Dan Pardi Reveals Vitamin C's Surprising Anti-Aging Power

They identified in this paper a new mechanism of aging called ferroaging. Iron accumulates in our tissues with age, so you see it everywhere. Another pathway of cell destruction was identified, and it's called ferroptosis. So when a cell is ready to die, it's served its purpose, the cell shrinks, and it gets absorbed by the surrounding tissue and leaves no trace. The cell explodes, so iron accumulates and it causes the cell to explode.

Oh, are we having this ferroaging because of a disfunction in the way that our body is now handling iron?

Yes. With age, more iron gets accumulated in your tissues and it drives this process. A goat under stress, they'll make 10 grams of vitamin C in their livers in one day. Wow. So they looked at monkeys for 40 months and they put it in their drinking water and the results were astounding.

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You know? Totally. So why does it matter so much?

I like— I got interested in vitamin C, full disclosure, really much more around stress. Yeah, but I have a feeling it goes further than stress and immune health. So why does vitamin C matter so much?

There was a study that came out just last month and it is an uber study. So there is not just one experiment, but a series of experiments, about 10. And it came out of China, but it was also in collaboration with some of very prestigious researchers from Altos Labs. They are in California. There's a couple of different sites, but they've brought in a bunch of really impressive researchers. And the goal, I think, is to create something that is, um, a center where the researchers don't have to worry about funding, where they can do really transformative work. And so this paper was a part of that research. It was published in Cell Metabolism in April. So it's just like a month old. Okay. And not only did it have those researchers, but there's 51 researchers on the paper across 19 institutions, across 4 continents. Like, it is really— it had a very impressive list of people. And it's not just one study. They did about 10 different studies that hunted down this interesting new mechanism. They identified in this paper a new mechanism of aging called ferroaging. And so what they first realized in their work is that iron accumulates in our tissues with age. So you see it everywhere, everywhere that it's tested, iron is accumulating. And not only that, you see it accumulate in your plasma and also in ferritin, which is an iron-carrying protein. So all of those— iron has an important function in the body, but this is a maladaptive response with aging. So it hoards iron as a stress response, but it becomes problematic. Why? Well, iron creates a very reactive, reactive oxygen species, which is a hydroxyl radical. It's the most disruptive, problematic reactive oxygen species in biology. And the reaction goes as follows. So the normal byproduct of metabolism is hydrogen peroxide. And when iron will react with it, it creates this hydroxyl radical and that causes our membranes of our cells to break down. Hmm. Yeah. So 2012, another pathway of cell destruction was identified, and this one was a collaboration from Columbia and Stanford, and it's called ferroptosis. And if that name sounds kind of familiar, think of apoptosis. That's programmed cell death. And that is a very neat process. So when a cell is ready to die, it's served its purpose. The cell shrinks and it gets absorbed by the surrounding tissue and leaves no trace. Ferroptosis is not quite as clean. The cell explodes. So iron accumulates and it causes the cell to explode. Yeah. So think of it more like a fire.

Like it's like a hand grenade. Yeah, exactly.

Pharaoh aging is utilizing that exact same mechanism, but instead of it being this explosive acute process. It is a long-term process that induces cellular senescence. So with iron accumulating in our tissues, more cells become senescent.

So is this at the foundation of senescence? Is this what's causing it, or is it just one of the mechanisms?

It's one of the mechanisms, but seemingly a primary mechanism that is driving it. And we didn't quite know about it. Wow.

And we didn't know about it. Holy smokes. I know. Wow. Yeah. Okay. So, so then the obvious thing would be, well, how do we have this not happen? And is this happening? Are we having this ferroaging because of a dysfunction in the way that our body is now handling iron? Yes.

With age, more iron gets accumulated in your tissues and it drives this process. And this process is taking place over long stretches of time. So think decades, not, you know, just over a month or so.

So how do we get that iron out of those tissues?

Great question. And that's what they did next. So they said, all right, what's the mechanism here? And they identified an enzyme called ACSL4. And what that enzyme is doing is it is implanting polyunsaturated fatty acids into our membranes. Then they did a test. It was so interesting how they did it. It's like, identify that iron accumulates, identify what's happening in that reaction with the membranes, identify why those polyunsaturated fats are getting put into the membranes. And then the next thing they did is they said, oh, we're going to test in mice and we're going to just give them a high iron diet. And it drove ferroptosis.

So just over 2 months. But wouldn't it depend on the age of the mice, or is it any age is going to drive that?

This is middle-aged mice. Okay. Middle-aged mice for 2 months. But of course, they have shorter lifespans.

So I think like you could give it kid a high iron diet and it wouldn't be the problem, right? It's really the— and is it the age? Does menopause have anything to do with this? Do we know that yet? Like, is it when we say age, is it like starting around age 30, which is when things seem to start to go wonky?

I don't have a great insight into exactly when this flips to become problematic, but you're exactly right. It's not a problem when we're young. It is a problem starting about in middle age, and then it starts to drive that aging process. So they tested it and they gave high iron and they noticed that cellular senescent markers went up and ferroaging markers went up. So they said, okay, this is good. If we give more iron, that's driving the problem. The next thing that they did is try to block that effect. And they noticed that— so they did a very interesting work where they used CRISPR gene editing and they blocked the ACSL4 enzyme so it couldn't put polyunsaturated fats into the membrane. That was just in the liver. But they noticed that the brain was performing better. There was less markers of senescence everywhere in the body.

Don't you want cell membranes that are fluid? And you do. This is very confusing. You do want that, but it becomes maladaptive.

