Spermidine's Role in Cellular Health - Dr. Elizabeth Yurth : 1160

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today's episode, we're going to talk about longevity, which is actually why I started the biohacking movement. I was so frustrated that no one besides me who was under 30 would come to an anti aging education group in Palo Alto, California, two minutes from Google's headquarters said, well, we need to find some words that tie together control of your own biology. And when you're young, you want power, you want energy, you want attractiveness. And then in middle age, you want longevity, and actually not even longevity in middle age, you want. You want extended energy and. And me. And as you start realizing, okay, there's some aging stuff happening, then you start wanting longevity. So there's sort of this arc, but it's all the same things. So if you learn to do this when you're 20 years old, you'll just get better grades and have a better career and be calmer and happier and have better relationships and better community because your energy is better. And when you're 70, you're going to like what. What you look like and feel like. But if you started when you're 70, you can still get benefits. It's just harder. So I'm like, what do we call these tools? Well, we call them biohacking. And one of the areas of interest for me, two of my books have been about this. It's about fasting. And, no, I don't think men or women should fast every single day. In fact, my second fasting book was to correct misperceptions about fasting that happen when people get very excited about something in biohacking and decide they're gonna do it every day, forever, and without regard to outcomes. So there's a fasting mimetic, or a substance that gives your body the effects of fasting that is a postbiotic. And I wrote about it in Superhuman, my longevity book. It's called Spermidine, and you've heard episodes on it before. So Today I've asked Dr. Elizabeth Yurth to come on the show to talk about the new research in Spermidine. Since the publication of my book and since our last podcast, she's got 30 years of clinical experience in orthopedics, cellular medicine, and regenerative medicine. I reviewed my labs with her, and she just has a great mind for thinking about things. She runs the Boulder Longevity Institute, where she's medical director with a focus on nutrition, hormones, and get this human enhancement. Are you allowed to say that. Dr. Y. How dare you. Doctor, what do your colleagues say when you say I'm enhancing humans? Are they. Are they down with that? Or do they just like kind of snub their noses?

Really? Why I had to leave my orthopedic practice and. And start Border Longevity instit. Because that didn't go over well.

Yeah, the funny thing is half the doctors who are complaining probably come in the back door after hours asking for treatments because they don't like being fat and tired either. And somehow antibiotics just don't fix it. It's weird.

So I do love to hear you say that, you know, and, and like, like most of your. You guys who are probably in the collective and stuff, you know, a lot of us didn't get into this field because it didn't exist, unfortunately, when I was 20. But my kids are in their 20s, everybody in my office is in their 30s. And we're trying to do is actually sort of, you know, start convincing people in their 20s and 30s ultimately that you have to actually start doing this stuff. Then you're right. Anytime you can start doing it is going to be beneficial. But how do we actually reach out? And so those of you guys who are my age or, you know, in their 60s and, and, you know, have kids in their 20s and, you know, work with people, we're truly trying to engage that. My kids, you know, know a whole lot more about supplements than most of their. Their friends do. And so I love to hear you say that. I think it's one of the things we really have to sort of work on is spreading the message. Because as you know, Dave, a lot of us, our followers, our people finally feel poorly. Right. And then they come looking for something to make them feel better. And we really have to start thinking about in our 20s and 30s, what can we do at that point so that we aren't playing, you know, try trying to reverse the clock, but we just don't let the clock age as much. So I love to hear you say that. And I think that's one of our goals, that we need to really try and reach that younger population a little bit more.

You've got the words. When I was 20, even though I was fat and really unhealthy, I had brain fog. Longevity wasn't my jam. It was, I want my brain to work again. It was enhancement, cognitive enhancement. I just want my brain back going, my energy back. Sure, I like to lose weight, but when you say human enhancement, I'm like, sign me up. Right? And it's the same thing, longevity enhancement. And that's why longevity is one of the three main pillars of the biohacking movement. And I'm, I'm just so excited that now you can have, you know, you know, 30 years of experience out there talking about that openly. And the fact is there will always be people in every profession who do things that others, some others don't like or do like and it doesn't really matter. So you're going to do what, what works in your clinical data and they're going to do what they think works. And well, one of you is going to be younger and healthier and your patients will be as well, depending on who's right. And that's why we get to shop to find the care team that we want. And I recommend for listeners, your physician, if they're in the functional world or longevity world, ought to be able to have a detailed conversation with you about spermidine, which is why we're going to share this with you today. I should mention you are on the advisory board at Spermidine Life. I've worked with Spermidine Lifes because they were the very first spermidine supplement you could get in the US I wrote about spermidine in Superhuman, but I couldn't buy it, right? So I imported illegally some, some Japanese probiotics that allegedly made spermidine. And I ordered research chemicals in a little vial and I did take them, but $150 for 10 grams of spermidine was kind of expensive. And when you get research grade high potency spermidine, well, it kind of smelled and tasted like its namesake, which wasn't great, my biohacker perspective. So. And by the way, guys, if you're listening, you can tell what its namesake is. Anyway, tell me about it as I know some of our listeners know. But what is spermidine? Where does it come from and why do we care?

Yeah, you and I are the same boat that I actually got interested in this product way before it was available. And I did the same exact thing you did. And I got interested because what I studied cellular medicine. I study cellular pathways, right? It's, you know, it's the tedious part of what we do. It's looking at the cell and all of the pathways, all those biochemical pathways that you thought you could forget in medical school. And actually when I was in medical school, most of them didn't even exist, right? We didn't know about them. So. So we have an organization called Seed Scientific Research and Performance. That's what we do is we still use. We sort of study all these cellular pathways. So years ago, we started looking at this, what's called a polyamine flux pathway, and said, oh my gosh, this is a really important pathway and spermidine is a really critical player. So I did the same thing you did. I'm like, oh my gosh, I need this. And I started looking for it and I couldn't find it. It didn't, you know, like you. And I'm not quite as gutsy with research chemicals, so I didn't go down that road. Found some product that had some spermidine in it but really was sort of stuck. And that's really how I stumbled. And it was funny because I was calling and calling, calling. This was over a year's period and I finally, you know, got a hold of somebody who was from, you know, this Austrian company, Longevity Labs, that was trying to actually branch into the US and they were number one, astounded that I knew anything about this because nobody knew anything about it. And so they. So the reason, just for your listeners, I'm on the advisory board. I'm not a paid member. I don't get paid actually to promote anything. And so just because I was kind of really so interested in this molecule and really wanted it to be a success here in the us that's really why I got in the advisory boards to really help Bridget here in the US and for no other reason. So I actually use this product and recommend this product because I believe in it. Those you guys who, you know, sperm has now been around a while. Right back in, when you and I first talked, nobody had heard about it. It was just a weird word that had the word sperm in it and nobody had heard about it. And now there's a dozen products on the market that's pyramidine in them. And so it's, it's, it's made its way into more of the just regular community of people who understand longevity and biohacking. But for those of you who don't really know what it is, it is a polyamine. And polyamines are. There's three of them. There's putresine, spermidine and spermine. And they're all actually critically important. And it's kind of critically important, have to remember the fact that they're all sorted together. Just isolating spermidine is actually not going to do you a lot of good. You actually have to have to all three of these together. So you really need all of the polyamines in the body. Our Body is really imperatively. It, it relies on balance and we throw a whole bunch of one thing in and we disturb that balance. It's not a good idea. And so really you want all three of these. Now most things that have polyamines in them are largely spermidine, which is why you can call a polymene product spermidine. But it really typically, if it's a good polymene product, it has all three of those things. So basically what spermidine as a polymene does, it's found in every cell of your body. And in fact, we actually know that it is so critical to the survival of cells that if you take it out of the cell, the cell will die. It is absolutely 100% critical to cell life.

So we could, we could call this episode why you are addicted to spermidine.

