Living A Full Life

The Real Meaning Of Longevity And How To Get It

• Full Life Chiropractic • Season 4 • Episode 3

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Want more years that actually feel good? We unpack what longevity really means—healthspan, not just lifespan—and map out the simple levers that help you move, think, and sleep like a younger version of yourself. With Dr. Enrico Dolchricori guiding the way, we look at the evidence behind calorie consciousness, time‑restricted eating, and a plant-forward approach that cools inflammation and steadies insulin.

From there, we dig into movement as a true anti-aging tool. You don’t need extreme workouts to make a big difference. Consistent walking, two to four days of strength training, plus mobility or yoga can protect your brain, preserve muscle, and keep your metabolism resilient. We also get honest about sleep as a superpower: eight hours in a cool, dark room, screens off one hour before bed, and meal timing aligned with your circadian rhythm. These basics, applied with consistency, beat expensive biohacks every time.

Curious about biological age? We explain how new aging clocks use blood markers, DNA methylation, proteins, and the microbiome to better predict risk—and how you can use “measure, intervene, remeasure” to nudge those numbers in the right direction. We touch on repurposed drugs, polyphenols like resveratrol, and why early meal timing matters as much as calories for many people. The result is a clear, doable plan: lift, walk, sleep, eat earlier, manage stress, and track your markers so progress compounds.

If this conversation helps you rethink your routine, share it with a friend who wants more life in their years. Subscribe for future episodes on biological age, anti-inflammatory habits, and stress resilience, and leave a quick review to help others find the show.

