The Dylan Gemelli Podcast - Episode #144 Featuring Dan Pardi! The CHIEF Health Officer at QUALIA LIFE! Inside the WORLD OF SUPPLEMENT DEVELOPMENT!

Starting point is 00:00:17 Creatine, one of the most proven and studied compounds in existence, yet still one of the most confusing. Most people think creatine is only for muscle, but creatine is for energy, not caffeine-type energy, actual cellular energy, the kind that your body uses for strength, focus, and recovery. If your workouts feel flat, if your brain feels slower than it used to, and if your recovery is not where it should be, there's a high probability your energy system isn't supported, and creatine will help fix that. It essentially gives your body a reserve. so when your demand spikes, you don't crash. But here's where most people mess this up.

Starting point is 00:00:51 They grab the cheapest creatine they can find and assume it's all the same, but it's not. If it doesn't dissolve well, if it's not supported by the right co-factors, and if your body can't actually use it efficiently, you're wasting your time and money, and that's why I switch to Qualia Creatine Plus. It's designed around how your body actually produces and uses energy, not just dumping in creatine and hoping for the best, cleaner mix, better utilization, noticeable difference. If you're going to take creatine, take one that actually works with your body.

Starting point is 00:01:21 Go to qualiaLife.com backslash Dylan for 50% off and use my code Dylan for an additional 15% off. That's qualia.com backslash Dylan and use my code Dylan. Thank you to Qualia for sponsoring this episode. All right, everybody, welcome back to the Dylan Jameli podcast. So you guys that follow me know how much I love science, supplements, getting into the nitty-gritty on all aspects of health and fitness. And so I brought somebody in today who is a full-blown expert on all of these things and more. So he has a really strong background. He's actually the chief health officer at Qualia Life Sciences. He leads

Starting point is 00:02:04 education to advance health span and peak performance, but he's also the founder of humanos.com. And he's the host of HumanOS Radio. And that is the official podcast of the Slee research society, which, hey, I'm struggling there, my friend, so I'm going to need you on that as well. But he is amazing, and you're going to see that when we get into his knowledge base. He has a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, and that is another aspect of things that I'm so intrigued and that I know many of you will be as well. So everybody without further ado, welcome my new and great friend, Dr. Dan Party. Dylan, thank you so much for having me on. I've been hyped for this show. I love what you're doing with your work and how you are helping your audience. And I've just been delighted to have

Starting point is 00:02:50 the chance to come chat with you. Yeah. It's been beyond a pleasure talking with you. I'm super stoked. I know your knowledge base. And I know that you do work with Qualia, who is now one of my new favorite companies since I started getting acquainted with them several months ago. But there's a lot of other things that you do quite well and talk about. So I'm going to I'm going to nail you for all the information I can with the time I've got today, my friend. Do it. Awesome. Well, let's go backwards a little bit here. You have a PhD in neuroscience, and so that kind of is fitting for some of the product development, but I'm curious on your side, what drew you into the neuro side of things? For me, I've spent the last year kind of understanding that,

Starting point is 00:03:32 not that I had this wrong, but I spent so many years focused on training and nutrition, and I left the whole neuroside out of it, and I've come to the realization that that actually has control over every single aspect of the health side. And if we don't have that dialed in first, I don't care how well we train, eat, we're never going to be right. So I'm curious to you is what was the leading into you coming to that direction and how you feel about what I just said in relation to control of our bodies. Yeah. It's the brain is really an endless reservoir of interesting insight into who we are and how we live and how we decisions we make that we think we're fully in control of. And we are operating under certain patterns. There are aspects that are more,

Starting point is 00:04:19 we'll call it biological versus mental. So just the way that certain neurons are firing at particular times of day, that it make you do something or drive you to go do that. And then there's the whole mental side, which is how the entire system of the brain is working together to create this construct of the world that we interact with. And how did I get into it? Well, I'm love to say that it was this highly planned journey, but I was working for a genomics company. This was a company that was creating software on the human genome in 2002. And at that time, the human genome had not been sequenced. Today, you can order for $500 your entire genome and then you have it and you can reference that for the rest of your life. Super interesting. But at that time, our company had these clustering

Starting point is 00:05:02 and alignment tools, which meant that it was figuring out how to actually sequence the human genome. I was working in a role where I was interfacing with the scientists. It was sort of project management and sales. And it was really technical. Anyway, it was great. So that's, it's too much detail on that. But from there, I ended up, that company went out of business. So we'd raised $75 million.

Starting point is 00:05:24 And every company in that space went out of business. And all of the people that had been working in bioframatics were pulled up into the pharma industry, who was our main clientele. Essentially, the technology was in Viam. It was ahead of the market. So I got pulled up into a company called Orphan Medical, which had a drug for narcolepsy, which most people have heard of before, a neurological condition. People know it as being really, really sleepy.

Starting point is 00:05:49 That is a key component of it. Basically, people that have narcolepsy are missing probably through autoimmunity, a couple of critical cells called hypochreting neurons. And those do a very interesting job. They're like, think of like a symphony conductor telling the symphony, which is your wake network, different nerve transmitter systems in the brain, when to be on and playing, and then when to be off and sleeping,

Starting point is 00:06:12 and it coordinates all that activity. And the reason why people with narcolepsy get really sleepy is because those neurons get damaged. And so there's no thing with the doctor. Yeah, and really sad. I recently, a friend of mine who runs a jihitsu gym in Austin, he's like, hey, can you talk to my friend? He trains here, and his six-year-old boy is sleepy all the time

Starting point is 00:06:36 and experiencing some other classic symptoms of narcolepsy. And I was like, oh boy, that kid has narcolepsy. Turns out I was able to chat with him. And indeed, he does have narcolepsy. But anyway, that's how I got into the brain. It was through doing work with this company. I didn't know anything about sleep. I didn't really know that much about the brain.

Starting point is 00:06:55 I knew something somewhat. And I was just fascinated by it. I couldn't read enough. I couldn't learn enough. It was all just captivating my interest. And I worked at that company for almost a decade. and doing a lot of interesting things, running a certain type of clinical trial. And then eventually I was like, you know, I've got my own questions that I'd like to get answered.

Starting point is 00:07:14 So I decided to jump ship and go do my Ph.D. And then I was looking at this intersection of eating behavior, sleep loss, and decision-making. So, for example, like, do you choose different foods when you're experiencing what I call an ecologically relevant amounts of sleep loss? Like, you just miss an hour or two, which is very different than a lot of clinical research studies where you give people, no sleep for an entire night. And then you test them, which is, you know, interesting, but it's not quite as relevant as what most people experience.

Starting point is 00:07:44 So that was my work. And, you know, I could spend the rest of my career doing that because it's like an endless reservoir of questions and interest. But my bigger interest is more holistic. How do we, what does health mean? How do we support it? What are all the different inputs internally, externally? And so I think I'm now,

Starting point is 00:08:06 a generalist, even though my training is in. I had a master's in exercise physiology. I did that. I have a PhD in neuroscience. But that's not what I do is my career. What I am now is how do we then actually support these 37 trillion cells to keep them functioning at their peak, keep them alive as long as possible. And that's really fun the part of. So you're the epitome of the mind and body connection, my friend.

Starting point is 00:08:31 And I love that. You have studied all aspects. I want to ask you a couple of thoughts. on two points that you made there. The first one is on the narcolepsy side. Now, with the damage that's caused there, is that fixable and or reversible, or is that kind of a permanent thing?

