The Dr. Hyman Show - The Secrets Of Activating Your Longevity Switches with Dr. Matt Cook

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, Rupa Health, and Pendulum.   What’s the point in living a long time? Being fully in contribution to life. I want to do that feeling healthy and vital, not sick and decrepit. Everything we do speaks to our genes—the food we eat, our relationships, our environment. You’re either telling your genes to age faster or age slower. So I’m constantly working on how to give my genes the right information to do the latter.  Today’s podcast episode was recorded on my recent trip to Antarctica with my own doctor, Dr. Matt Cook. He’s helped me heal and has integrated so many different forms of technologies and science to rebuild people’s health from the ground up. Dr. Cook is the Founder of BioReset® Medical. He is a board-certified anesthesiologist with over 20 years of experience practicing medicine, focusing the last 14 years on Functional and Regenerative Medicine. He graduated from the University of Washington School of Medicine, completed his anesthesiology residency at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), and completed a fellowship in Functional Medicine.    This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, Rupa Health, and Pendulum.   BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough formula contains seven different forms of magnesium, all of which have different functions in the body. There is truly nothing like it on the market. Go to magbreakthrough.com/hyman and use code hyman10 at checkout for 10% off your next order. Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, and Great Plains. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com. Pendulum is the first company to figure out how to harness the amazing benefits of Akkermansia in a probiotic capsule. To receive 20% off your first purchase of Pendulum’s Akkermansia probiotic supplement, go to Pendulumlife.com and use code MARK20. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version):  What’s the point of living a long life? (5:38 / 2:23)  What I learned from my travel through the Blue Zones (6:36 / 3:25) Five converging trends that will change our thinking about medicine and health (13:33 / 10:16) The root causes of aging (18:16 / 15:02) Influence your genes to reverse your biological age (22:29 / 17:42)  How to eat to extend your life span (28:40 / 24:01)  Practices and supplements to support healthy aging (35:51 / 31:23)  Regenerative medicine therapies and protocols (48:12 / 42:13)  What the Yamanaka factors teach us about aging (1:13:12 / 1:08:31)  Reimaging how we deal with trauma (1:21:21 / 1:16:49)  Learn more about Dr. Matt Cook and his work at BioReset Medical at bioresetmedical.com.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Everything you're doing in real time is speaking to your genes. Every thought you have, every movement you make, every bite of food you eat, every relationship or hug you have, you're either accelerating your biological clock or you're reversing it. Hi, this is Lauren, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Just a note of context before we get into today's episode. The conversation you are about to hear was recorded on a ship in front of a live audience during Dr. Hyman's recent travels to Antarctica.

A video version of this episode will be made available on Dr. Hyman's website if you'd like to see the visual slides he references in his presentation. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. It's hard to overstate how important magnesium is for all aspects of our health. There is a long list of symptoms and diseases that can be treated and even cured with magnesium. In fact, way back when I was an emergency room doctor, magnesium was a critical element of our care. We used to treat all kinds of conditions

from arrhythmia to constipation to preeclampsia and even seizures. It's really essential to our health and our wellbeing, and yet over 80% of the population doesn't get the magnesium they need on a regular basis. Now, this is a problem because magnesium deficiency can increase your risk of all diseases and keep you from performing optimally. But even more critically, there's not just one type of magnesium. There are seven different types that we need in order to ensure both our health and vitality remain strong.

Now, I'm normally a big advocate of getting as many of our nutrients as we can through a well-balanced diet. But in this case, it's almost impossible to get enough magnesium intake through your food alone because our soil is so overworked and mineral depleted and lacking organic matter, which helps the plants get the minerals from the soil. Fortunately, BiOptimizers has the solution. Their Magnesium Breakthrough supplement is the only product in the market with all seven types of magnesium, and it's specially formulated to reach every tissue in your body to provide maximum health benefits. BiOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough

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Now, I know a lot of the listeners of this podcast are functional medicine practitioners like I am. And I absolutely love the community of support that we've built together over the years. I also know that as functional medicine practitioners, we need the right information to be able to form an optimal health plan for our patients. And as you know, a big part of understanding what forms of support each individual needs is done through testing, looking at hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, gut bacteria, and so much more. It'll help us find the most effective path to optimize health and reverse disease. And that means we're usually ordering multiple tests for each patient from multiple labs. Now I'm sure many of you can relate to how time-consuming this

process is and how it all feels like a lot to keep track of for both you and your patients. But I want to tell you about a better way, which is why I'm so excited to share with you about Rupa Health today. Rupa Health is a place for functional medicine practitioners to access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like Dutch, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. They've made functional medicine testing simpler and more convenient than ever so that practitioners like us can focus on more time helping our patients.

That's why I love Rupa Health and that's why I love what they're doing. In fact, they've made the process of ordering labs a full 90% faster while providing a noticeably better experience for both practitioners and patients alike. This is a much needed option in the functional medicine space and it means better service for you and your patients. You can check out a free live demo with a Q&A or create an account at rupahealth.com. That's R-U-P-A health.com. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's pharmacy with an F, a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about living longer, loving longer, serving longer, and

finding out the secrets to how to age backwards, listen up, because this is a conversation you're going to want to hear, because it's with my colleague, friend, my own doctor, Matt Cook, who has started one of the most remarkable health centers in the world called BioReset Medical in Los Gatos, California. It's my home away from home. And he has helped me heal so many of my patients that get stuck heal. And he's integrated so many different techniques, technologies, and science in order to regenerate and repair and rebuild people's health back from the ground up. And it's an incredible gift. And he's a selfless, loving, brilliant man. And I am just so lucky that you're on the podcast today. Thanks so much.

You're too kind. If I'm at all less coherent than normal, I'm struggling with nausea. We're on Drake's Passage, halfway through, 20 foot seas. But it's kind of amazing. And it's been a highlight, it's been probably the highlight of my life coming on this trip. There's a lot of, yeah, thank you so much. Matt has not taken a vacation in 10 years.

He's a scientist and doctor dedicated, like I've never seen anybody. He wakes up, from the minute he wakes up to the minute he goes to bed, he's on. Taking care of patients 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. And then barely has something to eat, listens to Grateful Dead, and goes to bed. Pretty much. All right.

So let's get right into it. How do we live longer in order to love longer, in order to serve longer. As a friend asked me the other night, what's the point of living long? I think the point of living long is to be able to be fully in contribution to life and not be sick and old and decrepit. And you don't have to be. This is my recent test. I'm 62, and my biological age is almost 20 years younger.

And I intend on trying to get that down to about 25. This was me 20 years ago at 40. You know, not overweight, but over fat and definitely not as healthy as I was now because I learned more and more and more. Now, Woody Allen basically says, I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen. I want to live on in my apartment. Now there are many...

I'm just going to take you through, quick through here. This is the Blue Zones. I spent a bunch of time in Sardinia last summer and it was extraordinarily beautiful. This is Sardinia. There's shepherds primarily. There are animals grazed on wild plants uh they they make fresh cheese and wine the kind of wine the soil soils are really rough there it's mountains have high levels of antioxidants and maybe contribute to their their health benefits they have the longest lived males in the world and centenarians and they make this cheese uh from the milk of sheep and goats that have been

eating you know a whole variety of wild plants it turns out that these these compounds that we've discovered in there are highly protective they're they're the phytochemicals in the plants end up in the meat and the milk of the animals this is a mind-blowing idea so can you get your vegetables by eating meat kinda Kinda. Kinda. You get some of the most important benefits which is they actually, and these are things that where you can't grow food, right? These are high rugged mountainous regions. This is Carmine who's literally stopped his car in front of us, made us get out and sat

on the bench and talked to him for like an hour. And then he took us to his farm where he's 85 years old and runs up and down i couldn't keep up with him he's going up the steps with his sheep and he grows a huge garden has multiple animals and lives in community and he's just like he doesn't even look like he's 80 anything you know this is julia she's 103 and three months as she made sure she told me and uh it's still working. It's still working, lives with her nieces and is actually making like little doilies

for weddings and stuff. This is Silvio who had a ranch, I mean a sheep farm, 200 sheep up at the top of the mountain and they opened a little restaurant so we went up there. We're this family all together, make minestrone soup

and I said, Silvio, do you have any stress in your life and he was like thought thought it was a weird question he says well yes um sometimes at night a goat gets out and i have to go get it uh it says it all uh this is Pietro, who's 95. He just retired from shepherding, where he walked five miles every day up and down the mountains. He had a booming voice. If you go on my Instagram,

you can hear him singing. He's just got a booming voice, erect back, sharp mind, and he's hanging out with his friends, just chilling. So the question is, how did we get there? You know, the Plains Indians,

100 years ago, were the longest-lived people in the world, most centenarians of any population. And the question is, how do we get there? You know, the Plains Indians 100 years ago were the longest-lived people in the world, most centenarians of any population. And the Seventh-day Adventists, and all they ate was bison and buffalo. And the Seventh-day Adventists lived also very long. Loma Linda is one of the blue zones. So what should you do? Should you be vegetarian or should you eat only meat?