And so at this point, when you're getting older, it's now driving cellular senescence. So, yeah. So what do we do?

Yeah. What, what do we do here?

So they feel like at this point, through a series of multiple experiments, they identified that all of the factors involved in driving this process. The next thing they did is they created— they found a library of compounds that are known to interact with ferroptosis or iron-driven issues. And with lipid metabolism. And then they screened every single one of those compounds to see which one had the greatest effect on these cell cultures in terms of inhibiting this process. Okay. And the winner by a long shot was vitamin C.

But here's what's bizarre, and this is like making me think about this because I had autoimmune gastritis and so I had low iron. Yes. And then I had to go get iron shots. And then I'm wondering, well, could you have low iron but still have this problem with iron dysfunction where you're storing more in the tissues? You're just not able to see it in the blood. Is this maybe being misdiagnosed and mis— or mistreated in that you wouldn't really wanna be giving more iron. You'd wanna be figuring out why it's going into the wrong places. Like, could it have been being driven into the tissues rather than You know, is that possible?

So everything in biology, as we're getting older, it— you have a dys homeostasis. So instead of thinking of certain things as good or bad, they can become problematic when the body's not handling them as well as they were when it was young.

Yeah, I just wonder if anemia when you're young is different than anemia when you're older. And if anemia when you're older is that you're not— the iron's not going where it should. Yeah, which is problematic because— and the reason I bring that up is vitamin C is what we always give to someone who's anemic to help them get the, you know, heme iron better absorbed. That's right.

Iron and vitamin C have a very interesting relationship. You will absorb 4 times more non-heme iron from plant sources when you have vitamin C that's co-ingested. Ah, now I never—

I didn't think that non-heme and vitamin C went together. I always thought it was just heme and that it didn't work for non-heme. Yeah, that's not the case. It's not the case.

So when you're consuming animal forms of iron, so iron that you get from, let's say, consuming liver or other organ meats, which are very high sources of heme iron, that doesn't require vitamin C for better absorption.

But what about meat? Because it was always a suggestion that you should have like a pasta tomato sauce with your ground beef and you'll absorb it better. Not the case. Not needed.

It's more necessary for the plant sources of iron. So spinach, vat.

Yeah. Okay.

And the heme iron is much better absorbed without that, without needing vitamin C. But you're right. I mean, we don't want to become anemic, right? Anemia means that we are not transferring oxygen to our tissues. That's really important as well. And iron is necessary. So we don't want to think of iron as entirely bad. But there is this issue that is also with its accumulation. So now we have like, all right, well, we don't want to like avoid iron altogether. You'll be tired and lethargic and you won't deliver oxygen, but you also want to be able to handle it getting implanted into your cells and then causing senescence over time. It feels like calcium to me. Mm-hmm.

You gotta have calcium. Yeah. But if calcium's going in the wrong places, there you go. You're in trouble. That's right. Okay. Then you want to have the right amount going to the right places. Mm-hmm. And you want to get it out of the tissues and you want to stop that process of it going to the wrong places.

How do we do that? Well, that's what's so exciting. So they found that vitamin C did a better job than anything else at affecting this exact mechanism of pharaoh aging in cell cultures. And then the next thing they did is said, why, why does vitamin C act in this way? And it turns out that there are 3 specific binding sites on the ACSL4 enzyme. Vitamin C is like a wrench in those gears. So it gets in there and it prevents this enzyme from putting the polyunsaturated fats into the membranes at too high of a level.

So it won't stop it from being flexible, —but it will stop it from getting to be ridiculous. There you go. Okay. A ridiculous cell membrane. We don't want that. Yeah. Okay.

So now it's like, wow, we've got all this really interesting work. Let's actually test it in an animal model that is relevant to us.

And that would be an animal that doesn't make vitamin C.

There you go. Okay. So about 60 million years ago, primates, our ancestors, lost the ability to make something called the— it's the GULU gene. The GULU gene is involved in transforming the final step of transforming glucose into vitamin C. That's where we actually make— animals that can make vitamin C make it from glucose. And so, for example, a goat under stress, they'll make 10 grams of vitamin C in their livers in one day. So we're special. We don't make it.

I wonder why we— why we ended up doing that. Seems like a deficit, doesn't it?

Yeah. So there's a good rationale for why it was so present in our diet that there wasn't pressure to continue for that gene, for those mutations. It allowed it to persist because it was so—

you could focus on other important things. Yeah. Okay, so we don't make vitamin C. Primates don't make vitamin C. So we had to do the test on primates, otherwise it wouldn't make any sense, wouldn't be a great—

right. So they looked at monkeys for 40 months. Which that's equivalent to about 10 or 15 years in humans, but great animal model. And they put in their drinking water and they had it every day and the results were astounding. So not only because a lot of times you'll see in work where something looks great in a cell culture and it just doesn't translate when you finally get it into an animal model, it looks so exciting and it's not at the end of the day. So after 40 months, they screened 70 different tissues. They ran 5 different aging clocks. That's probably why they had Steve Horvath on this study, cuz he's the expert in that. So they were looking at biological age of different tissues and what they found was nothing less than remarkable. So these primates after 40 months, which is again equivalent to like 10 or 15 years in humans, had younger brains by 6.5 years. They had younger tissues, the kidneys, the aorta, all sorts of tissues were younger, not only younger, they were younger than when they started according to— so what the way that just to give like—

so they really were reverse aging.

