LipoFullerenes for the Longevity Win – Ian Mitchell #577

Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that, well, eating a lot of fiber could improve some cancer treatments. One of the problems that's happening in ketosis right now is, is people make this mistake. Well, if little of something's a good thing, a lot of it must be even better. And if you do what I did years ago when I was developing the bulletproof diet, and you go on that no fiber kind of keto diet because you're eating just mostly fat and some meat, bad stuff happens to your gut bacteria, which I wrote about in a couple of my books. Some new research, though, shows that high fiber diets, and by the way, that doesn't mean high grain and things like that. You can get fiber from your vegetables, you can get fiber from different sources. But high fiber diets change gut microbes to make immune therapies more effective. And interestingly, they found that taking probiotics could do the opposite. It doesn't mean they will. It's obviously dependent on what probiotics you'd be taking and what you already have in your gut. The research comes out of MD Anderson Cancer Center. In other words, feed more of what you got instead of adding other stuff in which. Which is a core thing that I definitely recommend from a bulletproof perspective. Having enough fiber in your diet will cause the stuff your body needs to grow. It's kind of self regulating. Researchers looked at people with melanoma, kind of skin cancer, who were getting a kind of immune therapy called PD1 blockade. And the people who ate a high fiber diet were five times as likely to have the therapy halt the growth or shrink their tumors versus people who ate diets low in fiber. The researchers, after looking at a lot of data, including what's actually growing in poop, figured out that the people who had the highest amount of fiber had more of the kind of bacteria that were associated with response to immune therapy, and they got the effects of the therapy. People who ate a lot of processed meat or excess sugar had fewer of those bacteria, and they were more likely to grow despite the treatment. But when people took probiotics, pills, or even food supplements that are supposed to have helpful bacteria, those bacteria crowded out the bacteria that the body needed for the immune therapy. So it's not necessarily that they're bad for you, but that you want to make sure that the probiotics you're taking are good for you. And in this case, 40% of the patients said they were taking probiotics and they had lower diversity of gut microbes than people who didn't take them. So score one for prebiotics, and I wouldn't say score negative one for probiotics, but maybe if you do both at the same time, you'll see some interesting stuff happen. Today on the show. We're talking again with Ian Mitchell, who was a guest on the show about a year ago last summer on episode 514. We talked then about why inflammation matters for your dog and for you, and some things that I'm doing for my dog, Merlin, based on what Ian's developed as VP of Research at C360 Health. And Ian's just a fascinating guy to interview, which is why I had him back on, because over the past six years, he's been using these carbon nanoparticulate molecules as a backbone to do things like joint renewal, hair regrowth, and even anti metastatic therapies for cancer. And he has a background of doing actual real drug development for big companies and is looking at how we use this compound in order to do all sorts of good stuff in the human body. And he created something called lipofullerines. And what that is is these fullerenes, these buckyballs as they're also known, that are suspended in fats. Awesome. To get into more detail, and he was just recently granted a patent that has important implications for treating humans, which is kind of cool. So we're seeing patents on anti aging technologies like this. Ayan, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Dave. Glad to be back.

You know, last time you were on the show, you didn't come clean with me.

There were probably a few things that I really couldn't talk about just yet.

You didn't mention that you're like a semi professional or maybe professional saxophonist and that when you moved to Austin in a former life.

Yeah, I was a professional saxophonist.

Yeah, you moved to Austin, you were like best new jazz musician on the scene sort of thing.

Yeah, yeah. There was a competition. Yeah. They called the Clarksville Jazz Fest Best new jazz Artist competition, which I won. When I moved there, it had been a long thing. My family, there's quite the history of musicians and it was kind of the options were be very good or just don't do it. And. And so I very much enjoyed it.

That's too funny. And we'll talk about what being a musician does for creativity a little bit later in the show. But first up, I just dropped a lot of carbon360, carbon60, lipofullerene sort of stuff. I want you to define a few things so people understand why what we're talking about matters and what it is. So define carbon 60. What is that?

Okay, carbon 60. Everyone says it's an allotropic form of carbon, which just means it's another configuration of carbon atoms.

Everyone says it's allotrophic.

That's it.

If you're listening to this and you're like, what does allotropic actually mean? I'm pretty sure that's not what everyone says.

Okay, perhaps that is not what everyone says. So an allotrope is just a form where it's based on the same atom, but it's configured differently. So you've got diamonds and graphite and fullerenes, and they're all allotropic forms of carbon. So just different forms of carbon.

So if you compress your charcoal briquette into a diamond, it's still just carbon?

It is still just carbon. It's just configured in a tetrahedron, and hence the value goes up.

So, yeah, so if you're making Austin barbecue, you could technically make it over diamonds.

If you make barbecue at the right amount of megapascals. Yes. Yes, you could. You'd have a. The best barbecue ever. The most pricey barbecue ever.

All right, just. Just checking on that. Okay, so carbon 60 is a reconfiguration of the carbon.

Yeah. And the one that there. There are a bunch of them that. The one that we particularly play with is spherical. So it's 60 carbon atoms grouped together. Carbon 60, buckyballs, Buckminster fullerenes.

Geodesic domes.

Right, right. That's why the guys who actually discovered it in 85 called it. That is because it looks very much like a geodesic dome. Hence buckminster fullerene. And so over the past couple years, initially, it's been around for about 34 years. But initially it's been around technically since the big bang. But research started on it in about 85 after it was discovered. And most people were using it just by itself in its raw form, or they were combining it in an aqueous form with water and solution. And the results were not so good. There was a lot of thought about maybe you can use it for drug delivery, maybe you can group it with things. But no one had actually come across something that really made it bioavailable. In fact, in an aqueous form, there were actually a lot of issues with it. It had some genotoxicity and caused a bunch of not so friendly effects.

