Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Healthy Aging: A Deep Dive into Your Mitochondria with Anurag Singh

Episode Date: November 24, 2023

Healthy aging research has shown the critical role played by the tiny powerhouse within our cells – the mitochondria. Dr. Anurag Signh joins Dr. Mindy to explain how every aspect of health and wellbeing comes down to mitochondrial health, wherever you look in the body, the immune system, the brain, the gut, skin, muscle, mitochondrial health is essential. Daily damage to our mitochondria is unavoidable, but for the first time there are things we can do about this byproduct of aging. Throughout this episode, Dr. Anurag and Dr. Mindy address the essential questions: What do mitochondria do, and how can we keep them healthy as we age? Go to https://www.timelinenutrition.com/pelz and code PELZ for 10% off your order. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep209. Anurag Singh is currently Chief Medical Officer at Timeline that develops next generation advanced nutritional and skincare products targeting improvements in mitochondrial and cellular health. With a M.D. in internal medicine and a Ph.D. in immunology, his experience includes work at top consumer health (Nestlé, Nestlé Health Science) and startups companies (Amazentis/Timeline). He's authored > 40 articles for top science journals, been awarded >15 patents and has designed and led > 50 randomized clinical trials. His research over the past decade across multiple clinical trials on the postbiotic Urolithin A and its health benefits has led to the launch of multiple consumer products." Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.

On this episode of the Resetter podcast, I bring you Dr. On Your Egg Singh. Now, a little bit of a background on what you're about to listen to, we are dive deep into mitochondrial health. And I love the way we approached it in a way of looking at powering up your mitochondria from an anti-aging perspective. So a little bit about Dr. Singh that I think is really interesting is not only is he the chief medical officer at Timeline Nutrition, which you'll hear us talk a lot about, but he has an MD in internal medicine and a PhD in immunology, and he has worked at some of the top consumer health companies, and he's been at startup companies like Timeline. He has authored over 40 articles in top science journals,

and has been awarded over 15 patents. This man is a force. And why I wanted to bring him to you is because timeline nutrition has some really interesting products that are key for mitochondrial health. But hopefully those of you that have been listening to me for a while know that I'm not here just to tell you to take a pill and all of a sudden your life will change.

I'm here to show you a lifestyle that, will not only slow aging, not only balance hormones, but will have you really truly loving the body that you're living in. And timeline nutrition has come up with a really key product that involves a postbiotic called urythinol A. And urythinol A is a nutrient that our mitochondria need. So we've talked on here before about light. You're going to hear us talk a little bit about light here. We've talked about ketones. We've talked about co-cutin and nutrition that you need to support and good fats that you need to support mitochondrial health. But we've never talked about why you need urythinol A.

And in this conversation, not only are you going to learn why this nutrient is so important, but I'm hoping that you are going to learn why your mitochondria are the root. listen to this for a moment, your mitochondria are necessary. They are at the root of all of your health challenges. They are also at the root of being able to not only slow down aging, but to prevent health challenges. The mitochondria are that important. So I walked him all the way through, tell us why the mitochondria are that important. What does? do? How do they affect muscle growth? How do they affect skin health? How do they affect our immune system? What lifestyle changes do we need to make to keep our mitochondria healthy as we age?

I went at this from as many angles as I could find so that you all could benefit from building a lifestyle that works for these mitochondria. So Dr. Singh and know that if you're interested in getting his product, you can go to timelinenutrition.com slash pels, and they will give you 10% off on their product. And I highly recommend that you try their product for several months. You will notice a difference as the months continue on.

So at the back half of this conversation, we dive into the product. At the front half of the conversation, we really go over mitochondrial health and what you need to know about it. So Dr. Singh, timeline nutrition, enjoy. Hey, Dr. Mindy here, and welcome to season four of the Resetter podcast. Please know that this podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again.

If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. Enjoy. Hey, well, let's just jump right in, Dr. Singh. Let me start by just welcoming you to the Resetter podcast. I am so excited. I probably am one of the rare few that's really excited to talk mitochondria. But I think after people listen to this, they'll understand why. So welcome.

I'm happy you're here. Thanks for having us. Thanks for that, Mindy. You know what's really interesting is I really find the mechanics of cellular energy super fascinating. In fact, again, I find things like the Krebs cycle and how our cells take in our food and they take in vitamins and minerals and they convert that all into energy to be totally fascinating. And what I've seen over the last several decades is more and more people are understanding this one little part of their cell is key to energy, building muscle, to slowing down aging.

and we are now throwing out the word mitochondria over and over again, like a buzz, it's kind of like a buzzword, without fully understanding all the things that the mitochondria do for us. So can we start with the conversation there? Why do we need to think about our mitochondria and what are all the amazing things that these little powerhouses are doing for us? Sure. Yeah, so the great questions is kick it off.

So mitochondria essentially are these tiny, organelles inside a cell. There are like the energy factories, right? So they are involved in making energy. They are transmitting the currency of energy in our bodies. It's a molecule called ATP. And without that, you won't be able to get up from a chair. Without that, you won't be able to think clearly. So that's the key role of mitochondria. In a nutshell, to simplify it, think of them as as the battery is powering your car, right, or your electric car. If you take out the battery from a Tesla, the Tesla won't move, right? So that's exactly the role of the mitochondria in our bodies.

And they essentially involved in everything from sensing the nutrients that we are getting in from the food. They're involved in protein synthesis. So a lot of when you're taking your high protein shake, for example, these are the cellular organelles that are involved in the protein synthesis. aspects of the cellular machinery. And then, you know, really they're involved as sort of the central pillars to get all the cellular organelles to talk to each other. That's where they play a very integral role.