Well, we're going to get into that. And the truth is, no matter where you are in your life uh you know if your if your body looks like the guy on the left it can look like the guy on the right with the right application of nutritional science and exercise and activating longevity switches this guy was a postal worker 65 retired in france and became biker for the first time at 65 and competed and was riding at 105 years, almost 14 miles an hour for an hour. I mean, that does not even, I mean, 14 miles an hour if you bike is not slow. And he's the one on the velodrome track.

And then what are the limits of longevity? You know, the bowhead whales, we found hooks in them from the whale hunting days that recently discovered So at least they can leave a couple hundred years and the Greenland sharks live 400 years the Galapagos tortoises Barely age at all. They don't really age and they can live to be 200 or more and the problem is our current medicines We're practicing whack-a-mole medicine. We're treating diseases and not getting to the root cause So what Matt and I do is root cause medicine. It's activating the body's own healing systems. Regular

medicine has never actually had any insight into health. If you go to your doctor and say, can you please measure my health? Well, I can look for tests that will tell you if you're not healthy, but otherwise you're healthy.

But that's not true because there's so many layers. There's 37 billion, billion chemical reactions in your body every second. And you're getting maybe, you know, 30 or 40 analytes on a lab test. And most of those are only abnormal if you're really sick in the hospital. So we really need to get away from the single diagnosis. Just because you know the name of the disease doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you you could have depression but it'd be 10 different causes or rheumatoid arthritis and have 10 different causes so we want to do is have our health span equal our lifespan how many years we're alive is uh our lifespan how many years we're healthy and

active is our health span the average american's uh um lifespan is 70-something. Their health span is much less. They have actually 16 or 17 years where their health is poor and declining. And so there's this concept called compression of morbidity. And this was from James Freese from Stanford, who basically looked at people's health and longevity, and he found that if they practiced three behaviors, they exercised, they kept their ideal body weight,

and they didn't smoke, they died very late, they died painlessly, cheaply, and quickly. Whereas everybody else who was not doing those behaviors died long, slow, painful, expensive deaths. So if we learn how to activate healing and health in this population, we can actually create a vibrant, healthy group of elders who can contribute wisdom, knowledge,

and be actively enjoying their lives. This is a really exciting concept here, which is longevity escape velocity. Longevity escape velocity is the idea that at some point in the near future, and some scientists are saying 10, 15, I don't know, 20 years, that the accelerations in science is based on exponential changes in what we're doing and understanding will literally allow you to escape death. That you'll reach a point where every year we keep making new discoveries that will prolong our lives. And you can't really understand exponential change very easily. If I said, I'm going to give you a penny today,

it'll double tomorrow, and at the end of the month, it'll double every day. You can keep whatever is left over. Or I'm going to give you a dollar a day for 30 days. What do you want? A penny, I'm sure. Well, you guys are all smart.

A penny. So a penny will turn into $10 million. 30 exponential steps aren't 100 yards. 30 exponential steps are, I think, 24 times around the earth. So that's the rate of change that's happening now. Now, functional medicine, for those of you who haven't heard about it, essentially is a system of thinking. It's a theory.

It's not a treatment, a test, anything. It's simply a framework, an operating system for filtering data based on system biology and how things actually work in the body. And there are five converging trends that are going to change everything we think about medicine and health. The first is what we call network medicine, systems medicine, functional medicine. It's understanding the body is an ecosystem, that everything connects to everything else. It's all one.

It's not, you know, it's like Einstein said this. He said, I'm not interested in the spectrum of this or that element. I'm interested in the thoughts of God. The rest are details. And so what are the thoughts of God and how we were designed or what we believe? And it's really an ecological system that we have. It's just like a rainforest. But the amazing thing is, is we are the earth and

the earth is us. There's no difference. We are intersecting at every level, every minute with everything that's going on around us and what's going on in the earth, whether you like it or not, even if we live in an apartment city building. The second trend is the omics revolution. We really unpack the human genome, the microbiome, our proteome, our transcriptome, all the oms, right? Our socio-genome, which is the effect of our social interactions and community on our genes.

And then that also is added to by quantified self-data, these self, you know, continuous glucose monitors, the aura ring, a sleep map. They're coming. And all this data is going to be providing millions of data points in real time about us and how we feel and what's going on in our biology. And that is going to inform through machine learning and big data and AI with all the other omics data and the frameworks of network medicine, a whole new way of thinking about everything. Now, most of us think that, you know, our genes, we got bad genes. And the truth is not that. The and the frameworks of network medicine, a whole new way of thinking about everything. Now, most of us think that our genes, we've got bad genes.

The truth is not that. The truth is 90% of chronic disease comes from the environment. It's what washes over your genes, your diet, your lifestyle, toxins, stress, microbes, all of it. So this whole field is called systems medicine, network medicine. This is from Harvard, network medicine, Lacoste and Barbasi. This is just functional medicine. And so aging now is finally being considered a disease. So the reason I started with a functional medicine framework and all that is because you need a way of filtering data and making sense of it in order to tell a story and a narrative.

It's not random. Like Einstein said, you know, God doesn't play dice with the universe. It's not random how things work in our body. We're not just a bunch of organ systems separate, organ systems for this specialist and that specialist and this body part has every specialist in the world. So it's not that. It's how do you look at the body as a whole integrated dynamic system and understand where to push on that system to create the maximum change and shift. So aging is finally being talked about, not officially, not according to the governments

or the world coding of diseases, is being considered a disease. And then they call it Alzheimer's, dementia, cancer, diabetes, heart disease. We're trying to treat all these as independent diseases. It's completely wrong. We're never going to find the cure for cancer. We're never going to find the cure for Alzheimer's. There's been $2 billion plus over 400 studies on Alzheimer's, and they came up with bupkis. And basically, if you get three more months at home, that's a win.

So what really are the hallmarks of aging? There are other things. There are things that we now begin to understand about epigenetic changes, which is the epigenome is the uber genome. For example, your genes are your book of life. You have 20,000 genes, and every cell of your body, or all the genes for your entire body. So in your muscle cell, there's your brain or your eye or whatever,

but those genes are silenced. So the body knows how to regulate all that. But what happens is as we get older, and the epigenome is like the piano player, and if the genes are the keys, the epigenome is like the piano player that then determines which song gets played and determines the actual outcome of what's going on with your health. And so those changes in the epigenome are influenced by our lifestyle,

by what we do, what we think, what we feel, by our neutral status. And those epigenetic changes, those marks, is what causes aging in us over time, and that's how we measure our biological age. Telomeres shorten. We have poor communication with cells. We have proteostasis goes wrong. We have have glycation which means sugars and proteins come up like creme brulee in your body Mitochondrial the energy center doesn't work. We got zombie cells that just don't die and create inflammation this whole inflammatory cascade

And we have genes to become more injured and unstable and get more hits, and stem cells get exhausted. So these are the problems that aging scientists are working on now. But what they're missing, what they're missing is that underneath those, these are just upstream from the diseases. What's upstream from the hallmarks of aging, right? What are the real causes? What are the root causes of aging, if you consider disease. So this is what we call the functional medicine matrix. And these are the systems we look at in order to identify how to address a patient. We look at all the predisposing factors. We look at all the underlying

lifestyle factors. We look at their genetics. And we see how do those influence these seven basic biological networks. Assimilation, which is your your gut defense and repair your immune system energy your mitochondria and Detoxification how you get rid of waste internal external Transport lymph circulation and then communication which is hormones or transmitters cytokines and your structural system from cellular subcellular structures and membranes I mean if you're if your cell members are made up of Crisco instead of fish oil, they're going to work very differently and they're going to have very different functions. And that's really why we call it functional medicine because it's about how your body functions and how to get it functioning better and understand

why it doesn't function. And then it's also to your biomechanical structure, which is what Matt is so amazing at. So people go, oh, I got my genes, I got bad genes, my grandmother's got this, my grandfather's got that. Not so. And this is the Pima Indians 100 years ago, thin, fit, healthy, and simply 100 years they've consumed our culture and they're obese. We call this kamad bad on reservations because of the government commodities, basically a second genocide.

