Dhru Purohit Show - Having Low Levels of this Miracle Molecule Puts You At Risk of a Heart Attack. The Best and Worst Habits to Increase Nitric Oxide Production with Dr. Nathan Bryan

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Levels and Fatty15. When we think about long-term health and longevity, nitric oxide production probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. But today’s guest explains why this crucial molecule plays a key role in our bodies—and the tell-tale signs of low production that can ultimately contribute to chronic disease. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Dr. Nathan Bryan to explore why nitric oxide is the holy grail of molecules for long-term health—and the top lifestyle factors that can make or break its production. Dr. Bryan ranks the biggest disruptors of nitric oxide, including alcohol, poor sleep, a sedentary lifestyle, ultra-processed foods, and chronic stress, and dives into the latest research on how they impact your body. He also breaks down the critical role nitric oxide plays in disease prevention, from chronic illness to Alzheimer’s. If you’re looking for a masterclass on how to boost nitric oxide production and what habits you need to tweak, this episode is a must-listen. Dr. Nathan Bryan is a renowned biomedical researcher known for his groundbreaking work on nitric oxide (NO) biology. Dr. Bryan's research has significantly advanced our understanding of NO's critical roles in cardiovascular health, immune function, and neurobiology. Beyond academia, he advocates for public health, translating his research into practical solutions for improving human health. His new book is The Secret of Nitric Oxide.  In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Bryan dive into: How alcohol impacts nitric oxide production (00:31) Why nitric oxide is crucial for health (03:12) The dangers of nicotine and smoking on nitric oxide (04:36) The controversy around seed oils (10:17) How dangerous are ultra-processed foods (18:43) How nitric oxide is created and what chronic stress does to production (26:10) Sedentary lifestyle and its impact on health risks (33:39) Nightly desserts and glucose monitoring (42:10) Intermittent fasting and the importance of meal personalization (50:15) Antiseptic mouthwash, bad breath, and the microbiome (54:09) Nitric oxide benchmarks and what test strips measure (58:50) Lack of optimal sun exposure (01:11:57) Eating nitrate-rich foods and carnivore diet concerns (01:15:14) Hydration’s role in nitric oxide levels (01:21:27) Ibuprofen, inflammation, and nitric oxide (01:23:11) N101 products and final thoughts (01:29:22) Also mentioned in this episode: Dr. Nathan Bryan’s book - The Secret of Nitric Oxide https://www.n101nutrition.com/ Try This-Firefighter Study For more on Dr. Nathan, follow him on Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, YouTube, and his Website. This episode is brought to you by Levels and Fatty15. Right now, Levels is offering my listeners an additional 2 FREE months of the Levels annual Membership when you use my link, levels.link/DHRU. Make moves on your metabolic health with Levels today.  Fatty15 is offering an additional 15% off its 90-day subscription Starter Kit. Go to fatty15.com/dhru and use code DHRU to replenish your C15 levels for long-term health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Nathan Bryan, welcome back to the podcast. We have you here today to talk about the holy grail of health, nitric oxide, and the miracle molecule, as you like to call it. And specifically, we're going to start off today's episode by tier ranking the root causes of visceral fat, inflammation, and disease relating to poor nitric oxide production. Are you game for that? Let's do it. Okay.

So we're going to start off with a big one that my audience has questions on, which is alcohol. What's the relationship between alcohol and nitric oxide and where does it fall on our tier ranking system? Well, I think it's, you know, it's certainly moderate alcohol consumption has some cytoprotective, cardioprotective properties. And so what happens is when you have moderate alcohol consumption, and we're talking maybe one or two drinks every couple of days, right? What that does is it's called alcohol or ethanol preconditioning. And this has been studied for 30 or 40 years. And the observation was that people who drink moderate alcohol, if they have a heart attack, the heart is a little bit protected from injury from someone who hasn't consumed alcohol.

It's ethanol preconditioning. So it's upregulating an enzyme called out of high dehydrogenase, which is an enzyme that's responsible for metabolizing and prolonging nitric oxide activity. So there's a clear connection. However, the problem with overdoing alcohol consumption, you get portal hypertension, you get liver disease, and it destroys nitric oxide production, leads to inflammation, oxidative stress, and immune dysfunction. I think what we're finding is, and then the other thing, people ask me all the time, too, what about drinking alcohol and affecting the oral microbiome? Because we know alcohol-based mouthwash kill it.

But I tell people, at least when I drink a scotch, I'm not holding in my mouth for 30 or 60 seconds and swishing it around, right? So the alcohol in spirits and wine doesn't have a resident time long enough in the oral cavity to disrupt the microbiome. So if you had to give alcohol a grade, as it's related to, you. not just nitric oxide, but the whole conversation of visceral fat inflammation. And again, to contextualize it, you're talking about a moderate light level of drinking, right?

Where would you put it on our ranking here? All right? We have S is supreme. That means like something is really actually genuinely great for you. And then we have the classic grades, ABCDF. Where are we going to put alcohol on this tier rank system? You know, if we're talking about moderate consumption and not overcompetent, consumption, again, and this is not my opinion, it's based on published science.

But I think it's somewhere in the middle. It's probably a D. I'll give it a D. Can you read it a D? Yeah. Okay. It's not extremely beneficial. I mean, there are other ways that lead to cytoprotection, cardio protection that are probably more health promoting than alcohol consumption. But it's not, it's certainly not an F. Okay, we're going to come back to alcohol. I have a few more questions about alcohol, and I want to talk to you a little bit about why I chose to stop drinking. But we have a few of the things to cover. Before we get into it, just give us a lot of little reminder. You know, you have a new book out. And we've had you on the podcast before to talk about this, but your new book is called The Secret of Nitric Oxide. Remind our audience why Nitric Oxide is

truly one of the holy grails when it comes to our health. Well, we've known, we've learned over the past 40 years in this entire science of nitric oxide, over 200,000 scientific papers published in the scientific and medical literature. So Nitric Oxide controls important things like blood pressure, sexual function, cognitive function. It controls inflammation, oxidative stress, and immune dysfunction, the hallmarks of chronic disease. It's involved in insulin signaling and glucose uptake. So we know today that the functional loss of nitric oxide inside the human body is the earliest event in the onset progression of most, I think probably all age-related chronic disease. So if you're doing things that are disrupting nitric oxide production, that sets the stage for rapid

acceleration, onset and progression of chronic disease. If we can maintain optimal nitric oxide production, both the basic science and the clinical science tells us that we can prevent or delay onset of age-related disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, astro-dementia, Alzheimer's. Everything we know about the chronic disease revolves around poor blood flow, inflammation, oxidative stress, and immune dysfunction. Nitric oxide cracks off four. Incredible. All right. We have a few more to go, and we're going to come back to nitric oxide. Let's talk about smoking. In this day and age, still, there's a lot of people that are out there that are smoking.

And they don't think it's that bad for them. When it comes to the conversation of poor nitric oxide, inflammation, visceral fat, where would you tier rank smoking on our list over here? You know, smoking with all the data, all the warning signs, even on the cigarette packages themselves, yet people still smoke. And I get it. It's an addiction, right? They know it's bad for them, but they get pleasure out of it.

But smoking is absolute at the bottom. It's probably the worst thing you can do. Interestingly, though, you know, cigarette smoke, people who are smoking, we can detect nitric oxide gas coming off the burning cigarette. And we actually did, when I was in Boston, I believe we had a grant looking at the effects of nitric oxide and cigarette smoke on cardiovascular health. So I think what we figured out was there's so many toxic things in cigarette smoke that it certainly outweighs the small benefit you may get from the little bit of nitric oxide that's

filmed in cigarette smoke. What about nicotine? There's this resurgence now where people are talking about nicotine being protective to the body, maybe even a little bit cardio protective, and that the conversation, again, I have no idea about this, but you see a lot of people talking about it. They're even talking about nicotine being a neutropic. And now they're saying that the most important thing is where the nicotine sources from. Because the challenge with cigarettes is that you get the tar, you get the toxins, you get all other stuff that's there. But that for something, people, nicotine could act as sort of a vasodilator. Is that true? No. There are nicotinic receptors inside the body. So nicotine is a vasoconstrictor. Right. So when we get, when we'd have nicotine,

it constricts the blood vessels. But there are many other kind of extravascular effects of activating the nicotinic receptors and the effects of nicotine. But it makes people feel good. I mean, it's an addictive substance. That's why people smoke. That's why people dip snuff or chew tobacco. And now you've got the nicotine and the vapes that, you know, are rampant. But again, nicotine is one of these naturally occurring substances, but, and we have nicotinic receptors, just like we have endocannabinoid receptor. So our body's used to seeing these things and initiating some signaling aspect. But again, in the vapes, there's probably more toxic chemicals in there that outweigh the benefits of a little bit of nicotine. What I'm seeing a lot is people

using these nicotine little pouches. Yeah. And kind of keeping in their, their mouth. You're not a fan of that. Not a fan. No, personally, I wouldn't do it. I mean, anything that chronically constricts blood vessels to me is about chemist and physiologists and the biomedical sciences I stay away from. Let's talk about one of the most controversial topics of maybe the last five years, but especially right now, if I had to rank it, seed oils. Talk to us about seed oils, your thoughts on them.

