Comedian Dr. Rhonda Patrick joins Joe on The Joe Rogan Experience this week to talk about anxiety and how it s actually good for you. Plus, how to get rid of your anxiety and get a good night's rest. Thanks to our sponsor, Stamps, we re saving you 80% off your first box of stamps! Use promo code JREe to save up to 80% on your first order of stamps, and you ll get up to $55 of free postage! This offer ends on December 31st, 2019. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to josephcrane.co/OurAdvertisers and use promo code JOEYRJREe at checkout to get 10% all year long off your entire order of $50 or more! Thanks again to Stamps for sponsoring this episode of the show. This episode is brought to you in part 1 of a two-part mini-series on anxiety and depression. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! We re listening to your favorite streaming platform so we can keep bringing you quality, high-quality episodes of comedy and stand-up comedy! Please rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast! Thank you so much for listening and share the show! Cheers, Joe and Joe. - Caitie. Caitie, Caitie and Joe - Christina Pazitsky Tom Segura Brian Redband Joe Rogans, Matt, Joe, Jr., Sarah, , Christina, etc., & Joe, Sr., etc, etc., etc. , etc., & so much love, Joe, etc. & so on and so much more! <3 & much more. Thanks for listening, Joe & Jen, etc, so much gratitude, love, Jeni, etc.. XOXO, JUICY, JACOBY, KEVIN PZ & JAMIE, JOBY. & KAREN PASHTO , JOSIAE AND SO MUCH MORE! - THE PODCASTING, JOE RYAN AND KELLY, RYANA PASCHEY JOSH MILLER
00:01:40.000To send out the deskquad.tv t-shirts that he sells.
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00:03:25.000That anxiety-like feeling that you feel before you're going to do something that you care about or that's kind of anxiety-provoking, for me, public speaking, I get it right before I'm going to give a talk or something or do a podcast in front of 500,000 people.
00:03:44.000So that dynorphin binding to the kappa opioid receptor, what it does is it upregulates the mu opioid receptor so that after you get that anxiety feeling, You have a better endorphin rush because you upregulate the mu opioid receptors, which bind to the endorphins,
00:04:00.000the feel-good ones, and you actually become sensitized to them.
00:04:03.000So there's a biological mechanism by which having that anxiety actually does you good.
00:04:09.000So it's kind of like a stress at first, but then later on you feel better and you're more relaxed.
00:04:17.000You know, that's interesting because one of the best feelings ever is after you compete.
00:04:22.000Like when you fight, one of the things that people get addicted to is you get addicted to the rush, for sure, the adrenaline rush, and you get addicted to just the challenge of competition being life magnified on such an incredible scale that everything else seems kind of pale in comparison.
00:04:40.000But the big addiction, I think, is the feeling that you get after you compete, especially if you win.
00:04:58.000I totally know what you're talking about, and there's a biological mechanism for that.
00:05:02.000And it's interesting because it's also the same mechanism that occurs when you are working out really hard.
00:05:08.000I mean, it's painful while you're doing it.
00:05:10.000But the more pain you experience, the better the rush.
00:05:13.000It's the endorphin high people talk about.
00:05:15.000It's actually that mechanism is anxiety-inducing, stress-inducing is an important factor in that because of this mechanism I talk about where you upregulate those receptors that bind to the endorphins and you're sensitizing them, so they become more sensitized to them.
00:05:29.000So heat does the same thing, heat stress.
00:05:33.000So exercise capsaicin, so eating spicy food.
00:05:36.000It's painful while you're eating it, but what happens is you're upregulating those mu-opioid receptors and you're sensitizing them to the endorphins, which is why you feel really good after eating spicy food.
00:06:51.000Okay, so hormesis, what it really refers to is having a little bit of stress, something that's a little toxic for you, something that's a little stressful on your body.
00:07:01.000I mean, exercise for sure is that heat is a little stressful.
00:07:04.000Things in some of the foods we eat, like the EGCGs and green tea or polyphenols in some of the fruits and also in red wine, these things are actually a little bit toxic to our body.
00:07:15.000And what happens is that this induces stress response mechanisms in our body.
00:07:48.000You were talking about that last time we were here about mycotoxins, that, in fact, mycotoxins in a small dose might induce that sort of a response.
00:08:05.000It makes sense that in a small dose, I mean obviously you don't want something that's like very toxic and going to kill your brain cells or anything like that, but things in small doses, and I was assuming that maybe mycotoxins could possibly have a little slight hormetic effect.
00:08:21.000Like I said, that was just me theorizing.
00:08:26.000Isn't it fascinating, though, that that is sort of the way, especially when it comes to exercise, that you need to experience this intense hardship in order to get this wonderful feeling of accomplishment, this endorphin rush.
00:09:20.000These things can, you know, you grow new brain cells, and so growing new brain cells has always been associated with learning and memory.
00:09:27.000It's like, oh, you grow new brain cells, and they've shown that that neurogenesis, in adults at least, is associated with new learning and new memory.
00:09:34.000But what they found recently, and I found this really interesting because it kind of changed the way I think of it, Is that when you grow those new brain cells, like when you're exercising, heat stress does the same thing, actually, so getting in the sauna.
00:09:47.000When you're exercising, you're heat stress in your body.
00:09:49.000I mean, your core body temperature is elevated.
00:09:53.000So what happens is you grow new brain cells, and these new brain cells have to make new connections with other neurons.
00:10:00.000And so what ends up happening is that other connections that you made with...
00:10:04.000So the connections you make between neurons, these synapses that you form...
00:10:07.000It's things that you can remember, right?
00:10:09.000I mean, you form these synapses, and that's like a piece of information remembered, or in some cases, it's an experience that you had that you remember.
00:10:17.000Well, you actually change those synapses, and some of them go away, so you kind of forget.
00:10:23.000To make room for a new neuron to make a new.
00:10:48.000Again, it's just, you know, it seems like a very important biological mechanism, this mean and yang, where it's like there's stress and then there's the response to the stress, which is good, and, you know, there's things like...
00:11:00.000You know, forgetting things, but so that you can learn new things.
00:12:32.000So any episodic memory that has a big rush of serotonin, what would cause that specifically?
00:12:41.000What would make a serotonin rush in a memory?
00:12:44.000Yeah, I think, I mean, there's a lot of different things.
00:12:47.000Serotonin release happens to a variety of different factors, but one could actually be very potent, something that's very potent that you're experiencing.
00:13:00.000Where it's like, it's not just your everyday stuff that you kind of block out, like it's just routine, but it's something just novel and...
00:13:08.000Would that be like the day you find out that Kennedy got shot or the day 9-11 happened or the day like extreme events?
00:13:18.000I think that would be the amygdala response.
00:13:20.000Yeah, where your amygdala gets activated.
00:13:23.000But I think for the serotonin, it's more of they've done a lot of studies where they've looked at kind of like depleting it and what happens.
00:13:32.000What happens when you don't have, when you can't make it?
00:13:35.000You just, your episodic memory is bad.
00:13:38.000Well, that's the thing with people who do MDMA, with people who party too much and do ecstasy, is the crush afterwards is their serotonin being depleted, right?
00:14:55.000So some things that happen when you release a lot of serotonin into your synapses is that your body, because it's too much, there's more than it's supposed to have, you'll start to downregulate other receptors and there's like a negative feedback.
00:15:11.000So what would happen then is the next day...
00:15:14.000You're not going to be as responsive to that serotonin.
00:15:17.000And that's something that's a big problem with some SSRI drugs and things like that, where, you know, you're basically preventing the serotonin from being re-metabolized, taken back up, and so it sits around in these synapse for a lot longer than it's supposed to, and they've shown that the consequence to that is you actually down-regulate serotonin receptors,
00:15:36.000which is what, you know, serotonin receptor responds to the serotonin that you're releasing, so if you can't respond to it, then, you know, what's the point?
00:15:44.000There's a lot of these feedback mechanisms that occur, and I don't even know all of them.
00:16:11.000In some animals exposed to MDMA, other studies have suggested the brain may recover from the damage.
00:16:16.000But a lot of people that do it, they take 5-HTP to try to juice up their serotonin.
00:16:22.000They take it while they're doing MDMA and then they take it afterwards.
00:16:26.000You have to be really careful when you're combining multiple drugs that are affecting serotonin, for example, or that pathway, because then you can end up getting something called, I think they call it serotonin syndrome, where it's like people that are taking SSRIs have to be really careful and not take a bunch of tryptophan,
00:16:42.000because then you can induce a toxicity that's pretty dangerous.
00:16:47.000And I forget what all the actual effects of serotonin syndrome are, but they're not good.
00:16:56.000That's an issue with people also that are taking 5-HTP. If they're on a serotonin SSRI and they take 5-HTP, you can get this serotonin syndrome.
00:17:07.000You know, the other thing about serotonin, I mean, we always think about it as being a brain, you know, neurochemical, right?
00:18:25.000So your gut has neurons in it as well, enteric neurons.
00:18:28.000That enzyme, that's the neuron one, there's some of that also in your gut, but mostly it's the other enzyme.
00:18:35.000So there's tryptophanhydroxylase 1, tryptophanhydroxylase 2. They both make serotonin.
00:18:38.000So serotonin made in your gut Actually causes GI inflammation and they've shown this in like mouse models because what happens is serotonin made in the gut activates T cells and the T cells have a receptor to it on their cell surface and when they respond to serotonin they proliferate and grow more.
00:18:59.000And so if you're making – if you have a bunch of serotonin in your gut, you can get GI inflammation.
00:19:04.000And, you know, this is – I think this has also been documented with people that take too much 5-HTP as well as people with colitis and such.
00:19:13.000They've done mouse models where they knock out that enzyme, tryptophan hydroxylase 1, that makes serotonin in the gut.
00:19:18.000And it completely ameliorates that – the inflammatory, like – Thank you.
