Dr. Sanjay Gupta on “Chasing Life”: CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Talks About His Search for Secrets to Longevity Around the World

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Female : Welcome to Conversations on Health Care with Mark Masselli and
Margaret Flinter, a show where we speak to the top thought leaders
in health innovation, health policy, care delivery, and the great minds
who are shaping the healthcare of the future. This week, Mark and
Margaret speak with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Neuro surgeon and Chief
Medical Correspondent for CNN. He has launched a new series called
“ Chasing Life ” which takes viewers to far flung places around the
world that enjoy extreme longevity and exceptional quality of life.
From Okinawa, Japan, we ’ re living to 100 commonplace to Norway,
deem ed the happiest country in the world. They ’ ll learn the secrets
and the science behind these so called Blue Zones. Lori Robertson also
checks in , Managing Editor of FactCheck.org , looks at m i sstatements
spoken about health policy in the public domain, separating the faith
from the facts . We end with a bright idea that ’ s improving health and
well - being in everyday lives. If you have comments, please e - mail u s
at [email protected] or find us on Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, or
wherever you listen to podcasts . You can also hear us by asking Alexa,
play the program Conversations on Health Care . Now , stay tuned for
our inter view with CNN, Chief Medical Correspondent, Dr. Sanjay
Gupta on Conversations on Health Care.

Mark Masselli: We ’ re speaking today with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Staff Neurosurgeon at
Emory Clinic in Atlanta and Multiple Emmy - award winning Chief
Medical Corresponde nt at CNN. He has written several books
including Chasing Life, which is the basis of a new series running on
CNN, exploring so called Blue Zones around the world with
e xceptional health and longevity. His current HBO Documentary, One
Nation Under Stress e xamines America ’ s epidemic of stress. He was
named one of Forbes Magazine ’ s 10 most influential people. He
earned his medical degree from the University of Michigan School of
Medicine. Dr. Gupta, it is a pleasure to have you on Conversations on
Health Care .

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Thank you very much.

Mark Masselli: You know, first of all, you ’ re a great storyteller and that is on full
display in your compelling new series on CNN “ Chasing Life ” where
you explore the so called Blue Zones in far flung places around the
world, known for their exceptional health and longevity, and you
really broaden the viewers ’ horizon by taking them to places in Bolivia
where there ’ s virtually no heart disease to Okinawa where aging past
the 100 is not uncommon. You go to the happie st country on earth
Norway to unlock the secrets and I ’ m wondering if you could tell our
listeners about this journey and what evidence you ’ v e uncovered in
your exploration?

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Well , as you mentioned, I practice medicine in the United States . I

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love our health care system. I think there ’ s a lot to love about it, but
we also recognize that we spent $3.5 trillion dollars on health care
every year in the United States and life expectancy has gone down
three years in a row in the United States. I t ’ s sort of raised this
question for me and I think a lot of people, are there things to learn
from other countries around the world, places where they are living
longer, yes, but also happier and healthier lives. Why are they
continuing to go up in life e xpectancy while we continue to go down?
That was really what we wanted to explore , and we spent a lot of
time planning and doing homework and research and then chose
these six countries for all sorts of different reasons , but all driven by
that same theme.

Margaret Flinter: Well, Dr. Gupta, you take us to some pretty disparate locations
around the world that are quite different from each other
geographically and culturally. But these commonalities that you find
in these Blue Zones, this synergy between loca lly cultivated diets and
shared physical activities, all of these are things that we believe
support, not just health but true well - being. Maybe you could talk
with us about some of these lifestyle components that you
experienced firsthand and the role the y m ay play in leading to
longevity?

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Yeah. Some of these places are true Blue Zones where people live
exceptionally long li ves , but not all of them. Sometimes it ’ s a question
of living incredibly healthy lives, incredibly happy lives. So t ake a
country like Italy. If you think about it sort of broadly, Italy is a country
that is known for people smoke there, they drink there , they eat all
kinds of different foods there, they are not known for exercise and yet
they are considered the healthi est country in the world. Why is that ,
right? All those things that we ’ re told that we should pay attention to
and we should in terms of diet and activity and everything, why do
they not pay as much attention to these things and they ’ re still
healthy? One of the key ingredients really seems to be this idea of a
real social fabric, really tight knit communities. Even if you look at
certain communities in the United States that are made up primarily
of Italian immigrants, there was this town in Pennsylvania c alled
Rosato , you ’ d look at this population that high cholesterol, they ate all
sorts of different foods, didn ’ t go to the gyms and yet they had some
of the lowest rates of heart disease in the United States as immigrants
here. What is the real value of be ing part of a really tight social fabric?
I mean, in the United States, rugged individualism became the mantra
on the aspiration and yet you realize it in countries around the world
that are again not too different than the United States in terms of
their overall structure. The reason they continue to go up in life
expectancy is do a lot of things , but one of the big ones is people
really thinkin g about how to build community. We haven ’ t done that
as much and I think we ’ re paying the price a bit with regard to my

