Epidemiologist: This MILK Fat Slows Aging & Extends Life by 2x! | Stephanie Venn Watson

There's problems with milk protein, but milk fat is like the most important thing.

If mom is C15 deficient, then her milk is C15 deficient and her baby is C15 deficient. If we have C15 deficiencies, we develop new form of cell death called phoroptosis that accelerates our aging. So our job to get C15 back into our lives, slow our aging rates, and then optimize C15 to get us a little closer to your goal, which is to live longer. Studies showed that people who have more C15 on their complex lipids had younger biolog ages than their chronological age.

How much younger?

Dr. Stephanie Van Watson isn't just a scientist. She's a veterinarian, public health expert, and award winning lipid researcher whose biggest breakthrough started in the most unexpected place. Studying the health and longevity of dolphins for the US Navy, she discovered that the healthiest, longest living dolphins had something in common. Higher levels of a rare overlooked fat that protected their cells, boosted their metabolism, and kept them biologically younger. The twist. Humans used to get this same essential fat in our diets. But thanks to modern food processing, we've nearly lost all this. Essential fat is known as C15.0. And it may just be the missing link to cellular health, sharpened brain function, and one of the ultimate keys to slowing down aging.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Stephanie, thanks for coming into the studio to do a live interview in person in Austin. Our last conversation over the remote podcast was really popular and you've had a few critics come out and really just say a lot of really negative things about your research. And so I, I just wanted to have you on the show so that we could really have you apologize for saying you've discovered a new, a new essential fatty acid. The first one in a hundred years. What do you have to say to the trolls?

Yeah, gosh, Dave, you're right. No, no, that's actually not why not why I'm here at all. I, I have to appreciate skepticism. You know, a lot of crews have, have earned it and we have to be there to rise to the occasion, to help respond to questions. And the good thing is that, you know, it's like my whole life, the life of my team, we've all been science first, right? So it's been a road, it's been a 20 year journey of science that has led to today. It wasn't an accidental or an intentional finding to go make a buck, right? So like you and I, like work, this community is in the world for Exploration to be able to find places where you fail fast. But then when you find something, you follow the science, when you have an opportunity to help improve health. So I think what a lot of people maybe didn't recognize is that there was a decade of science and studies all funded by that.

No, you talked about that. It sounds to me like there was a bunch of young, cynical people saying, I'm going to get some attention by taking down some new research based on old research that they'd been taught. Yeah, right. And it's funny because I. I get a lot of weird requests to be on the show and I say no to them. And when I first looked at what you were doing, I'm like, okay, this is like a dolphin researcher. What the heck? But then I dug into what you were doing. Like, this is not a new finding. And I've had a bunch of new innovations come on the show. Like the original urolithin researchers came on, the original spermidine researchers. These are major longevity compounds before they're well known. But for every one of those, there's 10 people saying, I have this magical unicorn sauce. And no. So I thought you really passed the test. And since our last interview, what additional research has come out about fatty 15?

So, a lot. So there's been a huge year from 2024 for the research around C15, around the pure C15 ingredient that's in fatty 15. So, for example, you know, we talk about C15 being the first essential fatty acid to be discovered in over 90 years. Right. This is a giant discovery. We put the stake in the ground and said, and here's why, and we published that in Scientific reports. So since then, in this past year, we've had now four independent groups come out throughout the world. Challenging. Is C15 actually essential? Does it meet the criteria of a nutrient that our bodies must have? And if we don't have enough of it, our bodies fall apart, we develop a deficiency. So what those other groups did is they did the gold standard studies in models, in worms and in mice, and looking at all of the data that are existing in humans, and if every one of them independently concluded, yes, C15 meets the criteria of an essential fatty acid.

What are the other two?

Alpha linolenic acid. So it's an omega 3, and linoleic acid, which is an omega 6, they were discovered back to back in 1929, 1931, by George Mildred Burr. Wow. Husband and wife. So it's been a while. So it's, you know, I get. So there's a reason to ask, how can this dolphin veterinarian come out and make this big claim? We had the data to support it, we published it in the peer reviewed literature, and importantly now we have others coming out and publishing the data and showing that it's meeting these criteria. That if you give a mouse that is pregnant and you make her C15 deficient, she has a baby that now has a nutritional deficiency. And when you restore C15 back into that baby, the nutritional deficiency goes away. So they're basically the one state that had a worm where they showed that the worms, if you removed all nutrients from their entire diet, baby worms, then they stop growing and they go into this sleepy state. And they found that if you gave them just C15, no other nutrients, their neural development matched that of a worm given a full nutrient diet. Wow. So it's like, yeah, so it was good that the dolphins had something to teach us. We put it out there. And now having the world they'll come out with, you know, validating studies has been two clinical trials with the PRC 15, fatty 15 controlled clinical trials showing benefits. So it's been a good, it's been nice to see, see the world. Help validate.

