The Longevity Organ: Why Your Liver Is The Key To Anti-Aging! Siggi Clavien

38 to 40% of the US population has fatty liver disease. It's predicted it'll be 50% by 2040. 90% of the people with fatty liver disease was not showing up on bloods. One Tylenol does as much damage to your liver as six pints of beer. Tylenol literally dissolves liver tissue. More people will die of cardiovascular disease because of fatty liver disease than will die of liver disease because of fatty liver. It's the only organ in the human body that fully regenerates. 70% of liver disease in the U.S. u.S. Is not because of alcohol. Wow.

What's it because of? You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. This is a special in person live podcast from my studios here in Austin, Texas, and you're going to learn about your liver. For me, the liver is the funniest organ ever because, well, there's this show called Beavis and Butthead and there's an episode where they decide to do insurance fraud and so they, you know, get themselves in a car accident or something or another, but they're so dumb that one of them stands up and grabs his head and says, my liver, my liver. Because he doesn't know where his liver is. And I showed that to my kids and they thought it was hilarious. But a lot of people don't even know where the liver is. It's on the right hand side of your lower rib cage. And I've got an expert on liver here. We just did a liver scan for me, clinical grade one, and I have the best score that they've seen ever clinically, which is kind of cool. So we're going to go deep on what does your liver do for longevity, for brain fog, for human performance, and for not dying of the big things that will keep you from living a very long time. And he is the founder and CEO of Equilibrium Labs, and they're entirely focused on liver and just upregulating all the hundreds of things that your liver does for you. And I've seen massive changes, even some people on my team, in just a few months of using Deliverance, which is their flagship supplement, in terms of going from having liver disease to not having liver disease in a few months of taking a supplement. So that's kind of cool. And this is based on more than 20 years of research as a herbologist and just working on livers. Our guest's name is Siggy Clavien. Siggy, welcome to the Human Upgrade.

Dave, thank you very much for having me here. It's a pleasure One that has followed your work for a very long time and has participated and really got into knowing your community. And I have to say that the biohacking community is probably one of the most fluent in health and in science and cutting edge communities out there. And it's been a real privilege to enter into this community.

Oh, thank you. When you're at the biohacking conference, by the way, guys, biohackingconference.com in April of this year in Austin, you do a clinical grade liver scan that looks at two variables in people's livers. What do you track as the two most important things on that scan? And then I want to know what should we be tracking in our lab panels on AxoHealth?

The two most important variables that fibroscan looks at is stiffness. Stiffness will be indicative of scarring, inflammation or, or fibrosis, which is a technical term for scarring within the liver. The other variable that it's looking at that's critically important is liver fat. With the fibroscan, we can tell how much liver fat down to the percentage point how much of your liver is showing fatty change. And then we can use that as a baseline to then make recommendations.

Okay, so this is a kind of a cool test, the fibroscan. You can do this at the biohacking conference or at some clinics. In the very old days, doctors would just tap you all over your different organs because a healthy liver feels a certain way and an unhealthy liver feels more fibrotic. Well, it's hard to teach doctors that and it's also subject to interpretation and whether your doctor was hungover that day. So you have a quantitative scan that tells you very, very accurately stiffness and fat in the liver. What about the liver labs? People can go to Axo Health, which is part of upgrade labs, and we send a bunch of liver labs. What are the most important things that you should look at if you get a basic longevity panel that includes liver function?

If you're going to be looking at liver panel, just like the body, we need to look at several different things holistically. So start with the full liver panel on those. The three most important are called ast, alts and your gammas. That's going to be indicative of inflammation. There are enzymes that are inflammatory responses that have caused those. So that's going to be a sign. Gamma can also show if you've got an infection as well. I think if you're going to look at the liver from a whole part, you also want to check a 1Cs. So glucose that's going on, plus your lipid panel, which is cholesterols. Whilst cholesterol arguably is one of the most important molecules in the human body, too much of the triglyceride and low HDL can be bad and can also be a sign of liver health.

It's absolutely true that when you have a fatty liver, your triglycerides are gonna be high. It's also true that when you switch to eating the way I've eaten for 15 plus years now, written books about is, your liver will become less fatty over time and as it does that, it will release triglycerides. So sometimes I'll see people go on a lower but not necessarily zero carb diet and they start eating more saturated fat and they stop eating seed oils and corn syrup and fructose and magically, triglycerides go up for a month or two as the liver cleans itself out and then they go down. And I typically see high hdl, which is good, and you see low triglycerides, which is good. And those are the primary markers of things are working nutritionally. But if they weren't working, talking about AST and alt, what do those liver values mean?

So they're symptomatic signs of enzymes that your liver is releasing in order to fight inflammation, or it could be fighting liver damage, but they're not indicative of fatty liver. Hence why you've got 38 to 40% of the US population has fatty liver disease. Western world, it's predicted in the US and Western society that'll be 50% by 2040. 95% of people with fatty liver disease do not know it, but because it does not come up on a blood panel. So if you want to get the full picture, you need to do your bloods and you need to do a scan.

I absolutely love that. If you do the axohealth scan and your triglycerides are high and your HBA1C is high, what are the odds you have fatty liver disease?

I would say probably 70% plus if you're type 2 diabetics, 65% will have fatty liver disease. 90% of people that are obese and and also 80% of people with gout. A lot of people go to gout and they don't realize that it's a fatty liver that's causing that.

What are the problems with having a fatty liver? What does it do to you metabolically?

So whilst we got this fatty liver epidemic, so liver disease as a whole in the last 50 years is up 400%. Most diseases we've been able to keep a hand on and start to push down. Liver disease looks like an outlier and it's accelerating. Even with the most cutting edge medicine in the world, it's accelerating. And we can get into the reasons of that later. But the first symptoms of fatty liver disease are brain fog, which is the whole connection between cognitive function and liver fat, which I love to chat about. The other is your cholesterol will start to get elevated A1C because most of your receptors to deal with insulin are in the liver. So as the liver gets fattier, its surface area diminishes. Therefore its ability to regulate and deal with insulin goes down as well. Wow. Sleep, weight gain, that's kind of phase one. You've got probably fatty liver disease or close to it farther down the road. Things like yellowing the skin, bloating, feet, swelling as well. Generally if you're at that point, you've got some serious issues, but worry about getting, getting ahead of that.

