Longevity MASTERCLASS: Biological Age, Mitochondrial Repair & The Superhuman Protocol

0:00My name is Ben Greenfield and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast. If I was to boil my entire career down to one sentence, it would be that the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. We did not find a single disease ideological pathway that did not either have its roots in the absence of blood oxygen or was not severely exacerbated by the absence of blood oxygen. Give me an example. All cancer begins in a hypoxic environment, sitting as the new smoking. But why is sedentary lifestyle? And why is sitting become a new smoking? Because sedentary lifestyle is a foundation for hypoxia. Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity and beyond. Light is one of the most powerful biological signals we can give our body,

1:05and most people massively underuse it. Just like sunlight, specific wavelengths of infrared and red light interact directly with your mitochondria and your circulation and your detox pathways and your nervous system. So it's not just about sweating or relaxation. It's about using light strategically to improve how your body performs, recovers and adapts. Now infrared and red light are foundational performance tools. Light therapy is probably one of the more underrated levers for longevity and recovery and resilience. That's because infrared is absorbed deeply into the tissue, supporting mitochondrial efficiency and blood flow. Now, a sauna is a good way to get infrared light, but not all saunas are created equal. Light dose and delivery matters. I have a sunlight in sauna. This is patented heating technology that delivers the highest quantity and quality of infrared light, meaning more usable photons reach your body during each session. With more than 25 years in light-based wellness, sun might also prioritize non-toxic materials. Ultra low EMFs, which is important and thoughtful engineering.

2:10They have a really cool dashboard, where you just push the button for what you want and go. It feels great. It's like a warm teddy bear hug for your whole body. You get to save up to $1,400 on your sauna purchase at sunlighten.com slash Ben with code Ben. That's sunlyghtn.com slash Ben and use code Ben. What's quantum energy? Well, it's the energy that exists in everything. Every unit of matter contains quantum energy and every person constantly interacts with other quantum energy fields. And your energy field can be affected. Some say disrupted by a lot of the toxic stress that is thrown at our bodies every day, in many cases with modern technology, that creates electro-magnetic pollution. EMFs are something you may have heard of and no, I'm not telling you to throw away your phone and move to some pristine, hemily and mountain top. But you can look into this thing called the quantum upgrade. They documented a 29% increase in ATP production,

3:16when comparing the use of the quantum upgrade in the presence of electro-magnetic pollution versus not having it there. Now, I'm no quantum scientist, but I do know that quantum entaglement isn't limited by distance or time, so you can use this thing anywhere you'd like at home while traveling New York Tokyo. You name it. You have your own login and the dashboard where you get to choose the frequencies. You get to choose the type of quantum experience you desire. And if you're skeptical, you can actually try this for free. You get a 15-day free trial when you go to quantum upgrade.io and use the code Ben15. That's quantum upgrade.io. Use the code Ben15. I've been running one on my home. I think I'm going on about two and a half years now and my phone and my body. And it's very, very interesting and it's definitely worth exploring. So quantum upgrade.io with the

4:18code Ben15. In this episode of the Balance Life Podcast, I've got a mortality prediction expert, a molecular biologist and an engineer who's been beating billionaires at their own game, Gary Breka, a human biologist who spent 20 years in the insurance world predicting when people would die based on their blood work and now he uses those same strategies or biomarkers to help people extend life and live a fuller life instead. I also talk with Dr. Onorog Singh, a physician scientist and trained immunologist with more than 50 published papers, 20 patents and 50 randomized clinical trials behind him. He'll talk about the 15 years he spent on one molecule on what that one molecule does to your mitochondria. And then I've got Dave Pasco, 61-year-old engineer who's near the top of the Rejuvenation Olympics leaderboard out-aging tech billionaires without their budgets and he publishes his entire protocol publicly. It's not what you'd expect. All of the show notes are

5:18going to be at BenGreenFoodLife.com slash Ultimate Longevity. That's BenGreenFoodLife.com slash Ultimate Longevity. Enjoy. I would love to hear a little bit more about what got you interested in this because before I came to Miami, you and I talked on the phone and I always thought you were just some biohacker who was interested in the body and you know eventually took all the things you learned and started to do with other people but but you had a very interesting start. You were in like insurance ingesting or something like that. A very specific area of insurance which was the science and the predictability of mortality. It's called probabilistic mortality modeling. So if we got five years of medical records on you and five years of demographic data, we could tell the insurance company how long you had to live to the month. You see because the database to the month. This wasn't like methylation clocks and hors of-ath aging and telemares. This was just looking at epidemiological data. Epidemiological data but with the one thing you have

6:22to remember that insurance companies have that no other clinical study has, no other medical enterprise has, no other published trial has, no medical enterprise of any type has is that they know the day, the date, the time, the location and the cause of death for everyone that they've issued an annuity, a life insurance or a re-insurance policy on, even a reverse mortgage. You wouldn't believe the number of financial services products that are actually based on how many more months you have left on earth. And so when you have the endpoint, you can trace it back to causality. You see in a clinical study, we know that for example obesity shortens your lifespan by X number of years. You know, type 2 diabetes shortens your lifespan by X number of years. This is all data that's used on actuarial tables. How do we put somebody on an actuarial table? But when you talk about specific mortality, they have tens of millions of deaths and they trace that endpoint

7:25back to its causality. If this database could see the light of day, it would permanently change the face of humanity. It would upend modern medicine in a way that would absolutely be catastrophic. That information is like private. The insurance companies are the polar opposite of Google and Facebook. They collect the luminous amounts of information, but they don't share it with anybody. They use it to price financial service products against you. I mean, think about it. They're going to take out a $25 million or $50 million life insurance policy on your life. We're talking like a term life insurance policy. We're usually talking about universal life policies that are going to last until the day that you die. They don't expire after 10 years or 20 years. They're trying to predict when that date is going to occur so that they don't get stuck with the bill. Exactly. But if you think about it, they're taking $25 million or $50 million worth of risk on one variable. There's only a single variable that matters. That's how many more months do you have left on earth? How many more months are they going to predict that they're going to collect that premium?