00:19:52.000So what I found was that these two enzymes for tryptopin hydroxylase both have what's called a vitamin D response element in it, which is a telltale sequence that vitamin D, when vitamin D binds to a vitamin D receptor, it recognizes that and it can turn on a gene or it turns off a gene.
00:20:07.000And when it turns on, the gene does what it's supposed to.
00:20:11.000What I found is that the sequence itself of this vitamin D element can determine whether or not it's going to turn it on or off.
00:20:20.000And I found these two different enzymes of tryptophan hydroxylase had We're good to go.
00:20:45.000Not completely, but turns it down so that you're not making as much serotonin.
00:20:49.000You don't have as much GI inflammation.
00:20:50.000And then I related this to autism because I know I'm getting way out there, but it's pretty cool.
00:20:59.000Like right now, the most recent CDC report that came out said that one in 68 children have autism.
00:21:05.000I mean, it's been, it's risen like 600% since the 1970s.
00:21:09.000Like it's astronomical, like how much it's risen.
00:21:13.000So, they haven't identified a genetic cause.
00:21:17.000Over 70% of autism cases have not been linked to a genetic mutation.
00:21:22.000Which means, to me, something in the environment seems to be going on.
00:21:27.000Something that is, you know, interacting with possible genetic mechanisms that's causing, you know, this autism rise.
00:21:34.000And, you know, vitamin D is one thing that's been, people getting adequate vitamin D has been on the decrease the same time that autism rises, autism's been rising.
00:21:43.000And so I came up with this theory that Low vitamin D during pregnancy and also during neonate when you're a young child can lead to serotonin deficiency in the brain.
00:21:56.000And what happens is during the brain, during fetal brain development, serotonin is critical to guide neurons to where they're supposed to go, to make them proliferate.
00:22:09.000It's an important differentiation factor to help them make the kind of neurons they're supposed to make.
00:22:14.000It plays a very, very important role in regulating brain structure and morphology.
00:22:38.000And it converts something in your skin called 7-dehydrocholesterol into vitamin D3. And then this gets released into the bloodstream, goes to your liver, where then it's converted to 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is a major circulating form of vitamin D. And that's what you get measured when you get your vitamin D levels measured.
00:22:57.000And then it goes into your kidneys and gets activated to an active steroid hormone.
00:23:01.000And it's called 125-hydroxyvitamin D. So vitamin D gets converted into an active steroid hormone.
00:23:06.000And once it's converted into that active steroid hormone in your kidneys, what then it does is it binds to a vitamin D receptor in different tissues in your body, including your brain.
00:23:16.000And it does this thing where it turns on or turns off over a thousand different genes in your body.
00:23:23.000So it's regulating a lot of, you know, different processes.
00:23:29.000So I basically came up with this theory that, you know, women were not getting enough vitamin D and the child's brain was then becoming serotonin deficiency.
00:23:39.000It was changing the structure of the way the brain was developing.
00:23:41.000And They've seen now that autism actually seems to be occurring in utero.
00:23:46.000And they're finding now, they've been doing these studies where they're finding now there seems to be a good, strong environmental component.
00:23:51.000And they haven't figured out what it is.
00:23:53.000So I'm hoping that people will start...
00:23:55.000I'm not an autism researcher and I'm not a neuroscientist.
00:24:12.000Can protect you if you have low vitamin D, you can still make that serotonin from tryptophan because estrogen activates that same gene also.
00:24:21.000And then the whole gut inflammation thing, autistics have this and I think that they're They have high gut inflammation because they have too much serotonin going on in the gut.
00:26:51.000Stuffing and all the other stuff that goes along with it.
00:26:54.000The T-cells, I want to get back to that real quick because you were talking about the elevated T-cell count.
00:27:00.000Now, is that something that would help people that have HIV? Would a high dose of 5-HTP help people who have HIV that have low T-cell counts?
00:27:43.000No, it has an effect on peripheral blood T-cell counts.
00:27:46.000Yeah, that's why it's actually a pretty fascinating question I don't know the answer to, but certainly something that I think I'll probably look into after this.
00:27:54.000Yeah, that seems like we have a supplement that we sell that is, hold on, I'll grab it.
00:28:26.000And the idea would be when you came off of, you know, when people do MDMA, they call it rolling.
00:28:33.000And when you're off the MDMA, you know, you're like, oh, well, that was the nutritional boost that you needed to get your brain to produce more 5-HTP or to produce more serotonin, rather.
00:28:44.000Actually, what's really interesting as I look at this is that you have vitamin D3 in it.
00:28:49.000Which really surprises me because whoever made this connection for putting the vitamin D in with the L-tryptophan, I'm pretty impressed because that...
00:28:58.000Until my paper was published in February, no one had known that vitamin D can regulate.
00:29:06.000Whoever made that connection, that's interesting that you were able to figure out to put vitamin D with L-tryptophan because I haven't seen any supplement on the market that's done that.
00:29:16.000I don't know if whoever did this knew, but because tryptophan, you need vitamin D to convert tryptophan into serotonin.
00:29:27.000Well, my partner, Aubrey, who's also my good friend, he's very diligent when it comes to the research involved in any of these supplements.
00:29:35.000He's also been a freak about vitamins and nutrients his entire life.
00:29:39.000His mother's a maniac when it comes to that stuff.
00:29:41.000He learned a lot of it from her and then extensive research.
00:29:45.000We made sure that when we were putting something like that out, we wanted to make sure that we had all the bases covered.
00:29:50.000That's kind of cool that the vitamin D's in there.
00:29:54.000The pineal gland is a fascinating gland.
00:29:57.000The fact that that is what creates so many different elements that regulate mood.
00:30:05.000I don't know if you're familiar with this.
00:30:08.000There's always been this thing about dimethyltryptamine, which is the psychedelic drug that's produced by the brain.
00:30:13.000It's also produced by the liver and the lungs.
00:30:15.000They've found recently, like within the last year, evidence that it's produced by the pineal gland.
00:30:21.000It's always been like this big sort of, there was anecdotal evidence, but there was never real hard evidence until they actually showed that in live mice, the pineal gland is producing dimethyltryptamine.
00:30:43.000Well, it's producing it during different periods of stress, during REM sleep.
00:30:49.000But, you know, it's hard to get a brain...
00:30:52.000It's hard to get a mouse to sleep while you got a fucking big saw mark on its brain or an opening in its brain and you're testing its pineal gland.
00:31:00.000So the amount of evidence they have about humans, about when and where is kind of limited.
00:31:07.000But now they're making these correlating.
00:31:10.000They're making a correlation based on the mammal, based on the mice.
00:31:15.000We're trying to do more studies on human beings, more accurate studies, and trying to come up with more accurate ways of testing, especially during different stages.
00:31:25.000Because the hypothesis is, the theory is that during heavy REM sleep and during periods of extreme stress when your body believes that it's going to die.
00:31:36.000Like if you're under extreme physical trauma, like people that have had extreme physical trauma, you know, and they have that go to the light moment.
00:31:43.000The idea is that that's a dimethyltryptamine rush and that the reason why they have these intense afterlife experiences and I came back and it was amazing.
00:31:53.000I got to see my mother and I went to this place and God was there.
00:31:58.000You can get there if you take psychedelic drugs.
00:32:08.000And it's just a crazy psychedelic drug because your own brain makes it.
00:32:11.000So the dimethyltryptamine that you produce in the pineal gland crosses over the blood-brain barrier and starts affecting things in your brain?
00:32:19.000Is it binding to different receptors and stuff in your brain?
00:32:22.000That would be a question for someone far smarter than me.
00:33:13.000I mean, they tried to – like, okay, this is the – when you look at – Any of the studies that they've done on the human mind and the studies that they've done connecting various hormones and things like whether it's dimethyltryptamine or melatonin or tryptophan,
00:33:36.000I think it's probably pretty safe to say that we know a lot about that stuff, or they know a lot about that stuff, but they're not entirely certain about all the different effects that these regulating hormones have on the brain.
00:33:54.000I think they're probably the most ignorant about dimethyltryptamine because it's been thought of as a recreational drug for a long time.
00:34:04.000So people aren't studying as much, probably.
00:34:06.000Well, the only guy that I know that's had grants to study it and has been allowed to study it by the Food and Drug Administration or who regulates...
00:34:15.000I guess it would be the FDA that would regulate that.
00:34:40.000You could literally get Phalaris grass.
00:34:44.000You just go mow a lawn, a Phalaris grass lawn, take the bag of that shit, bring it to a lab somewhere, and you've got DMT, and you have a Schedule I drug.
00:35:08.000Pull that video of a jaguar tripping out on DMT. Jaguar's in the Amazon.
00:35:13.000Find these DMT rich plants and they chew them and eat them and have psychedelic experiences.
00:35:19.000And they have a different, apparently they have a different way of processing things in their stomachs than we do because they're primarily carnivores.
00:35:28.000So they don't have the same gut enzymes and things.
00:37:40.000I mean, it's making neurotransmitters.
00:37:43.000There's neurons down there doing stuff, and there's a connection between the brain and the gut as well.
00:37:48.000The whole thing about the human mind is so fascinating where someone like you who is just sort of putting together all these different things that you found in different books and you go, well, hey, look at this combination of things that's going on and the vitamin D and vitamin D depletion and then here we have this issue with autism and autism has to do with inflammation and the gut.
00:38:10.000I put together a lot of stuff and I explained the male dominance and all this and really my goal was Look, maybe I'm wrong on some of these things, but I'm definitely right about some of these things.
00:38:23.000Here, I'm interjecting it into the scientific world for all you people that actually do research on autism and do research on serotonin and all this, because I don't.
00:38:37.000And I think that that's – it's good to have theoretical papers like that sometimes where it's like you get someone who can make all these connections where there's tons of stuff buried in the literature.
00:39:57.000And if you want to pull it up, it's on foundmyfitness.com forward slash vitamin D, no, vitamin hyphen D. And it's a freaking awesome infographic.
00:41:13.000And then as you keep going, it shows you, oh, all the factors that regulate your vitamin D, like how sunscreen blocks UVB, so you can't make it with sunscreen.