They call it non alcoholic fatty liver disease. And in my books I talk about two causes of fatty liver predominantly. And I want you to either support these or shoot holes in them. Number one is you may not be an alcoholic, but you're having a drink several nights a week. Even just one affects fatty liver. And number two, you're eating too much fructose. And I don't care if it's fruit or if it's high fructose corn syrup, fructose raises fatty liver. True or not true. Of the 38% of people who have fatty liver in the west, how much of it do you think is caused by alcohol versus fructose?

Well, liver disease as a whole, you know, familiar with cirrhosis. When we were kids, 6% of people with cirrhosis were non drinkers. 94% were drinkers. As of last year, that's tipped. It's now 51% of cirrhosis patients are non drinkers. 49% are not. 70% of liver disease in the US and the world, which is 2 billion people with liver disease is not because of alcohol. That's why they give it the non alcohol. Wow.

What's it because of?

Primarily processed foods, fructose, sugar, pharmaceuticals, sedentary lifestyle, alcohol. While it is bad for your liver, the food industry, the pharmaceutical industry and the industrial food complex, they've made alcohol the boogeyman will over here. That's what's causing it. That's in India, right? Very low drinking. Persia, Iran has the highest percentage of nafld in the world. Both countries are very low alcohol. That comes down to cheap calories. High. Fructose corn syrup, all the chemicals. Wow.

What percentage of non alcoholic fatty liver disease do you think Tylenol causes?

So Tylenol or paracetamol? Paracetamol. In the uk, the acetaminophen, the main compound in that, actually dissolves liver tissue.

Oops.

So as that dissolves liver tissue, the liver's ability to function goes down, it gains more fat, and it causes all kinds of liver damage. In the uk, we actually have a lot of transplants, probably America as well, that are because of Tylenol overdoses. I was at actually your conference back in Dallas in June or May, and I was chatting with a lady who worked for the Poison Control in Denver, and she was telling me that the number one, by a factor of three of chemical overdoses that people have that they're getting around Christmas time is Tylenol. Teenagers taking too much and Tylenol literally dissolves liver tissue. One Tylenol does as much damage to your liver as six pints of beer.

Wow. And if you combine the Tylenol with six pints of beer, what happens then?

You've multiplied that and you're going to have a quantum effect to where you'd probably cause 20 or 30 times as much damage because they're accelerating each other.

That's so important. So over the holidays, if you drink, don't take Tylenol. And I don't care if you have a headache, don't take Tylenol. It's not okay.

Absolutely. And anything high in sugar, especially high fructose corn syrup, Coca Cola. Crazy as it sounds, Diet Coke is actually worse for fatty liver than regular Coke because of all the chemicals that are in it.

Wow. Yeah.

The liver is inherently intelligent and it's intrinsic and it will look at threats and it will identify what the bigger threat is. Sugar and fat, it's used to because thousands of years it's been dealing with that. And it takes it. And what it can't deal with it stores is glycans in little fat pockets. But when you start introducing chemicals into the liver, the liver sees that as the bigger threat and. And will bypass breaking down or metabolizing the fats and the sugars, because the chemicals that are in a diet soda or preservatives or pesticides, that is so much more of a threat to the human body that the liver will prioritize that as the danger.

What effect do seed oils have on the liver?

Seed oils, obviously they're Carcinogenic. If they're heated up too much, the process in which they're going through. Canola oil, or in UK, we call it rapeseed oil. Terrible name. Causes all kinds of problems with accumulating liver fat. It's carcinogenic. It has oxidative stress aspects to it as well. So a hack that I learned, actually, from a friend of yours that my wife and I use when we go out to eat. First thing we do is, are you allergic to anything we say? Seed oils. Please cook my food in butter. And they will always do that for you. And it tastes better and it's better for you.

Exactly. I just tell them, steam it or cook it in butter or I don't want it. Yeah, I don't eat any of those. I haven't eaten a seed oil on purpose or even in a processed food even in 15 years and at all. There was one time in the UK I ate a docent, which is a croissant. I didn't know they also fried it in canola oil. It was damn delicious. So there was that one time, and it was accidental. And, Dave, you ate a croissant? Yes. European wheat is soft wheat, doesn't have glyphosate, and if I take enzymes with it, I can tolerate it pretty well. And, dude, it was a croissant in Europe. I'm okay with that. So other than that, and because of that, I think my liver is pretty happy. Tell me, what did you see in my liver results?

So your liver would be equivalent to babies. It's incredibly soft. It's incredibly pliable. Very, very, very low liver fat. It doesn't get any better than that. And out of the thousands and thousands and thousands of people we scan, you had one of the best scores you've ever seen.

Beautiful. That means this stuff might work. And some people say, well, it doesn't work over time or. Dave, you're taking so many supplements, it's harming your liver. Did you see any evidence of that?

No. No evidence whatsoever.

Okay. This is why the quality of supplements matters. And knowing what they do matters. Focusing on eating less toxins. And frankly, I don't care if. If man made them or plants made them or bacteria made them or mold made them. I minimize toxins first, then I seek nutrients. I do not seek nutrients and ignore toxins, which is pretty much the vegan diet, which I was on years ago, when I would have had a very fatty liver.

We tend to see fatty liver in vegans as well, because a lot of the oils and the processes that are going to some of those foods as well. Once again, it comes down to if you introduce a hundred thousand chemicals and synthetic things into the human diet in a hundred years, we have not evolved past that. You're overloading the liver, hence why liver disease is accelerating.

What kind of livers do you see in people on the carnivore diet?

For long term carnivore diet, we generally tend to see very healthy livers. We do see, which is interesting if they're carnivore, but they're also fasting. We're actually starting to see more liver fat accumulate. The reason I think that's happening this is, you know, hypothetical, but we're looking at hundreds of cases of this right now. We haven't yet to do a study is that when you go into a fasting mode, there's a lot of health benefits to it. But one of the things is your liver thinks you're in starvation. So your liver will start to store liver fat in case you're starving. So I have seen a spike up in that as well. But it does tend to balance out over time.