We've given them white flour, white white sugar white flour as government surplus commodities Which they eat because they're poor and they end up looking like this and having a life expectancy of 46 and everybody's got diabetes By the time they're 30 and pretty bad But this is what's really remarkable about the science of aging. This is this is one of the first studies done on epigenetics Which Randy journal we basically took identical agouti mice. They're both supposed to look like the yellow guy, fat, diabetic, hypertensive, super unhealthy. And he decided for the mother, they were genetically identical, but he was going to give them some special things called methylation nutrients.

Methylation is essentially a carbon and three hydrogens. It's like the change of currency, the coin of the realm of our biology. And it's getting exchanged millions of times a second. But it's really important in DNA regulation and DNA methylation and making energy and neurotransmitter. I mean, it's really important. And so he gave them basically B vitamins and some other methylating-supporting nutrients. And then instead of the mouse looking like the big fat one, it was this skinny brown one, same genes. And this is just

remarkable. And this was the beginning of the field of epigenetics. And this is a little more technical I want to get into right now, but essentially there's many ways that our, our, our epigenome can be influenced, uh, from all the influences in our life. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Now a few years ago, I went through the worst health crisis of my life. And as a key part of my recovery, I had to revitalize my gut, which meant encouraging the growth of a specific good bacteria called Ackermansia mucinophilia. Yep, that's a mouthful, but it's essentially the bacteria that keeps the mucus layer in your gut and protects from leaky gut. Now, back when I went through my healing journey, I kind of had to be creative and then use lots of different ingredients to support

the right kind of growth in my gut of acromantia. But now it's easier than ever to up your acromantia thanks to Pendulum Therapeutics. They've done something nobody else could do because of the first and only company to offer products that directly contain acromantia mucinophilia. Now, acromantia is the bacterial strain known for strengthening and regulating the gut lining and is also one of the most important determinants

of maintaining your long-term health, your weight, your metabolism, and so many other factors. Increasing the acromantia in my gut has such a big payoff for my health and I've become a real super fan. If you want to try it for yourself, Pendulum is offering my listeners 20% off their first month of acromancy subscription with the code HYMAN. Just head over to PendulumLife.com to check it out. That's P-E-N-D-U-L-U-M Life.com with the code HYMAN for 20% off. Now let's get back to this week's episode

of The Doctor's Pharmacy. So everything you're doing in real time is speaking to your genes. Every thought you have, every movement you make, every bite of food you eat, every relationship or hug you have, all of it, all of it is influencing your DNA methylation patterns and your epigenome and is either creating health and disease. You're either accelerating your biological clock or you're reversing it. So we can reverse our biological clock. I just showed you my biological clock was 43.

I'm 62. And I've been through ****. I've been through mercury poisoning, Lyme disease, Babesia, autoimmune diseases, mold toxicity, everything. And I was surprised when I got that result. But I've been rebuilding my health. And that's what's so amazing about the body. It has its

own innate healing system that if we learn how to activate, the body knows what to do. That's what Matt and I do. We learn how to activate the body's own healing system. We don't use a ton of drugs. We use all these modalities that kind of trick the body into waking up to healing. And we literally can reverse the biological age. So why do we have all these hallmarks of aging?

One of the reasons, well, it's our ultra-processed food, which is killing people. It's 60% of our diet for every 10% of your diet. It's ultra-processed food. Your risk of death goes up by 14%. It's all these toxins. There's 80,000 toxins that have been introduced in the environment, and they're everywhere. every 10% of your diet, it's ultra processed food, your risk of death goes up by 14%. It's all these toxins. There's 80,000 toxins that have been introduced in the environment and they're everywhere. I just took my lab work and I have like cadmium, mercury, and lead.

I'm like, fine. Okay, because I'm just exposed and I try to keep getting rid of it. The microbiome is one of the most important influences on our health because it's almost like we're only there for them. We have 20,000 genes, there may have 2 or 3 million genes and their genes are making proteins. And if you do a blood test, up to a third to a half of all the analytes you find in your blood come from the metabolites of the microbiome, which is amazing.

We're just beginning to understand and map this. And we can't really understand this when you think about the thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands of molecules flooding around your blood, and you get like a lab test with three things on it or 15 or 100 things on it, it doesn't really tell you what's going on. So with big data and quantum computing, we'll be able to figure this out. Also food, food sensitivities. We all have leaky gut because of the processed food and the diet and the stress, the antibiotics. So often that leads to chronic inflammation, which really can be fixed. And also it's not enough of the protective nutrients.

It's not just what you're eating that's bad, it's what you're not eating that's good. So I believe we evolved, co-evolved, in symbiotic phytoabdication with plants to use their intelligence, their molecules, to do things for us that our bodies are lazy and don't want to do. So for example, if you eat broccoli, it activates an enzyme, glutathione peroxidase, that increases glutathione, which is the most, one of the most important molecules in your body for detoxification, for healthy aging, for inflammation. It's the most powerful antioxidant you have, and it needs to be constantly recreated.

And eating this protective food, like broccoli, will do that. Or if you have catechins, which are in green tea, it activates other detoxification enzymes that maybe explains why Japanese aren't all mercury poisoned, because they drink a ton of green tea and eat fish. One of the other major causes, and probably if not top of the list, is loneliness and isolation and disconnection. And on this journey to Antarctica that we're on, I think that we've all recognized

that that is part of the solution, is really finding a way for humans to connect to humans and reclaim their innate community. And I think I'm really impressed by some of the key leaders here like randall mays who's devoting his life to actually making this happen uh so these again are the hallmarks what did they cause well they cause things like diabesity and they cause which is basically belly fat and and all the consequences of insulin resistance and too much sugar and

processed food it basically creates this this prediabetes state, which ends up being the driver of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's. They call it type 3 diabetes. So it's not a bunch of separate problems. It's sort of like the blind man and the elephant in medicine. Chronic inflammation also is one of the big drivers, and inflammation is one of the biomarkers of hallmarks of aging. But inflammation can be caused by many, many things, right?

By your diet, lifestyle, your thoughts, toxins, allergens, microbes. So it's important to really understand inflammation. Oxidative stress is part of the key, but oxidative stress is not necessarily a bad thing. We need it to activate certain healing things. We have a process called hormesis, which I'll go through in a minute. And we'll talk about how that works to use oxidative stress as a healing power. Mitochondria are really these little energy factories that are really turning out to be the key to understanding aging. And a lot of the aging research is focused on how do we heal mitochondria? How do we activate them?

How do we turn on the longevity switches embedded in the mitochondria. There are longevity switches embedded in the mitochondria that if we learn how to activate, we'll extend our life by up to a third or more. And this is really what's so exciting. And they're not that crazy things to do. And we'll talk about what those are. Telomeres, they're the little end caps like at the shoelaces, the little plastic thing at the end of your shoelaces. An aglet, thank you. So the aglet at the end of your shoelace, you know, gets frayed and comes off, and then what happens is all

of your DNA is frayed, and then it becomes a danger. And that's when the chromosomes start replicating. They can become zombie cells, which flow around your body, creating a whole cascade of inflammation. They never die they just kind of cause more mess uh and and they shorten as we age but there's many things that can lengthen them exercise meditation love healthy diet a multivitamin so they're not static anyway

these epigenetic changes are are really key to understanding um the way in which we can regulate our health long term and how to influence our genes through epigenome. There's lots of ways to do it. There's mitochondrial therapies, there's hormetic therapies, there's ways to switch on the longevity switches, which we're going to get into, called AMPK and mTOR and sirtuin genes. So how do we extend life? Well, this is the first data we first got on anything that really worked, which was calorie restriction. Now, I met a guy once who did calorie restriction. And I said, what do you eat for breakfast?

