Importance of HRV for Longevity and Performance: 89

Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Don Moxley and we just had a lovely little pre-interview chat all about our things in common. Don went to The Ohio State University, was a collegiate athlete, and is currently, uh, traveling around in an RV, which if anybody that's listened to this podcast before or read my blog will go back to the little thing that I call the Vagabond Adventure. We did that for a little bit in a suburban, not an RV. But so, lots in common. But what I'm really excited about is Don knows so many things about health and wellness and sports performance, and he's got some awesome things to share with us today. But before we go into all that, Don, if you could just share a little bit— I shared briefly about your background, but if you could go into some detail and, you know, how did you get into this work? What makes you passionate about health and wellness and what you're doing today?

That's a great question. And literally, you can't separate the journey from the destination. So, I grew up, Cheryl, I grew up in Eastern Ohio. We grew up in the strip pits over in Belmont County, and I had every intention— I was a decent high school wrestler. I was, you know, I qualified for the state tournament twice but never won a match there. But when I went to Ohio State with every intention of going home and feeding beef cattle for the rest of my life, but I got to Ohio State, I was good enough to walk on the wrestling team, but it was a struggle. I was injured all the time, and I was one of those wrestlers that used to cut a lot of weight. I cut from 220 to 177.

Oh, wow.

And hence the injury problems. But when I finally, you know, I was injured my sophomore year, I'm thinking, okay, what do I have to do to finally get going? And I had this kind of unique interaction with several people in my life that basically said, you've got to get stronger. And now remember, Ohio State hired their first strength coach in 1977. This is 1982. So, this is right there. And the strength coach worked with football. They didn't really know what wrestling was at the time. And so, I started exploring what does it take to get stronger. And then, I found myself, Cheryl, sitting in one of my animal science classes, Animal Science Nutrition 661, non-ruminant nutrition, which is not a cow or a goat but a pig. So, it has a stomach like a human. And I'm thinking, "Well, if this is what we should be doing in farm animals, maybe this is what I should be doing for myself as an athlete." athletes. This is before we had sports nutrition as part of the athletic department. And I just, I fell in love with it. I fell in love with human physiology. I wound up changing my life around and from the standpoint, I went from a guy who couldn't get on the mat because I was injured all the time to where my last year I captained the team and wrestled really well and won a Big Ten title and was way more successful than I should have been. So, that kind of started it. I finished up grad school shortly thereafter. I did my grad work in exercise phys. Started working as, you know, an early personal trainer. A friend of mine was working with the Chicago Bulls, and this is the Jordan Bulls back in the day. And they called me because Brad Sellers, who was the 7-foot center on the foot— on the basketball team back then,. And Dennis Hobson, who was the NCAA Player of the Year from Ohio State back then, went to play for the Bulls. And Alver Meal, who now lives close to you there in Cincinnati, calls and says, "Hey, I need someone to train my guys." And so this was my first introduction to this kind of work. About the same time, I started working as a professor. I started teaching the exercise sciences there in Columbus at Columbus State Community College. And then that started a nearly a 30-year run as both a professor working in small schools, teaching primarily, doing a little bit of research, but at the same time, always kept a foot working with a stable of athletes. I also worked in the industry. So you've— if you're into fitness and you don't own a heart rate monitor yet, You're kidding yourself. Go get one now. But I had a chance to work for Polar Electro, the company that makes the best version of that, which was just an eye-opening experience because Cheryl McColgan, we were teaching people to measure their heart rate with two fingers on the carotid, which is— which when you start to use tech, it's a joke. It's just an absolute joke. And so fell in love with, you know, started using tech to measure performance and do pro, you know, work like that. So big change came in 2015. I get a call from the now wrestling coach at Ohio State, Tom Ryan. He says he's got an athlete that he's struggling with. And Cheryl, I'm one of these guys in my house, we lived in a little town outside of Columbus called Granville, and in my house I had a human performance lab. I don't know why everybody doesn't have one. I had one. And Tom had been over the year before and I'd helped him achieve some goals he was trying to work on. And he says he's got an athlete that he's struggling with and brings this kid over. And this is 9 o'clock in the morning on a Sunday morning. And he had wrestled a dual meet at 6 o'clock at night on a Friday night. So had nothing really in between those two times. He comes in, we wire him up, I start to do the testing, and it becomes immediately To me, I immediately see this guy's heart rate variability measurement is horrible. It's essentially when he walks in on a Sunday morning, he has an HRV, which is a stress measurement response, that's equivalent to someone being in a room when a lion walks through the door. It's a fully sympathetic response. And so, we started talking about what's going on. And I did some testing and I said to the coach, I said, "Listen, what's— what your problem with this athlete is that he's mal-adapting to