I wrote about intermittent fasting. The Bulletproof diet was the first big intermittent fasting book in a very, very long time. And people got into it so much they started over fasting. So I ended up writing fast this way, which was saying, guys, you shouldn't fast the same way every day. And you can over fast. And one of the effects of over fasting, whether you're carnivore or not, your body says, oh, you're starving, let's start holding on to fat. And long term carnivore can also cause insulin resistance, which is why I've recommended now for 14 years cyclical eating, which means even if you're a carnivore, Saturday morning, have at least some fruit or have pancakes made with stuff that doesn't have oxalate if you can find it, like rice. So do that occasionally because it's that coming in and out that signals abundance, supports glial cells in the brain. If someone's eating mostly fat, protein, maybe a few veggies, and then once or twice a week they're, they have 30 or 40 grams of sugar or 100 grams of carbs. What's it going to do their liver.

If anything, if they're on that diet, their liver is running so healthy anyway that when it does deal with this, it's going to deal with it like a speed bump. It's going to process it, it's going to get it out and you're not going to cause any damage. You need to mix up life. Everything should have a break. No matter what it is, you know, it's always good to mix it up. It's like when you're weight training, you kind of want to just change things up to keep the body on the edge of his toes. As a trained viticulturist and somebody that deal obviously all kinds of science and with plants, stress, just like cold plunging or heat can cause growth. So you want to kind of get the body out of its comfort zone. That pushing the body and maybe switching to carbs which throws off the whole cycle will actually create growth. The only thing that I've seen, I think scientifically it's proven that will regrow brain cells is fasting. But you have to fast in the right way.

Might not be the only thing. If you want to regrow brain cells, you have to increase bdnf. And I wrote one of my major books is called Head Strong and BDNF is brain derived nootropic factor and or neurotropic factor. And what happens is anything that raises that can grow new cells and fasting is a primary way to raise it. It turns out there's a coffee, fruit extract, there's lion's mane, there's a couple pharmaceuticals, some other supplements and electrical stimulation can all do this. So when people are at 40 years, as in my neuroscience clinic, we stack everything we can to increase bdnf. Oh, and what raises it most of all? Ketamine. So we use low dose, optionally low dose ketamine under a physician's care when people are there in order to create massive neuroplasticity. And if you stack in fasting and stack in a healthy liver, you're going to get much better results, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I have to really happy to learn something new today. I'm going to grab that book. My chief science officer is a anesthesiologist and he actually put the first government approved clinic in the UK to use ketamine for drug resistant depressants. I know a trauma surgeon in New York University that uses it for children that have had traumatic to have their magic to have the separation from their body so that they can do the surgery, come back to mitigate and minimize the psychological trauma of surgery. So there is some great medicinal uses for ketamine. So I'm really excited to read that book.

Is ketamine bad for the liver?

Yes. One of the only negative effects of ketamine even in low doses. But in any Doses whatsoever, it does cause liver damage. That being said, if your liver is healthy, it can deal with it. So keeping your liver healthy as your first front line of defense is the most important thing. Always remember, I tell people, clients this or patients, the liver is the master of your immune system.

We always give glutathione to people when they're taking the low dose ketamines. It's only for five days and haven't had any liver issues with it. But glutathione's a liver protectant. A lot of listeners think I put glutathione into the world of biohacking the very first year I started it because it's so important. Glutathione is a primary protector of the liver. Can you talk to me about what glutathione does in the liver and different ways to stimulate it?

So glutathione, as you know this is a master antioxidant. So it can also affect and help regulate other antioxidants in the body as they're dealing with free radicals. It's so important that in the Deliverance formulation, we are doing triggers to invigorate the liver to produce more natural glutathione. Plus we're encapsulating it nanoparticles so that it stays more bioavailable for about six to eight hours. Glutathione has many, many properties and I would say it's incredibly important. I, if I do an iv, I'll get it done. But I try to keep on my deliverance to do it and to the best source of anything is to naturally produce more of it. But we need other things in as well. And I'm intrigued to look at your glutathione that you're mentioning. My chief medical officer, who is a liver and pancreatic surgical oncologist who left the Cleveland Clinic to come out to now work with us, got a PhD in Glutathione and its uses in liver repair. So I want to chat with him about that too.

It's, it's profound. And Deliverance is a product that you've made with your 20 years of experience, the one that just healed one of my staff members who went from like stage 2 fatty liver disease back to, to none at all in about five months of taking Deliverance. So the, the strategy of making the body create more of what you want is a standard biohacking epigenetic strategy. We change the signals via herbs and other supplements that are part of Deliverance to make the liver do more of what you wanted it to do. It's also possible to add exogenous glutathione in. And I'd say if you're drinking, you probably should do both. Or if you took Tylenol because you hate your liver, you could do both. What's in deliverance?

So deliverance was 20 years of R and D, and it was a combination of traditional herbal medicine. And in Eastern medicine, we have about 5,000 years of Capia. So it's a tremendous amount of knowledge. And there's 17 active herbs ingredients, and they're mostly root based. And then we combine that with cutting edge western technology. So I took the best from ancient wisdom, modern technology, to combine those in. So we actually look at the molecules within these plants, pull them out and extract them. We look at bioavailability. We're doing clinical studies, scientific studies as well. And people ask me, well, what is the main mechanism of action? Well, there's lots of mechanisms of action that are happening. And I formulate and we believe in root cause. Medicine is to get into the root cause of it, but also in listening to the body. Rather than having a kind of more of an active or a yin approach to medicine, we have a yang. We listen to the body and we support the body to do what it does. And we sometimes you add things to do that, such as supplements, dietary things as well. And no single ingredient is doing everything. It has three pillars that it stands on. One is it optimizes liver function. Everything from metabolizing liver fat, increasing blood flow, glutathione production, cellular growth. Secondarily on that, it's also increasing oxidation of the blood, red blood cell count increase. Then the second pillar is a neurotransmitter. We have a very powerful neurotropic in it that is increasing neurotransmission. Which one? So that is from a molecule called a clonia kava. And there's a molecule that only exists in this one type of a clonia kava off of Jeju island in South Korea that cost about 23 million euros and 15 years of R and D to isolate that molecule. Wow. That increases neurotransmission. So when you take deliverance, you do get an immediate effect, which is the mental clarity, and that's the neurotransmission.

And this is different than kava entirely. Just for people listening, this is yours is C A V, A. So unrelated to true kava, which I'm also a fan of for different reasons.

Okay, I'm a fan of kava as well. This is A colonia kava with a C. Okay. And it's 150 times stronger than any land based antioxidant. So the antioxidants is off the charts. Yeah, it comes from this, but it's only this one type of kelp, this in the world.