And so are you, does everybody have the same amount of mitochondria or can you, like I've heard when you're younger and if you're really athletic, you build a lot of extra mitochondria because perhaps you're building more muscle. Like, are we all given the same amount of mitochondria, or does it vary from person to person? Or do we even know? The mitochondria are found in every cell type, except the red blood cells, right? So now, the more metabolic, the cell type, so typically the muscle, the skeletal muscle, the cardiac cell, the neuronal cell, these have thousands of mitochondria because their requirement

of energy is very high. And so what happens basically is compared to a platelet, for example, which is a kind of an immune cell that has only about 8 to 20 mitochondria, the muscle and the neuron cells have about 15 to 30,000 mitochondria. And so what happens with aging or as we all ages, the number of mitochondria in these very metabolic energetic organ cells, typically the brain or the muscle or the heart cell or the liver cell, they start varying and they start declining because now we are building a pool of unhealthy mitochondria

and the healthy mitochondria are diminishing. And so that's what happens with aging. Okay. And so what diminishes them? If we, like if the name of the game is, more mitochondria mean more cellular energy, which ultimately means more energy for every organ in our system, more energy for us, as we start to age, are there certain behaviors we can do to make sure that we keep our mitochondria healthy. Sure. So typically mitochondria in a life cycle exists in sort of a healthy state and an unhealthy state, right? So you start with this process and I'll try to sort of break it down into the three sort of

life cycle aspects of a mitochondria. When they're healthy, that's the process we called as sort of fission and fusion, which means now the mitochondria are talking to each other. they're happily talking to the other organelles. There's another phase called biogenesis, which means creating near mitochondria. And that's when a lot of small fragments in the cells come together from the mitochondria to make new mitochondria.

And then there's a third aspect, which is mitophagy, which is basically collecting a lot of poor mitochondria and cleaning them out. So there's always a balance when you say, how do you grow new mitochondria? You need to have these three systems that I just described in absolute things. So the creation of the new mitochondria,

the ones that you have, so they're talking and being more energy producing and then the cleaning of the mitochondria. And so what can you do? Well, there are two interventions actually that are super well-studied. One is, well, intermittent fasting or caloric restriction, right? That's your favorite topic there. This is well known to induce robust creation of new mitochondria. It's also known to clean the poor mitochondria out. And then the second aspect is, well, regular exercise, aerobic and resistance exercise regimens are known to have a very robust impact on mitochondrial health. And the third pillar, which we'll probably get into it, is what can you do in terms of, from constituents of your diet that can have robust mitochondrial effects that kind of supplement exercise and intermittent fasting because not everybody is 100% always compliant to these two other mechanisms. So I want to go back to one of the things you said of those three things that I've been really deeply thinking about, which is the mitochondria talking to each other, and or communicating with each other.

So I've been really deeply for the last several years unpacking a concept called cellular danger response, which is, and you'll probably explain it a lot better than I can, but where the cell goes into a crisis and then the mitochondria stopped, pushing out ATP, they start alerting all the other cells that there's a crisis at hand. And this is a deal when it comes to autoimmune conditions, cancers, chronic diseases. So before we move on to all the wonderful things you can do for the mitochondria, can we address cellular danger response and what we need to know about that? Fascinating question. So typically, mitochondria, as you just described, are the sentinels of good cellular health. So when things go wrong, for example, if they aren't a lot of stress, if you're not eating right, or there's suddenly, you know, a lot of stress on a cellular level from external factors such as even, you know, hot temperatures or cold temperatures, they're known to modulate these kind of stress signals.

With the mitochondria, what I described before, this sort of, they'll go into sort of from a healthy state to an unhealthy state and the body will try to release these unhealthy fractures. of poor functioning mitochondria, which we call fragments of mitochondria or mitochondrial DNA. This will go and then alert the other cell types, typically immune cells will pick it up and see it as a danger response. And they will basically start responding and creating an immune reaction to it. And that's what you were trying to get into that a lot of times this leads to autoimmunity because sometimes a lot of the viruses and bacteria manage to trick our cells and make this release happen from the mitochondria, and that leads to things like autoimmunity. So what can we do? So I think it boils down to really this central tenet that mitochondria

are this key hallmark of aging that connects every other hallmark or cellular behavior. And if you can improve mitochondrial health, you can then dampen this sort of stress response. And that's essentially what we are discovering, actually, as we do more and more trials. We think we are improving mitochondrial health, which we see the data, but in essence, in a parallel sort of biomarker that we pick up is these sort of immune reactive markers like C-reactive protein, for example. And whenever we see mitochondrial health go better, the immune system looks a bit, you know, quieter and, you know, dampen. And so I think there's a very key nexus between the danger response that you were describing and how good your mitochondrial health is.

