Your Arteries Are Rusting — Here’s How to Reverse It | Dr. Chris Davis

we talk about oxidative stress, but there was not a whole lot of good ways to measure oxidative and nitrosative stress. Well, now there are urine tests that we can measure oxidative damage and nitrosative damage markers. And what I see in my practice right now is everything we've been talking about. We see all the oxidative stress markers, but we see just as many nitrosative stress metabolites of this peroxynitrite, 3-nitrotyrosine. I mean, we see all these things that are extremely elevated. And so now we have something that, and all of our modalities that we're looking at to kind of promote longevity, well, we should be looking at these things that are gonna help diminish some of this oxidative and nitrosative stress. So now I have something that I'm looking at to make sure what I'm doing is working, making sure that getting rid of the toxins and the detox programs and using hyperbaric oxygen is actually lowering all these nitrosative and oxidative stress marks.

Hey there, I'm Claudia von Boeselager, a former investment banker turned entrepreneur, longevity coach, biohacker, and mother of two. Once burnt out and overwhelmed with chronic health issues, I've transformed my life and helped thousands of people do the same. I've even reduced my biological age by 17 years. Yes, I'm 26 again. Now I'm here to share the tools, strategies, and inspiration to help you live healthier, happier, and longer. On this podcast, I interview world-leading experts in health, biohacking, mindset, and performance. And share personal stories and learnings to bring you the latest insights and tips. Think of this as your go-to space for real talk about all things health and optimizing your life. Ready to unlock your best self? Let's dive in. This is the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast.

My guest today is Dr. Christopher Davis, a triple board-certified cardiologist whose work sits at the intersection of vascular health, longevity medicine, detoxification, and prevention. I'm also joined for this conversation by my Lumara Collective co-founders, Ashley Madsen, a repeat guest, and Alexander Cochran. Together, we lead Lumara, a global longevity and biohacking consultancy and platform working with individuals, clinics, and organizations to design evidence-based, outcome-driven longevity strategies. Dr. Davis trained at institutions including Duke University, the NIH, John Hopkins, Sinai, and the University of Virginia. Dr. Davis spent over a decade in interventional cardiology treating acute life-threatening disease. Over time, he recognized a critical limitation in conventional medicine. While exceptional at crisis intervention, it often arrives far too late to preserve long-term vitality, performance, and healthspan. Today, Dr. Davis serves as chief cardiologist at Human and founder and CEO of Reveal Vitality and Longevity Institute, where he integrates advanced vascular diagnostics, environmental medicine, detoxification science, and functional cardiology to uncover root causes of metabolic decline. His work focuses on nitric oxide signaling, mitochondrial resilience, oxidative stress, and environmental toxin burden, helping patients not just avoid disease, but actively reverse risk trajectory and age with strength, clarity, and resilience. Please enjoy. Welcome to the Longevity and Lifesub Podcast, Dr. Chris. It's such a pleasure to have you with us today, and we're in full force as the full Lumara team.

Excited to be here.

Amazing. So Chris, you've trained at the highest levels of conventional cardiology. When did you first sense that something fundamental was missing in how we approach cardiovascular health and maybe even health in general and aging?

Yeah, probably 7 or 8 years into practice, I started to realize that I kind of felt like my cardiology practice was a revolving door. I'm an interventional cardiologist by training, and, you know, initially when somebody comes back 6 months later or, you a year later and we have this issue of what we call instant restenosis or the stent that we put in closes back up. And it was just kind of part of what we were taught. This is, it happens sometimes. And same thing with people having a heart attack. They're taking their medications and their statins and their beta blocker, but they will still come back. And after a while of kind of doing that for 5, 6 years and realizing that the same people will come back all the time and we were— when I was doing what I was taught to do, But yet the outcomes really wasn't— they weren't what I was expecting as far as really people starting to get better. And then I also started to kind of really feel like there was a push on the system to do more procedures, to do— I mean, just prescribing this, I kind of found myself spending 5 minutes in a room and prescribing the medication. You know, it didn't take long for me to realize that, okay, this is not really what I thought it was. It wasn't really what I signed up for. More and kind of being in the space of kind of health and wellness and fitness myself, I realized that I really wasn't teaching my patients what they needed to know. And I also realized that I didn't know all of the things that I really should be teaching them. And so 5 or 6 years into the practice, I started to kind of just kind of get my feet wet with kind of learning more about nutrition and learning more about how to approach these patients and just kind of little by little introducing it. I started to see, okay, this is now starting to make a difference when I start to teach you about gluten in your diet and using other specific diets, elimination diets and things like that. You start to see people get better simply by giving them vitamin D and fish oil. Once you see that starting to happen, I started to question like, man, what am I doing? Is there, is there more to this? And then, you know, you open that rabbit hole and you start to see, I think the biggest change came for me when keto kind of came to the forefront and a lot of big organizations, big doctors were using it. There's a doctor at Duke using it, Eric Westman, I think his name was, was doing a lot of keto diet and they were reversing diabetes. Right. And so as a cardiologist, we deal with a lot of diabetic And I'm starting to see that we're telling the people to eat all this fat and their diabetes is reversing. And so, you know, that's turning everything I learned as a cardiologist on its head. And so I really dove into that space with respect to the medicine part of it, but I also dove into it on my whole fitness journey. And I started to do it myself. I started a keto diet and I think really, and, and this is not to say that things have changed for me now. I wanna preface this, that keto diet is not right for everybody. Keto diet is not something you do all the time. When I did it, it was the most amazing body transition that I've ever seen. And I was doing, and I was doing exactly things that I would never do before. Normally I'm eating rice and chicken breasts, but now I'm eating the chicken skin and more saturated fat than I've ever eaten in my life. And I look better. I mean, from a body composition perspective, it was absolutely the most amazing thing I have ever seen. And then that honestly was the wake up for me. Like, okay, I got to learn more about all this stuff. Right. And then it was off to the races. And then that's how it all started. And then we end up where we are today.

And we'll dive into that too. And I just want to preface for people trying to do the keto diet, it can go wrong. There are certain percentages in terms of the healthy good fats to protein to carbohydrate. And if you mess with that a bit, it can lead to gout. And I've seen people kind of go wrong and have other issues with it too. But I agree with you. And I think doing it at certain phases is really phenomenal. Like you wake up with this mental clarity and sharpness because of the ketones. It's amazing. And you get to eat food at the same time, so it's not just via fasting.

Honestly, today I don't recommend the keto diet without doing genetic testing. I feel very strongly about that. You can take your chances, okay, but there are a certain group of people who will have issues with the ketogenic diet, uh, and their oxidized LDL, a truly bad cholesterol, um, will go up. Your inflammatory markers, especially inflammation markers, will get worse. Your cholesterol may very well go through the roof. Certain groups that we do have to be careful with. Same thing with people that are doing carnivore diet. You really, really, really, really need to be careful with those and don't just start it. There are some very clear high-impact genes that you're going to have a problem. I have multiple, multiple cases that I can show you that if you have an APOE4 genotype or ACE genotype or TCF7 genotype, it's going to be problematic. It's going to be problematic and this happens over and over. Okay. In fact, you will end up, and this is something that you will end up with high triglycerides on an all meat diet. And how does that happen? Like I've seen this multiple times now, right? People will say, okay, I'm eating a carnivore diet and their triglycerides, they come in and it's 400. Guess what?

Wow.

That's TCF 702. I've seen it so many times now that, and it happens routinely. So using nutrigenomics is incredibly important. I mean, I use it in every single patient, not just for diet, but for everything that I do, to be honest with you. But, but anyways, we'll talk about that a little bit later. I mean, I just wanna throw that in for the ketones, the ketogenic diet diet part. I mean, you can go wrong with it. Yes, I had a great response personally, and, and most people who do ketogenic diet that are diabetics, they will do great. There is a subsection, and I learned this the hard way because I jumped on it. I did it for everybody, and I damn near killed some patients probably. And once you see that as the doctor, right, you realize that, wait a minute, it's not a one-size-fits-all.