That's what it seemed like. So the way that these aging clocks work through epigenetics is think of those like scratches on a vinyl record. And as those scratches accumulate, that's a way for these tests to account for those, those scratches and then give a very predictive measurement of what a biological age, someone's biological age is. And what happened is they had this vitamin C in their water. Those scratches were removed.

So the vitamin C in the water, what did that dose— what, first of all, what was the age if, if we were gonna like compare it to what a human age would've been for this start? Yep. And then their rate of aging is— is it faster than our rate of aging? They are.

They don't live— if you were to sort of compress their entire life, they don't live as long as we do. But they were given this intervention starting in midlife, so it would have been somewhere like a 40 to 50-year-old human.

And then what was the dose? And I'm like, I'm assuming they did it dose based on body weight.

Yeah. So it was 30 milligrams per kilogram. And if you were to then just scale that for body weight, that would be somewhere like 2 grams per day for a vitamin C for a human. But that's not the best way to scale. There's something called allometric scaling, which is body surface area. And so when you do that type of—

that's why you tall people need more. Yeah. Like a smaller person. Well, wouldn't you also need more if you were under chronic stress?

Yes. Because remember, one of the reasons why we're accumulating iron is a protection against stress. So it's a— like I said, it's something that you don't want to prevent. It's actually a good thing, but it becomes maladaptive with age. So for somebody my size, I weigh 210 pounds, then that would be about 1 gram if you do the allometric scaling. So and then if somebody who's, let's say, maybe 150, it's going to be around 600 milligrams per day.

Now, these, these doses— nothing.

It's not that. It's not that much.

Wow. How does one know if they have this iron accumulation? Like, is there a way for the average human to be able to know? There's doing a big no-no. Yeah. Gosh, wouldn't it be great if there was just— I know it's tissue-specific and you look at all the different tissues, but it would seem like if you have it in the tissues, it would be like, I guess you would have to do a biopsy or something. You could—

I mean, they tested 70 different tissues and found it everywhere.

So isn't there some simple tissue like your skin?

Possibly. Yeah, possibly in the future we could find— I mean, we run into this problem in biology. I know.

It's like we want to know, like, how do you know? And are there any symptoms that you would have if you had this going on? It sounds like we have this going on. Yes. But what about if someone's always been taking vitamin C? Yeah. Or now are we going to get into like the type of vitamin C? Because the vitamin C types I would think matter too. Yeah.

So typical ascorbic acid, which is vitamin C and ascorbate, means that it's preventing scurvy. That's how it was named. So we have receptors in our gut or transporters and we have transporters in our tissues. And talking about that is pretty interesting. So I'll talk about some detail there, but it's called the SVCT. So it's the sodium-dependent vitamin C transporter, and type 1 is in the gut. So that helps with absorption, getting into the body. But think of it like a turnstile. So if you take a gram of vitamin C, you really only get in about like 200 milligrams of vitamin C. And then it's like, even though you have more building up on the outside, that turnstile is only working at a certain pace. And so there are different forms now, like liposomal forms, And then, you know, you can still utilize that transporter. But if you have, let's say, a form which is bound to something that's going to buffer the acidity, can that cause GI stress?

Yeah, we used to do that when we do the vitamin C loading tests. Yes, you could see it. Yes, the C flush test. Yeah, buffered vitamin C flush test.

That's right. Yeah. So buffered vitamin C is, is a good form, but it still is utilizing that turnstile. Okay. And a liposomal form is going to use a whole different mechanism to get absorbed. And so there's no reason that you wouldn't want to use both ideally, but that is going to raise plasma levels more than what you'd— even if it's at a 1-gram dose, is not the same as a 1-gram dose of just ascorbic acid. So if you can have some from, let's say, liposomal, you can have some from a buffered form of vitamin C. You can even add, let's say, bioflavonoids, which prevent the kidneys from excreting it. So you're now keeping more plasma levels circulating. And a good statistic to keep in mind is as we get older, a younger person at the very same dose will absorb twice as much as an older person. So if you test the, let's say, 200mg with a 25-year-old and a 65-year-old, then the younger person will show plasma levels that are twice as high.

Gosh, it's like everything as we age.

Yeah, we need more.

We need more and more and more and more. Yeah.

More protein. More, more.

Enzymes. It's like, wow, okay. Yeah. And so would a good marker to see if you, you know, were where you need to be would be to run a plasma level like at some point, what, an hour after you took it?

Yeah. So if you want to know vitamin C status, you want to keep your level somewhere between 50 to 70. That's where a lot of— which is— and what's the test? The tests aren't perfect. You can get a blood vitamin C test, a plasma level. Okay. Yeah.

I didn't know there was a thing like this. Yeah.

It's really testing What your status has been over the last like 48 hours.

Oh, it actually looks— 'cause I thought these things had a pretty quick washout.

It is water soluble. And one of the reasons why older people are having showing lower levels to the same dose could be absorption, but it also could be because inflammation is rising with age that it's just getting utilized right away. And so if you measure the blood, you're seeing lower levels and we don't know if it's because of absorption or more rapid utilization. It's probably both.

Well, beyond the rapid utilization for, say, inflammation, what about it being used to help with this stored iron? Like, how much is used? Because wouldn't you want more then to get rid of the stored iron?

Yeah. So what I think is the best dose is to take an amount that is body size relevant. And, and all we can do now is estimate based off of the monkeys.

But there's no risk. Like, oh my gosh, you took too much vitamin C.

So what? And it's not, you know, we're talking about somewhere between 500 to maybe 1,500 milligrams. That is a totally biologically relevant amount.

