The Daria Hamrah Podcast
Do you want to change or simply improve your life? Take your business or your personal relationships to the next level? Have you ever thought why change is so difficult? Ever wondered how people become successful and we just call them "lucky". The Daria Hamrah Podcast gives you Dr. Hamrah's personal insights and pathways to his successes and what he calls "true happiness". Featuring interviews with some of the most successful entrepreneurs, authors and experts in their field, he shares their insights into what he calls the "Secret of Life".
The Daria Hamrah Podcast
Unlocking the Secrets of Cellular Aging: A Conversation with Dr. Nichola Conlon
Ever wondered if you can slow down the aging process at the cellular level? Join us for a groundbreaking conversation with Dr. Nicola Conlon, a molecular biologist and founder of Nuchido Laboratories, who shares her inspiring journey from the pharmaceutical industry to pioneering natural, scientifically-backed supplements. Dr. Conlon discusses her frustration with the slow pace of drug development and how it led her to focus on natural alternatives that can make a quicker impact on health and wellness.
Explore the rise of metabolic dysfunction in America and learn how our lifestyle choices directly impact our healthspan. We compare European and American food regulations and how they contribute to overall health disparities. Dr. Conlon sheds light on the hallmarks of aging—like DNA damage and cellular senescence—and offers insights into how understanding these processes can lead to effective anti-aging strategies. Discover how to measure and potentially reverse biological age using biomarkers such as telomere length and glycan age testing.
Dr. Conlon also reveals the critical role of NAD (Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide) in cellular health, elaborating on how natural ingredients like rutin and apigenin can boost NAD levels. The discussion underscores the importance of maintaining muscle mass and quality sleep as we age, and offers practical tips for optimizing health through diet, exercise, and stress management. Tune in to gain valuable, actionable advice on enhancing your health and longevity from a cellular perspective.
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Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of the Daria el podcast. This episode is going to be life changing. Now, the only way it's going to be life changing if you sit and listen until the very end, as this is going to be a very in depth conversation that will affect not just your health and well-being but the way you look at your body and the way you look at your lifestyle and the way you look at medicine today. So today's guest, dr Nicola Conlon. She's a molecular biologist specializing in the study of cellular aging. So she has a very unique background since, after a career in drug development, she went into the private sector and founded her own company called Nuchito Laboratories to deliver disruptive innovation in the field of aging and rejuvenation, as well as health span. So a little bit to her education. She received her PhD in physiology and molecular biology from Newcastle University, which is home of one of the largest institutions in aging research in the world and certainly the largest in Europe, and so I'm really excited to pick her brain on.
Speaker 1:What is it that we can practically do today like literally starting after listening to this podcast practically adopt to improve our health, and not just as far as longevity, meaning living longer and we're going to talk about those definition but also living healthier, which is, I think, more interesting, at least for me personally. So, nicola, welcome to my podcast and before we, you know, dive into the science Now. You left a very lucrative job in drug development and decided to take on the risk of becoming an entrepreneur and create your own supplement company, like. Can you please explain to us, because this is such a huge shift? There must have been something compelling that you have experienced during your career and education that made you do that. Could you kind of walk us through that moment where you made that decision and how did it come about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question because when I made that decision, a lot of people around me said you're crazy. Like what are you doing? You've got this amazing job that you've studied so hard to get working in drug development. You know you're leading projects designing drugs that are going to help people, but actually I'd become quite disillusioned with the world of drug development. Well, for two main reasons. The first was that it just takes so long for any scientific breakthrough to actually get translated and go all the way through to the clinic. We've got this huge translational gap.
Speaker 2:You know different people say different numbers, but you're looking at around 15 years from things being first discovered in a scientific, academic laboratory and then actually going all the way through all the development, the trials and getting it to a person that can actually benefit from it. So for me that's just crazy. That's some of the things I was working on. We're never going to help anyone anytime soon. And secondly, the other thing I noticed was that a lot of molecules that worked really well when we were testing them in our experiments were not drug molecules. They were molecules that were natural molecules, things that were found in foods and nutrients and, you know, things that were already regulated as dietary supplements. And in some cases they were outperforming some of the molecules that we were going to invest hundreds of millions in. But companies aren't interested in them if they can't patent them because they're not drugs or they're not, you know, chemical molecules that people don't already own or know about.
Speaker 2:So you know, I was looking at this situation where I was like hang on a minute. We are got all of these molecules that actually work well in fixing what we want to fix in the body and addressing the problems we want to address, but we're putting them in the bin and we're not doing anything about them, even though we already know they're well tolerated, they're safe, and just because of commercial reasons, which I understand, but we're not going to pursue them. But ethically, this is wrong. You know, we should be doing something with this. So that's what. That was the moment that made me sort of decide hang on, why don't I start a company that does all of the same research, development, testing that a drugs company does? But rather than look at the drugs, let's look at the things that we can get into consumer products and get to market quickly, so we can actually get this science to people in the meantime.
Speaker 1:So, from a business standpoint, it is like this podcast is also somewhat about business and entrepreneurship, even though today's topic is mainly going to focus around health and wellness. But what was the compelling moment? What was the moment where you decided to let go a lucrative job, a well-paying job? Because there's a lot of people that currently work at their job and there are some ethical battles going around based on what they experience and what they see. But because they get paid, well, they just kind of close an eye on it and just go with it and kind of shrug their shoulders and say, oh well, there's nothing I can do about it. I'm just working here and as long as I'm getting paid and putting bread on the table and can feed my family, I don't want to have anything to do with it.
Speaker 1:I don't want to stir up any controversy, but for you to make this shift I know you told us you saw that the naturally occurring molecules in nature and our body are much more effective in treating or, more so, preventing issues. But what was that compelling moment for you? Was there any specific incidents where you said you know what this is? It I'm out?
Speaker 2:I think, a mixture of things. I think. Firstly, you know, some people do just go to work for the money and that is all that matters for me. You know, I've never really known what I wanted to do. I always followed a career path of something that I was interested in, and that's how I was led down the scientific route. I was fascinated by the body. I've always wanted to do something that, you know, was purpose driven, and, you know, it's not about just putting the food on the table, it's about we're trying to make things better in the world. And so I think part of it was, you know, just a deep rooted ethical principle within me.
Speaker 2:And secondly, experience, in that I had saw my grandparents suffer terribly when it came to aging, and now I was looking at things in the lab that actually could have helped them. And aging is something that affects everyone. You know it's something it's not some diseases only affect specific people, but aging is something that can really really significantly limit a lot of people's lives and potential. And for me it was simply a case of I don't want to end up like that. I don't want my parents to end up like that. I'm sure many, many other people who have elderly relatives do not, you know, wish there was an alternative, and here we are looking at alternatives that are going to go in the bin. So let's do something with them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it doesn't look like aging has even started in your case. So I'm kind of I was kind of curious to see what was for you, the compelling moment, because usually we have to associate significant pain and suffering with our current situation to kind of change or someone near and close to us to like, in your case, your parents to see that we don't want to see them suffer, and then, if we see we can do something about it, we then do that. Now for the listeners, in case you're listening and thinking this, all of this is kind of like fluff talk. It's just well-being and I want to frame it properly because it's very important. It's something that personally, after 15 years of medical education and 15 years of practice, having grown up in a family of physicians my dad was an internal medicine physician, my brother is an ophthalmologist so all my life, since I was born, I was in touch with the medical field and so I had this almost blind trust to the practice of medicine, and when someone came to me, even started the discussion with an alternative type of medicine which involved not medication or a specific diagnosis, I literally rolled up my eyes and walked the other way and I just thought they're crazy and we often, you know that's the tribalism in us and I just didn't even listen to them until I started aging myself and until I saw my father becoming old and his diagnosis is still unclear, but I really think he has some sort of dementia or Alzheimer's. He has lots of long term and short term memory, mostly short term memory, and so I look back at his lifestyle. Of course you know he grew up in 50s and 60s where everybody was smoking. I remember I used to go to his office and there was in his consultation room. There was literally an ashtray and he was smoking while he was talking to his patients about health and uh, but that was you know. For those of you listening and you're too young probably to even um, remember that you might have seen it in an old movie from the 60s um, even athletes were smoking and so, uh, you look at that, how far we've come, which is pretty significant.
Speaker 1:But when I started turning mid-40s I'm 51 now and when I started in my late 40s, these little aches and pains started coming up that I never had for absolutely no reason. I would wake up in the morning and I would get out of bed and I was like why is my knee hurting? I didn't do anything yesterday. I would play tennis, and then my shoulder was hurting and then I had a labrum tear. And it's not like I played in Wimbledon, I just played on the court outside for an hour with a friend and so everything was starting to hurt. I felt bloated, I just felt tired. Around 10, 11am I just felt tired. I felt I need some sugar to get me going, and then dad helped me for an hour and then afternoon I was even exhausted. I couldn't wait to go home and it was this vicious cycle and I thought maybe I'm getting old. Maybe that's what people say when they say you're getting old.
