Realfoodology - Stop Aging + Enhance Focus | Dr. Greg Kelly of Neurohacker

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

EP. 191: Join me as I sit down with the insightful Dr. Greg Kelly from Neurohacker Collective to unpack the complexities of aging and brain health. Listen in as we explore the intriguing theories behind why we age – is it a programmed deterioration or an accumulation of cellular damage? Dr. Kelly shares his expertise on how lifestyle choices impact our cellular vitality and introduces us to the concept of cellular senescence. Go to neurohacker.com/REALFOODOLOGY for up to $100 off and use code REALFOODOLOGY at checkout for an additional 15% off.  Topics Discussed: 0:10:55 - Supplement Stacking Options 0:13:54 - Cellular Senescence and Aging Process 0:22:08 - Understanding Senescent Cells in Aging 0:27:11 - Senolytics & Cellular Rejuvenation 0:30:57 - Targeting Senescent Cells for Healthy Aging 0:38:28 - Individual Responses to Supplements 0:42:58 - Benefits of Quality Supplements and Probiotics Sponsored By: Neurohacker Go to neurohacker.com/REALFOODOLOGY for up to $100 off and use code REALFOODOLOGY at checkout for an additional 15% off.  Check Out Courtney: @realfoodology My FREE Grocery Guide Leave Me a Message! Air Dr Air Purifier AquaTru Water Filter Produced By: Drake Peterson Edited By: Mike Frey

On today's episode of the Real Foodology Podcast. So there's two main camps of why we age. One's thought of as programmed aging. We almost have like a cellular software program. And as we get older, it just runs, instead of the young version, it runs the old version. And that old version is not good. The other camp is really that aging is fundamentally failure to repair damage at a cellular level. And that because of that, the amount of unrepaired things just builds and builds over the years until it shows up.

Hello friends, welcome back to another episode of the Real Foodology Podcast. As always, I'm your host Courtney Swan, and I sat down today with Dr. Greg Kelly. He's a naturopathic doctor by trade, and he works for the company Neurohacker, which has quickly become one of my new favorite supplement companies. We go more into detail about this in the actual episode, but I recently discovered one of their supplements called Qualia Mind. It's for premium cognitive support. It's for focus. It's for memory. It's for drive. And I share more about my personal experience in the episode. But I am a person who has struggled with focusing for a really long time. And I actually more recently got some more information about that on a cellular and genetic level. I got a

test done with my doctor called Nutrition Genome. And according to my particular genotype, it is associated with lower levels of BDNF. And that affects my dopamine, my ser genotype, it is associated with lower levels of BDNF and that affects my dopamine, my serotonin, it affects my neural pathways. And if you're not sure what BDNF is, it's brain-derived neurotrophic factor. And when you have lower levels of BDNF, it's associated with lower cognitive function, focus. It can represent as issues with memory and also blood sugar regulation. And my doctor had suggested that I take a lot of these nutraceuticals that are already in the qualia mind. So I was very excited when I found this product, started taking it. I immediately noticed a difference in my ability to focus and my memory and my drive. It really like truly has

helped me on a personal level. So when I had the opportunity to bring someone on the podcast from Neurohacker, I was very excited. We also dive into what causes aging from a cellular level. We talk in great detail about senescence cells. So I'm not going to spend any time talking about it in the intro, but let's just say that senescence cells are connected with aging. And I'm not just talking about aging from a vanity standpoint of just wrinkles of your face. I'm talking about joint issues, energetic issues, cognitive issues, like everything that happens on a cellular level as we age, the systems that are affected by that. So we talk in a great detail about all of this and senescent cells. And then what are senolytics, which can help reduce the senescent cells and products that

Qualia or Neurohacker have that help with these senescent cells. So this was an absolutely fascinating episode. If you are wanting to try any of the Neurohacker products, go to neurohacker.com and use code realfoodology and you're going to save 15% on any of the products that we talked about today, but also anything off the website. So I hope you guys enjoy the episode. I hope you love the products. If you try any of them, write me on Instagram, let me know your experience with them. Let me know if you like the episode. As always, if you're enjoying the podcast, if you could take a moment to rate and review it in your Apple podcast app, it not only really means a lot to me, it truly helps this show grow. So I just want to say I appreciate your support so much. And if you're loving this episode

and you want to share it on Instagram, tag me at Real Foodology. I see almost all of your tags. I try my best to get back to each and every one of you. And I just want to express my gratitude for all your support. So thank you so much for listening. Dr. Greg, I am so excited to have you on the podcast today. I have quickly become a huge fan of the Qualia Mind supplement. I actually literally have it sitting here with me right now. I take this every single morning. I personally struggle with focus, a little bit of ADHD, and this has been a total game changer for me. So I first of all just wanted to name that and say I'm so excited to have you on today and talk to you about that and all the wonderful, amazing products that you guys have. So first and foremost, let's introduce my audience to you, what your background is and what you do.