No.

Okay.

As is so many things. So when I look at longevity biohacks that fail without vascular health, right, longevity today is often framed around biohacks, supplements, peptides, devices. Why does compromised vascular health quietly undermine almost all of them? And why should people be really focusing on vascular health as part of the longer, bigger equation?

Yeah, I'm going to give you a very short answer to that question. You think about everything that we do from a biohacking perspective, and a lot of it focuses on improving mitochondrial function, right? I mean, if we look at a lot of the peptides, if we look at hyperbaric oxygen, if we look at, you know, a lot of the supplements that are out there that we're looking at, they're actually to improve mitochondrial function because we know mitochondrial function is really the key to longevity. It, it, it's also the root of all chronic illnesses. So if we look at what the mitochondria need to function normally, like I said, I wanna make it really simple, right? We need oxygen at the end of that electron transport chain to make ATP for the mitochondria to function normally. And how is oxygen delivered to tissues? How is oxygen delivered to those mitochondria? Through the vasculature. So if the vasculature is impaired, right, if the endothelium is impaired, if the vessels are stiff, if the microcirculation is impaired, guess what doesn't happen? Oxygen doesn't get to those mitochondria. So we have lack of mitochondria or poor mitochondrial function. And that's the answer to why we can do all these things. But if we can't improve blood flow and oxygen delivery to the tissues, then we've missed the forest for the trees trying to— we're stabilizing mitochondria, using SS31, doing all these things. But we don't get blood to the, to the mitochondria. So that's a very simple answer to that.

And where would you recommend people get started? Because everyone is like jumping on the trends and they need to take this supplement or try this biohack. But what would be the foundation that you would recommend? And not everyone might be able to have access to a longevity clinician or what it might be, but what are some of the basics where everyone should be looking at first?

Well, I'll, I'll say obviously I'm somewhat biased because I'm a cardiologist, but I would tell you that the most important thing to realize when we talk about vascular health It's making sure that we have appropriately functioning nitric oxide, nitric oxide causing vasodilation and delivering oxygen to the tissues. I don't want to get too scientific today, but I think that we all know about nitric oxide from the perspective of vasodilation and helping deliver blood to the tissue. But more importantly, nitric oxide is the mitochondrial rheostat. I mean, it controls metabolism because nitric oxide actually binds to cytochrome c oxidase., right? And that's part of the electron transport chain, and it actually competes with oxygen in, in the, in the electron transport chain. Nobody really gets into the depths of the science of that. So nitric oxide is that mechanism that actually controls how we utilize energy. And so when we talk about where do we start, it's making sure that our endothelium is functioning normally so that it produces adequate amounts of nitric oxide. That's where I would say we start. And I don't think that's where we've all focused. Again, I, I'm the chief cardiologist of Human, is this a company that makes nitric oxide supplements.. But I got led into this, you know, you can call me biased from that perspective, but what I'm saying is I had to learn all this stuff about nitric oxide. And what I ended up learning is that, holy cow, this nitric oxide is much more important than we thought it was. I mean, and it also can be much more detrimental, which we can talk about in a little bit as well. When nitric oxide levels are extremely high, made by inducible nitric oxide synthase, which has totally been overlooked, that can be more problematic as well. And we'll talk about that and what causes this inducible nitric oxide to be upregulated. But making Making sure nitric oxide is functioning normally is what I would say.

Why don't we start with the nitric oxide, I think, before we touch on other, like, detoxification pathways and things like that too. So can you expand on that? And maybe for some people not that familiar, they've maybe heard the term nitric oxide, but like, what is actually happening there? And how do you get to optimal levels? And what are dangerous levels, right? And, and triggers for that?

So nitric oxide is a gas that we make in the body. It's a gas that actually has a fairly short half-life. And the primary role of it, it's made by the endothelial cells, the inner lining of all of our blood vessels. Vessel, vessels, it makes nitric oxide. And nitric oxide helps to kind of keep the vessels nice and compliant, stretchy. Blood pressure-wise, one of the leading or driving factors behind high blood pressure or blood pressure that's elevated is that the vessel is very stiff. If you could imagine you have a blood vessel and the same amount of blood is going through that vessel, but the vessel, if the vessel's stiff, the pressure in the artery is higher, right? That's high blood pressure, hypertension. But if the vessel is nice and compliant, the pressure in that artery, the same velocity of blood, the same amount of blood, the pressure in that artery is much less. So nitric oxide is a very important factor or molecule in blood pressure control. And in fact, many people have low nitric oxide levels, which is driving some of their hypertension issues. And some of those people actually have higher incidence of genetic variants in a gene, an enzyme that makes nitric oxide called endothelial nitric oxide nitric oxide synthase. That is the gene that makes an enzyme protein that actually makes nitric oxide. And there are lots of factors that you need to make nitric oxide. For example, I think if anybody, people that are listening know that arginine is an amino acid that typically gets converted to nitric oxide, but there are many other cofactors that are needed to take that arginine to nitric oxide. And in fact, if you are missing a lot of those cofactors, then arginine doesn't end up as nitric oxide, it can be more problematic because that enzyme becomes what we call uncoupled. And when that enzyme is uncoupled, it produces more issues with reactive oxygen species or more oxidative stress markers. Okay. And again, I'm not sure, I don't want to get too much into the weeds, but suffice it to say, if you don't have enough cofactors, vitamin C and another factor called tetrahydrobiopterin, then you can't take arginine and make nitric oxide. And the things that interfere with that are a lot of the infections and toxins in the environment, particularly metals and plastics and things like that. They interfere with a lot of these cofactors, and then that enzyme doesn't work normally, so we don't make nitric oxide normally. One of the things that I think is incredibly important to denote is that I talked about endothelial nitric oxide synthase, but there are two other types of nitric oxide synthase, and one of them is neuronal nitric oxide synthase, and the other one is inducible nitric oxide synthase, iNOS. I have been on a quest for the last couple of years, and the last 2 years I've given talks at A4M on iNOS, inducible nitric oxide synthase, and its production of nitric oxide, because it produces nitric oxide at orders of magnitude higher than eNOS. So you would think, well, gosh, it's producing lots of nitric oxide, that should be a good thing, right? Well, when we start to produce too much nitric oxide, Okay, that nitric oxide can then end up combining with one of these rusty, um, what we call reactive oxygen species called superoxide. And superoxide's made when the mitochondria are inefficient, uh, when we're exposed to toxins. But when that nitric oxide ends up combining with superoxide, we produce something called peroxynitrite. Okay. Mm-hmm. That's an important word I think all of us need to pay very close attention to because it has not been talked about very much. But peroxidase nitrite is a very, very powerful oxidative stressor and nitrosative stressor. What does that mean? What is oxidative stress? What's nitrosative stress? I tell all my patients, it just means getting rusty inside. As we get older, we get rusty, and that rust is caused by oxidative stress, right? Think about a pipe of a 200-year-old house, and in that metal pipe, over the years, there gets this orange buildup over layer upon layer, layer upon layer upon layer, and that layer is just layers of rust. It's like the pipes in London. The pipes of that house are getting rusty, and as we get older, the pipes in our body are getting rusty, right? And so I think about oxidative stress, and when you use that analogy, people start to understand, man, I'm getting rusty, and how do I prevent this rust buildup?

And how do I clear it out, right?

Right.