Speaker 1:And so I went for my annual physical. I love my primary care doctor, she's amazing. But she pretty much said Yep, your, your blood tests are all good and you don't need to come here. Just come back when you're 50 for your colonoscopy, and that's it. And I walked out of our office thinking like, but I'm feeling like you know, I'm not feeling myself, I'm tired. And she's like, yeah, maybe you know. Just, you know, just get some rest, maybe you're working too hard. So I thought, well, she is true, she's right, I'm working a lot. So maybe that's it, maybe I should get more sleep and all of that stuff. But it's kind of the stuff that we accept when we get. We kind of accept the aging aspect because we're told by our doctors that it's that's how it is Right.
Speaker 1:So until my shoulder pain didn't improve and, um, I was at a casual dinner with friends and there was this orthopedic surgeon his name is Matt and I just ran by him. I said, look, I hate when people and parties or dinners they come and ask me medical question and I hate to ask you. I don't want to bother you, but man, my right shoulder is just for two years, it's just not getting better. I just can't do. I can't play tennis anymore, I can't do the activities and my, my knee is like bothering me. I had an MRI and it just shows chondromalacia, which is just a fancy medical term for aging cartilage. So I literally thought I had a meniscus tear, but none of that. I said, what can I do? And so he introduced me to which we're going to talk about in detail, to NAD and NMN, which are some supplements that we're going to really delve deep into in this conversation. So if you really want to know about it. Please stay tuned until the end of this podcast.
Speaker 1:So I blindly, because I was so desperate, I said where can I get it? And right then and there at the dinner table, I went online and I bought myself NMN powder. And then, when I went home, I started doing research. I wanted to know what's the science? Is it just some BS? And that's what got me on this path and that's what got me into the science and that's where I had literally my awakening, my awakening. And so a couple of interesting facts for the audience, before I hit you with a million questions, nicola.
Speaker 1:I just want the audience to know that, if we look at the past hundred years, we've come a long way when it comes to lifespan and healthspan, but something changed about 30 years ago, 40 years ago, where we haven't really progressed much. As a matter of fact, in most Western countries, and specifically I can speak for the US, not only the health span has declined, meaning the rate of chronic disease has increased, not decreased. With all the modern medicine, we have the rate of chronic disease, and we're talking about diabetes, heart disease, neurologic disorders, alzheimer's and even psychological neurologic disorders in children, like attention deficit disorder, a lot of neurological disorders, all these chronic diseases have actually increased in the past 30 years. Disorders, all these chronic diseases have actually increased in the past 30 years. So and the lifespan, interestingly in the United States, has regressed by about, I think, 1.6 or 1.8 years in the past 20 years. And so that to me was shocking to look into because no one talks about it. I was in awe of our modern medicine. I was always raving, even to my patients I said we're lucky to live in this time and age where we have all this modern medicine. But little I knew is really to treat chronic disease, is just waiting for disease to happen instead of preventing it.
Speaker 1:So some facts are about 93% of Americans today live in metabolic dysfunction. I'm pretty sure it's very similar in the UK. You know it's most developed countries. They're kind of similar. But I think Europeans are healthier just because you don't have the amount of this ultra processed foods that we have, just because they're banned in Europe. So ultra processed food in the US I don't know if you knew Nicola make up to 70% of our calories here in the United States. I mean by ultra processed I mean just to definition of processed versus ultra processed. For example, yogurt is processed right, which doesn't mean it's bad. So processed food is. Almost everything we eat is processed. Milk is processed, but then ultra-processed is if you mix it with sugars, with maybe some colors, and that's what I mean by ultra-processed.
Speaker 1:Our sleeping hours have decreased by two hours in the past 100 years, so we're sleeping less. That's a biggie, and two hours of sleep is really significant. We're going to get to that. And we are outdoors about 7% of our time in a 24-hour period. Only 7% of a 24-hour period we spend outdoors.
Speaker 1:And the other thing is also, we live in a thermal neutral environment, which means our temperatures is fully controlled by air conditioning to like 70, 72 degrees, whatever that is, and we don't have the adversity of hot and cold anymore. And we've become more sedentary, meaning the average person does not get in 5,000 steps. So those are the facts, and they are certainly correlated to the fact that our health span is decreasing and our lifespan is decreasing. And then you look at the blue zones in the world, where the number of centurions is 80%, and then you look at their lifestyles. They don't have any of these problems. Now for the audience. Nicole, I want you to explain the meaning of longevity. Also, how do you differentiate lifespan with healthspan, and what should we rather focus on, and why?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question and you know, when I first got into the world of longevity, shall we say, this was 10 years ago now, and back then, you know, not many people lay people, shall we say were talking about this. If I had a conversation with the average person about what I did and spoke about longevity, their immediate response would have been, oh, like, this is a load of rubbish. Like, why would we want to live longer? You know, why would we want to be in a care home longer? Their immediate thought was that longevity is all about just living longer.
Speaker 1:Meaning suffering for a longer time.
Speaker 2:Exactly Suffering. You know, unfortunately, we do have this problem where our lifespan is way longer than our health span. So lifespan, simply the number of years you will live according to your birth certificate, you know, your health span is actually the proportion of that lifespan that you actually live in good health, and that is the bit that longevity science is really focused on improving. It's about how do we live these long lifespans that we now have, thanks to modern medicine and sanitation and all those other great things that no one would ever argue were a bad idea live the majority of it in good health. Because at the moment, we really have this gap and you know, I think, for for a woman, for example, in the uk, their lifespan on average is 83 years. Their health span, on the other end, is only 64 years. So that is a huge proportion. That that's 19 years.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Where we're expected to be in poor health at current rate.
Speaker 1:It's almost like you can't wait to die. Once you have chronic disease, you just hope you die a least painful death.
Speaker 2:So a lot of people will say, well, oh, you know, I'm happy to live my life. As soon as I get ill, shoot me, kind of thing.
Speaker 2:You know, that's really common, something awful that people say they're like I don't want to end up like my parents, like, if I get like that, do not let me live. That is the reality of it. That is what a lot of people will say. So the moment that you start talking about potentially doing something with longevity, people always assume that it's all about just making us live for more years, but don't start to consider this idea of being in better health.
Speaker 2:And the main reason for that is that for a long, long time, everyone, including scientists, have believed that aging was an inevitable process, that it was something that was programmed into us, that once it started, you literally couldn't stop it. So if you ask people about aging and what it is, they will just say it's this natural thing, it's a fact of life. Um, you know, there's nothing you can do about it, and that is the best way that people can rationalize and sort of comprehend something quite awful that is actually. You know, they just say it's just a fact of life because it's not nice. You know? No, there's no secret that a lot of the aging process is not nice.
Speaker 1:Well, how do you explain it then? Because there are people that say well, if it was true, how come my doctor doesn't talk to me about this? Can you? Can you explain that argument Like why?
Speaker 2:The whole issue. There is the translational gap between what is happening at a scientific level and what we are proving as scientists, versus how long it actually then takes to get that through into the clinic, and I think that is the main issue here. So, for example, when I first got into this, this field, 10 years ago, even for me as a scientist, I was like wow, this is incredible, like how, how have I not heard about this? And this science is new. You know, this is not something that has been around that long, for a long time.
Speaker 2:It was even argued within the field of longevity whether it was even possible to slow the aging process.
Speaker 2:But now the research coming through and all of the science really does prove that aging is a modifiable process.
Speaker 2:It is not a one way street, and I guess one of the main pieces of evidence that really demonstrated that aging was reversible was when scientists really started to look at something called our biological age.
Speaker 2:So our chronological age is just the number of years that we've been around on the planet. Our biological age, on the other hand, is the age at which we are on the inside at a cellular level, and it's now found that you can measure this. So scientists have worked out multiple different ways to measure this biological age, and the really interesting thing was that when they worked out how to measure this, quite often many people's biological age on the inside did not match their chronological age. So, for example, you said you were 50. You may measure your biological age and it could be more like age 40 or, on the bad side, it could be like age 60, and for scientists that was really exciting because it proved two really important things. The first thing it it proved was that aging is not fixed, because for a long time it had been argued that it was this fixed program thing that you could not do anything about.
Speaker 2:But if that was the case, then your chronological age should always match your biological age and everyone should age at the same rate internally. But they don't. And that shows us that there's things that are going on inside of our bodies, specifically in our cells, that are either speeding up the aging process or slowing it down. And if there's something that is speeding it up or slowing it down, it means, first of all, it's not fixed and, second of all, there are things going on in our cells that we can possibly target to manipulate that aging process. The second thing it proved was that you could actually measure aging, because, again, another huge area of controversy for people is well, you're telling me that you're going to slow aging, but how on earth do we measure this? Like you can't do a clinical trial where you know it's like science fiction, yeah.
