EP 172 WTH?!?: Revitalizing the Brain with Rowena Gates

Foreign hey, welcome back everybody. Dr. Greg Eckel. And this is what the health. Our topic today is how and why supporting protein functions improves cognitive recovery and performance. This one is near and dear to me. As many of you know out there, I'm all about proteins and folded proteins. And my esteemed guest is Rowena Gates and she is the co founder and CMO of Ang3 Corporation. She helped launch N3's Nanov technology and currently oversees business development of its use for health, wellness and performance. Rowena is a serial entrepreneur. In 1995, her first startup was one of the earliest companies to offer an Internet based solution to the logistics industry. Rowena received her PhD from the University of Washington for her work on international strategic alliances and economic development. Welcome aboard, Rowena.

Hey, it's nice to be here.

I, I love it. You know, we've been using nanov technology here for a while and what I recently discovered with your support is we're about four generations behind and I, we are so impressed with the research that you all are doing with your technology. I'm wondering know, I think the first starting spot is this whole component of improving cognitive recovery and performance for both for brain regeneration and high performers. So this one, you know, really is for anyone with a brain. So I thank you for that. You know, what, what are you finding here and how does this all fit together when we're talking about supporting protein functions to improve cognitive recovery and performance?

Well, first of all, the whole story of how we support the protein functions is kind of an interesting one. And Michael Hobson did an interview with you and if everybody could just go watch that, it's amazing how many of the things he hit on that we are doing. Pretty much all of them, including the research we've done in Italy with the group that looks for the coherent domains where the prove that, that our device does that. And so anyway, we are working through the cellular water and that's, that's the piece that we work on. And for those of you who missed that podcast, then Michael Hobson really dug in on the role of water and really how special it is. And in the cell that water, a water that he referred to as crystalline, but it's also like a gel. The water molecules are pressed closely together so it's not a liquid or a solid, it's kind of in between. And that layer forms around all the biomolecules, but especially around proteins. And so our device helps with the creation of that layer of water that then provides the, the energy needed for proteins to fold and the mitochondrial proteins are very important, but proteins need to fold before they can work. And that's one of the areas with cognitive function is that is very common that people understand that misfolded proteins are a problem. And if they're misfolded, they either became unfolded and damaged, usually by oxidative stress, or they never got folded in the first place. And that's a downward spiral because then they start sticking together and, and really causing problems and clumping together.

So let's back up one, one level above this discussion on, on proteins and like, their function in the body and why they fold and what they do for us. Right? Because we all think in protein for nutrition and you got to eat a high, you know, higher protein diet and. But why, you know, we're talking about something different internally in the body.

That. Yes. And also it's the whole body, not just the brain, really. So anything that we discuss is related to the whole function of the body. The protein that you eat is the reason we want to get more of that and pay attention to amino acids and so on is because those are building blocks for building the proteins we need in our body, and those are amino acids. So about half of the amino acids that we need come from our food, and then our body produces the other half. And those amino acids get strung together into proteins. However, when they're first formed, it's only a string of amino acids. Ultimately, it has to fold and it cannot function at all unless it folds. And so the string of amino acids kind of gets scrunched all up into this complex 3D shape that has to take place and it has to be correct or things go awry. And as an example of that with hemoglobin, that's one error in the genetic code is the difference. It changes the shape of the folded protein. So it's a little bent, and it's a sickle cell disease protein at that point. And it's just one error. And so they're really complicated and they're very, very precise.

They really are. And, and this one, as I alluded to near and dear to me, you know, really prionic activity, which are misfolded proteins that then start signaling other proteins to misshape and misfold, which is at the backbone or basis of Kurtzfeld Jacob disease, which is mad cow syndrome in people. And that's my, you know, kind of my personal story that I'm sticking to these days. So it's really got me looking for technologies and solutions because this is much more widespread than people realize. And Your research is also showing some amazing benefits for protein. So, you know, let's talk about oxidative stress in particular, because we've added some mitochondrial testing for folks lately that is showing some intimate looks at the mitochondria and reactive oxidative species. And what do you, what do you see with the role of oxidative stress with cognitive function and performance?

It's. It's the bad guy. So oxidative stress, you can't avoid it because you need to burn oxygen for energy, and it will always be doing damage unless it's been interrupted by an antioxidant. However, that antioxidant defense is nowhere near perfect. And so there's always more oxidative damage than repair. And we call it the aging process. I mean, so far, most of us, all of us, there are a few exceptions, but are aging pretty, pretty visibly even, because it's just sort of this downward spiral where the more damage there is, then the less capacity you have to fix it. And all of the repair of damage is done by proteins. And so proteins make up your body, but they also run all the systems, all the functions, and they repair the damage in the body. And so you. You want to keep them all, you know, healthy and functioning well, for sure.