your training. He's not adapting, he's mal-adapting." And I said, "You have to stop training him like you think you should train him and start training him in a manner that he's prepared for." And so stepped in, the team had a lot of things happening with it right then. This kid wound up turning himself around in the last, you know, month of the season. We helped him achieve All-American status. Ohio State won a national title that year because we had 3 other, 4 other tremendous wrestlers on that team. And so all of a sudden I'm at Ohio State. Tom says, I want you on staff. So I go working on back with the wrestling team as a sports scientist. In 2017, We measured 3.5 million data points on a wrestling team. We got— we measured everything and I ran correlations and I was looking at what makes a difference because so much of strength and conditioning and performance and nutrition and the adjunct fields, I say are dogmatic. They're more religious than they are science. Science means we measure the impact of everything we do. Is it positive? Is it negative? And again, with that athlete I was telling you about, Kenny, he was maladapting. And until we put a measurement in place that we could correlate workloads, recovery, things like that against, you're just going to run this kid in the ditch. So this is what we did with the team. We had a great run. I left Ohio State in '18. Largely because this is the— this is what can be the funny part of the story. While I'm at OSU, I have coaches calling me from around the country. Hey, what do you know about THC, cannabis, and HRV? I said, I don't know anything about it. I said, my guys are NCAA athletes. It's against the rules. When I had a really good friend that I worked with at a wearables company out now in New Mexico who had gone to work in cannabis, in Oregon, and he's sending me notes saying, what do you— do you see this? And I'm looking at some of the research, I'm like, okay, this is really interesting. Well, he calls me one day, he says, you want to work in cannabis? I said, yep, I need to understand this, I need to know what's going on. And he makes me an offer, it's the proverbial offer you can't refuse. Um, it tripled, it tripled my pay from what I was making at Ohio State. So That was easy, but it meant I had to move to Florida. I moved down to South Florida. I lived in Palm Beach, Florida. And I tell people I was selling weed in South Beach. And, but I was the director of applied science for a cannabis brand, a medical cannabis brand down there. And the amount of learning that took place was epic. It was absolutely epic. And when you finally pierce the veil of cannabis and what's out there, the amount of knowledge and the amount of information is ridiculous. There's so much there. It's a legit field. And I tell people, you know, Cheryl, listen, I taught the exercise sciences for 35 years. The number one benefit of exercise, the number one thing we should teach, the chapter one of Exercise 101, should be the enhancement of what's called the endocannabinoid system. It's part of your nervous system that's named after cannabis. You produce a molecule that's called anandamide. It's called the zen molecule. That this literally, it is, it's what we go for. And we also produce a thing called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which catalyzes learning. Kids who exercise are smarter than kids who don't. And it's— and so, you know, today when someone asks you about health and wellness and all these things and you say, "Well, you need to exercise," unfortunately we've brainwashed people to think exercise is about losing weight, which is the worst goal in the world. Worst. The benefit of exercise is that you produce anandamide, you produce BDNF, you do the things that you need to live a long life. You do the things that prevent you from ending your life too early, I should say. So that's an important part. So have my little stint down in Florida, just do an amazing amount of learning about cannabis. And one of the guys I worked with down there calls me one day and says, you know, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm looking for a project. And he said, what do you know about autophagy? And I said, well, I have a passing understanding of it. I said, I don't have a deep understanding. He said, have you ever heard of a thing called spermidine? I'm like, nope, that's a new one to me. He sends me this TED Talk from Austria that's all in German, so I've got to translate the whole talk. And, I learned about this molecule called spermidine. And, I was like, okay, this is really interesting. And, I said, what do you want me to do? And, he says, I want you to do the same thing for me that you did in Florida. I want you to teach people about these things. So, 3 years ago, I went to work for a company called Spermidine Longevity Labs. We have a product called Spermidine Life. And, the research shows that spermidine is critical in the autophagy process. And, for your tribe that's listening, you can't address longevity, either healthspan or lifespan, without addressing autophagy. You cannot separate the two. And, We now have research that shows that spermidine, this unique molecule, is critical in the autophagy pathway. It methylates some of the key genes that drive autophagy in the cell. So there's the short introduction if you were looking for one. Um, you know, started off as, as an athlete. Uh, I, I always keep a stable of people that I work with I've become expert in this area of heart rate variability, understanding stress, understanding how it impacts you. But at the same time, we now— and we've actually developed a product that if you go to a website called modemethod.com, you'll see a product there called HRV Plus. It's a cannabis and fish oil product that I developed that we sell through our company. And we also have the spermidines and things like that. We can talk about that more as we go.