Starting point is 00:08:46 What kind of treatment methods are there? Really good question. At this point in time, it does not seem to be fixable, but I would not, I don't like saying that it's not fixable. We haven't solved that problem yet. However, the way that this is typically treated

Starting point is 00:09:02 is with fur for a long time ago, it was tricyclic antidepressants and an anphetamine. And what happens is that, you know, of course, amphetamine do not replace sleep. So it worked great for a little bit. And then now the person has an amphetamine addiction and is also extremely tired still because they're not sleeping enough. So newer medications that were developed, one very interesting one is GHB, or get my hydroxybutyrate, which you used to be able to buy in GNC. And that one is a very interesting colorful history. And that is the drug that I worked with for almost a decade. And it turns out it promotes very robust deep sleep, which narcoleptic patients are missing.

Starting point is 00:09:41 So right now, that plus medaphanil, which is a non-is lymphedamine stimulant, those are the dual. And you kind of take one at night and take one during the day. But there's a new therapy being evaluated, which is the hypochretin peptide. So that's, of course, what's missing from those neurons. And now with peptides and all the advances in sciences around that, they're exploring a hypocretin peptide that could get into the blood-brain past the blood-brain barrier and act like hypochreden would at the right time of day.

Starting point is 00:10:10 And some of the results are the case studies that I've read about are really heartening. Like people are having, they've been on all the former therapies and gotten the benefit that they could from them. And this is like another level. So I'm really hopeful for that community of people that suffer with narcolepsy. Yeah, because old school thinking it's like Robin Peter to pay Paul,

Starting point is 00:10:28 you take an amphetamine like that. Like you said, you get an addiction. but you also get depression. So then you have to take the antidepressant. And before you know it, you're creating bigger problems than you already had, right? Yeah, that's right. It was never a really good solution. But for our community people that wrapped in the good ones,

Starting point is 00:10:44 we were doing the community of researchers and clinicians were doing the best they could. Sure. But those were pretty quickly, community realized that it wasn't deepened solution. So the sodium oxibate and the metafinil was much better. Yeah. So another point that you brought up that I find fascinating, and I have a couple questions about was the eating patterns that changed based upon the amount of sleep. And then my other question is timing of sleep.

Starting point is 00:11:09 So when your circadian rhythm goes off and let's say it's either switching time zones on a flight or you stayed up later the night before, you tend to notice more deeper hunger when you wake up, probably craving carbohydrates more on those certain amounts of days. Are those things that you noticed? And is the correlation correct there than I'm saying? So when there's a lot of ways for sleep to be disrupted. Timing intensity matter a lot. And so the end of duration.

Starting point is 00:11:38 So the duration is what we tend to think about. Did you sleep enough? Did you sleep, you know, seven hours, eight hours, whatever you feel like you need? The timing of sleep matters a lot too. So when I was younger, I'd go out and stay up later and then I would sleep eight hours. So I thought, oh, I'm fine because I slept the same amount. My duration was okay. But I was definitely not performing as well as I could mentally because I was putting myself in what we now call social jet lag.

Starting point is 00:12:06 I was car. My circadian rhythm was off because it was constantly shifting. And the major synchronizer of your body clock for which there is a master clock in the brain at the super chisematic nucleus is light. So light coming into the eye goes to that master clock and then it helps every single cell in the body with its own timekeeping. that all your cells are doing the right activity at the right time, right? You wouldn't, what certiting rhythms generally do is separate temporarily or over time contradictory goals. It's like you don't want to be in a building goal and a breakdown goal simultaneously.

Starting point is 00:12:42 So you say building for no and you say breakdown for day so that you're, you know, using energy and so forth. So yeah, so for feeding purposes, our appetites change in very interesting ways. And if you do fMRI on the brain, which is a brain imaging, you see that hedonic centers or areas that light up in response to palatable food, like stuff that you shouldn't eat but you would like it. That's that category. Those areas are even more responsive to those foods.

Starting point is 00:13:10 And couple that with areas of self-control in the brain that are now trying to dampen down the hedonic area. And those are functionally tired, basically. And so your self-control is tired and your pleasure seeking is elevated, and so you're much more likely to what I say, get a case of efforts. Just like, ah, I wouldn't usually eat this thing, but eff it. I'm going to eat it. All the things that take a little bit of effort, of course, which a lot of it is health, going to the gym, saying no to food that we know is not good for us.

Starting point is 00:13:42 Those all take some effort to discipline, and it's really a lot harder to stick with those goals when you're in that condition. And that is very obvious when you do something like transcontinental travel, but what's just as powerful, let's say you just don't get enough sleep you know, night after night for a couple of weeks, you might feel like you're doing fine, but your brain, your responsiveness to the world just changing quite a bit. Yeah, totally. I can tell the more travel I do, and especially when I go from like Pacific to Eastern, I mean, even just the one to two hour time change, but that three hour time change, I know right away, like, man, this doesn't feel good, especially on the hunger side.

Starting point is 00:14:25 And then when you get home and then you start having to catch up on that timing, it's just even worse. But it makes total sense. I love the effort. And that's true because you do them to feel that way. Totally. And then you're also, your routine is complicated. You don't have all the food you might at home.

Starting point is 00:14:43 So you're just picking and choosing from what's available. And it all ends up being a lot harder to stick with good eating habits. So some things people do when they do travel is try to prepack food and have a lot of healthy snacks. So they do better. Higher protein foods, which tend to be good for us, no matter what, they tend to be good choices where you can get them when you're traveling to. And protein itself, there's something called the protein leverage hypothesis where the idea is that we have a specific appetite for protein. And it's very well established at this point. David Rubenheimer and Stephen Simpson out of Australia, I've been doing awesome work.

Starting point is 00:15:21 that I've been monitoring for over a couple of decades now. And they've not only shown that this is true in humans, but really in all species that they've tested, even down to cockroaches. And so the idea is like, if you're not eating a protein, you stay hungry because your body is like, I'm missing a key nutrient. So I just got to keep my hunger levels up

Starting point is 00:15:38 so I can make sure I get enough protein, even that means I eat 1,000 more calories. And so that's another good way. If you have high protein food while you're traveling, it can suppress some of that craving, even if you're sick-depressed. Definitely. I'll tell you what, dude, when I travel, it's always has to have a kitchen.

Starting point is 00:15:56 It always has to have like fully stocked and equipped. I find the closest whole foods or local health store. I travel with avocados because you know they're not going to be ripe if you try to buy them. So I have to have those every day. So I go the extra mile when I travel, man, because I don't want to break any routine at all, literally. Man, avocados are really the best if you can get them. Yeah. They travel well.