Yeah, I mean you have to have it, you know, you would die without. So you're, you're, you're exactly right. So you, you know, so if you don't take sperm and where can you get it? It does come in our diet. It's just in smaller amounts. It's hard to get enough of it. Our body can make it, our intestine can make it, so our intestinal cells, you talked about it as a postbiotic, it can be actually made, so it can actually help our gut microbiome and we can actually make more of our own. So it can help sort of optimize that.

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Just worth paying attention to the history of vitamins and supplements. So amines are a class of biological compounds that we were easily able to detect a while ago. So the word vitamin is actually vital amine put together. So it turns out the B vitamins, they're not amines. So we made up this word for the original supplements that came out there, that which were based on polyamines. And then we kind of warped it to say a bunch of compounds that we, that we have classified and we of course missed a bunch of. And then we kind of forgot about the polyamines that we named vitamins after. So we're kind of going back to our roots here, right? And let's see, traditional foods, things like wheat germ.

Wheat germ's probably one of the biggest sources, but you can find other things. You can find it in peas and soybeans and there's other foods that have it as well.

But, but very small amounts, even very small germs, right? Which, which has quote high amounts. You still have to eat, you know, a cup or two a wheat germ to get a meaningful dose. Right?

You do. And interestingly enough, you can't actually every wheat germ does not have the same amount of polynes in it as well. It appears to be specific strains of wheat germs seem to actually be. Be more robust and a pure form of these polyamines. So you actually have to. And for instance, most American wheat germ seems to have much lower quantities of it. And so, so that's why, you know, this part, the parts for life comes from an Austrian, you know, company that actually has to go through some great lengths to actually get a really good source of wheat germ to make these polymenes. So it really is not quite so easy as we think.

American wheat germ does come with free glyphosate, though.

Yeah, that's true. Right?

Yeah, you get that slow, we spray it on there. So, guys, if you're looking for a source of extra glyphosate, you know, Monsanto's finest, you could get American wheat germ.

Right. If you want cancer high on your list of things to die from, that's a good thing to do.

There's also the amount of gluten. American wheat is hard red wheat, where wheat germ would come from lower spermidine, but also much higher and more allergenic gluten and gluten like compounds, which is why a lot of people can handle European soft wheat, but they can't eat American wheat. So I, I would say you want a European source, but there is still gluten in, in wheat in Europe, even if it's less problematic. So when you concentrate wheat germ, how much of the gluten are we pulling out?

That's an interesting thing because when you read the bottle, say, you know, if you're celiac or gluten sensitive, you know, be careful with this product. And I think truly there's some very interesting data. So, you know, what causes the sensitivity to wheat in both celiacs and people of gluten sensitivity is what's called tissue transglutamase. And very interesting. So if you don't activate tissue transglutamase, if the wheat doesn't activate tissue transglutamates, that's what creates the immune response, is the tissue transglutamase. It's just that the wheat will activate this tissue transglutamase, that creates an immune response in some people. So one of the treatments for celiac that is really being investigated are these, these tissue transglutamase inhibitors. Very interestingly, one of the competitive inhibitors to TTG to tissue transglutamase is spermidine. So when you eat wheat germ that's very rich in spermidine, you should not actually get an immune response from it because it's actually blocking the Immune stimulating agent. So I use it. I'm pretty gluten sensitive. I can take spermidine no problem. Most of my patients can. I will say some of my patients have had issues. Is it the spermidine? Is it something else? I don't know, but be wary of it. But basically, putracene, systemine, spermidine are all tissue transglutamase inhibitors. In theory, they should actually help celiac patients. I will also count that. Remember tissue channels. Glutamase is not just in celiac diseases and gluten sensitivities, it's linked to cancers, it's linked to Parkinson's, it's linked to Alzheimer's. So, so inhibiting tissue trans glutamase is actually a beneficial thing and it's probably one of the benefits of sperm and it's actually on this TTG inhibition.

All right, that's super helpful. So guys, I, I don't handle gluten particularly well. Although when I'm in Europe and I take gluten degrading enzymes, I can eat European wheat for a couple days and I'm okay. So if you ever see me eating baklava or croissants in Turkey or France or Dubai or somewhere, well now you know why. Because, well, it's, it doesn't have glyphosate. It's a different species. And you, at least I can handle that. But if you are, you know, the tiniest trace of a whiff of any kind of wheat anywhere on the planet messes with you, then you wouldn't want to use a wheat germ derived spermidine, which is the, the best source of spermidine that I'm familiar with. And I, I do take spermidine life. And I've been taking it well ever since it came out because like you, a friend of mine, Hani from, from Switzerland, sent me a bottle and I said, oh, this is great. So we started reaching out, saying can we get some? Can we get some? And, and so I, I'm just, I'm a big fan of, of, of the stuff and the research that I, I published in my book about spermidine as, you know, one of these new longevity compounds that, that you couldn't yet buy when the book came out was the convincing evidence that autophagy is important for longevity. And this is basically breaking down cells that need to get out of there and replacing them with new young, strong cells. And, and it turns out spermidine does that in a similar way to fasting and a similar way to rapamycin.

You're, you're right that spermidine is a fasting mimetic in a sense, but it actually may be the key player to, to autophagy that without it, if you fasted and you didn't have adequate spermidine levels, that you might actually not be able to induce it. And that's because what spermidine does is it's is actually activates something or increases expression of something called acetyl transferase EP300, which you're probably familiar with, right?

Yeah, define that for us.

You know, so EP300 is a crucial molecule that binds to something called beclin1, LC3 that are absolutely essential to activate autophagy. So when EP300 and aspirin actually is an EP300 increasing thing too, which is why aspirin has some anti cancer properties.

Right.

EP300 is so crucial to activate LC3 and Beclin 1 and activate autophagy that without it you cannot induce autophagy. So in theory, if you are fasting, but you didn't have adequate spermidine levels, and if you're not eating, are you taking in any spermidine? No, because if you're not taking supplement, you're just getting it from your diet, you're not eating any, you may actually not be getting some of the benefits of fasting. Now, we don't know that for sure, but if you look at pathway mechanisms and you have a molecule that's absolutely critical to instigate the proteins that are responsible for autophagy, it makes sense, at least in my mind, that you have to have this molecule on board. So I don't know that I even call it a fasting memetic anymore as much as I call it an essential nutrient for autophagy.

So it's actually a fasting enabler?

Yeah, I would say yes, that's probably a better term for it. Now, can I induce the autophagy without fasting by using it? Yes. I mean, I'm going to get more adequate autophagy. I think fasting has some other benefits as well besides autophagy. So, you know.

Oh, of course. Fasting is a broad spectrum thing.

Right?

All right, so it sounds like you're saying that if someone had a choice between taking spermidine and eating a, a schedule without restricted eating windows, other than, you know, don't eat late at night versus intermittent fasting versus going on rapamycin, it sounds like spermidine would be your number one recommendation.

You know, my belief in aging and longevity is you're going to have to attack it from multiple pathways. Right. So I, you know, I recommend spermidine and I recommend rapamycin and you know, for the right people, fasting. I don't know that fasting works for everybody. I'm pretty thin, I'm pretty lean. Fasting is hard for me because I lose a fair amount of muscle when I fast. Even short fasts, it's hard for me to get enough protein and then I can't exercise. And if I can't exercise I go completely crazy and nobody likes me. But I think that when you look at rapamycin and it's, it's at least somewhat inhibition of MTOR2 that you know, those are pieces that you know that are another player and I, you know, we know that there's, we're not going to find one magical bullet that stops aging. It's going to be attacking it from all these different roles. Probably the only one magic bullet to stop aging is exercise because it attacks every one of those pathways probably beyond that. So if you were to take one pill it would be exercise that would be the, the closest you could come to being one thing that you could do. But I don't just say spermidine is more important. I think it is essential to autophagy. But rapamycin may still be a critical player too to, to blocking other pathways.

