. So this one's by Dan Buettner is I think is how he says his name. I watch his TikToks all the time, and he's been on the top show circuits with my favorite podcast host that talks about all kinds of health and wellness topics. Diary of a CEO is one of my favorite one. The Lewis Howes and then Rich Roll. In fact, this one was Rich Roll and Julie Piatt’s book, Plant Powered Way. This is a whole food plant based athlete cookbook, and I love their recipes. They do incredible food.

Blue zones is really interesting because there's actually a Netflix documentary on the blue zones, which are the areas in the world where people from very different cultures all have one thing in common, which is the highest number of centenarians, 100 year old people. Dan has gone all over the world. He's accumulated recipes here. But the documentary itself is also really fascinating because what he's noticed and is a lot of healthy habits and commonalities in these cultures that are very far apart and disparate. I'm so fascinated by that.

So they incorporate some of the very primary lifestyle things that we teach here on The Dr. Crockett Show. You've heard me talk about them before. You've heard Dr. Miloy on with me talking about the table of health.

Those lifestyle foundational things, which are accessible to all of us, are our diet and what we eat and choose not to put in our bodies. Choose not to put things that are not healthy into our bodies because that makes our body work harder. So if our body's trying to be healthy and have good energy and repair at night when we're sleeping, if it's having to deal with a whole bunch of crap that we put into it, it doesn't have as much energy to do regeneration and to help us be healthier and happier and live longer and have that energy.

So it's not that you can't have something that's not so healthy for you every once in a while. It's just I want you to think about your body as a machine, and not gunking it up by stuff that it's having to work really hard to process. To eat clean, which means mostly whole foods plant based. So, diet is the number one thing.

Exercise is number two. Exercise has been shown to decrease the rate of depression as much as an SSRI, which is the type of medicine that we most commonly prescribe for depression. So this is something that affects us even more as we go through menopause and into aging.

So the exercise part of this, getting a good walk in 30 minutes at least five times a week, doing strength training as you get into your menopausal years. As a female, we want to maintain our muscle mass. We'll talk about that more in specific episodes. Maintaining our strength and our power and our balance and our ability to do normal daily activities is a really big strategy for healthy aging and that longevity thing.

Food, exercise, sleep. You need good quality sleep, at least eight hours a night. Sleep and nighttime are when your body regenerates. We have incredible capacity within our body to clean out the crap that doesn't belong there. That's what your body's doing at night. It's regenerating. It’s revitalizing, and that sleep is super important.

So I always tell my patients even if you feel like you have insomnia, and your brain is going, I want you to lay there and not get up. I want you to resist the urge. I want you to maybe watch what your brain is thinking about. But let your body still have that time. You can just tell your brain, okay brain, I see what you're doing. I'm going to lay here, and I'm still going to let my liver and my GI tract and my skin and all that take care of themselves. So we're going to lay here and get the rest that we need, even if you want to keep going.

The fourth thing is stress management. That includes our brain health and our brain management. I love Dr. Amen’s book about, and his clinic, about making our brains healthy. He's really foremost on the front of preventing Alzheimer's and dementia as we age and all the things that we can do now to help prevent those kinds of problems as we age, and coincidentally, those are a lot of the things that we're talking about for just longevity and living a happier life.

So those are some of my favorite resources for the lifestyle things. Like I said, these are the things that are available to you now. Sometimes we think that we don't deserve the other layers of things. I'm speaking about myself. I think I don't really deserve to go to a doctor's office and have my labs drawn, like I know I should get check. Because I know I haven't been doing the healthy habits that I should have been. So I just put off doing the doctor's office labs because I kind of think I don't deserve it because I haven't been so good about my diet or my exercise.

If that's you, if you're like me, and you have those kinds of thoughts, I just want to encourage you to have compassion on yourself. To go get the medical labs, go get your checkups, go get your pap smears, go get your metabolites and all of your hormones checked. You do deserve it, and you have access to it. So let's encourage each other with those healthy habits.

That kind of brings me into the second section. The second section is going to talk about the current medical therapies that are available to us, especially as women, to help us have healthy aging. Of course on the top of my stack is my colleagues book, Dr. M.C. Haver. She is an OBGYN in Galveston, Texas.

If you have not heard about her or seen her on social media, I would greatly encourage you to get this book. Find her on, oh man. She's on the those talk shows circuits too. She's been all over it. She's such a guru on menopause. I'm the guru on robotic surgery. If you want to know about minimally invasive GYN surgery, endometriosis, fibroids, come see me. If you want to learn about hormone replacement therapy and menopause, go find this lady.

This book is excellent. It's a great book about the lifestyle things that we were talking about. But also, she makes a great point about how hormone replacement therapy, especially estradiol and progesterone, are so important to us as women as we transition into the later part of our lives.