Starting point is 00:16:21 I'm just like you. I travel with them when I can. Definitely. So, all right, I want to talk about formulations, what goes into actually constructing a supplement because I think that people don't realize how difficult that is to find the synergy, to be able to pick the right amounts. Because, you know, I've been doing this 15, 20 years just being involved in the supplement industry and you get the same kind of complaints or kickbacks. Well, there's only so much. this and there or that and there. And I don't think people realize what it takes to actually put something together to make it synergistic and to make it work the way that the formulas are set out to be. I want to talk about that. And then I want to talk about maybe overcoming this aura that

Starting point is 00:17:07 comes along with proprietary blends, the good, the bad and why that's done and why it's okay. Yeah. Oh, I love these questions. And I'm going to be doing some more writing on them in the near term. I'm very excited about it. Supplements play. a big role in the health for a lot of people. And yet, you know, a few topics inspire as much polarity and confusion because it's how we haven't really been taught or convinced on how to think of them. And the thing that generates the most evidence in our world is drugs. So they have pharmaceutical companies that have huge budgets, one to $2 billion, typically,

Starting point is 00:17:49 to bring a new compound into the marketplace and the average time it takes from the beginning of a new molecule being created into FDA approval in the market is like 15 years, even longer for biologics. And so the amount of research that is needed as you're introducing a never-before-seen

Starting point is 00:18:10 synthetic substance into the human body is very high and rightfully so. But then you'll have, you know, at the end, maybe three, phase three clinical trials with thousands of patients each. And even then, you don't have all the information on a drug. A lot of times we continue to learn much more once it's been in the market for a year or two. And that's just appropriate for that space. The supplement space, of course, it requires a level of evidence as well. But the entire economic engine of it works very differently. You often have lots of ingredients with one or two or

Starting point is 00:18:49 three studies on them, not that many. So you have oftentimes biological possibility with some evidence. And then over time, some things get popular. And like blueberries, right? That's not a supplement. But for example, out of all the foods in the world, blueberries had their heyday of getting being popular and getting researched a lot. And so certain things, including in the supplement space, start to get more interest and money. And so we have this weird space where we're dealing with natural compounds. And we know that so many of these were not consuming regularly, even in a good diet, because we have a limited set of foods that we eat. And then in the limited sample of work that's been done, we see pretty cool facts. And so that's like the starting

Starting point is 00:19:34 ground of like, how should we think about this stuff. So there should be some evidence, but we shouldn't expect the same degree of evidence that we see from pharma. Because economically it'll never work. It just, we just, it'll never, we're not, the reason you don't see that is not because you have fraudsters trying to perpetuate a fraud on people. It's just that the economics are completely different. So, and it'll never be different. Now, you also have archetypes I describe about. So you have people who are like,

Starting point is 00:20:03 I don't want to take any supplement unless I absolutely have to. So that is the most sort of conservative version of a supplement taker. And you have your explorer. And on that end is like, hey, I just read about this. I want to try it. I like reading about supplements. I like learning about it.

Starting point is 00:20:22 I like testing them. And that's more me personally. I like I sit in that model. And I think it's totally fine to be who you are. You know, you don't have to be. If you're the really conservative, like I just need more. I need something to be studied for decades before I want to spend money on it. Cool.

Starting point is 00:20:38 And if you're the other person who likes to, you know, test explore, be smart about it. But that's okay, right? So that's sort of like the space. and people, and then you have individual ingredients, but that's not really how the world. That's not how our biology works. If you look at complex food matrix, there's lots of many, many different compounds

Starting point is 00:21:00 that are coming into the body simultaneously and interacting in very interesting ways, not all of which we've fully defined, that create an effect. And a formula is the goal that, so we're really a formulation company, which means that we try to have goals for our physiology, a sharper mind, better sleep. And then we think, how can we take a systems biology approach and support the system doing that function?

Starting point is 00:21:30 And that oftentimes involves a complement of nutrients that are either working individually on separate complementary mechanisms or maybe even working together. But all that is, you know, the process there, is both art and science. The science of it is, let's build this based off of known scientific work that we can see. What's preclinical work say? Do we see any

Starting point is 00:21:57 clinical work with humans? And the art of that is a group of smart scientists getting together in a room and debating what should this compound look like, why should this be an included in how much? It is not a perfect science there. It's more of like cooks in a kitchen.

Starting point is 00:22:14 That's how I think of it. And then what we do, which I really appreciate, is we test all of our compounds in a registered clinical trial that is on clinical trials.gov prior to it getting into the market. So what we do is we'll test for usually some objective measures. Like, for example, do you see blood levels of your vitamin C go up with that new vitamin C product? And then also how do people feel? There's a variety of well-valid questionnaires that you can then utilize in people taking a supplement and see how to do that.

Starting point is 00:22:46 they respond, do they have a generally positive effect? We go all the way down to, would you buy this, which is like a net promoter score, which is actually very valuable. Like, yeah, I'd buy it. I felt something. And then the last piece is, will you notice something? So supplements that create immediate feedback, like, I definitely felt sleepy for my sleep product or I definitely felt alert for my daytime product.

Starting point is 00:23:10 Those have an advantage of immediate feedback. but a lot of good supplements don't quite work that way where it would be hard to detect if they're working or not. So you have to just trust the scientific rationale for why it was built, like the clearing up senescent cells. Yeah, some people might notice some stuff.

Starting point is 00:23:30 But for most people, you're really trying to prune away these senescent cells that are building up and you should feel the same longer. How do you measure that, right? Exactly. I measure that in populations over time. Like, wow, this group that's been doing this is actually doing a lot better than this group that isn't.

Starting point is 00:23:49 But it's hard to feel it. Yeah. So it's a fun space to be in. There's a lot to think about. That's our approach for being general. The Carroll bike was designed to get meaningful benefits without spending hours training and is scientifically proven to deliver superior health and fitness benefits compared to regular cardio exercise, but in 90% less time.

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Starting point is 00:24:58 Well, one of the things that drew me here, because I, at this point in time, I would not say that I'm jaded. I'm aware. I'm aware of every single. little trick, every little thing marketing side, everything development side. I don't want to say that I cannot be fooled, but I'm very, very in line and in tune with what goes on, not to your level, but on more like the consumer side of things where I know what consumers are looking for and then I'm also aware of, man, that's not going to work. Like, and I know what you're doing here. The thing that I really have been appreciative on my side with what you guys do is the amazing. of different things that you put into something that make it stand out like the magnesium it's not

Starting point is 00:25:45 your everyday magnesium there's multitudes of facets that make this up that make it special and it's not just magnesium but that one comes to mind first because of how more intricate it's designed in comparison to most that i see that might have a couple forms in there and normally it's the cheapest forms if we're being honest so how do you guys become so innovative is that that like a group of people that are really coming together on a mind share type of thing? Or what drives that innovation? Because to me, that is, that is qualia. It's what makes it what it is and what makes it special.

Starting point is 00:26:23 We'll get into the products because I think that the products, too, I want to talk about why the certain areas that we're covering with those, but we'll get to that in a second. I'm more curious as about to the design and consumption side of these. Yeah. It starts with the origin of the, the company. So James and Daniel Schmachtenberger were system thinkers and that really crafted the canon of what this company is. And as an outcropping of that original thinking, how do we

Starting point is 00:26:58 approach the system of this goal? That has led to the formulations you see today. More approximately, like what's aside from the origin, we now have a very talented formulating. who is our chief product officer, Greg Kelly. He's a naturopasic doctor. He's worked in this supplement space for probably 30 or more years. He used to work for Thorne. He has got an incredible memory

Starting point is 00:27:25 and incredible experience. And then he also has a team of PhDs that are also very talented that are all working together in a very structured way. So we start everything with a comprehensive literature review. So what's everything in the space around this particular goal?