8:26Okay. You're working for one of these companies? I was actually working for multiple companies. We did life expectancies and we did these probabilistic models to basically take a portfolio of life insurance that one life insurance company is going to acquire and let them know if the mortality predictions were accurate or not. Because think about it. If you put $25 million with a risk on somebody's life and you don't collect enough premiums to offset that risk because your mortality prediction was wrong. It's kind of a really shitty business model. If you want to know how accurate just look at the last financial services crisis, we had 364 banks failed, not a single life insurance company failed. Not one. Really? Not a single life insurance company failed. This is how accurate and well-reserved they are because they have perfected the science of mortality. So what do you find out? If I was to boil my entire career down to one sentence, I say this all the time,

9:30it would be that the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. The presence of oxygen is the absence of disease. Yes. We did not find a single disease ideological pathway that did not either have its roots in the absence of blood oxygen or was not severely exacerbated by the absence of blood oxygen. Give me an example. Hypoxia, you know, all cancer begins in a hypoxic environment. Type 2 diabetes begins in a hypoxic environment. The hypoxic and warburg effect, cancer generating energy, anaerobically producing lactose gas and tissue acid, those things. And springing upon you to create that angiogenic effect to eventually provide oxygen to grow a tumor, but the genesis of that tumor begins in hypoxia. I mean, how does the answer decide where it's going to metastasize to? It looks for a focal area of hypoxia and it sets up shop in that area. And if you look at anemia, sedentary lifestyle, these are leading causes of all cause mortality. Sitting is the new smoking, but why is sedentary lifestyle and why is sitting become the new smoking?

10:34Because sedentary lifestyle is a foundation for hypoxia. The less we move, the less we breathe, the more poorly we manage oxygen, not only the faster we're accelerating towards the grave, but the faster the parabolic curve of all cause mortality. So we could predict the onset of and the severity of disease based on your hypoxic condition. If you have anemia, for example, and it's non-responsive, because you have the MTHF or gene mutation, you don't respond to folic acid, you only respond to methylfolate, for example. And you have a cardiovascular condition, athleroscarosis or tereosclerosis, you can predict how much more quickly that will accelerate based on a normal table of athleroscarotic progression. Okay, and I know if I'm wondering this, other people might be also, but of course we seek out, in some cases, as health enthusiasts, hypoxia, like you and I, when we were doing the breath work out in the pores, like we got to

11:37certain sections where we were blowing all of our air out and holding that for as long as possible. Or some people will do, I don't know if you've been like a CVAC chamber. Yeah, yeah. Which is hypoxic. Or I even do, like you do, exercise with oxygen therapy, but I have a little switch on that therapy device I use that pulls me into hypoxia, it gets my pulse so too down, like my blood oxygenation down, and then it goes back up once I get that surge of oxygen. But you're not seeing that all hypoxia is bad, right? No, not seeing. It's kind of like a whormedic effect to having periods of time with low oxygen. No, systemic hypoxias. Okay. Long duration hypoxia is bad. Short-term exposure to hypoxic conditions or even altitude can actually improve oxygen transport. You look at the way that a healthy body responds to a hypoxic condition, it increases urethropoesis, right? So that increase in urethropoesis offsets altitude. Okay. But if you weren't offsetting that altitude and you put yourself in a hypoxic environment,

12:40your body didn't offset that oxygen deficit, you would have severe long-term consequences for that. Now besides the hypoxic state, and this might be a loaded question, I don't know, but I'm sorry, besides a sedentary state, like you alluded to it, the sitting is the new smoking. What type of other factors have you identified that seem to be pretty associated with people being in this hypoxic state? Neemic conditions. Age-related sarcopenia that actually collapses the respiratory rate and respiratory volume. Muscle loss. Muscle inability. Carry oxygen to lack of muscle. Yes. Okay. Muscle is our metabolic currency. I mean, there's a direct correlation between early onset disease and even early onset death and your muscle volume. You know, percentage of muscle that you have, I mean, muscle really is our metabolic currency. We're realizing now that muscle is more important in older ages. Now, I want to learn a little bit more because I'm intrigued about where you got to where you're at now with this whole 10x health and you're probably aware that you're kind of blown up. Like I've been seeing you all over the place. What you're doing is obviously

13:45working or you're paying the right people the right amounts of money. I'm just kidding. I'm just and so the question I have for you though kind of like back to the science of the hypoxia thing and back to the light and what you were explaining about with the light, the importance of first light, the importance of natural spectrum sunlight. If you had walked into my room this morning, I'm increasingly becoming like this. Like I'm like a red light addict. So I travel with a red light headlamp and that's the only way I use to get around the house during the day or during the morning. So it's all red light plus my red light glasses. So my body is just basically bathed in sunrise. Even if at a hotel or I got to walk down to the lobby to get a coffee or whatever, it's all red light for like the first hour of the day before I hit the big lights. Because I'm up around five or so. So my reasoning is until the sun actually comes up, I want to keep fooling my body that were in no sun or sunrise. And then I showed you that wrap around red light thing that I have. I forget the it's a Kinion is the name of the cup that makes it. I wrap that around my neck, right? And this is