Because from everything that I've seen out there, and we've had people on all sides of the spectrum that have been on this podcast, people will tell you. that universities like Harvard and Tufts and the nutrition schools at a lot of our elite institutions are saying that not only our seed oil is not bad for you, but they seem to have some sort of protective benefits that are out there. Then the other side, let's call it the Maha movement, the individuals that are out there that are saying, hey, these things have been used for industrial lubricants. These things are not. benign. And just because there are observational studies that are out there that show that seed oils

typically are associated with better health, that doesn't mean that aren't downsides related to it, like trans fats from overuse of seed oils. Where do you fall on the spectrum of seed oils? And how would you rank it? All right, I got a question for you. What if you could track your food, sleep, exercise, blood sugar, and key biomarkers all in one place? Well, I have good news for you. With the Levels app, this is not only possible. It's actually needed if we're going to fix our broken healthcare system. You want to hear something pretty shocking that I learned from the Levels founder, Josh Clemente, recently on this podcast,

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And with levels, you can see these effects in real time. time right now if you're interested in this the app that tracks it all in one place levels is offering my listeners two free months of their annual membership when you sign up through my link levels dot link slash dh r you i don't know how long this offer will last so if you've been thinking about learning more about your metabolic health and tracking all of your metrics in one place now is the time to get started. Just go to levels.link, levels dot link slash dhru to get two free months of their annual membership today. If we had a Z on the ranking, I would rank it as Z. You put it a Z. It's the absolute bottom. And again, for me, it's about what are the risk and what are the benefits? Yeah. And there's really no

benefit of CDOLs. What are the risk? I mean, we probably don't have enough time on the show to talk about the risk. But the same people who are saying the so-called experts and nutritionists and epidemiologists who tell us that, you know, seed oils provide some benefit of the same people who told us that cholesterol causes heart disease for the best 34 years. And it's absolutely false. Clestrol does not cause heart disease. Targeting cholesterol to mitigate or to prevent heart disease has failed. In fact, it's made people worse. Again, let's talk about what cell biology and effect of seed oil on human health. So every cell in the human body has a phospholipid bilayer, a cell membrane.

And the fluidity of that cell memory allows for intracellular signaling. So the cell senses an extracellular environment, and then it binds to receptors, and through this really it's a seven transmembrane receptor signaling, and then it activates intracellular signaling, turns on proteins, turns on certain genes. But if we lose that fluidity, if we don't have enough cholesterol in there, or if we have these, you know, polyunsaturated fatty acids, these synthetic oils, it completely disrupts. the fluidity completely disrupts intercellular signaling, and we develop cellular dysfunction. And what is that? Well, insulin institutes or causes an intracellular signaling, right? We get

insulin minuses insulin receptors, the inside of the cell gets the signal. Glute 4 goes to the membrane, brings in glucose, and we cleared from the circulation. But what happens when insulin doesn't transduce that signal to bring in glucose because of lack of cholesterol, because of lack of the fluidity and the signaling aspects of CEDs. seed oils, we develop insulin resistance and diabetes. And the worst, the half-life of these is about 600 days. And a half-life means that in 600 days, half of the seed oils that you had incorporated in your cell membranes is gone. And in the sciences, we need at least five half-lives to completely clear over 99% of that. So you need 10 years. If you consume seed oil, it takes 10 years

to remove that exposure from the incorporation of human cells. So they provide zero benefit, and it's not just an acute injury. This is a chronic thing. This is what leads to chronic disease. When you lose the activity of the functional unit of life, which is the cell, you get sick, you can't perform, and your health becomes compromise.

In your opinion, what's worse for you? Smoking or seed oils? Cot oils. You think seed oils is worse than smoking? Chronically. Chronically. Yeah, because everything we know about cell signaling and signal transduction from the outside sensing to inside regulation,

whether it's transcriptional, translational regulation of proteins and enzyme function, I mean, it all depends on the integrity of the cell membrane and how we can introduce that signal. Would there be any sort of test that someone could do or a research institution that if somebody had been having CDLs for, you know, the majority of their life and somebody hadn't been, what kind of biomarkers or things would they be looking at to, quantify the impact of one person being healthier than the other person. Do we have anything like that right now or we don't have anything like that? I don't think not to kind of convincingly tell us that this is a problem.

I mean, the standard of care is you look at a standard lipid panel, cholesterol, HDL, LDL, triglystriids. I mean, those really don't tell us anything. Total cholesterol, you know, the people who live the longest typically have cholesterol between 240 and 280 based on the framing hem data. triglycerides are inflammatory. We have to get our triglycerides less than 150. But if you do an advanced lipid panel and look at certain lipoprotein particles,

the size, the number, and the amount of oxidized particles, that tells us really how inflamed the cell is and how inflamed that person is. But you have to ask for that because if you just go to your primary care physician and they do a blood draw, they're just going to give you a standard lipid panel, which to me doesn't provide any, it certainly has no prognostic value. You've got to dig a little bit deeper. Yeah, you'd probably have to ask your practice. practitioner who do like a full Boston heart workup.

That's right. That'd be in there. Certainly these seedles are inflammatory. So you'll see inflammatory markers, whether it's C-reactive protein. These are kind of lead to lipid proxidation and inflammation within the cell membrane. So you may see ferretin go up. You may see uric acid go up, C-reactive protein. Those are kind of the acute phase inflammatory markers that you may see in people who are chronically consuming seedles.

And they'll probably have metabolic disease. I'll be honest. I personally avoid seed oils. I go to restaurants that, you know, largely are seed oil free. True food kitchen, sweet greens, parakeet, you know, there's a bunch of places around L.A. and around nationally. And I also, too, I'm going to eat out with friends sometimes. I'm going to go to other places. They're going to be using seed oils. I'm not going to freak out about it. I'll tell you that even being in this space as an interviewer, I'm not an expert by any means, but I get to listen to different people. I still am confused about the topic because I see individuals very convincingly talk about a lot of the bigger data that shows that seed oils are not inflammatory.

And then I hear from individuals like you on the podcast that are sharing your perspective. All I know is that I don't see any benefit from including seed oils my diet. I don't feel great when I have them regularly. That's a personal thing. And it's related to my throat, actually. I feel like my throat gets a little bit more inflamed. I'm not noticing it anywhere else. And lastly, what I share with people is that if you're confused about it, know this.

Generally speaking, seed oils, the primary way of people consuming them is not through cooking, even though the image that we have on here is about cooking chrysco oil. It's actually through ultra-process foods. So generally speaking, when you reduce your ultra-process foods, you are going to be reducing your seed oil intake. And to give credit to the other side that believes that seed oils are not harmful, what they're really talking about is that seed oils, when you replace them with saturated fat for a lot of people,

that's the whole sort of side that believes that saturated fat is not great for you when it goes above 10% of your diet. And I know you would have different feelings on that. I probably would have different feelings on that. So you can reduce your seed oil intake by reducing your ultra-process food intake. And then I think on the saturated fat side, it's contextual. I think there are people that do much better

on a higher saturated fat diet. And there's people like me that are not afraid of saturated fat that I actually don't do great when my saturated fat gets up there a lot. I'm a hyper reabsorber of cholesterol. My APOB tends to be really high, even when I'm just eating very healthy, just naturally, genetically, I reabsorb a lot. It's around like 180. And I do believe high APOB over the course of a lifetime is atherogenic.

Right. And I'm not trying to. to get my APOB a lot higher. When I would have a lot of coconut oil in my diet, when I'd have a lot of sort of saturated fat of my diet, my APOB was up in like the 250-280 range. And even though I've gotten my clearly scan on my heart, you know, the AI CCTV scan and my heart health was, you know, great,

like fantastic. I'm just not willing to bet the farm over the course of my life. And I know that it's individualized. So like all things, If you can find an incredible practitioner to help you navigate all this stuff, that's a great place to be. But at least in your thoughts, in your opinion, seed oil, if we had a Z, it would be on there. So we're going to put it as an F on our tearing system. No, look, you make a great point.

It's individualized. And if you eat something and you don't feel great afterwards, that's your body telling you, hey, back off. And you said, if people eat and they get flu-like symptoms. I mean, that would tell me, and I tell people all the time, keep a food diary. And if you're struggling with health issues, anything you put in and on your body, write it down. And then a pattern will start to develop. And then just kind of record how you feel. Then when you go back to that and you go, I felt horrible yesterday afternoon.

Then you go back and say, oh, well, 90 minutes before that, I had McDonald's, Big Mac and fries and 48 ounce Diet Coke. I mean, you should feel bad. Well, we just talked about this. But let's talk about it again. Tell us the role of ultra-processed foods and how they, impact our nitric oxide production. Well, look, processed foods, it's a broad category. So this is ultra-process, but I'll let you share the whole spectrum.

So process, even things like ground beef, ground turkey, ground chicken, it's processed. Way protein. Yeah, it's all processed. But the problem is, and there's this term you hear all the time, non-perishable food items, that's an oxymoron. If it's non-perishable, it's not food, right? Food is designed to have a certain shelf life. And so if you've got food that can set on the shelf and not spoil for weeks, months, years, that's not food.

And the reason it's not food is because it's ultra processed and there's preservatives in there and things that won't allow it to rot or spoil. And I think we've all seen this. People who bought, you know, a Big Mac and fries from McDonald's that's been sitting outside for 10, 12 years. And it still looks like a Big Mac or fries that you would go and get if you bought it immediately. Yeah, it hasn't broken down. It hasn't broken down. I mean, that is not food. And why is it not food?

Because it's ultra-processed. So I think, again, the ultra-processed foods provide very little nutrient value. So there's no benefit. And what's the risk? The risk is all those preservatives that you're consuming are now disrupting normal cell biology. So again, in the spectrum of risk-benefit, ultra-processed foods, again, I'd probably give it, you know, probably an E or an F. Okay. We don't have an E, but we have a D and a F.

A D. Okay. Let's do it. All right. So we're going to give ultra-process food a D on the system. So so far, we have a D for ultra-processed food. We have smoking as an F. And we also have C oils, which we talked about as an F.

In fact, if we could have it be a Z, you would have given it a Z. Awesome. Let's zoom out a little bit for a second. You know, I was really interested to see that in the new book, you talked about the role of nitric oxide when it comes to fat in the body. body and retaining fat. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? So nitric oxide affects many different things. It turns genes on and we've run, you know, I'm here this week at a nitric oxide scientific meeting. The top probably 140 scientists in the world come together every two years and we

discuss kind of the latest in nitric oxide chemistry, biology, and the clinical applications of that. But we're learning that nitric oxide can turn genes on and turn genes off by histone modification, by affecting DNA methylation. So it's really controlling the end. epigenetic regulation of gene expression. So there's many things that affect that. But here's what we know in terms of fat deposition. So it's the quality of the calories that we consume, and it's how we burn calories. And it's based on the TCA Krebs cycle, glycolysis, and things like that.