How do we clear it out? So anyways, peroxynitrite is a very powerful oxidative and nitrosative stress molecule, and that is one of the things we need to be thinking about. How do we minimize this oxidative stress by peroxynitrite, and what do we need to be doing to prevent that? And what's causing it? And what do we need to do to help prevent what's causing it? And we can actually measure those things. Now, what I'm super excited about, we talk about oxidative stress, but there was not a whole lot of good ways to measure oxidative and nitrosative stress. Well, now there are blood tests or urine tests actually that we can measure oxidative damage and nitrosative damage markers.. And what we see, what I see in my practice right now is everything we've been talking about. We see all the oxidative stress markers, but we see just as many nitrosative stress metabolites of this peroxynitrite, 3-nitrotyrosine. I mean, we see all these things that are extremely elevated. And so now we have something that— and all of our modalities that we're looking at to kind of promote longevity, well, we should be looking at these things that are going to help diminish some of this oxidative and nitrosative stress. So now I have something that I'm looking at to make sure what I'm doing is working, right? Making sure that getting rid of the toxins and the detox programs and using hyperbaric oxygen is actually lowering all these nitrosative and oxidative stress markers. And that's been super helpful because, I mean, the number of people with heart disease, 100%, we see all these oxidative nitrosative lipid peroxidation models. Lipid peroxidation is rusty cholesterol, right? We all worry about our cholesterol, but cholesterol by itself does not cause heart disease, does not cause vascular disease, but rusty cholesterol does, right? So if we can measure lipid peroxides, the rusty cholesterol, now we know where these people are who truly have the higher risk, all right? And so that's something that I see over and over again. Lipid peroxide's elevated, and that's— I mean, the disease is progressing. We got to figure out what we need to do to actually help improve the lipid peroxides.

Maybe you can talk about some of the protocols and things that you recommend. So once that diagnostic tests are done and run, and if it is present, then what would be the steps that you typically recommend?

Well, typically the way I kind of even backed into this whole thing, and a lot of people who've heard me talk before, I talk a lot about environmental toxins. I talk a lot about metals and plastics and pesticides and herbicides, VOCs, mycotoxins, and the nitrosative and oxidative stress panels, they weren't available initially. So I was just kind of measuring all these toxins and I saw that all the toxins were an issue. Now, you know, you see that the toxins are issue, you see that the oxidative stress and nitrosative stress markers are high, and then we need to remove, we need to figure out, okay, is there ongoing exposure to all of these things that I've just talked about? And if there is, then it's about kind of removing and making sure water sources are clean, making sure that people are eating clean, organic, non-processed food that doesn't have all those pesticides and herbicides, making sure that all the people on the golf courses, I say this because I live in Florida and it is absolutely amazing. The pesticides and herbicides and how they are wreaking havoc on lots of people with all kinds of chronic illnesses, not just heart disease. I'm talking about Parkinson's, I'm talking about cancer, all of it. And it's not, it's not difficult to find. I mean, I promise you, if you do the environmental toxin tests, it's not hard to find. It's not hard to find at all. And now after 3 years of kind of, again, my practice has turned in kind of this I get a lot of people with a lot of chronic illnesses and not just heart disease now, but I really work off the premise of a lot of the environmental toxins are causing a lot of this. So, you remove the toxins and there are multiple different detox protocols we use. I mean, I use just detox protocols that include things like charcoal, bentonite clay, humic fulvic acid. One of the biggest things that I employ is sauna. I'm the probably— I tell my staff and joke about it, I probably could be a sauna salesman right now. Because of the benefits of sauna. And it's not just the detoxification.

You have one in your office. I saw it with my own eyes. I got to tour your amazing office and I thought, this is the only physician that I've seen in cardiology especially who uses sauna directly with his patients when you are even doing testing. Yeah. Which is really unique and amazing, to be honest.

Yeah.

Infrared sauna or regular sauna? Well, you know, there's data on both of those. I like infrared sauna cuz I think there is some data with infrared actually stimulating mitochondrial biogenesis. I don't know if there, there probably is dry sauna data out there too. Certainly the dry sauna was where a lot of the Finnish data came from in the first place. But the infrared data is actually coming fast and furious as well. The Japanese call the infrared sauna wayon therapy. And so a lot of that data is coming fast and furious. So I don't know if one is better than the other. I'll be honest with you. There, there may be some people who kind of really into this that can kind of speak on that, but I use infrared sauna in my office and we're getting great results. So I've just kind of stuck with it. Now, if a person doesn't have access to infrared sauna, I'm not going to tell you not to use a dry sauna. The detox protocols that I use are much— and I choose my detox protocols, meaning supplements and IVs and stuff like that, based on— I know how much this patient— do they have a sauna at home? Are they using sauna 5 days a week, or are they using sauna once a month, twice a month? I'll choose my detox protocol based on how much they're using the sauna. If they're using the sauna 5, 7 days a week, I'm a lot more conservative on how much charcoal and how many days a week we're doing, how many IVs I'm giving them, because I've seen the sauna work, right?

But what's the optimal protocol? Because someone might be listening and they might be here 7 days a week. Like, I'm not from Finland.

How is this possible? What would you say? I think it depends on the patient, but I, I think that I tell my, I tell my patients, I, I would use, and personally, I use a sauna 6, 7 days a week.

Wow.

I did my own toxin panel and I was appalled. But I think that, I mean, I tell, I mean, so I instruct my patients, if you have a sauna, I mean, I would recommend at least 5 days a week. I mean, I think the Finnish data showed that 4 to 5 days a week that your chances of a myocardial event or cardiovascular event were about 50% less if you use a sauna 4 to 5 days a week than using it once or twice a week. The neurocognitive data, there was about a 60% difference if you use a sauna 4 to 5 times a week. That's pretty compelling.

That's pretty compelling evidence. Dr. Chris, what would you say? Because, you know, a lot of people do sauna and they don't feel well afterwards, right? Because they're not under medical guidance.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. With saying that, can you go a little bit into some of the biggest mistakes that you're seeing with people doing deep? Cause you know, it's very trendy right now. And we see that people are not really working with clinicians. They're doing things on their own in many different areas of medicine right now. And so can you just you know, elaborate a little bit on that?

Absolutely. I mean, it's a fantastic question. And so let me go back and clean up this 6 or 7 days a week thing. I'm absolutely not. Okay. Yeah. Let me go back and clean that up.

Okay. It's detox the 6, 7 days a week.

Is that? Yeah. I'm absolutely not gonna put somebody who is super toxic and out of the gate, right, on 6 to 7 days a week of sauna. No. Okay. Because their body will not be able to tolerate mobilizing those toxins like that. Right? We mobilize the toxins. They have to go to the liver and go through all the phases of detoxification. You're not gonna be— you're gonna be sicker. You're gonna feel miserable, right? So the first part of it all is you have to prepare the body for this whole detoxification. You have to make sure the micronutrients are adequate. And that doesn't mean a juice cleanse. Yeah, right. And it doesn't mean a juice cleanse. You have to make sure the microbiome is— and the gut is working normally, right? You can't detoxify and get toxins out if the gut's not working normally. So I said that we kind of just kind of threw that 6 to 7 days out there, but that's after a lot of Prep, that's a lot of prep work and knowing that you can tolerate. So, I typically will start, particularly somebody who's very toxic, I will start them at once or twice a week for 10 minutes. So, just so that we can kind of gradually get them into it while at the same time making sure that we're giving them all the micronutrients they need for their liver and detoxification protocols, herbal remedies that help upregulate Nrf2 to produce glutathione. So, you have to prepare the person 4, and I, and I really, I make that judgment just on one. I call it, and I work with Neil Nathan who does a lot of the mold and Lyme work, and he called it the constitution of the patient, right? The constitution of the, if you got a patient that is sickly, so to speak, okay, you're not going to do some type of aggressive detox protocol because you know they're not going to tolerate it, right? But if you have somebody who is more of a robust constitution, then you can be a little more aggressive. So I don't have a one size, this is the protocol. This is where the art of medicine comes in, to be honest with you, right? You make those decisions based on the patient you have in front of you, how they're presenting, the rest of those labs, and what, what you think their overall resilience is, right? How much stress, how much we, I call it the stress bucket. How much of that stress bucket do they have? A little bit more room in the stress bucket? Is the stress bucket already overflowing? So you make the choices on any therapy you do, right? Any oxidative therapy you do, you have to be careful and know where that person is and making that decision. And Dr. Chris, binders always before? I do. I mean, I use binders. Well, actually, and I may be wrong about this and maybe you guys could I actually use the binders after I've mobilized. So I tell people if they use a sauna in the morning or whatever, I have them use the binders in the evening time when they go to bed. I don't know if you guys want to comment on that. What do you think about that? Tell me, because I, and I don't know, I've read both ways, but I actually use it afterwards. Would love to hear Ashley's opinion on that.