And does the danger response happen because you're not? not giving the mitochondria what it needs, or does it happen because of physical, emotional, chemical toxins that come into the cell and start to put it into this reactive state? Or is it both? Yeah, it's what we call as oxidative stress. So basically, it's creating stress with, these highly reactive oxygen species, mitochondria, or these, you know, sort of factories where a lot of oxygen consumption is happening and a lot of oxygen is sort of being, produced for, you know, that's that's sort of why we feel fatigued or we feel more energetic kind of at a whole body level. And so what happens is if we accumulate too much of this,

what we call as Ross or reactive oxygen species, this leads to damage of the mitochondria. And if you have too much damage mitochondria, your cellular health will just go off and you won't be able to fight, you know, you won't be able to feel very energetic or mount even a proper immune response. So that's what's happening at the cellular level. And so if we looked at the mitochondria as a, I always, I love to refer to things in our body as like pets. Like I always think of the microbiome like this. Like if you really thought of your microbiome as like a pet you were trying to keep alive that was going to make you feel really good, here are all the things you would do to keep that pet alive. I feel like the same thing with the mitochondria, it has a checklist of things

that it needs. Like you mentioned, intermittent fasting helps it. Well, I look at that. What does intermittent fasting do? It can stimulate, it can produce ketones, which is one of the requirements of the mitochondria. It can help with what you talked about, mitophagy if you fast long enough, so it can clean those mitochondria up. We also know that the mitochondria has a bilipid membrane like the outer part of the cell, so we need to be giving it good fats. We also, also know that there's certain things we should be eating like I heard organ meats or have certain capabilities of feeding the mitochondria. So if the mitochondria was a pet that we wanted to keep alive, what, you know, what do you think of the checklist I just created and what would

you add to that checklist? No, it's fascinating. Well, actually, there's a big field of research that is upcoming and that's called the microbiome mitochondria axis because essentially mitochondria or nothing but ancient bacteria that involved, you know, within our cells in sort of this symbiotic or mutually, you know, a green relationship where, you know, we would, as hosts, humans provide energy to these ancient bacteria and they would process our nutrients and give us, you know, energy in return. So that's kind of the network between microbiome and the mitochondria story. Now, what is the checklist? I say there, you know, I think most of the things you you mentioned diet, exercise, advanced sort of supplementation with things that are known

clinically proven to improve mitochondrial health. Sleep is a big one. Your circadian rhythm is how you're sleeping, believe it or not, affects mitochondrial health. And stress, you know, stress at a lot of neurocognitive disorders are now ultimately pointing down to metabolic disturbances in which at the root is mitochondrial dysfunction. So those five, I think, are, pretty much if you think about them, you'll have, and you address them, you'll have good mitochondrial health. And what about light? I've heard like that mitochondria has sensors for different light, you know, frequencies or vibrancies, like red light. Is that true that it actually has a receptor site for that? Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of new research that is just coming out, I guess, in the last couple of years, how they're sensitive red light. I think it really boils down to their ability to regulate things like Sarcadian. rhythm and even a hot versus cold.

We worked with a professor close by where we are based in the university, Swiss Institute of Technology, and he even studies how hot temperatures and cold temperatures modulate mitochondrial. And so, yes, there's a lot of new fascinating literature coming out, showing that things like red light and cold temperatures, and maybe that's why a lot of people by hiking community are doing a lot of these cold plunges. that these are things that you can use to improve mitochondrial health. Yeah, yeah.

It's fascinating because I think when you look at the biohacking community and you look at everything from hyperbaric oxygen to red light to plunges, you start to see that at the root of everything we're trying to do with all of those biohacks is improve mitochondrial health. So that's why I think all of us understanding it in the best way possible is key for longevity. Absolutely. And, you know, probably listeners may have heard a lot about these hallmarks of aging on different, you know, episodes of your podcast, but essentially they're now 12 of them.

And they all link to telomatration or stem cell exhaustion in our body or poor communication between our cell organelles. At the central, I think the right at the middle is these mitochondrial dysfunction, because if you correct that, you can correct basically all the others as you're describing. and it's amenable to making it better, right? So if you can eat 20% less or if you can move, walk and do your 10,000, 8,000 steps that are recommended, you are. In fact, improving your mitochondrial and cellular health. So I think these are key learnings. Okay, that was a brilliant point, and I want to make sure that nobody misses that. Because when it goes to either slowing down aging or overturning a diagnosis, it can get very, very complicated. We can get like, I call it shiny object syndrome, where we're like, I'm going to go do that and I'm going to go do this. But what I love about the

mitochondria and this discussion and why I'm wanting to break it down in the simplest way possible is if you correct the mitochondrial and you get your mitochondrial health in order, if you correct the dysfunction of the mitochondria, you address so many things. Like it's one, target that can amplify your health in so many different directions. I've taken people who have been really, really sick and just thought through the lens of their mitochondria. What do I need to do to get their mitochondria working well again? And once I do that, you start to see the body heal itself. It's really, I mean, I want to make sure nobody lost what you just said. If we're looking at the hallmarks of aging, mitochondrial dysfunction is a root.

issue that we need to address. So taking that thought, what do you think when we look at some of the things specifically that menopausal women go through? So you talk, when we first got on this call, you talked about skin aging. That's a big thing that we're concerned about. I also want to talk about muscle because as you, as we go through the menopausal process, the movement of hormones goes from our ovaries to our adrenals. And when the adrenals are super stressed out, they start to break muscle down to grab nutrients. And the muscle is rich in mitochondria. So now we're losing all that mitochondria.

So can you talk a little bit about both of those and what we can do to preserve muscle and to slow down the aging of skin? Sure. So I think let's start with those two. I think bone health from what we are seeing is a third, another third factor. Yeah, we can throw, yes, thank you. We see. So muscle health is, I think we peak in muscle mass and muscle function around the third

decade of our lives. And then with each decade, we are losing about 10%. So when the moment we are hitting our 50s, 60s, especially around that time, it even accelerates and becomes almost like 15, 20 percent of muscle mass and muscle strength loss. And so as clinicians, and as somebody who's seen a lot of old frail populations in my past life before I became a physician scientist, is that a lot of these people will come in with the classical complaints of where energy and, oh, I went for a walk or I did gardening and my muscles were sore. And I think for long, the whole fundamental, let's say, agreement in the muscle field was, oh, just, boost your muscle mass, right? Just boost and get more mass. Oh, take a gram of protein for every kilogram of body weight and then, you know, as you get older, you know, increase that even more.

