Dr. Will Cole: Fix Your Cellular Health to Reclaim Energy, Slow Aging, and Perform at Your Best| Health & Wellness | E415
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha: Entrepreneurship and Self-Improvement Podcast
Dr. Will Cole discusses how modern lifestyles accelerate cellular aging, leading to premature health issues even in seemingly healthy indivi
Key takeaways
- One in five Americans has at least one organ aging faster than others, increasing the risk of chronic diseases like heart failure and neurodegeneration.
- Cellular aging is influenced by trauma, stress, toxins, poor sleep, and lifestyle factors—not just genetics.
Main topics
- Uneven organ aging
- Cellular health and longevity
Notable quotes
"50% of Americans that have a heart attack, their first symptom is death."
"The younger you are, you are actually aging more rapidly than the people that are older than you at the same age."
Conclusion
True health isn't just about appearance or performance—it's about nurturing cellular
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) 50 % of Americans that have a heart attack, their first symptom is death. And I lost my dad suddenly in a car accident because we think he had a heart attack. That was my dad. He was a bodybuilder. He was into fitness. He was into health. He was here one second, gone the next. Speaker 1 (0:16) Today, we're going straight into why so many healthy high achievers are quietly aging faster on the inside and what to do about it. Returning to Young and Profiting to help us understand this is Dr. Will Cole. a leading functional medicine expert and best-selling author whose new book, Heal Your Cells, just came out. We'll also get into Ozempic AI and why real healing starts at the cellular level. Speaker 2 (0:39) The younger you are, you are actually aging more rapidly than the people that are older than you at the same age. Speaker 1 (0:46) How does that make sense though? Because everybody says we're living longer. Speaker 2 (0:49) There's many people in their 20s and 30s and 40s that have cells of 60-year-olds today. That's Speaker 1 (0:55) crazy. Speaker 2 (0:55) Common, not normal. Speaker 1 (0:56) So like 44, you get like a big aging spike. Speaker 2 (1:00) And the problem is it's just you're jumping off the... What Speaker 1 (1:03) are like two or three practical things that we can do to just reduce the amount of environmental toxic load? It Speaker 2 (1:10) starts with what's in your house, right? Just one scratch of a nonstick, like a Teflon type pan, release over 9,000 plastic particles. If your brain cells were aging more rapidly, Speaker 1 (1:22) the Speaker 2 (1:22) researchers at Stanford found that you had about an... Speaker 1 (1:27) Well, welcome to Young and Profiting. Thanks Speaker 2 (1:29) so much for having me. Can I just say thank you so much for a few years ago having me on your podcast and rooting for me then. And then when I reached out, you answered right away. And I said, I have this book coming out. Like, can I come on the show and chat with you and catch up? And I just, your kindness is off camera. And not everybody can say that, right? I can't say that to everybody. And you're the real deal. And congratulations on the network and all the amazing things. how God's working through you. Thank Speaker 1 (1:58) you so much. Well, of course I wanted you back on the show because you provided so much value last time. We talked all about gut health. I learned so much. You were like one of my first doctors that came on the show. And then I started interviewing like so many different biohackers. So that was really cool. And today we're going to talk about cellular health because you have a new book that's coming out, I think it's September, Speaker 2 (2:19) called Speaker 1 (2:19) Heal Yourselves. And... Cellular health is so important. And one of the most new things, unique things that I learned when I was reading your book is that parts of our body don't age all at the same rate. And that is something I had no idea about. So your heart and your kidneys and your immune system and your metabolism all can age at different rates. And so my first question to you is, how is this possible? Speaker 2 (2:50) Yeah, many people don't know and not just know this, but why it's so important. Because when we're looking at the United States and really when any Western society right now, but the U.S. specifically spends more health care on health care than any industrialized nation. Yet we have the most chronic disease and the shortest lifespan of all Western nations. And we spend the most for it economically. But we're paying a human price for it, too, not just in the quantity of our life. not just the quantity of life, but the years of healthy years, the health span, not just our lifespan. But yes, one of the cornerstone studies that I talk about in Heal Your Cells, and I wrote the book with Dr. Josh Axe, a friend of mine and colleague of mine in the functional medicine space. It was a Stanford study. It was published in Nature in 2023. They found that one in five Americans have at least one organ aging more rapidly than other organs. And why that's important is, and that equates to about 23 million Americans. That's a lot of people. But why it's so compelling and why we wanted to write about this and other longevity research is it's all down to cellular health. I mean, if you can actually heal the cell, you can deal with a lot of these chronic diseases. If your brain cells were aging more rapidly. Yeah. The researchers at Stanford found that you had about an 80 % increased risk of a neurodegenerative issue, like