Say before. You know, I'm, I'm big into setting up the terrain. So for me, I always hit cell membrane and gut microbiome and make sure that they're able to move. And they actually get it out of their body because there are a lot of people that I work with who actually don't sweat well. And so I'm like, we have to set them up. So I make sure like their, their cell membranes, we, and I agree with you 100%, mitochondrial function, all of that is so important. And I tend to use binders after. And, you know, I'm very cautious about when we use them because a lot of our patients, you and I both, we have them on very targeted supplementation. They're on certain medications, potentially thyroid medication. Potentially all those types of things. But I usually will use a binder afterwards. It depends again on the type of treatment. So if we're doing an ozone sauna and I have a patient who's like on a Lyme protocol or MS or something like that, I tend to have them do a binder within 30 to 60 minutes and then again later on. Because what I tend to see is some people are super sensitive and they end up getting hives. Mm-hmm. They'll get skin reactions. So I, again, depends on the person. I agree with you. Everything has to be personalized. And, you know, we can say generalized statements, but I have people who can literally— they're doing an ozone sauna 3, 4 times a week and they have no problems whatsoever. And then I have another person who does it once and they break out, they have migraines, they feel terrible. So I agree with you. I usually use the binders sometimes at night, again, because we think about how the body regenerates in the liver and also the different types of phase. And then for some people, especially in the beginning, I tend to do it 30 to 60 minutes right after to scoop it up. And then, um, you know, we, we go from there. But I agree with you, Dr. Chris, like every single person in front of you, and I also do genomic testing.

Yeah.

Yeah. So for me it's like I need to understand what's going on. I need to see what you're, you know, I have to look at all the things. We look at your antibody levels for thyroid. We gotta look at all these things cuz you know, most people who are coming in are not with just one thing. They've got a series of history of co-infections. They've got stuff under the hood with lids on, you know, the lids of the pots are on, but they're starting to bubble. And, you know, you unroof one thing and all of a sudden their Epstein-Barr virus comes back and it's like their mold, their heavy metals, right? So what I like to say, especially with you, is what you said is that please, like, if you want to do a detox protocol and you don't feel well, work with someone who's trained because, you know, I think you and I probably have heard horror stories where people go and they do things and they don't have a way to actually dispel, like they do these these chelations or they're doing these really heavy detoxes and they're not actually getting rid of the toxins or just mobilizing them. And then they're circulating in the body. And the same thing with the fat tissue. What I saw is that a lot of people went on these very significant weight loss journeys. A lot of the toxins are stored in our fat tissue. All of a sudden they're losing weight. There's no support and they're not obviously doing the other things that we talk about that we care about— resistance training and blood work and all of these things. And all of a sudden they're like, I feel horrible.

I feel horrible.

And what people don't understand is a lot of toxins are actually stored in your fat tissue. So I agree with you. I think binders are amazing. There are different types of binders. Certain ones are more powerful. I love Dr. Nathan. I love that you talked about him. That was one of my favorite books ever reading as a young clinician, but he has a great book specifically talking about toxins and different, different ways to actually clean up and pull them out and use different binders for your different patients. So that's my, experience?

I think that one of the things that I'll comment, go back to the genomics again, and I'll say, you know, genes are not your destiny. Okay? So I don't want anybody listening to think that, okay, the genetics is everything, right? Genes are not your destiny. However, they really give us a great idea for propensities. And so when you think about, you know, how somebody's gonna respond, when you look at all the glutathione genetics, GS, GSTM, GSTA1, GSTT1, and then glutathione peroxidase, you look at the SUOX genes, man, you get a, you have a much better understanding of what potentially can happen. The HNMT, histamine and methyltransferase, how you break down histamines. The people who are gonna have mast cell issues are gonna be HNMT and DAO gene variants. And you, you can tell what's going on and you know what you need to support, right? So, so I've really become really, the genetic part of this for me is again, I, the genes are not everything, but they give you so much information and understanding on how to approach specific patients. I mean, I mean, so much.

Yeah. I think about it is like, oh, there's a potential pothole at exit 35. There's a potential this.

Yeah.

And if you It's like what I, you know, I agree with you because there's so much regarding epigenetics and then also, you know, understanding does someone is like, you know, how many SNPs or what's the polygenomic picture? So because everyone kind of harps on one, you know, SNP like MTHFR and I'm like MTHFR is huge, like 1298, 677. Do you have MTRR? Do you have CBS? And I'm so glad you brought up APOE4 because what I used to see is like people used to have, you know, this and they would obviously it's very scary, right? But like, are you looking at their inflammatory? Are you looking at IL-6? Are you looking at, you know, all of these areas that, you know, all of the genes that you were talking about? Because again, it tells us, are you walking on the train tracks and the train is coming down at you, or are we kind of walking along the train tracks and we potentially could get on the train tracks or off the train? You know, like it helps us as clinicians to say, where, how aggressive do I need to be? And maybe I want to choose this versus that for that person. And the same thing with like, I mean, I'd love to hear a little bit about your thoughts on like Lp(a). Yeah. Because again, a lot of people will say, do I still put them on the statin? Do I use the PCSK9 inhibitor? Mm-hmm. Do I put them on a baby aspirin? You know, there's so much when we look at genomics, right? It's like, well, where do I pivot and how do I take myself off of the algorithmic conventional medicine track where everyone gets the same exact medication at the same starting dose?. But when you have all of these other polygenomic picture issues, how do you actually, from the cardiometabolic standpoint, really optimize someone and reverse their trajectory?

Yeah, exactly. Great question. The Lp(a) question is a really good question. What I, what I would say to you about that and how my approach to Lp(a), man, we know that is one of the risks. I mean, that is a true risk for vascular disease, thrombotic disease, atherothrombotic disease, particularly the thrombotic component. I'll say this, when I see Lp(a) that's elevated, the first thing that I'm doing is I'm making sure that everything else that I can control pretty easily, i.e., homocysteine, i.e., when fibrinogen levels are up, I'm looking for the other, what other things are going to cause increased risk of thrombosis that I want to make sure I'm not adding, I'm not adding this kind of LP(a) with the homocysteine being high and fibrinogen being high and you're on testosterone and your hematocrit is 60, I'm asking for a problem there, right? So you want to make sure that you're looking at all these other pieces that may contribute to a thrombotic event. And so I'm making sure that we get all those things squared away first. And then with the LP(a) itself, as far as lowering LP(a), I think we have a lot more to learn about LP(a). One, because Not all Lp(a) is created equal, number one. I mean, there's something called kringle domains, and some of it implies more issues with atherothrombosis than others. So we, we have some pieces still to learn. Specific gene SNPs of Lp(a) are higher risk in different patient populations, i.e., Chinese have some increased risk with SNP RS number, and European Americans don't. There, there are a lot of pieces here that I don't think we've quite figured out yet. As far as lowering it, have not seen PCSK9 inhibitors certainly have been the only thing that I've seen fair reduction in the Lp(a) statins.

The new one that's coming out, I think it's an oral version, right? And it's still in clinical trials, but that one I saw was pretty impressive.

