estimates that 5 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s, and this number is going up, too. The death rate due to Alzheimer’s disease increased a full 55 percent between 1999 and 2014. And last but not least, 1.73 million people in the United States are diagnosed with cancer each year, and more than 600,000 of them die from it.
Suffice it to say that if you don’t die in a car crash or from an opioid addiction, chances are that one of these Four Killers is going to drain your life and your energy (and your retirement fund) before you die in a hospital. It was certainly looking like that would be the case for me—and sooner than most people, given how sick I was.
In the 1990s when I was in my twenties, my doctor used blood tests to determine that I was at a high risk then for developing a heart attack or stroke. My fasting blood sugar was a whopping 117, which put me solidly in the range of prediabetic. I didn’t have Alzheimer’s, but I was experiencing significant cognitive dysfunction and often left my car keys in the refrigerator. And I may not have been at an obvious risk of cancer, but guess what nearly doubles your risk of certain cancers (including those of the liver and pancreas)? Diabetes1—which is also a risk factor for Alzheimer’s.2 Guess what else dramatically raises your cancer risk? Toxic mold exposure, which I had also experienced.
Even obesity itself is the second largest preventable cause of cancer. Your risk goes up the more overweight you are and the longer you stay that way.3 Bad news—75 percent of American men are obese, and so are 60 percent of women and 30 percent of kids.4 No wonder the Four Killers are on the rise. Are you going to let them take you out?
I still didn’t know what was causing me to age so quickly when I began a quest to discover how to fix my body. In the mid-1990s, we didn’t have Google yet, but we had AltaVista, and I worked at night teaching the engineers who were literally building the Internet. This meant I had the good fortune of having access to information that most people didn’t. I started doing a ton of research and buying whatever I could find that might help me slow down or even reverse my symptoms. I simply couldn’t imagine even more stretch marks or more joint pain as I got older.
An important part of this journey was connecting with one of the first medical doctors who specialized in the study of anti-aging, Dr. Philip Miller. Seeing him required what was a tremendous financial investment for me at the time, but I was desperate. My first visit with Dr. Miller was like nothing I’d ever experienced. He ran new kinds of lab tests that regular doctors at the time didn’t know existed, including the first real hormone workup I’d ever had. Then he sat me down and gave me the bad news: I had Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (an autoimmune condition that causes the body to attack the thyroid) and almost no thyroid hormones, and my testosterone levels were lower than my mom’s. (He had done a workup for my mom not long before, so he wasn’t exaggerating when he told me this.)
The news could have been devastating, but I was actually excited to have the hard data. I felt in control for the first time because I finally had real information and knew exactly what I needed to change. This was proof that it wasn’t just a deficiency in my effort or some sort of moral failing. It’s common to see your hormone levels drop off around middle age, but not in your twenties. Now I had proof that I was aging prematurely and not just lazy, and I was determined to turn things around.
Dr. Miller and I came up with a plan for me to restore my hormone levels to that of a young man using bioidentical hormones and continue to track my data. The hormones made an enormous difference right away. I got my energy back along with my zest for life. It gave me so much hope to know that I could actually reverse some of my health issues, which I now knew were common symptoms of aging. So when I heard about an anti-aging nonprofit group in Silicon Valley, now called the Silicon Valley Health Institute (SVHI), I decided to check it out.
As I sat there at the first SVHI meeting listening to people who were at least triple my age, I felt completely at home. These were my people, I realized. I had more in common with them than I did with most of my peers, except these people had decades of wisdom I didn’t. After the meeting, I stayed for a long time talking with a board member who at eighty-five years old was kicking ass and full of energy in a way that was amazing and seemed totally impossible to me—but that I was inspired to replicate.
For the next four years I focused completely on learning as much as I could about the human body. I studied medical literature, read thousands of studies, talked to researchers, and spent all my free time at SVHI learning from seniors who were actively reversing their own symptoms of aging. This completely changed the way I thought about health, as well as aging. I learned that there is no one thing that causes disease or that leads us to age. Instead, aging is death by a thousand cuts, the cumulative damage caused by little insults stemming mostly from our environment.
Then in the year 2000 I found a former Johns Hopkins surgeon who ordered a litany of tests, including some allergy tests that showed I was highly allergic to the eight most common types of toxic mold. That was the smoking gun. In order for my immune system to be sensitized to those toxic molds, I must have been exposed to high levels of them, which wreaked havoc on my cells. This was one of the unexplained environmental factors that had made me age so rapidly.
My premature aging makes complete sense to me now. Mitochondria, which are bacteria embedded in most of our cells, power our energy production. Back when we were single-celled creatures, we became host cells for ingested bacteria. Over millions of years of evolution, the host cell became humans, the ingested bacteria became mitochondria, and today neither of us can survive without the other. Mitochondria are not of human origin; they even have their own DNA. And what has posed a lethal threat to bacteria since the beginning of time? Mold.
This means the very powerhouses of my cells were constantly engaged in a battle with their mortal enemy, and this fight left behind many casualties. When cells are under chronic stress, their mitochondria cannot make energy efficiently. This leads to an increase in the production of molecules called reactive oxygen species (ROSs), also known as free radicals. ROSs are unstable molecules that contain atoms with unpaired electrons, making them highly reactive. When an excess of free radicals are present in cells, they cause a chemical reaction that damages your cellular structures in a process called oxidation.
This is exactly what happens as you age, whether or not toxic mold is present in your life: Mitochondria function steadily declines, leading to an increase in free radicals, which damage your cells. In response, your body sends vitamin C from food to the liver so it can produce antioxidants, which fight off free radicals. The problem with this process is that it leaves you without enough vitamin C to produce collagen, the protein in the connective tissue of your skin, teeth, bones, organs, and cartilage. Vitamin C interacts with amino acids to build collagen, but only if you have enough of it. Your body will gladly sacrifice healthy blood vessels and skin in favor of fighting off free radicals that are draining its energy source.
This is precisely why I had stretch marks and vascular issues (manifested as nosebleeds) and why most people don’t develop these symptoms until they’re much older. The fight in my body between my onboard bacteria and mold left me constantly depleted of antioxidants. And my mold-damaged mitochondria also laid the groundwork for prediabetes, poor blood flow to the brain, arthritis, cognitive dysfunction, and, according to one doctor, a high risk of stroke and heart attack. I was still in my twenties, but I was biologically old because my mitochondria were slowing down. And it really pissed me off.
MITOCHONDRIA AND THE FOUR KILLERS
As I fought my way back from experiencing the many symptoms of aging, my likelihood of dying from the Four Killers dropped dramatically. That’s because—surprise, surprise—they all have one underlying issue in common: the cumulative damage to your cells, and in particular, to your mitochondria, that takes place over the course of a lifetime. This damage occurs in all of us, though at varying rates. Some damage stems from the bad choices we make, but much of it is simply the price we pay