Speaker 2:You wait and see how long it takes for people to die or something. It's like how do you measure it? But again, this was a way to measure it and since these sort of tests have become available and this type of science has been deciphered, it's meant that there have been huge advancements in the aging field, because we are now looking at what is happening in the cells to drive aging and also we have ways to measure to see if interventions are actually working.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's fascinating. When I first heard about it, just like you, it sounded to me like science fiction, because all my life I was told completely arbitrary comments like 90% of what happens to you is based on your DNA and 10% is just based on the environment. And you just accept these things because if someone that you respect says that, you take it as a fact and you don't question it. And in reality it's probably the other way around. To dogs, to horses and now human trials going on where we actually have proven not only we can slow down the biologic aging, we can actually reverse it and better even, we can cure chronic disease and even, for example, blindness in mice. So when you hear this stuff, you can't help but to get curious and to question what traditional medicine has been postulating for decades. And I think we live in a time where the internet and social media has made the science so accessible to the layman. And there's all these companies, direct-to-consumer lab testing and biomarker analysis where anybody can take the health in their own hands. You don't just have to and I'm not saying not to trust your primary care doctor, but if I break an arm or I come up with an illness, I'm going to go to my doctor, but when I'm healthy my doctor is not going to do anything about it. But I don't want to get ill, I don't want to get sick, I don't want to have chronic disease, and the beauty about today's world is we can take it in our own hands.
Speaker 1:The problem, though, for most is there's so much information out there that people get confused there, that people get confused. So that's the number one uh hurdle or point of friction in people taking um initiative. The other one is people are scared to know what's wrong with them. I have this conversations with my patients, and especially with the ones that haven't seen a doctor in years. I mean, I'm talking about a 50 or 60 year old that hasn't gone to the doctor in 10 years and when I just simply ask why they're like, well, I'm not sick, I only go to the doctor where I'm sick.
Speaker 1:So there, and then when I ask a little bit more questions, I find out that they're actually scared to know if there's anything wrong with them and they just don't want to know and almost like turn a blind eye, and and they just don't want to know, and that's, I think, why people are more hesitant in pursuing or or taking control of their own health, um, until there is something bad that happens either to them or a loved one. That's when they get really scared and feel, okay, I have to do something. And um, so I don't know what, um, what, uh, your experience has been with trying to get through um clinicians? Uh, I don't know if you can maybe share some experiences you had in conversing with some doctors that completely, like, not made fun of your science but actually refused even to look into it. Have you ever experienced anything like that?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, like a lot and there's. You know, there's been a lot of times in the past where I have to say that a lot of medical doctors would outright dismiss anything that I spoke about. You know you could kind of see them going. Oh yeah, you know, that's really interesting. Lovely to meet you.
Speaker 1:But why do you think? Why do you?
Speaker 2:think that. I think it is because this is such a radically different way of thinking about aging and, again, we have always been led to believe that aging was nothing you could do anything about really, and therefore you just had to deal with the consequences as they came up one by one, and this is flipping everything that we've ever been taught, whether as a medical professional or just the average person that's going to visit their doctor. This is flipping it all upside down on its head. So the real change in the way of thinking is this idea that you know, first of all, we call it healthcare, but really it's not healthcare, it's sick care.
Speaker 1:Sick care.
Speaker 2:You know, you just hit the nail on the head before before. We only go to the doctor when we're sick, and actually the body is extremely good at masking a lot of illness and failures before they start to appear on the outside as symptoms, and that means that usually by the time we're at the doctor, it's something that is quite hard to fix and there's already quite a lot of damage done in the body that probably could have been preventable. The other thing is that when you think of aging and, oh, I guess, when you think of diseases, the most common diseases and illnesses that people are going to the doctors for the majority of them are age related. So our health care spend over age 50 just goes through the roof. That you know. And then the last few years of a person's life is when the biggest spend for healthcare happens. It's all age-related. If you look at the major diseases, you know the heart disease, cardiovascular disease, cancer, cognitive decline, dementia, all of those things. Cognitive decline, dementia, all of those things the biggest risk factor above everything else is your age. That doesn't matter for diet, smoking, anything like that. Age is your biggest risk factor for the onset of the major diseases cardiovascular cancer, dementia, your risk of all of those goes up exponentially with age.
Speaker 2:So a big shift in thinking within the longevity space and with the scientists in this field was hang on a minute. At the minute what we do is we look at all of these diseases individually, we research them all as separate institutes, separate scientists have separate conferences, separate ways to deal with them, separate departments and hospitals. Yet the biggest risk factor for all of these things is actually our age. So if you turn this around a bit, why don't you say, well, is actually age the root cause of all of these different diseases? And actually all of these different diseases are symptoms of aging. And therefore, if they're all symptoms of aging, well, isn't aging actually the disease? And why don't we target the root cause and target aging? Because if we can do something, even a little something, about the aging process, then it would have an impact on all of these different age-related diseases in one go.
Speaker 2:And for a long time that was thought of as pretty radical, you know, really really crazy. But now all of the evidence coming out shows, in fact, if you can slow the rate of cellular aging, you can actually reduce the risk of many different things that are leading to these age-related diseases and therefore ultimately improve health span across the board. So rather than just say, for example, eliminating cancer. So if you think of all the money that goes into cancer research, even if cancer never existed anymore and we cured it, everyone would still get dementia, everyone's still going to get heart disease, cardiovascular disease and all the other age-related problems. So this is a completely different way of thinking about it.
Speaker 2:And now you know, when I had this conversation with people maybe it's like you know, five, six years ago people were like, okay, it makes sense, but still weren't convinced. But now the data, the evidence, the discussion, the conversation around it has become so great it can't be ignored anymore. And in fact last it's probably last month I went to a conference and this was in the UK and the UK is very different to the US. I'd say the actually, despite what you may think, has a lot more preventative healthcare than the UK because we have the NHS and everyone just relies on that. I went to a conference and it was full of GPs, general practitioners, all saying do you know what? We are ready to listen to this. Something has to be done. It is not sustainable the way we're going.
Speaker 2:And now actually we are going to start looking more at preventative care, and you know they were going off their own backs to this conference to say I am sick of not being able to offer this type of thing to my patients. The science is really credible. It's really strong. How do I just learn it myself so I can start incorporating it into my consultations?
Speaker 1:Amazing. So it's very refreshing to hear that, because I, as a anti-aging doctor and surgeon who mainly performs cosmetic and rejuvenative surgery and procedures, I feel ethically almost obligated, which I have actually changed the course of my practice. I feel ethically obligated to have these conversations with my patients where I think this is a primary care job, and here I am talking to my patients about it, and the reason why I feel that we in the aesthetic industry are so well positioned is patients that come to us. They care about their appearance, they care about their well-being and they care, therefore, about their health and they're ready to make lifestyle changes and they're not happy with the status quo and they want to go through a transformation. They want to obtain their self-esteem and self-confidence back. They want to be more active and I see it on my patients. Once they do a transformation let's say, I do a facelift on a patient and literally they look 15 years younger it motivates them to also change their lifestyle, to go out more, to make more connections with other human beings, to be more active to change their diet beings, to be more active to change their diet, and now I have made it part of my practice and consultation to educate them about everything that I'm learning still every day.
Speaker 1:But whatever new thing that I'm learning in the longevity and anti-aging science I share with my patients, and the excitement, the relief that I see in my patients is so overwhelming. It motivates me even to go further, because it's almost like they're thirsty for this information, they're longing for it and they don't know where to get information. They feel overwhelmed. Trying to do their own research, they get bombarded with all this information. They don't know how to interpret it because they don't have the scientific knowledge and background, and it's very hard to digest this type of information as a layman.
Speaker 1:I mean because you really need to understand the hallmarks of cellular aging to be able to wrap your head around the fact that, look, we actually can reverse our biologic age, you can become younger, and that is not science fiction. And so I want you to walk us through several key hallmarks of cellular aging and as they relate to what we perceive clinically and how it makes us feel and look clinically. And I know you've published an article in the PRS a couple of years ago as it relates to skin and anti-aging, which is a great article, and I wish I had read it then and not later. But again, my awareness wasn't into this field at that time, which shame on me. But I want you to walk us through some of the hallmarks of cellular aging. I know we're going to get a little bit nerdier here, but also maybe explain it in a way that someone with just a basic high school science can understand and wrap their head around it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the hallmarks of aging has been one of the I guess one of the key changes in the field.
Speaker 2:That has shown us what is actually causing aging at the cellular level, and I think, for the average person, one of the real mindset shifts that needs to happen is that, traditionally, when we think about anything to do with aging, we always think about how we look.