Well, there's 3 medications in trials right now, and I got a couple patients that are in the trials and they clearly got the medicines. I had one guy who had an Lp(a) 3, 330-something. Um, and this one, that's extremely high for people that are listening. And he enrolled in this trial and within 3 weeks that Lp(a) level was 30.

Okay.

Wow. Now, now these are the type of trials though that, you know, we're looking at now. Now we know they're, they're, this is, they in phase, I think all 3 of them in phase 3 now. But we have to, one, we have to now make sure that, okay, are we gonna see outcomes just because the number went down, right? Okay. And then also, like, just like with all the medications that actually raised HDL, I mean, there was a ton of medicines. We used to think LDL is a good cholesterol, and they were trying to come up with all these products that actually worked on CETP that increased HDL, and they all caused all these liver issues, and not one of them ever made it to the market, right? So now we gotta look at this whole Lp(a) thing and say, okay, they're like plummeting the Lp(a), but what's the long-term safety trajectory of these? I don't know right now, medication-wise. What I do with it is I try to normalize everything else. There was a lot of talk about high-dose vitamin C lowering Lp(a), and I've tried that. And this is why I say I think we don't know the whole story about it. And I've seen some significant improvements in Lp(a) with high doses of vitamin C, but then I've seen just as many, probably more, that really don't respond to it. Now, I read a lot of Jim Roberts' work, who's a cardiologist who does a lot of integrative stuff, and he has written a bunch of articles. If you go to YouTube, you'll You'll see long lectures on Lp(a) and using high-dose vitamin C. I did not see tremendous drops in Lp(a) with high-dose vitamin C. I mean, routinely. Okay.

I just haven't seen it.

Kidney stones.

I see kidney stones with, with high-dose vitamin C. Do you know how many of my patients came in? They went to these clinics and they got these big vitamin C IVs and ended up with stones because they didn't test. And so many issues. Yes, I agree with you, but everything. Has an upstream and downstream effect. We just don't know what's the risk versus the benefit. But I love that because that is a huge trending topic about Lp(a) and how much insurance companies are dictating how clinicians can actually treat it or treat their patients. And so the big question was always like, okay, well, do you still put them on the statin potentially? I mean, obviously I know you believe in coronary CAT scans and plaque, looking at calcium. And are you big into looking at the soft plaque as well? Like, in these scans, like, clearly, let's talk about— that's why I I love talking to you.

I could talk to you all day. This is a really important salient feature here because we're now in an age where we don't have to guess about coronary disease and we don't have to guess about whether you have calcified plaque or non-calcified plaque or even what we call the low-density, I call it sticky plaque, right? The sticky plaque is the plaque that's more likely to form these blood clots. Even if you have a 20% blockage, you can form a blood clot in that artery and have a heart attack because of the sticky plaque. Plaque. I use primarily Cleerly on most patients that are coming in from a cardiovascular perspective. And I can't tell you the last time I did a stress test because a stress test is designed to pick up a severe blockage, right? A 70% blockage. Well, I don't really care. I mean, I don't want to just know if you have a 70% blockage. I want to know if you have a 30% blockage and it's low-density plaque. Well, absolutely we want to know about it. And so why is that important? Because, and here's where the integrative part of cardiology comes in, I think. I mean, a lot of times I have patients that come in and they are gung-ho, I'm not going to be on the statins, statins do this, they're going to kill me, and all this stuff about how bad they are. Now, statins are overused, 100%, yes. Okay. But there are, in my opinion, there is a role for statins in patients who have low-density plaque that's thrombogenic and other risk factors, vascular inflammation markers like lipoprotein phospholipase A2 that's elevated. Now, you have to figure out this vascular inflammation is there, they have low-density plaque, The benefit of the statin is not necessarily in lowering the cholesterol. That benefit is what we call that pleiotropic effects of statins, right? It's in the antiplatelet, it's in the anti— I mean, it's in the anti-inflammatory, right? So, I mean, and I can tell you, I have seen patients. One patient I will never forget, probably 2, 3 years ago, 4 years ago when I first started using Clearleaf, had just a ton of this low-density plaque. And he was one of the patients that just didn't want anything done. He wanted chelation. He didn't want to be on the statin, didn't want anything else done. And I told him, I said, listen, you have a tremendous amount of this low-density plaque and you are extremely high risk. I even recommended that he go get a heart cath, but he, no, I wanted to do chelation. He didn't want to be on the statin, didn't want to do anything. And I said, listen, when it comes to making these recommendations, I don't take them lightly, okay? But he didn't want to do it. And this is a true story. 4 days later, I got a call that he died in his sleep. And I will never forget that because, so this low-density plaque on these scans, I mean, I take that very seriously. And I tell my patients, sometimes you need a Band-Aid, right? Sometimes you need a Band-Aid until you can get to all those underlying root causes that cause this vascular inflammation in the first place. Right now, you have it. So we need to put the Band-Aid on until we can get to deal with the underlying root causes. And so I would really encourage people not to have these blinders on saying everything is bad. Statins are bad. This is bad. It's a case-by-case basis. And there are clearly indications to use a statin. There are even some doctors out there, some integrative They say you never use statin. Well, I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that. Wouldn't say that at all. I mean, there's a role.

And Dr.

Chris, hard plaque that is in the veins already, can you get rid of that? In the arteries? Yeah. So, so I have not found anything that routinely will get rid of calcium in arteries. Have I seen calcium scores get a little bit better? Yes. We used to be taught that chelation therapy was actually for calcium in arteries and that got rid of it, but that's not the mechanism. Chelation therapy. And so, and chelation doesn't routinely lower calcium scores. Chelation has to do with oxidative stress and vascular damage, and it improves by getting some of these toxins out, but improving overall vascular function, not by getting calcium out. So, there are a couple other things that were out there. I had a person come to me from a naturopath in California, and he was using a supplement called IP6. And IP6 has to do with calcium metabolism. And he had an extremely high calcium score, and it got better, much better. And now whether it was that or whether it was some error in the measurements, I don't know what it was. I've used this IP6 with coronary calcification and not seen a lot of change in the coronary calcification. But what I can tell you is that I've had kidney stones totally dissolved. Amazing. Using IP6, 100% totally dissolved. I have one guy who had a bunch of little stones in there. 6 months later, he got another scan by his urologist, the kidney stones are gone. Okay. And so, I'll say that I don't have something that routinely gets rid of calcium, but what I— let me take this a step further. Only in the last 6 months have I realized that we know a lot more about why vascular calcification occurs now. And, I got some more rabbit holes to go down right now, but it has to do with FGF-23, which has a lot to do with bone metabolism and whether calcium goes to the right places or not. Now, we know obviously vitamin K is very important and having adequate vitamin K is important. But this FGF-23 and parathyroid calcium phosphorus metabolism, that's why we have so much coronary calcification, I think, and phosphate metabolism. People who drink lots of sodas. Okay. And we've not paid attention to it in cardiology in general. I remember saying, well, why do you have calcification? It's genetic. Okay. But now we're starting to see the science out there about some of why it's a calcium metabolism issue and bone metabolism. If you look at osteoporosis and start to look at calcification and coronary arteries, there's a relationship between calcium and phosphate metabolism and how— and I'm still trying to put together this whole FGF23 part of this and whether we can reverse it or not. If we dial in the why, I don't know yet, but that's something that really the science is starting to evolve more. But I've always had this question about why do we develop this calcium in the arteries? And what happens is Actually, it turns the smooth muscle cells in the arteries to calcium. Okay. And you guys will love this. Yeah, this is hot.

Okay.