14:49the first hour after I'm getting up. So all of the blood going through my neck and my carada is getting blast with red light. And then I have a little travel based red light that people have probably seen like, Juve makes one called the go. I won the Dr. John LaRonce came last week that's got the little red. And so it basically is like putting a sunrise on in your bedroom. And so I'm all red light for that first hour of the day. Now these are all technologies. We'll talk more about some of the cool technology of here like some forward light. But technology. So for this concept of first light, do you think that there's an advantage to that that I'm still getting benefit from that versus what we did this morning and going out and full spectrum sunlight and sitting on your balcony? Do you use these red light devices when you first wake up? I do. I mean, I do the first light. I do the walk in the morning. And I believe in doing weights when I'm fed. So I usually do weight workouts later in the fed, which we're going to go do after this will be. Yes. We'll be. But then I get back

15:51and I do what's called the superhuman protocol, which is essentially taking all of the good things from the outside and bringing it in. I believe we get three major things from other nature. We go magnetism. We get oxygen. We get light magnetism, oxygen and light. Most of the three big things we get from other nature. And the further we get away from those three things, the faster the onset of all-cause mortality. It kind of begs the question real quick. Start in a rough. No. It's okay. But when you say magnetism, oxygen and light, and you found in these insurance actuaries that hypoxia was one of the big issues associated with mortality, do you think that magnetism and light should have been on that list as well or a magnetism and light, kind of like the precursors to oxygenation? They're precursors to oxygenation because if you think about how oxygen is transported in the body and then the delivery system not only just to the cell wall, but into the mitochondria, which actually occurs more through the water, mitochondria water than it does through direct oxygen entering the mitochondria. But if you look at the degradation

16:56of the oxidative state of the body, a lot of this has to do with the charge, the polarity on the surface of the cell. Not to get too technical, but if you look at a red blood cell for technical. Okay. So let's get technical for a second. So if you look at a red blood cell, and we're going to do some dark field microscopy here after this, if you look at a red blood cell and the surface of that cell has a charge, and just like a magnet, if two cells have similar charges, they repel, if they have opposite charges, they attract. And it's a pH stands for potential hydrogen. This is a charge, right? That's why it's a complete fallacy that we can get alkaline from drinking alkaline water. We get alkaline by changing the charge of the body through low-gouse current, through grounding, through herthing. I mean, discharging into the earth or discharging through a PEMF mat, and low-gouse PEMF mat, is the safest and the most natural and the fastest way to alkalize, repolarize the charge of cellular structures in the body. I never really thought about this. So you're basically making the case that alkalization is synonymous with or linked to repolarization.

18:04No question. It's linked to potential hydrogen. That's pH. The scale of pH is based on the potential of hydrogen. So what this means is, let's say you have a group of red blood cells and they're all hanging out in the bloodstream together. And they have similar charges. They will repel. They'll slide around like hard boiled eggs. They're like protons with a positive charge. Like protons with a positive charge. So what happens is, you have a lot more surface area now for that cell to take in nutrients, to expel nutrients, to have oxygen from the serum of the blood, enter a cell. So for cells to shuttle oxygen through the bloodstream, they need to have more surface area to increase the surface area. You need to create cellular separation. To create separation, you need to have the right charge. Tell me about the protocol we did today and what all you use for exercise is exercise with oxygen therapy. Yes. Exercise with oxygen therapy. And we do this with a lot of our professional athletes that we're trying to get to the next level. I'm

19:05working with a lot of athletes that are playing in the league right now that are dominating their game. Some of them are very public about their relationship with me, some are not. But we are measuring their performance using magnetism, oxygen and light, which is NSF certified. It's not considered performance enhancements, considered comparative or generative. And we're seeing incredible results with tissue repair, regeneration, protein synthesis, increase in protein synthesis, and muscle repair and performance. But not, you know, E1 is a 10, 11 minute time frame where you're went by super fast, hyper-oddrained afterwards, like after a big workout. You can't do too much oxygen over too long a period of time. It'll actually drive riblet cell down. And that's the opposite of what you want. But for a short period of time, it took you 10 and a half minutes to do it today. Right. There's three minutes with 33 seconds after each breathing

20:07pure oxygen breathing pure oxygen, 25 oxygen. And it's just like a you have an air-dine bike, you have a mask next to I'll put pictures for folks at Ben Greenfield Life.com slash Breka. I told you my protocols kind of sexy too. Like I got the vaspir, which is the blood flow restriction. Right. And the grounding and the earth thing because you're grounded to the to the plates on the vaspir. And then the full body exercise. And I keep the live O2 next to that because I got a switch. And so during my recoveries, like the long periods, you go hypoxia. And then during the efforts, you go hyper-oxia and flood the T-Shot. I love it. And that's 21 minutes. I've felt as though your 12-minute protocol beat me up a little less than the maybe I'm going too long with the vaspir protocol. But nonetheless, the takeaway message here for people is it's high intensity interval training with periods of time during that high intensity training where you have some kind of a mass to deliver higher amounts of oxygen to the body. And 10 and a half minutes is all you need. You breathe 900 liters of 95% out too. Now something I've always wondered,

