Ep. 165: Slow Down the Aging Process–Tips From the Pros! with Brian Vaszily | Vibe Podcast

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Robyn:  Hey everyone. It’s Robyn Openshaw. Welcome back to the Vibe show.

I am interviewing today, my friend Brian Vaszily and like me, he’s become really interested in aging and how to do it gracefully — how to do it slower. He’s the founder and host of theartofantiaging.com, and he has just done a free summit, and I was one of the 22 speakers on it.

I invited him to come on the show and talk about what he learned from interviewing 22 health and wellness experts and authors and physicians and asking them the question, “What are the three little known (but most life changing) tips that I’ve picked up in my research and writing on health and wellness over the many years?”

He asked me that question and I wanted to ask him and give you one last chance to join his summit.

If you want to check it out, it’s at greensmoothiegirl.com/brian B. R. I. A. N. I just decided to make that link really short and easy because the name of his summit would be a long URL, right?

The Little Known Life-changing Health Summit. If you want to jump in and get that summit or at least listen to the Replay Weekend, where you can listen to it for free, that’s about to happen.

On January 29th as we launch this episode, it’s at greensmoothiegirl.com/brian.

Brian Vaszily, welcome to the Vibe show.

Brian Vaszily: Well, thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

Robyn:  You’ve been working really hard interviewing lots and lots and lots of people on the subject of how to age better, how to age slower. What’s your take on aging?

Everyone’s obsessed with it. I personally have started to be obsessed with it since I turned 50 almost three years ago. I wasn’t paying any attention to that content until probably about age 50.

What makes you so interested in it? What’s your story with aging?

Brian Vaszily: [That is] a good question. First of all, I’m right behind you in terms of [your story]. Actually right now, [I am] on the verge of turning five-oh.

It’s actually quite a long story that I’m going to try to sum up for you in terms of what put me on this path.

Long story short, I had what people may call a particularly challenging first half of life where I grew up in a really rough neighborhood in Chicago and lost friends to gangs.

I had a dad who was a good man until he became severely alcoholic and quite abusive.

What kept me on my feet and actually what kept me alive is strong women in my life. I have a Saint of a mother who I still don’t know how she did all that. I have a Saint of a sister.

I had some saints of teachers [that] all happen to be females. They all kept me going in life I guess.

I went through all kinds of other stuff — very poor, very young father lost a house in the past and went through bankruptcy — all kinds of stuff.

I am thriving today, so I will put that note in there. This is so largely due to the women in my life. Today I have a wonderful wife.

Where I’m going with this is that I’ve been in natural health for well over 20 years now, and I worked with and helped many of the best out there. [I] helped Dr. Mercola build mercola.com when nobody knew who he was. [I] helped Dr. Mark Hyman [and] many, many others.

A couple of years ago, I was at that point in life where there was the two paths and I’m like, “I could do a lot in a lot of different ways, but what do I really feel strongly about, Robyn?”

It was really already bothering me that I’m watching my wife (who’s in her forties), my mother (who’s in her seventies), my sister (who’s in her fifties) — these really powerful women in my life– struggle with what you just said.

The fact that there’s this whole pervasive notion out there that it’s all downhill from here, as the saying goes.

Getting older is equated with becoming undesirable and incapable and doomed to suffering and disease. That just went against what I’d seen over the years in natural health, [and] in personal growth for that matter.

That’s nonsense. It hurt me, frankly, to see these powerful women in my life going downhill, in a sense, because of this nonsense myth. I’m like, there’s only one thing I can do here.

I have access to all of these amazing experts, all of these doctors and researchers and integrative health and natural health and folks like you.

I said I’m going to do something about this. I’m going to put this out there as much as I can to let people — who [are in their] late 30’s and 40’s and 50’s and 60’s and beyond — know, and show them there are answers and these can and should be the best years of your life.

Here’s proof — here’s how to do it. That’s the art of anti-aging.

