How to Heal Like Your Ancestors: Light, Peptides, and Self-Knowledge | Nathalie Niddam

Hey friends, welcome back to Everyday Ancestral. I'm your host, James Barry. So what do peptides and biohacking have to do with ancestral health? Well, on today's episode, you'll learn that peptides are very often fragments of naturally occurring amino acids in the body. Today's guest, Natalie Needham, bridges the modern biohacking practice of peptide therapy with the wisdom of ancestral health practices. And you will be surprised that no matter what biohack you embrace for longevity, Natalie combines ancestral health principles with contemporary biohacking techniques, focusing on sustainable practices that align with our evolutionary biology. Please enjoy our next episode with Natalie Needham. I have to right away get out of the way the fact that you are glowing red. Can you please explain?

I am glowing red. And the reason why I'm glowing red is because as of a little while ago, I've been working with a company called MitoLux for a couple of, couple of years now. And the first product that they brought out to market was a small infrared and red light panel that also delivered a measured dose of UVB. And what UVB does is it helps your body to make its own vitamin D, which is really great, right? So for someone who lives in a climate where It's hard for me to get out. And also like the sun is actually not at a good angle for my body to generate its own vitamin D for most of the year. I'm kind of in a world where I don't make a lot of vitamin D because from my, an ancestral perspective, my ethnic background is based on getting a lot of sun. So my body protects me from making too much vitamin D from the sun, which is great except for the part where when you don't live in that climate anymore, you now are at a real disadvantage for making enough vitamin D for what you need. What the manufacturer did recently is he launched a new panel, which has all those same features, but also has what's called the fireplace feature. And the fireplace feature is literally just red and near-infrared light. And when you have it on, when you're sitting in front of an artificial blue light source, like your computer, it helps to kind of offset and mitigate all the negative impacts of that artificial blue light, which is, skin aging and even for the eyes. And I find that on a heavy workday, I get to the end of the day with way better energy than I do when I'm sitting in front of my computer under my artificial lights all day. So it doesn't replace going outside, but it's definitely a really nice, you know, it's a nice hack for when you're indoors a lot more than maybe you should be.

Yeah. You bring up a really good point. 'Cause I think about that a lot and it's been coming up on a few episodes about how A lot of people have been helping to recalibrate their sleep patterns by just waking up early, getting some of that early morning sun. But to your point, sometimes you live in areas or different seasons where there is no early morning sun. Yeah.

I think I would say there are 2 different things, right? Because I can still get outside and get that early morning sun for circadian benefits, which is what they're doing. Where this lamp is different is the other thing you get from the sun is the UVB exposure that really only happens kind of midday. when it comes in contact with your skin is what allows your body to make your own vitamin D. So, that's ostensibly how we're supposed to get our vitamin D. You know, he's an interesting guy. You should talk to him because, you know, he's coming at it also from a very ancestral perspective in the sense that he's like, okay, I'm going to mimic what happens during the day with your exposure to red, near-infrared, blue. The duration of your exposure to UVB is based on your Fitzpatrick scale skin type. I mean, I've now been doing it for long enough that I've gone up from a Fitzpatrick Type 3 to Fitzpatrick Type 4. And what happens is I get the, the lamp runs for 7 minutes and for the first couple of minutes it's running red and infrared. And then for a few minutes in between, it brings in also the UVB. So it's mimicking a little bit of what the sun does. And then it finishes with the red and infrared again. And he's got sensors in there that if you're too close to the to the device, the UVB will shut off because if you get too much UVB or you get it from too close, you will burn.

Ah, interesting. Is it just 7 minutes? What, 3 times a day or once?

If you're trying to optimize your vitamin D levels, it's once a day. Right now there's no UVB coming from this light. And so it's literally just the red and infrared.

This is a great place to start though, because you are known in the biohacking communities. You are a longevity expert. Why is it that longevity and biohacking seem to go together? Like what, for those that really don't understand the whole biohacking community, the terms, can you just kind of share like what is biohacking from your perspective and why is it kind of associated so closely with longevity?

Yeah, it's a great question. So for me, biohacking is looking at our environment, looking at the inputs into our system, You know, and it's funny, I think that biohacking for me has changed, has evolved a little bit as a definition, because where I think people kind of get a bit of a disconnect, a lot of people are gonna say, you know what, why do you need this red light? Just get outside.

Right.