Speaker 2:We always think about the appearance, the visible signs and symptoms of aging, maybe how we're feeling, but what we actually need to understand is, despite the way we feel or the way that we look due to aging, actually everything that is causing the aging process is happening deep within our bodies, at the cellular level. That is where it is all happening, and this means that, whilst we've really focused on treating aging at the surface level, actually, if we really want to have a major impact, we need to now start thinking about treating aging from the inside, at the cellular level. And this is where the hallmarks of aging comes in, because these are 12 things that scientists have discovered seem to go wrong in our cells and drive the aging process. So these particular hallmarks. As they get worse, aging gets worse, and if you make the hallmarks better, aging slows down and even reverses. So there are 12 different things and you're right we can't go into all of them because that would be totally geeking out for hours.
Speaker 1:That would be another podcast. Maybe we would do like a geeky podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, maybe, but let's just think about you know, just think about use skin for an example. So how do these things that we see on the outside with age relate to what's happening?
Speaker 2:on the inside. So one of the most common hallmarks of aging is DNA damage. So we know in our cells they all have DNA and the DNA is the blueprint for the cell to teach it to do everything that it needs to do. It's its instruction guide and constantly we're getting damaged. So this could be from our diet, from pollution in the case of skin, from UV, from the sun. It's constantly damaging this DNA and when we're young, our cells are very good at repairing this DNA damage. In fact, we get around 10,000 pieces of DNA damage in every cell every day and our bodies just deal with it and repair it. We have this army.
Speaker 1:This is from the day we're born.
Speaker 2:by the way, you know, this is crazy, this is not.
Speaker 1:This is not for old, senile people that get DNA damage. This is from the day we're born. Our DNA gets hammered.
Speaker 2:Hammered constantly and we have an army of literally an army of DNA repair enzymes that is going around looking for damage. As soon as it spots some damage, it's repaired before we even know that it's an issue, and when we're younger we're very good at doing this. It just happens. But as we're older, this DNA repair seems to get turned down, and this is one of the hallmarks of aging the fact that our cells can't repair this DNA anymore. And when it comes to skin, a real classic sign of a lack of DNA repair is hyperpigmentation and the brown spots that we get on our skin as we get older. Because there's a certain type of cell in our skin called our melanocytes, and they are the skin cells that produce the melanin which gives our pigment in our skin, and when they get too much DNA damage, they suddenly have this reaction and start overproducing the pigment, and that's why we get this classic sign of pigmentation. So that is probably one of the most famous hallmarks.
Speaker 2:The second one that I'll probably would be a good idea to discuss is something called senescence. Would be a good idea to discuss is something called senescence. Now, this is actually linked to the first hallmark, so senescence is when a cell gets so much damage that the cell goes. Oh my goodness, there's too much to repair. Even our army of repair proteins is overwhelmed. We need to just shut this down before this cell becomes dangerous. It may become cancerous, it may go rogue, because this DNA instruction manual is not working anymore. So we just need to shut the cell down and rather than get rid of the cell, this dangerous rogue cell, out of the body, it's much quicker and easier for the body just to tell it to go to sleep. So effectively, the cell becomes what we know as senescent it's a sleeping cell.
Speaker 1:Now that has a negative effect on our body. Can you kind of tell us what happens, what those senescent cells actually do in our body?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So for a long time it was thought that these cells just stay asleep and don't do anything and they're harmless. But we now know that they actually secrete a lot of inflammation and they're often referred to as zombie cells, because they're like these sleeping cells that are actually giving off all of this toxic waste, and this inflammation is actually another hallmark of aging. So chronic low-grade inflammation in our bodies is a key driver of the aging process. So when you look at these senescent cells in skin, not only are they giving off inflammation, which is actually degrading our collagen and elastin, which leads to, you know, lines, wrinkles, loss of elasticity, but also they're sitting there taking up space and they're not making our own natural collagen like they should be, which is why our collagen production goes down. We also know that this inflammation is causing things like redness and rosacea. So very quickly you can see that you know for our skin. A long time we've just said, oh, you know, wrinkles, lack of collagen, but it's like, yeah, but why is there a lack of collagen? You know why is?
Speaker 1:it suddenly gone and, and it's funny, people are so obsessed with, uh, taking collagen and they're just everybody's so focused on ingesting raw material instead of tackling the root cause and letting your body take care of business. And it's? It's fascinating fascinating at cellular level what our body is capable of doing if we know how to let it do what it can do, instead of throwing more raw material at it in a cellular functional capacity that it can't really work. It's almost like you have a factory, you don't have enough factory workers and you keep bringing raw material with trucks to the factory and hoping you can increase your production, and yet you know your factory workers are striking or are quitting and you don't have anybody that can actually run the factory. And that's what's happening as we age, you know.
Speaker 1:And the cellular inflammation that's what's happening as we age, uh, you know, and the cellular inflammation that that you uh discuss, that affects our skin, is what affected me, my muscles, my tendons, um, um, my brain, you know talking about brain fog, even vision. It affects every cell in your body and, um, you know, within the context of this podcast, of course, um, you know, your skin is the most important part, but really, um, your brain, your eyes and your skeletal, skeletal muscle function is really what disables you to then get into that vicious cycle of becoming less and less active and then accelerating all these hallmarks of aging, and I think we can disrupt it now, and we're going to talk about how we can disrupt that pattern. So that's one thing, and so what's another hallmark?
Speaker 2:So another one that is probably quite a famous one is mitochondrial dysfunction, which sounds really complicated but it's not. It's basically in our cells we have these energy powerhouses that literally take our food and convert it into the energy that our whole body needs to function. And these powerhouses are called our mitochondria, and as we get older they start to dysfunction. So they're kind of like a power plant that has become old and it's not as efficient anymore. It's leaking toxic waste and really it should be getting decommissioned and closed down, but it's not. It's still running, trying to churn out energy and it's doing it in a very wasteful manner. And that's exactly mitochondrial dysfunction.
Speaker 2:Our panic power plants in our cells just don't function like like they used to. They're not producing as much energy. So we start to experience things on the outside like tiredness, fatigue. In terms of the skin, you see reduced, reduced skin cell turnover, because the cells literally don't have the energy to do it. You also see, and again, an increase in inflammation, because these toxic power plants are giving off free radicals and other damaging things that are then causing problems in the cell and damaging components and giving off inflammation that then goes on to affect the rest of the body. So that is another really key hallmark of aging and I think, looking at the hallmarks, there's 12, but I'd say DNA damage, senescence, mitochondrial dysfunction and inflammation are probably the ones that are most well-studied and are probably the things that are to studied and are probably the things that are today, the things that we can probably do something about in terms of trying to promote our health span in everyday life, shall we say.
Speaker 1:And this is very interesting. I hope you've been really listening carefully to these three main hallmarks because, remember, in the beginning I told you I felt I started feeling tired every day. I had all these aches. I felt, like you know, obviously my skin was aging, but I've been really diligent. I have my own skincare line and product I've been using religiously for 10 years, so luckily, my skin hasn't been aging too bad.
Speaker 1:But that's an external thing. That can be even augmented internally, which is probably more effective, and I've proven it to myself over the past year by just changing my lifestyle, taking certain supplementations that we'll come to and talk about, that are significantly, like exponentially improved. Not just my skin, my hair, like, my nails grow faster, they're not brittle anymore. All my aches, the entire inflammation in my body is gone. And I've measured, I'm measuring it with biomarkers. I use uh inside tracker and every three to four months I get, uh, my biomarkers measured.
Speaker 1:And we're going to talk about some of the biomarkers that are essential to measure, because I think unless you measure an outcome and a change, you really won't know what you're doing. You will be doing things randomly, and I think that's another strategy that has to be implemented and there's so many direct-to-consumer apps and sites that you don't even need your doctor. You just go to a lab, they send your biomarkers to that company and they analyze it for you and you can keep track and you see how you've improved based on your lifestyle modifications and the supplementation and your diet, and so that's something that I've been doing actively in the past year and significantly reduced my biologic age. And so talk to me about you know there's so many measures that we can use to measure our biologic age that gets confusing. You know there's so many different metrics. What is like the most common and most reliable metric where we can really measure our biologic age?
Speaker 1:So for someone that wants to know, hey, am I doing well? So I listened to Dr Conlon and Dr Hamra. I'm all in Starting tomorrow I'm going to turn back my biologic age. Is there anything that they can measure it? Is there any marker, biologic marker that they can measure how well they're doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there are two main ways that you can measure your biological age. Well, there are three really. So the first one is something called measuring the length of your telomeres. Now, this is not one that I'd recommend, but I'm going to mention it because if you start Googling it it's probably going to come up and you're basically telomere shortening is another hallmark of aging. So in your cells you have your DNA and when you look at you know a Google image of DNA, you will see these little chromosomes that look like little squiggly things, and on the ends of these chromosomes they have basically your telomeres. Now, telomeres, you can describe them as being like the plastic bits on the end of your shoelace to stop your shoelace from unwinding. Well, a telomere is kind of like the same thing for your DNA. It's on the end of your DNA to stop the DNA from fraying or unwinding, because you do not want that to happen. Now, as you get older, it seems that the length of these telomeres decreases. So there are some companies that will offer telomere measurements and they will look at the length of your telomeres and use that to predict how old your cells are, and that's probably like biological age measuring, sort of generation one, um, where it was the best that we used to have, but now there are way more superior measurements. The issue with this type of measurement is that it's usually very specific to the cell type. So if you're measuring telomere length in your blood, then it's only kind of telling you the age of the blood and not the rest of the tissues. So this is when the next sort of generation of biological age testing came out, and this is something called epigenetic testing.