Oh my gosh, I like do 2 to 5 grams a day on the rate. Like, you know, it's just kind of something I've done for years and years and years. And what do you take buffered? So some of it's in one of my electrolyte formulas. Sometimes it's in some of my multis, it's in my collagen. So I just get it in all these different forms. When we used to run that buffered C test, you know, that was fun, which was, I think, probably complete BS, you know. But it was like, how much, how much do you need? Just keep taking vitamin C till you have diarrhea. I'm like, okay, it's kind of like magnesium. Like, there's probably a better way that's a little more scientific. So true. But it's just kind of one I've always taken just for the stress side of things. Yeah. But, you know, one of the things to talk about here too is, because we were mentioning about joint health, which is another Qualia product I'm obsessed with, don't leave home without. But with vitamin C, do you take it twice a day since it's water soluble? And if you're taking it twice a day, how do you time your workout if you're doing a resistance training workout so you don't block any of the— yeah, yeah.

I interviewed Michael Ristow years ago, who is the researcher out of Switzerland who showed that antioxidants can squash the reactive oxygen species that are a part of the adaptation response to exercise, which you don't want to— right, this is no good. Those were pretty high levels. That was 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C and 400 milligrams of vitamin E together. And so what I don't know that we have resolution on is if you're taking, let's say, 200 milligrams of vitamin C, if that's going to have anywhere near that effect. Are you going to get rid of all those reactive oxygen species that then prevent the adaptation to— yeah, adding muscle and even cardiorespiratory fitness? Both of those have been, been shown, and insulin sensitivity. But what I do is if I'm working out in the morning, I'll skip that dose, but I will take it later. And if I'm not working out that day, I'll take 500 milligrams in the morning and then 500 milligrams like early afternoon. Because what I've noticed is that if I take it later, it'll keep me up.

Really? Yes. Vitamin C.

Yeah. Wow. And there's a reason for that. Vitamin C does not spread throughout the body evenly. There are certain tissues that concentrate it, and those tissues are your immune cells. So immune cells will have 20 to 85 times plasma levels in white blood cells. So white blood cell vitamin C test would be ideal. And I've looked for one. It's used in research, but it's not commercially available. So anybody listening out there who creates tests, please make that.

But it also like there's no risk to just doing this.

Yeah. I mean, my— the risk for me, the experience that I had was that I was experiencing some sleep issues by taking it too late.

Wow, that's so interesting.

I didn't see— yeah, your adrenals concentrate it too. Yeah. So your retinas, your eye lenses, your brain, your immune cells, and your adrenals, they concentrate it. And one of the reasons why what I was experiencing, which is a great— if you get the dosing right, it's an alertness that experience. I feel sharp and alert. But if it's too late, then it can feel like, oh, I'm still alert, I want to go to bed. And it also probably has to do with the liposomal form increasing tissue storage. So, okay. Yeah. If you're taking, let's say, up to 5 grams from ascorbic acid, you're not absorbing nearly as much. But what vitamin C is doing is it helps with enzymes. It's a cofactor for enzymes that are converting norepinephrine to epinephrine, which is adrenaline. Yeah. That's how you feel. That's for sure. Yeah.

Are there any signs that one could tell that they have this dysfunction? Is the dysfunction with the iron source— is that just aging? It's one of those things like as we age, we start to have mitochondrial dysfunction, we have iron storage dysfunction. Like, is it just one of the things that happens?

We now know it's one of those things that's happening, and it's very likely it's happening in us as well. So how might you test this? Well, you could do a Pace of Aging or a biological age test. And so what I would imagine is that if you were to employ a really good form of vitamin C and take it regularly, so every day, the right dose, which we can estimate and infer from the monkey studies, uh, which we talked about already, then you would see a potentially, if you went from a state where you weren't really getting enough vitamin C, which is many people, to getting enough in the right form, you would see potentially a slowing of biological age and also potentially a reversal of your epigenetic age test.

Now, in absence of muscle biopsies or any other tissue biopsies to see things, would this just be done based on labs?

There are estimates of biological age, Morgan Levine's PhenoAge, from 10 common markers that you can get in bloodwork, but you can do a more direct test. So if you heard of True Diagnostic, I love that company. They've really become the standard for both epigenetic age and aging pace. And so I'll explain the difference because it's, it's useful. Imagine a scenario where, let's say you're working with a nurse and between the ages of 20 and 40, they were working a lot of shift work and they, but they were stressed. So they smoked and they drank and they were, you know, living hard. That would add years. That accumulation of damage would add years theoretically to your biological age estimate. So you could be 52, but it looks— your biological age test would say 55, right? So it's older than your chronological age. Your aging pace is saying how fast are you aging now? And this is why it's so important to distinguish between aging pace and biological age. Because let's say that same person took on a wellness routine in their 40s and was doing everything right. Well, they now might be aging only 10 months out of every 12, but their biological age test might still look older. So if they just got the biological age test, they'd be like, oh, you know what, I'm not doing anything right, and then I give up. Exactly. When in fact they are doing things right. And that's why it's good to have both the, both sets of data and True Diagnostic provides both, which is great.

The iron stores. So this, these studies showed that you could actually get rid of these.

Yeah.

So what I always want, can we take more vitamin C or is it like a, a rate limiting process? Or like, I would imagine you can't just dump it all at once. Your body would not do well.