It's funny, I have been taking that for 10 years.

Really?

Because I'm into longevity.

Oh, fantastic. Yeah. Most people don't have no idea what it is. We take a thousand kilos, we refine it to one kilo.

Wow.

And then we get four part distillation, we get one gram. So we're actually extracting one part per million. So I'm obsessed with bioavailability and quality, not quantity.

It's a million to one. Concentrate.

Exactly. Wow. That's what you feel right away. That's also on an Orac score. It's, it's 450% stronger than Lion's maneuver and it comes from the sea. Interesting is the, it's these 400 foot sea kelp forest where it grows. And for a thousand years the fish that live in these sea kelp forests are some of the most prized and expensive fish in the whole Sea of Japan. And the reason is because they're eating antioxidant rich food all day. So they're incredibly healthy. Wow. And then the third component of deliverance is the antioxidant aspects of it. Not only is the antioxidants that are in the product off the charts, but we did a clinical study called an Abel rack where we're looking at what happens in the cells post metabolization and post consumption, how much antioxidant activity is happening. That was also incredibly high. And most people get into this vicious circle where oxidative stress causes inflammation, inflammation causes oxidative stress, and you get stuck in this vicious circle. I'm trying to crack that with deliverance by hitting you with so many anti inflammatories, so many antioxidants that you stop that cycle and, and then you can go into more of a healing cycle as well. The professors at ucl, my chief medical officer, me and a lot of us, we suspect that we're getting into the mitochondria with the antioxidant activity. That's one of the studies that we're conducting. But antioxidants are incredibly important for dealing with free radicals and anti aging and longevity.

That's, that's incredible. So you're, in fact you could test whether you're getting into the mitochondria.

Yeah, that's one of the things we've got a bunch of studies we're doing next year, that's one of the big ones we're, we're looking at.

Yeah. There's a collaboration with one of our speakers at the conference from UC San Diego who makes the, the ME health test.

Oh, wow.

Looks at mitochondrial function. So I'll make a connection.

Please intro me there.

His name is Dr. Hamil Patel, and I've been to his labs down there and they're just doing great work on mitochondria and actually measuring them. So, like, that's the perfect test for you. When you come to my biohacking conference in May in Austin, we're taking over the entire Fairmont. You can get a liver scan for half price when you come in. So biohackingconference.com, that savings will pay for a substantial portion of a ticket to the conference. So you definitely want to do that. But most of all, just try Deliverance and go to loveyourliver.com and code Dave. Is there a wearable that would work to help me track my liver? I'm testing two different wearable devices now. I was CTO of the first company to get heart rate from the wrist. I wear levels continuous glucose monitor. Is that enough or is there some other thing I need?

Personally, I wear an OURA ring and I found it to be very useful. I like it for sleep. Looking at recovery, things like that, lingo is the Abbott patch in the uk I really want to get into do a research. We're actually studying that as well, because as the liver has 500 functions, you know, everything you eat, all the vitamins, nutrients, all those things, they're all stored, processed and managed by the liver. So as those are checked, as those are gone through the body, and that's going to affect your readiness score, that's going to affect your sleep score, all that as well. There isn't an actual wearable that's tracking liver health, but there are things around that that we could look at.

Got it. I would look at my heart rate variability in the morning. If that's high, your liver is probably doing okay. Right. You're unlikely to have fatty liver disease and a very high heart rate variability consistently. Right?

Correct.

Okay, got it. So if your HRV is low, maybe you should look at your liver. And how would you go about doing that? Well, one thing is you could get a lab test, which is going to miss some of this. You could get a physical scan, or if you're on a budget, there's nothing wrong with saying, I'm going to improve my liver. You go on a supplement like Deliverance and you try it for three months and if your brain works better and your heart rate variability goes up, like, great, I solved it. I love to track what I'm hacking and sometimes it's easy. How do I feel right now? That's free. Did I wake up groggy? That's free. What's my morning readiness score? It's a few hundred dollars and you can do it for years. Those are affordable. But going into a doctor and getting a liver test or doing the AXO health panel, that takes money. So I just want to encourage you, if you're young or you're just getting going and you can't lose weight and your skin's not looking good, you have brain fog, you could try taking Liber supplements for a couple months and see if it all changes Deliverance. Like I just said, reverse stage 2 fatty liver disease in a few months. And one of the people I work with really closely, so I'm, I'm pretty impressed with the, the combinatorial strategy that you guys put together just to speak.

On that too, which I think, thank you very much for that. It's. That's why we started the liver clinic. So in the uk, to get a fibro scan is a one to two year wait list with nhs.

Wow.

If you go private, it's incredibly expensive. You know, we're data driven and evidence based. So I don't want to people just to be taking deliverance and saying, oh, I feel better, I don't know if I feel better. So I wanted to hit it from three perspectives. One, anecdotally, how are you feeling, how are you sleeping? That's just as important as your biomarkers. To some people, it's more important. Let's look at your biomarkers. So we ideally get a blood test and a scan, you take Deliverance and then we test you again at three months and six months. So the proof is in the pudding and in the data. And then thirdly, you hit that with scientific study, observational studies. Who, who are the people using your product and endorsing it? What studies have you done? How much use science is behind it? You know, what are you using, technology, what innovations are using? We use all three of those to try to get efficacy and results. I'm trying to prevent people from getting chronic disease. So we need to really be getting ahead of it. I think it's really important to note, and I had. It was the head of cardiology at Mayo Clinic in uk And I was saying you need to be looking at fatty liver for your cardiovascular patients.

Of course you do.

He said, well, there's not a correlation. I said, let me get this straight. What are the two main causes of cardiovascular disease? He said, Type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. Correct. The foundation for both of those is fatty liver. Fatty liver leads to fatty liver disease and that leads to metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes. If you want to look at cardiovascular risk, you need to come back and check on your liver health first by keeping that low metabolic syndrome diminishes, type 2 diabetes diminishing. And that's really important. More people will die of cardiovascular disease because of fatty liver disease than will die of liver disease because of fatty liver.