Okay, that makes sense. So order these for me. Fasting then spermidine, then rapamycin, you do all three.

When I fasted fast for very short periods of time again because of, because I, I lose muscle and muscle's my kind of priority in my life. So I pass. You know, I used to do three or four day fast. It's probably what you really need to get to, to really induce that, that true MTOR inhibition. Right. So if I'm really, and then the, and then the reboost of MTOR with refeeding. So I, I, I fast really for, for much briefer periods of time now rarely more than a 24 hour fast. So in my, in my book I'll put spermidine kind of it's I, I have everybody stay on it all the time. We'll talk about in my practice I use it in much higher doses for other things but it's a baseline thing. I have people stay on a maintenance dose all the time to get that autophagy really, you know, enabled because again if it is the one thing I have to have on board and again there's not a whole lot of things we think that are you know that are going to do have the same effect as spermidine, then it's going to have to be up there if you want that autophagy effect. There's other things obviously induce autophagy. So I put that, I put fasting for the right people in the right. With the right timing. I, I don't know that we have the perfect. And I know you're very expert on fasting. I don't know that we have the perfect answer to what is the length of fast that you really need to do. And you know, and so I like fasting when I'm trying to reset an immune system in somebody, you know, doing things like that. When people are more now stable. I find fasting sometimes to not fall, it falls lower on my list. So I would put spermidine. I have most of my patients on rapamycin. I take rapamycin. You probably take rapamycin. I have most of my patients that are at my, it is high on my list in one of my longevity protocols. And there's a whole lot of other things.

The science on fasting is it, it's really clear you need to fast exactly as much as your body needs today given your current state. That's what it really comes down to. There is no fasting window that works for everyone. And if your normal fasting window that works is, you know, I do an 18 hour fast most days and that's really worked for me. If you do that for two years and you fix your metabolism, you might find that you get lean right. And that you don't need 18 hours.

A day and I don't need it as much. Right, that's exactly right. I agree. I used to fast a lot more than I do now, you know, and I find that I can, I don't need the longer fast anymore to sort of keep my body habitus where I want it, you know, But I will if I gotten sick or things like that sometimes to kind of reboost reset my immune system or I have an autoimmune disease like you do, you know, your, your Lyme mold issues, sometimes you get these, you go, you down, you slip back and I'll do a little fast to try and reboot my immune.

System, you know, using it as a tool. Just like ketosis being an unending ketosis or unending over training or unending over fasting. All of those in men and women always lead to the same excessive cortisol and depletion.

Right.

So they're just tools that you can use. But spermidine is one of those tools you can use every day because it doesn't induce those, even though you're getting a lot of different benefits.

Right?

So for you, what's a maintenance dose of spermidine life, like, how many capsules, how many milligrams of spermidine is that?

That's going to depend on who you are. So, you know, one of the, one of the big critiques of spermidine, know when everybody's like, okay, sperm is the, you know, the elixir of life. Then this article came out, which was then publicized by certain naysayers of everything. And there's, you know, you know this. There's these people who get on and they are very big at taking these newest and greatest things and picking them apart. And sometimes it's good and sometimes maybe just leaning too much on false information or on one article. So a study came out in, in Germany in April of 2023, and it basically said that when you measured plasma levels of spermidine, when somebody took spermidine, there was no measurable plasma level and said, obviously this is a worthless supplement because you can't even get plasma levels of sperminine when you take it. So, you know, all these people are telling you to take a product that you can't even measure in your system above what baseline placebo measures do is not doing you any good. And, and what they did, however, find was there was high levels of spermine. So sperminine can turn into spermine and secondarily, spermine can turn back into spermidine.

Is sperminine useful or not?

So spermine is useful. So spermine definitely has some. So spermin does. So spermidine turns into spermin. Spermine definitely has some systemic effects, probably more on the gut. So some of its really beneficial effects have to be in the gut, which is why it's probably found in metabolism. Now, the big point they failed to mention here is where is. Where is spermidine doing its job? It's not floating around in your plasma, actually. It goes very rapidly into the cell. So it's proteins that pick it up very rapidly into the cell. Because inside the cell is where the mechanism we talked about to induce a photophagy that's intracellular. So nobody's measured intracellular levels of spermidine. We know it's getting into you, but and be metabolized because you see high levels of sperm. So we know it's getting into you. It's not as though it's not doing anything because it's Metabolite, there's lots of things we can't measure very well in plasma. It's why when we look at even some of the B vitamins, it's better measured in some of the urine metabolites because those are a better measure of the, of the levels because these drugs are either rapidly picked up or rapidly metabolized. So I, so I'm a big naysayer of that. And the fact that I think they prove, by proving that spermine was in higher levels when you took it. So basically when you, when you look at that effect that we have to get spermidine into the cell, you know, and we, and we don't have to have these high plasma levels. What dose is the right level? We're basing a lot of these studies obviously on mice. Like we do a lot of things. But it appears that at a baseline level, you know, if you're healthy and young and you really are just trying to take this drug to just sort of, or the supplement to just sort of stay nice and healthy and young, then one milligram is probably enough. I much more commonly find that I would recommend a little higher. So spermidine has a spermid and they have a sperm extra that's one and a half milligrams. I very often recommend in even healthy people to go up to that level.

I did four of the spermidine life heavy pills. So that's about six milligrams a day.

Six milligrams. Right. And, and that's what I, that's what I typically recommend too. So honestly, I think more is better. I think we're oftentimes dosing a lot of things and at a point that probably they are a little underdosed. So I think it's probably a good maintenance dose to maintain good levels if you're a young healthy person. But if you get sick, if you, you know, if you have a disease state, if you have cardiovascular disease, or you have early cognitive decline or dementia, or you have liver problems or kidney problems, you need more. So in my practice, I'm much more often using a 6 milligram dose. And even in healthy people, I will cycle them on that 6 milligram dose because I think you truly need a really high dose to, you know, massively induce autophagy. Right. So if I want to, so can I keep autophagy going? Probably with a small dose I can sort of keep a stable level. But I think if you really want to get a, you know, a big clean the house, you need to use A higher dose and maybe do that on periodic basis. So when I'm treating my patients who have disease states, I'm much more often using the 6 milligram dose.

Okay.

There's no toxicity even at high doses. That's been seen with this. I mean, it's a food. So we really haven't seen toxicity associated with higher doses. And it may well be. And especially like in this study, when they measured spermine levels, more was better more, raised spermine more. So, so it may well be that you could even take more in people who have more disease states. And we're finding all these different things now that spermidine is helpful for like liver, like kidney, you know, like, like brain and heart. I mean, the heart studies are pretty, are pretty impressive.

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You said you like to, to cycle spermidine. Do you recommend that you stop taking it for a day or two or what's the cycle look like?

So all people take the 1, 1 1/2 milligrams on a baseline level. And, and then I will cycle a little bit. I think that you may be getting when you gain questions when you get into that 6 milligram dose. Do you want to maintain that 6 milligram dose? I think if you're well and you're doing fine, probably you want to cycle lower for a little while and then go back up. Just like you're doing right with your fasts and refeeds. A little bit of as. Let's cycle it higher, induce a little bit of, more of, of an autophagy state and then cycle it down a little bit. So I do think, and I believe this with a lot of supplements, that you're better off sort of supplementing things up and down, not maintaining doses at the same level all the time of things. I think that that just keeps the body more homeostatic and it keeps these cellular processes more stable. Our body doesn't like when we overload it with one thing. Our cells are really, really, really smart. And we see that a lot in our world. You know, Dave, is that, you know, people are on a whole lot of supplements and they're taking them every day and you may actually start to overload certain cellular pathways. And, and, and that becomes an issue. And I see it, I see one pathway overloaded start to create problems. Yeah. You know, so I, I do think like if you're taking 6 milligram every, every day, do that for a while, go off of it for a little while, go to just a low maintenance dose for a little while. Right.