00:41:22.000Melanin, which is an adaptation to prevent UVB rays from burning you, actually also blocks your ability to make vitamin D. And body fat regulates it.
00:41:32.000Body fat regulates the bioavailability of it, so it has to be released into the bloodstream to get converted into active hormone.
00:42:01.000So the solution is vitamin D supplement.
00:42:05.000This is just a really awesome way to put all this great information, show it with graphics, people like that, and it's easier for people to understand.
00:42:14.000And I go into what your level should be and all that, but I was really stoked because I've been wanting to do this for a really long time, and I have no artistic capabilities.
00:42:56.000The reason why I wanted to get to that is because I had emailed you about this supplement that I had read about called TA65. And I had read about it because my friend Bobby...
00:43:07.000He emailed me about it and his dad was taking it.
00:43:10.000That's bad Bobby for folks on the message board.
00:43:13.000B-A-A-D-B-O-B-B-Y. His dad was taking it and his dad started experiencing vision improvement.
00:43:27.000So I go on to Google and I Google TA65 and there's all these crazy claims and a lot of people are selling it and, you know, there's a lawsuit against it because there was a guy who was working for the company, a former executive,
00:43:42.000who is suing them because he says that it might have caused him to get cancer and I mean, the idea is what they're saying, this is the company that sells it.
00:43:56.000The correlation between cellular aging and telomere length is rooted in solid research.
00:44:01.000Telomeres become shorter every time a cell divides, and when they are lost, cells can no longer reproduce.
00:44:07.000The enzyme telomeres, telomerase, how do you say it?
00:44:24.000Telac functional telomerase showed brain degeneration and shrunken testes, but those effects were reversed when the enzyme was reactivated.
00:44:34.000Such findings have sparked a lot of hype and encouraged a cottage industry of companies that assess a person's biological age on the basis of their telomere length.
00:44:44.000But TA Sciences has taken the buzz further, and they sell a pill called TA65, which it says can shorten, can lengthen, excuse me, short telomeres.
00:45:08.000Every cell in your body has 46 chromosomes, with the exception of your gametes, which have 23. But these chromosomes have your DNA. They're wound up with these histone proteins, and that's where your DNA is.
00:45:21.000And at the end of these chromosomes are your telomeres.
00:45:23.000The problem is that these telomeres have a funny structure where their DNA, it's a repeat of TTAGGG and there's like this structural defect in the DNA of the telomere where there's a big overhang and like one of your strands of DNA is longer than the other one.
00:45:41.000And so when the cell divides and it's got to copy its entire genome with all those 46 chromosomes to make a new cell with all that same DNA, there's a little gap there at the end because it's like, oh my god, I don't have anything here.
00:45:55.000How do I make the new DNA? And so what happens is the next cell then has a little bit shorter telomere because there was that little gap that didn't get filled.
00:46:02.000And this is happening successfully over multiple generations year after year after year after year.
00:46:08.000Each time it gets a little shorter, each time it gets a little shorter.
00:46:10.000And that becomes a problem because these telomeres are actually protecting your DNA from damage, you know, oxidative damage from unwinding and also from your chromosomes when your cell divides.
00:46:23.000They protect your chromosomes from fusing together and getting all these funny abnormal translocations, which lead to cancer and other problems.
00:46:34.000And the problem is that most of our cells, with the exception of our stem cells and our lymphocytes, don't express this enzyme called telomerase, which is able to actually rebuild the telomeres.
00:46:48.000It's actually able to rebuild the end where That telomere little gap where we can't make it.
00:47:07.000And the answer for that is, well, if you express too much telomerase in all these other cells, what happens is you can make a cell immortal.
00:47:18.000And cancer cells have actually developed – they're so smart.
00:47:21.000Cancer cells are like the smartest thing ever.
00:47:24.000They've developed this capability to reactivate that enzyme.
00:47:50.000And at that point, if they reactivate this telomerase, if this is a damaged cell that already has mutations and stuff, you're like, boom, okay, we're going to keep you going now.
00:48:00.000So it's kind of paradoxical that the short telomere length is what actually can reactivate the telomerase.
00:49:06.000You have to genetically engineer them to not express that telomerase.
00:49:10.000And what happens is over multiple generations, it takes like three, three or four, when you get to generation four, you know, then you start to see progeria types of effects where now these mice, they're born.
00:49:23.000If it's the fourth generation of not having this enzyme, it takes like that long to actually get the telomeres to a really short level where it starts to have progeria effects and they start to prematurely age.
00:49:32.000Their tissues start to You know, break down and they have all these sorts of aging effects.
00:49:38.000And so what they've shown is they can reactivate telomerase at that point after four generations and it reverses those biological effects.
00:49:45.000So the tissues become younger, the stem cells, you know, are Would that have a possible benefit to children that have progeria?
00:50:09.000So, it depends on what type of progeria.
00:50:12.000There's certain ones, like there's Werner syndrome, which if you just Google Werner syndrome and image it, W-E-R-N-E-R, Werner.
00:50:23.000That's a disease that involves short telomeres, so basically you can't rebuild your telomeres, and it's excessive telomere shortening.
00:50:34.000And what happens is, yeah, if you click on the one with the two pictures of the women, by the time they reach puberty, like 15, no, not that one, there was, if you go back, there's, yeah, it's like Filipino woman there, I think.
00:51:41.000So the thing with reactivating telomerase is if you generally are healthy, you don't have a lot of, you know, your C-reactive protein is low, you don't have a lot of inflammation, a lot of damaged cells, then a lot of pre-cancer cells,
00:51:57.000your immune system is getting rid of them, you know, reactivating telomerase in a normal cell is not really a bad thing.
00:52:04.000It's not going to make it a cancer cell.
00:53:07.000So I don't have any red blood cells or platelets or any of those neutrophils.
00:53:11.000I don't want those or macrophages or things like that.
00:53:13.000And I take those peripheral blood mononuclear cells and I look at the amount of double-stranded breaks in the DNA. So I can actually measure that.
00:53:25.000And not only do I look at those double-stranded breaks in the DNA, so the double-stranded breaks, I think we talked about this a little bit last time, so just normal living.
00:53:42.000Your metabolism, your mitochondria are generating oxygen radicals, which, you know, It gets your DNA and you get enough of these oxygen radicals to cause a strand break.
00:53:53.000And then you get them in parallel, you have two strand breaks.
00:53:56.000UV radiation does the same thing, but let's just forget about all the outside stuff.
00:54:01.000Forget about carcinogens, UV, smoking, all that.
00:54:10.000And so your body has to repair that damage.
00:54:13.000And I talked about those enzymes that are magnesium-dependent and how magnesium is important for DNA repair enzymes.
00:54:19.00045% of the population doesn't have enough of that.
00:54:21.000Well, I'm looking at people that are obese and those people usually don't have a really good diet and they're most often magnesium deficient.
00:54:31.000Well, I don't want to say deficient because it's not like a clinical acute deficiency.
00:56:42.000So it has the capacity to activate telomerase.
00:56:48.000And there's two different papers that were pretty good.
00:56:51.000One paper was a clinical paper where they gave people varying doses of TA65. And I don't remember the exact doses, but they did a dose response.
00:57:00.000And they looked at a couple of things.
00:57:01.000A, they looked at the activation of that enzyme telomerase.
00:57:05.000And B, they looked at telomere length.
00:57:08.000So they started the trial baseline, measured telomere length, And telomerase activity.
00:57:25.000And not only did it increase telomerase activity in the very high doses in a subset of people, it actually increased the length of their telomere over baseline.
00:57:40.000Usually when you're doing a lot of other things that affect telomere length, vitamin D is one of them.
00:57:45.000The way vitamin D affects telomere length is totally different than the way TA65 does because vitamin D is preventing DNA damage, inflammation, things that accelerate telomere shortening.
00:57:55.000TA65 is literally rebuilding the end of your telomere.
00:58:00.000So it's possible to actually start and end up with a longer telomere as opposed to other nutritional factors that regulate just delaying the attrition of it.
00:58:23.000So then I went and read the other study, which was the mouse study.
00:58:29.000And actually the woman, the lead investigator, I'm very familiar with her work.
00:58:32.000I was really close to doing a postdoc in a telomere lab because I've been very interested in telomeres for quite some time.
00:58:39.000So I had been familiar with her papers, like her publications.
00:58:44.000And I was like, when I saw that she was, it was from her lab, I was like, oh, it's, I know, I'm familiar with her work, you know, she's pretty good, pretty thorough.
00:58:51.000And so her paper, what she did, was she took that same mouse model that I was talking about where they, over successive generations, they knock out that telomerase enzyme and they, over, you know, three or four or five generations, they start to get these mice that have really short telomeres that are aging,
00:59:08.000their tissues are aging quicker, and they gave those mice, like third or fourth generation mice, TA-65.
00:59:15.000And what they found was that giving those mice the TA65 was able to rejuvenate their tissue.
00:59:22.000The tissue started to look younger, very similar to telomerase reactivation, not as robust, which isn't surprising.
00:59:29.000I mean, you're talking about reactivating the entire enzyme versus something that's just able to activate it.
00:59:40.000But like I said, now if you were to take a mouse model, Knock out their telomerase enzyme, inoculate them with cancer cells, so give them cancer cells.
00:59:52.000And then given the TA65, they're probably going to do that experiment.
00:59:58.000I mean, that's the logical thing to do next, just to make sure, to really prove that it's pretty safe.
01:00:06.000So, bottom line is, I was impressed with TA65, actually surprisingly so.
01:00:13.000And, you know, personally, I think there's always that risk.
01:00:18.000It's like, well, if you have a lot of precancerous cells...
01:00:23.000Obviously, if it was a big issue, more people would be coming down with cancer.
01:00:27.000I wonder how many people are taking this stuff.
01:00:30.000I've only heard of a couple of people that I know that are taking it.
01:00:33.000I've read some folks online on a message board that I go to that say they started taking it, but I don't know enough of them.