So you make these Unusual little spheres. And it turns out these carbon 60 things do occur naturally just at a very, very low incidence.

Right. Lightning strikes, volcanic activity. Yeah, big bangs, things like that.

Okay, so they exist, but they aren't common. If scientists made them common, then they would put them in water and it was bad for you.

Yeah. Generally speaking, when you made an aqueous solution with C60, it was not a good thing. But some guys started working with them, trying to find other ways that they could solubize them and they found, hey look, we can actually adduct these things to lipids. So they started binding them to fats, and oddly enough, they'd bind them to fats and they became bioavailable and they'd actually move through the cell membranes. So in my lab we took that a couple steps further and we really started breaking down. How do they work with different lipids? What impact do the different lipid chains have? How can we configure these to get a different response on your hair and your eyes and your liver and your skin?

Hold on a second here. Are you saying that different fats do different things in the human body?

It's almost like proteins, different types of proteins. Like venom, for instance, does a different thing in the body than say a nice steak.

Who would have thought? Oh my goodness.

Crazy talk, right?

So what you did though, is the original days and full disclosure, you and I, we've had time to hang out and I have, we both have done extensive anti aging stuff that is very cutting edge. So we're kind of cut from the same cloth that way. And going back, I want to say 15 years, I ordered my first olive oil, C60 molecules from, you know, some crazy, you know, brown cardboard thing. I think I saw some in my freezer, but I didn't feel good when I had them. I'm like, I don't know, I also don't know what to do with them. So I have these little purple vials of whatever. And so I was a bit skeptical when you told me what you were doing. But I also had seen the research. The same stuff that got you excited said, oh, like rats live like 90. Was it 90%?

90% longer?

90% longer. And so I was intrigued when you said, well, why does it have to be olive oil? It could be any of these other oils. So what did you find when you started mixing these in different oils and what did you do differently than that original stuff? That kind of gave me a headache.

Well, okay, so one, you have to really look at the quality of the Oil, obviously you have to look at the quality of pretty much anything you're going to combine with at a ratio of 1 to 99. Right. So you're using one part fullerenes and you know, 99 parts oil. So you've got to make sure that it's really good quality. So we started finding different effects in terms of say, like brain octane. Right. It fractions in the liver. So you're going to get an entirely different biological effect. If you couple it as we had, if you take fullerenes and you adduct them to caprylic acid, it breaks down in the liver. Hence it's going to be delivered to different areas in the body. The chain length is a different size, so it's going to be compatible with different aspects of your physiology. And some it won't. Some you need long chains, some you need short chains, some you need medium chains. And you're trying to basically figure out what key goes into what lock. And so we spent months and months and months breaking down all of those things. And I think I've told you this before. You know, some of them were really cool, fantastic. Some of them, like vitamin E and fish oil, really disgusting and kind of disturbing at a very visceral level.

You take it and you're like, I wish I didn't take that.

Yeah, fluorescent orange and the worst smelling thing I think we've ever seen in the lab, other than maybe, I don't know, there are a couple of really noxious things occasionally that come through.

Got it. So it doesn't always work. It comes out very different.

It's almost like straight glutathione.

Okay. So if you're a longtime listener and you tried the original glutathione force that came in a syringe, it was sort of this weird banana ish flavor with a strong sulfur under and over note, but it worked really well. And since then, we've managed to get into a powdered liposome in a capsule, which is the modern version, which is much more civilized. But that potent sulfur is what pure glutathione smells like. It's nasty. So you were having problems because you were getting these fullerenes, putting them in different oils and trying to figure out where can you direct them in the body using the oils. But some of them tasted crappy. Couldn't you just put the crappy tasting stuff in a capsule and just take it?

Yeah, actually you could, but you can elicit a certain response from lipofullerenes, which is the term, and there is a Big difference, because like I said, with aqueous C60 or C60 and other forms, it's not the same as a lipofullerine. A lipofulllerene functions differently. It's bioavailable. It moves through cell membranes. So, yeah, we could have put it in a capsule, but that was just part of the process. We were taking it many, many steps further. We were looking at what happens if we couple this with proteolytic enzymes, what happens if we couple this with different amino acids and different tetrapeptide groups. And that's the first patent we had issued was about peptide group combinations, because we were able to elicit a whole host of different responses. And the patent office rebuffed it initially. And then we had to go back with more documentation and testing and verify everything.

And according to my notes here, and my notes are pretty good, because I am an advisor to your company, an investor in your company. I really believe in this stuff because I've seen what it did, both for my dog and for me. So just. You're listening to this. I believe in this a lot. But you found in your university tests that your formula for dogs had a 223% increase in effectiveness for reducing inflammation. A cytokine called IL6. And if you guys have read Head Strong and all, you know it's one of the big inflammatory compounds in the body. So you are knocking this thing down really strongly with this unusual form of carbon that no one had ever heard of.

Yeah. And there was a precipitous drop in the span of about 2 hours. It just cratered the cytokine levels.

And you got this patented now, which is a good thing. And a lot of times these anti aging compounds, new nutritional substances like that, they either aren't patentable or no one knows how to do it, or no one is willing to do the hard work. But because you've worked in actual drug development for Big Pharma, you understand that whole process. So you got the patent issued and it's now in a good place.

Yeah, that was the precursor to the patent that we were just granted the notice of allowance on, which means that it'll publish here in the next couple of months. And that was really.