Starting point is 00:27:43 How do we analyze all of that? And in fact, there are many times I'll see from that team where they will find, for example, that they analyze the paper. And the paper's conclusion or abstract said one thing. And they're like, you know, this data in the paper doesn't support that conclusion at all. So they want to be as precise as possible

Starting point is 00:28:04 because that work early on in the lab is going to pay off. Like, does this paper really say what it says it says? So they do, they're very good researchers. And then he has a methodology of pulling that together into a product. And, you know, you'll see some of our products have 42 ingredients. Others have three. So the goal is in complexity for complexity's sake. The goal is how do we support this system in a way that makes sense for this particular challenge at hand?

Starting point is 00:28:37 And I have to say, I mean, take my word with a grain of salt. I get paid by the company. But I do really love their products. And it's kind of funny because over time, I've had that realization even more. I knew I liked them from the start. I wouldn't have come. But I've had many moments where I was like, you know, I really like these products. Like now that I've been taking them for a while, it's, I'm pleased.

Starting point is 00:29:04 Well, it's natural when you're taking something that you actually, love to want to find some sort of alignment with that somehow, some way. I mean, even if it's just the consumer going around saying, man, I take this and I love it, you know, and you're on our side where it's our profession, I want to be involved. And I want to, and the reason I want to be involved is because I want to show everybody else what I'm experiencing and say, hey, like, this is it. This is what you need to be taken. Because look, I mean, there's good and bad in everything, foods, cars. I mean, There's always going to be something that works for somebody better than the other war is constructed better. And I have a really deep appreciation for that and the amount of time and effort.

Starting point is 00:29:46 I have a question for you. I know you'll answer honestly. I have always talked about this because I love data. I am a data guy to heart. I love numbers. I love to see things on paper. But I also like real world experiences and I value seeing people's reactions and monitoring hundreds. I've been blessed to say hundreds of thousands of people that I've dealt with over the past 15 years coaching, interacting with.

Starting point is 00:30:11 I rely, I will tell you, I personally rely more on that kind of data than I do studies because, as you know, studies, there are groups of people. You can try to control it. You can try to manipulate it. You can't have full control over people, but I can control what I'm getting reported to by people. So how much value do you take on, I'd say, being in the trenches? seeing what people are really saying as opposed to just textbooks, you know, because there's always that argument, a street spart versus book smart, knowledge versus wisdom. So you tell me on your end what you look at the most or value the most.

Starting point is 00:30:48 Gosh, I love this question. Because a rigorous scientist is going to say something to the effect of, well, you know, we're easy to dupe. If we're taking something, there's always the chance of a placebo. Right. All right, right. Then you have all of this, the gold standard, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study, where you have randomization so people don't know what they're taking. You do everything you possibly can.

Starting point is 00:31:19 If you look at, and let's say the paper says, great, we surpassed statistical significance, we think that there's a real difference here. But if you were to look at the population, I'm being general here about data and RCTs, If you map every individual response, you call that a waterfall plot, and you'll see, you'll see this. Like the people that had the best response all the way down are people that were below baseline. And so what are you? Are you the average? Maybe.

Starting point is 00:31:48 You're maybe one of the three people that was actually the average. Otherwise, you as an individual, deviate from that. You could have a much better response or a much worse response. So the empirical data has been under. appreciated significantly. In fact, Carl Young said that one of his greatest fears was that we would use statistics to assess human health. And that is because we can learn a tremendous amount from an individual who carefully documents their own process. Yes, all of those effects. If you're tending to take something, you're more likely to tell people how great it is.

Starting point is 00:32:27 But there are those who are also very good listeners to their body and can be honest. They have an easier time with that. And so I'm always interested to hear an individual response. In fact, Paracelsus, who is a philosopher from the Renaissance era, he said, really, the way that we need to understand the body is through empirical data that you see working with individuals and then learn knowledge, which is kind of equivalent to like the scientific method and how we derive data. But no clinical trial is designed for individual optimization. It's designed around the intervention to see if it works generally in people. We don't end there, right? You should never end there.

Starting point is 00:33:09 It helps us understand generally what's working in specific populations, but it's imperfect. So it's just one way to generate knowledge. It's not the top of the mountain. So I'm going to be writing about some of this in my book, actually, because I feel have strong feelings about it. I love it. Here's my issue and my problem with the amount of close-mindedness that are, I'd say almost our world has come to at this point where it's like you got to pick and choose

Starting point is 00:33:39 one way or the other. And I'll tell you when I started to notice this was because I'm a big massive sports fan and I'm a big A's fan and they started to do money ball and they had this whole way of, oh, we're going to control this by based on this statistic. And then it turned into, well, everything in sports is going to be analytics. And then we saw how that worked out when people were going for every fourth down in the NFL and it was backfiring. And the analytics say this, but the analytics don't take into consideration. What's happening in that specific moment or the person that has an allergy or has this family history or that family history?

Starting point is 00:34:16 And so if you become too antiquated in data studies and not real life experiences, and vice versa, you need the studies. I'm not saying that. But that's when you start to create problems. It's really, honestly, Dan, I really center this around more of a closed-mindedness or an inability to be open to different methodologies and understanding that one size fits none. And I think the bigger struggle is conveying that message as opposed to the data itself. Yes, that's really well said.

Starting point is 00:34:48 And you're, like I said, you know, the questions that you're thinking about are some of the most interesting ones overall. and we have one of the arguments or the criticisms of big medicine is that it's become so standardized and formulaic. You're applying these guidelines rigidly to individuals. And you know, you're only approximating what might be good in that scenario. So now with the whole wellness sphere, I mean, things like diet and exercise, they've never, they haven't really even been. It's been on the way out the door, you know, remember to eat, right, and exercise. Like, that was as much credit as it's gotten.

Starting point is 00:35:30 And over the last decade or so, there's been a real interest into the hardcore science of this and how powerful it is compared to, you know, drugs, et cetera. So we're seeing some changes. More changes need to be done. I think people should pay attention to their own experience and listen carefully to the experiences of others. And like everything, have strong opinions but held loosely. That means do the hard work to not to kind of come up with an impression of what's happening, but don't associate your identity with that impression. Let it evolve with new information.

Starting point is 00:36:07 Yeah. I always tell people these are numbers. These are like standard baselines, but tread lightly. You can always go higher, right? But if you start too high, it's like you learn how to play basketball and you start at the three point line. And I always tell people, you start with layups. You work your way out because you can always do more and take more. But if you start too high, you're setting yourself up for a lot of problems and failure early on.

Starting point is 00:36:31 But you know how we are, man. Everybody wants things right now. And you can't do that with anything, especially supplements. That's the worst thing you could do. Yeah, yeah. You know, a better thing too. People think of them, oh, it's like a crutch. I think of it are, I think supplements is a catalyst.

Starting point is 00:36:48 If you're making an effort in a particular area, You're now, you've invested money, you're investing some research to read about it, you're more likely to do other things that are consistent with that behavior. So I think supplements are probably more likely not a crutch, but a catalyst to doing other good things. You can now create this virtuous cycle of momentum. You know, if I'm going to bed on time, I'm going to walk a little bit more. I'm going to start doing other things that are healthy too. And I think we should always try to use that motivation. So I take a good amount of supplements.

Starting point is 00:37:29 But that's not the only thing I do. I do a lot of other things too to try to take care of my body. Supplements are only a crutch if you try to just use those in substitution or take a shortcut with them. But they're actually not only just an aid at times, but an enhancement for what you're already doing. If they're used properly, I mean, but people, again, they become reliant on things and then think it takes them, it gives them a license to not do the work or eat the right foods or, you know, I went through this with bodybuilders that wanted to depend on 50 scoops of protein

Starting point is 00:38:01 every day as opposed to eating first and then, you know, using them as they're supposed to be. But when we're looking at picking out the areas that are going to define a brand or a company because it's very difficult anymore because there's, I don't know how many, thousands of different brands and companies. What does it take to stand out? Like, is it we're addressing this problem? Is it just the people that are behind the brand?