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expectancy in this country.

Mark Masselli: Yeah. Dr. Gupta, one of the lenses that you see the world through is
as a physician neurosurgeon and you approach topics with scientific
curiosity. It ’ s really interesting to see how you utilize some of the se
modern technologies on your journey there. We see you wearing a
skull cap with all these sensors in it and in many scenes and engaging
in activities like yoga and mindfulness and we ’ re just gathering
important real time neurological and physiological da ta set. Tell us a
little more about that approach to try and to unlock some of these
secrets to longevity in these unique cultures.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Mark, it ’ s interesting because you go to certain places around the
world and if you take practices like yo ga, which in India, is something
that they ’ ve been using for thousands of years , and you say, well how
did this come about? What ’ s the real science? You get sort of two
versions of the answer. One is that, look, we ’ ve been doing this for
thousands of years . It works. The proof is in the populations of people
that it serves. But I think a newer and more emerging answer is that
we realized that we need to have scientific evidence here. We don ’ t
want to just keep saying trust us. So that was sort of more the
a pproach that we took as well to say, look, we should see evidence
around these things. So when someone says yoga can do the
following things for your body and your brain, where ’ s the evidence
around that? So when you look at the skull cap, which is
measure ments of all these different brain waves, you get an idea
looking at me as an example, but thousands of people who ’ ve gone
through these studies, what does it really do to the brain . When they
say it quiets the mind, what does that even mean exactly? How c an I
actually explain this to the viewers? Is it going to work for lots and lots
of people? Or is it just for a few very well - trained yogis? These were
the sort of questions that we wanted to answer.

Also when there were claims that were made that did not pass muster
and where the scientific evidence did not show this to be true, we
sort of talk about that as well. We approach it like any other story in a
way when we present something to the viewers, we want them to
have some degree of confidence and what they ’ re seeing and
watching.

Margaret Flinter: Well Dr. Gupta, you ’ ve covered a lot of health stories in your career,
but you say that perhaps the least analyze condition underlying most
disease in this country particularly is stress. So in addition to the
series Chasing Life as CNN, you also have a documentary airing on
HBO called One Nation Under Stress, which probably should be
required viewing for anyone working on the front lines of healthcare.
You note that stress is an underreported contributing fact or to death
and illness. It underpins much of the disease we treat in our practices

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and health centers every day , and you point to arise out of the so
called Deaths of Despair that are bringing life expectancy down. Talk
with us more about this research on the stress epidemic. Why we as a
nation have just got to be very vigilant in addressing it?

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It ’ s a big topic and some could argue it ’ s one of the biggest most
urgent topics of our time. What ’ s driving the drop in life expectancy
and the increase in mortality are really three things. Death by suicide,
which has gone up from 30% over the last 20 years , Overdoses
primarily opioids, but that ’ s gone up significantly and Liver Cirrhosis
typically due to alcoholism. Those are the Depths of Despa ir and you
can right away see why their name that they ’ re all reflective of self -
medicating and trying to ease a deep rooted pain that I think many
Americans are suffering from , and I think stress is an underlying
problem there. But you look at other count ries around the world and
other countries you say, well they ’ ve had similar challenges
economically in terms of the changes in life and fast food and lifestyle
chan ges and all that, and yet they continue to increase in life
expectancy and decrease in morta lity. We know what ’ s happening in
the United States . In some ways , the question is why isn ’ t that
happening other places? You realize that there is this undercurrent of
stress in the United States that is a much highe r than other similar
countries.

Our pe rception of pain, for example, much higher in the United States
than other than other places , our self - reported stress much higher in
the United States than other countries , our willingness to try and
medicate that stress away with drugs and alcohol. If yo u look at the
entire world 80 % to 90% of some of the world ’ s opioids are consumed
in the United States. We ’ re not even 5% of the world ’ s population and
we ’ re consuming 80 % to 90% of some of these medications. It ’ s a
symptom of a much larger problem and I t hink stressors is the
common denominator.