Okay. First of all, Don, I am obsessed with your background. It's like right up my geeky little brain alley. Everything that was in your background. College athlete as well. Almost went into athletic training. Ended up with psychology degree. So I focused more on the kind of brain part of the sports performance. But my goodness. So I just don't even know where to start. But since we're going to focus mostly on heart rate variability, I already feel like I need to talk to you again sometime so we can go into some of the sports performance stuff because there's just not enough time for all this wonderful knowledge. But, um, you mentioned, um, I think one thing that could be useful for some people listening, and then we'll pop on to the HRV, uh, subject more deeply. But you mentioned way back that you were, uh, injured a lot in high school when you were an athlete. And I think a lot of us, you know, the now middle-aged, getting over 50 kind of thing, you know, our bodies certainly experience injuries more easily. And I think it might just be useful to know what you learned during that time that helped you become more resilient, because you went from being kind of injured, you said, in your sophomore year and always being hurt, to, you know, winning and, and having a really successful senior season. So what was it that you did during that time? Was it nutrition? Was it the way that you train? What— or was, you know, what combination of factors? I'd love to hear all about that.

It was all the above. And you can't— and as an athlete, you can't, you can't not look at everything. But the two major elements were, one, I stopped cutting weight. So, and again, you know, my, my young— I'm at 6'1". I would start my first two seasons around 240, 250 pounds, 230, 250 pounds, and I would either cut to 177 or 190. I was the smallest person in my family. My younger brother, who was 5 years younger, is 6'9", you know, a biscuit over 340, you know, and a 2-time state champ wrestling champion. I mean, a really talented wrestler too. Went on to play football at Ohio State. I had no business cutting weight like that. Huge mistake, number one. Number two is since I was cutting all that weight, and this is back, remember, we're starting this in the late '70s, early '80s. The whole concept of strength and conditioning has not really bought into the general, you know, may you of the general public, and it was emerging. So, we started learning about lifting. We started learning about that stuff. So, number 1, stop cutting weight. Number 2, pay attention to the food that goes in your head. Where is it coming from? What's going on? You know, college kids, you know, they've got a hot furnace and they can burn about anything that goes into it. When you reach 40, 50, 60 years old, it's not quite the same. You're not burning quite as hot. So you gotta pay. And but the other thing that we've really— that has really come to really, you know, inform my position lately is the role of micronutrients. Cheryl, so much of our nutritional information is based on the macros. Proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and water. And that, listen, that's fine. I don't wanna minimize that at all. But when you start talking about longevity, we're talking about micronutrients. And we can spend more time talking about things like spermidine and NAD and nitric oxide. And again, the micronutrients that'll be in our food. But to go back and answer your question, you gotta look at everything. Stopped cutting weight. I became an absolute gym rat. Um, spent a lot of time in the weight room. And I went to where I didn't lift, to where the— by the time, as, as I was finishing up my summer cycle in 1985, so I was probably— this would have been August, late August, early September 1985. My last workout was, was— it happened to be the most. So I, I squat— I doubled in the squat, 840 pounds. And the next day I doubled in the bench, 480 pounds. So, I went from didn't lift to was a gym rat and really strong, which was my superpower wrestling. I was able to convert that into wins and fell in love with the field. I just fell in love with exercise phys and all those things that go with that. So, that was the transition. And this is one of the big challenges for athletes. Can you move? You know, most athletes in college were pretty good athletes in high school. Their challenge is, can they make the transition to the stress load of the collegiate demand and not break? Okay? This, you know, because it's injury that ends your career. It's injury that finishes— that you don't make it. So literally everything you have to do has to be about resilience, building resilience. In fact, when I lecture on this now, I talk about the physiological aspect of performance. And the first thing, you've got to be able to move. So, you got to have functional movement capabilities. Once you have functional movement capabilities, you add strength to that. There's no use adding strength to bad movement because it just doesn't work. You got to get good movement first. Add strength to that. Build your ability to produce energy. Understand cardiovascular work. Understand your electron transport system, your ability to produce ATP, which is where it's all at, which consequently those first 3 things apply directly to longevity as well. If you want to live a long life, and when you get to 60, 70, 80, 90 years old, you have to be able to move. Because if you can't move, you fall, break a hip, and die. You have to be strong. If you're not strong, you fall, break a hip, and die. You've got— we don't die when we run out of energy— when we run out of time. We die when we run out of energy. So, everything's got to be about mitochondrial performance, that part of the cell that makes energy. And then finally, I've added a fourth element to that physical, and it's resilience. Your ability to withstand stress, have it be you, have it be a eustress, a positive stress, not a distress. Your ability to do that and recover. This applies to a college athlete. This applies to that college athlete's parents. This applies to that college athlete's grandparents. That line is very consistent. And so, you know, it's taken me now, what, 40 years to kind of get on top of this. The first part, though, was stop doing stuff that hurt me. And, you know, there's a lot of athletes that need to do that. There may be distance athletes that just get off on putting in the miles, but if they're creating so much cortisol and they're creating, you know, challenges there, you've got to— you've got to— you've got to make sure that what you're doing has a payback. You know, I— probably 5 years ago, I feel like I've stopped looking at performance physiologically and I start looking at it now economically, okay? Economics is about return on investment. What do I put time into and what do I get back in return? Well, so much training— when someone's going in the gym every day and just burying themselves, They may, you know, there's a dopamine hit on that. There, you know, there's no doubt that they feel good, but there is a, they're paying a physiological price. And you can't ever forget that. So, you know, this is part of the challenge as we work our way through this. Can I move? Am I strong? Can I produce energy? And do I have resilience? That's very much a human guideline from athletics through, aging.