But you can increase more muscle or let's say protein intake. But if you're not improving the machinery in our muscle cells, which is all linked again to mitochondria, after a certain age, and this is again well known, you hit this anabolic resistance. So you're going to, even if you're increasing your protein intake, your body is just letting it out because it's not able to process it. So that's something that happens after 50s. So if you can make yourselves more energetic, if you can improve the energetic capacity, I think you can have even better results with things like protein and other nutritional supplementation because now you have this really dual combo. So muscle health typically that's where, and we've looked at 60-year-olds and 70-year-olds

who are moving more, who are eating more protein and versus 60, 70-year-olds, who are not very sedentary, for example, men and women, both the same. What we see is basically that mitochondrial health is absolutely key in their skeletal muscles.

So the better your mitochondrial health, the better your muscle health. So that's, I think, proactively, if already in your 40s and early in the 50s, people are addressing these things, then sort of the trajectory towards losing more muscle mass

and straddle, be diminished. So that's the muscle piece. Skin aging is a big piece of the puzzle. Now, the skin cell also has a lot, hundreds of mitochondria. And what we see actually happen in the muscle happens in the skin as well. So when we look at a 30-year-old woman's skin cell versus a 70-year-old woman's skin cells, we see the mitochondria number hasn't really changed. It's just their inherent capacity to make more energy, sort of what we call the energetic supply of the cell has really gone down. And so if you could boost this energetic or rewire this energetic supply, I believe, and we are seeing the results actually in our trials with some of these nutrients, is that you can

put more collagen in because, again, mitochondria are the sites for collagen synthesis. And so you have more collagen that you're losing in your skin cells over aging, and that's how you can correct the skin. Bone I mentioned quickly is the same. We have looked at the bone cells in sort of different models of osteoarthritis and in people who have osteoarthritis, they have huge issues in mitophagy and atophagy in their bone cells. And so that sits off a whole cartilage degeneration process that gets accelerated. Okay, so like osteoporosis is a dysfunction in mitophagy and autophagy? Osceoporosis has an element of mitochondrial dysfunction. Austrothritis has a big, big component because now you set in motion with poor mitochondria held this sort of inflammation

aspect that then leads to, you know, pain and that results in a lot of, you know, bone degeneration, and that leads to a lot of problems in mobility in general. So combine muscle and bone issues together, and that's in your 50s, that's a huge problem to address. And so if one of the fuel sources for the mitochondria is protein, but the, mitochondria becomes more dysfunctional. And I would say even the cell as a whole becomes more dysfunctional as we age at bringing those amino acids into the cell for activation. Now we're in, we're in what I call a quagmire. What do we do? Like we're at a funny little juncture as we age where we're like, okay, I know I'm supposed to eat more protein so I can get more amino acid so I can

build muscle and I can help with my you know slow down the aging of skin but but my but my cells aren't taking in that protein in the same way that it used to so I just keep eating more protein and and then how do I fit that in the fasting window is a question that a lot of people in my community ask yeah so we at this really funky spot where we totally understand everything you're saying we're excited about keeping our mitochondria healthy, but we need other solutions to power up those mitochondria. What else do we have? So typically today, the whole mitochondrial, let's say, targeting field is split into improving and creating new mitochondria. That's what I was describing is the sort of the pathway of

a mitochondrial lifecycle that we call as mitochondrial biogenesis. So there are compounds such as NAD boosters, there's respiratory compounds such as those that have been studied to, and what you're doing basically is creating more near mitochondria and who are young and healthy and will produce energy. And the second is you can improve the efficiency of mitochondria, so that just means now instead of four ADP molecules, they're producing five ATP molecules per mitochondria. And that's kind of where...

Sign me up for that. Yeah, so there is a lot of work done. there on compounds such as co-Q10, co-enzyme Q10, for example. That's where it, but what happens with aging is that now suddenly we have this trash bin, right, in our cells or in our mitochondria, and that gets stacked up, that gets filled. So there's very little space for near healthy mitochondria to come in or for the healthy mitochondria to, let's say, talk to others even because there's a lot of garbage separating. Now, we can't, our cells by default, just slowly. down to clean this way. So think of this as your trash bin in your home, which gets filled,

and if you're not cleaning it, your house will not smell very nice. And that's exactly what's happening in our cells. So caloric restriction does this very well. It stimulates autophagy and mitophagy, and that's the garbage disposal machinery. Now they're nutrients, and the one we have discovered and put about 10 years of research behind it is a molecule called eurylithen, and that activates naturally mitophagy, similar to what calorie restriction or fasting would do. And that's how it kind of takes the waste out. And now you have a lot of space to grow new mitochondria. So urethanol A, when I first learned about your product, I thought, how can I know so much about cellular health, about nutrition, about detox, fasting? And I'd never heard of

urithinol A. So can you talk a little bit about it? Because again, when I first started trying timeline, I was shocked at how much more consistent energy I had throughout the day. And so it made me fascinated by this one particular – and it's a prebiotic, right? That isn't – yeah, can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. Oh, it's a postbiotic. Yeah, so uralitone is a gut metabolite. So it's made by the gut microbiome.