Speaker 2:So again, if you think of your DNA in your cells, every single cell has the same set of DNA. Yeah, cells are very different. You could have a skin cell, or you could have a liver cell or a hair cell, even though each of these cells is genetically identical. Okay, so the way that a liver cell becomes a liver cell and a skin cell becomes a skin cell is via a process called epigenetics, and this basically means that our cells turn on different patterns of genes to become different things. So the same thing happens as we get older. So if we were to take a sample of cells from a young person, what you would see is that their cells generally have a very different pattern of genes switched on to a sample of cells out of an older person, they will have a much more older pattern of cells switched on. So sorry, pattern of genes switched on, and this is what we call epigenetic drift. So our cells seem to drift from having a very specific set of genes switched on when we're young that are associated with things like low inflammation and lots of repair and less damage. It's drifting all the way through to having all those beneficial genes sort of switched off and actually bad genes switched on, things that are driving inflammation and turning down repair.
Speaker 2:And if you measure this epigenetic pattern, you can predict the biological age of the person. So epigenetic age tests have become really common again. Like you mentioned, these are things that you can order online. You can do it as a finger prick blood test. The other one to measure is something called your glycan age and this works in a very similar way to epigenetics, apart from it's not measuring the patterns of genes, it's actually measuring patterns of sugar molecules on your immune cells and in a very similar way. When you're young you will have a very specific pattern which is anti-inflammatory essentially, and as you get older you seem to have a very different pattern that becomes way more anti-inflammatory essentially, and as you get older you seem to have a very different pattern that becomes way more pro-inflammatory. So again, this is another test kit that you can get and it measures biological age.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that glycan age is probably one of the most practical and relatively accurate ones that anybody can do starting tomorrow, and I'll put the link down below in the podcast for people if you're interested, because it's good to have a basis by which you can measure your improvement and then go from there. Now, are there any? Now we talked about all of these hallmarks of aging. So if someone is interesting to make a change today, are there any supplements that one can take? Is it as easy as taking a pill and then everything will be fine? Or what do you recommend people to do if they're really interested? What are the main key elements of their lifestyles that you recommend to change?
Speaker 2:And then also, as it relates to supplementation and dietary modification, yeah, so I think the first key thing to point out is that actually, lifestyle has a major role. So we touched on this earlier that many people think aging is down to your genetics, and this is a really common misconception that you know how well you will age is just based on the genes you inherited.
Speaker 1:You know people say oh, my mom's got great genes, you look so good, it must be your genes.
Speaker 2:It's absolutely not. Um, in fact there's. There's different percentages and different studies, but in in some studies it's been shown, you know, like huge population studies, it's actually been shown that actually 90 is your lifestyle and the other 10 is your lifestyle and the other 10% is your genes. Other studies estimate it's more like 70-30. But it's between. You know, 70% and 90% is actually lifestyle, so that's huge.
Speaker 1:It's exactly the opposite of what we were told for decades, which was, for me, a paradigm shift in the way I think about aging. And this is, for me, was probably the most life-changing and attitude-changing fact in all my medical career that I've ever encountered, because it's almost like someone telling me hey, the earth is not flat, it's round. And I actually see through a telescope. I'm like, oh my God, you're right, it's actually round. So for me, that's how it was.
Speaker 2:And the reason for this and the reason that we really now understand why our lifestyle can have such a big impact, is because of its link with epigenetics, which I just explained, is this idea that even though we've got our genetics, which is set, actually the genes that are switched on and off are not set. They're changing all of the time and actually it's our external environment that is influencing which genes are switched on or off and it's our lifestyle that is literally affecting our biology and how our genes are expressed. So that is why our lifestyle can have such a major impact, and you know, just to think about those things. So I have a supplement company, but I am the first person to say that supplements are not the first thing that you should be doing. You know there are so many other things that you should be doing first that can have such a major impact on your health and how well you will age.
Speaker 2:The first thing is your diet. So diet is so underestimated and diet influences our health, span, our longevity, in two ways. The first way it influences us is that, literally, food is medicine, and this is one thing that I say time and time again when people question why I left my job in drug development to start a supplement company. I always say to them your body has no idea what is a drug, what is a nutrient, what is a supplement? Actually, they all have a very powerful biological effect in the body. Your body isn't going oh, it's a drug, it's not a drug, so I'm not going to let it do anything right you know, actually our diet is full of compounds that are constantly influencing our biology.
Speaker 2:So if you are eating the ultra processed american diet that is beige and full of sugar and full of all sorts of unnatural things that are harmful, that is going to be actually aging you, it is going to be increasing inflammation in the body and also it's depriving you from a lot of the phytochemicals, the nutrients, the beneficial molecules that are actually in plants, and then all the fruits, the vegetables, the herbs, the spices. We know that if you can flip from the standard american diet to more of the mediterranean diet that is full of good fats rather than, you know, polysaturated fats, and actually also full of lots of different plant molecules, you are going to be getting nature's medicine cabinet All of those beneficial compounds that are actually switching on the good genes and the good pathways in your body.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think if I could pick one dietary, if I could give one dietary advice, if I could give one dietary advice or if I could blame one element in our diet that causes the most damage and significantly accelerates aging at cellular level. It's probably sugar.
Speaker 1:I was just going to say that I guess which one is good for me. I mean, I know, look, people are listening to us and we probably sound like a broken record, but it's almost like one of those things that's, you know how something is right in front of you. It's so close that you don't see it. I think that is. And because everybody talks about it, people are like, oh God, you know. And you have conversations like no, I don't eat any sugar.
Speaker 1:And then I realized people don't know what in our food consists of sugar. People don't know. They don't know that all these starches that we eat they're actually sugar. They're just sugar molecules that are attached to each other and so our body breaks it up to sugar and that attaches to all of our proteins and pretty much puts them out of commission, to the point that they can't do what they were designed to do and hence our biologic age increases. And so if you could cut one element out, is the sugar. And people don't want to sacrifice because that's where they get their dopamine. I mean you tell a drug addict not to get their fix, they're going to fight you. I mean that's why drug addicts go and steal or even kill people just to get to their drug because they're addicted to it, and sugar is probably the most addictive element in our diet today, and that's why it's so difficult for people to get rid of it. And that's probably the number one element that makes us sick and is the root cause of all chronic disease.
Speaker 2:Completely agree. It's so pro-inflammatory. It causes glycation in our body, which is where sugar becomes bound to proteins like collagen, elastinin, causing our arteries to stiffen our skin problems. My one piece of advice to anybody who, you know, doesn't believe that sugar is an issue or you know it doesn't really want to admit that maybe they're eating too much sugar is is wear a continuous glucose monitor. You know, you see the people with the little discs wear a continuous glucose monitor.
Speaker 2:You know, you see the people with the little discs. Wear a continuous glucose monitor for two weeks and you will entirely change your relationship with food. Because the problem is a lot of the eating that we do is mindless. You know, we're just constantly. Oh, you know, we see something and just go, oh, I'll just have a little snack. And we're told we have to eat every two hours and whatnot. Every time you put something in your mouth, your body has to go through this huge process of dealing with it and we don't see because the body just deals with it and gets on. But if you can actually see in real time when you put that biscuit or that cake or whatever in your mouth, thinking, oh, I'll just have it as a little snack with a coffee or whatever, and then all of a sudden you see in real time on a graph oh, it's going up, look at my sugar in my blood, it's going through the roof and then it's crashing. And then, oh, look, I feel hungry again. What a surprise.
Speaker 2:Um, I've had a blood sugar crash and you suddenly realize that the the effort that your body has to go to every time you're putting something in your mouth, and that makes you really reconsider. Maybe I'll not have the snack in between breakfast and lunch, Maybe I'll you know, wait till lunchtime, maybe I won't have that mega bowl of sugar cereal for breakfast.
Speaker 1:I think that brings me to the biggest anti-aging advice that I can give the audience is that, first of all, these sugar spikes, they cause our insulin to spike with it and you know, especially one of the hallmarks of aging is that we lose insulin sensitivity and that insulin sensitivity is another aspect that you know. That's why we get type 2 diabetes. And you know your doctors tell you well, you know, I guess you're 50 years old or 60 years old You're. You know it's just part of aging. You know, here, get some metformin, which metformin, by the way, is a great drug, is a great anti-aging drug. Some people just are taking it for anti-aging purposes, but it's purposes, but you shouldn't accept it.