He says, well, I'll eat five pounds of celery. I'm like, no thanks. I'm going to die soon. And so you're hungry all the time. You're starving all the time. But what they found was that by calorie restriction, which is adversity the body starts to kick in repair healing mechanisms that allow us to actually function at a much better rate so we never had all the abundance we do now you know like we never had a buffet right we had to go hunt and gather and scrounge around and

maybe we didn't have food maybe we did so we have 200 or more genes that help us deal with starvation and almost none that help us deal with abundance so when you calorie restrict all these longevity switches get turned on because it's a sign of oh i better go into survival mode which is great and it activates this process called autophagy who here has heard of autophagy so autophagy is a very simple process of recycling your body has its own recycling plant and essentially it envelops all old cells and parts and puts them in a little bubble called lysosome. And then they transport to another part of your body, another kind of component of your cells called lysosomes, which are full of enzymes, degrading enzymes. So basically, it's like recycling where they break things apart into its component parts,

and then you get to use those parts again. And that's really called autophagy. And it's so important because think about it. If you just cooked and cooked and cooked in your kitchen, you never cleaned up, it's going to be a real problem. So you've got to go through phases of both autophagy and building. The key to understanding aging is not just, oh, you should be vegan because meat activates mTOR,

and if you activate mTOR, you're going to die sooner no you you need both my autophagy and the cleanup and autophagy so repair which is a catabolic state and you need you need protein synthesis you need to build new tissue and protein so it's really about the dance of how to activate those switches in a way that's those versi switches not too much it's kind of like the goldilocks effect the worst thing is sugar sugar is the worst thing and has has the most adverse effects on all the longevity switches whether it's mtor or cmdK or sirtuins. And it is the central driver of aging, period. So there's a lot of desserts out there, but just think about if they're worth it.

And the body, as we age, particularly becomes more and more... How are you doing, Matt? For people who are listening to this, Mark is single-handedly doing acupressure on me because I've got a little nausea. We're on 20-foot seas. He's moving the slides forward, but I'm doing good. You're not nauseous anymore?

It's about half of what it was, so it's about a 5 out of 10. Okay, good. So I saw the barf bag go down on the floor, so that's good news. Okay. So sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar. Sugar, flour. I've sugar, sugar, any part. Sugar, flour. I've written dozens of books on this.

You know, you can read the 10-Day Detox Diet, which talks about sugar a lot, or about sugar solution. But it's really the driver of so much. We now eat about 152 pounds a year per person. We used to have 22 teaspoons a year as hunter-gatherers. But what about protein? Should we not be eating meat? Because meat's bad for the planet,

it's bad for the animals, it's bad for humans, right? Not necessarily. Depends on what meat and how it was raised and so forth. So a regeneratively raised cow is very different than a feedlot cow. And one study, for example, they found that kangaroo meat,

which is available in Australia, they were able to do a study where they compared it to feedlot cow and you know one study for example they found that kangaroo meat which is available in australia australia they were able to do a study where they compared it to feedlot meat and the feedlot meat raised inflammation and the kangaroo meat lowered inflammation same amount exactly gram per gram of protein so it's it's the information in food that matters this is such a key concept if you learn nothing else today learn that food is not just calories, that it's information, it's code, it's instructions. And it's literally programming every cell, every biochemical reaction in your body every day in real time. And it's talking to your microbiome too. And it's just, it's so important to think about your food as a pharmacy with an F.

So one little geeky minute here, and then we're going to move on to some fun stuff. So these are the longevity switches. And I don't have time to explain all of it. Read my book. It's coming out in February. But basically, scientists have discovered that there are these longevity switches that can be turned on and off by different inputs or outputs. So dietary restriction is one of the most powerful ones so if you want if you were to in my studies and you extend like by a third and yeast they can do

it by a thousand years they put a thousand years and we'd be 120 so mtor which we'll talk about in a minute is is important because it's it's really based on protein synthesis which is great but if it's too much it's not good and so in order to initiate autophagy which is a self-eating recycling system you need to shut it off and the best way to shut off is to just don't eat overnight just take a 12 14 16 hour fast which is not that hard uh cmbk a lot of this research around informants about this is regulating the blood sugar and insulin sirtuins are massive dna repair systems and anti-inflammatory systems and they they're very much activated by um i mean inhibited by sugar uh you heard the red wine story resveratrol this is that story where they were able to extend life and found the rats and mice could you know drink all this wine and

still be fat, but all their biomarkers were really healthy and they were more fit. They had better health, even though they drank the equivalent of 1,500 bottles of wine. But unfortunately, it wasn't wine. It was the capsules. So don't try to do this at home. Muscle building and muscle as an organ is one of the most important things to think about as you age because if you don't have that, you're in trouble it's like as an organ is is one of the most important things to think about as you age

because if you don't have that you're in trouble because it's what drives people into frailty the reason people end up in nursing homes is not because they have an illness it's because they can't get up a chair like just a simple test like where you where you get up like this without holding on they're gonna have to go like this right and then you see these people do that this this is the beginning of the end and and when they fall, it's a disaster. And body composition, we can measure now with a DEXA scan. This is probably one of the most important tests. Look at where your visceral fat, the organ fat.

That's what causes all the problems. So exercise is the key to that, and then sleep is really important, but we won't talk about that on this ship. Meditation is, again again a key lifestyle factor to reset community which we're all experiencing which is really feeding our souls and helping us uh joy and happiness joy and happiness is so important and altruism altruism is actually a drug it literally binds to receptors in your nucleus accumbens and activates the pleasure centers they're the same as cocaine or heroin. So serving others, loving others is actually medicine for you.

Okay. Now supporting healthy aging, adversity. I'm going to sort of frame the things that can be done that are coming down the tracks because a lot of them and they get confusing in the context of adversity and abundance. So adversity and abundance. So adversity are things that stress your system. Basically, whatever doesn't kill you is good. So it makes you healthier. And abundance are things that activate abundant pathways for good repair. So let's talk a little bit about adversity.

This is the Himalayas, and in the Himalayas there's a plant called Himalayan tartary buckwheat, which is not a grain, it's a flower, grown under the most adverse conditions you can imagine. Poor soil, bad light, high altitudes, cold temperatures, drought, I mean, just rough.

And in order to survive, in order to survive, they have to produce many many defense chemicals these molecules these phytonutrients are not there for us but they're there for them and they are their communication systems

their defense systems and Himalayan terabuckwheat has basically more phytonutrients than anything on the planet it's the world's best superfood and you can make pancakes out of it you can make basically more phytonutrients than anything on the planet. It's the world's best superfood, and you can make pancakes out of it. You can make soba noodles out of it.

And it's delicious and amazing, and it also has many, many things that help the microbiome. It has very low glycemic load, high in protein, high in minerals, and has unique phytochemicals like tuhova, which doesn't exist any other plant that we've discovered yet. And why that's important is that we have these zombie cells that never die. And this actually helps these zombie cells get killed. So by using plants and using these foods in this way, we can actually help deal with some

of the hallmarks of aging using other strategies. Also, just the phytochemical pharmacy has to be part of your diet. All these are a little xenohormetic. You're saying, well, some people say, oh, don't eat vegetables because they've got poisons in them. Yes, but in little doses, it actually stimulates you to do the right thing. So intermittent fasting, again, is a technique. Strength training is a technique. This is called hormesis. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And it's a really important concept.

Adversity, hormesis, same idea. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Wim Hof, ice baths, polar plunges, great like we did here. Hiking around the top deck naked like I did the other day. Or almost naked. Saunas, which we've been doing a lot of here,

on the boat to Antarctica. And there are things that really happen in here biologically. I mean, for example, you produce heat shock proteins, which help refold misfolded proteins, which is a big hallmark of aging. It increases your innate immune system. And the cold activates your sympathetic, parasympathetic nervous system the right way

and has so many benefits. And brown fat gets activated, which increases your metabolism. So there's just so many techniques. They've been around forever, ice plungers and hot therapies. This is a cell gym. This is essentially a hypoxia machine. So another hormetic therapy where you go up to an Everest by something sticking on your face and then you come down and your blood

saturation drops way down in the 70s and it comes up, goes down and your mitochondria go, damn, something's happening here. I've got to get in gear and get myself in shape and make some new ones and clean out the old ones and get more efficient. It's actually a way to really

radically upgrade your mitochondria. Then there's hyperbaric oxygen, which also does the same thing. And there's studies out of Israel where they're actually seeing the benefits of longevity from this. Essentially, it's putting you in a tank that's used for diures for the bends. But essentially, it puts you under one or two atmospheres or more pressure and then pumps in a hundred percent oxygen So it hyper oxygenate your system. We use this for wounds that won't heal for stroke victims If we're gonna give a stroke your part of the brain is in debt is sort of numb and it's with the hyper oxygenation and hyper Back pressure you look and wake up

That there is the brain I've seen CP kids walk out of these things. It's pretty impressive There's ozone. It's pretty impressive. There's ozone. That's another hormetic therapy. We heard about the ozone layer over the Arctic being destroyed because of fluorocarbons, but ozone is not bad. There's a lot of bad press. Ozone is going to kill you.

