When we hear the word longevity, it’s not just about living longer—it’s about thriving through the years with good health. Adopting healthy habits can make a difference in our day-to-day life. What are the things we can do to promote healthy longevity?
In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Cory Goldberg, a distinguished plastic and craniofacial surgeon with a vision for longevity medicine and aesthetic surgery. He discusses how to promote healthy longevity, emphasizing diet, exercise, sleep, and emotional health. He highlights the impact of poor diet and processed food on health and life expectancy. Listen now to explore strategies for a healthier, longer life!
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Unlocking the Secrets of Healthy Longevity with Dr. Cory Goldberg
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about longevity. Now, we’ve covered this a little bit in some of our podcast episodes that have covered health, fitness, wellness, but we’ve never really talked about longevity specifically. My guest today, Dr Cory Goldberg, is at the forefront and using some innovative techniques to promote longevity and some innovative ideas for the future of this entire subject as well as healthcare in general.
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Dr. Cory Goldberg, welcome to the program.
Hi, Stephen. It’s a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. Looking forward to our conversation
Where we began here. So you have some innovative ideas about longevity. I know, traditionally, people just talk about stuff like getting regular exercise, eating well, and even we’ve recently talked about some other kind of psychological things people can do, like controlling their thoughts, minimizing stress, and being around the right people and spending good time and good company. Is that part of your program or do you go right to some of these more innovative, less currently mainstream techniques?
Well, honestly, what you just hit on are two of the most important pillars of healthy longevity and good diet and exercise are keystone. I mean, you can’t have healthy longevity without that. There’s no quick fix that gets you around those basics. And I would add to that, good healthy sleep and a good emotional state and interpersonal relations so you commented on your episode on thought control and those kinds of things, being present and controlling your thoughts and your emotions and relations with other people really key for healthy longevity. So, no matter what else we add to that now, those four pillars are by far the most important things that anybody can do to make sure that they’re as healthy as possible for as long as possible.
And so if you think about the average person, either the average person you encounter or the average person kind of in society today, what do you think is the number one worst thing people are doing for the health on a regular basis?
I have to say it’s diet. People follow the diet that their parents taught them, the idea of four main food groups. They follow eating habits that are based mostly on addiction to the foods that we were exposed to on a regular basis in our society. People are eating poison, they don’t even know it, and I think that’s the biggest contributor to poor health. And the reason that in the United States, the past few years, the average life expectancy has actually gone down by a couple years for the first time in over a century and a half and that’s with corrections around the pandemic and COVID.
Even with that, the life expectancy is going down and I would say diet is the number one contributing factors to that. Share on X
And so what is the biggest mistake people are making in their diet? You talk about the foods that you become addicted to, the foods that you’re trained to eat. What can someone do right now to get out of that?
Well, as with any addiction, I would say the first step to correcting it is admitting that you have a problem, and that’s hard for most people. I think the biggest things are the animal proteins and the processed foods. Those two things, and especially combining the two together, those are poison and those are the things that people are addicted to. But if you talk to people about decreasing their animal protein intake, the first thing that they’re going to start saying is, “Yeah, I know it’s not so good for me but I really love it,” and, honestly, when people talk to me about the food they eat, when I hear those kinds of reasonings and the responses, it sounds to me exactly the same as the responses I get from heroin addicts and drug addicts in the emergency room. When you talk to them about their addiction, they will respond back to you, “Yeah, but…” I really think it’s the animal proteins and the processed foods that are the worst things for us and that makes up a large part of our diet these days for most people in North America.
So, you’re basically referring to going to McDonald’s, getting a burger and fries, and then snacking on Doritos later, that type of thing.
Yeah. You know what, that’s the worst of it. When people go grocery shopping, they spend way too much of their time in the middle aisles, right? It’s the periphery and it’s the produce section that you should really be spending most of your time in. And the animal proteins, the processed stuff, when you go to McDonald’s and that kind of thing, I mean, those things are really harmful, but even healthy animal meats, dairy, eggs, all of it, they all contain the same things. Whether it’s a good quality or poor quality is not a defining factor. It doesn’t matter. What’s in it is it’s a series of amino acids. There are 20 amino acids that make up every protein in our body and in all animals and there are three of those amino acids that happen to be very heavily concentrated in animal proteins of all kinds and those things actually shut down our specific genetic mechanisms that help repair our genes and our epigenetics. It is directly aging us. I mean, it is literally like eating poison and slowly poisoning yourself over decades.
And then are other habits, such as drugs and alcohol, are they as big a contributor to what’s aging us? If someone is constantly just drinking a lot, and I think, I’m kind of at this age range where I’m witnessing some people age faster than others. I’m seeing it directly before my eyes. I’ve seen some people who around my age are already pretty much acting like they’re elderly and others that are still acting like they’re young and spry.