Wow, that's profound. In Superhuman my a big book on longevity like step one, don't die. And there's four killers. Other people in the field called like the four horsemen, but I thought that was too much of a cliche, so I just call them four killers. So there's diabetes, which is a precursor to cancer and a precursor to cardiovascular disease and a precursor to Alzheimer's disease. If you don't get those four things, you'll probably live a lot better than you otherwise would have. In fact, that goes without saying. And you're much more likely to live longer. And those are unlikely to extend human lifespan. They're just going to make sure that you feel good and live as long as you could. And then we add in the other true longevity technologies that have already added 6.5 years to the expected human lifespan over the last 25 years. And I'm saying that because there are people out there saying there's no evidence that we can extend human life. And I'm like, we already did it. So if I was to take care of my liver, even Starting when I'm 20 years old, that's going to shift my risk of diabetes and that's going to shift my risk of cancer and cardiovascular. Oh, and I won't get Alzheimer's or brain fog, which might happen decades before that. Right.

And you have better looking skin and better looking hair.

Oh, no, not that. So okay, what if I'm on a budget and I like to go out to restaurants every now and then? By the way, I'm. Neither of those is true for me. I like to cook my own grass fed ribeye because I'm really good at it. But let's say I'm going back to myself when I was 25 or something. So I said I'm Going to take some steps to take care of my liver. And that buys me the ability to maybe do some things like have a drink, you know, eat some french fries.

Is that a good strategy, taking care of your liver? Absolutely as well. I don't know if you'd want to start off by already thinking the naughty things you're going to do. You know, sometimes the stress of not having the french fries or not having the glass of wine could cause more damage. Number one damage thing in the world is lack of sleep for two is stress. Then you go through all the carcinogens and everything as well.

Do you think people really get stressed because they didn't have the french fries?

Some people. I think some people do. Maybe they. Maybe not French fries per se, maybe the alcohol. Some people will get stressed, yeah, because they calm down. It's a coping mechanism.

Social anxiety.

Social anxiety is a big thing. People are learning more, though, and opening up. So they're learning breathing techniques, they're learning things to modulate. You know, antidepressants is very damaging for your liver as well. What that does is that that robs people that are growing up of the ability to coping mechanisms, how to deal with things.

Right.

So you don't learn that can cause stress, de stressing and, you know, there's a lot of things you can do that are free. And I always say the number one thing you can do for longevity and health is immediate and it costs you no money is just be conscious. That's the first thing you can do. So if you be conscious of I'm taking care of my liver, what am I doing? That's going to help to answer your question? Absolutely. You know, drinking lots of water, leafy greens, just be, you know, use common sense in what you're eating.

It's really funny because people enter biohacking usually because I just want to perform better at all sorts of things, or I want my brain to work, or I want to lose the weight the way I've lost £100, or I want to put on muscle, whatever. The thing is, eventually you always end up at I want to feel good, which means I want to be more conscious and therefore I want to live longer. So biohacking is a gateway drug to consciousness and longevity and it always ends up there. That's the way upgrade labs is structured that way as well. Because people are going to say, you know, I solved all my immediate problems. I just want to be happy. What's that take and what's missing from a lot of the personal development stuff? Try to be happy when your mitochondria are broken or when your liver can't process toxins, well, it's very hard to be happy because you have inflammation going on all the time. Then the mitochondria are stressed because they keep getting an inflammatory stress signal, and then you're stressed. So this is why the primary detox organ in the body, to me is one of the most important. And I've been, I'd say, pretty well obsessed with liver function, as well as reducing my toxin intake. So I'm excreting more and I'm taking in less. And over time, the effects on longevity, on aging, it's really profound what can happen.

It's kind of like Benjamin Button's liver.

There you go.

Yeah, the liver, it's so amazing. It's the only organ in the human body that fully regenerates. No other organ in the body fully regenerates. And it's. Let's say, for instance, one of your friends needed a liver transplant. We would do what's called a live liver transplant. We would take a third of your liver out, we would put that into your friend, and that'll grow back to a fully double lobed organ, and yours will grow back. No other human organ does that. The average age of your liver is three years. Whether you're 95 years old or 90 years old or five years old, it's about three. It's never older than 10. So it's also one of the youngest organs. But if you're constantly beating it up as an age bone, when you look.

At radical longevity, we always want to find examples of times when regeneration is possible. And the logo or the mascot for Upgrade Labs is the axolotl. And the axolotl is a rare type of Mexican salamander relative. And it's the only vertebrate we know of where you can crush its spinal cord over and over. It'll grow back. Any limb you cut off will just grow back over and over. It's like Wolverine. So that's proof that it can be done in vertebrates. And the liver, as you just said, is proof that some tissues in our body are fully capable of regenerating. Do you see a future where we learn how the liver does that and then we gene edit other tissues so we can regrow them?

Absolutely. Right now we know 500 vital functions the liver does, but there are thousands. We're learning more and more. An exciting part of being a scientist, of being involved with deliverance, is that, you know, you have known knowns. We have known unknowns and there's unknown unknowns that we don't even, can't even contemplate yet that's going to come out of that. We've also taken patients that had F3, F4 fibrosis, which common old school medicine would tell you is irreversible. We've switched that around. The also common thought process is that people with cirrhosis cannot be fixed. It's incurable. I'm working with Dr. Diocon who I think is a colleague of yours and some other stem cell doctors and we're looking at, okay, what's the next generation? Let's do, let's take stem cells that are programmed to regrow liver cells and liver scar tissue. Let's ultrasound, guide them right into that point. Let's regrow that area and open up that canal so that liver tissue you can regrow. So innovation is incredibly important as the, as the liver is healthy, everything else is going to be healthier.

What's the connection between your gut microbiome and your liver health?

You can also say that the liver is kind of the master of your gut microbiome. It's a two way street off. Microbiome can actually, if it's off or it's bad or it's out of whack, can affect the liver negatively. And also if the liver is not functioning properly, its ability to produce biles and enzymes and stuff to go into the gut microbiome is affected as well. You know, when we eat food gets broken down in the stomach, it goes through the intestine. The intestines are pulling all the nutrients and minerals and proteins out. That goes back to the liver. The liver then manages those, stores those. So if your gut microbiome is out of whack, you're not properly getting absorption, which a lot of people, I think that's a problem with a lot of people taking supplements. It's not being absorbed. So you've got to fix your intake so that your liver can then if not, you could be starving your liver of minerals even though you think you're eating everything. Great.

It's incredible what happens if you have bad gut bacteria because they block absorption. They also make one of the biggest toxins that affects brain health, brain fog, systemic inflammation and even liver health. And it's called lipopolysaccharide or lps. Talk to me about how LPS gets into the body and what it does to the liver.