Don't use it. You go to the FDA website. This is dangerous. It's not a medical treatment. Yes, if you inhale ozone, it's very dangerous. But also, if you inhale water, it's very dangerous. It's called drowning. So it all matters where you put it. And ozone is one of the most powerful hormetic therapies.

It really saved my life when I was really sick. Matt uses it all the time. He's going to get talking about it a little more. I'll let him go talk more about it. There are abundance medics too, things that help turn on good switches like resveratrol turns on sirtuins or fistin, which is from strawberries,

also helps with longevity switches. Pomegranate, for example, has a compound in it that's turned into urolithin A if you have the right microbiome. Urolithin A then goes up into your mitochondria and helps do mitophagy and clean up the mitochondria and also protein synthesis, so it builds muscle.

So basically you can not, but the thing is if you just eat pomegranate, your microbiome's so screwed, there's a company that's actually derived this and then made urolithin A. It's something I take every day. Spermidine, which exactly comes where you think it comes from,

but another longevity abundance memetic, vitamin D, fish oil, all the quercetin and bioflavonoid plants are also abundance memetics and then turmeric as well, which is really clear. And then

it's really all about getting autophagy cleaning up your cells recycling so it's basically the the the dynamic between breakdown and build-up right between adversity and abundance so if you just have for example certain longevity switches turned on turned off all the time you're going to die like if you if you if you turn it off mtor all time, if you're vegan, let's say you never touch any protein, it will be silenced, but then you won't make protein enough to survive. And you'll end up with sarcopenia

and all kinds of other issues. So NAD is one of the key components that Matt uses and I use basically to help regulate sirtuins and these longevity switches. And it does so many things. It's involved in energy. It goes out and repairs DNA.

It helps neurotransmitter function, and it lengthens your telomeres. It improves your immune system, and it basically works in your cells and your mitochondria, and this whole autophagy thing we talked about. Hormones, again, are another big part of aging, and how do we deal with optimizing our hormones? Long conversation, but our sex hormones

really need to be balanced as we age. There's menopause, there's andropause, and often we have high insulin levels, we have thyroid levels that aren't right, we have adrenal hormones that are overtaxed because of stress, and all these affect us. And one of the key ones is insulin, which is driven by a high sugar carb diet, and that's why a lot of people in the longevity space are taking metformin, which is a cheap diabetes drug. It has side effects, but I'm still on the fence. By the time I get done my book, I'll have an opinion about it.

But right now, I'm not really excited about it because I think most of the gains that you can have from that, you can have with lifestyle. And they've done the diabetes prevention trial over 10,000 people years ago where they found that lifestyle, metformin was better than the control group,

but lifestyle was 58% better than metformin. So then there's really, really cool stuff coming down the pike called rapalogs. And so we talked about those longevity switches. Imagine if you could switch them on without causing a problem, without causing bad side effects. So in the 60s, a bunch of scientists went down, not anthropologists, but scientists went down to look at what kind of compounds were in Rapa Nui.

And they scratched the back of one of these statues. And they found a compound they called rapamycin, which they thought was going to be an antifungal drug. It's currently being used as an immune suppressant in transplant cases, but it's not really its real role. And, in fact, the receptor on which it works is called the mammalian target of rapamycin. It's literally named after Rapa Nui. And now they have some side effects.

Some people are using them. I started trying them. I'm experimenting with them. But you have to be careful. They have some downsides they're coming out with new rapalogs that are select for for better um silencing without any of the side effects um so rapamycin is that drug so let's talk about more now what matt does and the frontiers of aging and looking at aging biomarkers so we do a lot of diagnostic tests and there's going to be more and

more diagnostic tests we're going to look at look at. Obviously, your omics revolution, Jonathan and I, well Jonathan started it and I piggybacked on it because it was so good, I fought my way in. And we're creating a company called Function, which is giving you access to your own biomarker data, your own lab data. And we're gonna be layering in things that you aren't gonna get at your doctor's office that are gonna help you map out your health and longevity in really important

ways. So there are all kinds of functional medicine testings that look at the systems. I'm not looking at whether you have diabetes or whether you have kidney failure. I'm looking at what are the dysfunctions in your system. And we can look at telomeres as a biomarker. We can look at telomeres as a biomarker. We can look at, this is my telomeres a few years ago. I was 58 and my telomere year was 39, so I've gotten a little bit older. This is TruDiagnostic, which is a DNA methylation test. These are home tests you can do. The Gallery test is a new test, liquid biopsy, that essentially looks at 50 different cancers and you can detect them and then you can get them early stage and get cured pretty awesome guy named David Furman at

Stanford has developed a test where he's put thousands and thousands of molecules through throughput analyses looking at correlations with chronic disease and inflammation he's found four to eight biomarkers of inflammation that we've never heard of that exists in our blood that are highly predictive of aging and rapid aging and chronic disease and it's going to be available on the market in the next few months it's called i age i little i age also we're going to get all the data from the biometric sensors to put up into that and um and we're going to have so much information about how our body's functioning not not looking for disease, not looking for pathology, but looking for what the root cause is.

And our whole diagnostic model is just so antiquated. We really, really have to move beyond the notion of disease and understand the body as this dynamic web and function. And yes, sometimes it's helpful to know if you have rheumatoid arthritis or whatever but just but knowing the name of the disease doesn't tell you what's wrong with you you could have 10 people with rheumatoid arthritis all having very different causes so when i go to see matt he's the future uh matt matt's taken this to the next level and um and works on a lot of things i'm going to hand the mic over to him or i'm going to give you you go your your mic,

and talk about what you do and what are those things that are involved in what you do to regenerate people's health. And his clinical is called BioReset Medical, and it really is a reset. I personally, just quickly, I personally had back surgery two years ago, couldn't walk, bad complication, bled into my spine,

was like a 90-year-old man, couldn't do anything, went bled into my spine was like a 90 year old man couldn't do anything went to see matt and he completely fixed me uh it was over a number of sessions but he completely fixed me and i'm 30 years of pain gone and uh it's it's pretty impressive and i've sent him patients with chronic illnesses with covid with long covid autoimmune diseases. And the amalgamation techniques he uses are all designed to activate the body's own healing systems and mechanisms in ways that aren't giving a prescription. And so he uses IV initial therapy, he uses exosomes, he uses peptides, he uses ozone

dialysis, he uses plasmapheresis, and he uses all kinds of injectable techniques, hydrodissections, telegangling block, ketamine therapy. It's quite amazing, in addition to all the basic functional medicine stuff. So I'm going to let Matt go, and the first slide's really about IV nutrient therapy and the value of that and why, and then we're going to go to NAD, and I'll kind of guide you through the steps.

We think of IV therapy as sort of a platform of a whole bunch of things that you can do. So you can do antioxidants in an IV, things like vitamin C. You can do NAD in an IV, which has this diversity of a whole bunch of effects. You can do regenerative therapies like exosomes, and you can do regenerative therapies like stem cells. And so it's going to depend on what regulatory environment you're in in terms of what you can do regenerative therapies like exosomes, and you can do regenerative therapies like stem cells. And so it's going to depend on what regulatory environment you're in in terms of what you can do. But I think these are things that are going to become really part of a mainstream way

of thinking about care, and it's going to be something that people are going to adopt all over the world. And I think the cat's out of the bag and and this can be an exciting time the next 20 years as we start to work with these modalities yeah and matt you know you don't just use the regular ivs of myos cocktail glutathione vitamin c drip you you do a whole array of things that are so extraordinary you put in uh plant compounds olivine from olives which are antivirals and quercetin and you use nad resveratrol from grapes you literally give these like plant compounds direct ib in addition to using things like nad iv and even peptides ib so there's there's a lot of extra things that can be done i i know

when i got covet i called matt like what do i do he, take an entire vial of Thymus and Alpha-1, which is an immune regulator, and stick it in a little 100cc bag and drip it in all at once. And I did, and I was like, wow, it worked. How much better did you feel? So much better. It's sort of shocking. And so then I get nervous talking about COVID

because it's like people don't want you to talk about COVID, but these modalities are profoundly helpful for COVID and for immune dysregulation. And, you know, we've been using the diversity of the IV therapies that we use to take care of patients with chronic fatigue, chronic Lyme disease, and what had been the major plagues of our lives before COVID came along. And I think that we were lucky in that sense that it gave us a chance to prepare and learn how to do it. And I think of IV therapy kind of like a meal. I've got 80 things that I use, but I'm not going to give you all 80. So it's going to depend on what's going on. Yeah, it's kind of cool.