Yeah, so professionally, I'm a naturopathic doctor. I went to what is now called Sonoran College of something or other, but it was called Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine when I was in the first class back in 1993. And my current role, I work as the vice president of product development for a company called Neurohacker Collective, but we're best known for what you just held up the qualia line of dietary supplements with qualia mind being the original product that we launched and it's still um one of our two best selling the

other is qualia senolytic which is um you know we'll get into today but that's um for healthy aging so i'm glad you've tried it and it's helped you. I know many people that feel like more productive, better versions of themselves when they take Qualia Mind. Yeah, it really, this product, I will tell you, it really surprised me. As someone who's been in this space, in this field for a really long time, I've seen countless doctors, naturopathic, integrative, functional, you name it. I mean, I've been in this space for like 20 years. And it's pretty rare that I find a product that I'm like, oh my God, wow, this really works. Especially when coming from a space of brain

health and focus, because it's something that I've really struggled with my whole life. When I was younger, they tried to put me on Ritalin. My mom stopped that almost right away. They tried to put me on Adderall for a while. And so I've always really struggled with focusing in school and being in the space that I'm in, I've always really looked for more natural, you know, non-pharmaceutical interventions. And so I feel like I've tried everything on the market, you know, just anything I could get my hands on in college that was natural that I could find like Whole Foods and stuff. And nothing really made that big of a difference. So when I took this Qualia Mind, when I tell you, I was so excited because the way that it lit my brain up and just how it really helps me focus and I can feel the effects of it on my brain. So I was very excited when I found this product. One of the things just for listeners, the idea behind just the qualia

is that we're really concerned with people feeling and experiencing our products in positive ways. That's where the term qualia comes from. So we really won't do products if people don't experience them, which is fairly rare. There's lots of products people take that you don't really feel. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. And we're going to drive into other products, but I do want to say one more thing just because I have a personal experience with this product. I recently got a nutrition genome test done with my doctor and we found that my genotype is associated

with lower levels of BDNF, which is brain-derived nootropic factor. And she was listing off all these nutraceuticals that I should take in vitamins. And I went home and I read the back of the qualium mind and I was like, oh, wow, this is literally like made for my brain. Yeah. Yeah. And so just for listeners, because I don't know who will and will not, BDNF is really involved in neurite growth. So like, think of neuroplasticity. That's a compound that our brain releases to help itself be more plastic and reshape itself and learn. So yeah, things like the theanine and a whole bunch of ingredients in

qualia senolytic, I'm sorry, qualia mind are intended to do that. Yeah, I was well done with this product. It's a great one. The choline really helps a lot too, I think. Yeah. Do you want to hear my simple choline story? Yeah, let's do it. So choline is very much a neuro, like acetylcholine would be the neurotransmitter made from choline. And it's really about, hey, this is really important. Pay more attention and reshape my brain so that I remember it. So that's what acetylcholine does. Like dopamine would do something very different. Yep, exactly. Oh, that's what acetylcholine does. Dopamine would do something very different. Yep, exactly. Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, this is, well, like I said, it's a great product. So what is it about, what is your main goal at Qualia? Because I know you guys are very focused on brain health, aging, and you do a lot of nootropics. So maybe we can explain what nootropics

are and what is really your main goal in helping people with your products. I'll start with nootropics first. So nootropics was coined by a Romanian chemist, pharmacist that created what are called racetams now, but paracetam was his invention. And he was trying to do one thing, but when he gave it, I think he was trying to do something for sleep. And when he gave it to animals, they performed smarter. Their memories were better for the maze tests and other things animals would do. And so he coined the idea of nootropics from France. Romanian, like France, Italian, Spain is a Romance language.

And it kind of translates into bending the mind. So in that is that idea of neuroplasticity from the get-go. And over time, nootropics were then embraced first by, maybe you think of the Silicon Valley, hard charger CEO, coder type of people, students. And then the movie Limitless, when that came out, that really kind of put it more in mainstream consciousness. So for listeners, when you think of the idea of nootropics, they're things that can make our brain work better. Maybe not to the degree of Limitless in the movie, but that's the idea, that our brain would be better able to focus. We'd have more motivation to get the things

and ultimately our memory will work better. That's amazing. Yeah, and there's a lot of research coming out right now about nootropics and how they affect the brain and how they work on the neural pathways. And it's a really fascinating body of work that's coming out right now. And I obviously shared my own experience with it,

but people are talking about them a lot lately because everyone is having a positive experience with them and it's really helping their brains and helping with cellular aging, with focusing, with overall cognitive function, with memory, like you said. It's an exciting body of research. Well, we also live in a world where there's so much vying for our attention. So think of attention as a finite resource. Like as an example, while we're recording my phones nearby, notifications are almost always off on my phone, but that email, social media, you name it, is constantly really eating away at that scarce resource of attention. So a simple story about quality of mind is it's just giving us way more resources

to put into that system to counter these things that are draining away our attentional resources. I love that. So I know you have a bunch of different products and actually this is a question that I've been wondering for myself. So are they meant to be taken separately? Or is this if somebody was really focusing on,

let's say they wanted to take Mind and then they also wanted to take Focus because you also have a Focus supplement, which I haven't taken yet because I wasn't sure if I could take them together synergistically. And then you also have an amazing, the Synalytic that I want to get into as well. Can you take all of these supplements together

or is it really meant to hone in on your specific needs? So it would depend on the product. So we would think of Qualia Mind and Qualia Focus as an either or generally. I know people that have taken both, but they overlap in the goals. And what Focus was made for was basically to be just a fewer capsule, but get in the same general zip code of what you'd experience from QualiMind in a day or a week. QualiMind just has far more premium support for the brain. Where the other one, QualiAscenolytic and our other products by and large are completely stackable together. One of the things that's part of my job as product development is to make sure that if someone chose to do all our products, that they wouldn't, like I guess stepping back when I was

in practice, it wasn't unusual to have a patient come in and I'd say, bring all your supplements. And I'd start adding up the amount of zinc or selenium, minerals especially, and be like, oh my God, this person's taking like five times as many as as they safely should be taking and so we do that for our products we make sure that if someone did stack them together that what they're getting would still be safe and tolerable okay amazing well let's dive into the science of aging because i know this is something that you talk about a lot. What causes aging from a cellular level? So there's two main camps of why we age. One's thought of as programmed aging. And the simple way to think of it would be we almost have like a cellular software program. And as we get older, it just runs instead of the young