This summit that you referenced, I’ve been overwhelmingly working hard on this thing with passion. [The project] almost never feels like work. Let me put it that way.

It’s like the pinnacle of this mission because I’m able to bring these 22 top longevity and anti-aging doctors and researchers — just really brilliant people to the forefront.

[They are] each from some different areas of expertise to give their answers to the big question that I asked. I asked you that big question, so you know what that is, but I can review that question if you want.

Robyn:  The question was to tell you the top three things that I know from my research in health and wellness, as one of the many authors, researchers and physicians that you interviewed, that [I] wish everybody knew, but that very, very few did.

I had fun with that question. I really just wanted to have you on today to pick your brain a little bit, about what you learned in the deep dive with 22 health and wellness experts.

A lot of the people that you interviewed are colleagues and friends of mine as well. Probably half of them we’ve had on this show on a specific subject, but I know that you interviewed them on subjects.

I haven’t even scratched the surface with them. Just start wherever you want to talk about some of the meaningful things that you learned having just come out of this extensive interviewing of some amazing people.

Brian Vaszily: Right. True compliments to you. You were one of my favorite interviews, by the way. I imagine I don’t need to review what we discussed because I’m sure everyone listening has heard your brilliance before.

The first one that actually pops to mind was Dr. David Perlmutter. He’s a world renown neurologist. Most people know his book, Grain Brain, which has sold a gazillion copies.

Tips with Dr. David Perlmutter

That was a profound conversation with David Perlmutter. He revealed that they now know that 90% of your genes that code for your health are under your control. Now, 10-20 years ago there wasn’t even this notion that we can control our genes, so to speak.

We thought we were doomed to our genetic destiny or praised by it in some cases. As time has gone on and became known, — this is kind of the field of epigenetics — [scientists have found that] we do have some control. We can express different genes in different ways.

As time continues to go on, according to Dr. Perlmutter, we’re finding more and more that we have this tremendous control over.

He said even a couple of years ago, he was saying 70%. Now he’s saying 90% of your genes are under your control. That’s just a monumental fact right there that kind of overrides the entire summit.

So much more than most people realize when it comes to how they look, how they feel right now, avoiding disease, fighting disease, living long is under their control.

Robyn:  It’s such an important topic, and I’m sure you touched on that with a number of your speakers because it’s fairly new to realize that our genes express. They’re not just sitting there doing bad or good things for us.

They’re expressing based on the environment we put them in, everything from the thoughts that we think and the amount of time we spend in low vibration emotions and thoughts to the foods we eat, and much more.

What else? Tell me more.

Brian Vaszily: Along these very lines, different types of hormesis (I’ll define that in a moment for those who may not know what it is.) came up in so many different ways throughout this entire summit.

This is basically the idea that not all stress is bad. Certainly chronic stress — where it’s overwhelming — can be devastating for people, but there is a certain amount of stress in life in different ways that’s actually good.

In fact, that’s what working out is. When you exercise, you’re technically breaking down your muscles so that they build back twice a solid, twice as strong.

It goes with so many other aspects of our health. For instance, I believe you have had Ocean Robbins on before.

Ocean Robbins’ Cold Shower Tips

In his classic humble Ocean way, [he] brought up taking cold showers and how we’re finding out that this is increasingly important for our health [to] expose ourselves briefly to these uncomfortable cold temperatures.

Others did bring up the opposite — heat therapy and how that’s important.

What this is it shocks our body. It doesn’t let our body get complacent — to use my own words here. It can definitely boost your immune system in so many ways. I found that quite interesting and rather remarkable.

Something as simple as when you’re in the shower, maybe for — you might want to start off kind of slow here — 10, 15, 20 seconds turning that knob all the way to the cold and just standing there. Enduring it can actually be really good for you.

I live in a cold weather climate, and I never found a good reason — from a health perspective — until I started thinking about that. I’m like, “Maybe that’s a benefit. Ha ha to those on the beautiful West coast or in Florida.