I think that we don't have perfect resolution into what is optimal because they did their best. Because again, this paper was really like 10 experiments. So they hunted it down, they figured out how it was working before they went into the animal models, and they gave them that dose that had really impressive results. By the way, they also showed a younger brain and increased connectivity of their— so there was not only a younger brain but better brain function. So the functioning of the brain was also performing better. They had less senescent markers. So is this the only thing that's going to drive senescence? No, but it seems to potentially be a primary driver of senescence.

Well, then wouldn't it make sense to do senolytics, you know, so do, do senolytics every month. Yep. But then do the vitamin C. And would it make sense to hit the two together at that time too?

You're absolutely right. That senescent cells do accumulate and they resist death. They stay alive and they release all of these factors into the surrounding that are inflammatory. They have tissue degrading enzymes. And I'll point to one aspect of this Liu study that we've been talking about today. So remember when they did the gene editing, they just did the gene editing in the liver. And yet just by affecting that one organ, they also saw that the brain had improved significantly. And that has to do with senescent cells releasing these inflammatory factors into the whole body that drive inflammation. So there was less neuroinflammation just by affecting that one, that one organ. Now vitamin C is going to affect all your organs. So it's conceivably even better than this gene editing example, which is cool. But yes, so we do accumulate senescent cells. We want to clear them, but we also want to slow down the rate of senescence and vitamin C can do that. So this one-two punch is perfect.

Quali came out with this, which I want to talk through, this very cool formula for vitamin C. Yeah. Did you guys know about this paper and the study ahead of time? Because this seems very opportune. I'm assuming you caught some wind on this. Wouldn't that have been great?

No. You're kidding me. It came out and we were—

You're kidding me. Yeah, because that's why I'm like, oh, you must have known about this paper a year in advance and you put together this killer vitamin C product to go with the— Wow.

Wouldn't that have been awesome? Are you guys lucky?

I'm so fortunate. So you made this vitamin C product. What was your thought process then in making the vitamin C product?

Recognizing that vitamin C is important even before we knew this. It's an antioxidant. It helps with collagen formation for skin, for joints. And in fact, that's what scurvy is, is when you don't have enough vitamin C, the enzymes responsible for— there's two enzymes. One is called prolyl hydroxylase, and that creates this three-dimensional helix structure, which is the backbone of collagen. And then the second enzyme is lysyl hydroxylase, and that actually creates this cross-linking, which makes that collagen structure flexible and strong. And we have it in our skin, we have it in our vessels, we have it in our joints and ligaments. And it's again, really, it's of course really important and that you will eventually die from scurvy if you don't. That's how important it is. So it's not just, oh, you know, I've got bleeding gums. It's essential, meaning that we need it for survival. It's important for our immune system. That's how a lot of people think about it. And even some of the science there is fascinating. Like when you get a pathogen, exposed to pathogen, which is happening all the time, whether you get sick or not, right? There are these things called PAMPs, which is a pathogen-associated mediator, and your cells detect that., and then they come, they go into the immune cells, they drive transcription factors, and those transcription factors will increase the amount of vitamin C receptors. So the cell, your immune cells can pull more vitamin C. Wow. It happens within hours.

So if you are traveling, yeah, I mean, it would seem like, and this is how I've always played around with vitamin C, like, uh, I think I hadn't gone to the Amazon last time I saw you, but I went to the Amazon and got a big bug bite on my butt. Big, big, like can't sit down on this, you know? Oh yeah. Oh wow. That was fun to go show the Spanish doctor. Yeah. I was like trying to explain to him in my broken Spanish, my Spanglish. Anyhow. But that's one of the things that I was cranking was vitamin C. But it would seem like, you know, the whole thing where we always talk about have more vitamin C when you're, if you're sick, it would seem like it's really a prophylactic that you should think about too.

It's better if you maintain good vitamin C storage than try to use it to rescue the situation. But the— what's happening with your immune cells, one of the ways that they kill pathogens is your white blood cells will release all sorts of reactive oxygen species that kill the pathogen. And where they need vitamin C is to protect themselves and then also clean up the mess. Ah, and so they protect tissues. And so vitamin C is playing a fundamental role in helping your immune system perform its healthy function. And so if you have lower status, like many people do for a variety of reasons—

any idea how many people have low vitamin C status? Well, if we were going to guesstimate, considering how few people eat fruits and vegetables too.

So, yeah, I, I, it could be a close to 50%, which just kind of leaves you open.

And when you said that, it reminded me of— and I was like, I don't know if this is a, you know, myth or real, because one of the things we were taught in nutrition was you never just high-dose vitamin C and walk away from it. Like, if you want to— if you want to bring it up, yeah, because you've been, you know, you're sick or something, you have to titrate it back down again. But it would— but you're saying you just keep a good dose all the time.

Keep a good dose. But there is evidence to go higher when you are sick because it's— your cells are using more of it when you're fighting an infection. Your immune cells are some of the hardest, most energy-using cells in the body.

So, so what, double, double, triple, quadruple? What would you do?

1 to 2 grams. But if you're now maintaining a Pharaoh's Age dose, then you're getting pretty close to that already. And so maybe you up it a little bit. Like, you know, I'm taking a gram a day and I would maybe do like 1500 milligrams up to 2. But I would again worry about feeling overstimulated. But I had never heard that.

I'm one of those people too who can like, you know, have an espresso, hit a beat, like do stuff and go to sleep.

But try our product and notice. See if you notice. I'm going to try it.

