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Forget the scale - it doesn't tell you what actually predicts longevity. In this episode, Dr. Barrett walks through a 5-part scorecard you can start tracking from home: waist-to-height ratio, grip strength, metabolic markers (glucose, insulin, A1C), VO2 max, and sleep quality. He breaks down the research behind each one and why these fundamentals matter more than any supplement stack, peptide, or hormone protocol - plus simple, practical ways to start improving your score today.
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Watch the episode on YouTube here!
DISCLAIMER
This content is strictly the opinion of Dr. Barrett Deubert and is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice or to replace medical advice or treatment from a physician. All viewers of this content are advised to consult their doctors or qualified health professionals regarding health questions and concerns. Neither Dr. Deubert nor the Real Health Co. takes responsibility for possible health consequences of any person or persons reading or following the information in this educational content. All audience members, especially those taking prescription or over-the-counter medications, should consult their physicians before beginning any nutrition, supplement, or lifestyle program.
. . .
Watch the episode on YouTube here!
- (00:00) - Intro
- (02:04) - #1: Processed Foods
- (04:42) - #2: Indoor Air Quality
- (08:03) - #3: Plastics & Endocrine Disruptors
- (11:27) - #4: Light & Circadian Rhythm
- (13:09) - #5: Noise & Stimulation
- (16:34) - Recap
- (17:53) - Closing Thoughts
DISCLAIMER
This content is strictly the opinion of Dr. Barrett Deubert and is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice or to replace medical advice or treatment from a physician. All viewers of this content are advised to consult their doctors or qualified health professionals regarding health questions and concerns. Neither Dr. Deubert nor the Real Health Co. takes responsibility for possible health consequences of any person or persons reading or following the information in this educational content. All audience members, especially those taking prescription or over-the-counter medications, should consult their physicians before beginning any nutrition, supplement, or lifestyle program.
Creators and Guests
What is The Real Health Podcast?
On a mission to share practical solutions to improve your wellbeing, The Real Health Podcast will equip you with evidence-based recommendations essential to achieving a healthy lifestyle. Join Dr. Barrett Deubert as he shares his passion for educating, inspiring, and empowering individuals to achieve “real health for real people”. Breaking down health topics such as: immunity, stress, real food, natural living, and much more to provide you with actionable steps to improving your family’s health.
When we look at a scale, a number, let's say it's two hundred pounds, you step on a scale it's two hundred pounds. How much is that fat? How much is that muscle? We don't know. Right?
Dr. Barrett:It doesn't give us a lot of data. But there's something that's really simple you can do at home to understand how healthy are you. And it's what we call your waist to height ratio. And it should be half your waist is half or less than your height. Welcome back to another episode of The Real Health Podcast.
Dr. Barrett:Today we're diving into aging. How old are you? Right? And we would say, well, I'm 75 years old, but more what we're talking about today is biological age. How old are you inside?
Dr. Barrett:How old are your cells? How old are you biologically? And so much can move the needle. Today, I'm going give you a a scorecard. So if you were to score yourself or give yourself a report card, a scorecard, we're going to look at five areas that you can immediately look at from home that's more important if you don't have these five areas supported.
Dr. Barrett:It's more important than any supplement stack, peptides, hormones. I mean, we're gonna talk about the essentials to longevity. And I'm gonna give you some data to support it. Today, we're diving into a five part scorecard and I just want to know how well do you score on this? Because if you score five out of five, you're crushing it.
Dr. Barrett:Let's talk supplements, let's talk peptides, let's talk health optimization strategies. But hey, if you're failing in any of these items, like these are the quintessential top five that have to be improved before you do anything else in your health journey. Number one, let's just get right into it, add as much value to you in this short period of time, body composition. But specifically, we're going talk about our waist to height ratio. So here's what data shows us, right?
Dr. Barrett:When we look at a scale, a number, let's say it's two hundred pounds, you step on a scale it's two hundred pounds. How much is that fat? How much is that muscle? We don't know, right? It doesn't give us a lot of data.
Dr. Barrett:But there's something that's really simple you can do at home to understand how healthy are you. And it's what we call your waist to height ratio. And it should be half, your waist is half or less than your height. So if you're seventy inches tall, want to be from a waist standpoint thirty five inches or less. So your waist needs to be half of your height or better.
Dr. Barrett:Right? And so why does this matter? Well one, when your waist is large in proportion to your body height, we associate this with high visceral fat. High visceral fat is a major issue. So, when we look at visceral fat, it is the fat that surrounds your organs that is associated with metabolic disease, increased cardiovascular disease, and increased all mortality risk.
Dr. Barrett:And when we look at the data, it's really interesting to show that when you have a less than 0.5 cutoff of waist to height ratio, if it's less than 0.5 or better, the BMI looks at this and says, hey, you are going to be healthier. It's a simple, simple metric that you can do at home, get a tape measure, and go ahead and see what does your waist to height ratio look like. When we have more visceral fat, we have more inflammation, we have more risk at fatty liver, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. So, I want you to go home and measure your waist ratio, and measure your height, and go ahead and calculate that. And if you're above point five, we need to do something about it.