21:12what if you were to use? Let's say you didn't have money or you have access to the oxygen delivery system mass that you wear. What if you just during the easy periods were to wear something like a training mask, you know, or like resist oxygen intake or even breathe through a straw? You think you could still get some effects by then during the hard efforts, just like opening your mouth and taking the training mask off and breathing. I absolutely do. If you look at the cyclical breathing methods of Wim Hof, you look at exercise with oxygen therapy, a lot of these have the same foundational concept, which is one created demand. And then two answer that demand. And what I mean by that is we know that we can't just eat a bunch of calcium and have strong bones. You have to load a bone and then have calcium there to help build it. We know that you can't just eat a bunch of protein and build big muscles. You have to tear a muscle and then you have to have the protein available to repair it. The same thing is true with oxygen. You just can't sit and hyperventilate and flood the body with oxygen. What you have to do is create an oxygen demand. So the idea behind E1 is exercise

22:18is putting an oxygen demand on the body. And then when it's same as a breath hold in a Wim Hof method, for example, exhale, breath hold. Why are we exhaling and holding our breath? When you're resetting carbohydrate or carbon dioxide receptors, you're actually driving the level of that gas up. Now when you breathe in, the tissues just, they take it up. So it might not be perfect, but you could basically the way you want to think about it is this. During an exercise session, try to deprive yourself of oxygen, then throw in a few high-intensity intervals where you're just opening up the portals and flooding yourself with oxygen. And you're at least, even if you don't have the fancy equipment, kind of like going outside barefoot gives you a taste of the PMF, doing that will give you a taste of the E1. Can hold your breath and do pushups to exhaustion. That's a great idea. Breathwork. There are a few things I consider foundational when it comes to sleep, recovery, overall performance. Cheesecake is not on that list. Magnesium is actually pretty high on that list. Magnesium is involved in hundreds of processes in your body. So when you're

23:24looking at something as important as winding down at night, recovering from training, managing stress, maintaining healthy metabolic function, maybe even eating cheesecake, it's a mineral worth taking seriously. So magnesium breakthrough from bioptimizers has been a part of my routine, specifically my nighttime routine for a while. As you may have heard about this stuff before, it has seven different forms of magnesium, but brace yourself. They just came out with magnesium, breakthrough advanced 10. As the number implies, it has 10, count them 10, biovailable forms of magnesium, along with active vitamin B6 and trace minerals to support the magnesium uptake. They actually tested this stuff for bio accessibility to ensure the magnesium is actually available for absorption, and that distinction is important because magnesium isn't just magnesium. Different forms have different properties, so that's why bioptimizers kind of overachieved here. They didn't just choose one, they choose 10. So here's my challenge to try this stuff, especially the new version with 10 forms,

24:28track your sleep, see how you feel. You've got nothing to lose because every order is backed by. Bioptimizers 365 day money back guarantee, so you can try it with confidence, all 10 of them, all 10 forms and one ball had to buy optimizers.com slash Ben, that's bi optimizers with a z. Dotcom slash Ben, you just got Ben 15 for 15% off your order, that will unlock exclusive discounts for friends of my show, which would be you plus surprise free bonuses and bigger discounts that bioptimizers rolls out during certain special windows of the year. You can also get free shipping on select orders and you won't find this on Amazon in stores or anywhere else, that's bioptimizers.com slash Ben and use code Ben 15. Let's talk key tones. The whole drinkable, eatable, ketone category has become very noisy. A lot of products marked in this ketones are not actually delivering ketones directly. They're delivering ketone free cursors, that your body still

25:33has to convert first, which creates a very different experience physiologically and from a performance standpoint, a recovery standpoint and all the reasons that you'd want to use ketones. My ketone of choice has become tech con TEC T-O-N. They use something called R3HBG, which is technically bioidentical D beta hydroxy butyrate, that's a mouthful. Essentially the same ketone molecule, your body naturally produces drink ketosis. No precursor conversion, no ethanol byproduct and in my experience a much cleaner and more stable effect compared to the other ketone products that have saturated the market. What makes this stuff especially interesting is the science and the regulatory side. First of all, TEC T-Tone's molecule is the first ketone ingredient recognized by the FTI as a new dietary ingredient. It's actually a very significant differentiator in a category that frankly lacks a lot of transparency and standardization. The founder's background has also caught

26:34my attention. The founder Mike Chesney spent decades in US Army Special Operations as a green break combat medic. He began developing this ketone technology after dealing with a traumatic brain injury, a TBI himself. So this wasn't just built as another trendy supplement brand. TEC Tone came from a much deeper performance and recovery need. It gives me super clean cognitive support. They have different varieties. They have a very caffeine with lion's mane with 5HGP and it tastes great single shot, not get back and you basically drink yourself into ketosis, which is pretty handy especially for things like my morning fast workouts or going out to not wanting a raging appetite when I get to the restaurant. You can go to tectonketones.com TEC T-O-N tectonketones.com Ben and use code Ben at checkout for a whopping 16% off your first order. That's tectonketones.com slash Ben drinkable ketones use code Ben for 16% off today. How do you describe immune aging?