That's the link to the microbiome mitochondria that I was talking about. So a lot of us are eating the right foods such as the palm granite or the walnuts and piquins. So if you're eating things like what are known even in Mediterranean diet or if you're just sticking to healthy foods and nuts like raspberries, for example, now these contain a lot of antioxidants that we know are good for you. But what we discovered was that it was not these antioxidants or polyphenols that are, for example, in the palm granite is the richest source of polyphenols. called Elegitanins. Now, Elegitadans have been studied or palm granites have been studied for thousands of years, hundreds of clinical studies, some going in favor, some not going in favor.

What we discovered was, depending on the gut microbiome you have, and you may have it or you may not have it, you may have levels of a molecule that has the postbiotic urelatone. And if you do produce your litanye, your mitochondria are much better shape. So when we started studying it, we found, that only about 30% of the healthy adult population had some levels of urolitone in their blood, when we look at the blood levels of uralitone. So we figured out why not directly calibrate and give sort of direct doses of the postbiotic

and see if that would have sort of a cellular rejuvenation effect on our muscle cells. And that's how we got into eurlitone. So I'm thinking about the woman who's maybe been on multiple antibiotics maybe decades of birth control, and her gut is completely destroyed. And then she comes, you know, roaring into her menopausal years and now has a major shift in hormone production from her ovaries to her adrenals.

Her stress is super high. And now her, she's noticing more muscle wasting, more muscle soreness. She's not sleeping. Her moods are off. I mean, the whole, I can paint the whole picture for you because I have been her. So what I just heard is that there could be a link between the lifestyle we had in our younger years and production of urythinol A as we move into our older years. And that if we are supplementing with urythinol A, not only is it giving the mitochondria a

nutrient, I'll just call it that even though it's a postbiotic, a nutrient. that it needs to be able to give us ATP for energy. But is it possible with the addition of urethinol A? Does it repair the microbiome from all the destruction we endured in our younger years? So I'll tell you my personal story. I grew up in India and in India, when you're sick as a kid, you always get antibiotics. So you respect to whatever, you know, it's a viral illness or a bacterially unless. And so I got exposed to a lot of antibiotics, and then I moved to the States, and I then finally last 15 years in Switzerland.

And so the first time we discovered this molecule, I actually bled myself and started looking at, if, you know, after drinking a glass of pomegranate juice, pure 100% squeeze pomegranates, my body will make it or not. My body just refused to make it. And so then I went on months of eating only berries and nut and sort of whole fresh food dyes. diet, I could never change my microbiome. And so that actually led to this whole idea. Well, then there are so many folks. And we've looked actually, we've looked in in the U.S., we've looked in France and Italy, we've looked in Canada. It seems like the more exposed to fermented foods, the more exposed to sort of the Mediterranean diet you are, these are the areas of France, Italy, where we see this 30, 40% people who have. U.S. Canada is like 10%. Right. So whenever you'll hear me say, oh, 30% percent

people, healthy adults can make it. Well, it depends on their geography. So in the U.S., we've done hundreds of people in a clinical trial. Only 12% came with some level of urotinase. So they are probably more people eating, let's say, the healthy diet. And then, so we then gave them the healthy diet, and we saw that you could convert about 30% even in the U.S. population to making the molecule. But that brings the question, why are the other 60%, 70%, 70%, not. never able to make it. And the answer lies in the gut microbiome. It's really the richness. It's really the diversity. So I think you can probably change it, but that requires months and months of, you know, sticking to a fermented diet and really following it. And that's why direct supplementation really

helps because you can actually give that, those high levels of eurylithinae, which is a cellular nutrient exposure to your body for those, you know, for this nutrient. And if you add in urithinol A, is that now something you got to add in every day for the rest of your life? Or is there a moment you're like rehabbing the mitochondria and you're getting them back up to speed so that they can produce the ATP you want all on their own? So we've done a number of randomized placebo control clinical trials. What we see is that you need to give, it's not a magic pill, right? it's like caloric restriction or in fasting, you need to give yourselves the time to repair. So that's the first month kind of where we see the mitochondrial are if we take biopsies

or if you take blood cells and we look in their mitochondria after one month of supplementation, we see that now the mitochondria are in this sort of new growth phase. And then when we give them, we'll give the supplementation longer for two to four months, we start seeing the whole body effects. Now, the question you're asking is, well, after that, can you wean off and then maybe your mitochondria will be in good shape? Well, I think you will have some much like exercise or fasting. If you stick to a regimen, you will get the benefit out of it.

But as soon as you drop, you know, if you become noncompliant to it, you're probably at a certain point going to lose the effects. And then you'll have to redo the whole regimen again. So I think it's in the same category because we know the biological pathway that we're hitting is the same as what exercise or fasting is hitting. I'm such a fan of like a multi-therapeutic approach where we're pulling in a lot. And I think I just want to make sure everybody's catching the through line of everything we're saying. If you're looking at fasting, you're looking at fermented foods, you're exercising,

you're working on your stress, and you're adding in something. like Erythinol A, there becomes this mitochondrial lifestyle that you are now in sync with that is going to slow down the aging process. If somebody comes to a product like timeline and they want to use it for the first time, it would make the most sense to me that you would make sure you're doing those other pieces I just mentioned and that there would be a bit of a power up phase where you're coming in with perhaps a high dose of urythinol A for a period of like you said for let's say three to six months and then there would be a maintenance dose after that. Because the way I see the body is that if we're always doing the same thing at the same time

over and over again, we're not applying any hormetic stress. We're not tricking the cell to move into a different action that we want it to move in. So have you all looked at if you come in with a therapeutic dose and then a maintenance dose with urethinol A and what that would look like? No, we haven't done those studies, but I can tell you because I get a lot of real world because we now have thousands of customers on it. And that actually led us to develop tests even where you would first know if you get to know. and we haven't lost the test, but that's sort of in a prototyping clinical studying phase where if you can already know where your urolitone levels are,

are you a producer, are you not a producer? If you are a producer, are you a low producer, are you a very high producer, meaning that you've got microbiome already is in great shape to harness some of the urulitone from the dietary exposure, then you stick to a dose we know, which is around 500 milligram and you stay on it, right?