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Welcome back to Living a Full Life, the podcast where we talk about creating more energy, more health, and more life in the years you are living. Today we're diving into a topic a lot of people are searching for right now: longevity. Not just living longer, but living better for longer. More years with strength, clarity, mobility, great sleep, and the ability to do the things and be with the people you love. You know, most people think of aging as just genetics or maybe risks or luck, but research keeps showing that we have a lot more control over how we age than we used to ever think before. So in this episode, I want to break down what longevity really means, the lifestyle choices that make the biggest impact, what science is discovering right now about biological age, and the top simple daily things anyone can start doing today. So let's get into it. Thanks for joining us on Living a Full Life. I'm Dr. Enrico Dolchricori. And each and every week, we bring you tips to bring back to your family so that you live long, healthy lives. That's the whole point of health and wellness. And longevity is being researched more now than ever before. The cool thing about Google and Chat GPT and all these AI programs is that you can actually search and see what people are searching. Kind of weird, but kind of cool to see where the mindset collective is going. And it's a lot cleaner than you think it is. It's people legitimately searching to better their lives. And longevity seems to be at the forefront in 2025, especially right now. So I thought, hey, let's talk about this. I've done other podcasts on evidence-based research around the world over the last 100 years and what we've really found out through Harvard research, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinics, and research from around the world. But today we're going to specifically talk about longevity and what it truly means. And I think we need to understand the meaning of the words we speak in order to speak the words with true meaning. When we hear longevity, we usually think of lifespan. It's right in the word longevity. How long do we live? How many years we're alive? But it's more important concept is the health span, not the longevity. How many of those years actually healthy, moving well, thinking clearly, and living fully? That's longevity. No one wants to live to 95. If the last 30 years are filled with pain, medications, and limitations, they've researched people near the end of their life and they've asked them. So we know the answers. They don't want to be there. Uh, healthy minds won't end their lives, of course. Uh they'll just they'll live it through, but nobody wants that. Nobody wants to say, hey, my plan for 75 is to be in a wheelchair. I don't think anyone in their 40s right now is planning for that. So all we can do is do our best. And this is what this podcast is about. How do we do our best? And the exciting part of all this is that research across tons of fields: microbiology, longevity, uh, exercise physiology, physiology, nutrition, sleep, genetics, it's all showing that we can influence our biological aging more than ever before because of the time that we live in. So the big three lifestyle factors that affect longevity, let's dive into these ones. And these are really, these are this is the bulk of the podcast. This is what we're going to be talking about is nutrition and calorie intake. The service and disservice that the food industry gave us was the calorie measuring on all of our packaging. And now we look at everything from fruits, vegetables, meats, and everything. We look at the calories, which is good. It gives us a tool to measure how much fuel we're eating. However, the calorie game is a game, and it's not true on what you think it is. The 2,000 calorie standard diet was made by the food industry. Why? Because they think people are dumb. So they said, let's just make a round number, 2,000, and let's fit everything we need to fit in there as a percentage of the daily intake: sodium, carbohydrates, sugars, fats. And it tells you right beside it, this isn't, you know, um, this will make up 25% of your daily fat intake in this uh small snack trail mix that you buy. Pack as trail mix, right? And that's a disservice because not everyone needs 2,000 calories. We actually need a lot less than you think to manage the daily lives that we mostly live. If you work in front of a computer most of the week, you don't need 2,000 calories a day. It's interesting, we'll get into this. One of the most studied strategies in longevity research is calorie restriction. Not starving yourself, but simply eating slightly less than your body burns. And your body does not burn 2,000 calories. A six-month randomized trial found that calorie restriction, lowered uh fasting insulin, and core body temperature, two body markers linked with longer lifespan. Lower insulin means less inflammation, lower body temperature means less inflammation. Remember that as we continue. And this is from JAMA in 2006. And long-term studies show that uh it improves inflammation, heart markers, and metabolic health. So keeping in mind calories in a healthy way, not what the food industry slaps on the side of a package. But here is the exciting news: you don't need extreme dieting, don't need any diet. Intermittent fasting and time-restricted eating show similar benefits. So you can just pick a window during the day where you eat. And most of us already naturally do this. As we age, we we tend to skip breakfast. We just wake up, we get going, drink a cup of coffee, and go naturally. Why? Our hormones control how we act. That's why. So if we're naturally doing this and then we make it more of a mental note to be more alert when we eat, we can create these windows. And that eight-hour eating window is safe for most people. So you start around 10 a.m. and then you finish around 6 p.m. And before you know it, you're intermittent fasting naturally, which means after six, you don't eat. You go to bed, you're sleeping, you're fasting, you wake up in the morning, you skip breakfast, you're still fasting, and then by 10 a.m. you eat something. You just had a 16-hour fast, which has been shown to be fantastic. A big review in nutrition reviews just a