Yep. You know what, you raise a very good point. So, one thing to note there, among your friends and your peer group that you are watching that differential aging, there is a component of that that’s genetic, there is part of this that we are born with and that can make a big difference for somebody, but really important, when I talk to people about this, I like to drive home the idea that the genetics is a really small minority of what determines your healthy longevity. Most people, if you ask them, would say, “Yeah, my genetics are – my bad genetics. My mom was this, my dad was that and so, of course, I’m unhealthy.” Honestly, the evidence shows very clearly, at most your genetics is 20 percent of your future health. Eighty percent is in your hands and in your control. So your friends that you’re seeing age faster, they’re aging faster because of how they’re behaving, what they’re doing, and absolutely the smoking and the drinking is a big part of that. The drinking thing is a very interesting thing. More and more evidence, especially in the past year or two, has come out showing very clearly, even a small amount of alcohol, it doesn’t have to be a large amount, you don’t have to be blackout drunk, even a small amount actually decreases your brain function severely over time. And this has shown up again and again, study after study, and so it’s not necessarily aging you directly, it’s not making your body older, but alcohol is aging your brain. So if you just stick to alcohol and you skip out on the smoking and the other things, you could live to a long age, be it 90 plus, you would be brain dead when you did it. So, it’s really important when you think about aging not just to think about the whole body but also different organs because certainly things that you do, like drinking or smoking, it affects certain organs and parts of you much more than others.
So is it safe to say that your view of longevity is not simply put the number of years you live but it’s actually about the quality of those years, like if you’re 80 years old but you can barely do anything versus some people, I see 80-year-olds still on their bicycles riding up terrain.
You hit the nail on the head, man. It’s absolutely true. There is no point in living longer. When you talk to most people about longevity, would you want to live to 100 or 120? Most people, if you ask them that in North America, the first thing they say, “Absolutely not. Why would I want to be old and frail and take medications?” Most people have a very fixed concept of aging and we’ve come to accept that as a natural part of life. But reality, it’s not. I mean, aging is a disease. It’s actually measurable and can be changed, it can be manipulated. So that whole you’re 80 and you’re in a nursing home somewhere incontinent, that is absolutely not the way that it should be.
And so have you read up on or visited any of these blue zones that people talk about where they’ve mapped out the places where you see the most people live past 100?
Yeah, absolutely. Those blue zones, first off, it’s important to note that, although there’s been some recent controversy around the blue zones in that some of the data on those people has not been completely accurate as far as how long they’ve lived for, but putting that aside, because, honestly, I don’t think it matters. In the end, the people in those areas are definitely living longer than average and doing really well at it and the most important things consistently showing up there are those basics that we’ve just talked about. It’s the diet, it’s the activity, it’s the sleep, it’s the community, it’s the love and the families and the people in the communities. That’s what keeps those people alive. So, in answer to your question, the area that I visited is this sort of Blue Zone 2.0, it’s Singapore. I was just there in the spring. I got to present a paper at a healthy longevity conference at the National University of Singapore. They actually have a section of the university called the Center for Healthy Longevity. It is an area, it is a center dedicated to learning and doing research about longevity and I was really fortunate to present a paper on a very cool supplement that is exactly for those purposes.
And so one other thing that I get really interested on when I think about the current state of health is kind of how many people are on some kind of a medication, and this kind of pertains to both physical and mental health and, obviously, physical and mental health are related, they can’t just be compartmentalized. So, I’m curious to get your thoughts on the fraction of North Americans, or anywhere in the world, for that matter, who are on some kind of a medication and whether or not that seems like a natural course of events?
You know what? It’s a natural course of events because we’ve come to accept it as such and it seems commonplace now, but, actually, it’s not natural at all. And it’s fascinating, the actual statistic in North America, 25 percent of North Americans will have three or more comorbidities, diseases, 50 percent will have two, and 75 percent will have one. So 75 percent of our population, when they are 65 years old, will have some kind of a significant disease requiring medication. Seventy-five percent. I mean, at 65, to think that that much of our population is now dependent forever on a medication, 50 percent are going to have two or more, that, to me, is crazy. We just accept that as just natural. It’s not and the thing about aging that’s very interesting is when you go back to a root cause level, when you really think about where these things are coming from, you come up with very different answers. If you follow a stream back up to its source of the river where it comes from, there’s much more there than seeing that little trickle at the end. This is where we’re falling down.
I mean, honestly, the pharmacy lobby is a part of this. There’s certainly a lot of bias and impetus towards these companies having us on these medications. But if you take a step back, there is a root cause to all of these things, and the root cause, there’s a lot of components to it related to your genetics, related to oxidative stress, and things that are actually driving the aging and damage in all of your organs. And that’s aging. It’s not one by one. It is the whole thing that is being driven by these common factors.