How do we mobilize fuel? So there's not a lot of data really on the direct effects of nitric oxide on fat metabolism. We know that through, you know, turning yellow fat to brown fat or white fat to brown fat, it's the yellow visceral fat that's inflammatory. The brown fat is more thermogenic and it's because it contains more mitochondria generating more energy. So we know that things like caloric restriction, intermittent fasting, the cold plunge, the contrast therapy, all that has been known to convert the yellow fat, the visceral fat into brown fat, more thermogenic and you basically consume more fat or burn more fat. Are you a fan of cold plunging? I'm not a fan of it. I do it. It's not very fun. But no, usually when I'm at home every day, I start my day in a sauna, 170 degrees for 30 minutes, and then I do a three-minute cold plunge at 37 degrees.

Let's talk about another one that's on this list, poor sleep. What's the role of sleep? And especially what's the role of poor, inconsistent, high-quality sleep when it comes to nitric oxide production? We know that nitric oxide can help the body restore and replace cells during sleep. And so, you know, aging is just wearing our cells out and the inability to repair and replace dysfunctional cells or senesate cells. And we repair and replace when we sleep. So if you're not getting good sleep, or if you have obstructed sleep apnea or you're hypoxic when you sleep, you can't produce nitric oxide, you can't mobilize stem cells and you don't repair and replace dysfunctional cells. So in terms of poor sleep on nitric oxide, there are many other things that are affecting

nitric oxide production than poor sleep. But poor sleep will certainly lead to a loss of nitric oxide production because if you're not fully oxygenated, if you're not mobilizing stem cells and repairing and placing cells that can work properly, then you can't make nitric oxide. And you're chronically inflamed, your stress and it's just a downward spiral. You've covered this before, but this is a good opportunity to remind people, how is nitric oxide actually created in the body? You know, after I turned 40, I started doing everything I could to understand what was going on with my heart and making sure that I do everything that I could to protect it as I get older.

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ingredient. Faddy 15 is seriously on a mission to replenish your C-15 levels and restore your body's long-term help. And through today's promo code, you can get an additional 15% off their 90-day subscription starter kit by going to Fatty15.com slash D-H-R-U. That's Fatty-F-A-T-T-Y-15.com slash Drew and use the code Drew at checkout. So today we know there's two ways that the human body makes it. One is through an enzyme called nitrochoxide synthase. This enzyme is first found in our endothelial cells, the cells that line all blood vessels throughout the body. And so we call that enos. It's found in the neurons. We call it in-noss. It's found in our immune cells. activated macrophage is, we call that inducible nitric oxide.

But really nitric oxide, the synthase, the enzyme is found in most cells. Because every cell, part of that insulin or signal transduction involves nitric oxide. So when that enzyme becomes dysfunctional and it becomes what we call uncoupled, then it loses its ability to convert arginine, l-arginine to nitric oxide. So that's number one. Number two is through the oral microbiome. So the foods we eat, and I'm sure we'll address that, that are enriched in, nitrate, the bacteria in and on the body, convert that into nitrite nitric oxide.

So that obviously is dependent upon our diet. It's dependent upon the oral microbiome and it's dependent upon stomach acid production. Any of those steps become compromised, then we lose the ability to make nitric oxide. So one can compensate for the other. If we have poor endothelial function, if we eat a certain diet, we support the microbiome, and we have stomach acid, you can kind of compensate, if you will, for the lack of endothelial function. but if you have endothel dysfunction, a poor diet, and that's what most Americans are faced with,

we see, you know, poor health, metabolic disease, hypertension, sexual dysfunction, cognition, decline, and eventually Alzheimer's. You mentioned the foods that support nitric oxide production and the lifestyle habits. We're going to talk about a couple, but we actually have a separate list that we're going to go through, 12 things that really, really supercharge and support nitric oxide production. So stay tuned. We're going to get to that in a second. So where would we put poor sleep on our list?

of, you know, A, B, C, D, I know it's not supreme, so, but how bad is poor sleep for you? So just, by way of clarification, we're ranking it based on overall health or overall nitric oxide production. You know, if A is good for you, B is, you know, obviously we already are putting, we're already calling it. These may be really bad for you, but it may be completely independent of nitric oxide production. Okay. So there may be a disconnect.

Okay, okay. Poor sleep is probably the worst thing. It would certainly be an F. But is it because it's disrupting nitric oxide production? If that were, then I would have to rank it probably midway, kind of halfway in between. But certainly, poor sleep is a driver of chronic disease. Okay, great. So we'll put that in the category of F because it's just not good for you overall.

That's right. And that's something that people obviously need to pay attention to. So we're just going to put it in terms of F, but you've added in the clarification of it's not necessarily the worst thing for nitric oxide production. But it's going to be one of the worst. worst things for your overall health. Right. Okay, so stress.

Let's talk about that and where you would put that on our list of things of where we would rank it. Yeah, so stress is one of these subjective things that you ask, right? But for stress, for me, there's a stress response, there's stress hormones, there's overproduction of corticol, there's overactivation of the sympathetic nervous system and dysautonomium. And so what we have to do is correct that stress response. And so, but this is, you know, this takes a.

mental kind of a complete change in perspective. You know, everybody's stress. We live in a stressful world. But stress doesn't solve anything. And I made a conscious decision many years ago that if I can't change it or control it, then I don't worry about it. And think about that. If you can't change the situation or control the situation, you shouldn't worry about it.

That's 99% of the things that people stress over it. Right? So what I do is, and it's so saying, it's not what happens to you that matters. It's how you respond to what happens to you that matters. So, you know, I live a pretty stress-free life. And it doesn't mean that there's not stressful things around you. People apply a lot of stress to me. I just don't stress over it because if I can't control it or change it, what good does it do?

It's not going to change a situation. No, but what we have to do is affect the, you know, there's something called adrenal fatigue. And the adrenal glands secrete these things like adrenaline, these stress hormones and cortisol. So when you have an elevation, chronic elevation of cortisol, I mean, that's a normal stress response. So we need that acutely. right, but when you're chronically stressed and then it completely shuts down and disturbs, you know, other hormones and the whole endocrine system. And it'll eventually shut down nitric oxide production because you're inflamed, you develop oxidative stress and you develop an immune dysfunction. So part of what I'm hearing you saying is that there's this chronic stress that so many people are wrapped up in.

It could be physical stress on the body from an ultra-processed diet. It could be not dealing with the toxic people in your life and putting up boundaries, you know, other examples of that. But stress in itself, like doing a cold plunge. That's a little bit stressful. So there's good stress. There's bad stress that's there. So stress isn't the worst thing for us.

We shouldn't fear it, but we should look at the areas that it's overruling our life and the root causes that are contributing to it. Yeah, we call that hormesis in terms of how the body adapts to because when we exercise, or when we go for a run or when we do a cold plunge, it's an acute stress on the body. So the body then transduces an adaptive response. So like resistance training, there's intermittent hypoxia when we contract our muscles. It's squeeze in on the blood supply, and then it's causing intermittent hypoxia. So the body responds with angiogenesis, we're creating more blood vessels. So now with that same resistance, we're not developing hypoxia, because now we revascularize that tissue.

we develop, you know, we build more protein, we build more muscle, and that's, you know, the benefits of weight training. For instance, when we run, you know, if you're doing a marathon and you're running for two to three hours, you're completely diverting blood flow away from the kidneys, the intestines, and some people can develop schemic organ disease. But the body adapts to that and go, oh, I don't want to run out of oxygen again. I need more mitochondria, turns on mitochondrial biogenesis. It improves the oxygenalization, so now that cell can make more energy with less oxygen.

And why is that? because it was confronted, it dealt with a stress and acute stress. And that's kind of like the cold plunge. When I go from the sauna 170 degrees to 37 degrees, it's flexing the blood vessels because when you're hot in the sauna, your blood vessels are maximally dilated, trying to rid the body of the heat so it doesn't overheat.

Then when you go to cold, the body's trying to preserve heat, so it constricts all the blood vessels. But for me, it's like weight training for your blood vessels because there's smooth muscle that surround all the blood vessels and it's working them out. But it's stressful. But the adaptive effects to that acute stress are undeniable. I would look at the system that we have, and I would take something like stress.

We got a guy with, you know, putting his hand on his head in front of a laptop. It probably could be like a B or a C in the sense that it depends. If it's a controlled stress, chronic stress will kill you. Chronic stress will kill you. But a control stress, stress that you choose is actually really helpful. So I'm going to throw it on here under C as a place to say that it depends. Either way. Because really good stress for you could be an A or maybe even an S in certain situations.

Absolutely. Okay. A sedentary lifestyle, specifically walking less than 4,000 steps today, which the CDC says is sedentary. How bad is that for you? Talk about both nitric oxide and anything that you know when it comes to keeping a healthy body composition. Well, we have to move. I mean, humans are designed to be mobile to move. And yet most Americans aren't.

We get in our car, we drive to work, we sit for six, eight, ten hours a day. Nobody gets exercise. And then the calories we consume through diet is stored as fat and become unhealthy. But we have to move. And kind of scientifically explaining this because exercise has been shown to stimulate nitric oxide production. And that's why exercise is medicine. You're giving your body activation and stimulation of nitric oxide. The other thing is kind of an electrical, you know, we're electrical beings, right?

we diagnose death through loss of electrical activity, EG or EKG. So we have to maintain electrical conductance and flow and current and maintain voltage across cell membranes. Muscles are what we call piezoelectric, meaning that when we contract muscles and we move muscle, they're muscle battery packs. So they're creating voltage. And through the fascia, through these meridians,

those muscle battery packs supply different organs with certain voltage. So you'll find, and one study, conductors who do this, you know, orchestra conductors, they have some of the lowest rates of heart attack in cardiovascular disease than any other profession. And why is that? Because they're doing this and this is fueling the muscle battery pack that supplies the heart. So that heart never runs out of voltage, never conductance. And if you do that all over, we have to contract our muscles and get those battery packs. So when we lose voltage, when we lose this transmembrane potential, which is about minus 25 millivolts, and if you convert that to pH, it's a pH of 7.4, right, which is normal physiological pH.