I go to this clinic, there's like four bags. I'm like, what is that? What is that? So let's talk about NAD because NAD is something you know a lot about. It's the latest rage. Everybody's talking about it. All these companies are producing pills. Everybody's saying theirs is the best.

People are doing clinics with IB, NAD. And so what is NAD? What does it do? And how valuable is it? And when do we use it? So NAD is actually a form of vitamin B3. And it stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide and and it is basically our body basically is like a battery and so there's an electrical charge across every cell and then there's a lot of biochemical reactions that require energy to happen and NAD is a high energy molecule that donates an electron and in the process of donating that electron it facilitates a biochemical reaction. And so where it facilitates

that reaction determines what it does. So if NAD is donating an electron it can help for DNA repair, it can turn on your sirtuin superfamily. It can help stimulate the Krebs cycle, which is how we basically make energy. It facilitates reactions in our mitochondria, which you mentioned earlier. And so NAD is a pervasively helpful molecule. One thing for people to remember is that for patients with complex illness who are real sick, a lot of times we like to start very low with the NAD doses. On the other hand, the other side of the spectrum is people with hardcore addiction. They can tolerate a lot because one of the other things that NAD does is it helps break

down toxins, including alcohol. Yeah, I think it's used in trauma and brain injury and people with Parkinson's. I've seen dramatic results because it works on the mitochondria to stabilize the mitochondria, which is the source of the Parkinson's problem. It's used for energy and athletes. And so we started doing a lot of NAD years ago. And we're focused a lot in the addiction space because that was primarily what NAD was being used for at that time. And now we do a lot of NAD, but we'll do it in smaller amounts. And we're pairing that and bundling that with a whole bunch of other things.

Synergistic. It's easier to go through, and so I like it that way. I have a little Zofran on board for some seasickness that I got from the waves. Some people will use Zofran before NAD. We also like to use trimethylglycine, and it helps with some of the side effects of taking NAD. So it has a lot of beneficial effects in real time, but it also is one of the key activators of sirtuins, which are these master compounds that activate systems in your body

that run around and repair your DNA, which is constantly getting hit. You're getting hundreds of thousands of hits every day to your DNA. Your body has to repair them. And even if like 0.11011% isn't fixed, it ends up being a problem. So this is going on so fast. So at warp speed, you can't even imagine what's happening in your cells. But NAD will help to activate those longevity sartorian switches which is so cool um let's talk about ozone so ozone is sounds crazy

right ozone layer all that ozone's dangerous don't breathe it uh but it turns out it's one of the most powerful hormetic therapies on the planet and one of the most important medicines, and it's basically free. So, Matt, would you please explain ozone, why we should be using it, what are the indications, and how it works? So ozone is an oxidative therapy, and so what O3 is unstable, and it will donate an electron,

and it turns out our blood has an incredible buffering capacity. And so you can mix ozone with blood and it tends to be safe. And there's a fairly wide range of dosing, but I tend to like some of the lower dosing strategies and even micro dosing of ozone. By the other hand, our lungs have almost no buffering capacity. And that's why if you breathe ozone into your lungs, this could be a toxin. But because you can put it into the blood, and what we do is we basically mix the blood with ozone and then outside of the body and put it in. So we're not actually putting ozone gas in the body. We're dissolving

ozone in the blood outside of the body and then putting it back in. And what it does is that when it donates that electron, it will kill single cell organisms and it will kill viruses. It's the most powerful germicide on the planet. And so then we have been using, and many people have been using around the world, ozone for Lyme and mold and complex illness to help people with these chronic infections that are really probably some of the things that are underlying a large percentage of the medical problems that we face. And that in and of itself is worthy of kind of a deep

and good conversation. But so then ozone is a fantastic way to, you can think of it as an antibiotic. And so then suddenly now you have one antibiotic that you can use as an infection and now you can begin to combine you can use as an infection. And now you can begin to combine that with other things that are intravenous. And it works against viruses, bacteria, yeast, parasites. It's pretty impressive. It's quite impressive. And then you can also inject it.

And ozone is 99% oxygen. And so then you can inject it into infections. In the body, you can inject it subcutaneously. You can inject it into joint infections. I mean, I had a nasty cellulitis on my foot in Hawaii last year, and I thought I was going to have an abscess and have to take antibiotics. And I got

ozone-infused cream, gel. And I put it on on and the next morning my foot was not red and I was what happened here so it's you know ozone was invented the machine was invented by Nikolai Tesla it was used a lot in World War I for wounds because they would soak the gauze and the ozone water and then they would wrap it around the wounds to prevent infection but it it the way that the way that it works is as a hormetic therapy. So it creates oxidation, which sounds bad, but that causes the body to go into like call the Marines,

bring out the Air Force. And so all of a sudden, you increase stem cell production. You activate your anti-inflammatory system. You shut down something called the nl3p inflammasome you inhibit something called nf kappa b which is the transcription factor that turns on all the inflammation genes it inhibits all the coagulopathies we see for example covid uh and it and it basically increases your your brain chemistry so there's so many benefits to it that that your body can engage with because activating the body's own healing system it's like danger okay let's go and that's what happens

pretty amazing and so then we do we do a uh form of ozone therapy where we run uh ozone through dialysis filter yeah and um or run blood through dialysis filter and Yeah. And, or run blood through dialysis filter. And at the same time, we mix the blood there with ozone. Yeah. Which can be quite helpful for chronic infections. And we've been using it for people with long COVID

and with very good benefits also. And we're going to get another kind of dialysis in a little bit. But the next thing I'd like to talk about is hyperbarics. We can just spend a few minutes on those. So hyperbarics. Oh yeah. So I'm actually a hyperbarics. We can just spend a few minutes on those. So hyperbarics.

Oh yeah. So I'm actually a hyperbaric certified doctor. And the reason I got into it was to help patients with wounds and also to help people with these chronic infections, people with Lyme disease, chronic mold, long COVID, all generally do quite well with oxygen. And basically what happens is you get into that chamber and they put the pressure up. And then over the course of the time that you're in the chamber, because you're breathing 100% oxygen at pressure, the partial pressure of oxygen goes up in every single compartment in your body. So initially the amount of oxygen goes up in your blood. But then eventually, you get an increased concentration of oxygen in your bones, in your brain, and in every organ.

And then that increased concentration of oxygen has a whole bunch of beneficial side effects that are helpful. And so that's why people do well after strokes, for example, because you're increasing the concentration of oxygen in the brain. And interestingly, I've had a lot of great results combining ozone therapy with injections. Yeah, I mean, it's basically how I got out of my deep sickness with mold and colitis and autoimmune disease after cdif I used IV nutrition I used ozone I used hyperbaric and I used stem cells uh and so stem cells are controversial confusing the legislation and regulations around them are all over the place and you know you can get them some places here but here but you can't grow them so people go to Mexico or Panama or Caribbean.

So give us like a one or two minute stem cell overview. So stem cells, we have stem cells in every organ. We have stem cells all over our body. And what stem cells do is think of a stem cell as a general contractor that kind of rolls up on a construction site that is inflammation. If you bruise your leg or bruise your knee, the result of that bruise is that you release a whole bunch of cytokines. Those cytokines are there, and what they do is they call stem cells in, or they activate stem cells that are in the local area. And then what those stem cells do is they take a look, and then they begin to regulate and modulate that inflammation.