And you mentioned stress. How big of a factor is stress in what’s going on with a lot of people, whether it be general aging or the development of some of these diseases?
You asked an interesting question because what I mentioned was oxidative stress, which is a very physical chemical property, but your question about emotional and mental stress, it harkens back to stuff that you mentioned a few moments ago, which is that sort of relation between mind and body. Let’s answer that and talk about both the chemical version of stress and the mental, emotional one. So, first off, it’s really important to know the separation of mind and body is a non-sequitur. That is absolutely untrue. There is no separation of mind and body. Evidence absolutely shows, undoubtedly, that every single part of the of every dimension of aging that we can measure, that we know about, is directly affected by your emotional state and your stress level. And that means that depression, anxiety, those things actually affect your genetics, your epigenetics. It affects your microbiome, the bacteria in your intestine. So every single one of these dimensions is related to your emotional and cognitive state. So there’s no separation. Mind and body are one, that is absolutely known. And so with that, your question, how much does emotional stress affect you? Immensely, absolutely. The mindfulness that you were talking about earlier, that is huge. Being present and actually having a few moments in a day to meditate, that actually measurably improves your health. So, the answer to your question, absolutely, emotional stress, huge determinant of your health. The chemical version of stress, which is very interesting also, that’s oxidative stress and things like smoking that you mentioned earlier, that’s one of the principal harmful causes that come from smoking, it’s the creation of these oxygen-free radicals, these reactive oxygen species, and those things cause oxidative stress. That is one of the primary drivers of aging in your body in every single organ system, from your head to your toe, your heart, your kidney, your eyes, every single one of those has disease processes related to oxidative stress.
And so these oxidative agents, these free radicals, are there any foods or any activities, such as strenuous exercise, that help reduce this level of oxidative stress, reduce the number of free radicals?
So, yes, and it’s interesting because, actually, one of the benefits that comes from those oxygen-free radicals in exercise, you produce some of them in certain places in your muscle, and that actually is sort of an internal stressor that makes you stronger. The idea that that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. So, in fact, oxygen-free radicals in that setting, when you’re generating them yourself through exercise, that’s actually quite beneficial. In the long term, by exercising and building up your muscle mass and having better aerobic capacity, that actually does help to reduce oxidative stress in your body and that is very important. And as far as diet goes, there are dietary sources of antioxidants but, generally speaking, they’ve been shown to be not very effective and the reason is that they’re not efficient. An oxygen-free radical, if you dredge up your high school chemistry, if you dig way, way back to that, you remember those sort of redox, reduction, oxidation, it’s about electron exchange. So, the oxygen-free radicals, they have a charge, they have a negative charge, so when you eat food that has antioxidants in it like you eat carrots, you get beta carotene, you eat blueberries, there’s lots of antioxidants in blueberries and lots of fruits and vegetables, the antioxidants in those are chemical, meaning that there is sort of one molecule that will destroy one of those oxygen-free radicals and that reduction oxidation reaction destroys both molecules, it neutralizes them, and then one oxygen-free radical has been taken care of. You need to eat a lot of that food in order to really benefit yourself. So, in fact, most of the studies looking at dietary sources of antioxidants have shown little or no benefit and it’s simply because it’s not efficient enough. One of the sort of newer or I think more interesting ways of managing oxidative stress and actually reducing that is an oral form of an enzymatic type of antioxidant which is a particular enzyme that I think is really beneficial that actually helps with this exactly.
And so what does this enzymatic form look like? Is it a pill? Is it a treatment? Is it…
Yeah, so it’s a pill. It’s something available orally. And the ingredient that’s inside of it is this enzyme called superoxide dismutase, SOD, and superoxide dismutase is a really interesting enzyme. So, enzyme, just for the listeners who may not know biology as well, an enzyme is a protein that has a function. So any protein that does something or is functional, it’s called an enzyme. So enzyme really, ultimately, is a protein. And this enzyme, this SOD, is actually common to every single living organism on this planet. I mean, we all make one or more forms of it. And when I say every single one, I mean plants, single-celled organisms. If you go to the bottom of the ocean, every organism you find anywhere on this planet makes this stuff and it is fundamentally the same. And the reason for that is that it actually evolved around two and a half billion years ago. It stayed common to all life forms on the planet since then. And the reason that it evolved at that time is, at that time, two and a half billion years ago, there was this event called The Great Oxidation Event. Now, the great oxidation event is the time when plants first started producing oxygen in the world. I mean, photosynthesis didn’t exist before that so life has evolved over around three and a half billion years. When plants first started producing oxygen and it’s accumulated in the atmosphere, two and a half billion years ago, there was an event where the oxygen got to a point where it almost destroyed all of life on the planet. I mean, it was nearly an extinction-level event for every living thing on the planet because life forms had no way to handle oxidative distress and now, suddenly, there’s this oxygen present and it started killing things. So, the thing that evolved, our ancient ancestors evolved, is this enzyme, this SOD, superoxide dismutase. And so that’s why it has stayed with us, that biochemistry has remained the same in every organism that has evolved from that time because we need it. Without it, we would die. I mean, really, very quickly. So this is probably one of the most important enzymes in our body.