Why do you need to take these supplements? Just eat real food, ground, get outside. And I'm like, yes, and I don't certainly live in a great environment. I live in a big city. There's a significant amount of pollution here. There's a lot of toxins in the air. I'm swimming in a non-native EMF soup no matter what I do. I'm hooked up to an Ethernet cable here, but I bet you if I turned on my phone right now, I would see at least 10 different Wi-Fi networks. There's a certain degree of things that we just can no longer control in our environment. And so to me, what biohacking is, it's 2 things. The first thing is, what do we need to do? What principles do we need to apply to help us get to a baseline of balance? And that means that we need to mitigate for some of these overwhelming inputs that our bodies are being challenged with on a minute-to-minute daily basis. And I'm not saying this to freak people out or to make people think, oh my God, I really need to worry about the air that I breathe. Like, without being panicky about it and without getting neurotic about it, we also need to accept that our bodies are being forced to deal with a lot of things that we just weren't designed to deal with. If we can put things back into balance, if we can mitigate, if we can find strategies that help to offset, you know, I have 2 Jasper air scrubbers in my house. These are air purifiers that do a really good job of cleaning the air. I have to accept that I live in an environment that is not that healthy. And so my indoor air is not gonna be that healthy. So by putting 2 of those things in my house, I'm getting into a world where I can at least control for the air that I breathe most of the day. I'm still gonna go outside. I'm not gonna wear a hazmat suit or a mask, but I do what I can to mitigate what I can when I can. The next step of biohacking is once we've done all those and once we've gotten ourselves to kind of a balanced state, now we get into the part where it's kind of like the biohacking 2.0. What can we do To really try and slow down the aging process. And other people will talk about reversing the aging process and whether we can truly reverse aging remains to be seen, but we can definitely do a lot of things to avoid speeding it up. That's for darn sure. We can definitely, at the very least, bring it back to aging at a normal rate. And I've definitely seen evidence that we can slow aging. So now we're getting into things like Inhaling hydrogen air or doing things like a NanoVi. And then there's the whole space of regenerative medicine and that's starting to get really crazy, right? We've got things like stem cells and exosomes and growth factors and gene therapy. And now we're starting to get into the more, we can call it crazy, but really just like the more aggressive strategies for living a longer, more vital, healthy life. That's where they intersect, right? Because if we can slow down the aging process, and I would argue that if we don't do any of this stuff that I talked about initially, our environments and our lifestyles risk accelerating our aging process. And even things like controlling chronic stress, which I think chronic stress is becoming unfortunately all too common. And so, can you develop some kind of a mindfulness or breathwork or Any kind of strategy to help to create some kind of buffer between you and what's crazy in the world to you.

What I hear you saying is that you look for a marriage of ancestral principles and using technology and these tools to help to offset how kind of extreme, you know, modern life has become in terms of how harmful and accelerating our aging it has. started to do. But because I'm sure you've heard this before, like where people talk about, well, are we trying to play God with some of these things? Because I feel like even when you were just starting to go to these extreme kind of gene things, like I just read recently that they were just successful in basically customizing, I want to say a child's DNA, like so that people could literally order the type of child they want. And then that's what they get. I mean, I feel like that's where we're going. And that really does, in my judgment, border on like, oh, we're going into like really scary territory.

I agree with you. I think that it's a slippery slope. I think that a lot of the biohacking 1.0, I'll call it that, is about bringing us back to nature or using technology to bring back elements of nature into our life that we've lost. It's not going to replace Getting out into nature, but it's helping me to mitigate my reality of being inside in front of a computer for too many hours a day.

I like that.

As far as gene therapies go, I recently interviewed a woman by the name of Liz Parrish, and she's part of a group of people that absolutely are, are in a world of delaying death and extending vitality as long as humanly possible. And she herself has done 4 different types of gene therapy on herself, and she looks the part, not gonna lie, but is showing that it's actually slowing down her aging. You can see it in her labs, in her blood work, in her performance. But here's what's really interesting about that, and I'll get to the custom child in a minute. What's interesting about the work that she does is in shooting for this extreme longevity, let's call it, what's happening is that a lot of health issues that have been considered unsolvable. could get solved along the way. So things like type 1 diabetes. She showed, at a conference I was at recently, she showed a video of a child who I believe had muscular dystrophy. I could be wrong about the disorder, but whatever it was, it was a genetic disorder that they showed this little boy from the back. He was trying to climb a set of stairs. There was no way he was getting up these stairs. No way. They administered a gene therapy to this child. 3 months later, The next video is this kid running up the stairs. That is life-changing. That is unbelievable work. And so, you know, I think when she first started what she was doing, it was because her son had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and she wanted to solve that. And she realized very quickly that solving for disease was complicated, it was expensive, and it was really heavily regulated. So, she moved into this kind of longevity space, but as she explains, You get to solve a lot of health problems when you start to, you know, change the way the genes are expressing, like a telomerase gene, which is— telomerase is the enzyme that protects the ends of your DNA, your telomeres, helping them to replicate appropriately. If you can solve for telomerase, you know, is it possible that that gene therapy could be part of a solution for children who are born with a genetic disorder called progeria? It's a complicated disease and it's very unlikely that one gene therapy is going to actually solve the whole problem. But these are kids who start aging kind of like at 5 times the normal rate the day that they're born so that by the time they're 20 years old, not only do they die, but they've died of all these chronic age-related illnesses that people suffer. So their arteries harden, their skin wrinkles, they shrink, they lose bone density, like all the things happen to them at this crazy accelerated rate. So I think that that application of gene therapy is unbelievable and could really be massively impactful to people suffering from really horrible diseases. She even has one for cognition, which could be very helpful for people who have cognitive, experiencing cognitive decline or dementia or neurodegenerative diseases. Now, this is all work that's ongoing, so I'm not saying she has the solutions yet. As far as Creating a designer baby with gene therapy, I think we're crossing the line. That's my personal opinion. I think that it's one thing to, if you're able to analyze a genome of a fetus and say, oh, this kid's heading for trouble. What if you could control for ApoLp or something and prevent this child from having a cholesterol problem their whole lives? That might be interesting, but when you start choosing eye color, hair color, height, aesthetic features, physical ability, that kind of stuff, many people could disagree with me, but to me, we're crossing the line and we're denying ourselves the breadth and depth of what humanity is supposed to be.

