At age 67, Dr. Mark Young just snatched something from Paul Newman, RIP. And he’s gunning for another prize.
He broke Newman’s Guinness World Record for the oldest male professional rookie race car driver, having recently started at age 60.
“I like to collect experiences,” he says. “I run 8 companies, I love to race cars and I put a ton of my attention on fitness and longevity. The Guinness record was a way for me to put a pin in the fact that if you take care of yourself, you can do anything.”
Young – aptly named – says at 67 he feels 37, and is an evangelist for living healthily “without limits” to 120.
“I don’t believe in old age. Sixty-five years was a union thing, not a human thing. Our DNA is programmed to go to 120 years. This was discovered in 1963 by Dr. [Leonard] Hayflick. It's called the Hayflick limit, or Hayflick phenomenon, which is the number of times a normal somatic, differentiated human cell population will divide before cell division stops.”
Young quotes another, less scientific, authority.
“If we go back to the Bible, to the Book of Genesis 6:3, that passage says ‘my spirit shall not strive with man forever, but his days shall be limited 120 years.’ So six thousand years ago, the Bible said we should live to be 120.
Now let's fast forward to science, and we are discovering that we should be able to live to 120.”
Young says that’s not happening because “we kill ourselves.” Namely, our four or five largest disease states – including Alzheimer's, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer – are responsible for over 70% of deaths in the United States.
“But all of those disease states are manageable and preventable. There is early detection for all of them. If you just manage those disease states, you reduce your odds of dying by over 70%.”
THE THREE PILLARS OF LONGEVITY
Young takes environmental toxicity seriously.
“We've messed up the environment. We've messed up the quality of the food we've got… air issues, we have enormous issues with EMFs [electromagnetic fields]. But we also have better preventative technology. I have a device at my desk called a Blue Shield X1 which puts a ninefoot shield blocking EMFs from hitting my body.”
Young counsels leveraging what he calls the three pillars of longevity:
Pillar #1: Nutrition and Fitness.
Are you eating good food? Are you taking the right supplements? Are you exercising correctly and enough? This is the basic block and tackle.
Pillar #2: Early Detection.
Are you doing, for example, advanced cancer screening, VO2 Max testing and stress testing?
Pillar #3: Regenerative Medicine.
This includes treatments involving stem cells, peptides, ozone, and the like.
“These tools are available,” he says, “they’re not cheap, but they're all open to us.” He points to marketing genius Dan Sullivan as a beacon of longevity practice. “Dan literally is living a life that is thirty years younger than other men his age: what he can do, how hard he works, how he travels.”
He also recommends nitrous oxide gummies and testosterone supplementation as you age. Contrary to popular fears about TRT causing prostate cancer, “we find that it is cancer protective – that it reduces the risk of prostate cancer. There is no real credible evidence that shows that testosterone accelerates any form of cancer. This is absolute nonsense and a paradigm from decades ago. It was a faulty study that doctors learned in college but just isn’t true.”
He prefers a formulated testosterone cream done at a compounder rather than injections or pellets so you can avoid big peaks and ebb and flow closer to natural T-rhythms throughout the day.
THE BODY FOLLOWS THE MIND
You want to live long and die fast, Young says, and psychoneuroimmunology – the mind's ability to have physiological impact on the body – is also key.
He likes to share an experiment run by Harvard’s Dr. Ellen Langer called “The Rewind Study”
“So Ellen took a hotel and they equipped it to look like 1957. Replaced all the furniture, put old televisions in it, no mirrors. She then went and recruited a group of men from nursing homes and she put them in the hotel for, I believe, one week. During that week they were not allowed to see mirrors. They saw pictures of themselves hanging on the walls of when they were 25 years old. They were only allowed to read the morning newspaper from 1957. They could only watch TV from 1957, and they got the daily news of 1957. They were required to only talk about the current events of that day in 1957.”
The results were extraordinary.
“At the end of a week every one of those men gave up their walker, cane or wheelchair; they no longer needed them. Their cholesterol went down. Their blood work got better, their pain levels went down, their mobility went up.”
So much of longevity, says Young is “the mentality. We have the ability to think ourselves dead. We have the ability to think ourselves sick. And we have the ability to think ourselves healthy.”
When Young gets into his race car, he is surrounded by sixty guys in their twenties and thirties. Those drivers “are all willing to kill you to gain an inch of space on you. I feel young. I drop into flow state. I'm in a happy spot. I'm not driving to save my life or thinking I'm on the edge of death. This is why I can compete with them and win. Mindset.”
A SECOND RECORD?
Young’s rigorous longevity practices are paying off.
He regularly participates and often has won several first and second place finishes in car races that typically last eight to twenty four hours. “My whole team of drivers are over sixty – and all have “Dr.” in front of their names.
What’s next?
“I want to win the 24 Hour Rolex before I’m 70. It’s a 24 hour endurance race on the Daytona Speedway.”
The current record holder for oldest winner in his class? Paul Newman.
“He won it when he was 70,” says young Dr. Young. I’ve got three years. Watch me.”
Written by Adam Gilad
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