So they bring the inflammation down, and you say, well, how do they do that? And the way they do that is by secreting small vesicles of growth factors called exosomes. And so then we've actually decided, Dr. Kaplan, who came up with the name mesenchymal stem cell, actually retracted that. And now he calls it a medicinal signaling cell because the stem cell is basically a mobile pharmacy that rolls around and looks for inflammation in your body and then regulates and manages that inflammation and manages the healing response. Yeah, I mean, so stem cells are really the original cells that create all the other cells.

And that's when you cut your skin, your skin heals because it knows what to do. They age, they age out, they get harmed. We have less of them as we age. And so people are going, should we use umbilical stem cells? Do we use placental stem cells? And there's a lot of exploration of that. You can't use somebody else's stem cells because your body will react to it as a foreign substance. But this technology is emerging, and now we can get purified stem cells. That can be extremely

helpful. And the applications, the uses for orthopedics, for aging, for various diseases, really interesting. But what Matt said was really important, which is that they're basically little carrier groups for all the good stuff that are in the stem cells. It's not like the stem cell goes somewhere and becomes something else. It releases other factors. And those are exosomes. And Matt uses exosomes a lot in his practice. I've been a huge beneficiary of exosomes. And I was really under the weather with COVID.

And I got sent a bunch of exosomes and I took it and the next day I was back to normal it was pretty remarkable so exosomes are what? so exosomes are those vesicles that stem cells secrete and so fundamentally we're always

at some level of inflammation but generally we're able to manage and modulate that Something can happen they can they can spin inflammation out of control an example of that would be like a viral infection that that is creates inflammation that's that's Beyond what your body can begin to deal with and so then exosomes is we're injecting billions and billions of vesicles with growth and healing and modulating factors. And then one of the things that they do, I said that a stem cell will manage inflammation.

They manage it with exosomes. And what they do is they regulate and balance immune function. And that regulation is often what's awry at the end of an infection. And so it brings you back into kind of a balanced immune state. And the reason they're helpful for so many chronic infections is that in almost all of those chronic infections, we're in a constant state of inflammation that is beyond what the body can deal with. And so if you can support with an anti-inflammatory, a lot of times that's enough just to reboot a reset for the immune system and then it gets back to doing what it's supposed to do. And they're much easier to take because stem cells, you have to suck your bone marrow,

suck your fat, you have to go to a foreign country. These are coming a little vile. You just defrost them and inject them and you can give large doses of them and have profound effects. So next I'd like to talk about peptides, which you all on the boat are hearing about, thinking about, getting. Many of you have been the recipients of Matt Cook's Large S and helping heal different problems. What are peptides?

How do you use them? What are they for? And how do they affect longevity? So there would be a symphony of different molecules that exist within the body that do things. And so exosomes are one of those. Proteins and small molecules are other ones. And then a protein is a sequence of amino acids.

A baby protein is called a peptide. Less than 20 amino acids. Maybe less than 100. And so then there are peptides that do all kinds of things. You mentioned hormone replacement. There's peptides that will tell your pituitary gland to make more growth hormone and to secrete more growth hormone. And since these came out, essentially everybody

that was in anti-aging that was giving people growth hormone has quit doing that because it works so much better to tell your body to make growth hormone. There are peptides that are anti-inflammatory. We think about one like BPC-157 that is really incredible for burns and pain and around nerves and even in things like the P-shot. The P-shot? You can actually put them in the penis and it will help with penile function. There are peptides that will help reset and turn on mitochondria, peptides that turn on cognitive function,

peptides that are immune supporting, and the immune supporting peptides have been, I think, fantastically helpful for people with COVID, sort of as you mentioned. And so then there's this huge diversity of different baby proteins that modulate every aspect of our biology, the assembly line of biology,

and they have different inputs and do different things. Like we all know about neurotransmitters. We know about neurotransmitters we know about hormones we know about you know different communication systems like right but but the peptides are really the body's super high wave communication systems and signaling uh-huh and then as we age, I mean, this is longevity talk, the issue is that our immune peptides really go down as we age. Our thymus, which is kind of the master immune gland, starts to involute and do less. And that's why older people are at so much higher risk for chronic infections and then even at risk for the big viruses that come around. And so I think that intermittently supporting the immune system with peptides, with the

immune peptides, is going to be a crucial part of managing aging. You can use peptides to manage senescence. You can – and so then there's a – we now have this incredible palette of molecules that we can begin to kind of in a real detailed way manage how your body responds to healthy living, to infections, to trauma, to toxins, to emotions and PTSD. Yeah. I mean, the science is advancing so fast, and to be able to actually play in the dance of our biology with these molecules intelligently and turn on and off

things or help regulate things that degrade is important. I mean, the thymus degrades over time, and we now call aging inflammation. And it's really driven by a host of factors that drive ongoing inflammation.

So how do you manage that as you get older? What causes it? And yes, there are all the things we talked about, but there's also ways through peptides to really help support that. This is like a spiritual experience for me because I'm sitting here with nausea and every time Mark does this, he's doing this acupuncture point in my hand and it makes the nausea totally go away so interesting um okay now i want to talk about you know parabiosis for a minute uh which essentially

is this discovery that if you hook up the circulation of young mouse to old mouse the old mouse gets young and i think that spawned a television show called Blood Boy or something. And, you know, Mouse-a-Tongue used to take the blood of young soldiers and put it in them so he could maintain his youth. And, you know, maybe this is really an important scientific discovery because it means there's stuff in the blood of young mice that's helping to keep healthy and young and perverse aging. But you don't have to do that.

It's not like I have to find a five-year-old and sell my circulation to him and walk around like that. There are ways to actually do this through plasmapheresis, which is cleaning out the bad stuff in the blood that's driving inflammation. So talk about the work you do about transfer plasma exchange, how it works, and when you would use it, and what's going on. Okay, so then this one is just really amazing. And so your blood is basically, think of your

blood as being about 50% plasma and then 50% cells. And those cells include the white blood cells of your immune system and then red blood cells that are carrying oxygen. And so the blood goes round and round and it does what it does. But what we do is we put an IV in one arm and an IV in the other arm. And so then we pull blood out. And then I've got two ways I do it. One is where I run it through a centrifuge system where we spin and we separate the cells from the plasma. And then we send the cells back and the plasma goes into a waste.

And then the other way that we do it is we take it. You throw out all the bad stuff. We throw away the bad stuff. And the other way we do it is we do it through a plasma separator and then put your cells back in. Either way, basically we're taking toxins and inflammation straight out of the blood and then throwing it away and then replacing it with saline and sometimes with albumin as well. Now, it's really been effective in autoimmune diseases and all kinds of chronic things like Gilby and Bray. It's been used in medicine for a long time, but it's not been used for these applications. Yeah. So it's used traditionally in extremely severe autoimmune cases because

that plasma, one of the things that's in plasma is antibodies. And so if your immune system is making antibodies to yourself and then you're attacking yourself, which is what autoimmune disease is, and then we could do something where we could pull all of those antibodies out but let you keep your cells, it's like we washed the blood. Yeah. Yeah. So what are those things and why don't they come back? Like I was just saying antibodies, there's the cytokines,

there's immune complexes, there's, you know, who knows, bacteria, fungus. Why does it just all come back? So they will come back. And so then, for example, in autoimmune, in the classic cases, people are intermittently doing this all the time. So doing it on a regular basis. Doing it on a regular basis. But what we found is when you do a substantial detox and the body, it allows the body to get back on its feet again. And it allows your immune system to kind of re-regulate because once you've taken all of those out, it kind of like wipes the deck.

Yeah. And it gives you a fresh start. Yeah. And I've had all these treatments at Mass Clinic. It's extremely efficient, well done, highly skillful. And I've sent patients to him who really struggle with everything else. And it's really when they make the breakthroughs.

I want to talk about something really cool. So this is all the stuff now. Like this is now medicine. Everything we talked about today, you can get, you can do. It may not be accessible to everybody, but it's there and a lot of the science is there, and it's safe.

And the question is, what's coming down the pike that's really exciting? Anybody here heard Yamanaka factors, who I didn't tell about today? Yamanaka factors were discovered by Yamanaka, who's a Japanese scientist, and he won the Nobel Prize for this. Essentially, in every cell of your body is the blueprint for your entire body.