For listeners who didn't hear your last episode, how did you discover C15?

Yeah, so bees. Just kidding. Dolphins actually. Now that makes it sound even better, right? Yeah. So I'm a veterinary epidemiologist, was working for cdc, World Health Organization, and was recruited by the Navy to help lead a clinical research program to help continually take good care of older Navy dolphins. As we talked about before, dolphin, the Navy's taken care of this sustained population of about 100 bottlenose dolphins for over 60 years now.

That's crazy.

Crazy, right? And they live in the open ocean in the wild. Dolphins live on average to about 20. Dolphins in the Navy are living to 40, even to 50, some even beyond. So we had this population of geriatric dolphins and that were getting high cholesterol, chronic inflammation, fatty liver disease, even the full suite of changes consistent with Alzheimer's. And importantly, Dave, what we saw was that some of the dolphins, but not all, were developing these aging associated diseases. So we were able to use this advanced technology called metabolomics to find out which small molecules predicted the healthiest aging dolphins. We thought it would be Omega 3s because all they eat are fish, right? And Instead it was C15, which was like, well, what is C15? Never even heard of this fatty acid before as the top predictor of, of healthy aging dolphins. So that in itself was a 10 year journey of understanding the pathophysiology of this condition in dolphins, understanding what a C15 nutritional deficiency is. There's actually a clear definition behind it that is well backed by lots of studies now. And we think that is present in as many as one in three people globally. If we have C15 deficiencies, we develop the cell death, new form of cell death called for optosis that accelerates our aging. So our job, this is a movement to get C15 back into our lives, slow our aging rates, and then optimize C15 to get us a little closer to your goal, which is, you know, to live longer.

And it's kind of funny the number of details you'd have to pay attention to. Only an epidemiologist could do. And, and to be really clear, I generally make fun of epidemiologists.

Fair enough.

It's fair enough because you'll see things like, and I apologize, Dan Buettner, lovely human being epidemiologist, he was like, well, I saw some data and they ate beans, therefore beans are the thing. And there's no mechanistic evidence behind that. And we talked about that on the show. And I'd have him back on any time to talk about things. And so for blue zones, it turns out epidemiology, it just shows correlations, but it doesn't show any cause. So you found, oh, the dolphins, some are old, some are young, even though they are the same age. And the type of fish that they like to eat was what was driving that?

Right.

And then what do you, like, put the fish in blenders and find out what was in them? Like, how does that work?

It was a bath. Somatic? No, I was just watching during the 50 year anniversary of SNL. But so they, what we're able to do is we were lucky enough that the, you know, the dolphins are given options in some cases of five different types of fish. So, so it was the types of fish that they chose that really dictated did they get an adequate or a low C15 diet. So the fish get routinely tested for as just part of the preventive medicine program. Could you imagine that, like, if everything that you ate every day was sent out to a lab to test for all the different nutrients and you knew exactly on every day which nutrients you got.

Have you seen the recent AI studies where they're now able to translate what whales are saying?

There's really cool science coming out showing now multiple cetaceans have names.

Yeah, individual names, and they can't have directional stuff because it's underwater, but they Talk about their pods and their family and identifiers and all this cool stuff.

Yeah, we just had to get smart enough to figure it out.

So when our AI systems get a little bit better, do you think bottlenose dolphins, that they're sitting there going, I'm a biohacking dolphin. I don't really like the taste of this pin fish or whatever, so I eat them. Because I'm a better dolphin than. Do you think that's going on?

Yeah, I'm pretty. I know that they're egging each other.

Like you're eating a junk fish. Ha ha. I kind of feel like that must be going on.

I'm pretty sure even just from the personalities that we would see in the different dolphins, that, yeah, you have some smack talk going on in a. In a fun way.

If the dolphins had a nickname for you, what would it be?