When we lose that transmembrane potential and we lose the ability for that cell to maintain some sort of negative inside with respect to outside, we develop dysfunction. And when the inside of the cell becomes positive with respect to the outside, we call that cancer. And that's, you know, the Warburg effect. So cancer only grows in a low oxygen, low pH, low voltage environment. And so when we move, when we exercise and we eat food and we ground and get electrons and we maintain some voltage and electron flow, then we become a little bit protective from not a little bit. We come a lot protective from chronic disease. So would you say that across the entire spectrum of things, one of the worst things that you could do when it comes to especially nitric oxide if you care about it is to be sedentary?

Be sedentary and eat an ultra-processed food diet, which unfortunately is most Americans. That's most people that are out there. That's most people, yeah. And again, what are your thoughts on sedentary being defined as around less than 4,000 to 3,000 steps a day? Do you consider that to be sedentary? Look, there has to be benchmarks, right? You have to have something, kind of a milestone. I think, sir, it's not difficult at all to walk 3,000 steps a day.

So if you're not getting in 3,000, then yeah, I think that's probably, if you're just walking from, you know, the couch to the toilet, to the kitchen, to the garage, from the parking lot to the, you should easily. be able to get 3,000 steps. And if you're not doing that, then I think that would certainly be sedentary. And I think that, you know, if you have an iPhone, if you have any phone now, they all have pedometers. And again, there's this whole history that 10,000 steps a day was a whole marketing campaign that came from a Japanese pedometer company. But still, there's some truth to it as a benchmark that if we are not getting these amount of steps, it's just an indication that we're probably what in our modern day and age we're sitting a lot that's right you're watching tv a lot you're not moving you're not really activating your lymphatic system you're not pushing your heart

enough no that's right the lymphatics the lymphatic system is dependent upon muscle contraction right especially in the lower extremities if you're not moving them you're going to get lymphodeme you're going to get pooling and you're going to get neuropathy and you know vascular disease peripheral vascular disease so that's just one aspect but you have to have a target you can't set goals if you don't have a target. So yeah, some of these numbers are random. Is it 3,000? Is it 10,000? It doesn't matter, but you have to have a target. You can never hit your target, hit your goal if you don't have a target. So I think it has some meaning, but what is the right number? I don't know. We've done a few episodes on this with Mike Mutzel and a few other people. And generally they say

that a good place to start is that wherever you are if you try to get an extra 3,000 steps. that's a good place to start off with. So if you're at 3,000, just try to get an additional 3,000. Shoot for 6,000, right? If you're at 4,000, try to get an additional 3,000, shoot for 7,000. And track it using your phone. That's what I was mentioning before. You don't have to get any sort of fancy device.

You can keep your phone on you, put it on airplane mode, put in your back pocket, whatever it is. If you have an Apple Watch, obviously that's tracking it as well too. And actually see what you're getting in. A lot of people think that they're moving around throughout the day. and once they actually start tracking, they're like, oh, shoot, I'm not getting in that many steps. No, but it's consistency. You can't do it one day and go, oh, I did that, and then never do it again.

You know, for me, I travel every week. And so sometimes I would, you know, when I arrive at a new hotel and a new city or new country, always go to the gym, right? No matter what time of day it is because I've been sedentary in an airplane for sometimes 15, 16, 18 hours. And then when I figured out, you know, that's not always possible. So now what I do, and I've been doing this for probably six months, when I wake up, usually within five or ten minutes, I do 100 push-ups and 100 squats every morning. And that takes me less than five minutes. And I don't have to go to the gym anymore. And then I did that, and at first it was pretty difficult.

But now I can get it in and no problem. So what I did, I'm not content with that. Now I'm doing 200. And I'll do that. When that becomes too easy, then I'll up it. But that, for me, I mean, it's, I do an 18 hour fast every day. I wake up every morning, do 100 pushups now. It's 200 pushups, 200 squats.

And it's just gets your day going. And it's mobilizing the lymph. It's removing a lot of the inflammation. The bags under the eyes because everything's pumping. Blood's pumping. Lymph is flowing. And you just feel better. There's no better way to start your day.

We wrote a newsletter. We'll put it on the screen over here and LinkedIn and the show notes. But it was about one benchmark for, I believe that it was done on men, but one benchmark to see how well you're aging and they studied a group of firefighters and they found that like, can you work your way up to getting 40 pushups, right? And that's a great sort of proxy for grip strength as well as cardiovascular strength. And, you know, that's a good target for people to shoot for, right? You know, I don't know if they did the same test with women. there's plenty of other studies that will be applied to both individuals,

but we can link to that in show notes below. No, just one short comment on firefighters. You know, firefighters, in general population, have about the same risk of heart attack as any other profession. However, when they go into a burning building, their risk of heart attack within 24 or 48 hours after entering a burning building goes up tenfold. That's crazy.

Because they're breathing in carbon monoxide and all these toxins and flutons. The particles 2.5, PM2.5. And so they're at risk. And so we're, you know, certainly during the fires here in L.A. we donated a lot of product to them to protect them. I mean, they're protecting the community and going in when, you know, doing their job and it's putting them at risk. Yeah. Shout out to all the firefighters that, you know, kept as crazy as these fires were here in Los Angeles where we're recording.

And I think that the, I heard Rick Caruso say that it was, you know, and multiple other people say that it's two men to Manhattan's, two areas the size of Manhattan. Crazy. Manhattan twice that burned. down that was there. But a lot more would have burned down if it wasn't for the heroic firefighters looking out for everybody. So safe to say that if we had a Z and might have to come up with a new tier ranking system after chatting with you, but at least for this ranking system that we have right now, we're going to put a sedentary lifestyle walking less than 3,000, 4,000 steps a day. We're going to put that as an F. Yeah, yeah. I don't think, again, there's no benefits

and not doing exercise. Yeah. And there's enormous risk. So again, if we're using that same risk benefit quotient, yeah, it's got to be at the bottom. Okay, what about this one? This one seems like something that a lot of people ask. I think it was one of the top comments

in a previous episode, people asking, I know Nathan's thoughts about excessive amounts of sugar in the diet, right? And it's rolled with nitric oxide, which I might have you recap here in a second after you answer the question. But what about a nightly dessert? Where does that fall? on the list of things when it comes to nitric oxide and just overall health for the body.

Well, again, I think it's individualized. It depends upon your metabolic flexibility. You know, continuous glucose monitors are available anywhere. Anybody should do it. And I think everybody should do the experiment. So broadly speaking, nightly dessert is not good. The worst thing you want to do is eat right before bed and especially get a spike in blood sugar and insulin before bed. You're not going to sleep well and it's just going to, it's a recipe for disaster.

It's going to drive your resting heart rate up. And a resting heart rate right before bed is one of the biggest predictors of great sleep. When my resting heart rate is lower, I sleep better. When it's higher, like a big meal or dessert on occasion, I don't sleep as good. Yeah. No, look, what you do one day a week is going to kill you. It's what you do the other six days. It probably will.

So an occasional nightly dessert is not great. But as long as you're not doing that every night. And again, for me personally, I speak to what I do. I try to eat my last meal before 6 p.m. And then I don't eat again until noon the next day. So it's an 18-hour fast every day. But, you know, they're not like at this conference. We eat at like 7 o'clock and there's always dessert.

You're hanging around. You're networking. You're having friendly conversation. And so, yeah, I'll have a bite or two or some cake or a cookie or something that's around. Do it? Does it affect my sleep? No, because I know I'm not going to get this spike in blood sugar because my insulin is very sensitive. My body can mobilize that and then bring it into the cell.

and I don't get the hyperglycemic response, and I certainly don't get an increase in heart rate. But everybody's different. So what I tell people is get you a continuous glucose monitor and then figure out what you eat, again, take a food diary and figure out how big did that lead to an increase in blood glucose and how long did that persist. Yeah.

And then you have to experiment with yourself. And if you're concerned about the health is our number one asset. And if you're concerned about that, don't take my word. Because what I do may not work for you. you may not have the discipline to do what I do. If somebody else does that, you know, like the Ben Greenfields and the Dave Asprey support, I don't do what they do. It works for them, but it doesn't work for me. Yeah, a couple points that are there. I'm a huge fan of continuous glucose monitors.

My listeners know I'm an advisor and investor in Levels. I love the company. I think they have the best software that's out there in the space. We'll put a little code up here and a link that people can check out. I believe it's levels.co slash Drew, but we'll put the link in the show notes as well. And then through Levels, I'm also a big fan of taking your, using that data of the continuous glucose monitoring and seeing like, what times of the day do you feel like fatigue? Do you feel off? And how does that correspond with like blood sugar spikes?

That was my biggest learning. Even though I was eating a whole foods diet, organic, all the stuff that was out there, I was eating carbs for me at certain times of the day and then feeling like immediately tired, like as if I ate like a big Thanksgiving dinner. And it was weirdly certain types of foods. It's like I love blueberries, but if I eat a ton of blueberries, I don't know what is up with my gut microbiome or whatever, and blueberries are healthy for you. Listen, I'm not saying blueberries are not healthy for you.

I crash like crazy, especially if I blend them in a smoothie. But if I blend strawberries, I'm great. I have good energy. Everything is good. Again, that's some of that individuality that's there. So I do not put blueberries in my morning smoothie anymore because I crash like crazy. I be falling asleep at this podcast table that's there. And the other thing that I like through levels is that blood sugar is great.

And a lot of how sense of you are to insulin is muscle mass. And I didn't get that memo until later in life. I got serious around the age of 39 turning 40 from talking with Dr. Gabriel Lyon to really start investing in my muscle, which has been very, it's a lot of work to get 0.8 pounds of lean muscle mass added during a period of time. Like, I have to like bust my ass. You know, I'm in the gym three to four days a week, strain training, and, you know, making sure that I'm hitting my protein goals. But I can tell you, nothing has improved my insulin sensitivity, my blood sugar, like adding. And I was pretty skinny fat before, right?