Mark Masselli: We ’ re speaking today with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Multiple Emmy - award
winning Chief Medical Correspondent at CNN and Staff Neurosurgeon
at Emory Clinic. He has a new series on CNN Chasing Life, which
explo res remarkable examples of health and longevity around the
world. Dr. Gupta, you framed it up really well. We ’ re spending $3.5
trillion on our health annually and yet the outcomes are bad,
particularly access to things like behavioral health, addiction ser vices,
all remaining out of reach for this population. I ’ m wondering the
health industry itself, what ’ s the prescription you would sort of give to
the industry itself to say, look it, we need to head in this direction and
what do you draw from other countr ies as you think about that
prescription?

Dr. Sanjay Gupta : Well, there are many things that are our health care syste m in United

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States c an do remarkably well. I mean in terms of life shorte ning, life
ending diseases , certain cancers, some of our progres s in catastrophic
heart problems, but I think a lot of the attention is sort of on this
home run mentality. We want to get the home run and take care of
patients who are the sickest and sometimes dealing with the more
chronic disease in a meaningful way or truly optimizing people ’ s
health all along their journey often gets short shrift in the United
States. I think that ’ s one thing you see in other countries that ’ s
different . Health care is not a necessary evil in other places where you
just go, if you ’ re sick or you ’ ve had some sort of injury, it ’ s a more
frictionless, seamless part of life. You ’ re constantly thinking about
what am I doing in terms of my health today? Why am I eating this
particular food? What function does it have besides just providing m e
calories?

If you look at the United States, 70 to 80% probably of chronic disease
in the United States is entirely preventable. You ’ d think it ’ s not just
the medical establishment, but it ’ s the entire way in which we live
from the food that we ’ re eatin g, the air that we ’ re breathing, the
medications that were sometimes taking unnecessarily. All these
things in aggregate lead to a problem where what most doctors are
taken care of in the hospital are entirely preventable diseases. People
talk about preven tion all the time on the individual level. I think
talking about it on a societal level requires a lot more insight. You got
to look at these other countries, see what they ’ re doing. Small
changes can make a huge difference. I never really thought about th is
that much. I ’ ll be honest with you until I started working on this, but I
thought about it a lot after I started learning this and now I have three
girls that are all ones, a teenager already. I ’ m going to have three
teenage girls.

Mark Masselli: That ’ s exciting.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Yeah , it ’ s p retty much, yeah, well that ’ s another [inaudible 00:13:12 ] ,
but in terms of their lives and what their lives are going to be like
when they ’ re my age, sometimes I feel like the system is rigged
against them a little bit. Even if they want to do the right things for
their bodies and their brains and they want to be healthy. It ’ s
sometimes hard in the United States. The United States i s a way of life
doesn ’ t always lend itself to that so easily as it is in other countr ies.

Margaret Flinter: Well, I want to give a shout out for something that ’ s worked
exceptionally well and that is prevention in the area of vaccines, but
it ’ s under threat. We have whole generations of our young health
care professionals who I don ’ t think we ’ d know measles or mumps if
they tripped over it because they ’ ve never seen it. We ’ ve made such
enormous progress, saves so much suffering, and yet we see the
reemergence of these conditions due to the beliefs in messaging

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that ’ s out there around vaccin es. You have such a unique role in this
country as one of the most recognizable and I think trusted, health
experts and it can do so much to help drive the point home that
vaccines are safe and save lives. How are you using your pulpit to do
this?

Dr. Sanj ay Gupta: It was surprisingly challenging to understand why there were pockets
and populations of people who did not want to vaccinate , the belief
that vaccines would cause some sort of harm has been widely
debunked. By really good important studies where they actually look
at millions of people who ’ ve gotten vaccines, looked at rates of
autism and other adverse things and said, is there a connection here?
There is not. There ’ s also, you don ’ t want to establish some sort of
false equivalency that people say , Hey, look, I just want to be careful. I
just want to be safe. Oftentimes I feel like people hedge them. They
say, well, no, we understand that you just want to be safe. Why don ’ t
you skip the vaccines or whatever. There should be no hedging here.
Vaccine s have saved millions and millions of lives around the world
and nothing is a 100% safe, but you have a literally a one in a million
chance of having some sort of serious adverse effect from a vaccine.