You know, to that point, you know, one could argue that these kinds of contrasts, what some people would look at as issues that people have now, whether they're caused from the toxicity of our present day, or just it's part of life, how sometimes, you know, genetics just, you pop out something that's a little off or different, right? That sometimes it's these differences that, and this is getting a little spiritual, but it's like that maybe that soul needs in this lifetime, you know, that kind of esoteric kind of thing. And who are we to kind of look at that and say, well, no, that's wrong or right. But I hear what you're saying is that If this is what we're given right now because of how life is and we can solve and fix it, why wouldn't we? But I guess the, the thing that pops up for me is I think about, like, for example, the poultry industry, right? They cage the birds. They keep them in these confined places where they were pecking at each other or themselves, right?

Yeah.

And so what do they do instead of saying, oh, well, maybe we, they, they don't do well in these tight, confined spaces. They cut off the beat. And to me, that is kind of what we're doing is like, we're not going, hey, maybe we should rethink how we're doing this because it's resulting in continued chronic illness or this or that. And I know that people say, well, we don't know for sure, but we know that there's more issues popping up than there used to be, I think. Right. I mean, it's not just that we have more testing, is it?

No. I mean, look, I think there's a difference between A kid that's born with muscular dystrophy or a child who has type 1 diabetes, these are not controllable by, I mean, maybe there's something in the environment that's causing these genetic mutations. I don't know, but these are not lifestyle diseases. I think that if you were the parent of one of these kids and somebody said to you, we can help your child to live a normal, healthy life that is not filled with suffering, Yeah, you'd take it. You'd take it. And I mean, is there on a spiritual level, if that soul came back under those circumstances, if you believe in those things and if you've read up about it, sometimes it's a lesson that soul needs to learn. It's something that soul chose. Sometimes it's to teach the people around them certain lessons. Are we interfering with that? Heck yeah. I don't have the answer to that. You know, I can only tell you that as a parent, If I had the choice between watching my child suffer and live a life of suffering, and if I could end that suffering somehow by making them healthier, I probably wouldn't care so much about anything else. These are very good questions and they're good things to think about. I mean, there's no doubt that we're already in a world where technology is starting to outstrip our ability to balance the ethics of what we can do with what we should do. I would never pretend to have the answer to that. I think, I mean, maybe it's part of the human evolution is, is, I mean, who knows? You know, maybe part of our journey as a species is to learn to solve these problems. And these people have come along with these problems all along to help us to get to a place where we can solve them. Maybe.

It could be either or. You're right. You're right. And we could philosophize all we want, but the reality is, is like the parent that's dealing with it, they want the result now. They want help now.

You know, they want their child to be able to run and play and have, have a normal life fundamentally is what we all hope for.

Now, what motivated you to go down this path of health and your interest in longevity? Did something happen to you or were you sick at one point or?

I started to get old. My first career was in sales and advertising, but I was always a fitness instructor and I've always been interested in health. And I studied physiology in university. I was the kid that, I was the nerdy kid that read National Geographic from front to back. When I first got married, I had cases of National Geographic that had to be pried outta my fingers and disposed of because it's like, I mean, you can't just keep collecting this stuff. So, you know, I've always had this very, very keen interest in health and being a fitness instructor kind of gave me a little, always allowed me to kind of keep my finger in the whole helping people part, right? And health and wellness. And what ended up happening is I woke up one morning and realized, you know, this sales thing is not working for me. Like, it's not feeding me, I don't like it. You know, you can only say to yourself, they can't possibly be paying me enough to do this so many times before you decide they're not paying me enough to do this. Like, I just don't care enough. I don't care about moving money from here to there. It doesn't make a difference to me. So, you know, at the time, the paleo movement was getting really big. People like JJ Virgin had come out with the Virgin Diet. We had guys like Robb Wolf. We had guys like Mark Sisson was just coming up at the time. Even Dave Asprey was, was coming out big at that. Like it was that kind of initial wave, if you will. And I just got super interested in, I decided to go back to school and become a holistic nutritionist because I've always been interested in food. And I've always been interested in the body's ability to heal. I've always kind of had this belief that the body has a massive capacity for repair and regeneration built in, but we need to figure out how to tap into it. And how to get outta the way. And then the longevity piece really, I think, evolved over the last 5 to 6 years. And for me, longevity, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you I'm aiming to live to 180. I'm aiming to live for as long as I can be healthy and vital and contributing. And the day that that is over, whether it's at 90 or 100 or 110, if I'm lucky, or 120, So be it. This may not be a popular opinion, but I believe, back to your point, there's a natural circle of life. Like we're meant to be here for a period of time and then we're meant not to be here for after that because it's an evolution. Like you, like imagine if you were never gonna die, James, how would that affect your psychology?