Speaker 1:And I think one of the strategies that anyone can implement today to work towards anti-aging is avoid these snackings that you're talking about, nicole. I mean, I used to be a bigger snacker and it I I prided myself of being a snacker that I don't eat large meals, and now I basically have one, maybe two meals a day. You know I do time restricted, I follow a time restricted diet because you know that really gives my body a chance to clean up the mess. You know all these senescent cells. You know science has shown, as you know, you put a little adversity and stress into your cells, not stress as far as working harder or not sleeping, not that type of stress, but stress at the cellular level that adversity is shown that this actually has an anti-aging effect and increases a level of a certain molecule in our body that's called NAD, which is one of the products that your company actually not the NAD itself, but the boosting aspect of the NAD that your supplement is actually targeting, and so we're going to talk about.
Speaker 1:I want you to explain what your supplement does in that regard, but I also want the audience not to miss on this important piece of information that you can boost your NAD, which is in charge of the energy in your body which is actually produced in your mitochondria. You can increase that through exercise, diet and everything we just talked about sleep, stress reduction as far as mental stress, not as far as cellular stress, because cellular stress, again, is adversity for the cell. That is anti-aging, whether it is temperature changes, heat and cold. Everybody has heard of the cold plunges or saunas. That improves your health and it is an anti-aging strategy.
Speaker 1:But as far as cellular level, you can actually supplement, take a supplement or help boost the energy of your cell using supplementation that you can combine together with lifestyle changes to double down on it, which is what I'm doing today, and I've seen significant changes in my mental health, in my energy level, in the inflammation, in my sugar levels, and that caused me to be more active and instead of going to the gym once a week, I'm in a gym every day because I have the energy, I'm not tired around noon or afternoon and in the morning I'm as sharp as a tack and I can't wait to tackle the day. So tell me about NAD and tell me what the problem is as we age with that and what strategies your research has shown to be most effective in addressing that issue is something that people can literally start tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so NAD was one of the areas that I just got so excited about when really starting to look at all of the research in terms of how we could impact cellular aging. And basically, it's a natural molecule that's already found in every single cell in our body and it's really important for hundreds of different reactions. But the two things it's most important for are, firstly, energy production, so those mitochondrial power plants. Nad literally helps to take the food that we eat and do the energy conversion process to make our energy. And secondly, remember I said about all of those army of repair proteins that are going around fixing things in our cells continuously.
Speaker 2:Well, it seems also that NAD has a role of acting as a fuel to basically power a lot of those repair processes. And what's been found is that as we get older, nad seems to decline in our cells and that means, as NAD goes down, we have less energy production. So we start to experience the things like brain fog, tiredness, fatigue, lack of stamina, reduced skin cell turnover and also we have less repair going on because there's less NAD to fuel all these repair processes. So we start to see an accumulation of cellular damage and then this starts to cause all of these hallmarks and these problems that we were talking about earlier, and that decline is significant?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's really significant.
Speaker 2:So it's estimated that it halves every 20 years. And this is from birth. So even by the time you're 20, you've lost half your levels of NAD. So even by the time you're 20, you've lost half your levels of nad. Then, by the time you're 40, that amount is halved again. And it's no surprise that this is around the time when we really suddenly start to feel that we're not invincible anymore and actually we are starting to feel the signs and symptoms of aging.
Speaker 2:It's really heavily correlated with this decline in nad. So scientists said, right, well, we got this molecule, it's keeping all of these, you know, our energy production switch on, our repair up and when it goes down it causes all these problems. So what happens if we just don't let it decline? And basically, to cut a very long story short, there's hundreds, if not thousands, of scientific publications now that show that if you can keep NAD topped up or restore NAD levels, it has all round benefits, from not only the cellular level but all the way through to all round health span benefits. So when NAD is boosted in cells, we see an increase in all of the repair processes and energy production. We see an actual positive impact on all of the hallmarks of aging and so far it's one of the only things that has been found to have a positive impact on all of the hallmarks At a whole body level. You know we're seeing in animal studies and now even human studies. We're seeing improvements to things like cardiovascular function, reduction in inflammation and even reversal of biological age.
Speaker 1:And that's something that, what I alluded to, has really changed my life and just in a very short period of time, explain people what your research has shown that in only in what like 28 days, you've seen significant changes by people taking these NAD boosting supplements that you're discovered.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when we realized that NAD was so important, I started looking at how people were, you know, using this information and it became evident that there were some supplements out there that were designed to boost NAD levels. But this goes back to a comment that you made earlier. A lot of these supplements are actually what we know as precursors, things like NMN or NR. They're precursors to NAD. They're like the building blocks that our body uses to make NAD, and when I started looking into the reason why NAD was declining in our cells, I couldn't find any evidence that suggested that the reason NAD goes down is because our body doesn't have enough of these precursors, these building blocks. Actually, all of the evidence shows that NAD declines because the factory in our cells, literally that NAD declines because the factory in our cells, literally that takes the precursor and turns it into NAD. That is what declines with age.
Speaker 2:So for me it was kind of one of those moments where it was like, hang on a minute, these products don't make much scientific sense, so why don't we try to do this differently? You know, our body's very good at making NAD when it's young. It just seems to get turned down these pathways that are producing it, the enzyme that's producing it gets turned down. So let's design a supplement that has ingredients in it that actually switches back on your own natural nad production. So that is exactly what we designed our nad boosting product to do.
Speaker 2:And again, you know, because of my background as a scientist, I was very keen to prove that this is not snake oil and this does actually help people in reverse biological age. So we did a full double blind, placebo, controlled crossover study, which is like a gold standard in terms of clinical studies. Not many supplements have that type of study and we proved that not only does it boost nad levels, but also it works by actually switching back on your body's own natural nad production. So it fixes the root cause of the problem. We showed it reduces inflammation, it reduces glycation and also we use glycan age and measured biological age and demonstrated that it does indeed reverse the biological age of cells and this is in humans, not animals.
Speaker 1:I know and here's the beauty for decades we had animal studies where we had shown that in animals, but there's not many clinical trials or human studies, which are more, increasing more, and you're one of the big contributors today, and so I love that now we have a metric, now we have a really standardized way of testing it where we can actually prove it. Now I just took it before even I came across your study, because I was like I have nothing to lose, you know, as long as it doesn't harm, I'm just going to take it because I don't want to wait 10 years for research to prove something that we've proven is working in animals. As long as it doesn't hurt me, I'm taking it. So I'm not giving advice to people just taking random supplements. I'm just saying where my logic was. And when I saw this significant change in a very short, like within a month, nikolai, within a month alone I felt it like I felt when I read your study. I'm like I'm exactly like those people in your study, but of course, I optimize other stuff too.
Speaker 1:I I changed my lifestyle. I cut out all the sugars, other stuff too. I changed my lifestyle. I cut out all the sugars. I got more sleep. I exercise more. I eat much more health conscious. I do intermittent fasting. I also take a lot of foods that have all these polyphenols. They have the flavonoids and all these molecular substrates that basically improve the NAD synthesis pathway, which is one of the basis of your supplement. So can you talk about the two main ingredients of your supplement? That so for the layman.
Speaker 2:Ingredients of your supplement that so for if anyone looks on the back of the tub they'll say, oh, these are quite natural botanical type ingredients. How are these working? So we have two ingredients in there that are actually designed to switch back on the cells natural NAD production pathway. So it's a specific enzyme in this pathway that makes NAD and we use a specific ingredient called rutin. Now rutin contains an active molecule called quercetin and this can be found in certain foods such as apples, onions. They tend to have decent amounts of quercetin. It's hard to get the exact amount you would need to actually, you know, have the effect, but it can be used as an additive form. We also use parsley and a lot of people go why have you got parsley in there? That's a really unusual thing. So parsley actually has an active ingredient in it called apigenin, and apigenin is an inhibitor of something in our cells called cd38, which drives a lot of chronic low-grade inflammation that actually degrades a lot of rnad. Now you can eat parsley to get the apigenin.
Speaker 2:Um, but unfortunately you have to eat like a truckload of parsley yeah, a huge amount of parsley and nobody ever would want to eat that amount of parsley.
Speaker 2:But having said, that you know people say to us well, why, you know? Why do you not just use pure apigenin? Why are you still putting it in as the parsley? And again, I just go back to the fact that these molecules, although they may be isolated in labs and turned into pure molecules that are put in supplements, they never existed like that in nature, which means it's very hard for our body and our gut to absorb them in that format. If you take it in the whole food format or the extract format, you definitely get way more absorption. So my PhD was actually in bioavailability, which is why I'm so particular about what sort of ingredients go in?