version, it runs the old version. And that old version is not good. It causes DNA not to be repaired, senescent cells to accumulate, you name it. The other camp is really that aging is fundamentally a failure to repair damage at a cellular level. And that because of that, the amount of unrepaired things just builds and builds over the years until it shows up in our life as what we think of as the signs of aging. And the truth is, there's probably aspects of truth to both camps. But currently, there's not much you can do if it's a software program. But there are things we can do to repair the damage. So that's where Qualius Analytic, the product, the box that you held held up earlier comes in. It's intended to help repair a certain type of damage that are called

senescent cells. Which we're going to dive into. It's interesting, the portion that you were just talking about where a part of aging could be that we are damaging our cells. And I see this from, with my background in nutrition, we are not eating real food so much anymore. People are eating processed packaged foods. We're eating a lot of fillers, a lot of preservatives. And there's not a huge conversation around what that's doing to our body on a cellular level. And I can imagine because we know it's having an effect on our mitochondria. We know it's having an effect on our nutrient depletion and all of that, that some of that damage is probably coming from the fact that we're not

getting real true nutrition from our food. And as a result, it's leading to aging at a rapid, more rapid rate. For sure. Like if you just for the audience listening, imagine almost anything that at a whole body level would cause stress you know so poor diet as you pointed out but lack of sleep or you know like financial stress or toxins

kind of as above so below at a cellular level they're going to be stressed out as well and when cells get stressed they'll try at first, maybe like we would, right? Like, oh, I'm going to protect myself from this stress. I'll increase my antioxidant defenses. And foods are great. Real foods would have antioxidants, compounds like glutathione in them that cells use to protect themselves from stress. So that's step one.

But if stress is more than they can do with that, then they'll take some damage. And that's where autophagy as a process would come in, like things that would then be to repair it. So if stress is too much, some damage, but cells will try to repair it. And if stress is more than that, and the damage is non-repairable or unrepairable, that's when a cell would become senescent because we don't want to make copies of non-repairable cells or really damaged cells. And so, yeah, I would think at the most fundamental baseline when we do good things, like make sure we're eating plenty of real foods, we're giving cells the resources to enable them to be more resilient to all the other forms of stress so that they don't take on the damage that then leads to this kind of cascading. Yeah, that's really fascinating. So what is cellular senescence? Yeah, so cellular senescence is fundamentally, think of healthy cells as living an entire life

and towards the end of their life, they'll go through cellular death and often make clones of themselves. So, you know, daughter cells, we'll call them, and replace them, right? So, that's why our tissues stay the same, roughly, way, right? Because the cells dying are replaced by new, young cells. A senescent cell is a cell that you can think of as an old cell, but really, more accurately, it would be a cell that's so stressed that it's not allowed to make any new copies of itself. It's just too damaged. We don't want to replace damage with more damage. So that would be one characteristic. It doesn't create offspring. Another is that typically a cell that's damaged should either go through what's thought of as a falling off process. It should disintegrate and then be gobbled up by the immune system. Or if it misses that step,

the immune system should say, oh, here's a stress cell. I'll mark that and eliminate it. So the other key thing about senescent cells in the context of aging is they figured out a way to outsmart that. They kind of avoid going through that natural falling off process and hide from the immune system. So those are two things. And then the third thing in the context of aging is senescent cells secrete all kinds of compounds into the microenvironment surrounding them. So these are scientific things like cytokines and chemokines. But fundamentally, these things cause low levels of inflammation. And what they can do, and it's part of the idea why senescent cells are sometimes

called zombie cells, these things can change the behaviors of the nearby healthy cells and make them into new senescent cells. And then that can cascade. So senescent cells, those are the three things. They're kind of frozen. So they're not live healthy cells, but they're not dead, so they're trapped somewhere in between. They make these chemicals that can zombify other healthy cells, and then ultimately they accumulate with aging. So, those are the key points for the listeners. What would cause so much damage that it would create a senescent cell in the sense that it wouldn't die off, but then it would be in this kind of purgatory? Like what would be the, why would it go into this senescent state instead of just dying off in the natural phase of autophagy?

Do we have an answer for that? Yeah, I mean, I think, so autophagy, just to clarify, autophagy would be something that would prevent senescence. What they should go through is something called apoptosis, which is a Greek word for falling off in the context of, say, a fruit falling off a branch, as an example. So what they're doing is they're resisting that apoptosis process. And certain stress cells do, right? I mean,

it's one of the reasons our immune systems, one of its many cool jobs, is it's supposed to find stress cells and gobble them up. And stress cells often are cells that took enough damage that they would create markers on the outside saying, hey, I'm stressed, immune system, come find me, get rid of me. But our immune system will miss some of those naturally, right? And so senescent cells typically have figured out a way to make those markers on its surface less visible to the immune system, right? And again, maybe that's because of this programmed aging idea, like, you know, that, you know, maybe that's because of this programmed aging idea that we've done

our thing. We've created our offspring. We're not as important for passing our genes on, so we don't need to worry about these. So there's lots of reasons that senescent cells accumulate, but the big ones would fundamentally be that we make senescent cells all the time. If you and I just said, oh, let's go do an intense HIIT workout, we'd probably make some senescent cells. A 20-year-old, a day or two later, their immune system is going to have found those or the cells would have themselves gone through apoptosis. But an older individual will make a lot more of them. And we could look a week, two weeks, three weeks later, they'd still be lingering in the tissue.