This is a good strategy for pretty much all supplements except maybe some things that you're taking for very specific reasons that are, that are daily. Like if you're taking adrenals or something.

Yeah. Or like your D3K2, you know, magnesium, those kinds of things I think you just need on an ongoing basis. Those shouldn't be cycled. We're all low on them. We all need those on an ongoing basis. So I, you know, I think if you're, you're maybe like you're, you're being minerals, things like that, where you're, you know, we're where you have humic and fulvic acid to bind up. Because I can't get away from glyphosates if I'm going to live in the US So I want something that binds out glyphosate. So I think there's some things I think you just stay on all the time.

I kind of put that in my coffee, right? D Danger coffee has a therapeutic dose of those minerals because I also agree those are daily dose things, right?

Those are things that you, you know, especially when you'll get humic and fulvic acid is one of the few things that are going to get rid of glyphosates. And I measure glyphosate levels on my patients. There is nobody, nobody that has glyphosate does not have high glyphosate. So you really have to sit down top of that. Because we know they're linked to so many diseases. I will mention when I said, you know, is there, is there too high or too much spermidine? So there are some studies. And this also came back, you know, I, all the naysayers, whenever I, I talk about something or post something and you get this, I'm sure, you know, all the naysayers come out of the woodworks and say, oh my gosh, you're taking this and it's causing cancer. And that was one, there was a study that showed there was higher levels of spermidine in some cancers. Right. And so now everybody was like, oh my God. So spermidine is causing cancer. And the study would sort of imply that you have high levels of spermidine in cancers. So what does that mean? Well, what it means is that our body is trying to get rid of cancer. So this is that whole cause and effect confusion that occurs where, you know, what is my body going to do when I have cancer now until it gets too distraught and too disturbed, I'm going to try and induce autophagy. I'm going to try and get rid of cancer. Now eventually the cancer cells take over. They don't, we don't do so well. So of course there should be higher levels of spermidine because the body's actually trying to accelerate the polyamine pathway to actually help us fight the cancer. So when you read these studies, guys, you have to be a little careful. Are these causes, are they Effects because a lot of, you know, a lot of people who are coming after you for this stuff, they love the, the shock impact of saying, oh my gosh, you're just doing something that's going to cause cancer. Look at the study that showed spermidine, you know, high levels of spermidine cancer. So you have to sort of think and you have to go back down to the pathway levels. And we know this polyme flux pathway is disturbed in cancers and that higher levels of sperm and e restore that.

And it's funny, if cancer makes a lot of something, people will argue that that causes cancer.

Right.

Even if there's no evidence.

Right.

And cancer is one of those weird metabolic conditions where I've had a variety of experts on the show and the story we hear about cancer from, you know, very western trained doctors, even ones who, you know, say they're longevity doctors but don't think we can extend human life, that they maybe don't. They don't show an understanding of the complex nature of cancer. And that said, there are some things like mold toxins and smoking and alcohol that we just know.

Yeah, right.

There's really no question about those being pro cancer. Um, but there's other times, especially when for some reason we're coming after supplements, they'll talk about it even though the cancer increase from pharmaceuticals might be 10 times higher, but they don't talk about that for some weird reason because we.

Love shock impact of things. Right. It's like semi glutide, everybody getting semi glutide face and you know, and losing all their muscle mass, which is complete and utter BS. And, you know, these GLP1 Angus are hugely beneficial drugs on a whole lot of basis. But the press loves hitting on this because everybody was starting to take it and, you know, and so the press loved it. And, you know, people are going to read bad press a lot more than good press. So, you know, you always have to remember that it's nobody really. It's like the news. Nobody wants to give you the good news. It's only the bad news. And that's how a lot of these articles are done too, or at least what gets out to you in the press.

One of the more important pieces of evidence for the longevity effects of spermidine is simply that at about age 25 to 30, you. You start losing levels. You can roughly predict someone's age based on the amount of spermidine in their tissues.

Right.

You get cellular decline as you age. So you. This is one of the many things that are A sign of cellular decline. So it's something that you can change. But you take it on empty stomach. Do you take it with fat? Do you take it with protein? Do you take it in the morning, do you take it at night? Give me the perfect spermidine dosing and schedule for the average person who's healthy and wants to live a long time.

It's interesting because, you know, personally I take it on, on the morning with, in the morning with a little bit of fat, fatty food or some, some food and that's probably, you know, a good way to take it. It seems to be well absorbed eat. If you take it on empty stomachs, which is why I encourage you, if you're fasting, take it because yeah, again, you want that autophagy effect. You want that. It doesn't make you, you know, I, I. Very few people get nausea or anything like that from it. So like a lot of those vitamins.

Where you like, it's a fasting booster.

Or essential, you know, a critical piece to fasting. Right. So, so, you know, so I think you can take it. I have some people who really describe taking at night, helps their sleep. I've experiment with that a little bit. Like I have some people who, you know, open the capsules and they mix them with, with a, you know, into a little bit of a, you know, a tea or something. And they love that before bedtime and they said it's really helped their deep sleep. When they look at their aura ring data, I haven't noticed that myself, but I have some patients who swear by they love their spermidine for sleep. I don't think there's a lot of documented evidence of that, but whatever. So I don't think there's a critical. Take it in the morning, take it, even take it when it works for you, play with it. Look at your ordering data. Are you better when you, when you take spermidine before you go to bed? Right, Yep. So I just. Fine with me. I'm a lot more compliant with my stuff I take in the morning. So I tend to, to throw in most, most of the things I can earlier in the day. And then I got, obviously a few things you've got to take later or a couple times a day. So I, and I think with food there's been shown to be sl. You know, again, we, we can't measure plasma levels. So are you getting better absorption with food? Don't know. Because we gotta measure plasma levels. We need to measure intracellular levels. I think that in general the recommendation is take it with food. But I don't think it's really critically important one way or the other, honestly. It's one of those pretty forgiving supplements.

That was my conclusion as well. A lot of postbiotics don't need to be with.

Right? You don't. Right.

And so I, I don't notice the difference with or without food.

And yeah, you talked about the declining levels, you know, with age. And this might be one of the really good. And you're right, we forget that we start aging our 20s. You know, people always think, oh, I'm, I'm super young. Really. Our Decline starts about 25. We start aging pretty darn early. And so, so when you look, for instance, one of the places where spermidine is found in very high levels of semen, right. Because that's one, one of the ways it's got its names. Semen and breast milk has some of the highest levels. When you look at semen levels of spermidine, they definitely decline with the age of the male. And it seemed like males who were having fertility issues had much lower levels of spermidine in the semen too. And we also have now mouse studies in, in October, like fall of 2023. So just, you know, six months ago or so, published in Nature Aging. I think it was they, they did studies in, in both culture button live mice as well, looking at fertility because oocytes age pretty rapidly, right? That's why we, we have a hard time getting pregnant after the age of 35. Right. Our, our fertility declines. It's also why, you know, they tell you if, if you had a baby later in life, you live longer. That's nothing to do with having the kid. It has to do with that you were able to get pregnant later in life, right? Because it means you're younger, your oocytes were younger, but ovaries age five times faster than the rest of our body. So reproductive aging is a sign of, you know, so the earlier you go into menopause, the earlier you can't have kids. Those are both signs of earlier or more rapid aging. And what they found is that sperm and eat, at least in mice, allowed their fertility extend much, much longer. Mice have a pretty short time of fertility and so extend much longer. Don't know in humans, but it makes sense. And you know, if we have something, if we look at oxidative stress and all the things that damage eggs then, or egg cells, then spermidine inducing autophagy and getting rid of damage is going to be beneficial. Right? Getting rid of damaged Cells. So I think if, particularly if you're younger and you're thinking of delaying having children, this is probably a really good supplement to take at least at a, you know, maybe a 3 milligram kind of dosing on a regular basis if you want to maintain fertility a little bit longer. Again, we need the human studies. We don't have that. That's true of so many of the things we did. I was just at a huge longevity docs event, sort of the top hundred longevity docs in the world. And we, we have this great little WhatsApp chat that we do all the time. And then we finally met in person and, and we talked about how we all need to get our data together because this n of 1 data that you and I do all the time has to be, you know, put together so we can prove these things in humans. Right now we have to go on the best data we have, which lots of times is simply mouse data, mice data.