01:00:39.000I don't know how many people are taking it either.
01:00:42.000That would be my one concern, though, is that having a bunch of precancerous cells, reactivating telomerase in those cells, then pushing them, giving them the fuel they need to then make more cancer cells.
01:01:28.000If you have cancer before taking it, I'm not saying this is going to happen.
01:01:33.000I'm saying theoretically, reactivating telomerase could push those cancer cells to full-blown, precancerous cells to full-blown cancer because now they're immortalizing them.
01:01:44.000And letting them survive and propagate and proliferate.
01:01:48.000Here's the question, and here's the big one.
01:01:51.000Is there a diet, a thing that you can do?
01:01:54.000The word is always, oh, you need to have, you know, cancer cells can't grow in an alkaline environment.
01:02:02.000But I've heard that that's horseshit, too.
01:02:04.000That this idea of alkalizing your blood and having a diet that makes your blood or your body alkaline-rich is horseshit.
01:02:12.000I'm totally not familiar with any of that.
01:02:58.000I mean, I think with the exception of the gut, where you're trying to actually make a little more...
01:03:03.000You want these different gut bacteria to be more acidic and make more acidic type of environment to get rid of the bad bacteria, which can't grow in that type of environment.
01:03:16.000But all the other stuff, I think, yeah, there's slight changes in pH and, I mean, you're talking about activating these things.
01:03:23.000The immune system is sensitive to this sort of stuff.
01:03:25.000I mean, It's like all of a sudden you start activating your neutrophils and, you know, they don't know why they're activated, but when they're activated, it's just like fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, and they're firing all kinds of crap, cytokines, which are making, you know, reactive nitrogen species, which are damaging your DNA and your lipids and your proteins.
01:03:42.000So it's like, you know, there's things like that going on.
01:03:49.000This critique of it was saying that foods don't influence the blood pH.
01:03:56.000And they were saying, this is, I'll just read what it says here on this guy's website.
01:04:00.000Proponents of the alkaline diet have put forth a few different theories about how acidic diet harms our health.
01:04:05.000The most ridiculous claim, more ridiculous claim, is that we can change the pH of our blood by changing the foods we eat and that the acidic blood causes disease while alkaline blood prevents it.
01:04:31.000The body tightly regulates the pH of our blood and extracellular fluid, and we cannot influence our blood pH by changing our diet with references.
01:04:41.000High doses of sodium bicarbonate can temporarily increase blood pH, but not without causing uncomfortable GI syndromes.
01:05:35.000I know that things in vitro, when you're looking at cancer, if you're talking about growing cancer cells in a dish and changing that environment is one thing, but I don't know.
01:06:46.000Well, I mean, obviously when you're eating sugar, you're inducing an insulin response, which then you take the sugar up into your cells, so that regulates the blood sugar levels.
01:06:54.000Unless you're type 2 diabetic or something that's not working, then you can't regulate your blood sugar levels normally, and that's not good.
01:07:02.000It's saying the exception to this, of course, is people with diabetes who don't have the proper insulin-regulating systems, but if you apply the theory that sugar can affect your insulin levels and feed cancer, diabetics with cancer would all be dying of their cancer.
01:07:45.000You know, the thing is that cancer cells do acquire this capability to become glycolytic, where they're, instead of using glucose to convert into pyruvate and go into the mitochondria and use this whole mitochondrial metabolism,
01:08:02.000oxidative phosphorylation, to generate energy, they become They use this whole pathway that's called glycolysis, which is a much shorter pathway, and that's how they're using it to generate their energy.
01:08:16.000So I think that probably plays a role in people coming up with all these different theories and things that manipulating the glucose and all that, what it can do.
01:08:26.000I know that I did a lot of work manipulating nutrients and cancer cells in grad school, and This is in vitro, first of all.
01:08:38.000If I do it in vitro, if I take a cancer cell and I take away their glucose, but they still have all these glutamine, they have these other amino acids, and they were fine.
01:08:50.000They'd grow slower, but they wouldn't die.
01:08:52.000If I took away their glutamine, they would die within like 24 hours.
01:08:56.000And it's, you know, for me to think about cancer cells, well, not only do they need energy, ATP, they need nitrogen source to make new nucleotides for new DNA and also new amino acids.
01:09:07.000They need, you know, molecules like to build lipids for lipid or, you know, lipid membrane.
01:09:11.000So there's a lot of, you know, just taking away the glucose is one thing, but there's a lot of other, you know, macromolecules that are really required for cancer proliferation that are also important.
01:09:25.000So, you know, taking some of the stuff that we're learning in science and immediately applying it, I think in some cases...
01:09:31.000It can be a little dangerous, you know, just because we don't exactly understand how all these mechanisms are working together.
01:09:38.000So I'm a little, you know, cautious about taking something that we're learning in science and immediately applying it to yourself, especially if you have cancer.
01:09:49.000I mean, if you think about, like, the last time I was here, I was talking about the folic acid, you know, and how that's a perfect, you know, example where, you know, folic acid is...
01:09:59.000It's great for you if you don't have cancer because you can build new DNA, but if you have cancer, taking a lot of it is not great for you because you build new DNA, and that's what cancer cells are doing when they're dividing.
01:10:09.000And there's another example of that with another micronutrient, one of the vitamin E's.
01:10:16.000Actually, this would be a transition into some of the Offit stuff because he was talking about that specifically.
01:10:24.000Oh, that doctor, the stuff that I sent you?
01:10:28.000So we definitely get into that, and I would love to in a moment.
01:10:32.000So just to let everybody know, it seems, if you're not interested in doing any of the research, it seems that almost everyone who's done any research on this alkaline diet thing says it's horseshit.
01:10:45.000But they do say that these foods that they're suggesting that you eat to keep an alkaline-rich diet are very healthy for you.
01:10:53.000So in that sense, it's good for you because it's going to provide your body with the nutrients that it needs.
01:10:59.000Especially if you're nutrient deficient, you're much more likely to be unhealthy.
01:11:01.000If you're much more likely to be unhealthy, your immune system is going to have a harder time dealing with any host of different diseases.
01:11:07.000But that this alkaline thing of your body, your body basically hovers between 7.35 and 7.45.
01:11:15.000Your stomach is very acidic with a pH of 3.5 or below, so it can break down food.
01:11:20.000And your urine changes depending on what you eat, and that's how your body keeps the level and your body steady.
01:11:26.000But this idea that you're going to regulate the alkaline of your body with food and that you're going to keep your body in an alkaline state Well, there's a lot of those sort of, like, myths going on.
01:11:39.000In fact, recently, I think I saw on your Twitter, you posted something, I don't know, a couple days ago about kale.
01:12:40.000Isothiocyanates For us, activate a variety of different genes that are involved in stress resistance, including tumor suppressor genes, which actually kill tumor cells.
01:12:55.000That if you give mice, like mice that have cancer, isothiocyanates, they will kill the cancer cells.
01:13:02.000And the whole isothiocyanates thing also competitively binds to the iodine transporter in the thyroid.
01:13:12.000So here comes this whole, oh my god, you can't eat kale or cruciferous.
01:13:18.000Because it will screw up your thyroid and cause hypothyroidism, right?
01:13:23.000So the thing is, though, is these isothiocinates, they...
01:13:27.000It appeared to compatibly bind to the same transporter that iodine does to get into the thyroid.
01:13:32.000Now, I was looking for the paper where they showed that, and it's like 1948, because what I wanted to see was a dose-dependent manner of giving them these isothiocyanates, or kale, and show how much of it competes with iodine and how much it doesn't.
01:13:46.000Well, I couldn't get access to that paper, but what I did find is that when you give these mice isothiocyanates, a lot of them, that kills cancer cells, but it doesn't cause any thyroid problems, which leads me to believe is that The isothiocyanide is probably very, very, very small degree of competitive inhibition of getting iodine into your thyroid,
01:14:05.000which if you aren't low in iodine, it wouldn't be a problem.
01:14:09.000So if it's just a very small amount of it competing with it to get iodine into the thyroid, it's not going to be a problem unless you're really, really deficient in iodine and then any small amount you need.
01:14:21.000In my opinion, and for me, I love getting isothiocyanates from these cruciferous.
01:14:29.000And by the way, the enzyme myrosinase that converts the glucosinolates into isothiocyanates is heat sensitive.
01:14:36.000So if you heat it, it will generally inactivate it, not completely, but it does inactivate it for the most part.
01:14:43.000And so you're not getting as many of those isothiocyanates, which is probably why people started to Oh, boil your kale.
01:14:49.000I personally want the isothiocyanates because the data is so strong showing that these things kill cancer cells.
01:14:57.000I mean, it's a well-known fact that these things...
01:15:00.000So this idea that raw kale or any of these raw...
01:16:05.000It kind of irks me because I'm like, I see all this stuff and it's like, no, don't not eat your raw kale because you want to get things like isothiocin.
01:16:15.000There's chemicals in these plants that are, yes, they're...
01:16:18.000They're slightly toxic, but they're inducing stress response mechanisms in our body that are good for us.
01:16:26.000They're fighting off all the bad stuff that we're making in our body every day.
01:16:31.000Pre-cancerous cells are always happening.
01:16:34.000Tumor suppressor genes are genes that when something's wrong, like you get that DNA damage I was talking about, something happens or a mutation happens in a cell.
01:16:57.000So all this stuff about poorly researched, bad conclusions...
01:17:04.000So, the thing is, when you look in the literature, if you're trying to look at the effects of isothiocinates on thyroid function, there's not a whole huge literature on it.
01:17:18.000Like I said, I was looking for the experiment to prove to me, I wanted to see how much competitive inhibition there was of isothiocinates.
01:17:37.000I wanted to see the data and I had to dig until I got to 1948 where they did this competitive binding assay.
01:17:45.000Then I found other papers talking about, oh, it's only in effect if you have low iodine, which made me think, well...
01:17:53.000I can't see the data, but what I think makes sense is that it's such a low competitive binding that it's not like if you eat this, you're going to not get iodine.