Out of 10,000 p eople who take an aspirin a day 12 wil l have an
adverse thing. If you look at liver failure in the hospital, most of it
comes from taking too much Tylenol. You ’ re more likely to get hit by a
c ar walking across the street the n to have an adverse event from a
vaccine. Yet people look at the risk of vaccine a s somehow much,
much higher. I don ’ t think that there is large percentages of the
population who believe this. I think it ’ s small percentages, but the
problem with that is that vaccines are this perfect example of
something that is both an ind ividual health decision as well as a public
health decision. I have three girls, as I mentioned. I got them all
vaccinated on schedule and part of me realized that I was not only
protecting them, but you ’ re also protecting the people around them
as well.

I ’ ve traveled to countries around the world where people don ’ t have
vaccines and they die. I ’ ve talked to these families and man, they
wished they could have had vaccines for their kids. They didn ’ t and
somet imes they lost their children a s a result of th at, we have this in
this country, how do we not take advantage and something that is so
available to us.

Mark Masselli: Y ou were talking earlier about the health system trying to hit home
runs. You were saying that small changes can make this difference, I
wondered if you think about the changes that need to take place. It
may not be completely the responsibility of the health in dustry
though they play a role.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Sure.

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Mark Masselli: But you really talk to people in your show. So talk to just the
individual who ’ s listening. What ’ s the journey that individuals in
America should take as they try to think through ways to be healthier
and live longer.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Yeah, and I ’ ll just say we all have a responsibility certainly in terms of
mana ging our health, but it is worth looking at the environment in
which we live sometimes and saying, here ’ s some things that we
could change that could benefit large populations of people all at
once , b ut when it comes to individuals, you think about the fac t that
we are one of the most overmedicated countries in the world . Again ,
a lot of times these medications are completely necessary. I ’ m not
telling anybody to stop taking their medications, but if you are being
prescribed a new medication, I think it ’ s o ften worth taking the extra
beat and saying, do I really need it? Obviously , most countries don ’ t
take nearly as much as we do.

I think when it comes to how we eat and how we move, think about
how humans evolved. Right now the life we ’ re leading is but a blink of
an eye in the human existence on this planet . For most of our
existence, we lived very different lives as human creatures. We
weren ’ t designed to sit or lie for 23 hours a day an d then get up and
go to the gym for an hour. We were moving, I mean people s at only
when they were older, when they were getting ready to die.

The Ayurvedic Diet in India, which is thousands of years old, how does
a diet get created for a culture? Mostly it gets created because of
taste, but then if you look at diets from before thousands of years old,
it was all about the functionality of the food. I know these sound in
some ways like silly things because we don ’ t think about it, but in
other cultures around the world it ’ s all they think about. It ’ s not just
about energy from calories, it ’ s about truly thinking of food as
medicine and we can do that too. I also think that, look, stress is not
the enemy . We all need stress. People come to me and they say, I
want to live a stress free life, that ’ s not possibl e and it ’ s proba bly not
a good thing because we need a certain amount o f stress to survive
and thrive.

The problem is when the stress never turns off. If you can find time,
whether it ’ s meditation, Yoga, maybe it ’ s just being outdoors and
smelling the aroma of the forest , you can get these little breaks from
stress that we now objective ly show makes a change in your brain,
the parts of your brain that are responsible for your judgment ,
change. If I can relieve your stress even for a little bit of time right
now, you ’ re mu ch more likely to make good sound decisions. Stress is
not the enemy but find time to try and break that cycle. It ’ ll make you
a much happier, more productive person and probably help you live
longer as well.

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We ’ ve been speaking today with Dr. Sanjay Gupt a, Multiple Emmy
award winning chief medical correspondent at CNN who has a n
important new series Chasing Life . You can find him most days on
CNN. You can follow him on Twitter at Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Dr. Gupta,
thank you so much for sh aring some time with us today, f or your gift s
as a physician , as a communicator and for joining us on Conversations
on Health Care . Thank you so much.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Oh, it ’ s my pleasure. I really enjoyed the conversation.

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Mark Masselli: A t Conversations on Health Car e we want our audience to be truly in
the know when it comes to the facts about health care reform and
policy. Lori Robertson is an award winning journalist and Managing
Editor of FactCheck.org , a n onpartisan, nonprofit consumer advocate
for voters that ai m to reduce the level of deception in U.S. Politics.
Lori, what have you got for us this week ?