Now I think we might be in that group. I don't know. Or is that a different group?

Yeah, it's just docs.

It's just docs. Okay. There's a longevity experts, that's a very similar group that I'm in there. And it's all, it's all docs except for. So I'm an honorary member. But it, it's, it's interesting, the conversations that happen in those private groups versus what you see online.

Yeah.

Because there's so much good stuff happening in the clinic. Probably will never get studied by NIH or something like that. At least not with our current leadership in place.

I mean, that's the hard thing with all these things, guys, everybody wants the data. The data. Give me the data. You know, if you wait until we have all the well proven data on these things, you're probably, I mean, I'll be dead, you know, so, you know, maybe if you're 20, you've got, you've got at least a few years, but you, you know, it's like rapamycin. I'm willing to take the chance if something's improving. Safe and efficacious. Well, we'll say safe because maybe we don't know its efficacy yet, but safe and efficacious in at least the animal models and in my mind in a cellular model, then I'm gonna, I'm gonna take it. I mean, I know you think the same way. You know, it's like I'm going to take the. Roll the dice.

It always makes me laugh when people are like, well, it's not proven safe. I'm like, okay, if you do nothing.

What does it look like if you.

Do nothing, you're gonna have 25 years of suffering and die broke without knowing your name in a diaper.

Like, that's.

That's the status quo. If anything you can do likely moves the needle away from that. Even if your goal is just to extend your health span, which is a crappy, childish, 1970s goal compared to extending your life and your health span. Right. So, oh, my God.

You.

So I'll look you right in the eye and say, there's not enough evidence for that. I'm like, there's plenty of evidence that doing nothing is worse than trying to do something. So, like, let's do something. And spermidine is an obvious.

We know the outcome of doing nothing. Absolutely know the outcome of doing nothing.

Right. And I just maybe fortunate that I got to experience being old in my late 20s, where you have pre diabetes and arthritis and cognitive decline and high. And a high risk of stroke and heartache, all that stuff.

I mean, honestly, when you look at, like, bad things in our life that happen, sometimes they end up being good. It's like that, right? Like, had that never happened to you, would you have gotten into this field? Would you be, you know, would you have the health you have now? Probably not, right? Yeah. Sometimes it is these bad things that sort of drive us. Somebody has a heart attack and now they become the healthiest person in the world. I find a lot of life is like that, right. Some bad event pushes you to something better and, you know, so, so. But I don't think you have to wait for that bad event. You can, you can sort of look at people who have gone through it and, and start learning from them.

Yeah. It's one of the things that, you know, everything you have happening in your life that sucks right now. It probably will give you something, something good once you've gone through it and you have a chance to, to look for gratitude, even if it's a crappy little gratitude, at least one good thing happened. Right. And so it doesn't mean you have to like it, but it means you got something out of it. I. I would have rather not gone through that, but I'm really grateful I've been able to help people as a result of it.

Yeah. I mean, because look at you now. Right?

Yeah.

You probably wouldn't be there. Who knows? But probably not.

Probably not. God does what I'd be doing psychopharmacology or something. That was my plan when I made $6 million when I was 26 and lost when I was 28. When I was 26, I'm like, I'm so done with tech. As soon as I, as soon as this company, you know, I get my four years of stock, I'm out and I'm going to get a PhD and then of course I end up working for another. Now there's something about spermidine that we haven't talked about before. Even when you were last on the show to talk about this, it was about 250 episodes ago. So it's been a little while. And it's hair growth and spermidine. Tell me what spermidine does for hair. And the best way to use spermidine to make your hair better, honestly is.

One of the things that it was actually probably one of the first things that was in show with Fermi was improvement in hair growth. You know, and there was there, there's some very good data on it. But it was very interesting from my patients. I would start hearing that, right. I wouldn't even tell them that story. I wouldn't tell them, oh, this might help your heritage grow too. Right. I put them on it for some other reason. Their liver enzymes were high, something like that. And you know, so she, at the high dose they would say, oh my gosh, my eyelashes are so much longer. We have this one patient, she, you know, who sent me pictures and it was dramatic. I mean, her eyelashes were dramatically longer when she started doing this high dose remedy. So we know that it actually, you know, induces or helps with hair growth. And again, that was actually one of the earliest studies that ever came out. I don't have that study in front of me, but that was one of the early studies that ever came out on this. I do think it takes a little bit of a higher dose. So probably like the dose you're kind of doing on a. For a little while to start, and to start to start inducing that, you know, hair growth is tough because like in post Covet, everybody lost their hair. I lost almost all my hair post Covid. Wow.

Spike protein does that.

Yeah, it's horrible, right? And we're seeing that all these people who lost here after, you know, after that and so, so hair growth is tough because there's a whole lot of pieces. But immune dysfunction is one of the very important players there. So one of the things that we know spermidine does to assist the immune system and this actually came, came out in like a 2022 article actually when they were studying kidney disease but in 2022, an article in Molecular Medicine showed that spermidine blocks something called NLRP3.LRP3 you're familiar with. It's an inflamma. It's a bad player. There is no disease that does not have, is not linked to high levels of NRP3. So NLRP3 guys, is this inflammable that initiates this big inflammatory response? It's okay to get a big inflammatory response acutely if it sticks around. Not a good thing, right? And you lose your hair and your, you know, your, your, your macrophages start talking, attacking your hair cells and your joints and your brain and everything else. So by inhibiting NLRP3, that may be one of the reasons that it's actually helping with the hair growth, is by inhibiting this inflamma zone and restoring the immune system. So you can actually stop destroying your own hair follicles, you know, and get yourself into a growth phase. There's a lot of other pieces there because firming actually strikes from a whole lot of angles there. But that, that reducing inflammatory state is really important. It's why I love it for joints. Honestly. If you look at things that are elevated in arthritis, arthritis is an immune mediated disease. It is not a wear and tear disease. It is an immune media disease, whether it's rheumatoid or osteoarthritis. And we know that we have very high levels of these NLRP3 inflamma zones. We know we have very high levels of something called interleukin 1 beta. There's not a lot of interleukin 1 beta blockers on the market, but spermidine does. Spermidine has been shown to lower this inflammatory cytokine.

It's a hard one to lower.

It's a hard one to lower.

IL6 is easy, right?

L6 is easy. TNF Alpha is not hard. We have a lot of products. Lotus naltrexone works well for those, right? You know, lookin one beta, not so much. I use pentasin, polysulfate a lot for that. But, but spermidine does that and, and it lowers this interle, which is really triggered for kidney disease and for joint disease. So, so if any of you guys have osteoarthritis, I use high dorimy in my osteoarthritis patients, especially before doing any kind of regenerative procedures on them to try and get themselves into a much better state by blocking this inflammatory piece. And then that was, you know, pretty recent article, like in medicine. 2022 showed this very significant reduction in the NLP3 inflammazone and interleukin 1 beta. So you know, to me it just confirmed what I was already seeing, you know, with these patients and intuitively new because of the cellular pathways. But actually you have it nicely confirmed now in article is great, you know, and that's probably one of the reasons it's helpful in cancer too, is by blocking some of this inflammatory state. But that's, you know, that that's why it's so useful in kidney disease. I think we forget, you know, kidneys are also, boy, you know, kidney disease is there's, I think John Hopkins estimated 50% of people over the age of 60 have kidney dysfunction. I mean, 50%. So half of us are walking around with kidney dysfunction. Your doc will look at it and go, oh well, your, your, you know, glomerular filtration rate, 60, it's fine. Well, normal really should be greater than 80 if you have optimal kidney function. Right? Yeah, it starts to decline, but you know, we have to make sure that we maintain kidney function because your kidneys are one of your key detox organs. Right. So if my kidney function is declining and you know, I'm going to have more and more problems and we so, and we don't really have great ways to treat this decline in kidney function. But Spermony has been shown to do that.