27:39And you know I hear terms like inflammation and immune senescence and immune cell exhaustion. Can you walk us through what all these things actually mean? Yeah so I'm a trained immunologist after my MD. I did it for the training and immunology. So immune aging to me is everything you just mentioned. Immune aging is sort of the sequel A and their tricky hallmarks to this sort of phenomena. One is inflammation, which means as we get older, our cells are getting fatigue, damage and these sort of damage zombie-like cells become triggers of inflammation in our cells and organs and body. And that kind of keeps increasing as we ate. So from our 30s, 40s to our 50s, 60s, our bodies as my professor would say is swimming in a sea of or a milieu of these soluble factors that we call immune cytokines and these are basically damaging our organs. So that is inflammation

28:42in in in in sort of broad context. Then there is these terms like immunosenscence, which really means your immune system just does not have the ability to you know be what it was in our 20s and 30s and that's primarily because we have this organ called thymus you know up right here and around our 20s, it starts imbuluting means shrinking. And as a shrink and that's the organ that makes a lot of immune cells and the most potent immune cells it makes is something called T cells. Immunologists are not very creative people they just thought about a few cells called them ABCD all the way to T. And so these are T cells which stands for basically think of them as the elite forces of the army of the immune system and they are patrolling all the organs for when is the next big threat coming whether it's auto-immunity or an infection or even cancer. And so these kind of disappear and become very fatigued and that's the phenomena called immunosenscence. And then there's a third term

29:46called immune resilience or immune sort of fatigue. What happens is that these immune cells, T cells, B cells, old, old, you know sort of alphabetical names that come with these immune cells. They have mitochondria that at over time get fatigued and they just don't have enough metabolism, metabolic capacity to keep fighting cancer, keep fighting infection. And so that's sort of all encompassing into immune aging. Okay so when we talk about longevity in anti-aging and I'm not one of those guys who you know enforces the idea of just trying to live no matter what to 200 years old I'm more in the camp of live as healthy as possible as close as possible to the day that you die. But when we talk about the immune system how much of an impact does that actually have on longevity like declining immune health you know because you hear about declining matter of control health or you know declining brain health how big of an impact does declining

30:46immune health have on longevity. So I mean we've all talked about it probably it has been talked about in their podcasts before this whole idea of hallmarks of aging right. So biological hallmarks of aging are these very interconnected biological pathways that all decline together with aging. And I believe there are two or three key in these they're 12 of them now you know the arranged from your genes getting altered or the environment impacting our genes or poor nutrient absorption as in ourselves. But the two main ones I believe are mitochondria dysfunction and chronic inflammation or inflammation or immunaging or immunaging. And I think they're they're really linked together very closely. And when I say linked together very closely I mean I personally believe that immunaging is sort of the central piece and that's the trigger for a lot of these hallmarks of aging. So if you slow down immunaging immune cells are in all organs

31:49and if they go problematic then you're impacting what I call the organ ray of aging or cellular aging. We are finding evidence that things like changing exercise, regimens or diet or even mitochondrial interventions actually altered these two key hallmarks and they're very closely linked mitochondrial health and immune health. So why is it that um I mean you say that immune aging and mitochondrial health are kind of very much related but why is that what's the link between the two? Yeah so you know as I was starting to mention that immune system the way I see it it's almost like you know like a policeman of the entire body, all the organs the immune cells are everywhere. So when something goes wrong in a bigger picture who comes in the police comes in right and so as we age when the cells in our organs are not optimally functioning the immune cells kind of come in

32:55to survey if everything's going all right if you know all the organelles are etc and they side the cells the neighboring cells they're talking to each other and so what they're almost like a surveillance program this immune system and what happens is as soon as the cellular health declines okay so as soon as all the different hallmarks start declining the immune system is the first to put its hand up and say hey there's something going wrong and it starts to survey per and at a certain point it cannot because it just gets overwhelmed and so I believe the immune system is like the centenial of our health span decline and as soon as we hit our 30s 40s and and the first wave of you know biological changes happens the immune system is the first one that fires that shot and says problem okay and so it and the connection between mitochondrial health and

33:57immune cells and immune health is they are it's a feeling we call immune metabolism so the the policemen in this case the immune cells need energy to to to be able to survey all the organs the key metabolic organs that decline with aging and so they run out of gas and and they run out of fuel because mitochondria powered them up and so one of the fixes we think is by sort of reenergizing or rewiring the immune system by boosting the mitochondria and that's the connection okay so so in the case of uralith and a then does it have more an impact on the mitochondria or is it working on some other element of the immune system yeah so uralithinate from time you take it orally will hit mitochondrial health in every cell that is mitochondria and all all ourselves accept the red blood cells have cellular mitochondria now the more metabolic ones like the neurons or

34:59the skeletal muscle cells they get hit hard the the most so the the things that happen the most frequent you with aging is problems getting out from a chair problems walking and that's mostly because your muscle cells do not have the right energy source which is mitochondria able to power them up same with neurons the first thing that will happen is decline in cognitive health and the seepally to things like Alzheimer's I believe it's you know when when you take uralithin A not only are you hitting mitochondria in your skeletal muscle cells theoretically in your neuron cells and you can even target brain health we have that but what we are discovering is that the mitochondria in in inside the immune cells these t cells and v cells they get recharged and they kind of propelled immune system to start surveillance at a at a at a much better way and so that kind of links to aging in mitochondrial health okay god let's let's get in the mechanism of action here you use the word

35:59like hitting the mitochondria recharging the cell but in terms of a little bit more of a scientific explanation of what that means like hitting recharging etc what is uralithin A doing to the mitochondria so you can power up your mitochondria three ways today or at least three known ways to to scientists and and doctors one is a process we call mitochondrial biogenesis so this is the sort of pathway you you if you're hitting exercises well known ex um way to induce mitochondria biogenesis it means just create near-healthy mitochondria that create more near-energy more healthier energy and you power your cells up that's one way and there are compounds like NAD modulators things like uh rest virtual these are all known mitochondrial biogenesis agents the second pocket is you have your healthy pool of mitochondria you know i see you're exercising so you're already inducing biogenesis but how do you keep these healthy mitochondria up and running