Right.

The way that you live your life and interact with people. And to me, that's inconceivable and it's not, As much as I don't wanna die, I don't think I want that either.

Unless everyone around you and that you love is also on the same track. I mean, I, I know Dick Van Dyke is talking about this cuz I think he's 100 now.

Yeah.

And he's talking about how, yes, he's enjoying his life as much as he can, but everyone he knew is gone. Yeah.

They're all dead.

Your whole— They're all dead. And so he is like, I don't have like my friends anymore. And, you know, and that begs the question of like, well, what is the, point of this life? Is it about the things we achieve or is it about the connections we make?

It's both, right? And I'm sure Dick Van Dyke is still surrounded by people. It's just his peer group hasn't kept up with him. Is it possible that as we learn to control for all these things that are shortening our lives unnaturally or that are making us sick or accelerating our aging, if we can do that as a society, Can we age better as a society, be less of a burden on our loved ones, be less of a burden on society as we age, as a result, get more out of the lives, the years that we live, and still come to a good end whenever that may be.

I like that thought a lot. Let's just say someone is new, just beginning their journey, just like you did, you know, so long ago, but with your knowledge and what you've seen come up, where do you think they should start?

Yeah, so where they should start depends on where they are. So, if this is someone who, you know, really is new to this space, this is someone who doesn't, didn't have the benefit of coming from a family where, you know, they ate home-cooked meals every day, they got outside, they didn't spend a ton of time in front of screens. If they didn't have those benefits, then you have to start there. You have to start with the super unsexy, Foundation. That is, get to bed at a reasonable time so that you can get quality sleep. Get outside at least a few times a day so that your brain gets the natural light inputs that it needs to regulate your circadian rhythm, which has a huge number of downstream effects. Move your body. Like, I'm standing at my desk right now. Like, I figured out quite a while ago that if I sit for those 8 to 10 hours, I'm done. You're cutting off your circulation. Like it's not, it's not healthy. Right. So I have a walking treadmill, which I don't use as much as I used to. Number one, if I record my podcast on that, people get really annoyed because it's distracting.

Yeah. You're kind of moving.

Like you're bouncing and people are like, what are you doing? Like, this is really annoying, but I have like a 20-pound kettlebell under my desk. So I have one foot up on the kettlebell just to change up my posture on a regular basis. So move your body during the day. Get that quality sleep, get the natural light. Once we've checked those off, eat real food. Like, you've gotta clean out your cupboards, guys. Like, you've gotta go back to eating whole foods. And even if, even if our soils are not as rich as they should be and we're not getting as many nutrients, it's still— don't forget that food's not just— Calories. It's not just nutrients, it's information. And this is where I think, and this is a whole different discussion, but this is where the Beyond Burgers of the world are so freaking scary, right? 'Cause lab-grown meat to me is an example of human arrogance to the nth degree. It's one thing to make a burger out of nuts and seeds and legumes. I mean, whatever you believe, if that's what's gonna float your boat, at least it's real food. But if you're gonna start growing your food in a lab, I think there's a lot of danger signs there. And then exercise, right? So, and then you have to like challenge your body. Like you need to, you need to build muscle and maintain muscle. And, you know, now there's, there's been this big thing over the last few months of, of people saying, you need to build muscle, you need to lift heavy weights. Absolutely. But now there's this backlash of people saying, well, you don't really need that much muscle. And I'm like, okay, you know what? Could we just not Do that. Could we just tell people and be clear, you need to lift heavy things, as heavy as you can lift, because if you don't challenge your body, nobody's telling everybody they have to walk around with like 100 pounds of muscle on their frame. That's actually not efficient and it's not that good for you. But we are saying that our goal, my goal is that in my 80s and my 90s, I'm standing as straight and as tall as I am right now. And that's only going to happen if I keep challenging my body to maintain itself and to remain flexible and strong.

I love it. But you're bringing up something that this whole, like, we're going one direction, then we go another. To me, that's so human. We want the comfort of consistency, but we're yet, we're so inconsistent. Yeah.