Yeah, I wish that this is something that I would have learned much earlier in my life because I still think that my body is suffering/recovering from 17 years of distance running, which, oh, if I would have just put all of that time and energy into weight training, I'd be in a much better place now.

But when you did your distance training, did you wear a heart rate monitor?

Of course I did. I had the Polar. I had the one that went around your chest, the very old school one. Um, oh yes, I'm all about the geeky technology.

The thing is, and what drives me crazy, Cheryl, is the number of people that I see training at elite college levels that are not wearing a heart rate monitor. And I don't think— listen, I don't think there is a single piece of equipment that's more valuable. I think it's the single— and when you understand physiology and you understand zone 3, zone 4, and zone 5, what you get and what it costs you to train in each one, Most of us train in zone 4 because that's where we feel it. It's also the zone that we pay the biggest price in. So this is— and this, whether you're a distance runner or whether you're a college wrestler, energy is still the same. And you can never forget.

I love this. And it's such a— I mean, it's such a simple tool. And now, you know, heart rate monitors are much less expensive than they used to be, and it's It's a, it's a perfect thing to really enhance your training without a lot of money. So that being said, you mentioned some things already about the heart rate variability, and I really wanted to get into this a little more deeply because it's something that I've been looking into more lately. And, you know, some of the research on it that I've seen basically says that it's, you know, it's, you can't tell if it's causative because they can't do a study like that, right? They can't wait till we die and see what our heart rate is. I hope he wasn't if it was related, but it's highly related to mortality, all-cause mortality. And you were probably way better on the research than I am. So, I would love to hear your thoughts around that.

We know the moment before you die, your HRV will be zero, okay? I know my Olympians are greater than 100 in that particular measurement that they take. And there's lots of measurements. We're not going to go down the the deep HRV rabbit hole, but that one that we see with most products, we're all in between, okay? And you're always wanting to push HRV away from zero, okay? Now, it's not like blood pressure where everybody falls in this relatively tight window. It's not like that. And it's very individual and it's something that you gotta pay attention to, but it's a relatively new variable. You know, we, we, when I was working for Polar, now almost 30 years ago, they were integrating HRV technology into their wrist-worn products because we didn't have, cell phones were just coming on the market. Smartphones weren't out yet. We were still using Nokias and flip phones and things like that. But now, we carry a computer lab in our pocket with our cell phones.. And with good Bluetooth, these things connect and talk to each other. So, we're walking around with a lab and we're learning more about HRV every day. We're able to go in and for your audience, let's talk about HRV for just a moment.

Heart rate. Yeah. If you could define it, I think that'd be great because probably a lot of people are like, what are you even talking about?