37:01and become more efficient and that these are things like creatine coq 10 now what uralithin A mitochondria is doing is hitting what i started to describe process called mitophagy which is basically damaged zombie mitochondria so as we're aging our immune cells are aging their mitochondria getting more and more damaged because they just can't keep up with for example all the viruses and bacteria they have to the onslaught that happens with aging and or cancer uh sort of uh mutations that have started happening and so they need to be recycled and that's what we are seeing when we take the immune cells these T cells out from people who are who are aging or 78 years old we see exhaustion in these immune cells and what that means is basically that mitochondria not able to induce properly the energy currency which is ATP when we give them mitochondria whether in you know in our randomized trials we can talk about or in cell culture we see more PGC1 alpha or biomarkers

38:06linked to better mitochondrial health starting the shop in in these immune cells and when we put for example these immune cells with bacteria they killed them better so that's the you know sort of biology that we are seeing happen which is really mitophagy we had started when muscle cells and we we we focus on endurance and performance and strength benefits but what we are actually discovering now as a sort of additional benefit is that you lower inflammation you recharge your immune system and even in you know athletes for example athletes are well known to have a lot of overtraining induces inflammation we're seeing that get blunted so that's the connection. Okay I'd actually never heard it explaining that way before so you have mitophagy that's like one of the three things that you said those that's the last one that your elithinate focuses on like the mitochondria clean up you said mitochondrial biogenesis I think you said that one's more triggered by things like exercise yeah exercise fasting okay no known modulators yeah okay and what was what was the third

39:11one the mitochondrial efficiency so this process you know you always have in your cells this Yin and Yang of healthy mitochondria and damage mitochondria and this sort of balance in between and and that's always going on you know even when we're healthy young we always have this process continuing but what happens with aging is mitophagy slows down biogenesis slows down and so you basically shifting that balance towards all damage mitochondria and so what we see is mitophagy is the actual trigger to clean out that waste almost like the Pac-Man of cleaning up shows up and cleans the waste and now that is recycled and and triage and put back as recycling in a building blocks of near-healthy mitochondria which is biogenesis in many ways okay so like in an ideal scenario you're exercising you're fasting you're doing things for mitochondrial biogenesis yep you're getting some fuel in with things like NAD creatine healthy diet etc for the mitochondrial efficiency

40:14and then for the mitophagy you're introducing a component like your elithinate yeah and and that is is actually I described it one after the other but I think think of a little town right or think of a little town where you have x amount of buildings you can have unless you clean the damage buildings or the damage portion out you can really build new stuff and that's what my toppagy or a toppagy is you have to clean out the damaged cell that damaged cellular machinery and that again gives way to real estate and now you can do the building box so we have thought about we've combined uralitin we've tested in different models of aging where we've combined exercise with uralitinate we get a better augmented response we've combined calorie restriction with uralitinate supplementation we've got a better response you've actually done now two or three randomized trials and athletes where people are training and and they're finding in in these

41:16different trials some of them are published some are not that uralitinate actually augments even the the the performance of exercise or the impact of exercise yeah that's actually what I wanted to ask you about because like three months ago you guys sent me the new rct I think it's called mitoimmune that's what got me interested in this whole topic of mitochondrial immune aging in the first place tell me about this rct yeah so this is you know this is a long collaboration with the two of the pioneers in the field of studying immune aging one is a professor Eric Guardan who's the CEO of the Bucking Street of Aging and has been studying immune health and the impact of immune aging and health span for the last 35 years and the other is actually a cancer researcher who many years back came to us and and and basically in different models of of cancer what he saw was that actually the immune system was failing and it was failing in part of what I was describing

42:19surveilling you know the the the cancer prone cells because of mitophage issues so mitophage decline and cancer incidents in in these models went up so he came to us and he said you've published and at that time you've just published the uralitinate was a mitophage agent and enhancing muscle health but he was very interested in using it as a way to sort of recharge the immune system in the fight against in these models of cancer and so he published actually two three years back actually when he first spoke in a in a very prestigious journal but it was an animal study in a in a model of colorectal cancer when he supplemented with with uralitinate he saw it he saw basically better immune system and more mitochondria in the immune cells that would then lead to sort of better cancer survival in in these models and so we said well we don't want to do cancer yet let's start and see what

43:19happens with this molecule in healthy middle-aged addles because we had seen the effects on muscle in middle-aged addles so we ran a trial where we selected from hundreds of people about 50-60 years of age they were a bit overweight some of them were exercising some were sedentary and we gave them we randomized them into two groups and now the way top tier clinical trials are done as you you do you have a control group a placebo group so we took 25 participants we gave them placebo and 25 participants we put them on a gram of of uralitinate mitochondria and and we did serial blood draws so we before they started the supplementation we took their blood and we ran something called as as complete immune profiling now this is not what your standard medical doctor will do but this is a technology that was from a small amount of blood I can profile all your immune cells in your body and there are trillions of them and I can see the immune age

44:23score of all these cells basically and so what this professor we are collaborating the the CEO of the Bucking Street of Aging Professor Warda he profiled them and what we saw was really shocking was that we almost saw the 50-year-old persons was healthy immune cells that were fatiguing that were inflamed they almost reversed back to probably what a 30-40-year-old persons immune system will look like and these when you see immune cells these are the T cells yeah so you okay you take the when you do a blood draw you get total blood cells and you can take the the red blood cells out and what you're left with is what we call white blood cells are leukocytes now these are you know they let's say the main cell immune cells in our body are the T cells they're about 10 to 20% of your immune cells then they're the B cells which make antibodies and and these are another 20-30 percent and then there are cells called neutrophils which are like you know the they're not the police