So what do you see to. So we can't escape? Well, number one, aging is a fatal condition. That's what I've heard exact. And then, secondly, well, okay, if we can't escape oxidative stress, because that does play, you know, inflammatory process and repair process, how do we mitigate or modulate it best?

Well, there are a lot of lifestyle and diet interventions. Don't. There's certain things don't do that, whether it's. It's too much radiation from the sun all the way down to inflammatory foods. Because what happens is you end up with this chain of. That you eat the bad food, which is not necessarily itself oxidative stress. But then that gets created when your body goes into high gear to try to deal with it, for example, and that's the inflammation. And so the idea is to get rid of, you know, the exposure to chemicals and poor quality food and other other lifestyle factors. Athletes are exposed to much more oxidative stress because they burn a lot more oxygen, sometimes a hundred times more oxygen than we do. However, they're usually also way better equipped to deal with it. And so it's only in athletes that aren't really paying attention that you see that aging process. And, well, you're too young for this. But when I was younger you used to see endurance runners, like dying young and looking old because they hadn't quite figured out how to mitigate the damage that was being done by, you know, hundreds of miles of running.

And would you call that they were speeding up the metabolic processes so they were accelerating the aging process is the way that I would view that.

Right. And so then you, you also need to be able to decelerate it with appropriate repair, recovery, and antioxidants that are going to mitigate that damage. And so now there's lots of really healthy athletes that are burning a tremendous amount of oxygen, but they're just taking care of the repair side for sure.

You know, I, and I think I love listening to trainers. LeBron James in particular is one athlete that stands out. I think he's played more hours in the NBA than any other player ever in the history. And listening to him and his trainer, they take this like it's a science on recovery. And they're doing, doing hyperbarics and, you know, proper nutrition and sleep and all, all of the things. And his body actually shows like he's not wearing out the way his predecessors did because he gets it like he's investing in himself. I'm wondering in your, in your research with, tell us about the technology that you have helped co found here and bring to light.

Oh, sure. Okay. So we have a device called nanov, and it's about the size of a desktop printer, maybe a foot square on the desk. And you breathe it through inhalation, you're breathing a humid airflow, but the water's been changed inside the device in a very precise way to create this gel, like layers on the surfaces inside the cells. And so that's kind of the device and what it looks like. And then because we help, if you think about this, is it's so fundamental to just help the environment that the proteins live in and the proteins do all the work. And the body decides with its own signaling and wisdom of what actually needs to get done. And this device is so basic that it could be the outcome is going to be absolutely different for everybody. And there's no possibility of a contraindication because there's no, there's nothing. It's. The body is really running the show.

Yeah.

So what we've done is we have testing that's, that's a range of testing. One thing we don't do is study diseases, which you probably appreciate because of medical claims. And so diseases really live on top of all this other dysfunction. If you've got cognitive decline, that's not the cause. That's, you know, those are all symptoms, and all these diseases are symptoms. And a ton of them are symptoms of oxidative damage, as you mentioned, oxidative stress. It ends up in chronic illness. What we look at are the things that are under the hood, like the mitochondrial function or the proteins themselves and how well they recover when they're damaged. Oxidative stress levels, heart rate variability, because that's looking at your autonomic nervous system and plays a big role in brain health. And your body will always try to come back into balance when you're stressed, for example. And so those are things you can measure. So those are just a few of them. We've also looked at lactate levels to show how fast a person recovers when they're stressed. And also.

The.

The immune response to stress. And so. And everything I mentioned, by the way, is statistically significant and tested. Some of it's published and almost all of it's done at a university research center somewhat. Some is placebo controlled. The other is just controlled with the sham device in the lab. So it's also controlled.

How did you come up with the idea of inhaling kind of humidified water vapor? Does this, like, where did the idea come from? Or the original thought it was so simple.