Yeah. In Superhuman, my big longevity manifesto, there were four big killers that you have to avoid and it was number one, diabetes, which is a precursor to cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer's. Like, don't get those and you'll probably live longer. But the fifth killer, if I wanted to go one higher, would have been avoid kidney disease. And it, it's caused primarily by two things. One is high blood pressure, which is treatable by minimizing insulin or at least lowering it to safe levels, not necessarily too low and by taking potassium and whatever. But the second one is eating a lot of plants that contain oxalate because 70% of kidney stones are oxalate, not caused by phosphorus from eating meat and alcohol.

Right. I mean, metabolic control is very key to kidney disease. Right. But so is endothelial function. So when you, when you talk about, you know, why hypertension, you know, hypertension is just a sign that you have endothelial dysfunction. Your blood vessels aren't pliable, so you have to work on endothelial dysfunction. And actually that's another place where spermine actually was shown is improvement in the cardiovascular studies, recent study, actually 20, 23 I think it was fall 2023. There was a report on sperm and endothelial function of blood vessels in. In post heart attacks, and there was significant improvement and revascularization blood vessels again in mice in blood vessels with that. So. So that's one of the reasons it's protective of kidneys, because you're right, hypertension is a culprit, but it's really. Hypertension is the first sign that you actually have endothelial dysfunction. And, and guys, you know when your doctor's like, oh, 130 over 85, that's fine. It's actually not. I mean, an optimal blood pressure is really 115 over 70. I'll let it go up to 120 over 80. Above that is hypertension. Really, if you look at endothelial dysfunction above 115 or 70, you have to start focusing on improving vascular function, improving endothelial function. You have to have these nice pliable blood vessels or you do get kidney disease. Kidneys are very, very sensitive to that, that, that dysfunctional blood flow. So, so that's one of the reasons kidney failure, kidney function starts to, to reduce as we age. And you're right. It's a key player. Now, caveat there is when your docs measure gfr, like in. In. In you, Dave, who eats a lot of protein.

Yeah.

Or if you're taking creatine as a supplement, or if you're really muscular, you can sometimes look like you have very poor kidney function because kidney function is an estimation based off creatinine. And creatinine will be fooled by creatine or high muscle mass or high protein. So your, your GFR filtration may look very poor. Caution. You guys who have that, you eat a lot of protein. You take creatine as a supplement. Like, all of you should be 5 grams of creatine. You know, then you might look worse. I always measure what's called a cystatin C. So something to remember. Ask your doctor to measure cystatin C. It's a much better measure of kidney function for people who are healthy.

I love it that you said that because, yeah, there are estimates. Even people who are on very low carb diets, your cholesterol calculations are horribly wrong.

Right.

Because they think you're average. And even when they tell you, oh, you know, your. Your kidney function is where it should be for your age, you should be outraged for your age.

Right. Don't you hate that?

Yeah. What the hell? Like, I'm sorry. I identify as being 30 years old. So, you know, how dare you not respect my age? Because look, if they're saying you're aging like a normal person, you already failed.

Right.

And then you're looking at health span and that like, fake longevity stuff where like, oh, you know, you can't extend life so just work out all the time, which is nonsense. You gotta protect your kidneys. So spermidine is a way to do that. And the other thing is Clotho, which we're not gonna talk about in this show, but I wrote about that in the book as well. And I'm about to go be one of the first, first humans to get Clotho gene therapy to raise my Clotho levels.

Oh, lucky you. Yeah, Clothos is actually, and I know there's a company that's been working for a long time on, on that, and so you're lucky to, to get that. You know, it's going to be really a huge player for people who have like polycystic kidney disease. Clothos may actually be the answer for those people. So, you know, life saving because it's. That's a disease you really don't have a lot of control over.

Yeah.

So Clothos guys, you know, which is kind of our longevity gene as well, but it's really critical to kidney function. So now. Lucky you, Dave.

Well, it's funny because both Clotho and Spermidine, they affect kidney function and cognitive function and they're both core longevity substances. So I'm, I look at the stuff that I always take. I mean, I might pause for a little while, like for a weekend or something just to, to get sickle. Cyclical levels. But things that are my permanent longevity stack. Sperm life is on that.

Yeah.

And if I could buy Cloth though, I would. But you can't. And it's not digestible.

Anyway.

I think we'll get there where it will be more available even beyond gene therapy. I think we will. You know, look at some of the companies are doing. I think we will get there with clothes. I hope so, because a lot of these gene therapies are still cost prohibitive to most of us.

Oh, yeah, that's a temporary problem. Cell phones were cost prohibitive and didn't work in 1980 as well. But look at them now. Right?

Yeah. I mean, the brain studies with sperm knee, where they were. Some of the first studies that came out, the Smart age study, which was 2018, showed that. And this was actually in humans. So we actually do have some human Studies showed over 12 months significant improvement in adults with cognitive decline. So, you know, we have the data on brain even in depression. There was a really, again, a really good study on, on mental status and sperm. And we know it improves and it makes sense, right? If I'm lowering inflammation, if I'm increasing vascular function, you know, if I, if I am improving autophagy, then my brain function will be better. Really. There's no, no organ that is not going to be be helped by addressing all those factors.

So there, there's going to be a, a stack of things that we know work for longevity. And at this point we know enough to, to say we might have to change the dosing amount and schedule based on who you are and what you do in your state. But these are things you want to keep elevated for the course of your exceptionally long life.

You know, one of the things we talked about is you are, you know, there's a stack, right? So how can we address these? And one of the things Spring Life recently did is you guys are all familiar with nad, right? And it's, it's important because NAD is sort of the, you know, currency to make ATP. So a lot of companies now are trying to say, okay, well how can we maybe attack multiple pathways? So sperm and a. Recently kind of came out with this product that has other things in it. So as this interesting compound called Ribitryl and Ribotil is, is, is this compound that is what's called an I Kappa beta kinase. I Kappa beta is really highly linked to the inflammatory cascade. There's a lot of cancer drugs that are, are I Kappa beta kinase inhibitors. So basically by, by blocking I Kappa beta kinase and, and I use a drug called M Lexanox as well for that, you can actually prevent cancers and things like that. But also as Ribatrol has this very interesting effect on phosphodiesterase 4 and 5. Now you guys will know PD5 inhibitors are things like Viagra and Cialis, which are also very linked to longevity. Right? Particularly brain.

I take microdose Cialis every day. Because it makes you live longer.

Exactly right. It's not because you want to be walking around with an erection. It's erection. It's because you want to live longer. I have my women, my women all go to the pharmacy and fill, you know, Cialis and the dog pharmacies are like, you know, but it, it improves cognitive function, it improves vascular flow, it helps support kidney function. It is a longevity drug. So what they did is they, you know, they said, okay, well here is, we'll, we'll mix a PDE5 inhibitor. So ribotryl has. It acts as a PDE5 inhibitor, ribotril.

It's R I B O T R.

I B E T R I L.

Yeah, that's not a drug I played with, but I will after this.

Yeah, I think it's. It's a patented compound.

Okay.