Starting point is 00:38:34 Like, what are we looking at here to deliver something special that's addressing a problem that nobody else is actually hitting? Yeah. You know, supplements are definitely reflective of the personality. of the company. And so some of them like Fear Encapsulations or Thorn, they're delivering mostly really high quality ingredients, sometimes in formulations, that are aimed at a particular goal. But those have great reputations. They're usually a little more expensive than you're, you know, than another brand that you can find on that same ingredient. But I, I, to round out,

Starting point is 00:39:19 my supplement approach, which is by always always sort of evolving somewhat. I like those brands quite a bit. Yeah. You have some that are our goal is to sell this for the absolute minimum price, but we're just, we're going to do a good job with that, like a like a Costco approach. Then you have other ones where there's a real, there's a real premium on it for one reason or another, some valid, some not so. Like some of the things that actually matter for price, If you look at our formulations, like we list everything on a bottle. So there are no, there is no pixie dusting, which is this idea that you have your proprietary formula. You list what's in there, but you don't know the amounts, right?

Starting point is 00:40:02 So, yeah, you don't really know if you're getting enough of that. And there are definitely been companies that have taken advantage of that. And just put the tiniest amount of an expensive ingredient into a formulation. and it was like 99% the other thing that's in there that's cheap. There are ways to do this in a manner that's less ethical for sure. And people do it.

Starting point is 00:40:27 Yeah. We use a lot of, if you notice like our products, we use a lot of named ingredients that have like a brand behind the ingredient. And so the reason we do that is because since we're using a lot of ingredients, we want to source the ones that are the best

Starting point is 00:40:44 and companies that say, hey, we're going to then carve out our own little proprietary space on this ingredient, lock everything down. It's standardized. They've done all the work on it. So you're getting the extract of that root that you want. It delivers what it says it delivers in terms of amount. It actually, like, you pay a little bit more for those, but you see huge varieties in what is listed on labels and what people actually get. So every time you can find, a like branded or trademarked ingredient like that, I usually go with it. That makes me think more favorably towards that because then you're like, okay, these people have won that hard work

Starting point is 00:41:26 for that ingredient. So qualia life, right? So and I, that's what kind of drew me to it. So it's, to me, it's focused on enhancing quality of life and it's hitting the target areas. So cellular health, mitochondria, right? And then stem cells, mind. These are the products. that I feel, seniletics that are really associated with the qualia brand. And then we have a really nice creatine because, you know, any more, that is just so widely promoted. But how do we know the difference? Well, this one, and we'll get into why yours is more on the special side. Even the magnesium and now the new vitamin C, there's something special about everything that you guys are doing that's enhancing quality of life and it ties them together. And it's

Starting point is 00:42:13 not just this basic, you know, ingredient that's hard to stand out. So what are the main key focuses for you guys when it comes to this? Am I right when I say that it's like in really, truly scientifically enhancing quality of life? I think we start every, a good way to say it is we start every formula, every product with the goal that is generally recognizing, hey, I think we can do this a little better. Yeah. And so sometimes, with our Cynolidic product, I don't know if there was another formulation like that. That was very innovative. Other ones like creatine, vitamin C, those have been around for a long time, but we saw an

Starting point is 00:42:55 opportunity to like, you know what, I wish we would, there was something like this existed. So we start with that idea as unscientific as this sounds with just like, hey, I wish this was in the marketplace. I'd like to use it. And that oftentimes is at least an initiating part of the discussion for, Should we look into creating it? And yeah, so like vitamin C and creatine, some of these aren't, don't seem as revolutionary

Starting point is 00:43:21 as like a bespoke formula like mind or synolytic, but they're playing a really valuable role. And sometimes we confuse just in general as humans, novelty with meaningfulness. Like, it's new and interesting, it's better. And that's not always the case. So we definitely have a novelty seeking brain as overall as humans. So I like to try to balance the, well, even though I've known about it for a while,

Starting point is 00:43:46 what is the magnitude of effect here that we see in terms of some sort of outcome that we care about? And yeah, all of the different health effects that we can induce in our life, no matter what strategy we used to do that, can have a meaningful quality of life impact. And you're oftentimes affecting energy, which ends up being this energetic undercurrent of your existence, your day-to-day moment-to-moment reality that determines how you spend your time, what you choose to do, whether or not you say yes to an opportunity,

Starting point is 00:44:20 is you have the energy for it or not? And we definitely feel better if we get older. And so quality of life is a really good marker. It's sometimes less specific than an objective blood level that went up 27%. But it matters not. So there's no orientation of how to view health that is better than the other.

Starting point is 00:44:37 They all have their place. But you should also love. look is what about the overall effect on your day-to-day experience and your quality of life? What I enjoy and I really like is the fact that there's different options. So, you know, there's good companies that make one product for mitochondria or one product for NAD, but they don't have where you can just go and get everything in one spot. And I love how you've picked the most strategic and most important areas that we need to address. And I would like to discuss that and explain especially because I have studied this now for quite a while,

Starting point is 00:45:15 basanalytic, why that is so important, how we're also utilizing that to enhance longevity with something like NAD and those types of things, how those coordinate and go together, because I have stressed this now on everything that I've taught for the last, I don't know, year and a half, two years about the importance of our cellular health, why that needs address. But I've really come to study NAD a lot more in the past. six months. I mean, we can't live without NED and most people are superiorly deficient as they get older. So talk about those a little bit and why those are so important before we get into the

Starting point is 00:45:51 mind side of things. Yeah. So in 2013, a paper came out describing the hallmarks of aging. And in it, the researchers cataloged some reliable markers that you see when a organism, not just humans, get older and that those included things around energetics, your ability to produce energy, stem cells, telomeres, genomic stability. And that playbook certainly doesn't capture everything about the aging process, but it created a model. That model became instrumental in understanding aging, but also operational. So you could perhaps say, well, if this is, something that you reliably see when we do get older, can we target that with some sort of intervention? How do we reduce it? How do we reverse it? How do we improve it? And that whole

Starting point is 00:46:49 line of thinking has now been going on for at least a decade. That paper became the most cited paper in the journal cell. It was like 17,000 publications since then. So it's very, very formative, influential work. And how does this come back to supplements? Well, all of those different areas that you see as reliable markers of the aging process. Now, like I said, can become targetable. We shouldn't expect that one product is going to affect all of them in one. And I want to be careful here because actually, if you do affect one hallmark of aging, you might very well affect the others in a positive way, right? If you affect energy, you're likely to affect the exhaustion of your telomeres and stem cells.

Starting point is 00:47:38 And so, you know, your body has no more energy to take care of other processes that prevent those other markers from accumulating. So yes, you should, if you can affect one with enough power, you should be able to see a positive effect on the others, but you wouldn't expect it to be a complete solution. So where am I going with this? Well, we're very likely entering into a future

Starting point is 00:48:00 where you are taking different compounds for different purposes all towards the global goal of slowing down the aging process and continuing and augmenting your own health span. Got it. Excellent. And that's how we'd see our, it's like the terrain that we see that we're going to try to create good solutions for. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:23 Would you break down to CentaLytic? Why is the CentaLytic something you only have to take two days? And how does that work? And why is it so important that people take it? And then how would one actually know that that is working? Because you know that's probably the biggest kickback on something like that. Yeah. So such an awesome topic.