It's like, I don't know if I want to try it and I'm going to try it. I did a big boo-boo where I took the NAD+ in the evening and I was like, oh, in a way it was great. So I was like, this really works. You can actually feel it. Don't take it at night. Yeah. So yes, I will be tempting. I have the bottle sitting downstairs and I wanted to learn all the stuff about it. So why did you— I'm not sure who— I guess a team of you worked on this. Like, talk us— walk us through this formula, why you put it together the way you did.

Yeah. Greg Kelly, who you— you know, he's our chief product officer and he He's very— he's a special guy. He is somebody who's been working in the space for a long time and understands it well. And so when Qualia thinks about creating a product for anything, we're looking— we're looking at products that exist. And if we see an opportunity to do it better, whether it's a complicated path to get there, like our stem cell product or even Qualia Mind, we'll try to figure out the best way to, to get the results we want with our magnesium. With our vitamin C, even with creatine. They're great products, but they're less complicated. But we still felt like there was reason to go forward and create it. So overall, the product is trying to utilize different absorption pathways. And by the way, when we think about the forms of vitamin C, it's not only about getting it into the body, but it's also getting into the cells. So the liposomal form, you will see remarkably increased levels of vitamin C in those tissues that are actively concentrating it, which means it's getting to where we need vitamin C. I think that's good.

So that versus food, because you're not going to get liposomal vitamin C in food. Yeah. So if you were trying to get this from food alone, yeah, first of all, I think you probably have to eat a lot of, a lot of peppers and oranges to get there. Yes. Right. So, um, but it sounds like you'd never really be able to get there because some of it's just not going to get into those tissues because of the form it's in. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. And we respect nature. And in nature, you're never consuming just ascorbic acid. It's coming along with flavonoids. Yeah, flavonoids, bioflavonoids, and flavonoids are the same thing. In marketing, we use bioflavonoids so that people made the connection that our biology uses these. But they're the same thing. And so with things like rutin, quercetin, these are types of flavonoids that change how it is used, where it goes, how it's excreted. And so it makes it more usable for the amount that's in your body. And we like that idea. We're like, we're going to make this a more natural— we're aiming for a more natural form of this, even though some aspects like the liposomal are not natural. And then we also have some factors like ferulic acid, which also is— you'll find it in oat bran and broccoli, and that serves as another form of antioxidant and also gets into the membranes to protect them as well. Hmm. So we're talking about maintaining cellular protection to avoid cellular senescence. That's another ingredient that's probably contributing to that in a way that wasn't observed in the study. But because we know how that works, it's probably helping too.

What do you think about getting IV vitamin C?

That has its place in particularly in certain diseases like cancer. So you'll take very, very high doses of vitamin C, but it's a completely different mechanism. So when Linus Pauling, he got a lot of criticism for his work saying that really high doses of vitamin C are healthy. And because, you know, he won two Nobel Prizes. And he was somewhat discredited by the end of his career because the high-dose vitamin C didn't fulfill the hypothesis in any evaluations of it. However, the first study that he did to evaluate it was with IV vitamin C, and all of the tests that studied higher-dose vitamin C were oral. Now remember the bottleneck of oral vitamin C. You take a very high dose, get very little getting in after 200mg absorb, you're not getting that much more. So high-dose vitamin C is really like a— it's a pharmacological effect. You're not driving natural restoration of vitamin C levels. It has a specific medical purpose and that— and more work is being done in that area. But you have to think of those as completely different. So does it make sense?

Because I know in a lot of the longevity clinics now, it's like one of the— you get the Myers cocktail. Yes. With vitamin C. Yeah. Which of all the things, if I do IVs, I can't stand the vitamin C because I feel it and it burns like I can't stand it. Yeah. But is it— is there value in that or is that just kind of not really?

We know that our gut is not as healthy as it used to be for a variety of reasons. We have dysbiosis and that dysbiosis is from, you know, plastics. From altered circadian rhythms. Even—

don't say that, I just got back. I know, I was listening to someone who was like, and your microbiome has a circadian rhythm. I'm like, I don't know how to fix this jet lag in my microbiome.

So there's all sorts of reasons that our gut is working with a disadvantage from modern life, and that is affecting absorption. Like, one exciting thing for, for that doesn't get that much credit or discussion is creatine. So the single cell wall that lines your gut, those cells use creatine and that is another energy source for them or supporting energetics. It's helping them make cell energy. And in doing so, then those cells are better at keeping out things that shouldn't be making it through that wall and into our bodies that drive inflammation. And so are we, you know, we're probably not absorbing as much of a lot of things. And so with IVs, if you've had surgery, if you know you have known gut issues, I think IVs have a place. How much are they influencing health for a healthy person? I think that's probably overblown. And I think people are feeling the effects of hyperhydration, which makes you feel great. Right? You get your body really hydrated and all of a sudden there's some benefit to that. You feel more cognitively alert. Your immune cells can reach places that they couldn't before when you were less hydrated. Yeah.

So it's, it's not bad and you could have some room in like, I'll tell you when I do it, I do it when I'm traveling. Yeah. And time zone adjusting. Yeah. I will pop in. Yeah. And I'll get, do that with a little extra glutathione and NAD+ and I'm like, good to go. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

All right. I don't doubt that. That— I don't doubt that you feel good from that. And when you get NAD+, do you get whole molecule?

I don't know what it is. I just know that that's the— that's actually the only IV, and I just do a push of that. I don't do the whole IV drip because it takes too long. Yeah, but it's the only thing I've ever felt. But then again, even when I take the NAD+, the Qualia NAD+, like I take it every single day. Yeah. And I notice like that's when I notice.