So we produce them naturally and so this pill would give people more of it. Are we not producing enough or is our lifestyle causing us to need to artificially bring more into our bodies?
That’s a great question and I thought about this. It’s not that we’re not producing enough, it’s that evolution never drove us to produce more. And so if you think about it, the past 100,000 years, our life expectancy was early 20s at best, and if you made it that far, you made it because nobody killed you or ate you or you didn’t get trauma. So if you survive past 20, you were doing great. And the past 150, 200 years, that’s changed a lot. However, if you really think about the horizon of evolution, and you can’t think of 100 or 200 years for any meaningful change, you need hundreds of thousands, millions of years for something to change measurably, and so for the fact that we’ve never lived past our 20s up until very recently, there was never an evolutionary driver for us to produce more of this stuff because we would die of any other number of different things well before oxidative stress caused cancer or caused diseases or arthritis. As a 20-year-old living 100,000 years ago, I can guarantee, you didn’t have arthritis. So there was no reason for us to evolve more and that’s why we never developed more. So, the idea of adding exogenous or outsourced SOD actually is a remarkable concept and the fact that it’s available orally, that you can eat it and absorb it, is very cool. I mean, that’s what makes this particular molecule really very interesting.
And where does the SOD that people have access to today generally come from?
The molecule that I’m referring to, the source of the SOD is a melon and the melon is grown in France and, honestly, as I said earlier, this SOD, this superoxide dismutase stuff, it is common to all life forms, you could get it from anything. The only reason that it’s being isolated from this particular melon is because it has a very high concentration of SOD. The farmers that grew melons thought it would be a good idea if they bred together all the melons that had the longest shelf life because one of the limiting factors for them when they brought melons to market, they put in a store, if they were rotten, people wouldn’t buy them so they wanted the melons to last longer on the shelf so they bred their melons to do that. And, eventually, it came to a melon that actually could last a month or more on the shelf and it had a really long life and the only problem with it was it tasted like crap so nobody wanted to eat it, but somebody asked the question, why does this melon have such a long shelf life? And they tested it and that’s what they found. It had really, really high levels of this SOD enzyme, and so that’s why it was chosen as a source of SOD for this product in order to be able to deliver that to other people. It is possible to get bovine, cow-sourced SOD. I don’t know of a commercial source. I don’t know if that actually exists, but there have been a couple studies that looked at that. It is an unsafe way of doing it because getting anything from an animal, there’s definitely risks of infectious disease and when you put that in intravenously, it actually will last a very short period of time. It doesn’t get absorbed. So it’s not terribly effective and it’s unsafe. Although that does exist, it’s not commonplace, it’s not something that’s commercially available, and it’s definitely not something I would advise doing.
And since every animal, every life form has this SOD or enzyme, does all the food we eat have some amount of it?
All of the food that you eat 100 percent has some of this SOD. But, first, there’s not a lot of it. It’s relatively low concentrations. And, second, when you eat it, you digest it. So if you just take this SOD stuff straight as a protein, and, again, it’s an enzyme but, fundamentally, it’s a protein, it’s a series of amino acids. When you eat that, it’s digested. So in your stomach, it’s cleaved, it’s broken down into little segments, and so any protein that you eat, that’s what happens to it. So by the time it gets to your intestines, it’s broken down and it’s little pieces and that’s what your intestines are programmed, that’s what they can absorb, they have little receptors and channels, amino acids, little peptides, little short chains of those amino acids get absorbed, but you can’t absorb whole proteins, except in this instance, there’s a special way that that this SOD gets protected and that’s how you absorb it. That’s what makes this molecule really interesting. Just eating straight SOD from a food source actually wouldn’t really do a thing at all.