You got FGF23 and KLOTHO. Okay. KLOTHO, you guys know as this longevity gene, but KLOTHO is a co-receptor for FGF23. And so that has to do with vascular calcification as well. So, and one of my other cardiology colleagues was talking about this, Dr. Bar, or I can't pronounce his name. I can never pronounce I lost his name. Sanjay. You guys can look him up. Super cool, good guy. Another cardiologist who's kind of made this transition. I really, he's doing some great work. He, he actually was the one that brought up Klotho to me and then led me down this whole pathway of Klotho and FGF23. So that is a major driver of coronary calcification.

Amazing.

I know there's so many topics that people always are asking about and it's, it's very hard because, you know, there's so many influencers that talk about these topics and it unfortunately deters so many people from seeking treatment and doing things that could really slow down their disease and potentially even reverse their trajectory. And that's why you and I are very passionate with our patients because it's like, we see it every day that people come in and you're just like, you see the trend, you see those like, oh gosh, like I know if we do this, this and this, we can keep this person more functional, cognitively healthy, fu— like physically healthy, but they've heard so many negative things like they're gonna get this if they take this or they that. And honestly, I agree with you. I love statins in the right person and I personally use rosuvastatin. Mm-hmm. And it's very effective at low dosing. I have very good results. Patients do not have muscle pains. They do extremely well. And I love PCSK9 inhibitors for the right person too. And you know, I am a big fan and I'd love to hear your thought on low-dose aspirin because from the cancer prevention aspect and also like, what are your feelings? Cuz a lot of cardiologists backed off low-dose aspirin with the New York Times article that came out. Is that something that you recommend to certain patients or you kind of like doesn't really help anything?

I'm looking at the entire picture, meaning that if fibrinogen levels are high and it's not an acute phase reactive type thing. If we want to go back to the genetics, one of the things that we know is there is a group of, I think it's only in women, I don't think this is the case in men, but if you have a COMT gene variant, there is a select group of people who do well with aspirin and then another select group that don't do so well with aspirin with COMT. So, kind of picking who I use the aspirin with, I don't routinely start. Now, if somebody has underlying coronary vascular disease, I will put them on aspirin. The data is that just putting somebody on aspirin just to put them on aspirin, I don't do that. No. But if they have underlying vascular disease, then I will have them on a baby aspirin. I will start them on a baby aspirin if they have underlying vascular disease because with vessel damage, with damage to the glycocalyx and the risk of actually thrombus of platelets coming in and causing more of a thrombotic issue, I think it makes some reasonable sense to actually put them on low-dose aspirin. So that's kind of how I make my choices. And again, I get— clearly it's on everybody, so I know what they have, right? So I don't have to just— if you have coronary disease, right, I'll start it. If you don't have coronary disease, I'm not just starting.

I'm not starting. And I have a peptide question for you.

Yeah.

You know I love peptides and you love peptides. So a lot of this is off— obviously I understand that not a lot of this is not approved, right? In general, do you use SS31 lamipretide in any heart patients? Because we know that was originally thought about, we know that it's recently approved for Barth syndrome, which is a devastating mitochondrial disease. We know that SS31 has the ability to repair the inner membrane of the mitochondria, which we know the heart is full of mitochondria. We know like there's obviously post-MI, all the things that we've heard. That SS31 potentially could be beneficial for it. We're not curing, we're not treating, but potentially beneficial.

Dr. Chris, what are your thoughts? Well, let me say first and foremost, one of the things that I decided I was gonna kind of really do deeper dive on over the last, I mean, the last, probably last 2, 3 months, there's nobody really diving into peptide use in the heart that I see out there really diving in and saying, okay, With all these peptides and their mechanisms of action, you know, what, what's the role of some of these peptides in cardiovascular disease? And so you bring up a very good question with respect to cardiomyopathy and SS31. I recently started to use that simply because of what you just said, right? We know that the tissue that's the most dense in mitochondria is the heart tissue, right? And if the heart's not squeezing normally, again, this is kind of theoretical stuff, if the heart muscle's not working normally, squeezing normally, that's probably a mitochondrial problem from some reason. Like, we don't necessarily know exactly what that reason is, but if the mitochondria are not working normally, what can we do to help support the mitochondria and support the cardiolipin on that inner mitochondrial membrane? Well, SS31 is a great option to do that, right? So, if we can support the mitochondria— now, we, again, we don't have any data, but I 100% have been using that recently. We'll see what echocardiograms are starting to look like, but that makes a lot of theoretic sense. And then I'm using the other stuff that I typically use as well, D-ribose, CoQ10, L-carnitine. So, all of these things are supporting the mitochondria. We have a gun to help support the mitochondria with SS31. Yes, we need carnitine. Yes, we need D-ribose. And these I kind of think about as BBs when I got a gun with SS31, right?

Structural repair, which we've never had before. Even like if you look at MOTS-C or other mitochondrial treatments or peptides, it's, this is actually have the ability to repair the architecture of the mitochondria, which we always thought about biogenesis, right? We're just gonna stress more mitochondria to function for our crappy mitochondria, but now we potentially can repair. Now again, I appreciate you being thoughtful on it's not an approved therapy and this is all very anecdotal.

But it is really exciting in my opinion. Yeah. The concept makes a lot of sense. And again, it all goes back to the membrane, right? It all goes back to cell membrane, mitochondrial membrane. We can talk about this till the cows come home and we're gonna start to hear more and more about membrane medicine. I think you've already talked about how you start with making sure that the membrane is intact. That's a whole nother podcast on membrane, but I believe you 100%, right?

Remember, phospholipids are so important. We could have a whole conversation on phospholipids.

Yeah, we absolutely could. Couldn't agree more. But focusing on getting that, the phospholipid membrane to work normally, to get things in and out of the mitochondria, in and out of the cell efficiently. Because what we are doing in today's world with all these toxins is we are with heart disease, we are damaging all of these phospholipids and we have all the fatty acids in the lipid membrane. They're being oxidized. That's the major problem. So if we can, one, remove all the things that are doing that, and two, replace with these, with more normal phospholipids in the lipid membrane, I mean, the cells in general are going to work effectively. The mitochondria certainly are going to work more efficiently with respect to the electron transport chains. I guess the kind of the holy grail is really, in my opinion now too, is really starting to focus more on the cell membrane we won't get into the esoteric stuff about the cell membrane and some of the energetic principles and how the cell membrane—

That's another podcast.

That's, that's round 2 or 3. We need a part 2, a part 3. I mean, this is just too much fun. Like, I just love, I love these conversations because I know so many people, they ask us all the time and like, obviously, you know, I've been practicing for 15 years. You obviously have been practicing longer than me and we hear it and we see it every day. And I just like, we gotta get the education out there for people. It's not even just about the regular people are listening, the audience, I love them, but the clinicians need to know.

Yeah.

The clinicians have to be able to support their patients. Yeah. And be able to have shared decision-making conversations. And so I just love these types of podcasts because I know there are so many clinicians that listen to this podcast as well as just curious high performers who wanna just improve their health. And these are really important topics. So I thank you for answering my questions.

Yeah, absolutely. We need to get, one of the things that I really think needs to happen is as we practice, well, my practice, I'm always looking at how to objectively start to really curate all of this data so that I don't need to have a large randomized controlled trial to do this. But the more clinicians that listen to me and other, other people who are doing this work, and we have the data to support it, and we have all of the patients that can talk about how they got better, right? And so the clinicians that are listening that get it, okay, and not having this closed mind, then we all start to work together. We start to collect more and more data out here and not be so about all the stuff that we kind of learned in medical school. Like, I love, I mean, I do these podcasts so that people can hear. I remember when I first started, they were like, this guy's crazy. Well, okay, you can call me crazy, but now you come to my, you come to my clinic, you look at the charts, you look at the objective data, you look at the measurements, you look at the patient's numbers, And then you tell me I'm crazy. You, you can't, right? And so that's the kind of thing that I want more people, more clinicians to see. Because I mean, yeah, we step outta the box and I can promise you there's a lot of things when we start to do personalized medicine, you're gonna get your patients better. Yeah.