I think also, like, don't forget the power of social media. People are looking for clicks, they're looking for eyeballs, they're looking for attention. And so, they're gonna say, The most controversial thing that they can think of that challenges the current status quo so that people will go, wait, what? I didn't know that. What does that mean? Oh my God, does that mean I don't have to exercise? Thank God. It's unfortunate that now we're in a world where social media is a new input. It's a new thing we have to control for. And I'm on social media and I'm building my following, but I'm not building my following as fast as some people because I flat out refuse to say the crazy shit that's gonna get people's attention. Like, I just won't. Like right now there's this massive thing going on. There's some study, a study came out where there's 2,000 lawsuits against Novo Nordisk, against Ozempic, because there's people who have woken up blind and it's being attributed to the Ozempic. And it is legitimately being attributed to the Ozempic. But what nobody wants to talk about Is who are these people? What dose were they on? What were their underlying conditions? The truth is nobody can understand what the mechanism of action is for this happening, but it's happening. But we also know that people who are diabetic are very prone to, to blindness. And in the study, what they talked about is a lot of these people, if most, if not all of them, had seen a massive sudden drop in blood glucose and a massive sudden drop in weight. And the body doesn't love massive shifts like that. It needs time to adapt. And I'm not saying that that's the reason, but is it possible that that is part of what's happening? Can we please ask more questions? Can we find out, were these people put on major aggressive doses because they had a lot of weight to lose? lose too fast before their bodies can adapt. We've become so, so dramatic that we don't stop and ask questions, and we don't give time people to say, okay, well, let me explain, or let's look into this and let's ask more questions. Like, if you look at the flip side of the 2,000 lawsuits, and there's lots of other lawsuits, there's lawsuits for gastroparesis, which is paralysis of the stomach. There's other ones for— Pancreatitis, which can also be an issue. But the flip side of that is that there are millions of people who were completely stuck, whose metabolisms were completely broken, who have been helped dramatically by these compounds. Is it true that if you're gonna use this stuff, it's even more important to eat a great diet? It's even more important to manage your sleep. It's even more important to exercise. But the problem is that people are stuck on aesthetics.

Yeah.

They just care that they fit into their size 6 jeans. They don't actually care that they're any more, that they're any stronger or they're any healthier, and they want to get there in a rush.

First of all, you're so beautifully navigating the kind of human situation in my judgment. But I also feel like you are capturing that we as humans, we kind of look towards the loudest person in the room or the shiny bright light. I guess my question then around that is, so how do we support people so that they're asking more questions so that they're more curious about starting with more natural modalities of health, not going towards the shiny object or that magic pill? Like, how do we support in the grounding of people in their health?

That's such a good question. And I think it comes back to the choices that people make for themselves. There's not much we can do about the voices that are screaming from the rooftops, look at me, look at me, look at me. What we can help people to do is become more discerning about the voices they choose to listen to. And that's hard. So it's a little bit like you have to establish your own framework. It's like establishing your own value system. Is this person intolerant? Did this person plant a flag on a hill and is gonna die on that hill? Or is this person willing to admit every once in a while, oh God, you know what? I used to say that. Actually, I wasn't right. I've learned new information. Because if you can't accept that you made a mistake or you can't accept that new information has come to light that is changing your position on something, then that's not probably the person you wanna follow necessarily. Because confidence is a beautiful thing, but arrogance is the, it's the dark side of confidence, right? If there's one thing we both know is that nobody has all the answers when it comes to our health. Not only did the human body not come with a manual, but to add insult to injury, every body is different. And now we have new inputs we never had to deal with before. So, even the things that were true 10 years ago, or in our grandparents' time, have changed because our world has changed.

This is a fun topic then. So if there was one, and I'm going to use air quotes, healthy, people think it's healthy. And it's talked about a lot right now that people are doing in the name of wellness. What do you think that is? What do you think people think is healthy that they're doing, but in your opinion is like, it's not at all.

And then what would you I think it's possible that the protein message is being overplayed. I believe it's true that many people don't get enough protein, but I also think that what's happened is there's been a hyperfocus to protein, and now people are like, oh my God, more is better, more is better, more is better. So, find the voices that are saying, That are going to help you to understand how much protein do you need based on where you are in your life, based on your health status right now, based on your activity levels. Now, at a baseline, most people don't get enough protein, but do we all need to be consuming 1.8 or 2.0 grams of protein? Do we all need every single meal to deliver 70 grams of protein? No, we don't. Not all of us. If you're looking to get buff, I mean, I see some of these influencers and trainers and fuck, they're amazing, man.

Yeah.

I wanna come back looking like them sometime. But like, there's this one girl, she's adorable, and she's like, one can of chickie and this or this. And by the time she's done, she's got this bowl, which I don't think I could eat in a day, but it's 75 grams of protein and this many grams of this and them. And I'm like, Dude, but she's built like a figure competitor, right? Which is amazing. But I'm thinking of all these regular people watching this, building their can of chickie bowls and wondering why they're kind of stuck in their journey or not realizing that they're not producing enough digestive enzymes or HCl to actually break down that protein so that they can digest it. There's so much more to increasing your protein intake than just eating more protein. Like, Can we take a step back and check in with our digestion and figure out, am I even breaking this stuff down? Maybe that's why I'm deficient in protein.