So the senescent cells are a natural part of the response to recovery from things, as an example. What happens in aging is that we're just not good at getting rid of them. Okay, so senescent cells on their own aren't bad, right? It's like I think of the response to stress as antioxidants, defenses, and other things to toughen up cells. More stress than that, autophagy and other things to repair the damage. More stress than that, okay, too much damage, we can't repair it. For now, let's just freeze this cell so that it doesn't make new copies. And even more damage, right? Trauma, something like

that, a cell will maybe go through what's called necrosis, right? Like unplanned death. It was just so disruptive, the cell immediately dies. So depending on the degree of stress, cells just have a menu of things to choose from. And that menu just disproportionately as we get older, senescent cells happens for all kinds of stress that we would be resilient to when we're younger. Now, are there different concerns when it comes to senescent cells? I want to talk about maybe the role that they play in aging and maybe specific places where we would see them. But are senescent cells also like a risk for cancer? Is there other things happening as well with are senescent cells also like a risk for cancer? Is there other things happening as well

with those senescent cells? Yeah, so senescent cells do different things depending where in our life cycle they're made. So like as an example in creating a baby, right? Embryogenesis. Senescent cells like come in in waves to help form the baby and remove certain tissues and tissue differentiation right so unfortunately cellular senescence is treated as the same

you hear that term and everything seems bundled under that but it's um i know the way in aging to think of it is that there's um transient senescent cells and lingering senescent cells so young people you know during that like as an example during pregnancy there'd be waves of transient ones so they would come and go um if we you know i had that intense workout we should create transient ones that come and go they do their job a days later, they go away or the immune system finds the stragglers. What happens with aging is we're talking about lingering ones. So ones that have figured out a way to remain long after they've started or stopped doing what they were intended to do. And so that's a distinction I think is really important because cellulose,

like a senescent cell on its own, you'll sometimes hear, oh, well, don't they do good things? And yes, but not when they're left hanging around indefinitely. And then like cancer starts to become a nuanced topic as well. And so it used to be thought that the reason that cells would enact cellular senescence and stop making copies was because they were damaged enough. We don't want to make damaged cells because they could lead eventually to microenvironment in tissues that was pro-cancer, as an example. But what scientists have been finding in, so think of that as maybe why we would have transient ones. But what scientists have been finding, and this is still, I think, you know, premature, but that the lingering ones, instead of doing that protective things, may be more contributing.

Okay. Yeah, that's interesting. So from an aging standpoint, why should we care about these senescent cells? And where do they take hold in the aging process? Like, are we seeing it in specific places? Yeah. So the kind of what I think of as the old timer naturopathic doctors would have said, oh, the health of our tissues is reliant on the health of the cells in those tissues. And our VP of marketing at the Koya products is a gardener. So when I was trying to figure out a way to tell her like about their importance, we ended up coming up with a plant metaphor.

So I'll try that for you and let me know if it's working. So like imagine like picture I can see just in the background here, like a beautiful green plant. I don't see a single yellow leaf on it, right? But if you started to have a yellowing leaf, then what that yellow leaf will be doing is it's pulling resources that would be better used for keeping the green ones healthy. And it's preventing healthy growth, right?

It's kind of sucking up resources resources and it's ultimately not helping the plant. And if we're not careful, what pests, other things can be attracted to that yellowing leaf, and then we can have more yellowing leaves, right? So what a good gardener will do, will prune off the yellowing leaf when they detect it. So think of senescent cells as somewhat akin to that yellowing leaf. Like We would have all these healthy cells that would be like the green leaves. We want to feed them with the real food we're eating. We don't want that real food now being sucked up by the yellowing leaves and being wasted. So fundamentally, when you think of senescent cells, that's what they are.

They're taking up more and more space in our tissues and consuming the resources that would be so much better used to create vibrant, healthy cells. Okay. Okay. So that's one thing. The other is what I mentioned with the past, like yellowing leaves beget more yellowing leaves, right? And so that's another thing I mentioned before that senescent cells act somewhat like zombifying agents, right? They can take nearby cells and turn those into the yellow leaf equivalent. So over time, if we don't prune them off, they just create this cascading snowball rolling downhill where more and more of the green leaves are being replaced by yellowing non-functional leaves. So fundamentally, that's

why just to be a good gardener for our tissues, we need to do things to prune those away. And what are those things that we need to do in order to keep these senescent cells at bay? So I think that's where the idea of senolytics originally came in. So senescent cells have been known about for quite a while, but their role in health, the aging, is more new. So starting around 2010, I think, would have been a landmark study. And what they did is they genetically modified animals so that their bodies wouldn't produce senescent cells. And what they found is, lo and behold, these animals just were way healthier through the aging process. So science is like, wow, this is super cool. We thought before

these things were only important for maybe preventing cancer, but they're playing all these other roles we didn't know about. And then in 2015, scientists at Mayo Clinic and Scripps Institute of Aging coined the term of senolytics. And what that meant is these were things that we could take, ingest orally, that somehow went in and caused senescent cells to finally go through this vanishing process, right? That falling off, right? So fundamentally acting a bit like gardeners. And what they found in that original discovery was that when these animals were given these senolytic compounds, their totes became more like vibrant and healthy. Their fur, like a younger animal, their metabolism improved. They were just healthier

through the aging process. And so that discovery, the things we could take, senolytic compounds, that could do things to finally get the body to remove these senescent cells would then translate into better performance. As we age, just cause an explosion. So, I mean, now, I mean, so that term was coined in 2015. If you search PubMed for it now, you'd see thousands of citations. Wow. And so a senolytic is essentially, would it be considered these different compounds that are in this senolytic supplement that you have?

Correct. Yeah. The first two compounds that the scientists at Mayo and Scripps identified as senolytic were quercetin, which you'll see and call you senolytic, and a medication called dasatinib, which you won't find in there because that's a medication. And what they found at the time is that, as an example, quercetin was senolytic in, let's say, endothelial cells, or I think the other one was bone cells. And dasatinib was senolytic in fat cells, but not these others. So stacking them

together had a synergy, was basically more senolytic than either on their own. And then a few years later, that same group of research, since quercetin is a polyphenol, since that had worked, they're like, okay, well, let's screen a bunch of other polyphenol compounds and see if other things work as well. And what they discovered is that fisetin, which is the top on the label, that's the most milligram amount, that that was even a more powerful senolytic compound than quercetin and tended to have activity in some of the tissues where quercetin didn't. And so like stepping back a few things just for the listeners is something can be senolytic, but that doesn't mean it can get rid of senescent cells in all tissues.