couple of years ago in 2022 found that eating in a six to 10 hour window improves metabolic health, reduces inflammation, and supports healthy aging. And it's easier for most people than any long-term dieting. There you go. Never jump onto another bandwagon diet. The program we've been using in our office for over, oh man, it's got to be six, seven years now, uh, and helping people lose weight is that we just give it different names. We're like, come on in, use our red light bed. Come on in, uh, do this for six weeks. Come on in, try this for six weeks, try this magic. And they're waiting for like an injection, a magic pill. And then I sit them down and I give them a 15-minute podcast that I've been doing all these years about how they're gonna eat for the next six weeks. And they're like, Oh, oh, I could do that. I'm like, okay, and I'll monitor you every single day. How's that sound? So they get my text, they call me every single day, or my wife, and uh, or they text every single day and we keep them accountable. And it's that accountability over 42 days, everyone loses weight because they have somebody in their back pocket that they trust who's not their family member, who they're not gonna lie to, and uh they hold them accountable and they're paying a little bit of money for it too. So there's a little skin in the game as well. See, and it's been working forever, and it's never gonna change. It's always gonna be the program we use. And uh, it's natural, it's effective, and we know it's healthy for them. That's why. Number two, so nutrition and calorie consciousness, we'll call it calorie consciousness. Movement is number two. Exercise is probably the most powerful anti-aging tool we have above any supplement you can take, any injection you can do, anything. A massive UK uh biobank study found that people who exercised regularly, ate well, and slept well had slower biological aging and lower mortality, regardless of what their genetic history showed in their family history. It doesn't have to be crazy when it comes to movement. Man, everyone in America wants to jump, jump on a gym or go to CrossFit or do something crazy and poop their pants. I don't understand why you have to work out like that. You don't have to do that. You don't have to flip a tractor tire as many times as you can at 48 years of age until you you soil your pants. What's going on with that? Keeps me busy as a chiropractor. You all tear your tear your hips, it's wonderful. But aside from that, these are what the around the world, what they talk about with movement, walking, strength training, mobility work, and even tai chi or yoga, movement, movement, constant movement. Studies in frontiers and aging in 2025 show these all help maintain muscle, protect the brain, and support longevity. Simple, simple stuff. This is gonna be a very simple podcast, but profound one. And number three, you guys already know the answers. It's like every podcast we talk about nutrition, movement, sleep. Number three is sleep. If there's one area most people underestimate, it's sleep. The same Biobank research showed that good sleep is just as important as exercise for lowering biological age. So they're equivalent. We have to split our efforts 50-50 between the movement that we do every day and the sleep that we take. You think sleep would be so easy. You just have to lie down in a bed and close your eyes. But it has to be scheduled, it has to be programmed, we have to aim for eight hours every night. Don't care who you are, you need to do this each and every night. It's just as you can't go out and run marathons and sleep poorly and think that you're on pace for a healthy longevity lifestyle. You can't. Not sleeping is biodegradable. It's gonna degrade your overall quality of life, literally with degeneration, because we can't heal. Sleep is where we heal, movement is where we move and grow, and nutrition is how we fuel. It just all kind of makes sense, doesn't it? So simple. So poor sleep increases inflammation, it increases the insulin resistance we talked about, and it actually accelerates our aging. Simple habits are just create a consistent bedtime, no screens one hour before sleep to help you fall asleep. Many people are like, man, I have trouble falling asleep. And I ask them how their digital use is. And they don't consider the television, you know, digital use. They they think their phones or their laptops are digital use. Anything with a light on a screen is digital use. It's artificial light that tricks our brain that it's still daytime. When it's not, it might be 10 p.m. So no screens one hour before sleep gets our brain into a circadian rhythm start, which is the natural flow of uh hormones, the decreasing of cortisol, and the things that help make us tired and fall asleep. And what we need is a cool, dark room. Research across the world shows that the cool dark room is what most humans need to feel comfortable to have a good night's rest. So sleep is a longevity superpower. We can't ignore that as well. I think those are three equally as important things: 33%, 33%, 33% of the 100% success to living a long, healthy life. So, biological age. What does this mean? You may you may see some new um data from your Apple Watch or these bioscanners that you can stand on at the gym, and you'll have your age, your birthday, put in there, and then it will print out your biological age based on your biometrics. They're not 100% accurate, but it will show you, and we use it in our office too. People hop on this thing, it'll be a 48-year-old female, she'll hop on this thing, and it shows that she's acting like an 82-year-old female. It's just an eye-popping identifier showing, hey, your metabolic age is at 82, but you're 48. So it just gets them alert on that. And what ends up happening when we start improving those biological markers, the biological age starts to go down. I just hopped on the EO, I go to EO's gym and I hopped on theirs. I'm 42 and it showed it was 37. I was like, for the first time under 40, I was like, that's great. That's that's what you want to see. You want to act younger than you actually are. And that's that part's fascinating. So chronological, chronic chronological age, you can't change. It's your birthday. You were born on that day, it's not going to change. Biological