Lori Robertson: During a speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee,
President Donald Trump, once again attacked Wind Power falsely
claiming that noise from turbines causes cancer. There is no evidence
that wind turbines cause cancer and in fact there ’ s no direct evidence
that the sound is harmful in any way to human health. The American
Cancer Society told us in the statement that it is “ unaware of any
credible evidence linking the noise from windmills to cancer. ” We also
searched the biomedical literature for any studies investigating a link
and couldn ’ t find any cancer or what scientists think of as
uncontrolled cell growth is at heart a genetic d isease because it starts
when a cell has or acquires a mutation in its DNA that al lows it to
grow unchecked. The mutations can be inherited come about
naturally as cells replicate or can come from environmental exposures
such as cigarette smoke, pollution or ultraviolet light. Sound waves,
however, aren ’ t thought to mutate DNA or to cause cancer in any
other way. In fact, some sound waves help diagnose cancer. The only
plausible way wind turbine might contribute to even a small amount
of cancer risk is by i ncreasing stress or disrupting sleep, but it hasn ’ t
yet been demonstrated that those problems do contribute to cancer
risk or that they are caused by turbine noise. Studies indicate that
people liv ing in near your turbines are rarely exposed to average
so u nd levels beyond 45 decibels s imilar to the home of a refrigerator.
Trump ’ s claim is baseless and that ’ s my fact check for this week. I a m
Lori Robertson, Managing Editor of factcheck.org.

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Margaret Flinter: FactCheck.org is committed to factual acc uracy from the country ’ s
major political players and is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy
Center at the University of Pennsylvania. If you have a fact that you ’ d

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like checked, e - mail us at www.chcradio.com , w e ’ ll have
FactCheck.org ’ s Lori Robertson check it out for you here on
Conversations on Health Care.

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Margaret Flinter: Each week Conversations highlights a bright idea about how to make
wellness a part of our communities and everyday lives. Louisvil le,
Kentucky has consistently been on a top 20 list of US cities you don ’ t
want to live in if you have a lung disorder surrounded by the nation ’ s
leading rubber manufacturing entities. This is a city that has grappled
with pollution. Several years ago, the city ’ s newly hired chief of
innovation made a decision to tackle the issue.

Ted : Maybe the risk is concentrated in certain places and if that were true,
maybe there would be something we could do about it.

Margaret Flinter: Through his work in public heal th research, Ted Smith had learned of
a tech enabled smart inhaler that when sync to a person ’ s phone
acted like a GPS for whenever that person needed to use their rescue
inhalers.

Ted : That kind of real time monitoring of asthma events, especially those
r escue inhaler attacks is really high value signal and you ’ re capturing it
in real time.

Margaret Flinter: Smith dubbed the Program Air Louisville and tracked 1 , 100
participants over the course of a year. He said they were able to chart
environmental trigge rs in any given area where an asthma attack
occurred. Realtime data on the conditions and the location, giving
them some great public health epidemiology data.

Ted : We ended up with a very high spatial resolution map of the burden of
a sthma in Louisville , Kentucky and then that led us to explore, you
know, where those little micro areas are that are problematic and
what we might be able to do about it.

Margaret Flinter: More importantly, the smart inhalers gave users a feedback loop of
information which all owed them to better manage their exposure to
known asthma triggers .

Ted : There is an immediate effect. People end up getting better control of
their respiratory disease.

Margaret Flinter: Reliance on emergency inhalers dropped 78% among participants. A
tec h enabled smart inhaler that gathers meaningful data, that informs
public health officials how they might reduce the burden of asthma
health costs while teaching asthma sufferers to better control their
disease and stay healthier. Now, that ’ s a bright idea .

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Mark Masselli: You ’ ve been listening to Conversations on Health Care. I ’ m Mark
Masselli.

Margaret Flinter: And I ’ m Margaret Flinter.

Mark Masselli: Peace and health.

Female : Conversations on Health Care is recorded at WESU at Wesleyan
University, streaming live at www.chcradio.com , iTunes, or wherever
you listen to podcasts. If you have comments, please e - mail us at
[email protected], or find us on Facebook or Twitter. We love
hearing from you. This show is brought to you by the Community
Health Center.

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