One thing I don’t have to be jealous about is the fact that stepping outside in this cold weather’s a very similar thing. Even people who — I’m pushing it a little here obviously — take a polar plunge in a lake or something like that.

They do this, Robyn, in countries like Norway and Finland. Apparently, they’ve known this for years and the rest of the scientific world is just now qualifying how beneficial it is, both the heat and the cold.

Robyn:  Yeah. I was just talking to Joe Mercola last week on the phone, and he was showing me a medical journal article about how the thing most linked to anti-aging is heat shock proteins.

It was good news for the fact that I started a sauna company last year. It makes our saunas that much more powerful of an anti-aging tool to have one in your house.

What did you learn from a breast surgeon?

Brian Vaszily: She’s amazing. That’s one of those interviews that could have kept going and going and going. Dr. Kristi Funk, breast surgeon to all kinds of celebrities — I believe Angelina Jolie and others — and just a wonderful human being.

Dr. Kristi Funk’s Tips on Breast Cancer

First of all — another big one — 87% of all women diagnosed with breast cancer don’t have a single first degree relative who had it.

There’s this prevailing notion still out there that if your mother or your grandmother had it, you’re going to get it. On the flip side, if they didn’t, you won’t.

Dr. Funk very clearly explained in that great interview was 87% of the cases are not about family members, et cetera.

What it has everything to do with is, of course, your choices — things that people do and don’t do in their life. She covered all kinds of ground on what to do and not do.

Now I know a lot of people like the occasional alcoholic drink and the occasional one could be okay, but she surprised me, I guess I’ll say, by noting that just one drink a day increases a woman’s risk of getting breast cancer by 10%, three a day by 40%.

That was just one of the shocking facts that stood out to me. It’s seems pretty wise to limit your alcohol intake. I know she’s been on your show before here, and she talks about boulders versus pebbles.

Things like alcohol she includes in that equation. Your diet — I’m sure I’m going to miss one here — [and] exercise [are both included in the equation.

These are the big boulders, and if you’re not addressing these what you do with the pebbles doesn’t matter so much.

The pebbles are things like toxins — reducing them in the home. She’s not saying they don’t matter. They matter tremendously, but there’s some really big [problems] that you’d got to address first and foremost. Profound interview there.

I also had Dr. David Sinclair PhD. That’s how he’s a doctor, and he is a Harvard longevity researcher. He’s at Harvard Medical School.

A few years back Time Magazine named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people, and he’s kind of a friend [of mine].

That was actually the very first interview in the entire summit. I’m glad I interviewed him first because it was this great overview interview for everything to come. [His interview] really worked out great in that regard.

Dr. David Sinclair’s Tips on Meat

David basically talked about how your longevity genes are real. There are really longevity genes, and you can do things to turn them on, and you can make mistakes, Robyn, that turned them off.

One big mistake that he pointed out that a lot of people make — especially as you get older — is eating too much meat.

It really seems to me — based on this entire summit collectively — that when it comes to meat, (I know [this is a] super controversial topic) the less the better, especially when you’re older.

[In your] 40’s [the amount of meat you eat] matters. 50’s, it matters even more. 60’s, it matters even more to really reduce the meat intake.

Why? Methionine is an amino acid, and it’s heavy duty in meat. It’s necessary. It’s essential to us. However, [you should eat meat] in very limited quantities the older you get because it’s one of these things that turns off people’s longevity genes.

Methionine’s actually really beneficial if you’re a young man or woman and hitting the gym and wanting to build muscle, for example. In that case, it could be good for you.

It’s good for growing [because] it’s telling the body, “We’re doing good just by eating meat. We’re doing good. We don’t need to work on longevity.”

I’m putting it in my layman’s terms, and there’s a little more science behind that. [Laughter] You’re constantly putting these things in (or not!) into your body.

Your choices have everything to do with what both Dr. David Perlmutter and Dr. David Sinclair [have said. They are] making a very similar point in a different way, which is that it influences how long and how well you live.

It was just really profound stuff.