01:18:05.000It's that if you already are at that point where you don't have it, Any little bit you don't get makes a difference.
01:18:11.000And I know this because the mouse models, where they're not even looking at thyroid function, they're looking at the effects of isothiocinates on killing cancer cells.
01:18:19.000Those mice have no problems with becoming hypothyroid, and they're giving them large doses.
01:18:23.000So to me, I'm like, okay, well, that would have been a side effect they would have noticed.
01:18:28.000So this is just completely theoretical, and it doesn't work.
01:19:47.000And what people are saying on the internet from what I could see on this whole echo chamber thing that happens is that you need to boil your spinach, I guess, or in some people they're saying kale.
01:20:00.000You're going to inactivate this oxalic acid and now it's not going to bind up minerals like magnesium and calcium.
01:20:07.000And they're saying that this is a problem if you don't do this because then you're going to get kidney stones.
01:20:13.000So I was looking in the literature and I found a really cool experiment done by this Japanese group where they took spinach, raw spinach, they boiled it, they fried it, they frizzled it.
01:20:26.000So they did various different temperatures.
01:20:29.000And then you make it into a powder to give to these mice that are magnesium deficient.
01:20:33.000They put them on a magnesium deficient diet and they fed them either the raw spinach, the boiled, the frizzled, the fried.
01:20:39.000And they measured magnesium levels in their blood, in their bone, and they measured calcium levels in their blood and bone and also in their kidneys.
01:20:48.000And what they found was that there was no difference in the magnesium and calcium levels in the bone and also in the serum.
01:20:57.000Whether or not you boiled, raw, fried, whatever, frizzled.
01:21:26.000Causing kidney stones and things like that, and there was no difference between boiling or not.
01:21:30.000So if you're going to make the claim that having oxalic acid causes kidney stones and you need to boil it, well, maybe you need to say don't eat it.
01:22:25.000Raw kale, raw spinach, tomato, carrot, avocado, banana, almond milk, some berries, and protein powder as well.
01:22:33.000Anyways, I haven't convinced myself that eating raw spinach in my smoothie every day, and I put a nice amount of it.
01:22:40.000It's not pounds of it, but I haven't convinced myself that I'm doing any harm.
01:22:47.000And this is obviously not just based on the way your body reacts, but based on the research that you've done.
01:22:51.000This is based on the little bit of reading that I've done on those.
01:22:55.000The isothiocinates, I'm definitely convinced that, you know, the oxalic acid, you know, because it does bind minerals, it's chelator, you know, there may be some cases where kidney, you know, can accumulate in the kidney.
01:23:09.000But I think that from my reading, that's a really, really large dose.
01:24:13.000And it is pretty beneficial, the reaction to some of these toxins.
01:24:17.000So the point being that the incorrect correlation that people have made between the very low toxicity between these plants, kale, broccoli, whatever, and them being something that you should avoid consuming unless you boil them.
01:25:05.000And this patient with oxalate induced acute renal failure that was attributable to a consumption of oxalate rich fruit and vegetable juices obtained from juicing.
01:25:18.000We describe the case and also review the clinical presentation of 65 patients seen at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
01:25:25.000From 1985 through 2010 with renal failure and biopsy-proven renal calcium oxalate crystals.
01:25:32.000The cause of renal oxalosis was identified for all patients, a single cause for 36 patients and at least two causes for 29 patients.
01:25:44.000Three patients, including our index patient, had presumed diet-induced oxalate nephropathy.
01:25:54.000In the context of chronic kidney disease, identification of calcium oxalate crystals in a kidney biopsy should prompt an evaluation for causes of renal oxalosis.
01:26:44.000So to me, it sounds like, like I said, you know, there's always going to be cases where you can probably cause that to happen because it does...
01:27:36.000But, you know, it sounds to me like there can be cases where you're getting a really concentrated amount of this and you're doing it every day because there's people out there...
01:27:44.000That go extreme and no matter what they do, they go like to the extreme.
01:27:49.000And, you know, because you can, you know, the oxalic acid or the anion of it, the oxalate, can bind, does bind to these metal ions.
01:36:41.000And then you're going to look at some clinical endpoint like heart attack or mitochondrial infarction or something like that.
01:36:48.000And it's really a great design for that sort of thing because You know, when you start off at baseline, everyone in the trial has same levels of drug blah, blah, blah in their blood.
01:37:02.000You know, it's not something that we're, you know, eating on a daily basis.
01:37:06.000This is a pharmacological drug that's been designed with a certain mechanism of action to act on a certain thing to do a certain thing, right?
01:37:16.000You know, you can do that where you have this randomized controlled trial for a certain X amount of time and you look at the effect on heart attacks.
01:37:23.000And you don't have to measure anything, you know?
01:37:26.000The problem is, is that you can't apply that same thinking for nutrition research.
01:37:55.000You're going to have people that were severely deficient and whatever you gave them, they're still severely deficient.
01:38:01.000Or you're going to have people that have total adequate levels and you're giving them a vitamin they already have adequate levels of and you're trying to look at some clinical endpoint.
01:38:09.000You can't do nutrition research with The same mind frame, whereas we're looking at, we're going to do the same type of trial that we do for drugs.
01:38:21.000You have to think about the way you control and design a clinical trial.
01:38:24.000And when you're doing nutrition research, where you're looking at the effects of vitamins and minerals, first of all, there's two very different things going on.
01:38:32.000When you have a pharmacological drug, you're giving it to someone because they're already falling apart.
01:38:37.000They're already falling apart and you're trying to help them not fall apart as fast by giving them something that blocks X or Y or Z, like cholesterol synthesis for one, statins.
01:38:47.000With vitamins and minerals, these are things that are important for preventing you from falling apart.
01:38:54.000These are things that we require, these enzymes we need, cofactors for enzymes that we need to do like hundreds of different physiological functions, thousands of different physiological functions.
01:39:06.000We're talking about a different start point, right?
01:39:26.000And that's how we determine whether or not they're effective or their efficacy, basically.
01:39:33.000You have to measure people's vitamin and mineral levels.
01:39:35.000Let's say you're looking at vitamin D at baseline to see how deficient they are.
01:39:40.000For one, this is going to determine the dose that you give them.
01:39:42.000If someone's like 12 nanograms per milliliter and you give them 400 IUs a day, They've even shown in that annals of internal medicine paper that doesn't work.
01:39:52.000They're still going to be deficient at the end of the trial because 400 IUs a day raises your blood levels by like 5 nanograms per milliliter.
01:39:58.000So that's not the way to do nutrition research.
01:40:02.000The difference being that giving someone something that's completely alien to the body but could be beneficial like a drug or giving them something that is absolutely essential to the body that is necessary and is a part of normal everyday diet, that you can't look at the two of them the same way,
01:40:17.000that the drug may help people but the reality is you're introducing something That's completely alien to the person's system in order to benefit them, whereas with vitamins, you are just regulating or measuring what is essential to the human body and pretty much has been established that vitamin B,
01:40:37.000vitamin D, vitamin C, all these different things, various aspects of nutrition are essential to human health.
01:41:21.000You're taking vitamins and mineral supplements because you're not getting everything you need from your food and you want to get yourself up to an adequate level.
01:41:28.000And so what you need to do is start off.
01:41:30.000You need to measure people's levels at baseline.
01:41:32.000Start off with the population that's inadequate.
01:41:35.000Give them a vitamin and a mineral supplement to get them to an adequate level and then you can measure something.
01:41:40.000So it's really important, and I think I even talked about this last time, is quantifying these levels.
01:41:46.000Starting off with a population of people that has enough vitamin D, and you're trying to look at the effects of vitamin D on cancer incidence, well, guess what?
01:41:55.000They already have enough vitamin D. They're already in this adequate range.
01:41:58.000Or conversely, if they're really, really, really deficient, and you're looking at the effects of vitamin D on cancer incidence, and you give them a dose that they're still deficient, well, guess what?
01:42:09.000We don't know how vitamin D is affecting cancer from that one study because they're still deficient at the end of the trial.
01:42:15.000So the conclusion is, oh, my dose was inadequate to bring them to an adequate level of vitamin D. That should be the conclusion, not, oh, vitamin D doesn't affect cancer incidence, which is what people tend to do.
01:42:29.000You have to sell your story to get it published.
01:42:37.000It's like, well, you got to sell it somehow.
01:42:39.000So you're not going to sell it by saying, oh, well, didn't give them an adequate dose and they're still not, you know, up to adequate level.
01:42:45.000So that's That's really the one first thing about Offit and so many others, including the people that wrote this whole Enough is Enough editorial.
01:42:54.000They were looking at randomized control trials.
01:42:57.000Most of the time, they started off with people, didn't measure anything at all at start or throughout the follow-ups, and it's like, well...
01:43:05.000Well, the enough is enough was even worse because the enough is enough, they were studying, two of the things they were studying were heart attacks in people over 65 and dementia, delaying the onset of dementia in people who are over 65. Like, Jesus fucking Christ,
01:43:21.000you're talking about people who are dying.
01:43:54.000Vitamins and minerals are important to prevent disease.
01:43:57.000They are important to prevent disease.
01:43:59.000It's not like if you're already falling apart and you've already been deficient for years and years and years and years and years, guess what?
01:44:23.000They were looking at the effects of beta carotene or vitamin A in smokers.
01:44:27.000And the thing is, is that smokers are...
01:44:32.000A different breed because, I mean, they're taking in poison every day.
01:44:37.000And what happens is their lungs, they have a very oxidative environment.
01:44:40.000So when they take beta carotene, which is part of the vitamin A family, this beta carotene gets cleaved because they have oxidative stress and stuff going on.
01:44:49.000It gets cleaved into some of these cleavage products which actually damage DNA more.
01:45:15.000Well, if you're a smoker, it's a, you know, this is a certain context where, you know, there can be problems with taking high doses of beta carotene for that reason, where you've got all these oxidative, you know, stress things going on, and so they cleave the beta carotene to certain cleavage products that normal people don't get.
