Can Spermidine Replace Your Fast?

Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance. Now might be a bad time to be doing cycling rapamycin in the middle of a pandemic because I've noticed immune suppression from it as well. So for people who are listening saying rapa what? There's been a few episodes like with David Sinclair, where we talked about that it's an anti aging thing, but maybe one to hold off on for a few months. So aside from rapamycin though, you got into the cell and you said, what's going on here? And spermidine, what's it doing in the realm of fasting and all of that?

So just like fasting, it's going to increase autophagy, it's going to help get rid of the bad parts, the bad mitochondria. It works on increasing what's called MAP1s, which is one of the pathways that we know helps get rid of destructive mitochondria. But when you look at our bodies, our bodies are really designed to heal. Right. So when you look at damage to mitochondria, which is all oxidative stress, you eat poorly or you are outside in a bad environment, or you're sick, or you take some kind of medication, what is that doing? Or you have cancer, what is that doing? Is it's changing the oxidative phosphorylation pathway. Remember, that's a pathway that's making ATP, that's producing energy. Right. And if you now start forming too many free radicals, those free radicals start doing cellular damage. We can take antioxidants, but really if you just pound the body with antioxidants, when you lose that oxidative stress, you're actually shutting down one of the mitochondria's ability to heal itself. So where we see the spermidine work is at a very, very base level to correct that autophagy to get rid of those bad mitochondria. So that now we don't have, we're not being overwhelmed by these reactive oxygen species. So we actually will start to recycle the bad parts of the cell and start with a new set point. But it seems to do a whole lot more than that as well. Like for instance, in the heart, it actually increases the number of mitochondria. Yeah. So you actually see marked increase in mitochondria, it actually. Immune system. Well, I think that I don't know the exact percentage that mitochondria were increased, but it was substantial. When you look at the immune system, remember we have sort of good and bad pieces to our immune system. So in the immune system, it increases the M2 macrophages, which are our anti inflammatory parts of our immune system. So we know that it helps immune surveillance. So that now if we start getting damage to, to cells that could lead to cancer, where you've improved immune surveillance, we know that it actually decreases some of the inflammatory cytokines like tumor necrosis factor alpha. And that's linked to things like osteoarthritis. So it's doing a whole host of things probably because it's working at that very, very bottom level to restore those normal mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation pathways to stop producing so many reactive oxygen species. You know, I'm, and I don't know how many of your listeners are taking, you know, they're pounding antioxidants, right? Well, when you're doing that, remember that when you produce these reactive oxygen species, your mitochondria sends a message to the nucleus and that nucleus responds by sending a message back to the mitochondria to basically start getting rid of these damaged proteins. If that doesn't happen. So if we don't upregulate mitochondrial peptides and we don't send these messages back for this, what's called unfolded protein response, if we don't do that, then the cell becomes sicker and sicker and sicker and those damaged mitochondria produce a lot of toxic substances that damage things around it. So if we go back to spermidine's base of correcting, recognizing and getting rid of those bad mitochondria, we stop that whole process. So it's really working at a very bottom level and working in ways we probably don't even have quite figured out. It's working on so many pathways to reduce reactive oxygen species to, to improve the immune health, to reduce the inflammatory cytokines that we know are initiating disease processes.

If it's a fasting mimetic, can you take spermidine instead of fasting?

That's a big question, right? We went through that with other things like resveratrol, which we thought were fasting mimetics too, and probably are to some degree. Does anything substitute for fasting directly? I don't know the answer to that. I think there's a lot of people who would like to say yes, that we can take a pill instead of having to fast because fasting is hard. I think that when we look, maybe the answer might be maybe. I think the problem is what is the dose that would really have that same exact effect? We don't know that yet we know there's a maintenance dose that's very healthy. We know that higher levels of polyamines are healthy. We use very high doses of spermidine sometimes in our patients who have disease processes that we want to treat. And the question is, how high can you go? I don't know if I'm going to answer that, but I think the question is how high can you go in patients and still be safe? I think it depends on some of the markers that you're following on people. We're following a lot of markers, but when I do regenerative procedures on people, one of the things spermidine does is actually increases stem cell activity. If I want to throw stem cells into a knee joint, I'm going to always follow that with using a relatively high dose of spermidine for a six week course. So I think that there's a low maintenance dose that's probably really good, that kind of one gram daily. And then there's probably higher doses that are going to have more beneficial processes for disease. And can we get to a dose that would have the exact same effect as if I fasted for 48 hours? I don't know that.

It'S probably a good idea to take it during a fast.

I think it would accentuate the fasting benefits.

Yes, it would. Okay.

Because it would offer protection, more cellular protection.

I have a new book called Fast this Way. And by the way, guys, this is a plug. If you haven't pre ordered Fast this way, it's because you're a bad person and you don't like yourself. Just kidding. But there's a whole section in it on fasting supplements. So what should you take during a fast to make it work better and not take. And I didn't put spermidine in there because you couldn't buy it when I wrote the book. And now that it's already at the printers but hasn't been sent out yet, I can't add this. Otherwise this would be on my list of things to take.