age is how old your cells think you are. How are they functioning? And new technologies can actually measure things: blood markers, DNA, myelation, or methylation, uh protometrics, your proteins, and even the microbiome. We can test all these things to see how you're functioning. A recent multi-omnix study in 2025 showed these new aging clocks predict disease risk better than traditional labs. So looking at certain blood markers, your DNA methylation, how fast it's methylating, and even the microbiome in the gut are better predictive of longevity than anything else that we look at cholesterol, insulin, all those other things. So another fascinating study found that brain biological age, how old your brain functions, is one of the strongest predictors of mortality. So this isn't science fiction anymore. This is happening right now. There's even a body clock tool coming out of the University of Washington that uses clinical labs to estimate biological age and future health risks. The idea is measure, intervene, remeasure, stay younger longer. That's how they've been doing this. The insurance agency industry has been using this forever. The life insurance industry, it's exactly what they've been doing through their metrics and analytics, is they take your blood work and your urine samples and look at it completely different than what your doctor does. Your doctor's looking at pathology right now. Are you healthy or are you not today that we did the labs? Your life insurance company is sending it to universities like that, University of Washington says, give us an accruity map of this person's risk of death. And when that comes back, that's how you get either accepted or denied for your life insurance, if you're wondering what it was. Like, oh, I thought it was healthy. Well, they saw something and they're not going to tell you, but they know you're going to die in 10 years. And uh they keep because they can't tell you. It's super interesting. That's been around for about 20 years, believe it or not, what they've been doing. So this is the same science. Now, what we're doing is making it part of mainstream medicine so that we can see this stuff and get doctors more involved in the intervention perspective. I think that's what functional medicine doctors have been trying to do inside of medicine for a long time. Intervene right now and make you better so that you can live longer. Pretty wonderful thing when we think of it long term. So, some cutting-edge stuff that's coming out in the science that you may like like I do. I love this stuff. Drugs being repurposed for longevity. Now you can say, Enrico, you're going to talk about drugs? Come on, man. That's why I listened to you. So you don't talk about drugs, but there is some cool stuff that's happening. Scientists are mapping the hallmarks of aging to find existing drugs that may slow aging pathways. This is a major research happening right now in network medicine. So preventative medicine, you know, we've always laughed at it. How do you use a drug preventatively? Isn't drugs bad? But some there's some out there right now that help make the body function better that can directly lead to better health. Now, in men's health, being a man myself, the erectile dysfunction medicines are out there all the time. We've heard of them all. Viagra, Cialis, all this other things that have come out. They never came out originally because to solve those issues. They came out originally as cardiovascular tools to vasodilate arteries, to help with many blood flow, just blood flow in general, blood flow to the heart, blood flow to the organs. And one of the side effects is like, wow, blood flow helps there too. And now it's used and sold like that because men would are definitely going to buy that pill, forget about blood flow to their liver. They don't care about that. So they're not going to buy that pill unless the doctor prescribes it for them. So that's that's the selling factor of it. And the same thing with Ozempek and GLP1s. It was to help gut, it was to help heal the gut. And uh the side effects were alarming and in a good way. And what happens when you take certain things like this, like vasodilators regularly? You're gonna have better blood flow. Is better blood flow gonna be good for you in the long term? Yeah, it really is. So there's the risk benefit to a lot of these things. Baby aspirin, we've seen that for probably 60 years now, taking baby aspirin to thin the blood a little bit. Is it to really help prevent stroke? Possibly. But does thinner blood uh help us flow better with blood pressure? Yeah, it kind of does. Does taking a baby aspirin have long-term effects? Maybe. Does it outweigh the benefits? Not really. So that's that's how we're looking at medicine, right? How does it you how do we use it in there? Compounds found in foods. We've been studying biochemistry forever in foods. So polyphenols have been around a long time, reversatol, red wine, tannins, uh, the compounds in berries, green tea, dark chocolate, olives. You've heard of this. This has been around for three generations. And getting attention for showing for slowing aging pathways. So these polyphenols are really on the verge of becoming maybe a staple supplement in everyone's daily life, along with their multivitamin, their omega-3. Maybe we're taking a polyphenol supplement as I am reversatol. I take, I take that. So every single day. A recent review found they help immune function and slow cellular aging. So, yes, your berries and your blueberries and your cyberries and your raspberries, they matter. Should have these in your diet daily, absolutely daily. They're wonderful. We used to talk about them as antioxidants, and that's a now. Remember when antioxidants was like cutting edge, probably in the 1990s, uh, early 2000s. And now antioxidants is like the big umbrella with a bunch of cool things underneath it, like polyphenols, reversatols, and these things underneath it that act as antioxidants as well at a micro level, which is very cool. Timing of eating. We talked about this with our intermittent fasting. A study from UT Southwestern showed that when mice were fed, timing mattered as much as calories. Eating aligned with the circadian rhythm improved longevity. For us, that means eating earlier in the day, avoiding late-night