Now, in your skin cell, you could remake a brain or a liver or a kidney. Why doesn't your skin become a brain, right, or your nose become an eye? It's because of all the genes you have, many of them are silenced and only turning on the right ones to do the job that they're supposed to do and as we Grow the Yamanaka factors are involved in regulating You know how far we grow and then they turn off because we want to grow new tissue We want to build a tissue, but then we don't want to keep doing that. That'd be bad

So they think they get silenced and they stop for the rest of our lives but they're there. And he discovered them. And there are a few that are problematic. But out of the five, if you take three of them, this is what David Sinclair did at Harvard, give them to blind mice. Totally blind, optic nerve dead, not working.

And by the way, I've had a limp for 30 years and my nerve doesn't work and Nerves don't grow back off and if they're dead right it's just the way it goes They were literally able to regrow by injecting yamanoctin factors in the eyes of these blind mice regrow these Optic nerves and give these blind mice full sight Now this is only in animal models models but it's very soon coming down the pike and there be a future imagine future out of its 5, 10, 15 years away where you'll be able to get an adenovirus vector or maybe CRISPR to insert Yamanaka factors the right ones in your genome with a special molecular

switch that when you want you can turn it on. So let's say you put them in when you're 25, but then when you're 40, you're like, hey, I'm getting a little gray hair, little chubby, muscle mass lower, you know, let me turn that on. So you take that pill for three months, six months, and you reverse age. Your skin unwrinkles, your hair turns black,

your muscles get stronger, your metabolism improves. That's coming. And this is one of the greatest advances because it causes the induction of pluripotent stem cells. In other words, you can take any cell in your body and reverse it back to its original state and then re-differentiate it into what you want. It's just mind-blowing. And, you know, really the foundation of all this stuff is the work that you've done, functional medicine. That's fundamentally the foundation. And so then within that platform, then you have this diversity of things.

There's things that can focus more on infections. There's things that are somewhat more anti-aging. And then we're going to have things like the Yamanaka factors and more modules that we can insert into the platform of health. And that's going to be the future. Yeah, I mean, it's basically two things that's going to happen. One is we're going to fix out how to repair and clean up all the damage we've all done to ourselves.

And two, we're going to learn how to turn on all the longevity switches and actually really extend life, which is amazing. And we're almost done. I've spent a few more minutes. This is what Matt does a lot. He uses ultrasound-guided injections everywhere you can think of, using technologies that most pain doctors don't use. For example, Grateful Dead background music.

He uses things like exosomes and peptides and placental matrix, the healing, the placentas full of such healing compounds and also exosomes. It's what he did to me and it's really what fixed me. So talk a little bit about, and we only have a couple minutes left, talk a little bit about the work around the musculoskeletal regenerative medicine stuff and how it works. So basically what happens in the body is that you have nerves and muscle and ligament and tendinous and fascia. And when you look with an ultrasound, you can see where the nerve is, you can see the artery, the blood vessel.

And my initial area of interest, starting in about 2002, I started doing ultrasound-guided nerve blocks where I would use an ultrasound, look and put a needle right next to the nerve, and then put local anesthetic around that nerve and put it to sleep. And then I would give people sedation with ketamine and propofol and they would not know that anything happened during the surgery and wake up at the end. But when I would do that, I would do the nerve block and they would say, hey, you know all that pain that I've been having? That just went away. And they were like, do I really have to have the surgery for this? And I was like, yeah, you have to have the surgery. But then I would tell all my nurses,

someday I'm going to have a job where I do ultrasound-guided injections, I'm going to fix pain, and I'm going to do IV therapy. And everybody said to me, oh, that doesn't exist. And so then I just kept thinking about that. And then I found out that people were putting other things. The first thing we started putting in around nerves was 5% dextrose, because that's kind of calming. It's kind of like Prolo, but it's lower inflammatory because it's just 5%. And then I found out about putting growth factors and other things around nerves.

And then we would see one person after another that had nerve pain that would start to go away. And so then we started putting those same products in joints. Or probably my favorite thing to do is to work with people with back pain, just because if you have back pain, it's almost debilitating. It's really hard, back and neck pain. And it's almost debilitating. It's really hard back and neck pain. And it's been a profoundly helpful thing where we treat your facet joints. We put exosomes in the epidural space. What that means in English, as he did it to me, is imagine your tinal spinal cord like this. He sticks a needle right at the bottom of your spine, up that canal, and injects 30 cc's, which is a lot of fluid into a very narrow space and it

feels like you're going to explode from the inside so it sounded nice but it's actually a very intensive procedure so he did a couple times without any kind of sedation i'm like matt no put me out give me some drugs but um but but basically we're we're trying to look and see how force moves through the body and see where people have pain. And then basically, where people have pain is often where there's partial ligamentous tears at the insertion onto a bone, or because a nerve is compressed because it's going under a tunnel, or over a ridge, or often an area that is stuck in chronic pain leads to a whole bunch of physiological changes. And so then we stick needles into the fascia, we stick it into muscles, we stick it into joints and we put fluid around tendons.

Basically anything that we can see that is having a problem, we'll treat. And it's been amazing for me. You use not just fluid, but healing fluids like exosomes or peptides. And then directionally, the next 10 years is going to be the decade of the peptide in terms of musculoskeletal medicine because we're able to do at an order of magnitude lower price with peptides. Now, what has worked for me better than anything else is exosomes and placental matrix, and that continues to be the gold standard. That's true.

But we'll have all kinds of people that we'll begin to see who have not as many resources, and I'm doing a lot of peptide work. That's great. And it's nearly as profound, and in some cases, more so. I mean, look, Matt, one of the biggest drivers of cost in our healthcare system is back pain, and billions, trillions, literally, of dollars are spent on this. So it makes sense, once this gets proven proven that this will be covered by insurance. Yeah.

So next thing I want to talk about, and we're almost done, is trauma. And I can't talk about longevity without addressing our soul. And whatever we've all been through that's damaged us in some way, that's hurt us in some way, that's made us not whole. And we know, we know from deep medical research that if you have adverse

childhood events, and there's a questionnaire we use called the ACE questionnaire, that if you have a high score of a lot of adverse childhood events, you're more likely to have all host of diseases, from obesity, to immune disease, to cancer, everything. So how do we begin to reimagine the way we deal with trauma? Because talk therapy doesn't really work. CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy can help a little bit. Psychiatric medication really has been a massive failure. There's a psychedelic revolution going on that is actually looking at how we begin to rethink treating trauma and treating trauma is essential because if people don't do that it's hard for them to get their hands around anything else to love to serve to live longer love more serve better I mean it just it's

hard so whether it's psilocybin mushrooms or ayahuasca or ketamine or ibogaine these are all things that are being researched, explored, and soon will be part of our culture and reimbursed and part of psychiatric care. And I think it's going to be incredible. So I'm excited about that. And then the other thing is the stellate ganglion block, which is an injection that turns your fight or flight nervous system all the way asleep. And when that happens, it forces you to use different neuronal pathways, which would be the rest and relax pathways. And so then we've been doing sort

of an experimental protocol where we do that. And it causes vasodilation of the blood vessels to go to the brain. It causes increased blood flow to the brain. And then when we achieve that with a block, then we've done exosomes IV. And that's probably the most miraculous thing we've ever come up with up until now

in terms of changing trauma. And I don't know if I told you, we had this joke in my family that psychology didn't work. And so I was, because my father's a psychologist. And so then I went into anesthesia trying to do the thing furthest from psychology. And now about a third of what I do is psychology. But I'm a psychologist with a needle. You're the best.

But then the synergy of that with ketamine, with plant-based medicine, with all of the stuff, I think is the future. And there's a lot of cases that are one and done with any one of those modalities. But then for the hard ones, it takes a little bit of all of those. And I'm super interested in kind of working with that

over the next couple of years. So all those things that we just mentioned are available now kind of working with that over the next couple so all those things we just mentioned are available now but what's coming down the pike right uh well artificial intelligence will be able to help us interpret the massive amounts of data that's going on in our body and quantum computing will help us make sense of it but what's happening now is just advances you can't imagine like nanobots being able to deliver and do surgery and drugs that are just you you know, edit your DNA, 3D printing of organs, gene editing in CRISPR.

This is just massive changes that are going to change everything we do. And, you know, we may just end up being like Madame Clement, who lived to be 122, was still sexy and smoking. You know, and she had good genes, clearly, but we all have the potential to be 120. The science is there, and it may be even much, much longer. If you really love this podcast

and you want to hear more, please share with your friends and family. I'd really love to hear about it. Leave us your comments about what you learned about how to extend your life and get healthy, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash PICS to sign up.

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