Oh, Data Girl. Or. Or it would be a vampire. Because at the point. At a certain point we were, you know, they actually develop part of this cellular fragility syndrome, like C15 deficiency syndrome, iron overload in their livers. And so the way we were treating it, we didn't know the cause at the time. But the way you treat it is same as what you do in people. When you pull blood out, it's phlebotomy. And by pulling out blood, you can get the iron out of the liver. So same with dolphins at work. So anyway, I would always take whatever blood they had during those sessions. I would put it to work in.

The blood girl right away. Swim. Swim fast. It's funny, in longevity, when people have high iron, it's turns out you can reduce iron and you live longer. Which is why some people give blood if their iron's too high. So there's evidence for that. But that is intriguing. Does that mean when people have iron overload, they might really have a fatty 15 or a C15 deficiency?

Yeah, that's it. That's exactly it.

Evidence in humans for that.

Yeah, same thing. Holy crap.

Really?

Yeah, yeah. So. So the. What we have found is that. And again, what was great about the dolphin, this dolphin patient, it was so clean because if you, if you took, you know, 100 people that we'd have so much diversity. You take everybody sitting in this room, right, and we have a diverse enough lives, it would be hard to be able to be like, okay, this one thing is going to mean something to all of us because just have very diverse lives. But with the dolphins, it was such a similar population getting similar exposures. So what we were able to show is that when C15 levels in our cell membranes get low because we need a certain amount of it just to stabilize our cells. When it gets below 0.2% of total fatty acids, the cells get fragile. Hence cellular fragility syndrome. That includes red blood cells. And so when our red blood cells get fragile, we have KUFR cells in our liver, which is their whole job. Not their whole job, but part of their job is to sit there and engulf weak red blood cells, which is great because then they would recycle the iron and put it back in the body. But when you have a lot of fragile red blood cells, then those cells in the liver get overloaded and, and what's left behind is iron. And over time, it accumulates and you've got a bunch of free iron sitting in your liver. This now in humans is called dysmetabolic iron overload syndrome, or Dios. And it then results in this ferroptosis, this new form of cell death. Lipid peroxidation of fragile cells mixes with iron. You get reactive oxygen species, mitochondria get taken out.

Oxidized ldl.

There you go. Yeah. Oxidized LDL spills over to the brain, to the heart. So now it's. And we were able to show that this is the phenotype of C15 deficiency that causes this. And then we're able to then reverse it. Right. Just by putting C15 back into our bodies.

Crap.

Right.

So anyone listening? With iron overload, it's unlikely to cause harm. To test having some C15 in your diet or I've just got to say this. If you've listened to this crazy guy telling you cultured, grass fed butter for the last 15 years. Years. Is there C15 in butter that's cultured?

That's funny you should ask that.

Oh my God.

So we now know as far as, like, how did we create. How do we get to where the world, one in three people are C15 deficient? It's, you know, we've moved away from what you have known and appreciated all along. Right. Which are. We have healthy fats in our dairy fat and ghee. And in butter, when it's, when the cow is fed grass, it has twice as much C15 than cows that are fed corn. And so that is one reason why it's. Those foods are healthier for you. And, you know, one of our calls to action is to help, help the dairy industry to report what, what are the C15 levels in your product? Because I would try, I would buy that product if it had higher C15 in it. If I was looking at different butters, I would choose the one with the highest C15.

So it's funny if you look back at this group called Weston, a Price anthropologist and I think also an epidemiologist, if I remember right, this group was originally saying, well, let's look at ancestral foods and the correlation of those with straight teeth and a lack of degeneration. So some of the very early thinking behind my fertility book and my longevity book comes from a book called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Are you familiar with these works?

Yes, yes, yes, absolutely.

And he hypothesized that there was a magic factor in butter and he didn't know what it was. And it was the thing that was causing all these health benefits. And most of us, including me, have said, well, it was probably vitamin K2. Right. But there's no evidence that it's just one factor in butter. It was probably two factors, given what you're saying. So. And they would also tell you fermented butter is better, which is why I always recommend that when you can get it. Which is also why unsalted kerrygold, which is mostly grass fed, that is fermented and the salted kerrygold is mechanically separated. And I, like, I don't know why. My intuition tells me and I can feel the difference. You want the fermented stuff? Add your own salt later.

Yeah, I can actually tell you why the fermented is better.

Tell me why.