So, heart rate, HR, heart rate is the number of times your heart beats a minute. So if your heart beats every second, you have a 60, uh, 60-beat-per-minute heart rate. But with heart rate variability, it changes and it's variable. So instead of being beep, beep, beep, high variability sounds like this: beep, beep, beep, beep. It's variable. It's still 60 beats a minute, but it's variable. And what we've learned, so the Russians were the first to really describe this in the early '60s with their cosmonaut program. They had a cosmonaut that had an appendicitis while in space. And they were able to diagnose the problem looking at heart rate variability off of a wired EKG they had on this guy. So the Russians really started to get on top of this. Finland, which is right next to Russia, it's kind of like junior Russia up there. Well, they were— their tech is outstanding and they had phenomenal cardiovascular training athletes. The Finns, Pablo Normi, and just their cardiovascular athletes were phenomenal. And they started to use— and by the way, that's where Polar's from. Polar is based up in northern Finland close to a little town called Oulu, which is where Panas— excuse me, Nokia was based. So it's like Silicon Valley of Europe. So this is where we started to see this technology come into wearable tech. And I saw some white papers come out of Polar back when I was working with them. I'm like, wow, this is interesting because Cheryl, at the time, we were prescribing exercise. We would either do a maximal test, find out what your maximal heart rate was, or we would do the 220 minus your age and apply equations to that. And so, that's how we would do it. And, I've never been comfortable estimating down. I've never felt comfortable with that equation. But, with HRV, we can measure the onset of cardiovascular benefit. Where does it start? And, this is that zone 1, zone 2 area, and then we can estimate up. And, this was to me, this made a ton of sense. So, I started looking at that technology. Now, with— and again, over the last 30 years, wearable technologies has gone through the roof. I mean, the amount of tech that's come. And I personally believe— look at you, yeah. I personally believe that it is your primary key performance indicator. When I look at one thing to measure health and performance, Well, let me take it back to athletics. In '18, we qualified our entire starting lineup for the Nationals. 10 guys, first time in school history. We had 8 All-Americans, most in school history. I could have told you day one of the tournament the 2 guys that would not make All-American because their HRV scores were too low. They did not have the resiliency necessary to win the 5 matches over 3 days that you have to win to be All-American. They didn't have it. My other guys did. And we were seeing this data emerge over about 3 years. So, and again, you can apply this to Joe Bag of Donuts, just waking up every day to go to work and make a life and you want to live long. You know, it's been funny, Cheryl, that in the longevity space, I talk about the 3/3 of your life. You spend your first third learning. You're in school, you're growing, you're trying to figure out what you want to be. You spend the second third of your life earning in service to others. And so, this is work. But we were talking before we started recording, my daughter moved out. We only have one child. My daughter moved out of our house 2 years ago. And I looked at my wife and I said, "We're done." I said, "She's not coming back. She's going to get a job and we're done." And we started our third third. We were empty nesters. It's now our third. It's what we want it to be. And I want my third third of my life to be as vigorous and fulfilling, if not more so, than the first two-thirds. You know, I had a great first third. We enjoyed it. I was a great kid growing up. College was fun. My second third rate, you know, being married for— my wife and I've been married for 33 years now, raising a child that you're proud of, does cool things. But now, we're going into third third and I want that to be vigorous. So, I'm constantly looking at what's going on with HRV because the more I can push that up, the closer I— the farther I am away from zero and the better off I am.

Yeah. And so since you brought that up, I mean, one of the things I think Oura Ring, a lot of people are familiar with this tool and really that's probably what finally got heart rate variability more seriously on my radar because I'm imagining that my Polar, I had several iterations of it in all the years that I was running and it must have had HRV, but for some reason there wasn't the focus on it that there is now. And first of all, I'd love to have that baseline now, but I don't think that Polar would still have my data from like 30 years ago. So So that being said, now I have this, and what I've started to observe are, you know, what kind of habits that I have have an effect on heart rate variability. Due to the research on this, what are the things— Have you stopped drinking yet? I tell you, that is where I notice it the most, honestly. And I think I've mentioned that before on the podcast. It's like some nights I like, my ring thinks I'm dead. But, so that, yeah, that's one of the huge contributors to poor heart rate variability. But I would love it if you could share with people some of the other things that can affect it in both— let's start with the negative and then we'll bring it up to a higher note on what you can do to improve it.

Well, anytime that you're doing something that's going to create stress on the body, both internally and externally. And so, I've had so many friends of mine come to me and say, "Thanks, you've ruined my drinking habits because my HRV." And, I'm like, "Well, have you stopped drinking?" And ironically, when I moved to Florida and was working in cannabis, I stopped drinking out of it because I was looking at HRV. And, if I decided I wanted to modify my personality, I would do it with cannabis because you wake up the next morning, you feel great, you're not— and, oh, by the way, it boosts your HRV if you do it right.

I always wondered about that. Good to know.

Now, it can lower it too if you do it wrong. That's when it really affected me. I essentially stopped drinking when I moved into the cannabis field. And so, and since then. So, let's talk about what affects HRV. The number 1 driver of poor HRV scores is inflammation, okay? So, anything that you can do to lower inflammation will improve HRV. By the way, alcohol consumption, pretty big driver of inflammation. Bad food. You know, we talked a little bit coming on that you're very much into the keto lifestyle. Yes, ketogenics. If you're producing ketone bodies, you're probably lowering inflammation. Those are all good practices. We talked about the variability. Well, the more time that I can put between heartbeats, the more opportunity I have for variability. So improving cardiovascular fitness. So being a former runner, I've got a feeling yours is down in the high 40s, low 50s, your nighttime resting heart rate.

It was 48 last night.