Starting point is 00:48:45 I started following it. Probably in maybe 2015 or 16, I interviewed now deceased Judith Campesi for Human Rights Radio, which I'm no longer recording at this time. I'd love to get back to that because it's so fun to talk to here. I started my podcast in 2014. And the goal was, let me go talk to the researchers who did that work on the interesting paper. Because at the time, there was a lot of people who were communicating science talking about studies at once.

Starting point is 00:49:14 And that was just something that I wanted. Like, oh, I want to hear from the horse's mouth. Like, why did they do that study? What did they do? How did they discover what they came up with? Anyhow, so Judith is a legendary figure. And she started to study senescence back in the 80s and even named this concept Sasp, which is the, this secretary profile of the senescent zombie cell.

Starting point is 00:49:36 So a zombie cell is one that doesn't quite die and is a result because of some sort of damage, right? It increases some damage and it goes into this senescent state, which is a protective mechanism. So it doesn't turn cancerous. It's actually, you don't want to prevent senescence. You do want to clear those cells once they've formed. Now, why would those cells send out all these secretory molecules into their surrounding?

Starting point is 00:50:08 Well, that is a beacon for your immune system to come and clear them up. That is the natural order for how that works. Well, guess what happens when you get older? Your immune system goes into immunosinessence. It doesn't work as well. So now you have all these increasing accumulation of senescent cells that are launching their highly inflammatory molecules into the surrounding and damaging the tissue, and there's nothing to come clean them up. And so some natural compounds like quercetin and facetin and pipporongamine

Starting point is 00:50:38 and luteolin and other lots of natural plant phytochemicals have shown to target some aspects of the upregulated physiology of those cells. What happens is when they morph from a normal cell into that weird state, certain survival pathways get upregulated, which prevents them from dying. So that's why they're like zombies. And these different compounds have been shown to, like, you knock it down. And once you knock the cell down, it can go into apoptosis, or it can be cleared, and you actually clear away those senescent cells. So a lot of work started on this by the Mayo Clinic with James Kirkland and Jansman Derson. And they were showing some pretty cool combinations where if you don't just target one pathway, but you actually try to target multiple at once, you can actually clear out

Starting point is 00:51:25 these cells. And that went into the clinic. So it went from the Petri dish to the clinic. And you saw people saying, yeah, wow, my knees feel better. Like, I'm actually improved, like, I feel different if I do this. And it was once a month because you don't want to be running that all the time at full blast. Otherwise, that itself could be damaging. You want to kind of hit it, hit it and run. So with our product, we are following that strategy that was created by the Mayo Clinic, which is two days, high dose, plant flavonols and other compounds. Do it for two days in a row. then you go back to living. Then the next month you do it again. Would you say that if somebody's highly inflamed, that there's a very good chance that the cause of that is a likelihood of

Starting point is 00:52:11 senescent cells that are accumulating? That is a great comment. And yes, undoubtedly senescent cells are contributing to that. But there are other pathways that become dysregulated with age too. And there's some pretty cool work, the MP3 inflammatory. Amazon is one of those targets that might be nearest term to the clinic, where if you knock down that pathway, you'll, you could feel a lot better. But yeah, I mean, generally with aging, it's a, you see increasing its regulation of normal homoestatic processes. Homeostatic is this maintenance and balance.

Starting point is 00:52:47 And for one reason or another, things start to get the tilt in the balance becomes off, which can then lead to reliable signs that we see with aging, including like, I, back hurts all the dies. Right. These are, yeah. Let me ask you this. I fight with this a lot with people saying, oh, you're so young or oh, you don't need to check that or oh, you don't need to do that. This is kind of like a three-part question, but you can answer it all in one.

Starting point is 00:53:16 One, is there certain triggers or causes aside from aging that caused somebody to go into senescence earlier than others? Two, when is the age time where somebody could start? to see this more in three, is there too young of an age to be addressing this? Yeah, those are, those are very good questions and the answers are, is somewhat complex. So not everything that is good for you to do or seems good at this point, given the data that we have, when you are older is something that you should do to maintain or support health when you're younger. So there's an super easy example of that would be if And this is crude, but like if somebody is diabetic and you give insulin, that's really helpful.

Starting point is 00:54:03 But you wouldn't give insulin to a healthy young child to make them healthier, right? It's conditional. Right. As mechanisms start to break down. So another great example, I introduced a researcher Ben Miller on metformin. And the idea that metformin, which is one of the top 10 medications that's prescribed in the world, it's given people with pre-diabetes and diabetes. We've, we started to notice interesting things that those people were actually living longer

Starting point is 00:54:32 than some of the people that didn't have diabetes who weren't taking it. And it led to, wow, is this actually like a compound that can affect the aging process overall? And it got popular. So I have some friends that are extremely fit, 50-year-olds, because they're former professional athletes and they kept in really good shape. And they were like, I want to do everything I can, right, as early as possible. And they went on those METs and I said, well, listen, get off of them. Now, wait, you don't need it yet.

Starting point is 00:55:00 Because what we've seen is that when you give those two people who train, for example, that metformin can squash a lot of the signals that lead to improved cardio-respartatory fitness or muscle gains. So you really have to look at the context of the health of the individual to determine if certain compounds are going to be healthier or not. Yeah, 100%. Then there are factors like protagonistically, tropy, which is a term that was created by Aubrey de Grey. And that's like kind of healthy at any age, right? When you're like exercise and good nutrition and things, certain things you can do throughout life without having to give a second thought and other things really become conditional.

Starting point is 00:55:39 And hopefully more so in the future we'll be able to be, oh, I got this bi diagnostic test. You're now a very good candidate. Even though you're not sick, you're a good candidate to get on this therapy and that's going to actually create a better outcome. But I wouldn't do it 10 years before that. Okay, perfect. Yeah. I want to ask you a question, one more related to this scented and cellular side, and then I want to get into the mind side of things a little bit. How would somebody be able to know if they are accumulating senescent cells? Is there a test, or is it just certain blood markers that they need to look for that are indicators of this? Unfortunately, there are not good tests that are commercially available. There are techniques that are used. used in research, like with muscle biopsy or tissue biopsy, that look for certain markers. But those markers also are not consistent across cell types. So you can experience senescence in your liver and your muscle and your brain tissues, all

Starting point is 00:56:38 different tissues, but the actual signatures of those are not uniform. So in a way, senescent cells, we know they're important. We know that clearing them has gotten so much attention. the whole xenotherapeutic field has started, which is basically all different techniques that is looking to clear or xenomorphics that look to convert them so they're less harmful. There's lots of science going into it.

Starting point is 00:57:07 Whole pharmaceutical companies, biotechs are funded with hundreds of millions of dollars to try to create novel solutions, vaccines, that would selectively target senescent cells and clear them out. There's lots of cool strategies that are being explored. Right now, are, you know, the ones we do seem to have an effective, at least in the way that you can measure some markers.