Alzheimer's or some sort of neurodegenerative problem. If your heart cells were aging more rapidly than the rest of your body, you had about a 250 % increased risk of heart failure, heart attack and stroke. But just one in two Americans are, it's killing one in two Americans. And 50 % of Americans that have a heart attack, their first symptom is death. And I lost my dad suddenly in a car accident because we think he had a heart attack or at least some cardiovascular event lost consciousness and it caused him to crash the car. So that was one of the pivotal roles of me just diving into, okay, why is this happening? Why are so many people, not just people in their 60s, the baby boomers, but we're seeing so many people getting heart disease. heart, cardiometabolic problems, autoimmune problems, cancers in their 20s and 30s and 40s. And they look Speaker 1 (5:07) healthy. They look fit and muscular and healthy, but then underneath that all, they might have heart issues. That was my Speaker 2 (5:14) dad. He was a bodybuilder. He was into fitness. He was into health. He was here one second, gone the next. And I've seen some, and Dr. Axe, who wrote the book with me, had his father-in-law, same thing. did all the wellness-y stuff. Here, one day, gone the next. So this concept of uneven aging and not just looking at problems for the sake of it and saying, well, we can't do anything about it. Actually, it's the empowering thing is when you know what you're dealing with, you can do something about it because largely these things are reversible, healable, overcomable things, but we have to do something different to see something different, which is why. We call the book Heal Your Cells, and the subtitle is Reversing the Irreversible, because the world and the system that the world runs in says there's nothing you can do. Just take this medication, see you later. But actually, the science is pointing to actually quite the opposite. We have a lot of agency on our health, but we have to actually do something about it. Speaker 1 (6:05) Yeah, and what else was interesting for me is the fact that when we're looking at our body, it's better for us to think about what is the system that is failing the most? Or like, what is the system that I need to be worried about the most? Like, am I having gut issues? And like, that's the thing that I really need to focus on first. So you really want to figure out what is the system that is failing the most and work on that first, correct? Speaker 2 (6:29) Absolutely, yeah. Now there are... On a clinical level, because we still run a telehealth clinic. So obviously for telehealth patients, we run labs. We can look at DNA methylation and some of the hallmarks that the Stanford group looked at. We can look at these different organs. 11 different organs is what Stanford looked at. And we could look at similar ones of how cells and specific type of organs and not just the organ cells themselves, but the type of cells within the organ. That's the follow-up study just this summer. There's just in June of this year. different types of cells within that same organ can age more rapidly. So we can get very precise. This is just cutting edge stuff. But yes, we have to know what organs aging more rapidly or what's your pain point. Everybody has, there's so much bio-individuality to that, right? Yeah. Based on genetics, but genetics loads the gun. Epigenetics pulls the trigger. There's something in our life that's causing that accelerated. clock, that cell clock to be aging more rapidly. So yes, we look at labs, DNA methylation, inflammation markers to look at that. And somebody's health history obviously is important and their family history is important. But beyond that, in the book, we adapted questions that we asked new telehealth patients. It's a cellular health report card to kind of see. It's not the same as a lab, obviously. But I wanted people to see what organ may be the weakest for me. Maybe for some people, it's their gut. And they always have digestive problems. And there are some good clinical pearls, some telltale signs that their body is giving them a proverbial check engine light. Like something's off here. The body's nudging them to pay attention. In our hustle culture, we're so divorced from our body. And our body oftentimes is giving us some clues. Pay attention to me. Pay attention to me. And we're not aware or conscious or paying attention to these signals that our body's giving us. Speaker 1 (8:20) Yeah. Most of my listeners are like late 20s to like early 40s, even some like late 40s, 50s. What should we be paying? Like, what are the common things that we should be paying attention to in terms of like realizing that a system is failing? Speaker 2 (8:35) Another study. published in Nature. Nature has so many good studies on PubMed. But this is another summer of 2026 study, recent study, that found that people born after the year 1965 were aging significantly more rapidly than people born prior to 1965. But specifically, people born in the 1990s, basically every decade after 1965, if you were born in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, every decade, the younger you are, you are actually aging more rapidly than the people that are older than you at the same age. Speaker 1 (9:11) How does that make sense though? Because everybody says we're living longer. We're Speaker 2 (9:14) living longer lifespan by a few years, but it's not a great health span. Speaker 1 (9:20) So Speaker 2 (9:20) we're aging more rapidly, but we, so we can keep people alive longer today because of modern medicine, but we can't keep them healthier. with