There you go. So you're, you know, you're fit. You've probably got a VO2 greater than 55, 60, in that range right now, which is a really good place to be. I talk to a lot of people and they'll have a nighttime resting heart rate of 75. And, um, they may be exercising, but they're not doing the cardiovascular work that they need to build the mitochondria to drive the electron transport system to do the things that you need for that low resting heart rate and high variability. That just tells you there's resilience there. There's, there's, there's a place you can work. So lower inflammation, improve cardiovascular fitness, get to that, but One of the number one drivers of poor HRV is poor sleep. When we look and when you look at things like depression and you look at a lot of these health problems, they're so aligned with poor sleep. In fact, the one wrestler that I was telling you about, one of the first things we had to do was I had to fix his sleep environment. And, you know, it was— so we could wire these guys up for 24, 48 hours at a time. And I'm looking at his nighttime sleep. And then I said to him, I said, "So your girlfriend's living with you." He goes, "Yeah." And I said, "I kind of need you sleeping in a bed by yourself." I said, "I don't care what you do before you go there. I just want to get your business done and get into a bed by yourself." Girlfriend was not happy with me at all. Kid turns around, makes All-American. All of a sudden everything takes care of itself, right? But, but yeah, this was— so sleep is critical. You know, Cheryl, I don't know if you've ever talked about it on your podcast. There's a thing called sleep divorce where couples will choose to sleep in different beds. This is a very— this is a, this is a wonderful practice to figure out what does it take. And, you know, we were talking before, we— my wife and I live in an RV now, so we have a king-size. I don't have two beds in this place. I have one. We have a king-size Sleep Number bed, but one of the little tricks we've learned is we have that Sleep Number bed, we put a regular king-size fitted sheet on the bed, but then we use separate sheets and blankets for she and I. So if I turn over, I'm not pulling her blanket off and things like that. So this is just a little trick we've picked up along the way that just improves our sleep environment so that person in bed with you is not waking you up. And respecting that person that's in bed with you, you know, if— listen, and the thing that we cannot gloss over, trauma is a bitch, okay? Trauma is rough. And, you know, when I was in Florida, this was one of the biggest learnings I had. So, I go down there with this great background in HRV. And then, I go down. And I learned about this, what's called an endocannabinoid, a cannabinoid that your body makes called anandamide. We talked about a little bit of girl, the zen molecule, but in your brain you have a fear-sensing organ that's called the amygdala, okay? In dogs and in mice, if you fear condition them, you put them in a cage and shock them to where they become fearful, and then if you harvest their amygdala and measure, there is a drop of anandamide that does not come back, okay? That this is— and if you think about Vietnam veterans, when we took kids from the States and we dropped them in Vietnam, the closest thing you can get to a snake pit that there is, and it's just about pure survival because remember that HRV system is about helping you survive, okay? If you're born in a rattlesnake pit, The only way you survive is through hypervigilance, okay? You've got to be vigilant all the time. If I take you out of the rattlesnake pit and I put you in a house full of bunny rabbits, you're still vigilant, okay? It doesn't come back, okay? So, when you're looking at HRV and someone with chronically low HRV, you have to pay attention to trauma. And so, This is where, listen, you talked about getting your degree in psychology, understanding breathing, understanding. I don't think the anandamide comes back to the amygdala. Once you have the hypervigilance, that's you. It's part of your existence. But recognizing your environment, knowing that meditation is critical, knowing that you won't naturally recover You've got to plan your recovery the same way you plan your training. If I'm going to train for 30 minutes today, I'm going to get 10 minutes of breathing and meditation in the morning and 10 minutes of breathing and meditation at night. That's going to drive the recovery side of the HRV. So let me go back and recap. We talked about the fact— lower inflammation. Do whatever you can when it comes to diet, exercise, things like that. Number 2. Exercise in a manner that's going to boost the amount of time between heartbeats, improve cardiovascular fitness, improve mitochondrial performance. These are all critical. Number 3, fix the sleep environment. Have to fix the sleep environment. Number 4, pay attention to what's going on with trauma and stress in your life and begin to engage in behaviors to counterdict that, to counteract that, I should say. Those are 4 key elements you should start to take a look at to improve HRV.

Well, and since you mentioned that lowering inflammation is part of this, and as you mentioned, most people know, you know, ketones are very anti-inflammatory promoting, all that good stuff. So that's one way to do it. But I kind of wonder if some of that benefit in lowering inflammation is not only because ketones are a signaling molecule, but maybe also because it promotes autophagy. And since that's one of your favorite topics as well, I'd love if, if you could just talk a little bit about autophagy, because you mentioned the spermidine, and I have not done a ton of reading on that yet. And I'm going to imagine that probably most of the audience here has not either, and maybe hasn't heard you speak before. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that molecule, because it sounds like it's something that you can take either as an adjunct to a healthy thing, or maybe to counteract some things that you don't do as well, like get that in there, and then maybe promote promote these anti-inflammatory properties through autophagy, through some of the other things that you mentioned?

