Women In Wellness: Dr Elizabeth Yurth of Boulder Longevity Institute On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks That Will Help Support People’s Journey Towards Better Wellbeing
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
Take Vitamin D! My last lifestyle tweak is an easy one. Take vitamin D! There are a handful of supplements that I think are critical to life, and vitamin D is up there at the top of the list. Vitamin D impacts so many organ systems, especially our immune system. We know that taking vitamin D upregulates our own response to be able to fight infections. It upregulates something called a peptide in our body that actually fights infections. You need to take enough vitamin D to maintain optimal levels. This depends on where your levels are (so testing this is important), but in general most people need around 5,000 to 10,000 IUs daily.
As a part of my series about the women in wellness, I had the pleasure of interviewin gElizabeth Yurth, Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer at Boulder Longevity Institute.
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth is the Co-Founder and Medical Director of Boulder Longevity Institute, where she has been providing Tomorrow’s Medicine Today to her clients since 2006. Dr. Yurth obtained her Medical Degree from the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and completed her residency at the University of California — Irvine. Along with her 25-plus years as a practicing orthopedist specializing in sports, spine, and regenerative medicine, Dr. Yurth is double-Board Certified in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and Anti-Aging/Regenerative Medicine. She has a Stanford-affiliated Fellowship in Sports and Spine Medicine, and a dual-Fellowship in Anti-Aging and Regenerative Medicine (FAARM) and Anti-Aging, Regenerative and Functional Medicine (FAARFM) through the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M).
Dr. Yurth has also completed a Fellowship in Human Potential and Epigenetic Medicine, is part of the first cohort of providers to receive the A4M National Peptide Certification, and is a faculty member and national lecturer for both A4M and the International Peptide Society(IPS). She is a member of IPS’s very first Peptide Mastermind Group, comprised of a small elite group of national peptide experts.
Dr. Yurth has completed over 500 hours of Continuing Medical Education (CME) training in the areas of Longevity, Epigenetics, Nutrition, Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy, Regenerative Peptide Treatments, and Regenerative Orthopedic Procedures. As an athlete herself who has dealt with numerous injuries, Dr. Yurth is thrilled to share with her clients all the innovative, life-changing treatments that are on the cutting-edge of medicine.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Our readers would love to “get to know you” better. Can you share your “backstory” with us?
I think I always wanted to be a doctor. It’s actually a bit odd, because I didn’t come from a family of doctors. My dad was a geologist and my mom was a teacher. In fact, my dad had an innate distrust of doctors — and perhaps he was right since his avoidance of doctors allowed him to live a long and healthy life until age 92, after being a bit worn down caring for my 96 year old mom as she progressed with dementia in the last few years of her life. As for why I went into orthopedics originally and then found my way to regenerative and functional medicine, I think it was largely because we grew up a very active family. Then when I was 21, I tore my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). I would go on to tear my ACL three more times before the age of 35. After the fourth time, I finally just stopped fixing it with surgery. I also had watched my dad suffer from knee problems his whole life. I vividly recall his knee locking, and I’d have to be the one to “pop it back into place.” By the time he passed away, his knee pain had turned an extremely fit and athletic man into somebody who could barely walk. Watching this demise terrified me.
I think it was a combination of watching my dad be his own doctor alongside not understanding why some people were more prone to injury that led me down the path I pursued in medicine. Honestly, I never remember not wanting to be a doctor.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? What were the main lessons or takeaways from that story?
Over time, I became increasingly frustrated with patients coming back again and again with the same pain in their back or joints. It became apparent that despite my best efforts, I was merely patching them together — never fully recovered — rather than truly fixing the problems causing their pain. They were well enough to go on their way, but it was only a matter of time before they came back into the office with the same joints or other joints hurting. Yes, people would “get better” to some extent, but they were never back to “good as new.” And the saddest part is that this was/is just the accepted reality — the norm for orthopedic medicine. As one of my old partners often said, “After 50, it’s just patch, patch, patch!” I knew we were missing something!