I was lean, but I was still fat. My body composition was almost 24, 26 percent body fat. And it wasn't that I was fat. It was that I was under-muscled. And when I added almost a... about nine pounds of lean muscle mass, I saw a massive difference and I actually could get away with eating even a little bit more carbohydrates. And through the Levels app, I did my blood test because they allow you to do blood testing

too. You can get blood tests done. They'll send a phlebotomist. You can go to like a local quest or lab corp, I forgot where. And you get your fasting insulin done. And I saw that even though I was eating more carbohydrates, my blood sugar was more stable and my fasting insulin even improved during that period of time. So whether you do it through levels or whether you do it through somewhere else, just remember that testing is important.

Test don't guess. And then on top of that, invest in your muscle mass. For sure. Now, look, it's improving your metabolic flexibility and improving insulin sensitivity because people monitor fasting glucose levels. And glucose is bad because it sticks to proteins and renders things dysfunctional. But the inflammation that occurs from that is due to the hyperinsulinia, the elevation of insulinemia, for prolonged periods of time. And so if you can improve insulin sensitivity, and that's where muscle mass comes in, because there's three main kind of cell types that take up glucose and are insulin sensitive. It's skeletal muscle, it's the liver cells, and it's the fat tissue. So if you increase in your skeletal muscle, then you're increasing insulin sensitivity, increasing glucose uptake.

And people who don't have a lot of muscle mass, then they're relying on the liver. It overburdens the liver. the fat cells, the adipose cells, and so you're working at 67% instead of 100%. Just to clarify one thing you said. You said, glucose is bad for you. I think what you mean is that excessive amount of glucose. You have a chronic hyperglycemia. And you monitor this through hemoglobin A1C.

And what is that? That sugar that's stuck to hemoglobin, the blood cell that carries oxygen to all cells in the body. But it's not unique to hemoglobin. It sticks to other proteins. It sticks to enzymes like nitric oxide synthase. And in enzymology, these proteins have to be flexible and nimble and undergo conformational change to transfer electrons. If you got too much sugar and the sugar stuck to it, it's kind of, it's glue, right? If you spill a soda on the countertop and you come back the next day, what is it?

It's sticky. That's glue. It's glucose. It's sugar. So it does the same thing in the body. Everything sticks together and then you can't, you know, red blood cells can't form. You can't deliver oxygen, develop, you know, coach your neurons, you develop in your opathy. It's just bad news.

You have to eliminate sugar. So we didn't rank a nightly dessert. Okay, so in this instance, I'm going to talk about a nightly dessert. Literally people having dessert every night and the classic cookies filled with gluten and sugar or, you know, ice cream that's there. Where are we going to put that on our list of items that we have over here? Certainly at the bottom. It's probably not as bad as smoking or seed oils. But it's certainly not good.

I mean, again, it's risk benefit. Are there nutrients in that? There's probably not a lot of healthy protein. probably not a healthy fats. There's a lot of carbs. It's going to disrupt your sleep. It's going to disrupt your sleep. So what do you think?

A D? Probably an E. Yeah, D. Okay, great. We'll put that as a D. We're going to go to another one, which is going to sound a little bit out of the blue. And then we'll speed round through the rest of these

so that we can get into the list of things that actually make a huge difference to benefit our nitric oxide production, including many foods that are there. But bacon for breakfast. Separate from nitric oxide, right? I don't know if there is a connection that's there from nitric oxide. What are your feelings about bacon for breakfast when it comes to the conversation? of the conversation of inflammation, visceral fat.

Is it something that you have? Or should people be steering away from that? I don't eat breakfast, but I know people who do. If you're going to eat breakfast, a high-protein quality-fat breakfast is the best. The worst thing you can do for breakfast is eat pancakes and, you know, drink milk and things like that. Bacon, it's high-quality protein. It's good fat. And so if you're going to break your fast, then bacon's the way to go.

Okay, you like bacon. I like bacon. So you're going to put bacon higher up on the list, maybe an A or a B. There's nothing wrong with it. No, but it's probably not promoting nitric oxide. So separate from nitric oxide. Yeah, bacon for breakfast, I think an intermittent fast every day and not breaking your fast in the morning is kind of the best prescription.

But if you're going to eat breakfast, bacon for breakfast would probably be a B. Okay, great. We'll put it as a B. I found I don't do really well skipping breakfast. I like to have a much earlier dinner. You know, I'll usually shoot to have dinner. like if I could have dinner some days like I know this can sound crazy to people but if I can have dinner some days at like 4.30 yeah right five I feel amazing me too that's my preference if I can have dinner at 5 o'clock 530 but I know you like to skip breakfast I've found that and again again this is where the whole

personalization piece comes in and I also will say for a lot of the women in my life my wife if she skips breakfast my sisters if they and I work with my sisters if they skip breakfast they don't feel like they're functioning. That doesn't mean that they're eating Cheerios and pancakes. No, they need a little bit of smoke salmon, avocado, olive oil, some chicken sausage, some greens, fat fiber protein is their typical breakfast. They just feel like they're functioning so much better. And I've talked to a few female clinicians about this on the podcast.

And one of the thoughts and ideas is that, you know, especially for women in their prime fertility years, maintaining a stable sort of blood sugar is one of the things that signals to their body that like they're safe and everything is okay. So there may be some individuality. I generally see the women that tend to do better on fasting maybe are out of that period of time in their life. They might be individuals that are going through menopause, perimenopat, at the tail end of the perimenopause spectrum.

So there is that variety. And then I think that it's easier in America. to probably skip breakfast because breakfast is one of the more unhealthy meals that are there. But I've found, you know, this is where you should really test things for yourself. That's right. If you need a lot of brain power in the morning, if you, you know, don't do well with intermittent fasting, try eating and then move your window for dinner a little bit earlier and see how you do. No, I agree.

But not a high carb breakfast. Right. Not a high carb breakfast. If you have good metabolic flexibility, the body is designed to maintain optimal blood sugar. You know, we need glucose. We need sugar. to fuel cells, especially in the brain. That's a primary energy source for the brain is glucose.

If you fast, the body then starts to break down glycogen stores, primarily in the muscle, and mobilize that as glucose. So even if you're not consuming it, your body's making it through glycolysis and the breakdown of glycogen. So that's how our body maintains homeostasis. But if you're not and you're not, you don't have a lot of glycogen stores, which a lot of people don't, you can do that through some impedance and figure out then you're going to get some low blood sugar and maybe feel lightheaded and dizziness and develop a little syncope and feel bad,

then I would recommend you probably have to eat. But again, it's the individual. It's the personalization of medicine and nutrition. Here is one that you've talked about before. It might even be some of your most viral videos on Instagram. We talked about it previously on the podcast. It's pretty controversial on YouTube. There's a lot of people that disagree with it,

but it's the idea of using antiseptic mouthwash. Where does that fall on the list and why would you put it there when it comes to specifically nitric oxide production? Well, I think it's probably one of the worst things you can do. And again, it's not based on opinion. It's based on data, both clinical observational data and then understanding the mechanism of what that does. And so I kind of compare it to the chronic use of antibiotics, right? No matter what physician you go to here in the U.S. for abroad, there was no physician in his right mind.

They would say, I'm going to give you an antibiotic. And I want you to take this every day, sometimes twice, today for the rest of your life. Why wouldn't they do that? Because today we know that destroying the microbiome, the bacteria that live in and on our body causes systemic disease. The bacteria that live in and on our body outnumber human cells 10 to 1. And sure, there's some infectious pathogenic bacteria that cause disease, that cause infections. But for the most part, if we can maintain a healthy microbiome, then those bacteria kind of police the bad guys and keep them at bay. So mouthwash destroys the microbiome, shuts down nitric oxide production because it's killing these nitric oxide producing bacteria.

And then what are the consequences of that? We see an increase in blood pressure, which is the number one risk factor for cardiovascular disease, number one killer of men and women worldwide. You lose the protective benefits of exercise. And that's just a short list to develop sexual dysfunction because if you can't make nitric oxide, can't dilate blood vessels, can't get an erection. And so that's a major problem. And all you have to do is look at the numbers. Two out of three Americans use mouthwash every day, sometimes twice a day. Two out of three Americans have an unsafe elevation and blood pressure.

And prescription medication isn't bringing it down because there's no prescription anti-hypertensive medication that's targeted toward the oral microbiome. Anaseptic mouthwash fluoride is absolutely one of the worst things you can do for the microbiome, nitric oxide production, and overall health. If you had to put it on the list and, you know, we don't have it here, but you added another column called Z where you put seed oils. No, it's certainly an F. I mean... Okay, it's definitely an F.

So we're going to put C-noils as an F. So we're talking about daily chronic antiseptic use. Yeah. So just like if I get a scrape or something, it's infected, and I have systemic inflection or at risk of developing sepsis, I want an antibiotic. Don't deny me an antibiotic, right? It's effective treatment for infections. If you've got dental patients who have horrible, poor oral hygiene and really pathogenic bacterial

infections that could cause them to have a heart attack or stress, or increase fast inflammation. Those patients may need an acute antiseptic kind of treatment, whether it's chlorhexiting or something to kind of eradicate, but you can't do it every day, right? Just like you can't take an antibiotic every day because of the complete destruction. So we have to, in medicine is risk management,

do what's best to get out of the acute critical phase, but then you've got to support the microbiome. You've got to support the body and eliminating daily chronic antiseptic use, whether it's antibiotic, fluoride, or antiseptic mouthwash. you got to get rid of it. Yeah. And plus there's so many better alternatives that are out there using healthier toothpaste that's there.

I know you're working on one. There's one I use called Fig, FYG, Dr. Mark Bahanna. There's better mouthwashes that are out there. And also, too, what is the root issue of bad breath or other things like that? It's probably going to be your gut microbiome. I mean, why does poop stink? Why do your armpit stink? Why does some people stink?

Why does your breath stink? It's bacteria. It's dysbiosis. So if you can maintain a healthy microbiome, you're not going to have bad breath. Your pits aren't going to stink. And so what we've done, and we've been working on this for probably six years, trying to figure out, I know in dental medicine, you have to eradicate the oral pathogens. But more importantly, we have to support the healthy microbiome.