So as obviously it's it, it's produced and created as an offset. Some of the most toxic things that we deal with are actually byproducts of breaking something down that gets into the liver. It affects liver functionality. And the just as there's a gut brain axis, which is more to do with emotions, there is a liver brain axis as well. It has been proven. I just read a great NIH study. I was reading some stuff out of Yale the other day. If a liver has too much of that, what will happen is it can go into the brain and it'll diminish cognitive function. It is proven that fatty liver disease affects cognitive function full stop. Some of those chemicals, especially the ammonia, that comes as a byproduct of breaking down proteins that actually can get up into the brain. If you've got fatty liver cross the blood brain barrier and actually cause decrease in your brain matter, it can actually shrink the size of your brain.

Ammonia is interesting because if you're on a high protein diet and you don't have enough stomach acid or enough digestive enzymes, or you have gut, if you have bad gut bacteria, you will make ammonia and you'll smell it because you'll have bodybuilder farts, they'll be terrible. And that ammonia causes profound brain fog. So that is a state you don't want. And these lipidopolysaccharides are bacterial toxins and they're really bad for the liver. So if you have gut dysbiosis or if you have an infection somewhere in the body, the reason you feel like crap is that these toxins are produced. And in a normal healthy gut with an intact lining, which few people have, if they eat the normal western diet, the lipopolysaccharides stay in the gut and get excreted. But since most of us have some degree of leaky gut, the LPS toxins enter and they go to the liver. So one of my strategies for longevity is, well, what protects the liver from lipopolysaccharides? Glutathione. So deliverance, your product raises glutathione in the liver, which helps protect you. And interestingly, this weird thing called C8MCT oil that I turned into a billion dollar industry in studies. It protects the liver from lipopolysaccharides. What takes these toxic compounds through the gut lining is saturated fats, including lauric acid, which is one of the MCTs. And there are brands like on it who are saying, oh, we have lauric acid. Lauric acid is an abundant and cheap mct. So cheap that some places they use it for fracking but you can claim it's an mct. It's the one that escorts LPS across the gut the most. So the strategy for me is understand that I'm going to eat a high saturated fat diet because that's good for me. That means I need to have healthy gut bacteria, but I might not because something in my last meal could have thrown them off. So what do I want to do? I want to protect my liver by making sure that it's producing enough glutathione so that the normal amount of LPS and the normal amount of environmental toxins I can't avoid, they cannot touch my liver. And as a result of this strategy, for more than 10 years, I have the best liver score you've seen out of thousands and thousands of patients. So I think it works at this point. Is there anything else you would do.

For that strategy besides saying, I mean, really well hydrated? I mean, as you said, a lot of ways that people's gut microbiome gets completely devastated is antibiotics. And in the west, especially in America, they tend to oversubscribe antibiotics where they should be giving you a probiotic in tandem with that. So I would think get ahead of it, keep, get your gut microbiome, try to make sure that's imbalanced as much as possible so that a, your liver can do its job. And because you're doing all these preventative issues and you're keeping all these mechanisms, these pathways, these flows really healthy, is indicative of obviously your vitality and also your amazing liver score.

Understanding that you can make toxins on board. And if you ate something and you have stinky farts, that means you're making toxins just unequivocally. So what should you do? Well, you should always have adequate glutathione in the liver and deliverance does that. You might also take activated charcoal away from supplements when you have bad smelling farts because it's going to bind to the toxins in the gut and you know they're there because you can smell them. So when that happens, well, you'll fart less, which is good for the holidays, unless you don't like your in laws or something. Then that also though means less brain fog because it means less of these toxins could cross the blood brain barrier. So this idea of eat less toxins, produce less toxins, if you're going to eat toxins or you are producing toxins, block them and increase your ability to get them out of the body. And that leads to more consciousness, happiness, less pain in the body, less risk of dying from all the different ways you could die, and then maybe you'll live longer. But there's something we haven't talked about that has a lot to do with the liver. Coffee. Is coffee good for you?

Coffee is very good for you. Coffee in its basic form is a berry. You know, that berry's taken, it's picked, it's cultivated, it's loved, it's roasted. And then it goes into this antioxidant drink that we drink all over the world. Coffee brings blood into the liver, which is very important. That's why being hydrated is very important. You want to keep the body well hydrated whilst there is a aspect of coffee that takes some water out. Coffee is very, very high in antioxidants. There were some studies I was reading with NIH studies, this is all available on PubMed, that people that drink two cups of coffee a day or more are 44% less likely to get cirrhosis. This is a. You can pull this up. Everybody but Pubmed, NIH people that drink four cups of coffee a day are 65% less likely to get cirrhosis. It lowers your chance of fatty liver disease. It lowers your chance of liver disease as a whole. Carcinogenic aspects of it, cancer. The effect and the correlation between drinking a lot of coffee and liver disease is undisputable.

So coffee protects your liver from all sorts of bad things. Okay, that's cool.

That and it promotes your liver. It's getting more blood in there, it's getting antioxidants in there. It's supporting it as well.

It is, which is one of the reasons I think it's a preeminent longevity substance. Now, there's a little bit more to coffee, though. You mentioned the potential for dehydration. And caffeine by itself is such a weak diuretic that it doesn't count for making you lose water. But if there is mold toxin in coffee, which is a bladder toxin, when people drink a cup of coffee, an hour later, they're a little jittery or cranky, but you have to pee and your bladder's not full, and that's dehydrating you because the body's responding to the toxin. And the toxin from mold that's in the coffee makes the bladder irritated, so the body will pull water out of your blood. That's what's dehydrating in order to dilute the toxin. And then it makes you feel like you have to pee even though your bladder wasn't full. So it turns out coffee that makes you have to pee is not good coffee. And coffee by itself in studies actually does hydrate you as well as plain water. Except plain water isn't very hydrating because it doesn't have electrolytes in it. So what do you do about that? Well, there's this little thing called Danger Coffee, my new coffee company. And it is coffee that has no mold toxin in it and it has electrolytes and trace minerals in it, which makes it more hydrating than coffee without those things. So I'm looking to solve all those problems. But the smoking gun in the room for liver health is mold toxins. What do mold toxins do to liver health?