45:27but they are kind of the the first responders and so they kind of they they give the first shout-out to these immune cells and there's something called dendritic cells which are basically immune cells but with tentacles and they are always surveilling whatever infection or cancer you know prone cells are are lecturing around so we actually profile all of them and amazingly the mitochondria and all of them went up which means now the immune system has more energy to function but what struck was two kind of cells that are needed to fight cancers and are needed to or decline very fast and aging process these are the T cells these are the what we call the cytotoxic T cells they fight cancer they fight flu they fight any wires that you have growing up you have lots of them and as you age you kind of lose all of them and so we see them kind of coming back to the you know almost like a repopulating in the body and and and then the inflammation was much subdued in these people

46:30so these are the tricky findings from this trial you know a lot of people this just makes me think about this they whether for cancer or I mean I've done this just as almost like a longevity play they'll go overseas into a killer cell infusions how do you heard of this of course yeah so you know I didn't want to get too nerdy but we look at naturally called natural killer cells which is abbreviated to killer cells so the two main cells if your body just loses them your chance of getting cancer is like thousand full higher and that's these cytotoxic T cells and the killer cells the killer cells are about a percent to two percent in your body and we see them their mitochondria also getting recharged and we see the increase in what these end K cells are the natural killer cells inside the toxic so as an immunologist I think these are the two main cells you have and so of course what you are seeing today is if you go all the way to cancer treatment is two kind of therapies as you were saying NK cell or killer cell infusions

47:33or something called carticell infusion which is basically where you take a T cell and you are officially put the cancer sort of signal on it and then you inject it into the into the cancer patient and because then how they have seen it in a dish they'll multiply and they'll they'll love the cancer so these are the two main cells we're seeing the effects what's talk about your hair held hair held I should say is one of those things that quietly reflects what's happening beneath the surface stress recovery inflammation aging all of the tenses show up there eventually and instead of jumping straight to invasive treatments or complicated protocols you can try light therapy now I like those red light helmets but they're hard to take on the go on charge has a red light hat you heard me right a red light hat or as they call it a cap what makes this cap interesting is the technology in it uses targeted 650 nanometer red light designed

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49:36there you go work so well I spent 20 years measuring and optimizing everything about my body deep performance metrics cold stress heat stress sleep scores blood panels peptide protocols testosterone telemiers VO2 max you name it and somewhere in the middle of building what looked like a perfect life almost lost the life that I was building it for boundless the man who became human is a brand new feature documentary that follows what happened when the optimization framework that I spent two decades constructing ran headlong into the things that metrics could never measure my marriage my sons my face the private archive footage in this documentary has never been seen publicly some of it I debated even including at all it shows basically the worst of what happens

50:36when longevity becomes the ultimate goal and how you and I can turn that around to become fulfilled by what's truly important in life now this is not just another biohacking film it's an honest look at what it costs to chase the ceiling on human performance told through real footage of one family my family finding that out my new film boundless is out now on apple tv and amazon get it and prepare to be shocked about what goes on behind the scenes in the biohacking industry at boundless doc.com that's boundless doc.com I hope you'll be one of the first to watch it I want to definitely get into your history and how you got into longevity in the first place and and and all the little things that you're doing to be so high on the leaderboard on the rejuvenation Olympics but I don't know if you're familiar with this research or probably the foremost researcher who kind of has raised an eyebrow at endurance sports and the potential

51:41for things like atherosclerosis or arterial stiffness or excessive aging from excessive endurance exercise dr. James O'Keefe you know he certainly brought to light the idea that too much endurance exercise could cause a lot of inflammation or accelerate aging or cause arterial stiffness or you know or plaque build up or things that will like have you ever thought about that? oh yeah um I don't really think that endurance running is healthy for me it was something I do for charity so I I'm willing to take the hit for the cause but it's not something I do for my longevity but yet you seem to to be doing a pretty good job based on your your true age results despite that but you know originally back like in 2012 I think I learned this from you actually listening to one of your podcasts or probably reading one of your blogs back then um I learned about telomeres and how they shorten with age every time a cell divides and I learned about the telomere test that you could get so I got the test thinking that you know hey I'm going to be

52:44really in great shape it's going to come back and tell me I've got the telomeres of a 20 year old right I was just turning 50 I was just starting my first marathon so I was deep into the training that I was doing P90X I had a really stressful job I was taking care of both of my elderly parents who were battling cancer at the same time and I took this test and I said I had the telomeres of a 68 year old at age 50 and it was pretty shocked because that was not the results I was expecting uh yeah I ended up taking a um they had um you could make a consultation call with them and so I took the call because I wanted to find out what they're possibly they could tell me and one of the first things they asked me which puzzled me because they wanted to know about my lifestyle you know and at that point in my life I knew lifestyle mattered somewhat like you know what you eat how well you slept you know exercise was good but I guess I didn't understand the depths of which my lifestyle was causing me problems because as I started to explain to them about stressful job taking care of my

53:49parents doing P90X doing the marathon training they're like whoa whoa whoa stop right there we've seen this before we've seen this in endurance athletes that have very very short telomeres we've seen it in people who are caretakers same way we've seen it with people who have incredibly stressful jobs so basically they explained to me that the stress that I was putting myself under both you know emotionally and physically was eating me alive so they suggested that I start you know maybe looking into doing things like yoga and meditation things that I had been doing earlier in my life and I just completely forgotten about I mean you get busy the day-to-day life and you certain things fall on the floor and those were two of the things that I stopped doing so yeah for my sanity and for my health I had to start including more rest days I had to drop P90X while I was doing the marathon training get back into yoga more meditation a lot more sauna things that were better for my health