01:45:33.000You know, so context is very important, and this is something that so many people So often ignore, including off it.
01:45:41.000He basically states that it's clear and consistent that antioxidant supplements are bad for you and can give you cancer.
01:45:54.000The one example he says is the prostate cancer study.
01:45:58.000And the second example he says is because you need pro-oxidants around in your body It's kind of a big overgeneralization and it really shows me his lack of understanding,
01:46:15.000his lack of understanding of mechanism, either because it's too much work to look into it because it's a lot of work or just because he doesn't care.
01:46:43.000It's a cofactor for about 25 or so different proteins, one of them being glutathione peroxidase and synthase and all these different antioxidant genes.
01:46:55.000High selenium was correlated with low cancer incidence.
01:46:58.000So they thought that would play a role in prostate cancer.
01:47:01.000So they did this big trial where they got something like 30,000 men.
01:47:21.000And the present is either tocopherols or tocotrienols, trienols.
01:47:26.000The major forms are alpha and gamma tocopherol.
01:47:30.000And these two different forms of vitamin E, the alpha and gamma tocopherol, they're antioxidants, but they actually have separate functions.
01:47:38.000So the alpha tocopherol is a very potent antioxidant.
01:47:42.000So it's very good at getting reactive oxygen radicals that's generated by normal metabolism.
01:47:50.000These things damage your DNA, but they also damage your lipid-like bilayer of your cell membranes.
01:47:55.000What happens is vitamin E is fat-soluble, so it gets in those lipid bilayers and it prevents that oxygen radical from damaging it.
01:48:03.000And what happens is if you don't have that happening, your lipid membranes get stiffer and stiffer over time.
01:48:08.000This is part of aging where they become rigid and it's hard to transport metabolites into your cells.
01:48:13.000It's hard to transport proteins in and out.
01:48:49.000So these nitrogen species also do the same thing as oxygen species.
01:48:53.000They damage your DNA, they damage your lipid membranes, they damage proteins in your body.
01:48:57.000So having both alpha tocopherol and the gamma tocopherol, they're doing two independent functions, is important because they're making sure you're not getting those oxygen or nitrogen reactive species damaging crap in your body, basically.
01:49:11.000And that's important to prevent cancer, to prevent, you know, a lot of, you know, diseases of aging.
01:49:17.000So proteins that become oxidized or get nitrated aggregate and they can form, you know, things and plaques in your brain, they can cause neurodegenerative diseases.
01:49:25.000So it's important to have, you know, these antioxidant mechanisms in play to prevent that from happening as we age.
01:49:32.000So with that said, the alpha tocopherol, and you can see how complex this is, you know, the alpha tocopherol It's the major form in your tissues and in your bloodstream.
01:49:42.000The problem is that when you take really high levels of it, so the RDA is like 22.4 IUs.
01:49:48.000When you take really high, like 10 times that, like 400 IUs, what happens is it depletes your gamma levels.
01:49:57.000And this has been well known for over a decade.
01:50:00.000Multiple labs have shown this, including the lab I work in.
01:50:03.000They showed it many years ago before I even joined their lab.
01:50:06.000So taking high, high levels of alpha...
01:50:09.000It can be bad because it depletes the gamma, and the gamma has a separate function from the alpha.
01:50:57.000But what you can see if you look at the data is they measured their alpha and gamma levels at baseline.
01:51:03.000And then at five and a half years, what happened was those men taking 400 IUs depleted their gamma tocopherol by like 45% at the end of the follow-up, which is like crazy.
01:51:15.000And then the second follow-up, what it found is seven and a half years later, they found that, oh my goodness, the men taking 400 IUs of alpha-tocopherol had a 17% increased risk of prostate cancer.
01:51:29.000And then they went on to say, oh my goodness, 400 IUs of vitamin E a day can cause prostate cancer.
01:51:34.000However, the men taking the selenium with the vitamin E didn't get it.
01:51:39.000The men taking that alpha-tocopherol by itself but took ones that took the selenium with it didn't get it.
01:51:45.000So the selenium protected and they didn't know why.
01:51:47.000So another study then recently came out from the same, this is all the same big cohort of people, found that only the men that were severely deficient in selenium to start the trial that took the alpha-tocopherol We're the ones that had the increased cancer incidence.
01:54:24.000But it has a lot of magnesium in it and a lot of the mixed vitamin E, so it's a good source.
01:54:30.000So, vitamin E supplementation, in your opinion, you should probably just get it from diet to make sure that your levels are normal, healthy levels, and that it's the balance of the different types of vitamin E's?
01:55:02.000Yeah, and then I think that might be a good one.
01:55:05.000I can't recall off the top of my head, but they are pretty reliable in general.
01:55:09.000So in a sense, he oversimplified things, but there is a danger of taking too many vitamins when you're taking vitamins like a vitamin E that could potentially...
01:55:21.000If you're taking one form of it, that could potentially deplete your absorption of the other form.
01:55:27.000If you're taking a really, really high dose of the alpha tocopherol, vitamin E, there could be a potential danger in it depleting the gamma form.
01:55:36.000And how would anyone know whether they're taking alpha or gamma to just have a vitamin E thing?
01:55:41.000If you have a vitamin E container and you look on the back of it, it'll say alpha tocopherol.
01:56:19.000I mean, there's lots of complex things going on.
01:56:21.000And he said that it's clear and consistent that supplemental antioxidants cause cancer.
01:56:25.000Well, there's also other studies showing that in the case of prostate cancer, if you look at their blood levels of alpha, tocopherol, and gamma, those with the highest levels of alpha Gamma and Gamma have the least prostate cancer incidence.
01:56:41.000So there's inconsistencies in terms of what exactly is going on and we're still really trying to understand all the mechanisms at play.
01:56:49.000But he also made the overgeneralization that taking supplemental antioxidants is bad because you need pro-oxidants to kill cancer cells.
01:56:59.000And that was like the second part of his why supplemental antioxidants are bad.
01:57:08.000If you don't have enough of the alpha, gamma, tocopherols, then you're going to have increased DNA damage.
01:57:16.000You're going to have things that cause mutations.
01:57:21.000What happens is you're going to accumulate that over time and that's going to lead to cancer.
01:57:26.000So not having enough of this vitamin E is not good.
01:57:28.000Like I said, 60% of the population doesn't have enough.
01:57:31.000But the flip side is that if you already have cancer, then taking supplemental vitamin E, what happens is because it prevents that oxidation, then there's mechanisms in your body that induce cell death.
01:57:46.000When you have oxidation, when you have this damage to your DNA, tumor suppressor genes get activated and they kill the cell.
01:57:53.000So what they've shown is that in mice, if you take mice that already, if you give them cancer and you give them supplemental vitamin E, you can attenuate that whole pathway that activates the death of these cancer cells.
01:58:05.000But that's not the case if you take a mouse that doesn't have cancer and you give them vitamin E. It actually prevents the DNA damage.
01:58:10.000So this is a case where you're looking at context.
01:58:13.000So if someone that doesn't have cancer on their body, you want to make sure they're not causing DNA damage, which is happening every second, by making sure they have enough of these antioxidants.
01:58:26.000But on the flip side of that, if you already have cancer, taking a bunch of supplemental vitamin E is not a good thing because you can attenuate that.
01:58:53.000So it's just incredibly irresponsible to make a simplified version of these incredibly complex processes that are going on.
01:59:02.000In my opinion, it's a big, big overgeneralization and it's probably because diving deep into this stuff, it takes time and it's complex and you need to understand how some of these things are interacting and working.
01:59:17.000So it's much easier to be like, oh, you read the study, the conclusions, and oh, yep, that's it.
01:59:24.000That's the thing that people love, too.
01:59:25.000They love when someone can break it down in a clear sentence.
02:00:32.000So, you know, you have a certain percent of the population that's going overboard, and they probably don't know about the effects that's going on, you know, the depletion of their gamma and how that can be bad.
02:00:43.000So I think it is important for those people to realize that.
02:00:46.000But on the flip side, you know, someone like Offit, his solution to that is he wants to have high-dose vitamins, FDA regulated, so that people like him, who have an MD, can prescribe them.
02:00:59.000And So that's his solution to, you know, high dose vitamins.
02:01:04.000And yeah, it's, if you think about it, First of all, who's going to define what a high dose is?
02:01:11.000Is it the RDA? Because if you look at something like vitamin D, right now the RDA for vitamin D is like 600 IUs a day, and 70% of the population doesn't have enough vitamin D. Taking 600 IUs a day, if you're deficient, isn't going to get you to an adequate level.
02:01:29.000What is a good level of vitamin D? If 600 is not an accurate level, what's an accurate level?
02:01:35.000So, you know, in a couple of studies that I've read where people that were deficient in vitamin D took 4,000 IUs a day for a year, that was enough to get them up to 30 nanograms per milliliter.
02:02:28.000I think generally speaking, people that are supplementing between 2,000 and 4,000 IUs generally tend to have adequate levels if they're not severely, severely deficient to start with.
02:02:40.000If you're severely, severely deficient, it can take longer to get up to an adequate status.
02:02:45.000Trevor Burrus What are the other things that Offit said that you didn't think were accurate or were problematic?
02:02:52.000Yeah, so he also said that the data is clear and consistent that supplemental vitamins don't do anything.
02:03:00.000There's no positive benefit from them.
02:03:02.000That's what he said, no positive benefit.
02:03:04.000And like I said, to his credit, I haven't read his book, so maybe he goes into some specifics that I'm not aware of.
02:03:11.000However, to say that supplemental vitamins have no benefit is like, really?
02:03:17.000You know, I mean, they've even done randomized controlled trials showing that Omega-3 fatty acid supplementation lowers all-cause mortality.
02:03:30.000He actually refers to omega-3 fatty acids as an antioxidant, at least in that podcast he did.
02:04:16.000They did a questionnaire and found out How frequently women took multivitamins and how many times a day or how many days a week they took them.