Robyn:  Yeah, that’s interesting. My colleague — I won’t mention his name — was one of your speakers and a longtime friend of mine, and he — in the last year — decided that people should eat quite a bit of meat.

He and I had been going back and forth about it, and he gave me his references, and I promised him I would read them all. I’ve been reading through them all in the last two weeks.

He had two people — I think Alex leaf is one of them and Chris Masterjohn is the other — both reference the same opinion or same conclusion based on looking at the same data that eating a high protein is totally fine as a cancer preventative.

I’m referring here to the China Study, the Oxford Cornell project, the work overseen by Colin Campbell, PhD from Cornell that showed that a low protein diet is a cancer preventative and the best diet to get well from cancer as well.

These two guys — both of them — in separate interviews told my colleague, “A high protein diet is just fine for cancer prevention, but after you get cancer then you should eat a low protein diet.”

Here’s the thing I want to point out about that that makes that just patently false is that we all have cancer. We all have cancer. We all have cancerous growths.

If we got a really detailed CT scan that could go granular into our various organs and tissues, all of us have cancerous growth. It’s a matter of how much we have.

Therefore it makes no sense whatsoever that you should eat a high meat diet all the way until you get cancer.

It has been well established that a lot of juicing, a lot of vegetables, [and] very, very little animal protein (if any) is right for getting well from cancer — for starving that cancer.

It makes no sense when you consider the fact that we actually all have cancer. If anybody hears that, it seems to be the new trend.

“Eat your standard American diet of 20% to 35% animal products just fine. After cancer, give it up.” The only thing about when you get cancer is that that’s when it was diagnosed. It doesn’t mean you didn’t have it.

Brian Vaszily: What you are saying makes complete sense. What I heard over the course of 22 different experts [is that] there’s an inkling of a case to be made that animal proteins are okay. I wouldn’t say necessary, but okay if you’re young in a growing body — a kid.

My goodness, I tell you, Robyn, what I heard over the course of this is that if you are over 40, you really actually want to think twice about consuming too much, if any, animal based proteins — especially today.

I’m not even talking about the fact that they’re full of antibiotics and all this other stuff. I just mean in general.

Robyn:  If anything, many of us are getting too much protein. I don’t know if you got into [this] on your summit — there’s a case to be made that people 65 and older need higher amounts of protein, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to eat[ing] more animal products.

I know that Ocean’s father, John, now eats fish. He said that when I interviewed him. Decades of being vegan and now he’ll eat a little bit of wild codfish.

Anybody you missed? I know there’s 22 people. You didn’t cover them all.

Brian Vaszily: I really am so, so excited about what came out of that. When it happens, it’s just astounding. It was a remarkable talk about advocating for plants.

We all know cruciferous veggies are like saints. They’re kind of the saints of the vegetable world. They can be amazing for you — and alliums too, like onions and garlic.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s Tips on Vegetables

[Dr. Joel Fuhrman] revealed this very simple research-based — we’re talking about Joel Fuhrman here, eat to live guy — [fact] that how people are preparing [their vegetables] is dramatically reducing, if not flat out eliminating, their cancer fighting power. [That] blew my mind.

Robyn:  What are people doing to prepare those?

Brian Vaszily: He said he was doing it wrong for a long time. They’re cooking them whole because of how these compounds are.

The smartest [and] the healthiest way to release cancer fighting power — we’ll put it in my layman’s terms — is you must cut them up and put them in a blender or mixer. That works too.

If you use them in smoothies, for example, you’re doing a good thing there. Especially if you’re doing it raw.

You can cook them, but you want to cut them up first long story short. There’s a very simple piece of knowledge and it was just like boom — mind blowing — and so many things like that came out.

I think you’ve had Dr. Razi Berry on the show. Yeah. Razi’s a good friend. She always comes out with so many amazing little facts.

If I’m challenging her to reveal her three biggest “little knowns,” I knew was in for something interesting with Razi. Where do I focus on that one? It was a really wonderful interview.