Oh, yeah. So when it's fermented, it's great that you brought this up, is that the fatty acids are then broken down and they go into a free fatty acid form. So that when, so when you talk about fatty acids in foods, typically they're in the form of triglycerides. Triacylglycerides. So they're bound to it. So it requires our digestive enzymes to take off those fatty acids, make them free fatty acids so we can absorb them. But when they're fermented, what studies show is that the fermentation actually cleaves them off already. So they're all. You have more fatty acids that are already in the free fatty acid bioavailable form. So you get the grass fed fermented dairy fat and there you go, Dave, you're, you just knew it.

Or you could go one step further and you could clarify the fermented butter, which makes it all free fatty acids, which is what all of Ayurveda talks about, in which Weston A. Price talks about his butter oil was the magic factor to heal you. And all this time we thought it was vitamin K too, and I think it is. And this was in there all the time. But because as humans we love to think there's one cause, but for longevity, it's not one thing, it's a recipe.

That's right.

Right. And I think you've done some foundational work and the reason you could do it is that you're not an md. It's because you're an epidemiologist and you're looking at animals, which means you have control over them that you could never do with humans unless it was like a prison experiment in the 60s, like they used to do in the US to like, well, let's feed half the prison nutritious food. And then they'd get less violent and actually start, you know, becoming happier and. But apparently that's unethical. So you were just able to figure this out? What gave you the, we'll say the cognitive or emotional resilience to take this through to humans? Because you've had a lot of people complaining about, it's like, how dare you? I felt the same thing, but not about you, but just people. How dare you do this? You're a computer hacker. And I'm like, I don't know, I'm not a fat computer hacker anymore. Like, you should try it. So how did you go down this 10 year path of making this a human supplement and actually writing a book about it? Now, where'd that come from?

Grit, you know, and, and it's just, it's a big part. If we talk about longevity, what's the why of longevity? Why do we want to live as long as possible? And just like, you know, you always share, we want to live as healthy for as long as possible to, and ideally to spend that time fulfilling our purpose. And for me, that purpose fell in my lap like so from a kid, as a kid, a super nerdy kid who was like always fascinated with pattern recognition. So it's the recognition of patterns that I was gifted by the dolphins and 60 years of dolphin data. So matrix like, you know, it's like patterns were really clear and clean coming from these dolphins. And then once we move from just like you said, from association to moving pure free fatty acid C15 into the lab, going to the world's real skeptics. Right? That one's like. We went to Dr. Edward Dennis, who is the editor for the Journal of lipid research for 15 years. This is a world leader in fatty acids. We sat down with Ed. Right. As soon as we saw this hypothesis from dolphins and said you're a leader, what do you think? And he's like, well, probably not going to happen.

You're fully girl.

Chances are staff that a dolphin veterinarian didn't discover something that the entire fatty acid community has missed. But the dolphin angle is compelling. And so if you wanted to test it, here are the things that you would want to do. So we then spent the next three years doing eight studies in the lab demonstrating that not only is C15 a pure and active fatty acid with dose dependent mechanisms of action that are relevant, that it was meeting the criteria of an essential fatty acid. So we wrote that paper and the senior author is Ed Dennis. So if like you're a skeptic, you're going to have to talk to Dr. Dennis who is a leader. We did the same thing in longevity. We brought in Dr. Nicholas Schork, he's head of NIH's longevity consortium. And Nick is like, man, I'm watching the science on this C15. It's like it is, it's meeting the criteria of a geroprotector. Right. Which is like the holy grail of longevity that it is. It is showing evidence of slowing the rate at which we age so that we could slow the onset of chronic diseases and therefore live longer. So then Nick and I did a bunch, did a couple of studies, published those in PNAS and in nutrients and showed that C15 outperformed rapamycin, metformin and acarbo, some of the leading longevity. And again, this was senior authored by Dr. Nick Shark. So it's not just like I'm sitting on the grass. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Wow. And I have a pretty good track record of spotting the longevity things early. C8MCT might be one of those things. You know, people I've heard me talk about brain octane in coffee and I have this kind of list of the superhero unusual compounds for longevity and it includes NAD. I've been using NR and before that niacinamide for 20 years now. Right. And more and more science keeps coming out here. Thank you, David Sinclair for, for pushing the science on that stuff. Um, so NAD and its precursors would be there. Um, and then I look at urolithin A. They came on the show and that stuff first hit the market. But 10 years of research on it, a big longevity mitochondrial resuscit and spermidine. Spermidine. I couldn't even buy it. I knew what it did and I couldn't get it. When I Wrote my longevity book and now that's on the market and all of them come through the show. And so for some reason I've got a good BS detector on that stuff. And this for me a fatty 15. It is one of the preeminent small handful of unusual unknown longevity molecules that are worth taking if you're on this longevity journey to live to at least 180 and be healthy and happy and smart and conscious the whole time. So thank you just for, for doing the hard science behind that. Because it's not easy to change people's minds.