Because then you're getting these other areas. exposures. Now, for someone like me, his body just refuses to make your litany, I always say, well, then you need to, and then again, you have to gauge as a practitioner or, you know, where this person is in terms of their whole body health, right? If they are in a stressful state, then you start with a higher dose, as you're saying, and then after a few months, switch them to a lower maintenance dose. I think that, that, I think it's really on a case by case, you have to really look at, look at that as that. Yeah, and I think like when you said it earlier, like NED, K-Q-10, I think methylene blue is a real

popular one right now that a lot of people are using for mitochondrial health. And what I've learned in the research that I saw on urethanol A is, and what I'm hearing you say is it's a necessary nutrient and for those mitochondria. And so when you're giving that on a consistent basis, just like if you decide to dive into NAD shots or methylene blue IVs, like you're giving these mitochondria a nutrient that it's being depleted of as it's aging. And as we age, we have to, we really have to think about this more. So this is what I really want to bring to everybody's attention is, yeah, maybe your 30-year-old self didn't need to think about this, but your 50-year-old self that may not feel like your 30-old self

needs to start to think of all the ways you can power up those mitochondria, and it becomes more of a necessity as we age. I, 200% agree with that. So I think the way I see, and I've always seen Eurotena, it's sort of the foundation, right? So if you've got your cellular health in good shape, if you've got your mitochondria repairing themselves at a much faster rate, even if you're taking NAD supplementation, now you'll absorb NAD better, right? Because now you're, you've rewired, your mitochondria to be in a much better energetic state. So they're absorbing, whether it's multivitamins or protein, you know, that is coming in, or amino acids through the protein synthesis pathway, or NAD. You're just going to have, and that's I know that a lot of people like to stack in

the community, take multiple supplementation. I think that's how I see. It's really the foundation strategy that people need to think about is to improve the sort of repair capacity of yourselves. And that's how I saw it too when I started to dive into looking at urethinol A. I was like, wow, why are we so excited about NAD? Why are we so excited about all these other things? But we haven't really highlighted this one postbiotic. So I'm glad that I was seeing that through the same lens that you created timeline for. Now, talk a little bit about timeline as a product because you have tablets, you have serums,

you have shakes. And where I really want my community to see this is as something we might be able to do within our fasting window. And we can do it as a way of not only powering up the mitochondria, but I also am thinking of it as a beautiful addition to so many of us that are trying to eat more protein. And we can be getting similar effect on those mitochondria to keep our muscles strong, but do it in the fasting window, maybe requiring less protein in our eating window. I'm not sure if that's a right analogy or a right way of thinking,

but talk a little bit about your products and about, and can we use them in the fasting window, and would it make it so that we don't have to eat as much protein in our eating window? So we have three product types, and they're all delivering the same dose, a daily dose of the products. So you have the fruit flavors. So these are berry and palm granite flavors,

sort of tip-in sachets that you just can mix it in yogurt or your shakes. And that's sort of speaking also to the roots of the discovery from the pomegranates and the berries where the precursors come from. So that's one of the more popular products. Then the second, which is probably the biggest, uptake is the soft gel. So these are pills. They have 250 milligrams of the compound. People like to pop pills. Exactly. They're very easy. I take them every day. They're very easy for sure. And they fit in with the fasting lifestyle, right? And these are the ones we've actually studied the most in all. We've now

run 15 randomized trials. The ones we really see people absolutely being very highly compliant to and we can count the number of pills at the end of the trial, for example, is these soft gel pills. So it fits perfectly with the fasting. It has zero-caloric value. It doesn't impact. The high-protein shake, we launched that because I always felt that, you know, if you combine good taste with two different benefits, so improving muscle mass with your muscle quality or energy, you would have a combo. So that one, of course, because it's 20 grams of way you have to put some sort of things in there to natural sugars to sort of, so that I won't recommend that fits in with the fasting lifestyle.

No, it wouldn't be. Yeah. But it does, you know, if you're making shakes, if you're doing, for example, you're 168 intermittent fasting and you still want to, you know, eat something healthy and you do shakes, then that's where it fits in. And a lot of people like this protein shake a lot because of that. I think actually it's really good for breaking a fast. that's how I use it.