That's the only NAD precursor that I've ever felt personally. Yeah. And the Qualia brand, I actually— it's one of my favorite products that we make and I take it every morning and I feel it throughout the day.

Yeah, it's quite amazing. Yeah. What are your foundational supplements? Because you mentioned magnesium. Like when you look at your core. Yeah. What would they be? And is vitamin C part of that?

It is now.

Yeah, it's like I'm now very going to focus on how much I'm actually getting.

What we pay attention to has a lot to do with what's floated by our conscience in our consciousness over the last bit of time and whether we prioritize it. So if you look at a supplement aisle of any grocery store, there's just thousands of products. They all have their rationale for it. So what do I— what do I do? Well, I just gave a webinar this last week and I talked about a healthspan stack, and in it there is room for every one of our ingredients or every one of our products that we make. Magnesium. There's a paper that recently came out that shows that magnesium levels or magnesium, the mineral, is affecting all 12 hallmarks of aging. And that was great to read.

Wow. Yeah.

And so it's simple, but so much of us are not getting enough magnesium. And so even though it's not as maybe sexy as some of the newer molecules like NAD+, just getting replete with magnesium is probably doing a lot.

Yeah, I always feel like there's a hierarchy and you should always start with the more orthomolecular ones, like, yeah, magnesium first. Yes. Then you have to add the fun stuff.

I think that's a great approach and I follow that too. So I do the joint and, uh, Qualia Joint Formula, which is essentially a combination of anti-inflammatory molecules that are working on different pathways that help keep inflammation in check. And inflammation is a dirty word, but really it's a signaling communication system in the body. And for a variety of reasons, that's the noise— the signal-to-noise ratio changes as we get older and we see markers of that elevated environmental noise rising. You can detect them from the blood. And so things like curcumin and Boswellia and ginger, they're affecting leukotrienes, they're affecting prostaglandins, all these inflammatory pathways. And so when I take it, I feel lubricated, I feel good that nothing is calling. I don't feel anything.

So do you think it's— you just brought up something that, that's making me think because I broke my foot when I was 21.

Yeah.

Dr. Ashu Goyal's treating it. Um, he's the best. But I mean, I broke it and then proceeded to teach aerobics on it. Like, I have a, like, if you look at my foot, you're like, oh gosh, you know, it's, yeah, doesn't look good. Yeah. However, like, I lived on it for years, never paid any attention to it, never noticed jumping, running, doing all the things, and then all of a sudden started to hurt. And so it was like, well, is it progressive osteoarthritis or is it that I'm feeling, is, is it now maybe my inflammatory markers are up? I would assume it's probably both. Yeah. But that's interesting that you just said that because it is, it is like as you age, why do things hurt more? Yeah.

The way that I look at it is that our health needs more management when we get older.

I call it the low margin for error as you get older. Yeah.

Yeah. The, the flip side of that is when we do something, you're kind of, you're protected when you're young. Like you could do anything and you feel okay, but you also are somewhat hidden from factors that aren't as healthy for you. Like you can stay up all night and wake up the next day and you feel fine. And as you get older, things that stress the body become more noticeable. The benefit of getting older is that when you do things that are good for the body, you also notice those more too. And so that has been a really cool perspective that the more that I tap into things that make my body feel good, I get more feedback about what's working working for me. And then if I stop doing them and I start to feel more aches and pains, and I'm like, all right, well, that's also another sign that what I— I should keep doing what I was doing. So it's like a good, good and bad. Yeah. But yeah, so I take NAD+, I take magnesium, I take now vitamin C. And I should have been taking it before because I tend to not eat a lot of high vitamin C containing foods.

But even if you did, like, what are your favorite vitamin C foods or What? Which ones?

Probably broccoli, but I don't eat a lot of peppers. I don't eat a ton of citrus. I don't eat a ton of root vegetables, which is not necessarily a high source of vitamin C, but like I, when I look at my diet, which I try to be, make it really healthy, I eat a lot of crucifers. I eat a lot of onions. I eat a lot of broccoli. I'll eat a lot of kale.

You do? I do. Impressive. You're the one eating all the kale. I've grown to like it. Gosh, I can hide it in things. But the reality is, even if you were eating all of that stuff, it's still not that much vitamin C when you look at it. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I mean, we've—

a perfect diet is eating those things every single meal, right? Yeah. That's like every meal is mineral-rich, nutrient-dense. I did a reel recently for Instagram where I talked about mineral content for magnesium in particular. And the idea is that where our soils are depleted, But in this paper, we hunted it down. Like, what's the real story there? It turns out that our minerals in our soil are fine, or at least they can be. And yet still you can have a broccoli, you know, a stalk of broccoli on your plate and it has 40% less magnesium than your grandparents did 50 years ago. Why? Because we have genetically bred our vegetables to grow faster. And so there's two different routes of like shoots in vegetables. One is pulling up like calories and, and that's going to help the energy. It's going to help the vegetables grow faster. The other shoot is pulling up the minerals and that one did not— was not bred to work to grow proportionately. So now our vegetables are growing faster, but by weight it's going to have much less magnesium.

And then look what it's done to us. It's done the same thing to us. Yeah, it's the whole idea that you, you know, cows have eat corn to get fattened up. It's like we are overfed and nutrient deficient. Yeah. And our food is overfed and nutrient deficient. That's right. It's wild.

It increasingly emphasizes for me— it's why I like working in this space— the value of supplements.

