100 Year-Old Nutrition Professor: 7 Keys to Longevity

I'm Dr. John Scharfenberg, 100 years old. Chris and I invited 100-year-old Dr. John Scharfenberg to speak at TEDxBoston on October 1st, Longevity Day, so he could share his keys to longevity in just 15 minutes. Dr. Scharfenberg is that giggly guy we interviewed on this channel. His interview got about 2.3 million views in under a year. I eat breakfast about 6.30 and then lunch come 12.30 or 1 and then I don't eat anymore. I'd called Dr. Scharfenberg expecting him to say that he wouldn't be able to travel so far. He said he wouldn't be able to make it to Boston at that time because he'd be lecturing in Slovakia at that time, where he's gone annually the past 10 years. In fact, he'd recently returned from speaking in Madagascar, about 20 hours of flying in total. He travels completely alone. He only uses a wheelchair in the airport if the time between flights is very short, like it was when he was laying over in Paris. He's returning to Madagascar this year to lecture. Then the Czech Republic in September. And he's in Guam right now to speak. All that is to say, Dr. John Scharfenberg is jet-setting around the world to educate people at the sprightly age of 100. He says traveling isn't tiring at all. Not surprising for a man who, at age 80, climbed Half Dome in Yosemite. We recently visited him to learn more about his adventurous life. You'll see more of that coming up on this channel. By the way, for his 100th birthday, he drove over three hours to go to a home to celebrate it with his family. And he regularly drives that long to give lectures, all without a GPS. Since Dr. Scharfenberg couldn't make it in person at TEDx, we decided to film him giving his 15-minute talk. We'll show it on October 1st at TEDx, and you'll see it right here, coming right up. He delivered this talk at one of Chef AJ's potlucks. We enjoyed lunch together there, where he shared that he always gets standing ovations. And boy, did he get one here too. He didn't even need a microphone. We could all hear him delivering his rousing speech. Chris and I still aren't sure how the heck we filmed this. We had so many issues with cameras, lighting, the stage, all before our star spoke. Dr. Scharfenberg typically stands while presenting for over an hour at a time. We had him sit for this talk so he'd get the camera at eye level with him. At the last minute, somehow everything fell into place. Must have been the Scharfenberg effect. How does Dr. Scharfenberg stay so healthy and vibrant? You're about to find out. Thank you, everybody. I'm so happy to be here and tell you something that has just happened in my lifetime. I never expected it to happen in my lifetime. We now know the major cause of disease and death in all industrialized countries is cardiovascular disease that can be prevented with proper lifestyle without any medicine. We just have to avoid seven lifestyle risk factors. Now you should know I'm 100 years of age. It's taken 100 years for all this to happen. I'm starting on my second 100 years. I've been a vegetarian all my life. But there's seven risk factors you must know about. And I can't be in Boston in October because I'll be overseas in Czechoslovakia. I'm going to be in Guam this year. I was in Madagascar once. I'm going back in July to Madagascar. And then I'll spend a month in Czech Republic and a month in Slovakia. So I'm traveling quite a bit by myself. Everybody asks, do you drive a car still? Of course I drive a car. I got a red Toyota Prius. But the seven risk factors you should know about. Number one is tobacco. We've known that for a long time now. 1964 Surgeon General's Report. Everybody knows not to smoke. But did you know that some people like people with Alzheimer's disease, they have less smokers? Because they don't get old enough to die from Alzheimer's disease. You know, they'd already died before they get Alzheimer's. So they don't get Alzheimer's. But alcohol is another risk factor. Women should know about this particularly because it has to do with breast cancer. Alcohol. Now we used to say two drinks a day for men. One for women was probably safe. But Max Griswold, a doctor at the University of Washington, did a big study, the biggest ever done, on 195 countries around the world. He's a social drinker. He wanted to know how much is safe to drink. He got the answer. Zero. Any little bit of alcohol you take increases your risk of dying from something. He says he has to review his lifestyle now too. His study was funded by Bill Gates, who has a home just behind the University of Washington. His article was published in the Lancet Journal. So it's tobacco and alcohol are two risk factors we must avoid. The next one is inactivity. Lack of exercise. We need to exercise every day. That's very important. I have outlived my two brothers 13, 14 years, 17 years. They're already passed away. And every year that's going to increase another year. And I'm not going to die next year. So it's going to keep going up. But exercising is extremely important. I had a lady who helped me with the PowerPoint lectures. She was a graphic artist. She did it for a living for advertising purposes. She did a lot of work for me. But she was kind of big. I mean, big, big, big. I said to her one day, you know, I've got to talk to you about your weight. I'm a preventive medicine doctor. I must talk to you. Her face fell. I said, do you want the bad news first or the good news first? She says, tell me the bad news first. You should understand that overweight increases the risk of dying from almost every disease we know. But now let me give you the good news. Even though you're obese, if you exercise every day, you will live longer than the woman who's normal weight who doesn't exercise. A man who smokes has hypertension, has high blood cholesterol. But if he exercises every day, he will outlive the man who doesn't have any of those problems who doesn't exercise. You got that? To be lean is good only if you exercise. Otherwise, it has no advantage. Exercise is extremely important. Now, you should know the age at which it's most important. It's during midlife. 