So I've been using the supplements in my fasting window, and then I've been using the shake to break a fast. And I feel like then you can get your protein. You can get all the nutrients that are in there. So one of the questions we get a lot in the fasting community is, if you're taking certain supplements within a fasting window, are they either breaking your fast or are they pulling you out of autophagy? So if we look at amino acids as being a key nutrient for building muscle, one of my theories

is that if we do an amino acid supplement within our fasting window, that it could pull us out of autophagy. I don't think we have any, I don't think we have any research on that. But with urethanol A, I'm thinking that it only enhances because of what you said, metapagy an autophagy in the cell when you take it in the fasting window. So it would actually be helpful to do it in a fasting window. It would amplify the fasting effects. You have thoughts on that? Sure. So we've done actually studies comparing urulitinae effects to fasting. So typically, you know, these studies look at the induction of autophagy, the sort of the percentage and

and the health span extension in different aging models. And it's very similar. So if, for example, autophagy induction is 30% following a fasting period in different experimental models, Eurlatanai comes very close. And if you combine both of them, you see an additive effect. And in all our trials, actually, the window we have told all the study participants where we see the best results coming in is,

after an overnight fast. That's the first thing they take. And that already makes sure there's enough uralotin exposure that can amplify that response in the mitochondria or at the cellular level. The second is exercise. And often I get asked the same question on exercise is, well, will this be additive if you exercise in a mitochondria already, you know, mitophagy is happening because if,

so we've actually done now a trial. We have not done a clinical trial combining it with, German fasting, but we have done it in athletes who are training for even Olympian level races. And we found that combining exercise with the Eurlatinae led to a better recovery, less inflammation, because believe it or not, these athletes also get inflamed because of the amount of training they do. And so we think there's a magnitude of response you can even build, make it additive fasting and exercise regimens.

Yeah, and it's the stacking that I think is really interesting because if we break down really what biohacking means, and I realize that we probably should have started off the conversation as we've thrown that term around, not everybody knows what that means. But all it means is that you are lining up your health habits with the way your body wants to be treated. That's the way, like you're lining yourself up with your own sense. self-healing. And when we look at that, through the biohacking through that lens, there are many things, behaviors you can do at one time that will amplify yourself healing.

And so what you just taught me was, okay, we could fast and we could work out in a fasted state and we could do timeline at the same time. And now we are really putting our mitochondria into a power position is the way I would look at it. Yeah, yeah, that would be a triple booster. If we can do all those, and that would be a dream trial for me to run the future. Yes. Usually we start in populations where we know mitochondrial dysfunction exists, like a bit sedentary population or a bit older population that the age is the stressor.

But I think if you're practicing exercise and I, We have to yet publish this very cool data that we just got recently with exercise being amplified that might appear. I think if you can add the fasting element, that itself. And I think that would work, actually, the way you said is you get this three-prong attack on your cellular energy that just sets you up and you have more fuel left at the end of the day. And then I'm also thinking, and then when you go back into food, you would do a timeline shake. So you're getting that protein, and you can add in other protein powders and other to hit that 30 gram mark that's going to start the initiation of mTOR and the sensors within the muscles.

So now you've literally stacked like four or five different strategies that your body wants to keep not only the cells healthy, but to keep preserving that muscle. Because I do believe that muscle as we age is this key organ. I agree with the zeitgeist of the moment, which is that muscle is that organ of longevity. I agree. And so then the question really becomes, well, if I have a fasting lifestyle, how am I going to fit this all in? And you've solved that problem. Like, that's the way I look at it. You literally solved a huge fasting issue that is being discussed right now.

And I want to go back to the powder you put in the water because my experience, and I don't know if you all have tested this, but the powder and water not only tastes amazing, but it doesn't spike blood sugar. You guys, have you done any trials on what it does to the blood sugar? So it's happening right now. It's actually a trial. We are partnering with the National Institute of Aging, which is the premier institute in the United States for all things aging. and we had data. We knew, because I did a small pilot study where I stuck basically these glucose sensors

and I gave everybody a glass of pomegranate juice. Now, just pomegranate juice has 30 grams plus of sugar and that spikes the blood glucose. Yeah, it does. And if I gave this folks the mitopure berry powder before, a few hours before, so I could time the peak of your litanya in the blood to, then the glugos peak wouldn't happen. Now, this is, again, just a pilot that I did. And so now we have more groups that have shown that in pre-diabetics, this could work as well, just like

you were saying, and we're actually running this big trial now with the National Institute of Aging. That's amazing. It's amazing. Again, I literally, when I saw your product, I was like, oh my gosh, where have I been? How did I not know about this? Yeah, I mean, glucose people don't think about it, but glucose is being metabolized. The glucose metabolism is happening at the mitochondrial level. So if you could impact mitochondria protein sensors, you know, say same thing. So I think if you modulate your mitochondria, I actually think glucose sensors could become like a de facto way or non-invasive way to actually look at some of your cellular health or your mitochondrial health.

Wait, okay, so you just gave me another idea. So if it helps, if the mitochondria helps with glucose regulation, then that person that's struggling to metabolically switch and get into ketosis and needs more support around the mitochondria, let me back up, it would behoove them to look at healing the mitochondria to make sure they can make that switch happen, and one of those missing things might be urethinol A. Yeah, I totally agree, and that's the way I see it too. And there may be ways to combine it also with the ketones or other ways, you know, MCT is a good sort of things to even boost it further, to live even only talking about fasting and exercise, but I do think that there are other

ways to sort of mimic fasting and that could be augmented with combining it with your litanya. Yeah. You need to come up with a product that can. go in everybody's coffee. Sure. Yeah, so the beauty about eurolitone compared to other, let's say, natural compounds that have very robust health benefits is, for example, omega-3. It doesn't smell very good if, you know, it has this, all this fishy odor. Eurlatene is tasteless, is odorless, and you can leave it at different temperatures, and it just would not budge, and you can blend it with a lot of different things. So that's the advantage we have in terms of a product

formulation. So yeah, we're working on how to make it. I just can see a whole way to enhance our fasting window now after talking to you. And I, and you know, coffee is such a powerful tool with you add MCT oil in your fasting window to keep you in that fat burning state. I'm now thinking, okay, how do we get some eurythinol A products in there? Now, of course, you can take the supplements. And that works well. So last question I want to ask you. And this is one, since you've been talking a lot about studies. Have any of the studies you've done been on women only? And do you have plans to do study timeline on women only? So a lot of our studies are predominantly women participants because, you know, so far the study we did in the 40, 60-year-old, the disposition was about 60-70

