Welcome to the FAKTR Podcast where we talk about the stuff they didn't teach you in school. How to grow your practice, refine your clinical skills and get better results for your patients. We're here to help you navigate the real world challenges of being a healthcare provider. From delivering top notch patient care to running a business that doesn't run you into the ground. Whether you're fresh out of school or scaling your practice, we're diving into effective, cutting edge treatments to get patients better faster. We'll also talk about business strategies and tactics to help you work smarter and not harder, and the mindset shifts required to thrive as a top performer in your field so you can build a career you love without burning out. If you're ready to learn what works and what doesn't from leading experts, industry innovators, and respected clinicians across a wide range of specialties, you're in the right place, my friend. Let's dive in.

Hi there. Happy Friday. Welcome to the FAKTR Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Riddle. Thanks for tuning in. Today we're doing something a little different. We're taking a look back at a conversation we originally recorded in October of 2023 with Dr. Robert Silverman.

He's a leading voice in functional nutrition, immune health and gut health, and he's also the lead instructor for our functional nutrition certification program, which is now in its second year. At the time of this recording, the healthcare profession at large was still actively sorting through the long tail clinical impacts of COVID Many of you were seeing cases of long Covid symptoms that were unexplainable. You had patients dealing with inflammation, immune resilience, and you were learning more about the role of gut health in recovery. While some of these statistics and references in this conversation reflect that particular moment in time, the bigger ideas still matter today, maybe even more now than they did. In this first part of the conversation, Dr. Silverman lays the foundation for what healthspan really means, why chronic disease remains such a major challenge, and which systems and biomarkers deserve more attention if we want patients not just living longer, but living better. Whether you're listening as a healthcare provider today, a student, or someone simply interested in the connection between nutrition, inflammation, immunity and recovery, this is a conversation definitely worth revisiting. Let's dive into part one of our look back conversation with Dr.

Robert Silverman.

Let's move right in. Let's talk about the protocols for longevity optimizing health span and human performance. Longevity is without question the conversation piece, and I do believe that we're really going to still be talking about in 2025, because it really incorporates all that we do, or at least a lot of what we do in the idea of nutrition, functional nutrition, also functional medicine. I believe that the key to longevity is turning on the health switches. And I'll go into a little more detail with that. But without question, the master switch is having a robust and resilient immune system. People always ask the question, what is longevity? Can we have a definition? Well, we talk about lifespan versus health span. And what is truly the difference? Well, the difference between lifespan and healthspan, interestingly enough, is that lifespan is how long you live and health span is how long you live without a chronic disease.

Even longevity is based on chronic disease. I'm not real happy about that. Now most people have a chronic disease in America by the time that they're 65. Actually, almost 70% of Americans have a chronic disease by that point. Four out of 10Americans have two chronic diseases. So the World Health Organization put together some stats and the reason they did was Covid was driving a lot of conversation about age of death. And what they found out was that our generation, this generation right now, is the first generation where people's ages rescinded. So the American mantra, or one of the American mantras when it comes to health is always to leave the place in better shape for the generation after us because of what everybody did before us.