Dr. Barrett:And you know what to do. We talk about the non negotiables of nutrition and lifestyle approaches, but one of the biggest issues that we're seeing in this situation is a crisis in your metabolic system. We need to get your insulin levels down, get your blood glucose levels down, and we need to get your body into a fat burning machine. Which brings us to number two. If we wanna burn more fat, we have to have higher metabolic activity, and one of the best ways to do that is with muscle.
Dr. Barrett:We talk a lot about muscle in this podcast, but specifically the more muscle you have, the more metabolically active you are and proportionally we see that more muscle usually equates to longevity or living longer. There's actually a really simple test you can do, and it's called a hand grip strength test. So you can buy these devices to see what your hand grip strength is. You're thinking, well, what does that mean? It just means I don't have enough muscle.
Dr. Barrett:Well, not necessarily. Hand grip strength equates to not just muscle, the amount of it, but also how well your nervous system is firing and functioning. So, the grip strength is actually a broader neuromuscular functional test that doesn't just look at muscle mass, it also looks at how well your nervous system is outputting. We look at a study that was done in meta analysis of 3,000,000 people, and they showed that people in the lowest grip strength category had approximately forty one percent higher all cause mortality risk. And every five kilo reduction in grip strength, five kilos, which would be about 11 pounds, was associated with roughly a sixteen percent increase in all cause mortality.
Dr. Barrett:The stronger your grip, the longer you live. It's that simple. A 2023 meta analysis found that low skeletal muscle mass was associated with approximately fifty seven percent greater all cause mortality risk. The question I'm asking you today is, are you building muscle? Are you building strength?
Dr. Barrett:Are you improving your neurological output? Because this is the aging problem nobody talks about enough. They talk about muscle, but they don't talk about muscle mass plus strength plus power and how that all equates to longevity. When we look at a stronger person, because the goal isn't necessarily bodybuilding, right? It's having good neuromuscular function.
Dr. Barrett:It's having the nervous system primed and ready to respond. But when we look at muscle mass or grip strength or neurological output, the whole goal here is preventing you from falling. If you do fall, you're more resilient. The ability to get off the floor, the ability to carry heavy loads or even just groceries, the ability to climb stairs and absorb injuries like a fall, right? To be more resilient to illness.
Dr. Barrett:And muscle helps with all of that. Build muscle while you can. At 40, you lose 1% every year unless you do something about it. Now's the time to do something about it. Number three, all about metabolic health.
Dr. Barrett:Glucose and insulin. How hard is your body working to keep your blood sugar normal? We see hills and valleys with blood sugar all the time. And so we look at blood glucose and it can be technically normal on blood work, yet this constant insulin spike is going to create issues in the future. You will get insulin burnout, insulin resistance, and one of the big markers that we look at that you should look at, so the first thing we looked at was waist to height ratio, being 50% or better.
Dr. Barrett:Number two, we looked at grip strength. Number three, we look at A1C or what is your fasting glucose levels? What is your fasting insulin levels? And what is your hemoglobin A1C levels, which is a great average of your blood sugar over the last few weeks. And when we look at this, research shows that when we are lower in our glucose, lower in our insulin levels, and balanced in our blood sugar with a lower hemoglobin A1c, we would call this insulin sensitive versus insulin resistant, you have a 34% higher all cause mortality if you score higher on this insulin resistance score.
Dr. Barrett:We call it the HOMA IR score. We look at fasting blood sugar, fasting insulin, and hemoglobin A1c levels to give us this data to figure out where you're at. Maybe you go to a traditional doctor and they run hemoglobin A1c levels, which they should, and you get a number. Where should that number be? Because unless that number is 5.7, then they're really not gonna associate you as having blood sugar issues.
Dr. Barrett:And technically if you're not even above 6.4 they won't even associate this as being diabetic. Yet prediabetes starts to show up at 5.7 or above. But I would much rather my patients to be at the 5.0 to like 5.5% range on your hemoglobin A1c levels indicating a healthy metabolic system And when you are there, when you're on that side of things, is an optimization target and it's not necessarily a universally accepted clinical guideline, but it does tell us that you are healthy metabolically and you're metabolically flexible. That you can go without meals and burn fat for energy and be balanced in your blood sugar. So number three, get your hemoglobin A1C levels checked.
Dr. Barrett:Number four, it's all about your cardiovascular engine. Research shows the higher your muscle mass, the longer you live, and the higher your VO2 max, the longer you live. VO two max is a question we ask, hey, how much oxygen take you're taking oxygen. How much can you transport it, deliver it, and use it? That's VO two max.
Dr. Barrett:Right? So when you start running, how far can you go? That is VO two max. How efficiently are you able at carrying oxygen and utilizing it at the cellular level? Because this tells us so much.
Dr. Barrett:It tells us muscle mass, tells us cellular efficiency, tells us mitochondrial health, tells us how well you circulate through the cardiovascular system, tells us if your blood vessels are dilated efficiently, tells us if your nitric oxide levels are sufficient. And this is why this cardiorespiratory fitness marker is essential to longevity. And a landmark meta analysis found that for every one met increase of exercise capacity, It was associated with a 13% reduction in all cause mortality. That's incredible. And a fifteen percent reduction in cardiovascular events.