It's why we need them. And I think that's because you would look at this and go, you guys are crazy, like, why are you taking all these things and blah blah blah. And I I saw some post that, you know, they were going after Kim Kardashian 'cause she took 36 supplements a day. And I was kinda like, that's all, you know, that's cute. You know, you look at, you go, okay, D3, K2, and you take your omegas, you take your creatine, you take your magnesium. We've got our joint health, our NAD. I take Mitopure, I take Synalytic, I do the stem cell one. I take way more than this. Oh. At night I take a sleep formula. Uh-huh. I've been doing some gut stuff after the Amazon. So you take some enzymes. I'm like going, you know, you just, but it is because it's just like us going to the gym. Yeah. You know, every time I go to another country where it's, they're actually living life like you should. Yes. You know, so just being in Switzerland and we went up to the French Alps and there were no gyms there because they were hiking up and down the hills and doing like carrying around you know, water and all sorts of stuff. Like they had their gym, it was outside, you know, it was called walk hill in altitude. Yes. But you look at all the things we've had to create to mimic what we used to do. Yeah.

Think about red light, right? You can go outside. Yeah. Okay. A lot of red light.

I think I told you this last time where I went to this big longevity clinic in Miami. Like it had every toy. Yeah. And so I'm standing in this room with this negative ion big thing and I'm staying in the room and I look outside and I see the beach. Fish in the sand. And I thought, well, why don't we just go out there? Like, like, we're mimicking everything we have. It's right out the door. Yeah, but that's what we've had to do. And so that's really the argument with supplements, because I know what people are saying is like, well, do we really need all this? Yeah, probably not. I mean, 500,000 years ago, right?

You know, but now, good luck. We have a very unsophisticated approach to nutraceuticals and supplements in our society. And the reason why is because the economics of pharmaceutical clinical trials, they can pour a billion or $2 billion into a molecule that then eventually gets FDA approval for a particular condition. And the economics are such where then that company gets monopoly profits on that for the next 20 years. The supplement industry, the research that goes into it, it always looks comparatively thin, but we're comparing apples to oranges, right? So typically if you see a study in the supplement space, it might be a single-blinded arm. It doesn't have hundreds of people in it, and it never will because the economics aren't such— you don't have protection. Like if any company did that, then other companies would come in and they would say, great, thanks for doing all that work for us. We're now going to extract that value. And you're going to go out of business. And through this sleight of hand, we now think that the pharma approach overall is more rigorous and serious because of that economic disparity and how we generate knowledge around supplements. But there are also different categories, like when you're introducing a synthetic molecule that has no biological familiarity with, with our body at very high doses. Yeah, you need to do those studies to test that.

So you don't like supplements aren't going to kill people.

If you're looking at restoring magnesium, then what is the evidence threshold that you need to do that? And so unfortunately in medicine, we have a lot of people that will look at the thinness of the supplement research and say and dismiss it all because it's like, well, this is not serious. But it's sad to me because there's so much good that can be done. And you're right, we're living in a society, we're living in a world, a time where we're not getting all of those needs. Hence we have red light machines at home because we're spending 93% of our time indoors.

Right. And a treadmill under our desk.

Yeah. And so, yeah, those things aren't as good as living naturally, but it's also helping us live better in the life that we have.

Boom.

Yeah.

That was fantastic. Okay. Thank you so much. So my biggest takeaway from today is that let's make sure that vitamin C is part of the foundational stack. I am. I never really paid attention to it that much. I was just like, knew it was in there, but now I'm going to get focused on it.

It might be one of the most impactful choices that we can make when we have to choose on that supplement aisle. On how we age. Wow. And that— I cannot say that because we now have 5 clinical trials in humans, but that monkey research and that, that study that was done was very compelling to me. And like you said earlier, it's a really a low-risk proposition. So for me, I'm prioritizing it and I'm taking the best form that I can think of. And I love what we've made. So I'm going to be taking that every day.

Me too. I'm going to go hide mine from Tim. Okay, good. No, I'm kidding. All right. Well, thank you again for stopping by. Thank you so much for having me, JJ.

It's great to see you.

Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to last. Also, I'd love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the podcast. Here's how. First, First, subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest review. Second, take a screenshot of your review. And third, text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. When you do, I'll reply using my brand new Virtual JJ Virgin. It's my on-demand virtual self built from my books, talks, and years of experience so I can interact with you directly. You'll make my day and I can't wait to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next episode. Hey, JJ here. And just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice. Diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health-related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk. You know, when we talk about menopause, the focus is almost always on hormones, But what I've learned is that's only part of the picture because this phase of life doesn't just affect your hormones. It affects how your brain works, your energy, how you feel day to day. And a big part of that comes down to your cells. Your cells rely on something called phospholipids. These are the building blocks of your cell membranes, and they're essential for how your brain functions, how your cells communicate, and how your body operates overall. As estrogen declines, your body's natural production of key phospholipids can shift, which can impact things like mental clarity and overall resilience. That's why I started focusing on supporting this more foundational layer. One of the things I added into my routine is BodyBio PC. It's a phospholipid complex that helps support cell membrane health, brain function, and liver function. Basically, helping your body get the building blocks it needs to function well. And what I like about this is that it's not just about chasing symptoms. It's about supporting how your body works at a deeper level. So you're supporting things like clearer thinking, better focus, and feeling more like yourself again. And of course, BodyBio is known for really high-quality, practitioner-trusted formulations. So if you're in perimenopause or menopause and feel like something is still missing, this is definitely worth looking into. You can head to bodybio.com and use code JJ Virgin 20 for a discount.