And that's why, you know, it took me five or six years to develop a toothpaste, because what's the purpose of toothpaste? Clean the teeth, clean the biofilms on the teeth, give the body the minerals it needs to enhance mineral density of the teeth, maintain healthy gums, and normal pH, but more importantly support the oral microbiome. And how do you do that? Well, you create a toothpaste that's free of any kind of detergents, fluoride, antiseptics, but then create an environment after you brush your teeth that supports the repopulation

of the healthy microbiome, improve the diversity of the microbiome, normalize the pH, and that's through our oral care products. So we're developing a nitric oxide-friendly toothpaste and a nitric-oxid-friendly mouth rinse. Yeah, which you have a sample over here that we might play within a little bit. Okay, let's pause for a second. You know, people often ask,

is there a way to sort of benchmark nitric oxide in the body? And one of the things that regularly comes up is nitric oxide strips. You know, people even on this podcast previously have talked about them that you can get a strip and you can kind of see. I've used them, and I think I even went one time,

to my cardiologist in St. Louis, Michael Twyman, and they can be all over the place depending on a few things. You've actually been involved in the creation of these strips, and we're going to do one live on camera here for people that are looking at YouTube. Tell us where they're helpful and tell us where they have limitations. You know, I was the person who developed these strips.

Wow. In 2009, I developed these salivary test strips and created this kind of semi-color metry, semi-quantitative color metric test strips. I filed patents on them when I was a professor at UT Medical School Houston. Years later, we abandoned the patents because this chemistry that we're capturing on

this test strip is old chemistry. It's called the grease reaction. Grease. The grease, G-R-I-E-S-S. Okay. It was named after, I think, a chemist who developed that, it's a diazoneum salt that forms that turns a pink color. So we can absorb it.

We can detect it at 540 nanometers, and that's, so it should turn pink. And it's basically an acidified sulfanilomide reaction with nitride. Very complex chemistry. But it creates this. color metric reaction that we can quantify. The reason that I abandon the patents and the reason that I don't rely on them anymore is because there's false positives. So there's really no false negative. And really at the end of the day, when people understand what we're measuring and what it means, then I think they can provide value. But people would use this test strip and think,

oh, this is nitric oxide test strip. It's not a nitric oxide test strip. Nitric oxide is a gas. Once it's produced, it's gone in less than a second. What we're measuring here is salivary nitrite. and the ability of the oral microbiome to recycle nitrate from the diet into nitrite. Then we swallow the nitride in our saliva. We get nitric oxide in the stomach. And the example came years ago, probably 10 or 12 years ago. We were demoing these test strips, I think at a compounding pharmacy in Austin. And this 50-year-old guy walked in, severe obese, morbidly obese.

His blood pressure was through the roof. He was diabetic. He hadn't had an erection in 10 years. and obviously the clinical symptoms of nitric oxide deficiency, complete nitric oxide deficiency. He goes, oh, well, let me test this. He turns bright pink. And by the way, bright pink, the more pink, the better.

The higher than nitric oxide. The interpretation. That's interpretation. So we go, oh, he goes, I'm healthy. If what you're saying is true, I'm healthy. I don't need nitric oxide. This dude had all the comorbidities, all the symptoms of nitricos. So what was causing it to be pink?

An oral infection. Okay, so if somebody has dysbiosis in the mouth, that's not treated, that could make this strip turn pink. What we're measuring in that case is the immune reaction, the local immune response in the genital tissue in the mouth from either an asymptomatic or even a symptomatic infection. He didn't even know he had an infection. But yet his immune system did, and it was creating this macrophages, reducing nitric oxide, it was spilling over in the saliva, and we were detecting it on these test strips.

Should we do one of these strips and see how it is? Yeah. So what we're measuring is kind of steady state, salivary nitrite. And so this is dependent upon our diet, the last meal we had, the presence of oral microbiome, the activity of the receptors in the transport material in the duodenum, the silen receptor in the salivary glands. So it's a very complex cycle. It's called the interocellarivary circuit. If it's intact and we eat a good diet, but again, it's based on our last meal. How dilute our saliva, people with

with dry mouth, poor salivary secretions, they're usually always low because they don't have that circuit intact. I think the last time I did mine, it was low, and I did it at my cardiologist's office, but then also they have another machine that they use as a proxy for seeing how well you do with nitric oxide.

That's right. The functional tests are much, but this is a biochemical test. Right, right. And I scored pretty high on that one. Yeah. But let's see. So what do we do with this?

So typically what I do is just... Get some saliva in your mouth. Get some saliva. And just apply it on the end of the test strip. What's the end of the strip? Is it this side? So this is the... You'll see the pad there, the test pad.

Okay. I lick the wrong side. So that shows what I know. Okay. So, you know, I haven't eaten since 5.30 p.m. yesterday. All right. Mine is like super light. Yeah.

So mine, I mean, I'm optimal, but I work at this, right? I know that my circuit's intact. Yeah. And I got out this morning. I had one and a half cups of coffee. I did my 200 push-ups, 200 setups. I activated, stimulated nitric oxide production. I have the right oral microbiome.

And this is typical for me. Right. So again, you've talked about the limitations. Generally speaking, for most people, would you say that these strips are something that they can use or not use? Like, should they seek them out or should they not seek them out? I think they have utility. I think they can be useful.

But what I want in my goal, and really going back to the book, writing the book is people need to be. to understand what they're doing and what they're doing and what meaning that has. Same with these test strips. So I tell people it's a good tool to have in your toolbox. But like Dr. Twyman, who's a good friend and a great cardiologist, he doesn't rely on this. Yeah. He complements functional endothelial test, FMD, flow media dilatation, which looks at the functional production of nitric oxide in the lining of the blood vessels, and then correlates it with a biochemical test. Then you really get a complete clinical picture. Right. So the answer is they can

have utility. And we may bring them back because really what we're measuring is how well is your oral microbiome. And if you have a good diet and a good oral microbiome, then we can move the needle on these test strips, right? And that gives people something good because people want to see changes. A lot of times you don't feel the effects of nitric oxide, but you can certainly see it on these test strips in your fasting sugar, in your fasting insulin, and your blood pressure, and your sexual function. But people, it's a nice show and tell. For sure. Nice show and tell has some limitations. Ultimately, you want to make sure you're doing all the right things that are there.

We're going to be talking about some of them and eating the right foods. We're going to be talking about some of them. Did you want to do anything else with these test strips? Well, I'll just show what we're doing. And the reason this is so important, and we may bring them back, is because the effects of toothpaste, daily oral hygienic practices have such a profound impact on the microbiome and nitric oxide production. But with this mouth rinse, we've recapitulated the effects of a healthy salivary pH environment. And so in these mouth rinses, we can actually, if you use it, I'm not a big fan of mouth rinse. I don't even, maybe I'll use my mouth rinse, but I don't need to.

As I've shown you, I can do what I'm doing now, maintain healthy microbiome. I haven't had a cavity since I was five years old. I brush twice a day. I don't floss, but I eat a healthy diet and take care of myself. So there's really no need for me to take my own mouth rinse. Well, maybe, maybe not. Yeah. But people who don't, people who want, take a mouthwash and who want a fresh breath,

if they don't have a fresh breath otherwise, then this becomes extremely important. That could be helpful. It could be very helpful. Where can people go to stay tuned if they want to keep in touch with when your products are out? Where should they go? N1.1.com. That's the letter in, the number one, the letter o number one.com. So that's what they'll find the future.

You have like a mailing list that people can subscribe to if they want to hear about the mouthwash once it's ready? Yeah, so we'll launch it. We're going to launch it probably, the third week of March, maybe the end of March. Oh, great. The toothpaste, the mouth rants is probably maybe in April. But this cardio smile, maybe breath of life, we call this breath of life because it's producing nitric oxide gas. But you can do a demo.

So we saw that you didn't really light it, the test strip there. But, you know, we can use this mouth rinse. Sure. And we'll just do a little demo here. I'm just squeezing a little bit in. And squish it. So grabbing a new test strip. And now test strip.

So obviously we've diluted the saliva a little bit, right? so maybe give it a couple seconds, but, you know, mine didn't. Mine was already pretty optimal. But what we're finding is that if what we've done with this mouth rents, we can now start to see a complete change in the microbiome. Yeah. And what we're finding is kind of the same. The same?

Yeah. So again, this is, this takes time. Right. Because the turnover of these bacteria. And most helpful for people who might be dealing with something in there. In their. No, that's right. Because the target, the target for me.

was, dysbiosis. In dental medicine, we need to still address the pathogens. The pathogens may be causing systemic disease. The oral pathogens causing systemic disease. We still need to address those. So how do we selectively kill the pathogens? But how do we restore and improve the diversity of the non-pathogenic commensal oral bacteria? That's been the target and that's what we've accomplished with this toothpaste and with the mouth rinse. That's exciting. All right. Well, I'm going to stay tuned. And again, these are a proxy for nitric oxide. Ultimately, the thing that is the best that we have out there would be these functional tests. That's right.

There's one called Ancoblot, right? That's, do you know about that one? The ones that I know that are probably the best clinically validated is a device called the endopat. Endopat, sorry. Endopat, yeah. Ancoblot. I got confused.

Ancoblot was an old test that was an early cancer detection test. That was taken off the market for a while, whole story around that. But endopat, yes. And then there's others, you know, You know, there's a CV profiler, there's the Max Pulse, all these. But they're all doing different things. The endopat is what we're looking. It's called flow-mediated dilatation.

And it's Venus occlusion, platmosography, is kind of the technique. But what that device does is, if you've done it, they put a blood pressure cuff on your brain artery. Yep. And then they pump it up to super systolic levels to work completely impeding blood flow. Yeah, your arm gets so sleepy. Yeah, so for five minutes. So your fingers will tingle because there's no blood flow for five minutes.