It's such a good point. And I, and through my 20 years in, in this health field, I have definitely found hydrochloric acid as a major issue because, well, you started out talking about stress, right? That is a major cause of, you know, low hydrochloric acid. So, we have to assume that we have low You know, hydrochloric acid because it's such a stressful life.

And we, as we age, we make less. You'll meet a lot of 70, 80, 90-year-olds who are like, oh, I can't eat meat. It's too heavy. I can't digest it. You're right. You can't because you're not making enough stomach acid. Does that mean that person needs to now just up their protein? No. It means that person needs to either take bitters before the meal to stimulate acid. Maybe that for them, that's not going to be enough. Maybe they need to add digestive enzymes and HCl to their regimen when they eat so that it helps their body to break down the protein. And maybe then they can eat a reasonable amount of protein and be A-okay with that. You know, like—

What do you think of the apple cider vinegar, you know, in a glass of water before you eat your meal?

I think it's great. I think that can help to blunt glycemic response. I think, you know, I think apple cider vinegar also helps with digestive enzymes if I'm, if I'm not Wrong. But, you know, bitters are great before a meal. And I remember listening to a podcast about this years ago, and the guy said, look, there's wisdom built into different cultures. So, in the Italian, for example, world, you might have a small salad of arugula, which is a bitter, with extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, and a bit of lemon juice. And that would be the bitters. That would be getting your digestive system ramped up and ready to go. For what's to come next. But if you don't have it in you and you don't like bitter foods, because so many of us are, you know, people's taste buds have evolved sadly towards sweet. Like we live in a culture where we no longer tolerate bitter. We no longer tolerate anything that's not sweet. There's companies like Just Thrive has a bitters supplement you can take before your meal. So see if that helps you and you'll know you're not digesting your protein If your hair, skin, and nails starts to fall apart, which everybody says, oh, that's your thyroid. Well, maybe it's not. Maybe it's your digestion. So let's just get some blood work done and calm down for a minute. It could be that. It could be that you feel heavy after you eat meat and it takes forever to digest it. And you just, you know, like the words will come outta your mouth. I just don't feel good when I eat meat. Or it could be that you're not pooping regularly. Sometimes I've helped people to solve constipation with something to support their gallbladder, like a TUDCA, an ox bile, and digestive enzymes. And all of a sudden they're regular right as rain because their body just needed that support to get the system going.

It's a great reminder as well, 'cause a lot of times when people, they'll eat meat or just using that as an example, and they'll be like, oh, it just doesn't, it doesn't feel right. And then they'll just stop eating meat. It's like, I love that you're introducing like, it's, it's not black or white. It's like there is a gray area and it might be that you're just not digesting the meat properly and you need support there. You don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I want to talk about peptides because I know you're, you know, a lot about that. First of all, I think there is a misunderstanding that there are some people that think peptides are unnatural. They're not really, right? I mean, many of them are taken from nature, right? Yeah.

They're not all, some of them are synthetic molecules that are designed to interact with receptors in your body.

Okay.

Um, or they're mimicking a natural peptide in your body. I mean, there's 7,000 peptides made by the human body. All a peptide is, is a small protein. We're made up of protein. And so the peptides are the smaller chains of amino acids. Some people put the limit at 100. Most people put it at 50. There's talk that it's going to get lowered to 40, to below 40, which means that things like thymosin beta-4, which is a common peptide that people will use, even though it's not approved for human use, I kind of have to say that. Thymosin beta-4 is 43 amino acids. So all of a sudden it'll be on the wrong side of the fence and they will qualify it as a biologic. And what's interesting about that is that tells us That there's value to it. I'm not going to assign full malice to it. All I'm going to say is that clearly it's doing something and the regulatory bodies are saying, well, wait, if it's that active, then we need to establish what it's doing before we have people running around using it willy-nilly. You know, whether I agree with that or not is beside the point. I'm just delivering the information right now.

Okay.

Then you've got the BPC-157. BPC-157, which is one of the better-known peptides that people use. Is a fragment of a peptide that we naturally make in our, in our stomach. It's, it's part of our physiology. And so it can be reintroduced to the body therapeutically to help deliver therapeutic benefits. And it's so interesting because the FDA a couple of years ago decided that BPC-157 is a research chemical. It is not approved for human use by injection, period. Nobody should be using it. Now, it can be taken orally, and people argue about this all the time. They're like, no, it's going to get broke down in the stomach. It's just another protein, blah, blah, blah. It does not. It is native. The body recognizes it. It's a recognizable sequence of amino acids arranged in a certain way that it gets a bye. Just last week, ironically, I had given each of my parents a bottle of an oral BPC formula that is a gut healing formula. So, it has 4 different peptides in it. It has 3 or 4 other components we know are needed for gut healing, like glutamine, zinc, all the regular stuff. And I get a call from my mom. I think I gave it to them 3 weeks ago when they were visiting, like at the beginning of August. And I get a call from my mother a week ago saying, we need more of that stuff. Like, what do you mean?