I think it's found. It's like called mitoactive or something like that. But it's a patented compound. Not really. So. So it's a PDE5 and also a PDE4 inhibitor. So phosphodiestate 4, 4 inhibitors are. That are. Really have a lot of research going on in them also treating diseases like cancers, autoimmune disease, copd. So there's a lot of drugs coming to market, really expensive drugs, I will say, like these are the $20,000 a month drugs that are coming to market as PD4 inhibitors. So this compound has an effect on the ICAPA beta kinase, the PD4, the PD5, they mixed that with sperm. So now we're attacking all these other pathways. And they mixed it with some nicotinamide and so a little D ribose and nicotinamide with the, you know, the. Again, nicotinamide being one of your precursors to nad. Now where some of these products scare me and all you guys who love your NAD and all your NAD precursors, right. Here is my two cents on that. If you. Your NAD levels, they do drop as you age. Yeah. And one of the main reasons for that is because you've got this bucket of nad, there's actually a bigger hole in the bucket. So it's enzymes that are depleting the nad.

You have to fix the enzymes.

Right? You have to fix the enzymes. You have to block the enzymes. And one of those is you can use apigenin to, to fix P38. You can use apigenin to fix. And there's another one that's a little harder and that's called nnmt. And NMT is a much worse enzyme to be upregulated because NNMT is upregulated in cancer, in visceral fat cells, in senescent cells. So you guys can keep pouring NAD into your bucket and you're old or have cancer pre cancer lesions or you have. Or you have some visceral fat cells. Those guys are stealing all your nad. So you keep filling the bucket and they're like, great, we got more. Because they just keep accelerating nmt. There's a. There's some peptides that will block it, but they're block nmt, but they're expensive. So we recently worked with a company in Europe to bring over like spermidine, Another compound called 1M&A.1MNA is a really ideal blocker of NNMT. In fact, you could probably use it alone to boost nad. And the, the problem with nicotinamide, you guys all saw, you saw the study, Dave, where they showed that study that showed high dose nicotinamide, actually even long dosing raised cardiovascular risk, right? That was because it converted something called four puridone and four pyridone is really bad. Well, one mna, very interestingly, even though it's one of the byproducts of nicotinamide, does not convert. You can't raise four pyridine levels with it. It will raise them to just the right level and then get excreted. So 1m and a is a much safer alternative. And that's why we work so hard, much like sperm, to get it here to the U.S. they, that was not very easy, but the, to get it brought over here to the US so that we could actually have a safer way of replacing nad. Wow. So I think if you did this product right, which has your spermidine, it has some nicotinamide in it, it has this, this ribitrol, which looks very, a very interesting thing. And you know, to block the, you know, for your PD4, PD5 and I Kappa beta kinase, and then you use a little epigenin and the one M&A. I personally just use one M&A myself just as my NAD boost that. You, you're gonna have a really nice stack with a couple, you know, just a couple of compounds. So it might be a nice thing to look at, you know, for you guys who are taking a lot of, you know, you're taking this and this and this and this. It might be a nice kind of compound to look at.

Beautiful. And that is a supplement or it's.

It'S one of the, the new spermidine supplements.

Okay.

That they've come out with.

Excellent. And is that from Spermidine Life?

Yep, from Sperm Life.

Okay, cool. So I'll switch to that stuff. Why not?

Yeah, it's a little packet, so sachet packet. So it's nice.

Oh man. Stupid packets. I don't want any more packets, guys. I take 180 supplement extra 156 a day right now, but 156 packets. I would, I would the like, like there's too much fiber in there. Like, I'm sorry.

The problem is it's hard to get like a capsule that has, you know, that stuff in it. So yeah, maybe for you it's better to just take your, you know, take your sperminine, take your, you know, take your, your Cialis, you know, and, and in my mind, take one M&A instead of NAD precursors because I think the data is becoming more and more compelling about that. But you know, whatever you want. Otherwise, take your NAD precursors plus one M&A. And that might be a way to substitute because I agree with you. I literally have, you know, my water bottle, I've just thrown 8, 000 packets into it and now it tastes like. So, you know, it's hard for me to drink all day cause it's mostly just dust. So I, I agree with you. It does become a little difficult. And because the problem with some of these, when you're trying to put a lot of thing into a supplement, you just can't put into one little capsule.

Yeah, I, I feel you. It feels like, like the solution for longevity just for the world is not to have 25 packets or 25 canisters of powder to take every day, because that sucks. And the worst thing would be to mix them all into one powder and sell that, because you don't. No one needs the exact same ratios of all this stuff.

Right, Right. And that is a problem. And you see a lot of companies doing that. Right. Putting together these little packets. And I'm not a real fan of that because, number one, I like to sort of toggle things around with my patients. And, and I, and I use different dosing on different patients for different things. So I, I am a little more of a fan of, you know, even if it means opening a few more bottles to actually kind of sometimes separate these things out. But this is for, for you guys who wants a simple approach. I do think this is a very interesting product. And, you know, I'm kind of eager about it.

We'll come out with pills after this episode. I, I know that I, I've harassed lots of companies into taking packets and making pills, including like the, the urolithin a stuff. I'm like, come on, just give me pills. And here's the thing. Most people think they can only swallow one or two pills because they never thought about it.

Yeah, I can lay swallow 50 at a time.

Yeah, I do. 50 at a time. Like I kind of shamed Deliver King once. I was just teasing buddy. He's like, anyone who could take more than 20 pills is more melee than me. And I'm like, I just, you know, pull my shirt off. I'M like, I'm gonna take 40 pills, you know, but it's like, it, it's the, it's a weird flex is what Brian Johnson says. But guys, if you drank beer in college, it's not that. I just go from 1 to 2, go from 2 to 3, and all of a sudden, like, my girlfriend's like, oh, my God, I can swallow eight pills at a time and it's not even hard. Why did I not know this my whole life?

Right. It is funny when you start taking more because it would take you your entire day to take them all one at a time.

So I love it that you can go deep on all these topics because we weren't planning to necessarily go into all these, but you just, you're very well rounded in your, in your knowledge here. And I, I should have mentioned this earlier, but guys, Sperm Life is giving you 25% off because you listen to the show, which is a big discount. And thank you, Spermidine Life. Spermidine Life US use code ASPREY25. So that's a big savings on Spermidine. So buy the big pills because now they're probably the same price as the little pills.

Yeah. I would recommend you guys get some of the higher dose ones at least, at least cycle through those occasionally, right?

Yeah.

Even if your baseline is unless you're 20 and you just want to maintain fertility for a while and you feel great and your life's perfect, then you could probably get away with the 1 milligram.

And I also just want to say this. There are people of all economic brackets listening to the show. I don't have space in my stomach for all the supplements that I could afford. So it turns out all of us have three things that control what we're willing to take. There's cost, which is obvious. There's the amount of time and effort it takes to do it.

Right.

How much energy does it take to do it? And the other one is how much does it suck? So it's time, money and pain. Right. And what that means is that you have to look at, okay, what are the biggest goals for you? And how much pain, how much time and how much money is available to allocate to those right now? Now, in my 20s, I allocated 20% of my paycheck towards health and wellness because I was so damn sick. Right. And it was not easy. In fact, it caused relationship problems with the person I was with in my 20s and she's. Why do you spend so much money on all this stuff? I'm like, because my brain doesn't work without it and I'm in pain all the time and things like that. So I just want you to make efficient and intelligent choices and not to feel like you have to do everything. I don't do everything. I just try to know what everything is and then choose everything I'm willing to do. So 25% off is a good, is a good savings. If you want to try this and if you're saying that's not my thing, I want to save money. Start with intermittent fasting. Just don't overdo it and you'll get some of the benefits.

That's cheap, right?

Yeah. Or get the discounted Bottle Sperm Life US code ASPREY25 and take one every two days as something to encourage your gut bacteria.