You know, following the science and just forging forth. Right. It's the whole, in the book we mentioned that whole Teddy Roosevelt being in the arena thing that it's about being in the arena where you have a purpose. It, the science is pointing you continually in that direction that you're willing to get bloodied and marred and bruised to be able to do something great and good for the world. It's okay. Like when you're, if you, as we talk about, if you have a true breakthrough, you're breaking the ground upon which people comfortably stand. So you have to expect skepticism. The goal is then again because the science kept holding, you just have to hang it there and get it across. And so we're now with the book with the longevity nutrient with now over 100 peer reviewed papers on the benefits of C15 around the world anti cancer with activities of whole group working whole group looking at the importance of C15 to infant growth and development to be able for, with regard to fertility, all of these studies they were coming out from different groups that are just picking up C15 looking different. So it's just been, you know, it's worth it. Got to fight for it.

My very first book, a lot of people don't know this. It's called the Better Baby book. And it took me five years to write it. And I went deep on the research of everything that will make a father and a mother more fertile and healthy before conception and then during pregnancy to reduce the odds of autism and to have smarter, healthier babies. And I published that in 2011 and it was because the mother of my children was infertile and I had to put together the program for that. And there's a lot of cultured butter in those recipes because the science was really good for that. And if I was to update that book, I would just say straight up, if you want to get pregnant or you are pregnant or you are nursing, you are crazy if you don't take Fabi 15 because the evidence is there. You should also take your EPA and for younger kids, especially DHA, and this is critical. You can change a child's IQ and reduce their risk of neurological issues and behavioral issues for life just with, you know, six months or nine months of the right fatty acids. And we didn't even know this existed.

And it's. And it's current day now. Like, you know, it's just we still have things to learn. It's still. We still need to push the envelope even with simple, simple things like here's. It's a saturated fatty acid in milk, right. Which is what every infant mammal gets from birth to milk. It's like, should pay a little attention to, you know, the important nutrients within that perfect food.

Well, the fact that milk has saturated fats, C15, a lot of C8MCTs as well, it's proof that saturated fats are bad for us, right?

Oh, unequivocally so I think it's just, you know, it's just a world we love putting things in a block and white. Right. It's like, it's like it's one or the other. And so what, you know, and fats were in that world for a long time.

All of them.

Yeah. Right. And then it was like, okay, well, unsaturated fats are good and saturated fats are bad. We now know that saturated among saturated fats. Right. That the, that we have specific ones that you have found, like the short chain. Saturated fatty acids have benefits when they get longer. It's the odd numbered chain versus the even chain. The C15 is, you know, this Goldilocks essential fat. C16 and C18 could be pro inflammatory and have opposite effects. So is we're just learning still as we go that there's massive differences in different fatty acids.

And it's really funny. We love to just make buckets of things. So let's see. Carbs are bad for you, protein's good for you, and saturated fat's bad for you. These are common beliefs. And like, well, spider venom probably isn't that good for you. And it's a protein. And high fructose corn syrup probably isn't that good for you. And it's a carb. And all of a sudden is every different type of sugar and starch has a different biological effect. Some are probably good, some are probably bad. Every length of fat, whether it's saturated or unsaturated, has a different biological effect. And to lump them all together is lazy intellectually. And when someone says saturated fats are good or bad. Breathing is bad if you're breathing toxic gas. And breathing is good if you're breathing air. And if you breathe too much air, it's also bad. So this simplification thing doesn't work. What we have now is we have AI, we have big data, and we have the ability to comb through vast amounts of information. You could have never done this Even in the 90s or early aughts, right?

Yeah.

How much did big data and AI help you discover? C15 and what it does.

And it's mainly big data. So and relative, like for dolphins, like just the Navy had amassed an unprecedented amount of dolphin health data throughout their lives. And these archived samples, they have, I think at the time they had 10 minus 80 freezers in a room that just held archive tissues and samples that are collected throughout their routine healthcare. So it was only because of the foresight that the Navy was able to do that. We were then able to go in, take serum, archive serum samples for their whole lives and then be able to look at thousands of small molecules in each of those samples to then be able to do relatively simple statistics. Because, you know, that's where it's where that's all I needed to be able to have very clearly rise to the top the molecules that predicted healthy dolphins. We couldn't. It did. Those same trends were coming out in people. People with higher C15, reportedly lower risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease, multiple types of cancers. But again, it's association and there's so much noise. So it was only because the dolphins, we were able to do that with big data that were clean. So we didn't even need AI at the time. Just I wow, just a little bit. I.