And then they release the cuff and now you're getting this oxygen-starved tissue. It's now getting blood flow. The body's natural response is reactive hyperemia. So the hypoxic, the low-oxygen environment, when the body starts to, when you release the cuff, if you have good endothelial function and the endothel cells can make nitric oxide, it immediately dilates the blood vessels. It immediately produces nitric oxide and immediately dilates the blood vessels. So in the endopat, I believe they're looking at change in temperature of the fingertip,

which is correlated to how well, how fast the blood supply returns to that ischemic tissue. And the fast of the blood supply returns, it's an indication that you have great. The better nitric oxide. Yeah. I scored good and my brother-in-law, who literally works out probably like four or five days a week, super fit. He's also a cardiologist. He scored excellent on the test. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, that's the functional production of nitricot. oxide because nitric oxide is produced. It's gone in less than a second. It signals, it dilates, it relaxes the smooth muscle, dilates the blood vessels. And that's the only way you can detect it. What we're doing here is kind of understanding the circuitry and the oxidative end products of nitric oxide and how the body handles it. But then there's other machines that are non-ischemic or non-oclusive that's looking at the elasticity of the blood vessels or the compliance of the blood vessels. So with each beat of the heart, you know, the aorta is very important because it dampens that pulse response.

And the ability of the endothel cells to produce nitric oxide to dampen that heartbeat and that pulse response predicts vascular health. Because if you have stiff arteries with each beat of the heart, that pulse wave travels really fast down the vascular tree. Then when it hits kind of the bifurcation at your renal arteries, that wave reflects. Now you've got a reflective wave going on that new heartbeat and, you're going. there's an overlap and you can look at the waveform on that. And so that's the beauty of things like the CV profile or the max pulse because it's looking at the structure of the blood vessels. If somebody's listening to Day and they're like,

well, I want to find a practitioner that does these tests. Where do they go? Look, there's not enough clinicians. I mean, the really good, innovative physicians, cardiologists like Dr. Twyman, Mark Houston, the ones that are kind of on the cutting edge of diagnostics and clinical care, you've got to find them. But as we, and the beauty of this podcast is if patients go to their doctor and demand this and they start asking enough, then they'll almost be forced to bring it in the clinic.

And there's no reason they should because whether it's a cash practice or an insurance-based practice, there's ICD-10 codes for these diagnostics. Yeah, but they've got to get trained on the interpretation of the report. And that's where there's a big gap that's there. The data is only good if you know what to do with it and how to interpret it. A few more things on the tier rank system. And then we're going to go through a list of foods that can super. your nitric oxide production. So let's talk about one of the ones you write about in your book, lack of sunlight

exposure. What's the relationship of lack of sunlight exposure to nitric oxide? Well, I mean, sunlight is beneficial in many ways. Part of it is due to the release or activation of nitric oxide. So there's certain wavelengths of the sun, both infrared and both ultraviolet. So kind of both ends of the visible light spectrum. So infrared technology, infrared light coming from the sun or infrared. red light technology, provides a frequency and a vibration that can release nitric oxide bound

to metals. So when nitric oxide is produced in the body, it's a gas, and it typically, it has an affinity for metals, and then it binds to that metal. And sometimes it can be released. If we dispose to certain frequencies like infrared light, it'll release that nitric oxide, and that becomes vasoactive, it can dilate blood vessels. The infrared, the ultraviolet can actually bind, that energy is much higher so it can cleave a nitric oxide molecule bound to a thial, what we call a nitrosothial. It's a much stronger bond, covalent bond. You need higher energy to release that. But, you know, as we know, it activates vitamin D, the active form of vitamin D.

Worse than lack of sunlight is sunscreen. Because you've got the toxic chemicals in the sunscreen that's completely preventing traditional sunscreen. Traditional sunscreens. I stay away from it. My kids, none of us wear sunscreen. very dangerous. Yeah, be sun smart, don't over-exposed at the wrong time of day, etc.

But the sun can be medicine for you when you use it the right way. Look, it lowers blood pressure. If you look at just epidemiological data, people who live in kind of Scandinavia and northern kind of countries or societies have higher blood pressure on average than people who live near the equator. And there are a lot of confounding factors on that, but a predominant hypothesis or theory is that it's because there's less sunlight. We know through the mechanism of nitric oxide production, we can produce nitric oxide. We can dilate blood vessels and normalize blood pressure. So if we had sunscreen on the screen, you'd probably put that as an F. Yeah, Z, it's down there with Cedols.

There's no benefit. It's very toxic. Traditional sunscreen. And if you had sunlight exposure, how high are you going to rank that? Is that get an S? I don't know if we put anything in S yet. S is supreme. Or does that get an A?

No, I think it gets an A. again, because it's moderate and it's dependent upon skin type. Yeah. You know, kind of the white, kind of the typical Irish American, you know, that has really light skin, light complexion compared to, you know, a person who makes a lot of melaton, you know, African Americans, dark skin. So the requirements are completely, it's different. So again, it's the personalization of diet and lifestyle.

What about morning sunlight? Getting those first 20 minutes of the day, 30 minutes a day, getting some sunlight. Now that ranks up there. pretty high because would you put that as an s well it depends upon endogenous systems in the person that's exposed to that light yeah right but certainly it's the most cost effective and effective thing you can do if you want to do one thing because it has multiple benefits number one you're getting that 20 30 minutes of sunlight and that first sunlight a day completely sets reset your circadian rhythm right because

it's that for the same of you oh it's daylight it's time to wake up we've been have our eyes closed all night we've been in darkness now we're waking up and it completely sets our circadian rhythm. You know, in the book, you have a list of 12 things that we've touched on some of these already, but you have a list of 12 things that are important if you want to support your nitric oxide production. And one of the first things you talk about in the book is eating nitrate rich foods. Why is that important? Because it's fueling at least one of the major pathways how the body produces nitric oxide. Right. So nitrate is found primarily in green leafy vegetables. Then when we consume it, about 90 minutes after we consume,

that food or that nitrate-rich vegetable, it's concentrated in our salivary glands. Now we're secreting nitrate with the saliva. We have the right bacteria. It's reducing this. It's doing a two-electron reduction of nitrate to nitrite. Now our saliva is enriched in nitrite, which we can detect with the test strips. And then we swallow our saliva. And that nitrite becomes nitric oxide gas in the lumen of the stomach as long as their stomach acid production.

But if we're taking in acids, proton pump inhibitors, and there's no stomach acid secretion, we disrupt that entire cycle. And that's the other problem. You know, we may detect nitric oxide in the saliva, but if we're taking an antacid, you're not going to get the nitric oxide that's produced in the lumen of the stomach. Yeah, in fact, that was one of the recommendations

you talked about on the last podcast is that figuring out a way to get off of these stomach acid suppressants, right? Which would be down there on Z with seed oils. Yeah, maybe even worse. I mean, because they're causing death. I mean, the proton pump inhibitors are causing a 40% higher incidence of heart attack, stroke, and Alzheimer's. This is very clear, indisputable clinical observational data because they're shutting down nitric oxide production.

It's leading to an elevation of asymmetric dimethylalalurgenene, which is then inhibiting the enzyme and the lining of the blood vessel from producing nitric oxide. So this one class of drug shuts down both pathways to produce nitric oxide in the body. And what do we see? Heart attack, stroke, and Alzheimer's. Right. And we should mention that if you've been on it for a while, you might need to work with somebody who can gradually take you off. Now, these are like similar to SSRIs, and you can't just stop these drugs called turkey because there's clinical consequences to that. You'll get an overproduction and secretion of stomach acid and life will be miserable. And then your doctor will say, see, I told you these are working. You're dependent upon these, yeah.

Yeah. Now, so what I, again, work with your prescribing physician, but the best kind of recipe I found is whatever dose you're taking, cut it in half. And now for 10 days, take that half dose. And then after 10 days, take that half dose every other day. And then do that for 10 days. So we're slowly titrating down the circulating levels of these PPIs. And then once you get those 20 days, then you can stop. But then, because you need stomach acid to absorb things like B vitamins, iron, zinc, iodine,

things you need to make stomach acid on your own, you have to supplement that because your body hasn't been able to absorb that. I tell people take apple cider vinegar before a meal, so now you're acidifying the lumen of the stomach, so now you can actually break down the foods you're eating so you don't get reflugs, and you've got to figure out what nutrients you're missing. If you've been on an acids,

if you do a micronutrient analysis test, blood test, you're going to find that you're depleted in B vitamin and selenium, chromium, iron, you may be anemic. You don't have any iodine. Does all this require stomach acid production to be absorbed? One of the other ones that we already talked about was avoiding mouthwash, right? Another one you list inside of your book is engaging in regular physical exercise.

And we already talked about that, about how important that is. But let's double click on some of the things related to the foods that are there, right? So you mentioned a few already. You talked about beets, certain root vegetables, green leafy vegetables like spinach, arugula, kale. What do you think about people who are on a carnivore diet? Are they missing out on optimized nitric oxide production, potentially? You know, that's a great question and a question we've been trying to answer, but no, it doesn't appear to be.

And here's the thing, when we list things like beets and there are hundreds of beet products on the market now, which typically aren't providing nitric oxide. But the problem with root vegetables, the problem with green leafy vegetables, is the oxalates and the oxalic acids. So some people that are prone to developing kidney stones may not be able to tolerate things like this. But here's the deal with the straight carnivore diet, is that you're not getting the inflammation from the high carbs and you're not getting the sugar. So what we're doing is we're maintaining optimal endothelial function, that enzyme is functional. So now we can make nitric oxide on demand in the lining of the blood vessel and we're less dependent upon the oral microbiome and feeding this pathway through the diet. because I think most carnivores, if you've made a decision, a conscious decision to eat a carnivore-based diet, at least in my interaction with the people I've met, these people are very health conscious.