meals, and keeping a consistent eating window, small habit, big impacts that happen with that. We've talked about this. Maybe your grandparents used to tell you don't eat late at night, don't eat before bed. This is like ancient wisdom being passed down from the ancient Greeks. They're just telling you this without Chat GPT, without clinical research in the 1900s. This stuff has been passed down. Why? Because people function better doing certain things, and the people that were healthier lived longer to pass down the information to their kids and grandkids to tell them, do this, you'll live long like me, don't do that. And Uncle Jim died because he just ate bacon every day, right? So they passed this information down, and it worked back then before computers, and now that we have all the information in front of us, we almost don't know what to believe anymore. Hence the reason why we do this podcast to help you sift through reality and AI, right? So, section number five, the last section of this uh challenges and real talk about all this. Let's be honest, not everything works for everyone, okay? Calorie restriction can backfire for some people. Supplements get overhyped, animal studies don't always translate to humans, and some longevity therapies will only be accessible to the wealthy, at least at first. So the most powerful tools we have are still food, sleep, movement, stress management, and social connection. The basics beat the expensive stuff every time. Don't get hooped into social media influencers telling you to buy the next best thing. They're usually expensive, they usually don't work, and they overpromise and underdeliver. Wait for the research, wait for it to come out, and do the right things. It doesn't mean you have to sit here and not eat good food and not sleep well and wait for the best thing. It means do the right things first. So here are some simple longevity habits you can start today that cost little and can really propel you to not only feeling better, but the wealth that you will get from this is living better long term, which is fantastic. We can't control what happens in the future. We know this, we all know this. I don't think I have to put a PSA at the end of this podcast saying barring, you get struck by lightning at the age of 51, right? We know strategies happen, things happen, but we can only control what we can control. And these are it. Strength train two to four times per week. If you do two, do two full body workouts. If you do four, break them into 20, 25 minutes, 35 minute, four four muscle groups. And then you can break back, chest, legs, arms, whatever, or core. Break it all up and get that flow and make that part of your life habit. Every week you do it, rain or shrine, no matter what. You miss your typical Tuesday, Thursday because of travel or whatever. You do the workouts Monday, Wednesday. Whatever. You do not miss this, you do not skip these things. Walk eight to ten thousand steps or at least 30 minutes per day. Now, before our phones and our Fitbits, we didn't know how many steps we were taking. Nobody talked in steps. We talked in distance. And I think that's why kids don't know what one mile is anymore. But we talk in distance. You need to walk about three miles a day. That's really it. Two to three miles a day. That's that's it. So if you break it into two walks, two one mile walks with the dog, make sure when you take the dog out, you do a one mile walk and make sure you do it twice a day. That'll get your steps in, especially if you work in a sedentary job. Eat more plants and fewer processed foods. We know this, right? We know that. How many of you are starting to eat better, focusing on things, not eating the fast food anymore? You feel like you're doing the right things, and then you go and review the day and you're like, how many plants did I eat today? How many veggies? And you're like, man, I don't even think I touched a veggie, right? You may have had some broccoli for lunch or something, or a piece of lettuce or tomato with your with your lunch. That's not what we're talking about. We got to in put vegetables with every meal and eat some fruits during the day. We got to bring the stuff back. We have to replace the processed foods with good food. Try the 10-hour eating window. Try that intermittent fasting window. 10, 12, 16 hours. Whatever you can do, try the 10 hour. For many of you, it's pretty simple. Eat at uh 7 p.m. and don't eat breakfast until 7 a.m. Boom, there's your 12-hour window. You did it in your sleep. Pretty awesome, right? So no late night snacks. That's what that means. Go to bed at the same time every night, Monday through Sunday, every single night, and watch what that does to your mood, your energy, and all these things that you complain about. Do something every day that brings you joy or reduces stress. You need to do this. You need to sit down for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it is, and do something for yourself. It could be it could be scrolling social media. That could be your time to do that. Get regular blood work to track inflammation, insulin, and cortisol. It blows my mind how many people don't get blood work every year. I'll literally ask people, they'd be like, oh, it's been years. Like two years plural, or they're like, no, like seven. I'm like, go tomorrow and go get your blood work. You got to know where your markers are. Aging well isn't about perfection. You're never gonna get this perfect. It's about consistency. Longevity isn't about adding years at the end of our life, it's about adding life to your years right now. Small choices made daily, stack up. Your body wants to heal, your cells want to repair, your brain wants to stay sharp. You just have to give it what it needs. Your body's here for you. It was a gift given to you. You just have to do what you want with it. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with someone who wants to live a fuller, healthier life. And stay tuned. We have more episodes coming on biological age, anti inflammatory habits, and stress resilience. Until next time, stay well and keep living a full life and take care.

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Dr. Enrico Dolcecore

Host
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Dr. Christine Hafer

Co-host