It's kind of mind boggling. You look back on how much the world has changed. I was there at the conference where the term big data was coined. Guy named Om Malik put on the first big data conference way back in the day as probably late 90s if I remember right. And we were just figuring how to do this. And you fast forward not that much time compared to human history. And all of a sudden like, oh yeah, I've just used the tool set and look what we just discovered. And I feel like that curve is accelerating dramatically in the last couple of years because of now AI plus big data. Like whoa.

Yeah, it's great. I was a technical agent for darpa, which is the Pentagon's research arm. That's what it was called at the time. And, and we had, there was a whole program on big data. Right. And these just best, best mathematical minds in the world in the room. And the issue they were having was that the technologies were generating so much data that we didn't have the AI component yet. And we were having. It was difficult to just figure out, we have all these data now, how do we actually use them to translate into something that actually positively affected somebody's life within months. Right. And yeah, so it's still, I think it's still a challenge. But obviously we have evidence now that we can get there faster, especially when the data are clean. Right. Because if it's junk and it's junk out. So if the data aren't good going in, AI is going to have a. Get things confusing, but we're getting a better idea of what clean data look like and then able to get some great excited. This is, this is just the beginning. I'm certain of it. As far as the discovery of other nutrients that are important and essential for us.

You know, the military has been collecting blood samples on every recruit for like the last 75 years or something. Right. And they save them.

I don't know what they say they do.

Yeah. And someone a few years ago went through and found that they could, by looking at the blood samples, I don't remember what the compound was, they could predict Alzheimer's decades and decades ahead. Just with a little blood sample. I'm wondering if you could get like 5 or 10,000 of those samples and do an analysis for C15. And just because you can get ones from 50 years ago.

Right.

And just be like, are they dead or are they alive? Do they have neurodegeneration? There's probably so much cool science to be done on that stuff.

Yeah, there's. There, there may just be a paper in the works. I didn't even tell you. How did you even know?

Is that really everybody doing that?

There's a paper in the works, so just stay tuned.

I may or may not have psychic powers.

That's great. Which supplement was doing that?

And then I actually can tell you that that's largely neurofeedback based and there is one supplement that has pretty good evidence for that that I do take that you cannot buy yet.

Oh, all right.

I'm an investor in that company and I think they'll be at the biohacking conference sponsoring a part of it. So as soon as that one is public, I don't know if they're going to tell you that's what it does. But the, the lead researcher who's building their Tech is this Russian woman and she's like, I don't believe any of this stuff. She goes. Then two months after I take it, I start knowing things like, okay, you're.

Like, all right, we just fed it to the test right there.

And people would say, but that's impossible, therefore it can't happen. I'm like, if it did happen, it's not impossible. Like, you're not very scientific. So in the yogic cities, this list of. Of superpowers that humans occasionally manifest the ability to kind of know, stuff happens. I'm not climbing. That's what I did. I. Sometimes it was just pattern matching, but it's interesting. Sometimes it's just in the field and I think people know it.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the projects I worked on at DARPA was telepathy, so.

Oh, did you now?

Can't. Can't say anything more about it, but just say it's. It's. We have things that we're. We have still have lots of things to explore.

I am friends with the top remote viewer that worked with the three letter agencies on that. So that stuff is real. It does happen, and it's actually trainable. In fact, she's been on the show and I don't know if she wants me to say her name. I'm not going to. She was entirely secret about until someone outed her in a big book on remote viewing. So this stuff is like, sometimes intuition is a thing and it can be trained. And I like. It's. It's there. So maybe that was intuition. Maybe I noticed your left eye was twitching and I unconsciously pattern matched that. Let me ask you this. You mentioned you had this kind of unusual pattern matching ability. Are you neurotypical?

Neurotypical. I'll need a definition.

All right, Sorry. There's normal brains and then there's people who are on the spectrum. Asperger's got. It doesn't have to be Asperger's. You know, anything autism. Like, different auditory. Could be synesthesia. But basically people whose nervous systems don't run the standard operating system. I'm one of those.