Or take it while you're doing a fast so you get that benefit of the at autophagy. But I also remind, that's what Dave and I were talking about, cyc supplements. So if, if you're like, oh my gosh, this is so expensive, this is so expensive, think about cycling things. Right? So what I do with my patients who have a, a fixed income that they can spend on supplements, I go, okay, for a while, we're going to do this and then we're going to do this and then we're going to do this. So there's not more than maybe six, seven things at one time. Right. You've got your baseline supplements, then we have, you know, I'll, I'll do a month of sperm, then I may do a month of this and a month that. Yeah. And that way it makes it more palatable, less supplements and less money and becomes a better way of thinking about it and, and not necessarily a bad thing for your body. Like I said, when you over, over supplement, you can start to create problems. It's like too many antioxidants are horrible for us. We need oxidative stress. So if you're taking a ton and ton of antioxidants and you never stop, you're not doing yourself any, any good. So, so think about that. You know, when you're, when, when you, you're feeling overwhelmed, just say, okay, I can do this for a while and then I can do this for a while.

Right. Such good advice. So, so if you're saying, you know, I have a budget, that's okay, everyone has a budget. And doing different things on different days is a way to stretch your, your, your dollars a lot. And because I, I really respect this problem, when I was dealing with the very beginnings of my health problems from mold, I actually worked at Baskin Robbins scooping ice cream. And I put, I welded Toyota truck frames. I put auto parts in boxes to help pay for my college. I also started a T shirt E commerce company. Like I did everything, I was scrappy because I have any money. And that's what happens when you're out.

Of money and you have to prioritize your health over. I don't, do I need a hundred thousand dollars car or do I need my health? I think, you know, we all prioritize putting money into our 401ks for retirement and not thinking about putting money into ourselves because otherwise my retirement's going to be miserable, you know, and hopefully the goal being that you never want to retire because you feel good, you feel active and you want to be productive. So, so I think that that's it. I really think the number of people I see come to my office driving their hundred thousand dollar car in and I mentioned a supplement that's expensive, like oh, I'm not doing that. And you know, and I say, well get a cheaper car.

I drive a 10 year old Jeep. So there you go.

Yeah, that's where you put your money on the health. Right?

My hyperbaric chamber and my supplements cost more than my car. Yeah, that's just how it is. Right, Perfect. I'm also, I, I, I need help on how to allocate my own time, energy and dollars and just suck on biohacks and supplements. So at the biohacking conference this year, I'm planning to launch a really detailed data driven AI tool to guide you. If you only have six bucks, here's what to do. If you have 600 bucks, here's what to do. And the weird thing is your goal is not the same as my goal is not the same as your partner's goal. We all have slightly different goals. So if we can actually use the data and the tools we have now to guide you to know what do you really want first and then how do you get there in the shortest possible time? It makes it so cool because then.

You really know where to focus when.

You go into your doctor. Because like I took care of my basic minerals and vitamins and all that stuff because I knew what to do because that's what the data says. And now I need help with the really cool high end stuff. So it, it should waste less time and less money for everyone who uses it. So I'm, I'm really, that's really cool. It's like Just tell me what to do. We all want that.

Yeah.

And I'm happy to do that on this show, but there's 1200 episodes. Like, have you even heard the last episode with Dr. Y? It was awesome. But how much time do you have to listen to this podcast?

I don't know.

I. I thank you for listening. But if I can give you everything I know in a chatbot, which I'm doing as part of this, yes, I'm going to do it. Because I don't think most people have time to go to medical school like you have and study for 30 years and. And it's hard to get meeting with someone disqualified. So I. I think this is a necessary tool for biohackers, and I'm so excited to be able to. To bring this to you guys. And of course, sperm life is gonna be right in there because, well, it matters. Perfect. All right, I have one thought for you, so, topical spermidine.

Ah, topical spermidine. Yeah. This is funny because I had read these articles on topical spermidine back when we first. You and I first finally got spermidine. Right. Actually, even before that, when I had the. These weird little green things I was taking from somewhere I bought.

We're so similar.

And I had read this article about how much topical spermidine improved collagen function in skin. I'm pretty skinny, so like, the hardest thing for me is saggy skin. And, you know, and so I was like, oh, great. So I just, you know, opened up all my sperm and I crushed my little things I put in my face cream. I started putting on. It was the worst thing. It was like this gritty mess. And, you know, and got all of them made a big green mess over my pillow initially. And at least the other sperm wasn't green, so that helped. And so now recently, young Goose, I left you. You know, you. You listen to all the company, but it's an incredible company. So young Goose actually sort of decided, oh, wow, we need sperm in our products. So they actually made now a great. And it's much, much nicer feeling, has a tiny bit of green tinge, but not much the, you know, from some of the other things in it, actually. But the. The spermidine is. I think it's a combination of spermidine. Nad. Nad topically is great. And copper peptides. Copper peptides, amazing for skin, right?

Ghk Copper peptide is a major longevity compound.

Major longevity. Both sub Q injections, but also topically or for wound healing, things like that. And so they put mixed Copper peptide, some, a little bit of resveratrol and they made a face cream out of it. So they sort of partnered with Sperminine on this. Experimenting life on this and it is a really good product. It feels so nice on your skin. I just started using it recently, but I also already know some dark spots going away. It is an incredible product.

Founders of Young Goose, when they first started, came on the show and, and shared their product and they've been at the biohacking conference too and.

Right. They're always there.

Yeah, yeah. In fact, I think they're there this year as well. By the way, guys, it's coming up here just in short period of time. Biohackingconference.com and I, I just, I, I love seeing collaboration between different brands where like you have a great ingredient.

I know, that's cool, right? When you see these different companies actually getting together. Yeah.

I run into this problem now where, okay, I, I take my sperm in life. So I've got my internal version, but I have like six bottles of amazing stuff that each has its own set of longevity compounds that don't overlap. I'm like, I don't know how much oil my skin can absorb. So you like slap on like five things and it's like, I don't really want to, but I, I like one bottle on my bathroom counter because I'm a guy and like I have like three things. I spray in my hair and, and, and you know, so I, I want the one skincare mush to rule them all and maybe this is the one.

Yeah, I think this is, this is a pretty complete. Right. It's pretty, you know, it's a, it's pretty robust. At least again, you could do this one day something else, you know, but, but I think it's a pretty robust product. I think they did a really nice job with this product. Man, I love that company anyway. But this product I really like because it was a little bit with their products that's like there was like eight of them, you know, when you're doing their whole regimen. Yeah. So this is kind of a nice catch all for those of you guys who want a simplified routine. I think it looks like a nice.

Catch all of everything that makes sense. One thing that doesn't get appreciated enough in the world is that topical absorption oftentimes is the same as intravenous absorption and way better than swallowing it. So I don't know the systemic effects of spermidine, but some peptides are so powerful at getting them on your skin. In the right formula trumps even an infection.

GHK copper is like that, right? Not enough dose. I don't know what kind of dosing they have in this product, but GHK copper, lots of times when I have somebody who doesn't want to give themselves injections because GHK copper is so important to longevity too, I'll just have them use a lot topically. It ends up being a little more pricey, but I'll measure a lot topically, get the skin effects and, and they'll get some systemic absorption of it. So you're right. That's, that's, that is a really nice way. And I, I don't know what the systemic absorption. I think part of the sperm effect is going through the gut. So you're probably gonna get a lot less of the benefits from it taking it topically. So it's probably going to be more isolated skin. But for the GHK copper, that probably is actually a very nice way to get some GHK copper into your system.

Well, Dr. Ureth, thank you for coming on the Human Upgrade today and just sharing the latest on spermidine and thank you. Spermidine Life, 25% off. Spermidine Life US code ASPREE25. Totally, totally respectable savings. And guys, it's a foundational longevity supplement and the evidence is very strong for that, which is why it's here, why Dr. Youth is on here, and why you here. So thank you for listening. I will see you at the biohacking conference or online.

Thanks, guys.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

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