I didn't come up with it. So it was easy for me. My partner was looking at the sort of the biology and what was known to go on. It was already known in cell biology that the water surrounding proteins gave them the energy they needed. And they'd also determined that a certain free radical emitted the wavelength that created the energy state in the water. And so he was looking at. He's a German engineer, Hans Eng. He was looking at it and said, can we create that specific wavelength outside the body and deliver it? And so it doesn't exist in a bulk glass of water. It only forms on surfaces. So what? Or droplets make perfect sense because they have a lot of surface area. And so that's really where he started. And we did a lot of lab testing with different institutions and so on to show that it was having the effect we wanted. And then once our device was built, then with more sophisticated testing to show how impactful the wavelengths were. And as a result of that testing, we added wavelengths to it because they had an even more profound impact on the water droplets, which was what we were trying to accomplish. And so that testing was done in Italy and it verified it essentially for us.

Ah, that's awesome. You know, as we're seeing here at The Energy for Life centers. The future of medicine is in frequency. This totally fits the bill for the technology to fit in on frequency medicine.

That's all it is. It's energy and it's all vibration, frequency, energy and it, so it fits perfectly. And, and there's, I know that you do a lot of things that basically harmonize the system and so those things are completely complementary. And that's another aspect of this device. Whatever you're doing is complementary to it.

Because it's not contraindicated, it's not going to interfere with medicines. It's just really, it is very much supporting the innate intelligence. On healing. How do you measure improvement? How is that measured?

Usually we do before and after one test because we don't want anything else to come into play. So all of our studies, except for one, one study was done through an Olympic training center on, on DNA damage. Because by the way, with those endurance athletes, that's the, the double strand DNA damage is what is the risk factor for them. And that one was done with week of training with or without the device. Wow. But the, all the others are done after a single session because we, we don't want it to have the possibility of something else came into play.

Sure.

With that mitochondrial testing, for example, the VO2 Max was an improvement in one session of 7.8%. Yeah, it's, it's a lot. And that's the indicator for biological age. So it's got this longevity component and things like that are, are. It tends to show results quickly, I guess is what I'm saying, rather than a lot of interventions. You need to stick with it and you should stick with it. They're good for you. But don't expect to see it right away. Don't eat one organic salad and expect to transform.

Massive change. Right? Yeah. So that is really, I mean, so the person did a VO2 max before, they did a session and then they did a VO2 max after and they showed an improvement of 7.8%.

Yes. And the testing company, Pinoy was, was really excited by what they saw and they actually wrote a white paper about it because they said we measure lots of different devices and we don't see the needle move like this. Yeah. So that was exciting. But where we stand is we're complementary to any of those other devices. You just get more of an upside when you combine things.

That is awesome. And that component of having it in a station in your stack for longevity, for health, for repair, even for mitochondria, you know, mitochondria are the buzz. That's the buzz right now. Right. So everybody's talking about the energy factories of the cell and we now have some really amazing ways to measure it. So I'm excited to put this in our stack here at the Energy for Life Centers and, and why I wanted to bring you on. You know, we met up, we've known each other, but kind of met more. More playing again at Da Vinci 50 is a longevity group that we go to and we're founding members. And you know, having you and your presentation, I was like, okay, we got to get you on and share you with people because this is something, a device that you can have at home. We've had one for a while. We're going to be getting an upgrade soon. In fact, I'm going to talk to you about that after the show. And, and I did want to share, you know, we'll have a link on in the show notes for folks to investigate it themselves and if they wanted to get started with the technology too. This is one that we personally use, Kitty and I, and have for many, many years. I'm wondering what else you would like to share with regards to the Nano V and maybe some more of the outcomes that you've done and seen because that VO2 max is a very important finding for longev. I'm wondering on performance enhancement and other outcomes. I know you don't treat disease or illness. You can leave that up to me. We're going to be putting that into some, you know, mitochondria testings before and after. So we'll keep you informed on what we see there. So anything else that you would like to share?

I. I would like to just kind of circle back to the brain a little bit because I talked about athletes. But the reality is if you concentrate and focus for two and a half hours, it's like you ran a marathon. You have that oxidative damage in the brain just the same way you're burning more oxygen. And so anything that applies to the body also applies to the brain. And what they do there is look at brain scans as the easiest way to. To verify that. And I don't have a study yet, but there's a group that is currently studying it because they'd noticed it clinically that their clients had much better brain inj endurance at a neurofeedback center and noticed higher endurance until they asked if they could do a study on it, which is comparing to a placebo device again. And so those will be interesting results. But I'm very confident that they will be good results because of the preliminary work. And then 40 years of Zen's, another neurofeedback center, and they show higher. That their clients reach a higher level when it's incorporated with the brain training, the really stressful brain training they do. Yeah, those are some of the brain things. And then another one, I think is really interesting because of the mitochondria. And you're looking at that is the respiratory exchange ratio, which is an indicator of oxygen consumption, and that's an indicator of how well your mitochondria is working. And that was an improvement before and after with metabolic testing. Before and after one session, that was an improvement of 11%. So it was a high improvement. And we see this all the time where people have better utilization. So if they're low in blood oxygen, maybe they're ill, or they go from sea level to elevation and they use the nanov, that brings their blood oxygen saturation back up. And that's a matter of utilization, which is, to me, it's sort of a thing. It's like, don't just push more oxygen in there, especially if a person's already sick.