Yeah. So my trade off of strong pattern recognition capabilities are a very poor physical capability. So if you ask me to walk and talk, I could very well trip.

Wow. So you're probably not that typical. And it's a complex and kind of beautiful spectrum. And there's a study just came out on women who are in that direction on the spectrum where quite often they're really interested in a certain kind of animal or a certain Kind of plant. And they just tend to know everything about it. And I'm interested in that because I had Asperger's. It runs in my family. Grandmother's a PhD nuclear engineer on the Manhattan Project with my grandfather and just loves math. And she actually sent a thing out to the whole family in the 90s going, oh, my gosh. Like, I did this, this test and I have this. And it turns out all of my kids have it too. And it's actually reversible. You can keep the pattern matching, get rid of all the negative stuff. But it's been a lot of work for me. So I'm always curious when people have an unusual mind.

Yeah.

What's going on in there? So there's some unusualness there.

There is definitely an unusual. Yeah. And there's a. There are trade offs for that. You know, I think, you know, one thing you share in the book is, is the whole idea that if, you know, longevity is enabling. These advances in longevity are enabling more of us to live healthier, longer and. Right. And if I was like back in the 1700s, I would have been eaten by bears. Right. Because like, I would have to. Yeah, glasses and I would have been eaten. But. But now it's like we now have the ability that like even us nerds can live a long time. And what do we do with our time? Well, we're doing science. Right. It's just. It's just.

And we can eat the bear's gallbladder if it'll have tudka. That makes us live longer. There you go. But don't eat bear gallbladders. It's mean. You can buy tudco separately now.

Yeah, there you go. That was nice. Nice.

By the way, that is also a longevity molecule, I would say. Now you wrote your book called the longevity Nutrient, which is a pretty big claim here. So what in your definition is a longevity nutrient?

Right. So. So a longevity nutrient. This is kind of thought what we thought through with Dr. Nicholas Short. Right. So it's like what is actually longevity? So in order in our book, the way we define longevity is it's something that's sl. Slows aging, that helps to delay the onset of chronic diseases so that we can live longer. So it slows the things that inevitably kill us.

When you say live longer, you're talking about extending lifespan.

Extending lifespan, expanding health span and being able to extend lifespan to some extent. Not quite to where you're to your 180. So but it is a good step in that direction. Right. So it's like, let's start with, first of all, not aging faster than we should, which is what looks like what's happening with kids now because of C15 deficiency. So when we talk about a longevity nutrient, we have these seven longevity nutrient must haves. You'll be familiar with all these. It must tap into human longevity regulating pathway. So C15 activates AMPK, it inhibits MTOR. So it's like right at the mother.

Those are kind of big pathways.

Kind of good that it does that. The second is it needs be to. To target key hallmarks of aging. So we, you know how we age at the cellular level. So we know that it repairs mitochondria, it helps with cellular signaling, it helps with gut dysbiosis, it decreases inflammaging. So it helps with at least six different hallmarks of aging. And we walk through all the science and studies showing that we, we know that in there needs to be evidence that it slows the rate at which we age. We now know that C15 again, by helping cell membranes stay stable, it helps keep this measurement called red blood cell distribution width, which tends to go up.

As they get bigger and less functional.

There you go. Yeah. So that it actually. And that is a measurement of how fast we're aging. We know that C15 reverses that.

Whoa.

Yeah. And in one study showing measurements of epigenetic aging, our biological versus our chronological aging study showed that people who have more C15 on their complex lipids had younger biological ages than their chronological age.

How much younger?

I think it was about two years. Like, I'll take that. Right. And it's early stages of that study. And then fourth, that it needs to have meaningful clinical benefits within months. So this is not something where you cross your fingers and say, I hope I live longer than that. It needs to, like when you take it. And if you have an aging related condition, there's evidence of reversal of that, of an improvement within months. And that's where these randomized clinical trials have shown that within 12 weeks, C15 supplementation. Fatty 15 supplementation lowers LDL cholesterol, it lowers liver enzymes in people who have a history of fatty liver disease. It improved red blood cell function, and it improved gut health, like all within 12 weeks in two different clinical trials. So, and then the fifth, the big one is, you know that there's evidence. And that's where epidemiology comes in. Oh yeah. Evidence of large scale studies show repeatedly showing prospective cohort studies showing that higher levels of this molecule can prevent the onset of the diseases. That kill us. So heart disease, type 2 diabetes, certain types of cancers, Alzheimer's. So evidence of all of those first three, Alzheimer's, we'll be talking about later in the year. And the last two are really simple, but really hard to overcome. The first is that we need to know that it's something that we could have access to our whole life because something we need to take every day for 75 to 100 years. Are we going to have access to it? And the last is that we can do that safely. So once you get those criteria, it's real hard to find something that meets all those. And that's where Nick was sitting. He's like, gosh, stuff. He's like, there is no. He was spoke at the ARDD meeting, one of the leading anti aging therapeutic meetings in the world. And Nick stood on the stage and he said, there is no single molecule that has more evidence of being a longevity molecule than C15. And he says, I've seen it all. So it's. We really are there. So I love.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