So, let's talk about autophagy for a minute. So, autophagy, it's also called autophagy, self-eating. The Latin is self-eating. And, what we know is that this is an evolutionarily preserved process in all animals, okay? That most people fast, but they don't know why they fast. Well, fasting is a relic that's in every major religion in the world. People who fast are healthier than people who don't? Well, the reason is, is that when we're eating and we have food available the whole time we're up, we're constantly sending signals to our cell through insulin production and IGF that say, "Build, keep building." But when we fast, what we do is we cut down on that signaling. And all of a sudden, we don't have that signaling going to the cell and the cell says, "Ah, what's going on?" Maybe we need to clean ourselves up a little bit. And when your cell is making— when a cell is doing what cells do, it's usually making proteins. Okay, this is what cells do. And but not all proteins are made correctly. And this is important because if it's not made correctly, it'll just sit there in the cell and will never— and will be unproductive. And if you think about a disease like Alzheimer's, there's a buildup of tau plaques. These are proteins in the neurological cells. Okay. What we know is that when you, when you engage in fasting and you boost autophagy, you clean the cells, you lower inflammation, and you improve longevity. All made, you know, there's a great book called Blue Zones. And when you look at the Blue Zones, Fasting's part— first of all, they raise their own food, which is really important. They manage stress very well. They're not looking at iPhones 24/7. And, they have spermidine-rich diets, this crazy molecule called spermidine. So, we've known about spermidine for hundreds of years. The guy that invented the microscope described a crystalline structure in his semen. Now this brings a whole nother question, is why didn't we give the microscope to a woman instead of this guy? Um, because we would have been much farther along now if we had. But it didn't get named for another 200 years. A group of Dutch scientists named it spermodyne. There's sperm and semen. This structure was in there. Let's call this spermodyne. Um, we all through the early, uh, 20th century into the '80s, the 1980s, we were looking at it. They thought it was cancer-related. They could never figure it out. But in 2016, we gave a Nobel Prize to a Japanese researcher who described the genetics of autophagy. This was really important. And when we start to understand the genetic triggers to autophagy, a researcher in Graz, Austria, by the name of Dr. Frank Madeo— Frank started looking at using spermidine extracts with senescent cells. So cells— a senescent cell is kind of like a zombie cell. It's no longer duplicating anymore. It's still alive, but it's not doing what cells do. It's just existing. Throws off inflammatory markers. It's kind of like the apple that ruins the bunch, right? It just gets bad. Well, Frank started treating senescent cells with spermidine and reversed their— and reversed it, reversed the senescence. We keep looking at this and all of a sudden spermidine, we used to refer to it as a calorie restriction mimetic. It mimics fasting. Well, we have a paper coming out anytime right now that basically shows it's not just a mimetic, it's critical. So some of the other mimetics to fasting, we've heard of resveratrol. This is what Dr. Sinclair talked about in his book on longevity. Resveratrol works through the, what's called the sirtuin genes. And boost autophagy that way. We've probably heard of metformin. It's a diabetic drug that is being studied as a longevity drug. So it works through another pathway that's called the AMPK pathway, which is the same pathway that exercise impacts. When you exercise, you engage the AMPK pathway and it drives autophagy. And then finally, there's a third memetic in there that's called rapamycin, which is an antibiotic that they found on Easter Island that blocks a protein production, a protein production protein, I should say, called mTOR. So, when you block mTOR, it boosts autophagy. But, with all of these other memetics, what we're starting to see with some of our most recent research, and we're talking research that's been done in the last 12 months, is that spermidine is critical. For all those other pathways to work. And this is what's really important. So, we extract— so, I work for a company called Longevity Labs. We have a product called Spermidine Life. It is an extract from wheat, European wheat germ. So, we get ours from wheat germ in Europe. We can't find wheat germ in the United States that we can harvest spermidine from. It's so low. In fact, in Europe, We go out and buy wheat germ, spermidine-rich wheat germ. We bring it into the factory, we test it again, and we reject nearly 70% of what we buy and bring in because it's not rich enough. So, we get the really good spermidine-rich and that's what we run our extraction process on. So, spermidine is a molecule that in the absence of spermidine, you don't get autophagy whether you're fasting or exercising or anything else. This is going to be the important part. Of what comes out of this most recent research. So it's kind of like vitamin C. We didn't know about vitamin C until, you know, 1492. What'd we do? We sailed the oceans blue. We put, we put a bunch of people on boats in Portugal. We sent them across the Atlantic Ocean. They go into the Caribbean. This is Columbus's journey. Do you know how long it took Columbus to get across on that journey? 33 days. 33 days. But 100 years after that, by 1592, we're in the age of piracy and people are living on boats for extended periods of time, years at a time. And they developed a condition called scurvy, which is a breakdown of cell walls that's related to a lack of vitamin C in the diet. So this is the reason they started carrying limes on boats And the British sailors, they called them limeys because they had limes on them. But the people on the boat that didn't need the limes, the sailors that ate the rats, okay? The sailors that ate rats make their own vitamin C. And if you ate the rat on the boat, you didn't get scurvy. So this is understanding micronutrients and going clear back to the beginning of our conversation, the role of micronutrients. We've started to see this development of these vitamins and that we have a whole list of them now. We fully expect spermidine to be— have vitamin status at some point in time. That you have to make a dedicated effort to add it to your diet or else you don't— you're not able to run all the physiological processes that lead to long life, good healthspan, good lifespan.

