Dr. Will Cole: How to Heal Your Cells, Leaky Gut, Light Exposure, and Why Your Gut Sets the Pace To Aging

Show notes

We talk about aging like it happens to a whole person at once. It doesn't. It happens organ by organ, at different speeds, and most people never find out which part of them is running ahead until something breaks.

Dr. Will Cole has spent sixteen years running one of the first functional medicine telehealth centers in the world, and he came to this conversation with a case that is both clinical and personal. In 2023 his father lost consciousness at the wheel and died in the crash. The autopsy pointed to cardiometabolic changes, and his heart cells had been aging faster than the rest of him. That same year, Stanford researchers found that one in five adults over fifty has at least one organ aging faster than the others, and that when it's the heart, the risk of a cardiac event more than triples.

His new book with Dr. Josh Axe, Heal Your Cells, makes an argument that reframes most of what gets called normal aging. Exhaustion, brain fog, the weight that will not move, the hormone shifts nobody can explain. These are not the calendar. They are cells that have stopped reading their own instructions clearly, and that is a state you can change.

We get into what actually makes a cell feel unsafe, why your gut lining is one cell thick and therefore the first thing to break, and the point almost nobody makes about elimination diets: the reintroduction matters as much as the elimination, and a protocol you never came off of is a cast you left on until the muscle atrophied.

We also get into light. Not just morning sun, but the darkness half, which matters more for women than most people realize. Melatonin is not only a sleep hormone, it's one of the more important antioxidants for ovarian aging, and light levels most people would call almost nothing can cut its production substantially.

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