54:52and where did the the rejuvenation Olympics enter into the scene for you that was kind of by surprise because I didn't know anything about it when I was doing my true diagnostic testing I learned about true diagnostic again I suspect it might have been from you back in the day it was some podcast but it was probably you so I was using the valumus just another you know another marker for how I was performing like just devalidate that my supplementation was not causing me harm and was pointing things into proper direction so I just happened to have my third qualifying test when I became aware of the competition and I remember looking at my results and thinking wait a minute this this can't be right am I actually beating this this billionaire guy I'm thinking I must be misinterpreting the do you mean Brian Johnson yeah that guy yeah okay yeah and so I submitted my results thinking that

55:57they were just gonna come back and tell me no you're misinterpreting that you're not you're not beating Brian or it would have been that I was beating Brian and then the question was going to be will they actually you know publish a result if I'm beating them and to their credit they did right and and you you would question that just because I think he's involved with promotion of the Rejuvenation Olympics and I you know I know Brian I've interviewed him I think he's actually you know an ethical guy I'm thinking you would like tweak the results to ensure that you know so he gets some oil olive oil he'd appear towards the top of the charts it doesn't appear that he's he's doing that but you know similar to when I saw Julie Gibson's Julie Gibson Clark's results you know I saw yours I've met you a couple times you saw you down in Austin and I thought well gosh like you know he's he's definitely not getting young blood transfers but and you know still doing endurance training and you know climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and you know doing the things that you're doing so I thought it was very interesting that that your pace of aging is so low yeah I was very surprising to me as well I think even at my worst my pace of aging I think my

57:00highest test was maybe 0.8 I think it was right and what's your what's your best result for your age pace of 0.66 so for so for every year like if you take 365 days of every year you would only be aging for 0.66 of those days which comes out to what 250 you know rough math in my head 250 260 something days we get seven months we age seven months for every calendar year so we get the other months for free yeah how much of this do you think is contributed or how much of this is is attributed to genetics like what are your parents look like oh if you saw my family and I don't want to throw my family under the bus yeah I wouldn't say that any of us look particularly young in fact my family tends to be overweight on average although you know both my parents have since passed and they both lived to the ripe old age of 89 despite not exercising smoking drinking not eating well

58:08so I don't deny that there's some good genetics there you're not really into like the calorie restriction thing no not at all not at all in fact my friends make fun of me when we go out to restaurants because I will order two meals I eat like a pig I don't count calories but usually when I'm eating at home or even when I'm eating out the very first meal that I have is an enormous salad so I'm stuffing myself on you know vegetables to start with then I'll usually follow that up with a meat and maybe some carbs but the meat would be you know condiment size portions so I like to say I have a favorite restaurant it's just ford's garage locally the first thing I'll get is a berries and gorgonzola salad with shrimp and it's huge it's a meal in itself it's larger than my head maybe two of my head put together and I'll eat that first and then people are like wow you you really killed that and like yeah that's only my first meal then I ordered the mushroom Swiss

59:08burger with avocado and an egg sunny side up and then yeah I killed that usually get like a side of either their mac and cheese or from really behaving it's just a big side of broccoli well I see a lot of restaurant menus that right there that you just described is probably pushing around three thousand calories for a meal that wouldn't be surprised yeah yeah yeah okay so so why is it that you you aren't on the same kind of like calorie restriction bandwagon as a lot of these folks you know you can Brian Johnson when I interviewed him I think he said you know every calorie has a fight for his life what is it about your protocol that inspires you to just kind of eat ad libido honestly I don't know I really don't know um I think it's because I'm just so physically active during the day that I'm burning a lot of those calories and so I know my I know my metabolism is fast because of that all right another thing I found out about you Dave is you've got pretty decent testosterone levels but to my understanding at least as far as I know you're not using testosterone replacement therapy that's true that's true so when I started looking at my markers I noticed

1:00:13like my DHA and my pregnant alone were a little low compared to what I thought they should have been for a healthy collegiate athlete so I began supplementing with those and I think for for folks that know things about hormones they know that those are upstream precursors of testosterone and estrogen and if you supplement the upstream precursors you're gonna get boosts in those downstream hormones and I saw a pretty good size you know um increase in my testosterone from doing that I also saw that from just getting out and running I got a really nice kick in my testosterone so I get frustrated when friends of mine tell me that you know they just go right to their doctor and get testosterone replacement and their doctor didn't even check any of those things and they didn't try any of those things first yeah addressing the lifestyle and other supplementation factors what what are your levels at by the way do you know what your total

1:01:15or your free levels are at approximately um like so I don't know this month but I check usually every month and my range from like in 2023 went from about 809 to like 1295 I think it was oh holy calmer a TRT free 61-row that's that's really yeah do you want free access to comprehensive show notes my weekly round up newsletter cutting edge research and articles top recommendations from me for everything that you need to have your life in a whole lot more check out then greenfieldlight.com it's all there then greenfieldlife.com see you over there most of you who listen don't subscribe like or rate this show if you're one of those people would do then huge thank you but here's why it's important to subscribe like and or rate this show if you do that that means we get more eyeballs we get higher rankings and the bigger the Ben Greenfield Life Show gets the bigger and better the guest get and the better the content I'm

1:02:20able to deliver to you so hit subscribe leave a ranking leave a review if you got a little extra time it means way more than you might think thank you so much