What did they experience?

So, in her case, her digestion improved, right? 'Cause we're healing the stomach, we're healing the GI tract. The next thing that she's gonna say about her and my dad is something that people say doesn't happen. People believe that the only way for BPC to help with tissue and joints and injuries, soft tissue and hard tissue injuries, is to inject it. And I generally would agree with that. I would say that is the most efficient way to use BPC-157. But my mother and my father not listening to what I tell them and not necessarily reading the instructions on the bottle have been doubling down on their dose of this supplement. And my mother earlier this year tore a muscle in her shoulder. My dad has a major problem in his back that causes him no end of discomfort. And both of them, she said, I was telling your father that my shoulder's feeling so much better. And he said, oh. You know, funny, now that you mention it, my back feels better. And I never even mentioned to them that this was a possibility.

Wow. Right.

Which is the best way to test something. Because if you tell someone this is gonna make your shoulder better, there's a 50/50 chance that their belief will make their shoulder better, which in my mind is actually valid.

I love placebo effect. I love it.

I think placebo's awesome. If you can convince someone that, that they're gonna feel better and they do feel better and things get better, rock on.

Power of suggestion. It works. If it works, it works.

100%. But in this case, they had no clue. And both of them noticed that they physically feel better. They have fewer aches and pains than they did before.

This is so good. But for someone who you had mentioned the whole idea of who wants to age younger. So someone who's over 40, who wants to age younger, what is a not so obvious protocol or supplement you'd have them start with today?

So, this is something you and I have talked about before, and this dovetails a little bit with your other business, Pluck, which is about reintroducing organ meats into people's diets. There's a subset of peptides called bioregulator peptides, and bioregulator peptides are the tiniest of the proteins. These are 2 to 4 amino acid chains. They're teeny tiny, but they are epigenetic switches, meaning that they influence the way your genes express. Not as creepy as gene therapy because they're natural to the body, but these are natural in nature. There's a Russian scientist by the name of Vladimir Khavinson who almost 40 years ago now discovered these in Russia and studied them extensively for his entire career. Started in with computer simulations, moved into animals, and then moved into human testing and was able to show that when we reintroduce these bioregulator peptides into the body, it helps to basically repair day-to-day damage or day-to-day deficiencies in the function of our tissues, glands, and organs that we lose as we age. So, the cool thing about bioregulators is that they don't boost anything, they don't suppress anything, they just try to bring things back into balance. So, if I have someone who says to me, you know what, I just wanna age better, I would say, of course, we're gonna talk about all the things we talked about at the beginning. But I would also say that what these bioregulators can do is they can help to restore better balance and function to the pineal gland, which controls your circadian cycle. It controls your melatonin production, which is gonna be helpful for sleep and a whole bunch of that other stuff. 'Cause we know that melatonin is a major hormone in the body. It's gonna help to upregulate more production of telomerase to protect the telomeres on the ends of your DNA. And then there's an— there's a bioregulator for the pancreas, maybe to give some TLC to the pancreas, which has been working so hard for you for the last 40, 50, 60 years. There's gonna be a decline in its function. So, can we help the pancreas to kind of regenerate a little bit or speed up the regeneration? There's one for the liver, for the stomach, for the heart, for the blood vessels, for the thymus gland. Like, there's 21 different bioregulators.

Wow.

And I would, at this stage of the game, to err on the side of nature and safety, I would err towards the natural bioregulators that are actual extracts from those tissues from animals. And that's where we get to what you do, because where the bioregulators are extracted from are essentially organs. So, the liver bioregulator will be found in the liver. The kidney bioregulator will be found in the kidney. The thymus gland bioregulator will originate in the thymus gland. And same with adrenals and testes and ovaries. It moves into the world of homeopathy. It borrows from glandular therapy. It's all part of that same world. You know, even in your supplements, you only have access to so many organs. There's lots of bits and bobs that are not allowed to be used or get thrown away or whatever the case may be. So with the bioregulators, you get access to the thyroid, the adrenal glands, the ovaries, the testes. I mean, you can eat heart, you know, it's really nice meat if you can find it. You can eat bone marrow. There's a bone marrow bioregulator, but a lot of people don't like it, don't want it, or it's not part of their world. To me, that is where I would start. I feel like the other peptides, the longer chain peptides are fantastic, but right now they're very controversial. Certainly there's a group of people out there that's like, I don't care if they're controversial. I'm using them because I know that they work for me. That's fine. There's a certain number that now that you can use orally, which is great. So there's companies like Level Up Health that I work with very closely. He's got a number of them. There's another company, there's a couple of companies, but I would say Level Up is doing some of the best work. He's the one that makes that Ultimate GI Repair that I was talking about, which people—

That you gave your parents?

Yeah, that I gave my parents.