Starting point is 00:57:30 And the question then becomes, all right, so if you can see less senescent markers in the way that you evaluate it in this particular tissue, how much does that apply to everything else in the body? A lot of open-ended questions right now. Got it. 100%. I appreciate the breakdown there because I think there's a lot of confusion. There's a lot of verbiage that gets thrown around, especially now. mitochondrial and even senescence, but not a lot of explanation. So I appreciate the breakdown of it because I think there's a lot of confusion there.

Starting point is 00:58:00 I want to ask you about the mind side of things and now we're at Qualia Mind 2.0. So what changes were made as we went into a 2.0 version and can you talk a little bit about the value of the ingredient makeup here? because there was a lot of different types of neutropic blends. A lot of times what I found with neutropics is you've got to pick and choose when you use them. You can't use them too often. Your body adjust or it's not really the healthiest thing to do. Can you talk about all of those aspects for me and the changes that were made here and why?

Starting point is 00:58:35 Yes. So this was the first product that, oh, this was like how I was introduced to quality. It was the first product that this company, which used to go by the name Mineral Hacker Collective, created. So the neurohacker collective formed and created the product called Qualia. And that product was what we call now Qualia Mind. And we like the name so much. The company changed its name to Qualia Life Sciences.

Starting point is 00:59:04 And Qualia Mind is now what that first formula was. Now that first formula was taken in two parts. So you woke up and you took one bottle that had that you took on an empty stomach. and then you took six horse pills later with your first meal. And so it was a two-part formula and it was awesome. Like most people were like that was their favorite formula ever. What I really appreciated about it with multiple things, it elevated.

Starting point is 00:59:37 I felt a detectable, noticeable upshift in my cognitive abilities that didn't seem to be oriented just for concentration or thinking stamina. Like overall, I felt brighter. in all of my cognitive domains. That lasted throughout the day. There wasn't a big dip in a crash. And I didn't feel overly stimulated at night, so I couldn't sleep.

Starting point is 00:59:59 Those were great. Those attributes were fantastic because I had tried other things, and maybe there was a positive effect, but there was a crash, or that I couldn't go to bed at night. So that was all good. The other thing that I was very important was that when they recommended

Starting point is 01:00:16 that you don't take it on the weekends. So you can take it for five days in a row, then you don't take it on Saturday and Sundays. And the whole idea is to keep your body sensitive to it. But I didn't feel desaturated, low energy, lethargic, whatever, or mentally slow on the weekends. In fact, I felt still pretty sharp. Probably sharper than I would have if I hadn't been taking it. Now, the idea of a neutropic is that it's not only an enhancer of some cognitive domain, but it also was good for the brain.

Starting point is 01:00:44 It's supporting the brain's neurons. structure, connectivity in a way that actually would make the brain healthier over time. Have we done that? I don't know. Did it feel like that? Yes. Because of course there are other types of cognitive enhancers where you pay the price and you feel it. And this felt like a really nice solution. So we made the first mind product was one that I didn't like. We went from the original qualia to the first mind and there were something in there that I just didn't work well for me. And then the 2.0, we made some classic changes. I don't remember exactly what they were. And that, but that new formula is one that I've been sticking with for probably five or

Starting point is 01:01:31 six years now. I don't remember the exact amount of time. I love it. And so the category, there's a lot of ingredients in there. It's kind of hard to talk about because there's so many. But there's, the categories that you can think about is that it's supporting neurotransmitter precursors. So I'll give you one example. Like if you're going to acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter, that is really involved in thinking stamina, so being able to concentrate on something and stick with it for a while. Coaline, which you find in egg yolks and beef liver or things like that, is the precursor to acetylcholine production. So that's an example, right? You have neuroprotection and anti-inflammation support. So there's compounds that are in there that are actually affecting

Starting point is 01:02:15 neuroinflammation, so things like Ludiolin and Ziazanthin, saffron, those are all doing aimed at that category. You have neurotrophic support. So this is like BDNF. This is, think of this as like fertilizer for the brain. Lots of things will stimulate BDNF and you want that. Exercise rye from rye bread is actually a rather potent BDNF stimulator. And there's other versions as well. You want to enhance blood flow so you can get oxygen and nutrients. and calories into the brain and clear waste. So again, going through all of them is sort of tedious. But you can see where the system approach came into play.

Starting point is 01:02:59 How does the system work? And what makes sense for us to support every part of that system, whether it from blood flow, neurotransmitter synthesis, on and on, stress resistance, those are all the goals. And each ingredient fits at least one of those goals, Sometimes you'll see one that's actually working in multiple domains. We see that a lot with our stem cell product. Excellent.

Starting point is 01:03:22 I just had a discussion the other day on BDNF. We were doing like a gut brain discussion. And so I just kind of got. And the exact same thing you said, fertilizer for the brain stuck in my head. That's how I remembered what it was. That's so crazy, man, that you brought that up. But yeah, it's so important. And the neuro side, like I mentioned earlier, I just, I want to drive that into people.

Starting point is 01:03:45 people's brains literally so that they work on that and treat their health. Now, I'd like to close up with innovation. So qualia kind of to me is synonymous with innovation. There's been a new product that just came out. And really, I, you know, I think the, there's a few that are newer. The vitamin C is the newest. What are some of the newer products and maybe, you know, get into that. And then is there anything on the horizon that's coming? If you, if you can discuss that. Yes. So, The last couple of products have been creatine, vitamin C, our magnesium product. These are some of my favorite products from the company. They're foundational staples, and each one of them plays a really interesting role.

Starting point is 01:04:32 And because I'm in the role, you know, the role that I'm at for the company, it's given me this luxury of being able to dive into the literature. My job requires that, which is great, because we all know some stuff about some of these things. But when I get a read about them for days and days on end, there's all these really cool discoveries that have increased my own motivation to be consistent with taking them. So, like, you know, I take, I've been making reels, which they turn into ads for Instagram where I'm talking about mineral depletions, particularly magnesium depletion in our water. So that because of water softening techniques, that hard water is sodium and magnesium. and then to soften that water, that magnesium is removed. Then you go through filtration.

Starting point is 01:05:21 And we used to get a really significant amount of our magnesium from spring water. You could easily take in 500 milligrams a day, which is over the RDA, but probably not optimal. And if you drank enough, and now we probably get zero from water. Then you have the fact that minerals are depleted from our soil. But even more so, less than mineral depletion, the way. that we've bred plants, we've bred them in a way where they've added to their caloric more than they've, there's like two different chambers that pull in nutrients from the soil and calories basically, think of it that way. And we've engineered them in a way where they grow quickly,

Starting point is 01:05:59 but they're not pulling up as many nutrients and minerals from the soil. So a 20, you know, the same volume of broccoli that's sitting on your plate versus your grandmas won't have didn't, doesn't have the same magnesium. It's like 40% less. So our food has changed, even the healthy stuff. Then you go through processing, which basically strips out all of it. You have the changes in water. There's really a good need for magnesium supplementation. And I know that when I take it regularly, I'm sort of surprised by how much I feel a benefit.

Starting point is 01:06:36 Take it during the day, feel nice and calm, I take it at night, I sleep well, which is objectively measured with my aura ring. I'm like, oh, yeah. You know, my HRV was higher. My deep sleep was longer. So that's part of been my own personal discovery process with magnesium. Vitamin C is a lot more interesting than what we all kind of come to learn. It helps urine system. It helps with collagen, which obviously is important.

Starting point is 01:07:02 But there's this really cool new paper. We should talk about it sometime where they discovered that vitamin C, was the most interesting foil against a new pathway of aging called pharaoh aging, where iron rusts yourselves and causes them to go into senescence. Major driver of senescence.