Which is the point of it all, right? And there's a fine line between crazy and genius, by the way.

So better to be on that line. They call you crazy until they call you for your help.

Yeah, exactly. The funny part is now all the physi— I mean, the physicians call me to take care of Yeah, right.

They're like, what do I do? I have no idea. You know, you figured out. Dr. Chris, just taking a step back for, for someone wanting to have some actionable insights, right? So let's say for the layperson, not the clinician, potentially listening, as we know, cardiovascular disease doesn't appear overnight. What are some of the early signs? What are some of the biomarkers, functional metrics that they should be testing for that they should be asking their clinician to really get ahead of it?

Yeah. Well, the first thing I'll say is never, never be be happy with just getting a regular lipid profile. Never be comfortable just having your cholesterol and LDL and HDL checked. There's so much more to— and, and making decisions just on those numbers. We really need to have advanced lipid testing to look at the particle sizes and particle numbers and vascular inflammation. So ask for an advanced lipid panel and making sure that includes the Lp(a) with inflammation markers. That is, in my opinion as a cardiologist, it's malpractice if you're just ordering a lipid panel and making decisions off of a regular lipid panel. So number one, make sure you get the right labs, and that, that would be one part of getting the right labs. There are other things you can do as far as screening technologies. There's a lot of information that comes from things like the InBody, for example. InBody is looking at body composition, it's looking at something called visceral fat. We didn't talk about that at all. Visceral fat is that metabolically active inflammatory fat. Fat. If you have lots and high levels of visceral fat, then you likely have underlying metabolic syndrome, heart disease, and lots of other stuff cooking, to be honest with you. So looking at metrics like the visceral fat, looking at hydration, intracellular and extracellular hydration parameters, looking at something on that same InBody, they measure something called phase angle. Phase angle is a great surrogate marker for cell membrane function. Most people don't use it for that, but it's a great way to look at if your phase angle is super low, then You probably have— your mitochondria are probably not working well, and just your overall cellular health is probably not working well. And we need to kind of do a deeper dive into the why behind that. Other markers, I mean, obviously the basic stuff like just checking, monitoring your blood pressure, know what your blood pressure is doing. The thing about blood pressure issues is people feel fine. And the most common thing I hear, I feel fine. My blood pressure is 180 over 110, but I feel fine. Okay. But, you know, that's so very common. You feel fine until you don't. But, so, know what your vital signs are. Other things, again, I have to say this again. Everybody, in my opinion, every single person listening to this, if you have not had an environmental toxin test, you need to have one. Okay? I mean, you really do. Because if you don't know you're exposed to all of whatever it is, and a lot of us have exposure to these things, you're going to continue to rust from the inside out. That oxidative stress and nitrosative stress will continue to get worse and you will continue to get rusty. That is aging. The key to longevity is maintaining mitochondrial function and actually maintaining adequate oxidative and antioxidative. I won't say because we have to be careful because not all oxidative stress is bad. If I have to kill the, the, the whatever virus I had and I need oxidative stress to deal with that, that, but it has to be balanced. And so, really knowing that you are exposed to these toxins, and I'll say toxins, I will also say even some of these viruses and parasites and things like that, that's something new that I've kind of realized also that I've kind of have been overlooking, another whole subject. But, you know, when oxidative stress markers are high, it's not always lead, it's not always the plastics. You always have to think about also some of these infections that are causing oxidative stress, nitrosative stress, as well.

Amazing. Is there a specific lab that you like to use for the environmental toxins?

Well, I use Vibrant because Vibrant does— I don't know of another company that does oxidative damage markers and certainly don't know— well, there are other companies that do 8-OH-DG. There are a few that do a few oxidative stress markers like 8-OH-DG and, uh, malondialdehyde. Those are pretty routine. You can get those at a couple different places. But the whole spectrum of nitrosative stress markers like, uh, 3-nitrotyrosine and other nitrosative stress markers and 4-HNE. Vibrant has the panel that looks at them all. Okay. And so, I use Vibrant for their oxidative damage markers and I use them for their environmental toxin test too. You mentioned earlier, Ashley, and I'll say this, the way I do my toxin testing, I always have my patient do a sauna before they do. So, the day prior to their test, which is a first morning void, first morning urine test, test. The day prior to that test, they do a sauna, and then they do the first morning bullet. I will tell you that the results of the test are entirely different if you don't do the sauna versus doing the sauna. And that's another way I knew that the sauna was working, because when I was first doing this test, I could tell you, first couple years of using Vibrant, the, the heavy metals test came back normal. Every single patient that I did heavy metals test was normal, until I actually had sent off to Germany for another— for this— and all these metals came back, but the urine test from Vibrant was normal. What is this all about? And, and I happened to be watching some webinar and they said this recommendation about doing the sauna, it was on there. And so I started to do that, changed everything. In fact, it has changed my entire practice. Where I am and what I do right now is a result of starting to do the sauna prior to that test.

Wow. It's that powerful.

Wow.

So looking ahead, the future of longevity medicine, how do you see longevity medicine evolving over the next decades and the focus on detoxification, which is one of your key areas?

Yeah. You know, one of the things in this longevity space that's a little bit tough to deal with is it's a hot— I mean, one, it's a hot topic nowadays, right? And there are a zillion different devices and supplements and how you parse through these and figure out what's working, not working, how you stack them together.

It's a little bit problematic. It's a bit of a Wild West, right?

So much out there. There's so many different, and everybody has their own thing. That's the most important. What I'll say to you is this, you know, what's most important is that we mitigate the oxidative and nitrosative stress and, and improve mitochondrial function. Okay. That's point number one. Okay. Now how we get there and what's doing it is a different story. And that's where I think having, having a measurement like this, the Vibrant, uh, test and, and having other objective measures of Hey, what did the HBOT do? What did that light therapy do? We didn't talk about another really important point though, about light and the mitochondria and nitric oxide and chromophores.

So many topics. That's round 4.

Round 4. We'll get to that. We left out one big, big topic because the whole light world.

Yes.

The whole light. And, you know, we think about light and people talk about just chromophores, but really what it's doing is it actually, that light is actually helping to release the nitric oxide from the chromophores.

Right.

Um, and, and so, hey, there's a whole nother stuff.

Oh man. Alexandra is our queen of red light over here.

So, I mean, she, she loves all things red light. That'll be, we should do a whole red light kind of podcast because that field is evolving so fast. Um, that, and I didn't realize that it was so connected to nitric oxide and inducible nitric oxide. It is all connected.

It's all connected. We're gonna have a series. Yes. We'll do a series of part 1, part 2, part 3. And well, I mean, this is like, and you know what, it's gonna be great because we can put it out to all the medical schools and say, this is what you should be listening to.

Training material. Exactly. Oh gosh, man, I'm sorry. My ADD's all over the place.

But anyway, we love it. We love it. There's so many amazing topics and nuggets of education and information. We, we appreciate it cuz we knew this was gonna flow in a very specific way. So, cuz there's so much. Amazing knowledge that's out there, you know, we have to. But yeah, the nitric oxide, especially for you, because that is an area of your expertise. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, we talked a little bit about the sauna and the infrared versus the far infrared. But yeah, so you, you're a big fan of red light, I presume?

Yeah, I'm a huge fan of red light. And then not really— and now understanding more about it, and actually I'm even more excited about it now because I didn't recognize that it was really a lot of the mechanism is mediated by the release of nitric oxide. From chromo— from the— from cytochrome c oxidase. And really what happens is when we have all these toxins and that actually— so inducible nitric oxide produces these very high levels of nitric oxide. So now nitric oxide is just bound to cytochrome c oxidase. So oxygen can't even get into the binding site there. What light does, what red light therapy, particularly, you know, 600, 6, whatever, 680, 630 to kind of whatever, 800, 900 wavelength, it actually releases the nitric oxide from that chromophore, from— this is a specific binding site in that chromophore. And so now oxygen can come back into the chromophore and actually work more normally again. I didn't realize that was the mechanism. It's— and it kind of ties all the way back around to nitric oxide again.