So, thirteen years into a successful and comfortable career, I came to the realization that I needed to fundamentally change the management of my patients, especially the ones coming into my office again and again or the young people with injuries that we would fix and then would see years later with early arthritis and pain. The problem couldn’t just be with their joints or they “should be better by now.” So, I started to look beyond their back, knee, or shoulder, and started to evaluate their health in general. If we could make the body healthy, could people heal completely and avoid the chronic decline we have come to expect with age?
Can you share a story about the biggest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
The path to becoming a doctor is a long and arduous one. A heavy pre-med course load throughout your undergrad, followed by excessive studying for the MCAT and completion of multiple in-depth applications. Then you fly across the country doing interviews to hopefully get into any medical school, let alone your top picks. You get into medical school and you have four years of coursework and clinicals. You spend time applying to residency programs, and after you graduate medical school, you go complete another four years of residency where you are working nights and assigned to do the things nobody else wants to do. You finish your residency and then if you choose, you go on to complete a Fellowship program in your specific discipline. The point of this is that most doctors spend at least 12 years learning how to practice medicine — then they get into the field and by the time they are a practicing doctor, a lot of what they learned is already outdated!
The biggest mistake I made in my career is not realizing sooner that everything I know may be wrong! As Dr. Strange says in one of the Marvel movies, “You need to forget everything you know!”
I won’t say that that is exactly true (obviously some of what I learned is still relevant), but what keeps medicine from moving forward is that oftentimes doctors invest so much time, energy and money into what they have learned that to think there may be a better way is really tough! Some of you may have had the experience where you spent hours and hours on a project and when you showed it to fresh eyes they said, “Hmm, it’s good but it would be better if….” It’s a hard pill to swallow when someone tells you something you invested so much into requires more work or effort. It’s easy to cast aside this feedback or new perspective (even if it’s right) and to keep with your plan.
Let’s jump to our main focus. When it comes to health and wellness, how is the work you are doing helping to make a bigger impact in the world?
Boulder Longevity Institute (BLI) was born out of the need to practice better medicine. Working as an orthopedist in a traditional healthcare practice, I saw how the limitations imposed by traditional models of care led to a fragmented and single-minded approach to treating patients that was neither fulfilling nor effective. It takes on average 17 years for the latest science and research showing safety and efficacy to make its way to clinical application — and by that time much of what was learned is already outdated. BLI believes in bridging that gap by offering our clients the most cutting-edge, science-backed treatment options in a guided, clinical environment.
Our goal at Boulder Longevity Institute is to teach people how to take control of their own health. Too many people believe that their doctor has the answer without any knowledge that often what their doctor is recommending is not necessarily the best option. We are teaching people to read their own labs, analyze data, learn the newest research and challenge the status quo! In our clinic, we call people clients rather than patients, because we believe that we are consultants working alongside people on their health journey. In our online learning arm, The Human Optimization Academy, we aim to share this knowledge and education with as broad an audience as possible. We are changing medicine by empowering people to be their own advocate and come prepared with science and research to ensure they are getting the best care options available.
Can you share your top five “lifestyle tweaks” that you believe will help support people’s journey towards better wellbeing? Please give an example or story for each.
Optimize your hormones
I don’t care what age you are, you’ve got to have optimal hormone health. We all think about hormones for the 50 plus year old people. And yet, hormones are impacting young women as well, we’re talking about your 20 year olds. So unless you get the hormones optimized, everything else doing is going to be a little more of a struggle. For instance, if you’re a young woman, and you’re taking birth control pills, you’re not going to have normal testosterone levels. So how is that gonna impact you? Well, you’re not going to be able to strength train as well. Even as a young person, you need to know what your hormones are, you also need to know how your body is dealing with those hormones. Because if you think about things like cancer, we blame breast cancer on hormones. But cancer is not due to hormones, it’s due to your metabolism. So how you’re metabolizing those hormones — which has to do with genetics, and environment, and lifestyle — that’s what’s going to predict whether those hormones are metabolizing into either bad things or good things. And this is all stuff that we can test and we could look for, but you have to have in your head that you can do it. So don’t start thinking about your hormones when you’re 50, start thinking about your hormones when you’re 20 — and this applies to both men and women.