Starting point is 01:07:27 And vitamin C blocks a key enzyme in that that drives that process. And then they tested that in monkeys for 40 months, and they had remarkable age reversal effect. So really, really cool. And then there's creatine, which, you know, that was the first study I ever did, was in the mid-1990s.

Starting point is 01:07:43 I was this, you know, little no-nothing graduate student who was just like, all right, I'll carry the boxes. What do you need me to do? I'll do it all. And it was fascinating. You know, we were trying to evaluate at that time in the mid-90s where really, like, it just became into existence. Remember?

Starting point is 01:08:03 During the public awareness. Yeah. And people at the Barcelona Olympics, cool story there. So this researcher, sport scientist, Steve Jennings was working with a scientist. And the global supply for creatine was one kilogram. And they realized with this new study that just came out that it could increase ballistic performance. Like in sprints by up to 3%, which doesn't sound a lot.

Starting point is 01:08:29 But if you know all of those sports, you know, it's milliseconds, right? Yeah, it's actually significant improvement. And so the British athletes were taking it and they did well. and Lidford Christie was the poster child for that. And it totally kicked off Creed team. And that led to within five years maybe about there's like a $150 million market in the U.S. And it's grown to about 400 million, 500 million in the U.S. now with almost 2 billion globally. And it's still growing because for the first 10 or 15 year period, it was all sports performance.

Starting point is 01:09:05 And it's now probably the most tested. It is the most tested. it's ergodetic aid ever. It's safe, it's effective, it reliably works under certain conditions, and we're still learning even ways that it might support athletic endeavors that we don't think of it being classically helpful for. So like law endurance events. So yeah, so that's really cool. But around 2010, then we started to look at it, realizing like, okay, so this helps energetics or energy production. The sports example is a very clear place where this could help,

Starting point is 01:09:44 but where else might it help. And that's now kicked off the second life of creatine. It's being studied for the brain, for the immune system, in perimenopause for menopausal women, that for maintaining bone mineral density and muscle mass, and on and on and on. And it is so freaking cool. to like, feel and I knew so much about this

Starting point is 01:10:07 and then rediscovered this whole other world that makes total sense why it works. I would have never thought back in high school when we got introduced to it that I'd be giving it to my mom when she's 77 years old, my wife in her 50s and recommending it to women and menopause and still recommending it to teenagers and how it would be so effective in every way that it is.

Starting point is 01:10:30 I never would have thought of that. Yeah, totally. It's amazing. I did not foresee that. No, no. But I'm so thankful that there's been so much research done and it got looked into more so, and that there was an ability to figure out that it had multitudes of benefits and we can utilize that now. I just, I have to often do videos and content to teach people exactly right and wrong with it because you know it becomes so convoluted because everybody wants to sell it and they don't teach you right how to use it.

Starting point is 01:10:59 And I see all of these ways and it gets confusing like everything else. So it's a battle of education, my friend. Yeah. You know, education is a critical part of supplements because we have to learn about why it's interesting and do so in an honorable way, not aggrandizing. I just think that the science as it is for whatever we're talking about is interesting.

Starting point is 01:11:31 Like, this is where we are now. It's a minor effect. It's probably meaningful. I'm just speaking in generality. It's not about creatine right now. But they, yeah, I never feel like I have to distort or enter into some sort of hyperbolic statement around things. Just tell people what you know and show how it can be used.

Starting point is 01:11:52 How do you do it right? And then let people make their own choices, kind of like we were talking about earlier. But creatine is one of these molecules that compounds. It's really moving into a new stratosphere of, like where it sits in the supplement hierarchy. It could, it really seems like it could support an individual across life, whether you're a man or woman.

Starting point is 01:12:14 And how, the question now is like, how young can you be taking? Yeah. And I don't see, I don't see any issues of younger people taking it because it's in our food. You know, we eat it every day. If you eat an omnivorous diet, your body makes it endogenously. It goes through a multi-step process. And your cells don't make it. It's made in the liver primarily, and then it gets into circulation, and then your cells have receptors

Starting point is 01:12:40 that pull it in. And so it doesn't go uniformly to all tissues. Your muscles love it. So like 95% goes to muscles. And that's sort of stimulated the thinking of like, well, instead of taking five grams per day, which has been like the classic dose, what if we took 10 grams a day, might that bypass the daily muscle saturation? And then you can actually have more for other. their tissues and if there's any remaining, you'll pee it out. And that's why a lot of people are now taking 10 grams a day as like their standard baseline. Yeah. Yeah, I've been seeing different ways of taking it and different ideas and thoughts that I've tested and seen. So it's nice that we have that now and that data. And it's also, you know, when I go talk to people, I ask them and I do this with the

Starting point is 01:13:28 people that I find the most brilliant, name me your five most essential like regular vitamins or things. magnesium is always 100% of the time in that answer. And when I say, okay, top five supplements that you don't have to take but are going to offer the most benefit, I'd say 9.9 out of 10 times creatine is the first thing that gets said. It's universal that these two in particular are always brought up by the most brilliant and variant minds all over the world. So it's something there's actually agreement upon and I think with good reason. The only thing I'm not sure what I would agree with is whether to put it in list A or B, but it's on. I totally.

Starting point is 01:14:13 Totally. Well, Dan, I swear, man, I know we went way longer than we said, but I enjoyed it that much that I could have kept going with you longer. But I think we'll have to get back into some things that I wanted to discuss with you on another episode, especially more, I'd say in-depth study, discussion and certain scientific areas that I think you have brilliant on that we discussed off camera that I want to cover. The problem is there's never enough time when things go so well, which is a good thing. That means that we open it up for another part. So I appreciate not just the time, but the effort because you're one of the good guys that actually cares and really puts a lot of effort into formulations and conveying the right information. This isn't a marketing thing

Starting point is 01:14:58 or let's sell as much thing as we can. It's a how many people can we help and how many people can we really change their lives? And you're one of those guys and I'm proud to show that to people, to bring you in front of people. And it's just been a real pleasure, my friend. Oh, thank you.

Starting point is 01:15:15 I really appreciate those kind words. And it's true. I do really care. I think about the people that I'm of service to every day and that motivated when I'm creating some scientific content like this might this might help people that I'll never meet in ways I'll never know or understand. But it feels great to do that. And then I get also learn myself. And then I'm naturally a share of I discover something that I think is useful or interesting. I want other people to benefit from it too. So it feels like a really good job for me. But I would be righted to come back on anytime. I feel like you and I could just talk for hours and hours, you know. We both had that feeling the first time we connected.

Starting point is 01:16:01 And yeah, we can talk more about this stuff anytime. So let's make it happen. You got it, my friend. And everybody, I have a little special for you in the description. You got to go read the description on the quality of special that I'm going to throw down there for you. I'm going to leave it to you actually taking the time to go click and see what kind of special that I have for you today. So, yeah, I like to give surprises and gifts. So thank you, Dan.

Starting point is 01:16:26 again, you are the man. I appreciate it. And that wraps up another one, everybody. So stay tuned for plenty more to come. Dylan Jameli, signing off. Thanks, Dylan.

The Dylan Gemelli Podcast - Episode #144 Featuring Dan Pardi! The CHIEF Health Officer at QUALIA LIFE! Inside the WORLD OF SUPPLEMENT DEVELOPMENT!

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