Very interesting. You brought that about Danger Coffee. And I have to speak on that. I didn't understand the level of sophistication Danger Coffee until we were at your conference and my wife and I bought a huge bag. We've been taking it since. And it being mold free was one of the biggest selling points that I'd never seen that before. And that's why that's actually what we take at our house. We love coffee. There's so many different forms of mold and there's so many different effects. Mold can get into the. Obviously it gets into the bloodstream, both airborne touch. It could be on your food as well. And different molds have different levels of toxicity. So you start to overload the liver and cause liver damage. The liver's constant repairing that can also get into the blood and it can affect blood cell count. It's weakening your immune system, causes free radicals to cruise around causing oxidative stress. You get inflammation. Mold is. It can affect everything to where I mean, people that have cancer might have. We have a loved friend that we think didn't live as long as. Because there was mold in the house she was living in and her immune system was being attacked constantly by the mold. So mold is, and it's a huge problem and it's one that's I think tend to be overlooked and landlords don't want to deal with it.

Environmental mold or mold in food or mold in coffee, they all affect the liver one way or another. And a lot of the worst mold toxins are called xenoestrogens. And xenoestrogens are either man made, like plastics or BPA and things like that, or they're made by primarily toxic mold. And one of the nastiest ones is called zearalenone. And it's such a powerful estrogen that is 10,000 times stronger than human estrogen. And if you live in a house with zearalenone, which I did when I was overweight, you can get fat on 30% less calories. And it's so powerful that if you eat conventional meat, there's a good chance that the industrial company that owns the cowl production facility, they put this estrogenic toxin into the cows so they can feed the cows 30% less. In other words, food cost goes down and they feed you a cow that has levels of estrogen that you shouldn't have. What organ in the human body clears excess estrogen and plastics out of the body?

The liver.

Oh, what do you know?

That's crazy. You just told me that. That's terrible.

It is terrible. The drug for people who are doubting me is called zero. And ranchers do buy it and I don't know, it's at least 25 million year in revenue, probably more for that, which should be banned immediately. But there's a lot of other things, like atrazine, which is in most countries, it's banned in the U.S. it's not banned. It disrupts human hormones. In fact, at levels that are allowable in water, it causes frogs to become hermaphrodites. What does the liver do to remove atrazine?

So anything to do toxic that's coming in, that's not natural, anything in the body, actually the liver is dealing with it, managing it, breaking down and synthesizing it. And if you felt you were exposed to that, I would like. You brought a good point earlier with activated charcoal. If ever an ordinary gets food poisoning or bacteria, first thing I do is tell them, besides drink lots of water, get activated charcoal, because that's going to bind and help to get that out as well. But if your liver is fatty, remember it's not functioning as well. And if it's not functioning well, its ability to get those toxins out diminishes. Therefore, you could exasperate the problem as well.

The goal of biohacking is to build highly resilient people. In fact, danger coffee is called danger because who knows what you might do. It requires resilience. And if you want to have resilience, the number one organ is your brain. The number two organ is your liver, because your liver is what controls how well your body gets rid of toxins. And if you don't get rid of toxins very well, your brain is hooked. And as someone who's had profound problems with toxins, chronic fatigue syndrome, serious brain fog, every bad thing I can think of has happened at one point or Another it really does come down to your gut dysbiosis, it comes down to your liver. It comes down to taking in less toxins and excreting them better, even something like man boobs. Every guy in my family has them and I had them to the point I was really self conscious about it. And at this point I've been been in men's magazines, you know, fitness magazines with my shirt off without fasting and all that crap ahead of time. And I don't have man boobs the vast majority of the time. If you give me enough mold, I'll grow them back. But it comes down to liver, because if your body has enough testosterone, it's likely to turn it into estrogen. And what removes estrogen? It's the liver. So if you're on testosterone replacement therapy, which you should be if you're a guy and you're over 30 and your lab tests are low, and yes, you can test that at axohealth, which is very, very low cost. If they're low, you need to either change your diet, change your sleep, change your exercise and get your levels up to 20 of free testosterone. If you can do that by yourself, power to you. But given the toxin environment we swim in, you probably can't. If that's the case and you go on testosterone, or even if you don't support the liver so that you get rid of the estrogen, otherwise the more testosterone your body, the more estrogen you'll make and then you can be on testosterone and still grow man boobs. My body is uniquely good at making estrogen out of testosterone. So what do I do to not get man boobs? I keep my liver running.

Hormone health is incredibly important. I was just giving a talk at big medical center in London on menopause and some of these doctors, practitioners, patients as well. And I asked her, I said, what is everybody doing for liver health? To manage your menopause. Just like testosterone in men, menopause in women. The liver is in charge of your hormones, it's synthesizing them, it's creating some of them. Liver's also a gland. It's an organ and a gland. And bad liver or liver that's not functioning as well can dramatically affect early menopause. Perimenopause, estrogen and progesterone getting out of whack. And with the prevalence of HRT right now, where they should be doing bioidentical plant based hormones to destroying everybody on.

Hrt, plant based is not bioidentical, which.

Is a no, there's bioidentical plant based hormone therapy for women.

But if it's plant based, it's not bioidentical. Right. Because. Because humans are plants. So if it's plant, but like wild yam can't even convert into progesterone, they will.

They identify that the plant based hormones that will go with the patient much better and you have a lot less side effects. The cancer side effects or the cancerous growth. Maybe I'll get the terminology wrong.

Gotcha. Bioidentical. I would support most of the plant based hormone supplements you see out there. They're fake. Because the body cannot convert wild yam into anything. It takes seven steps in a bioreactor to make yam into progesterone. So I would just say bioidentical. And if they derive it from plants or from fermentation or from anywhere else, don't use the stuff that comes from pregnant horses, which is what big pharma wants to sell you.

Yeah. Oral dairy cows and stuff it as well.

Gotcha.

Functioning liver, healthy liver is going to make menopause symptoms much more dramatic. Much less dramatic, much more balanced. Mood swings, the sweats as well. If you, if you into menopause or type, type 2 diabetes, you got to start with the liver as well. It's incredibly, incredibly important.

Ooh, talk to me about menopause or perimenopause in the liver.

So as the liver manages, synthesizes and controls liver, if your liver is not functioning very well, its ability to flush out the old hormones and to go through this cycle of rejuvenation and this, you know, incredibly important part of a woman's life, its ability to do that decreases. So why women between ages of 20 and 45 that drink three times a week or more socially are 30% higher chance of getting breast cancer. And that is because their liver is not functioning as well. Its ability to get rid of and flush hormones goes down. Those bad hormones situation, those build up, those can then metastasize and turn into cancer. So there's a direct correlation with alcohol, which is toxic. A woman that's taking it isn't drinking as much and functioning as well, therefore causes all kinds of damage downstream.