Speaker 2:um, but yeah, another one green tea. Green tea has a very powerful active ingredient called egcg and this is a catechin and basically what this does is it inhibits some other methylation processes that degrade our nad as we get older. So again, just looking at all of these natural things that are already there and available, that we have put into a supplement in the right combination, the right amounts the right formulation that is then proven in a human clinical trial to reverse biological age just shows that we do not need drugs.
Speaker 2:You the things that we can be doing now that actually can have real significant impact on our cellular health.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and for anyone that is interested to try it out, I'll put a link down below. And it's definitely worth trying. And it's definitely worth trying. However, you should accompany this with the lifestyle changes that we discussed, or else you're just really not. I don't know if I don't know what your study has looked at. Did your study look at people in accordance with lifestyle changes, or did they maintain their lifestyle and then just take that?
Speaker 2:this was we had to get them to maintain lifestyle, make no changes.
Speaker 1:So just to see if it's a pearly the supplement.
Speaker 2:But you know, just to sort of quickly like whiz through the lifestyle things that I would say. Diet we've already discussed that that's extremely important. Exercise I mean you know it goes without saying exercise it's been shown in a study that those people who engaged in 12 and a half hours of activity, exercise activity a week, show a 42 reduction in all cause mortality like there is no drug on this earth that has such a beneficial effect. And you want to be looking at incorporating both high intensity interval training and that actually switches on energy stress pathways. So you were talking earlier about this idea of putting yourselves under a little bit of stress and this is a concept called hormesis and it's basically the fact that many of the beneficial pathways in our cells that kickstart repair only ever get switched on if we put our bodies under a little bit of stress. Otherwise they don't bother.
Speaker 2:And this goes back to evolution and the way that our biology is designed. It's not designed to be sitting all day at a computer, having three meals a day and five snacks. Is designed to be running around finding our food, going for periods without food and then suddenly the body has to go oh, no food. I need to kickstart repair. I need to be not be wasteful. Unfortunately, those things aren't getting switched on in our modern lifestyles, so things like high intensity interval training can really help to activate some of those pathways. Intermittent fasting, like you mentioned as well, also will activate similar pathways in the body. When it comes to exercise muscle, muscle mass decreases by three to eight percent per year after age 30. Muscle mass is massively linked to longevity. It's very important to maintain that.
Speaker 1:And then that's where most of our mitochondria reside yeah, exactly that and that's where energy factories are they are, and just in.
Speaker 2:They are first of all where the energy factories are better at removing sugar and things like that, for insulin resistance, but also just generally. We know that as muscle mass declines, people are more at risk of falls, and actually falls are one of the biggest killers of older people, because once somebody has fallen and broken a hip or whatever, then they cannot, you know, live. They can't all of the other things. The cognitive function goes down, they can't get out, they can't be doing any other exercise. Everything then starts to know.
Speaker 1:I think you touched on a very important topic, which is muscle mass, is one of the things that the primary care physician doesn't emphasize enough. You know, it's almost like we accept our physical decline. The problem is, as we get older, we lose muscle mass. Our body is less capable of creating new muscle mass for two reasons Our caloric intake that comes from protein mainly decreases, so people are not taking enough protein. And, secondary, you need to do some sort of resistance training to actively build muscle mass, to put the protein into muscle, or else the protein will just be turned into fat because you're just sitting around and you're sedentary, you're not active, and all of that is going to be turned into sugar and that's not going to be utilized by your body and in turn it's going to be stored around all your organs, your livers, kidney, heart, everywhere as fat storage, and that's what gives us chronic disease and illness. So I think, focusing for anyone that is above the age of 50 and is accepting their age as an excuse or using it as an excuse to be less active, you have to do the opposite, because unless you build up your muscle mass, you will not be able to store the glucose, because your muscle is, in general, the biggest storage unit for sugar Muscle is, in general, the biggest storage unit for sugar. And also you're decreasing the number of mitochondria that produces the NAD, which are your energy factories, produces the ATP, which is energy, what our body uses as energy.
Speaker 1:So the only way to come out of that vicious cycle again I sound like a broken record.
Speaker 1:The only way to come out of that vicious cycle again I sound like a broken record. You have to hit the gym and just doing a little bit cardio is not enough. You actually have, by strength training, I don't mean bodybuilding, I just mean maintaining your muscle mass, and that's something you significantly lose as you age and then, like you said, nicola, it contributes to falls. And then also, increasing your muscle mass actually increases your bone density, makes your tendons and ligaments thicker, gets rid of the inflammatory processes that happen in those parts of your body body and boosting it, together with NAD boosters and proper supplementation based on your particular body, which has related to your diet and lifestyle supplements, like you know, from your vitamin D, vitamin K, your magnesium, all the good stuff. That is beyond this podcast right now that you can find enough information online. I think it's the key is really in combining all those things, but I think our job here is to explain you the processes at a cellular level that contribute to improving your health span and with that, also your lifespan.
Speaker 2:Exactly that your health span and with that, also your lifespan. Exactly that it's. You know, it's just. I think a lot of people are sick of hearing the same things like oh, do this, do that with your diet, exercise, sleep.
Speaker 2:Everyone's so sick of it yeah, we've heard it all before, but I think now it's about looking at all of those things in a new light and, you know, understanding actually there is the significant impact they are having on our bodies, and then also being able to measure that these things are having an impact, being able to see that if you are changing your diet, it really is lowering your glycan age, it's lowering the inflammation, it's lowering biological age, and seeing that a lifestyle change can make such a massive impact. Um, you know, sleep again.
Speaker 1:That's another thing we haven't even touched upon yet it's so important Um sleep is just it's how many hours of sleep do you recommend uh to be, um recommend to be, to have shown like significantly to be anti aging? How many hours of sleep? I know there's different philosophies about sleep, but by sleep we also are talking about quality sleep. Which?
Speaker 2:is.
Speaker 1:REM sleep, Like if you're in bed for eight hours. You're not sleeping for eight hours, you're probably sleeping like maybe seven hours or seven and a half hours. So can you talk about about that? How many hours of sleep do you actually get?
Speaker 2:so I aim for seven, seven to eight, and seven to eight is what is recommended. So it seems that sleep has a bit of a u-shaped curve, which means that too little is too bad, but also too much is also too bad. So around eight hours seems to be the sweet spot for most people. There's less than one percent of people that can actually get away with less than six hours sleep, with not get, without getting some sort of health, um benefit, decline in health, from it. So I think less than six definitely not good.
Speaker 2:And even up until very recently, I think you know, especially between professionals and you know people I guess in type doctors, people that you're working with, there is almost like a thing of like, oh how little sleep can we survive on, and like it's like a badge of honor, but it's really, really not a good thing. And and you know what, there was something that I saw recently which actually I mean it, it really shocked me, but then it didn't. But it was that the World Health Organization have actually classified shift work as a potential carcinogen because of the so much evidence of how much shift work ruins our sleep and has such a profound impact on health that the the world health organization have literally labeled it actually I'm not surprised.
Speaker 1:I'm actually surprised to hear that, especially coming from a World Health Organization which in the past decade I've kind of changed my opinion about them, but that's a different topic. It's that it makes sense, because the one thing is not about how much sleep you get, but also when you get it, meaning you should wake up at the same time every day and go to sleep at the same time, because your body is really depending all the functions in your body based on the hormones that get released. They're really based on the circadian rhythm that you don't want to change it. It's not like you sleep and wake up the same time during the weekend and on weekends you completely disturb it. That significantly alters the pattern and with that you're cellular aging.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly that. It's about the timing of going to sleep, and that is just something that people don't appreciate. Going to bed and getting eight hours sleep between 1 am and nine is very different to going to bed at 10 and getting eight hours sleep. And if you one day you're going to bed at 10, the next day you're going to bed at 1am, your circadian rhythm, which is meant to be a 24 hour cycle, is suddenly either becoming compressed or stretched, and then that knocks everything everything else that is controlling you know out of sync as well. So, yes, having you know, good, good bedtime routine, so trying to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time is very important and non-negotiable.
Speaker 1:Sorry, that's non, that's non-negotiable. So so let's put that in the category of the non-negotiable. So sleep, eight hours of sleep and the same pattern non-negotiable yeah, exactly what's the second one?
Speaker 2:the second non-negotiable, aside from sleep, is definitely the diet making sure that you're getting 30 different plants in your diet each week. And this, can you know this sounds people go. That's so difficult. It's not have a fruit salad with five, six different fruits in. Have a actual salad with different types of leaves, herbs, spices, nuts, seeds, even chocolate. You know a bit of dark chocolate. It's coming from a plant that has got powerful antioxidants in. You can very easily get 30 different plants and again, that is shown to help reverse biological age. So that would be number two.
