So let's talk about the four that I mentioned. Okay, diet. What does that mean? It means don't overeat, don't eat a lot of processed foods, minimize your meat, and eat a lot of green leafy vegetables.

In terms of intermittent fasting, I'm not going to weigh in on that, but basically, it's common sense. If you eat in moderation and don't eat more than you exercise, you know you're going to do okay. Don't be overweight. Try to keep your weight within a proper BMI. Because what do we have in this country, the United States?

We have an epidemic. We have an epidemic of periodontal disease, where 50% of the population has periodontal disease. We have an epidemic of obesity, where if you look around at the beach and see all the young people, a lot of them are overweight. When I was young, which was a while ago—over 60 years ago—all my friends weren't overweight. Very few people were overweight. Maybe there was that one kid in my classroom who was a little overweight. Today, 50-60% of the kids are overweight.

And the third thing is we have an epidemic of diabetes, which also fuels cardiovascular disease, one of the most common causes of death, especially for males, and increasingly for females as well. They're all interrelated. There’s an interrelationship between diabetes, inflammation, cardiovascular disease, and periodontal disease.

A lot of this is diet-related. The second thing I want to talk about very briefly is just exercise. I think it's important to move daily. If you look at the work of Dan Buettner and the Blue Zones or the work of Andrew Huberman on the Huberman Lab, he always talks about the importance of exercise.

How much should you exercise? Well, we were told maybe 20 minutes, three times a week. Well, I don't think that's enough. I think you need to move on a daily basis. Now, I don't think you have to lift heavy weights every day or run a marathon, but I think you should be in movement.

What Dan Buettner found in his studies of the Blue Zones is that people who live longer—eight to ten years longer on average—move constantly. They were gardening, walking up and down hills, and they weren't driving places. They were constantly in motion. I think that's important.

If you go to New York City, which people don’t think is the healthiest city, you look at the people who live there. Most of them aren't overweight because they're moving all the time. They're not sitting in cabs or stuck in traffic. It takes forever, so they walk. People walk a lot. They do a lot of movement.

In the healthiest states, like Colorado and Hawaii, you see people moving, while in states where people are a little more sedentary, they're a little bit heavier.

So what would I recommend for physical exercise? Well, I think you should do aerobics at least three to four days a week, along with some HIIT training. Get your heart really moving. A nice walk is great, but some HIIT training is important. It increases metabolism, improves cardiovascular tone, and has been shown to increase lifespan.

As you get older, especially men and women over the age of 25 to 30, we start to lose muscle mass. So it's important to lift weights at least twice a week. Push yourself; lift some weights. I cannot overemphasize the importance of being flexible and stretching. They say that you're as young as your spine, or you're only as young as your spine is flexible.

So do some yoga, maybe some light martial arts, or do some stretching. Go to a stretch lab and work with people. If you don't know how to do anything, find a coach and do it. But I think you should do something every day.

Now, I may be a little bit of a freak because I love to work out, and I've always loved it since I was a little kid, but I work out between one and two hours a day. I don't think you need to do that, but I think if you can devote one hour a day to taking care of your body—it's the only one you have—you might as well do it.

So I think it's important for you to take care of your body. Give yourself that one hour. If you don't really know how to work out or anything, just go out in nature. Start to relate and take a walk, walk in the woods, or walk down to the beach. If you don’t have the woods or the beach around, find some nice place to walk. You can go inside a mall in the morning and walk around there.

Now, the third thing we've covered is diet and exercise, and now we move on to sleep. It's important to get a good night's sleep. Early on in my career, I used to pride myself on not sleeping. I would sleep four and a half to five hours a night. I remember someone said recently, "I don't know how the competition keeps up with me because I sleep only four hours a night."

I get all that time to really work hard. But I find that I'm much more efficient when I go to sleep earlier, and I try to get seven to eight hours a night. I wear an Oura ring, which monitors my sleep, so I know how much I sleep. When you start to measure something and monitor it, then you can improve it. Before I was measuring my sleep, I was sleeping six hours a night.

Now that I'm wearing the Oura ring, I'm up to seven. I'd like to get up to seven and a half hours a night, but that means I have to be very rigid about the time I go to bed. I get up at 5:30 or 6:00, which means I have to be in bed around 9:30 or 10:00 at night. I try to do this and relax at that time—no TV in bed. I just try to relax, read something, or maybe listen to something. So sleep is very important.

The fourth thing is mindfulness. Now, what is mindfulness? It is decreasing stress. If you look at the work of Dean Ornish, who did a lot of work on stress reduction about 30 years ago, he found that when you reduce stress, you reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Stress can wreak havoc on our bodies. It releases cortisol and puts us into fight-or-flight mode. We don't need to go into fight-or-flight anymore. We're not running from tigers on the savannah anymore. Most of us have food readily available; we just pick it up and it's there for us. We don’t really have to engage in fight or flight, but we're doing it all the time—especially when we're on our iPhones, which most of us use for three or four hours a day.

We're constantly being pushed—push, push. People are calling us all the time. I turned off my phone during this video because I got three texts while recording. The phone was buzzing all the time because people want my attention all the time, and it drives you crazy.

So what do you do? How do you quiet that mind? Because I can't get away from the phone, I can't get away from the TV and people. All the noise is coming at me. So what do I do? I try to take an hour a day by myself—not the exercise hour, a different hour. This can be for prayer, meditation, yoga, or walking in the woods by myself.

Get away from it all. I remember when I was growing up, my father used to say, "Mike, you're so selfish. You always have to run because we're going to dinner." I said, "Yeah, I am selfish." But it's not selfish to take care of yourself. If you take care of yourself, you can take care of others better.

The most important person in your life— and the only one who can take care of you—is you. If you take care of yourself, you're going to have a better life, and then you can be of better service to others.

The old example is: when an airplane goes down, what do they say to do? Put the air mask on your kid first? No, put it on yourself first, then put it on your kids. You have to take care of yourself so you can take care of others.

So those are the four main things that are very important: diet, exercise, sleep, and mindfulness. I added two others: decreasing inflammation. Now, those four things do decrease inflammation, but the paradigm shift in medicine has changed dramatically.

It's no longer just an infectious disease orientation. It’s basically inflammation that leads to the breakdown of our bodies, shortens telomeres, breaks down chromosomes, and leads to more cancer, etc. People who do really well usually have decreased inflammation.

How do you monitor your inflammation? We can take blood tests for that. You can look at C-reactive protein and metalloproteinases and other things in your blood to see what your inflammatory indices are. But if you do these things I talked about, you're going to decrease the inflammation.

Now, how do you know about that? You have to test. Testing is important, and you should be able to monitor that. Maybe it’s mammograms, maybe it’s PSA tests, maybe it.