So it’s just like very negligible effect. Like you have a you have a hamburger, there was a cow, that cow had some SOD, but that’s going to be like just not even a factor, is what you’re saying.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It would do nothing for you. So the thing that makes the SOD from this molecule really unique is that it’s actually made into a polymer, so it’s actually combined with another molecule and that protects it, so that the molecule is combined with something called gliadin so gliadin, it’s a component of gluten, and it’s a really, really tough molecule so it actually doesn’t get digested in the stomach. And so the thing that makes this molecule really unique is that what it does is it takes the gliadin and it actually corkscrews it open on a molecular level, it actually twists it open, allows the SOD molecule to fit within it, and then closes it. So it’s actually encapsulated on a molecular level. So it’s a polymer, it’s a combination of the two molecules where the SOD is actually nested inside the gliadin. And so when you consume this stuff, it actually doesn’t get digested, the gliadin is like this armor that protects it, and the SOD and the gliadin, this complex, makes it to your intestine, it adheres to the walls and you actually can absorb that and then the SOD is liberated and it circulates and makes it to your blood and makes it to other tissues and it actually affects diseases. There’s lots of studies look at eyes, ocular health, skin health, kidneys, cardiovascular. There was a two-year study looking at the effect on heart disease and vascular disease using this stuff. It protects DNA. That’s a really interesting one. I mean, the genetic change and DNA modification is definitely one of those measures of aging. This stuff actually helps to protect your DNA. It reduces the amount of damage happening to your DNA from oxidative stress. So this molecule is really exciting to me because I think it gets to that root cause level and inflammaging, one of the concepts of inflammaging is it’s inflammation in everything that’s causing you to age, reactive oxygen species, oxidative stress is one of the primary drivers of that. So this molecule is actually really unique in that sense because it actually addresses that root cause issue.
So, obviously, we talked a little bit about the standard approach to longevity, the stress management, the diet, the exercise, the kind of company around, stuff like that, but I know you’re also big into being at the forefront of some of these innovative techniques, which is what this SOD is. What other innovative techniques are you excited about right now?
So, I would say one of the really innovative techniques I’m excited about is, it’s an AI-driven dashboard and an assessment tool for patients. And I’m really excited about it. The tool is something called AI Nexus and AI Nexus is this really amazing program where, using a cell phone camera, you’re able to scan your face, takes 60 seconds to do, and you can do this on a daily basis, and what it will do is it will actually generate a set of vital signs, it can measure your heart rate, your blood pressure, and a whole bunch of other parameters, but that information is then fed into a second level of artificial intelligence, a deep learning model, and it actually can then take that information and give you risk factors. It’ll give you health of your different organ systems. It will tell you how likely you are to develop Parkinson’s disease in 10 years, how likely you are to have a heart attack in the next 20 years. And all that information is given to a person in their hand. So I’m really excited about that and the use of AI to drive behavior, because I really think, I mean, as we talked about already, behavior is such a – it’s the cornerstone of healthy longevity, and this tool is a way where people can actually monitor themselves and have a dashboard for their health and we talked about addictions earlier with food, so people are addicted to their phone. So much of what we do on a daily basis is gamified. There are addiction experts that do this. I mean, they help develop those apps to get people hooked. The beauty of this is that it’s going to gamify people’s health. I mean, people are going to actually be able to monitor their progress. And these things can generate recommendations too. It will tell you this particular supplement would be useful to take care of this issue. If you do 10 minutes of exercise now and do this kind of exercise, aerobic or strength training, those things actually will modify, you’ll be able to watch the changes in your dashboard. So most people, you drive a car, you got a dashboard. You sort of know how fast you’re going, your engine temperature. People in life, they don’t really know very much about their own health. It’s sort of you get some blood work every once in a while from your primary care doctor. Most people really don’t know what’s going on inside them so I’m really excited about this, because it’s going to give people a tool where they can actually monitor themselves, make changes, and, in real time, see the difference that it makes. And I really think that that’s going to get people hooked on their own health and take responsibility for their own healthcare. Because I really – I think that that’s a very necessary step for the next step of public healthcare. I really don’t think it’s going to come from hospitals and doctors and healthcare systems, I really think it’s going to be on an individual level, that people are going to be looking after themselves.
And for anyone listening that’s excited about this, what was the name of this product again called?
The AI product is called AI Nexus, and AI Nexus, it’s a B2B Company so it’s not something you can get as an individual but you will have access to clinics that provide this for you. And the molecule that I had mentioned earlier, the biopolymer with the SOD, the brand name of that is something called GliSODin. If anyone out there is interested, you’re a scientist or a clinician and you want to look up publications, the website for that is glisodin.org. All the publications around that are located there.
And then do you have a personal website where anyone that’s interested in either talking to you or any further information on anything that you’ve brought up in this podcast can be found?
Yeah, for sure. So I would refer people to my BeautySpan website, so beautyspan.com, and BeautySpan is kind of my background, as you mentioned, I’m a plastic surgeon so I have a very aesthetic component to my practice but I’ve grown into this longevity space and I really believe that there’s a crossover between health and beauty and that there’s a direct relation between the two. That could be a whole other conversation as well. But my website around that is beautyspan.com and it has some information on that sort of crossover and how to maintain your beauty over time and not just with getting injections or treatments but actually maintaining health and a lot of what we’ve talked about on this conversation.
Well, it’s interesting to hear about AI Nexus and measuring people’s health from the face. Now, you’re saying it’s only a 60-second scan of the face every day. I guess, what I think a lot of people might be wondering is what is the accuracy rate of that? Can this tool really scan your face and be able to figure out all these other factors and how often is there something that trips it up and say, okay, although these trends are here for this individual, it was off a little bit?