Strength train (rather than long endurance)
The second thing is that when we look at exercise, everybody’s going to tell you exercise is important, but I’m not sure everybody knows what kind of exercise is important. I have these very long endurance athletes who think they’re very, very healthy. Really, long endurance athletics is not healthy. It may make you feel really good, it gives you that “runner’s high,” and I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever do it — there’s tons of benefits to being able to push yourself and overcome the mental challenges of say, running a 50 mile race. But I have a patient who is 40 years old and was an ultra marathoner, and her body was not healthy. She stopped and is now recovering and doing well. The best thing for exercise is strength training, and short burst exercises. You absolutely have to lift heavy things.Our muscles produce hormones called myokines, and these are critical to the rest of your health. You need to lift heavy things, (I don’t mean picking up your two pound weights), because you need to build muscle. Muscle is the currency for your life.
Live in line with your natural circadian rhythm (light/dark cycles)
You have to re-establish circadian balance. A balanced circadian rhythm is really important. This does not just mean sleeping during your eight hour window of sleep or whatever that might be. It means keeping a consistent light-dark cycle. Get up in the morning and be in direct sunlight — get sunlight in the first hour of morning to cue your brain that it’s daylight. Get outside or if you can’t get outside, get a “happy lamp” or high powered lamp that gives you the same wavelength as sunlight. Your body needs sunlight during the day. It is equally as important to have a period of darkness before you go to bed. You need to be in the dark at night. When you’re on your computer and you’re on your cell phone at night, then you get all of this “junk light” that screws up your circadian rhythm. We know that imbalances in circadian rhythm are critical to people getting sick and people getting diseases. So to summarize, get light during the day and dark at night…And if you can, get outside and get direct sunlight!
Time-Restricted Eating and Intermittent Fasting
Contrary to some diets that have faded in and out of popularity over time, we do not want to be eating every two hours. We used to tell people, “You’ve got to keep your body metabolically active, eat every two hours.” But now we know that if you go longer periods of time in a fasted state, your body becomes more healthy. That time period you’re not eating puts a little bit of stress on your body and that stress tells your cells to do a process called autophagy. Autophagy is a cleanup of the bad or senescent cells in your body. During that period of time when you’re restricting food, your body goes into cleanup mode and gets rid of the damaged cells — it gets rid of the bad stuff so you can “start fresh.” So try to keep an eating window to a smaller period of time. We like a 16 hour fast to an eight hour eating window, but there are many versions of time restricted eating and intermittent fasting, so find the schedule that works best for you.
Take Vitamin D!
My last lifestyle tweak is an easy one. Take vitamin D! There are a handful of supplements that I think are critical to life, and vitamin D is up there at the top of the list. Vitamin D impacts so many organ systems, especially our immune system. We know that taking vitamin D upregulates our own response to be able to fight infections. It upregulates something called a peptide in our body that actually fights infections. You need to take enough vitamin D to maintain optimal levels. This depends on where your levels are (so testing this is important), but in general most people need around 5,000 to 10,000 IUs daily.
If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of wellness to the most amount of people, what would that be?
YOU MUST STRENGTH TRAIN!! Myokines are critical to health. Muscle is the currency of life.
Myokines are released by muscle cells and are not only important for building muscle, but they play a critical role in helping us avoid disease and the decay of aging. A 2011 study published in the Journal of Experimental Biology analysed the role of myokine more specifically. The study found that, “myokines may be involved in mediating some of the health effects of regular exercise, in particular chronic diseases associated with low-grade inflammation and impaired metabolism.”