02:04:25.000And what they found is that the ones that took vitamins on a daily basis had the longest telomeres, the measured telomere length.
02:04:34.000So we're talking about, you know, taking supplemental vitamins helps you fill some of those nutritional gaps that you're not getting from your diet.
02:04:43.000And the reality is that we're not getting a lot of those vitamins and minerals from our diet.
02:04:48.000We talked about this a little bit last time.
02:04:49.000Is it possible to eat a completely healthy diet and get everything you need, or do you need to supplement?
02:05:06.000For vitamin D, you'd have to really be living in a place that was exposed to the UVB during winter and summer and...
02:05:14.000And you'd have to be out in the sun for 15 minutes, you know, because getting it from fish, well, maybe fish has a good bit of it, but you'd have to eat fish every day.
02:05:23.000And also to get the omega-3s, you'd have to eat fish, like, every day.
02:05:27.000The omega-3 fatty acids are another big one.
02:05:29.000You'd have to eat quite a bit of fish, right?
02:05:36.000So I think it would be really difficult.
02:05:39.000Like I personally, I agree with Offit and that goofball Dunning in some instances where, you know, you should try to get all your micronutrients, much as you can from your diet.
02:06:16.000I also take a B-complex, even though most people don't have low levels of the B vitamins due to fortification and stuff now.
02:06:25.000I actually take a B-complex because it's really kind of interesting, but our lab has shown that, well, it's partly shown this, that as we age, I talked about how your lipid membranes get more rigid.
02:06:41.000So this includes your mitochondrial membranes.
02:06:45.000And over time, what happens is metabolites and stuff can't get transported as easy.
02:06:51.000And also what happens is these proteins, they bind cofactors.
02:06:55.000Like B vitamins are really important for a lot of proteins in the mitochondria that are necessary for metabolism to generate ATP. And these proteins require B vitamins.
02:07:04.000And a lot of them are embedded in the membrane.
02:07:06.000So when the membrane gets stiff, The protein binding constant changes to that B vitamin.
02:07:11.000And it's been shown that you can overcome that, meaning you actually can overcome that messing up that binding constant because it screws up the structure of the protein by increasing the level of B vitamins.
02:08:47.000833% of the US RDA. And the other big one, vitamin B6 is 1,250%, and vitamin B12, 2,083% of US RDA. That's interesting.
02:09:02.000I've always found that interesting when you look at some vitamins, you look at multivitamins, and you know what the RDA is, and you see their percentages fucking off the charts.
02:09:21.000In the case of the B vitamins, you know, like I said, most people aren't deficient in them, and they haven't really shown any toxicity in taking too much of these B vitamins, and they are water-soluble, so you end up peeing them a lot.
02:09:38.000I'm taking them just because I've seen some of this data where it shows that some of these proteins that are, when your lipid bilayer is kind of more rigid and gets screwed up over time, and also when your oxidation does that or eating rancid fat, things like that, changes some of the structure of those membrane proteins that require B vitamins.
02:09:57.000And like I said, I don't know how much more you need.
02:09:59.000It'd be cool to do a study to figure that out.
02:10:02.000But it's not a dangerous one because they're water-soluble.
02:10:05.000I haven't seen any data that shows it's a dangerous one, for one, because they are water-soluble and you pee them out.
02:10:10.000What are the fat-soluble ones that we should be careful about overdosing?
02:11:29.000And women may be able to do a little bit better of a conversion.
02:11:32.000I can't recall off the top of my head what their number was, but the point is that if your only source of omega-3 is flax or walnuts, you're not getting your DHA and EPA. You hear that, vegans?
02:11:46.000Yeah, the vegans, if you're a vegan, really, I just, microalgae oil, I mean the phytoplankton, or essentially are what making these omega-3s, the fish eat the phytoplankton, it gets concentrated in the fat.
02:12:30.000But if you're a vegetarian or vegan for health purposes and there's not like a philosophical component where you have a problem with eating these phytoplankton, then...
02:12:42.000Well, I mean, vegans shouldn't avoid...
02:12:45.000I mean, there's certain probiotics that are...
02:13:25.000And so you asked, can you take too much?
02:13:27.000I mean, for one, EPA, it's got a very potent anti-inflammatory effect, which is important for a variety of different mechanisms.
02:13:38.000Chronic inflammation over time can lead to a lot of age-related diseases.
02:13:42.000And DHA, as we, I think, even discussed last time, it's a really important component of your cell membranes, particularly in the brain, like 40% of it.
02:13:56.000So you have to look, okay, you got your fish oil container, and on the front it says, like, 1,000 milligrams, or mine says 2,120 or something like that.
02:14:05.000And then you turn around the back and you look at the breakdown.
02:14:09.000Okay, how much EPA? How much DHA? And then there's other fish oils mixed.
02:14:13.000So on my container, it says like 2,100 and something.
02:16:00.000But that's the major way that EPA does.
02:16:03.000And they've even shown that taking two grams of EPA a day...
02:16:08.000Can lower, can like reduce your C-reactive protein levels.
02:16:11.000Oh gosh, I don't remember the exact amount by how much it was, but it was pretty significant where it's like it really, you can measure it, lowers inflammation, like systemic inflammation.
02:16:21.000How many thousand milligrams are in a gram?
02:17:52.000So keeping them at four degree, well, keeping them in the fridge, sorry, lowers that oxidation process and also just Smelling it, you know, take a sniff of it and make sure it's not rancid smelling when you're taking it because that's the one thing with the omega-3 fatty acids.
02:18:10.000I mean, like I said, I take a lot of omega-3 fatty acids and I think they're really important, but I think it's important to be aware that they can go rancid and if they go rancid, consuming them can be not as good.
02:18:20.000Yeah, and when you leave them in the refrigerator, how long are they good for when you crack open that bottle?
02:18:25.000I've always given it a two-week window.
02:18:27.000If I don't drink it in two weeks, I throw it out.
02:18:30.000I don't use the bottle anymore, but the bottle is more open to oxygen, so that is one thing to be aware of with the bottle.
02:23:16.000That's what it's doing, in addition to what it's doing for your lipid membranes.
02:23:20.000This is so confusing after reading what you said, because it's saying some studies have shown that krill oil may be 48 times more potent than fish oil.
02:23:28.000It means you'll need far less of it than fish oil.
02:24:00.000And the reality is understanding mechanism, like when I'm saying mechanism, I'm talking about DHA can activate promoters in certain genes to increase the expression of mitochondrial metabolism genes.
02:25:33.000God, that really is the issue, isn't it?
02:25:36.000There's just so much to try to sift through, find out how to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.
02:25:44.000With the DHA and EPA, the really important thing, in my opinion, is getting it, getting enough of it, taking a good bit of DHA and EPA, because most people aren't getting any of it.
02:25:57.000And all this other stuff, I'm just not sure how significant it is.
02:26:04.000Maybe it does increase bioavailability a little bit.
02:26:07.000I don't know if it really makes a big difference.
02:26:11.000So for the folks that are getting their omega-3s just completely from a plant source, What can they do, if anything, to try to...
02:26:23.000I really think the microalgae oil is the best.
02:26:25.000I mean, I would recommend taking the fish oil, but I guess they won't do that.
02:26:30.000In some cases, vegetarians won't do that.
02:26:33.000So the microalgae oil is the next best thing, in my opinion.
02:26:39.000Like I said, I don't really know much about the krill oil, but I do know that DHA is very important, as is EPA, for a variety of different reasons.
02:26:49.000Well, I'm going to send you some of these studies on the krill oil, unless you get bored reading it and you can't do it.
02:27:03.000There's so many different supplements.
02:27:06.000Just going into all the contradictory arguments, the back and forth about all these different ones, it can be incredibly taxing.
02:27:14.000I mean, your website is a great resource for this.
02:27:17.000If people want to go to foundmyfitness.com and try to figure out what you've already sort of described and you've already explained, but how does a person start?
02:27:28.000A really good resource that I like is the Linus Pauling Institute.
02:27:34.000So if you go to Linus Pauling Institute, they are pretty good about writing a very...
02:27:40.000It's a scientific research institute that's associated with Oregon Health University or Oregon State Health University, something like that.
02:27:48.000But they do a very balanced review on a variety of different supplemental vitamins and minerals and essential fatty acids.
02:28:12.000Are there places where someone can go where they can say you're not sure what you need?
02:28:20.000We were talking about various levels of vitamins and getting them tested.
02:28:24.000Is there a standard place where you could go?
02:28:28.000Someone who lives in the middle of nowhere can find a place and get their blood tested.
02:28:33.000I think one of the companies that I am familiar with is Wellness FX. And I have no association with them other than I did a couple of guest blog posts for them.
02:28:44.000Where I, for free, wrote about vitamin D and magnesium.
02:28:48.000And they actually, I think they're pretty much in almost every state now, where you can go onto their website and they have a variety of different assays they'll do.
02:28:57.000Will they measure different vitamins and minerals?
02:29:34.000And obviously you can go to your physician, your primary health care provider, but they may not measure everything that you want, like omega-3.
02:29:41.000And they also might give you some of that, all you need to do is eat a balanced diet.
02:30:04.000But the nutrition thing, I think it's making its way into medicine, and that's part of the reason why people like Offit, who is an MD... These people, they've been trained very differently.
02:30:15.000They haven't been trained in understanding preventative medicine, understanding how these complex micronutrients are interacting with different proteins in our body and how that's important to prevent different diseases.
02:30:27.000So they're not thinking about it from the same frame of mind as people like me that are PhD researchers or nutritionists and there's a variety of other I guess naturopathic doctors maybe have more.
02:30:41.000There's a whole variety of different...
02:30:43.000Naturopathic gets lumped into homeopathic sometimes accidentally.
02:36:24.000Like skin cells that we slough off like every day and they can add four different transcription factors like four different genes that they can add by like a viral and add virus to them and they can reprogram them to become these pluripotent stem cells in your body meaning they can form any type of Wow.
