Cristina Cuomo: I’ve been such a fan for so long. We were just talking about your oldest client, Anne Cox Chambers, whose granddaughter is a friend of mine. Anne is 99 years old. She’s still doing yoga, and still as healthy as a horse. You’ve said we have to stay young on the interior to fix and maintain the exterior. We’re all looking for ways to stay young, right? How do you find those?
Dr. Oz Garcia: There are many paths to taking care of ourselves. When it comes specifically to our appearance we are extremely vain. I think that would be true across the animal kingdom—human beings display themselves in really quite remarkable ways. You’ve seen an evolution going on in terms of how people put their diets together, how they eat to look better and feel better, and it’s evolved now to a point where the vocabulary is changing. It used to be all natural—you were moved to vegetarianism, to being vegan, the vocabulary went that way. And now you have this term, which is biohacking. In large measure, it means being your own doctor.
CC: Why are you an advocate of biohacking?
OG: Being a citizen doctor means that you’re responsible for your own well-being, your own education. It is about taking an essential place in educating yourself about how to be the best you. Getting really well educated is the premise of One Ocean Beauty. Besides the fact that they produce really quite special products, they want the consumer educated on how they source the material.
CC: How can nutrition help skin health?
OG: In New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Miami…we’ve got populations of people who, unfortunately, are exposed to horrific dietary practices. It’s called the typical Western diet, defined by a huge volume of sugar consumption, saturated fats, and foods that are highly processed. If you’re eating animal food, it is somewhat toxic; you’re consuming what the animal consumed, and that becomes you. There’s a very interesting documentary called King Corn. It’s funny as hell. These two college kids had their DNA tested, and found that segments of their DNA were corn DNA. Corn is the largest crop sold in America. Genetically modified corn has already entered the human genome, just to give you an idea.
CC: There’s a lot of talk about collagen. As we age we lose the collagen in our skin. What are the benefits of collagen, and what is the most effective way to receive it?
OG: You may remember or not, your mom or your grandma would eat Knox gelatin, you can get that. It was meant to actually strengthen your nails, your hair, your skin. That’s actually collagen, but nonorganic. Not the type of collagen you would want to eat today. On Amazon, you can get different kinds of collagen powders by number. Collagen No. 2 is rendered from organic chicken bones. It makes you build beautiful collagen fibers, in terms of your skin.
CC: How do supplements help skin care?
OG: There’s no substitute for eating well and actually understanding how food works. This is chemistry: There’s lycopene in tomatoes, in broccoli, cauliflower and broccoli. How it is that these foods get into your body and interact with you will determine your energy, your level of intelligence, your digestive system, your immune response, the speed at which you’re aging, how you deal with stress, and so on. Nutrients actually introduce critical supplements, whether it’s a vitamin, a mineral, an essential fatty acid, a peptide, or collagen, like One Ocean Beauty.
CC: What are so-called dirty ingredients?
OG: The news just this week told us that by 2025 we’re going to lose about a million species on the planet. You know, we deal with a highly toxic environment every day. These things are used in cosmetics to make them last longer on the shelf, or appear a certain way; many people are very sensitive to the fragrances, and so on. One Ocean Beauty made it part of their manifesto to avoid that.
CC: One Ocean Beauty is offering a solution, but how do you avoid all chemicals in other products?
OG: As simple as it is, you really do have to read labels.
CC: What are your recommendations for clean living?
OG: I think it’s a lifestyle issue, how you go about being yourself. Start with cleaning up your sleep. Start with your workouts. We now know that if you walk one hour a week, you lower your chances of dying from any cause by about 40 percent. Many of us love walking the city. That makes a huge difference. I got into yoga a couple years ago. Get knowledgeable about how your food works.
CC: So sleep, fitness, good nutrition—those are the basic tenets of wellness. Anything else?
OG: Meditation. I love the new Sam Harris app, Waking Up. And the Muse device will teach you how to become a meditator fast.
CC: What do you do for personal wellness?
OG: A lot. There are people who come up all the time who I fall in love with, who have unique styles of taking care of themselves. I think Wim Hof is amazing. He’s called the Iceman; he’s the guy who ran the Arctic in shorts. So you can do ice-cold baths like Wim Hof; you can do cryotherapy, which gets you slimmer, works on the quality of the skin, does remarkable things for your brain. So that’s a biohack. Go to a sauna, do cryotherapy.
CC: What do you think of intermittent fasting? Is it another craze?
OG: I’ve been doing it for 40 years. I don’t think it’s a craze. What I do, schedule allowing, is try to skip meals, dinners. If I can’t do that, I just won’t eat lunch. I’ll go from a very early smoothie, maybe 5:30-6:00 in the morning, till 7 at night. During the day I’ll have water. I’ll do that twice a week. Many people think that supplements are going to put a strain on your body. You can use them through intermittent fasting and get full benefits.
CC: I’m interested in female supplements. What do you recommend for easing into that perimenopause phase?
OG: Black cohosh is terrific. It’s a plant that reduces a lot of the potential symptomatology that you get as estrogen levels drop. It’s got nutrients that actually doesn’t let you get fevers and feel very uncomfortable. I’d start with that.
CC: What’s so special about One Ocean Beauty supplements? Why are they so good for us?
OG: The collagen product they have is good for you because one, it’s collagen. It’s a really good supplement in terms of the quality of skin and hair [it gives you]. There are others, not in the line, that I would recommend: high-quality fish oil is remarkable for hormones, skin and hair. Gamma linolenic acid from vegetable oil is also remarkable for hormones. Hemp oil and flaxseed oil are terrific, too.