They're working out every day. They're getting sunlight. They're getting sunlight. They're drinking good, clean water, and they're doing everything else. So they can get away with that of elimination of the nitrate. But here's the other thing. If you're making nitric oxide in the body and the lining of the blood vessels, that nitric oxide is immediately oxygen. oxidized to nitrate. So now we have nitrate, an elevation of nitrate circulating in the blood,

and it's taken up in the saliva, and we're still secreting nitrate. But the nitrate is not coming from the foods we eat. It's coming from the oxidation of nitric oxide that was produced in the lining of the blood vessel. You know, one of the ones on the list of 12. And again, people can check out the book, The Secret of Nitric oxide. We have a link in the show notes, bringing the science to life. It's a culmination of all your work in the space. Also the history of... the nitric oxide molecule, how it was identified, the work in the space of, you know, that led to the Nobel Prize on identifying it, the development of Viagra, which has shown benefits for even things like Alzheimer's disease potentially to actually help with avoiding

nitric Alzheimer's disease in the future, cognitive decline, a whole bunch of things. So it's a fascinating reinde. One of the ones that we didn't talk about that is listed inside of there was the idea of hydrating well. What's the role of hydrating well when it comes to NO levels? Well, look, the body is 80% water and the water hydrate cells that allows for the transport of minerals and oxygen and nutrients. And if we're dehydrated, you know, we become dehydrated at the cellular level, right? And so then we get a buildup of toxins. And so now you've got a lower volume and a higher concentration of toxins. It becomes toxic to the cell. And hydration and urination is part of

detoxification, right? So we drink water, we have an exchange of solutes, and we urinate it out. If we're dehydrated, obviously, we make less urine because the body's trying to preserve what volume it has. So then we get a buildup of toxins. But the problem is, you know, municipal water supply, which is toxic, you're hydrating, but you're actually poisoning yourself too. And that's why I recommend good clean water, good, you know, well-designed home filtration system, remove the fluorine, the fluoride, the chlorine, the chloramines, the drug metabolites, it's found in municipal water. But it's just a good way to detoxify, to dehydrate the sill, or to hydrate the cell,

and to, you know, maintain good health. I want to come back to this list, but first, you have another list of about 12 things in the book that harm. I didn't realize I was focused on 12. Well, it's also our team that put together, but it's equally 12 on both sides. Things that harm nitric oxide production. Now, we've already talked about a lot of these things, but I'm going to talk, I'm going to pull a few that we haven't talked about. We did talk about, you know, avoiding antiseptic mouthwash. You went into a whole aspect of that.

We talked about chronic stress, lack of physical activity, smoking, the dangers of smoking when it comes to that. Excessive alcohol production. What about things like chronic use of certain drugs like ibuprofen? Well, these are a class of drugs called insides or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. You can get them over the counter. And you look, all we have to do is look at the history and the use of these. And the number three killer of men and women worldwide is medication. Prescription medication, over-the-counter medication.

Inseds cause gastric bleeds that cause gastric ulcers, things like acetaminophen, which is Tylenol, and cause liver failure, liver disease, and death from liver failure. So these are, they're very effective anti-inflammatory drugs. but what they're doing is they're masking the symptoms of inflammation without getting to the root cause of the inflammation. Same thing that steroids do, right? They kind of suppress the inflammatory response and alleviate pain. But what they don't do is address the root cause of the inflammation. So if your diet is inflammatory, if your lifestyle is inflammatory, if you have infections that are inflammatory, the worst thing you should do is just take an anti-inflammatory drug.

Get to the root cause of it because that inflammation, still there, you just don't feel it. And so, again, it's risk-benefit. Certainly, they can provide benefit on alleviating pain in chronicling-inflane patients, but the risk, there's also risk there. There's nothing that's without risk. And so you just have to, again, it's personalized. All right, this is a big one.

And as we wind down, an important one for people to pay attention to, high blood sugar and diabetes, you know, almost 85% of the population, 88% of the population is, in the diabetic or pre-diabetic range. And the scary thing is that many people that are in the pre-diabetic range have no idea. Their doctor hasn't even told them yet that they are on their way

to developing diabetes. Why is insulin resistance and high blood sugar impairing nitric oxide signal? It's the number one driver of chronic disease and it's the number one thing that completely shuts down

nitric oxide production. It is the number one enemy. And it's a national security crisis, right? Because we don't even have enough healthy young kids these days to serve in the military. They can't even pass a physical. So this is a national security issue. Years ago, 30 years ago, we knew that once you develop diabetes, get what's called advanced glycosylation end products or ages, and that's sugar that's stuck to enzymes, hemoglobin, other proteins like the nitric oxide synthesine, completely shuts down nitric oxide production. And that explained

why diabetics have higher blood pressure. They have diabetic retinopathy. they have diabetic neuropathy, and everything that in rectile dysfunction, everything about diabetes shuts down nitric oxide production, explained everything about the clinical presentation of diabetes. Then the other thing is we're learning now that once you get, if you lose the ability to produce nitric oxide from poor diet, from sedentary lifestyle, that leads to insulin resistance. Because as I mentioned earlier, when insulin binds to the insulin receptor,

it activates intracellular signaling called AKT, P-I-3 kinase, and AMP kinase, which is the target of metformin, glucophage, the main anti-diabetic drug. And those two proteins, or what we call kinases, activate the nitric oxide synthesis enzyme. But in diabetics, we know that that enzyme isn't functional. And so it's a loss of signaling. It's resistant to insulin. We call that insulin resistance because the cell can't make nitric oxide to bring glucose into the cell. So now, if you develop insulin resistance, you've got a feed forward mechanism. It's

decreasing nitric oxide production, which is then decreasing insulin signaling. Now you get hyperglycemia, hyperinsulinemia, and it's just fueling this diabetes. And it's uncontrolled. And now you see even type 1 early onset diabetes that now become insulin resistant to their own insulin that they're having to take. This is a huge problem. But it's the number one drive And so we have to get to the root cause of this. We have to give nitric oxide. If your body can't make it, then we've got to get it. That's what I've spent 25 years doing.

Now we can improve insulin signaling, glucose uptake, restore endothel function, and then you see, along with change in their diet and their lifestyle and the things that made them diabetic in the first place, we can correct that. Because we know diabetes is reversible, it's curable, it's treatable, and it's preventable. Type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes. So we just, once you understand the mechanism of how insulin is secreted and insulin signals and glucose is taken up into the cell and we cleared from the circulation, then you can start to take steps to address that.

And the other thing is Alzheimer's, it's diabetes type 3, and it's going to quad, it's going to increase sixfold in the next 10 to 15 years. And what is Alzheimer's? It's insulin resistance. Again, the brain uses glucose, so you can't get glucose into the cell. Those cells don't function. you get misfolding of proteins. There's focal ischemia, so loss of regulation of blood flow to the brain.

You get neuroinflammation, you get oxidative stress, and you get immune dysfunction. That's Alzheimer's. What does nitric oxide do? It perfuses the brain, gets insulin in the cell, inhibits the inflammation, mitigates the oxidative stress, and prevents the immune dysfunction. So you don't get protein misfolding. I mean, it's the root cause. I mean, again, that's the purpose of writing this book.

So consumers and physicians and patients, can begin to understand that maybe this one molecule, it's not a panacea, it's not a silver bullet, but understand your own health challenges. Consider nitric oxide may be the cause, the lack of it may be the cause of your health problems, but more importantly, it may be part of the solution. And so just employing these things that we talk about today

of diet, lifestyle, eliminating things that are inhibiting nitric oxide production and focus on the restoration of this molecule, your life is going to transform. I mean, I've been doing this for 20 years, and I get emails, text every day when I wake up, hundreds of we've changed people's lives. There's just nothing more gratifying than that.

Powerful. Yeah, nothing more gratifying than that. And a great reminder that the foundation can and should be these lifestyle factors, healthy diet, getting away from ultra-process foods, not having a sedentary lifestyle, getting that morning sunlight, you know, maintaining some degree of caloric,

restriction, whether it's through intermittent fasting or... Or just reduce how much you're eating in a day. Reduce how much you're eating. 2,000 calories into a, you know, a 1,500. Double down on your muscle mass that are there. All these things are going to improve your body, but they're also going to increase your nitric oxide production as well. And then for some people that are on the place where they're dealing with deeper issues

that might be there, oral microbiome stuff, you have some products that are on the way. And you also have, I believe you mentioned it last time, too, you have some nitric oxide lozenges. Is that through the same company? Yeah, all of our products are going to be the N101. It's our consumer product division of our drug company, Brian Therapeutics. So my objective is to create safe and effective nitric oxide product technologies in every major market segment around the world.

We've done it in supplements. We're our orally disintegrating tablet. We make a fermented beet powder for pre-workout on energy. We've got a skin care line of products for skin and fine lines and wrinkles. Oral care. We've got a toothpaste and mouth rents coming out, which I think is going to be a game changer. because 50% of the people who have high blood pressure don't respond to prescription medication

and it's resistant hypertension and the reason they're resistant to drug therapy is because it's not affecting their the hypertension is a symptom of oral dysbiosis so what we're finding is if people change out their toothpaste to our toothpaste and then start using our mouth rinse we can improve the oral microbiome and we watch their blood pressure come down

simply by targeting the oral microbiome And now for the first time in the history of Western medicine, we can talk about how do we get people off medication. That's never happened before. This has been fantastic. It's always a pleasure to have you on the podcast to talk about the power of nitric oxide, the top things, which many of them we ranked on our tier ranking system, that hurt it and also the things that are helpful for it.

And I think that if people walk away from this episode on, you know, one thing is that the body is so miraculously designed. and it wants to keep you healthy. You just need to do the things that allow it to be in that state. And we've got to many of them. The body's smarter than we are. We just got to get out of the way, give the body what it needs, and let the body do its job.

And I think that's the direction we need to take. We have the link to the book and the show notes, The Secret of Nitric oxide. So you can find it where books are sold. People can pick it up. And also, if they want to keep in touch with you personally, where do they head to? My objective is to educate and form.

You know, and I developed a YouTube channel, Dr. Nathan S. Brian, nitric oxide. I'm on LinkedIn, Instagram, Dr. Nathan S. Brian. Yeah, Nathan's Book.com. This will officially launch February 24th. Oh, beautiful. It's where books are sold. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, 1,000 private booksellers around the U.S. And then for those interested in the products, you know, if your body can't make it,

then we do it for you. And we got products that actually produce nitric oxide. In fact, I coined the term and trademarked nitracuticals to differentiate what we do from all the other nitric oxide products out there. And those are at n101.com. Exciting. Dr. Nathan Bryan, thank you again for coming back on the podcast. Thank you, Drew.