Inflammation, Aging, & How to Put Out the Fires Your Body Keeps Setting | David Furman, PhD

About this episode

Every year you get your blood drawn, and someone circles a number that supposedly tells you your inflammation level. Turns out that number is barely more accurate than a coin flip. But, knowing how chronically inflamed you are is critical in preventing disease and slowing the age clock. David Furman directs the Stanford 1000 Immunomes Project and runs the Bioinformatics and Data Science Core at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, where he's spent over fifteen years studying how inflammation drives the diseases most of us start worrying about in our forties and fifties: heart disease, dementia, diabetes, cancer. He's the researcher behind the first published clock that can predict frailty seven years before it shows up, and along the way he's worked with NASA and SpaceX. What you'll explore in this conversation: • Why the inflammation test your doctor already runs is barely more accurate than flipping a coin, and what David built to replace it • The everyday object sitting in a lot of living rooms right now that's silently raising one of the 7 key drivers of inflammatory aging • How chronic stress can disable the anti-inflammatory drugs meant to fight it • The one dail