Dr. Barrett:What does this mean? It means the longer you go, the healthier you are. The better you are at delivering utilizing oxygen, the healthier you are. And so this is staggering. And it really puts it in perspective that increasing your aerobic capacity isn't just about being able to jog farther, like that's great, but what we see is that your ability to be a efficient, right, respiratory, cellular respiratory machine, your mitochondria efficiently utilizing oxygen to power your cells, this is where we get health.
Dr. Barrett:This is where we get longevity. Almost all chronic disease starts in a mitochondrial deficient stage. The mitochondria are the power plane of the body. So the better you're able to utilize oxygen is a direct indicator of mitochondrial health. And so does VO2 max, does it look at, yeah, can I jog farther?
Dr. Barrett:Sure. But does it look at really how healthy your mitochondria are? Absolutely. So you can actually test your VO2 max, but even if you didn't test it, we wanna improve it. And how do we improve it?
Dr. Barrett:One of the best ways to improve v o two max is zone two training is running, walking, jogging, or walking on a treadmill where your heart rate is usually in between 120, 140 beats and you're like, wow, I have to walk pretty slow or hey, I have to jog pretty slow or I can't even run to keep my heart rate there. That's okay, We don't want you at one hundred fifty five and one hundred sixty struggling on a run. That's not gonna improve your VO2 max. We call that just that dirty zone of training. We want you in that The best runners in the world, the best long distance runners in the world, they spend 80% of their mileage training this zone two.
Dr. Barrett:Zone two is really where you're gonna thrive and improve your VO two max. So let's get some zone two training. It's boring, but gosh, it moves the needle significantly in your health and longevity. Number five, the last one, it's all about sleep. It's all about recovery.
Dr. Barrett:What are the things they'll look at? Well, first thing is research involving more than one and a half million people demonstrated pretty much a U shaped relationship between sleep duration and mortality. So with approximately seven hours associated with the lowest observed risk in the analysis. A U shape means if you get too little, you're in trouble. And actually, you get too much, that's not healthy as well.
Dr. Barrett:That a seven to eight hour amount of sleep is actually the best for adults. When we look at how poor sleep affects your health, poor sleep affects insulin sensitivity. If you don't get as much sleep, you can actually go into a pre diabetic state pretty quickly. Improving your sleep improves your appetite regulation. It improves your cortisol levels.
Dr. Barrett:It improves your testosterone levels. It improves growth hormone production. And improves muscle protein synthesis, so your ability to repair. It improves immune system regulation. It improves blood pressure.
Dr. Barrett:It improves training recovery and circulation. It improves the ability for your brain to drain through the glial lymphatic system, drain toxins through the night. So make sure we're getting seven to eight hours of sleep. And once you're doing that, well then you can start looking at some really good data like HRV, heart rate variability. You can start looking at resting heart rate.
Dr. Barrett:You look at your breath rate, respiratory rate, and that'll give you additional data to see how well you are recovering. If you know that you're struggling with sleep and recovery, one of the best ways and tools to maximize your sleep and understand what's happening, potentially at disrupting your sleep. If you're waking up in the middle of the night, you may be having some oxygenation issues at night that's affecting your nervous system. If you reach out to us at The Real Health Co, we have at home sleep studies that you can take to look at how well you're sleeping, recovering, oxygenating at night, and we'd be happy to walk you through that and give you the data to start moving the needle in your recovery at night. It's one of the best ways of testing to see how well you're recovering.
Dr. Barrett:Because we know people with sleep apnea, their risk for neurodegenerative conditions directly increases, cardiovascular conditions directly increases. And so we want to make sure we're not just sleeping seven to eight hours, but we're also sleeping efficiently and oxygenating well at night. If we look at the top five, the scorecard number one, scorecard body composition. Be less than 50% of your waist to height ratio. Number two: Grip strength.
Dr. Barrett:We want to be strong. Start doing dead hangs. Start holding heavy things. Because we know grip strength is a direct indicator of how long you're going to live. Number three: Metabolism.
Dr. Barrett:Look at your insulin resistance score. Look at your hemoglobin A1C levels. Let's try to get those close to five to 5.4%. Number four, improve your VO2 max. Test it, train it, improve zone two training.
Dr. Barrett:It'll directly improve your VO2 max, help you live longer. Number five, recovery. Seven to eight hours a night of sleep is going help you recover. And if you're struggling with sleep, get a sleep study. It could literally change your life.
Dr. Barrett:So that's your scorecard. How well are you doing? Right? Get some data. Write it down.
Dr. Barrett:See where you're deficient. Start moving the needle in that area. As always, we're trying to add as much value to you in a short efficient time. We're all on the grind. We're all in a car dropping kids off here and there.
Dr. Barrett:Right? We are working. So I don't want you to listen to an hour long podcast that has a bunch of information that isn't practical. We wanna give you as much practical information in the shortest, condensed period of time. That's how I run my life.
Dr. Barrett:So I pray it was a blessing for you today. And as always, thanks for listening to another episode of The Real Health Podcast. Hi.