Dr. Chris, what's your protocol? People are going to be there saying, well, what is he doing? What is your protocol? What is day in the life of Dr. Chris in terms of the biohacking health optimization looking like?

How much red light are you doing? So I do red light every morning. Um, I come over here to my Longevity Center. I do red light for about 6, 15 minutes, 16 minutes. And you have a red light bed? So I have a red light bed while listening to my BrainTap.

What do you do, the alpha, theta?

Which, which brainwaves do you do on the BrainTap? Well, no, I, so BrainTap, I'm just listening to binaural beats. And so BrainTap has the, the, the goggles with the ear lights. I don't use those. I just listen to the, I just listen to the binaural beats on whatever one I'm listening to at the time. But I also, prior to doing that, actually, I don't know if you guys have heard this, my, my newest thing that has has been incredible is I use a device called a NeuroVizr. Oh yeah. NeuroVizr is the lights. Yeah. And because my, I mean, I'm, I'm, it's very hard for me to meditate cuz my brain's always just kind of racing all over the place. Mm-hmm. But NeuroVizr has changed things, man. NeuroVizr allows me to get into these spaces where I'm, when you're meditating, I literally feel like I'm talking to the universe.

I'm like in the universe. Don't know. And I've actually had the founder of NeuroVizr on, Garnet Dupuis, also very interesting. And there was very compelling research last year, the year before out of MIT around pulsating light and clearing amyloid plaque for brain health, right? So really interesting. If you go full throttle with this pulsating light, so it's a headband with, I'd say maybe like half a hand distance away from your eyes, you close your eyes, you listen to the music, the flashing light will trigger like a psychedelic experience if you go full throttle on the flashing light. I mean, I had my mother while she was still alive with the Alzheimer's doing it, my 87-year-old father doing it as well. Obviously the light was a little bit less Yes. I think it's really, really fantastic. And particularly people who struggle with meditation, this is an alternative for that neuroplasticity and brain training.

Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. Fantastic tool. So NeuroVizr with a PEMF mat. Then I come to do my light bed and sauna. Then I work out mostly zone 2. I've changed my, changed my training a lot. It used to be just heavy lifting and HIIT training until I herniated a disc and realized I was too old to be doing stuff like this. And so I do a lot of zone 2 training, uh, and then some resistance training as well. Zone 2 and a whole nother conversation.

We didn't even talk about VO2 max and all that stuff either, but you have to get—

that's for part 2.

Again, part 2 and 3 and 4. Yeah. So zone 2 training, what I've realized with that is kind of cool because I do all my patient charts. So I review, get my patient plans together, review stuff while I'm doing zone 2 training, walking on the treadmill, just kind of looking through all my notes on my iPad on a treadmill. And then I come into this office and and see patients and do stuff like this and have fun. Have a lot of fun practicing medicine. It's definitely a different type of medicine, but it's super rewarding. Definitely the most fun I've had in my career. And then I like to just really, I love to learn. So it was just about kind of what, what, what's next and what are we going to create next? What are we going to create and how we change the world of medicine to really affect patient lives?

That's what's most important to me.

Beautiful.

And if anyone hasn't been to your office, it's absolutely amazing. You've got the TPE, eBoo. You've got sauna, Emsculpt. I mean, literally you have a phenomenal longevity center and I like give you big kudos because that, I know that takes a lot of effort to do. So you really, you believe in it, you live it. It's really inspiring.

So yeah. Well, we'll put it in the show notes for people. It's Reveal Vitality in Sarasota, Florida, a beautiful location. So they can show that. Where can people follow you? Where would you like to send them to? Any handles?

And we can link it within the show notes. You can follow my Instagram is CJ Davis. MD.

Yes.

RebuildVitality.com. You'll see, you'll see the facility there. And we're working on a lot of other cool projects right now. I'm trying to really get this message out to different areas in the country, out of the country. So it's really a lot of fun, a lot of fun putting these things together and developing protocols, developing how to, how to put these pieces together, meeting a lot of good people like you guys and meeting people through you. Like, by the way, if you could make an introduction to the NeuroVizr person, person. I've not rolled it out to my clinic yet, but I want to get some of the science behind it to try to start to use some of that with clients.

So if you can make it— science, I mean, they're doing their studies, but also out of MIT, and MIT is trying to develop their own one, but getting FDA approval for it. But yeah, we can discuss offline. Any parting thoughts or message? And I'd love to ask everybody, Ashley and Alexandra as well, parting thought or message for our audience today?

I would just encourage everybody who's listening to really be proactive and take control of your own health. I mean, there is a plethora of information out there these days. I think it's so much more. I say on my website that the tagline is the science of medicine is 25 years ahead of the medicine that we practice. And truly in my practice, I can tell you that's absolutely true. Things that we do, it will be mainstream 25 years from now. But why wait 25 years when you could have access to a lot of this technology, a lot of the studies that are out there? You know, I mean, cancer world and looking at circulating tumor cells, why am I going to wait till I get a that you can detect on an MRI, when I can look at circulating tumor cells and detect cancer well before. I mean, there's just so many things that are out there that— so I would just encourage everybody to really, one, just be proactive about your own health and be motivated to kind of just, you know, find practitioners out there that are willing to step out of the box. And, you know, we're not crazy. I can promise you that. I spend a lot of time and energy on my training, and I'm not crazy. What I am is dedicated to truly helping each of my patients get better. Beautiful.

Asha, Alexandra, any parting thoughts, message, piece of advice? I mean, for me it's like, yeah, test, don't guess. Right? So test, then know what you're dealing with and then, you know, and see a very skilled practitioner like yourself.

Mm-hmm. You know? Yeah. And I think for me it's don't try and do everything at once. It's the goal isn't perfection. It's honestly, it's progress. And that could be, you know, adding something in or subtracting something. And so I find that sometimes adding something in, like adding in more protein, adding in more whole foods, organic, you know, adding in a filtration system for your home or your shower, things like that. Where I know sometimes people get so overwhelmed because there's so much noise and a lot of people throwing things at you that you should, you should, you should, you should, you should. And it's incredibly paralyzing. So longevity is long. It's meant to be. We're not just improving lifespan. We wanna improve that healthspan. And I think what Dr. Chris talked about today is just incredible. You start at that cellular level, reduce inflammation, start to choose better ways, use glass versus plastics. Just, just start to be aware of your environment and what you're using on an everyday basis. And I say this too also is that some people are like, well, does that mean I can never use a cup from a barista again? And I'm like, well, if you're drinking coffee every day or twice a day or 3 times a day from that that plastic cup or whatever, and you're using hot liquids, then yeah, we want to maybe think about a different way. But every now and then in moderation, not trying to live in a bubble. We're not trying to overwhelm people, but just think about like, what are you consistently using? What are you consistently doing? And that water, air, I think a lot of that is really important.

Beautiful. Thank you so much, everyone. It was so much fun today. We definitely have part 2, 3, and 4, I think already with topics. And thank you, dear audience, for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed it. It. Um, and we'll talk again soon.

Thank you so much.

Amazing.

Thanks, Dr. Chris. Yeah, thank you guys. Hi everyone, it's Claudia again. Before you take off, would you like to get a short email from me to you several times a month with top tips, insights, and strategies to help optimize your life, health, and business? This could be interesting posts or articles I've read on life and longevity optimization, cool biohacking or lifestyle products that I've discovered, and other fun things to help you be at your best. It's a very short piece of inspiration for you, so if you want to receive it, check it out by going to llinsider.com. That's llinsider.com, and leave your email to get the next one.