Tips for Relaxations by Dr. Razi Berry

Relaxation. She just gave her usual research-substantiated backing that relaxation in so many ways has equivalent benefits as working out. A lot of people might like to hear that.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re really relaxing in life. [Relaxing] boosts heart health. It lowers inflammation levels in the body.

It was just great to hear that in the first place, Robyn. This doesn’t necessarily mean vegging out in front of the television set or something like that. It means really relaxing your mind and your body.

It doesn’t even necessarily have to mean meditation, but just really feeling chilled out, so to speak, can be remarkably good for you.

Razi and I were talking, and a lot of people downplay that she even talked about the importance of daydreaming in relation. Just letting yourself be is so, so crucial.

Not having a thing to do in the back of your mind or having a remote control in your hand, [thinking,] “What am I going to watch next?” Or flipping through a phone but just chilling out.

There is research showing that this is extremely important for you. I found that really interesting too.

Robyn:  Well, I’m excited to jump in myself and listen to what everybody has to say on your summit. The summit, everyone, is called The Little Known Life-changing Health Summit.

That’s because Brian asked each of us, “What are the three little known things that you’ve learned in your journey as a human being and as a health and wellness researcher and author that will really change people’s lives?”

If you boil it down to three things you wish people knew, what are they? I enjoyed answering that question. I enjoyed my own talk.

I’ll just give you one of the things I talked about and that’s because Brian wanted me to. I said, “Brian, I really like to talk to people about their dental work and what kind of dentist they choose and what kind of practices and materials and procedures they allow their mouth.”

I really like people to know that they have options, they have alternatives, and that those materials [and] those procedures in their mouth could be at the root of why they’re sick.

We talked about that. I was like, “That might seem strange.” He’s like, “No, no, no, no, no, no. I want to talk about that. Let’s go there.”

He also wanted to make sure that each of us talked about things that were unique and distinct from the others so that we all aren’t talking about epigenetics or whatever.

I’m excited for it to come out. The Little Known Life-changing Health Summit. Just to make it easy for you. We set it up as greensmoothiegirl.com/brian, and his name is spelled B R I A N — the easy way.

Tell them about Replay Weekend because when we launched this episode, Brian, I think it’ll be just in time for people to get in on your Replay Weekend. Tell them [about] that and anywhere else they can learn more about you and your work.

Brian Vaszily: It’s a great time to be launching this talk. While the summit has concluded, exclusive to Robyn Openshaw and everyone listening, — I haven’t told anybody else, not the rest of the world this yet — we indeed are going to have a Replay Weekend.

That starts on Friday, and it goes through Sunday. What that basically means is you go to greensmoothiegirl.com/brian, I believe it is B R I A N (not the Bryan with a Y).

You could sign up free there — just takes a moment — and you’re in, and you can listen to any and all of it starting on Friday. It’s a lot. You’re talking 22 interviews, each about an hour, each of really profound information.

If you’re the type of person who prefers to listen on your own time, on your own schedule, you’re certainly going to want to listen to these interviews multiple times — certain ones of them — including Robyn for sure.

What I call the Summit Empowerment Package is available as well. There’s a big early bird discount right now which will end at the end of Replay Weekend.

You can also go and take a look at that, and you get tons of really great bonuses. Tons, in this case, equals 22 different bonuses. [Laughter]. It really is worth over a thousand dollars to take a look at the bonuses. These are not shoddy bonuses.

We talked about Ocean. One of them is complete access to his 2019 Food Revolution Summit.

You’re getting an additional 24 speakers just from his summit last year, access to the recordings and transcripts there and all of his bonuses too.

I can go on and on. The point is, it’s a really good time if you’re the type of person who wants to own all of this. It’s also there for free this weekend.

Really, I think you’re going to love it. As you can tell, I’m excited about it because it was amazing.

Thank you, Robyn.

Robyn:  Of course. Thanks for coming on my show, Brian, and good luck with the summit. I’m excited.