Yeah, it’s a really, really good question. And so the answer to that is, most of these metrics are within 97, 98 percent accuracy. Any AI tool is based on some amount of data. You can’t train something without inputting some data. And so what it comes down to is what’s the data source? So AI Nexus actually has a partnership with the Mayo Clinic and that partnership has given them access to 10 million patient charts with 10 years of data. So, 10 million charts and 10 years of data, that’s a lot of information and so combining all of that together with the vital signs and the various health issues that those people developed over time allowed the development of this AI model to come up with these parameters and give these predictions. There’s an earlier level of artificial intelligence, which is just what’s called a direct learning or DL model, and that’s the part which takes in your scan your face and comes up with the vital signs and that’s actually open source code. I mean, there are other entities that have that. AI Nexus has honed that and has, across ethnicities and ages, so it’s made that better, but then it’s also added the second level of deep learning, and that deep learning model is a much more complex one and that’s the 10 million charts so that’s how those kind of health metrics and predictions are made. So very high level of accuracy and enough to action on. I’ve changed a lot of my habits, for sure, looking at that.
Now, do you at all get concerned about other possible impacts. So, say, someone says, “Oh, this is cool,” but I think we all remember that one like scary movie where there was this watch that told you how much time you have left to live and how that would affect people psychologically, so if someone were to scan their face and suddenly they predicted an alarmingly high percentage chance of someone developing a disease within the next 10 years, is there any fear component where someone’s like, “Oh my god, I’m too afraid to want to know,” or, “If I were to find out, I would enter a feeling of despair rather than one of empowerment”?
Yeah, you know what? Honestly, I think that’s an excellent point and certainly someone’s emotional state impacts their health overall. And so, to our conversation earlier, stress or not being in a good emotional state, that definitely causes you to have poor health. In the end, that that certainly would be a potential risk. But the reality is, if you knew you were going to be in a car accident tomorrow, what would you do about that? Would you get your car fixed? If you knew that your car was going to blow a tire, you’re going to spin out on the highway, what are you going to do? Either you don’t get in the car or you get your car fixed. So, predicting maintenance issues for your body, it gives you the opportunity to action. The counter argument of, “Let me just stick my head in the ground and not know,” there are people absolutely that I’ve spoken to about this that said, “You know, I don’t want to know,” and you know what? That’s okay. The thing I’ll point out, at the end of the day, one of the things about being a physician that really has struck me over my training and my career, people don’t like death. They don’t like sickness, they don’t like death, and yet they’re on this course towards that. We’re all going to die. There’s no such thing as immortality. Although there are people in the longevity space that are chasing that, I don’t believe that we’re going to achieve that. Some people do and it may be possible but the reality is that we all have to face mortality. Death is coming. It’s just a question of when and what that’s going to be like, and you have a choice. I mean, your choice could be to just accept it’s going to happen, get old “gracefully” and watch your health slowly decline, and then you’re one of those 75 percent of people at age 65 that are going to have one chronic disease. I don’t think that that’s a nice way to age, and, as a physician, being in hospitals and walking around the medicine floors and seeing those patients, I mean, that’s a terrible way to die. I don’t want to be in that place. So, today’s that day that I have control. I have a decision to make and that decision is to be healthy and to try and maintain that and so that information, giving it to people, it’s a motivator, and I think that it needs to be put in that frame. For the person who sees that and says, “I don’t wanna know, I’m not doing anything and I’m not going out,” that’s really unfortunate. That ideally would be a great case for good community and good support from their friends. So, we all have to support each other towards this endpoint, right?
Well, it reminds us about the importance of kind of facing our fears. And this kind of ties into the very theme of this podcast, which is anyone that kind of goes out on their own and decides whether you’re going to start a business or try to do something really interesting, try something, try to connect community, there’s always going to be like a fear to face. There’s always going to be the fear of failure, the fear of ostracism, the fear of something else. And so, if someone’s going to pull up AI Nexus, there’s always that fear that thing’s going to look at your face for the first time and say, “In the next 10 years, there’s a 44% chance that you’re gonna have a heart attack,” and that’s a scary thing to devour, right? Even though, in the long run, you’re better off, because even if you’re in that 56 percent scenario where you don’t have a heart attack, the changes you made based on that revelation that you encountered on that one day probably gave you a higher quality of life in the long run, the same way all of us facing our fears to go out on our own and do our things or do something kind of contrary to society’s narrative, gives us, in the longer run, a better quality of life. So, what is your story as far as getting to the point where you are today?