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?
Be an avid reader.
I wish someone had told me to read more from people who I think I have nothing in common with. Be an avid reader of everything — the things that have nothing to do with what you’re studying, what you’re learning, what your job is — read from every discipline. Read philosophy, read religion, read from people who have completely different opinions for you. My son is the most avid reader I know, and he is so smart because he has such a wide array of knowledge! All I did throughout most of my education and early career was focus on science. I read about the things I was studying or doing. I feel like when you do this, you become an uninteresting person. By reading everything, you’re going to be more interesting, and you can be better at what you do.
Injuries never really heal — unless you intervene early!
The second thing I wish somebody would have told me is that injuries actually never really heal. Now, we know that there’s ways that you can change that. For example, now in my field of regenerative medicine, I know that if you intervene right away with somebody who has an injury, especially if that person is young, you can introduce treatments that change the pattern of recovery. In turn, you can prevent that injury from going on to become chronic arthritis when they’re 50 years old. I tore my ACL 4 times, starting at a young age, and I wish someone had told me that when you hurt yourself, don’t just say “Oh, this is going to get better with surgery or time, etc.” Because unless you do the right things at the right time — and you start interventions right away — those early injuries will come back to haunt you.
Sleep really is as important as everyone tells you.
When you’re young, it is easier to prescribe to the adage, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” I spent a lot of years doing that. For a long time, I did not prioritize sleep, always saying I had too much to do or too much on my plate. But as I’ve learned more and done more research, I have come to learn at a cellular level how truly critical sleep is to living long and healthily. It doesn’t work to decide at 50 to start “catching up on sleep,” because those younger years you didn’t sleep still took a really big toll on your brain, on your body, and on your cells that you can’t make up for. You’ve got to really respect sleep.
Breakfast is NOT the most important meal of the day.
The fourth thing I wish someone would have told me is to not believe the cereal commercials and that breakfast actually isn’t the most important meal of the day. As a kid, I heard that all the time; however, really the science says that longer periods between eating is much more advantageous to your health. If you restrict your eating, especially in that 14–16 hour range, your cells go into a state where they kill off the bad stuff. This process called autophagy happens at the cellular level to help your body clean up cellular trash. So take the idea that eating first thing in the morning off your plate (unless you fasted through dinner), and remember breakfast is not the most important meal of the day.
Listen to your kids — they give the most honest advice.
The last thing I wish I had paid more attention to is the advice and feedback from my kids, especially when they were little. As you get older, the only people in your life that are really going to be brutally honest with you are your kids. Even your best friends will always be a little careful not to make you too upset, and your spouse has to be really careful… But your kids don’t care if you get too upset. They will tell you the hard, honest truth. For example, if I’m thinking about investing time/energy/money into a new project or a new activity, I can count on my kids to tell me if I’d actually be good at this new thing or if it would be a good use of my time. I’ve learned that your kids are really the only people who will ever be brutally honest with you, so listen to them because a lot of times they can be really helpful in helping you make important choices.
Sustainability, veganism, mental health and environmental changes are big topics at the moment. Which one of these causes is dearest to you, and why?
Mental Health: I have been touched by suicide several times now. The loss of my old partner at my orthopedic practice — one of my mentors when I first began practicing here in Colorado — was an amazing man. His loss hurt so deeply. SO many people are quietly suffering. He was so strong but he never reached out so we need to be sure we take care of each other.
What is the best way our readers can follow you online.
Follow me on social media @dryurth and @boulderlongevityinstitute. You can also join our online learning academy called the Human Optimization Academy by going to www.bli.academy and you can learn more about our clinical practice by going to www.boulderlongevity.com and submitting an online inquiry.
Thank you for these fantastic insights!
Women In Wellness: Dr Elizabeth Yurth of Boulder Longevity Institute On The Five Lifestyle Tweaks… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.