40 to 70 years of life. That's when you should exercise. That's when people get more money to relax and do less exercise and eat more. They need to turn it around. Exercise more as they get older and eat less as they get older. Okay. Exercise is extremely important. The next risk factor, overweight. We already mentioned a little bit about overweight. Okay. We need to figure out why people are getting so fat. We have a new idea. They're addicted. So we can divide the overweight people into different categories now. Some are psychologically affected. They crave something psychologically. Other people, they have a real addiction because they're making opiates in the body. We need to differentiate these two and treat them in a different manner. Okay. The next big risk factor was a problem with too much meat and too much sugar. Now, sugar, for the first time, we've discovered, increases heart attack risk. Too much sugar can increase heart attack risk. I remember that Mr. Fischbeck from Redlands, he went through my program. His cholesterol and triglycerides were sky high. It took me a long time to find out his problem. He wasn't overweight. He wasn't eating a lot of meat. What was his problem? I hit the right question. Do you like ice cream? Oh, yes. I like ice cream. I said, then you mean sometime after your meal, you have a dish of ice cream? Well, it's not quite like that. Well, how is it? It's before I go to bed at night. Now, the usual bowl isn't big enough. I go out to the kitchen and get a mixing bowl and I put in my scoops of ice cream. How many scoops do you put in? Well, I'd mash it up so my wife wouldn't know. But you know, how many is it? Well, it's at least three. Then I put frozen strawberries on top, but you know, they aren't very sweet. So I whip sugar into it. And then I put whipped cream. And you know, whipped cream isn't sweet either. So I whip sugar into the whipped cream. I said, how long have you been doing this? Every night for the last six months. No wonder he was having high cholesterol, high triglycerides. Okay, so sugar. But now the question of cutting down on meat. That irritated the American public. They didn't like that. They liked their meat. So what were we going to do about that? The Heart Association changed the recommendation. Eat more fruits and vegetables. But really, they meant eat less meat. But it didn't say it. So they had another recommendation. Don't eat more than five to six percent of your calories as saturated fat. Now let me tell you the secret. That means vegetarian diet. But they didn't use any bad words. Vegetarian or meat. They didn't talk about it. Just saturated fat. Cut down your saturated fat. That's the animal fat. The dairy fat. If you're going to use milk, make sure it's nonfat or one percent fat only. That's the standard Heart Association recommendation. So get rid of the pork fat, the lard, and that sort of thing. See, animal fat is a big problem. Now they added to this hypertension, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. But the first five, if you do those, they keep you from having high blood pressure and high cholesterol. I'm so excited about what we know we can do. We can lower heart attack risk 80 percent. The first stroke risk 80 percent. Diabetes risk 88 percent by lifestyle without any pills. No medicine. Now it's not just me talking. The World Health Organization agrees to this. The American Heart Association promotes it. The European Cardiology Society agrees to it. So this is scientific. But it's hard to get the doctors to agree to it. Practicing physicians, they have been told for many years, if your cholesterol goes up, you should take the statin pills. Any of you heard of the statins? You know, 24 million Americans in this country are taking statins to lower their blood cholesterol. They did a study on life expectancy, and they discovered for 93 percent of the people, it didn't help them one bit. They didn't live any longer because they took the pills or didn't take the pills. Didn't make any difference. For 7 percent of the people, it did help. Those were the ones who really had heart disease. And they lived, if they took the pills, they lived eight and a third or eight and a half years longer. So it was worthwhile for those. Our problem medically is, we don't know how to tell who has atherosclerosis, heart attacks, and needs those pills, and who doesn't. We've been going by cholesterol level. Now in 2015, the U.S. government was advised by their medical scientists to tell everybody the optimum diet is a vegetarian diet. Can you believe it? The vegetarian diet is an optimum diet. It'll help reduce the risk of these diseases. But when it got to the leaders of the agriculture department and the health department, they said that's too strict. They added lean meat to that optimum diet. But the scientists didn't want them to do that, but they did it. But the optimum diet is a vegetarian diet. Everybody should know this. It's not something unusual. Everybody needs to know this. Now, it's exciting that we know what we should do. Our next breakthrough is going to be to get people to do what they know they should do. That's why we have to have experts helping them to go ahead and do what they know they should do. But here, a doctor writes a prescription to this overweight lady. You will now exercise one hour every day. She comes back one month a little fatter. Did you follow my prescription? No. After they have 100 patients going through their office like that, they don't want to continue that nonsense, telling people to do something that they aren't going to do. They know they should tell them. We have another problem. A group of doctors, they're practicing in groups now, 20 together. The leader calls the group together and says, now look, you've got to see another patient every 10 minutes or we're not going to make any money on this. 10 minutes is not long enough to teach anybody anything. And then a lady comes in and says, what shall I eat for breakfast tomorrow morning? The doctor thinks he hasn't had a good nutrition course in medical school. So he thinks, what did my wife feed me this morning? That's crazy. They need a good medical course in a nutrition course in medical school. They don't have it. They need it. But the exciting thing is you and I don't have to wait for the doctor to tell us. If we live the right lifestyle, we won't get these heart attacks and the strokes. So I pray that all of you will live the right lifestyle and tell your neighbors in New York too. Thank you.