That’s a great question. I had my health journey starting in 2010, so it’s about 14 years ago. And, in 2010 I reached this point, I had just started my practice three, four years earlier as a plastic surgeon, and through my residency training and my first few years in practice, my health wasn’t good. I wasn’t looking after myself. I was overweight. I ate badly. I mean, really, really badly. And I realized that I was telling patients about trying to maintain their health and I was seeing people with skin cancer and getting them ready for surgeries and telling them, “You gotta be healthy,” and I realized I was such a hypocrite and I realized that I really wasn’t taking care of myself at all. And so, 2010, I made the decision, this is the time, this is the moment, that you don’t get a second chance at life. This is it. And, at the time, I was still working in hospital and I was walking around those wards and seeing those patients and what I saw was a mirror. It was like, “That’s gonna be me,” and it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when, and I realized that I didn’t want to go down that path. So it was the moment of revelation that it was, I need to be responsible for me, this is my life, I have to look after me, so in 2010, I started eating better, I started working out, I lost 50 pounds, and then I took that and correlated over a few years, I then moved to a plant-based diet and it really changed my life. So that was a huge transformation for me. And part of that transformation, in 2012, I actually had surgery, I had had man boobs, I had gynecomastia, and it was a leftover after I lost my weight. It was really upsetting so I went to one of my colleagues, I had surgery, and that was actually part of my transformation as well. I recently posted that online in social media on some of my feeds to sort of share my story that way. And so that was an important tool for me. And, by 2012 to 2014, it was a whole new life for me. I realized that I felt so much better about myself. At the same time, I actually started using that GliSODin stuff as well, which is also, in my mind, a huge determinant of my own health. So, to me, that was my turning point and I haven’t looked back. Today, I still take care of myself and I know that I’m on the right trajectory. And so while I talk to people about this, I lead by example. I will never advise somebody to do something that I don’t personally do myself and I think that’s really, really important in the longevity space.
And then so this personal transformation inspired you to want to bring this opportunity for transformation to others.
Yes. I would say that’s exactly the case. As I went through my transformation and I saw my patients struggling and they would come through the door asking about a breast augmentation or asking about a face lift and asking them questions about their medical history and their life, I came to realize there was a lot more going on in my patients than just wanting to pull this or lift that. And so I got more involved and started asking more questions and understanding their needs a little more. And don’t get me wrong, I still do surgery and I love operating on people. I really – it’s like a surgical form of psychology. If you do the right thing for the right person, you can really change their outlook on life.
But I really look at it like a partnership. I like to help my patients get to a state of good health. I like to give them advice on how to achieve that and be a part of that process. Share on XAnd then, that way, when I operate on them, I give them the best results, they have the easiest recovery, and I know that they’re going to maintain over time. And that sort of overall transformation where someone really adjusts how they live and then they have surgery as a tool, a part of that to address that one or two things that really bother them, man, that’s magic. That fuels my soul. When I see that, it’s like it’s so rewarding and so that’s why I really love this longevity and healthy part of my practice, because it’s a really rewarding way to really impact someone’s life, not just have them come through my operating room and get this nipped and that tucked.
And one thing I hear quite a bit whenever the topic of our healthcare system in general comes up is that healthcare in America, probably Canada, Britain, those too, is too, quote-unquote, “reactive,” and I think you alluded to this earlier in the episode, the idea that, like, okay, I think the phrase I hear the most is you buy back your health. You get sick and then you buy back your health. Do you see a paradigm shift actually happening? Do you see over the course of, say, the next five to ten years, our general approach to healthcare, whether it be through our institutions or just individualized, becoming more proactive?
Absolutely. Our healthcare system, and when I say our, American system, the Canadian system, we all work fundamentally the same way. It is that reactive care, the whack-a-mole medicine, you wait for something to pop up and then you fix it. And really calling these health care systems, it’s a misnomer. It’s not right. I mean, they’re not health care systems, they’re sick care systems. I mean, they’re looking after people who are sick, and several things, you’re buying back your health to get to that state, but reaction is so much more costly. And, of course, the effectiveness of that treatment is so much worse. And so it’s remarkable to me that we’ve just come to accept that we just wait for something to break. Where we are now is absolutely, in my opinion, at an inflection point of medical and healthcare. We have become accustomed to these treatments because that’s how healthcare developed. There was no understanding of the mechanism of aging or the mechanism of the development of these things. You wait for something to come up and then you’d find that medication, the willow root that cured the headache or it’s an anti-inflammatory, that’s where aspirin comes from. That’s how healthcare developed. Now, we’ve gone to a point where we have the genomics, we have the ability to test for things, we have these AI tools that can assess long-term outcomes and risks, putting all that together, we now have the ability to, in a precise fashion for each individual, figure out what are the risks in the future, what are the ways that we can address them today, and how do we avoid that heart attack that could come 10 years from now? How do we avoid that prostate cancer? And we also know the lifestyle changes and things that need to be done in order to manifest a lot of that and we have the ability to help people adapt their lifestyle to do these things. So I personally think that healthcare is about to go through a revolution, and I don’t know that it’s going to develop within the public healthcare systems that we have. Our healthcare systems have developed over decades, 100 years or more, and they’re very fixed. Both in Canada and the United States, we both suffer from the same issue, regardless of payer and that kind of thing. They’re both the same fundamental system. And I think that the new healthcare is an individualized healthcare. I think these tools that we’re talking about, things like this GliSODin antioxidant, these artificial intelligence tools like AI Nexus, these kinds of things, this is going to put health in the hands of the individuals and people are actually going to be able to look after themselves and take responsibility for themselves and that’s going to be the thing that decreases disease. So my hope is, as the population ages and longevity becomes a thing, I mean, our populations are already getting older, we are actually going to be able to improve our health and reduce costs on the healthcare system. Both our systems are actually not in a good state, and I think that this is going to be a way to save healthcare globally is by giving individuals control over their own health.