modern medicine. So we see that in elderly homes, right? I mean, they're alone, hopped up on tons of medication, completely sedentary and depressed. It is a miserable existence. So that's not what we're talking about here. So of course we want to add years to your life, but can we also add life to your years? And that's what all this whole longevity chatter in the biohacking space. I think they lose the plot because it's like, what's... how can we add quality of your life to the here and now? Not just look for the promise to the future, which of course I am interested in living a long thriving life and being able to play with my grandkids someday and enjoy life and not be in that space that many elderly people find them. But for myself, in my 40s or people in their 20s and 30s, like, how can we enjoy life now? I see so many of my friends that are kept back from living the life that God created them for because they're fatigued and they have nervous system dysregulation. They have other inflammatory problems. That's not a great quality of life. So yeah, the science is pointing to the fact that there's many people in their 20s and 30s and 40s that have cells of 60-year-olds today. That's Speaker 1 (10:39) crazy. Speaker 2 (10:39) Common, not normal. Speaker 1 (10:40) I really want to dive deep on this whole concept of aging. And there's all these different like aging phrases or ways to calculate it. You've got your biological age, you've got your chronological age, and you've got your cellular age. Can you break down the differences between those? Speaker 2 (10:55) Yeah. So the chronological age is how much, how many years, like how many birthdays have you had? The biological age and the cellular age, I would say pretty much the same. It's overall understanding what's happening. at the cellular level. What's your cell's age, which can be very, very different. And we can actually quantify this, looking at different metrics like inflammation, like DNA methylation, and other health biomarkers that can aggregate more or less where your cellular age is. And many people are aging more rapidly. But many people think, well, To your point, people in their 20s and 30s or 40s, I don't have to be thinking. This idea of longevity isn't really sexy or they're not really into it. And that's why it's like, to me, they're missing the point. Missing point is like, yes. We all kind of have a cellular credit score, whether you know it or not, and we can improve it. And what you are dealing with in your 60s and 70s and 80s, you actually start investing in your 20s and 30s and 40s. You can't wait until you're in your 60s Speaker 1 (12:01) to Speaker 2 (12:01) be like, yeah, I care about this now. You have to start building this now and investing in your health now. But even if that still, if your head is in the sand for the future, and that may be the case. that quality of life is actually more important for me. It's like, what are they doing? Like the talent and the time and the vision that they have in their life to not be kept back. That's also a sign. If somebody's not thriving in their life and being the best version of themselves, that's also a sign that their cells are aging more rapidly. Speaker 1 (12:29) Yeah. So I actually, for the first time ever, I'm going to be taking one of those aging tests, like a really popular test. It's going to have 160 labs. Speaker 1 (12:39) and I'm going to get my biological age. Now, what do you want to tell me in terms of when I read that biological age? What should I take seriously or not seriously? How should I be reading that? Do Speaker 2 (12:50) you know some of the biomarkers they're looking at? Speaker 1 (12:52) It's function health. So it's Speaker 2 (12:53) probably familiar with. Yeah, yeah. So they're, look, and function health is, I don't know all the labs that they're running, but they're running a lot of good conventional lab data. I diner it out on this stuff. And what we're also going to, what we would look at, and Mark Hyman's a friend of mine, and they're doing amazing things over there. And what we do with our telehealth center, it's similar, but one-on-one. It's not like, you know, we're seeing people one-on-one online. I would take all of that data important. I would take it all important. Knowing what you're getting done, I think all of this conventional data is important. There's going to be bigger deals and smaller deals potentially, right? So I think the context around these biomarkers matters. What I think you should do is actually send me the labs afterwards and I will give you my hot take on it. I Speaker 1 (13:41) will definitely do Speaker 2 (13:41) that. Yeah, for sure. So I think one of the things I would look at, this is what I'd look at. Well, let me just say this. I am assuming everything's going to be fine. You're a healthy, vibrant person. And I don't want people to become hypochondriacs or become obsessive about this, stressing about... Your health isn't good for your health either. Yeah, exactly. So I'm going to assume it's just going to be a good pat on the back and say, you're doing everything great. And cool. It's a snapshot in time. It's a great report card. And we can check in next year. That's what I would assume. But if there is something off, the beautiful thing, the grace in all of this, is that by you being proactive about your health, you could do something about it. You know, like Maya Angelou said, when you know better, you do better. Labs are no better thing and you can do something about it. So I think some of the areas I think are the most helpful for the average person are inflammation