Now, is spermidine a compound that your body can manufacture in any way, or is this something that is required to get from our diets?

It looks like it's required to get from the diet, particularly as you age. So it needs to come from food sources. You know, our product is a food extract. It's a natural food extract. So, and when we look at people who live in Blue Zones, their diets are high spermidine diets. They're the— you know what, Cheryl, when we grew up on the farm in Eastern Ohio, we had two 1-acre gardens that we fertilized with our barn and the tomatoes, And the beans and the corn that came out of that garden were ridiculous. Okay. I've never eaten anything like it since. Okay. You can't get tomatoes like that even at Whole Foods. Okay. They just don't have them. And so if you're raising your own food, that's a different story. But when we live in an industrial food environment, which we all do, we have to take a look at, okay, what's the impact of that? And what are the extra micronutrients that I need to get into my system? One of them is spermidine. You know, one of the other ones that we're going to start talking about a lot is NAD, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, which is critical in energy production. We actually just created a supplement for that too. So, you know, it's this balance between industrial-produced food versus what's critical for good healthspan lifespan.

Yeah, that's such a, you know, that's a whole separate topic about how our industrialized food is, is not supporting our health any longer and how deficient so many foods are in all kinds of nutrients. And, you know, you just took me back to— I was a little girl on a farm in Louisiana, and those gardens and the orchard that we had there, it just doesn't exist anymore, unfortunately, unless, like you said, you're growing your own food. But, you know, we had our pigs and our cattle, so yeah, it was all fertilized very well and very So we don't get that.

Did you suck the juice out of the head of the mud bug?

Yeah, that I still never got into. People definitely love that down there, no doubt about it.

There's got to be some nutrients in there. I hope so.

Well, yeah, brain, brain has a lot of nutrients. People are afraid to eat brains, but it definitely has some, some good health-promoting things. Sure. Whole other topic. Well, Don, so since we mentioned your company, I just want to say the name again. Longevity Labs. And you shared with me before the podcast that we'll have a code for everyone that you can get 15% off. So, I'll create— what I usually do is I create a special link, and I'll just say it here now so that people that listen to this will have this all set up when you hear the episode. It'll be healnourishgrow.com/longevitylabs, and that will send you to the link where you can get some of the products that Dawn discussed today, if that's of interest. But if people want to follow you personally,— or I don't know if you share about any of your RV adventure online or anything like that, but if people want to get in touch or find you, what is the best way to do that?

So, if you want to get in touch with me, the best way to do that is through LinkedIn. I accept nearly all of my invitations on LinkedIn unless the invitation says, "Hey, the system put us together. You look like a nice guy." I mean, I don't do— I usually nuke those. If you send a note, say, "Hey, I heard you on the Hill Nurse Grow podcast. I'd like to talk to you." I wind up having conversations with lots of people talking about HRV, what you can do. So, I still consult on that. So, LinkedIn's a great place to go. I used to push a lot of information through Twitter. Who knows where Twitter's at now? I'm still there. I'm not pushing nearly as much information there. I am on Instagram. You know, when we started the nomadic journey, I was putting a bunch of stuff up there. I've slowed down dramatically. I'm not sure the world needs another person talking about where they're at. But, again, getting a hold of me, if you want to learn more about spermidine, you can go to spermidinelife.us. That's important, spermidinelife.us. And, if you want to learn more about HRV+, the product that we developed from Proven HRV, That's at modemethod.com, M-O-D-E-M-E-T-H-O-D.com. That's where that's at. So, I'm sure we'll put all this in notes. But that's the best way to get me.

Okay, awesome. Well, I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. And you are welcome back at any time to discuss any of these topics because this was so much fun. And I just love all the knowledge that you shared today. So, thanks again for joining us.

We're gonna have to do little, uh, little amplets, you know, and break it all down.

Perfect. All right, thanks, Don.

Thanks, have a great day.

You too.