One of the interesting things around perimenopause is that the liver, amongst its 500 plus things is it converts progesterone into cortisol. Now you might say, well that's a bad thing, except low cortisol is four times more dangerous than high cortisol. So what that means is you may have a dysfunctional stress response in perimenopause if you have a dysfunctional liver. So you want the body to be able to call for cortisol when it needs it and for the body to not need cortisol because you've managed emotional stress and environmental stress and sleep and all of that. So this is a little known part of perimenopause is have a healthy liver. So your body can, even if you're taking progesterone, can at least convert it into the downstream hormones that it needs. And the liver plays a central role in that. So if you're dealing with really, really harsh perimenopause, look at the liver and deliverance would be a way to do that.

Absolutely no organ in the body is managing your hormones more than your liver. And one of the big studies that we're doing next year is type 2 menopause. I'm sorry, type 2 diabetes and menopause, those are the two areas that we're going to go into because it's liver centric. Beautiful. You brought up a good point earlier with type 2 diabetes. There's a silver lining to type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease. They're both reversible. They are.

So many things that are irreversible are totally reversible when you stop listening to big Pharma. All right, Siggy, I got a serious liver question for you. In front of you is a giant plate of french fries cooked in a mix of canola, corn and soybean oil, a restaurant and a cigarette. You have to eat the french fries or smoke the cigarette. Which one are you going to do?

I'd smoke the cigarette because I can get those toxins out quicker.

Exactly. You get at most 24 hours of inflammation from the cigarette. And by the way, smoking is really bad for you. Micro do nicotine, good for you for longevity. But those french fries, they're going to trash the liver for several days, right?

They're going to trash it for several days. They're going to be stored in the fat. You're going to have fat issues. You're going to be dealing with that plate of french fries for weeks, potentially months.

Yeah. That's why I just don't eat restaurant fried food ever. And by the way, fried brussels sprouts, French fries, I don't care. Same thing. I was deep fried. Don't eat it.

Yeah, carcinogenics, what this cooked in, what else was cooked in there? Mixed with it too? Yeah, it's just not, not a good way to go.

And by the way, there's a Get out of jail free card for this. If it was fried in beef tallow, I would not smoke the cigarette. I would eat the french fries. Because now what does pharmaceutical nicotine things I use, like a spray or a lozenge. What does that do to the liver?

Well, pharmaceutical nicotine is obviously much less dangerous than smoking it. It does increase toxicity if you mix it with alcohol. So you're taking something that's toxic and you're doubling down on it.

Okay, so it makes alcohol worse. Correct. Okay.

It doesn't show a direct correlation between liver enzymatic reaction or diminishing liver function. But. But it has been shown to also reduce bile flow. And bioflow is an incredibly important part of the body and how we break toxins and foods down.

Got it. The studies that I found showed it was a. A minor reduction in bile flow. And for people who read the bulletproof diet, I talked a lot about how important increasing bile flow is. And to be clear, I recommend about 5 milligrams of pharmaceutical nicotine a day as a longevity strategy. Because people who smoke don't get Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. They just get cancer. But if you use nicotine without using tobacco, without burning stuff and breathing it, then you don't get the cancer risk. So this is one of those neat little nootropic things. And at those low doses, it's unlikely to affect bile. But what I'd like you to do is tell me what bile does and why it matters and the role of bile in having a healthy liver.

So the bile is managed, and also a lot of it is processed within the liver, but the gallbladder processes a lot of it as well. And the gallbladder acts like a carburetor, and that will release bile into the stomach at certain times to help down with. To manage acidity, break foods down, break toxins down as well. So having a healthy bile is incredibly important. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that we've seen a huge uptick. And I'm part of a big European study that people that have had their gallbladders removed are seeing a huge increase in liver disease as well as liver cancer, about 10 years down. Because if you take the gallbladder out, which modern medicine has felt that it's cheaper and less expensive just to pull the gallbladder, what you've done is you've taken out your control mechanism that the liver uses. So now when you've got a constant drip of bile and acids into the stomach, which can Cause all kinds of effects and upstream up into the liver, therefore increasing chances of cirrhosis. Any patients that we have come in that have nash, which is non alcoholic steatosis, hepatitis, which is the precursor to cirrhosis and is very bad damaging, first question we ask them, do you have your gallbladder? So if you don't have your gallbladder, it's incredibly important that you're taking extra care of your liver, getting a scan regularly as well.

One of my really close friends for 25 plus years had her gallbladder taken out years ago. So I did a lot of research and the biggest thing you could do is make sure you take ox bile with any meal that contains fat to help the body be able to metabolize fat, because fat contains fat soluble nutrients and it is a nutrient itself. And without a gallbladder, you're not very able to digest fat. You can have greasy stools. So ox bile is something you take with every meal for the rest of your life. If you've had your gallbladder taken out and you support your liver with the right herbs, deliverance is a, a great way to do that. And then you get a regular liver scan because you are at increased risk for that.

Much bigger risk for NASH and liver cancer as well. That ox bile thing as well. We're going to add, we'll look into that, probably add that to our protocol. A lot of patients that come in. So with the liver clinics, our goal and our promise is we will hold your hand, whether it's as little as nutritional advice all the way up through deliverance scanning, mri, biopsy if needed, or up to a liver transplant. We're going to make sure that you're taken care of it the best way possible. And you know, being conscious of your liver, what you're eating, what you're drinking, drinking more coffee, avoiding toxins, doing these things as well. So I think that's a really interesting protocol that I want to, I'm going to add in. I'll speak to Dr. Gareth Oxbile. Is there a particular brand you recommend or is it liquid or powder? I don't know much about it.

It's just capsules that you get. So a lot of brands of digestive enzymes include some because even if you have your gallbladder having extra ox bile along with extra protein digesting enzymes, it actually helps you absorb your food better. So if you don't want ammonia and you're on a carnivore diet or you're just getting adequate protein, I recommend 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight, and that is animal protein, not that fake plant protein. That's. You need three times as much of that. No one can do that without farting all the time. What that means is take enzymes with your.