markers. And you're Speaker 1 (14:36) going Speaker 2 (14:36) to look at that. High sensitivity C-reactive protein. Homocysteine is another one. Specifically having to do with cellular. Both have to do with oxidation. Because when they're high, it's the cells kind of saying, hey, I'm not safe. And they're trying to protect us. trying to protect themselves, but it's showing that something is threatening the cells. Yeah. And we want to find out what's the root upstream cause of that threat. And it could be both physiological, physical, or mental, emotional, spiritual, things like stress and trauma, and looking at both of those things. And that's where health history comes in. So I would say, let's look all of it. And then the great thing about... looking at conventional biomarkers like that is we also can look at the tighter interval within that larger reference range of where our body functions the best. And that's where we get our name in functional medicine. So we're looking at optimal, not average, which we probably talked about the last time I was here. But the labs reference range is based on that statistical bell curve average of people who go to labs. Speaker 1 (15:32) Got it. People Speaker 2 (15:33) that go to labs aren't the healthiest group of people. So we're looking at where does the longest vibrant lives live? Where does the health span longevity people live? That's the functional range. So yeah, I think that that's a great illuminating proactive tool for you to then say, okay, what are the things I need to focus on? Speaker 1 (15:52) Yeah, but in terms of the biological age that they're going to give me, I feel like every time I hear somebody tell me their biological age, it's always younger. Than their chronological age. Are Speaker 2 (16:03) they lying to us? I don't know. Speaker 1 (16:04) Like, is it real? Should we really take that, like, seriously? Speaker 2 (16:08) There's a lot of labs out there that I don't know their system and what they're basing that calculation on. So not everything is accurate out there. So I want to look at the reproducibility, the credibility of the tests. For example, the Stanford researchers and us looking at DNA methylation, it's an estimate. These are estimates of more or less where can they be. But I think we want to put all labs in context. Speaker 1 (16:41) Yeah. And also, like you mentioned, like the people who get labs are usually unhealthy. So you're like basing it on the average unhealthy person, maybe. Speaker 2 (16:50) Right. It's yeah, exactly. But I think it's Speaker 1 (16:52) a Speaker 2 (16:52) ballpark is what I would say. A lot of these labs can say a ballpark. Am I trending in the right direction or am I not? And it's not. It's not, you know, it's not even as we talk about in Heal Your Cells. You may be great in some areas and then some pain points in other areas. So it's, I think the context around this data is important. Speaker 1 (17:13) Yeah. So there's lots of things that impact your cells. One of them is what you eat, of course. Talk to us about, you know, I feel like there's a lot of information out there about what we should be eating, but what's your like best guidance in terms of how to navigate our nutrition? The Speaker 2 (17:29) food. Foods are instruction manuals to ourselves, right? I mean, they're determining how quickly or how slowly that cellular clock ticks and talks. And we have agency on the rapidity or the slowness of that cellular clock ticking. So it's not just about what we're eating, it's when we're eating. A lot of researchers are talking about the chronobiological disorder. So basically things like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and insulin resistance feeds many types of cancers. That is this Yes, these are inflammatory problems, but in the foods we eat, either feed inflammation or fight inflammation. There's no neutral food. There's no Switzerland. I'm doing nothing for your physiology meal. But so what you eat matters. But when you eat, the science is pointing to also. So the whole concept of time compressed feeding or time restricted feeding, intermittent fasting or fasting mimicking ways of eating is a tool that we have to slow down that cellular clock. So you are right in the sense of you ask 100 different doctors in the wellness space, you're going to get 100 different opinions pretty much. Speaker 1 (18:38) We Speaker 2 (18:38) can get into the granular details of it, but I think there's so much bio-individuality to this topic because I look at people and their health history in their labs all day long. So if I hung my hat on one way for everybody, I'd be proven wrong all day long. Because you could say, for example, a Mediterranean diet has lots of great... studies are on it, right? But what if that person has... FODMAP intolerance from SIBO. And they eat lots of greens and grains, and it's causing a lot of bloating. So you keep doing that. It doesn't make that version of the Mediterranean diet. And there's different ways to even do a Mediterranean diet. It doesn't make that bad, but it's not loving that person back right now. And then there's many examples of that. Things like fermented foods, right? They have a lot of data. I love the data on sauerkraut and kimchi and kefir. But if you have histamine intolerance, Mass cell activation syndrome, which we see a lot clinically, that's going to flare some people up. Does that make even bone broth? Bone broth is like the pinnacle of the gut health food that we talked about for years. It can be, depending on how you cook it, can be higher in histamines. So there's very few hard and fast rules