And how there is an under treatment of women due to the Women's Health Initiative studies in the early 2000s, which is resulting in many more women dealing with chronic anxiety and depression issues and ending up on medications rather than being on helping bioidentical hormone replacement therapy.

So what we notice in women is we, as a gender, have much less, we have much less cardiovascular disease, until we go through menopause. So men have higher rates of heart attacks and strokes, kind of increasing gradually as they get older. But women, we are really relatively protected until our ovaries quit functioning, and then our estrogen bottoms out and our progesterone and testosterone bottom out.

Then what happens? Well, our cardiovascular risks, our risk for heart attacks and strokes, go at the same rate as men. We match them. We have a secret weapon. We can prevent this. So the newer studies coming out on bio identical replacement are showing that it can be dosed longer without a limit without the risk of increasing our unhealthy desire, unhealthy morbidity risks, and it can reduce our cardiovascular risks well into our later years, our geriatric year.

So I would encourage you to talk with your providers about your menopause treatment, your menopause hormonal therapy. Another great resource that we'll put below is the North American Menopause Society, NAMS. They have clinical guidelines that are updated with the latest research for both hormonal treatment and menopause and non-hormonal treatments for menopause. So those of you who aren't good candidates for hormone replacement therapy or don't want to take hormonal therapy, you should also check out the non-hormonal menopausal treatments available on the NAMS site. So that's kind of cool.

The other thing that I got is this idea of intermittent fasting. I picked this book. This is by Dr. Mindy Pelz, Fast Like a Girl. This talks a lot, and actually Dr. Haver talks about intermittent fasting too. Intermittent fasting or prolonged fasting is just prolonging the time that we don't eat at nighttime into a 14 or 16 hour window so that we're only eating like six to eight hours a day.

This has been shown by more and more research to reduce our risk of metabolic diseases because it gives the body a freedom or a time to clean out the free radicals and the things that are harmful to our bodies. We weren't designed to eat constantly from morning until dusk, like we kind of do in our American lifestyle now.

So one thing that I like doing is I can drink my coffee in the morning without breaking my fast. I sometimes work continuous glucose monitor. In fact, I've had many requests to do a show on the CGM, or the continuous glucose monitor. That is coming up in the next month. So stay tuned for that one.

But I will try to put off eating my breakfast until about 10:00. I generally have an eating window from 10:00 until about 5:00 or 6:00 at night. I eat a fairly early dinner. Then you shouldn't eat for about two or three hours until you go to bed. I go to bed super early so I don't always get that. But the idea is that my eating window is generally from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

So that's limiting how much my GI tract is having to work. It's certainly letting my body process things at night, other than a heavy meal that's eaten at like 8:00 or 9:00 at night. So intermittent fasting is a really cool tool. I love reading more research about how fasting affects our ability to repair our bodies. It's really cool, really super cool.

Then the last thing I'm going to talk about is a really awesome medical breakthrough in cancer detection. That is by a company called GRAIL. The test that they have is called Galleri. The Galleri test is a blood test produced by the company GRAIL that has the potential of detecting multiple types of cancer.

So one of the things that super fascinating to me about this is that this test, which detects, it has an early detection of over 50 cancers, 50 different types of cancer from one blood draw. This test was developed because of obstetrics. It was developed out of testing of moms for fetal abnormalities when they're pregnant. There was a test called a MaterniT 21 that came out in the 2000s, when I was practicing OB, MaterniT 21.

So it was checking for, it was drawing mother's blood, and it was a test that drew blood from the mom. But what they noticed is that they could find fetal DNA or fragments of the fetal DNA particles in the mom, and they could use those to check for specific abnormalities like Down Syndrome, et cetera, et cetera. So, this test was really earth shattering when it came out. It really replaced a lot of more invasive procedures that were risky to the baby, such as amniotic fluid testing.

What came out of this is this company called the GRAIL that had been doing this test, this MaterniT 21. They noticed over time that they were isolating fragments of DNA that weren't maternal DNA, and they weren't fetal DNA. They looked at him a little bit closer, and what they realized was that they were small fragments of cancer DNA. So they were starting to isolate fragments of DNA thrown off from very early cancers in women who didn't even know that they had malignancies. It was super early detection.

Out of that, they've developed this whole test called Galleri. Galleri is available right now across the nation and doctor's offices. You can also go online to their site, and you can order a kit. So if you go to their site, it looks like this. There's a page that says what is Galleri. There's a section for patients, section for healthcare providers. So those of you that are healthcare providers, this is something you want to carry in your office. This is really cool.

So basically what happened is they developed this test, and it screens for cancers that are bloodborne. So it's not great for everything. For instance, it's not great at thyroid because there the thyroid is kind of capsulized. It's not great at brain because there's a blood-brain barrier. But it screens for almost every other type of cancer because the majority of cancers are in our organs that are, and they would be easily bloodborne and throw off fragments of DNA.

