Andrew Huberman Interviews David Sinclair

by Nils Osmar. January 1, 2022

I was just watching Huberman’s full interview with David Sinclair on Youtube (posted below).

Some of the key points:

Sinclair typically does 22:2 fasting almost every day. He does break his fast (technically) by having a few bites of food in the morning with his supplements, but other than that, he doesn’t eat till late in the day.
He drinks water, tea and coffee (including expresso) when fasting. (He sometimes adds “a little bit of milk” to his coffee.)
Once a month or so he does 2 day fasts for autophagy benefits (autophagy removes misfolded proteins)
He’s currently taking 1 gram of resveratrol a day and has been doing so for 15 years. It does need to be taken with food though. (He sometimes to mixes it with yogurt; other times he will put some olive oil in a glass, adds some resveratrol and vinegar to it, adds a basil leaf and drinks it.)
Sinclair is not impressed with the idea of taking hGH injections. He points out that the people who get hGH injections age faster. High levels of hGH are associated with shorter lives, which Sinclair calls “burning your candle at both ends.”
Huberman asks him about leucine. Leucine is beneficial for bodybuilding, but too much of it is, or “could be” pro-aging. Sinclair: “I don’t burn both ends of the candle… I pulse things so that I get periods of fasting, then eat, then I take a supplement, then I fast…you can’t just expect to do something constantly and it’ll work.”
Huberman tells Sinclair about Ori Hofmekler and the Warrior Diet, and the need (according to Hofmekler) to “pulse”, i.e., to switch between fasting and nourishing the body.
Sinclair revisits something he’s hinted at before, which is, if you give resveratrol every day it doesn’t do much, but if you give resveratrol to mice every other day, they’ll live up much longer than usual.
Sinclair takes metformin in the morning along with the resveratrol. But if he’s going to exercise later in the day he’ll skip the metformin that day.
Sinclair’s impressed by berberine but does mention that berberine decreases the lifespan in worms. (He feels though that the human studies showing benefits are more important than the worm studies suggesting problems.)
He reminds people that we need NAD, and that NAD declines as wet obese or get older. He still takes NMN with his resveratrol. “Taking NMN for two weeks will double your NAD levels in your blood.” He says NR also works for raising NAD but not as well. High doses of NR might actually drain phosphates from the body.
Sinclair is “fairly vegetarian but not strict.” They talk about dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol; Sinclair says that he avoided eggs for years but now feels that there was no need to do so, since dietary cholesterol does not raise blood cholesterol.

My thoughts:

First, I’m not in any way saying my opinions about NMN or resveratrol or fasting have the same authority as Sinclair’s; he’s a lead researcher in the anti-aging field. All I’m doing is bouncing some thoughts off of his presentation. With that said, here are some thoughts I had when listening to him.
Like him, I’ve also switched to taking resveratrol every other day
I take 1.5 grams of NMN a day. But then, I’m a 68 years old; he’s 52. I suspect I may need more.
Re: hGH, I agree with Sinclair that hGH injections are bad; I have a different POV about raising hGH levels naturally. In order to emulate the TRIIM trial protocol, I take supplements that increase hGH.
However, I only take them on workout days currently. I suspect that just as eating some protein to activate mTOR just after exercising has been found to not be pro-aging, it’s also fine to activate hGH on workout days.
(Sinclair’s not what I’d call an hGH purist; he’s an advocate of fasting, which raises hGH levels.)