So we want to have things that can go in or target different tissues and have effects there. So that's one of the reasons you'll see nine different compounds in quiescenolytic. Okay, wow, that's really fascinating. So these different compounds will essentially target different senescent cells depending on where they are in the body. Yeah, so like again going back, like it would, it's this tendency and it's a mistake the scientists that came up with names, right? We think of senescent cells, oh that's the same name, they must all be the same, but no, like the, like there'll be almost tissue specificity.

So something could be a senolytic in one tissue and not necessarily in another, where things like you'll see in there like an olive leaf extract, that seems to be more senolytic in joint and cartilage tissue. Like I said, fisetin, you know, multiple tissues, but bat tissue with quercetin doesn't seem to have any activity on senescent cells in those tissues.

So when we're at the Qualia brand, we're constantly thinking of the best way to think is that our system is really complex and that we want to support it holistically and so so these different compounds will essentially target these senescent cells and hopefully get rid of them in your body correct and i just say hopefully not saying that i don't think that it works but just that that is the general yeah so the the general idea is the the end state for a senescent cell should either be going through that apoptosis, that falling off process, or if it didn't, the immune system finding it. And we're often asked, or I've been asked many times, like, oh, sorry, are we detoxing these senescent cells after? But no, what would happen is apoptosis is really a disintegrating of a cell. It bursts apart, and then the immune system would come in and gobble up that. So think of the visualization of the leaf falling off the branch instead of clinging to it, falling into the soil and being recycled.

So that's really what should happen to a senescent cell, but it's somehow been stuck along the way. It's glued onto the plant. So, and it's scientifically what is happening is there's networks within the cell that are resisting that falling off process. So what senolytic compounds do is they go in and really normalize those networks so it can finally go through that journey of falling off. Wow. So what will people see in the sense of real time? What is the word I'm looking for? Like when they take this, like, will you notice a difference in your body or will it be something maybe over time that you'll notice as far as the anti-aging properties of it? That's a great question. And it really depends on if and what someone's experiencing. So we always do what we would think of as a beta study before bringing a new product to market.

And the group that we recruited for this had some degree of joint issues, which are super common with aging. So that's why we decided to go after that. And what we saw in that, so for the audience, by a senolytic, we recommend people taking two days a month. So that's it. I do it the first weekend of every month. Oh, so we just take this, wow, two days a month. That's it. I did not know that. Yeah. So think of, again, that pruning metaphor. If you pruned a plant every day, you'd actually start to harm it. You want to just prune periodically. But you could take it more frequently for that. But that would be our general recommendation for that particular study to make sure more

people succeeded in completing the study. We had them take it two days, take 12 days off, take it two days, 12 days off, take it two more days. And what we saw was on average somewhere around 65% improvement in joint performance. So joint comfort, ability to do activities of daily living. And we more recently repeated that study as a placebo-controlled study and again saw something really similarly. So if someone had joints as their challenge, absolutely, we'd expect them to feel it. You may want to do it more aggressively like we did in that study, but even if you did it slower, you would still see dramatic improvement over a couple cycles. And a cycle in this case is just those two days.

Wow. And now let's say someone listening is significantly younger and they're looking more to just take it on a preventative side. Is this something that will also have preventative benefits? Yeah, so that would be how I would, so that group I wouldn't expect to notice anything subjectively, right?

Because they're, think of, we'd use the idea of threshold in naturopathic medicine, like in allergies would be an example. Even if we're allergic, if allergens or pollen, we'll say, is below a certain threshold amount, we may not experience any symptoms despite, you know, even though we're allergic to that. And so that's how senescent cells are thought to work as well, that as long as we can keep the amount in tissues below a certain threshold, then our tissues and organs can perform their jobs well. So yes, like in that context, I would think of as yet you're going in and just making sure that the amount stays at a manageable level so that

you're not experiencing any problems from having the accumulation. For someone that's older, they may already be experiencing in multiple tissues something from the accumulation of senescent cells, so they're more likely to feel something. But for some people that won't be joints, it may be something completely different. So maybe their cognition is not firing on all cylinders. So maybe that's what they would experience. Or a good friend of mine, and just for the listeners, I'm 62. His passion is fostering dogs. So he does a lot of dog walking for the dogs they foster and had told me, so this goes back maybe a year plus ago,

that for years he'd struggled throwing a ball to the dogs it just you know probably some micro tear back there and that after a few cycles he texted me like wow like like i can throw a ball comfortably now that's an n of one that's unlikely i didn't experience that a hundred people may never experience it but that was something he experienced it and we've had this is one of the more interesting we've had that I know of at least a handful plus of women that have taken it and started menstruating again. So it's done something to almost make that system more youthful or lack of a better way to describe it. So like, so somebody that has gone through menopause has actually gotten it back after doing this.

I've heard of six through our customer service so far. Wow. Wait, that is incredible. Yeah, so it may happen, maybe those six were out of 500, who knows, right? So there's not a particular way that qualiocenolytic is experienced. It's really going to depend on what might benefit to be, you know, youngified, so to speak, in that individual. Well, that's what's cool about this supplement is that it sounds like

it's very bio-individual in the way that it affects everybody. And that makes sense to me, because what I'm struggling with is probably going to be totally different than what you're struggling with and what my dad is struggling with. And so whatever systems need, for lack of a better word, like a good judging, you know, like maybe some little things need to go in and be refined and fine-tuned. And then as a result, you're going to start seeing effects on that particular system that was affected by that. So this is, wow, this is really fascinating. And if no system is being effective, because maybe you're 30, right? Like then you may not experience anything, but we all can use a good gardener, right?