That sounds wonderful. And I want to finish up with one kind of wildcard question. In order to achieve some of this individualized, preventative, proactive healthcare setup that we’re looking for this future revolution, is there something about the overall setup of society, whether it be our work culture or the way our relationships work, the way our social structure is, the way we set up our days, the way we build our homes, that needs to shift in order to achieve the best possible results?
Wow. There are so many different ways that I can go with that answer. I’ll hit on what I think is going to be the most revolutionary part of the new healthcare system. What I think it is, I think it’s real estate. I think it’s homes. I think that as a part of our sort of taking grasp but taking responsibility of our own health, our home is going to become an extension of our health and our life, and that’s going to include smart mirrors in our homes, it will include sensors, it will include integration with all of these things that we’ve just talked about and also your exercise and activity can be tracked so that you’ll actually be able to see how you’re doing and your home and those tools will also link to your gym and it will also links to your physician so that it’s going to be one network of health. So your genomics, which dictate your genes, your whole gene sequence, that actually dictates a lot of your health, taking that information and combining it with your wearables and information at home, the food that you eat, you can track, you can sort of see the nutrients you’re taking in, all of that is going to become one ecosystem and your home is going to become an extension of you and your healthcare. So, I think that that’s going to be a big thing that changes in the coming years.
So that rumored toilet that can detect cancer early from picking up data about your urine every day, stuff like that –
It’s only a matter of time. You got it. That toilet is going to pick up cancer from your urine, it’s going to measure the different types of bacteria in your stool, and it’s going to tell you what your gut microbiome is doing and what food you need to eat or probiotic you should take so that you can actually balance that out. By the way. Interesting thing about your gut microbiome, it is directly related both to your mood and to your skin. There are actually nine different skin disorders that are directly related to the bacteria in your intestine. So that toilet that you just mentioned, that will not just detect cancer, it will actually tell you about bacteria in your stomach and your intestine. It’s actually going to cure skin diseases and it’s going to be able to give you a better mood and take care of your anxiety. So talk about things being interconnected, they absolutely are.
Wow, that sounds even better than those Japanese toilets everyone raves about right now.
I’ve tried those, actually. Those are pretty cool.
It sounds pretty cool. Oh, my God. So much fascinating stuff. Dr Goldberg, thank you so much for joining us on Action’s Antidotes, talking to us a little bit about the future of health and also how we can be a bit more empowered to take care of our health and longevity from a day-to-day basis so instead of just relying on a doctor or decision tree of sorts to recommend some sort of cure for whatever has developed, preventing us from developing it in the first place and looking to the future and how we can take control of this pretty much every day.
It’s been my pleasure, and I think your nickname is very appropriate for what we just talked about, because this is a time for people to take action. So it’s been a real pleasure chatting with you. Thank you so much and looking forward to our next chat.
Thank you so much. And speaking of taking action, I would like to thank everyone out there listening as well and hopefully this has inspired you to take action on something, whether it be taking care of your health or whatever that risk you face of the first time you look at AI Nexus and figure out what your actual risk is and being okay with that information because it gives you the power to figure out what you need to do next.
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About Dr. Cory S. Goldberg
Dr. Cory S. Goldberg: Plastic and Craniofacial Surgeon
Dr. Cory Goldberg completed his plastic surgery residency at the University of Toronto which included the Surgeon Scientist Program, earning him a Master of Applied Science in Biomedical Engineering with a thesis on stem cells. He subsequently completed a Pediatric Craniofacial Fellowship at the University of Southern California and is Dual Board Certified in Plastic Surgery in both Canada and the United States.
His private plastic surgery practice is in Toronto, Canada and he volunteers with Operation Smile doing cleft lip and palate surgery around the world including missions to Cambodia, Egypt, Honduras. and Bolivia. He earned an Executive MBA in International Business from Cornell and Queen’s schools of business and Co-founded HealthSpan Digital in 2023. His mission is to align aesthetics and healthy longevity through BeautySpan.