percent women versus 30 percent women and and then we've done a study in in 70 to 90 year olds and there also we had uh out of this 66 subjects we recruited about 40 were women so and i'll never forget for as long as i do clinical trials in my life the oldest participant i've ever recruited was an 89 year old lady and she called me up saying well i finish the trial i know the trial is still blinded and you may have to finish. But I tell you, I stop your product and I garden and I feel my sore muscles. So can you send me your product after you know which product I was and tell me if I wasn't the right product or not? And believe it or not, she knew she wasn't the right product. And so a lot of her trials actually have a very good representation of women. And now

we're running these skin aging trials, which is mostly, you know, involving 40, 50, year old women in the trial. Yes. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. We need the most, you know, and when I look at that, just skin aging, you know, it makes me scared when we're putting poisons in our skin to slow down the aging process. And what is that long term for those mitochondria? It's like a, it's sort of a double-edged sword, right? So you put in toxins into your skin to make yourself look younger, but then you deplete your mitochondrial energy, which ultimately means. means that you're aging faster. So if we can use a product like eurythinol A to power up those mitochondria and slow down aging, now we're incongruent with how our body wants us to be living.

So I love that you're doing so much on skin. And are you seeing any difference in men and women with your product? So a lot of research early on, for example, in different aging models, was done either in male sort of rodents or female rodents, and the data was very similar. Our trials, we don't specifically recruit only men or women. And as I was mentioning, most of them have about 60% women and 40% men. We see same responses. And I've done sort of what we call a subgroup analysis, looking at it.

at if the rates are better in women versus men and it seems to be the same. The mitochondria, yeah, the mitochondria are, you know, essentially behave the same way in both genders. It's an interesting thought. I never looked at, you know, I'm always looking at the gender difference from a hormonal perspective, but I don't look at it from a mitochondrial perspective, but I would just, I would think that the point of the mitochondria is to allow your hormones to be to work at their best. And so if you're in a male body, that means testosterone going up into the brain to convert to estrogen. And if you're in a female body, it just means, you know, all that, well, hormones mean more than just sex hormones. But again, we're back at root cause. Like,

exactly. So believe it or not, mitochondrial also the factories where a lot of these hormones are getting made, right? So a lot of research now in the mitochondrial field, when I go to really like top longevity or scientists which are starting is actually in. fertility or women's health because there are a lot of these issues, you know, in the reproductive field that are now pointing to, to, to issues, you know, poor mitochondrial health. And same with, same on the sort of the other spectrum where a lot of issues with men and testosterone production is being linked to sort of poor mitochondrial. So I think, you know, it's really the context, as the mitochondrial evolutionary are these sort of cellular energy.

factories and this you know depending on their environment they they change or can be modulated but at the core they are there to provide energy and and process nutrients yeah wow so cool well dr sing i really appreciate you creating such an amazing product and i'm going to encourage my community to really test it in their fasting window you know i think that there's two things i would expect my community to find is muscle of strength and building of muscle becomes easier skin in what like we talked about, the skin aging changing, but then just overall vitality. Anything else you would add to that list of,

if you were a 50-year-old woman trying this product, that you would expect to see shift for the positive? Yeah, so I think the number one feedback, and there's obviously the clinical evidence and the real world evidence, and the amount of feedback I get that points to people feeling better energy, more strength, just better recovery. Like if you do exercise, a lot of 50-year-olds swear that they're recovering

better and their body is less damaged because, you know, and they're doing even better than they were in their 40s. So I think that, and the immune aspect, we forget that, as I mentioned, the inflammation as we're all aging, our bodies are getting inflamed. And I think you just dampen your, the body is less damage and the danger signals we would talk at the start. Yeah, you know, it's funny you say that I actually have noticed less soreness. and I work out hard and often, and my recovery's been amazing. So I hadn't attributed it to timeline. So I can really vouch for that one, not only consistent energy,

but I just don't get sore after a workout. So that's impressive. I'm 54. So I'm going to give you some of that credit. Sure. Thanks. How do people find you if they want to order the product? And we'll leave links in the show notes.

Yeah, they can go to our website, Timelinenutrition.com. And if they wanted to learn more on the science and clinical evidence and subscribe to sort of even learning more, they can go to mitopure.com, which mitopure is the sort of the proprietary trade name for Eurlatanate that are Timeline Company markets. Beautiful. And then I have to ask you my last question that I ask every guest. And so if you were to name one superpower, that you have as a human that you bring to this world,

what would your superpower be? My superpower will be empathy. I was trained as a doctor. I'm trained to listen and understand sort of. And yeah, I mean, really connect all the dots that, you know, let's say the symptoms of a person at a whole body level and find this root cause. And that's why I switched to actually becoming a physician scientist because I realized my core strength was digging deeper and really going at the root cause of these

issues we all have with aging. And so that's my superpower, I think. You know what? I think we need more people on this planet with empathy as their superpower. So that is a heck of a superpower. So really appreciate you, Dr. Singh. I cannot say enough about your product. It is one that will stay in my personal regime forever. And I'm just so grateful that there are scientists like you out there really digging deep into understanding what we can do to slow down aging. So massive appreciation. Well, thanks for having me. Wonderful being on your podcast and talking to you.

Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends, and let me know. what your biggest takeaway is.