So only five types of cancer have recommended screening tests in our country, and they are breast, cervical cancer. So breast cancer screening is your mammogram. Cervical cancer screening is your pap smear. Colon cancer screening is colonoscopy or Cologuard, which is another fragment DNA type test. Lung cancer, which is CT scan, and then prostate, which is exam in lab.

So what they've discovered is that if you can find these cancers earlier then you have a four times higher survival rate. If we're isolating little fragments of DNA that early cancers are throwing off, we have the potential to grab a cancer diagnosis earlier and intervene earlier and really reduce mortality. Now you're getting where I'm going with this longevity thing? If we have the ability to detect all these cancers at zero stage and just give you a little treatment thing for it then we've greatly increased your ability to live a whole lot longer.

So we're addressing cardiovascular disease not only through HRT, but a lot of other means. Then we're addressing malignancy with early detection. So this little page right here shows the screening tests that they do for the 50 different types of cancer. So if you go on their site, you can find this list of cancers.

The ones that are really exciting to me and other doctors that are using this test are the ones that don't have screening tests and have historically been found very late, like ovarian, fallopian tube, and primary peritoneum. These are grouped together because they're pretty much the same disease. So ovarian cancer has been really scary forever because it's rarely found before it's stage three or four, which is advanced. So it's very, very highly associated with a low cure rate and a high mortality rate. This test has the ability to detect stage zero ovarian cancers.

The other two that are really like that one that are exciting that are not GYN cancers are pancreatic and liver. So these cancers, it's really exciting for us to have a new screening test for these types of malignancies. Like I said, it's a blood test in the office. Like right now, the problem with this test is that it is going through FDA approval and is not on insurance plans yet, but it is very likely going to be in the close foreseeable future. I hope so.

In fact, one of the things that I foresee is that in the near future, we're going to be drawing this type of test as an annual screening test as part of our annual labs to check for early stage zero malignancies. So right now it's only available on cash pay. If you Google, you can find a physician in your area.

We do carry it in our office at Virtuoso GYN. We carry it at cost to us, which is just under $1,000. We don't make profit off of this because we believe this is something that we should make as easily accessible as possible. We do have payment plans too. So you're welcome to check that out at my practice.

But if you don't live near San Antonio, if you go on the Galleri site, you can also look, like I said, at how to download the kits. You can have them sent to you. Download the information, have the kits sent to you, and send it off. Okay, so that is that.

Then the last section that I wanted to talk about are the what's in the future and what's on the rise. That comes into this whole group of newer technologies and testing for plasma genetic type genetic modifications to fix our genetic problems. So I've got a couple of recent resources for you. I'm not a guru on this yet, but I'm getting there as fast as I can.

By and large, most of the things in these resources are not available to us publicly, either because they're cost prohibitive, or they're just undergoing testing right now because there's kind of this race to see who can win the longevity race.

So the first book that I want to share with you is this one by author Bryan Johnson of Venmo and PayPal and all etc., etc. This book DON’T DIE is kind of interesting because it's written from the perspective of all the different voices in his head, his different personalities talking to each other. But he has this goal kind of similar to mine to see how long he can live or anti-age. He calls his the Project Blueprint. So this is kind of a cool book called DON’T DIE, and it's available on Amazon.

The other one I'm going to mention is Tony Robbins’ Life Force. This was written by Peter Diamandis with Tony Robbins. Peter is a physician, and he's also a longevity expert. He has his own amazing clinics, and I highly recommend following him. Peter Diamandis has also been all over the podcast circuits with all the bigwigs, and he's a lot of fun to listen to. Check it out of you're bored and looking for something to look at other than the regular Tuesday night TV fair. That's kind of fun.

Then the other books that I wanted to show you were The Telomere Effect. There's a lot of research going on about telomeres. They show kind of the age of our cells. They're a way for us to look at our cellular aging now. Those are accessible to you. Mitochondrial research is also a big deal right now. Mitochondria are the little energy engines in our cells. So our medical technology is drilling down into the cellular level for advances into longevity medicine.

This one's another one I thought were mentioning by David Sinclair called Lifespan. Super, super cool. Then one of my favorites, Peter Attia, The Science and Art of Longevity. I hope this show has been helpful to you. I hope maybe I brought you something new and interesting. Maybe there's something here that will help you live a longer, healthier life.

If you have any other thoughts or ideas about longevity and longevity medicine or maybe there's something more that you want me to discuss in part two because I feel like this one's just part one, drop your comments down below. Don't forget to mention where you're from because I'd love to know.

Thank you for joining us today. If you found this useful, please like and share it with other people. Please hit the subscribe button. I'll see you next week on Tuesday. Have a great week. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.