To come in once in a while. So I'm actually going to send some of this to my dad, because my dad, most of my life has really struggled with back pain. And more recently, he had surgery on his knee. He tried to get some stem cells in his knee. His knee has been pretty painful and it really didn't do much for him, at least so far it didn't seem like it. And so I'm curious to see how this is going to affect his knee and back pain. Well, yeah, I mean, same. I'm always super curious. I'm'm a big like n of one would be the term you see in the biohacking space right and or your mileage n of one would be like a fundamentally means like you as an individual right instead of like a big study where at the end of the day we're trying to like oh did was there a statistically significant effect for the group as a whole an n of one would

be like what happened when you took it or what happened when i took it or your dad like did in our n of one did it work right because maybe so like one of my examples would be beta blockers with weight gain so i don't know what the current thing is but like 10 12, 12 years ago, last time I looked into it, beta blockers were thought on average to cause about one to two pounds of weight gain. So fundamentally, if you went to a doctor and were put on a beta blocker, six months later went in, doc, I think I gained a lot of weight because of this medicine. They'd look it up and say, no, it only causes one or two pounds of weight gain. It must be something else.

But there's also this idea of data distribution. So that's a big word. But what that means is that most people won't gain any weight from beta blockers, but maybe 10% will gain a lot. And so the average spread out across everyone looks insignificant. But for those 10%, it was really big. Their N of one was different genetically, you name it, right? So because of that, N of one just gives sometimes a different insight that would be missed in a big study. Like, yes, maybe this doesn't do something compared to placebo in a big group, but a small fraction of people were really penalized, as an example. And then the other thing that you'll see,

especially in the nootropic community, is the saying, your mileage may vary. So Y-M-M-V, your mileage may vary. And what that means is that we all are somewhat unique and individuals, right? And so that you had what I would think of as a super response to call your mind. Someone else may take it and only have a good response. They won't, it won't quite work as well for them as you. And maybe what we see is there's always a sliver of people that are non-responders to things. So think exercise even, right? Like I had a buddy back when I was in the Navy because I was an officer in the Navy before becoming a naturopath. And we lifted

together pretty much every week for six months when we were in deployment. I think I gained two pounds of muscle maybe. He gained like 40. He looked like someone just pumped air into his muscles, right? So he was a super responder. I was like almost a non-responder to what we were doing at the time. And so it's one of the reasons we offer such a big money-back guarantee for all Qualia products, because we recognize there's always going to be a sliver of people that may be non-responders to one of our products, and we want to make sure that if that's the case, that they can get their money back.

It's great that you guys offer that because what I was saying in the very beginning of the episode that I spent years, I've spent years trying to find a product that would actually work on my brain and really help me to hone in on focusing and help with my cognitive function. And we're also bio-individual that we're not, everything's going to work for everyone. Right. So like we really have to go through and figure out and see what works best for each of us. And so that's cool that people can try it out. And then if they're just like, you know what, this actually didn't do anything for me. Hopefully it does, though. Yeah, for most people it does, right? So that's part of the reason we do our studies

before launching a product. Because if we don't get a lot of super responders and most of the rest good responders, we just wouldn't launch a product. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I would hope that. Okay, so I'm curious. This is more an individual question about an individual compound in here. So I will say that when I first got this product, I was a little bit bummed to find soybean seed extract in here

because I know there's some studies showing that soybean oil is not great for us, but would the soybean seed extract be different than the soybean oil? Yeah, so it, but would the soybean seed extract be different than the soybean oil? Yeah, so it's really a soy isoflavone. And so the extract pulls out these polyphenols, isoflavones are a subcategory of polyphenols called genistein, diazine. So those would be the compounds that then have senolytic activity. So and that pulling them out, the oils and all those other things are left behind. be the compounds that then have senolytic activity.

So, and that pulling them out, you know, the oils and all those other things are left behind. So, it's the single biggest thing that comes up on social media and maybe with influencers is, oh my God, there's soy in this, why? And the reason we did is, like going back to that original stack of quercetin and dasatinib. Dasatinib just did some things that quercetin didn't. And so one of the things that I did actually on a vacation in Europe was trying to figure out, okay, what's that doing to correct different mechanisms in these that maybe other medications that are similar to it aren't doing? And are there than any plant

compounds that would also have a corrective mechanism that's somewhat similar. And long story short, the two things that seemed to come up the most in animal research, because like mechanisms are almost always studied in animals, were the milk thistle, like a compound called salimorin, and then the compounds isoflavones and soy. So they just do something to help correct this resistance to going through falling off that there's just not other options for. That's fascinating. And I'm really glad that I asked because I do think a lot of people initially might see that and be like, what?

Because I did. When I first picked this up, I was like, oh, I don't know that I want to take this. I mean, and more specifically, what I'm referencing is there was a study that came out a couple of years ago that showed soybean oil specifically has an effect on our brain. It actually reduces the levels of oxytocin in the brain. And so when I saw that, I was like, is this soybean oil or is this different? Because I know it can have different effects on the body. And when you're talking specifically about oil, it's a way more highly concentrated amount of something versus maybe like the extract or whatever,

you know, or just the seed itself. Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing that I would say too is that often something, so I think of, you know, when you think of the negative effects of things, do you know the term Yerkes-Dodson law? Does that ever come up?