Yeah, that's a huge accomplishment.

Thank you. Well, you've been along for the ride. I mean, you saw it early and it's just the data just keep growing and growing. So I love those skeptics that we talked about in the beginning because it's like we should continue to challenge and say, what else do we need to look for? What do we need to challenge? The world has taken that on and C15 has emerged truly as Simon and Schuster gave it the title, like, the longevity nutrient.

How do you respond to like, the minority of doctors who say there is no evidence that we can extend human lifespan. All you can do is hope to be healthy until you die at the age you're going to die.

I have two answers to that. So the first is we are, we have. We've doubled our lifespan.

Okay. Yeah.

So like even you look at humans and just like, okay, that's already. So we already know that. We already know that that's possible. Um, I know that there's some, you know, controversy around 120, 122. Can we get past that? The other is evolution. Right. So you take mammals, we have mice, and then we have humans and dolphins and elephants.

You have naked mole rats. That's what I'm saying. They're way better than even better.

Right. So in nature today, we have proof that mammals can live. A human can live 37 times longer or 27 times longer than a mouse. So evolution has already figured out massive changes in longevity for C15. That's where we've learned it feeds into this whole cell membrane pacemaker theory of aging, that the more stable the cells are. This is A.J. holbert described. The more stable our cell membranes, the longer a species lifespan. So C15 is just tapping into something nature told us all along. So my answer, clearly I'm like, yes, we can get there, but we really need to be like. That is a big reason why the Navy funded development of a pure free fatty acid, C15, absent of the pro inflammatory fats. We know what you get in propel. The Navy funded all this, Dave. Like, all of the science to help optimize a molecule that they saw a lot of promise in to do a lot of good for dolphins and for, you know, puppies.

Is the Navy going to put fatty 15 in MREs so soldiers can be more productive?

Shouldn't they?

They paid for the research. They ought to.

The dolphins are getting it. No joke. They get fatty 15.

Oh, that's so cool. Like, here's a bucket of it, right?

Oh my gosh, they get like 20 capsules a day.

Now you mentioned that in your study of epigenetic aging, I'm assuming using true age or something.

And it was another group that did the study.

Okay, so you didn't do the study. Even better. I love it when you didn't pay for it. You didn't know the results and they arrive in your inbox.

Yeah, those are the.

I always feel good about those. Okay. Two years of additional lifespan. Now, there are some people who will say the only thing you can do to be healthy for your health span, which is all that's possible, is to train, train, train. VO2 max is the most important. If you improve your V2 max by 12%, that correlates with a two year life extension and you have a nutrient that gives you a two year life extension. And get this. If you do an hour of Cardio Every day, five days a week, you only get a 2% improvement in your VO2 max when you come to upgrade labs. And we kind of have a way to do it in 15 minutes. But seriously, this idea that more exercise is going to improve VO2 max or muscles, and it's gonna make you live longer. The effect is relatively small compared to what you can do with nutrients and other lifestyle measures. And exercise is really important and muscle mass is important.

Yeah.

And if you had high VO2 max and you took fatty 15, are you likely to live longer or less long?

Yeah, I'm gonna go with longer. And. And the big point being it's that it's additive. That more and more things we can do that are becoming. It's not right.

It's multiplicative.

You have a good point.

Because synergistic effects.

Yeah, yeah. You see how we did synergistic at the same time? Totally.

How we were downloading that with our psychic telepathy because we know you're foam darpa.

That's right. I had the little device.

Nice. You have one of those two. The implant. Now everyone's going. Oh, my gosh, they really are. No, we're actually not cyborgs, I promise. What happened to remove C15 from our diets.

So we did. So there was this 50 year experiment where, you know, somehow Congress.