Yeah.

To use the oxygen they. That, you know, that they have better. And so that's another one that I thought I'll just mention.

I love it. Yeah. That efficiency of utilization, I mean, that is the. That's the whole key of more is not necessarily better. It's how efficiently are you using it. And really, for me, near and dear, for brain regeneration, I mean, misfolded proteins are really the causative agent. When you look at Parkinson's, it's alpha synuclein. When you look at Alzheimer's dementia, it's beta amyloid plaque or Lewy bodies that are misfolded proteins. These are. This is the issue of our times, for our nervous system and our brains and brain health. And so many people are not talking about it. And to hear nanov really just speaking right into it of, you know, what it is, the hydration, it's almost like an exclusionary zone around the protein that helps provide the structure. Now, I just made that sentence up, but it is maybe. Correct me if I'm way off base there with that statement.

You're right on. Because the testing that was done and this was published in the International Journal of Molecular Science, which is a top journal, the testing showed that it improved the stability of the protein, so it was less prone to damage. So pre treatment worked as well as post treatment, and they actually studied different proteins with different types of damage. So for Example pre treating alkaline peroxidase with nanov did not help, but if it was damaged by heat. But when it was post treatment it was very helpful. 34% or something. Improvement in the number of proteins that made it through when it was treated after. And so in some cases it helps prevent damage, but not necessarily.

Wow.

Yeah. And they act differently. Each protein might act a bit differently as well as what they showed. However, they all showed faster recovery with treatment after and many of them showed benefit of pre treatment. It was just often not as much of a benefit as treating after they were damaged.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah. So the, which, which kind of makes sense, right. As a preventative you're not going to see as much change as if you have the damage there already. So it's not. I, I guess we would advocate, let's prevent it and not see a lot of change versus you needing a lot of change with your brain. Right. Like that's a, it's an important distinction. But I, I just want to be explicit with that because more, again more is not necessarily better. If you have a further road back to Wellville, you're going to show more improvement because you needed more improvement.

Exactly. You have a greater need. So the better thing is to, is to avoid that situation.

And so speaking into prevention and proper use of the technology, I mean some of these studies, you're saying one, one use of it shows this benefit. What is the recommended use? Is it twice daily, 20 minute sessions or how does that, how does one person use the device?

It's a bit more complicated because there's different power levels in the device. Some are more expensive and more powerful. However, a typical would be if someone has a chronic illness or they're really struggling, a couple sessions a day is, is important. They should do more. It's very easy to use. I use it at my desk while I'm working. And then for if someone's young and healthy then they might have a. Maintenance of, you know, two, three times a week, you know, one session versus and that's someone in their 20s or they only use it after they really exert themselves after exercise or high focus. And so it really varies a lot. But one thing is for sure, even if you only ever do it once, it would have been beneficial to you.

Yeah, I love it. Is there anything else that you would like to share with our listeners and viewers today?

I think you have done, you've pulled it all out of me. I can't think of another thing to say. No, I don't. I think that that's really about it. It's. I totally appreciated it if everybody doesn't really understand all the nuances of this. It's biophysics, not biochemistry. And that's not the way we're really taught to think all the time.

Right.

And so this area of water science is also a relatively new area, but I think we'll see a lot more coming out of it.

It's so compelling to me. And when we're bringing bioenergetics into the table in the discussion, it's really essential for when we're talking about the body battery and charging the body battery. These are. You all are the leading technologies in doing this. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom here.

Yeah, it's such a pleasure. And also people are welcome to, to reach out and contact me as well. I'm. I'm fine. You know, it's a pleasure to speak.

And so I love it. I love it. And you're welcome. I'll just invite folks, you know, if you learn something new on today's show, give us a like, because that helps other people find this information because it is not coming from the top down. It's coming from our platform directly into your living room. And we wouldn't be doing this without you. So if you like the show, please share us with your friends, family, communities, and get the word out. Thanks, everybody for tuning in.

Thanks, everybody.