Speaker 1:As well as protein. So protein you know a lot of there's all these vegan movement and such but there are essential amino acids, that meaning the amino acids that our body doesn't make, is incapable of making, and they come only from animal sources or eggs. You know red meat, fish, chicken. You know, specifically leucine glycine, and they're important for your brain, they're important for your vision, they're important for your skin. So if you are vegetarian or vegan, you have to make sure that you supplement those essential amino acids one or the other way, otherwise you're going to get really sick. So protein is important. There is the current recommendation of protein. To me is way below what one should be taking, which is kind of like the main, just base survival for your body survival, but definitely not optimal, which is optimal. You're supposed to take about 0.8 gram per pound of protein. So that's important. Otherwise you can't build muscle mass and you won't have any energy to do your exercise. So sleep diet is non-negotiable. What's the third one?
Speaker 1:Exercise Unsurprisingly how many hours a week, would you say, is important.
Speaker 2:So the study shows 12 and a half, but the reality is that for someone doing nothing, anything is better than nothing. Um, again, studies have shown that you know, people don't even do any steps. Even getting 4 000 steps a day has been shown to improve cognitive function. I mean, versus someone that does nothing. So doing something is better than nothing? Um, but you know, absolutely try and you know, just make different choices. Think about getting out for a walk at lunchtime rather than sitting, and try to get to the gym. Try to mix up gym, not just doing cardio, which a lot of people do. Do some resistance training. It's really important, as we've already mentioned.
Speaker 1:I think to that point. I had a separate podcast a couple of years ago with a neurologist who is an expert in brain health. His studies actually showed that walking one mile a day increases the size of your hippocampus by 40%, which is in charge of your memory and preventative for Alzheimer's dementia. So one mile a day, that's nothing the know. The definition is interesting. I was shocked to hear that the definition of a sedentary, of someone that is sedentary, is less than 5,000 steps a day. That equates to roughly 2.7 miles, and unless you have a dog or something that you have to walk three times a day, you're not going to get in 5,000 steps.
Speaker 2:Think about actually going and doing it.
Speaker 1:And that's the one factor that is significantly associated with all-cause mortality by a significant number. I don't know the exact number, but that alone, the definition of sedentary is less than 5,000 steps a day, and that doesn't even include your resistance training. That is even more important as we age, since we lose muscle mass as we age yeah. So that's the third one. What's? Is there a fourth or fifth one? So my fourth would be.
Speaker 2:So we've talked about good stress for the body, the kind of what can make you stronger stress, but the other type of stress is psychological stress the bad? Stress and you know a lot of people will say, oh, I'm not stressed, I'm fine.
Speaker 2:But stress is very relative and you know lots of people are living in chronic states of stress and they just get used to it and actually the when you are stressed, you have elevated cortisol, which is incredibly pro-inflammatory, and this is a real issue that people are chronically stressed have a lot of inflammation and this is accelerating aging. So even in people that don't think they're stressed, even doing things like meditation, breath work which again is something that a lot of people have perceived as being quite woo woo and you know, oh, I'm not going to meditate and you know what difference is that going to make but actually there are literally studies now showing that meditation can actually reduce inflammation in your body and also extend the length of your telomeres.
Speaker 2:So just by sitting, meditating, you can calm calming the brain and calming the body, you can actually reverse two of the hallmarks of aging there 100, and that's that's where I think cynicism can kill you.
Speaker 1:And I think one of the things about mental health is not often talked about and we it's almost seen as a sign of weakness, um, if you admit it or do anything about it. But in our society it has been changing and that's a good thing. So mental health is one of the big stressors, probably if not the biggest stressor, especially in the Western world that is fast-paced and we put everything onto ourselves and just blame others, and then let the external uh onto ourselves and just blame others, and then let the external uh facts of life, like, really affect us in a terrible way, and stress has been therefore associated with uh on all-cause mortality and cancer because it significantly increases uh inflammation in our body. And uh, these, these are, this is science. By the way, guys, this is not like us like. This is not opinion. This is science. By the way, guys, this is not like us, like. This is not opinion.
Speaker 2:This is true science.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is not theory, for those of you who have.
Speaker 2:For me as a scientist, everything that I talk about is not theory. There is science to back it up in terms of the stress. There was literally a study done that showed that acute traumatic episodes so things like surgery, things like pregnancy even they classified as a traumatic episodes. So things like surgery, things like pregnancy even they classified as a traumatic episode increased biological age and this was reversible. So that is the key thing that it's reversible.
Speaker 1:I can't tell you, every time I take a history on a patient that suddenly has an acute autoimmune disease, whether it is skin related, whether it is uh system related, like lupus, um, it always there was always a preceding um stressful event in their lives, like a that shocked the system, and that's how our body responds and it just puts our immune system out of array and these things happen. So it's not fluff talk. Meditation is not like holding hands and singing a song is really affects your health. So that's a fourth one. Is there a fifth one?
Speaker 2:You know, I think they would be the best ones, they would be my go tos and obviously I also.
Speaker 1:I also take NAD supplement, but I think for a lot of people I was going to say to that point.
Speaker 1:My fifth, non-negotiable, which is what you just mentioned, is optimizing my biomarkers through supplementation, meaning areas, supplements that are deficient in my body based on what I'm eating, and then I use those biomarkers to improve my diet and lifestyle. I look at them as signs, but while I'm doing that, I'm supplementing them, and we're talking about stuff like vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin K, magnesium. I actually take ashwagandha for just reduce my cortisol level, just because the nature of my work is very stressful, even though I have to include more mindfulness in my life that in order to reduce my stress. That way, and you know a bunch of other supplements. I think I take about 12 or 13 different supplements. Um, together with my lifestyle changes, and partly also because I'm experimenting, I'm just following to see which one affects my biomarkers. But I think, to conclude, the lessons we learned from this conversation is you can't just change your life with supplements. You have to make lifestyle modifications.
Speaker 1:Using current science that is undeniably affecting our health through boosting our immune system and turning back the biologic clock. So, for those of you who have heard about NAD and I mean people are getting infusions, injections and all kinds of stuff because it's not very bioavailable. I love your approach to it to boost the enzymes and the substrates. That actually enables our cell, which is an amazing ecosystem that actually can produce the NAD on its own if we help it out. I think that's a much smarter approach. And if you want to take NMN which is something I do, but it certainly won't be the only thing that you should take, as we just discussed that, your ability to turn NMN into NAD decreases as we age, so you need some sort of boosting agent. So I will put the link down below for people that want to try it out. There is going to be a discount code if you want to try it out for the first time, and I think what is it like? 30? Is there 30 tablets? They take one a day, or how does that work?
Speaker 2:So it's six capsules a day.
Speaker 1:Six capsules a day, so when should they take it? In the morning or in the evening?
Speaker 2:so do they. When should they take it in the morning or in the evening?
Speaker 1:we would recommend taking it more towards morning, midday if possible, just because that that sort of yeah within your natural circadian rhythm of nad um, but we recommend taking it with food as well I actually, when I started, I mistakenly took the nad boosters and I'm in the evening and I couldn't. I literally couldn't sleep. I was like I was wired, I was like up ready to go to work, so take it in. I take it in the morning myself, you know, um, or early, um afternoon, or midday and um, um, nicola, thank you so much. I know this was supposed to be an hour where, uh, I knew that it's not going to happen. In an hour it's just so much to discuss, especially to frame it properly for the audience so they understand what we're talking about.
Speaker 1:I'm really so grateful, not just for you coming on to the show to help educate my audience, but also for the research that you're doing, that you're doing.
Speaker 1:I think we need more people and scientists like yourself that don't think about drugs and rather think about how we can improve our lives, and I think we've arrived at a time in society where people are ready.
Speaker 1:I think 10 years ago would have been difficult. I think today there's not a patient I talked to is not ready to implement these types of changes, and the distrust towards medicine has significantly increased in the recent years, especially after COVID, and people are ready to really grab the bull by the horns and just take their health in their own hands and be in control of their own faith, and the evidence is out there. So thank you so much, nicola, and I hope we meet one day in one of these conferences and meetings and I will definitely have you back on this podcast, because there's so much stuff that we didn't have time to discuss. It's going to be a little nerdier one, a little more one that is more specific into the basic science of what we mentioned today. I think it would be great to do a part two for anyone that's interested, and thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, thank you for having me. I think we definitely could have spoke for another hour, or even two.
Speaker 1:Right me.
Speaker 2:I think we definitely could have spoke for another hour or even two, right um, but I just hope it's inspired some people to think differently about aging, because it really is the future. So thank you so much all right, everyone episode's over.
Speaker 1:Um, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with anti-aging scientist dr nicola conlon from Nuchito Time Plus, and if you'd like to try her NAD booster supplement, please just click on the link in the caption and get your discount code DrHamrah20, d-r-h-a-m-r-a-h 20. No space and again, as always, please don't forget to leave me a review on Apple, itunes and Spotify or any other outlet. You listen to this podcast and until next time, bye-bye.