Everyone's going to be ordering that one based on—

So if you want that, we can put the link in the show notes or people can just go to my website, natnitum.com, and there's a Not recommend section there and they can—

Oh, that's great. We should, we will definitely do that. This is a perfect place to ask. So if people feel inspired from your talk, they wanna work with you, do you work with clients? And if not, how do people kind of get more access to you?

Thank you for that. So right now I'm not working with clients. I think I'm starting to feel the pressure to develop some kind of a curriculum or something that people can go through on their own. I, I don't know that I'll go back to working with people one-on-one, but the best way right at this instant to get access to me and to work with me is to join my membership community. So I have a membership community called the Longevity Community. You can find details for it at natnitin.com. I'm doing office hours once a week in there. I actually, last year, I just finished this Year of Bioregulators program where I was working with people and getting to working them through all the bioregulators for a year. I don't know yet if I'm doing it again for next year, just because I'm so busy, but I might be doing that again. I also bring in podcast guests to do live Q&As, and it's a really cool community of like-minded people. We've got practitioners in there and consumers, and everybody's really just contributing. And because it's, you know, it's maybe, it's, I don't even think it's 300 people. It's intimate enough, but big enough that it's active. It's a really great resource. So that would be the best way to go, or, and/or listen to the podcast. I mean, Like you, you know, I've got a podcast and I talk about a lot of this stuff or bring people on that talk about it as well. And that's another resource.

Yeah. And your podcast has been going on for a long time. There's a lot of great episodes and continue to be just a really great resource. Highly recommend that to everyone. I think I want to end just highlighting that you said something earlier about how we need to support people in being more discerning about who they listen to and what they follow. And I just want to offer that You are a great example of someone who I believe is worth following and who has earned that following because not only do you live what you preach, you also look healthy. And I think that's really important that when we follow people, when we hear people, you know, on their soapboxes, how do they look? I know that we don't want to be too visual necessarily, but I think we have to be because If that person doesn't exhibit what they're saying and they don't exhibit the type of body and/or persona that you are pursuing, then they may not be the right person for you. You know, and I just, I just think it's really important that you were talking about longevity and I've now known you for a few years and you do look like you're de-aging.

First of all, thank you for, for everything you just said. I appreciate it. I think that when it comes to following people, We have to be careful with how people look. I came to the space relatively late in life. If I'd been doing what I've been doing since I was 35 or 40, I probably would look even like a lot younger than I look now. And that doesn't change my message, right?

Yeah.

I mean, definitely somebody who looks ill and who you can find shots on TikTok of, you know, sitting and having their meals at Burger King or McDonald's or whatever, it's not living the life. They're not walking the walk. They're simply just talking a talk that's gonna get them recognition or whatever the case may be. So, I just think we need to apply a little bit of grace on that one. Sometimes stuff happens, you know, even people in this space, like we had one fairly high-profile person recently who got cancer. Like, it can be a beast, and it's not because she's any less good at what she does. It's not because she's not living the right life or doing the right things. It's because sometimes there are— circumstances beyond our control when it comes to health that are just gonna kick in. So definitely, you know, somebody being vibrant and healthy is a really good sign, but we also have to reserve a little bit of grace for sometimes when things do go off the rails, which they can, that's beyond our control. And now we're working in a world of, okay, now how does this person handle that? How do they manage it? What are you gonna do about it?

Yeah. Well said. That reminds me though, I was curious during this talk. So do you fall off the rails ever? Like, do you ever have days where you're just like, I'm just done doing all the biohacking. I just want to have a, you know, no frills, nothing kind of day, you know?

Of course, you know, it happens every once in a while, you know, and I don't feel as good at the end of the day. If I allow myself to spend too much time on social media, kind of get sucked into that doom scrolling thing. It's almost like a necessary lesson for me to remind me, man, I can't imagine people who spend their days like this. Talk about toxic. It's more toxic than any food, than any activity, than almost anything else because—

I could see that.

It will alter your physiology by destroying your mentality, your spirit. It's soul-crushing what's happening right now. in the world. And I think that in an effort to be heard, all the sides are becoming more and more and more toxic, and it's becoming more and more and more difficult to find the truth, to not lose anybody's humanity in all this. And if there's one thing I want to leave people with is remember that everybody's a human being. Everybody wants to live. Certainly, there's bad actors in the world that are We have to wonder what they're doing here and why they're here, but they're not the majority. And you cannot paint a whole group of people with the same brush of a bunch of bad actors. So, I don't wanna get political about anything, but I just, what I see happening in the world right now is this rise in hatred and intolerance. And honestly, guys, I think that will be the thing that takes us down. That will destroy your longevity. Almost more than anything.

Well, thank you, Natalie. Just so, so well said and love talking to you. There's, there's 1,001 more things we could of course talk about. So I hope to have you on at another date, but thank you so much. And thank you all for being curious enough to stay with us, to listen and to keep asking questions. Thank you. Have a great one, everybody.

Take care. Thank you, James. Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You can find the show notes, links, and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's eatpluck.com. And hey, if you know someone who'd get something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.