02:37:15.000Because I've seen other studies that were not super recent, but what they did was they took like bone marrow cells, they did a bone marrow transplant and took, which obviously bone marrow forms are blood cells, from young mice and transplanted them to old mice and the mice lived longer.
02:37:32.000It's from March 6th, or May 6th, rather.
02:37:35.000They actually took an injection of young blood.
02:37:39.000So they took the blood of young mice, they injected it into old mice, and they had tremendous benefits, including regenerating different cells,
02:38:22.000I mean, this is stuff I'm really excited about now is this, you know, the stem cell research and reprogramming, you know, where the epigenetics is a really cool part where you can reprogram your cells to basically be younger.
02:38:37.000You know, they're finding now that, so epigenetics, I think we talked about this a bit last time, It refers to changes in gene expression.
02:38:46.000And, you know, things like methyl groups and acetylation groups will sit on top of your DNA and turn genes on and off.
02:38:51.000But now what they're finding is they're trying to look at patterns of methylation, like, in your DNA. So they've already solved the Human Genome Project where they know genes, and now they're trying to look at the methylome, the human methylome.
02:39:05.000And they've been able to, over the past, you know, few years, they've been able to identify that there's patterns of methylation in your genes I think?
02:39:57.000I'm on this kick, this epigenetics kick, where they've been able to now also look at the cancer cells.
02:40:06.000Like in a person, they'll take a tissue, a tumor sample, and then a tissue from the same person, another non-tumor tissue, and they'll look at the methylation pattern and they'll see that the cancer or the tumor tissue ages by like 40% based on the methylation pattern.
02:40:21.000Yeah, so it's like the cancer cells aging rapidly.
02:40:23.000So what's really interesting is now they're looking at what genes these methylation patterns are happening around, and they're finding it's like DNA repair, mitochondrial metabolism, antioxidant genes, like everything we've been talking about in this whole podcast, things that affect DNA damage and metabolism,
02:40:40.000Methylation patterns are happening clustered around these genes.
02:40:45.000And the cool thing about it, to me, is that if we're figuring this out, then we can figure out how to reprogram our cells to be young and extend lifespan.
02:40:53.000And I really think that we're getting close to doing this.
02:40:56.000So, I mean, if you think about, I'll give you an example, like stem cells.
02:41:00.000Stem cells also have methylation patterns that are very distinct to stem cells.
02:41:05.000And there are certain genes that are...
02:41:07.000When a gene is methylated, it's not being expressed.
02:41:10.000There are certain genes that are not expressed in stem cells for a reason because when they get expressed, they cause the cell to stop dividing.
02:41:17.000And you don't want your stem cell to stop dividing because stem cells are what's repopulating the tissue.
02:41:42.000You're basically losing your stem cell.
02:41:44.000And then, you know, more stem cells you lose, the worse off you are.
02:41:47.000You can't replenish your damaged tissue and all that.
02:41:50.000But what they found was that the thing that activates that thing that takes off the methyl group It's something called NF-kappa B, which is an inflammatory.
02:41:57.000That thing is activated by inflammation.
02:42:01.000Inflammation activates NF-kappa B, and then it activates this whole pathway of demethylase that take off methyl groups.
02:42:07.000So what I'm thinking is that inflammation is a chronic signal.
02:42:11.000It's a way that I've been able to link...
02:42:28.000They're taking methyl groups off of DNA. And now you're expressing genes that are usually not expressed when we're young in stem cells that stops the stem cell from dividing.
02:42:37.000So it's like a really cool link between, you know...
02:43:01.000I think that we're getting really close with...
02:43:04.000I mean, if you look at, like I said, with the stem cell research that we're doing now where we can even take renal epithelial cells that we excrete in our urine and make it into a pluripotent stem cell.
02:43:15.000We can make it become a cell in our liver.
02:43:19.000So I think with the advances we're making with that...
02:43:23.000In combination with this learning, figuring out the human epigenome, where we're looking at methylation patterns and figuring out what's happening with age, you know, I think we're going to make huge strides in the next decade.
02:43:36.000I mean, hopefully if research, if funding doesn't go down, you know, it's been going down the drain.
02:43:50.000But why is it with something like anti-aging?
02:43:52.000It would seem like, boy, if there's something to be made where there's money to be made, funding anti-aging research seems like, God, that's the way to go.
02:44:49.000You know, as opposed to someone that has this very creative idea, it's very risky.
02:44:54.000It's like, well, I'm not going to, you know, there's all these other people that are trying to compete for this money.
02:44:58.000Giving funding for something like that is...
02:45:00.000So they don't fund a lot of creative research, which unfortunately is what makes leaps in science.
02:45:07.000This mice thing is so fascinating because they show that after four weeks, stem cells in both the areas of the muscle and the brain got a boost of activity and were better able to produce neurons and muscle tissue.
02:45:20.000And then they also discovered that injecting the old mice, or rather the young mice with old blood was a huge setback.
02:45:31.000When conjoined to an older mouse, so bringing the old blood into the new mouse, the creation of new cells in the young mouse slowed, and old blood seemed to cause premature aging.
02:45:46.000But how long before people start fucking doing something gross, like taking a person, stealing their blood, introducing it to their own to stay young?
02:46:31.000Yeah, one of them was from Stanford, the Stanford group.
02:46:35.000Well, apparently they've been working on this for quite a while, but the results of the blood results have been pretty shocking to a lot of people.
02:46:46.000I think a lot of it comes down to, you know, like I said, there's these...
02:46:48.000If you look at the epigenome, the methylation patterns in these stem cells, these young stem cells, even young cells in general, they're very different from old ones.
02:46:59.000I mean, if you're looking at epigenetics, you're talking about regulating a whole host of genes, like hundreds of different genes.
02:47:05.000And so if these things are being differentially regulated when you're young versus old...
02:47:09.000Then taking someone's young blood and transplanting into the old transplantee would make sense because now you're basically taking all those...
02:47:23.000Patterns that we've been able to identify and gene expression things are now going back to young.
02:47:28.000So it's like now you're not expressing genes that are causing your stem cells to senesce.
02:47:33.000You're expressing more things that are involved in DNA repair and things like that.
02:47:38.000This is incredible what they were able to do.
02:48:48.000In the midst of news that engineered organs are being implanted into animals and people, researchers announced the creation of artificial blood for transplant.
02:49:43.000I mean, I know when I first got into the biological sciences, so I was a chemistry major in college, I did research using these nematode worms, C. elegans worms, that have like a 14 or 15 day lifespan.
02:49:58.000And they have a lot of the same genes that we have, but I could like inactivate one of their genes and literally double their lifespan.
02:50:05.000So they went from living like 14 or 15 days to like 30 days.
02:50:10.000Actually, you inactivate insulin growth factor, and what happens is that this growth factor then, usually when it's active, it keeps this FOXO gene,
02:50:26.000which is a transcription factor, outside of the nucleus and doesn't allow it to perform all the functions it usually performs, which is involved in a bunch of stress resistance, like hundreds and hundreds of genes.
02:50:37.000And so when you get rid of that IGF1 signaling in the worms, FOXO gets activated and all those genes involved in stress resistance get activated and the worms live twice as long.
02:50:46.000So it's like literally a genetic program in these worms that's controlling the way they age.
02:50:51.000So when I first, I remember that hit me, it was kind of like, holy crap.
02:50:59.000Like, being able to reprogram the way you age.
02:51:02.000It's just such an amazing time with all this stuff, because it seems like we're around at just the right time to catch this just incredible percolating of all these new studies and all these new things that are being developed.
02:51:17.000It's just such a strange time to try to pay attention to all of it and watch it all happen.
02:52:10.000Management of my body, of my hormones, management of my feelings, management of my energy levels, stress, relaxation techniques, stretching, yoga, all that different stuff.
02:55:10.000So I get out of the water and there's just ash falling, like, because my car was, I was in La Jolla Shores at the time, my car was in the parking lot.
02:55:16.000And there was just ash, like, all over the cars and parking lot.
02:55:19.000But it was like, that moment where I was sitting on my board and all the birds, like, came to the water.
02:55:25.000Like, I had this almost like, oh my god, it's a nuclear warfare.
02:55:29.000Something that, you know, that eerie moment, like, have you ever had one of those?
02:55:45.000Yeah, my neighborhood came really close two times to giant fires.
02:55:51.000I mean, we have fires that are so bad out here.
02:55:53.000One time, while we were doing it, and this was the time I got evacuated, I was filming Fear Factor, and I drove from Los Angeles to Tohono Ranch.
02:56:04.000Tohono Ranch is about an hour and a half outside of LA. And as I was driving near Simi Valley, which is about 40 minutes from here, Simi Valley is where the fire kicked in.
02:56:17.000And then from there, for the next 50 minutes of driving, there was no fire.
02:56:23.000Well, when I got to work, we started filming, we were doing the show, and then when we were done and we left, the fire had reached us.
02:56:32.000So the fire had reached, you know, an hour of driving.
02:56:36.000So we're talking about, you know, somewhere around 60 plus miles.
02:56:39.000And the entire right side of the road was like a Lord of the Rings movie.
02:56:44.000It was like I was expecting a demon to ride a flaming horse.
02:56:55.000The only thing that separated it was the highway, and flames were jumping the highway, and they had tried to keep the fire as far away from the roads and far away from structures, but it was so out of control that it traveled 50 miles plus in a few hours.
02:57:09.000I mean, in a place like this, like L.A. or San Diego, where there's a lot of dry brush, what kind of mechanisms do they have?
02:57:18.000I mean, they obviously know this can be a serious problem.
02:58:21.000I also have a Patreon campaign where I'm trying to do these podcasts and I have a couple of milestones where I'm trying to do two podcasts a month or four.
02:58:32.000So I'm asking people to pledge $0.25 a month to help me reach my milestones so that I can help give you the context that you need and the mechanisms for how Science and health and nutrition, all these things are interacting.
02:58:46.000That's about as reasonable as you could ever ask.