No. So visualize an upside down you. And we'll say alcohol as an example. Like your first drink, if you can imagine way back, like one or two drinks, your performance suffered a lot. But for some people, if they continue to drink, their performance will improve, meaning they build a tolerance. So they're kind of going up the hill, so to speak.

And at some point, it'll plateau. And if they continue drinking, often they'll start to descend on the other side, right? Like your classic down-in-the-gutter alcoholic, one or two drinks, they may black out. They fundamentally used up the whole adaptation. So most things track through that type of adaptation curve. And if you think on going up, like that would be performance for lack of a better way to describe it. And along the bottom is time. And also into that would be this idea of intensity. So think of exercise as an example. If you and I decided, all right,

let's run a marathon every weekend for the next year, how quickly do you think we'd progress through that upside down U? Oh, probably pretty quickly, right? Oh yeah, I would. That's what I'm thinking, yeah, yeah. And so that's just such an intense thing that the amount of time that elapses before we go through the whole curve is going to be crunched down.

But if instead you and I decided, well, let's go for a three-mile walk every weekend for the next year, we'd still probably be climbing better performance a year from now. So when you think of like any performance and like soy as an example, they always want to think of time as one of the factors that's playing into both good and bad responses of things. And the intensity, which in food or supplements is the dose or the amount that we would take. So one of the cool things about quality analytic is we're just having people do it two days a month. So what that means, even if there was something, which there isn't, that would be potentially not great in it, we're spreading the time thing out so long. Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah. So that's like, and quasi-analytic is not the best example, but it's one thing I would

love more, you know, of our listeners, yours, people that I teach, to just keep in mind. Because quite often I'll get like, oh, almost this is oversimplified. This is good. This is bad. And almost everything that's thought of as good can be bad if it's done too intensely. And most things that we think of as bad are only bad because of the dose, the amount, right? Exactly. The saying, the dose makes the poison.

Or maybe in some cases, if it's isolated, like I learned this about sunflower oil. We know that sunflower oil is highly inflammatory, but if you're actually eating the sunflower seeds, you're not getting the same amount. Because you think about how many sunflower seeds go into just a tiny dose of sunflower oil, you're going to get loaded with all that. But if you're just eating the sunflower seeds or you're just eating sunflower butter, you're going to get a completely different dose. And that's kind of similarly what I was wondering

about the soybean seed extract. I was like, this can't be the same as the soybean oil. Yeah, so going back, I guess, to that metaphor, because you're right on the money. Soybean seeds, eating the whole seeds or the nut butter made from them would be more like us deciding to walk every weekend where eating the extracted oil is doing the marathon. And we're going to use up our adaptation to that really quickly and start to have the downsides. Yeah. I love that. I love that metaphor. It makes it easy to understand. Well, in the essence of time,

is there anything else that we haven't covered that you think is really important for people to hear? Maybe is there another supplement that you wanted to talk about? Yeah, so I think just going back to quality of scene, like the key takeaways is that, no matter whether we have an impeccable diet or a poor diet or relatively low stress or lots of stress, we're

all going to build up senescent cells over the course of time. And that if we're already older, you know, I view myself as having lived a pretty healthy life and doing mostly good things, but I'll have some as well. It's just an inevitable part. So, we all can benefit from printing away senescent cells. We can benefit more if we're already struggling with issues related to them. And Quoia Senolytic, I think, is an exciting innovation in this area, and especially exciting for me that it's only something to do two days a month, so easy to fit in. Quoia Mind, for I'm sure many of your listeners,

most of us can use support and focus, mental clarity, memory. Again, as we get older or if we have older people we love in our lives, they often need it even more. And one of the interesting things about Quiet Mind is that product seems to have found its sweet spot in young high performers. So most of our sales for Call Your Mind go to people that say 25 to 35 or 40. And the truth

is like they benefit a lot like you have, but that it would also benefit an older demographic that just has never really found it yet. So and qualicinolytic, much more, you know, 35 and older is the, just to get into the sweet spot. And then other products, one I love, so I'll just share it quickly, is called qualicin biotic and it's our gut brain product. And it's a scoopable powder. It's a tropical fruit flavor. It tastes yummy in water. It's a combination of three probiotics. One of them is what I would call a psychobiotic. And what that means is it not only helps your GI performance be better,

it helps our brain perform better. And that usually shows up in a gut-brain sense in lower feelings of stress or anxiety, things like that. So when you think of probiotics, probiotics is a category, but some probiotics are also psychobiotics. So quiescent biotic, that's that. It's also got resistant starch and some other,

baobab fruit, some other fibers that are great. And so again, like the key thing to remember, I live nearish the San Diego Zoo and our head of marketing has two young daughters, they go to the zoo a lot. So I was trying to figure out, how do I describe symbiotic to a five and eight year old? And so it's like, all right,

let's imagine we go to the San Diego Zoo. There's obviously lots of animals in it. And if we're taking probiotics, in a sense it's like adding more animals into the zoo. But we'd be silly to put more animals in the zoo and not supply more food. And that's why the fibers of prebiotics are important, right? If I get, again, for the listeners, many of you are probably taking probiotics. I think that's awesome. But we also want to make sure we're providing the food so that they can do a good job. And then Koi Symbiotic also has a blend of pen fermented berries, fermented turmeric,

because fermented foods, as you would know and your audience probably knows, create all kinds of cool metabolites, right? They're almost alchemy when you ferment a food. And so, you know, think of qualia symbiotic as a very food-like solution for, you know, gut health and that gut-brain axis. Okay. Well, you just sold me. I have a bottle of it. I just haven't started taking it yet because I wasn't sure if I should wait until I'm done with my probiotics that I have right now. Maybe I can take them in conjunction, but I'm going to start taking them today. Oh, you're going to love it. It's a great product. And then the last product

is Qualia Skin. So we have other products too, but that one I think your audience will love. So Qualia Skin is meant for beauty from within, would be its niche. And it's really like a super fruit blend. So it's got omelet, which is an Ayurvedic super fruit. It's got just a range. It's got ceramides from a peach fruit. So it's got lycopene from tomato, which is a fruit, but we think of it as a vegetable. And that product has never really found its sweet spot in terms of an audience yet. But everyone I know that's taken Koya Skin really loves it. So if you haven't tried it, we've got to get some.

I need to try that. Yeah, I would love to try that. You're definitely speaking my language right now. I wanted to ask you one thing quickly before we go, because I was reading the back of the senolytic and it says on the back of here that we take six capsules for two consecutive days and then wait about four weeks.

If we're just starting this out, would we follow that and then maintenance just do two on maybe like the first of every month or what would your recommendation be? Yeah. So that's our general recommendation is just the six capsules, two days a month and repeat once a month, once a month. If you were wanting to like say you were suffering joint issues, you might want to do three over the first five weeks and then go to that once a month. So yeah, but our general recommendation is just the once a month. And it makes it easy.

I know a lot of us at the Qualia brand do it the first weekend of the month because it's easy. And often like Qualia Mind for listeners, that's a product we typically say, oh, take that five days on and then take two days off. So naturally, one of those two days off for me is a weekend and Qualia Synolytic, one weekend a month plugs in on those days. That's perfect. I've been naturally just taking the mind Monday through Friday anyways.

So that's interesting that that's what you guys recommend too. I just did it like intuitively. That's so cool. Well, before we go, I want to ask you a personal question that I ask all my guests, and I'm very curious to hear what yours is. What are your own health non-negotiables? These are things that no matter how crazy your day is that you really prioritize for your own health. So it's varied over the years. Right now, I started in my day with what I think of as ceremony music. So what you'd, you know, like, um, here at like an ayahuasca ceremony as an example.

And, um, and then while I'm listening to it, it's kind of meditative, but I'm also trying to, um, like feel things in my heart, right. To, um, kind of like begin and each begin and end each day, like in a state of gratitude. So that would be one. Sleep has always been one. So when I was younger, I mentioned I was an officer in the Navy and out at sea quite a bit. And my first two and a half to three years, there was only two of us on the ship that could stand a certain watch. So what that meant is if we were out at sea, we call it port and starboard. So six hours on, six hours off. And then in your six hours off, you still had to do your job. And then you still had to get sleep if you wanted to exercise. So

I was pretty chronically sleep deprived by circumstances through a lot of my 20s. And when I realized how important sleep was, which was sometime in post going through naturopathic school, but going back now to the late nineties, sleep since then has been a non-negotiable. Like I, um, well, like I remember at one time I had a girlfriend that was a naturopathic doctor and, um, she was also did a lot of delivering babies. She was a naturopath midwife. And one of her rules was that she always had to have something fun in the day.

So if she had worked all day, had to deliver a baby, it was now three in the morning, she would still feel like she needed to do something fun. The most fun thing for Greg would be going to sleep. So sleep is that non-negotiable. And I think sleep neglect, probably not with your listeners, but like with all my siblings, as an example, just don't realize how important sleep is for everything, whether it's our metabolism and keeping weight off and looking radiant and beautiful or having our mind fire on all cylinders. So sleep's another one. I feel you. Sleep has become the number one most important thing for me as well. I have a similar

story. When I was younger, I was working in a career that really was not conducive with getting great sleep. And I had the same kind of realization where I was like, oh man, this is actually really having a big effect on me. And it's so incredibly important. I need to really prioritize this. Because I was a person that was a self-proclaimed night owl. I would go to bed at like 2, 3 a.m. and then didn't understand why I didn't feel good all the time. I mean, just the disconnect is so funny when you're younger. But having learned, mostly through doing this podcast,

honestly, is just how important sleep is. I've really prioritized it and made it my number one. It's really important. And then I guess my last non-negotiable will be, I mean, I think of food-like substances, maybe like the Michael Pollan thing. There's no food foods that are not on Greg's menu, but things that have certain food-like substances like sucralose, that would right away be, no, that's not on the menu. So your audience is preaching to the choir, but just investing in quality foods.

Yeah, I love it. Well, I think the audience just loves to hear what each individual person's non-negotiables are and what they prioritize is most important. So it's always fascinating to hear what people's answers are. I loved it. Well, please let everyone know where they can find you and where they can find the Qualia products.

And then I also want to take the moment to drop that if you guys want to buy any of these products we were talking about today, use code REALFOODOLOGY and you're going to get 15% off. But please let them know where they can find them and find you. Yeah, so it's neurohacker.com. We're most active on Instagram. So it would be the same neurohacker.com there. Not particularly active on Twitter. So the new X, but I actually took over X. So I'm trying to be more active on that. So on X, it would be me on um you know instagram and other social media it would be

our social media person so the best way to you know follow you know what i'm thinking about would be just the the twitter account and then i blog quite a bit on the neurohacker.com website i co-host our podcast collective insights And mostly my focus is interviewing authors about their books. And many of the books have to do either with diet or the brain. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time. This was a really fascinating episode. I really enjoyed it. Well, thanks for having me. This was lovely. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of The Real Foodology Podcast. If you

liked the episode, please leave a review in your podcast app to let me know. This is a Resonant Media production produced by Drake Peterson and edited by Mike Fry. The theme song is called Heaven by the amazing singer Georgie. Georgie is spelled with a J. For more amazing podcasts produced by my team, go to resonantmediagroup.com. I love you guys so much. See you next week. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and doesn't constitute a provider patient relationship. I am a nutritionist, but I am not your nutritionist. As always, talk to your doctor or your health team first.